The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  The reporters were all busy writing, heads down. A few tapped maniacally on their laptops. Now I was hitting my stride. “Proof number three. The loot.”

  These were snapshots and I flipped through them rapid fire: Jeremiah trying on running shoes. A tailor holding a jacket while Jeremiah slips an arm into a sleeve. Jeremiah grinning at a jeweler while holding a gold watch up to his ear.

  “Are we going to get copies of this material?”

  “Absolutely, yes,” I said. “I’ll tell you this, too. Jeremiah has received so many goodies there is now a big locked storeroom of them at the Lazarus Project offices. I can’t guess what it’s all worth. But don’t let that loot take your eyes off the big prize.”

  I showed my photo of those men from the meeting room, waiting for the elevator. They’re all holding folders. Carthage is speaking while Thomas hovers at his elbow.

  “These guys are money,” I explained. “Potential investors. Most of them run cryogenics companies, a few are biotech. Maybe you recognize some faces. The folder contains a prospectus for commercializing the Lazarus Project’s discoveries. Basically Carthage was looking to sell out, which is acceptable capitalism but unusual science, wouldn’t you say? Oh, and the minimum entry point was one million dollars.”

  I enjoyed the silence which greeted that news. “Not all loot comes in the form of money,” I added. “Sometimes access is almost better than cash.” On the screen I flashed a photo of Vice President Gerald T. Walker and his toothy trademark grin, with his arm tightly around Jeremiah’s shoulders. There was a guffaw from somewhere in the room, so I guess I’d put the icing on that particular cake.

  “Finally, proof number four, the romance.”

  Oh, I had a quiverful of those arrows. Between my camera and the video files, I’d been stung by them a hundred times over the weeks: Dr. Kate hugging Jeremiah before releasing his straps and wheeling him to the roof. The two of them squeezing hands at the first news conference. Jeremiah and Dr. Kate strolling Back Bay arm in arm. Jeremiah and Dr. Kate snuggled against each other in front of the moving sculpture at the Museum of Science. Dr. Kate on a bench by a beach, her head in Jeremiah’s lap. “Not exactly the professional scientist–research subject relationship, am I right?”

  I kept going. The two of them on a sidewalk at night in the North End, some fat guy singing melodramatically while Dr. Kate leans against Jeremiah and moons like a teenager. A telephoto shot, the knockout of the series, in a cemetery north of Boston, the two of them so glued together it looks like they’re having sex standing up.

  “Get a room,” someone called, and people laughed.

  The last one in that sequence was the nighttime kiss outside her apartment, backlit by a convenient streetlight, as clear as if they’d done it onstage. I left that photo up a little longer, then switched off the projector like Perry Mason saying the defense rests. “I’d guess that leaves not too great a margin for doubt, does it?”

  The lights came back up. People took a minute to collect themselves. I thought about a snake digesting a fat frog it had just swallowed. That was them. Me, I felt as relieved as a gymnast who tried a hard move to finish a routine, and stuck it good.

  “So let me understand this,” said a reporter in front. “You’re saying the Lazarus Project is fake, and they concocted this scheme for money and political influence?”

  I held my hands out wide. “If the people at the Lazarus Project have a better explanation, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Why aren’t you just writing this story yourself?”

  “Believe me, I’d love to. But I’ve become part of the story. They played me, and like a good Boy Scout I passed the garbage right along. That’s why I’m handing it over to all of you. And, frankly, crossing my fingers that you get it right.”

  “This coverage has been all yours, the whole way,” said a familiar voice from over by the wall. “Why did you get it so wrong?”

  I craned my neck, and damn if it wasn’t Wilson Steele, looking like someone had pissed in his cornflakes. Which would be yours truly. How had he snuck in here without me noticing? And where did he get off asking such a sharpie?

  “Great question,” I said, stalling. I stared at my loafers, as if they had the answer. But they just looked beat, unpolished, a metaphor for my shoe-leather existence. And then I experienced the great what-the-hell of Daniel Dixon’s life. At that point, declaring my big-time exclusive to be bogus, killing my career in service of the truth, what did I have left to lose?

  “Look, Wilson,” I said. “All of you. We each have our blind spots, you know? If we’re honest with ourselves. Weaknesses we may not even know we have, but that the spin meisters and professional deceivers can spot from a mile off. There are certain events in my past that made me an excellent tool in the service of Carthage’s fantasy, even with all my experience, a reporter perfectly susceptible.”

  “What events?”

  “None of your goddamn business.” I bristled. “Besides, I’m not the only one he duped. You guys right here, you let this stay a press-pool story, with everyone writing from my filings, for way too long, and you know it. As far as I know, only one newspaper got past the walls. The rest of you went right along with the game.

  “But here’s the main point I want to make, on the record and for the record. I am not Carthage’s manipulated mouthpiece anymore. And as far as I’m concerned, all embargoes and exclusives and deals of any kind, well . . .” I laughed, I had to laugh. “Hell, they’re dead.”

  The reporters sat as still as statues, not even taking notes. It was like we were throwing a year’s work out the window, running the correction to beat all corrections, and they knew it.

  “Excuse me,” someone at the back called out. Now I have been to maybe two zillion news conferences in my career, and I cannot remember a single time that a reporter said “excuse me.” No, you bark your questions, you interrupt, manners are for sissies. The rest of the room must have felt the same way, because everyone turned, a path cleared, and I saw that the speaker was Tucker Babcock, senior political columnist at the Globe practically since the days of my first byline. If Boston had an elder statesman of the news, Tucker Babcock was it—from his white beard to his bushy, intimidating eyebrows.

  He brushed one of them back with his pinkie like it was the queen clearing her throat. “Walk us through it, Dixon,” he said. “Can you give us more detail on how you developed this information, and reached this conclusion?”

  Well, I have been around long enough to know what a softball like that means. The days of yours truly being some unrecognized hack were at a definite end.

  “You bet,” I said. Then I took a chair from the front row, turned it backward, and flopped into it. “So far you’ve heard the highlights. Now I’ll tell you everything else.”

  CHAPTER 38

  That Kind of Man

  My name is Jeremiah Rice, and I begin to tremble.

  Nor can I stop it either. I awakened that day to the unusual sensation of ropes coiling up and down my legs, beneath the skin. Or was it snakes? My acquaintance with those creatures was limited to the harmless slitherers basking on our garden wall of a summer’s day. Now these snakes were within me, strong, uncontrolled spasms. Over the minutes my muscles calmed, lowered to a tremor, and at last drooped as loose as sails without wind. I placed a palm on my chest and my heart had resumed its regular thrumming pace. A breeze raised the curtains into the room as though lifted by a ghost.

  It was July, the miracle of July. When we set sail in August all those years ago, I did not know that my final July had just ended. This time I knew. This time I lay back in bed, tasting the air, and it was delicious, the sour tang of ocean a few hundred feet away, and three months after my awakening, the scent of salt no longer painful.

  I had slept. After losing count, so many nights of wakefulness I longed for the peace of mindlessness, I had stretched myself beside Kate in the white iron bed of this inn, the lull of her breathing as steady and serene
as the surf. Once during the night I was aware of our entangling, body to body with bedclothes between. Otherwise I had dozed into the depths, swimming deep waters, surfacing only now in midmorning.

  Beside me the bed was empty. Through the warped opening in the bathroom door I could hear the shower running.

  My view of life had changed in recent days. I found myself noticing, with breathtaking acuity, and . . . what was the word? Language came and went too quickly now, as if my mind lacked some glue to keep it long enough to say. Appreciating. Yes, I found myself appreciating everything. I could never pretend to be an artist or spiritualist, just a man of law, a servant of precedents and procedures. Yet now I was heightened, aware of each thing however humble. At dinner the innkeeper lowered a match to a candle, and the wick seemed to pull the fire into itself. The bread had a thick crust I had to bear down hard upon to bite, and foolish or no, I felt a fondness for my strong teeth. A lump of ice chimed in my water glass when I raised it. Life was filled to bursting, rich as a kingdom. The shortness of time was teaching me to notice.

  When a man is dying, the world is loud, insistent, and vivid. Each thing, however modest, becomes exaggerated, because it is the last of its kind: the glint of a wave, the cry of a gull, the weight of clothes on my bones. More than once I wished that I had infinite pockets so I could tuck aside one thing after another, keeping them somehow before everything vanishes. Yesterday a bee veered near to inspect me, then hummed off on its tireless errands, and I nearly wept as the sound fell away.

  That first time, in the icy sea, I experienced the loss of everything in seconds. The pain was so unspeakable, vast and sudden, that fading consciousness brought relief. This time, losing the world by degrees, in full consciousness, is proving harder.

  Once I thought that aging would make me into an excellent judge. Experience would give me wisdom. Now I know that I will never grow old. Yet I feel ancient already: less the master of my body, swept by tides of emotion, mindful that each thing I perceive is already on its journey away from me, and the wisest act I can perform is to appreciate.

  Even now, the angling of the light into this room. The curl of the curtain as it falls from a slackening breeze. To call these things symphonies would be untrue. They are but two of the hundred thousand simultaneous extravagances known as existence.

  Of course my keenest appreciation has been of Kate. She laughs and it is a melody. She takes my arm when we are strolling and it is serenity. She becomes pensive, increasingly of late, and I wait with affection for the shadow to leave her face.

  A spasm gripped my foot, then passed. Hm. How much longer could I conceal my body’s paroxysms from her? I wanted to shield Kate from worry for as long as possible. Perhaps today I would tell her. At least there was no pain.

  Through the window I heard children playing. My mind leaped to Agnes, my cherub, and to Joan. Was I wrong to keep myself from Kate in their name? Was it honorable to remain steadfast in my vows regardless of the way that time had distorted them? The world of here and now made little sense. Joan was my foundation and firmament. When all else was unknown, her fidelity and generosity were certain and enduring.

  Yet if I said that waking that dawn to find myself entwined with Kate was anything shy of comfort, anything less than delight, it would be falsehood.

  Once upon a time, so long ago it feels like it happened to a different Jeremiah Rice, a woman loved me with devotion beyond my deserving. She bestowed the singular gift of a daughter, my heart’s joy. Yet I left them blithely, arrogantly, certain I would return in a few months’ time. On that voyage I lost everything of myself, yes, but worse, I inflicted who knows what hardships upon them, what undeserved suffering.

  Now a woman of a new era offers me her kindness, her intimacy, whilst I know it is a matter of hours or days before I depart from her, too. Am I to deny what happened the first time? Am I to join her in tenderness, give in to the desire like a fire in my blood, and inflict another generation of harm? I have already left behind one woman, one child. How can I countenance hurting another? Do I want to be that kind of man?

  I sat upright, throwing back the sheet to see my diminished body. My time was escaping. Was the man who lived ever grateful for Joan’s willingness incapable of being willing himself? Did I truly believe that withholding would spare either Kate or myself any grief?

  Of course not. The bond existed already, consummated or not. The sweet entanglement of our sleep proved it. Our loss would occur, then, regardless of the happiness beforehand. My leg shuddered from ankle to hip, as if the spasm were an instruction to me: it is better to live generously than to regret having lived with restraint. I would surrender to Kate that very night—I vowed it—and give her my fullest remaining self, grateful and entire. I was willing, yes, because sorrow is the price we pay for joy.

  With that I roused myself, rising to dress. My clothes had begun to hang loosely, despite all the foodstuffs I gorged. My shirt slouched, my trousers drooped. At least my boot, my trusty old sea boot, slid on snugly and held me like the handshake of a friend.

  I heard the shower stopping, and hurried with the other boot. Kate deserved private time to dress and settle in herself. She was generous, taking time from work and driving me up and down the coast. Rockport had galleries, Hyannis hotels. Everywhere change, everywhere cars and crowds and haste. Then we reached the National Shore. The relentless waves at Nauset pounded with their drumming and rush, a rhythm unchanged since I’d last seen them in my twenties, two turns of the century ago.

  Eventually we landed in Marblehead, settling in this little inn among old houses near the docks. Kate paid for everything, though it chafed my masculinity. But the plain fact was that I had no cash. One day she handed me some bills, so I might explore whilst she rested. Kate needed naps, of course, because I could persist without breaks both day and night. I returned with bread, grapes, and cheese, waited hours until she woke, and we made a light meal on a dock deserted but for us two. A wood drake swam by to lecture us. I felt as though I had never beheld a duck, its iridescent feathers, its comical nagging. A thing of beauty.

  Kate nibbled and chatted whilst I showed restraint as well as I could. Then her face took a melancholy cast. “Go ahead, Jeremiah,” she said, pushing the wedge of cheddar toward me. “It’s all right.”

  I devoured that cheese as a dog would. The remaining grapes lasted seconds more. Kate ambled to the end of the dock. Swallowing the last bits, I followed and stood near. She leaned against me without a word. Even her silence was a pleasure. I promised myself to remember. If I was learning to appreciate, I must also honor experience by remembering.

  That morning in our room I reached into the closet for my jacket, and tremors ran through my fingers. I wagged my wrist to shake them away, but that trick was becoming less effective. I hurried to make the bed, as I had done every morning with Joan. What are habits but a steady way of either honoring or diminishing ourselves?

  The shower curtain slid back with a scrape of rings on rod, and I hastened to the hallway door. My instinct—call it, perhaps, my base animal self—could not resist the temptation, and I peeked through the cracked open bathroom door before my conscience had a chance to intervene. I was the plaything of my own eyes.

  There stood Kate amid the steam, hair wet and clinging to pink skin, stunning, lovely brightness, the long, lean flank of her. She brought her nearer leg up on the toilet seat and rubbed downward with her towel.

  I burst from the room and down the stairs, my body roaring and ravenous.

  CHAPTER 39

  Where Are They?

  (Kate Philo)

  He slept. After four days that I know of, four long nights without his eyes closing, at last he rested. He laid himself beside me, he curled his body into mine, he slept.

  Sometimes when I see someone lose his temper, I imagine someplace else where a person is praying, or gardening, or performing some meditative action that is the opposite of the anger in front of me. That place is what it is
like to sleep with Jeremiah Rice. The world may rush and rage, but you are in a realm of deepest calm.

  Drying myself after a shower that morning, I admitted to an unreasonable optimism. When a man is revving so high he practically hums, a night of sleep is like hearing that a cancer patient’s chemotherapy has worked. There may be a reprieve. Forty winks for Jeremiah made me hopeful again. I slept better, too, relieved of worry for those tender hours.

  Maybe it was the power of touch. Over those celibate months I had forgotten the effect of body on body, the warm weight, the way my arms wrapped him by instinct. So what if we hadn’t had sex? I didn’t expect it. There are many ways of taking a man inside yourself and filling both of you with pleasure. There are many ways of making love.

  Oh, who was I kidding? What I felt for this man was want, in every meaning of the word: in my heart, in my sex, in the memories I hoped to hold for the rest of my life. Ultimately, I now understand, my yearning for Jeremiah might best be described as curiosity. After all, what is love but the desire to know another person as thoroughly and deeply as possible? Every quirk and passion, each response to the changes of time, every possible inch of skin? Also perhaps to be ourselves known, with all our flaws, yet somehow miraculously still be desired? In days past they spoke of lovemaking as a man and woman knowing each other. That is precisely how I wanted Jeremiah Rice. At long last, completely, to know him.

  Also to save him from dying alone.

  I left the bathroom wrapped in a towel, to see that he’d gone out. But not before making the bed, which amused me. Jeremiah had done the same thing in the motels on the Cape, no matter how clearly I explained how the hospitality industry works. He’d listened, nodded, said he understood . . . and made the bed the next morning anyway.