The Golem of Paris (27 page)

•   •   •

“M
Y PRIMARY PASSION
,” Tremsin says, “is the relationship between brain chemistry and truth. What is the physical mechanism for deception? Can we locate it in space? In time?”

A steel bracket, a quarter sphere like an orange slice sucked to the peel, is latched across her head. A second bracket secures her chin.

“To understand these processes is of the utmost importance.”

The gurney has been partially raised, the wheels locked. Leather straps fix her limbs; a wide leather belt across her waist, pliable from countless bucklings and unbucklings, straining and sweating, blood.

“A pill that opens the innermost chambers of the human heart . . . You might call it the Holy Grail.”

The tall orderly has left, and now Tremsin stands at the sink, twisting at his ring.

It won’t come off. He spits on his finger and it slides loose. He sets it on the counter with a clack, turns on the water, and begins lavishly soaping his hands.

“I’ll be honest: at first, I was not terribly thrilled at the notion of coming to Czechoslovakia. The most exciting work is being done back home. Already I had found success far beyond what we had achieved with sodium pentothal, which, frankly, I’ve never trusted.”

Tremsin wrings his hands out, opens a plywood cabinet, finds a needle and a syringe. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a halfway decent bathhouse in Prague? I’ll tell you. It’s not difficult at all. It’s impossible. There are none.”

He screws the needle onto the syringe.

“In a certain sense, though, the atmosphere here is more intellectually open than in Moscow. One is freer to take risks, to make mistakes and learn from them.”

He cranes back, smiles. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

From the cabinet, he takes a vial containing an amber liquid. “To lie successfully involves many complex and often competing calculations. What do I know? What does my interlocutor know? What does he know I know, and what do each of us not know?”

Tears run from the outside corners of her eyes, collect inside her ears; she is crying backward.

“Don’t look so glum. As I said, your case presents a rare opportunity. You’re advancing the cause of science. You should feel proud.” Tremsin holds up the notebook. “And flattered. I’m dedicating a whole lab book, a fresh one, just to you.”

He opens the book, slashes lines. “The third of November. Patient number—ah, but you haven’t got one yet, have you? We’ll fix that. For the time being, though . . . ‘A-me-ri-can.’ There. That suits you. Diagnosis: sluggish schizophrenia, distinguished by an exceptionally pronounced systematic delusion. I’ll fill in the details later. We don’t have a minute to lose. Haloperidol—”

He stops writing and peers at her. “Please try to relax. Can’t you see how agitated you are? That’s the first obstacle.”

He stabs the needle into the vial, draws up a nauseating quantity. He flicks the syringe, holds it to the light, squirts a tiny bit back into the vial. “Let’s say thirty milligrams. We’ll start there and see how it goes.”

He folds her gown over her stomach and crushes a handful of thigh.

The needle bores to the bone.

A freezing cavity blooms.

Her spasms loosen the rags in her mouth. Tenderly he tucks them back in, then begins unbuckling his own trousers, pausing to turn the wheel beneath the gurney, lowering it to a more manageable height.

“I’m sorry about the discomfort,” he says. He unbuttons his fly. “It has to deliver deep into the muscle to be effective.”

His words are water through a sieve, the holes expanding.

and now

how

do

you

feel

•   •   •

“S
ISTER
.”

She is nothing.

“Sister. Can you hear me?”

Her tongue flopped out, rancid air.

“Here. Over here. Look.”

A white flutter at her periphery.

“Take it, please. You’ve made a little mess.”

It’s true. Bina can smell it.

“Sister—”

“Shut up, Majka.”

“They’ll punish her for soiling herself.”

“Then they’ll punish her.”

“All right, sister,” Majka says. “I’ll leave it here for you. When you can.”

“Shut,” the second voice says, “your idiot mouth
.
”

Hours pass. Bina finds that she can make the world stand still by bearing down. She lies in something like an outsize chicken coop, a bed with wire walls and a wire roof and a rusty padlock. The room is just big enough to hold four such cages, two on each wall, set end to end. A cuboid window opaque with dirt beats back the light.

“You’re awake.”

Through two layers of wire, bright blue eyes search her; a sharp,
sad smile. “Let’s not wake them, eh? Fat Irena is a bitch and she’s worse when she’s tired. Can you reach the paper?”

A scrap, crumpled and stuffed into the three-inch gap between their cages. Bina tries to pluck at it, but her unhinged fingers dislodge it and it spirals to the floor.

“Don’t worry. Let’s try again. What I’m going to do is make a baton. Okay? I’m rolling it up, and you take it. Can you take it? Don’t fall asleep on me, now.”

The paper noses its way into her cage. Bina’s hand sways in midair.

“Almost there. A little to the left . . . Now take it.”

Bina scissors the paper between her pinkie and her ring finger, and it unfurls, revealing the masthead of
Práce
, the trade union daily.

Majka laughs softly. “All it’s good for. Go on, clean yourself up . . . Good. Showers are in three days, that’s not so bad. It’s on your back. Can you—you can’t reach it, that’s all right, don’t worry about it. It’s just a small . . . They won’t notice. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I’m glad you’re here. I can see you’ve had a tough time. You’ve been to see Doktor Tremsin. It won’t last forever. It happens with new patients. He might play favorites for a week or two. At some point, he’ll get bored of you. What did they bring you in for? Better yet, don’t tell me. We’ll talk later, when you’ve had a chance to rest. They’ll be coming in to wake us before you know it. Try to gather your strength.”

Exhausted, Bina lets the shit-smeared paper drop from her hand. She can hear Majka bedding down a few inches away, a comforting sound soon overtaken.

•   •   •

F
OR HER SECOND TREATMENT
, Tremsin announces that he is considering reducing the dosage.

“Your file lists you at fifty-eight kilograms. I gather that was true at admission, but it is no longer so, since the file further indicates that you have all but refused to eat. I can count your ribs. Nutrition is essential for rehabilitation.”

A single wooden bowl of vegetable stew, brought at dawn by a nurse. No utensils provided—
We might hurt ourselves
Majka whispered, winking—so they sat on the floor, a few feet from the overflowing Turkish toilet, passing the bowl around the circle, scooping up the thin liquid with their unwashed hands. Bina couldn’t sit up, let alone feed herself; Majka did it for her. Fat Irena got the final handful. Olga grumbled that she always got the final handful, and Fat Irena said
In your ass
and then they went at each other as the nurse wearily blew her whistle.

“For the moment,” Tremsin says, “the important thing is to get a new and accurate measurement. I ask that you please step on the scale.”

It wasn’t an ordinary fight between women. They were vicious as wolves. Olga’s ear disappeared into Fat Irena’s mouth, and Bina could feel the crunch in her own teeth.

“The patient,” Tremsin says, “will stand on the scale.”

What he perceives as defiance is in fact inability: Bina’s legs cannot bear weight.

She thinks of her parents, alive in body but not in spirit.

There are many kinds of survival, not all equal.

She raises her head, seizes control of her tongue.

“I have a name.”

With satisfaction, she watches the color creep up over Tremsin’s collar, into his shapeless face.

He walks abruptly to the door, throws it open, shouting down the hall in Russian until the giant orderly appears.

“The patient will be placed on the scale,” Tremsin says.

“My name is Bina.”

The orderly dutifully hoists her out of the wheelchair.

“Bina Reich Lev.”

“The patient will stop struggling.”

“My name is Bina Reich Lev.”

“The patient will be silenced.”

She shouts once more before the orderly gets the rags into her mouth. He carries her to the scale, draping her across it so that her heels and head brush the ground.

“That’s no good. She’s half—sit her up, you imbecile.”

She flops around.

“The patient will
cease
.”

The orderly kneels, applying light pressure to her shoulders.

“Don’t make it harder,” he murmurs.

“Sit her up,” Tremsin says. “Dmitri. What are you waiting for.”

Bina stares into the orderly’s eyes. He nods.

She relaxes, allowing herself to be balanced and weighed.

“Put her on the table,” Tremsin says. “Hurry up.”

The orderly moves her to the gurney, his white face orbiting in and out of view as he straps her in. Bending to screw down the chin bracket, he whispers in her ear.

“Blink if it’s too tight.”

“
Spasiba
, Dmitri Samilovich.” Tremsin is scribbling furiously in the lab book.
“Chorosho
.
”

She blinks.

The orderly loosens the bracket a bit, bows to Tremsin, and exits.

Tremsin locks the door. “I was right,” he says.

He stabs the vial of amber liquid, draws up the syringe.

“You have slimmed down, quite a bit. However.”

He taps out air bubbles, squirts off the excess.

“Upon further consideration, given your level of agitation, I cannot help but think that it would be premature to lower your dose.”

He throws back her gown. “We’ll stay at thirty.”

T
he last thought Jacob had as the chandelier came down on him wasn’t a neat summing-up of his life. No jubilation, no regret; instead, the petty disappointment that he would die drunk, yet not drunk enough.

He thought, breathlessly, that he was still thinking.

The point of the chandelier, a spear finial aimed for his breastbone, ready to butterfly his heart, bounced twice before coming to rest a foot above him, swinging lazily.

It reminded him of something. A Foucault pendulum. He’d last seen one here, in Paris, at the Panthéon. He’d gone alone. Stacy had wanted to sleep in. That one swung from an anchor in the ceiling.

Now he gazed up the chandelier’s hollow body and saw the broken chain, stretched taut, tethered to nothingness. He felt a powerful downward wash of air; heard the effortful buzzing of wings. Against the vaulted black, he saw a black speck.

The scar on his lip was on fire.

He scratched at it, hypnotized, as the beetle began to move, towing the chandelier behind. It went up the aisle a safe distance, centered itself between the pews.

Let go.

The chandelier landed with a deafening peal, spraying marble chips, toppling to the left and crushing several seats, its graceful curves deformed, branches bent like drinking straws.

Behind the wreckage stood Mai, naked, glorious, hands on her hips. Her eyes were green tonight, her hair an untamed crown, her skin flushed red. Sweat coursed between her breasts, over her tight belly, which swelled and deflated; sweat collected between her thighs to hang in quivering droplets.

She ruefully contemplated the damage. “Whoops.”

Jacob said, “I’m sure they’ll understand.”

She grinned at him. “You always know how to cheer me up.”

He got to his feet, working a finger in his ringing ear.

Mai said, “Are you okay? Are you going to pass out?”

“. . . fine.”

“Aren’t you going to thank me?”

He ought to. She had saved his life. For a second time. The words wouldn’t come.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

She could see his aura. He had to remember that. Surely she could tell that he was angry. She might even know the specific reason, his suspicion that the chandelier hadn’t fallen on its own, but had required a bit of encouragement.

Was it ungrateful of him to wonder where she’d been thirty minutes ago, when he was being chased?

He put on a smile. “Thank you.”

“Be a gentleman,” she said. “I’m freezing.”

He stumbled over to the rack of prayer shawls, selecting one large enough to cover her to the ankles, holding it out at arm’s length as she wrapped herself.

“Just like the first time we met,” he said.

“Just as itchy.”

“And now we meet again.”

“Did you think we wouldn’t?”

He said, carefully, “I’m glad you were around.”

“Of course I’m around,” she said. “That’s what ‘forever’ means, Jacob Lev.”

Wind hammered through the broken windows.

She said, “Did you think you could get on a plane and be free of me?”

“I’m here for a case,” he said. “And I don’t want to be free of you.”

“Don’t you.”

He said, “Look, Mai. What happened, with Divya—”

“‘Happened.’ That’s an interesting way to put it. ‘Occurrences occurred.’ I like how it sounds, as if you didn’t have a choice.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Actually, you didn’t.”

“Well, I am. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes changed, became the color of lead. “Not good enough.”

“Really? Cause I was thinking we’re even, considering you tried to burn down my apartment.”

“
I
didn’t do anything.
You
passed out and left the stove on. Not my fault you drink too much.”

What was it the couples’ counselor had told him, so long ago? Find the hurt behind the anger? “I am attempting to express—”

“What you’re attempting to do, Jacob Lev, is turn it around on me.”

“I screwed up,” he said. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry. I’m a normal human male.”

“The oldest excuse,” she said. “Also the most predictable. And the worst.”

“And that justifies killing me?”

“Frankly, I think I’m being a lot nicer than a lot of women would be in my position.”

“What do you expect? I’m going to be celibate for the rest of my life?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t say no.”

“We are not having this conversation,” he said.

“And why’s that?”

Because you’re a beetle.

A monster.

A figment of my fucking imagination.

What he said was, “I barely know you.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “Ever.”

She came closer. Her face was wet and twisted. “I knew you before you knew yourself. I read the pages before they were written.”

Fear coursed through Jacob.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not prepared for . . . all I can do is say I’m sorry.”

She wiped her cheeks on the prayer shawl.

“I don’t want to fight,” he said. “It’s a nice night. We’re in Paris. Let’s try to enjoy it. Can we do that?”

“. . . all right.”

“Thank you.”

“What should we do?” she asked.

Another blast of wind; the balcony wailed.

“I’m thinking,” he said, “we might want to get out of here.”

She gave a wicked smile. “Sounds good,” she said, whipping off the shawl and tossing it in his face.

He clawed free. She’d already vanished, though.

“Mai
.
”

And suddenly she was behind him, against him, but she wasn’t a woman any longer; he felt a hard breastplate pressed to his spine and legs like iron rods lashed him, strapping him in at the shoulders, waist, thighs. He experienced a brief sensation of weightlessness, dislodged immediately by the stronger, gut-churning sensation of violent acceleration as she flew straight up, hauling him into the air.

“Mai.”

She launched forward, their flight path obvious as they leapt over the women’s-section balcony and jetted toward a stained glass panel on the left, and he curled chin to chest to avoid the debris and she lowered her horn and punched through glass and lead.

Jacob screamed.

Kept screaming as they climbed through the storm, bursting thunderheads and raging seams of light, higher and higher until the altitude left him gasping for breath.

Mai crested softly, affording him a panorama.

Paris, through patches of black velvet, a coursing circuit board, so splendid that for a moment he forgot to be terrified.

Then she dropped in, streaking toward the earth, dragging him through strata of mist, rain blistering his face, his nervous system sparking, eyelids soldered shut, lungs filling with force-fed wind, the glowing heat of reentry.

“Down.”
He was yelling so hard he could taste his lungs.
“Down.”

Undoubtedly she was getting a kick out of hearing him squeal: a little payback. He bit down hard, determined not to give her the satisfaction of making him puke.

She flattened her angle of descent and they exploded through the dark cloud underbelly, leveling off over a broad stroke of concrete: the Champs-Élysées, terminating in a luminous bull’s-eye, roundabout and spokes, the grinning Arc de Triomphe.

“No.”

She dove.

They threaded the monument and the flame of the Unknown Soldier licked his chest and he went eyeball-to-eyeball with granules of concrete before she pitched up to reascend.

“No. Mai. No.”

She took him over the rooftops, lustrous zinc tangrams, and vaulted the river.

The crown of the Eiffel Tower flashed by.

She banked hard, circling the observation deck, spiraling inward.

A warm gush of gratitude.

They were going to land.

She didn’t land.

She slingshotted out of orbit, the tower’s spire shrinking in the distance.

“Goddamn it.”

Could beetles laugh?

She zagged along the river, bouncing between the quais, leaping and ducking bridges. Jacob had given up screaming. He was beyond fear, another sensation emerging, a tautness in his groin. He felt her armor, hot as a spent casing, and he surrendered to the present and let beauty flood in: the water, daubed with lamplight, its funk in his nostrils as they dipped to skim its surface; the musical plash of
bateaux
moored till morning, when they’d fill with tourists who’d never know what the city could look like from another perspective.

She went over and back again, showing him a geometry of fantasy.

The Place de la Concorde with its whipping tentacles. The candy box that was the Jardin des Tuileries, the Louvre’s pyramids burnished like quartz. He leaned to the right and Mai understood and fulfilled his wish, the two of them rising, soaring.

He heard the sound of snapping fabric and tilted his chin down, laughing to realize he was still clutching the
tallit
in his left hand.

The river forked to accommodate two teardrops of land, the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis. Below, Notre Dame, a low-waisted stick figure basking in starlight. Mai lined up along the nave of the cathedral, shedding speed, cheating in the direction of the north tower, the air congealing around them, now water, now oil, now thick as honey, until his toes touched stone, and the constriction across his body eased.

He wobbled.

Stood.

He was soaked with sweat and rain.

He felt the
tallit
tugged from his fist
.

“Come on,” she said. She had wrapped herself in it, her eyes back to green, her amusement plain. She took his hand. “Let’s watch the sun rise.”

•   •   •

T
HEY STOOD TOGETHER
atop the north tower, fingers laced, facing east, flanked by gargoyles.

She said, “I wake up. Strange place. Strange body. I couldn’t tell you how much time has passed. I couldn’t tell you when I was last awake. I see a person. Sometimes he—it’s always a he—sometimes he’s kind. Sometimes he wants me to do horrible things. I can’t say no. He says kill and I kill.”

She sagged, hiding in her hair. “A day goes by. A year. My mind starts to clear. Fragments come back. I begin putting them together and then it all goes dark.” She paused. “It’s horrible.”

He nodded.

She said, “For the longest time, it went on like that, over and over.”

“What changed?”

“There was a woman. She gave me the body I have now.”

“Well,” he said. “If I ever run into her, I’ll thank her.”

Mai laughed softly. “It was many years ago. After she remade me, I saw my reflection and recognized myself. Even though I was new. I know it sounds strange. She did that for me.”

Jacob said, “It sounds like love.”

Mai said, “She looked like you.”

Silence.

“She set me free,” Mai said. “The tall men were furious. They hunted me, for years and years. A few times, they managed to corner me. They seemed to expect they could snap their fingers and return me to dust. But I wasn’t as malleable anymore. The woman knew me. She knew how I was supposed to be. The form she had given me, it was . . . sticky. I always got away.

“In the end, I came back on my own. To see her. I had to. Nothing else mattered.”

She could have been describing any addiction.

“She was expecting me. She’d left the garret door open. She said they had ordered her to destroy me. They threatened her. She said, ‘I’d never do that to you.’

“She showed me a jar. It looked so delicate, you can’t imagine.”

He could. He had seen one like it. More than once.

In a garret, shards.

In his apartment, intact. He used it to store sugar.

Mai said, “I did what she asked. I crawled inside. I felt so tired I could hardly move. It was like that, if she touched me, and the jar came from her hands; it had her in it.”

He made to release her fingers, but she held on tightly.

“Right now,” she said, “this is where I want to be.”

She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I broke out. It takes time, but I’ve done it, more than once. I’ll open my eyes and see light everywhere. Not a pleasant light. Sludgy, like a window that’s never been cleaned. As long as it’s there, I have the strength to kick. When it fades, I fall back asleep. Eventually, though—”

“The jar cracks,” he said.

“Usually someone’s waiting there to put me back in.”

“Not the last time,” he said.

“No.”

“You saw a man, attacking a woman.”

“Yes.”

“You acted.”

A dreamy smile, as though she was recalling an especially delicious dinner. “Yes.”

Reggie Heap, a rapist and murderer. In general, Jacob believed he’d gotten his due. Nonetheless it unsettled him to perceive the pleasure she could take in ripping someone’s—anyone’s—head off.

“When I touched him, I saw the others he’d hurt, the men who helped him. I went to find them. I found you, too.”

Jacob shivered, recalling her, naked in his apartment, a girl he didn’t remember picking up, a creation without equal, bathed in early morning sun.

I’m just a nice young lady who came down for some fun.

“They’ve never stopped watching you,” she said. “You do know that.”

He shook his head. He hadn’t, and while the deception infuriated him, worse was realizing his own naïveté.

“They backed off a bit. They’re still in your neighborhood, though. I fly over them most nights. They keep a van at the ready, half a mile from the archive.”

The desire to bash Mallick’s smug face in gave way to a pinch of anxiety. “Do they follow me in the car?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“I try to shake them,” he said.

She said, “They know about your mother.”

He stared at her. “How do
you
know about her?”

“You visit her every week. It’s not hard to see. You have her face.”

Silence.

“Why haven’t they gone after her?” he said.

Mai bit her lip. “I suppose they think she’s in no state to help them.”

He said, “Is she?”

Mai considered her answer at length.