“When I get the chance.”
“But surely … I mean, don’t you always win?”
He looked at her. He smiled, but the smile was cryptic … she couldn’t tell whether he was amused or disappointed.
“One hopes,” John Shaw said.
She walked back with him to the rooming house, attentive now, her fears beginning to abate, but still reluctant: how could she tell him? But she must. She used this time to observe him. What Dr. Kyriakides had told her was true: John wore his strangeness like a badge. There was no pinning down exactly what it was that made him different. His walk was a little ungainly; he was too tall; his eyes moved restlessly when he spoke. But none of that added up to anything significant. The real difference, she thought, was more subtle. Pheremones, or something on that level. She imagined that if he sat next to you on a bus you would notice him immediately—turn, look, maybe move to another seat. No reason, just this uneasiness. Something odd here.
It was almost dark, an early October dusk. The streetlights blinked on, casting complex shadows through the brittle trees. Coming up the porch stairs to the boardinghouse, Susan saw him hesitate, stiffen a moment, lock one hand in a fierce embrace of the banister. My God, she thought, it’s some kind of seizure—he’s sick—but it abated as quickly as it had come.
He straightened himself up and put his key in the door.
Susan said, “Will Amelie be here?”
“Amelie works a night shift at a restaurant on Yonge Street. She’s out by six most evenings.”
“You live with her?”
“No. I don’t live with her.”
The apartment seemed even more debased, in this light, than Susan had guessed from her earlier glimpse. It consisted of one main room abutting a closet-sized bedroom—she could make out the jumbled bedclothes through the door—and an even tinier kitchen. The place smelled greasy: Amelie’s dinner, Susan guessed, leftovers still congealing in the pan. Salvation Army furniture and a sad, dim floral wallpaper. Why would he live here? Why not a mansion—a palace? He could have had that. But he was sick, too … maybe that had something to do with it.
She said, “I know what you are.”
He nodded mildly, as if to say, Yes, all right He shifted a stack of magazines to make room for himself on the sofa. “You’re one of Max’s students?”
“I was,” she corrected. “Molecular biology. I took a sabbatical.”
“Money?”
“Money mostly. My father died after a long illness. It was expensive. There was the possibility of loans and so forth, but I didn’t feel—I just didn’t enjoy the work anymore. Dr. Kyriakides offered me a job until I was ready to face my thesis again. At first I was just collating notes, you know, doing some library research for a book he’s working on. Then—”
“Then he told you about me.”
“Yes.”
“He must trust you.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m sure of it. And he sent you here?”
“Finally, yes. He wasn’t sure you’d be willing to talk directly to him. But it’s very important.”
“Not just auld long syne?”
“He wants to see you.”
“For medical reasons?”
“Yes.”
“Am I ill, then?”
“Yes.”
He smiled again. The smile was devastating—superior, knowing, but at the same time obviously forced, an act of bravery. He said, “Well, I thought so.”
Susan had no relish for this talk of illness. Her father’s illness had dominated her life for almost a year, keeping her on a dizzying rollercoaster of falling grades, missed deadlines, serial flights to California. In her graduate work she had been doing lab chores for Dr. Kyriakides, a study involving the enzyme mechanics of cancerous cell division; and it had been too painful an irony, that shuttle between the colonies of laboratory cells and her father’s bed, where he was dying of liver cancer. There is such a thing, Susan thought, as too much knowledge. She could not bear this meticulous understanding of the mechanism of her father’s death. She began to dream of malignant cells, chromosomes writhing inside their nuclei like angry, poisonous insects.
She suspected that the work Dr. Kyriakides gave her was a kind of charity. He had explained to her—the sophisticated European to the parvenu Californian WASP—that this was good and useful, that a person in mourning ought to have tasks to attend to. She was skeptical but grateful, and within a month she began to admit he was right: there was solace in the library stacks, in the numbers that marched so eloquently across the cool amber screen of her PC terminal. Her grasp of the work began to deepen. Dr. Kyriakides was a brilliant man; the book would be brilliant. Their relationship was not a friendship but something that, in Susan’s opinion, was much finer. She began to feel like a colleague. She took her own work more seriously.
Then, in August, Dr. Kyriakides had escorted her to a Creek restaurant in the mezzanine of a downtown hotel and had ordered impressively for both of them: medallions of lamb, an expensive wine. She had wondered with vast apprehension whether he meant to proposition her.
Instead he leaned forward and gazed into the bowl of his wine goblet. “A quarter of a century ago,” he said, “when I was just out of Harvard, and the government was paying so many smart people to commit such stupid acts, I did something I should not have done.”
It was the first time she’d heard the name John Shaw.
You can see his illness, she thought now. Waves of discomfort seemed to sweep across John’s face. He clenched his teeth a moment; then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Kyriakides wants to see you,” Susan said. “The changes you’re going through aren’t necessarily irreversible.”
“He told you that?”
“He can help.”
“No,” John said.
“He told me you might react this way. But there’s no one else you can go to. And hewants to help.”
“I think it’s beyond that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“No offense intended. But my guess is as good as Max’s.”
“But,” Susan began, and then faltered. The pain he was suffering—if it was in fact a physical pain—overtook him again. The smile that had grown small and ironic now disappeared altogether. His knuckles whitened against the arm of the chair; his face seemed to change, as if a great variety of emotions had overtaken him, a sudden shifting … she thought of wind across a wheatfield.
She was frightened now.
She said, “What can I do? Can I help?”
He shook his head. “You can leave.”
The rejection was absolute. It hurt.
Susan said, “Well, maybe you’re right—maybe he can’t help.”
It was her own moment of cruelty. But it caught his attention. She persisted, “But what if you’re wrong? There’s at least a chance. Dr. Kyriakides said—”
“ Fuck Dr. Kyriakides.”
Susan was quietly shocked. She stood up, blushing.
“No, wait,” John said. “Leave your number.”
“What?”
“Leave your number. Or your address, your hotel room. Write it down. There’s paper over there. I’ll call. I promise. We can talk it over. But right now—I need to be alone right now.”
She nodded, scribbled down her name and the hotel, moved to the door. She turned back with the idea of making some final entreaty, but it was pointless. He had dismissed her; she was as good as invisible. He sat with his eyes closed and his head pressed between his hands … containing himself, as if he might explode, Susan thought as she hurried down the walk into the cold October night; or shutting out the world, as if it might rush in and drown him.