The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Do you honestly have other plans?” her mother had asked Alexis on the phone as she emerged from the subway near her apartment late that afternoon. “You just got back from Vietnam, you’re due in the ER at noon tomorrow, and you just endured every traveler’s worst nightmare. Your traveling companion died.”

  She had paused on the sidewalk and tried to understand the reasoning behind her mother’s choice of words: traveling companion. She could only conjecture. She considered saying, Since when is my boyfriend my traveling companion? Are we suddenly living in an E. M. Forster novel? She supposed she would have said something like that if Austin hadn’t lied to her about why they had gone to Vietnam and if she, in turn, hadn’t finally told her mother that he had. In the end, Alexis had said yes simply because it was just easier than saying no, and now the three of them had finished dinner in her small apartment—smaller than Austin’s, that was for sure—drinking coffee that, strong as it was, was never going to smother the aroma of the saag paneer, the matter paneer, and the samosas. Alexis knew that when she awoke tomorrow morning, the apartment would still smell like an Indian restaurant. Their plates and silverware were in the dishwasher and the leftovers were in plastic containers in the refrigerator. Her mother would have it no other way.

  “A private investigator,” Ellie was saying to Alexis when her mother returned from the kitchen. “I don’t know whether I find that idea interesting or disturbing.” The veterinarian was sitting with her long legs curled beneath her. She was a tall woman with brown eyes and a long red braid that she toyed with sometimes when she was thinking aloud—as she was now.

  “I feel I owe it to him,” Alexis said, her tongue feeling a little thick from the Indian beer that Ellie had picked up when Alexis’s mother told her what she herself was bringing. Alexis had drunk only a bottle and a half, but she was tired and the alcohol was hitting her hard. She was a lightweight when it came to beer and wine and booze, and didn’t drink much.

  “You owe him nothing,” her mother said, sitting beside her on the couch. She was still in the gray skirt and the blouse she had worn to the office that day, but her suit jacket was hung up in the hall closet. She dyed her hair auburn, and it was dyed perfectly. She was sixty and looked fifty. She joked to her employees—and Alexis had seen her do this in speeches and get laughs from it—that she looked so youthful because she’d been blessed to have been a young widow. “Why he would tell you—why he would tell all of you on the bike tour—such an outrageous lie is beyond me. It’s appalling. Look, I know—”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Please, let me finish,” her mother said, steamrolling forward. “I know when things should be transparent, and I know when complete transparency is a bad thing. But he was up to something really shady. That’s clear. It’s not that he lied about his father’s military record or where his uncle died. It’s that he used those lies as a pretext to go to Vietnam—twice. Two times. I know you cared about him, Alexis. I get it. For all I know, you loved him. And his death is a terrible thing. But it’s not your responsibility to bring in a private investigator. If anyone should, it’s his parents. You need to move on. Sure, grieve. Though, personally, I wouldn’t grieve for a man who misled you so disgracefully. I would love to know what his plan was when you found out—because you would have found out.”

  “Unless—” Ellie began, but then stopped herself.

  “Unless what?” her mother asked, but then she nodded and understood. “Unless he never planned to be with you long enough for you to find out,” she said, finishing the sentence that Ellie wouldn’t.

  “Look, Mother,” Alexis said, pausing when her voice cracked, but not stopping, “I don’t pretend to know why he did what he did or what he was doing the afternoon he went missing. I only know this: he was always—always—very good to me. He was always kind and fun. If he had any flaw that I ever saw, it was this: he was…boyish. Maybe he hadn’t completely grown up. But I’m not sure that was a flaw. That was…” And once more, she brought her lips together, pressing them shut, and this time she did stop speaking when she saw Austin’s smiling, boisterous face in her mind.

  Ellie finished the beer she was drinking, tilting her head back for the last, likely warm drops. Then she put the bottle down on the coffee table and asked her, “Did you suggest getting a PI to his dad?”

  “I didn’t,” Alexis admitted—and it felt like a confession, a failure. “I had planned to, but I was unprepared for his animosity when I told him how Austin had lied. He was so angry.”

  “And he had absolutely no explanation for that lie? For those lies?” her mother asked.

  “I told you: he got defensive.”

  “Which is when we parry,” her mother scolded her. “Either you push back or you agree. But no matter what, you reiterate exactly what you want. What you need. You negotiate.”

  “No!” Alexis snapped at her. “The man had just lost his son. His son had just died. Listen to what you’re saying. Just listen.”

  “I was thirty-six when my husband died. Your father. Trust me, I don’t have to imagine that kind of pain. Neither do you.”

  “You’re wrong, Mother. This time, you’re wrong. Peter Harper outlived his son. He and his wife have to shoulder that. I’m sorry, but after he pointed that out to me, it was all I could do to”—and again she ceased speaking. She had a feeling if she had continued that her mother would have reminded her that the man had referred to her as merely one of the women his son was dating; it had taken a lot to react to that observation without losing her mind the first time she had heard it.

  “Did he say anything about a funeral?” her mother asked, softening.

  “No. I’m guessing they’ll focus on that when they know more about when the remains will be back in America.”

  “Have you heard from any of his friends?” Ellie inquired.

  “Not yet. But I will. Maybe tomorrow I’ll reach out to some. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Since he wasn’t on the social networks, word spreads a lot more slowly.”

  “Don’t you find even that strange?” her mother asked.

  Alexis started to respond, but instead just made what Ellie referred to as her angry monster toddler face: squinting her eyes, baring her teeth. Sometimes she’d raise her hands and curl her fingers into claws. It was comic and it was ridiculous, and usually it made its point and defused whatever conversational bomb was nearing detonation. It did so again now.

  “Tell me more about the glove, Lexi,” Ellie said, after a moment of silence in the room.

  “What about it?” Alexis asked.

  “You’re sure there was no hole in it?”

  “Positive. There was nothing at all that corresponded to the wound on the back of his hand.”

  “Did he have any other weird scars on his body?” the veterinarian asked.

  “Other than the bullet wound on his biceps? Not really. Why?”

  “You’re a physician. Sometimes a person’s body is a road map.”

  “Or a biography. I see where you’re going.”

  “I mean, in the six or seven short months you knew him, you saw some weird shit.”

  She nodded. “He also had those little scars on his fingertips from the cat bite.”

  Her mother turned to her and sat forward, her elbows on her knees. “When did a cat bite him? Why did a cat bite him? You never told me that.”

  And so Alexis shared with her that when Austin had arrived at the ER with the bullet wound the night they had met in the spring, he still had Band-Aids on his fingers from a cat bite. She explained that a cat had snapped at him at a bakery.

  “It happens. Sometimes cats get skittish,” Ellie murmured, but Alexis could see the wheels turning in her mind by the way she was fiddling with her long braid. “Tell me something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re sure it was a cat bite?”r />
  “No. But he said it was.”

  “Have you ever seen a cat bite?”

  “Yes. Where is this going, Ellie?” Alexis asked.

  “Well, when a cat lashes out, it’s likely to scratch—not bite.”

  “But cats do bite.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Do you think he might have been lying?”

  Ellie shrugged, asked to borrow her phone, and started typing. Alexis felt her mother’s gaze upon both her and her friend. After a moment, Ellie handed the phone back to Alexis and said, “Look at those—especially the top one. Those are pretty good images of cat bites. I know you saw the wounds back in the spring, but that top photo shows cat bites on a finger. Did Austin’s bite look like that?”

  Alexis studied the image. It was a puncture wound. It was a couple of puncture wounds. They were clean, they were clear, they were precise. The cuts on Austin’s fingers really hadn’t looked like that. There was a puncture—at least she recalled one—but generally the cuts had looked more like a series of gashes.

  An idea came to her, and she glanced at the photo of the scars on his fingertips she’d snapped at the morgue. Then she performed another search on the phone and went to those images on the web. It may have been the power of suggestion, given the papers she had discovered behind the cabinet in Austin’s front hallway, but maybe not. These photos looked a lot more like what she remembered from that night in the ER.

  She held up her phone so the veterinarian could see the photos she had just found.

  “It was months ago, so I’ll never be sure,” she told Ellie. “But I think the bites looked more like these ones.”

  “Those are rat bites,” the animal doctor said.

  “I know,” Alexis said. “I think, looking back, he’d been bitten by a rat.”

  * * *

  . . .

  In the night, after her mother and Ellie had left, she sat alone on her bed in her underwear and her nightshirt, and pulled it up above her waist. She tilted the shade on her bedside lamp toward her lap and stared at the scars on the insides of her thighs. She recalled the first time that Austin had seen them. God, he’d been gentle. Not a lot of men had seen them, because she hadn’t had a lot of men. Med school will put a crimp in anyone’s libido.

  On the mattress beside her was her cutting kit. It was an airline’s first-class amenities bag, deep blue and white, and she had emptied it of its earplugs and toothbrush and slippers and sleep mask. She’d filled it with a five-pack of old-fashioned, rectangular razor blades, each in its cardboard case, a scalpel, a few Medi-First alcohol wipes, a five-ounce bottle of Bactine, some hydrogen peroxide she’d poured into a 3-1-1 travel container, a couple of sterile gauze pads, and six of her favorite Skin-Flex Band-Aids. She’d assembled it as a reminder of all she had transcended when she’d moved back to New York, and as a dare she would never take. She would always, she assured herself, choose truth.

  At least she told herself it was but a reminder and a dare. In fact, she feared, it was a life preserver. In case of fire, break glass.

  Now she held the scalpel in her right hand very much like a pen and stared at the tip.

  It had been years. Years.

  But she was shouldering so much, and she had lost so much. She was lost herself.

  And she was a riot of emotions, some of which were cavernous and raw, and she found herself tortured by self-loathing. Again. Intellectually, she knew it was undeserved. She knew—or, at least, she believed—that she was a good doctor. She knew that she wasn’t the only person whom Austin had deceived. But how had it all come to this? She glanced at the photo of the two of them at the party that she had taken from his apartment and, though she was alone, shook her head.

  She’d learned about why people cut well before med school, but she was fascinated by the clinical ways they discussed it in one of her classes. They didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but they’d spent enough for her to see all the professor got right and all he got wrong. She considered speaking up and talking about thumbtacks and kitchen knives and sewing needles. At one point when the professor was saying something about how a cutter may simply be a person with too few natural opioids, she considered correcting him—telling him that it had less to do with opioids or endorphins than it did with self-loathing and release. At least in her case. It helped with both: it was simultaneously punishment and agency, the scarlet fluid filling the sluices in her skin and allowing her to whisper to herself, This is me. This is no one else. I deserve this and I did this. Fuck you. Fuck you all.

  But she hadn’t said a word to the professor.

  Because that sort of “look at me” narcissism was never who she was. It wasn’t who most cutters were. You hid your cuts, just as you hid your scars: the ones inside as well as the ones outside.

  She put the scalpel back into her cutting kit and removed one of the razor blades. The razor blades had always been her favorite. The pain was exquisite. The lines were precise. She had always been better with razor blades than she had with the X-Acto knife she had sometimes used as a teen. She’d never used a scalpel because she hadn’t owned one back then, but she presumed the sensation of the scalpel would be a bit like the X-Acto. Carefully she pulled the blade from its cardboard sarcophagus and started to press it against one of the lines of scar tissue at the seam of her panties. But she stopped before she broke the skin. She closed her eyes and rolled her head, stretching her neck and breathing mindfully. This wasn’t who she was; this wasn’t who she would be.

  At least not tonight.

  She slid the blade back into its cardboard holster and put it aside. Now that she’d removed it and pressed it against her skin, she’d throw it away. Then she zipped up her cutting kit. She considered taking it right now to the garbage chute by the elevator on her floor of the apartment building, but she knew she wouldn’t. She was like that ex-smoker who always kept a pack in the nightstand. Just in case. And if she did throw it away? Tomorrow she would simply go to a pharmacy and the ER and create a new one from a new cosmetics bag.

  And so she put her cutting kit back in her dresser, burying it deep behind the socks she never (or rarely) wore, invisible, and then stripped off her clothes and disappeared into the hot, hot water of the shower, once again curled on the porcelain, a body that was warm and wet and sad, but also—and this was what mattered—alive.

  WEDNESDAY

  Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million Americans take Coumadin. Most are older or downright elderly. It’s a blood thinner. It treats blood clots. It decreases the likelihood of strokes. Want to see someone on it? Go to any golf course in Florida or Arizona and look for the old guys with the bruises on their arms.

  Coumadin is actually an anticoagulant chemical called warfarin. A scientist discovered it caused rats to bleed to death internally. That was way back in 1948, certainly not the early years of rodenticides, but a long time ago.

  These days, most brown rats are resistant to it. An exterminator can spread it on grain like brie on a cracker, and rats will eat it and ask for another. The animals were largely able to scoff at the poison by the mid-1970s. Thirty years. A very short time for evolution.

  But that’s the thing about rats. They evolve fast. They adapt. You don’t ever exterminate them. Not ever. You just control them as best you can.

  17

  Quang had spent the morning kicking a soccer ball with his daughter and three of her friends at their school. The CSCD captain was an old dad, but not as old as his hair, which had gone prematurely white, made some people think he was. Some people thought he was his daughter’s grandfather when they first saw the two of them together. He was actually only forty-five. Ly was a ferocious competitor and always gave him—and her friends—a spectacular workout. Afterwards, he had dropped the other girls off at their houses and brought his daughter home. Then he’d showered, put on his unifo
rm, had a quick lunch with his family, and gone to his office at the Canh Sat Co Dong in Da Nang.

  He began his shift, as he did always, by looking at any new paperwork on the open cases. Often, he was surprised. On Monday, for instance, he saw there was something interesting about last week’s hit-and-run on the Hai Van Pass. The one involving the American bicyclist. On Sunday, a Chinese tourist trying to take a selfie on one of the southern switchbacks near the summit had found Austin Harper’s bike bag about twenty feet from the guardrail, and turned it in to the police. It was the nylon box that sat on a platform on the back of the bike. The fellow didn’t know it was Harper’s because there was no identification, but he’d seen something on the news about the bicyclist’s death on the mountain and presumed it had been his. Inside it had the touring company’s map for the day, a bag of peanuts and dried fruit, sunblock, antibacterial hand gel…and a dress. It was the dress that broke Quang’s heart just a little bit when he saw it: it had been tailored in Hoi An to very precise measurements, from silk that was red and purple and orange. Harper had almost certainly had it made for that ER doctor, and so he’d sent the dress to Toril Bjornstad at the American embassy in Phnom Penh to forward to the woman in America. He supposed it was likely that the cyclist had picked up the dress in Hoi An before heading up the mountain, but he suspected there was another reason it was in the bag: it was a gift and he didn’t want the woman to see it just yet.

  Again today there was something new about the hit-and-run—though this was far more ominous than a bike bag with a dress in it. The Psych energy gel packets that the dead man’s girlfriend had picked up off the road had fingerprints on them that matched the deceased. The CSCD lab technician, a nice young guy named Xuan Le, had written that he didn’t recommend bothering to see if they had his DNA as well, because it was clear now that they had belonged to Harper. Apparently, however, it was possible that they had been—and these were the words the technician had used—tampered with. The two chocolate packets had what might be tiny needle holes in the bottom fold. The tech wrote that he wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking for fingerprints. The pinprick in each packet, if that’s what it was, had then been plugged with some sort of heat gun. It looked a bit as if the plastic had been cauterized so it was airtight: factory sealed, so to speak. It could still be just some sort of factory defect in the packaging, Xuan had written. But, once you spotted it, it looked like some kind of tinkering.