The Experiment Page 4

  Still, they had had some fantastic lovemaking. Working nights, they used to sneak into the library and make out among the boxes of microfilmed newspapers. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and he could tell she was doing the same. The elevator came to her floor, and she gave him a pinched smile and a flat but reasonably warm "Good-bye," as if to say: I now care so little, I can treat you like anyone else. When she was gone, he was relieved.

  The elevator door opened, and he stepped out on his floor.

  "Morning, Barry," he said to the receptionist, a fellow with a heavily waxed blond handlebar mustache that gave him the lugubrious look of a water buffalo.

  "Well, if it isn't the big novelist."

  Jude groaned inwardly. He was in no mood to deal with sarcasm.

  The newsroom had that familiar Saturday feel—people casually dressed, hoping for catastrophe to strike somewhere but not right on deadline. Only a dozen or so reporters were in; they were keeping their heads down, out of the line of sight of the editors.

  Jude was up for a good breaking story. The interview he had just done had been a bust. He had recently finished a takeout on gun control, complete with wrenching stories of children who had found loaded revolvers and shot their siblings, and he wanted something neat and fast—"quick and dirty" was the newsroom expression—to wipe his synapses clean.

  Jude looked up at the Metro desk. Leventhal, the editor in charge on weekends, was holding a huddle with the sub-editors. That was not a good sign. When Jude had first joined the paper, he had heard an old-timer remark that no good story ever came from a meeting of editors, and he had found nothing in his experience to contradict the axiom. Still, Leventhal liked him, or at least appeared to respect his work. If there was something good around, he might throw it his way.

  Jude sat down at his desk and clicked on his computer. The screen leapt to life; he signed on, and promptly swore out loud. The message light was glowing, and he knew what that meant: questions about his piece. He was right, and as he scrolled through the story, his heart sank. He saw long dark patches of comment mode placed there by an unseen editor. He spent the next three hours piling through his notes, checking facts and calling up sources, who didn't exactly feature the idea of wasting a Saturday on the phone with him. For revenge, he took a long lunch.

  When he returned, his phone rang. It was Clive, the young news clerk on the Metro desk, speaking in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Clive owed him—more than once, Jude had helped him shape a story—and as their eyes met across the newsroom, Jude picked up the signal: payback time.

  "A murder, sounds good," said Clive. "Don't know much about it, but the wires are saying it's strange. Mutilation. Maybe a ritual killing, maybe a Mob hit."

  "Who's the victim?"

  "No ID yet."

  "Where?"

  "Not far. Tylerville. Near New Paltz."

  Jude did a quick calculation; he could get there in an hour and a half, maybe two; have an hour to report it out and half an hour to write it. He could make the deadline. Monday's paper was a good one, read by people starting the week and looking for something to gossip about around the proverbial watercooler. He felt a familiar rush—a quickening of the pulse, not much more—and he knew that he was hooked.

  He sauntered up to the Metro desk and stood next to Leventhal, who ignored him until he cleared his throat.

  "Hey," said Leventhal nonchalantly.

  "I finished the revision on gun control," Jude said noncommittally.

  "Weren't you out on some story this morning—what was it?"

  "The psychic who got rich on the stock market. It didn't pan out. She lives in a railroad tenement in Hell's Kitchen. I'd like to leave if you have nothing for me. I've got to go upstate tonight."

  "Upstate—where?"

  "New Paltz."

  "New Paltz." Leventhal raised one eyebrow slightly. "What're you doing up there?"

  "Nothing much. Dinner with friends."

  Leventhal paused, as if he were deep in thought. "Well, as long as you're in the area..."

  He made a point of fishing through papers on his desk, even though the printed piece of wire copy was right on top. He finally seized it and handed it wordlessly to Jude, with a sideways cock of the wrist that said: this is no big deal, but it could amount to something.

  On his way to his desk, Jude congratulated himself on the stratagem. He had known it would succeed because it tickled two primitive spots in the editorial cortex: fobbing off an assignment and disrupting a reporter's private life. As he grabbed his coat and a fresh notebook and hurried out the door, he looked at Clive and flashed him a V sign.

  Chapter 3

  Skyler lay in bed, listening to the birds and identifying them. There was the bubbling chatter of the yellow-throated warbler, and he imagined it hopping from branch to branch. Nearby came the fluted cries of the chachalaca; he knew how it looked when it rippled its feathers to shake off the morning dew. And far in the distance, he heard the jingle of the white-eyed vireo, "the drunkard" as Kuta called him, crying out quick with the beer check.

  The moment he had awakened, he'd thought about Patrick. He had done the same every morning for the past week, since he and Julia had discovered the body. The image of it, shrunken and gutted on the cold table, rose up unsummoned. Part of him—the part that was so assiduously listening to the birds—tried to block it out. But that was impossible.

  Maybe today something would happen—something that would bring to a head the confusing and frightening chain of events. Patrick's death had rekindled all the doubts that he had tried to lay to rest over the years. There had been a service for him, of course. A simple wooden coffin had been placed under the photograph of Dr. Rincon, and Baptiste had delivered a eulogy. But Skyler had not listened. Instead, he was envisioning the wounds in the corpse, his mind reeling with questions.

  Thank God for Julia. Thinking about her was a balm to his fevered imagination. He needed her more than ever, now that his world was turned upside down and people that he had once loved and trusted had become objects of suspicion and fear.

  He conjured her up in his mind's eye—her flowing dark hair, her bright laugh quick as a sandpiper, the fullness of her thighs and hips that never ceased to excite him, her body that schooled him in wisdom, and her mind that seemed to range always to the next horizon and welcomed him when he arrived there.

  How long had he loved her? It was impossible to say. Forever, it seemed.

  He remembered her as a young girl, and almost blushed in recalling how she used to trail after him and Raisin, and how the two would run off into the woods without her. Once they'd pretended to ignore her, and lured her deep into the forest and then abandoned her. It had been a great lark. They'd laughed and returned to Campus. But as the afternoon shadows lengthened and she still had not returned, Skyler had felt dread in his stomach. He'd scanned the treeline, unable to confess his mounting alarm, until finally close to dusk, he'd spied a tiny white spot—her shirt!—and felt such a rush of joy and relief that he actually gave a little leap of happiness.

  Not long after that had come a second, even more frightening scare.

  He came to dinner at the Meal House one evening—this was back when boys and girls were still allowed to mix—and noticed that she was not there. The next morning, he drew aside a girl from the Age Group and asked where she was. The girl lowered her voice to a whisper.

  "Didn't you hear? She went for a physical and then right into surgery. Nobody knows what it is, but it sounds serious."

  For five days he didn't sleep at night, and barely ate. During Science, he thought of nothing but her. On the evening of the fifth day he could no longer stand it. During dinner, he feigned a stomach ache and was consigned to barracks. He slipped out while the others were eating, crossed the yard to the Big House and located the window to the sick bay on the first floor. He opened it and climbed inside, and there she was, sitting up in bed, throwing him a big smile. Before he knew it, he was at her sid
e.

  "I was lucky," she explained. "They found something wrong, but they operated on it and now I'm all better."

  She turned over in bed and raised her pajama top to expose her back, where an eight-inch-wide bandage was wrapped around her waist.

  "I'm going to have a great scar."

  She sat up again, and he reached over and touched her hand. It was a shock to be holding it—already the Elders had been laying the groundwork for the precepts against contact between the sexes—and he felt a thrill when she squeezed his hand in return.

  From that time on, things were different.

  He did not try to put a name to his feelings for her, because that was too complicated and upsetting, but he knew that she had come to occupy a central place in his scheme of things. He laid down the law: he and Raisin would no longer exclude her; they were offically a threesome. Raisin accepted the change, but not as easily, and once in a while, talking late at night in the barracks, his friend would reminisce about the good old days.

  Then the Lab itself did something to solidify the relationship among the three of them. They were chosen, along with several others, to participate in storytelling sessions. Every few days, they would be taken out of class and placed in a room in the Big House itself. They lay down on cots and a nurse gave them injections from a big needle, which hurt. But then they got to stay there and listen to stories played on a tape. They hated the injections, but it was fun to lie around while others were studying. And they felt pride in being special, in being "an experiment within an experiment," as Baptiste had put it.

  In retrospect, those were the halcyon days, the carefree years when the three of them were together, before all the questions and doubts. And then Raisin had died.

  Julia had been just as profoundly affected by the death as he'd been, and so they felt a need to comfort each other. It was natural for them to seek each other out and to begin meeting secretly, going to great lengths to plan ways to be alone together even when it became clear that doing so was against the rules.

  "How can this be wrong?" Julia asked one time, as they strolled through a meadow near the hidden pasture. "It doesn't feel wrong. It's the rules that have changed, not us. We're not doing anything different."

  But, of course, they were. They had begun touching and holding hands. And one morning when Skyler was lying on his back, she asked him why he'd come to visit her in the sick bay that time, and as he tried to explain, searching for the words, she leaned over and kissed him on the lips. He was shocked and scared and thrilled all at once. And he wanted more.

  They began meeting regularly. Her job gave her some leeway two days a week—when she delivered mail to the small airstrip on the island's eastern bulge—and Skyler met her nearby. They began touching and kissing as soon as they were in the woods. The Lab said sex was wrong, but Kuta preached a different doctrine, and what he said seemed to make sense. Skyler followed Raisin's example: he didn't take the little pill that was proffered every evening, and Julia stopped, too. Soon their bodies felt different, more sensitive, alive and subject to sudden exciting urges.

  One hot, silent afternoon, they explored the southern end of the island, where they had never been. They followed the remnants of an old road scarred with ruts from wagon wheels. It skirted a line of scrub brush and loblolly pine and led them to a sand dune. They walked around it and saw an astonishing sight—a forty-foot tower rising up from a rocky peninsula. It was made of brick. Painted bands of red and white ran up the side, now faded to pastel hues, and on top was a round glass cabin encircled by a walkway and topped by a round metal roof. It was an abandoned lighthouse.

  They ran to it. Skyler pushed the wooden door, which gave way with a bang, and they stepped inside. Suddenly, the air was alive with the beating of wings—scores of birds flapping and circling and rising to disappear out open windows. It was gloomy and there was an acrid smell from bird droppings that coated everything. A spiral staircase clung to the sides and mounted toward a shaft of light above. They went up it, and halfway to the top, there was a two-foot wide breach. They crossed it, clinging to iron rivets in the brick wall, Skyler first and then Julia. They continued up and finally reached a circular glass room flooded by light. In the center was a huge lantern with a four-sided lens set upon a rusted rotating track. They stepped outside onto the round balcony. A strong wind blew against their clothes. They could see for miles over the green-gold marshes and curving brown creeks and distant mudflats—all the way to the mainland.

  They stepped back inside the glass room. They hugged and lay down on the warm concrete floor. As the birds resumed their roosting on the metal railing outside, they kissed. Then slowly, trembling, they removed each other's clothes and came together naked. Skyler caressed her body and she caressed his. They knew instinctively how to touch each other and where. Skyler felt Julia's breath hot in his ear, and he clenched her tightly and told her he loved her. She squeezed him back, so hard that at first he thought he was hurting her, and she told him that she loved him, too—more than anything in the world, more than life.

  They made love. Afterward, they examined one another's body thoroughly, taking it all in, all the turns and curves, including the blue marks on the thighs. Then lying in each other's arms, listening to the sound of the birds outside, and in the distance the waves slapping upon the shore, they said again that they loved and would always love each other. Skyler was amazed that he felt no regret, no feeling that he had done anything wrong. On the contrary, he knew he had done something right. And he also knew deep inside that now there was no turning back.

  The lighthouse became their refuge and escape. They came whenever they could get away, and after making love they would sit in the glass room at the top, holding onto each other and looking over to the mainland like two castaways in a crow's nest.

  On Campus, they studiously ignored each other, which made their trysts in the lighthouse all the more passionate. To arrange them, they evolved a code using a smooth gray rock the size of a fist at the base of an old oak tree; if either of them moved it from the right side of the trunk to the left, that was a signal to meet in the lighthouse that afternoon. How Skyler's heart would soar when he saw the rock had been moved!

  It was not long before the meetings turned subversive. After making love, they would talk about everything, sharing their doubts and fears. In addition to lovers, they became confederates.

  Once she startled him when she looked out at the distant banks and said: "You know, I've been thinking more and more lately that we should go to the other side."

  Since Patrick's death, Julia had been on a campaign to get to the truth. She had stepped up her spying in the Records Room. She had stolen a glimpse at two folders in the filing cabinet, which looked like the results of their physical examinations, she said. And by close observation, she had learned some computer commands. Twice, when left alone, she had used them and even gotten the computer to respond. But she needed to find the right passwords, she said—two of them. Without those two words, she would get nowhere.

  The danger she was running made Skyler wild with fear. He tried to drive home the risks of discovery: she could be caught at the computer at any moment; for all they knew, it made a record of its use. But she would have none of it. She was so caught up in the chase that she was throwing caution overboard. She insisted he was letting his imagination get the best of him.

  But as he tossed around in bed, he thought again about Patrick's body laid out in the morgue and recoiled at the image. That was not imaginary.

  Skyler rose and pulled on his jeans as the morning light began to stream in through the windows. The other Jimminies were beginning to stir in their beds, shifting around, clearing their throats and making other waking noises. Benny, a small boy who had slept above Skyler for as long as he could remember, let one arm dangle over the side rail of the upper bunk, as he did most mornings. Skyler looked at it; the meat of flesh on his underarm was filthy. He was often in trouble for lack of cleanl
iness.

  From outside came the clanging of the ranch bell, the signal to get started, which roused more movement in the bunks. They had heard it so many mornings now, it was almost subliminal.

  Skyler combed his hair in the mirror. He looked at his face looking back at him—his dark eyes and thick dark hair and broad forehead. He had never thought one way or the other about his looks, until Julia, but he did now. He liked it, lying in her arms when she told him how handsome he was, but he was not sure he believed her.

  He glanced at the corner where Patrick's bed used to be; it was gone. The same thing had happened with Raisin years ago—as soon as he had died, the bed had been taken away, as if somehow that would help them forget the loss. He wondered who made decisions like that, how they could be so obtuse.

  The young man in the next bed, Tyrone, cleared his throat, ran a hand through his flaming red hair, and rose up on one elbow.

  "Up early—as usual," he said.

  It was a pointless observation, meant to be social, but Skyler let it go with a nod. He didn't like Tyrone and he didn't trust him. From time to time he wondered how the Elder Physicians knew so much about what the Jimminies were up to, and whether or not there was a spy in their midst. One time, when they were watching a TV show about the Second World War, a spy entered the plot and the Orderlies turned the program off without explanation. If there was a spy, Tyrone, with his need to be loved and appreciated by the Elders, was Skyler's candidate.

  But perhaps he was being unfair. Ever since he had begun his lonely quest to try to unravel the mystery of their existence on the island, he had been struck by how much he had changed—how often suspicion dominated his thinking and how apart he felt from the others in the Age Group. They were strangers to him—as he was to them.