Thirteen Specimens (28 page)

     For the first time, I slowly drew near to the building’s glass door and framing, full-length windows. I pushed Logan’s stroller up onto a slightly raised cement border. At first, I looked inside from a few steps away, not taking my fists off the stroller’s rubber handles.

     There was a little corridor behind the entrance labeled DOOR 2. To the left, it turned at a 45 degree angle, past a
water fountain and recessed restroom doors, toward what must have been one of the conference rooms. To the right, the little corridor led to a small room, and in was in this room that the light originated. The room’s door was shut, maybe locked to keep out thieves, but it was already barren, stripped of furniture and decorations, the color of its carpet impossible to make out in the barely perceptible illumination coming from two fluorescent tubes running along the ceiling. There was so little light being emitted from them, and the light was such a murky green, that it seemed pointless to leave them on at all. They fluttered or pulsed or strobed ever so subtly.

     Something made me take my hands off the rubber handles of the stroller. Made me walk right up to that glass, lean my forehead against its cool surface, and cup my hands to either side of my eyes.

     There was a man in the room.

     He wore dark slacks, a white dress shirt, his tie hanging down languidly because he floated at the very top of the room, his back against the ceiling, his elbows and knees slightly bent, his eyes shut. At first I thought he must be pinned up there, or suspended in the air by wires, until I realized the truth – that this small empty room was in fact full, filled with water or some other fluid. Maybe the fluid itself was greenish, and not the fluorescent radiance.

     My heart seemed to pound against the glass I peered through, as if to break it and let that fluid out. The man was drowned! There were no escaping bubbles of breath; he had to be already dead. How long ago? Had he been like this when I’d passed by the building before? If only I’d looked, then! He must have become locked in the room, trapped...a pipe must have burst...somehow the room had sealed in all of the water...and I must call the police, right away, I must...

     I saw the man’s eyes open. As soon as the lids lifted, his eyes were already locked directly on mine. With a little push of his expensive shoes against the ceiling, the man floated down through the liquid slowly like an astronaut in a weightless cabin, his arm reaching out. My heartbeat accelerated; I thought that he was reaching toward me. But then I saw his fingers fumble at a switch on the wall. His grave stare remained fixed on mine right up until the moment the two fluorescents winked out and the small meeting room was plunged into absolute blackness.

DOOR 3

     Late that night, because I couldn’t sleep, I watched a movie a friend had once copied for me from a rented video but which I had never gotten around to looking at before. It was subtitled, a sequel to an infamous, fact-based Chinese movie about atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II. These atrocities were actually biological experiments that would have made Dr. Mengele green with envy, conducted at a research base called Unit 731. The main thrust of their research was to develop biological warfare, a super-virulent strain of bubonic plague, but according to the movie the scientists also occupied their time with other experiments such as firing bullets through domino rows of prisoners to see how many could be killed with a single round, and freezing a woman’s hands and arms, then thawing them in hot water, then ripping off their flesh while she was still alive and screaming in horror – staring at the naked bones of her forearms with the bloodless flesh hanging like torn sleeves.

     Did you know there is an actual autopsy in this movie? It is an apparently young Chinese woman, naked, whom we
see slit open down to the edge of her pubic hair. Her organs are roughly detached and removed, until all that is left is a cavity filled with muddy brown fluid that I could almost smell just by watching the screen. Her organs are yellowish-grayish, corrupted; she is not a fresh cadaver all red and bloody inside. At last, her limbs are sawed off, for no reason I could understand. I
do
understand that the Chinese film-makers wanted to express their outrage at the biological research of Unit 731...yet I couldn’t help but wonder if by including this actual dismemberment, they were themselves exploiting a human being in a similar way. I suppose it’s a complicated ethical dilemma, utilizing real-life tragedies in a work of entertainment.

     When I finally did fall asleep in the early morning hours, on the sofa with the TV watching me instead of me watching it, I dreamed that I wore a white lab coat, and stood over a steel table upon which lay my wife Pam. Naked, her flesh glowing bloodlessly white under the harsh lights. I had a scalpel in my hand, and I leaned over her, began an incision, opened her in one long slice, pressing deep and with force. She was like a rubbery manikin in that no blood flowed from the neat wound, as if I had merely unzipped a zipper. Next, I cut through her breastbone with a long-handled tool. A crunch, a snap, each time I moved the handles toward each other. When I was through her rib-cage, I took the bisected halves of it in my hands and pried them away from each other. It was like opening a door to her interior. Yellow-gray organs swam in a foul brown stew. But I didn’t remove the organs; my green-gloved hands squeezed between then, fished around under them, until I grasped hold of something and began to pull. I extricated a human infant from her body, held it by one ankle, its dripping body upside-down. Its flesh was blue, and sloughing off; a gobbet of decaying meat fell and
plopped into the brown stew. But there came a watery gurgle from the inverted infant’s throat. A drowning sort of cry...and the rotting baby gave a shuddery spasm in my hand.

     I woke up then, and couldn’t get back to sleep. While I brewed a pot of coffee I took the dishes and glasses that were piled in the sink, crusted with food, and put them in the dishwasher. After that I did a load of laundry that had been heaped on the floor of the bathroom against the side of the drier. By the time the sun had come up, I felt like I had accomplished something that day. I experienced a dull kind of pride, as if I had built a fence or painted a house.

     That morning, when I took my first of what would probably be three or four walks through the neighborhood that day, I cut around the right side of the little conference building instead of taking a left through its short driveway. In this way, I passed the windowless rear of the building instead of its glass-faced front.

     I came to the edge of the road that separated the conference building from the parking lot I favored in my strolls. I had been hearing odd cries as I approached, but had thought they were from noisy children playing in their back yards. Now, however, I saw a flurry of seagulls spinning and gliding over the parking lot, brilliantly white against a sky of the sharpest blue. We were not near the ocean, so I wondered what had inspired this flock to venture this far inland. I had never seen seagulls in my neighborhood before.

     Elusive, ghostly microorganisms swam across the gelatin of my eyes, their presence picked out against that too-vivid sky. The way the gulls dove and dipped, it was as though they were chasing the microorganisms and feeding on them.

     Aside from those birds in the air, a whole row of them
sat along the peaked roof of the small brick warehouse with the green garage door. From its appearance, this building had to be one of the very oldest structures on the Odyllic site, dating back to the days of Lethe Toys I should think – if not earlier. The gulls shifted along the roof restlessly, letting out halfhearted, muted little squawks as if they were weak or sick. Some of those scything through the air emitted high-pitched squealing squeaks but even these cries sounded subdued.

     When I pushed Logan’s stroller across the street, the birds arrayed along the roof launched themselves into the sky with a clapping of wings, their flurry of shadows scattering across the ground like blown autumn leaves. I was sorry to disturb their rest, but I had to follow my daily routine. Routine gives one structure, order, handholds to cling to in life, like jobs and marriages and raising children...

     Besides the gulls, there had come two other intruders to my familiar stomping grounds, and I dreaded seeing both of them again. I could still picture Marsha as she walked away the night before, the athletic leanness of her tall body. I was a male animal; even I had hormones spinning through my system like squealing gulls, like those tiny creatures on the microscope slides of my eyes – but was dealing with a disturbed, perhaps outright insane woman worth whatever I might gain from her company, if I took her up on her invitation to visit? No, no, I must resist. Solitude had become my safe routine, if only by default. I hoped that she would not be inspired by our chance meeting to walk her dog in this particular area again, in the desire for another encounter – I prayed that she would no longer stray from that section of the Odyllic grounds facing toward Willow Street, where she lived. Well, she might be so addled, I thought hopefully, that she would not even recall she had met me last night. Then I felt guilty for wishing her to be that far deteriorated...

     The other intruder I could still envision, as well. I glanced back across the street at the squat, modern conference building, such a contrast to the brick warehouse architecturally. Though I could only see the foreshortened edge of the building’s glass front from here, I too-clearly envisioned that businessman with his jacket casually removed, still hovering in the flooded room...watching and watching for me to reappear...

     What Marsha had said to me last night, and what I had seen in the conference building, had increased my curiosity about Odyllic from an obscure pulse to a deeply throbbing beat. However addled she might be, Marsha had said some things that resonated with me. Particularly about Logan...his leukemia. Hadn’t it ever occurred to me before? Perhaps out of denial, I had never
consciously
picked up that idea for examination before. But now I did. I turned it over and over in my hands, and lifted it to my nose to sniff at it, and the idea reeked of decay and infection and moldering things. The idea was firm in my hands, as hard and glassy as a fact.

     I pushed Logan’s stroller close to the concrete ramp that angled up to the warehouse’s folding garage door. Stenciled on it in white paint, the words: DOOR 1. Above the door, brittle and broken remnants of dead ivy still clung to the mortar between the bricks. A little shudder rippled through me; the ivy reminded me of those webs of fungus I had seen in the forest. I glanced again across the street, but the glass front of the conference building was still angled in another direction. Feeling a new boldness, I took my hands off the stroller’s handles, stepped onto the ramp, and began to hunker down so as to peep through the one broken panel in the bottom of the green folding door.

     “I wouldn’t do that,” said a strange, distorted voice behind me.

     I spun around, and saw that a boy on a bicycle had come from around the other side of the warehouse, so that I hadn’t been aware of his approach. He had stopped the bicycle not far from the stroller, and stood aside it staring at me. For several moments I was too stunned by his appearance to speak, even though I had seen this boy in my neighborhood from a distance many times, riding his bike or walking to the bus stop. He must have suffered some terrible malformation of the bones in his face. His head was like a cheap Halloween mask, too large to fit him properly, and filled with lumpen rocks that ground against each other when he talked. His face didn’t look
realistic
to me.

     Before I could fumble for words, he went on, “My brother saw a coyote come out of there one time. We don’t go near it...we think they live in there.”

     “Could it have just been a dog?” I asked him, finally able to formulate words.

     “No. It was a coyote. They live in the woods.” He pointed across the parking lot, in the direction of the newly paved access road. My eyes followed his finger.

     “Do you ever ride your bikes down there?” I asked him. “Down that road?”

     “No way,” said the boy, and then he was pressing his weight down on one pedal to start his bike’s tires spinning again. Before I could question him further, he was already shooting away.

     Afraid that he might circle back and see me peeking into the garage door, I straightened, stepped off the ramp, and wheeled Logan’s stroller back toward my little house.

     But rather than dissuade me from investigating the warehouse, the boy’s words only heightened my curiosity. Within my home I paced and paced as if to make up for my
abbreviated walk. At last, I picked up a flashlight and tested its batteries to make sure its beam was strong.

     Now, I hated to leave Grover all alone in the house, but sometimes I simply had to, as when I did my grocery shopping. So I tucked him into bed and pulled the shades, and triple-checked my door to make sure it was locked behind me before I ventured outside once more...praying that the deformed boy on his bicycle had zipped around the corner to play on one of the other quiet little back streets.