Orient (13 page)

But Jeff Trader’s death was ultimately supplanted, in the common conversation, by news of the strange creature—thanks in part to the three unmarked vans of military personnel that breezed into Orient State Park on Sunday afternoon to document and remove the cadaver. A fleeting evening news report on Channel 11, and two write-ups in the following day’s
Suffolk Times
, stoked the bizarre finding into a possible laboratory cover-up, even a federal conspiracy. The fact that Jeff Trader had also been found in the water—and that his body had, for a time, been splayed on a nearby stretch of beach—so distorted the news of his death that before long August Floyd, who ran the outdoor organic vegetable stand, found himself wondering aloud, “What did Jeff Trader have to do with Plum? How did he get himself caught up with that mess?”

Most residents in Orient dismissed such ideas, assuming that Jeff had either fallen into the water drunk on a predawn fishing trip or drunkenly got himself tangled on the line of a shellfish rack. The Southold police opened a case, but the investigation never considered using the word
homicide
. (Southold had not opened a case that used the word
homicide
in nearly ten years.) The autopsy proved that Jeff had died of drowning, with enough alcohol in his blood to qualify as acutely intoxicated at time of death. Jeff Trader had no relatives to call for a deeper investigation, nor could anyone name an enemy who would want to do him in. “He was harmless,” Karen Norgen swore. “It harmed us to lose him.” The sheriff’s department agreed to leave the case open-ended, and Reverend Ann Whitlen found it in her Christian heart to waive the church rental fee and perform a Wednesday morning funeral at United Church of Christ as long as it didn’t impinge on the eleven-thirty Ecumenical Ministries Meeting. Everyone was doing what
they could to honor the lonely man who had been as ever-present as evergreens in the village.

Still, the coincidence of the two bodies discovered in Orient on the very same morning created an impulsive association. For many residents, the mere mention of Jeff Trader’s death sparked memories of the newspaper photo of the creature, or of Adam Pruitt’s poetic description to anyone who would listen. Jeff Trader, in their minds, became something rotting, diseased, mutated; many believed that he too had washed ashore, naked, with green, decomposing flesh, because of the well water pumped into his mobile unit or through a virus he had contracted from insect bites or exposure to livestock. Jeff was another reminder of how much safer it would be when operations on Plum closed down.

Very few showed up at his funeral. Two men dispatched by the Veterans League of Long Island, sporting silver toupees and silver medals, placed a folded flag on the coffin to honor his service in the Vietnam War. The property owners he had devotedly served—some for decades, others for months—sent flowery wreaths, all of them signed by the hand of the same Greenport florist. Orient’s love for Jeff Trader filled the church’s vestibule with roses and left most of the pews empty. But one person was there—one who had spent hours talking to him through the years, sharing stories, finding out what truth there was to learn about a man.

Magdalena Kiefer sat in the last pew throughout the liturgy, aluminum canes at her side. She did not believe in god but she had her suspicions.

CHAPTER
8

I
t was a black, vibrating smudge. Only when the doctor traced his finger over the monitor and said “head” and “arm buds” and “tail” could Beth discern some form of life. It was seven weeks old, the doctor told her, and it was already the size of a chestnut. To Beth it looked like a turtle removed from its shell.

When the doctor gazed down at her on the hydraulic memory-foam chair, she responded with the kind of smile she supposed other pregnant women gave at the first sight of their fetus on a sonogram. An open smile, scrunched shoulders, head tilted back in rapture or relief. The gynecologist nodded and told her that the baby looked healthy. It wouldn’t be a he or a she for another few weeks. All of that was being determined at this very moment inside the gender war room of her uterus. He asked her if she wanted a printout of the image to take home. A printout, like a receipt or a copy of her resume, something to update her files.

On the Wednesday morning of Jeff Trader’s funeral, Beth confirmed her pregnancy. She walked back to her car, her 90 percent likelihood giving way to 100 percent certainty. Two steps ahead of her in the Greenport parking lot, another expectant mother in a green dress two sizes too big—a blimp of happiness—furiously tapped on her cell phone, sending a screen grab of her own fetus to a dozen numbers on her contact list. Her baby was already circulating in the bloodstream of global satellite communications. Beth folded her black-and-white printout and placed it in her purse.

“Is there anything I need to do now?” she had asked the doctor.

He laughed without blinking. “Not a thing. You’re already doing it. Millions of years of evolution have proven much more effective than anything I could prescribe. Just relax, be patient, stay healthy, and schedule your next appointment in three weeks.”

Relax. Be patient. Not a thing
. There is an art to killing time. Beth had become a master of that murder. After the moving boxes had been unpacked, the furniture arranged, and the accounts updated with the new billing address, Beth had learned the black art of time consumption—wasting hours loitering at windows, inspecting glassware for chips, reading old copies of the
New Yorker
, looking up
New Yorker
words she didn’t know, like
peristyle
, entirely aware even as she ran her eyes over the definition (“an open space enclosed by a colonnade”), that tomorrow she would remember neither the definitions nor the words themselves.

At first her lack of industry came as a blow. She almost missed her freelance days, restyling inert technical copy into overexcited prose in the windowless midtown publishing offices of the
Scientific Frontier
. At least then her time had been worth something in nonexistential, market terms: eighteen dollars an hour. In Orient, Beth had finally been blessed with the rare, invaluable gift of time, and with so much of it on her hands, all she could do with it was panic.
I could have made $174.58 today
, she thought.
Instead I made Gavril a sandwich
.

Gavril was the definition of industry. He woke at dawn, disappeared into the backyard studio, and returned to the house at night exhausted. In New York too they had seen each other only at night, but in the city their separation starved them, making them crave contact with one among eight million. Out here, they ran out of conversation before Beth lit the dinner candles. Beth blamed it on her lack of a vocation. If only she could start painting again, she thought. If only she had the courage to face an empty canvas and apply one stroke of color. The city had offered the constant distraction of danger. Orient offered the far more dangerous distraction of
peace—restless peace invading each window in the morning, with the same view of the blue pines and wild grasses tipping in the wind.

But soon Beth learned the trick. To kill time successfully, she must take delight in watching it die. She must retrain herself not to think that every action needed a purpose, that a purpose robbed an act of its joy. So she tried to appreciate the miracle of the lopsided floorboards on her bare feet, or the heat of the sun on her hands when she washed them under the kitchen faucet. She tried to believe that life was experienced more fully when each breath wasn’t accounted for. Days went by. Hours evaporated as she examined the peeling paint above the rafters over the fallow tomato garden without thinking of how to tend to the paint or the garden. The seasons changed in front of her. She didn’t feel guilty when the Greenport attendant pumped gas into her tank and she used that expensive fuel to drive aimlessly around the back roads of Orient. She was no longer embarrassed to tell Gavril that her plan for each day was “nothing.” Each swallow of water chilled by cubes of prismatic ice became its own moment of transcendence. Leisure opened like a sinkhole at her feet.

But she couldn’t go on this way for long. Beth was too workaday American for the peaceful transcendence of eastern religions (
feel the vibration of the dishwasher on your hip, saith the Buddha
). She was driving herself crazy with this unarmed showdown with the abyss. So, on that Wednesday morning, she should have been happy to discover that she hadn’t spent the last seven weeks doing
nothing
. In fact, her body had been an epicenter of activity. “We hoped, we prayed, and now it’s here,” she said as she drove purposefully over the causeway toward home. So why wasn’t Beth happier? Why had she felt the need to perform the role of blissful mother in front of the gynecologist? Why hadn’t she said what came to her while her legs were splayed in his chair: “I’m not sure. I don’t know. How much time do I have to think it over?”

“You wanted this,” she said harshly, looking at herself in the rearview mirror. “You wanted this, you told Gavril you wanted this, and now you’ve gotten exactly what you deserve.”

She pulled into the driveway, heartened at least by the absence of her mother’s car. She searched her purse for her keys as she walked toward the porch, noticing a lime green pamphlet wedged in the doorframe. Beth pulled it out and examined its black lettering:

A muddy Xeroxed photograph of the mutant animal appeared below the title. On the inside page, a paragraph was devoted to Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani doctor (“and suspected al-Qaeda operative”) who had been arrested in 2008 carrying plans to induce a mass casualty attack on Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Beth glanced at the houses across the street and saw the same lime green flyers decorating the doors. She shoved the pamphlet in her purse and fit her key into the lock.

Today she would tell him. She washed her hands under the kitchen faucet without appreciating the warming sun. She would prepare lunch for Gavril and carry it out to the studio with a glass of whiskey and tell him to lift it for a toast. Then she would unfold the printout and let him see the evidence for himself. As she collected the ingredients for a sandwich, a smile broke across her face for the first time that day, an unforced smile that matched her mood. That was all she needed to do, tell Gavril, and all her doubts and fears about motherhood would be released or at least forgotten in the eight-month marathon of soon-to-be parents preparing for the birth.

She cut the sandwich diagonally, poured the whiskey, and gathered the folded printout from her purse. She crossed the grass and heard rock music blast through the renovated garage. Beth opened the studio door, surprised by her own excitement. Gavril did not like being disturbed in the middle of the day, and even the promise of the momentary annoyance that would flash across his face excited
her because she knew another emotion would soon overtake it, the rapture or relief of fatherhood. A thunderstorm giving way to sun.

Two pints of ice cream sat on a metal cart by the door, the ice cream melted into a chocolate-vanilla soup. He had already eaten. Drums blasted from the rafter’s speakers and echoed through the cavernous space. Due to some trick of insulation, the studio remained mausoleum-cold year-round, and she shivered as she set the plate down on the cart. Gavril was on all fours in the middle of the garage, stirring a black puddle of tar with a wooden stick on the terrazzo floor. She wondered if even Gail could really forgive her son-in-law for the damage he was inflicting on her property.

“I’m working,” he said gruffly when he saw her. He leaned back on his knees and wiped his nose with his sweatshirt sleeve. “I thought you would be out all day.”

“I was out,” she said, anticipating this reaction, almost teasing his irritation in order to heighten the surprise of the coming news. “And now I’m back and I brought you a sandwich. And some whiskey.” Beth dangled the glass in front of her. That’s when she noticed strands of blond hair stuck in the tar puddle at Gavril’s knees. “Is that my hair?” she asked.

Gavril sighed. He did not enjoy explaining his work.

“Beth, I cannot be interrupted,” he said, almost yelling as the music abruptly ended. He climbed to his feet and reached out to accept the whiskey. She walked over to him and gave him the glass. He nodded at the tar. There were bones in it, chicken bones, and what looked like fingernail clippings, and long blond strands that caused her to gather her hair protectively in her fist.

“Gavril, where did you get my hair?” she demanded.

Gavril winced at the sting of the alcohol. “I took it from brush,” he admitted. He squinted and grabbed her wrist to keep her from stomping off. “I did not think you would mind. I am doing experiment.” Gavril’s English grew conveniently broken anytime he sensed that Beth was growing angry. Unfortunately, that only made her angrier, as if articles and contractions were somehow beneath him.

“You could have asked first.”

“Ahh, Beth, I am trying to make something. I don’t want to ask every time an idea comes. This is why it’s better not to interrupt me. Not to come back here. I have already been bothered once today.”

“Fine, I won’t bother you,” she said defensively. “I’ll keep to the house, but then you don’t bother me in there without knocking first.”

“What is the problem? It’s just like how you made that painting on our floor in New York.” Gavril had proposed to Beth in the kitchen of their East Village apartment at precisely 2:13
P.M
. on the microwave clock. Their kitchen window faced west, toward a view of graffiti-scrawled tenement rooftops, and Beth had surprised Gavril by painting the four squares of light that shone through the window onto the kitchen floor at precisely 2:13
P.M
. on the microwave clock—a romantic gesture that she hoped would remind them both of their love whenever the sunlight aligned with the white painted shapes. This tar puddle of human remains—
her
human remains—was nothing like her kitchen installation, and Beth glared at him to advertise her response.

“Don’t be mad,” he said. “I’ve had this vision stuck in my head ever since I saw that body in the harbor. That black speck of death floating in the sea. It was like a shadow of the worst possible fear. Like an oil slick in the ocean, killing all life that swims into it. Only I
did
swim to it and touched it and brought it back.” He stared at her with a pained expression, and Beth queasily realized how much the description matched the very image she had seen on the monitor in the doctor’s office. “A black human stain just floating there. I can’t stop thinking about it. How awful it was and pure, like a computer bleep or a fly, destroying just because it is there. So I wanted to re-create it, to make that smudge right here. It is supposed to look disgusting.” As he squinted, the Hawaiian Islands stretched across his cheek.

Beth stepped back. She tried not to connect this puddle of tar stuck with bones and fingernail clippings and her own blond hair
with the fetal smudge on the printout in her hand. But as she stared down, all she could think of was the pulsing shape on the monitor.

“It will grow,” he said. “It will keep eating away all the clean space. That will be my next work. A landscape, or the death that hides in a landscape because it is always there.” He finished his whiskey. Beth was too dazed to open the printout now, too afraid the screen shot would match the puddle at her feet and rob them both of the joy. She felt dizzy from the tar fumes and noticed that the lime green leaflet on the mutant animal had gotten tucked in the fold of the paper. She shoved the printout under her arm and, without another word, walked to the door.

“I almost forgot,” Gavril said as she touched the knob. “That nurse stopped by while you were out, the one from next door. She said Magdalena would like you to drop by today. She probably wants to complain about me making noise. Don’t listen to her. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”

The fresh air revived her. The tips of sailboats rocked in the Sound over the pink-tinted trees, the color of autumn turning colder, the color of baby balloons and crib liners and blankets all ready to descend on her in the coming months. Gavril’s new piece had shaken her, but she told herself she was acting stupid. It was just art. It had nothing to do with her, with them. She stopped on the lawn and tried to think rationally, but nothing came. Just the cold breeze blowing sidelong, scattering leaves.

Beth made her
visit in the late afternoon. Magdalena’s nurse, Alvara, answered the door. She was tall and lanky, with aristocratic cheekbones and yellow dish gloves stretched to her elbows. “She will be so glad you come. Messus Kiefer very anxious.” Alvara led Beth through a blue-carpeted living room furnished with a rosewood armoire and an ancient, ticking grandfather clock. They passed through a cramped galley kitchen and entered a screened-in sunroom fitted with wicker chairs and raffia stools draped in orange
cushions. The screen that shut the sunroom off from the backyard was sagged and warped, distorting the green grass into gauzy waves. In the far corner, Magdalena sat with one foot propped on a stool, the table by her side covered in newspapers, medicine bottles, and a small plastic terrarium.