The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  “Excellent. Marvelous. I just knew today was going to be a special day. Marcy? Oh, Marcy?”

  A freckled waif came from the back room, a silver ring through one nostril—the oddities of here and now were apparently limitless—and folding a shirt as she entered. Franklin told her where to find his phone, which he explained to me also contained a camera. My experience with photography consisted of long-held poses with the captain and crew prior to the expedition’s departure. The camera was larger than a breadbox, stood on three legs, and had a cloth draped over the back. I could not imagine how a thin-wristed elf like Marcy would carry such a weight. When she returned with a device smaller than a pack of playing cards, I was all the more perplexed. But Marcy dutifully pointed it at me in my worn clothes, displaying the photograph a moment later, my whiskered face, my surprised eyes.

  Franklin bustled back. “This is going to be so much fun.”

  I cannot say the subsequent hour fit that description, exactly, but there was a certain amusing giddiness in trying on so many garments. The store boasted a wealth of options. Dr. Philo left to buy herself a coffee while I tried on each of a stack of shirts. When she returned, she pulled Franklin aside and they chatted a moment. He nodded, looking at me meaningfully.

  “What conspiracy are you two concocting?” I asked.

  Franklin only hurried over. “Let’s see about some shoes.”

  So passed the morning: shirts, socks, pants, jackets. Marcy photographed everything. When I pulled on a pair of navy, pleated trousers, Franklin assessed my appearance, then called to Dr. Philo. “This is going to be better than winning the lottery.”

  Lastly came undergarments, which I tried alone in a dressing room. The fabric was soft like a cat, and snug. Finally Franklin had me dress in a complete ensemble and pointed me at a mirror. A man of here and now peered out at me: thin lapels, no waistcoat, a softer shirt with its collar already attached.

  “Marvelous,” Franklin said. “Now there’s only one last thing.”

  I turned to him. “Yes?”

  He wiggled a finger to instruct me to face the mirror again, then brought one hand up on either side of my face, palms over my sideburns. “These.”

  “But I’ve had them since—”

  “Not an option. They simply must go.”

  “They must?”

  “We’re not providing all of this merchandise for free if you’re going to walk out of here looking like that.”

  “I beg your pardon? You mean to say you are giving me these clothes?”

  “In exchange for photos of you for ads, yes. That’s what your friend negotiated. Now, wait right here.”

  In a moment Franklin returned with a corded device which had one end shaped like shears. Plugged in and switched on, it buzzed like a bee against a window. “Hold still,” Franklin said, pressing me into a forward lean, while Marcy held a wastebasket beneath. In two sweeps he had taken most of my whiskers. Another half minute of close work lifted the stubble away to give me clean cheeks. Just like that.

  Marcy took more photos whilst Franklin stepped back to survey his handiwork. “Marvelous. Believe me, sir, you will thank me. Now go show your friend the new you.”

  I ran a hand over my smooth face, as unknown to me as a stranger’s, then tugged my sleeves down snug and marched into the sales area. Dr. Philo was standing by the window, sipping her coffee. I cleared my throat. She turned, and brought one hand to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. “You, you look . . .”

  “Franklin insisted on my sideburns. What do you think?”

  “What do I think? Good Gawd.” She lowered herself into the nearest chair, clearly unaware that she was staring. Then all at once her face went blank, as calm as a pond. “You look fine, Judge Rice. Just fine.”

  “He looks fantastic,” Franklin announced. “Now, last thing, we find you a tie.”

  I followed him to the racks and he selected several with bright colors. Marcy photographed away while I stood before another mirror, holding them to my neck: blue, green, a patterned purple one you would never have seen the likes of in the gentlemen’s stores of Lynn.

  Then I felt Dr. Philo’s hand again, in the middle of my back as when she wakened me that morning. I held perfectly still. She looped a yellow tie around my throat.

  “That’s an excellent shade,” Franklin said. “Nice and bright.”

  Bringing her hands under my arms, she proceeded to tuck the fabric through my collar, then tie it with surprising skill. “I used to do this all the time for my father,” she said, finishing a neat knot, then sliding it snug to my throat.

  “There we go,” Franklin declared.

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “It is I who thank you. And now you are gorgeous.” Franklin turned to Dr. Philo. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  She made final adjustments to my tie, smoothed it down my chest, and said not a word. Only stepped aside and directed me toward the door.

  Thusly did my introduction to contemporary humanity commence.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Bandit

  (Kate Philo)

  Years ago, when my father died, instead of flying back to Ohio, I decided to drive. My mother passed away when I was twelve, so there was no need to rush to give or receive comfort. Chloe was on the scene anyway, competent as a robot. Instead of jetting disconnectedly overhead, I wanted to feel the distance. It gave me time to remember, time to cry. He’d been declining for almost two years, my beloved, round daddy, but that did not mean I was prepared for the fact of it, the finality when his death arrived.

  I drove north from New Haven, across central New York, into Pennsylvania, then down toward home. I kept the cell phone off, only checking for messages when I stopped for gas or a snack. Each time, Chloe’s updates showed that she had things in better order: the casket selected, funeral songs chosen, relatives notified. She was an insurance litigator, skilled in detail, handling these tasks with her accustomed efficiency.

  When I arrived, it was to discover efficiency times ten. I climbed out of the car before an open garage door. Inside lay boxes, chairs, kitchen gadgets, paintings, a disassembled bed. What the hell? I entered the kitchen. A stranger was packing up the everyday silverware. He glanced up, said hi, returned to his work.

  I found Chloe upstairs in our bedroom, our childhood bedroom, separating books into two big boxes. I stood in the doorway, stupefied. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Katie-bug,” she said, giving me a hug so quick and weightless you would have thought she was part hummingbird. Chloe had a look on her face, though, almost as if she’d been caught at something. It struck me, that expression, much as she tried to conceal it. Then she returned to her task, hunched like a vulture. “I hope you don’t mind the disruption, but since we’re both in town, I figured we’d get a head start on all this nasty dividing stuff.”

  “Really? If you think so.”

  I had no interest in participating. The one thing I wanted was a cable-knit cardigan my father had bought long ago on a trip to Ireland. He’d worn it constantly the winter I was seventeen. I found it in his closet, thin at the elbows, missing buttons, but it smelled like him. Except for the funeral, I wore it the whole time I was home: drinking wine with a high school chum on the rusty backyard swing set, standing in the kitchen in the morning waiting for water to boil, on quiet walks through my childhood neighborhood, the houses looking smaller but the trees become giants. Meanwhile my sister slaved away upstairs or in the basement, reenacting her half of the ancient roles of predator and prey.

  After the blur of the funeral, the two of us riding home in a limousine I thought was unneeded but Chloe insisted showed proper decorum, she coughed, removed her masking sunglasses, seized my elbow. “I can’t be silent one more second, Katie-bug. I have to say right now that I am worried about you. Extremely worried about your future.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I have my dissertation defense in three weeks, a great postdoc job lined
up at Hopkins starting in July. I’m on my way, Chloe.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t have him to puff you up anymore. It’s reality time.”

  “Puff me up? What are you talking about?”

  “We both know what I mean. Just try, Katie-bug, please. From now on? Try your best not to be insignificant.”

  While I gulped in disbelief, my sister put her shades back on, her job done.

  I should have been furious, I suppose. Instead I felt sorry for her. So I did not correct her. I did not explain that my father was not puffing, but loving. I did not pierce Chloe’s view of herself as the responsible executor of his estate, when her behavior was more like that of a thief.

  Is that the younger child’s job? To bite her tongue out of pity? Possibly. Meanwhile I was the one acting like a criminal, sneaking that sweater out to my car the night before driving back to Connecticut only when I knew Chloe was asleep.

  I defended my dissertation, landed the next job, then the next, then the Lazarus Project. Each advancement served in my mind as a rebuke to my sister’s putdown disguised as concern. In my nerdy world, not for one second have I been insignificant.

  Enough years pass, I forget these things. Chloe has her husband, her two girls. But she is all the family I have left. That reality apparently enables me to excuse scorn, insults, even her decision not to divide my father’s estate evenly. “I knew you needed the money more,” she announced, when I found out five years after the fact.

  True. Still I fumed, I stomped, then I let it go. Yet it did not quite let me go.

  I was strolling Cambridge with Judge Rice. June, a windless evening, streetlights dappled through the trees. By that point we walked arm in arm, whenever we had privacy. I delighted in being his teacher. He was amazed by everything: this traffic light was brilliant, that parking meter a revelation. I prompted him to tell me about days in his court. Judge Rice’s memory was spotty in that area, but on rare occasions a case would come back to him in detail. His favorites were the ones in which both sides were partly in the right. He called it “competing legitimate interests.”

  There was a banging from a stand of trash bins a few feet away, a metal top clanged to the sidewalk. It scared me; I hooted, jumped aside. The barrel tipped over, more noise, garbage spilling into the alley.

  Who should poke his head up from the cans then but a fat old raccoon, his face masked like a bandit. He made no effort to run or hide, but rather growled at us.

  Judge Rice laughed. “Bold creature, isn’t he?”

  “He startled me, though.”

  The raccoon returned his attention to the empty soup can between his little black paws, glancing up at us while he licked his snout.

  Judge Rice offered me his arm again. “Seems this fellow knows what he wants.”

  “He sure does,” I said. “Good thing for him that I already ate.”

  We moved away slowly, calm regained. But two things stayed in my mind. The first—say what you will about human traits in animals—was that the raccoon’s face echoed Chloe’s expression when I caught her dividing the books. I recognized it. The spoils.

  The second thing was that in the moment I leaped back in alarm, Judge Rice had jumped forward to protect me.

  CHAPTER 23

  “For My Next Trick”

  My name is Jeremiah Rice, and I begin to receive a welcoming.

  Each day Dr. Philo promenaded me from place to place in Boston, one corner of the city to its opposite. Newspaper interviews, business meetings, long marches down one street after another. Everywhere people greeted me, shook my hand, and provided me with whatever merchandise my heart desired or they felt to be beneficial to my needs. At no place would anyone accept payment.

  Restaurateurs held their doors open to us, and when we demurred because of Dr. Borden’s diet for me, they extracted promises that we would return. I met teachers, lawyers, clergymen, clergywomen, by glory, plus women lawyers, doctors, and more. The city’s people came from all nations and races, Japanese and Russian and Brazilian and African American, and all manner of mixtures thereof.

  Everyone knew my name. They hailed me on the avenue, called from passing cars, saluted on passing transit vehicles. As I walked a side street, an upper window opened and an enormous woman stuck out her head and waved a meaty arm.

  “Hey theah, Jerrr-oo-mmiieee-uhh.”

  “Hello and good morning,” I called in reply.

  She laughed. “Good mawning ta you, too, ya crazy fuckah.”

  “Hm,” I said, recoiling.

  “Actually”—Kate leaned near—“it’s kind of a compliment.”

  “Thank you.” I waved the woman good-bye, then muttered to my companion, “Your world is mad.”

  But oh, the voices, to hear so many voices once again. In my time I had disapproved of the long-voweled accent of Boston, which I equated with brawling, ignorance, and drink. In the here and now that same drawl sounded melodic, expressive, sincere in the best and earthiest way. Ha. It was akin to entering a house and smelling a favorite food cooking on the stove.

  And the crowds, the throngs outsized even those from the weeks before our expedition set sail. I met police officers who stood straight and puffed their chests. I held babies, thrilling to their animal aliveness even as my heart clenched with the memory of little Agnes. I played checkers in a park with old men who defeated me without mercy, for which I thanked them.

  The city opened its arms to me. I saw a film, so bright, frenzied, and loud it caused me to perspire. I visited the control tower of Logan International Airport, giant aircraft going and coming in a pandemonium as frightening as it was sublime. I visited the Old North Church, symbol in the story of early American freedom. I rode on a bus that became a boat that became a bus again as we toured the harbor and Commons. I strolled the lawns of Harvard University, I stood to applause in the Statehouse chamber, I rode an elevator to the Skywalk of the Prudential Center, the city at my feet, and off to one side the infinite Atlantic.

  I must say a word about touch. In my time, reserve was lauded. Men shook hands only, women touched arms only, couples of any standing made contact in public only with their eyes. Here and now seemed the opposite, with displays of intimacy in every direction. Couples swooned in each other’s arms in broad daylight. Men hugged; I saw it repeatedly. Women strolled arm in arm. Travelers crowded onto trolleys and trains, like so many sheep in a fold.

  This contact, I hasten to add, extended to me. I was hugged, touched, patted, squeezed like some fruit perpetually being gauged for ripeness. Hm. At first it demanded accommodation on my part, a resistance to the impulse of withdrawing, but by degrees I came to like it. It seemed almost a way of treating bodies as friends. It felt warmer.

  One day Dr. Philo broke a shoe on the sidewalk, and we stopped at a shop to have it repaired. The woman at the counter was wizened, with three hairs bristling from her chin. Her husband labored in back. She brought the shoe to him, then returned to the counter. Lacking other customers for the moment, she eyed me, and I wondered if perhaps she recognized me. After the cobbler returned from behind his curtain, she rang up the cost and made change for Dr. Philo. As we made for the door the woman rushed around the counter and pulled me down into an embrace so fierce it surprised me. What’s more, she planted a buss on my neck and thanked me for showing the world that Boston is a smart city. Smaaht was how she said it.

  Out on the sidewalk again, Dr. Philo elbowed me. “All the women fall for Judge Rice,” she teased.

  “I will never wash my neck again,” I replied.

  Not everyone delighted in my presence. Dr. Philo took me to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, which I had visited long ago on the day between my father’s death and his funeral. I had sat there all the silent afternoon. The loss of my last parent was a finality without mercy. Moreover, a barrier no longer stood between me and mortality. My generation would be next. Thus in the here and now, when I stepped beside Dr. Philo to open the heavy doors, their weight was
burdened by personal history. Whilst we stood in the foyer, an old woman crept toward me with her rosary raised.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” she hissed.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

  “Why are you accosting me?”

  “We are given only one life on this earth,” she said. Her manner of speaking bared yellow teeth. “Then there is life everlasting.” She crooked a bony finger at me. “You are a walking blasphemy. Your existence is a sin.”

  “While you,” Dr. Philo called over her shoulder, drawing me away, “are a nasty old crone.”

  “Get thee behind me,” the woman said, louder.

  Dr. Philo led me into the central nave, where the echoing stones compelled us to silence. At once I had fresh eyes for beauty. The stained-glass windows shed multicolored light on the pews. The aspiring arches drew our eyes toward God.

  The woman’s anger remained in my mind, naturally, but not topmost. There was too much competition. I was a student of the present and every day brought a deluge of novelty: a web of colored lines on a map corresponded to routes in the city’s transportation system; streetlights shone when the sun went down, with no one needed to spark them; signs beside the roads directed a ceaseless stream of vehicles like so many bees in a hive; refrigeration; lawn-mowing machines; timepieces worn on the wrist.

  Often I reminded myself that our species had not become smarter over the years, nor any more moral than is its nature, and what I witnessed merely represented the culmination of a century’s exertions.

  Possibly the rate of change and discovery had been greater when I was a youth, and the combination of steam power and coal had multiplied a thousandfold the force a man could exert with a lift of his hand—provided that hand was guiding a mechanical lever. Possibly neither of these eras came near in courage and adventure to the decades in which people cast monarchy from their backs and shouldered the burdens of democracy. Perhaps those times shrank beside the days when men sailed toward the edge of the globe, and discovered a new world. And those days possibly were eclipsed by the dawn of the scientific method. Which in turn must bow to the invention of the plow. And so on backward to the commencement of human time.