"I'd like to be a mother," Nadja had declared in a burst of sincerity.
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Just something that happens to female paleontologists from time to time. After being inseminated by a male, they breed and then carry embryos in their wombs."
"Well, I've decided to be a drone, myself," Elisa replied, dozing on her towel.
"You really don't want kids, Elisa?"
Elisa couldn't believe the question. But she also couldn't believe that she couldn't believe the question.
"I haven't really given it much thought," she said, and Nadja assumed she was joking.
"It's not a math problem, you know. You either want to or you don't."
Elisa bit her lip, the way she did when she was working on a math problem.
"No. I don't want kids," she said after a long silence, and Nadja shook her head slowly, that angel hair of hers swishing back and forth as she did.
"Do me a favor," she'd said. "Before you die, leave your brain to the University of Montpellier. Jacqueline and I would love to study it, I can assure you. There are very few female examples of Fisicus extravagantissimus."
She came out of her daze. She was in the hallway, in the middle of the night, spying on her colleagues in her underwear. What if they get up and catch the Fisicus extravagantissimus in her underwear peeking through their peepholes? She couldn't hear the footsteps anymore. Still smiling, she tiptoed up to Ric Valente's door. The metallic floor was cool on her feet, a nice contrast to the heat she felt everywhere else. She looked through his peephole.
Her theory was disproved. Under the light filtering in through the window, she could clearly make out the skinny contours of Valente Sharpe stretched out in bed, his bony back, his white underwear.
She watched him for a moment, and then went on to the last room. That ball curled up under the sheets had to be Rosalyn Reiter; Elisa even thought she could make out her highlighted hair.
Shaking her head, she returned to her room, wondering what she'd been expecting. Nosy. She realized that all the work she'd been putting into her first project on the island was starting to take a toll. In a normal situation, she knew how to deal with that kind of stress. She'd take a walk, exercise, or even explore her erotic fantasies. But on New Nelson, with such a lack of privacy, she felt like she'd lost her bearings.
She got back into bed, faceup, and sighed deeply. No more footsteps. No noise at all. If she strained, she could make out the sounds of the ocean; but she didn't feel like straining. After debating it for a second, she slipped under the sheets, even though it was very hot. She wasn't trying to get warm, though. She sighed again, closed her eyes, and let her fantasies take her wherever they wanted to go.
She was afraid she knew where that might be.
Valente was still Valente Sharpe: a stupid, vacuous boy with a brilliant mind and the body of a sickly child. A daddy's boy. But somehow, almost against her will, her fantasy (which was probably also sickly, she guessed) inevitably drove her to him. This was the first time it had happened, and she was taken aback.
Fisicus hornissimus.
She imagined him walking in just then. She could see him clearly, now that she'd closed her eyes. She slipped her hand under the sheet and pulled down her underwear. But he didn't think that was submissive enough, so she tugged them all the way off, balled them up, and threw them on the floor. She imagined that even that wouldn't be enough for Valente Sharpe. Well, fuck you, then, because I'm not pulling the sheet down. She slid her hand down to the exact burning spot and began to stroke herself, squirming and panting. She could imagine exactly what he'd do: stare at her scornfully. And she'd say...
Just then, she heard footsteps right beside her bed.
A feeling of budding pleasure exploded in her brain, like fragile china being trampled by an elephant.
She opened her eyes, moaning quietly.
No one.
That fear, abruptly interrupting the climax of her sexual excitation, had been so intense that she was almost glad just to be alive. It was like yellow fever or malaria, something that left you stiff and shivering. Somewhere she'd even read that fear like that could actually kill you, give you a heart attack no matter how young you were or how clear your arteries.
She sat up, holding her breath. Her door was still closed. She hadn't heard it open at any point. But the footsteps, she was sure, had been inside her room. And yet there was no one there.
"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 fir
st 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] To:
[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.
At times, she found that more disturbing than the tales of his perversion she'd heard from Victor. The period of forced coexistence on the island had let her see that beneath his apparently calm, disdainful surface lay a churning volcano of desires to be the best, to be number one. That's the sole purpose of every single thing he does or says. She realized obsession was eating away at him, and not only from inside. He had developed new tics; his lips and right leg twitched convulsively whenever he sat at the computer; his naturally anemic skin tone had grown even paler; and the bags hanging under his eyes were so big they could have been nests. What's the matter with him? What is he up to?
He was so fixated that she felt sorry for him. And she knew that feeling even the tiniest speck of pity for Valente Sharpe meant she was at least halfway to earning a place in heaven, maybe well on her way to having done so. But she'd grown so used to his presence that she did feel sorry for him.
At least until that day she met him on the beach.
On
the afternoon of Wednesday, August 10, one day after she'd handed in her first attempt at a calculation for the Jurassic time strand, Elisa went down to the beach. Nadja wasn't there yet. In her place on the sand stood a white statue that someone had clothed with a few rags that flapped in the wind.
When she realized who it was, she was dumbstruck.
Valente stood stock-still. In fact, he was petrified. And he was staring at something. It must have been the sea, because she looked in the same direction and all she could see was a glorious horizon of green waves, blue sky, and clouds. He didn't even realize that she was there.
"Hey," she ventured. "What's up?"
That seemed to shake him from his stupor, and he turned around. Elisa felt a chill run down her spine. For a brief moment, the expression on his face reminded her of an old classmate of hers, a physics major who was schizophrenic and had to drop out of school altogether. She was pretty sure he didn't even recognize her.
In a split second, though, his face changed completely and the old Ricardo Valente Sharpe peered down at her.
"Well, looky here," he murmured, his voice hoarse. "If it isn't little Elisa, the prick tease. What's up, Elisa? How you doin', Elisa?"
"Listen, asshole," she said, quickly switching from fear to anger. "I realize we're both under a lot of pressure, but I'm not going to let you stand there and insult me. I've had about enough. I'm serious. We work together, like it or not. And if you insult me again, I'll file an official complaint with Blanes and Marini and get you thrown off the project."
"Insult you?" The sun was in Valente's face, and he squinted as if he were sucking lemons. "What are you calling an insult, sweetheart? I'm merely stating fact. I can see your body through that T-shirt, and I can practically see up your shorts, and it gets me hard; that's teasing my prick, as far as I'm concerned. A raised temperature and a sudden stiffness in the male member, that's what I'm talking about. And it's not my fault. That's like accusing me of saying that the first law of thermodynamics applies to heat engines. I'll make an official note of that, too. Wait, where do you think you're going?"