Authors: Chase Novak
“Military.”
“What is he saying? Let’s hear it. Maybe. I don’t know… you never know. Maybe there’s something here.” She knocks Alex’s hand away and clicks on the Play icon to continue the YouTube video.
“Hello,” Kis says. “My name is Slobodan Kis, and I have been practicing medicine in Slovenia, primarily in my home city of Ljubljana, since 1987.”
“Oh my God,” says Leslie. “This is too much. This is just really fucking too much.”
“For many years I was fascinated by the mysteries of human reproduction,” Kis says. He pauses, swallows, dries the corners of his mouth with the back of his spotted, trembling hand. “I treated infertile couples in my home city, and eventually all over Europe, and finally from everywhere—China, U.S.A., United Kingdom. I had some successes, some failures. And one day in the summer of 1999, I devised a fertility treatment that indicated we were at a new threshold in the science of human reproduction. Blending endocrinal materials from human and nonhuman sources, I began to administer injections that had a stimulating effect on the human reproductive system that was nothing short of miraculous.”
A wave of static goes through the image, flashes of light like the branches of a bare tree, and for a moment the image of the haunted old physician is a jumbled, disjointed negative of itself. But quickly it comes together again, and now Kis is holding an immense photo album covered in a plush, quilted material that looks like it’s from the sofa in a fortune-teller’s waiting room. With some difficulty, Kis opens the book, and in it, eight to a page, are snapshots of children, from infants to young people in military uniforms. “These human beings are alive today because of me, my work, my science.” He turns the pages, first slowly, and then quickly, as if the whole enterprise is trying his patience, and the pictures flash by.
“Whoa,” a voice says, a teenage boy. “I think I saw us in that book.”
“Who is that?” Leslie asks. “What’s going on?”
“Two kids. We’re watching them watching him,” Alex says. “They’re the ones who posted the video.”
“Oh Jesus,” Leslie says. “This is making me sick.”
The video camera with which the two young boys have been recording Kis’s video swings off to the side, revealing a disheveled bedroom, a window with tattered green curtains, and a flat-screen TV showing Kis’s video.
“Rewind it,” one of the boys says.
“What the fuck, Mario,” the other boy says. “I’m not fucking rewinding it.” Still, he does as he was asked, and they freeze the image of Kis’s book of accomplishments.
“That’s us!” Mario says, and he runs to the TV and jabs his finger against the screen. “We’re in there!” He is a slight kid with shoulder-length hair, sloping eyes.
“Look at what’s happened to this guy,” Alex says. “Look at his eyes, his face. Look at what he’s become.”
The boys start the video from where they’d paused it.
“A doctor is not measured by his successes alone,” Kis says. “The failures often eclipse much of the good.”
“Yeah,” one of the boys says tauntingly, “like you messed up, dude.”
“Big-time,” the other boy says. And they both dissolve into laughter.
As if hearing the taunts of the boys, the doctor falls silent, looks down at his hands, which rest on the table before him.
“He looks a hundred years older,” Leslie says. Her hand is on her chest as she tries to slow her breathing, but the sight of this man, no matter how time-worn and melancholy, no matter how desperate and fugitive his manner, brings her back to that time in his offices when he seemed to tower over her, an overpowering presence who seemed almost to rape her with his needles.
“Do you want to talk about the canine component of the serums you were using?” the kindly voice prods.
“No, I am not talking about that.”
“Well, the whole purpose—”
“Don’t speak to me of purposes,” Kis says, suddenly regaining the imperial manner both Alex and Leslie so vividly recall from their own meeting with him.
“Nothing of the canine component?” the voice says rather sadly. The doctor shakes his head. “And nothing of the ursine?” Again the doctor shakes his head. “And nothing of the vulpine?”
“There is nothing vulpine in my serum. Fox are not good breeders. You must be mad.”
“And nothing lupine?”
A long pause. Then: “It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter?” one of the boys screams, his voice rising on the wings of incredulity.
“It matters to us, Doc,” the other boy cries.
“If we live, we’re coming to kick your ass,” the first boy says. One of them zooms the lens of his video recorder so that Kis’s face is closer, grainier.
“Stop it for a minute,” Leslie says.
Alex does what she asks.
“Can he fix us?” Leslie asks.
“Do we even want that?” Alex says.
“Are you insane?”
He opens his mouth to say something but remains silent.
“Can he fix us, Alex? Does he say anything about that?”
“You can hear for yourself,” Alex says, restarting the video.
“In my serum,” Kis says, clearing his throat, straightening his shoulders, “I use many different strains of genetic material. What is my crime? Trying to bring happiness and relief to people? Vigor. That is the watchword.” He closes his fists, shakes them, bares his teeth. “Strength. So many of these infertile couples, they wait too long, they live too soft, they worry, they obsess about nonsense. They fatten. They tire. I give them back the vigor. And health. Good blood, wildness. You understand? I put the wild in them.”
“Jesus,” one of the boys mutters, no longer finding it funny.
The boy with the camera turns it away from the video of Kis and toward his brother, who has hair down to his shoulders, shaggy sideburns, and the beginnings of his first mustache. He looks hollow-eyed, frightened, but needs to put himself forward for the camera’s sake. He holds up his pointer finger and his pinkie and sticks his tongue out as far as he can, as if he were some heavy-metal hair god acknowledging his headbanger audience at a concert.
“Oh, that boy. That poor kid,” Leslie says.
“Wait,” Alex says. “This is what I most wanted you to hear.”
“In pursuit of vigor,” Kis is saying, “I introduced certain kinds of fish oils. Yes. You understand?”
“We’re not stupid, you fucking wack,” one of the boys fairly screams.
“I believe in fish oil, quite apart from my fertility research. For joint health, lowering triglycerides, depression. Even skin tone.” He glances unhappily at his own hands and puts them onto his lap and out of sight. “I perhaps made an error.…”
“An error?” the kindly voice asks.
“Yes.”
“Can you say more about that?”
“Is that what is required?” Kis asks.
“It would be helpful,” the voice says.
“We’re going to find you!” one of the boys bellows, his youthful energies returned.
“And tear you up, man,” his brother adds.
“And scatter you to the wind!” they both shout in unison, their voices now a virtual howl.
Leslie reaches for Alex’s hand, looks up at him with very, very frightened eyes.
“I used oil harvested from a most common fish,” Dr. Kis says softly. “I was concerned with availability. Eventually, I settled on
gobiodes
.”
“English, please, Doctor.”
“The goby fish. An everywhere fish. Cold water, warm seas, aquariums.”
“And there was a problem with this?” the voice asked.
“Here we go!” one of the boys calls out in an amusement-park sort of voice, the kind people use when the roller coaster is creakily inching up its initial ascent.
“Yes, a problem. This particular fish has a particular nature.”
“And this nature was?” the interlocutor prods.
“The goby is a cannibal fish. It feeds on its own kind.” Kis’s voice is clipped, factual; whatever it costs him to say these words will remain his own secret.
“Specifically?” the cameraman asks.
“I am working all the time,” Kis says, now with emotion. “Don’t you understand? All the time. Perfecting, taking out the bugs. And learning perhaps how some of the unfortunate side effects can be reversed.”
“You see? He can reverse this,” Leslie says.
“Not yet,” Alex whispers, indicating with a gesture that Leslie should listen to what Kis says next.
“But you were saying about the fish,” Kis’s gentle interrogator asks. “This cannibal fish.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“What we discussed before.”
Kis heaves a huge sigh and looks off into the distance. “It’s a cannibal fish. The goby.”
“And specifically?”
“Specifically? This is what you want? Okay. Specifically, the goby fish likes to eat its own young. It seems to be its preferred form of nourishment. These are legal matters now. You understand? My lawyers advise me that there is very little I can say until these issues are resolved.”
With a popping noise and a hiss, the video goes dark. In the sudden silence, Alex and Leslie can hear the faint screams of the man caged in their cellar.
“We shouldn’t be hearing that,” Alex says. “I must have left the door open.” He starts to stand up, but Leslie stops him with a hand on his forearm.
“What has he done to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alex.”
“Worst-case scenario? Exactly what we think.”
“We are a danger to our own children.” Leslie’s voice is plaintive, as if all she desires is for Alex to disagree with her.
“Sometimes,” he says. “We have our good days, and we have our bad days.”
Again, the faint cries rise from the cellar. Leslie turns toward the sound with a startled expression, and Alex wipes the saliva from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
The howls make him hungry.
The sun trembles red over the small slice of the East River Michael can see from his windows. It is a little before 6:00 a.m., and pale thin stalks of light rise on the streets below. Michael is exhausted. He has barely slept and he is overwhelmed by worries—what to do about Adam, what Adam’s insane, bellicose father might do next, and as if that were not enough, he is also consumed with worry about Xavier. Since Michael learned that Xavier never made it to Rosalie’s, his mind has felt like a fish hooked by two different fishermen, being yanked and reeled toward two different shores. He is at once deeply worried that Xavier has been hurt or is in some other kind of trouble and is also furiously certain that Xavier has decided to punish him for basically turning him out of the apartment and has retaliated with some tawdry hookup. Or maybe Xavier’s finding another bed for last night was part of some larger retaliation, based on his boredom with Michael’s slow social metabolism, Michael’s stay-at-home mentality. Hadn’t Xavier regularly complained they didn’t go out often enough and were not a part of the throbbing nightlife?
When Michael gets out of the shower and comes back to the front room, half expecting to see Xavier tearfully repentant or, perhaps—best-case scenario!—slightly injured, he finds Adam sitting on the sofa, which is still covered with bedsheets and blankets. Adam cradles a bowl of cereal and eats ravenously. He glances up at Michael with an expression both nervous and fierce.
“I was just about to wake you up,” Michael says, trying to sound parental, even though he is wearing only a towel.
“I get up early.”
“Well, it’s time to go to school.”
Adam concentrates on his cereal.
“Adam?”
“Can I have some more cereal?”
“Of course. You want me to get it for you?”
Instead of answering, Adam springs off the sofa, scampers into the kitchen, and pours so many Cheerios into his bowl there is scarcely room for milk.
“Since you’re coming with me, you’re going to be a little early. We get there before the students.” He watches Adam shoveling the Cheerios into his mouth.
“Please don’t make me” Adam is finally able to say.
“You have to. It’s school.”
Adam shakes his head no.
“Come on, Adam…”
“That’s where he’ll look for me.”
“But that’s exactly what’s going to have to happen. Whatever is going on between you and your folks, you’re not going to solve it by running away or hiding out here.”
Adam shakes his head, more and more insistently.
“Well, you can’t stay here. I’m going to school and you’re going to have to come with me.”
“He is going to kill me. Or maybe Mom is. Or both.”
“Adam! Come on.”
“They are. They do things. They’re different from everyone. They can’t even help it.”
“Are you sure, Adam? Are you sure you’re not just super-angry right now and this is what you’re feeling?”
“You saw him. He was right here. You saw him.”
“I know. And all I saw was a dad looking for his kid. I should have given you to him right then and there. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Yes, you were. You could tell.”
“Maybe I should call him right now.” Michael glances at his wrist to see the time, but he’s not wearing his watch. He’s not wearing anything—just the towel. A creepy, guilty feeling comes over him, the kind that comes not from doing anything wrong but from doing something that leaves you wide open to misinterpretation and accusation. He realizes there are still plenty of people who think gay men can’t be trusted around male children, though to Michael being with anyone younger or smaller or lighter or smoother has zero appeal—he likes the weight and smell of someone substantial on him, a commanding air, a firmness of touch. He even likes a certain degree of sheer bossiness, something for which Cubans in general seem particularly disposed.
Xavier! Where are you?
“I don’t want you to call him,” Adam says, very softly.
“Then you better get ready for school, and we’ll get this all squared away once we are there.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Adam, I think you’re old enough to understand this. I am a teacher. It’s my job. And I could get fired for coming between one of my students and his parents, or even for just the perception that I am.”
“Even if the parents are going to kill the kid?”
“No one’s killing anyone, Adam.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Come on, be reasonable.”
“I am.”
“Okay, as your teacher I am legally required to call Child Protective Services. I have to tell CPS that your parents are trying…” Michael stops himself, though it’s already too late. He has ventured into territory he should have never gotten near. The parents at Berryman Prep are for the most part wealthy, demanding, entitled alpha-dog types, and the school’s administration has always followed a policy of accommodation and catering to the wishes and whims of the parents upon whose large tuition checks and occasional endowments Berryman depends, a policy that was not a whit less stringent for being unspoken. Though carved over the Gothic-style front entrance were the words
knowledge is freedom,
a more truthful motto would have been “The customer is always right,” and at Berryman Prep, the customer wrote with a pricey Montblanc pen.
“How come you don’t believe me?” Adam says, his lower lip beginning to tremble.
“Adam, I’m not here to debate with you. We’re going to school and we’re leaving in ten minutes. Once we are there, if you don’t tell me to do otherwise, I’m going to make that call.”
Ten minutes later, Adam emerges from the bathroom, washed, his hair wet-combed, his face frozen with unhappiness. Wordlessly, he follows Michael into the elevator and through the lobby. It is a cold, steely morning, with a stiff wind that carries the scent of burned coffee.
Adam has not even bothered to zip his skimpy jacket. Michael stops himself from telling the boy to bundle up against the cold. None of them seem to close their jackets anymore; none want to seem like vulnerable boys.
As they descend the steps to the subway, surrounded by others on their early-morning commutes, Michael, suddenly sensing that the boy might do something foolish, takes hold of Adam’s arm—not tightly, but with just enough force to remind the boy that someone is in charge. Yet the touch of the teacher’s hand seems to electrify Adam, who twists away from Michael.
“Settle down,” Michael says, but as he gives Adam an admonishing look, the boy’s eyes narrow and his lips part, revealing two rows of bright white teeth. Too bright. Too sharp. The sight of them unnerves Michael momentarily, and he stumbles on the subway steps. He regains his balance by gripping the railing, and the next thing he knows Adam has yanked himself free, turned around, and leaped away. It almost seems as if he is flying.
“Adam!” Michael cries out. Maybe half the thirty or so people on the staircase show some interest in the commotion Michael is creating, while the others either don’t hear or are absorbed in difficulties of their own, or perhaps they both hear and care but have been trained by city life to always reveal as little as possible.
Michael chases after the boy. He has no choice. And, also, no chance. He sees Adam knife into the crowd on Twenty-Third Street, dart this way and that way, at absolutely awesome speed—and then, to Michael’s horror, the boy dashes into traffic to cross to the gloomy greenery of a small park. A beat-up-looking truck hauling large sheets of plate glass brakes quickly to keep from hitting Adam, and Adam rises as if there were wings on his heels and steps onto the truck’s hood, using it as a platform from which to vault across the street. And disappear.
“Did you see that?” a middle-aged man in a cashmere topcoat and a brand-new baseball cap says to Michael. “I’ll bet you a sock full of nickels that kid is on one of those energy drinks.”
There is a cold, steady drizzle soaking the streets and the tops of the parked cars when Michael arrives at Berryman. It’s still a few minutes before classes begin; most of the younger students are already there, deposited by caretakers who have other duties to attend to or by their parents, faces stark and worried in the weird light of their smartphones, who must be prompt because they have early-morning meetings to chair. “They hold their phones out like Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull,” Michael once said to Xavier—and the thought of Xavier brings Michael’s hand reflexively into his pocket, where he finds his own phone and calls his great dear friend’s cell for the tenth time that morning.
“You’re here!” announces Davis Fleming, Berryman’s headmaster. Fleming is large and fleshy, but with his broad smile, well-scrubbed skin, and silvery hair, he looks like a large boy cast as the father in a school play. Fleming’s grandfather and both his parents attended Berryman Prep, as did Fleming himself. He lives in a Berryman-owned apartment next to the school, and, except for college and a honeymoon to an island off the coast of South Carolina where he and his wife (Berryman, class of 1983) had their honeymoon, he has never been farther than ten miles from these corridors. But despite the animation in his face and the unvarying, unyielding smile, there is annoyance in Fleming’s voice and a bit of steel in his hand as he grips Michael’s biceps through the slick chill of his leather jacket.
“What can I do for you?” Michael says, falling into step as Fleming marches through the hall, past the glassed-in case with fading old pictures of by-now-aged Berryman athletes taking flatfooted set shots in basketball games a half century ago, where the time eternally shows six minutes to go; and wrestling boys in black sneakers and unitards, their expressions hovering between nobility and teenage hormonal haze, lawyers now, surgeons, bankers, grandfathers, dead and buried, some of them. Michael and Fleming are in the old wing of the school, with its Gothic touches and scuffed maroon floors, where the light is dim and somehow humid, like the watery gloom of a submarine. Fleming doesn’t keep his grip on Michael’s arm, but he continually touches it nonetheless, as if Michael might need reminding that flight is not an alternative.
“Can you tell me what this is about?” Michael finally asks.
“About?” Fleming says, as if the word itself were peculiar.
“Why am I basically being abducted here?”
“I think you know the answer to that, Mr. Medoff.”
There’s nothing Michael can say to that. He
does,
more or less, know why he is following Fleming to his office.
But what he is not prepared for is that both the Twisdens are already in Fleming’s office, Leslie, the mother, in flared trousers, a turtleneck, and a long raincoat, and the horrible father pacing back and forth like a beast in its cage, snarling into his cell phone. When Fleming leads Michael into the office, the furious parents turn toward him with devouring eyes.
“Where is our son?” Alex says, snapping his phone shut.
“And our daughter,” adds Leslie. Her voice shakes; her eyes are red, presumably from crying.
“Yes,” Michael says, and clears his throat. “Yes.”
“Yes what?” Twisden says.
Michael tries to quickly consider his options, and in the confusion and uncertainty he decides it is best to stay as close to the truth as possible, though he is loath to state that Adam spent the night in his house, and that upon rediscovering him after Twisden’s late-night visit, Michael did nothing to inform Alex, thus, by implication, entering into a state of collusion with the little boy. “I haven’t seen Alice, and I have no idea where she is,” he says to Leslie.
“And what about Adam?” Twisden says. He is wringing his hands with suppressed rage; there is something reddish beneath two of his fingernails. He sees Michael glancing at them and he quickly puts his hands in the pockets of his expensive-looking suit jacket and steps closer to Michael—years of tough negotiating have schooled him well in the body language of intimidation, and even though his career is sputtering now (at best!), he knows how to impose his will.
“What about him?” Michael says.
“Did he go back to your little love nest?”
“My love nest? What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well what that means,” Twisden says.
“I resent that,” Michael says.
“If you would just answer Mr. Twisden’s question, we could get this matter squared away,” Fleming interjects. “Please, Michael, let’s stop all this… posturing. A child is missing.”
“Two children,” Leslie says. She wraps her raincoat tightly around herself, though it is as warm as an armpit in Fleming’s office.
“Mrs. Twisden,” Michael begins, but Leslie cuts him off.
“Ms. Kramer,” she says.
“I don’t know where your daughter is. I’m sorry.”
“And our son?” Twisden says.
“I don’t know where he is either.” He knows what question will come next and chooses to offer more of the truth rather than endure the viselike grip of Twisden’s inevitable interrogation. “Your son came back to my apartment last night after you left,” Michael says. “He was cold, he was wet, and he seemed very, very frightened.”
“You see?” Twisden says to Fleming. “It’s exactly as I told you.”
“And why didn’t you call Mr. Twisden and Ms. Kramer the moment he first arrived?” Fleming asks.
“Adam told me they were out of town.”
“And he believed him,” Twisden says, as if nothing could be more unlikely or absurd.
“Yes, I did.”
Alex and Leslie exchange quick glances.
“And what other tales did our son tell you?” Alex says, this time with a shade less bluster in his voice
“Mr. Medoff,” Fleming says to Michael. “This is highly irregular.”
“If you so much as touched him,” Twisden says, shaking his head and grimacing, as if sickened by the punishment he would be forced to mete out.
Michael has never seen eyes quite like Twisden’s—so intense, yet with no more emotion than halogen lamps.
“And now where is he?” Leslie Kramer says. “What have you done with him? And why in the
hell
did you not call us when he returned to your apartment?” The atomizer of whatever perfume she is wearing seems to have been given several extra pumps this morning; her lipstick appears to have been applied with a trembling hand.