by Ashley Ream
* * *
Rachel stood up from the plastic folding chair. She had been sitting in the same position for so long, preserving and cataloguing what the others brought in, it felt like her joints had begun to rust into position. The worst of the side effects had passed. Time felt like time again. Nothing changed shape or size or seemed more scary than before. She checked her watch. She had added the information to her secret notebook earlier, and there had been nothing but improvement since. It was something to feel good about.
Rachel threw another empty can into the waste bag. She was three diet sodas into her night, and it was time to make the trek up the beach and up the hill to the porta-potties by the road. It was enough of a deterrent that she had put it off until it could not be put off any longer, and when she finally made the dash, she made it at speed.
She could not have been gone long, she told herself, not more than five minutes. But when she came back, Hooper had returned from checking the offshore instruments. He was standing in the tent next to the chair she had occupied for two hours, and he was flipping through a notebook.
He was flipping through her notebook.
She did not stop. In fact, when she saw what she saw, she picked up speed and was still moving forward when she got to Hooper and pulled the notebook out of his hands. She kept right on going before slamming hard into the folding table with the computers and microscopes and nearly sending the whole thing toppling over in the sand.
“What has gotten into you?” Hooper demanded.
Rachel kept a steadying hand on the rickety table longer than was necessary. “That’s my notebook. My personal notebook.”
“It was just here,” Hooper said.
Rachel had left her backpack by her chair when she had gone to the bathroom. She had forgotten it in the rush to relieve the pressure in her bladder, but she did not think she had taken the notebook out. In fact, the backpack had been zipped. She pressed her memory, and her memory agreed with her. It had been zipped. He had opened her things and taken the notebook out.
“What are we looking at?”
John seemed to come out of nowhere, but nowhere was only the darkness beyond the light of the tent. The bare bulbs powered by the growling generator—was it getting louder?—were so bright that they made everything beyond them vanish.
“Nothing,” Rachel said.
“Dr. Bell is very protective of her work,” Hooper said.
“We’re all protective of our work,” Rachel replied.
Hooper inclined his head in a way that meant nothing but seemed like a response. “I think you should try to get some more rest.”
“Maybe I should,” Rachel said. “Right now I have more classifications.”
23.
Day Four of the Miracle
Tilda had fallen asleep in the chair. She snored. She had always snored but had been in deep denial of it since they’d been married. She’d slept there with Harry listening until three o’clock when she startled herself awake. Whether it was because of a dream or one of those jerks that come when your unconscious mind plays a prank and tells your body it’s falling, Harry couldn’t say. But he heard her get up and pause halfway to the door. Harry kept his eyes closed. He knew he was being watched, and he wanted to be alone.
When she was satisfied, he heard her leave the room. He heard her right-hand ring click against the stair railing when she started to climb, and he heard the creak one of the third-floor stairs always made. He could never remember which one and couldn’t be bothered to have someone come fix it. Tilda stopped at the creaky stair long enough to hold her breath and curse and then continued up to her own bedroom. He didn’t hear the door shut or the latch catch, and he had been listening for them. Harry, whose eyes were open now, scowled into the dark. He would have to be even more quiet.
By six a.m., Harry would have told you that he hadn’t slept at all, which probably wasn’t the whole truth. Probably a night-vision camera and some electrodes could’ve picked up thirty or so minutes of sleep here and there throughout the night for whatever good that had done. But at six a.m., he was awake. He had gotten himself out of bed with his cane and collected his pants and his sweater and put them on, along with his socks.
Dr. Woo had told him not to wear socks around the house. Harry was supposed to wear either rubber-soled shoes or go barefoot. It seemed socks didn’t offer enough traction for someone in his condition. But the shoes that were out had laces, and his right hand wasn’t up for tying laces. His slip-on shoes were in the closet, and sliding open the closet door might rouse Tilda. And he didn’t like anyone to see his bare right foot. Its deformity was even more repulsive unshod, so socks with a chance of falling it was. He was beginning to get a little bit used to falling anyway.
Dressed, he sat back down in the dark and resumed his listening vigil. It wasn’t long. By 6:15, he heard the back door open.
* * *
Rachel had decided she needed more samples, and while she still secreted away a dozen or so of the collection containers in the “food” cooler once it had been emptied of sandwiches each night, she no longer trusted that no one would find them when she wasn’t looking. And if they did find them, they might take them. And if they didn’t take them, they might contaminate them—either on purpose or by accident. She was betting on the former.
To guard against the possibility of sample sabotage, she had taken an X-Acto knife and a flashlight into the porta-potty with her. She had worn her puffy coat that night. The storm front that had been threatening hadn’t kicked up much rain, but the winds were increasing and it was getting colder. The coat made her look like the Michelin Man. It was black, stuffed with down and quilt stitched into poufed stripes. Each one of the poufed stripes was big enough to fit one of the smallest collection containers, bigger than a flask but not much bigger.
When Hooper was away from the tent, she’d stolen eight she was supposed to be classifying and flash freezing. Just before the shift was over, she made her trip to the bathroom. With the jacket off and the flashlight in her mouth, Rachel slit open the outer fabric and pulled out as much of the down as possible. The feathers were small and light, and they stuck to everything, which wasn’t something she’d planned for. Not planning for it made her angry at herself. She couldn’t possibly clean all of them up, not from the inside of a porta-potty in the middle of the night. Anyone who used the toilet after her might see, and if they saw, they might guess. Either they would guess or they would think she was trapping, killing, and plucking seabirds in the bathroom.
Rachel kept going. There was no point in stopping then. She shoved each small container of specimens into the holes she’d made—one hole per quilted row of down on each side of the zipper, four usable rows, eight containers. Afraid her body heat would raise the temperature too much as it was, she couldn’t risk doing it on the inside of the coat.
She made sure no feathers were peeking out of the holes and might be noticeable against the black fabric. The down that remained kept the containers secure and muffled any sloshing. Then she cleaned up the porta-potty as best she could, which involved touching a lot of surfaces she would really rather not.
By the time she was back in the beach house, her thoughts were on loading all of her samples—those of dubious security in the cooler and her secret stash—into the tanks. Any thoughts she had left were devoted to an OCD-level need to wash her hands. She was not in the mood to talk to anyone, and when she carried the cooler up the stairs and saw Harry waiting for her on the landing, leaning on his cane, she was prepared to make herself very clear.
He spoke first. “I have a report to make, and when I finish, you have to give me more of whatever that was.”
Rachel sat the cooler down. It seemed to get heavier every night. “You experienced pain reduction?”
“It was so much more than that.”
Rachel had still been thinking only of her samples and washing her hands. Only the smallest possible part of her mind had been engaged wi
th Harry, but that small portion was a scout, and it sent word for the rest of her brain to suit up.
“Tell me,” she said, turning and putting her cat eyes on him.
“In exchange for another dose.”
“The first dose was in exchange for a report.”
“I’m renegotiating.”
He looked more rumpled than usual. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, his pants looked like someone left them in the dryer for a week, and his hair was taking on an Einstein quality.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to renegotiate,” Rachel said.
“I’m going to try. I have additional information.”
“What information?”
“Side effects.”
“What kind of side effects?”
“A second dose,” Harry repeated.
A beat passed, and then Rachel nodded.
“Deal?” Harry confirmed.
“Deal.”
“I saw things after I took the first dose.”
“What things?”
“Things that weren’t there.”
“Known,” Rachel said, disappointed that she’d traded more of her samples for predictable information. She should’ve been smarter.
“Known, what?”
“Known side effect of the active ingredient. Native people have been making up stories to explain the hallucinations for hundreds of years.” Rachel picked up the cooler. “Eventually, I hope to be able to neutralize the effect.”
“What kind of stories?”
She was heaving the cooler the rest of the way to her door, and her words came out strained and breathy. “They told missionaries that it opened up a path to their ancestors.”
“Their ancestors, like ghosts?”
Rachel opened her door a crack and slid in with her samples. “Ghosts. They used the word spirits. It’s a sort of curse.”
“What kind of curse?”
Rachel’s hand was on the door, and Harry could barely see her through the tiny opening she left.
“Sometimes angry or vengeful ancestors would try to coax men across the divide. When a man had been to the land of the spirits, no other tribal members could look upon him for twenty suns without facing terrible misfortune. Women would be struck barren by looking at their husbands before sufficient time had passed.” She spoke as though she had memorized the passage from a textbook.
“The ghosts coaxed the men?” This seemed an important point to Harry that needed to be clarified.
It was not, it seemed, so important to Rachel.
“They were an uneducated people,” she said and shut the door without giving any indication of whether she would open it again anytime soon.
Harry decided that she would keep her word and that he should wait. Certainly she meant for him to wait. Ten minutes went by.
Coaxed how? Seeing Becca had been unexpected. It had left him both terrified and thrilled, but she had not indicated he should follow her. This had not stopped him from trying, of course, but that was of his own volition. He did not doubt that Becca had been, as Dr. Bell said, a hallucination, but that did not stop him from wanting to see her. The pain relief, the mobility—they were wonderful, but seeing Becca was the high. “A curse,” Rachel had called it. That did not seem a very apt term to Harry.
Finally, Rachel opened the door and handed him a spoon. “I really need to wash my hands,” she said and pushed past him.
“Can I read them?” Harry asked, only glancing at the dose.
“Read what?” She was heading into the bathroom.
“The ghost stories.”
“Do you speak French?”
“No.”
“Then you would find it challenging,” Rachel said and shut the door.
Harry looked at the spoon. It was a known side effect, and she did not seem worried. She wouldn’t give him more than he should have. He knew that. He trusted her. She wasn’t worried, and so he shouldn’t worry.
24.
As project leader, tenured professor, and a man with a lot of letters behind his name, Hooper would have been entitled to marginally better lodgings than were being enjoyed—or perhaps endured—by the other members of the team, who were mostly post-doc researchers and a few graduate students, but he liked maintaining a certain “professor of the students” facade. Still, the truth was all of his years in the field had led to various illnesses and injuries, which were beginning to add up. There were those that could be measured (one case of reoccurring malaria, two bouts of hepatitis A, one seriously infected leg wound, giardiasis twice, and three or four notable cases of dysentery) along with the cumulative bodily stresses that could not be so easily measured but that manifested in aching knees, difficulty sleeping, and a back that wasn’t as reliable as it once was. All of this made whatever creature comforts that could be had worth having.
Unfortunately, there weren’t better lodgings available in the camp, and while he did not have to participate in the cooking and dishwashing chores that rotated among the other team members, this was not always a blessing. Hooper’s own cooking skills could not be said to be wide, but they were deep. The six dishes that made up his repertoire had been perfected by round after round of experimentation, controlling for all possible variables until the ideal ratio of ingredients and precise cooking methods had been achieved. He was especially proud of his spaghetti carbonara. However, it would seem from the dinner he had eaten that night—and several of the other nights—that this domestic skill wasn’t as widely developed as one might hope.
It had been Marcus’s turn to cook that night. Hooper had agreed to be his thesis advisor not that long ago and had been impressed by the young man’s fastidious nature and attention to detail in the lab. Hooper trusted Marcus’s prep for an experiment more than he trusted his own, and given how much cooking had in common with the experimental sciences, Hooper had expected the skills to be transferrable. He had been disappointed.
Marcus’s idea of dinner had been to pick up and prepare half a dozen boxes of off-brand macaroni and cheese, the kind that came with powder the color of hunter safety vests. He prepared these more or less according to the instructions but failed to cook the pasta long enough so that it stuck in Hooper’s teeth, giving him the opportunity to taste it for a good long time. This had been paired with several other boxes of frozen chicken nuggets, which Marcus did have the good sense to reheat in the oven rather than the microwave. He had offered two condiments—ketchup and mustard. And because they deserved a treat, his shopping trip was topped off by a case of beer and a large box of individually wrapped children’s snack cakes.
If this was how Marcus ate at home, Hooper was left to conclude that he was doing some sort of experiment to determine if consuming a sufficient quantity of preservatives could lead to immortality. Hooper did not care to offer a hypothesis on the matter, but he did feel that life wouldn’t be worth living in perpetuity like this even if you could.
Those on the night shift had finished their dinner, including the entire box of snack cakes, and had left to get what sleep they could. The day shift had not yet gathered there in the dining hall, which, even clean, smelled like old food and disinfectant. Like any research trip, Hooper had very few waking moments to spend alone, and he was spending them there. But at least he still had his beer, and that was something because Hooper was worried.
Rachel Bell had been his star post-doc. He wasn’t sure he’d said that aloud to her or anyone else. Probably he had not. She was smart and meticulous, which could be taught, and she was driven, which could not be. It had not taken him long to know she would have a distinguished career ahead of her if she did not derail it of her own accord.
Rachel had constructed for herself a shell of equanimity, but it was thin and had a tendency to crack, especially when she was under stress. Things had been worse this past year. Her composure had become wobbly, and he had wondered at one point if she was ill. But he was the department chair, not her minder or even her friend, and besides,
academia tended to tolerate difficult personalities that would be shunted aside in a more corporate environment. Eccentricities were, with no proof whatsoever, considered a sign of either intelligence or creativity or both.
In the cold dining room with a lump of undercooked macaroni and cheese in his stomach, Hooper knew he had been swayed by that academic fairy tale where Rachel was concerned. He had forgiven much, overlooked more, and allowed her more leash than, it seemed now, she could handle. He had, on this trip alone, allowed her to shun the rest of the team, duck out of most of the chores, and now she was staying in a beachside mansion while the others—including him—were sleeping on short-sheeted mattresses. This had led to serious disharmony among the others. Rachel was on the verge of being roasted on a spit by her peers. And more than that, he had now seen proof that she had, in nontechnical terms, gone rogue.
He had neglected some of his more basic duties as project leader, showed favoritism, and allowed a lack of discipline on his team.
“Shit.”
It was a rookie mistake that he should have outgrown. Perhaps he had outgrown it once but had started to devolve. Maybe he didn’t have as much business as he’d thought leading trips like this anymore. Maybe he would be better off retiring to his lab and his lecture hall. Maybe it was time to retire all together. If he had the money, he would.
Hooper wouldn’t have said that five years before, but it had been a rough five years. The divorce had been difficult on his bank account, and in an overreaction, he had made poor investment decisions from which he was unlikely to recover. Current projections estimated that he would be working in campsites like this one until he was ninety-three and a half.
It was the “half” that got to him.
Hooper reached into his pocket for his phone. He had thought without thinking that he should check for messages only to remember once again that the device was lost.
To console himself, Hooper drained what was left of his beer in a short chug and wondered if there was another left in the fridge. He pushed himself up to his full height and groaned. His long limbs had been folded quite severely onto the stool, and his knees and hips creaked as he rose. With a deep breath that he pushed back out with a hiss through his teeth, Hooper shuffled toward the kitchen. If he could find one last bottle, he would have just enough time to drink it and toss the evidence before the second shift arrived and made him coffee.
