"Hello?"
she called out to the dead.
The
dead responded with more footsteps.
They
were coming from the bathroom.
At
the time, Elisa was sure that she would never be more scared than she
was right at that moment. That she could never feel more fear than
what she felt at that moment.
Later,
she found out just how wrong she was.
But
that was later.
"Um,
hello?"
No
reply. The steps faded in and out. Was she wrong? No. They were
definitely coming from the bathroom. She didn't have a lamp on her
nightstand, and they cut the lights at night anyway, except for the
bathrooms. She'd have to get up in the dark and walk over there to
turn it on.
Now
she couldn't hear anything anymore. They'd stopped again.
All
of a sudden, she felt like a complete idiot. Who the hell could have
gone into her bathroom? And who would possibly be moving around in
there in the dark, without saying anything? The steps must be coming
from someplace else and just echoing against the walls.
Despite
that reassuring conclusion, the idea of actually pulling back the
sheet, getting up
(don't
even dream about stopping to put on your underwear; besides, if
you're about to die, what the hell difference does it make if you're
stark naked?),
and
walking over to the bathroom seemed like a superhuman feat. She
realized that the bathroom door, which she couldn't see from bed, was
closed, and the peephole was completely dark. She'd have to open the
door and then reach in and turn on the light.
She
turned the handle.
As
she pushed it open as slowly as humanly possible, revealing more and
more darkness within, she could hear herself panting. She panted as
if she were still in bed with her fantasies. No, louder than that. As
loud as a steam train. Her moaning in bed was a joke compared with
this.
She
opened the door all the way.
She
could tell even before she turned on the light. It was empty, of
course.
Relieved,
she exhaled, not knowing what she'd expected to find. Then she heard
the steps again, but this time quite obviously distant, maybe in the
professors' wing.
For
a second, she stood there, naked in the doorway of the lit bathroom,
wondering how on earth those steps could have echoed beside her bed
just moments earlier. She knew her senses weren't playing tricks on
her, and she wouldn't be able to sleep until she arrived at a logical
solution to the problem, even if it was just so she didn't feel like
an idiot.
Finally,
she thought of a possibility. Crouching down, she put her ear to the
metal floor. She thought she heard the steps with more intensity and
deduced that she was right.
There
was one place in the science station she'd still never been: the
pantry. It was underground. On New Nelson, they had to save both
space and energy, and storing supplies in the subsoil fulfilled both
of those objectives since, given the subterranean temperature, the
refrigerators worked on an energy-save mode and many provisions could
simply be kept on shelves with no additional refrigeration needed.
Cheryl Ross went down there some nights (there was a trapdoor that
led down from the kitchen) to make lists of all the supplies that had
to be replenished. The cold store was close to her room, and the
footsteps of whoever was in there must have been able to be heard
easily due to the metal paneling on the walls. She thought she could
hear the steps
in
her
bathroom, but really she must have heard them
below
it.
That
must have been it. Mrs. Ross was probably in the pantry.
When
she finally felt calm enough, she turned out the bathroom light,
closed the door, and went back to bed, after first finding her
underwear and putting them back on. She was exhausted. After that
unbelievable fright, the sleep she so longed for began to wash over
her.
But
as she drifted off, before slumber dragged her all the way into its
blackness, she thought she saw something.
A
shadow slipping past the peephole on her door.
16
From:
[email protected]
Sent:
Friday,
September 16, 2005
Subject:
hello
Hi
Mom, Just wanted to send you a few lines to tell you I'm OK. I'm
sorry I can't write or call more often, but we're working flat out
here in Zurich. Which I like (you know me), so I can't complain.
Everything I see and do is incredible. Professor Blanes is amazing,
and so are the other people I'm working with. We're on the verge of a
really important breakthrough, so please don't worry if I'm not back
in touch for a while. Take care. And say hi to Victor for me if he
calls.
Love,
Eli
YEARS
later
it occurred to her that she, too, was to some degree responsible for
the horror.
We
tend to blame ourselves for the tragedies we suffer. When catastrophe
overcomes us, we withdraw into the past, searching for some sort of
mistake we might have made, something to explain it all. Often, that
tendency is absurd. In this case, though, she thought it was only
fair.
Her
tragedy was overwhelming. And perhaps her mistake had been, too.
When
had she made it? At what exact moment?
Sometimes,
at home alone, standing before the mirror, as she counted the
agonizing seconds to go until her nightmares would start up again,
she thought that her biggest mistake had also been her greatest
success.
That
Thursday, September 15, 2005, was the day of her great breakthrough.
Her
day of reckoning.
MATH
problems
are like anything else. You spend weeks banging your head against the
wall and then suddenly one day, you wake up, have some coffee, watch
the sunrise, and there, right in front of you, blindingly obvious, is
the solution you've been searching for.
On
the morning of September 15, Elisa sat stock-still before her
computer screen, pencil in mouth. She printed out her results and
dashed off to Blanes's office, paper in hand.
Blanes
had an electronic keyboard in his private office and he often played
Bach. A lot of Bach. In fact, Bach was all he played. His office and
Clissot's were connected, and sometimes the crystalline sounds of a
fugue or the
Goldberg
Variations
aria
filtered through the walls like ghosts on the lonely afternoons that
Elisa spent working in solitude. She didn't mind. In fact, she found
it sort of comforting. She imagined, despite her ignorance of all
things musical, that Blanes was a decent pianist. Nevertheless, that
morning she had her own tune to play him, and she was pretty sure
that if it was the right one he'd be happy to hear it.
His
hands hovering motionless above the keys, Blanes stared at the
trembling sheet of paper before him.
"It's
perfect," he said impassively. "We've got it."
Blanes
no longer seemed "amazing," as she liked to tell her
mother, but he wasn't average, either; he wasn't even an asshole. If
Elisa had learned anything in twenty-three years, it was that nobody,
absolutely nobody, could be easily pigeonholed. Everyone is
something, but they're all also something else, and maybe even the
opposite of what they are, too. People, like electron clouds, are
hazy. And Blanes was no exception. When she met him at Alighieri
during his summer course, she thought he was some sexist jerk, or
maybe an introverted sicko. Then, when they'd first come to New
Nelson, she decided that she just didn't even figure on his radar
screen, that maybe the problem was her deeply rooted belief that all
male professors would somehow treat her differently, not just because
she was smart (very smart) but because she was also hot (very hot),
and she knew it, and was used to working it to her advantage. But
with Blanes, she felt like he was saying, "I couldn't care less
about your geometric intuitions, your original methods of
integrating, your legs, your shorts, or the fact that you often go
braless."
Later,
Elisa realized that he did care. That he always looked at her with
those squinty Robert Mitchum eyes as if he were about to fall asleep
when actually that was the furthest thing from the truth. That when
she was on her way back from the beach half naked and bumped into him
in the hall, he did, of course, gawk, even more than Marini (and that
was saying something) and Craig (and that was not). But she suspected
that Blanes's mind, like her own, was elsewhere, and that he probably
suspected a few things about her, too. She sometimes thought that
maybe they should just sleep together and see if that cleared the
air. This is how she pictured it: they'd both be standing there,
naked, staring at each other. After a few minutes, he'd suddenly say,
"You mean you really don't mind if I touch you?" and she'd
say, "You mean you actually
want
to
touch me?"
"Let's
wait for Sergio to finish," he said, and went back to playing
Bach for a change.
Blanes's
idea was to take both light samples—the Jurassic and
Jerusalem—on the same day, since the geographic area they were
investigating was more or less the same. But Marini and Valente were
behind on their calculations, just like last time, so there was
nothing to do but wait.
With
nothing to work on, Elisa spent her time vegging out and doing things
like writing her mother the e-mail she'd send the next day (after
going through the requisite security filters, of course). Then she
thought about that morning in early August, a month and a half ago,
when she'd interrupted another one of Blanes's recitals to show him
her first answer. She'd been tormented after that, and Nadja had
saved her.
She'd
just had one of her worst encounters with Valente and thought she
finally understood just how much he hated the fact that he kept
coming in "last" in the supposed race they were having (in
his mind, at least). Ironically, at the time, both of their solutions
were incorrect.
This
time it was going to be different. She was sure that this time she'd
hit the nail on the head. And she was right.
She
also believed that if her calculations were correct, she'd be the
luckiest person alive.
And
there, she was wrong. Dead wrong.
THE
previous
month had certainly not been the best in Valente Sharpe's life. Elisa
barely saw him around the station, not even in Silberg's lab, which
is where he supposedly worked. But there was no doubt that he
was
working.
Sometimes she needed to tell him something and she'd find him in his
room, sitting on his bed with his laptop, so into his work that she
was almost inclined to consider him a "soul mate," as he'd
once called it. He'd even stopped his little flirtation with Reiter
(and it was clear that Rosalyn was a lot more upset by it than he
was). Now he seemed to seek out the company of Marini and Craig, and
it wasn't unusual to see the three of them returning from a long walk
on the beach or by the lake in the late afternoons. It seemed clear
to her that Ric had entered a new phase in which he really wanted to
shine at all costs. He wasn't satisfied with being
one
of
the
only people chosen for the project; he wanted to be
the
only
one.
He wanted to beat not just Elisa, but everyone else, too.