Garcia's Heart (32 page)

“Hello, Birgita.”

 

FOURTEEN

Patrick sat up on the edge of the bed, a balancing act, and not one well-recommended after a night of too little sleep and with a hangover imposing martial law. Off to one side, a series of red lines hovering above the bedside table organized into different shapes, then numerals, and finally, a time. He should sleep but his feet were already on the floor, taking him now to the washroom and then back again. Not even a promise of morning outside. Den Haag slept in the grid of lights; administrative dreams, banker's dreams, dreams of people who wanted to go home. He couldn't remember what he dreamt, if he dreamt anything. Even though he could tell the bed was empty when he awoke, he still put out a hand, ran it over the sheets, just to make sure she wasn't there before turning on the light. The light stung when he snapped it on. The bed was empty.

After a couple of drinks in the hotel bar, Birgita had come up to the room under the mutual pretence of seeing the view. The view mustn't have been all that captivating, for he came
out of the washroom to find her thumbing through his copy of
Moby-Dick
that had been sitting on the undersized desk near the window. She'd read it too, in school; it was apparently widely admired in Holland, where, he supposed, the thought of nautical catastrophe coming from something other than the sea itself was a distinct novelty. She told him she'd never seen anyone read it who wasn't doing it as part of a school assignment.

“You've made a lot of notes,” she said, the pages fanning from her thumb.

“They're not mine. It belonged to a friend.”

He turned on some music, and they sat and talked some more about how long Birgita was going to stay in Den Haag. She had plans to travel that were just vague enough to depress Patrick. They drank a few shrunken bottles of an unrecognizable single malt whisky (C15.50) and ate pistachios (C6.25) and rolled around in a proto-coital haze for the longest time before he got up to search the room for a switch to turn off the lights, so as not to feel like the Phantom of the Opera with his half-mangled face. Any qualms were dissolved by the scotch and a remembered list of slights and oppressors: Celia's hostility, Heather's abandonment. Even Hernan made an appearance, Fernandez in tow, then di Costini and Lindbergh, along with Roberto's fist. A Mardi Gras parade of rationalizations.

He felt he understood her–it was something he'd sensed in the bar of the Hotel Metropole, nurtured on their way up to the sixteenth floor: Birgita was lonely. Birgita–just another person putting in their time working in Den Haag, lonely enough to wander around the museums on the weekend or take in the kitsch aesthetic at Scheveningen. Lonely enough
to make their way over to the bar of the Hotel Metropole on a Friday night. As lonely as he was. The loneliness wasn't sad or poignant, but it defined her to Patrick, so that when she slipped her sweater over her head, arms held up in mid-undress, making the shape of a victory V tilting one way, and then the other, she wasn't Birgita at all as much as a lonely woman undressing in front of a lonely man.

She pushed him back on the bed and giggled. They were refugees, come all the way to the same room at the Hotel Metropole in Den Haag, here to witness terrible things that normal people did. He kissed her on the neck and felt the weight of her on him and it seemed like the overture to nothing more than a few hours of comradely solace, something diverting and sustaining at the same time. He imagined trysts in the darkened recesses of London tube stations during the Blitz, the expressions of mutual need, the solidarity of loneliness.

But after that, as she swivelled her shoulders out of the last of her clothes and they were both naked for the first time, Birgita didn't look lonely any more. She smiled and the whole nature of her smile was different and although it was dark and he'd had some scotch, he could see it wasn't a look of loneliness or commiseration or even appetite. It was pity.

She was being
nice
. It angered him in the most invigorating way. He hadn't realized it at first, but thinking of Birgita as some sort of kindred spirit and having images of her lonely life spool out in front of him as she came close
was
too sad and poignant. But then the look on her face turned into an insult, and she was different now.

Birgita, touching her; all he could think about was how anger freed him. It changed the way he thought of her, his intent, his desire, and yet she was still there, oblivious to what had just happened inside him. He kissed her and searched her face for further traces of pity. He found it, or imagined it there enough that he could feel what he needed to feel. Patrick wanted to put on the light again, to see her face more clearly. But other thoughts came to him, first in slow sequence but soon a torrent. Patrick imagined Hernan in that room at Lepaterique, trying to understand what he saw when he looked into the eyes of the detainees. Fernandez's eyes. What was his intent? Was it a type of love that Hernan felt bringing them back from death, or the opposite? He had watched Hernan tend to a dying man, nothing that he'd witnessed had changed, and yet what Patrick had once found heroic now terrified him.

A stab of pain in his head made him wince. He squinted at Birgita as it passed and in the gloom she looked beautiful again, she was Birgita again, and nothing was complicated. Fernandez had vanished and any pity he'd seen on her face, if it had been there at all, was a memory. He apologized. He was a little messed up, he said.

Birgita was gone now. She must have left sometime in the night. He could see her in her apartment, making toast for herself and maybe thinking she should have stayed home last night. Maybe she would speak to her mother or one of her brothers but she wouldn't say a word about how she'd spent her evening.

He opened his computer to find remarkably few messages in his inbox. Nothing from Sanjay. One message from
Marc-André. This was good, he thought, looking at the empty space, maybe Sanjay had figured it out, after all.

It was like speaking to children, and the only comfort, until now, was that his colleagues lacked the sophistication to be devious. Over and over, he had explained to them it was a
matter of analyzing the data. The answer was there, they just needed a little time and expertise to find it. He wondered if Bancroft was trying to coax Sanjay through it, a new-age
sensei
letting his young ward find his confidence in the crisis. Patrick had been through moments like this, the crunch of time and numbers, and he was nostalgic for those times, when he had the information at his disposal and it was a matter of making sense of it. He could imagine an all-nighter, just him and the data, knowing something interesting would come of it, knowing he could make it work. Other than designing a study, it was the moment he enjoyed most. Surprisingly, he felt a few sparks of excitement thinking about the problems at Neuronaut, and fanned by the righteous indignation he felt at Marc-André's threats, it all amounted to something he hadn't felt in months. Neuronaut was his and his alone. They needed him. They were falling apart without him. He lay down on the bed, savouring the feeling, its warm narcotic ache. It was a melancholy he imagined only people who've fled could attest to, the reverie of exiled princes and runaways. He would help them, he told himself, as he closed his eyes and the Den Haag morning pressed him deeper into the bed. Yes, he would do the right thing. Once he had the data.

 

FIFTEEN

Patrick awoke to a room the colour of eggshells. He looked at the clock and saw it was later than he'd thought. From the vantage point of his pillow, his gaze wandered the empty room until it settled on the books on his bedside table–
Moby-Dick
on top, where Birgita had left it, as if placed there in an attempt to contain the psychic biohazard of
The Angel of Lepaterique
beneath it. He pulled out the bottom book and opened it randomly, always surprised by the density of grief inside, how every page contained its own psalm of minor catastrophes.

 

At approximately 9:30 on the evening of June 28, 1983, Lieutenant Hector Gonzalez called García into room 14 to attend to a detainee. It was García's first day at Lepaterique in more than three weeks, and log entries from various buildings at the
INDUMIL
complex suggest that it had been an exceptionally busy day. Interrogation of detainees arrested the previous night was being carried out simultaneously and García was called from one holding cell to another, often travelling between the buildings on the compound.

Hector Gonzalez–interviewed at his home in Columbia, South Carolina, five months prior to his death in 2003–had been stationed as a guard at Lepaterique since September of 1982 and recognized García from his frequent visits.

“The doctor came in and asked the guards (JLB, AH) to move back from the prisoner and he went down to his knees to look at the man–he was a boy, really–who was lying on the floor, chained by one arm to the wall. He'd been very badly beaten. His face was swollen and bloody, and his back and arms were covered in bruises. I asked the doctor if he needed anything and he said no, but could we release the man's arm from the shackle. I looked at the interrogators and they said they didn't care but none of us had the key, so it took a few minutes to get the prisoner out.

“The doctor had his bag open and he was listening to the boy's chest. The doctor turned to me and asked me to get ‘the cart' right away, so I went to building 2 where it was kept. When I got back he was pushing on the prisoner's chest and then he used the electrical paddles to shock him and I guess his heart began beating again. It took another twenty minutes for the boy to wake up and the doctor looked relieved and began packing up his equipment in that black bag of his. The interrogators were still there, I remember that. The boy, he had his hands free now, made a motion for the doctor to come closer to tell him something. He could barely speak and so the doctor put his face next to the boy's face as he whispered.

“The doctor just looked at the boy. He was shocked, you could tell. I heard the shouting. I thought it was the boy but it was the doctor. He was shouting ‘Who is this man?' and ‘I demand to know who he is.' And the interrogators took the doctor outside, it was a scene, really a scene. There was a scuffle because the doctor did not want to leave until he knew the boy's name. I had to leave soon after. I never saw either one again.”

 

With this interview, a line was drawn from the boy on the floor, José-Maria Fernandez, to Patrick Lazerenko. Even though one man was already dead and the other unaware, at least at first, they had been connected for twenty years, according to Elyse Brenman. Elyse went so far as to index her hypothesis in
The Angel of Lepaterique
: