Vigil (25 page)

He wanted to know. It was his very nature to know.

In the halo cast by a streetlight, on the glistening slick pavement, he saw someone pacing, the same one he had encountered when he’d walked out of the inferno that night. The one who had given him the red cloak he still wore.

As he approached, the figure stopped and stared at him, as if in awe. Was it so plain, what he was? He didn’t want that; he wanted things to be as they were, so long ago . . . before everything had come so terribly undone.

The closer he came, the more the figure seemed rooted to the spot. Dark skin, long hair, the features of the face concealed by paint and mud, juice and dust. A leather pouch—a
purse,
the word suddenly came to him—slung over one arm.

“It’s you again,” his benefactor said, wonderingly. “It’s you.” Wobbling on shoes with sharp heels, the figure approached, and laid one hand—whose nails, he noticed, were dyed a bright silver—on his sleeve. “I never thought I’d see you again. Never in this life, at least.”

With so many in the world now, perhaps that was common.

“But this time you’re not getting away so easy. Not without telling me a few things first.”

“What . . . do you . . . want to know?” It was the first time he’d actually tried speaking the words, the words he had plucked from the very air around them, and he looked to see if they were understood.

“For starters, I want to know who you are.”

They were.

“Or maybe I should say,
what
you are. Last time I saw you, you were glowing like some kind of lightbulb. Now, you’re not giving off light like that.”

He could not afford to. It would have been too unwise. He watched as a white car with blue stripes and a red bar across the top came slowly around the corner.

“Oh shit,” his benefactor muttered.

He felt himself tugged by the sleeve of his coat toward the darkened doorway where he had once stood to watch the fire.

The car kept coming and he was dragged deeper, down to the bottom of the stairs, below the level of the street. The ground, littered with matted papers and broken bottles, reeked of garbage . . . and human congress.

“We’re just gonna wait here for a while, till my friends are gone.”

Now he smelled . . . apprehension, too.

“So, they call me Domino, maybe because I topple so easy.” A chuckle. “You want to tell me what they call you?”

He didn’t like it here, and he started back up the stairs. But Domino grabbed his sleeve again and said, “The cops are still cruising around up there. What’s your hurry, anyway?”

Domino drew him close. They were about the same height, and he could look directly into Domino’s eyes—they were dark brown, with long black lashes, and the brows, he could see, had been brushed with an amber color.

“You know, you owe me.” Domino’s fingers played with his cloak. “I
did
give this to you.” He felt the buttons being undone. “I’m not asking for money—’less you want to give me some—but the least you can do is show me what you’ve got inside.” The coat began to fall open. “I still think you’ve got something special going on.”

The darkness at the bottom of the stairs brightened as the coat opened wider. Domino leaned back to take it in. “Damn—you’re doing it again!”

His glow grew brighter still; he made it do so. And in its light, he could see Domino more clearly than ever. Could see the false hair that concealed the real, the strong bones of the face beneath the powder and clay, the sinewy arms under the soft, feminine clothes.

Domino’s hands slunk inside the cloak. Touched him.

Beneath the sweet perfume, he smelled the odor of corruption.

“What the . . . hell,” Domino said, haltingly.

He opened his own arms, wide, and Domino suddenly stepped back, against the damp wall of the stairwell. The purse slipped to the filth-covered floor.

“Jesus Christ . . .”

He shrugged the coat from his shoulders and moved closer . . . embracing Domino, who struggled now.

Which simply made him hold on even tighter. He folded the thrashing, twisting body against himself. He could smell the heat, the fear, the fury. He clutched Domino so close his limbs couldn’t move. He could feel his body straining for breath, the heart racing wildly in his chest. “You asked me my name,” he said, as a precise circle of flame suddenly etched itself into the cement floor around their feet. Domino’s eyes, wide with terror, reflected the glow of the fire. “It is Arius.”

And then the flames swiftly rose, coiling up around their joined bodies like a snake writhing up a tree. Domino screamed, but the sound was muffled by the fire, echoing hollowly around the shadowy stairwell. His clothes burned and his skin crackled and snapped. The wig on his head disappeared in a puff of golden fire.

When there was too little to hold up anymore, Arius, unaffected, let go . . . and stepped away. What was left of Domino fell into a blazing heap of blackened skin and bones. Orange sparks danced in the dark air as Arius bent to retrieve the red coat, shook it free of ash, and then put it back on. He picked up the fallen purse and turned toward the stairs.

Nothing has really changed,
he thought as he rose toward the street, rummaging in the purse to see if there was anything of use.
This was always what came of abomination
.

Carter was in no mood today. First there’d been that
disturbing appointment at the doctor’s office, and now he was trying to explain the theory of geochronology to an unusually restive class.

“Most of us have been led to believe,” he said, “that mankind has evolved in one long continuous process, and that any protohuman fossils, no matter where they’re found and no matter what their age, must fit into that lineage somehow.”

He glanced up from his notes and saw a couple of students in the back row conferring with lowered heads over something that looked like a greeting card.

“But that theory, known as the single-origin, or out-of-Africa theory,” he went on, trying to ignore it, “is becoming increasingly hard to defend. Recent finds in such places as China and Indonesia, notably Java, have begun to point us in another direction. They’re pointing us toward a world millions of years old, in which several different hominid species all managed to inhabit the planet simultaneously. Not necessarily peacefully, but at least at the same time.”

He glanced up again, and this time he saw somebody passing the same card to Katie Coyne, and he snapped.

“All right, who wants to explain to me what’s going on out there?”

Silence fell over the lecture hall.

“Katie, you want to tell me what’s up, before I decide to just throw a pop quiz at you all?”

Katie looked like she’d rather not, but after adjusting the blue kerchief she was wearing on her head today—she looked to Carter like a pretty peasant girl in a painting by Millet—she said, “It’s a get-well card.”

“Okay,” Carter replied coolly, wondering how this was supposed to serve as an adequate excuse. “Who’s it for?”

“Your friend,” she said, “Professor Russo. We were all signing it.”

Carter was at a loss for words.

“I was going to bring it over to him later today, if you think that would be okay.”

“Yes,” Carter said, still flustered, “I’m sure he’d like that.”

The bell rang, not a moment too soon. The students, perhaps in deference to his foul mood, packed up their things faster than ever.

“But that geochronology idea,” Katie said over the bustle, “sounds cool. I give it a thumbs-up.”

He knew she was just trying to assure him that not everything he’d said had been entirely lost on his audience; it was a nice try, but he knew he’d failed to capture their attention today.

For lunch, he went to the one place he was sure he wouldn’t bump into any of his faculty colleagues—the student center cafeteria, where he took his tray of sloppy joe and french fries to a table in the farthest corner of the room. The din back here was a little bit less, and he could sit in peace, with his back to the rest of the lunch crowd, and think his thoughts without interruption.

The only trouble with that was, every direction his thoughts went in today was bad.

It had started out with the follow-up appointment at Dr. Weston’s office, to get the results of their various tests. Carter hadn’t been looking forward to it, but he hadn’t been dreading it, either. He figured the problems he and Beth were having were fairly routine, and that by making a small correction or two in their family-planning methods they’d get everything on track in no time. They were both young and healthy, and Beth even stuck to a healthy diet. If for some reason he had to, he’d give up his junk food.

But the look on Dr. Weston’s face told Carter, before the conference had even gotten underway, that something more than diet and nutrition was wrong. The doctor shuffled a bunch of papers and lab reports around on his desk, made some awkward small talk to Beth about his personal art collection, and only then addressed the problem head-on.

“In all your tests and lab results,” he said, looking directly at Beth, “we don’t find any problem in achieving conception. The physical exam revealed no obstructions or problems of any kind, and in terms of your blood workups and hormonal balances, again we see no problems. A slight tendency toward anemia, but we can clear that up with a simple iron supplement.”

Carter breathed a sigh of relief. At least Beth was in the clear. And maybe, just maybe, his intuition had been wrong?

Then Dr. Weston turned his gaze on him—and he knew it wasn’t.

“I see in your medical history, Carter, that you had the mumps in your early teens.”

The mumps? “Yes, I did.”

“And was it, do you recall, a bad case?”

Carter instantly flashed back to a feverish month at home, quarantined in a back bedroom with the curtains drawn and a cup of cooling tea by the bedside. “Yes, it was. I missed a few weeks of school with that one.”

Dr. Weston nodded. “Do you remember what medications you were given?”

Carter remembered pills, lots of them, and even a couple of shots in the butt, but he had no idea what they’d been. “You’d have to ask my mother, or the doctor, if he’s still practicing. He was kind of an old-timer even then.”

“We probably don’t need to. I think what happened is pretty clear, especially given that your doctor had been practicing for some time, and this incident occurred in the early eighties, before we had all the information we have now.”

To Carter, that last bit—about “the information we have now”—set off an alarm bell.

“Chances are, he prescribed some strong antibiotics,” Dr. Weston elaborated, “which we know now, if administered during the onset of male puberty, can in some cases have an adverse impact on later potency.”

Carter had to sort through all the words. Was the doctor saying that he was impotent? Because if that’s what he thought, then . . .

“I’m not suggesting you have any difficulty with arousal or even ejaculation,” Dr. Weston went on. “Neither of you has implied there are any difficulties in that area.”

One thing cleared up.

“But the unfortunate side effect of the mumps, and the measures taken to alleviate it, is that some men, later on, experience sterility.”

Carter sat still in his chair. Beth didn’t move either.

“We ran two cycles on your sperm sample—you gave us plenty to work with.” Weston proffered a small smile, which didn’t help. “And the results, unfortunately, were the same. The count was in the one-percentile range, and motility was equally impaired.”

Carter was still processing the information. He was . . . sterile?

“Are you saying that I can’t . . . father a child?”

Dr. Weston sat back in his chair, his palms flat on the desk top. “Biologically, I’d have to say, no. But I don’t need to tell someone of your intellectual caliber that being a father isn’t only about that.”

For a second, Carter didn’t follow.

“As a couple, you can still have a child, using, for instance, an alternative source of insemination. We can discuss that some other time, if you like, once you’ve had a chance to sort through things. Physiologically, Beth is still a prime candidate for motherhood.”

Carter felt her hand snake across the arm of his chair and take hold of his own. He wondered if his hand was as icy as hers.

So they could have a child—or at least Beth could—with somebody else’s sperm? A friend’s? A family member’s? An anonymous donor’s? Gee, Carter thought, there were so many good choices—how would he ever pick one?

“I know this is not good news,” Dr. Weston said, “so you should take as much time as you need to consider all your options. But if I can leave you with one thought, it would be just that—you do have options. If you want a family, you can—and you will—have one.”

Sure,
Carter thought.
But whose?

He knew that Dr. Weston’s parting words were meant to be encouraging, but as he looked around the cafeteria now, at all the kids, the words had a hollow ring. Looking at all the boys, he had a weird and unwelcome thought: Any one of them could be the father of his child, any one of them could do for his wife what he couldn’t, any one of them could make a baby, pass on his own genes into the next generation—how hard was it?—but it was always going to remain something that he could not do. He knew it was self-destructive and wrong to think that way, but he couldn’t help it. He also couldn’t help feeling that now—now that he knew the truth—he was less of a man than he’d been when he’d gotten out of bed, still ignorant, that very same morning. He could only hope, though he knew she’d never admit it if she did, that Beth wouldn’t come to feel the same way.

He put down his fork and pushed the half-eaten food away. Even the smell of it made him a little queasy now.