Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) Read online

  I snuck a peek at my face and was repelled as always. Beyond my albinism, more evident than ever as I’d aged, lay my flattened nose, bulging to the sides like sewer culverts; broad volcanic stone-chiseled lips —natural on Easter Island; a humped brow; straight ghost-white hair. The years had been no kinder to my birthmark, dog-poop brown and sinister, creeping across my left cheek and down my neck like some horror film mutation.

  Love? Who could love a face like that? Who could take on the peril? I ran my finger above my right eye, along my snowbound eyebrow, Harold’s fetish. White-white. The only color I possess. I will please him, that’s what I thought. But maybe I was pleasing myself, maybe because he was something I could control.

  The elevator pinged. The doors slid open with a whisper. No one would be in the hallway. I investigated anyway, in both directions.

  The corridor, less chrome than the elevator, still existed as an abstract; not at all Victorian like the building’s façade. I could have been anywhere, maybe even Minneapolis, but not likely Bemidji. Not a scent of balsam or cedar anywhere. Still. It was Harold’s gift, apartment 13-F, part of what they called The Penthouse, my lease-to-buy the benefit of his modest estate.

  In his odd accountant’s way, Harold had given me freedom to expand yet be invisible, to come to New York and try again at the top of the world, or close to it. Yes, his death was opportune; it kept my dream alive, his sacrifice. I thanked him. But I wished he would go away, that all of the coroner’s and detective’s questions would go away, though no one could reasonably expect relief so soon after a death. A suicide.

  I listened, even for the murmur of a TV set, but by then I should have known that The Octagon condominiums were built for discretionary income and privacy. Nothing escaped. Privacy at least tranquilized.

  My key slipped fluently into the tumbler. It snapped with authority. I was in.

  In the darkness I moved effortlessly, keys to the table.

  It was just as I’d wanted and as the brochure had promised: “Floor-to-ceiling windows, where the East Side skyline hangs in your living room like a colossal urban fresco . . . Easy to reach, yet possessing a secluded character all its own.”

  I readjusted to the welcoming shadows. No need for light; I knew the studio confines edge by edge. Airtight. All atoms in place.

  Even in the shadows it had the sheen of a model apartment. No extra fuss. It had none of the flaws that those older apartments bore, none of the snoopy, small building managers or superintendents.

  Here, organized entirely by me, the walls were barren but for my college diploma, which reminded me I could do anything. All reflective surfaces, except for the windows, I’d covered or removed. Little stood on the counters — a few unlit candles, my small TV, my laptop, a textbook, the next stage of my education: Data Mining for Genomics and Proteomics: Analysis of Gene and Protein Expression Data; and a celebrity magazine or two, part of the ongoing steam-driven sector of my research, a habit I knew I’d inherited from Momma.

  Even the magazines were neatly fanned. And the simple triangular table by the high-backed chair on which my diary sat. All hygienic. Except. That damned box, the large cardboard box, still unopened. It sat to the left of the two kitchen stools. Harold’s box.

  And then there it was again, barely audible. The apartment bristled with high frequency white noise, a deep kinetic turbulence that seldom went away. No reason to be anxious. A radio tower? The city? Never mind.

  Except for my tower apartment, I’d been judicious. I’d stayed under the radar in every way. My overcoat: secondhand. A muted pickup intended to reflect cosmopolitan New York but not bring attention, bought Day One, then aged a month or had it been six weeks?

  It slipped from my shoulders to the bamboo floor, which was as tightly woven as my chest. The buttons scratched the silence. I quickly retrieved the coat and hung it up. Everything in its place.

  Too late. Particles began to move, and all the spaces between them too. As if I was slipping under water, numinescence enveloping me, my ears feeling it first, just as they always had, then those vibrations around my heart. Knowing there was a rational explanation, and rather than resist, I slid past the unopened box of Harold’s books, almost as heavy as Harold himself, and settled into the wing chair.

  I followed my breath. I focused on the diffused gemstone light radiating from my floor-to-ceiling cityscape. I ran my left palm across the chair’s scarred high back, reminding myself of my persistent intention to correct its imperfection.

  A chill in the dark apartment distracted me though every window was hermetically sealed; nothing stirred on The Octagon’s 13th floor, did it? At best I was a motionless nebulous reflection surrounded by New York’s skyline. What moved? A vardøger!

  “Ridiculous,” I said aloud. “Momma and the old witch and Sarah Pooley telling their damn spook stories. And I think of myself as a scientist!” I cracked my jaw, trying to clear my ears. Mist played around my eyes.

  But then a whirring hollow sound, possibly a man’s measured voice. Composed but taut, and garbled as if underwater: Come with me. Build the watchtower. Protect our independence. That’s what it sounded like. Blood pumping faster.

  This was not the first time I thought I’d heard or felt something in the apartment. I covered my ears. I didn’t want to breathe. But the pumping, I felt it too. Hands off ears.

  “Harold?”

  I knew it wasn’t Harold. Sounded nothing like Harold.

  That set off groaning from where my small kitchen met the living area. I waited. A cold dampness seemed to rise off the floor. I directed an ear to the pipes under the kitchen sink. The cool filtered moonlight blanketed the angles. The spaces inside the atoms appeared to rest.

  I caught my breath. I waited.

  I thought: someone needs help.

  Then, stop trying to make sense of nothing.

  I turned my head left and right. My ears began to unclog. When nothing more was spoken and nothing more converged on me, I stood and paused for a moment, waiting for my breath to fully stabilize.

  A logical explanation would reveal itself when I least expected it. Or my cursed ‘gift’ had returned. Never mind.

  Carefully I assembled the rest of my clothes as always, neatly creased in the right places and settled over the chair. I watched my naked specter move along the glass, directly to the bed and then into it. In thirty-seven minutes the extended silence reassured me, and I drifted into a steady sleep.

  ***

  The next morning I referred to research. “La Trobe University (Australia) study, 2010: Heavy coffee consumption and high stress linked to auditory hallucinations. Could also be Parkinson’s, temporal-lobe epilepsy, or hyperthyroidism.” Doubtful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The 4 PM to midnight shift was an advantage. I was lucky. In the early New York rush hour the people jockeying the streets and subways had been early to rise and therefore were empty from a full day. The winter was also an ally, as it was in Minnesota, when everyone wore hoods and stayed close to home.

  In the dusk, the restless New Yorkers, smelling mysteriously of curry, cigar or bubblegum, some of them talking to themselves, wanted only to be home or to finish their Christmas shopping. They had no interest in making eye contact with anybody. If I wore my hood, and if I was very careful not to be seen, I moved transparently through the crowds, through the rising steam, down the stairs into the bottled subway chambers, and out, with hardly a second glance from anyone.

  My legs preferred water, but maneuvering through crowds was a challenge my body could still handle because —as Harold was frequently pleased to remark— you’re so supple. So I flowed through tight places like those.

  Passing through a street vendor’s cloud of sweet warm chestnuts, I arrived, undetected and relieved, at the side entrance. I slid my security card through the slot, scrubbed my hands with hand sanitizer, and climbed the narrow, dimly-lit back staircase without touching the railings, two flights to the hallway and lab 18. Another
small victory.

  I’d avoided the day staff; most left via the elevator. The second shift was sparse —me and Elizabeth and maybe Ruchika, with her irritating disorganized space and her perpetually stained lab coats. We each had our chores and tests and privacy.

  The mice in lab 18 and the rats in lab 19 were restless until I switched off the overhead fluorescents. The glow of the under-cabinet lights seemed to relieve their agitation but I still felt it in my ears, a string of low tremors that came every night when I entered the lab. Ineffectual. Elizabeth suggested Xanax, but after all, I had a job —even if it wasn’t the one I studied for and had been promised— before they saw me that first day.

  “I’m here to see the Lab Manager, Mrs. Warring.”

  “I’m Mrs. Warring, and you are . . . ?”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Eunis, your new Research Coordinating Assistant. Good to finally meet you.”

  “You’re Eunis? From Minnesota?”

  “Yes. Is there something wrong?”

  “Aah, no. No, of course not, dear. I only wasn’t expecting you so…can you give me a minute?”

  The room immobilized. Time suspended. She’s going to take my work away!

  “I see,” I said nodding to the placard on the wall before Mrs. Warring could quit the room, “that you adhere to the state’s non-discrimination policy.”

  “Yes.” A lost look deepened in her eyes. “Yes, we do.”

  Anyway, that was then. I was moving forward, that’s what counted, and in one of the world’s greatest cities. “I have work to do,” I said aloud before catching myself. I had to stop doing that.

  Most of the racks of cages sat silent with expectation. In each cage an inbred Mus musculus or Rattus norvegicus awaited the lab’s next scheme, hoping that the night would pass them untouched, at least that’s what I suspected. But I had my orders. Twenty generations of mating brother and sister and parent until they could be regarded for most purposes as being genetically identical. Each implanted with a chip to identify them and minimize human error. All in the pursuit of health and beauty.

  My employers were studying health as a portal to beauty, which was fine for a pharmaceutical company like mine poking around for a marketing edge. But to me, one couldn’t dismiss the view that symmetric faces were preferred because symmetric stimuli of any kind were more easily processed by the visual system than their asymmetric counterparts. In other words, there was still strong evidence that beauty was, in fact, objective, and that if I could define that standard, then one day we might be able to create transcendent beauty genes.

  The lab’s husbandry staff would be in around 4AM to clean the cages, so until then I inhaled the mildly aromatic rodent urine that filled both hermetically-sealed, air-circulated rooms. I regarded the codes on my ELN, my electronic lab notebook. Cradling it, I paced back and forth between the two small connected labs.

  “Everything seems in place.”

  Without really thinking, I translated the codes of a few residents into the individual personalized names Elizabeth and I had bestowed: Stonewall Jackson, he came from the Jackson labs. Mit Romney, from MIT. Emperor Sushi, from Kyoto University. And my personal project: Sam the Shadow, the rat formerly known as 68148:

  “Wistar albino rat selected for low ambulation in a bright runway out of a dark starting box (high emotionality) (Tsukuba, 1984); shows more burrowing activity, less aggression. Breeding is difficult because of filial cannibalism.”

  Above my ELN drawer I noticed a pink note taped to the cabinet. “Sydney infirmus per measles. Need to watch her. Told David. He ok’d. Gone home. You’re on your own tonight. Maybe tomorrow too. – Eliz.”

  By 6:57 PM I had administered shots, monitored activity, and inputted the data of Elizabeth’s flock. Two of Elizabeth’s subjects raced around the perimeters of their cages squeaking hysterically —or so it seemed to me. I’d never seen them respond to the medication that way. I wished I could console them, but I had my schedule. I marked “hyperactive, disturbed” under comments and lay down the ELN, but neither subject abated until I covered each cage in the black perforated canvass that I discovered could mitigate such hyperactivity. This also relaxed me, a little.

  By 11:03 PM I’d administered to my group. I took another chew on my vending machine ham and Swiss. The lettuce was soft and didn’t tear easily.

  “Sammy,” I said to my star, now that we could have some alone time, “this is your night.” Sam the Shadow stood on his hind legs and twirled like a dog reaching for a treat. His glassy pink eyes appeared emotionless, but I knew better. I knew that research demonstrated that rats have empathy for each other, that they will go to the aid of one trapped and work to free him.

  Sam was two —almost two and a half really— old for a rat. This was his last chance. His head was particularly long, longer than the multipurpose breed Sprague Dawleys, which gave him an Edvard Munch morbidity that drew me to him in the first place.

  I checked the clock. I checked his chart. “I’ll be back and then we’ve got to go, so gather your things.”

  In the lab 18 Mouse Room the drone of the refrigerator was more apparent in the gently broken gloom. No brains needed to be cut or kept that night, no new bodies preserved. An easier night. I opened the freezer and pulled the body bag. There were a meager fourteen or fifteen, but this was the once-a-week disposal ritual.

  The dead mice clustered around each other, their carcasses frosted. Through the icy glaze their eyes opened forever.

  Elizabeth said life is one disaster after another until it isn’t. Yet she laughed and said, “Let’s go get a drink.”

  I deferred as usual.

  In the time it took to strike a match, I was angry again. There was no note, and so much of my own blank space. How could I have missed Harold’s pain?

  But I knew that I hadn’t missed it; I’d missed the depth of it. I’d been distracted, luxuriating in his adoration. Not fully believing it, but indulging in it. Perhaps denying the inevitable catastrophe that Elizabeth embraced and that Momma prophesized.

  Did he realize that I was a terrible mistake? His disturbing moods, his death, because of me? And the police with their retracted stares, though there was nothing unusual in that. Their questioning tapered off. Mine remained. The murderess Pamela Ann Wojas inhabiting a remote place in my mind.

  I carried the zip-locked bodies into the Rat Room, lay the slab of mice on the counter, and pulled the rat carcasses from their freezer. It was a heavier lot, not just because the bodies were bigger, but also because there were more of them —almost fifty that had passed their usefulness. But they had been useful. I’d covered my tracks, registered Sam as dead, “found; age determinant,” so he was mythologically a part of the coagulum.

  I pulled the cardboard bio waste box from the second shelf cabinet, unfolded it, lay both species into their disposable coffin, sealed it, and place it in the lab 19 Biological Waste freezer, to be taken off site and incinerated by a crew of which I had no knowledge. Not unlike Harold’s cremation, which, as I said, I wasn’t allowed to attend, and which, despite the Bemidji police’s conclusions, Harold’s father labeled ‘that zombie’s fault’.

  ***

  With Sam safely tucked in the locker, the chlorine attacked my eyes before I even made it to the pool. The narrow hallways, the decaying locker room with its two plastic Christmas wreaths dangling from orphaned nails, even the urine-colored light, did not alter my mindset that in coming here three times a week, I was stripping myself of accumulated weight, like barnacles, and at the same time opening myself to possibilities. Anything that dragged on me had to be constantly cut or washed away. Like pickling myself in Carver’s brine.

  Christmas was like that; something to be scrubbed away and, by all accounts, a manufactured fairytale not at all related to Jesus or his birth. Harold would not be deterred; he was naturally enthralled with Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Still, Harold hung from a rope.

  So despite its lack of charm I was grateful fo
r Natatorium Ondine, the only club that side of town open twenty-four hours with a swimming pool. Well after midnight it was always deserted except for an occasional sighting of the thin little man with the oblong head who ostensibly removed the rubber mats and squeegied the paint-blistered poolside concrete.

  The natatorium echoed and plopped, even without life. Diving in, I watched the tiny white hexagon tiles, the order and beauty below the surface. Those hexagons helped me sort the day’s discoveries, settle my thoughts and free my body; my other world. I’m okay. I will be okay. I’ll contribute someday. Be grateful, no reason to be angry. Or guilty? My mind spilled the condemnations into the pool, dispersing them.

  With long strokes, I tested myself to reach the far side without air. It was meditative, a place where I could reconfigure the salient lab data to my own work. For instance, mice and humans shared virtually the same set of genes; 3.1 billion base pairs. Though the DNA coding and switches are vast, I already saw certain pharmaceutical combinations affect skin and hair. I noticed effects on eyes and teeth. I watched our computers synthesize the genetic data, and the pool allowed me to savor those small insights and store them. I was on the right track.

  Yet as the water streamed across my shoulders, my torso, my legs, I questioned if the harmonious face, rather than being purely genetic code, was also due to a lack of stressors during development. If that was so, it rendered my work useless. I’d assumed there was a quantifiable nexus.

  I stroked. I glided. I accepted the benefits of my lab work. I reminded myself that the only straight line was the one I swam, and forgave and forgave and forgave.

  ***

  My key slipped fluently into the tumbler. In the shadows I moved effortlessly, keys to the table. The view, as ever, was magnificent.

  I lifted Sam into his cage by the kitchen sink and the apartment door latched shut. Like so many other late nights coming from the lab, exhaustion crept back into my bones. A gauzy gibbering began —at first almost indiscernible— perhaps from the refrigerator or the entryway, perhaps next door, I wasn’t sure. The sound plugged my ears and pulsed sluggishly through my chest. All I wanted was to sleep.