The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  No one else was up, but Del had just plugged in the Christmas tree lights again. She loved Christmas trees. Loved the smell of the sap, and the warm feeling of peace the corny little lights seemed to emanate.

  “How did you get this number?” said the woman’s voice on the phone. “This is restricted to law enforcement personnel only.”

  “I’m a detective with the Suffolk County Police Department.”

  “And do you have an arrest warrant for a suspected flight risk?”

  “Not exactly, and look, I’m not calling in my official capacity.”

  “Can I get your name?”

  Del rubbed her eyes.

  She couldn’t call the FBI, or rather, there wasn’t anything more to say. They had already made it clear that they were handling the investigation and thanked her for all her help, but said they would take it from here. Some of the biological samples from the apartment in Alphabet City matched Jake Hawkins, but the age of the samples was in question.

  The idea that Royce had been surgically attached to Jake’s body had been entered into the possible theories regarding the case, she had been assured, but there was pressure from above to keep that on the sidelines. Right now they had their man, Jake Hawkins, and he was dead.

  This phone call could get her fired, and she wasn’t even really a police officer at the moment, but she hadn’t tried to call from an anonymous number. She wanted them to be able to confirm who was calling.

  “Delta Devlin,” Del said after a pause. She heard keyboard clacking on the other end.

  “And your organization?”

  “This isn’t officially from my organization. I’m acting as a private individual.” She knew that this didn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter. She was still in law enforcement.

  “Ma’am, as I said—”

  “There is a very dangerous man who got onto a flight from Philadelphia International two days ago.” She wasn’t even really sure whether he had gotten on a flight, or with whom, or to where—but her instincts were lighting up.

  She had barely slept last night.

  “The man’s name is Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe, but he may be going under an alias: Jake Hawkins, who is deceased and is the object of a current investigation by the FBI.”

  “Could we speak to the FBI case officer?” the woman asked.

  “I’m warning you that this man is very dangerous and should be watched.”

  Silence on the other end. “And there is no arrest warrant?”

  “None.”

  “We appreciate the call. Thank you very much, Ms. Devlin. We’ve taken down the information.” The line went dead.

  Del held her phone and looked at it. Had she just thrown her career away?

  Or done nothing?

  Or both?

  50

  After two days of wandering the slums in the north of Chennai, Roy was beginning to comprehend the futility of his quest to find the woman in the picture that Angel had sent him. Chennai was a city of five million people, and Achari was the second-most common surname of the poor Tamils who made up most of the population living in these huts and tin-roofed hovels.

  Piles of garbage clogged the intersections, and a pervasive and overpowering stench of rot clung in the humid air. Nothing in this place seemed fixed, everything shifting and moving in much the same way that Roy’s vision swam in a slow-motion, sleepless hallucination of this impoverished shantytown.

  What were the chances, armed with nothing but an old black-and-white, of finding a woman from forty-four years ago in a place where the life expectancy wasn’t even forty?

  For two long days, he had been slogging through the mazes of unpaved alleyways and open cesspits with his guide, showing around the picture with his new friend Ramya. The night he arrived, he had gone straight to a hotel in the city’s tourist core. He asked the concierge to recommend someone to show him around the slums to the north.

  After protesting long and loud that it wasn’t a place to visit, finally the concierge had relented. Half an hour later, a lanky young man in a polo shirt and baggy pants arrived. His name was Ramya, and he would be very happy to serve the American gentleman. The man had gleaming black hair combed in a high pompadour, and eyebrows that connected one temple to the other in a continuous dark band.

  Roy had checked into the hotel downtown using Jake Hawkins’s passport. He figured it was safer to use Jake’s, in case Roy’s name had been flagged from a flight manifest. He’d had to act fast. They hadn’t expected him to run, but the noose was tightening. It wouldn’t be long now.

  He was out of antirejection drugs.

  But not out of amphetamines. He was now popping another one every few hours. His feet and calves were swollen, probably from the flight but perhaps also from the stress on his heart. Maybe he would have a heart attack before his body rejected his head.

  Either way.

  He had checked out of the hotel on the first night after realizing he really didn’t need it. He would just stay in the slums until it was over.

  * * *

  “You see, Mr. Jak-baba?” Ramya said to Roy.

  He called him “Jak-baba” because Roy was using Jake’s name. Ramya was Punjabi, and the honorific “baba” meant “wise old man” in most of the languages from Turkey to Singapore. It was mostly a way to make Roy feel important, he decided, and it must be having the desired effect. He liked Ramya.

  They stood on a dusty mud road at the outskirts of a slum to the west.

  Three young Indian boys lifted up their shirts to expose the smooth crescent-shaped incision scar from a kidney removal operation. The boys stood on a mound of plastic bottles they had separated for recycling—a booming racket they had cornered on this side of the slum. Open sewer pits ran on both sides of their business operation.

  Roy struggled to focus. His vision swayed in the dust and swelter. He said, “That’s okay, thank you,” and motioned for them to put their shirts back down.

  He wore the scarf despite the sultry heat, and not just to obscure his neck. He also used it to keep the flies and gnats out of his nose and mouth. The constant nausea from the smell made him feel always on the verge of gagging. His neck scar itched. He wanted to scratch it, just dig his nails into it and tear it open.

  Three barefoot young men wearing baggy trousers walked past. One, in a Dallas Cowboys jersey, turned to look at him. Roy blinked. It was the face of Jake Hawkins again, looking right at him. He saw Jake everywhere.

  He remembered the parties at the Chegwiddens’, the flashing silverware and diamond necklaces and jokes about the cost of a new liver. This was the underside of the miracle, the part that no one saw, here in the dirt of a wretched slum where teenage kids would sell a kidney and their future for sixty bucks. Most of the donors suffered medical complications and didn’t live long or well.

  It was illegal, of course, but that didn’t mean a great deal here in Kidneyville—“Kidneyvakka” in local speech—and this was far from the only place. Every big city on this side of the planet had places like this, in India, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines—wherever grinding poverty and anonymity made it something less than a crime.

  On every intersection here were men and woman and children missing a leg, an arm or hand, an eye. Were they so desperate that they would mutilate themselves for sympathy, just to earn a rupee on a street corner? Or sell a piece of themselves? Or did someone else mutilate them?

  The boys still stood in front of Roy and Ramya. They kept smiling but stayed put.

  It took Roy a second to understand why they still stared at him, but then he pulled out a handful of rupees. Worth about a cent and a half each. He rummaged in his pocket for some hundred-rupee notes. He felt cheap, but he had to conserve his cash. “Show them the picture first. Ask them for help.”

  “Yes, Mr. Jak-baba, that is what they are waiting for.”
>
  Ramya pulled out the dog-eared picture of Adhira Achari and showed it to the boys. They squinted at the image, but all shook their heads.

  “Sorry, Mr. Jak-baba. But we press on, yes? Back to the car?”

  “Internet,” Roy said. “I need to check the web.”

  “Yes, of course. We have the most wonderful internet here in Chennai.”

  * * *

  At the edge of the slum was a bustling market, and Ramya led Roy to a little stall with walls of plastic sheeting. Ramya negotiated with the woman at the entrance, pointing his finger at Roy, and a minute later came to collect him. He ushered Roy to the back of the stall, to an old box-type computer with a curved CRT screen.

  It was slow, but it worked.

  “Fire Island Killer Found!” announced a website headline.

  The media now knew that the police and FBI had found the collection of body parts in the storage locker. Jake Hawkins’s DNA was all over it. There were pictures of Hope Hawkins, trying to hide her face from the cameras. Roy went online a few times a day, whenever he could, to read any developing stories. Old habits died hard. So far, the name Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe wasn’t attached to anything he read, but that didn’t fool him.

  The authorities had to have made the connection by now, despite what Penny had said. Despite her assurances that they could protect him. There was no way Dr. Danesti could hide this. They had to have issued an arrest warrant for him by now, but none of that mattered.

  He could have turned himself in, but he could also just die, stop Hawkins on his own. He would kill Jake, once and for all.

  “Kill” was too aggressive a word. He would die anonymously out here in this sea of anonymous people. Curl up in a corner of a sprawling slum and let nature take its course, let the antirejection drugs clean themselves out of his system, and Jake’s body could begin to attack Roy’s head, ending both.

  He wasn’t sure of the mechanics of it. He had heard that the white blood cells, the T lymphocytes, couldn’t pass the blood-brain barrier. So Jake’s immune system couldn’t attack his brain, but it would destroy everything around it: eyes, skin, connective tissue.

  What would it be like to die that way? To have his face and head rejected by the body? Tumors growing out of control? He imagined his face ballooning as if a fungus were sprouting from under his skin. He had read that rejected body parts, like transplanted hands, literally began to rot like dead meat. His mind kept wandering, imagining it.

  Apart from the last hour of the flight to Chennai, Roy hadn’t slept in four days. The dream of him butchering people on the airplane seemed more real than the kaleidoscope of colors and smells around him now. Amphetamines were easy to find in India, he had discovered. He had a pocketful, and kept eating one every few hours, trying his best to keep track of whether they were the white-blue or double-strength red-blue ones he’d recently found. He had taken his last antirejection pill in the morning. A headache pounded behind his eyes, or maybe it was his eyeballs throbbing in their sockets.

  Roy rubbed his temples and looked away from the computer screen.

  Beyond the seesaw jumble of corrugated metal, a glistening wall of concrete rose a hundred feet in the air—a new shopping mall. Yesterday, they had gone in, or rather, Roy had gone in while Ramya waited outside. Marble floors and cool recycled air. The contrast with the squalor outside was dizzying.

  Roy had learned on the web that the Ramaputra clinics inside the mall were affiliated with Eden. He had walked to one and loitered, fantasizing about going in and telling them he was Dr. Danesti’s patient and that he needed more drugs.

  You seriously want to do this? asked a voice in his head.

  Jake Hawkins’s face leered at him from the next stall, a sheet-plastic wall held together with string. You kill me, you kill you. Why don’t we go back to the clinic?

  “Shut up,” Roy said aloud. “We’re not going back to the clinic.”

  He got up from the computer, found some bills to give to the woman.

  Ramya didn’t say anything—just smiled and led the way back. He had come to understand that Jak-baba would speak to the invisible one who followed him around.

  * * *

  The rickshaw taxi stopped in a haze of blue-gray exhaust at the light.

  A bullock clomped up beside them, pulling a cart. On the other side of the oxcart, an electric Tesla whirred quietly to a halt. In the grass at the middle of the intersection a man squatted behind a satellite dish to defecate, while a robotic forklift unloaded a pallet of ceramic cooking pots on the far side of the road.

  Roy glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. He had dyed his hair blond yesterday, to look more like Jake in the passport photos.

  “We don’t need to do this,” Jake Hawkins said.

  The dead man sat next to Roy in the back of the rickshaw, as real and as solid as the ox standing beside them.

  “We’re not going back,” Roy said to Jake.

  If he feared anything, it was that Jake would finally take control. Roy fished in his pocket for another upper. The ocean of anonymous people in the slums would provide an endless hunting ground for a serial killer. He couldn’t let that happen. He kept a knife in his pocket—if he felt another blackout coming, he would have time to slit his own throat first.

  The last blackout had lasted three days. Maybe the next time, he would never come back. Would Jake head for the clinic? Get antirejection drugs? Explain some clever scenario to Dr. Danesti about how he liked it here? All the doctor wanted was to parade Roy-Jake around like a prized steer to show the success of his operation—the key to everlasting life.

  What a joke.

  Maybe not a joke. Jake Hawkins had clawed his way back into the land of the living.

  The dead man leered and said, “We should just stay. We’re safe here. Or we could go back. I’m sure Danesti would protect us.”

  Roy felt the pull, as strong as ever, toward Hope and Elsa. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the little red-haired girl.

  “We’re not going back,” Roy repeated.

  51

  “I’m not coming home with you,” Roy said.

  But Ramya persisted. “Not my home. But I have very good place for you.”

  Roy had just explained that he would meet him tomorrow to continue the search. They had exchanged email addresses, and Roy had a new phone they had just picked up. When Ramya asked where he could drop him off, Roy said anywhere. He was just going to walk the streets alone. Just him and Jake.

  Ramya would have none of this. “I have a hut. You can sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  The Punjabi man clearly thought Roy was crazy—and probably dangerous, from the jumpy way he kept his eyes on him. But he seemed more afraid of not bringing home money to his wife at the end of the day. “Then at least a place you can be most wonderfully safe while you stay awake.”

  * * *

  The drive five miles east along the traffic-choked roadways to the coastal slum of Nagar Navy took most of an hour in the rush-hour traffic. Roy agreed to go there, mostly because it was a place they hadn’t been yet. Ramya was excited to show him his home, and Roy couldn’t help but feel a tingling appreciation for the simple hospitality that this man he barely knew seemed determined to extend to him.

  Jake Hawkins rode along in merciful silence the whole way.

  The day was winding down, the sun dropping toward the horizon behind them as they parked the rickshaw beside a crumbling brick wall. The last of the wet season’s gray haze blurred the lines of a haphazard wasteland sloping down to the Bay of Bengal a mile away. Goats browsed in the heaped debris, and a pack of dogs trotted purposefully by on their way somewhere. Groups of men and children sat along the ruined concrete fence outlining the edge of the slum. They watched the rickshaw arrive and nodded at Ramya.

  “Come, come with
me,” Ramya said.

  Roy and Jake followed him through a gap in the concrete fence, into a maze of colorful laneways and hanging fabrics. Places of business bustled. People saw Ramya leading this Westerner around and waved cheerfully at Roy from their small abodes along the sheltered passageways. A growing throng of children tagged along behind. The air smelled clean—delicious, in fact, with the scent of roasting cardamom and cumin drifting in the air.

  Roy glanced behind at the children following them. The kids smiled and giggled. Barefoot, but they looked well-scrubbed, healthy, and happy. Roy asked, “Should I give them money?”

  “Most certainly not. There is no begging in the slum.”

  “You mean, sharing a few rupees is viewed as wrong?”

  Ramya’s face creased up as if he were trying to solve a math puzzle. “Not wrong. I mean there is no begging, but anything from your heart is your choice, Mr. Jak-baba.”

  Men dug black soil from under large paving stones along a narrow pathway running into an empty allotment, hoping to clear drainage areas of the last monsoon downpours. Roy felt as if he were walking through a dream, with Jake Hawkins’s dead face peering out between the cheerful dyed fabrics hung from second-floor terraces. A large German shepherd came up the lane with a small boy in tow. The dog was old, and its hips had almost given up on it. A father called out, and the boy smiled shyly at Roy and ran sideways into an alleyway, the dog in tow.

  Halfway to the oceanfront, Ramya took a left into an alleyway and stopped.

  “Here you can stay and do your meditations,” he said. “I called ahead and arranged for you. This is all for you by yourself, Mr. Jak-baba.”

  A six-by-six patch of hard-packed earth was covered by a lattice of wood poles and a blue plastic sheet. The ground was swept clean. A fresh-looking square of cardboard with a thin red blanket folded in the middle.

  “This is great,” Roy said. “Perfect.”

  The Punjabi’s smile widened, and his head wagged from one side to the other. “And you come with me for some chai? See my family?”