Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (8 page)

              Louis hid the book in the top of a hole of the neighbor’s tree that he blocked with a false overhead and buried thirty kilos of currency, three million dollars. He made a copy of the memory card with photos of the book in the girls’ computer, in an encrypted folder. He peeked in on the sleeping girls and wanted to kiss them on the forehead, but he couldn’t awaken them. He gritted his teeth and left the house, leaving behind a letter thanking them for taking him in but without explaining his departure nor promising to return at some future Christmas.

              Under his clothes, he had wrapped his arms with multiple layers of aluminum foil to block potential signals from the radio that had been implanted in him. Since he couldn’t do it alone, he’d convinced the younger girl to play Star Wars with him and had asked her to help disguise him as a robot. The youngster hadn’t hesitated a second, until they were discovered by her mother, who, smiling, scolded them both, “Time for bed, you’ve cost me a roll of aluminum foil, your rascals. Everyone, to bed.” Louis felt that, in some way, she had adopted him. He had his late biological parents, his true parents, and now American parents. But he hadn’t used just one whole roll of aluminum foil. He’d used seven of the ten they’d bought. Underneath the frugal clothes the Americans had offered him was a true sheet of metal armor. Perhaps that way he might be able to isolate the signal from the microelectronic tracker they’d injected in his shoulder.

              He visited the Interpol website and discovered there was an international arrest warrant for him for murdering two men and a woman. Lucas selected the route for his flight on the Internet. He wouldn’t go by bus or on foot along the highway since the police could easily spot him. He’d go by train. The railroad line traversed a forest, snaking through uninhabited areas. Louis Marcé had become an expert in escapes. He’d walk to the train station following the tracks. Not to the closest station, but to one farther away. At first, he tried adjusting his steps to the crossties, but walking one by one was too close and every other one too far apart. He gave up trying to find an easy pace and accepted the irregularity of his march. After all, he wasn’t a train and that was a railroad, not a stroll down a Lisbon avenue. Along the way, he discovered a regular pattern in the irregularity of his steps.                           

Part Two

Unexpected Progress on Violet Street

Chapter 8

The Improbable Professor Crane

During the Christmas season, in the city of Columbia’s wealthy neighborhoods, the houses looked like they came straight out of a Disney film. The lights in the yards and on the houses had gotten better over the past few years. Sparkling lights, Christmas trees, reindeer, presents, Santa Claus, elves, all flashing in the spell of the twilight hours that foretold the coming of night. At times as softly as the silver of the moon, at others like the clear gold of the sun, or a blue flame from the tip of a Bunsen burner. There seemed to be a competition to see who had the most fantastic yard.

              Unlike in Sofia’s neighborhood, the homes here were true mansions, be they sprawling in lush lawns that extended to the asphalt streets, dispensing with sidewalks, or hidden amongst the groves.
They’re beautiful at dusk.

              Sofia had just noticed the strange but elegant dark mini van parked on the entry, when two white biological hazard transport trucks passed by her and entered the property. Her friend Mariah’s abode was large, like all the others. From the highway, it looked like a Swiss chalet with only two stories, but it then descended some three floors in terraces to the docks and the lake on the lot. It was difficult to see in all the vegetation because it was integrated into the hill like some cabins are fused into thickets in the forest. It had intermediary levels, asymmetrical, seeming a little disjointed. It was strange in this way, but, principally, it was exotic, almost eccentric, at night because the lit floor slowly changed positions, in an endless ballet. The interior was no less surprising. Mariah had told her that it was designed by a NASA engineer, Prof. Crane, as if it were floating in space. “He designed it from the inside out, from a three dimensional simulation of the dweller’s visual field.”  The compartments were organically linked together, without initially taking the exterior appearance or optimizing external space into consideration. The bedrooms and living rooms were spread about several levels without being in harmony with classical divisions between floors. The first two stories that faced the street, looking out on the dock anchored in the lake, were almost fixed, but the two in the middle moved freely. To reduce the number of steps between floors and divisions, the intermediate levels moved when someone entered. Domotics detected the person’s entrance, velocity and direction, and the hydraulic system made the compartments move up or down in order to diminish the gaps, thus, the number of steps they’d have to make. Since few people lived in the house and most of them habitually made predictable trajectories at specific times of day, the system optimized their movements. Seen from within, the house seemed to have been developed in low plateaus. As the house had a lot of wood, the mechanism was not perfectly silent only because it creaked but even this had its pleasant side.

              In the beginning, Mariah’s father had not realized this system would have an advantage.
Do you really want me to live in some kind of an extra large elevator?
But after being constructed, that advantage became evident. The house was more comfortable because the flights of stairs were smaller and its movements were barely noticeable since they took place before you got to the stairs for the floor being adjusted. With the interior designed by Crane, an architect projected the house’s external casing, as well as the nearby spaces of the yard. This, despite also changing position in relation to ground level, moved much less, with there being a differential between the two that was noticeable mostly in the windows. The external windows, even though open, had to discretely oscillate up and down. In the dark, the illuminated windows and its external casing’s slow dance, as well as the nearby gardens, implanted with mobile terraces, engendered a silent ballet, as if the house were alive and was preparing itself to leave the lot and venture forth.

              When Sofia arrived, the gate was open as always and, having barely passed through it, she heard her name shouted.

              “Sofia Suren, Sofia Suren, I’m here,” waved Mariah, effusively.

              Sofia did not like her best friend calling her by her last name. The only person, besides Mariah Dexter, who called her that was her paternal grandmother. Running to her friend, who was like a sister, appealed to her, but she did not do so.

              “Hello, how’s everything?”

              “Well,” her friend answered.

              The smiling Mariah was as blonde as the summer and her eyes were clear like honesty when truth is a simple thing. She was one of those people who always wake up happy in the morning.

              “Have you seen the sky?” Mariah continued. “It’s incredible today. I just saw two shooting stars, parallel to each other.”

              “Where?”

              “Over there,” Mariah pointed to the north.

              “I didn’t see it,” Sofia complained, looking at the celestial vault. “Look, a satellite.”

              “Did you know there’s a lot of garbage in orbit, satellites that don’t work, rocket parts, loose pieces?” Mariah asked.

              “I know. They’re a danger for the new space station. I don’t see how the old one lasted so long. Whose car’s that? The huge one?” Sofia asked, approaching the black shining and polished seven-seat van of unknown brand in front of the house, looking as it had just landed from the future. “Is it yours?”

              “No. It belongs to my Uncle Crane,” Mariah explained. “It’s a prototype. They gave it to him to test in Florida’s hot climate.”

              Dr. Crane spent so much time in South Carolina that his Florida residence was more official than real. Sofia didn’t really understand what the deal was with this uncle. At first she’d thought that he really was Mariah’s uncle, since he had similar physiognomical features.  He’d met her friend’s father in as fortuitous way as Sofia had met Mariah at the university. The chance meeting had taken place several years before, after he’d been widowed. Later, when he learned that Mariah’s father was going to build a new house, he offered to take care of the domotics and wound up designing the house at no charge. Their friendship had strengthened since then. They seemed like childhood friends. When she saw Mariah’s new house for the first time, Sofia was stupefied because it looked like it was more than a century old. The house’s exterior was designed to look old, with the wood facade coming from demolitions and scrapped vessels. Making something look old is easy, her friend had told her. Rejuvenating it is more difficult. The contrast between the aged appearance and the technological interior made the latter more unexpected. Like a century-old vintage Port wine bottle but filled with five year old Single Malt Scotch.

              Her uncle had resisted making the house look old, but later became an effervescent defender of the idea, to such an extent that architect who designed the exterior felt put off. He first suspected that the NASA geek was being sarcastic because he considered the hypothesis of NASA giving a retro aspect to the next line of space ships.

              “Well,” the architect responded, “maybe that’s more probable than convincing this neighborhood to let him build a house that looks like a spaceship.” Later, when he realized that this was not the case, he was still troubled because it looked like it had been the engineer’s idea, such was the enthusiasm with which this uncle explained it to everyone. Anthony Crane was one of a kind. “He’s a lunatic who looks like a lunatic. He exaggerates,” Sofia joked in the beginning.

              “My mother’s plastic surgeon says that he’s not a lunatic, he’s lunar,” her friend corrected.

              “It’s serious then,” thought Sofia. “He’ll only go there with a transplant.”

              “Of the brain?” Mariah asked.

              Sofia thought it was curious that the family collected half of the people they had dealt with for any length of time, for whatever reason, as friends. It was not only the house’s architect who came to visit them—in the case of the engineer, he became part of the family or they would not call him uncle—but all sorts of characters accumulated as persistent visitors, from Mariah’s mother’s plastic surgeon to the church pastor, from a pediatrician of times gone by to the fellow who’d sold them their Mercedes.

             
It’s a good thing people die. If not, in three or four hundred years, we’d have an army.
Sofia recognized some of the parked cars.
It looks like there’s a party at your house every day, from the number of cars parked out front.
Another thing that surprised her was they all had something uncommon about them. When Sofia learned that the Mercedes salesman always drove a BMW, Cadillac or a Lexus—but never a Mercedes, Mariah explained to her, quoting Crane, that “It’s good to know the enemy and even better to sell Mercedes while wanting one.”

              “It’s a type of self-inflicted suffering,” Sofia once told Uncle Crane. “A light variation of masochism in case he really wants one of the cars he sells.”

              “Not quite,” Crane opined. “Look, it’s like sports: imagine someone practicing sports four hundred years ago, tiring himself out on purpose, without needing too?”

              “To stay in shape,” she argued.

              “Well, with him, it’s the same thing. It’s a type of ‘suffering,’ as you say, but not suffering in and of itself, but with an objective—that of wanting one of those cars in order to more effectively sell that desire.”

              The pastor, for example, spent his time questioning the existence of God out loud. “He’s making us look for the reasons for our faith,” she said to her friend. Sofia also repeated her paternal grandmother’s ideas from time to time, but people didn’t know that. It was her secret, something intimate. Sofia valued humanity in the abstract humanist sense. She recognized with some perplexity, and perhaps benign jealousy, that the Dexters liked concrete people. Her friend’s family was humanist in the idealist sense of choosing mankind first, but, well beyond this, they were fond of real physical people, their neighbors, their colleagues, common people they crossed paths with on the streets or who appeared on television.

              Sofia Suren had inherited from her Iranian grandmother not only her last name, which her grandfather had courageously adopted to keep such a distinctive name from dying out. She’d also inherited her straight hair, thick but loose, opaque and shiny, black like the winter. On her white skin, the contrast of those bright strands made her look like a live painting, a three dimensional picture. She had also inherited something else: a mystery that only happened to a Suren every other generation, having to do with the rapid healing of wounds, even serious ones. Her grandmother was like that and so was she. Her pediatric surgeon did not know and was stupefied when, a month after her appendectomy, he couldn’t find a scar from the operation. He doubted that she was who he’d operated on and asked her if she had a twin sister. They had to quit going to his clinic because the doctor, more and more curious, didn’t pay attention when the grandmother told him that was normal among Iranians from Tabriz, her paternal ancestors’ hometown. He wanted to send her to another hospital for exams that the doctor seemed to need more than the girl.

              Her grandmother, the last Persian in her family—her father was American—had instilled in her since she was a child the need to keep that secret: she was the descendent of princes, not a circus performer to be passed from one carnival to the next or to feed the curiosity of the “gods in white.” Her mother was descended from Italians from Venice and Siena, Goths like only Goths can be.

              Mariah, transparent and surprising like a diamond, seemed to have no secrets. She repeated family friends’ phrases with apparent innocence and named them as if they were authors. She overflowed with spontaneous joy, frequently aroused by small, apparently common things. But what impressed Sofia the most was that this happiness went beyond simple individual contentment. It was contagious, a transfusion of happiness for others. Indeed, not only was it her friend who provoked this effect—her father was even more so. The attention with which Mariah’s father honored people was so special that it built up the self-esteem of those who spoke with him.

              Anthony Crane could still be seen as an author. He was a brilliant figure, an odd star, so much so that Sofia didn’t truly understand his closeness to that family and, despite being financially comfortable, did not belong to the jet set in which the professor moved. Doctor Crane, fifty-eight, a graduate in hospital architecture, spent his younger years designing surgical centers. Later, he volunteered for military service and, afterwards, decided to dedicate himself to engineering life support systems.  It was through this competency that he arrived at the American space agency.             

              He had been one of the critics of both the Americans’ and the Russians’ inability to integrate the needs of pure and simple engineering with human nature in the old ISS, the first International Space Station. That transformed it into a spider’s web of cables, monitors, keyboards, and the like invading the areas where six people lived, with almost no windows to peer out—at least until 2010, the point at which they received a window facing the earth and a passenger compartment so they would no longer have to sleep among the electric cables.