Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  “Wow. How do you know all this stuff?”

  “It’s my job. I have to sell shit to these people.”

  He knew she was in marketing, but he didn’t really want to talk about either of their lives away from here, away from this moment. He was content to just watch her profile as she scanned the audience, her hair tossing this way and that, occasionally rolling a lock behind her ear with two fingers. Only Sara could find a way to have a good time at a funeral. Live in the here and now. She was good at that. Never at a loss for words, never uncomfortable with strangers. So unlike Marcy.

  “There’s Adel,” she said, “by the glass doors? In her last letter she asked me to come by and get all of Deverson’s lab notes.”

  “God, why would you want them?”

  “Don’t know,” Sara said distractedly, watching the podium while cupping her mouth with her hand, directing her voice at Gill. “I guess so Adel doesn’t think he died in vain, that someone’s going to continue his work. She wants to give them to me after the reception. There’s like dozens of file boxes, maybe more.” They watched in silence as Veronica and Bernice escorted their mother to a seat in the front row. “Poor thing,” Sara sighed. “You probably heard the rumor about him skipping out with a female lab assistant? What a load of bullshit! Deverson never would have left without those notes. Not even over his own dead body.”

  Gill nodded.

  The services began. Dean Darvey, retired, offered the eulogy, a fountain of flowery adjectives. Ironic. It had been Darvey who’d requested that Deverson take his INF research project off campus.

  During a lull, Sara whispered playfully: “Adel claims she’s still in contact with Mark’s ghost.” She rolled her eyes.

  Down in front, Darvey was turning the ceremony over to Veronica, the Deversons’ eldest daughter.

  “It was these three sisters who got their mother committed to a psychiatric hospital,” Sara continued, eyes riveted on Veronica. “With Adel legally declared mentally incompetent - the girls were free to go after the family’s large, extremely valuable farm property. In the path of progress, and all that.”

  “They got the farm?” Gill asked.

  “Failed. The plan didn’t work because Mark Deverson was still legally alive – and Adel’s lawyer kept him that way - until this very day.”

  The cemetery groundskeepers were loading chairs onto a flatbed trailer, but Gill grabbed three so he and Sara and Wilson Galtrup could sit awhile and exchange stories. Galtrup was, by several years, the youngest of the three. He’d taken over the Deverson graduate assistantship after Sara had moved on to Stanford. He’d worked at the professor’s private lab before and after the so-called ‘breakthrough,’ but hadn’t been on the farm the fateful day Deverson disappeared.

  “Breakthrough, breakthrough, breakthrough,” Galtrup sing-songed. “Deverson used the word all the time, but – to be perfectly frank – I was never quite sure what the hell he was carrying-on about. I mean it was mysterious…how much damage he did to that place without any apparent accelerants.” He paused thoughtfully to chew on his bushy red mustache. “The old man went from eccentric to stark raving mad that afternoon. I had to resign my assistantship before he could set up a redundant experiment.” He raised his shaggy red eyebrows. “Cal Tech needed me.”

  Gill and Sara exchanged glances. “I’m afraid I lost touch with him before that happened,” Gill remorsed.

  “I think about it sometimes,” Galtrup said. “Not having seen that experiment, not hanging in there for the next one. I regret that. But the old guy was almost out of money, all his equipment smashed. There was no knowing when he’d be able to finance the redundancy. To his credit he never gave it up. Even on the day I told him I was leaving, headed to CIT on a full-ride scholarship, you know what he said? He said: ‘You’re loss, Wilson.”’

  “I stayed in touch with Adel,” Sara shrugged, “but the poor thing…blind, talking to ghosts, locked up in a sanitarium…”

  “Speaking of Adel,” Galtrup said, “I got a call from her last week, practically begging me to come today. I really wasn’t planning to. Guilt-tripped me good, she did.”

  Gill and Sara nodded, acknowledging they too had received the desperate calls from the widow.

  They drove over to the catered reception in Gill’s rented Chevy Malibu. Midway between Woodland and Davis - two fast-growing communities relentlessly pushing their suburban sprawl at one another - sat the Deverson’s 660 acres of fallow farmland. Flat, weedy land except for the residence compound, about five acres, a hundred mature trees, a dozen old buildings, among them a modest, one-story farmhouse, paint faded to weathered gray, overgrown with creeping plants and unmaintained brush.

  “Turn down there,” Sara told Gill, pointing at a gravel road flanked by evenly spaced willows. After two hundred feet, she commanded: “stop! Park here.”

  In front of them sat a substantial, prefabricated, steel farm building set on a thick concrete slab. The off-white enamel paint was badly burned on one side of the structure, black blisters protruding from the metal skin like a relief map of Tibet, reddish rust where the paint had baked off. The steel roof above this wall was twisted and buckled.

  Sara got out of the car. “That’s where it happened,” she said, stating the obvious. “That’s the last place anyone ever saw him alive, seven years ago today.” Then, after a long pause, while they all just stared at it, she added: “They never found his remains.”

  “That wasn’t in the funeral announcement,” Galtrup said ominously. “I thought he’d just recently passed away.”

  “He’s been gone seven years but legally dead for less than 10 hours,” Sara said.

  “At least that gave them plenty of time to plan the services,” Gill observed.

  Most of the well-wishers had departed by the time Gill, Sara and Galtrup made themselves comfortable in the living room around the grieving widow, her pale-white complexion enhanced by the black, ankle-length dress and veil. A thin, gaunt old woman, a mere shadow of the once robust mother of three and assertive caretaker for a distracted, forgetful professor. Sitting in her south-facing parlor, they watched as the sun touched down on the distant horizon, visible through a bay window partially obscured by overgrown vines.

  “He’s never really stopped working on it,” she said, kneading her bony white hands in her lap, blue and red capillaries visible through the translucent skin.

  “INFX,” Gill re-affirmed.

  “Yes,” the widow said, swinging her head toward Gill. “Mark’s so close to controlling it. So close.” At that her mood grew more solemn and, as if on cue, the sun sat down on the horizon, bathing the room in an orange-maroon glow.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it,” Adel said.

  “Yes it is,” Sara said.

  “How do you know that?” Gill asked.

  “I can feel it,” she said. “It feels beautiful. Besides, This has been my home for 40 years. I know what it looks like.” She turned toward the others’ voices and nervously adjusted her jet black, wraparound sunglasses. Her eye sockets came visible for a moment; dark and bottomless.

  Sara winced, then quickly said: “INFX was practically my whole life when I was an undergrad. Your husband…he was my mentor. I worked out here even after Mark couldn’t pay me anymore, but when I got accepted to Stanford as a grad student, I…just had to go.” Her tone turned apologetic. “I got into Stanford because of what I learned from your husband...”

  “Me too,” Galtrup squeaked, caught up in the moment. “I learned so much about spectrometer technology from Dr. D. It’s how I aced my interview at PNNL.

  “Of everything in my resume, my dean at Akron was most impressed with having been Mark Deverson’s grad assistant,” Gill extended. “It’s what got me the professorship over a dozen other qualified applicants.”

  “Bless you all. Thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means to us…to hear these things. You know, I never went to college – it’s very hard for me to understand Mark’s
work. But he keeps trying to explain it to me.”

  Gill had been ignoring the present-tense references thus far, but now he sat forward as if to speak. Sara caught his arm and lipped the word “No.”

  Galtrup asked the question instead: “I’m sorry, Adel – did you say ‘keeps trying?”’

  Adel read the silence for a moment. “Yes. Most people think I’m a little touched in the head because I talk to Mark almost every day.”

  “Ahhh,” Sara purred consolingly.

  Adel adjusted her sunglasses again, then folded her hands between her knees. “He doesn’t talk to me in words, exactly. It’s…I don’t know…a feeling, a sense, an understanding.” She attempted a smile.

  “Can you hear him now?” Sara asked, trying not to sound skeptical. “At this moment?”

  “I feel him. Sara, he wants me to tell you something. About his Breakthrough” She moved her head slowly back and forth as a sighted person might do, checking for eavesdroppers. There was no one else nearby. “Up until that day, Mark hadn’t really found what he was looking for. And he never lost heart, either. But the years and years of failed experiments were taxing. We’d mortgaged the farm twice by then. It was getting very hard.

  “Then, sometime around noon, I went out to the barn, the place where Mark had his lab before we got the steel building?” she moved her head around nervously. “I’m sure you remember the old barn, Sara?”

  “We spent a lot of time out there,” Galtrup confirmed.

  The woman looked toward the voice and smiled. “I went into the barn, and Mark was alone, running another test. Inside the MRI tunnel were rats in a glass container of some clear liquid. There were wires and electronic devices everywhere. The MRI was making its loud, thumping noise, and I instinctively backed up. It proved to be a good move.

  “Mark was at his control panel, watching the scan monitor, tractoring the mouse into the tunnel a centimeter at a time, rotating the glass vessel this way and that.

  “Then the thumping went quiet, distorted somehow. I remember a metal grinding noise, louder and louder, and a bright light inside the tunnel. Mark was obviously surprised. He looked at me across the room and shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated way. That wasn’t very reassuring! Then there was this ‘thwump,’ like air moving, like a whole lot of air moving. Thwump! It was like it should have been very loud, and I remember covering my ears, expecting a terrible noise.

  “The light got so bright I couldn’t see across the room, couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. Then the barn walls on opposite sides of the tunnel blew outward, boards flying across the farm. My car got pushed 20 feet against the house, big trees blew over in the yard. It was total mayhem, like a tornado. I didn’t know what was happening.

  “Part of the roof fell in and Mark’s arm broke in two places. While I was driving him to the hospital up in Woodland, he was ecstatic. ‘This is it,’ he kept saying. His arm was bent terribly, he was drenched in a cold sweat and he was in shock, shivering, but he kept saying: ‘This is the way in, I found the way IN!”’

  “We never predicted an explosion,” Gill said.

  “You seem to know quite a lot about Mark’s work,” Sara said inquisitively. Back then, Adel had never taken much interest in INFX. She was the housewife. Her major contribution had been making soup and sandwiches for Mark and the lab assistants.

  “Well, not really. But I’ve had a good teacher.” Adel leaned forward, moving her head as if she could see her little audience. “The reason it was so important for you three to be here…is because together you represent almost 10 uninterrupted years of working on INFX. Together, Mark believes, you can reconstruct the research and move it forward…”

  “I can’t see that happening,” Gill mumbled.

  “Adel, honey,” Sara cooed, “we all have our own lives now…”

  Adel grasped Sara’s knee as if to hush her. “What happened to Mark…this is going to happen again - by accident - during some routine MRI. Could be anywhere. Mark says it’s only a matter of time, and there’s no way…” Adel shook her finger as if scolding a child… “no way at all…of predicting how powerful the explosion will be.”

  “Are you telling stories again, Mom?” Veronica called from the kitchen door. She turned first to Gill, then Sara. “It’s time to go now. Roberto’s going to lock up the house.”

  Adel leaned toward her guests. “They think I don’t, but I understand what they’re up to.”

  “Mother!” Veronica scolded. “You need to get back to hospital now.”

  “Sara,” whispered Adel. “Come visit me. I’ll get you those notes.”

  “Yes Adel, I will. I was wondering if we could take a look inside the lab…”

  “Oh, no,” Veronica said, waving her index finger. “Insurance Company won’t let anyone in there.” She made a contrived smile. “Even us.”

  Veronica’s husband marched in and practically lifted Adel out of her chair, then physically escorted her out through the kitchen while Veronica stayed in the room, standing guard. She followed them out.

  Then a short, elderly man wearing overalls entered with a stack of canvas tarps, intended for the furniture.

  “Whoa, they sure have her on a short leash,” Gill said. “When did she go blind?”

  Sara and Galtrup glanced at one another. “I thought you knew,” Sara said. “When Professor Deverson disappeared…that day the caretaker found Adel in the yard, over by the lab, unconscious, skin burnt, eyes…baked away.”

  They walked back to the Malibu, parked by the steel lab building several hundred feet from the house. The old man was raking leaves by the car as they approached.

  “Roberto?” Sara inquired.

  “Yes?” He stopped working and leaned on the rake handle, which was taller then he.

  “Were you here when the…accident happened?” She gestured with her head toward the damaged building.

  “I was,” Roberto answered, looking off toward the house. The Deverson clan was busy loading chairs and boxes into the back of two large vans.

  Sara pursed her lips thoughtfully and turned toward the car. “Could you tell me what you saw?”

  “Roberto!” Michelle’s husband snapped, fists on hips, from across the yard. “Come over here.”

  “I can tell you this,” Roberto said as he ambled off. “Mrs. Adel…she is not so crazy as they say.”

  “Where to,” Gill asked as he wheeled up to the front gate. He stopped the Malibu, put it in park. There was no traffic on Yolo County Road 9. He checked his rear view mirror. The Deverson offspring were still loading their vans.

  Galtrup glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a flight out of Sac in a couple hours.”

  “I’ve got to be in Miami tomorrow a.m., early,” Sara said. “Drop me at Sac too.”

  They sat for a moment.

  “She’s just plain wacko, isn’t she,” Gill said.

  Sara let out a sigh that seemed to say: probably.

  “Sure is creepy she thinks Deverson is still around,” Galtrup said from the back seat, looking over his shoulder at the old house.

  “She was always such a straight-shooter,” Sara said. “Pillar of the community, solid, dependable, well-anchored…this is too weird.”

  “She’s been in a mental institution for almost seven years? Gill said. “She must know that all she has to do is stop talking about Mark’s ghost. Even if she believed he was in the room with her, just shut the hell up long enough to get released from the funny farm. I don’t get it.”

  “She’s irrational, can’t make the connection,” Galtrup said, hands folded, tapping his index fingertips together.

  “Psychotic,” Gill said, looking at Sara. “Now she expects us to take 20 years worth of lab notes and resurrect INFX?”

  “Maybe we should do it,” Galtrup said. “Get the notes and see if we can duplicate that rat experiment.”

  Gill chuckled. “My god, Will. We’d need a complete MRI rig. And what about the explosion? We c
an’t do that in your apartment.”

  Sara looked over the seat. “Adel said the explosion was unpredictable. We couldn’t take that kind of chance.”

  “No, she said Deverson had it under control. It’s only dangerous if it happens accidentally.” Galtrup grinned. “And as far as an MRI goes, I know where one is, an old GE long-bore. May need some work.”

  Sara tossed her head sideways. “What if there really is a danger of an accidental explosion. Dare we dismiss the possibility out of hand?”

  “Considering the source, yes,” Gill smirked.

  “I have to tell you,” Galtrup interjected excitedly, “I do think about it. INFX, I mean. My curiosity won’t let it go.”

  “Maybe we could pick it up again,” Sara said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just run a few tests.”

  “Okay, Why not,” Gill said offhandedly. “What the hell, let’s make a date - get back together…when’s good for you guys?” After several seconds of dead silence they all broke out in spontaneous laughter.

  Alone in the dark B&B room, Sara smiled fondly at the memory of them laughing so hard it hurt. “When’s good for you guys,” she repeated out loud. Gill, you do have your moments.

  But what of Adel? What would she tell the old woman tomorrow? Time to cut the crap. Tomorrow she would simply tell the truth, apologize profusely and ask for the old woman’s forgiveness. It would then be up to Adel. The cards would fall as they may.

  The first hurdle would be getting past Westend security. Even for a supervised visit, Sara would need advanced permission from the trustee, Veronica Deverson Hardessey. That would have to be forged, and would take several days for authentication. Too difficult to fake and too time-consuming.

  “But as a blood relative…”

  “No!” Gill had said. “If you’re caught impersonating Adel’s daughter…that’ll be it… we’ll never get anywhere near her after that.”

  “But if I’m not caught…”

  They’d talked it out, examined the options, she cruising at 32,000 feet, he at Gyttings-Lindstrom’s Austin campus commanding a newly appointed team of support personnel. They’d brainstormed. They’d argued. But in the end there was no other way, not even a good alternate choice. They had to get those notes quickly, and Adel was the only person who might know where to look. A crazy woman. Satellite photos revealed the farm house and compound still intact. If Adel’s daughters hadn’t yet found those boxes, then maybe…