Here & There (47 page)

In the middle of the pipe, the metal wall had swollen up like a blister and then split open. “Yep. Doesn’t look like much but ya gotta figure, ya got aroun’ a maximum of five gpm, gallon ’puh minute, in
a typical one-half-inch supply pipe. Let’s figure since the wuh’tah’s squirtin’ out the slit theh’, it’s flowing at roughly three gpm. One gallon’s roughly .13 cubic feet. So ya got three gpm fuh sixty minutes an ow-ah, fuh eight ow-ahs, that’s around 192 cubic feet of wuh-tah. And as you can see, 192 cubic feet can easily covuh 2300 squ-eh foot with one inch of wuh-tah.”

“Is this normal?” Eve shouts.

“Oh, shew-uh. This saw-tah thing happens all the time. Although mostly during the wint-ah. Pipes freezing and whatnot. Actually it is pretty unusual fo’ah the pipes ta blis’tah open like this in the summ’ah. But ya know, these colonial houses, all ov’ah the East Side, they gotta lot of old pipes that have all been jerry-rigged togeth’uh over the ye-uhs. Maybe somehow it got real cold in the wall between this room and yaw husband’s office.”

“Ok, but now it is all fixed. How much longer for your pump to finish emptying out my basement?”

“Oh, I haven’t fixed it yet.”

Eve throws Butch a quizzical look. “What?”

“I mean, I turned off the wuh-tah and, well,” he gestures at the pipe in her hand, “removed the busted section. But I needed to ask you what kind of pipe you want me to put in.”

Eve wrinkles her brow at him, confused. “Why would I care? Whatever pipe is necessary.” The annoyance in Eve’s tone is discernible even above the din of the machine.

As confused as Eve was at Butch asking for her pipe preference, Butch is even more perplexed that Eve wouldn’t have an opinion on this. “Well, I can go one of two ways, cah-puh or plastic.”

Eve cuts him off. “Which one is cheaper?”

“Well, that’d be plastic.”

“Done.” Eve starts up the stairs.

“Cah-puh isn’t that much more, though. And in the long run, it’ll actually cost you less—”

“I don’t particularly care about the long run. I care about being able to wash clothes today. In a dry basement. Will I be able to do that?” Eve turns and hands Butch the busted pipe, crossing her arms.

“Most of the wuh-tah should be out in few ow-uhs. Should be safe to run your wash-uh by then.”

“I look forward to—”

The scream comes from above, clearly discernible over the noise of Butch’s pump. As is the subsequent metallic clatter. Eve is halfway up the stairs before the high-pitched cry stops.

Otto stands in the middle of the kitchen, wailing, holding his right hand in front of his mouth. Eve races in and slips, almost taking a bad spill, but somehow manages to catch herself on the countertop. She moves to her crying son.

The kitchen floor is covered with water. The empty pot lies on its side, on the floor next to a fallen stool. Hard-boiled eggs have rolled every which way. The oven timer beeps incessantly like an apathetic, needy metronome keeping the beat of chaos.

Eve squats down to Otto’s height, whispering in comforting tones, inspecting him for damage.
“Ce n’est pas grave, mon chéri. Ça va bien. Dire à maman ce qui s’est passé. Où es-tu blessé?”

Otto holds out his right hand to his mother. His fingertips are bright scarlet with mild burns.

“
Aïe!
You burned yourself.” Eve scoops him up with one arm and tenderly holds the wrist of his burnt arm with her other hand. She blows lightly on his pink fingers as she carries him to the sink. “It’s not so bad. We can fix it. We can fix it.”

Eve turns on the sink, first the cold water, then a little of the hot. After a few moments she tests the temperature with her own fingers, then leans over with Otto and gently moves his hand under the water. “There, better. No?”

Otto nods and says,
“Putain.”

Eve guffaws. “
Putain
, indeed,
mon trésor
.
Putain
indeed.”

Otto smiles.

“You burnt yourself just like
maman
. You were trying to help me with the eggs, eh? You should never play in the kitchen alone, ok?”

“I wasn’t alone,” Otto says. “Ecco was helping too.”

Eve turns and finally sees Ecco for the first time.

A quiet Ecco stands by the stove, staring at his brother, his lips pouting with sympathy.

Eve almost smiles at the attachment he has to Otto, but stops short when she notices Ecco’s arm. Just below Ecco’s elbow, a rage of white blisters boil up and blossom down the length of his arm, enveloping his tender, swollen hand, which still clutches a steaming, hard-boiled egg.

Otto smiles at Ecco who laughs back at his brother.

Eve’s eyes widen with fear and she stutters into motion, moving toward Ecco, then stopping, then back to the sink.

She sits Otto on the counter, making him continue to hold his hand under the water.

She grabs a dishtowel off the counter and tosses it into the sink.

She moves over to Ecco as quickly as she can on the slippery floor. In a panic, she’s at a loss for what to do next. Presumably trying to figure out how to touch him without hurting him. Water vapor condenses in air, like smoke, around the hard-boiled egg still in his grasp.

“Lâche prise. Lâche prise. Let go! Dépose l’oeuf.”
Eve half grabs, half smacks the egg out of Ecco’s hand.

It cracks a little and rolls.

Eve gingerly picks Ecco up and carries him to the sink. She blows on his arm but can only manage a suspiration, daunted by the violent topographical eruptions along his arm. She leans over the sink and puts Ecco’s arm below Otto’s fingers in the rush of water.

Eve takes the now-soaked dishtowel and gently wraps it around Ecco’s arm.

Ecco doesn’t scream out. He doesn’t flinch. He just watches his mother’s barely controlled panic and his brother’s pain.

Eve soaks another dishtowel and wraps it around Otto’s hand.

Never pausing, Eve moves on through her improvised triage tactics, snatches her car keys off the counter, and scoops up both boys from the sink. She rushes down the hall and out the front door.

Butch stands at the top of the basement stairwell, still clutching the busted piece of pipe. “I’ll uh clean everything up. Don’t you worry ’bout nothin’. I’ll do cah-puh, for the plastic price too.”
*

*
Pain is a remarkable creature. It’s a living, breathing, starving brute. The neuroscientists got it all wrong. They’ve tried to sterilize it, reduce it to mere electrical signals that leap from synapse to synapse, leaving a trail of lit-up neurotransmitters in its wake. An impression, a trick of the mind, a holographic warning system honed by evolution. It isn’t that at all. Pain has a life of its own. It is an unrelenting hunter that tracks the slightest scent of vulnerability. Stalking it along the spinal cord, burrowing into the soft wrinkled caverns of our mind. And once inside, it shreds everything it can get its talons on. It digs in and takes over. Hijacks the entire consciousness.

All anybody can do is run and leave behind a trail of scorched earth. Ask any torture victim, they all describe the same thing, a retreating into themselves, disappearing into their minds. But they’re not retreating, not really. They’re hiding. Fleeing its pursuit.

On the plus side, you’re never lonely when you’re in pain.

Bertram kicked his heel at the ground in front of the bench. An indentation started to form in the packed dirt.

I didn’t want to push him. Didn’t want to put his back against a wall . . . or a cliff.

He had been silent ever since uttering the word
accident
. It was an abrupt silence, one that had lain in wait until midstory to pounce. And now Bertram was wrestling with his doubt. The narrative up until then had still been safe—plausible deniability within a mundane
occurrence. He knew I already knew about the hospital and about the accident.

I just didn’t know
what
had happened. Even that seemed somewhat moot. He had to imagine I’d probably either have or be able to access the nanobot footage.

But there was something else at the hospital, outside of the Department’s reach.

All his and Clyde’s precautions, cloak-and-dagger feints, raptor watches, and it still came down to trust. Did Bertram trust me?

Almost as if reading my thoughts, Bertram cocked his head at me, squinting one eye against the sun while measuring me with the other. “You know on the other side of the island, there’s a second lighthouse? It’s older than this one, though only by a few years. It’s the third iteration of the North Lighthouse. The first two were washed out to sea.”

“Neptune has a sense of irony, apparently.”

Bertram nodded. Not at my comment, but at something that was said in whatever internal dialogue was taking place in his head. “Not too far from it, just to the west of Corn Neck Road, there’s an old labyrinth in a field. It’s called the Sacred Labyrinth. Most people never even see it on their way to the North Light. I only found it because a local at the bar told me about it one night. Drew me a map on a napkin.”

“He gave you a mapkin.”

“Mapkin. Yeah. I like that. It’s a quirky little place. Just some ruts dug into the earth, lyed over, I assume. Maybe just worn down by walkers. On the far end of it there are even these little human-head sculptures. Like some little weird Easter Island. Anyway, you just start out at the entrance, wind your way along the path, around and around, until you reach the center. Then you unwind your way back out. No twists, no turns, no puzzle. It’s just one path. It’s not a maze, just a labyrinth.”

“They’re not the same?”

“That’s what I thought too. Most people think that maze and labyrinth are synonymous. Fact is, a maze is what you and I were imagining, a complex branching, multicursal puzzle. Dead ends, wrong turns, et cetera. Labyrinths only have a single, nonbranching path. Unicursal. Its ‘solution’ is unambiguous. There’s only one option, one answer. Labyrinths were never designed to confuse people or get them lost, on the contrary they’re a way for people to find themselves. They were constructed for meditation. A pattern. A path. A ritual.”

“I blame Daedalus for the confusion. I think he designed the famous one on Crete. To trap and hide away the Minotaur.”

Once again, Bertram seemed not to hear me. At least there was no outward acknowledgment. He spoke, but it felt more like I was merely being let in, allowed to listen to a private conversation he was having elsewhere. “Around the same time that the Greek labyrinth showed up, a topologically identical pattern appeared in Native American culture. The Tohono O’odham labyrinth. Where I’itoi lay in wait by the entrance.”

“I’itoi?”

“The Man in the Maze. The mischievous creator god. It was an identical pattern but for two differences, a radial design and the entrance at the top.”

“Coincidental maybe?”

Bertram kicked a second divot into the dirt with his other heel. Identical indentations. “Halfway around the planet, well before transoceanic ships were built, before global trade routes had been established, and this design surfaces in two disparate cultures. This same pattern.”

“Maybe it’s just some deep-rooted mode of thinking. Like our disgust reflex or our fear of snakes,” I suggested.

“Maybe.” He finished with his divots and stared out at the ocean. The breeze was picking up. “It was quaint, the labyrinth. Sort
of pleasant to walk it, not think about my direction, just follow the path. I can see how it’d help some to meditate.”

“Not you, though?”

Bertram shook his head. “No. Problem is, you have to follow that same path out, and it leaves you right where you started. Standing with I’itoi at the entrance. You still have to figure out where to go next for yourself.”

Bertram looked at me, sort of half smiled, and sighed. He went on with his story.

After several hours, Ecco seemed to be stable. No reaction to the tetanus. The doctors hypothesized that in spite of the boys’ identical appearance, perhaps they were in fact fraternal twins, each with a unique genetic makeup. Or somehow, Ecco had developed a mutation in the second or third trimester. One even posited the supposed allergy could have been misremembered or even fabricated as a result of Eve’s concussion.

Surprisingly, the better Ecco turned out, the worse Eve got. Perhaps her mild concussion wasn’t so mild. She became increasingly irritated, aggressive. After two hours, Eve was glaring at the boys, muttering to herself in French.

Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien. Il n’est pas le mien.

Bertram grew concerned. He took the boys for a stroll to see if that calmed her down. Left them to play again by the nurses’ station.

She wasn’t better when he returned. He tried to soothe her. He held her hand. Told her she was fine. The boys were fine. Ecco was ok.

That’s when Eve snapped out of it. She grabbed Bertram’s hand back, looked him in the eyes.

No, he’s not. He’s not ok. He’s not real. He’s twilight. An
etiäinen,
a
vardøger,
a
ka,
a
doppelgänger.

Bertram brushed past her haunting accusations. Reassured her that her twins were just that, twins. She had two beautiful twin boys.

Il n’est pas le mien.
Eve hissed.
He is not mine. He’s a facsimile. An empty copy. Un imposteur.

Bertram immediately ordered an MRI.

That’s how he found Eve’s brain tumor.

Later that evening, when Kerek finally arrived, Bertram broke the news to him. He first assured him that the boys were fine. Ecco would most likely have some scarring, but no nerve damage. Neither they, nor Eve, suffered any sort of severe injury. But Kerek saw something deeper and darker was amiss for Bertram; he read it in his enervated body language, his beleaguered voice, his tensed jaw.

Bertram sighed and slipped into the safety of a clinical tone. He explained how Eve’s erratic behavior had concerned him and the other doctors, especially considering that she had sustained a concussion. They gave her an MRI. They found a mass. It was growing deep inside of her temporal lobe, where the temporal cortex bordered the limbic system.