The Experiment Page 7

  What he was doing—heading toward the identical wooden structure across the field—was unheard of. No man in the Age Group had ever entered the women's barracks.

  He heard the voice inside himself again. Help! Help me!

  When he burst in upon the women, they leapt back in fright, and a group huddled against a wall with more than a touch of melodrama. But he knew, he could tell right away, that they had surmised why he had come, and something about their reaction and the looks on their faces told him that his fears were well founded. Something was wrong. And one quick glance told him that Julia was not among them.

  "Where is she?" he demanded.

  The reaction was instantaneous. Some looked down at the floor uncertainly, others turned away. But one woman, Sarah, a friend of Julia's, found her voice and approached him sympathetically as she spoke.

  "She is not here," she said softly. "They came for her about noon. They said they had found something wrong in her tests."

  The words cut into Skyler. It was what he had feared all along on some level that he'd never articulated. "Something wrong"! That's what they always said. He felt his heart skip a beat and freeze up. The image of Patrick upon the slab rose before his eyes. Why did he let her do it? Why, why, why?

  He turned and ran out the door into the storm. He no longer felt the rain or the ache in his side. He was surrounded by a numbness that seemed to extend into the air around him. He thought of only one thing: Julia. He had to find her. He had to see her. He had to save her.

  Skyler entered the basement of the Big House through the same door that he and Julia had used only days before. This time he didn't worry about being seen or leaving signs of forced entry. He turned the knob and knocked the door open with his shoulder.

  It was dark inside and he flicked on a light switch. The Records Room looked just as it had before. There was a pile of papers on top of one of the desks, held in place by a rock. He moved slowly now—not out of fear but out of dread. He walked across the room, tracing the same path he'd taken before when Julia had been seated at the computer. The vision of her sitting there came to him in a flash—her long dark hair, her bare shoulder when she'd taken off her shirt.

  He came to the door of the operating room, felt the clammy, cold weight of the brass doorknob in his hand, steeled himself, and gave the door a shove.

  Instantly, he saw the body.

  A pale cone of light shone down from above, bathing it in a yellowish hue. She was naked, lying on her back, her hands at her sides. Her perfectly rounded neck was turned slightly. Her hair rippled out around her head, cascading onto the white metal table as if she were floating on a lake. Her features were serene and cold like porcelain: her brow unfurrowed, her eyes closed, her perfect nose tilting up slightly. She looked as if she were about to speak.

  Skyler couldn't think, couldn't feel. He was past thinking and feeling. He walked in a daze slowly around the table and the cone of light that shone upon it, looking at the body, the one person he had loved with his life. And now he seemed strangely detached, unfeeling—as if it were too much, as if his mind refused to take in the information offered by his eyes. He reached out and touched her on the shoulder. The body was not cold.

  It was then that he saw the incision, a dark red, angry cut beginning low down on one side. It curved around the belly, and he suddenly realized that part of her viscera was missing. That was why, come to think of it, the body seemed so small and shrunken. And now that his brain was functioning again on some primary level, his eyes began to function, too. They began to take in things, like the small pool of blood that had coagulated under the curve of her spine. And to see where it had dripped down onto the concrete floor, a little rivulet of red leading to the drain to one side of the table.

  Skyler couldn't hear. He couldn't breathe. The shell of numbness was too thick—but it was about to break. He felt a spasm overtake him. It started at the base of his back and fishtailed upward through his spine, like a corkscrew drilling upward, exploding in a whiteness in his brain. Help! He heard the little voice again. Help, help! But it was no longer calling for her. Now it was calling for him.

  He tried to think, to calm down. She had been operated upon—that much he could discern. Suddenly, the wave of incomprehension struck him again: the person that he loved, that precious body—cut into, hands moving inside of her, organs fondled and removed. The barbarians.

  Gone. She's gone.

  And as he thought it, he was conscious that it was the first thought he'd been able to have. He felt he was rushing to the surface from some numbing depths underwater. He had other thoughts. He knew that they would come to kill him next. But strangely, he did not feel afraid, because he was too much in shock and horror for that. The shell of numbness around him was still there—it was his friend.

  Skyler steadied himself by leaning against a counter behind him. His eyes swiveled and held, now taking in everything. The counter was cluttered with medical implements, jars of liquids, cotton balls, syringes, a small saw whose teeth were covered in blood. He picked up a knife and held it, the blade, too, covered in blood. He began to breathe deeply again, taking in oxygen in gulps, like a runner after a race, and looked around again. In a corner was a metal pole on wheels, and hanging down from it, a bag and a tube. Nearby was another counter, and above it, rectangular basement windows hinged at the top, leading to the outside.

  He saw the body again, and her death, the reality of her non-being, dealt him another body blow. It kept coming and coming, like being struck by the blades of a windmill. He grasped the counter and held on. He had an impulse. Should he pick her up? Should he wrap her up in something and carry her away? But to where?

  Suddenly, he heard a sound, footsteps on stairs. He raced across the room to the door and turned a key and heard the lock click. He heard the footsteps approach the door on the other side. The doorknob turned, once at first, then twice in surprise, then insistently it began to rattle. Skyler bounded across the room, leapt onto the counter and pushed the bottom of the window. It opened out and he heard the raindrops smacking against the glass. He threw the knife outside, jumped headfirst into the window, held himself in place by his elbows, and wriggled upward. His feet swung wildly and struck the IV stanchion and sent it smashing to the floor. He squeezed harder, and suddenly he was outside in the pouring rain. On his knees, he looked back through the open window and saw the body lying in the cone of light. He pulled away just as the door cracked open with a tearing sound, an instant too soon to see who was there. He picked up the knife and ran, holding it upright, through the rain.

  He decided to head north toward the forest, but he had to make one stop first. He burst into the lecture hall, empty and darkened in shadows, and ran up the central aisle to the podium. He stood before the portrait of Dr. Rincon, staring for a moment at the distant, familiar, unknowable face. Then he raised the knife and plunged it through the glass, smashing it and sending shards raining upon the floor. The blade went in deep, up to the hilt, and he pulled it out. Before he turned to run back outside, he noticed that a trickle of red blood—her blood—had spread on the black and white photograph. It looked as if the good doctor had taken a fatal blow right in the center of his chest.

  If only it were true!

  Chapter 6

  Jesus Christ! Jude muttered to himself as he walked down York Avenue on his way to the interview.

  An hour earlier, the city editor himself, no less, had used the loudspeaker to summon him to the city desk. This was a particularly denigrating way of handing out an assignment, perfected by the Mirror over generations of abusing employees. It compelled the reporter to walk past rows of competitors who wished him failure or ridicule—or, in many cases, both.

  "Dead man walking," muttered a forty-year-old rewrite man out of the side of his mouth as Jude passed.

  The spleen behind the remark held out a slender reed of hope—maybe the rewrite man knew the assignment and was simply envious—but it was dashed by one
look at the city editor, Ted Bolevil. His brow was creased, a sign that he had succumbed to shallow guilt. Bolevil was a short, ruddy-faced Australian who was regarded as little more than an errand boy for Tibbett and was consequently detested throughout the news room. His nickname—not always out of earshot—was, naturally, "boll weevil." In preferred short form, it was "the weevil"—preferred because it was close to weasel.

  "Harley. I want you to do a sidebar. Identical twins. What makes them and why."

  "What?" Jude knew it was a hack assignment. The paper was trying to string out the story of the mix-up of the homicidal twin and his upstanding brother; today's headline, over the revelation that one of them raised race horses on the side, was: WHICH TWIN HAS THE PONY? The story was running out of gas, and they wanted to pump it up with a bunch of sidebars. Jude didn't care to waste time on a sidebar. He wanted to follow the New Paltz murder.

  "You heard me. People want to know. Identical twins. Maybe separated at birth. You ever see that feature? Two photos of people who look alike. You know—like Tony Blair and the mule boy from Pinocchio."

  Jude just looked at the man. Bolevil got flustered.

  "But this should be serious. Scientific. What happens to them? Why do they both end up doing the same dead-end job? Or marrying blondes—that kind of thing. You know—get the point?"

  Jude was afraid he did.

  "Throw in new research," Bolevil added. "Scientific types up in arms. New breakthroughs. Why is one good and one evil? How to tell which one's the bad seed? You know, that kind of thing."

  His tendency to speak in sentence fragments was only one of his annoying habits, and by no means the most.

  "Make for good pictures," he said. "We get only one twin, we can shoot him twice—ha ha."

  Bolevil turned his back to Jude and dug into his in-basket, with a small sigh intended to suggest the burdens of newspaper leadership. End of discussion.

  Mule boy in Pinocchio!

  Jude found the address he was looking for, 1230 York, the gated entrance to Rockefeller University. He walked up a hill, past men mowing a patch of lawn on tractors, and entered ivy-covered Founders Hall. A bust of John D. greeted him. He leaned upon the reception desk, fished out a piece of paper and read the name he had found in the Mirror's electronic morgue.

  "Dr. Tierney, Research," he told a uniformed guard. He anticipated his question and cut him off open-mouthed: "She's expecting me."

  He was told to take a seat. After the appropriate New York waiting time of ten minutes—not enough to be impolite but sufficient to establish that the visit was an intrusion—he was escorted to the fourth floor. He sat in another chair, across from a secretary who was pecking at a keyboard. She eyed him up and down and lifted a phone receiver languidly.

  "The gentleman from the Mirror," she said, lacing ironic spaces between the words.

  The door opened, and through it walked a young woman in a blue skirt with a white lab coat, a pair of glasses tucked into the vest pocket. She had long dark hair that fell upon her shoulders and interesting-looking hollows under her eyes.

  "I'm Dr. Tierney," she said, looking at him closely as she extended her hand, which felt strong and warm. "Elizabeth Tierney," she amended.

  "Jude Harley."

  "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. I wasn't told you were here."

  The secretary lifted one eyebrow.

  Jude liked the apology—she was clearly from out of town, and in fact her speech hinted at the broad vowels of the Midwest. She was about thirty, he thought, his age.

  They stood in silence for a moment, until she turned slightly and said: "Won't you come in?"

  Her office was a mix of the official and the friendly, bound medical volumes next to books of poetry. Jude spotted Yeats, Blake and Baudelaire, for openers. There were stacks of computer printouts and personal clutter—mail, a model sports car made from wire hangers, a bulging Filofax and photographs on a windowsill. On the wall were a dartboard with Freud's face, a Kandinsky print, a large poster of a single human cell, framed degrees and a bulletin board pinned with postcards, many of tropical settings. Above her desk were two African carvings.

  "Would you like some coffee?" she asked, motioning him to a couch.

  He nodded yes, told her he took milk and sugar, and was pleased to note that she fetched it herself, from some sort of adjoining pantry. Two points.

  He was also pleased, when she returned, that she did not take up a position behind her desk, but sat on a chair beside the couch, angled toward him, her knees pointing up. Proximity always helps an interview, he thought as he pulled out a tiny tape recorder from his pocket and propped the half-inch mike onto a metal clip facing her.

  "Just for insurance," he said. "I thought you might get scientific and technical. But I won't use it if it bothers you."

  "Not at all," she said, and her tone suggested she meant it. She was nothing if not confident. She crossed her legs, and with her knees at an incline, he could see several inches under her skirt, a disturbing patch of white thigh disappearing into darkness.

  "I suppose you're here because of that murder case—the two lawyers," she said. "Horrible business."

  "That's right. For our paper, the more horrible, the better."

  She nodded knowingly. "For all of them, I'm afraid. Still, I like your sports section."

  Now he was really impressed. Three points.

  He looked at the pair of African carvings mounted on thick white blocks on the wall, resplendent in beams of light from the ceiling lights. The statuettes were about eight inches tall, worn smooth and dark as ebony. At first they looked identical: disproportionately large heads with wide-open oval eyes, bulging cheeks marked by slanting scars, and elaborately carved little caps painted blue. Each was adorned with a beaded waistband, a brass ringlet around the left wrist and a small shoulder cape of cowry shells. But from the exaggerated genitalia it could be seen that one was a man and the other a woman.

  Dr. Tierney followed his gaze.

  "Ibeji," she said. "They come from Nigeria, Yorubaland in the south. The Yoruba carve them whenever they have twins."

  He was taken by the carvings, and it occurred to him that he might somehow work them into his story. She read his curiosity and continued.

  "The parents commission them from master carvers, and they pay a great deal, the more ornate the better. Each statue represents one of the twins. They are kept carefully stowed away, and if the twins achieve adulthood, well and good, the ibeji are meaningless objects to be tossed out—or these days more likely sold for a pittance to a trader who gets a hefty markup when he sells them to foreigners.

  "But if one of the twins should die—which happens more often than not—the statue representing that twin takes on enormous spiritual value. It is dressed like the child, it is given food and put to sleep at night and takes its rightful place at all birthdays and ceremonies. The idea is that this is the only way to appease the missing twin. Otherwise, it will become jealous and angry and come up to claim the living twin and drag him down into the netherworld."

  She smiled. "That's because the two twins have only one soul between them. At least, that's the theory."

  Jude looked at them more closely—at the gently curving bellies, the serene smiles, the slitted oval eyes. They were eerie and majestic-looking, existing in another, timeless world. They reminded him, strangely, of fetuses.

  "They're beautiful," he said.

  "I'm glad you like them," she said, genuinely pleased. "I do, too."

  After a moment's silence, Jude switched on the tape recorder, pulled out his notebook, and said: "Well, time to get started."

  He began with some warm-up questions. Her age: thirty (so it was the same as his). Her hometown: White Fish Bay, Wisconsin. Her parents: her father was a doctor, her mother a housewife. Her background: Berkeley, and then Minnesota for postgraduate work and three years of medical school at Duke.

  She was not, she explained, a practicing doctor, but a medical r
esearcher in biology. Research on twins studies was a recent sideline.

  He jotted down her replies. The notebook was largely a prop, since the tape was recording every word. He had learned to use note taking to adjust the flow of information—he could open the spigot by scribbling enthusiastically and shut it down by tapping his ballpoint in boredom. But he quickly realized that this woman needed little encouragement to talk about her research, which aroused an enthusiasm that burned in her dark eyes.

  "Do you know why scientists are so passionate about identical twins? Every year we trek to their gathering in Twinsburg, Ohio, and set up booths and hound them unmercifully to get them to participate in all kinds of studies. Do you know why?"

  Jude nodded ambiguously; it could have signified yes or go on. She went on.

  "Twins studies are a powerful research tool."

  Jude wrote that down.

  "Monozygotic twins—twins that come from a single fertilized egg that splits—are an accident of Nature. It's like a little slippage of the gears, a crack in the mirror that allows us to see through it to the other side. It provides us with two separate individuals that have the exact same genetic makeup. Their genes are, for all intents and purposes, the same."

  "I see." Jude stopped taking notes.

  "So here you have two identical people, the same from the point of view of what they inherit from their ancestors, different in circumstances. It's a miniature experiment, aimed at solving that age-old conundrum: what counts more, hereditary or environment? Nature or nurture?"

  "I remember," said Jude. "Biology 201."

  "More likely 101. The introductory course. You probably know the salient features of the studies. All those coincidences that seem to defy belief—they're part of common lore: how two identical boys or girls, raised in separate cities and with no contact or even knowledge of one another, end up leading lives that have all these spooky similarities. Scientists love to study them, newspapers love to write about them, and we all love to read about them."