Vitals Page 12

  “Thank you,” I said. “But why should that matter?”

  “You haven’t been tagged,” he said. “Or if you have, it hasn’t taken.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The woman with the dogs, and whoever set the fire, they were tagged.”

  “Tag, you’re it,” I said.

  K gave this crack more than it deserved, a smirk and a wan smile. “Nothing funny about it. If you were tagged, you could be a grave danger to yourself, to me, and perhaps to others.”

  “All right,” I conceded. “What is it, a psychotropic chemical? They spray the fruits and vegetables and the whole neighborhood goes crazy?”

  Saying that took most of my energy, and I felt faint.

  “As I said, I’m not a biologist. Your brother was beginning to understand when they tagged him. He fought back as best he could.” K stared grimly across the aisle of the half-empty bus. “He offered me an explanation for my difficulties. He said I must have been tagged ten years ago. And now I’m very small potatoes. It’s a truly paranoid vision.”

  “Silk?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Sounds sinister,” I said. “Like being strangled with a scarf.”

  “We’ll find a room in San Francisco, cheap and anonymous. I’m practiced at lying low. We have enough cash for the time being. I’m relieved, actually. From this point on, at least we know.”

  K seemed familiar with all the fleabag hotels in San Francisco. We ended up in the Haight in a narrow little building called the Algonquin, squeezed between an Asian grocery and a store that specialized in posters, bongs, and Betty Boop dolls.

  The hotel had ten rooms, a tiny lobby, and a small couch sagging and fading in front of a flyspecked window on the street. K rented a double with the air of an experienced, upper-crust European traveler, temporarily down on his luck while awaiting a draft from his London bank.

  He paid cash.

  The room was small, with two single beds, a dresser, a tiny closet, and an adjoining bathroom. The sink in the bathroom was chipped. I was too exhausted to care.

  I took off the ugly green shirt, lay back on the bed, and thought about withdrawing my remaining three hundred dollars from the bank. Repaying K for my hospital tab.

  Phoning my mother and asking for a loan.

  K pulled the chair over to the window. He rubbed his temples with his hands, as if trying to focus psychic energy on the brick wall across the narrow shaft.

  “Churchill forced him to do it,” he muttered. “That isn’t where it began, but it led to where we are now.”

  I slipped in and out of his ramble.

  “It was the Jews,” he continued. “Krupp was a secret Jew, did you know that? Rockefeller. A Jew. They wanted the whole world to go to war. Read my last book if you disagree. Thoroughly annotated. We have lived a century of shams and deceptions.”

  “I’m really tired,” I moaned, and curled up on the bed.

  K turned his face toward me. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I was the best there was at winnowing out the dark underside of contemporary history,” he said. “The very, very best. I still am.”

  “Then why are you so full of shit?” I asked, uncharitably, considering what he had done for me in the past few hours.

  “Am I?” he asked with deep sadness. He pointed to his temple with a long, knobby finger. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand the twentieth century. A hundred years of hobnail boots grinding human faces into hamburger. I’ve uncovered the darkest documents, the most heinous official papers ever concocted by human beings. It was my duty to read them, absorb motivations, plumb psychologies, to understand how such things could be. I imagined myself a doctor diagnosing a long and hideous disease. Perhaps my mistake was having an open mind. Ghosts got in. Bad and unhappy spirits.”

  I rolled over and stared at him.

  “Why did my brother ever come to you?” I asked.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. “I wish I were a Jew myself. Then I would have the final answers. I would be given access . . . if I knew the secret signs, the genetic identification. They wave a special . . . box . . . over your head, and it sways left and right if you carry the blood of Aaron, front to back if you’re of the Levites. Then they tell you—”

  I had had enough. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, sat up with an effort, feeling my bandaged neck bind and my hand throb, and fumbled for the shirt.

  “Don’t leave,” K said, a hitch in his voice. “Please. I surely do miss your brother. He could see me as I really am.”

  “What’s your real name?” I demanded.

  “Banning. Rudy Banning. My mother’s maiden name was Katkowicz. She was Polish. I am Canadian by birth and British by nationality. I have written twenty-three books on the history of Germany and Eastern Europe, and for twelve years I was a respected professor at Harvard.”

  He pulled himself together and stood, then went to his coat and drew forth a wrinkled pack of cigarettes. He tapped out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, patted all his pockets, but could not find matches. The cigarette dangled, its tip bobbing as he spoke. “I was researching a Soviet program for the creation of artificial silk, in the 1930s. I located important documents. To make a very long story short, I came too close to the flame. They burned my wings.”

  “What does this have to do with my brother? Or with Jews?” I asked.

  His eyes glittered, and his lips squirmed as if they were fighting. “They saw how close I was.”

  “The Jews?”

  He shook his head, pointed his finger into his right ear, and lifted one eyebrow. “No need to kill me . . . better to discredit me. I have a defect in my character, put there by my father and my grandparents. A little rip of tribal fear. We all have them. They pulled mine wide open.” He jerked the cigarette from his mouth. “The subjects I studied became objectified. I began to hear them at night, whispering vast truths. Some people feel the touch of guardian angels. Mine is the monster I have studied most of my adult life.” His lips curled. “A fine companion in the wee hours.”

  Banning approached my bed, cigarette held in his bandaged left hand, filter squeezed flat between two tobacco-stained fingers. “I am pariah,” he whispered. “I am unclean, unemployable. The Jews have made sure I can’t publish, can’t teach. And that is the truth. But however hard I try to ignore my dark and hate-filled angels, they circle and strike like harpies. I have offended the gods.”

  I didn’t want to be in the same room with K, or Rudy Banning, any longer. I felt sick. “I have to leave,” I said, and tried desperately to get to my feet. I slid to the floor.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, and gently helped me back onto the bed. “Where would you go? You need sleep.”

  Despite anything I could will or do, my eyes closed.

  “We’ll try to make sense out of things tomorrow,” Banning said. “I’ll call Mrs. Callas and make an appointment. And I’ll tell you more about your brother.” His voice seemed to slide down a long slope. “And about Lake Baikal.”

  22

  The brick red reflection of morning bounced across the air shaft into our room. I sat up in bed and reached for Rob’s package. It was still on the nightstand. Dog claws had scraped through the paper and bent back a run of tape, but the contents were unharmed.

  Banning slept on his side in the other bed, snoring. I went into the bathroom, blew my nose, and washed my face quietly, hoping to have some time alone with the package.

  My back was a network of bruises and pulls. My throat hurt, and my hand felt as if it had gone through a meat grinder. I was clearly not cut out for adventure.

  I examined my bandages delicately, then changed them using the gauze and tape and disinfectant from Alta Bates. That done, I dropped the lid on the toilet and sat, then slid the blade of my pocketknife under the envelope’s taped flap. Cutting through the hairs seemed significant, fresh from sleep as I was; had I dreamed about this? Rehearsed the moment?


  The envelope had been hastily stuffed with papers, well over a hundred pages of typing paper, lined notebook paper, leaves ripped from a notepad, hotel stationery (the header in Cyrillic and Roman) from Intourist hotels in Irkutsk and Listvyanka. Pages of scribbled notes had been jammed between three slender manuscripts, two produced on a typewriter, one from an inkjet printer, the type smeared at the bottom by damp. All three manuscripts had been accented with yellow highlighter.

  A postcard showed steam rising from Lake Baikal. It had no message, had never been mailed. On the back the caption read, “World’s deepest, largest, oldest: One Fifth of Earth’s Fresh Water, Drink and You Are a Year Younger!”

  I tried to remember what I knew about Lake Baikal. There was volcanism in the area—gases warming the lake and frequent earthquakes. Heated baths and healing waters.

  At the bottom of the envelope I found a paperback book, an Auto Club map of California, and a small diary bound in black vinyl, all held together by a doubled and twisted rubber band. The book was Uncommon Graves by Benjamin Bridger, a history of the Soviet invasion of Germany near the end of World War II. I recognized the wrapper art, a hammer and sickle ripping through a Nazi flag. On the inside front cover, two names had been inked in precise, adolescent block letters: Hal and Rob Cousins. We had both read a lot of history in our early teens. Bridger had been one of our favorites.

  The book had vanished from my shelves when we were fourteen, and I had accused Rob of stealing it. Now he was returning it to me. I put the book aside and opened the diary. It was filled with looping scribbles. I could hardly read my own handwriting, much less Rob’s.

  One last item was stuck in the bottom of the envelope. I turned it upside down and shook it out. A ring of three keys clattered on the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor. Attached to the ring was a paper tag bearing an address in San Jose.

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Did I want to learn what Rob was thinking before his death? I knew with that insight unique to twins that my brother had enjoyed making this selection, that the contents would lead me on a goose chase. Or worse, he had laid out a puzzle for me to solve, a challenge for arrogant Prince Hal.

  I took my morning dose of Integumycin and two tablets of T3—acetaminophen with codeine. I hated codeine, but a jagged buzz was better than a drumbeat of pain.

  I heard Banning stir in the other room and pushed the bathroom door firmly shut.

  Opened the diary to the middle.

  Arrived Irkutsk this morning seven or eight hours from Moscow. Taxi. Fifty bucks and you’re king for a day. Met with Ch. and Tur. in hotel restaurant and shared local salmon, very good. Took me to their little lake museum off newly paved and renamed ul K Yenisei (used to be ul K Dzerzhinskova). Jovial fellows. Tippled a bit, peppered vodka, toasted the Decembrists, then toured the old lake lab and museum. Shunned by folks from the Limnological Institute. The lab is filled with specimens from Baikal, baby freshwater seals (in jars) called Nerpas; small ancient lab filled with old equipment.

  This was where G. did his early work.

  Ch. and Tur. showed me aquarium with recently harvested freshwater xenos. Massive—thirty centimeters across. Water smells of sulfides. Fan blows continuously to clear the dark little room. Ch. confirms these xenos carry ur-kinetoplasts. Very primitive, some still free-living at lake bottom. Tur. explains: Waters thick with xenos and also with curtains of gelatinous semipermeable membranes haunted by clouds of bacteria. Baikal surface in northeast corner gelatinous with polysaccharide ribbons and oily with phospholipids at times, confused with bacterially polluted runoff from infamous pulp plant (six hundred miles south), but the slime is indigenous, from lake bottom around vents.

  Rain here forms little fatty drops in water, protocells, that sink to bottom and get colonized by bacteria. Bacteria use polysacc. ribbons like dogs use trees, to establish communal centers and pass on local microbe “gossip.” G. saw and studied all this in twenties and thirties (before pulp plant was in place).

  Baikal is at most twenty-four million years old. But vent life here is hauntingly reminiscent of ocean communities. Like the Beginning Place, Eden?

  I looked up from the diary and contemplated the wall, feeling chagrin that my brother had been on the same track, a spike of familial pride, then rank, face-flushing irritation that somebody had gotten there before either of us. And in the 1930s, if I was reading correctly. What else did they know back then?

  G. wanted to understand the causes of aging. Intuited that disease and aging are strongly related. Thought perhaps bacteria benefited most from both aging and all sorts of disease, dead bodies being such wonderful opportunities for bacterial orgies. His early theories begin with that premise.

  G. studied parasitic control of hosts. Parasitized ant climbs to grass tip, eaten by bird, parasite’s next stage is in bird. Rats with toxoplasmosis have cysts in brain, not afraid of cats, get eaten, cats carry toxo. Wolbachia, widespread bacteria, actually control reproduction of host insects and other arthropods. G. then moved on to studying mind-altering substances produced by parasites and compared them with bacterial products. Many gut bacteria talk to intestinal cells. They, too, alter host behavior, he found.

  G. discovered “vaults” in cells 1927–8!

  After arrest, G. and wife threatened with deportation (Jewish problem?). Makes lemonade from lemons—G. went to Moscow and proposed to B. that mixes of altered bacteria in subject guts could make prisoners docile, talkative. Dosed in food. Beginning of Silk.

  B. released G. and financed his project. Luvvy duvvy with Koba for twenty years.

  None of the initials made sense, and who in hell was Koba?

  I turned a page and read on.

  Useless day at Limnological Institute. Nobody will talk about G.

  People at the university are more open. They say G. most interested in “Little Mothers of the World.” That’s what eastern microbiologists call bacteria when they’re being sentimental. G. interested in germ networking, that’s the word we use now, but it did not exist in that sense then. How do these bacterial societies cooperate? How do they communicate with their hosts? G. way ahead of his time. Might be ahead of some biologists even today. Can’t find these papers in the library, but my guides Tur. and Ch. from the univ. say that’s because B. took them back to Moscow. Wanted to use them to support naturalist view of Marxist theory!

  Russian laughter is dark, hard. Siberian laughter is even darker.

  I was so absorbed that when Banning knocked on the door I nearly fell off the toilet. I banged my knee on the edge of the shower stall, and the papers spilled on the floor.

  “All right in there?” Banning asked.

  “I’m fine,” I shouted, picking up the papers from the tiles. I had read just a fraction of the pages and my head swam with half-baked connections. Mind-controlling bacteria, for Christ’s sake! Rob and I had spent so much of our youth lying to each other about stupid things, especially girls. He might have been off on a tear, losing his sanity. Or he might have come under Banning’s influence . . .

  “Have a heart,” Banning suggested outside the door. “My bladder’s a balloon.”

  Banning and I spent the late morning buying two new shirts and a pair of pants for me. I also picked up a cheap business valise to hold Rob’s envelope. I refused to let Banning pay and drained my bank account writing checks.

  That was it, I thought. I had become a pauper relying on the kindness of a homeless bigot. The extra time to think was not sufficient for me to reach any conclusion about the envelope’s contents.

  Our appointment with Mrs. Callas drew near, and we took a taxi into South San Francisco.

  The collar of the new shirt rubbed my bandaged neck as we climbed three flights of stairs to the top floor of a converted warehouse. The air was stifling, and sweat dripped from both of us when we finished.

  A wide white door blocked the entrance beyond a small alcove. Banning pulled back a heavy iron knocker and slammed it down. Seconds
later, a finger pushed aside the little brass cover from a peephole. A woman’s dark brown eye peered at us. She let the cover swing back. The steel door slid open on small rubber wheels with a squeak like frightened mice.

  Mrs. Monroe Callas beckoned us into her sparely furnished waiting room. White plasterboard walls stood free within the larger space, open to the higher beams and corrugated tin roof above. Mrs. Callas was built like a heron—everything about her was a little too long, legs and neck, nose and fingers. But her strength and assurance were obvious.

  We took a seat before a stainless-steel desk, bare but for a tray and two sealed plastic bottles of water—Alpine Shiver. “Have some,” she suggested. “It’s hot in here.”

  The building was quiet. We seemed to be alone. Banning opened his bottle carefully and listened for the snap of the plastic protector and the hiss of escaping carbonation before drinking. I did the same.

  Callas watched this ritual with some interest, then issued her pronouncement. “I’ve looked into Mr. Banning’s references. I don’t take on charity, and I don’t do nutcases.” She looked at me. “You seem to be one, and Mr. Banning is certainly the other.”

  Banning adjusted his jacket with nervous dignity. “It’s hardly charity,” he said. “Dr. Cousins is a respected researcher. He might even be able to teach you a thing or two about the life sciences. Think of it as an exchange.”

  “Forget it,” I muttered. I felt like a fool, and Callas was only confirming it. Her evaluation was spot on. How much loyalty did I owe Banning because he had paid my bill at Alta Bates? How desperate was I in the first place?

  Pretty desperate. And desperately confused. My brother’s notes and manuscripts filled my head with disturbing and half-formed images, barely deserving the label of thoughts. The codeine was still active, but it wasn’t cutting the pain completely. I gripped my wrist to stop the throbbing.