I woke up the next morning with the recipe book draped across my face. I’d slept for less than an hour. In the kitchen, I found Dana standing tiptoed on a footstool, cleaning out the cupboards. When she heard me come into the room and pull the orange juice out of the fridge, she said, without looking over her shoulder, “How are you feeling?”
I poured the OJ into a tall plastic cup. “Fine.”
She turned to toss an ancient, half-used box of spaghetti into the trash bag at her feet. “You’ve hardly talked about Mr. Tampari. You can talk to me.” I’m not sure how many times, in the years since I moved in, Dana had said this: You can talk to me.
“I know.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Do you? Because you haven’t said one word about this man, who died, who you spent all this time with. That’s not healthy, Conrad.”
“I’m fine.” In a strange way, this was actually true. My mother had burned alive. My father abandoned me and drank himself sick. Sammy made love to me and said nothing about whatever dangers were at the door. That’s what I couldn’t communicate to Dana: I was sad and lost and fine. Grief is an emotion, but it is also a skill. I was simply more practiced at it than most.
Dana let out a frustrated sigh and returned to the dusty reaches of the cupboard. “On Monday we’re having dinner with your father.”
I finished my juice.
“You can’t not visit him.”
“I know,” I said again. As I went to the front door, I passed Emmett, eating breakfast in the living room.
Emmett looked up from the television. He was watching anime. “Don’t you need a ride?”
“I’m heading to RJ’s. I’ll ride with him.”
“Sure.” He increased the volume on the TV. “Whatever.”
Fifteen minutes later, I sat with RJ in his bedroom, catching him up. RJ lived in a big house—his father had to pay a “mansion tax” and complained about it—but RJ’s was the only bedroom on the second floor, and this made it feel private. The sun rose slowly into the skylight window. RJ was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, belted with blue fabric, and he was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his back to the headboard. I sat at the other end with my feet on the floor, watching his closed door with apprehension. He had just finished breakfast, and his whole family was downstairs, his sister watching TV, his parents making a grocery list in the kitchen, the pair of them dressed in matching tracksuits that rendered them more alien to me than the mother’s French accent.
Today, we’d be skipping school to visit the storage unit.
“You have the key?” RJ asked.
I showed him. It was a stubby yellow thing—the kind of key that comes with a cheap padlock, not the kind you would use to protect an object of value.
“Elixir of life,” RJ said in a voice of wonder. He had the recipe book in his lap. “You think he kept the ingredients there?”
Sammy had given me the recipes, but without the ingredients, what good were they? Still, I was having a hard time saying elixir of life out loud. So I said, “I just know he wanted me to go.”
RJ swung his legs over the side of the bed and began putting on his shoes. Where once he’d been reluctant to visit Sammy’s apartment, this morning he was a bundle of eager, impatient energy.
“Wait,” I said. This was the dynamic RJ and I had established over years of friendship: he would need to talk me into it.
But before he could say anything else, his door swung open, revealing his sister, Stephanie, eyeing us from the doorway. “What are you two talking about?” Her eyebrows were pinched, her voice slightly slurred by her condition, which affected the muscles of her neck and jaw. She was still in her pajamas—ankle socks, silk shorts, a white tank top that said, in gold letters, LOVE IS STRONGER THAN HATE.
“Nothing,” RJ said, and although he filled this word with annoyance, I knew how much he loved his sister. No matter how often or relentlessly she pestered us, I had never seen him tell her to leave.
“Nothing?” she said, slightly out of breath. “Nothing, really?” She looked at me (the weaker of the two). “You’re just in here saying nothing, nothing, nothing?”
I reddened under her gaze. Stephanie’s muscular dystrophy meant she had to turn her entire body to look at you, and I partially attributed her intuitiveness to this. For her, watching someone, listening, wasn’t casual—it took her whole self to do it.
“Why are you breathing so hard?” RJ asked.
Stephanie’s eyes went small. “The doctor said my leg muscles.”
It was the kind of sentence fragment one hears when dealing with a fatal condition; if spoken in full, every sentence would have the same ending. We all looked at her legs together, which were short and thin, her dark skin shaved smooth. In a moment of my own intuition, I knew she must be thinking about the work of that shaving, and how, in a not distant future, she might not trust herself to do it.
Shaken by these thoughts, Stephanie said, “You dipshits are gonna be late for school,” backed one step out of the doorway, and slammed the door shut.
RJ and I stared at each other in the hard silence that followed her departure. “Look,” RJ said, “when someone gives you the key to a mysterious door, you open it.”
We headed north out of Littlefield, tracing the Little River toward the storage facility. The river was shallow, slate blue, and curved to the southeast before emptying into the bay. Our route took us through Main Street, which was wide and still busy, though emptier now that summer was over. We drove by a lobster restaurant, a beachwear boutique, a chain sandwich shop with a CLOSED sign in the doorway. The sun was overhead, so we could feel it, but we couldn’t see it.
The GPS on RJ’s phone directed him away from the streets we knew and toward the storage facility, which lay in an industrial part of town we never had reason to visit. RJ guided the car down a one-way side street, his eyes focused on the road. He was not classically handsome in the way of Sammy or Emmett; in fact, I wonder if RJ was, to a neutral observer, a bit homely. His forehead was high, which gave him the appearance of a receding hairline. His lips were slightly too narrow for his wide cheeks. But I certainly didn’t feel that way about him, and I admired how he could be completely serious in one moment—as he was then, driving me to this unfamiliar place—or completely silly in the next, as though he had full control of his emotions. His face, handsome or not, registered this confidence. For me, everything always seemed jumbled together: my loves, my fears, my hardest questions about the world.
When we arrived, RJ parked in the lot among a handful of other cars—we would not be alone. I pictured the violent appearance of Sammy’s apartment and felt a stab of fear. It was one thing to read Sammy’s journals at night in my bedroom. But there in the parking lot, in the sun, I was exposed. I didn’t know if we were in danger, and in this not knowing, I felt Sammy’s absence most painfully.
The storage facility was broad and several stories tall, covering half an acre of fenced-off pavement. We made our way toward the wide double doors of the entrance. As we went inside, I was aware of footsteps on the sidewalk, getting near. RJ heard them, too, and indicated with his chin for us to walk faster toward the elevator, which sat around the corner and was large—as it would need to be, for people and their furniture.
We hurried into it, and I mashed the button to close the door. I’ve since read that these buttons rarely do anything—they’re installed to provide the illusion of control—but I didn’t know that then, and I pressed and pressed, not wanting to share the elevator with whoever was behind us. Only when we could really hear the footsteps did the door begin to close, and by the time it shut, we glimpsed the shadow of a figure making the turn around the corner. As the elevator rose, I imagined again the other-Conrad, Sammy’s second lover, tracing my steps. Then I entertained an even worse possibility: that the figure was Captain Carson, spurred by the intimate photograph of Sammy and me, hunting us like a dog.
At the third floor, we began the walk to Sammy’s unit, counting the numbers as we went. The walls of the storage facility were bright white, the color of tooth enamel, and the rows of identical units made the place feel endless. We twisted our way through the corridors until we were on the far end of the building. The elevator, having deposited us on the third floor, had been called immediately back down to the first.
I extracted the key from my pocket, but in a moment of horrible déjà vu, I once again didn’t need it.
“What in the actual fuck?” RJ said, running ahead of me—only a few yards ahead, but it was enough that I almost cried out to him. Instead I watched, frozen, as he picked up the pieces of the broken padlock and showed them to me. Whoever had beaten us to Sammy’s apartment had beaten us here, too, and the path they were forging was not peaceful. My lungs were a tightening knot in my chest. Someone really was out there, doing this.
RJ crouched into a squat, inspecting the steel roll-up door of the unit. When I came to stand next to him, he looked up at me. “Let’s be fast,” he said, leaving no time for me to question the wisdom of staying.
He slid the door up easily, quickly, the metallic sound of it echoing off the walls. As the storage unit received the light of the hallway, I expected to find total destruction. Instead, we found uncertainty.
RJ frowned, his arms still extended over his head. “Is it like his apartment, or is it just messy?”
The storage unit was packed with boxes, and while some were overturned, I saw no evidence of the violence enacted on his studio. The space was a mass of equipment, clutter, and cardboard, and only my aptitude for chemistry allowed me to make any sense of the scene. Immediately through the door, several rolls of dialysis and thistle tubing were coiled like garden snakes under a hedge of filter paper. A $3,000 immersion circulator, which must have looked to RJ like a microwave with arms, lay on its side, its wires dangling pathetically over the console. Sampling bags and sponge probes surrounded the pump housing of a fluid aspiration system, its nipplelike tube connectors standing at full attention. Under another empty box, I saw a $500 incubator. Based on a quick mental calculation, Sammy’s storage unit contained over $10,000 worth of equipment. Whoever had broken the padlock wasn’t motivated by money—having left behind an elevator-ful of expensive laboratory devices.
“What next?” RJ asked.
I didn’t like that he was asking—he was the one who was supposed to know. “Should we leave in case they come back?” I asked, gesturing to the broken padlock, and what I meant was Play your role.
“Just look for a few minutes.” This was what I expected him to say, but his tone surprised me with its uncharacteristic plaintiveness, almost desperation. I didn’t recognize it.
I began to search. RJ stayed near the entrance to the unit, picking at some open boxes, keeping his eyes on the hall. He pulled a reaction flask from a plastic crate and held it absentmindedly to his nose. He gagged and dropped it back into the box, his face contorted. I could smell the thiols—the same ones in my dad’s fetid breath—from the other side of the locker. Along with the laboratory equipment, the only immediately visible items were easy-to-find materials with no obvious relation to the recipe book: twenty boxes of baby aspirin, a gallon of lye, a box of sparklers. In a pinch, Sammy could have used these materials to build a bomb.
“What’s this?” RJ had reached into an open box and removed a small plastic vial. He held it horizontal, and the metallic liquid inside settled into a shallow pool. It was the first ingredient in Sammy’s Entrée: quicksilver.
Seeing my face, RJ grew excited. “There’s lots more stuff in here.”
He was holding the flaps of the box apart and looking up at me expectantly, as though I might be able to tell him, with only a glance, if the box contained the secret to immortality. I crouched down next to him. Along with the mercury, an unlabeled herb was wrapped in computer paper, which looked like the B. rossica of Sammy’s elixir. We found a pill bottle labeled RAPAMYCIN, though it was nearly empty. At the bottom of the box was a thick vial with only a tablespoon or so of a clear green liquid. The vial was circled in masking tape, and on it, Sammy had written CATHERINE in blue Sharpie.
“Who’s Catherine?” RJ asked.
“No idea,” I said honestly. I tipped the vial on its side, letting the green sludge slide slowly down the clear walls.
“Do you hear that?”
I listened. The heavy fumes of the storage unit had filtered down the hallway, and they were just then rounding the corner, hitting the nose of the figure whose shadow we’d seen on the first floor. The stranger coughed, barely audible. Before I could stop him, RJ began to creep in the direction of the sound. I followed, trying to wave him back. We approached a bend in the hallway. RJ pressed his spine against the wall and inched forward as if he were navigating the edge of a tall building. At the corner, he took a quick peek, and then he was running, at full speed.
“Hey!” he called, disappearing around the side.
“RJ, wait!” I yelled, giving chase. As I rounded the corner, I saw, at the end of the hall, someone’s legs as he sprinted away from us. RJ and I charged forward, but before we reached the second corner, I heard the sound of the elevator. We arrived just in time to see it depart.
“Stairs,” RJ said, and he was running again.
We traced the exit signs to the stairwell, which we descended quickly, reaching the bottom just as the slow, heavy door we’d opened at the top thudded closed. I followed RJ breathlessly, terrified—what on earth were we doing?
We ran through the unmanned lobby and into the light of the sun. To my great relief, the parking lot was empty of people. RJ threw up his hands and leaned against his car, breathing hard.
“Sorry I couldn’t catch him,” he said between breaths.
“I didn’t want you to.”
He coughed the air back into his lungs. “You need to call the phone number.”
I looked into the sky. A prop plane flew under the clouds, leaving a faint white contrail that faded as soon as it appeared.
“What else are you going to do?” RJ asked. “Let’s go back for that box and then we’ll call.”
I heard it again in his voice, the desperation. I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt, holding him in place. “Why do you care so much?”
RJ looked at me as if I’d asked him for the solution to one plus one. “Don’t you want to help your dad and Stephanie? Don’t you want them to get better?”
I let go of his sleeve. Of course. Without a miracle, Stephanie would be lucky to see her thirties. I’d been focused on the mystery Sammy had left for me, but to RJ, there was no mystery. If Sammy had given me the chance to save someone’s life, even the smallest chance, then that’s what we would do.
He was taking small steps toward the building. His face was serious, urgent, almost panicked—and for a moment, behind his confidence and his courage and his endless reserves of optimism, I glimpsed it: his widow self. It was like quicksand, pulling him under, into the world of pain and loss.
“This is all bullshit,” I told him, even though I, too, wanted to believe. “You know that, right?”
RJ waved me on. “Mr. Tampari’s work must be worth something if someone is trying to steal it.”