Lo jumps overboard, That’s eloquent and compelling. Marko says he was inspired by something she said in class. She freezes up. He’s overstepping somehow and I look at him directly for the first time. “What was that, Marko?”
He looks at her for approval but she just swallows.
“She told us about your family,” he says. “The naming through generations. The men all named Charles DeBenedictus. You’re young, you go by Eggs, and you’re Eggs until you have a son, and then you become Chuckie and your son is Eggs, but with your situation…” He tucks his hair behind his ears. “It broke my heart, the notion of you being Eggs forever, no end.”
Marko puts down his iPod and Lo looks at me. “Eggie,” she says. “It’s my smallest class, you know all the kids.”
I know Lo’s teaching style. I have no grounds to be wounded. “Am I complaining?”
“No,” she says. “Marko honey, did you want more bread?”
And this is where I kind of do like Marko. He apologizes for being so blunt. He means it. He’s a good kid. The kind of kid I wanted Chuckie to be. And I can’t be mad at Lo for talking about me and our son when I haven’t seen him in two years. Two years. And still she lets me sit at this table. I wink at her. She nods. She knows. She and Marko start talking about a band that’s playing downtown next week. I eat my pasta. This is what happens when your kid is sick, you wind up with someone else’s offspring, sitting down as if he’s yours. He picks up on my gloom, looks at me. “I have to ask,” he says. “Do you ever have to break up any fights at Lupo’s?”
Lo laughs. “Thank God, no,” she says. “Eggie’s a detective, it’s mostly paperwork. Anyway, Marko, tell us more about your paper.”
I twist my fork into the pasta. “Actually, I had an interesting call about a cold case tonight.”
Marko’s eyes light up. It’s a given with Lo’s kids that they’re always mining you for stories. They love to hear about our chief, Stacey, this ultimate character, a woman with five kids running a police force. Lo reads me excerpts of their short stories, all the different versions of Stacey. In truth, she’s not very interesting, not to me, anyway.
Lo’s fork drops into her salad bowl. “A cold case?”
Marko perks up. “Is this about those kids with the heart attacks, Officer?”
I nod. Lo bites her lip. I will pay for this later.
“I heard from a mother of a victim tonight. Now this might be nothing, but police work is more about your gut instinct,” I say, channeling my old man. “It’s about thinking. Imagination. It’s about looking away from the autopsy report and thinking about the body. Asking the right questions. Trusting your gut above all else because that’s your own little Internet right there, that’s your gut. And the way you pore over your writing, I pore over the facts.”
Lo grabs on to that word. “Facts,” she says, eyeing me.
“Anyhow,” I say. “It turns out that one of these kids, well, there might have been a person of interest that we didn’t know about until just now.”
Marko nods, he’s half listening, half observing, like all of Lo’s kids. I can see him using me already, knows more than he should about me. Lo has opened up to him, My husband and his boxes. You know those boxes have gotten him into trouble? He was on probation a couple years ago because he won’t let go of this theory that these deaths are related and this is the sort of thing that could cost him his job, but there he is, night after night, up there with his boxes.
“Anyhow,” I say. “It’s sensitive material and I have to leave it at that.”
And then we’re back to talking about Marko’s life, his paper, his housemates, they made up a drinking game where you have to say Nancy Ann Cianci three times fast. The three of us sit here like dingbats, croaking, Nancy Ann Cianci, Nancy Ann Cianci, Nancy Ann Cianci. I watch Lo. I wonder how much trouble I’m gonna be in after dinner.
After we finish and clear the plates, Marko unplugs his phone from the charger. He yawns, faking it. “I guess I should be hitting the road.”
Lo grabs his arm. “You can’t leave without dessert,” she says, she’s never ready for good night. “Do you like brownies, Marko?”
“Love ’em,” he says, and that’s my cue.
I pop the brownies in the microwave and listen to Lo and Marko discuss a documentary Lo has to see on Netflix. I watch the frostbite melt on the brownies. Marko laughs at something Lo said. She smiles because it feels good when you tell a kid a story and the kid reacts. I wish Marko were my son. I wish my son were Marko. The brownies go round and round and I wish Maddie had been calling about anything other than a goddamn dream.
* * *
—
“I’m not mad,” Lo says. “Are you mad?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m just looking out for you, Eggie. It’s just not smart. It’s one thing if I tell a vague story about us, about you, but you’re on thin ice when you tell these kids about specific cases. You know, what if Marko goes home and writes about one of your cases? He writes about a heart attack and it gets back to a family and the family calls Stacey. Then you’re out of a job.”
“I know.”
We settle into the bed and we try to get close to each other but we’re tired and we’re off. We put on a movie—American Splendor—and we sit there in the glow of the TV like kids staying up past their bedtime. We’re both forty-nine. We’re both from Rhode Island. We both fell in love with this house because it’s weird and we like weird. We both feel a strong sense of civic duty and actively use the library and the post office to ensure that our neighborhood remains just that. We both cried when Buddy Cianci passed away, mayor, husband of Nancy Ann Cianci. We both rejoiced when we realized what we had found in each other, one night in a movie theater, when we went into the wrong show and nearly killed ourselves laughing, stifling our laughter, the way she squeezed my hand, that thing when there is no one else on earth whose laugh could fuel you, whose hand could hold you. We’re both inherently grateful people. A cop and a teacher, Marko will probably write in a story one day, servants with imagination, a more compatible couple you could not find.
She’s eyeing me. “You’re so quiet, E.”
“I’m just thinking.”
She hits pause. I prepare for the lecture, You and Your Boxes. She sighs.
I stare at the TV, Harvey Pekar. He and his wife, they fell into a child, adopted a girl, a grown girl.
“Eggie, you know I don’t want to lecture you.”
“Lo, I know.” And Lord do I know that the odds are against me. Every autopsy is conclusive. Aortic rupture. Their hearts broke the way some hearts do and it’s bad luck that they should all go in my territory. Me with my overactive imagination. My gut and my boxes.
“But honey,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s just about one little step.”
I look at her. I wait.
“We could get out of the bed and get in the car, we could drive to Bradley.”
Chuckie. All this time she’s been thinking about Chuckie.
“You don’t even have to go in,” she says. “We could just sit in the parking lot.”
When she puts the movie back on, I send a text to Maddie. I was thinking about your dream, might be worth having another look at his email account. The thing about these cases, you think you’ve looked at everything, but sometimes you go back, it all looks different to you.
She writes back a couple minutes later: Sorry Detective, and a big thank-you for being there for me in my crazy moments. I had a good visit with my sister and her kids, I’m calmer now. No more paranoid calls from me, I promise. I know you have real cases to solve. Sorry again.
I put my phone away. I never feel calmer. I wonder what that’s like.
JON
This is where Yvonne Belziki died, right here, right on Dorrance Street.
I had only b
een here a couple days and I was walking around, circling a nightclub called Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. That’s what I did to Noelle. I broke her heart. I was sure of it. I was sweaty and overheated after she died, as if I had used my own hands to reach in there and twist her arteries, shredding them until my knuckles were raw, red. I hadn’t meant to do it. I would never do that to anyone. But I had done it.
I’d been trying to understand what Noelle did that caused my body to flare up like that. But it wasn’t fair to blame Noelle. I killed her. Me. I hated it when people blamed my mother’s “loose parenting style” for what Roger Blair did to me. You can’t blame the victim. You blame the kidnapper, the murderer.
And now I was the murderer, like it or not.
Noelle did not deserve to die.
And then, one day, right here on Dorrance Street, there she was, though I didn’t know her name, Yvonne Belziki. I liked every part of her—her legs, her fingertips, all of her—and it wasn’t a Chloe kind of love. She just looked full of goodness. She smiled at me, and it was contagious. I hadn’t made eye contact with anyone since Noelle died. But I looked at Yvonne and thought, Things can get better. Her eyes latched onto mine and I should have run then, should have looked away, because my heart was pumping in a way it hadn’t since Noelle died. I should have run. Instead I froze, a venomous deer in headlights. And for the first time I really listened, and I could hear the change in me, as if Roger had rewired my insides, added a circuit system between my emotions and these invisible bullets bursting out of me.
Yvonne went fast, maybe even faster than Noelle.
I tried to do a better job of keeping to myself. I only walk at night, no eye contact, no chance of anyone getting to me. Sometimes I get paranoid and swear someone is following me, and those nights I go straight home, where I’m safe, and so is everyone else.
I focus on my plan. I can’t find Roger Blair, no one can, but I try. I do my research, I concentrate on the science of it, read about Blair, his other experiments, the guy he worked with at Brown, Dr. Terence Meeney. If I can figure out what he did and how he did it, maybe I can fix it. Science could blow your mind, chemistry, in particular, with the codes and the numbers and the potassium, the chloride.
And when I can’t take the equations anymore, I step away from all the long, unwieldy words in the bio books and move over to the long, unwieldy words in the Lovecraft books. Cthulhu. Necronomicon. After all, there’s no denying that I’m a monster. And maybe the key is learning how to tame these powers. (I hate that word.) I read about Lovecraft the writer, the letters he wrote to his friends, his stories, but everything is cycles, seasons, and sure enough, after a few days of Dunwich life, I get weary. I’m back online, in Wired, in Science.
Part of the problem is there’s no name for what I am, what I do. I don’t know why my mom and Chloe and my dad only fainted while Noelle and Yvonne died; the romantic part of me thinks it has something to do with love, but that feels indulgent, silly, nothing to do with science, with the heat of my jets as they take off, one heart attacking another.
Providence is the best place for me. A lot of quiet, open streets, I pace around the city the way Lovecraft did in his day. I walk and wonder, Where is Roger Blair? That’s the only way I’m gonna figure it all out. Deep down I know it and it gets to me, the feeling that all my research, my reading, it’s all a waste of time. I’ll never find him, never fix it, and I can’t live like this, the danger I put into the world just by walking down the street.
But then another month goes by, the college kids arrive and grow and I stay, in my same basement apartment, in my same job delivering papers for the Providence Journal. The thing I keep realizing is that there is no bottom of the heart, no darkest moment of your life, there is only darker, darker still. Noelle died because I was mad at her. Yvonne died because I smiled at her. Kody died because I was so upset about Carrig and Chloe. There’s no end to the frustration, the curiosity, the horror that my feelings are poisonous. They have consequences for other people.
And it’s maddening, it’s stupid. As if the act of feeling is undesirable, as if highs and lows aren’t the whole point of life, to be mad at Noelle, to be dizzy over a beautiful girl on a spring day, as if we all don’t want to live at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel.
I remember what Beverly once said about the cycle of abuse, that I shouldn’t be surprised if I had thoughts about hurting someone, that it was natural for a victim to repeat that kind of behavior. I remember how hard I meant it when I told her that I had no desire to hurt anyone ever. And then the tears came, hard as the waves, harder.
My dad used to have crazy dreams. My mom would groan, Dreams are like exercise, no one wants to hear about it. Now I have crazy dreams, I see all the people I killed, I try to save them but there are no clues in my useless goddamn dreams. Roger Blair’s there, but he doesn’t help me. He doesn’t listen when I scream. He doesn’t open up and explain what he did, how to stop it.
Five people and one dog. Dead. Because of me.
Where the fuck are you, Roger Blair?
He might be going by Magnus Villars. And I understand why he became Magnus. He had ideas that no one wanted to hear, things he could only do as another person. I’m the same way, which is why I gave up my life as Jon Bronson. I have two names now: Theo Ward and Peter Feder.
Theo Ward (a mash-up of Lovecraft’s pen names: Lewis Theobald and Ward Phillips) is a normal dude, rents the basement apartment, delivers papers for the Providence Journal. I have an email account for Theo, but it’s never that exciting.
I do all my science work under my other name, Peter Feder. Peter is for Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Feder is for Lenny Feder (Grown Ups 2). I came up with the name on the first night of my paper route. I was so tired, so new to this place. I didn’t even have a mattress. I turned on the TV, a leave-behind from the last guy who lived here. Grown Ups 2 was on, I sat there on the floor and I laughed. I actually laughed. There were no tombstones, no Lovecraft, just these normal dudes joking around, drinking beers and jumping into quarries. There was no mystery, no unknown.
* * *
—
“Peter Feder” has a Facebook page where he runs a victim advocacy group. People think Peter is an online bounty hunter who cannot reveal his physical identity for legal reasons. I tell people I’m looking for Roger Blair on behalf of the Bronson boy’s family (not an outright lie, I am the family, I am Basement Boy). And I hear from dozens of people who knew Roger, people who think they spotted him. I have pictures, war stories, former students ready to testify that he made them feel uncomfortable.
But I still can’t find the motherfucker.
Roger Blair was a loner. But even people like that have to confide; everyone has someone. Roger never married, and as far as I can tell, his closest friend was the head of the biochemistry department at Brown, that Meeney guy. I actually saw him at the police station when I got out. He was a person of interest when they started looking for Mr. Blair but he was cleared right away. Shakalis said it was a no-brainer because Meeney banned Roger from the Brown campus. I remember him on the local news, outside of the station, almost smiling, You allow adults to be near children with minimal vetting and you want to point at me? I don’t think he’s in cahoots with Roger, but I know he has to know something. They were close until they weren’t. People who know you, they know your places. Same way Chloe and I had the shed.
Roger and Meeney were research partners. They were on this Animal Planet show The Machiavellian Life of Plants a few times. They talked about biochemistry, this plant called the dodder vine, a parasitic weed that sucks energy—life, essentially—out of others to survive. They saw the potential for power in this and they were also interested in the photosynthetic potential in mankind. They had this idea that people could, one day, be more like plants, and sustain themselves on sunlight and soil, become a part of the ecosystem. Roger’s reasoning was that w
ith technology, we don’t use our bodies as much, we’re down to eyes and fingertips. This is where Meeney was the normal one who would audibly groan and correct his partner, What he means is that there is more untapped energy in other parts of our bodies.
They got a lot of grant money, but nothing ever panned out, as far as I can tell. Blair was notorious for dropping one project to start another, and the two squabbled about research ethics a lot. My dad would say they’re a couple of Garfunkels with their high voices and curly hair, but Meeney’s camera-ready. It’s not surprising that he wound up with the job, the power. In the video with the most hits, Meeney calls Roger a sadist and warns the host that Roger will hurt someone someday. Roger Blair rolls his eyes.
People who live to know a sicko are very eager to tell you their story. There’s a pride, a sense of having survived someone. I hear from people every day who knew Roger, and they all say the same thing: You should find Meeney. He knew Roger better than anyone.
And every day, I call. I pretend to be a student, a professor, a reporter, but it’s always the same.
Dr. Meeney suggests you visit during his office hours. Dr. Meeney is preoccupied with research at the moment. Dr. Meeney does not speak with reporters.
If I wasn’t poison, I could go to him during his office hours. Of course, I think about blowing my cover, I am Jon Bronson, the guy who was kidnapped by Roger Blair and I think Dr. Meeney can help me. But I don’t trust him; look how he treated Roger, his best friend.
Look at him now, talking to a girl in front of the Dean Hotel, they were drinking, eating. The girl is not his wife, and who knows if he’s sleeping with her, but his smile is for her, his hand is on her elbow. I follow him every day, trailing him on the way home, where he kisses his wife, his dog. He’s so available, I could knock on his door, stop him when he’s emerging from his biweekly squash games at the campus gym, tap him on the shoulder.
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