by Chris Abani
He turned back from the view of Vegas, put his coffee mug down with exaggerated care, and walked into the bathroom to shower. He had much to do.
Nineteen
Salazar tipped the last of his coffee onto a white shell, staining it brown, flecks of coffee grounds standing out like black growths. He kicked sand at the shell, then watched the sun come up over Lake Mead. He was always amazed that something man-made here in the middle of the desert could look so natural and blue. The tire marks from the night before were still visible.
Unable to sleep after signing the twins over to Dr. Singh, he had returned to the station, typed up his report, and then driven to Jake’s, an all-night diner off Fremont Street. His other favorite diner, right next door to the Gutenberg Museum on South Main, had gone out of business. Now it was a Chinese fast-food joint that closed at ten. When the Library Gentlemen’s Club and the Gun Store, on the other side of the museum, went out of business as well, he figured he should move on and so he’d migrated to this diner ten years ago.
He liked the old parts of Vegas, ever since he moved here as a teenager. Parts that were now seedy and decrepit. Things seemed more honest here, less beguiling than the Strip or the new developments spreading into the desert. Jake’s had been in the same place for more than forty years, and it seemed that the staff hadn’t changed in that time either. It was the only place in Vegas that didn’t have any slot machines or gambling of any kind. Just a simple menu and a loyal clientele of people often down on their luck. He watched an old homeless man carry his bulldog past the diner, pause, then come in.
Spare some change, he asked Salazar.
Why the fuck are you carrying your dog, Salazar asked.
He’s tired, the homeless man said.
Who carries you when you’re tired?
Jesus, the man said. Spare me a dollar?
Get the fuck out of here, the cook yelled from the kitchen.
The old man shuffled out before Salazar could give him the dollar. He melted into the night with his dog, leaving Salazar with his thoughts, his guilt, and his desire. He really wanted to solve this case. Not just for his career, or because he had been working on it for so long, but because there was the matter of the dead teenage girl who had been found in the second batch of dead homeless men two years ago. Her discovery was a shock for everyone working that day. As they pulled the pile of bodies apart, there she was, like the dramatic reveal of a magic trick gone wrong. Salazar could still see it clearly in his mind’s eye. The near emerald-green dress in the midst of all that dirt and gray; an orange high-heeled pump on one foot, the other bare. A shock of red hair and a face twisted in agony. Everything about her was incongruous, not in keeping with the scene. There was no ID on her and even now, no one had come forward to claim her. Putting her to rest was what really drove him. The department therapist told him that his desire had nothing to do with putting her to rest. That it was really all about him.
Fuck you, he’d said then. Fuck you, he thought now. Even if she was right, there was still the fact of the dead girl. Buying a coffee to go, the size of a Big Gulp, he’d driven out to the lake.
All night he sat in the dark trying to figure it out, to get into the killer’s head as he liked to call it. Was it the twins? Why would they do it? How did they do it? The truth was, gruff and tactless as he was, Salazar was no criminal. He couldn’t really understand why people did the things they did, much less how. It was a severe limitation for a detective and he compensated for it by obsessively working his cases, going over the same ground again and again until something broke open for him.
So he sat in his car in the soft light waiting for that break, that crack in time.
Twenty
In the kitchen Sunil filled the kettle and set it on the range. The burner was the only illumination as he opened the cupboards and reached for a teapot, which he then filled with loose-leaf Black Dragon tea. He liked this tactile relationship with the world and had consciously cultivated it—if he could find everything in the dark then there was still order in his world.
He thought about the body dumps from two years earlier. About the testing of his serum that had led to them. All those homeless men recruited from the streets of Vegas with offers of money and sometimes drugs were housed in seclusion in the basement of the institute.
And then when they had enough viable and anonymous subjects, they’d put them into rooms in batches of ten, administered doses of the serum and a placebo to the control group, and then waited for the results. The drug and its antidote were delivered via an implant in the men’s heads that could be controlled from a distance.
Every test had proved disastrous. Not from the perspective of inducing psychotic breaks. That was easy enough. In fact, 50 percent of the placebo group was able to match the ferocity of the medicated. What proved abortive was the ability to control the behavior. The antidote hadn’t worked, and neither had electric collars, subdermal shock implants, or even tear gas. The rage just couldn’t be harnessed. And in the end, in every test, no matter what variations they made to the serum and antidote, all the subjects died. They simply beat one another to death. In any other clinical trial of a drug, adverse events were expected—side effects, some more drastic than others, escalating from a skin rash to a clinical trial subject dying. But the numbers here were beyond belief.
The body dumps that followed had been Brewster’s idea. Sunil hadn’t known any of the details. Brewster had simply drafted him to help the investigation as forensic expert with the intent to steer any possible connection away from the institute. Not that the institute’s possible involvement ever came up. There just wasn’t any reason for the police to suspect them. Sunil surmised that Brewster knew that all along. His motives remained unclear to Sunil. Maybe he should be studying Brewster.
The kettle shrieked. He emptied the water into the teapot and let it brew. From the fridge he took out the other half of the cantaloupe from the night before, laid it on a wooden chopping block, reached for the ceramic knife, and, still in the dark, cubed it perfectly. From the corner of his eye, through the kitchen window, he could make out the spotlight from the Luxor.
He poured some tea, stirred in some sugar, and drank it in the dark, watching the dramatic sunrise through the blue-tinted kitchen windows. He couldn’t make up his mind which he loved best: Vegas at night with all the neon and flashing lights, or Vegas in the morning, when the neon was replaced by a fresh light—an innocence.
It was a Saturday and he wished he weren’t going in to work. It would be nice to hike today. Somewhere hot but shaded, like the many arroyos that hid the scars of an older Vegas, of a past that was now held only in unreliable narratives; a confounding mix of hoaxes and urban legends. Sunil was drawn to those stories because he believed that there was real history embedded in their occluded forms and he loved nothing more than collecting them, sifting through them, and decoding the deeper truths he was sure were hidden in them—as if he could read the mind of the landscape, uncover its intentions and motives, and recalibrate its secret histories.
In the meantime, he’d settle for being able to uncover the secrets the twins were concealing. The real secrets, not the ones they had half buried for him to stumble on. He knew they were playing some strange game, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The thing about half-truths littered in among outright lies is that they distract from the deeper secrets, the ones you really want to find. But Sunil was good at finding secrets. That’s what he’d done at Vlakplaas all those years ago. Found secrets and used them against their owners.
Twenty-one
Sheila, Sunil said as Sheila stepped into his office.
Sunil, she said, and it sounded like a seduction. I was kind of hoping you’d made some of that amazing coffee you have, she said, and pointed to the machine on the sideboard.
Sunil smiled. Of course, he said.
This had become a little game they played. Ev
ery morning Sheila came in and pretended she was only asking for coffee. He didn’t know where it could lead, if anywhere, but he liked it just the same. Watching her cross the room he couldn’t help but notice how attractive she was: slim, fit, and tight, with perfect black skin. She stirred something in him. But in that same moment, while Sheila was a rational impulse in his mind, Asia was an ache that made him cross his legs.
As she stirred her coffee, Sheila turned to him. Sleep well, she asked, licking the wooden stirrer before throwing it into the trash.
Not really, Sunil said.
Oh, why?
You mean you haven’t heard about the conjoined twins, he asked. You must have, there aren’t any secrets inside this building.
Sheila gave him a look. What the hell are you babbling about, she asked.
Yesterday while I was meeting with Brewster I got a call from Salazar, he said.
Don’t know him, she said.
The detective from the homeless killing case I consulted on two years ago, Sunil said.
She shrugged: Okay. And someone killed some conjoined twins?
No, he arrested conjoined twins as suspects in the homeless murders.
Sheila looked bewildered. No fucking way, she said. The twins are the killers? How is that even possible? How are they joined?
Sunil opened the folder on his desk and passed her the Polaroid.
Oh my God, she said, holding it away. They’re undifferentiated. I’ve never seen a case like that.
I know. It’s crazy. I mean this one—he pointed at Fire—is barely a foot long and yet he talks incessantly. It’s crazy, the way they are joined. Fire, the small one, looks like a sea slug growing out of his brother’s side. And this one, the normal-looking one, only talks in factoids.
Factoids?
Yes, like, oh, I don’t know, giraffes have no vocal cords. Stuff like that.
Is it true, Sheila asked.
Is what true?
That giraffes have no vocal cords?
Yes, it’s true.
It’s weird that you know that, she said.
Whatever, he said. Anyway, the detective asked me to conduct a psych eval on them last night. I wanted to say no, but Brewster insisted that I do it.
Wow, you certainly had an adventurous evening, Sheila said, taking a sip of coffee. It was really good, as always.
So now I have the twins here, Sunil said. And we’ll keep them for at least seventy-two hours. I think Brewster wants to keep them indefinitely, but we’ll see.
You have them here at the institute?
Yes.
But if you don’t want Brewster to have them indefinitely, why would you bring them here, she asked.
Salazar can’t hold them legally so—
He’s asking you to keep them here. But why?
Well, when he arrested them, they were near a blood dump, but there were no bodies and so no evidence to tie them to the blood dump except proximity.
But if they are the killers—
I know, I know, Sunil interrupted. He filled her in quickly and she sat on the edge of the couch the whole time. When he was done, she sat back.
Jesus, she said. Why does stuff like this always find you?
I don’t know. Another troubling thing is that I think Brewster is running tests behind my back using my research, and I think these two things are connected.
That’s creepy, she said.
I’m not worried about the creepy factor. More important is the blood.
How so?
Well, Sunil said, if the blood dump is connected to my research it can mean only one thing.
Brewster is testing the drug you developed to trigger psychopathic behavior?
Yeah, Sunil said. Human trials of a psychopathic pathogen.
So what will you do, Sheila asked.
I don’t know.
Do you feel conflicted about holding them?
Yes.
That means you haven’t completely sold your soul to Brewster, she said, smiling.
In that moment he felt like he could fall for her, that he could make a life with her. He knew she liked him, was attracted to him. So what was holding him back? Was it because she was unabashedly black?
Sheila, he said, before he could stop himself.
What, she asked with a smile.
And he wanted to say, I like you, we should explore that. Instead he said: They have odd names, the twins.
Really, she said, and he could tell by the tone of her voice that she was disappointed. That she clearly thought he would say something different.
Yes, he said. His speech was quick, awkward, filling the space between them. One is called Fire and the other Water, and the one called Fire is a fire wizard. A sideshow thing, their act is called King Kongo, African Witchdoctor. Anyway, I noticed something really curious. Even though Fire is the wizard, there were burn marks only on Water.
Realizing she’d lost him to his work, she clenched her jaw. I have to go, she said, getting up abruptly. I have something to do. She hesitated in the doorway.
I’ll be brewing fresh coffee all day, Sunil offered.
She nodded and closed the door behind her. He stared at the smudge of lipstick on her coffee cup for a long time.
Twenty-two
So what is your diagnosis, Brewster asked as soon as Sunil picked up the phone.
Fuck, Sunil swore quietly. He wanted to say, Who doesn’t say hello when they call someone? Instead he said: You know how I feel about making hasty diagnoses.
Would you present them as psychopathic, Brewster pressed.
Always this shit with Brewster. Look, Sunil said, nearly every person in the world, at some point and under some condition, presents as psychopathic, from road rage to actual murder, but I don’t want to waste time researching twins who present nothing more unusual than their physicality.
Their twinning is everything, Brewster countered. We haven’t had an opportunity to study monsters before. We need to run an MRI on them. Judging from the photo on file, we may need to ask the zoo to assist, because the twins clearly won’t fit our own machines.
The zoo, Sunil echoed.
Consider their width, Brewster said. We can’t fit them in a regular MRI.
But the zoo?
What do you suggest, Sunil?
I don’t know. Aren’t there facilities that might have bigger MRIs that aren’t zoos? Shouldn’t we check with an obesity specialist first?
Yes, Brewster said, we could. But the zoo is a safe bet.
You don’t think taking a pair of conjoined black twins to a zoo for a medical procedure presents a problem, Sunil asked.
No, Brewster said. Whatever your sentiments, which are duly noted, make the arrangements for the MRI. We should probably try for tomorrow, as it will be less busy there on Sunday and cheaper for us. I’ll send them with a senior intern if that makes you feel better.
Sunil was silent at first.
Fine, I’ll have the intern handle all of it, Brewster said. That way you can keep your moral high ground. Brewster sighed impatiently. Listen, maybe the twins can provide the breakthrough we need for your X7 serum to work.
If they turn out to be psychopaths, Sunil said.
Well, we can only hope, Brewster said.
Twenty-three
Sunil was pacing when Sheila knocked and walked in.
Back for more coffee, she said sheepishly.
Sunil kept pacing.
Sunil, Sheila said. Sunil, stop.
That man, Sunil said.
Brewster?
Sunil nodded.
I know, Sheila said. He is such a dick.
Sunil smiled tightly. This isn’t your problem, Sheila, he said.
I know, but still, you know? So what happened exactly?
&
nbsp; He wanted me to take the twins to the zoo to get an MRI tomorrow.
The zoo!
My point exactly.
So what’s going to happen?
An intern is taking them, Sunil said.
Well, that’s not the I-told-him-to-fuck-off I was expecting, but at least you don’t have to do it, she said.
Before Sunil could answer, there was a knock at the door. A nurse stood there with a DVD in his hand.
Good morning, Dr. Singh, he said. This is the recording of the twins’ room from last night.
Thank you, Sunil said, taking the DVD.
You recorded them, Sheila asked as the nurse left.
Yes, they were on suicide watch. Of course I recorded them.
Did they consent?
Sunil crossed to his desk, ignoring Sheila’s question.
Maybe a little of Brewster is rubbing off on you, she said.
Sunil put the disk into his computer and pulled out his chair to sit. As the screen lit up, he became aware of Sheila’s breath on the back of his neck as she leaned over to watch. Goose bumps rose on his skin, but he pretended not to notice. The first twenty minutes of the DVD were uneventful, the twins moved about restlessly, trying to settle down. But then Fire slipped his caul over himself and retreated, to sleep no doubt. Water lay around for a while and then got up to cross to the window.
