The Air We Breathe (23 page)

“The two have nothing in common,” Miles said angrily. “The men I'm working with now are different, they're men like me. I simply coordinate their activities.” He opened the door, turning back to ask, “Why are you being so thickheaded? You have a huge problem staring you in the face. That fire…”

“If you read the report,” Dr. Petrie said, “then you saw my explanation. The fumes came from the racks of stored films. A simple chemical reaction, which could have been predicted.”

“All well and good—but you explained nothing about how the fire started in the first place,” Miles said. “Do you think I didn't notice that? The state investigators can say ‘accident' as many times as they want, but something still seems wrong to me. Why aren't you taking this more seriously?”

ABE AND ARKADY AND OTTO
, crowded together in Leo's old room as Leo struggled in the new infirmary, were trying as hard as they could
not
to take their situation seriously. If they had, they would have given up, or fought so bitterly that their friendship would have shattered. After rooming together for more than a year, Abe and Arkady had grown used to each other's snores and squeaks, Abe's way of paring his nails with a knife, Arkady's habit of snorting through each nostril twice, once gently and once more firmly, each time he blew his nose: the thousand little irritations of sharing close quarters. But Otto, who before the fire had roomed with Sean, cleared his throat every two or three minutes, spoke with food trapped in his overlapping teeth, and read sentences from the newspaper out loud. It took everything Abe and Arkady had learned in their time at Tamarack State not to band together and turn against him for what were, really, only their new roommate's natural ways. Otto, in turn, missed Sean, who whispered when he read but at night fell into a sleep like death, never rolling or stirring a limb until dawn. In the early morning hours, lying awake miserably while Abe and Arkady snored in concert and Abe flopped from side to side like a seal, he sometimes imagined mashing pillows over their faces.

But they'd been through this before—we all had, though never to this extent—and during their first weeks together they learned to joke about their resentments. In Leo's absence, they used his bed as a couch and tried to enjoy that scrap of extra space. All three of them liked Leo, but as a way of deflecting their own discomforts, they took turns making fun of him.

Abe did a perfect imitation of Leo's most common gesture, right hand raised to push a wing of his hair behind his ear; Otto and Arkady both found that hilarious. Otto mocked the hours Leo spent in the library, poring so earnestly over books and papers. Arkady popped his eyes and made moony glances that were, he claimed, exactly how Leo had looked at Eudora during our Wednesday sessions, and Abe said, “Did you see the way he was with her, the night of the fire?” Then Otto, who was stretched out on Leo's bed, picked up the two green volumes Leo had left lying on the white-topped table.

“I can't believe this is what he reads for pleasure,” he said, turning the first one over in his hand. “It's no wonder he was the only one paying attention during some of Miles Fairchild's early talks.
The Principles of Chemistry
—”

“Read some,” Arkady said, egging him on. One thing that made Otto bearable, even likable, was his ability to turn the driest material into something funny.

Otto flipped a couple of pages before clearing his throat and pursing his lips, assuming what he imagined was a professor's demeanor. “Listen to this.” Reading swiftly, he began:

He ran out of breath as Abe asked, “That wasn't all one sentence?”

“It was,” Otto said, flipping the page. “You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.”

“More, more,” pled Arkady, who'd been laughing throughout Otto's high-speed recitation.

Otto obliged.

He shook his head in disbelief. “It's all like this. Except the footnotes, which are worse. The tiniest type, page after page…”

“Let me see,” Abe demanded. Otto handed over the book.

“Well,” Arkady said, wiping his eyes, “but if Leo likes it, it must be good for something. It's not his fault he's still trying to make himself into who he was in the old country. I felt like that too, the afternoon I was talking about the history of communes. Those Wednesdays made it easy to think we might have a chance.”

“Might have,
then,
” Abe said, setting the volume back on the table. “Not now. We should leave his things alone, I suppose.”

Otto shrugged and set the other volume down. Elsewhere the rest of us had our own irritations with the new living arrangements, which we were trying to work through room by room. We tried not to hear what we couldn't help overhearing, tried not to see what was better left hidden; everything we knew about inventing our own privacy had to be doubled after the fire. Belle said, later, that she tried to imagine a wall of glass bricks surrounding her bed, which let in light but blurred any sights and shut out sound entirely. When she imagined that most fully, she said, she could lie in her bed, with Pearl and Bea and Sophie just a few feet from her, and not hear Bea crying or see Pearl examining the ulcer on her thigh. Pietr said that when he wanted to feel separate from Ian, Frank, and Albert, he re-created the night sky in his mind, complete with all the constellations about which he'd once talked to us, and then imagined himself moving among them like a shooting star.

All of us took refuge in conversations about the outside world, which some days seemed like the best way to ignore the difficulties here. Once the delivery of our newspapers started up again we seized on them eagerly, gathering what news we could about the world and the war. When the draft lottery came around in July, we were settled enough in our new lives to read with interest the story of how a general, in Washington, stood above a glass bowl filled with black capsules, each of which concealed a numbered slip, which he tumbled with a wooden stick until a blindfolded man reached in and chose one. Another man opened the capsule and read the number, which was flashed by way of a telegraph operator to all the local draft boards, to be chalked on a wall or pasted in a post office window. Although it touched us only indirectly, we considered for days how in our village, in any village, the man who held that number might cheer, or he might turn pale and stare down at the street. How in Washington a group of men too old to fight stood watching another number rise from the capsules moving like fish in their huge glass bowl. Lying in our cure chairs, while nine million men in other places waited for their numbers to come up, we read letters in the newspapers complaining that we were fed and housed at the state's expense. Some people, we were reminded, resented every penny spent on keeping us alive.

Inside our own fishbowl, we longed to talk with more than our roommates about what we'd seen and felt. We're not sure who started the message moving down the crammed porches and passing from one chair to the next, skipping some and landing at others, crossing floors to reach those of us who'd been in the habit of meeting on Wednesdays—but someone did, the message moved. Not long after the lottery we began to meet outside, under the pavilion at the nearest pond, at our traditional time and also on Saturday afternoons.

Without a leader or a formal plan we stood knotted under the cedar roof, talking awkwardly, our old ease hard to muster. At first we talked about the fire itself and about those who'd been killed or hurt. Morris, Edith, and Denis, of course, although we had not yet made, then, our first visit to the clearing. George, whom we saw in the dining hall, eating with his left hand as his right was still in a cast, and Vivian, confined to a wheelchair while her broken legs healed. We talked about Janet and Kathleen, who'd finally been released from the infirmary; about Irene, who had also been released but who still, worryingly, couldn't talk at all; and about Leo, recovering very slowly. Then about what Dr. Petrie and Eudora, who were busy working, had hurriedly passed along to us in the hallways. His reports, her worries about Naomi. We spent much of one cloudy afternoon discussing Naomi's continued absence and the gossip concerning Mrs. Martin's swift, apparently casual acceptance of it. While we struggled to piece together what we knew regarding Naomi—why had we noticed so little about her?—the mist blanketing the hill beyond the pavilion dropped down to the level of the field. Twenty minutes later we were drenched, but what was rain to us? Any weather seemed like a blessing and we were grateful to be there to get wet.

I
T WAS RAINING
on the day, toward the end of July, when the three investigators working for Miles crept through our crowded rooms at the sanatorium, asking questions and writing in their notebooks.
Tell us what happened,
they demanded.
Tell us again, in your own words.

Once more, wearily, we told our stories. But this time, for the first time, several people mentioned that the door at the back of the dining hall had opened and closed a few times on the night of the fire. One of the agents noted that detail, and then another wondered if a patient could have slipped from the dining hall during the movies before sneaking back. The third, a tall man with lumpy skin, passed that suggestion on to Miles, who showed up two days later with his new driver and asked to speak with all the patients at once.

Those of us involved in the Wednesday sessions gathered, along with everyone else, in the cramped new dining room. We sat, Miles stood, as if in mockery of the learning circle he'd started so optimistically. His slight figure was draped in a new suit, his hair freshly trimmed and his league badge glittering on his vest each time a gesture parted his jacket. He was only a few inches taller than Dr. Petrie and we'd never found him impressive. But the recent excitement seemed to have improved his health, and as he summarized what he'd heard about the opening and closing door in the back of the dining hall—those three men who'd talked to us, he said smoothly, worked for him—his voice took on a crisp authority. He read from notes, neatly organized; those sitting near the front could see the hand-drawn arrows marking his main points. From the interviews his agents had just conducted, along with data from the other, earlier reports, he'd assembled a single chronology, which he now reviewed with us.

At 8:15 the first reel had started and at 8:16 Mick had made a joking comment in answer to our groan of disappointment. At 8:30 the screen had gone blank while Mick switched from the short film about the fighting in France to the one about the ships attacked by submarines; we had talked a lot during that pause. At 8:34 the second reel had started. Myra started coughing at 8:36 and the overhead lights went on as Stephen and Gloria rushed her out. Charlie and Zoltan then righted the fallen chairs; the night nurse entered from the corridor and summoned Eudora to help; the lights went out again.

No later than 8:40 Mick resumed showing the second reel in the darkened room. Somewhere between 8:43 and 8:46 many of us saw, for the first time, the tall rectangle of light in the wall as the door to the corridor opened and then closed again. Some whispering followed, and also other noises; there were several reports of an argument. At about 8:55 the door to the corridor opened again, and swiftly closed—but within two minutes it reopened. At that point someone, annoyed at the interruptions, had called out, “Shut it!” Just after the door closed—at 8:58—Mick had switched reels again. By 9:02 the film showing aerial combat was running and by 9:04 the tall white rectangle appeared in the wall for the fourth and final time. At 9:16 Kathleen started coughing…

“The rest you know,” Miles said.

And indeed we did—but still, for the sake of completeness, he marched us through the moments when Kathleen had lifted her hands from the piano and risen, and when Jaroslav had thrown open the main entrance doors, and when Albert, Otto, Ian, and Frank had starting smashing the windows to free us. Every event he pinned to his timeline, asking us at each point to show, by raising our hands, how many agreed.

We gaped at the numbers, so strangely precise, but mostly we did agree: not because we were sure he was right but because already, ten weeks after the fire, the details were jumbled in our memories. Belle remembered the feel of her thigh sliding along the rim of the window, a sensation of cold rather than pain; then the surprise as she saw her own blood pouring out—but had that been before, or after, she'd seen someone crawling along the floor with a napkin tied over his nose? Sophie remembered watching the fumes slide toward her like dirty water and then, as they reached the chairs, gather and rise into clouds that engulfed her even as she saw that transformation. Agnew remembered the sound of his own ribs cracking as Dr. Richards, pulling him from the room, paused just long enough for Ian, who tripped on Frank, to fall on top of him. Each of us remembered a few brilliant images, and the fear, the smells, the sounds, the panic: but the mundane minutes before the fire, what had happened when and in what order—how could we be sure? We did our best.

“I'd like,” Miles said, “to try to amplify just a few points.” He looked down at his timeline, now heavily annotated. “Most of you seem to agree that the door at the rear opened four times once the room was darkened again after Myra's departure: between 8:43 and 8:46; at 8:55 and again either one or two minutes later; the final time at 9:04. Do any of you remember who you saw
near
the door?”

Five minutes here, five minutes there—who knew? “Eudora was sitting there for a little while. And Leo,” said Nan, who'd been near them.

Engrossed in trying to fit her own memories within the boundaries of that obdurate timeline, she didn't grasp the point of Miles's questions. Polly and Pietr, similarly preoccupied, murmured their agreement before any of us had absorbed the implications.

“Leo Marburg?” Miles asked. As if we had more than one Leo.

“Leo,
Leo,
” Albert responded impatiently. The long wound down his right arm had inflamed a nerve, and the pain made him testy. “The one your other chauffeur has such a crush on. She was there too, they were having some sort of fight.”

Miles drew his lips together. “Naomi was
here
that night?”

We could see from his face that this upset him, but we didn't understand why. A different voice added, “She brought a package for Leo.”

“For
Leo
?” Miles said. His gaze moved over Vivian, and then over the scars on Frank's hands, but he didn't seem to be seeing us. “When did she get here?”

No one knew; we'd noticed the argument, but nothing before it. But Leo, insisted someone—it might have been Belle—had been there the whole time. How else could he have been poisoned so badly? And much of the time, Arkady added, it was Eudora to whom Leo had been whispering. She'd left, Frank said, to help clean up after Myra had her hemorrhage.

“That's one of the times the door opened?” Miles interrupted.

“I think so,” someone said.

“And you think Leo was there all the rest of the time? While the door kept opening and closing?”

“We were watching the movies,” someone else said. “But he must have been there. How else could he have gone to help Kathleen?”

IN THE OLD BUILDING
, Dr. Petrie's office had been on the second floor, not far from the library, while Dr. Richards' suite of four rooms had been on the ground floor, opposite the reception desk and within easy reach of important visitors. In their new quarters in the women's annex they were squeezed into adjacent rooms, separated only by the flimsy walls and doors deemed sufficient when these were our bedrooms. Miles walked into Dr. Petrie's office again, this time without knocking and without even looking at the chair. What, he asked, without sitting down, did Dr. Petrie know about a connection between Naomi and Leo Marburg?

“I hardly know Naomi,” Dr. Petrie said cautiously. “She never confided in me. But once or twice I did see her talking with Leo. And they had some sort of argument the night of the fire. She was gone before the trouble started, though.”

“Did you see her leave?”

“Someone did. Eudora, I think.”

“Did Leo go with her?”

Dr. Petrie spread his hands. “How would I know? It was dark before the fire started, and once it did—all I know is that I found him by Kathleen, both of them unconscious.”

Miles nodded and moved on to Dr. Richards' office. The walls were so thin that Dr. Petrie could hear their voices, Dr. Richards remaining calm despite Miles's increasing intensity. He heard Miles saying,
We must, we must,
before they left the office together, still talking earnestly.

THAT WEEK,
we had just begun to use the rough kitchen and the new dining room reconstructed in the women's annex. Our old tables were gone—stripping and refinishing them had turned out to be too much work—and at each of the new rectangular tables a dozen of us now sat elbow to elbow, men and women separated only by a narrow surface: the sole good change. We could look into each other's faces, sit side by side and talk; apparently, given our new housing arrangements, separating us at meals no longer had a point. On the last day of July, while we were eating our midday dinner in each other's company, the men who worked for Miles returned. After dinner, Abe, Arkady, and Otto stepped through the doorway to their room and found the three agents looking in the night-stands and under the beds, lifting the sheets and the blankets and peering at the books.

“Excuse me,” Arkady said. “What are you doing?”

He retrieved his own pillow from one of the men. The agent took it back and tried to explain, even as Abe clutched his slippers to his chest.

“It's come to this?” Otto said, sitting down heavily on his bed.

The second agent grimaced. “Dr. Richards' orders,” he said. “Don't make a fuss.”

“Everyone's room?” Arkady asked. “Or just us?”

“Just you,” the third agent said calmly.

Arkady and Abe sat down on either side of Otto then, glaring at the strangers. It was an outrage, Otto thought. Ridiculous, thought Abe. But it would be over, Arkady thought, in a minute; they'd done nothing wrong. The third agent opened Leo's locker, which was also now Otto's—we'd all had to double up—and, after examining the shoes on the floor and the clothes on the hooks, found under Leo's jacket the little tin box Eudora and Naomi had held.

“Yours?” the agent said to Otto.

“I've never seen it,” Otto said truthfully.

“Then it belongs to Leo Marburg?”

“How would I know?” Otto said.

The agent returned to the empty bed and pointed at the white-topped table beside it. “Leo's?” he asked Abe.

“Obviously,” Abe said.

The agent picked up the two green volumes, which he must have already looked at once; they sat squarely in the center of the table, not open as Otto had left them. Now Arkady watched the agent reinspect them with disturbing eagerness. “We should take these,” he said to his two companions. “
The Principles of Chemistry
—wouldn't you like to know what he learned from
these
?” The three men nodded at each other and one went off to notify Dr. Richards.

We are nothing if not efficient and the news spread instantly; the rest of us knew what had happened, and what was in the box, even before Dr. Richards returned an hour later with Miles. When we saw him arrive in his sleek new machine, we clammed up. No one had to tell Arkady, Otto, and Abe not to speak further while Dr. Richards and Miles searched the locker again, checking for anything the agents might have missed.

“You three,” Miles said. “What do you know about this box?”

Nothing, they said; nothing, nothing. They'd never seen the box or its contents before. In the midst of their protestations, Dr. Petrie, who'd just heard what was going on, skidded into the room.

“What's this about?” he asked indignantly.

Miles showed him the contents of the box. “Otto claims it isn't his,” he said. “Which makes it Leo's. I've seen drawings of these in the papers and I suspect you have too. What possible reason could Leo have for owning such things, unless he had a plan to burn the place down?”

Something like pleasure rushed through Miles's veins as he spoke. Earlier, piecing together the chronology of movie night, he'd found that although the details themselves were painful, their accretion into an orderly structure was as satisfying as mapping out a fossil skeleton dispersed in rough ground. As he'd explained the chronology, substituting for our chaotic and contradictory memories one clean narrative of the night, he'd felt sure that this work would yield similar rewards. Already it had uncovered three new shards of truth: Naomi had been here that night; Leo had lured her here; Leo was a liar. When he thought of Naomi, forced to run away because of something Leo had said or done to her, he wanted to throw the bedside table through the wall.

“Leo wouldn't hurt a fly,” Dr. Petrie said.

But with the box in his hand, the intact pencil-that-wasn't-a-pencil exposed along with the pieces of another and the diagram showing how the pieces went back together, Miles could see that his own intuitions had been right. A perfect structure rose before him, the last bones ready to lock into place.

“That's Leo's handwriting,” he said triumphantly. “Look how he shapes the r's—I've seen that on his notes.” Perhaps it was over this very diagram that Naomi and Leo had quarreled; no wonder her voice had been raised, no wonder people had noticed them arguing! If she had only come to him when she first suspected trouble, he might have prevented everything.