Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  An unmarked helicopter swept in from the west, dipping down over the dorms of West Campus and pulling up directly over the gorge, hovering dead still. The door was open, and Jake saw a cameraman hanging out on the skids, lens pointed straight down. The local station must have hired the pilot to bring them over.

  “Check this out,” said a student to his right. He had his phone out, showing it to a friend. “It’s on CNN.”

  Jake took out his iPhone, carved himself out a little space up against a parked car. He pulled up the CNN website, found the footage rolling. The view was from directly overhead, the suspension footbridge maybe a hundred yards below, a thin ribbon of blue metal hanging over empty space. The bridge was empty except for a lone policeman. Crowds on either side were held back by yellow police tape and a phalanx of officers.

  The camera view zoomed into the gorge. Jake counted seven people: an officer taking pictures, two more watching, two EMTs, and two more in plain clothes that Jake guessed were also police. Their movements were choreographed, professionals going about their jobs.

  The view from the camera pulled back, then panned over to the waterfall upstream from the rescuers, the remnants of an old hydroelectric station clinging to the walls of the cliff. The water was running hard, plunging over the waterfall, cascading downward.

  The sound of the broadcast was inaudible in all the noise around him. Where the hell was the volume? It was a new phone; he hadn’t had it more than two weeks. He found the volume, turned it up. Nothing. The mute? Where’s the mute? The itchy dread in Jake’s stomach was building, his initial disbelief eaten away by the acid of information coming in. If this was on CNN, then—

  The camera swung back, zoomed in on the accident scene. In close on the victim.

  There.

  The image was grainy, but there was no doubt. The old brown coat. The shock of white hair.

  Jake felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. He lowered his phone, hardly believing it. He looked up to the helicopter suspended in the sky.

  Around him, people were yelling, struggling to be heard over the noise of the helicopter. Everyone was packed in tight, jostling him, elbows in his sides. The crowd surged, knocking Jake against an empty police cruiser. He barely noticed. All he could see was Liam and Dylan a week before, laughing their heads off, running Crawler races in the gardens of decay.

  6

  AT THE POLICE STATION, MAGGIE WAS FURIOUS. THEY KEPT saying her grandfather killed himself, but she was certain they were wrong. “It’s impossible,” she said for the tenth time, pacing the room.

  “I know this is a terrible shock. I’m very sorry. But please try to calm down, Ms. Connor,” the police chief said. His name was Larry Stacker. He was neatly dressed, short brown hair, a blue tie over a white shirt. Maggie thought he looked like a banker.

  “No way,” she said, shaking her head. “He had no reason. He was healthy. He was—” She looked away, trying to regain control. The office was modest, the painted concrete walls bare, save for a couple of diplomas and a picture of the Cornell campus from above. She expected the head of the Cornell police to have fancier digs. She wanted him to have a palatial office. She wanted to believe that he had every resource in the world at his disposal.

  “When did you last see him?” Stacker asked.

  “Last night. Around nine p.m. Outside the Physical Sciences Complex. He was fine. Making jokes. He and Dylan were going letterboxing this afternoon.”

  “Dylan? Who is Dylan?”

  “My son. His great-grandson. Please listen to me. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Liam. He loved Dylan. He loved me. He loved his work, his friends—everything. He was the most goddamned content person I’ve ever known. He had a big talk coming up next month at the AAAS meeting. He was getting ready for it. Why do all that if he was about to kill himself?”

  Stacker was silent. He was waiting her out, Maggie thought, wearing what must be the face he used for the bereaved, projecting equal parts steadiness and sympathy.

  “There’s no suicide note, right?”

  “That’s correct. But most suicides don’t leave a note.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care. I’m telling you, he did not jump from that bridge.”

  “Ms. Connor. I know this is very difficult to accept. But there’s no question. Your grandfather jumped.”

  “How could you possibly say that? How could you know? Were you there? Did you see it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. We have a security camera on that bridge.”

  Maggie was stunned. “Oh my God. You’re serious.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ms. Connor. There were witnesses as well. They saw a woman on the bridge with your grandfather. We’re looking for her now.” He opened a manila file, removed a printout, and passed it over. “Do you recognize her?”

  Maggie studied the image. It was grainy, a pixilated image of the woman from the waist up, clearly a blowup of a longer shot. It caught the woman in profile, dark hair pulled back, long forehead, thin cheeks. Asian. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She wore a black coat and gloves.

  Maggie shook her head. She was fighting back tears. “I’ve never seen her before. You don’t know who she is?”

  “Not yet. But your grandfather had said a woman that matches her description was following him. He’d reported it a week ago.”

  “Following him? Why?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Could she—”

  “She wasn’t close to him when it happened. Professor Connor seemed to run ahead of her.”

  “Did she try to stop him?”

  “It’s hard to say for sure.”

  “Let me see the video.”

  “I don’t see what good that will do, Ms. Connor.”

  “I don’t care. Show it to me.”

  After five minutes of fighting, Stacker reluctantly opened his laptop.

  Maggie watched, her heart pounding. The scene was grainy. The bridge was empty, swaying ever so slightly in the wind. A time stamp at the bottom said nine-thirty-two a.m.

  “Oh, God. There he is.” The tears ran down her cheeks. She fought the urge to cry out loud.

  Liam was slowly shuffling along, the unknown woman beside him. He had on his old brown overcoat, the one with the big wooden buttons. She could barely make out his face. “Oh, Pop-pop.” She put a hand to her mouth.

  He continued to progress along the bridge, the woman beside him. She couldn’t tell if they were talking.

  They approached the middle of the span.

  It happened so fast. One minute he was shuffling along. The next minute he was running. Fast. Then he was up and over.

  Gone.

  7

  FOR JAKE, THE NEXT FOUR HOURS WERE A LONG, SLOW WALK underwater. The first stop was Barton Hall, home of the Cornell police department. A lieutenant named Ed Becraft had led Jake to a dingy little room with plastic chairs and a white table. He looked to be in his late forties, with a wrinkled brown suit and tired blue eyes. He had a soft, high voice, incongruous, given his bulk and his job. When he told Jake the video camera on the bridge had caught Liam jumping, Jake was stunned.

  Becraft showed Jake a picture of the woman who’d been with Liam on the bridge. “You recognize her?”

  Jake shook his head.

  Becraft nodded, then stood. “I need a minute,” he said. He gave Jake a voluntary statement form and asked him to fill it out, then left him alone.

  Jake tried to get his head around it, but the whole episode didn’t register as real. Like a string of words said over and over until they lost their meaning and became just a stretch of sound: Liam Connor is dead.

  He picked up bits of conversations in the hallway. Rumors were spreading, speculation about what could have made Liam kill himself. The leading theories revolved around an incurable disease, cancer or incipient Alzheimer’s, affecting either his health or his judgment. It was all noise, Jake knew—the desperate attempt of people’s brains to adjus
t to a suddenly shifted reality. Whenever something big happened, there was always a great deal of Sturm und Drang. Jake was trying to see through it. To pick the signal out of the noise. To understand why one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century, a man surrounded by family and friends, all of whom adored him, chose to kill himself. And why would he do it in such a sudden, dramatic, out-of-character way, with absolutely no explanation?

  When Jake was done filling out the form, he poked his head into the hallway. Becraft saw him and came back, a mug in hand. “You okay? You want coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Tea?”

  “I’m fine,” Jake said.

  “Let me just say again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Becraft settled into his chair, picked up a pen. He made a couple of notes on a pad before looking up. When he did, it was all business, the questions coming fast. “Any reason you know of why Connor would want to end his life?”

  “No.”

  “Was he depressed?”

  “No.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “No.”

  “Any unusual behavior?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Was he tired? Slowing down?”

  “You have to be kidding. He worked twelve-hour days. Nights and weekends, he’d be there, fiddling in the gardens.”

  “Gardens?”

  Jake gave him a quick rundown on Liam’s fungal research, the granite-topped tables in the Physical Sciences Complex. Becraft took copious notes. The interview went on for another ten minutes, but the only thing that Becraft reacted to was the information about Liam’s labs. He’d grabbed his superior, a police chief named Stacker, and they dispatched a team to seal it off.

  Then they’d asked Jake to wait.

  He drifted up to the main part of Barton Hall, a cavernous space so big you could park a 747 in it. In addition to housing the Cornell police, Barton was also the home of the ROTC, as well as an indoor running track. It had been an airplane hangar in World War I, an armory during World War II. At the time, it was the largest freestanding enclosed space in the world. Now undergraduates took final exams there en masse, row upon row toiling under the watchful eyes of TAs and professors. When Jake taught Physics 1112, this is where they took their final.

  Jake stared out over the hall, imagining Liam running the track, eight times around for a mile. Liam had been a dedicated runner when he was younger, a good one. He’d gotten within fifteen seconds of the world record for the mile in the early fifties. Jake ran a bit himself, but he was more of a lifter. He liked the clarity of weights. The steel went up or it didn’t. Success or failure. With running, you were never done. You could keep going forever.

  Jake tried to get inside the old man’s skin. How many times had Liam stood in this hall over the years? The New York Times did a survey, asking where the greatest Grateful Dead show ever was. The answer was Barton Hall, 1977. Liam would have been what? In his fifties then?

  Liam listened almost exclusively to old Irish folk tunes, sad, sonorous ballads about lost love and delayed revenge, but he and Jake had once talked about the music of the sixties and early seventies. Jake had been surprised by Liam’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene through the Byrds, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead. Jake had said it was a revolutionary time, but Liam had a different take. He said it wasn’t a revolutionary period in music at all. Rather, it was a reactionary one—a throwback to when the popular art of a society was a dialogue about the issues of the day, not simply bread and circuses.

  Liam’s take on things always made you think, whether you agreed with him or not. Jake rarely emerged from their wideranging discussions with his initial perspective intact.

  Jake was going to miss him like hell.

  A voice behind him: “Professor Sterling? You ready?”

  BECRAFT LED THE WAY AS THEY WALKED DOWN EAST AVENUE toward Liam’s laboratory in the Physical Sciences Complex. The air was crisp and cold, carrying the scent of autumn leaves. The sun was out, normally a cause for celebration in perennially cloudy upstate New York, but today it seemed garish.

  To their right was the Andrew Dickson White House, named after Cornell’s first president, followed by Rockefeller Hall, built in 1906 with $274,494 from John D. Rockefeller. To their left was the Arts Quad, a large open space overseen by a statue of Ezra Cornell. It was surrounded by a mix of old and new buildings, some dating back to the university’s founding in 1865.

  Below the Arts Quad and past the library was the “Libe Slope,” a steep hill that ran from the edge of the library down to the West Campus dorms. This was the site of the traditional end-of-the-year blowout party that invariably filled the Gannett Health Services center with overindulgent undergrads. Beyond Libe Slope and the dorms was the eclectic mix of buildings and houses that made up downtown Ithaca, and beyond that the wide, flat expanse of Cayuga Lake.

  They turned right, toward the stone-and-steel façade of the Physical Sciences Complex, tucked in between Baker, Clark, and Rockefeller halls. Five minutes later they arrived at Liam’s lab. A uniformed officer stood guard outside. Technically, B24F was one of Jake’s labs, but in practice it was Liam’s domain. Jake had arranged for the space, saving Liam the trouble and paperwork. Liam was never an empire builder, always preferring to keep a low profile. He’d never bought into the science-as-industry model, where progress came by having a swarm of students and post-docs toiling away, picking a field clean like locusts. Even at the height of his career, the world’s leading expert on fungi was a perennial outsider, always preferring to work with just one or two students, lost in the unknown, tracking the craziest, most interesting idea he could find. His was so different from Jake’s way. Liam threw the long ball. Jake ran it right up the middle, making a few yards each carry.

  Becraft said, “Professor Sterling, is there anything in here that could be dangerous? Anything potentially explosive? Any chemicals we should be aware of?”

  “No, nothing beyond the usual.”

  “Usual?”

  “Bottles of reagents, maybe some syringes, things like that.”

  He nodded. “Okay, then go ahead. Open the door.”

  Jake slid his ID through the reader, and the door clicked open. Becraft flipped the switch, illuminating the rectangular space, twenty feet wide and twice that deep. The room was orderly and deathly still. There was a laptop on the desk in the corner, the screen blank. The opposite wall was lined with three lab benches, the shelves packed with pipettes, flasks of reagents, and sample cuvettes. And in the center of it all, the three huge mandalas of the gardens of decay. Jake always thought they looked like a giant painting by Klee, a spellbinding tapestry of complex mixtures of greens and yellows tucked between the narrow passageways down which the Crawlers ran.

  “That’s what you told me about?” Becraft asked. “The gardens of…”

  “Decay. That’s them. Each square is a different kind of fungus. Genetically engineered to cause the decay of one kind of trash or another.”

  “Incredible,” Becraft said. But then Jake saw his gaze change. “Professor Sterling, speed is important in a case like this. If there’s something to be found, we want it now instead of later. Understand?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “What I want you to do is this: Walk slowly through the lab and carefully examine every little thing. Is there anything out of the ordinary? Anything odd? I don’t care how small a detail it is. If it strikes you as wrong in any way, speak up.” He handed Jake a pair of powdered gloves. “But don’t touch anything without asking me first.”

  Jake pulled the gloves on and circled the perimeter of the lab while Becraft went to work. Jake watched Becraft quizzically as he turned over the trash can and laid the contents out on a small white sheet he had brought with him in a translucent bag. “What are you looking for?”

  “Draft of a suicide note. A paper cup with a good print. Yo
u never know. When I was with the Rochester PD, I once found the credit card receipt from the purchase of a murder weapon in a trash can not ten feet from the victim. The husband had dropped it there.”

  Jake returned to his searching. The door to a metal cabinet was slightly ajar. He glanced inside: a half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the shelf. Next to it were two tumblers, a trace of brown in the bottom of each. Liam marked every important event, good or bad, with a shot of whiskey.

  A memory bubbled up from a few years back. Jake had returned from a morning run to find Liam sitting in the hallway of his apartment complex, cross-legged on the floor outside his door, a paper bag at his side. “Is that the human snail?” Liam had said.

  “Snail?” Jake smiled. “You’re just jealous.”

  Liam scanned Jake up and down, taking in his running shorts and sweatshirt, the sweat dripping. “Of you?”

  “Of my knees.”

  “That is, in fact, true,” Liam said. His knees had forced him to give up running almost two decades ago. “Which route this morning?”

  “Cayuga trail. Up by the lake, then along Fall Creek to Route Thirteen.”

  “Time?”

  “Today? Hour forty-five.”

  “When I was your age, I could have shaved thirty minutes off that.”

  “When you were my age, the gorge was buried under an ice sheet.”

  “You are funny. A human tortoise, but funny.”

  Jake offered a hand. Liam took it, pulling himself up from the floor, a clinking sound coming from the paper bag in his other hand. He stood, all five and a half feet of him, head high. Jake was nearly a foot taller. It was an odd feeling, to be physically so much larger than this man Jake viewed as a giant.