Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn

by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira

  In that small city, most people professed being Christians in a very different way than he’d seen in Europe. They integrated their beliefs into their day-to-day living and it was not, for them, something of a private matter, almost intimate, testified to publicly once a week in a ritual celebration in closed circles that did not communicate with the community’s life flow. It was the opposite, making up part of their global existence. Not only did they not show the least inhibition about saying they were Christians that is so common on the eastern margins of the Atlantic, but they were spontaneous and extroverted in their feelings. On his second Sunday, the mother asked him if he was Catholic, to which Louis answered “yes.” The American mother surprised him by saying, “That’s just as well because the Catholic church isn’t far from the Lutheran church, and we can drop you off on our way and pick you up on our way home. Remember that you are the son of our European friends and that you came on a trip to America.” Louis never went to mass in Portugal, but there he had difficulty in refusing the suggestion. When he arrived at the church, two lay families who were receiving worshipers at the door greeted him warmly and, since they didn’t know him, asked him his name and what had brought him to their city. Afterwards, they wanted to know if he’d liked the ceremony and the choir, explaining that they were proud because their two children sang in it. When the American mother stopped to give him a ride, she chatted with the Catholic woman for some time, smiling and telling how she and her late husband had been helped by Louis’s parents during a trip to Europe. Later, someone from the Lutheran Church called, offering Louis Marcé a job, but he declined, since he planned on going on to Montreal.

  Louis found it odd that in this place religious sentiments were expressed candidly in the light of day, without any special reservations. It was a type of tolerance different from what he’d known on the old continent, more innocent and more open. Perhaps freedom of religion implied that normality, he thought, and not just not being persecuted or discriminated against. In Lisbon, freedom was the law, but here freedom was in the streets. A few days later, he was invited to participate in a fundraising campaign organized by the Catholic and Episcopalian churches, but decided not to go. However, some neighbors, seeing that Louis was good at painting and carpentry, proposed a simple task to him—building a storage shed and a tree house for their children. Saying no to everything was increasingly difficult, so he accepted. Within a week, he had finished the storage shed and was putting the last touches on the tree house, to which he decided to give an Iberian flair, painting it white with a red roof to the great delight of the neighbor’s children. He had the sensation of wanting to forget that he was leaving for Montreal sooner or later. The possibility of staying a long time near the coast grew in his soul, but then he began to have nightmares again and the old pain in his left arm returned. He was in a boat, alone, stalled in the midst of a storm. In the water, three mermaids surfaced, carrying offerings in small chests—one said gold, another rhodium and the third iridium. When he was about to open them, the sea-cock in the bottom of his boat was opened and he was immersed, awakening shocked and covered in sweat. A few days later, he had a fever, the pain in his left arm worsened and his shoulder swelled.

  “We’ve got to take you to a doctor or a physician’s assistant,” the girls’ mother told him.

  The man saw him and conferred with a doctor on the phone. He was not a doctor himself, but the Americans trusted him. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory and an x-ray. Lucas took the x-ray that came with an incomprehensible report, saying increased osseous density with no certain signs of osteopetrosis. Idiopathic variant of elevated bone mass? Foreign object near periosteum of the proximal humeral metaphysis, to the left, of mixed density, predominantly metallic. Edema of soft tissue, surrounding the deltoid, without images compatible with abscess or osteomyelitis.

  “What does that mean?” Louis asked.

  “You have very hard bones and a foreign object in your shoulder,” the physician’s assistant explained.

  “Foreign in what way?” Louis wanted to know.

  “It was not produced by your organism,” the health professional clarified.

  “How did it get there?” Louis asked.

  “You tell me,” retorted the physician assistant. “Have you had a recent accident in an electronics factory? It looks like an electronic device.”

  “Could it have been something I ate?”

  “No,” laughed the physician assistant. “Have you had a problem with the police?”

  “No. Can you take it out?”

  “Well, that’s something for the doctors, but try to remember anything, an accident, trauma. The report shows no associated infection, but the doctor told me to give you this antibiotic as a precaution. He can see you tomorrow. Take the x-ray with you and take your temperature to see if you have a fever.

  Back home, Luis examined the foreign body in the x-ray and in his body with a magnifying glass. He researched images on the Internet. Undoubtedly, it was a microchip. Could there be another one? Had it been implanted in prison? On that night he’d been drugged in his room in Lisbon? Was he being followed? He realized that, if he were the doctor, he’d contact the authorities. It was possible the physician assistant had already done so. In weeks, his life had changed more than in the last ten years. It was going to change again.

  The time had come to get back on the road, this time en route to Canada, after putting two cards in the mail, one addressed to his parents whom he loved very much and another to the brother he missed terribly. He went to get the backpack, which he hadn’t touched since arriving. Lucas opened it. Stacks of one hundred dollar bills, the manuscript, identification for the two scoundrels and the two victims, the orphans. One was the Canadian who resembled him. Two sealed boxes, one with LM and the other PR. Louis Marcé and Peter Romberg. He opened PR with difficulty. There were ten fingertips preserved in formol. What’s this? Fingerprints, he realized. He went to the lavatory, threw them in the toilet and flushed. He looked at the box labeled LM. Fingers, he thought. Portable fingerprints. I’m Louis Marcé, an orphan, and I have a box with my fingers in formaldehyde. I can have them embalmed and hang them around my neck in case I need them. The Canadian’s fingers also went into the toilet. He had to get rid of the other three IDs, but documents for the identity he had assumed since the beginning were absolutely necessary. He’d left Lisbon and his name was Louis Marcé. He had become a Québécois and his name continued being Louis Marcé.

  Louis hid the book in the top of a hole of the neighbor’s tree that he blocked with a false overhead and buried thirty kilos of currency, three million dollars. He made a copy of the memory card with photos of the book in the girls’ computer, in an encrypted folder. He peeked in on the sleeping girls and wanted to kiss them on the forehead, but he couldn’t awaken them. He gritted his teeth and left the house, leaving behind a letter thanking them for taking him in but without explaining his departure nor promising to return at some future Christmas.

  Under his clothes, he had wrapped his arms with multiple layers of aluminum foil to block potential signals from the radio that had been implanted in him. Since he couldn’t do it alone, he’d convinced the younger girl to play Star Wars with him and had asked her to help disguise him as a robot. The youngster hadn’t hesitated a second, until they were discovered by her mother, who, smiling, scolded them both, “Time for bed, you’ve cost me a roll of aluminum foil, your rascals. Everyone, to bed.” Louis felt that, in some way, she had adopted him. He had his late biological parents, his true parents, and now American parents. But he hadn’t used just one whole roll of aluminum foil. He’d used seven of the ten they’d bought. Underneath the frugal clothes the Americans had offered him was a true sheet of metal armor. Perhaps that way he might be able to isolate the signal from the microelectronic tracker they’d injected in his shoulder.

  He visited the Interpol website and discovered there was an international arrest warrant for him for murdering two men
and a woman. Lucas selected the route for his flight on the Internet. He wouldn’t go by bus or on foot along the highway since the police could easily spot him. He’d go by train. The railroad line traversed a forest, snaking through uninhabited areas. Louis Marcé had become an expert in escapes. He’d walk to the train station following the tracks. Not to the closest station, but to one farther away. At first, he tried adjusting his steps to the crossties, but walking one by one was too close and every other one too far apart. He gave up trying to find an easy pace and accepted the irregularity of his march. After all, he wasn’t a train and that was a railroad, not a stroll down a Lisbon avenue. Along the way, he discovered a regular pattern in the irregularity of his steps.

  Part Two

  Unexpected Progress on Violet Street

  Chapter 8

  The Improbable Professor Crane

  During the Christmas season, in the city of Columbia’s wealthy neighborhoods, the houses looked like they came straight out of a Disney film. The lights in the yards and on the houses had gotten better over the past few years. Sparkling lights, Christmas trees, reindeer, presents, Santa Claus, elves, all flashing in the spell of the twilight hours that foretold the coming of night. At times as softly as the silver of the moon, at others like the clear gold of the sun, or a blue flame from the tip of a Bunsen burner. There seemed to be a competition to see who had the most fantastic yard.

  Unlike in Sofia’s neighborhood, the homes here were true mansions, be they sprawling in lush lawns that extended to the asphalt streets, dispensing with sidewalks, or hidden amongst the groves. They’re beautiful at dusk.

  Sofia had just noticed the strange but elegant dark mini van parked on the entry, when two white biological hazard transport trucks passed by her and entered the property. Her friend Mariah’s abode was large, like all the others. From the highway, it looked like a Swiss chalet with only two stories, but it then descended some three floors in terraces to the docks and the lake on the lot. It was difficult to see in all the vegetation because it was integrated into the hill like some cabins are fused into thickets in the forest. It had intermediary levels, asymmetrical, seeming a little disjointed. It was strange in this way, but, principally, it was exotic, almost eccentric, at night because the lit floor slowly changed positions, in an endless ballet. The interior was no less surprising. Mariah had told her that it was designed by a NASA engineer, Prof. Crane, as if it were floating in space. “He designed it from the inside out, from a three dimensional simulation of the dweller’s visual field.” The compartments were organically linked together, without initially taking the exterior appearance or optimizing external space into consideration. The bedrooms and living rooms were spread about several levels without being in harmony with classical divisions between floors. The first two stories that faced the street, looking out on the dock anchored in the lake, were almost fixed, but the two in the middle moved freely. To reduce the number of steps between floors and divisions, the intermediate levels moved when someone entered. Domotics detected the person’s entrance, velocity and direction, and the hydraulic system made the compartments move up or down in order to diminish the gaps, thus, the number of steps they’d have to make. Since few people lived in the house and most of them habitually made predictable trajectories at specific times of day, the system optimized their movements. Seen from within, the house seemed to have been developed in low plateaus. As the house had a lot of wood, the mechanism was not perfectly silent only because it creaked but even this had its pleasant side.

  In the beginning, Mariah’s father had not realized this system would have an advantage. Do you really want me to live in some kind of an extra large elevator? But after being constructed, that advantage became evident. The house was more comfortable because the flights of stairs were smaller and its movements were barely noticeable since they took place before you got to the stairs for the floor being adjusted. With the interior designed by Crane, an architect projected the house’s external casing, as well as the nearby spaces of the yard. This, despite also changing position in relation to ground level, moved much less, with there being a differential between the two that was noticeable mostly in the windows. The external windows, even though open, had to discretely oscillate up and down. In the dark, the illuminated windows and its external casing’s slow dance, as well as the nearby gardens, implanted with mobile terraces, engendered a silent ballet, as if the house were alive and was preparing itself to leave the lot and venture forth.

  When Sofia arrived, the gate was open as always and, having barely passed through it, she heard her name shouted.

  “Sofia Suren, Sofia Suren, I’m here,” waved Mariah, effusively.

  Sofia did not like her best friend calling her by her last name. The only person, besides Mariah Dexter, who called her that was her paternal grandmother. Running to her friend, who was like a sister, appealed to her, but she did not do so.

  “Hello, how’s everything?”

  “Well,” her friend answered.

  The smiling Mariah was as blonde as the summer and her eyes were clear like honesty when truth is a simple thing. She was one of those people who always wake up happy in the morning.

  “Have you seen the sky?” Mariah continued. “It’s incredible today. I just saw two shooting stars, parallel to each other.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there,” Mariah pointed to the north.

  “I didn’t see it,” Sofia complained, looking at the celestial vault. “Look, a satellite.”

  “Did you know there’s a lot of garbage in orbit, satellites that don’t work, rocket parts, loose pieces?” Mariah asked.

  “I know. They’re a danger for the new space station. I don’t see how the old one lasted so long. Whose car’s that? The huge one?” Sofia asked, approaching the black shining and polished seven-seat van of unknown brand in front of the house, looking as it had just landed from the future. “Is it yours?”

  “No. It belongs to my Uncle Crane,” Mariah explained. “It’s a prototype. They gave it to him to test in Florida’s hot climate.”

  Dr. Crane spent so much time in South Carolina that his Florida residence was more official than real. Sofia didn’t really understand what the deal was with this uncle. At first she’d thought that he really was Mariah’s uncle, since he had similar physiognomical features. He’d met her friend’s father in as fortuitous way as Sofia had met Mariah at the university. The chance meeting had taken place several years before, after he’d been widowed. Later, when he learned that Mariah’s father was going to build a new house, he offered to take care of the domotics and wound up designing the house at no charge. Their friendship had strengthened since then. They seemed like childhood friends. When she saw Mariah’s new house for the first time, Sofia was stupefied because it looked like it was more than a century old. The house’s exterior was designed to look old, with the wood facade coming from demolitions and scrapped vessels. Making something look old is easy, her friend had told her. Rejuvenating it is more difficult. The contrast between the aged appearance and the technological interior made the latter more unexpected. Like a century-old vintage Port wine bottle but filled with five year old Single Malt Scotch.

  Her uncle had resisted making the house look old, but later became an effervescent defender of the idea, to such an extent that architect who designed the exterior felt put off. He first suspected that the NASA geek was being sarcastic because he considered the hypothesis of NASA giving a retro aspect to the next line of space ships.

  “Well,” the architect responded, “maybe that’s more probable than convincing this neighborhood to let him build a house that looks like a spaceship.” Later, when he realized that this was not the case, he was still troubled because it looked like it had been the engineer’s idea, such was the enthusiasm with which this uncle explained it to everyone. Anthony Crane was one of a kind. “He’s a lunatic who looks like a lunatic. He exaggerates,” Sofia joked in the beginning.

  �
��My mother’s plastic surgeon says that he’s not a lunatic, he’s lunar,” her friend corrected.

  “It’s serious then,” thought Sofia. “He’ll only go there with a transplant.”

  “Of the brain?” Mariah asked.

  Sofia thought it was curious that the family collected half of the people they had dealt with for any length of time, for whatever reason, as friends. It was not only the house’s architect who came to visit them—in the case of the engineer, he became part of the family or they would not call him uncle—but all sorts of characters accumulated as persistent visitors, from Mariah’s mother’s plastic surgeon to the church pastor, from a pediatrician of times gone by to the fellow who’d sold them their Mercedes.

  It’s a good thing people die. If not, in three or four hundred years, we’d have an army. Sofia recognized some of the parked cars. It looks like there’s a party at your house every day, from the number of cars parked out front. Another thing that surprised her was they all had something uncommon about them. When Sofia learned that the Mercedes salesman always drove a BMW, Cadillac or a Lexus—but never a Mercedes, Mariah explained to her, quoting Crane, that “It’s good to know the enemy and even better to sell Mercedes while wanting one.”

  “It’s a type of self-inflicted suffering,” Sofia once told Uncle Crane. “A light variation of masochism in case he really wants one of the cars he sells.”

  “Not quite,” Crane opined. “Look, it’s like sports: imagine someone practicing sports four hundred years ago, tiring himself out on purpose, without needing too?”

  “To stay in shape,” she argued.

  “Well, with him, it’s the same thing. It’s a type of ‘suffering,’ as you say, but not suffering in and of itself, but with an objective—that of wanting one of those cars in order to more effectively sell that desire.”