Year Zero (12 page)

Cavendish shrugged. “Who knows? Someone will find one someday, I’m sure.”

All eyes fixed on Elise. She was Cavendish’s boss. He had surrendered authority to her, but only to force her surrender to him.

“Deliver the poor thing,” she muttered.

“As you wish.” Cavendish gave a single decisive tap at a key on his wheelchair’s computer panel. It was the signal.

One of the divers snipped the colored wires with a pair of scissors. The heartbeat fell silent. In the silence, they heard a distant voice counting down to zero. The wires were drawn up and out of the water.

A scalpel appeared in Miranda’s hand. She made a careful incision. The sac opened. Its contents gushed out in a pinkish plume. The plume obscured their view. The other divers helped open the incision as the scalpel moved. As they peeled away the placental sleeve, more organic debris floated outward. Between the divers and the plume, it was impossible to see the newborn.

Then the clone drifted free. He began to sink like a falling climber, upside down, the umbilical cord trailing like slack rope. Abbot thought the scalpel must have slipped, because a long black stream floated from the head. It wasn’t blood, though, but hair, three or four feet of it.

Miranda kicked hard and dove lower. In slow motion, she opened her arms and caught him from below. His hair settled around her shoulders.

This was no infant. The clone opened his arms and unfolded his legs, and at the end of each limb was a rack of curled, tangled nails. He had a beard. A whole lifetime of hair and nails, Abbot realized. The clone’s body hair was stark black against skin that had never seen the sun.

The other divers joined Miranda, and together, cradling the man between them, they drafted upwards. As they passed the observation windows, the clone suddenly woke to his new world. He opened his eyes. And they were blue. Cornflower blue. “Look!” someone gasped.

Inside her dive mask, even Miranda appeared shocked.

The face was unmistakable. Cavendish had cloned himself. It grew more audacious than that.

The eyes opened wider. The clone turned his head, taking in the surroundings. He noticed the audience of scientists watching from the other side of the glass. A faint smile appeared in his streaming beard.

“Did you see that?” Abbot whispered to Elise.

“Of course, I saw,” she seethed. “He’s doomed us. The genie is out of the bottle now.”

“No, Elise. The smile. He smiled. He recognized us.”

K
ATHMANDU
/B
ADRIGHOT
J
AIL
T
HIRTEEN
M
ONTHS
L
ATER

L
ike a gargoyle in wirerims, Nathan Lee sat crosslegged in the windowsill with Grace’s storybook in his lap. He’d been at work with it for nearly a year. It was early in the morning. Blue fog lapped against what were left of his toes. Behind him on the floor, three lepers lay dreaming in a huddle.

The palace belonged to me,
he neatly printed.
At night I listened to my heart beating and the quiet claws of gecko lizards. To the lizards, I was king.

He left a four-inch space for art work. That would come later, maybe an aerial view of an Escher-style maze. Or a naturalist sketch of a gecko. He’d always been pretty fair at drawing. He would give it a thin sepia wash, or gently lay in some water colors with a dry brush. One had to be careful painting on this old rice paper.

I could look down and spy people going about their ordinary lives.
He bent close to see the ink on the page. His candle kept flickering in the tin lantern.
But no matter how loud I shouted, no one seemed to notice me. No one, until the day a little girl happened to look up at my window.

He loved this hour. He had made a habit of waking first among the prisoners. All too soon the dawn would break wide open. Roosters would screech; dogs would bark. Nine hundred men and boys would fill the yard, muttering prayers and hawking up the taste of night, clamoring, washing, bartering for extra rations of rice or for old Hindi movie magazines or rags of clothing. The noise would stretch into night, the clockwork of volleyballs batting back and forth and chess pieces clicking and lunatics chanting. But for now, his peace held and he could pretend to be alone with his daughter.

Long ago, Badrighot Prison had been a Rana palace. At this hour, in this fog, it was easy to make out the bygone glory. In buildings now occupied by murderers and political prisoners and rapists, rajas once listened to music. From terraces where prisoners now grew small red tomatoes and ginger roots, princes used to fly kites. Monkeys had capered in an arbor that no longer existed. Elephants and peacocks had drunk from a pool with emerald green lotuses. He had discovered all of this and woven it into his storybook.

The former palace had become his escape. Ironically it was escape that had brought him here. Since being jailed fourteen months ago, Nathan Lee had gotten loose three times. He wasn’t very good at it. The longest his freedom had ever lasted was fifteen minutes.

After his third escape, they had transferred him to this medieval compound with its towering brick walls. He’d gotten five years added to his twenty. As an extra punishment, they’d placed him with the lepers. It amounted to a death sentence. It wasn’t the leprosy that concerned Nathan Lee. He knew it was rarely contagious. But the lepers were regarded as walking dead. They received less food than the other prisoners. Even on a full ration, Nathan Lee knew he would never last a quarter century in this Third World sewer.

The leper asylum stood off by itself and was considered more secure than the other buildings. It was like a box within a box. The guards watched it, but so did the prisoners. Even the untouchables loathed to have lepers mingling with the general population. Like geese, prisoners would cry the alarm if anyone tried to leave the building. The one person lower than them all was their sole Westerner. Their one and only man eater.

Nathan Lee remembered his trial only vaguely, as part of a larger nightmare of interrogation and jail and the horror of his frostbitten toes blackening on the bone. He remembered the pitiless Indian doctor with his scissors more than the judges or lawyers. Apparently some kind of animal had gotten to Rinchen’s body before the authorities did. Gruesome photos were introduced showing the ravaged corpse tangled in Nathan Lee’s pink climbing rope. Once the charge of cannibalism was raised, the American consular officer had quit sitting behind Nathan Lee in the courtroom. The
Men’s Journal
writer had moved closer.

In a sworn deposition delivered by diplomatic pouch, Professor David Ochs claimed Nathan Lee had tried to throw him, too, off the mountainside. “Monster,” concluded Nepal’s main newspaper,
The Rising Sun.
“The yeti lives.” The court agreed. Nathan Lee had grown used to the pitter-patter of prisoners spitting on him or flicking stones at his legs. What tore at him was how much Grace might be hearing of it. He could only pray Lydia would spare her.

To his surprise, the lepers were good to him. They doctored and fed him when he developed a fever. They gave him a straw mat and a blanket and a mosquito net belonging to a dead man. Some mornings they would ask grave questions about his dreams. It turned out he wept in his sleep every night.

Once a day, they were allowed to walk around the compound. It was usually the hottest part of the day, or the wettest, or the coldest. Most of the other prisoners retreated inside their own buildings while the lepers staggered and limped around the walking circuit at the foot of the walls. One day he found tusk marks high upon the eastern wall. Though the gouges had been plastered over, they were the ghostly evidence of royal elephants. That was the beginning of his book for Grace.

After that, he pursued an archaeological survey of the old palace. He paced off measurements, gained an overlook of the grounds from the upper windows, collected oral histories. He came to treat it as his long-lost dissertation. His exploration quickly became magical for the lepers, too. They gave him paper and ink for his drawings. He gave them wings.

He hired one of the lepers, a cobbler, to sew his pages together into a book. It was comprised of a hodgepodge of paper. Some were pieces of rice paper, some linen or pulped wood, and some were empty end pages recycled from other books. A few were even made of papyrus or soft vellum. In all there were over three hundred pages bound together in a cover taken from a nineteenth-century botany compendium entitled
Flora of the Greater Himalaya,
by George Bogle, a potato specialist. The book was as beautiful as it was strange. It weighed five pounds in his hands. It even smelled rare and enticing. His archaeological notes and stories-in-progress occupied the first 183 pages. The rest was blank, waiting for his pen and paintbrush. Each morning, Nathan Lee rose at this same hour to fill in a little more.

Now he adjusted the tin lantern, and by its orange glow resumed his fairytale of the monster in the tower.
She was so small down there among that crowd. I wondered, Who could she be? What did she think, seeing my faraway face?

He left the rest of that page blank for a watercolor portrait of a little girl. It would consume him for days. Of late, he found himself confusing Grace with images of other girls and women. The lepers had shown him antique studio pictures of their wives and daughters, and their faces intruded on him. He had glued the snapshot of Grace to the inside cover, but it was nearly ruined from water and sun exposure. Time was against him and he knew it. She was growing up. Her fifth birthday was coming soon.

He’d sent dozens of letters, wishfully picturing Lydia reading them to Grace, and yet knowing better. Not so much as a postcard came back. Maybe Grace believed her daddy had perished in the Himalayas, a colorful excuse for her preschool friends. Just as likely, she’d been told he was an animal rotting in a faraway cage.

Nathan Lee closed the book. It was time to start a fire in the clay pit in the floor. He tucked the book in his
jhola,
a haversack made of coarse wool. The book fit perfectly, leaving just enough space for his pens and the little watercolor kit. The
jhola
never left his side.

As he was backing from the window, the fog suddenly parted and Nathan Lee saw something he’d never seen. Thirty feet away, at his same height, there was a monkey in the guard tower. It was perched on its haunches. The monkey saw him at the same moment. They regarded each other, then the monkey resumed eating a piece of fruit from some neighborhood altar.

Nathan Lee waited. There had to be some mistake.
The guards were gone.

He sniffed for the smoke of their
bidis.
He threw a pebble at the tower. The monkey bared its teeth and turned its rump to him and vanished into the fog. Now the guard tower stood completely empty.

What could this mean?
he wondered. All winter, Kathmandu’s power supply had been slowly dying. For the last several weeks there had been no electricity at all. The prison’s loudspeakers no longer blared childlike Hindi songs. At night the rusty lightbulbs didn’t light. The blackout spawned all kinds of theories. Some claimed it was evidence of a change in government. Others thought the rivers had run low. The country bumpkins blamed a dearth of lightning bolts the preceding summer.

Nathan Lee took off his glasses and carefully wiped them. He was thorough. He rubbed his eyes and replaced the glasses, and it was the same. The tower was empty.

There should have been two or three guards out there in the tower. They had gotten used to Nathan Lee sitting in his window with the orange candle flame. One fellow had made a morning ritual of aiming his rifle at the American cannibal. Nathan Lee would press his palms together in greeting, a wordless
namaste.
The guard would smile behind his iron sights. Not this morning. All were gone.

Nathan Lee swung his legs down and stood on the clay floor. His limbs ached. He slung his
jhola
on one shoulder. He didn’t wake the lepers. The fire could wait. Barefoot, he stole down the wooden staircase.

The leper building had only one entrance. He paused in the low doorway. Going out without permission was forbidden. But who would see him in this mist?

He took the chance and stepped from the building. No one cried out. He headed uphill, hopping wide across the ditch with grey water. Two posts marked the volleyball court. He limped across a million footprints pounded into the dirt. The blue air smelled of ash and curry and urine.

A soft clapping noise came from behind. He stopped. It was only a prisoner in the distance, the slap-slap of his thongs fading out. Nathan Lee went on, heading straight for the front gate. Regular prisoners lived for the gate. It was their eventual exit. Through its bars, they visited their lawyers, business associates, and loved ones. None of that applied to him, so he had avoided it. Until now.

The mouth of a tunnel yawned just ahead. Nathan Lee tried to remember what lay inside. When they’d brought him here, he was almost catatonic with despair. He remembered the clatter of chains being dropped and the heavy gate screeching on its hinges and an interval of darkness. His heart was racing. He entered.

The tunnel ran thirty feet, but seemed much longer. It was pitch black inside, the arched walls greasy with human passage. Nathan Lee reached the entrance. The gate hung open. Its iron straps were pitted with rust. The chains lay at his feet like dead serpents. He stopped.

Just ahead lay the world. It was almost too much to believe. The fog was thinning. He could see buildings hanging in the distance. Little shapes—people, dogs, cows?—roamed through the far mist. There was not a guard in sight.

He hesitated. Was this a trap? A dream? It seemed so close to one of his fairytales about a city that suddenly evaporated around a lone traveler.

Closing his eyes, Nathan Lee planted one bare foot outside the walls. There was no gunfire, no alarm. Mobs did not assemble. Thunder did not crack the sky. He let out a breath. For months he had contemplated all sorts of harrowing escapes. Now all he had to do was walk away? The moment was surreal. He began walking.

For the first few minutes, he didn’t dare look over his shoulder, afraid a single glance might sweep him backwards into jail. With every step he wanted to run through the streets, shout, throw his arms in the air. He kept his arms close. The
jhola
with his book rapped against his hipbone. He had no other possession in the world except the rags on his back.

A human figure surfaced to his left, giving him a start. It was a goddess, her shrine built into the red brick wall. Vermilion and ghee smeared her face and shoulders. While he stood looking at the stone idol, a woman and her daughter approached.

Nathan Lee drew his elbows tighter to his ribs. He was caught. Surely they would cry out. But the woman didn’t waste a glance on him. She was businesslike in her devotion, tossing a bit of rice, murmuring a prayer. The little girl stared at him with huge black eyes. Nathan Lee lowered his head and moved away.

His previous escapes had been nothing but wild, mindless gallops. This time, he vowed, would be different. He wanted to bolt from the city. But for the moment, his best ruse would be to mingle with other Westerners in the tourist district. Even there, Nathan Lee knew he would stick out. In jail, he’d weighed himself by the hook scale used for sacks of rice. He had shrunk to forty-six kilos. At six feet two, he weighed less than Miss America.

In the fabled hippie days, world travelers used to show up looking much like he did now, thin as skeletons, draped with rags, unwashed, impure, hair long. That was then. Nowadays tourists came sporting North Face and Nike brands, with designer sunglasses and thousand-dollar video cameras. Perhaps they would mistake him for a
saddhu
and give him some money. That would be a start. He could beg for clothes. Shoes were a priority. And socks. And food. And a backpack. His thoughts tumbled. Maybe some climbers would take him in. Maybe he could even arrange a passport. For the time being, the American embassy was out, however. The police would surely be watching it for him soon.