Kodachrome
A novel by
Jason Jahns
Copyright
KODACHROME
Copyright © 2011 by North Star Books
Published by North Star Books. Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved.
For information:
North Star Books, PO Box 55870, Phoenix AZ 85078 USA.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, companies, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jahns, Jason
Kodachrome: a novel / Jason Jahns.
ISBN-13: 9780984749119
ISBN-10: 098474911X
1
Zhuli took cover in the vestiges of an abandoned flourmill. The cement silos offered some protection, but Zhuli could think of no way to escape. The breathing in his headphones told the real story. After months of doing this together, you get to know your team, he thought to himself. And early on, Zhuli learned to listen for the breathing. Words could frolic, fortify or fool, but respiration always told the truth.
Zhuli knew he was losing his team.
Of course, in the midst of explosions and equipment noise, no one could discern the whispered message in a single exhalation; but in this silence—cut off and waiting for the next move of the enemy—every heave of every team member’s chest told the real story. They were giving up. Even though they had been on the verge of victory, this, again, would be decimation. They were preparing themselves for death.
“I thought we had them with us on this one,” a lone voice complained.
The whole team was young, idealistic, and trusted Zhuli to do the right thing, but now, there was no dredging up the words or ideas to comfort them. There was no clear path out of this. But how did you tell visionary young people that the plan simply was not going to work?
Their courage sputtered in the rapid-fire comments in Zhuli’s headset.
“One good air torpedo strike and these silos cave right on our heads.”
“Or a firebomb turns these old beams into kindling.”
“It’s a great day to die for the motherland.”
Another just grunted.
Not one of his charges was really much younger than he was, but Zhuli was the leader. His team members had pinned all of their faith on him, and Zhuli believed in faith, even though he had never been religious. The Party had worked hard to quash any pious stirrings in anyone of his generation. But at a young age, without God as an option, Zhuli had fixed his hope to people. And now, these voices…and their breathing…were the next best thing to being in Heaven.
More chatter.
“Do you hear something?”
“Not much, actually.”
“That’s what scares me.”
For a long minute, the communication channel was completely silent.
Lian’s distinctive, soothing voice broke the quiet. “Those most capable must work harder than the rest.”
Lian often invoked Chinese proverbs when he and the team ran out of their own words. Sweet encouragement. Not afraid. Not bleak. To Zhuli, that voice alone was reason enough to try again—to redouble his efforts, to ensure they made it through this together.
Then a low rumbling stopped all their breathing.
“Planes.”
Zhuli could not make out who said it. Maybe it was not any of his teammates; maybe it was the voice of Death itself.
There was a gasp. He turned toward the doorway, where he saw Lian looking out into the moonless night. The sky was clear and the stars bright. The line of tanks, black against almost-black was snaking over the hill from the east. The flares lighting the landscape to the west had cut off any possible escape. But the real worry was the sound of revving aircraft engines—the planes had come in low and were climbing now to avoid the aftermath of the destruction they were unleashing.
There was half a sound behind him; one final, unfinished report before everything went dark and dully silent. No fanfare. No light at the end of the tunnel. Just complete stillness and absolute darkness.
Even the worst moments in the past had been followed by something. Zhuli was motionless, waiting and hoping. There must be something. Anything. As the images around him faded back in, Zhuli found himself on his back. Sounds returned, too. He could hear the wood framed building crackling in flames; shells still exploded in the distance. He rose to one knee. There were some cuts and what seemed to be minor bleeding from his head. He should feel pain, but—of course—there was none.
Zhuli scanned the room. Crumpled bodies lay all around him—his friends and compatriots. All gone. The faces of the dead were ghastly. Eye sockets empty, jaws torn from heads: bloody…pulpy…gruesome.
He walked to the door of the shack to look out at the rest of the unit. Lit almost to daylight by the flares in the air, one of their vehicles looked like it had imploded. Destruction. Bodies as far as his eyes could see…all in unintended, uncomfortable repose. Extremities severed and joints bent preternaturally. Their angelic faces, now no more than featureless masses framed by expanding blood halos.
From behind him in the shack, Zhuli heard Lian’s familiar cell phone ring tone—a hip-hop rendition of the popular folksong “The Moon Represents my Heart.” It reminded Zhuli again that Lian’s old soul really was still so young. Zhuli half expected to hear Lian’s familiar, “Wei. Hello,” answer. But the ring tone continued. And then started over again.
He heard a beep from another cell phone in the field. Then the familiar Nokia tone from somewhere near the wall of the shack. Could word already be spreading about the attack? Were friends already calling to check on each other? How long had he been blacked out?
As his world began to dim again, all Zhuli saw were masses of dead Chinese youth. All he heard was a crescendo of ringing cell phones.
2
I know this girl should have breezed into the twenty-first century long ago. But part of me is forever trapped in antiquity…in a hopeless effort to regain my own past.
I think it is fair to blame my high school chemistry teacher for at least one particular manifestation of my historicity. It was the eleventh grade, just before I had to grow up too young, when Mr. Johnson introduced me to hand-written lab notes. It was all he had ever known. He had a raggedy pressed-paper-cover lab journal that he would display to the class as he mixed chemicals to produce explosions and hues and awful stinks. And then that old sweetie gave me a ledger-style notebook for graduation. How could I turn down such a kindly invitation to lifelong addiction? To this day, I handwrite everything: thank you notes, shopping lists, bank checks, but the most outrageous thing for a science PhD candidate to handwrite is lab notes, and I write those, too.
While every other Lab Monkey hunched over a keyboard, I scrawled. At my most retro audacity, I’ve even experimented with using fountain pens…at a messy cost. While other grad students of my generation sorted and searched and spell checked, I perused, rifled through, and crossed out.
Deep in my heart, I did recognize that Mr. Johnson’s largesse could really only take partial blame for the throwback researcher I’d become. Equally to blame, and arguably more formatively, was a titration for my undergraduate thesis. I’d described the resulting liquid as “pixelated” on my first pass at reportage. An instant later, my inner science editor apparently lined-out that odd term and replaced it with a more mundane “effervescent.” A few weeks later, another titration reminded me of something I’d seen before. I paged through my handwritten notes and was struck by the still legible, lined-out “pixelated” in my earlier description. I might never have recognized the similarities of the two solutions if I had digitally replaced all evidence of my first impressions in a computer text editor. Without my old fashioned ways, I believed I might never have made my first scientific discovery.
I know. I know. I could always have turned on the “track changes” function in almost any program and availed myself of some of the same benefits of handwritten notes. But when I used my lab notes ledger, I could diagram things in the margins, illustrate the set up of my experiment, and, of course, cross things out.
It did mean my notes were much like their author: decidedly unsocial. Unlike an electronic record, that everyone on a research team could instantly access, only one person at a time could share my notebook—assuming the reader could decipher my handwriting, a completely unfounded assumption.
When I explained to my professors that I’d been using the ledger so long that I didn’t think I could change my habits, they always gave an age-wise chuckle. Sometimes they’d say nothing while rolling their eyes, but when something emerged from their lips, it was usually along the lines of: “How old are you, anyway?” or “Can anyone break a habit around here?” or, one that women professors could get away with when referring to me but men really couldn’t, “This dog’s too old to learn a new trick?”
Just reading over the above paragraphs makes me blush. I have been trained so thoroughly to make explicit my motivations for doing any experiment: there must be a hypothesis, a rationale, or an underlying logic. I feel the need to justify why I am beginning a new set of notes in my favorite lab ledger, the one Mr. Johnson gave me, the one none of my experiments were worthy of…until now.
Hypothesis:
I remain unconvinced that I had much choice in this “experiment.” So, by way of disclaimer: this is not my hypothesis. When your dissertation advisor tells you to do a bit of research, you do it. I will deal with this more when I discuss ‘process.’ The hypothesis, the one given to me, was that my grandmother had a rare eye disorder. Eyes were certainly not my specialty, nor were they my advisor’s. He seemed to have been assigned to this experiment himself. I remain completely in the dark as to the actual conditions. I was tersely informed that the first step is simply to see if I can make friendly contact with my grandmother. If I can get her trust, I am promised more information. It all seems highly cloak and dagger, but the real reasons are probably much more innocent: some poor schmuck of a research assistant has probably not finished writing the briefing papers yet. My conjecture is that I will be able to make contact. But I lack data to even begin to postulate about my ability to gain my grandmother’s trust.
Did I mention? Until three days ago, I did not know I had a living grandmother.
This all promises to be an experiment of the heart…and of my unknown history.
Process:
I was writing this in my lab ledger while sitting on a Delta Airways flight to Salt Lake City, Utah. From there, I planned to rent a car, and forty minutes later, I’d be in the true heart of Mormondom—Utah Valley. My grandmother resides in Orem, Utah, near where my mother grew up. I’d never had the opportunity to visit, but I’d heard stories. Those mountains contained history: large, powerful families—driven by beliefs that I could never understand. The place is my heritage, but I knew so little about it.
Then there was an odd notion. It might just be the cosmic radiation that I absorbed from flying at altitude, but this all felt bigger than just a simple experiment somehow. My body sensed a deeper, more global purpose that my mind could not quite grasp yet. Even to me it sounded grandiose, but I believed this research would connect me to exotic places, powerful people, and new world orders. But everything, somehow, started with my grandmother.
The university was paying for me to do this research. This term, I was supposed to be doing lab work on e coli infection for my dissertation as part of my sumptuous research grant. It was only last week when Professor Turner informed me that he would be substituting my current assignments with urgent travel to a “remote site.” I could see no reason for “remote site” research into e coli, so I correctly assumed the task had changed vastly.
Professor Turner’s colleagues made the connection between my last name and my grandmother’s: not that Carter is a rare name. Dr. Turner emailed me to ask about Bernice Vernon Carter, and I immediately recognized my grandmother’s name. As I understand the situation, she has refused to cooperate with their research. Without my grandmother’s participation, the professors might be unable to publish any findings. And, for academics, publishing is life’s breath. Maybe even a life or death proposition for some.
If I can gain my grandmother’s trust, I hope they will bring me in as an author on the final paper. That would make this all worthwhile, because Dr. Turner’s colleagues are without doubt very important people. Association with them would assuredly make me a very important person as well. No one comes to Harvard without thinking they are already important. But it takes about two ticks of the wall clock in your first seminar room to realize everyone around the table is smarter, better-connected, and more capable. Maybe I can change all that by doing this.
Observations:
Seeing my grandmother was not anticlimactic. I was fully prepared to be unmoved, but I experienced both shock and awe: awe to be in the presence of my grandmother, finally; shock to see a faint family resemblance. She was sleeping sitting up in a lime green recliner. Her clothes bunched around her shoulders and hips, belying a woman who once was larger. At first, there was no obvious sign she could be a relative: wispy hair, hollow cheeks, and rugose forehead. If my mother had aged, I might have seen similarities, but she had few signs of graying the last time I saw her.
When my grandmother started to stir with a close-mouthed yawn, I fell immediately into the land of the familiar. My mother and I both welcomed wakefulness with that same yawn. I was looking at a much older version of my mother…and myself. Here, in the middle of nowhere, I felt I was at home.
I have described everything but the most obvious and startling aspect of walking into the room. My grandma had fashioned primitive eye patches over both eyes. These looked to be the metal ends of frozen orange juice tubes covered with tattered, light cotton cloth, held to her face by a strip of gauze around her head, and tied with a bow on the side. I was horrified by the contraption, but the facility administrator by my side was completely prepared for my reaction. My head had only started to turn slightly toward him when he answered my unspoken inquiry; perhaps the look on my face told him the whole story.
“We’ve tried to give her more sanitary and comfortable patches,” he defended. “She rips them off and puts these back on. I’d at least like to replace the cloth, but she won’t have it.”
The yawn revealed that my grandmother was probably awake, yet she feigned a very realistic coma. The administrator played along.
“I need to confirm that you are family, but we’ll come back when she’s fully awake,” he stage whispered.
I really didn’t want to leave the room, as I was sure the old lady in front of me must be awake. But the facility administrator herded me out the door with the élan of a funeral director. I found myself in the hallway.
He locked the door behind us.
“It will be lunchtime in forty-five minutes. It doesn’t look like she eats, but it is the only time of the day we’re really sure she’s alive. If you’ll take a seat in the waiting area, I’ll escort you again to her room then.”
Walking back down the hallway, we passed room after room composed of bed, TV, dozing elder, and younger visitors. I barely contained the begged question of why those visitors could stay in the rooms, but I was disallowed.
While waiting for my escort to return, I watched a dozen well-wishing visitors walk through the waiting room and down the hall to their sleeping progenitors. Only Bernice Carter, who seemed to go by “Bea”, could not have a visitor while she napped.
I was building to a red-faced rant, and not just because my treatment felt unfair. The extra time to think brought with it inevitable anxieties. New people were not my forte. No, that was not quite right: people were not my forte.
“Shall we go visit your grandmother now?”
The timing could not have been more perfect. I had been slipping into dangerous introspection.
“I would normally let you stay while she’s sleeping, but I really would like to be there to introduce you. It is very important that we protect the privacy of our patients.” FacAdmin droned about a new medical privacy rule in the state of Utah, but I had to wonder about their receptionist-less front door and wide-open patient rooms. “Mrs. Carter has had a bad reaction to visitors in the past, so I’d like to make sure you really are family and are getting along…”
The words oozed out of him. He was trying too hard. I simply nodded.
FacAdmin fumbled for the appropriate key and unlocked the door again. The room was brighter now, and my grandmother sat upright with a tray of grey meat and yellow whipped something in front of her. She was having no trouble with the spoon, even though that contraption still covered her eyes.
This time, she appeared taller and more robust. Couched in the lime green recliner, she crooned quietly to herself.
Not until I was well into the room did I notice the husky, busty, steel-haired woman changing my grandmother’s bedding.
“And who are you?” she asked, without even turning her head from her task. Her deep baritone voice made the question sound like a threat.
The FacAdmin took a step back. I, on the other hand, was ready to jump into his arms, believe in God, and join the NRA. A simple question like “who are you?” can be answered by a two-year-old without any major synaptic activity. Our identity is hardwired and slips off the tongue easily. Soldiers actually trained on this question under duress so they will give only name, rank, and serial number—the stuff the Geneva Conventions required—and nothing more that might help the enemy. The timbre of this question, however, took us both aback for at least three beats. The bed changer didn’t bother to look at us in our silence. No doubt, she’d grown used to people reacting that way.
The FacAdmin, in strangely Saturday-morning-cartoon fashion, grabbed his lapels with both hands and announced regally, “Patrice, this visitor is Mrs. Carter’s…” He looked Patrice directly in the face. “…granddaughter.”
Moments before, FacAdmin had not been convinced that I was anyone. Now, I was an emphatic “granddaughter.” The change of heart pleased me, but I knew I had nothing to do with it. This was a classic example of Newton’s third law: an equal and opposite reaction to Patrice’s show of force.
“Has Mrs. Carter recognized her ‘granddaughter’?” the steel-haired nurse queried; the last word was laced with ipecac. What happened to this poor yet daunting woman to make her hate granddaughters so much?
For all the buildup, the moment was anticlimactic. There was no long, drawn-out scene of grandparenthood determination.
Patrice the Nurse asked (commanded) my grandmother to take off her eyeshades and see if I was indeed her granddaughter. At first, she declined. But Patrice, in a moment of almost sweetness, reassured her that everything in the room was “safe.” With that, my grandmother untied the band holding the orange juice lids over her eyes. The contraption dropped into her lap. She blinked two or three times and looked in Patrice’s direction first. Patrice nodded, and my grandmother rolled her eyes to my side of the room and saw me for the first time.
Her mouth opened, her eyes softened, and she gasped. “Resurrected. Or never dead in the first place. Which is it?”
“Hi, I’m Miranda…your granddaughter…Suzanne’s daughter?”
FacAdmin rolled his eyes up and gave Patrice an “I told you so” nod before primly turning on his heel and exiting. My newly found grandmother spent the next few moments carefully examining every feature of my face and body.
I struggled to understand my emotions.
She raised her eyes back to mine and spoke longingly. “You’re the spitting image of Suzie. I thought maybe I’d died and gone to Heaven and Suz was my first visitor.”
I have never thought that I looked that much like my mother—in physical build we were, I had to admit, very similar—slim, narrow hips, medium-size breasts, great thighs and calves. If I had kept her clothes, I was sure I could wear everything. I should have kept her shoes; there was nothing in my closet that could highlight my legs the way her black stilettos did hers. But her features were broader: longer nose, thicker lips, wide-set, hazel eyes. Mine were narrower . . . and blue. While I had medium brown hair, my mother was a natural blonde when she was young. Her hair was still blond in the casket, but the undertaker had to ask what color to make it.
“But, of course,” the old woman continued, “there is no way this could be Heaven. I am pretty sure it wouldn’t be Patrice ushering me through Pearly Gates; would it, Patrice?”
Then soto voce to me: “Patrice is a gentile; they won’t let her within a light year of Kolob.”
As far as I could tell, everyone in the room was a gentile, and I had no idea what a Kolob was.
But with the confirmation that I was kin, Patrice (gentile or not) pushed a chair up next to the recliner and asked me to take a seat. Behind me, I heard shockingly soft steps for a woman of Patrice’s mass. My eyes were fixed on my grandmother and already noticing the similarities between her face and my mother’s. But my ears were trained behind me as Patrice pulled the door shut quietly. And I was relieved…until I heard a key engage the tumblers, the bolt slide into the doorframe, and Patrice’s muffled steps retreat down the hallway outside.
3
Zhuli was coming to expect Sharma’s surprise visits. The first time, she strode in past a row of military transports, wearing a combination of an Indian sari and battle fatigues. The cloth was camouflage brown-blue with a military issue undershirt covering her exposed right shoulder. Zhuli and the other men had never seen anything quite like it.
A flurry of gun pointing and grenade pin pulling was standard procedure when a stranger was detected. But when Sharma arrived, most of his men only half-heartedly raised their weapons. Beauty makes an excellent suicide bomber. Fortunately, two of the team members were less gullible. Lian and QiXi both stepped toward the potential enemy with fingers to triggers.
Sharma seemingly sensed mortal danger, stopped, held dead still for a few beats; then, with both arms a safe distance from her body, turned her open palms to show that she was not armed. Very slowly, she raised her right hand to her face, palm down, then she touched her thumb to the left side of her mouth and traced a broad arc—a smile—to the right side of her mouth.
She had given the sign.
Sharma burst into a luminescent grin, raised both hands above her head, and shouted: “This life belongs to the Skillz.”
Most cheered and returned the cry. Lian and QiXi did not. They slowly lowered their weapons and walked away, but kept a careful eye on the new visitor. QiXi’s reaction was understandable to Zhuli: women seemed easily disquieted by other women, particularly when a man was involved.
Lian was unreasonably apprehensive about the effect Sharma may have on the team…and apparently unfazed by Sharma’s beauty.
But then, Lian was distinctive in many ways. He rarely spoke, but it was his command of language that had first caught Zhuli’s attention. Lian was a master at chengyu—four character Chinese idioms that have distinguished scholars from riff-raff through the centuries. Soon after they met, he had coined a new one 俊力柱力 (Junli Zhuli) “Smart, strong Zhuli.” It was strange for a mere acquaintance to lavish such affirming words. Zhuli had blushed. It was nice for anyone to use his name in a kind way. From about the fourth grade, his friends had added a “ya” to his name. “Zhuliya” (pronounced Julia) was Chinese for Juliet…as in Romeo and Juliet. Even today, some of his childhood friends still called him Zhuliya as a term of endearment. His closest friends—those that didn’t want to offend him over and over again—just shorted his name to “Ya.” So, when Lian didn’t put a “ya” anywhere near Zhuli’s nickname and instead gave him a meaningful chengyu, it was an auspicious day.
The animosity Lian exhibited toward Sharma was fickle. Sharma had brought nothing but good luck to the team. Zhuli wondered if it might be nationalistic. Maybe Lian was a little xenophobic.
Zhuli found Sharma exotic. The cultural differences made their interactions more intriguing and less predictable. From their first meeting, he had recognized the stirrings of something quite unfamiliar to him. A curiosity…maybe an intrigue. Of course, it could never turn into anything, partly because of the haphazard frequency of their interactions. The only pattern of her visits—“Sharma sightings,” as his team liked to call them—was the lack of one; she was the flame bursting from a magician’s open hand.
So, it was pleasant, but not a surprise, when Zhuli heard, “Wei” and looked up to see Sharma’s stunning face smiling down into the battered tank turret at him. Alone in the vehicle, Zhuli sat in the commander’s seat. With no one there to witness his reaction, he beamed unabashedly at Sharma. He had not seen her for days. Her beautiful, long, dark hair and almost round eyes were more radiant than ever…as if she were using some new polish on her entire countenance. He couldn’t explain it, but she always looked better than everyone else; there was an ineffable something. And not just her face: even in a wooly winter jacket, she—all of her—came across as sensuous as any Bollywood star. And her voice, her voice, was soft, calming. The accent beckoned to him, but it was not the Indian accent he usually heard in China. It had something else to it. But then a lot of things could be lost in translation. Even an accent.
Zhuli motioned Sharma into the tank. She dropped lithely into the loader’s seat and closed the hatch in one seamless motion.
As Sharma settled into the seat to the left of him, Zhuli heard Lian and another of his men, Feiyang, trying to sort out the supply route problems. Even if Lian was not personally thrilled to see Sharma, the whole team—including Lian—knew the advantages Sharma’s visits could bring. They called her Karma Sharma. Soon after her arrival, no matter what mess they were in, they would find a way out of it. Today, Sharma was clearly a woman with a mission.
“Have you noticed when you win a battle, it is not just because you out-gun the bad guys?”
Sharma did not do small talk. There was never any: “Hi, how ya doing?” “Have you eaten?” “How’s the family?” or a simple, “You guys need any help?” These would be normal, human introductions to a conversation, but not Sharma’s style. Zhuli wondered if it was easier in translation just to keep it simple. Less chance for misunderstanding. Maybe Sharma was just too busy to do anything else. Maybe she was just socially challenged.
“Sure. It’s always about who we’re teamed up with. We win if we have more and better allies. That’s the way this world works.” Zhuli was slightly annoyed by having to state the obvious.
“Last week, you won a really important asset without firing a shot.”
“Yeah, we were sure we could never get across the bridges over the Liao River. Not only did we cross, but look around us. A lot of the troops guarding the river crossings are now with us.” Zhuli considered the future. “We have enough support now that if we fight, we’ll probably win.”
“And how did you get to this point?” Sharma nudged.
Zhuli’s move had been manufactured from desperation. He was tired of losing and starting all over. The team had done that for months. He was afraid that if they continued to lose, interest would flag. He feared showing up one day, only to find them all gone. And these team members were his sole reason for living.
Zhuli had to wonder if his focus on people was just a reaction to his parents. Until her death six years earlier, his mother had been a top official overseeing crisis management for the Politburo. In a country the size of China, there was always a crisis. Zhuli rarely saw his mother at home. After she passed away, his father had become alternately more focused on his son and on being a general in the People’s Liberation Army. In his father’s mind, both Zhuli and China had to be more successful and stronger.
The harder his father pushed, the less interested Zhuli became in both country and personal prestige. He disappeared into a world of books and computers. The ultimate slap to his father’s ego was when Zhuli did not even ask for advice or help when he graduated from college and needed a job. The son of the general ended up—to the general’s dismay—as the legal attaché in an insignificant, regional military unit
In his dead-end job, Zhuli barely endured each workday. His evenings were pure escape—drinking, carousing, and disappearing deeper and deeper into fantasy worlds. But then he met his current team members. And everything changed; his life had a kinship and purpose for the first time. Zhuli would do anything for these people. And he had.
Winning or losing was relatively unimportant to him personally, but Zhuli knew his team members badly wanted victory.
“Zhuli, how did you get to this point?” Sharma repeated the question gently.
“You know what I did.” Zhuli felt like a six year old.
“Yes, but can you say it?”
He steeled himself. “You know…I teamed up with some other people.”
His whole team knew what Zhuli had done. But no one had said a word about it. There was still such a thing as “saving face,” even in his young, non-traditional world.
Sharma was like his economics professor in college who would force students to speak the answer, even if everyone in the room already knew it. It was a perverted form of Socratic method. No one learned anything by saying it aloud, but the professor always acted like no one could possibly know anything until someone in the room gave up the required response.
“Is there a word for what you did?”
Zhuli sighed, resigned. “Well, I guess some people would call it a kind of treason.”
There was no new learning when he said the words. But there was an emotional something: embarrassment, pride, relief.
“Is that the worst thing you could have done?”
More Socratic shit. He shifted his gaze from her to the gunner controls in front of his knees. She knew the answer, just like his whole team knew the answer.
“Of course not.” The words spilled out of him uncontrolled. “The Specz are the real problem here. But the Stakez have been in bed with the Specz forever—that’s what makes our world capitalistic, isn’t it?”
Specz were the class who made their money more from playing with investments than from real ownership. Skillz, like Zhuli, saw the Specz as the real enemy. Stakez were the owner class who often sided with the Specz, but Skillz had more respect for them because Stakez actually cared about—even watched out for—their workers, the Skillz. Specz, on the other hand, would just sell their stock in bad times and move on to the next fad investment.
Zhuli glanced up at the closed hatch above Sharma, and then looked directly into her eyes. “The friend of our enemy should be our enemy. There’s no way to drive a permanent wedge between them. But case by case, some Stakez can’t do much without our help. Some need us. But, I suppose, they may always be our enemies—even if they ally with us for a while, they’ll eventually go back to the Specz.”
Zhuli wondered if it was a hormonal reaction to Sharma that was driving his honesty. Or maybe it was his reaction to all human relationships. This cause, these people, had become his religion. He wondered if Sharma was becoming a friend. She was not like most Indians he knew. Sharma had no trouble leaving “dead air” in a conversation. Indians and Americans were known to fill every free moment with words. Zhuli couldn’t tell if Sharma paused for effect or maybe just to think.
“What you did is only treason if you see the world in black and white. If you see the world in a full spectrum of colors, working with any enemy to ensure our victory is called diplomacy.” Sharma looked at him conspiratorially. “What if most of the Stakez in This Life, Stakez from all over the world, teamed with us? Would they ever need to go back to the Specz?”
This was not Socratic. Well, Socrates would say it was. But it wasn’t that faux-Socratic hoo-hah Professor Sharma usually used. This was a real question. A proposition Zhuli had never considered before. A possibility that was impossible, but if it somehow happened, it would change everything. His mind spun. Zhuli was glad Sharma was comfortable with dead air because his brain required a lot of it as he went down mental branch after mental branch of potential outcomes of such an idea.
After hours of mental time and several seconds of real time on the tank clock, Zhuli reemerged from his head. “If that could ever happen, it would work. With Stakez and Skillz together, we would win.”
Sharma nodded and without saying a word reached for the tank hatch, pulled herself up out into the grey sky, and disappeared almost before her feet were out of the tank.
4
I needed to go to drinker’s camp. Not to stop. To learn how. I was unbelievably ill equipped to deal with liquor. I came from a long line of never-even-tried-to-hold-their-drink ancestors. I wondered if those most likely to join a “dry” church like the Mormons one hundred years ago were the people who did not really like drinking in the first place—the ones who always passed out or always threw up. If so, my family history gave me no talents for one important part of modern life. But even if my ancestors could imbibe when they first became Mormons, my non-scientific brain was still convinced the alcohol tolerance gene must have been spliced out of my family’s DNA in several short generations.
I just wrote and deleted three paragraphs in my mind about the design of a lab experiment to determine how just a few generations of non-drinkers could make their offspring completely weak to alcohol. Then I realized I was still probably a bit on the tipsy side this morning. Never design experiments drunk…and if you do, certainly don’t write them down in indelible ink in a lab book that you don’t intend to throw away.
Last night, I wrote up my day’s experiences to where the conversation started, and then thought I deserved a bit of a break. My resolute plan was to return promptly to the room and finish my notes before bed. Clearly, that did not happen. It was already eight thirty a.m. here. Ten thirty a.m. in Boston. I hadn’t slept in that late since my freshman year…and that was only on the mornings after my roommate had been enjoying what she later described as “beautiful love” all night in the bunk above me.
I experienced absolutely no “beautiful love” last night. But I think there was a blink where I really did desire it. Then I got sleepy; then my head swirled; I weaved back to my room. Alone.
Now, I have two hours to write up my notes before I plan to head back into the “lab” again. And oh, what an interesting experiment this has turned out to be!
I spent an hour yesterday afternoon locked in a room with my “newfound grandmother”—not a phrase that most research scientists would ever be entitled to use.
On the surface, it would seem that Bea was completely coherent. While in strange flickers, her dreams and imaginings impinged deeply on reality, there were vast, concrete desert valleys of sanity between these mirage moments.
She started with memories of my mother.
“Suzie was such a good girl.”
I had never thought of my mother as a Suzie. She was either Suzanne or Mommy to everyone I knew. And I definitely never thought of her as anything younger than a highly competent, deeply sad data entry clerk. She worked long night shifts, and always made me breakfast before she curled up on the couch with the TV on for “soaps and sleep” and I ran to catch the school bus.
Bea continued, “Life was not easy for her. I felt like my problems hurt her more than they did me. And they hurt me plenty.”
I reached to pat her hand and wanted to tell her my mother was never bitter about her upbringing at all. Bea reflexively pulled her hands from my reach, then with an almost guilty look in her eyes, she slid them back into their former position. But I had learned my lesson and let my hand linger on the edge of her chair without touching her at all.
What possessed me to reach out to Bea was beyond me. It was so unlike me to initiate any contact: physical or emotional. Yet Bea’s withdrawal from my touch made me feel more connected than anything else she might have done. I was my grandmother’s granddaughter.
Bea continued as if nothing had happened. “I wish I’d been able to see Suzie before she was gone. It had been so many years. I don’t know why it took months for anyone to tell me that she had passed.”
Her gaze darted toward me quickly as she swallowed hard. I believed she was trying to make a decision about whether or not to continue. Maybe she went on as she originally intended. Maybe she chose her words more carefully. Maybe she changed to a new subject completely.
“Until today, I wasn’t even sure that you existed. I heard Suzie had a baby girl. But Margaret told me that, and Margaret could be so flighty. Someone told me they had a photo of you, but of course, I could never see it.”
I had no idea who Margaret was. I might have asked about her during the long pause that followed. But it seemed to me that Bea was under some kind of spell that did not deserve disturbing.
Bea broke the silence herself. “I always wanted to see that picture. But it was too much to know.”
She stared at the corner of the room. I was tempted to look and see if a mouse climbed through a hole in the wall there. Was she seeing something? I tried to look without moving my head, but my peripheral vision was just not wide enough to track her gaze.
Silence could bond or it could indicate the futility of trying. This was turning into a comfortable quiet…as if we had known each other for a long time. When Bea spoke next, she was in a fugue.
“You know they’ve built an escalator that goes right from the Salt Lake Airport to this building. It is amazing what they can do with technology these days. If they’d had that back when I heard about Suz, I would have flown to try to see you. But the airport limo has so much distraction—I took it in the seventies, there were pamphlets everywhere.”
That was jarring. I did not know what world she was talking about. Was this a dream she had? Did she really believe it had happened? No one had said anything about dementia. But this was either dementia or just plain crazy. I prayed for the former.
It was finally time for me to talk. I hated to interrupt the natural experiment, but in this lab, it would have been unusual for me to say nothing. Rather than explore the odd break with reality that Bea had just articulated, I took it to the present.
“They are really looking after you here. The nurse, Patrice, seems to be an excellent caretaker.”
“Yes, sure.” Bea’s answer was curt. Perhaps she was miffed that I’d interrupted her escalator story. She turned it back to me. “Tell me about you, since I know nothing. I really should learn about my only grandchild.”
I recounted frankly my growing up in Austin, Texas and then my move as a college student to Boston. I was just a senior in high school when my mother—Suzie, for the benefit of Bea—died of AIDS. She had a boyfriend, a professor at UT, who was a closet, functioning, heroin addict. He seemed immune to the disease. She was not.
In the weeks after her passing, I withdrew from everyone; my excuse was that I didn’t want to explain. At first, my avoidance of the rest of the human race might have been blamed on my mother’s death. But it became habit. To this day, people are still uncomfortable with my mother’s truth and universally react in ways that bother me: “Oh, I’m so sorry” was trite and annoying; “So the cocktail didn’t work for her?” came across as too clinical. “How did she contract it?” seemed way too personal. “You were young to lose your mother.” How obvious. “Beautiful weather we’re having.” Come on!
But Bea’s non-reaction was perfection.
Bea was tired by the time I finished my story. Naturally, tomorrow I would go back to see Grandma Bea again. Even though I’d only known that title for a day, it already emitted a natural sense of comfort and sweetness. I wondered how it would feel the first time I tried to say it out loud to someone.
While our conversation was largely personal, there were two notable observations:
1) She had her home-made eye patches off the whole time we spoke. She always maintained eye contact, and I never noticed anything unusual about her eyes.
2) When I mentioned the labs where I work, she just had two words: “Damn spies.”
5
I had no reason to include my personal life in my lab notes until I arrived for my second day at Bea’s place. (I stopped and started on those last two words. Should I call it the home? The facility? By its name: Shady Lane? Bea’s place was too homey, but less sterile. Maybe I should just call it “my lab.”)
I am writing these notes as I sit on a bench—really an old church pew—outside Bea’s room. She is in the middle of her “pre-lunch” nap.
Earlier, Patrice headed me off and corralled me in a nook outside the cleaning supplies closet as I was loping toward Bea’s room. She had a query for me that turned my previous evening into a big feedbag of questions. It was a confusing night for me even before Patrice stepped into it. But now, as professors say, more questions than hands in the air.
To find sustenance last night, I meandered out of the Hampton Inn to the Red Lobster next door. I feared that sitting alone at the family restaurant would immediately draw eyes. To my relief, on the other side of a dining room full of balloons and toddlers and lemonade, I found the heart of darkness of Utah Valley: the Red Lobster bar. I theorized that taking a small table and ordering an alcoholic beverage would scream to all that dared to peer into that den of vice that I was not of their tribe; less chance of any social exchange if I was clearly an alien.
The waiter/bartender was young, dark, and brooding, with beautiful teeth. His hair was longer than the style I was seeing around me in Orem. “Could you be excommunicated from the Mormon church for taking a job as a bartender? Or for having long hair?” I wanted to ask, but would never dare. An ex-Mormon research associate in my lab once informed me that the Mormon, family-owned and operated, Marriott hotel chain had the nefarious honor of being the biggest purveyor of spirits in the United States. The justification seemed to be that as long as the family members were not personally drinking any of it, nothing was wrong.
I flaunted my evil, non-Mormonness with a beer order.
The brew arrived quickly with a recommendation from the waiter. “If you want to get the full effect of your beer, you might want to order one more.”
Cocking my head, I tried to fathom his one-for-two sales strategy. “Did you just recommend that I need to order another beer if I want to enjoy this one?”
“Uh…oh…I think that came out wrong.” His face burned crimson. “I just thought maybe you were from out of state and didn’t know how it all works here.”
“And…”
“Well, Utah has some weird alcohol laws.”
“And…”
A step backward belied his fear: he might be alienating a customer. Even as his body prepared to flee, his mouth launched into an explanation. “We can’t sell full-strength beer in Utah. We can only sell three percent beer—a fraction of the alcohol you’d normally expect. So, if you’re looking for any kind of buzz at all, maybe order an extra one.” Then with all the honesty he could muster he added, “I wasn’t trying to pad your bill…I’d kill for a full-strength beer most nights.” And he finally smiled.
We were both relieved. As a sign of my support for another non-believer, I ordered one more.
I was generally good with service personnel. The boundaries were clear. And even one small interaction during a day with someone who was being paid to be nice to me made me feel like I was still part of the human family.
After the second beer was on my table, but before the waffle fries arrived, I noticed the handsome, black man sitting in the corner. I should have observed that “one of these things was not like the others” when I walked into the bar in the first place, so he may have arrived during the waiter’s distracting blush fest. The man in the corner nodded toward me. I grinned nervously, and he smirked back. He raised his beer glass in a toast and I hesitantly reciprocated.
In Boston, what would I have done at this point?
First, in Boston, I would not find myself in this position. I would not be without food that could be consumed in private. I kicked myself for not managing this better by picking up snacks from the gas station across the road.
Second, in Boston, I would never have raised my glass to any bar denizen. But to ignore one who was possibly the only black person in the entire state of Utah seemed callous—possibly bigoted. I suppose I acknowledged him to exhibit to myself, if not to others, that I was open-minded.
After the cross-room toast, I studiously avoided anything in the man’s direction, engrossing myself with my iPhone instead. But in my peripheral vision, I noticed his second beer arrive. Then, he stood and carried his Devil’s brew over to meet mine. He wanted to form a coven. I kept my eyes down, but this did not dissuade him.
“You appear as out of place here as I.” That was his opening line. Potentially offensive to some, but in this case, he captured my thinking precisely.
I have never been one to respond to any advance from, well, anyone—not even those familiar to me. I had advisedly set my sights on career success in lab research partly because it was a profession where the necessity of face-to-face interaction with others of my species could be sparse.
But last night, in an Orem bar, my fear of making a scene trumped my fear of meeting another human being.
“I’m Miranda,” I finally offered.
He needed to sit because standing beside me was drawing much unneeded attention. I motioned toward the chair across from me.
“Hello, Miranda. A beautiful, Shakespearean name,” he said as he seated himself. “I am called Oko.” His voice was deep and sonorously accented. It was not natural for me to stare at anyone, but I could not help myself. Oko was very dark, with close-cropped hair and fine features. In fact, it seemed that his relatively small head and features belonged on someone with a much smaller body. He was actually very tall. I knew there was some principle about ratio of head to body size that I learned in junior high school art class; Oko’s genes had decided not to obey that rule.
“Your name and accent suggest that you may not be from Utah.” It was intended as a question.
He laughed in full basso. “No, it is my first time. I arrived three days earlier. It is a beautiful place but with some strange customs.” He glanced at his beer glass knowingly.
“Yes.” I almost giggled.
I am not a giggler. I am a people-avoider. I have been known to stand inside my apartment front door for minutes, listening to the elevator dings and door closings, trying to identify the pattern that would suggest my neighbors were no longer in the hall. Satisfied, I would venture out. The industrial carpet path to the elevator on my floor passed two stairways, allowing speedy egress should a neighbor attempt to infringe on my space in the hall. The elevator itself was no problem. Everyone in the building obeyed the eyes-forward-no-talking rule. But my floor cohabitants seemed hell-bent on conversations before and after the elevator ride. I avoided these at the cost of taking the stairs or waiting for the next elevator.
In the Red Lobster bar, however, there was no emergency stairway, no opportunity for waiting in heart-pounding silence behind an apartment door. With no obvious escape route, I took a different tack: I became defensively chatty.
“It’s my first visit to the Beehive State,” I offered with no provocation, “but I have a whole covey of Mormons in my family tree.” I considered dropping my vocabulary to a lower grade-level to compensate for Oko’s accent. But I was torn. He knew Shakespeare. But then again, as I was speaking, his eyes hadn’t darted to the upper right—a sure sign he was trying to retrieve a word like “covey” from his mental dictionary. Professor Turner had taught me the upper-right eye trick as an excellent indicator of whether or not my tutorial students had actually read the materials. He told me to ask an obscure question about the readings and see where the student’s eyes went. Right meant trying to remember, left meant dissembling, straight ahead could mean a lot of things: knew the answer cold, didn’t have any idea and wasn’t even going to try to make it up, or lied really well.
Oko’s eyes hadn’t moved at all. They were looking straight at me. Either my vocabulary level was completely in his comfort zone, or he was a very good liar.
“So, where were you born?” I continued.
“Mississippi,” he deadpanned. I choked on my small sip of beer.
“Really?” I said, reaching for a napkin.
“No, really not Mississippi, but your reaction is very good.” He was grinning broadly now. And the smile turned him from handsome to gorgeous. “I am from Rwanda. You have heard of my country?”
“Well, I saw Hotel Rwanda. What a terrible thing your country went through.”
“Yes, it was tragic. A waste of human life. For no good purpose.”
I could feel a debate gurgling up in my throat. I tried to suppress it, but it was out before I could stop it. “Is there any good purpose for premature loss of human life?”
“Yes.” He didn’t miss a beat. “Your country’s history shows clearly that there are some causes for which killing is fitting: freedom, individuality, equality. I think some of my countrymen tried to achieve fairness through genocide. But the inequality in my country before the tragedies was not the fault of those who died. Women and children and simple farmers died. It was all for no purpose.”
I didn’t know what to say about that or many of the other things Oko told me last night.
The more we drank, the more loquacious I became. We tried to order a pitcher of beer, but that, too, was against Utah law. Instead, the waiter just kept us well supplied and stayed out of our way as he could see we were deep in conversation.
Now, as I try to remember the conversation, some of it is very hazy. The more I drank last night, the more I talked. By the end, it was pure aria, and I was the big, drunk diva. I talked about growing up in Texas and going from there to college at Harvard. Oko leaned in to absorb the Harvard story. But he reserved his keenest interest for my current “research project” with my grandmother. I explained that she had contracted some kind of rare eye problem, maybe a kind of glaucoma, and my professors were trying to understand that condition better. So this experience could be a double boon for me: I met my grandmother for the first time, and, if I were to uncover a publishable case study for my professors, there might be a science journal article or two…potentially with my name on the articles, as well. More benefit for all. Oko asked about the meaning of glaucoma, but when I started using any serious anatomy terms, his eyes glazed a bit. Not a doctor, I concluded.
I noticed I was slurring some words at one point. Soon after that, Oko offered to pay for my part of the bill. “You’re a graduate student. You should save your money.”
And even though I was beyond tipsy, I couldn’t allow a young Rwandan to pay for my drunkenness. We went Dutch.
In one day, I spilled my whole life story to two more people than I had in the previous ten years. Bea was an assignment. I needed to get her trust to make my experiment work. But why Oko? Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was that he was a stranger in a bar that I was unlikely to ever see again. Could it be the accent? Or those eyes?
I wondered at one point if something romantic was happening between us. I thought I wouldn’t mind that. But today, I can’t believe I was such a fool. I probably wrote too much here because I was putting off the inevitable and embarrassing revelation. Deep breath. Today, when I came to “my lab,” Patrice took me aside.
“I trust you,” she started.
“Thank you,” I said brightly, hoping she would not try to touch me. Actually, my brain was Play Doh, but I was aware enough to know that Patrice had just said something very nice, so I should act like it was nice.
Patrice barreled forward. “You’re the first person I trust with Bea. You see, you see…I could tell how much she liked talking to you. She wasn’t afraid of you.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.”
“So you need to know something. I can’t tell the facility administrator because he’s the worst offender. But I have to tell you. There has been someone…someone hanging around Shady Lane for the last few days; he wanders past your grandmother’s room several times a day and always looks into her room through that little glass in the door. Sometimes, he tries the knob to see if it will open.”
“Why would anyone want to be bothering my grandmother?” I actually had several ideas: life insurance salesman, Mormon missionary, IRS agent.
“It is not uncommon for strangers to try to visit your grandmother.”
That surprised me.
“But usually, they are escorted to the room by the administrator.” Patrice continued, “He’s the only other one with a key to Bea’s room. I would never let those people in.”
“Could you bar this stranger from the building?” I was trying to be helpful. My head was swooning a little still. I needed to sit down.
“I can’t. He says he’s the grandson of one of the Alzheimer’s patients—Mrs. Reynolds. He goes in there and sits with her all day long. She doesn’t object, but her mind is in bad shape. She wouldn’t object if Saddam Hussein was sitting there…” She paused. “…and he’s dead, among other things….”
“Can you ask him for an ID?”
Patrice looked confused. I figured out the look immediately. “Not Saddam Hussein. This man who is trying to visit Bea.”
“I did. His last name is Reynolds, too. But he doesn’t look like or sound like a Reynolds.”
“And what does a Reynolds look like?” My mother had a collection of records and cassette tapes of old Broadway shows. My head launched into a rendition of “Belly Up to the Bar Boys.” And I haven’t been able to rid myself of it since. Damn Debbie Reynolds.
“Well…”
Patrice was calculating this answer. She had seemed so straightforward with me always, until this moment. I could tell she was weighing how to answer this question in a way that I’d understand or that would not be offensive. I was just starting to wonder if there was some genetic trait attached to the Utah Reynolds clan—red hair, a cleft palate, big ears—when she blurted, “He’s black.”
The next question was obvious to me. “Is Mrs. Reynolds black?”
“Well…well, no, I don’t think so; not dark, anyway. But she has dark brown eyes.”
“Well, you said this is supposed to be her grandson. Maybe one of her children has a black spouse? Have you met her children?”
“As far as I can tell, she’s never had any visitors until now. But when Mrs. Reynolds talks, she’s got an accent like she’s from around here. This ‘Mr. Reynolds’ sounds like he’s from somewhere very far away. Maybe like Africa.”
Disturbing. “How long has Mr. Reynolds been coming to Shady Lane?”
“Oh, I don’t know…don’t know, three days, maybe?”
Uh oh. “And would you describe Mr. Reynolds as short or tall or average?”
“Oh, very tall, but his head looks like it’s too small for his body.”
Confirmation accompanied by nausea. “Is Mr. Reynolds here now?”
“No. I don’t…I don’t believe so. Last time I saw him was yesterday. I believe he looked into Bea’s room when you were in there talking to her in the afternoon.” Then Patrice must have picked up on my sudden interest. “He’s not a friend of yours, is he?”