The Society of S (43 page)

My father came back and switched off the television. “Enough melodrama for one day,” he said.

I’d been about to tell him about the “blind” man at the intersection. I’d planned to say,
I may have met the devil today
. But he was right: we didn’t need more melodrama that night.

For a few minutes we went onto the balcony, but it was too humid and windy to stay long. The bay water below raced toward the shoreline in whitecaps, and rain began to fall in tiny, stinging lines.

When we were inside again, my father locked the door. Then he pushed a wall button, and a metal hurricane shutter descended, inch by inch cutting off our view of the world. He’d already shuttered the other windows.

“I’ll go to bed in a minute,” I said. “But I want to know why Raphael Montero needed to die.”

He frowned. “It’s simple, really. I had no good reason to keep on as we had been. You and your mother had left. What did I want with a house in Saratoga Springs? And that fellow Burton kept coming around, asking questions. His pestering bored me.”

“So how did you do it?”

He sat back on the sofa. “The entire business was easily managed. Dr. Wilson — you remember him, the fellow who treated your sunburn — is one of us, and he signed the death certificate. And old man Sullivan (another one of us) cremated an empty coffin and interred the ashes. Dennis” — he spoke the name with an expression of distaste — “arranged for the sale of the house, and the relocation of the laboratory here. All of your things, by the way, are in storage.”

I took a deep breath. “It was a cruel trick to play. We saw photographs of your grave.”

He seemed surprised. “Well, I
thought
that you would see them. I thought that the epitaph might amuse you, that it certainly would tell you that my death was a ruse.”

“It did, I guess. In the end.” I yawned. “Along with the Picardo and the roses.”

He looked baffled.

I told him about the half-full bottle and the flowers left on his grave. “You didn’t leave them, as a sign?”

“No,” he said. “I wonder who did.”

I had one more question. “May I tell Michael about Malcolm?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ari. Not now, at any rate. The McGarritts deserve to know who killed her, of course, but think of the repercussions for us. We’d have that man Burton after us again. Arthur Pym would have to disappear or die, and I’ve already died once this year.”

I persisted. “When can we let them know?”

“When we’ve resettled,” he said. “I doubt we’ll stay here.” He frowned. “Xanadu. The place isn’t to my liking, at all. Once we’ve found a new home, then you can tell Michael the truth. Let Agent Burton sit on Malcolm’s back for a while.”

Keeping secrets isn’t hard for me. But I wanted to call Michael that night, tell him what I’d learned.

Instead I went to bed, but I didn’t feel sleepy. Outside, the wind moved like an overpowered locomotive, making the building creak and sigh as it passed. My mind raced in spirals. I wondered when my mother would arrive. Would I end up living with her or with my father? Was it possible that I’d ever live with both of them? What might that life be like?

When it came, sleep was uneasy. I dreamed of shadows tall as Xanadu, of eclipsed suns, of incense, ice, and music. Then of real things, mementos of Saratoga Springs: the lithophane lamp in my old bedroom, the grandfather clock in the library, the shadowbox on the wall. But in my dream, the birds in the shadowbox were real. I heard their wings beat against the glass.

I awoke in a room full of smoke. The room had no windows, and when I opened the door, smoke swirled even thicker in the corridor. It had a strangely sweet smell. A wave of heat stung my face. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and the lights were out.

I called for my father. I could hear the pulse of flames, coming from the direction of the kitchen. I called him again, and then I began to cough.

In the bathroom I soaked a towel and wrapped it around my head. I gulped down some water. The faucet sent out a stream at first, but tapered quickly, then stopped.

The bathroom had no windows, either. The whole central part of the condominium was windowless — a common design in water-front condominiums, I’ve come to know since. A “direct water-view” is the selling point; aside from that, the units resemble kennels.

I took a deep breath and ran to my father’s room. Its door was open, and the room, as far as I could see it through the smoke, was unoccupied.

Holding my breath, I ran to the living room, unlocked the balcony door. I yanked its handle, but it didn’t budge. I pressed the button to open the hurricane shutters. Nothing happened.

Think, think slowly
, I told myself. But my mind and my pulse were racing. My lungs burned, and I began to pant. On my hands and knees, I left the room and entered the study, and I tried to open the shutters there. Nothing.

We’ve lost electricity
, I reasoned.
It’s common in a storm, to lose electricity. To lose electricity is nothing unusual
.

I crawled to the end of the room farthest from the door, holding my breath, my mind singing its little song.
Nothing unusual. Nothing unusual. Nothing
.

“We’re only born once.”

Mãe says those were my first words in the hospital. And she says she replied, “Didn’t he teach you about reincarnation?”

But I doubt that’s what she really said. It wasn’t a joking matter, really. I’d spent most of a week receiving hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). The treatments were intermittent, and I was unconscious during the first two. I regained consciousness during the third treatment, waking up in what seemed to be a transparent cylindrical coffin.

My body was surrounded by 100 percent oxygen gas, dissolving in my blood and body tissues at concentrations much higher than normal — high enough to sustain life with no blood at all. I was told all of this during the third treatment by a nurse, who spoke slowly and clearly into a microphone connected to the HBOT chamber.

When I recovered the ability to think and speak, I thought, I’d ask a hundred questions about the treatment. I wondered if my father knew about it. Was it possible that we might not need blood if we had our own glass coffins at home? Then I wondered, where was home?

“Her eyes are open,” I heard the nurse say. “She’s trying to say something.”

And then my mother’s face appeared on the other side of the chamber.

Her blue eyes looked joyous and exhausted. “Don’t try to speak now, darling,” she said. “Just breathe.”

What happened?
I sent the thought to her.
Where’s my father?

There was a fire
, she began.

I know that much!
If she saw the words, they must be purple.

No need for sarcasm
, she shot back.
I guess you must be feeling better
.

I opened my mouth, but she said, “Hush. Your father is alive.”

In what we call “The Movie,” Dr. Van Helsing makes a pronouncement found nowhere in Bram Stoker’s novel: “The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.”

For many vampires, that statement is more than a favorite aphorism — it’s a central tenet of the philosophy of the undead. Despite all evidence to the contrary, humans are more comfortable with the most convoluted theories that contradict our existence than with the simple fact that we share the planet with them. We’re here, and we’re not going away.

My father, recovering from third-degree burns, was given a tracheotomy and skin grafts he didn’t need. The doctors couldn’t accept what their eyes told them: despite being found unconscious and badly burned in a raging chemical fire, he’d suffered minimal damage to his lungs and skin, and he was healing rapidly. Yet they kept him under observation in the intensive care unit, and they didn’t allow visitors.

I celebrated my birthday in the hospital. A candlelit Twinkie was delivered on a tray.

My gift was seeing my father for the first time since the fire. My mother wheeled me into his room, littered with monitoring devices connected to his body. The outline of his body beneath the sheets was slight for such a tall man. He was sleeping. I’d never before seen him asleep. His eyelashes, long and dark, lay against his cheek — like butterfly wings, I thought.

He opened his eyes. “
Butterfly
wings?” he said, his voice incredulous.

Mãe and I laughed, and he smiled — his real smile, not the scholarly one. “Happy birthday,” he said to me. His voice sounded soft. “Your fireworks arrived a few days early.”

I tried not to ask questions, but my brain generated them anyway.

“I don’t know,” he said, when I asked,
Who started the fire?

“I don’t know,” he repeated, when I asked,
Who rescued us?

“Well, I can answer that one,” Mãe said. “I did. Along with the help of Siesta Key’s finest fire squad.”

Mãe had been driving down I-4 in what she called “hideous rain,” when she picked up my first “distress signal.”

“You couldn’t breathe,” she said. “It came through to me as clearly as if you hadn’t been born yet.” She turned to my father. “Remember that time when her heartbeat increased, and you thought she was in fetal distress? And I told you no, I’d
know
it if that happened.”

“Isn’t the idea of
knowing
such a thing a bit of a cliché?” My voice was as innocent as I could manage.

She rubbed her eyes. “You must be feeling better.”

My father put his hand in the air — then looked at the intravenous needle taped to it. He thought about ripping it out, and my mother and I both said, “No!”

“All right,” he said. “The needle stays. But only so long as Sara tells the story in a linear fashion, without a thousand digressions. Is that possible?”

She tried.

She’d arrived in Sarasota to find the traffic lights out, and only a few streetlights working. Her truck was the only vehicle on the road, and she blazed through intersections, feeling like an anarchist.

She apologized for the digressive simile. But she’d always wondered what it would feel like to be an anarchist.

When she arrived at Xanadu (my father shook his head at the name), flames coming from unit 1235 were visible from the street. The elevators weren’t working, and in any case she knew the door to the condominium would be locked. She didn’t have a key, or a cell phone, but she remembered seeing a fire station at the intersection of Midnight Pass and Beach Road. So she drove there.

“They were sitting in the station watching the Weather Channel,” she said. “They’d put out a fire about an hour previously —” She looked at my father. “All right, I won’t tell you about that.”

When the fire trucks arrived at Xanadu, she said, a ladder truck drove to the back of the building, and another crew went up the stairs, carrying extinguishers, a hose, and other equipment. They told her to stay behind, but she trailed after them.