The Syndrome (8 page)

But why was she in California? To see someone. Find someone. But who? Why? She couldn’t remember. Which was the whole trouble with Placebo 1. It really messed with your memory. Seating herself at the table, she opened the computer, and slid the
On
button forward. When the machine had gone through its routine, she sent the browser to the requisite URL, and waited for the page to load. Soon, the familiar words appeared:

Removing the overlay from the carrying case, she began to affix it to the monitor—and hesitated. For a long while, she sat there in front of the computer, staring at the nearly empty screen. And then, impulsively and, somehow, defiantly, she switched the computer off, and stood up. Crossing the room to the hall closet, she grabbed her inline skates, and left the apartment with the vague idea of refilling her prescription. But when the time came, she glided past the pharmacy on M Street, and kept on going.

She didn’t know it, but a part of her was coming to a decision, answering a question that Nico herself hadn’t had the courage to ask, using a part of her mind that she would have sworn wasn’t there. In her soul or subconscious, an argument was raging, and that argument was generating all the energy she needed to move faster than traffic, sweeping past Georgetown’s chichi restaurants and slick bars, stores selling books and Japanese prints, artisanal toys and love potions.

She loved blading, the glide and grace of it, the way faces, trees and buildings slid by in a kind of montage, half glimpsed and never quite remembered. Somehow, this smooth ride took all the edges of the city away.

Approaching the Four Seasons Hotel, she swung south and descended into Rock Creek Park. There, she swept past the Kennedy Center, turned around, and went back the other way, moving like a speed skater with her right arm swinging in a rhythmic cadence. By the time she reached the old mill, just above Porter Street, the argument within her had come to an end, and the relief that it brought was palpable.
Enough
, she thought.
It’s over.

Reversing direction, she turned for home, elated by the prospect of a warm bath.
I’ll use the rosemary bath gel
, she thought, imagining the spice and tang of it.

*    *    *

Her headache was gone.

While the bath filled, she telephoned Adrienne at home, knowing her sister would still be at work, and left a message on the machine.

“Hey ‘A’,” she said. “It’s Nikki. I hope you haven’t forgotten about dinner tonight—it’s rainbow
importante
…”

The two of them dined together every other Tuesday, alternating venues—unless, as sometimes happened, one of them was really busy (as Adrienne had been of late) or under the weather (as Nico sometimes was).

Rainbow
was a family code word, invented by Adrienne herself when she was a really little kid, maybe four or five, and persisting in conversation between the two of them to this day. Used as an adjective, the word added urgency or veracity or weight to anything it modified. (You like that guy—
rainbow
like? Yeah. I am
really
going to flunk that math test.
Rainbow
flunk? You bet….)

She frowned. It wasn’t enough. What if Adrienne came and knocked and …

She scribbled a note to her sister and took it downstairs. Ramon was out front helping Mrs. Parkhurst out of a taxi, so she just ducked behind the desk and stuck the note into the slot for her apartment. If Adrienne came, Ramon would look there. He was very responsible.

Back upstairs, she went out to the balcony and made a little fire in the
chiminea.
The sun was going down now, splashing the sky with a swirl of violet and orange that reminded her of a Gauguin. As she stuffed some twisted-up newspapers into the
chiminea’s
belly, she tried to remember
which
Gauguin, but couldn’t. Atop the newspapers, she crisscrossed a few pieces of Georgia fatwood, and crowned it all with a length of piñon wood. Then she lit a match and watched her construction bloom into flame.
I’m practically a Boy Scout
, she told herself.

Returning inside, she checked the bath. It really did smell fabulous, and she saw with satisfaction that the froth of bubbles was deep and luxurious, and almost to the top. She
turned off the water and stuck a finger in—
hot hot
, as Marlena used to say.

Then she left the bathroom.

Getting a step stool from the broom closet in the kitchen, she went into the bedroom and, with the help of the stool, retrieved an old scrapbook from its hiding place at the back of the closet’s top shelf. Climbing down, she carried the book out to the balcony and, seating herself beside the crackling
chiminea
, opened it.

There were maybe a hundred snapshots in the album, each affixed to the page by little dabs of glue in the corners. They were family pictures, mostly, showing herself and Adrienne, Deck and Marlena, over a number of years. There was a picture on the first page of herself in a swing, hair flying, as Marlena pushed her from behind, her own face alight with laughter. In the background, a redbrick rancher.

Elsewhere on the same page—a snapshot of Adrienne at the free throw line, her eight-year-old face frowning in concentration; Deck, standing beside the barbeque in the backyard, a spatula in one hand, a Bud in the other; Nico and Adrienne at the beach, building sand castles; Adrienne, putting the finishing touches on a gingerbread house; Nico sitting next to Deck, with her arms around the pumpkin that she’d carved; and so on. There was even a photo of Nico in her prom dress, just before she went to Europe and all hell broke loose.

If you judged the family by the album, it was very nearly perfect, and about as wholesome as a Minnesota spring. But Nico saw what was not in the album as well as the people who were. And what was missing was the nightmare, manifest in the absence of Rosanna—whose face she couldn’t even recall.

There were no pictures of her older sister, not a one. It was as if she’d never existed. Which meant that the album in Nico’s hands was a part of the deception. Forget what had happened to
her.
She, at least, was alive. At least
she
had a past. But her sister—her sister didn’t even exist as a memory. First, she’d been slaughtered, and then she’d been erased—
like a Moscow apparatchik whose existence was suddenly, terminally inconvenient.

Nico removed the photo of herself and Marlena at the swing, and turned it over. Written on the back in her foster mother’s spidery hand were the words:

Even that was a lie, Nico thought. The ranch style house in the background was nothing like the peeling and dilapidated mansion she’d known in South Carolina. Had she ever even
been
to Delaware? She didn’t think so.

Crumpling the picture in half, she laid it on the fire in the
chiminea
, then watched the paper flatten, even as the faces faded to black. Finally, the snapshot flared into flame, and sparks snapped from its surface, swirling into the chimney above it. One by one, Nico fed the fire with pictures from the album until, in the end, the only photos left were of herself and her surviving sister. Then she got to her feet, blinking the tears from her eyes. And as much to the walls as to herself, she muttered, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

It was almost dark now, or as dark as it got in D.C., the winking lights of planes standing in for the myriad, invisible stars. She got a wire whisk from the kitchen and when the fire had subsided to a smolder, smashed up the ashes.

This done, she went into the living room and removed an envelope from the top drawer of her desk. Written more than a month before, it had lain out of sight until the time was right—and that was now. Going into the kitchen, she glanced around for a place to leave it, and finally settled on the refrigerator. Clearing the door of everything on its surface—cartoons and take-out menus, a recipe for chicken sate and a picture of Jack—she tossed it all in the trash. Then she centered the envelope to Adrienne, and affixed it to the door with a magnet shaped like a tiny bottle of Tanqueray gin. She
looked at her watch. Six-thirty. There was still more than an hour before Adrienne was due, so there was no hurry.

Standing at the kitchen counter, she poured herself a cold glass of Russian River Chardonnay, and put on a Miles Davis CD.
Sketches of Spain.

Sipping the wine, she felt a shiver run through her as she walked into the bathroom. All that time on the balcony, sorting through the album had given her a chill. Removing the space heater from the linen closet next to the bath, she plugged it in and set it on the ledge that encased the tub.

Flicking on the heater, she luxuriated for a moment in its bright and sudden warmth, then undressed slowly, tossing her clothes into the hamper. Standing there in the nude, she took a sip of wine, and, swaying slightly, gave herself over to the viscous, haunting slur of the trumpet, as Miles soared through “Concerto de Aranjuez.” Finally, she stepped into the water and, ever so slowly, eased herself into the cloud of bubbles that lay on its surface.

The water was perfect. So hot she could just barely tolerate it. So hot, the warmth seemed to suffuse her. So hot it was just at the perfect intersection of pleasure and pain—in other words, just over the pleasure edge. She thought about that phrase—the pleasure edge—and smiled as she continued her glacial slide into the water. She could hear the tiny explosions of the bubbles, collapsing under the pressure of her back. She could feel them in the hair at the nape of her neck.

Languidly, she sipped her wine and watched the coils of the space heater turn a deeper and deeper shade of orange. Then Miles hit a note so heartbreakingly pure that it brought a film of moisture to her eyes—and gently, almost tenderly, she extended her foot, and tipped the heater in.

Duran’s apartment complex, the Capitol Towers, included an underground shopping center that made it more or less unnecessary for anyone who lived in the building to ever leave home. There was a supermarket, a drug store, a dry cleaners, a newsstand, and a travel agency, as well as a Starbucks. Each Sunday, an ad in the
Washington Post
featured a photo of the building above a cutline that read: “Capitol Towers—the Convenience of a Village in a Sophisticated Urban Setting!”

Returning upstairs from the underground Safeway, Duran hefted three plastic bags of groceries with his left hand, while he struggled to open the door to his apartment with his right. Finally, the door swung open and, as soon as it did, he knew the telephone was about to ring.

It was a trick of his. Or something.

For whatever reason, he was peculiarly attuned to the pitches and hums of machines—the whir and chink of the icemaker, the somnolent hum of the air conditioner, the gush and gurgle of water in the dishwasher. Any change in the acoustics of his appliances, no matter how subtle, struck him immediately, the malfunction as apparent as a burglar’s sneeze at midnight.

It wasn’t a particularly useful trait, and he didn’t know how he’d acquired it. But that it was real was certain. Kicking the door closed behind him, he sensed a kind of tension in the room as soon as he entered it. For a moment, he stood there,
frozen, just inside the doorway, listening to the air. Then, he stepped toward the phone.

And it rang.

It was uncanny, and unquantifiable. If anything, it suggested that he was more in tune with his appliances, with refrigerators and phones, than he was with people—an unfortunate characteristic in a therapist. Still, he thought, reaching for the receiver, there was no mistaking a room in which the telephone was about to ring. The air trembled with expectation, like an auditorium on the brink of thunderous applause.

“Hello!”

“Jeff?”

He didn’t recognize the voice. And the question—no one really called him that. He was always
Duran
, or
Doctor Duran.

“Hel-lo-oh?
Anyone there?”

“Yeah! Sorry, I—this is Jeff.”

“Well, hi-iii! It’s Bunny Kaufman Winkleman? I’m so glad I got you! Mostly, I get machines.”

“Really …”

“Almost always, but … I didn’t really know you? At Sidwell? We were in the same class. Not English or anything, but—the class of ’87? I was just plain Bunny Kaufman then.” She paused, then hurried on. “You must have been one of those quiet guys.”

Duran thought about it. Had he been? Maybe. And Bunny? Who was
she?
A face didn’t come to mind—but then he hadn’t kept in touch. High school was ancient history. “Yeah, I guess,” Duran replied. “So … what’s up? What can I do for you, Bunny?”

“Two things. You can promise me you’ll respond to the query I’m sending. You know, one of those ‘where-are-they-now’ things?”

“Okay.”

“And the second thing is: you could come to the reunion. Reunion
avec
homecoming, you know. You got the alumni
newsletter, right? I’m calling to remind you—we need every
body
we can get.”

“Well …” He picked up a matchbook—de Groot had left his cigarettes behind at their last session—and rotated it through his fingers. The matchbook was embossed with concentric silver and black circles. An eye stared out at him from the center of the design. He flipped the matchbook over. The back showed the same concentric silver and black circles but instead of the eye, the center held the words:

He opened the cover to see that the matches inside were European, made of thin flexible wood instead of paper, with bright green tips.

“Jehh-eff?” said the voice on the telephone. “You still there?”

Pay attention.
“Absolutely.”

“Well how about it?” Bunny said in her wheedling voice. “Come
on.
Just
do
it!
Come.
It isn’t just
our
class—there are two others. And there’s a sort of competition to see who has the best turn out. It’s dumb, but—can I count on you?”