We buried the baby in the cemetery about a mile from the house. I burned the Sansluv drawings. I sleepwalked around because that week I was dying, too. I can still feel it in my ancient, dried up uterus — like I have this empty hole inside me — a bloody, ulcerous hole still seeping with babydeath. I can see it when I close my eyes.
I kept slapping my tummy, because I just couldn’t believe my body betrayed me.
Greta never wrote or called. She knew. I found out later that she knew all.
8 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Future Shock
Moses flew to Newark and rented a car. He thought about calling a Stuy Town friend who now lived in Paramus, but he didn’t want to try to explain what he didn’t yet understand. He spent the night at the airport Marriott and headed out at 7 A.M. He exited Route 80 at Red Gap, New Jersey, where a sign greeted all visitors HOME TO OVER ONE HUNDRED MILLION B&B CHOCOLATE BARS. From there he drove ten miles to the Collier Layne Health Facility.
Dr. Barnard Ruggles, a small, balding, puckish man in his midfifties, with black-framed glasses and overgrown gray eyebrows, greeted Moses with extreme recalcitrance in his cluttered office. Ruggles explained that he had been treating Salome off and on since 1979 and fully grasped the intricacies of her disorder. Ruggles informed Moses that he needed to take a DNA test and that until he received the results, he wouldn’t discuss any details with him. “Get a room at the DoubleTree in Red Gap. Take a tour of the B&B factory. Eat some chocolate.” He wrinkled up his forehead and rubbed the small mole on the right side of his cheek, which seemed to usher in a complete change of mind. “I may be out of bounds here. I believe you are Salome’s son. I can hear it in your voice. Without qualification I can say it bears an unmistakable similarity to Alchemy’s. What?” Moses’s face must have revealed both his annoyance and surprise. “Did I say something wrong?”
Moses chose to make it easy for Ruggles. “Second time I’ve heard that in twenty-four hours. Go on, please.”
“If, as we presume, this is true, we will need to talk with serious purpose and you will have even more decisions to make.” Ruggles sighed through his nose and looked askance at his diploma from Dartmouth on the wall to his left, as if it could supply an answer. “This, I am sure, has come as a shock to you, but you will come as a, a”—he paused—“a potentially world-shattering shift to Salome.”
“I expected something like that.”
He nodded. “She had been at Alchemy’s compound in Topanga in California, but she’s back now because she managed to ‘escape’ and get down to the main road, where the police found her shining her flashlight at oncoming cars, throwing rocks at their windshields. She violently resisted them, saying she had a mission to accomplish. Which now, she does not remember.” He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“I see,” Moses said.
“I suggest a man in your condition get some rest.”
“One other question. I assumed Alchemy Savant was paying for this, but you said she was here off and on since the ’70s.”
“I am not at liberty to divulge any particulars. Maybe William Bickley III can. Let me just say a trust was set up by a person of means who must remain anonymous.”
Still maneuvering cautiously, Moses kept his many other questions to himself.
After a visit to the lab, where they swabbed his DNA and drew his blood, Moses got the Collier Layne special at the DoubleTree. He called Jay and his mom, and started to read before soon falling asleep. He spent the next morning brooding at the resort and spa, in the midst of a treacly ex-suburb that made stars of the Barry Manilows and Celine Dions of the world, but also felt like the rural breeding ground for trigger-happy sociopaths like Gary Gilmore. He had less than zero desire to tour the candy factory, but he did make a quick trip the B&B gift shop and bought a box of specialty chocolates for Jay.
After lunch, he lay on the huge bed, aching with exhaustion, wondering, How many blows can my body absorb and comprehend in such a short time? This was the not the first, or last, of countless days and nights he would spend obsessing about the lies we are told, tell ourselves, and ultimately choose to believe. Moses steeled himself: Never again would he trust anyone’s truth to be unadulterated and without motive.
After his nap, he called Laban Lively. The machine-recorded voice played, and Moses hung up without leaving a message. He phoned Sidonna Cherry and updated her. He asked if she could find out some background on Lively and what she thought about the prospects of finding his father in Brazil.
“Now that he knows you have located him, if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be,” Cherry said with matter-of-fact certainty.
“What if he has any other kids?”
“I can try. If they’re in Brazil, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Dr. Ruggles called at 4:15. He attempted lightheartedness. “You’re unofficially a Savant. It is still considered preliminary, but I feel confident it will be confirmed.”
A silence wafted, which Moses deciphered as trouble. “I can sense an ‘and’ or a ‘but’ coming. You don’t want me to meet her?”
“Why don’t you come over and we’ll talk.”
In the lobby of Collier Layne, an orderly walked Moses to Ruggles’s office. Moses waited at the doorway. Standing hunched over his desk, shuffling papers, Ruggles barely lifted his head as he asked Moses to sit across from him. Moses sat while Ruggles remained standing.
Moses stiffened, waiting for the next body slam. “We are of the strong opinion that Salome will not be a match for the transplant. We’ve done a preliminary HLA tissue test. We will send samples to your doctor in L.A. You are aware that siblings are the preferred donors. You need to ask Alchemy. Although, as your half brother, there is only a fifty percent chance of a match.”
Moses nodded.
“No doubt you have questions, and I will answer the ones about seeing Salome and any others, but first …” Ruggles now sat down and stared at the four Dubuffet prints on his wall before speaking again. He turned his head and stared balefully into Moses’s eyes from behind his thick glasses. “Salome believes, I have no idea how to put this … that you are not alive … that you were stillborn.”
“What?” Moses shook his head, at first very slowly, then faster and faster until he put his hands on each temple like avise, clamping his head in place. His felt as if his entire body was retracting into itself, receding, collapsing into an embryonic ball. He remained wordless for a moment. Finally, he managed to push out a barely audible plea, “Repeat that and explain. Please.”
“Salome, your mother, believes you are dead and buried in a grave in Long Island close to where she was raised.”
Ruggles got up and gave him a bottle of water and a glass. “You want something stronger?”
“How about a shot of liquid Valium?” Ruggles raised his forest of eyebrow hair as if to say, “If you need it …” Moses realized he could in fact give it to him. “No, just kidding.”
Ruggles struggled to formulate his words. “This situation has placed me in the most tenuous professional and ethical position. I hate to be the bearer of such an inconceivable”—he paused—“revelation. What I can’t even presume is if she was told you were stillborn by her adoptive parents or if she was told the truth but doesn’t believe it because the process was so traumatic. She is highly, highly sensitive and alternately elastic and brittle.”