Sucker, p.20
Sucker, page 20
“Things are going pretty well with the label, too. We’re in the black now. We’re making a profit for once.”
“Really?” Mom butted in. “I thought you quit that with the new position.”
“I didn’t have to. It’s a well-oiled machine at this point.”
“We’ll have to listen to the big hits after dinner, then,” Peter said.
“Sure.” I couldn’t imagine Mom lasting more than a second into even our mellowest release. It was why I liked the music in the first place.
We returned to the subject of the bad impressions of the Impressionists. While Mom complained, I savored the moment, repressing all thoughts of the lies I’d just perpetrated. My parents were proud of their prodigal, and my brother seemed genuinely jealous. As I sat there in our cavernous dining room, surrounded by phony Monets, the play count on Sucker was steadily climbing. I could’ve kissed a zebra. I’d let myself have this moment of tranquility, and tomorrow I’d show Dad the dossier outlining Olivia’s bullshit.
I floated from the dining room to the parlor, just about as happy as I would ever be in that life (or the next, for that matter). I glimpsed a dark flash in the hall—it was the swallow again. I admired and related to the little creature’s tenacity.
I plopped myself on a plump sofa, one of the few remaining pieces of furniture from my childhood, the rest having been replaced by a new Jeanneret armchair and a Royere set resembling a family of overfed polar bears. But in my tranquil brain, even these ugly, overstuffed chairs had their charm.
Brad and the zebra man joined us by the fireplace, the former cradling a guitar, the latter with a violin, and as we sat down, the two began to play a sweet, sad tune. Brad started to sing in his signature soulful tenor, and his Afrikaner buddy Garfunkeled in for the chorus. My mother sipped her wine by the mantel. My father idly turned the pages of a book on his lap. My brother checked his email on his phone. For the first time ever, I felt at peace among them.
I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day.
Take me to the place I love, take me all the way.
An old folk song, I assumed, though sometime late in the night I’d realize what it was—a Red Hot Chili Peppers hit. But that’s okay. The music soothed me, taking me farther down my path of serenity.
“What is this?” my father asked me.
Only then did I see just what book he’d been reading. Tim’s dossier. The cover, the image of Gutenberg with history practically growing out of his beard, had struck Dad’s fancy. This was not how it was supposed to go down. My boasting at dinner was either going to make it look like I was in on the scam and dumb enough to leave the evidence lying around, or too stupid to see it for what it was.
Just then one of the original cuts sung by Thane came shooting out of the sound system, drowning out another tender duet. Mom put her hands over her ears. My brother sat smiling, phone in hand, having clearly spent the last half hour waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger.
“THIS IS CHUCK’S MUSIC!” he proclaimed.
Veronika came in. “WHAT IS THIS SHIT?”
“TURN IT OFF,” Mom screamed. “I’M DYING!”
The good son obeyed. Dad’s eyes remained fixed on the Kenosis exposé.
“What the fuck is this?” he yelled, and chucked Tim’s dossier at me. It bounced off my shin and landed on the rug. “Are you fucking with me? Are you and your little friend trying to rob me?”
Mom and Peter (still beaming from his dump on the chest of my dignity) took the hint—she led him off to denigrate the paintings, and Brad, Veronika, and the zebra man slipped away behind them. I was tempted to go outside, grab one of the guard’s guns, and litter the turf with incarnadine zebras.
“Dad, I’ve been trying to talk to you about this. It’s not exactly like what I said at dinner.” I blanked. The chatty spirit that had possessed me earlier now ghosted me.
But then I heard a knock at the door behind me. A member of the staff wouldn’t knock, and it was entirely impossible for an unexpected visitor to show up without a guard intercepting them. Mom, Peter, Veronika, and the zebra man all followed Brad back into the room to watch him get the door, and even Dad looked surprised.
“Charles!”
Out of the shadows stepped Olivia. Tim’s tome-to-end-all-(nano)-tomes was still at my feet. I kicked it under the sofa.
20
“Sorry I’m a day early,” she said, seeing the confounded looks on my family’s faces. “Charles didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“How’d you get in?” Peter asked, but Olivia had already dived into conversation with my mother. Olivia’s German was Goethe good, even better than mine and Peter’s, and with it she was able to disarm Mom right away. I watched as she moved on to my still-stunned brother, then finally came to greet my dad.
“Mr. Grossheart—I’m so delighted to meet you at last. I can finally thank you in person for your faith in our mission.”
My dad stayed silent, but I could see his rage had melted away, leaving him hollow.
“I’ve long heard of your legendary cellar and have always wanted to see it.” She was speaking in the overformal register most people automatically used when addressing him, the way a defendant would talk to Judge Judy. “Any chance you could give me a tour?”
Their eyes met. I had no reason to think my father would want to show her around under these circumstances. But after a few seconds of silent valuation, his face reanimated, as if he’d just been asleep with his eyes open and now found himself suddenly, embarrassingly awake.
“Oh, certainly.”
He rose and began his slow journey to the cellar door. I tried to follow, but Olivia waved me away.
“That music was terrible,” Mom told me. “I was prepared to take my own life.” Fair enough. I’d been about to Young Werther myself, too, but for other reasons.
We waited a long time for them. I was on the verge of a psychic break. How the fuck did she get here so quickly and make it past Dad’s Praetorian Guard? Did she know about Tim? More important, what was she going to do with me?
I considered grabbing the telltale report and hiding it somewhere more secure, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention to it and figured it was just as safe under the couch as it would be in my room.
Sweat from my armpits was flooding my love handles’ chubby deltas.
“What was Dad saying? About you robbing him?”
“I was trying to get him to put some real money into the label. I have a hunch it won’t happen now.”
“I need a cigarette.”
I wasn’t a smoker in San Narciso, but when I came home, I usually picked up a pack of Beaconsfields at the QuikTrip. It gave me an excuse to duck away from my family at regular intervals, and it drove my dad delightfully insane.
“Don’t burn the house down, Carrie.” Peter had called me that ever since I incinerated that poor couple’s barn.
I stood out there sucking on a Beaconsfield and puzzling over Olivia’s strange arrival. Nothing about it made any sense. Even if she’d figured out what I was up to, how had she followed me? I had a panicky, childlike fear of her, the same feeling I used to have awaiting the administration of punishment from the man currently with her in the wine cellar.
I received a call from Louise. This was, at least, conflict I could handle. It was time to play dumb, the role I was born for.
“Someone broke into Sydney’s van,” she said. “She had a panic attack, and I had to take her to the hospital. They took the box with her phone in it and, like, a stupid Orange practice amp. Not even a tube amp, just solid-state.”
Louise started sobbing. She sounded like a choking sea lion. “Chuck, I’m so fucking tired. This isn’t what we agreed to. I love you. I love Sydney, too. I miss Thane. But I need some time to myself. Just, like, a day. Two days. I’m going to fall apart here.”
“I’ll come home as soon as I can.”
“I’m sorry. How’s everything with your mom? How are things at the farm?” she asked once the last sob was out of her. When we met, I told her my family lived on a ranch. Which they did, technically, if you counted the zebras.
“She’s fine. Everything’s fine. It’s very pastoral. Hip surgery is pretty chill nowadays. I’m going to go rebook my flight back so I can be there for you. I’m sorry it’s been so fucking awful.”
“Are you okay? You sound kind of, I don’t know, weird. You’re talking really fast.”
“I’m just worried about Sydney. And there’s my family. You know how it is. You miss them, and then it only takes about ten minutes of quality time before you start looking longingly at ledges and sturdy rafters.”
“Please get back as soon as you can. I’m starting to go crazy.”
Back inside, Olivia and Dad reappeared, each carrying a bottle of wine. As Dad settled into his chair, she came over to show off the fruits of a very productive half hour.
“Your father has just agreed to double his initial investment in Kenosis. And it turns out he hates the FDA as much as I do, so the island will be no problem. Oh, he gave me this, too.”
I looked at the label. The bottle had belonged to none other than John Frémont, the first presidential candidate from my father’s beloved party. I’d have been jealous if I weren’t so afraid.
“Sorry to drop in unannounced like that. I decided to bow out of a conference at the last minute.” She studied the bottle of Frémont, then smiled widely at my mother. “I thought you might need some backup.”
Betrayal and humiliation have always been the major dialects of Dad’s love language, and I worried he’d blabbed about Tim’s dossier down in the cellar. I was completely perplexed by Olivia’s skill with him. As someone who had never persuaded the man—the only trust he ever gave me being of the fund variety—I was curious about her methods. (Yes, the nastiest conclusion did occur to me briefly, but I decided to spare myself the therapy sessions and not dwell on that possibility; Dad had always been too shrewd to fall for that kind of thing and scoffed at his peers’ child brides.) Winning him over was a manipulation of reality much greater than her cross-country teleportation, and I was totally confounded.
At my father’s request, Brad and the zebra man gave us another ballad (Take me down to the Paradise City / Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty) and Dad poured us each a glass from some actually drinkable vintage. He was the happiest I’d seen him, ever. We put away another two bottles—my family from mirth, me filling up the vacuum of dread that had opened up. My mind was two feet below my ass, plopped on top of Tim’s documents. We drank until all our mouths were red, our teeth as purple as salami.
It was late, and soon my parents and our musical entertainment stumbled off to bed. I tried to hang back and grab the packet from under the sofa, but Olivia and Peter had begun chatting about Grossheart Unity and didn’t look like they’d call it a night anytime soon. There was no reason to think she’d seen the incriminating documents, so I figured I’d wait an hour or so and creep back downstairs.
“Charles,” Olivia said as I tried to slip away. “Peter’s just going to bed. Let’s catch up.”
“Night, guys.” Peter looked a little starstruck. I hadn’t seen him like that since Fred Durst played his fourteenth birthday party.
“Charles, what I’m about to tell you is very important. Let’s go to the cellar.”
I followed her to the cellar door. I felt like a child about to be punished. But something in her voice took the edge off my panic. It was like I’d done an emotional speedball, pushed and pulled between peace and fear.
“Your dad typed in the code pretty slowly. I don’t think he’ll mind if we talk down here.”
We went down the stairs. Like I’ve said, I hadn’t been down there in a decade, and since then, Dad had expanded it considerably. The racks, indexed like the shelves in a library, stretched so far that, in the low light, they seemed to go on forever. I prepared for Olivia to Cask of Amontillado me.
“Charles, I know this all must look very strange. And I know you’ve caught wind of things that might have unsettled you. I owe you some explanations. More than that, it’s time I brought you into the inner circle. This is going to be hard to frame in a way that makes sense. Some of what I’m about to say is going to sound very weird. I need you to bear with me, and to trust me. I’m going to start at the beginning, and what I want is for you to hear me out without judgment until I’ve finished. Are you in a headspace where you can do that?”
“Olivia, yes. Just tell me what is going on. You know you can trust me, too. It goes both ways.”
“Okay.” She turned a nearby bottle over on its rack, took a look at the label, and began her story.
* * *
In January of sophomore year, a couple months before the trip to Greece, she got a call from her doctor. Her numbers were bad. Her years of remission had ended.
Olivia had already been through all this, and she knew things were about to get much worse. She made arrangements for treatment in Cambridge and decided she’d keep it secret for as long as she could to enjoy this last taste of freedom without our pity. She did her best not to mope around us, but it was hard to rein in her despair. Her life, as far as she could see it, was over, and it amounted to nothing. All the work she’d put in was a waste, and she’d barely enjoyed her youth. Years that should have been spent living, dancing, reading, doing nothing, were whiled away on a computer or under the fluorescent lights of a lab. She’d only just begun enjoying life with me, James, and Eugen, partying, reading poetry, going on our road trip, and she was deeply grateful for that, but even this was getting cut short before she could learn how to let go of the pain and fear she carried everywhere.
“A few times, in those weeks after my doctor called, I thought about finding a peaceful spot outside of Boston—Cape Ann, maybe, or Provincetown—to swim out into the sea and just let it swallow me.”
There was only a trace of the rhythm from her Kenosis speeches. Her smart voice, the audible italics, the long, Chekhovian pauses, all of this was gone. She wasn’t even bothering to give me her usual significant eye contact. I was getting the real Olivia.
One night, when she was feeling especially low, she texted Eugen to meet her at the library. The two of them liked to wander around the lower stacks (the book bunkers of C and D) or take the tunnel even deeper to Pusey to look at the old maps. “It’s a very similar vibe down here, actually.” They’d grab random books, sharing whatever lines their eyes fell on as they mazed their way between the shelves. It was like being disembodied, living in a world made entirely of paper and knowledge, and she especially needed that right then.
“You’re sick again,” Eugen told her as they sat down among some South American novels (she remembered the green, rebound spines that supported his, a detail the shock of the coming discovery would petrify, like the volcanic eruption that preserved Pompeii). “What’s going on? You can tell me.”
Olivia slid a bottle back, looked at me for a moment, then pulled out another.
“How did he know? Now I understand it had something to do with the awareness that comes with the Gift, which is what I’m getting to, but at the time I chalked it up to our closeness. That was probably part of it, too.”
We were veering into the weird shit. I tried to lock all the muscles in my face and keep my skepticism from seeping out.
“The other day I froze up when you asked about him. The truth is, his role in my life has been enormous. He listened patiently as I laid it all out for him, the bleakness of my future, the morbidity of my thoughts.”
When she was done, Eugen said he wanted to show her something. “Look, I can help you. What I’m about to tell you is going to make you think I’ve lost my mind—I know because I’ve been there—so I need to show you something first. Don’t scream.”
He pulled out his hunting knife and ran it across his wrist. She managed to obey him and keep quiet as he moved his arm closer to her. The wound was a good four inches long, and the tissue underneath was purple-black.
“It took a second for me to realize there was no blood. But before I could remark on this came the truly bizarre part: the wound closed, like a tent zipped from the inside.”
The cellar lights—casting us in gentle orange from udon-thick tungsten—shut off now that we’d been holding still too long for the motion sensor to pick us up. We were left in the faint red of the security system’s LEDs. Everything but Olivia’s face, which was closer to the keypad, was just barely perceptible, but she continued her story as if nothing had happened and kept on pulling out bottles and examining their labels in the dark. I’d lost control of my face and hoped I at least had enough cover to hide my dropping jaw.
“He explained the Gift to me then in rather vague terms. Had he not just shown me his arm, I wouldn’t have believed him at all. He was being oddly circumspect, but I learned later that he was simply putting things the best way I could understand them, what I’m trying to do with you now. I came away with this impression, which was ultimately correct: The Gifted are an ancient society of the world’s most intelligent and talented individuals, all working to bring about the evolution of humanity to something better, stronger. With technology developed over millennia, they had unlocked the full potential of their bodies and minds, allowing them to do seemingly impossible things. He saw my promise, and he was willing to give it to me, if I wanted it. He told me that there were risks: Some didn’t have the right constitution for it and didn’t survive. And even if it worked, there were side effects, prohibitions, and a strict diet. Should I want to proceed, he’d still need approval, which is why we planned our trip to Greece.”
So it was some kind of self-improvement tech cult, I thought. Eugen had never seemed particularly spiritual, but his fierce privacy meant anything was possible.
“Really?” Mom butted in. “I thought you quit that with the new position.”
“I didn’t have to. It’s a well-oiled machine at this point.”
“We’ll have to listen to the big hits after dinner, then,” Peter said.
“Sure.” I couldn’t imagine Mom lasting more than a second into even our mellowest release. It was why I liked the music in the first place.
We returned to the subject of the bad impressions of the Impressionists. While Mom complained, I savored the moment, repressing all thoughts of the lies I’d just perpetrated. My parents were proud of their prodigal, and my brother seemed genuinely jealous. As I sat there in our cavernous dining room, surrounded by phony Monets, the play count on Sucker was steadily climbing. I could’ve kissed a zebra. I’d let myself have this moment of tranquility, and tomorrow I’d show Dad the dossier outlining Olivia’s bullshit.
I floated from the dining room to the parlor, just about as happy as I would ever be in that life (or the next, for that matter). I glimpsed a dark flash in the hall—it was the swallow again. I admired and related to the little creature’s tenacity.
I plopped myself on a plump sofa, one of the few remaining pieces of furniture from my childhood, the rest having been replaced by a new Jeanneret armchair and a Royere set resembling a family of overfed polar bears. But in my tranquil brain, even these ugly, overstuffed chairs had their charm.
Brad and the zebra man joined us by the fireplace, the former cradling a guitar, the latter with a violin, and as we sat down, the two began to play a sweet, sad tune. Brad started to sing in his signature soulful tenor, and his Afrikaner buddy Garfunkeled in for the chorus. My mother sipped her wine by the mantel. My father idly turned the pages of a book on his lap. My brother checked his email on his phone. For the first time ever, I felt at peace among them.
I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day.
Take me to the place I love, take me all the way.
An old folk song, I assumed, though sometime late in the night I’d realize what it was—a Red Hot Chili Peppers hit. But that’s okay. The music soothed me, taking me farther down my path of serenity.
“What is this?” my father asked me.
Only then did I see just what book he’d been reading. Tim’s dossier. The cover, the image of Gutenberg with history practically growing out of his beard, had struck Dad’s fancy. This was not how it was supposed to go down. My boasting at dinner was either going to make it look like I was in on the scam and dumb enough to leave the evidence lying around, or too stupid to see it for what it was.
Just then one of the original cuts sung by Thane came shooting out of the sound system, drowning out another tender duet. Mom put her hands over her ears. My brother sat smiling, phone in hand, having clearly spent the last half hour waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger.
“THIS IS CHUCK’S MUSIC!” he proclaimed.
Veronika came in. “WHAT IS THIS SHIT?”
“TURN IT OFF,” Mom screamed. “I’M DYING!”
The good son obeyed. Dad’s eyes remained fixed on the Kenosis exposé.
“What the fuck is this?” he yelled, and chucked Tim’s dossier at me. It bounced off my shin and landed on the rug. “Are you fucking with me? Are you and your little friend trying to rob me?”
Mom and Peter (still beaming from his dump on the chest of my dignity) took the hint—she led him off to denigrate the paintings, and Brad, Veronika, and the zebra man slipped away behind them. I was tempted to go outside, grab one of the guard’s guns, and litter the turf with incarnadine zebras.
“Dad, I’ve been trying to talk to you about this. It’s not exactly like what I said at dinner.” I blanked. The chatty spirit that had possessed me earlier now ghosted me.
But then I heard a knock at the door behind me. A member of the staff wouldn’t knock, and it was entirely impossible for an unexpected visitor to show up without a guard intercepting them. Mom, Peter, Veronika, and the zebra man all followed Brad back into the room to watch him get the door, and even Dad looked surprised.
“Charles!”
Out of the shadows stepped Olivia. Tim’s tome-to-end-all-(nano)-tomes was still at my feet. I kicked it under the sofa.
20
“Sorry I’m a day early,” she said, seeing the confounded looks on my family’s faces. “Charles didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“How’d you get in?” Peter asked, but Olivia had already dived into conversation with my mother. Olivia’s German was Goethe good, even better than mine and Peter’s, and with it she was able to disarm Mom right away. I watched as she moved on to my still-stunned brother, then finally came to greet my dad.
“Mr. Grossheart—I’m so delighted to meet you at last. I can finally thank you in person for your faith in our mission.”
My dad stayed silent, but I could see his rage had melted away, leaving him hollow.
“I’ve long heard of your legendary cellar and have always wanted to see it.” She was speaking in the overformal register most people automatically used when addressing him, the way a defendant would talk to Judge Judy. “Any chance you could give me a tour?”
Their eyes met. I had no reason to think my father would want to show her around under these circumstances. But after a few seconds of silent valuation, his face reanimated, as if he’d just been asleep with his eyes open and now found himself suddenly, embarrassingly awake.
“Oh, certainly.”
He rose and began his slow journey to the cellar door. I tried to follow, but Olivia waved me away.
“That music was terrible,” Mom told me. “I was prepared to take my own life.” Fair enough. I’d been about to Young Werther myself, too, but for other reasons.
We waited a long time for them. I was on the verge of a psychic break. How the fuck did she get here so quickly and make it past Dad’s Praetorian Guard? Did she know about Tim? More important, what was she going to do with me?
I considered grabbing the telltale report and hiding it somewhere more secure, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention to it and figured it was just as safe under the couch as it would be in my room.
Sweat from my armpits was flooding my love handles’ chubby deltas.
“What was Dad saying? About you robbing him?”
“I was trying to get him to put some real money into the label. I have a hunch it won’t happen now.”
“I need a cigarette.”
I wasn’t a smoker in San Narciso, but when I came home, I usually picked up a pack of Beaconsfields at the QuikTrip. It gave me an excuse to duck away from my family at regular intervals, and it drove my dad delightfully insane.
“Don’t burn the house down, Carrie.” Peter had called me that ever since I incinerated that poor couple’s barn.
I stood out there sucking on a Beaconsfield and puzzling over Olivia’s strange arrival. Nothing about it made any sense. Even if she’d figured out what I was up to, how had she followed me? I had a panicky, childlike fear of her, the same feeling I used to have awaiting the administration of punishment from the man currently with her in the wine cellar.
I received a call from Louise. This was, at least, conflict I could handle. It was time to play dumb, the role I was born for.
“Someone broke into Sydney’s van,” she said. “She had a panic attack, and I had to take her to the hospital. They took the box with her phone in it and, like, a stupid Orange practice amp. Not even a tube amp, just solid-state.”
Louise started sobbing. She sounded like a choking sea lion. “Chuck, I’m so fucking tired. This isn’t what we agreed to. I love you. I love Sydney, too. I miss Thane. But I need some time to myself. Just, like, a day. Two days. I’m going to fall apart here.”
“I’ll come home as soon as I can.”
“I’m sorry. How’s everything with your mom? How are things at the farm?” she asked once the last sob was out of her. When we met, I told her my family lived on a ranch. Which they did, technically, if you counted the zebras.
“She’s fine. Everything’s fine. It’s very pastoral. Hip surgery is pretty chill nowadays. I’m going to go rebook my flight back so I can be there for you. I’m sorry it’s been so fucking awful.”
“Are you okay? You sound kind of, I don’t know, weird. You’re talking really fast.”
“I’m just worried about Sydney. And there’s my family. You know how it is. You miss them, and then it only takes about ten minutes of quality time before you start looking longingly at ledges and sturdy rafters.”
“Please get back as soon as you can. I’m starting to go crazy.”
Back inside, Olivia and Dad reappeared, each carrying a bottle of wine. As Dad settled into his chair, she came over to show off the fruits of a very productive half hour.
“Your father has just agreed to double his initial investment in Kenosis. And it turns out he hates the FDA as much as I do, so the island will be no problem. Oh, he gave me this, too.”
I looked at the label. The bottle had belonged to none other than John Frémont, the first presidential candidate from my father’s beloved party. I’d have been jealous if I weren’t so afraid.
“Sorry to drop in unannounced like that. I decided to bow out of a conference at the last minute.” She studied the bottle of Frémont, then smiled widely at my mother. “I thought you might need some backup.”
Betrayal and humiliation have always been the major dialects of Dad’s love language, and I worried he’d blabbed about Tim’s dossier down in the cellar. I was completely perplexed by Olivia’s skill with him. As someone who had never persuaded the man—the only trust he ever gave me being of the fund variety—I was curious about her methods. (Yes, the nastiest conclusion did occur to me briefly, but I decided to spare myself the therapy sessions and not dwell on that possibility; Dad had always been too shrewd to fall for that kind of thing and scoffed at his peers’ child brides.) Winning him over was a manipulation of reality much greater than her cross-country teleportation, and I was totally confounded.
At my father’s request, Brad and the zebra man gave us another ballad (Take me down to the Paradise City / Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty) and Dad poured us each a glass from some actually drinkable vintage. He was the happiest I’d seen him, ever. We put away another two bottles—my family from mirth, me filling up the vacuum of dread that had opened up. My mind was two feet below my ass, plopped on top of Tim’s documents. We drank until all our mouths were red, our teeth as purple as salami.
It was late, and soon my parents and our musical entertainment stumbled off to bed. I tried to hang back and grab the packet from under the sofa, but Olivia and Peter had begun chatting about Grossheart Unity and didn’t look like they’d call it a night anytime soon. There was no reason to think she’d seen the incriminating documents, so I figured I’d wait an hour or so and creep back downstairs.
“Charles,” Olivia said as I tried to slip away. “Peter’s just going to bed. Let’s catch up.”
“Night, guys.” Peter looked a little starstruck. I hadn’t seen him like that since Fred Durst played his fourteenth birthday party.
“Charles, what I’m about to tell you is very important. Let’s go to the cellar.”
I followed her to the cellar door. I felt like a child about to be punished. But something in her voice took the edge off my panic. It was like I’d done an emotional speedball, pushed and pulled between peace and fear.
“Your dad typed in the code pretty slowly. I don’t think he’ll mind if we talk down here.”
We went down the stairs. Like I’ve said, I hadn’t been down there in a decade, and since then, Dad had expanded it considerably. The racks, indexed like the shelves in a library, stretched so far that, in the low light, they seemed to go on forever. I prepared for Olivia to Cask of Amontillado me.
“Charles, I know this all must look very strange. And I know you’ve caught wind of things that might have unsettled you. I owe you some explanations. More than that, it’s time I brought you into the inner circle. This is going to be hard to frame in a way that makes sense. Some of what I’m about to say is going to sound very weird. I need you to bear with me, and to trust me. I’m going to start at the beginning, and what I want is for you to hear me out without judgment until I’ve finished. Are you in a headspace where you can do that?”
“Olivia, yes. Just tell me what is going on. You know you can trust me, too. It goes both ways.”
“Okay.” She turned a nearby bottle over on its rack, took a look at the label, and began her story.
* * *
In January of sophomore year, a couple months before the trip to Greece, she got a call from her doctor. Her numbers were bad. Her years of remission had ended.
Olivia had already been through all this, and she knew things were about to get much worse. She made arrangements for treatment in Cambridge and decided she’d keep it secret for as long as she could to enjoy this last taste of freedom without our pity. She did her best not to mope around us, but it was hard to rein in her despair. Her life, as far as she could see it, was over, and it amounted to nothing. All the work she’d put in was a waste, and she’d barely enjoyed her youth. Years that should have been spent living, dancing, reading, doing nothing, were whiled away on a computer or under the fluorescent lights of a lab. She’d only just begun enjoying life with me, James, and Eugen, partying, reading poetry, going on our road trip, and she was deeply grateful for that, but even this was getting cut short before she could learn how to let go of the pain and fear she carried everywhere.
“A few times, in those weeks after my doctor called, I thought about finding a peaceful spot outside of Boston—Cape Ann, maybe, or Provincetown—to swim out into the sea and just let it swallow me.”
There was only a trace of the rhythm from her Kenosis speeches. Her smart voice, the audible italics, the long, Chekhovian pauses, all of this was gone. She wasn’t even bothering to give me her usual significant eye contact. I was getting the real Olivia.
One night, when she was feeling especially low, she texted Eugen to meet her at the library. The two of them liked to wander around the lower stacks (the book bunkers of C and D) or take the tunnel even deeper to Pusey to look at the old maps. “It’s a very similar vibe down here, actually.” They’d grab random books, sharing whatever lines their eyes fell on as they mazed their way between the shelves. It was like being disembodied, living in a world made entirely of paper and knowledge, and she especially needed that right then.
“You’re sick again,” Eugen told her as they sat down among some South American novels (she remembered the green, rebound spines that supported his, a detail the shock of the coming discovery would petrify, like the volcanic eruption that preserved Pompeii). “What’s going on? You can tell me.”
Olivia slid a bottle back, looked at me for a moment, then pulled out another.
“How did he know? Now I understand it had something to do with the awareness that comes with the Gift, which is what I’m getting to, but at the time I chalked it up to our closeness. That was probably part of it, too.”
We were veering into the weird shit. I tried to lock all the muscles in my face and keep my skepticism from seeping out.
“The other day I froze up when you asked about him. The truth is, his role in my life has been enormous. He listened patiently as I laid it all out for him, the bleakness of my future, the morbidity of my thoughts.”
When she was done, Eugen said he wanted to show her something. “Look, I can help you. What I’m about to tell you is going to make you think I’ve lost my mind—I know because I’ve been there—so I need to show you something first. Don’t scream.”
He pulled out his hunting knife and ran it across his wrist. She managed to obey him and keep quiet as he moved his arm closer to her. The wound was a good four inches long, and the tissue underneath was purple-black.
“It took a second for me to realize there was no blood. But before I could remark on this came the truly bizarre part: the wound closed, like a tent zipped from the inside.”
The cellar lights—casting us in gentle orange from udon-thick tungsten—shut off now that we’d been holding still too long for the motion sensor to pick us up. We were left in the faint red of the security system’s LEDs. Everything but Olivia’s face, which was closer to the keypad, was just barely perceptible, but she continued her story as if nothing had happened and kept on pulling out bottles and examining their labels in the dark. I’d lost control of my face and hoped I at least had enough cover to hide my dropping jaw.
“He explained the Gift to me then in rather vague terms. Had he not just shown me his arm, I wouldn’t have believed him at all. He was being oddly circumspect, but I learned later that he was simply putting things the best way I could understand them, what I’m trying to do with you now. I came away with this impression, which was ultimately correct: The Gifted are an ancient society of the world’s most intelligent and talented individuals, all working to bring about the evolution of humanity to something better, stronger. With technology developed over millennia, they had unlocked the full potential of their bodies and minds, allowing them to do seemingly impossible things. He saw my promise, and he was willing to give it to me, if I wanted it. He told me that there were risks: Some didn’t have the right constitution for it and didn’t survive. And even if it worked, there were side effects, prohibitions, and a strict diet. Should I want to proceed, he’d still need approval, which is why we planned our trip to Greece.”
So it was some kind of self-improvement tech cult, I thought. Eugen had never seemed particularly spiritual, but his fierce privacy meant anything was possible.
