Flashback: 5 years ago
As Dad nears death he becomes strangely handsome. The weight he'd put on in his last twenty years has evaporated to reveal the hidden ridges and indentations of a young man. His jawline is pronounced. His shoulders look sculpted and muscular though they are weaker than ever.
But he's also developed a new smell. Like fish, I want to say. Salty and overripe. Like dried spit. The house is full of this new scent. He's not so insulated anymore by flesh. All the chemical changes in his body, the currents of humours, the various heatings and coolings, are now external events. When he's hungry his breath smells of damp cardboard. His fatigue, black olives.
It's like he's congealed. All of him. He's dried and condensed into something more him than himself. When I was a girl I used to think that my inner voice actually came from another girl living inside me and that she was the real me.
The sounds Dad makes now are more guttural, desperate. A whole new range of vowels and embouchures. Hoarse and breathy murmurs. Is this the lost dialect of the self?
More and more often he picks up his journal and writes. The results are mixed ― sometimes poetically disjointed, sometimes unintelligible. Sometimes they're promisingly sensical, but who am I kidding. It's a hypergraphic tic caused by damage to the temporal lobe ― the man is on his way out. His mind is like Aztec ruins. Dense layerings of intricate structures scattered between smashed walls and knotted weeds. There are beautiful remnants of glyphs, ideograms, symbols, but no cohesion. Nothing to order them in time and place.
Sometimes he writes upside down or backwards or over things he's already written. It's like he's rediscovering the language as he's losing it. There's a joy I see in his eyes when he beholds certain things ― simple things like a moving fan or a light bulb ― a look of wonder that springs up as though he is seeing them for the first time.
Implicit Contracts
I arrived early. The air was cool and drizzly, the leafless trees scratched and rattled in the wind. Sodium lamps from the parking lot bathed the medical building in a saffron-tinted light. This felt illicit. What was I doing here again? Following a vague, probably paranoid interpretation of an equally vague communiqué? I slid my card through the slot, half-expecting alarms to sound. Flashing lights, helicopters.
Many times I'd been through the building late at night. It's not unpopulated; many people work late. The noise is simply less. Muted, the way a muted trumpet is muted: crisp and direct; literal.
The custodians had just finished mopping and a dull chemical scent hung in the halls. Someone was playing Pink Floyd somewhere. I made my way to the slowest elevator in the world and took it down to level C. Have I mentioned that I'd never been there before? Well, I hadn't ― and hadn't especially had the urge to. C was, among other things, where the morgue was. I didn't know which one of those wide, steel-framed doors led to the refrigerated cadavers and did not want to know. Med students were nearby, pruning eyelids, vacuuming fat, embalming. Lovely.
There were various other facilities down there ― X-rays, MRs ― though, having been aware of the proximity of dead human beings, the whole space seemed to pulse with sinister clandestinity.
I read somewhere recently that there are 15 underground floors beneath Grand Central Station and that no one is allowed below the fifth or so, not even the MTA workers. I thought of these forbidden depths as I walked through the overwarm sub-basement halls, which were humming with ambiguous white noise. I thought of an old submarine, slowly sinking.
Room 80 was located at the far corner, next to the hissing boiler room. Should I knock? What's the protocol? All spaces are designed to manipulate the flow of information. There is an implicit contract you sign when you enter a space, any space, which stipulates the mode of transaction ― money for sex? attention for knowledge? prayer for redemption? But here there was no sign of what was expected, and this made me anxious.
I tried the door (unlocked) and slowly eased it open. The room was dingy and relatively empty but for odds and ends of supplies ― mismatched folding chairs stacked in rows, an unplugged brown refrigerator, cardboard boxes, an institutional-sized salad bowl filled with paper shreddings and lint. I supposed it was a staging area of some sort. The physics building had dozens of such. All the lights were on, blaring and buzzing, so someone had obviously been here, right? Still, I should have been more frightened than I was. I kept thinking there was no way I'd interpreted the message correctly. Was there a message? What's a message? In any case, the obvious thought arose that this was not a particularly safe thing to be doing. I was totally vulnerable, unarmed, and acutely aware of my femaleness. It was like agreeing to meet a mobster at the pier.
Then: a knock on the door.
A knock?
My arms went limp with fear. I felt a surge of terror and helplessness followed by a kind of jabbing echo of that terror, a recognition that what I was feeling was indeed fear, like the child who cries not from pain but from the sight of her own blood. Unexpectedly, the feeling was not unlike hunger. A pang of gloomy longing in the gut.
There was of course only one option. I approached the door, unhurried. The man behind it was slight, copper-skinned, of indeterminate ethnicity. Persian, perhaps, or Turkish, but with a kind of vitreous, Asiatic lumen. His hairline fell narrowly above his eyebrows, pinched down by a wool hat. A heart-shaped scar was visible just beneath his left cheekbone.
"Are you alone," he said. A piquancy to his voice, sour and gingerish, a half-English, half-French inflection.
"I'm alone," I said.
"Let's go. We have to keep moving."
I wasn't going to argue.
He led me outside. His mustard-yellow jacket seemed to glisten in the blueshifted moonlight.
"Will you follow me, please?"
There was a soothing quality in his tone. I imagined an army sergeant leading a meditation workshop.
"This way."
He led me through the darkened path behind the med school, which in the spring would be roaring with greenery, but is now a crackling bed of hardened slush. I opted not to ask the obvious questions, not yet. He obviously knew I wanted answers and I wasn't about to play tough.
"My name is Carter Benchley," he said, finally. "I am telling you my real name to spare you the trouble of searching futilely. There is no official record of the name anywhere, not even a birth certificate. You are free to check, as you should."
He cleared his throat, took a quick sidelong glance.
"I am going to tell you a number of things tonight. Some are very true, some are basically true, and some are outright false. You are free to believe what you wish. You are free to guess, to extrapolate. This is how it has to be for now. Certain very important things will be left out as well. This is how it has to be. Yes."
He was wearing thick-soled shoes which yielded suction noises from the moistened earth. I remained silent.
"My name is Carter Benchley," he repeated. "This is the name I have had for some time. It is not the name I was born with. I have had many names. I have had many lives. In this, we are similar."
The path forked into two as the hill sloped downward towards the reservoir. I followed him, trusting. Could I have even felt protected? There was a rhythmic, almost hypnotic quality to his phrasing, his pauses. His inhalations were long, and his words rose and fell with a careful cadence.
"Your name is Catherine Bloom. Your father's name was Richard."
When he said this it was not a surprise. I must have sensed he knew. Didn't everyone?
"I worked under him as a cryptanalyst in the Pacific many years ago," he said. "He taught me everything. I am forever in his debt. That is why I have compromised my safety to see you. Yes."
The moonlight gleamed on the surface of the water like shards of liquid glass.
"But there were others who did not share my reverence. On the contrary. But I must leave it at that, and that is how it is. Now would be a good place to draw inferences. Suffice it to say that some of your father's work was controversial. You do not know about this. But it is very true that the work was important, and it is very true that important work can be dangerous. Huh. Again, you may draw inferences."
Still, I said nothing. Our breath was silver and spectral.
"Many of us work on things without realizing what we are really working on. Bricklayers don't always see the house. Blind men don't see the elephant. We are bound. Do you find that to be so? In this, we are similar."
Distant cars rumbled from the highway, whispery bleatings bent by distant winds.
"So much has been buried," he said. "The buried have begun to infiltrate my dreamlife. I dream the dead will rise. I dream we will be forced to consume our waste. I dream I will be forced to consume my soul. This would be a good place to question whether or not I am telling the truth."
We came to the woodsy barrier that separates the campus from the edge of town. The air was minty and metallic and my mind was empty of language. Lights blinked through the naked branches.
"Careful what you drink," he said.
And he was gone.
Flashback: 10 years ago
As Dad and I hit ground in Tokyo, the loudest, brightest, most capital capital in the world, it's like being electrocuted; like being shaken violently from a dream. This is the height of the bubble years, and Tokyo is the glowing buzzing CPU of the economic world. Not the social world (no one smiles or laughs but "salarymen" chortling their way out of stripclubs and beefy-calved schoolgirls skittering in throngs through Rippongi like sexy beetles) nor the intellectual world (the best and brightest are shipped off to the States), but lord God is this a town of caffeinated hyper-commerce, drenched in sweetener, cluttered with humanoid arcana. The streets are pungent with lawless decadence, only it's all legal. Slot arcades, strip joints, sex clubs ― you feel like a gangster in 21st century Vegas. Everything for the consumer. Maximum comfort all the time, all desires gratified. Even the subways have seat-warmers.
We soon learn that, paradoxically, Tokyo likes to be clean. It likes order ― not hard-boiled, gun-to-the-head, Achtung! order ― rather, delicate, hygienic, harmonious, welcoming order. Restrained, calligraphic. Order for the sake of presentation rather than efficiency.
But it borders on obsession. The prophylactic daintiness is almost fetishistic, and begets a different kind of filth. The incessant urge to sanitize ― moist towellets handed out at meals, bidets in public bathrooms, gauze masks worn in the street ― and its bilious reciprocal, the surrender to hedonism ― adolescent hostess bars, racks of rape comics in every convenience store ― are actually inflections of the same vowel. The inner seediness cannot be teased from the outer cleanliness. Steam and lights, steam and lights, blinking, wafting. You feel it like another consciousness, this gurgling airborne goo, lecherous and lonely. It sticks to things. It creeps behind radiators and caulks the city's cracks with gummy spittle.
My morning walks with Dad are now quite different.
He wants to explain it all to me ― how the bullet train manages to go so fast, how the smog affects the sunsets, how digital watches differ from analog watches.
"But, Dad."
"But, Catherine."
"Why are there 12 numbers on the clock instead of 10?"
We're on the elevated subway heading to Yokohama to ride the Ferris wheel.
"A fine question," he says. "But first, tell me what time it will be in 2 hours."
"Easy, it'll be 9:00. But―"
"What about 8 hours from now?"
"Um..." I count on my fingers... "3:00."
"Why not 15:00?" he says.
"Because the clock only goes up to 12!"
"Because we are in a base-12 system."
"A what?"
"Put it this way. Can you imagine 350 hours from now?"
I shrug. The massive shimmering sprawl of Tokyo and Yokohama is visible through the train window, the largest unbroken stretch of industry in the world.
"To answer this, we must divide 350 by 12, which is called the modulus, then take the remainder and count that many places on the clock from where we started. It's the same with minutes, only there are 60 of them in every hour. As you see, we have many different names for the increments of time, and many different number systems. The days of the week, for instance. If today is Tuesday, what day will it be 100 days from now?"
"How should I know!"
A Japanese boy with long black eyelashes is shyly sneaking glances at me from across the aisle. He reaches into a brightly colored bag of cashew nuts and brings a handful to his mouth.
"Well, the answer would be easy if we had 10-day weeks, like the Egyptians, but we are stuck with 7. So we must again apply our formula."
"But, Dad."
"But, Catherine."
"Why are they all different?" I say. "Why didn't they make them all the same?"
"Because they come from all different places in the world, and from different ages. Our integers are Arabic, which has its roots in India, and the Indians employed a base-10 system, presumably because it meant they could count on their fingers. But our calendars are Roman, and the Romans split the days and weeks according to the cycles of the moon ― 29 days divided into 4 quarters equals roughly 7. Ancient systems, you see, still persist in the modern world. Your Commodore 64 speaks in a base-2 language called a binary ― just like Bororo people of old Brazil. And when you learn French you will see it still draws from an ancient base-20 system. Just be glad no one inherited numbers from the Babylonians, who used base-60!"
The ferris wheel comes into view on the left by the dark, greenblack water. It's so very tall; there must be over a hundred chairs. A great, spoked machine with a digital clock mounted to the center, lit with splendid orange bulbs.
Dad takes my hand and squeezes, once.
Toxicum
Street construction began today. Bleeping trucks, gnawing jackhammers, red cones and yellow tape. The obscene smell of burning rubber. I still get a frisson when I see the street being ripped open. It's like heart surgery, the city's guts suddenly exposed. Bands of rusted iron, sheets of layered asphalt, the geometric weave of pipes, wires, ducts. I like to be reminded there is a whole secret life going on underground.
Fleeting strands of last night's episode haunted me all day. The rustling wind and rattling branches. The chimeric cityglow in the night fog. The amber voice of Carter Benchley.
Only now did my waterlogged questions come spilling back. Who was he? How had he found me? Why? Was I somehow in danger? What was the significance of the silicon diagram? What does any of this have to do with my father? What was that business about controversial research?
And that was only the topsoil. There was also, Why had he chosen to get in touch with me in such a cryptic way? What did he mean, he'd "compromised his safety?" How did I fit into this? Into anything? What was he implying when he said we were similar?
And why the hell had I clammed up?
Because it was his show, idiot. He was going to tell me what he thought I should know, nothing more, and it wasn't my place to demand answers. But that's not it. The real reason was that I found myself, I think, in awe of him. It wasn't physical attraction ― he struck me as almost asexual, genderless ― but I don't think I've ever felt anything like it. He carried an aura, lit from within like a nightglobe. Like seeing someone you'd until then only seen in photographs.
This is going to sound stupid, but he seemed holy.
In any event, I waived my right to not follow up on his name. There was one Carter Benchley and one C. Benchley listed in the Whitepages. I cross-referenced them both on the Department of Motor Vehicles website and saw that one was born in February of 1928 and the other was dead. So I went to 555-1212.com, coughed up the cash and found 342 more Carter Benchleys currently living in the continental United States. Oi. I decided to quit there until I had more information.
He was right. It was futile.
"May I flush," said Steph, "or were you saving that urine for something?"
Duncan looked up from his notebook, red-faced.
All the bathrooms at the Fornier Institute are co-ed, much to the chagrin of our feminine contingent. There was a barbed atmosphere to the lab. Everyone felt it.
"Perhaps you should double-check those integrals," suggested The Professor.
"Perhaps be damned," snarled Miranda.
But the whole point of today is what happened when I came home.
It was late. A jazz band was playing in the cocktail lounge and the hotel, being ill-equipped to deal with acoustics, shook with noise. The tinkly piano chimed through the ceiling tiles, the aluminum ducts; the bass drum vibrated through the floor.
I showered, shaved smooth the pits, put on the fuzzy robe that makes me feel like a freshly powdered baby. Steam had amplified the afternoon's bleach smell, so I opened the terrace door to air it out. The remaining light ― a lucid, milky blue ― gave a poise to the sky, a readiness. Wind raked snakeskin-like patterns across the bright blue swimming pool below. Free! I felt unshackled by the sweet, brisk air and the city's rolling murmur.
I craved my nightly nightcap. Went back in and opened the minibar. Removed the Seagram's, revealing behind it a single teabag.
What the fuck.
Needless to say, it wasn't mine. Who refrigerates tea? I'd never even heard of this brand ― Rovinj. The slender bag was sown with cream-white silk muslin, the text golden-brown and handsomely frilled. I picked it up and slid loose the ribbon. Inside was a spoonful of crispy black leaves carrying a dull woolly smell, and tucked behind the fold was a small rectangular slip of paper. I removed the small card to see that something had been written in fine text on the back. I held it in front of the bedside lamp to read it:
nos omnes biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria
Here I felt a stinging, compressed weight in my chest, as though my lungs carried air from a high-pressure mountaintop.
I recognized the words.
They were the last my father ever wrote.