The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  “Honestly?” the stranger said, touching her once, softly, on the arm. The wound on his face didn’t seem to bother him. He seemed to be in no pain. He sat where she had been sitting, put his feet in their brown sandals up on her pile of papers. “You’re my last hope.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He sighed. “Sure you do. Of course you do.” He patted the sofa, and she came and sat beside him.

  Riggs smelled blood. Shenk knew the look because he had smelled blood, how many times had he smelled it, and though Riggs was very dignified and very restrained, still his nostrils quivered and Shenk could see them quiver at the smell of blood—Pileggi’s blood—his own.

  Riggs went right for the jugular.

  “You told us yesterday, Dr. Pileggi, that Wesley is suffering from a heretofore unknown illness called, quote-unquote, Syndrome K. Something you, personally, claim to have discovered, and which is caused by—sorry, what was it?”

  “A, uh…” She seemed embarrassed, as if caught in a lie. “By a—a prion.”

  “Right. Which lay dormant in Wesley’s brain for some indeterminate amount of time, until it was—activated? Yes? By the surgery. My question is, how is it possible for you to be so sure that this is the only explanation for Wesley Keener’s condition?”

  Pileggi looked off into the distance. Her eyes seemed to go out of focus. Riggs waited placidly for his answer.

  Shenk waited too, not breathing. They had practiced this. This exact question, and she knew exactly how to answer.

  “I’m not.”

  Shenk closed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Pileggi, can you talk just a teeny bit louder? Thank you. So—just so I’m clear. You’re not sure what caused Wesley Keener’s condition?”

  “No,” she said. “I—I’m not.”

  She slumped back in the chair. She looked like she wasn’t sure of anything.

  Theresa Pileggi did not know where to find the Keener boy.

  She had studied his scans and his charts many times. She had spent hours within the folds of his cerebral cortex, confirming her suspicion about the precise etiology of the rare syndrome he was suffering from. But she had only been in his actual physical presence once, when she examined him three months ago, and she had no idea where he was hidden now.

  She told all this to Dennis, who had asked her to call him Dennis, and he turned it over, humming to himself. He studied her face. He searched her eyes for deceit, considering them carefully, like a jeweler studying a diamond for flaws. He did not torture her, nor imply that he might. He did not insist, or threaten, or cajole. He gazed at her for a long time, toying with a lock of his blond hair, and then decided that she was telling him the truth.

  That should have been it, right? Didn’t he have to go?

  The shiftless dirtbag drifter who had smashed into the Shenks’ kitchen and left blood evidence all over their tiny house, the man who had to run and knew he had to run, who soon would be living a step ahead of the law, moving around the country hungry and homeless for the next decade—he had to go, man, he had to fucking go now.

  But that wasn’t all that he was. He did not go. He considered her, lazily, discerningly, wondering with slow pleasure if there was not something here that he could use.

  Theresa Pileggi was watching him, too. She watched him from the back as he went to the sink and slowly poured himself a glass of water. He turned, sipping the water, and smiled.

  “You’re the one that made the diagnosis, huh?” he said finally, wiping his chin with his wrist, like a kid. The packed gauze on his face flapped loose, and he pushed it back into place, fixed the tape.

  She nodded. Her papers were scattered all over the table, having been rearranged by his feet. Some had been pushed onto the floor.

  “Okeydoke,” said the night man. “So—let’s hear it.”

  “I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying,” said Riggs. “And I want to make sure the men and women of the jury understand. You are here as the expert on ‘Syndrome K,’ and now you’re no longer certain that what we’re seeing in this case is an example of it.”

  A pause. Pileggi, looking not out at the courtroom like she was supposed to, but down at her hands, which were twisting in her lap. “That’s right.”

  Riggs moved his head on his doughy neck, one way and then the other. “Can you assure us that there even is such a thing as Syndrome K?”

  “Well…no.”

  Someone in the jury gasped. Shenk closed his eyes again. There was a pain, a twisting pain, somewhere inside his chest.

  “What it sounds like, Ms. Pileggi, is that you have no idea what is wrong with Wesley Keener.”

  “The brain, you know…” Theresa Pileggi raised her hands in the air, helplessly, then let them fall into her lap. “It’s a mystery.”

  Shenk jumped up to object. But to what? What objection did he have?

  “Yeah, no, but what I’m saying is: how do you know?”

  This was the stranger’s question. Again and again, to whatever she said. They had fallen into a long and detailed discussion about the etiology and presentation of Syndrome K. She told him about her paper in the Spring 2006 issue of Proceedings in Neuropathology, and Dennis nodded and asked questions, smart questions about blood flow in the nervous system and the typical course of a prion virus. Theresa carefully explained that the prion causing Syndrome K differed in its molecular structure from the one that caused BSE, presumably resulting in their radically different symptomatology.

  And he said it again: “But how do you know?”

  She told him that she didn’t, not really, and he smiled slyly, challengingly, rising to pour himself more water while she explained to him that in the absence of facts we hypothesize, and that only when more cases were discovered, when more patients were studied, would it be possible to arrive at a fixed and permanent definition of Syndrome K. Her visitor listened respectfully, but he made low, skeptical noises in the back of his throat.

  Dennis had not touched her, not since the brief brush of connection when she let him in. If his intentions were lustful he kept them hidden.

  His manner was cool and cosmic. The thrust of his argument was epistemological, or rather anti-epistemological. She explained Wesley’s baffling MRI results, she theorized on his body’s refusal to metabolize, and he said “But you don’t know—but how do you know,” until she began to smile each time and say it with him, say it before him—how do you know?—a little inside joke between the two new friends: How do you know? How can you know?

  It was late. It had grown very late. Her eyes were bleary and the paperwork of her preparation was all over the floor.

  “I am going to tell you how you know,” said the stranger at last, answering his own insistent question. “Because you are a person who needs to know.” He leaned closer. “Right? You’ve always needed to know.”

  Pileggi held her breath.

  “Right?”

  She nodded. Right.

  She was there and she was somewhere else. This man was here, he was Dennis, and he was someone else.

  “So you built your knowledge like a fortress,” he said softly. “And you crawled inside. To escape. To escape from him.”

  Theresa’s breath caught in her throat. Him.

  The great horrible Him of her childhood. The shadow across her doorway. The weight of love and fear.

  But how did this man know about any of that? This stranger in her hotel room, how could he possibly know? And she almost asked him, his own famous question, how do you know?

  “You built all of it into a fortress,” he said again, pointing at the scattered papers, the charts and scans, and by “all of it” he meant science, he meant truth. “But can I tell you another word for a fortress, Theresa? A prison.”

  She looked at the scattered mess. All her work on Wesley Keener, on the disorder that had destroyed him. It was just paper. A pile of paper, words crawling like insects.

 
“What are you?” she asked the visitor. The room in the air breathed strangely. His face was sinister and kind. “Why are you here?”

  The night man settled happily back on the sofa and began to tell her about the good and golden world.

  “Let us posit as a hypothetical that Dr. Catanzaro acted in error. He would demur, and say he made no errors, and I happen to believe him, but let us pretend that he did.”

  Riggs, hands behind his back, head bent slightly forward.

  “Let us say he should not have operated for the subdural hematoma, that he should have implanted an EVD, as the plaintiff’s other experts have suggested, and adopted a wait and see attitude.

  “Yesterday you told this court that because of the surgery—now, in my hypothetical, an unnecessary one—Wesley has Syndrome K. Today you tell us you’re not even sure there is such a thing as Syndrome K.”

  He waited. Pileggi said nothing.

  “Dr. Pileggi,” he said, and now the word doctor sounded like a little joke, a taunt. “Dr. Pileggi, I have to ask: How certain are you that if Dr. Catanzaro had followed a different course of action, the result would be any different?”

  “Certain?” She looked at him, her eyes wet and wide. “I mean—who can be certain of anything?”

  And then Riggs said it, decisive as a coffin nail:

  “No further questions.”

  The other world has always been with us. Above and around us, unseen and ever present. Trying to get in.

  He told it to her the same as he had told it to Samir and Katy and all the rest of them that had come and gone over the years. Same as he had told it to Ruben on his doorstep on Tabor Street. There are books about it, going back centuries, if one knows where to find them, and how to read them. There are different routes that the curious and the believers have taken over the centuries, trying and trying to make it happen.

  What is the history of human life but a long attempt to make that life bearable? To build peace, to live without fear and grief. All the drugs and all the potions, from mandrake root to methamphetamines. All the meditation and stargazing and seeking. Everybody trying to get to this other place, and here it is. It’s been here all along, Theresa, trying to get in.

  “You of all people should want that, right? To live free of suffering.”

  When she didn’t answer, he leaned a little closer. He clasped her hands between his. His hands were soft, giving, slightly warm.

  “You of all people, right, Tess?”

  He held her as she trembled.

  And then, after a time, he whispered the words. He cooed them. “Can I tell you a riddle?”

  February 11, 2019

  “The two pieces don’t add up,” Ruben said, stroking his chin contemplatively, as he and Sunny drove west on the 10, from his Koreatown apartment to Cosmo’s motel. “That’s the problem.”

  “Wait, what now?”

  Sunny wasn’t really listening. She was driving with one hand, working Spotify on her phone with the other, scrolling through a playlist. Ruben was talking to himself. That was OK.

  “If I’m right, and it was Theresa who was the aggressor that night, and Richard shot her in self-defense…”

  “Wait—what? Hold on, Rabbi.”

  She had found the song she wanted, and now she was fumbling to plug the phone back in.

  “Then it no longer makes sense for him to insist on pleading guilty. It’s one thing to save yourself and your family the time and trauma of a trial, if you did it. If you’re innocent, though? Not even Richard would make that kind of sacrifice.”

  “Literally nothing that you’re saying makes sense,” said Sunny. “But you’re cute when you talk.”

  She had agreed, no problem, to scoop him up at his apartment—when he called, she said, she had just locked up Killer Greens and hung up a sign that said CLOSED FOR NO REASON.

  “But, Rabbi, this whole deal you’re rocking? The whole brooding detective thing is very Marlowe. Very McNulty. Very sexy. I’m serious.”

  He kept turning it all over, giving her the occasional direction: left turn on Centinela, cut across Washington Place to Culver.

  The only explanation left was that Richard had insisted so firmly on his guilt because he wasn’t guilty. Not because he had killed Theresa Pileggi in self-defense, but because he hadn’t killed her at all.

  Somebody had killed her, because she was dead, and the Rabbi knew who it was, and didn’t want to know, and had to prove it, and didn’t dare.

  “Here,” he said to Sunny, pointing into the parking lot, and she turned in and found a spot. Either the pink van advertising the topless maids had never left, or it had this space reserved.

  “Damn,” said Sunny, eyeing the dilapidated parking lot, the peeling paint of the decades-old motel. “The fuck is this place?”

  “Murder scene,” murmured Ruben, eyeing the door to 109, and Sunny shuddered, pulled a face, uncharacteristically serious. “I’m out, then. No fucking thank you on the murder scene.”

  “We’re not going in,” he said. “We’re fleeing the scene.”

  “What?” she said, but he had already taken off, and Sunny trotted after him.

  “If I am running away,” said Ruben. “If I am dying to put space between myself and what I’ve done, I do not go north. I go south.”

  Directly to the north of Cosmo’s was the highway off-ramp, where the westbound 10 disgorged itself into Culver City, the endless spill of cars coming in hot off the highway.

  “Wait—who are you, at this point?” said Sunny.

  “I don’t know.”

  He knew and didn’t want to know. It was like a children’s game. Richard is in the motel room, waiting for the police. Pileggi is dead on the floor. So who am I?

  Ruben walked south, head slightly bowed, hands in his pockets, mouth screwed up. He put urgency in his stride, felt the heat of panic in his cheeks as if he had really done it, as if he was fleeing the scene. Sunny rushed along beside him, playing along.

  “So you killed someone back there.”

  “Yeah. I think. Let’s say I did.”

  “You bad, Rabbi. How’d you do it? Gunshot?”

  “Lamp.”

  “No shit? Blunt object.”

  “And I’m bloody. I am covered in the blood.”

  “Hate when that happens.”

  Ruben swerved to miss a dog walker with a clutch of leashes, being tugged chariot-like by his unevenly sized pack. Sunny hurdled a Pomeranian and kept pace.

  A few blocks south of Venice, Sepulveda for a quarter block became a bridge, a short span over the ugly brown run of the Ballona Creek.

  Ruben stopped at the crossing, and Sunny stopped beside him.

  “So I’ve got these bloody clothes—” Except not clothes, thought Ruben, because by now he knew exactly, didn’t he? He knew exactly what he was looking for.

  “And you gotta ditch ’em. Is that it?”

  “It is.”

  “Right. So let’s do it.” Sunny stepped off the sidewalk onto the gravelly garbage-strewn path that ran roughly parallel with the river, sloping down to its banks. Ruben tripped carefully, just behind Sunny, goat-stepping down the shallow embankment. The uneven path led all the way down to the waterline, and Ruben’s heels slipped uncomfortably on the patchy concrete. The ruts in the slope were filled with clots of mud-thick river water. It smelled like decay.

  “Oh man,” said Sunny. She had gotten to the bottom and discovered a homeless encampment. The creek ran as a trickle here, leaving plenty of space on the damp banks on either side for a small village of people, living rough in a collection of mud-flap tents, the Sepulveda overpass for a roof.

  One of Ruben’s favorite memories of his mother was the time she took him to a food pantry run by their temple. They had stood side by side, handing individually wrapped sandwiches with great care to the poor souls shuffling down the line. Tiny Ruben had experienced this outing with a mixture of pride and sadness, confused about how the world could have arranged its
elf in such a way: that a little kid was providing food and comfort to these adults, who seemed to him so childlike in their need.

  “Remember the feeling,” his mother had said to him gently—without him having to say anything, she was always one step ahead, reading his emotions right off his tender heart like it was a TV screen.

  And he had remembered it. He thought of it now, scrabbling on his heels down the paved embankment, toward where the ugly water sucked and drained out of the pipe hole.

  “Hey,” said Ruben. “Will you hand me that?”

  Sunny, who for now had run out of jokes to make, gave him the long, bent stick he’d spotted bobbing half in and half out of the water. He gripped it with one hand, crouched as low as he could, and jammed it up the narrow opening, against the trickling current.

  The water rose and fell, swelling into and then easing out of the storm drain, again and again. The homeless people stayed in their tents and ignored the interlopers—sleeping or smoking inside their individual universes.

  Ruben looked as far up the narrow tunnel mouth as he could but couldn’t see much.

  Probably this was a waste of time, anyway. A wild guess, a goose chase. Anything up here would have been washed away, or taken and repurposed by one of the drifters on the banks.

  Ruben steeled himself against the self-criticism. He was tired of it, and he was even tired of the crabbed chiding voice telling himself to stop criticizing himself. He was sick of being sick of being sick of himself. It was exhausting.

  Ruben flattened himself into the mud and jammed his stick all the way up.

  What if? thought Ruben.

  “Well?” said Sunny. She was huddled up next to him, peering over his shoulder into the darkness.

  Let me be wrong, he thought, and Let it not be there, even at the very instant when it was. The tip of the stick brushed against a clot of fabric, and he snagged it and coaxed it out, very slowly, so it didn’t come loose off the end of the stick.