Guantánamo!
They could do, Downey explained, anything to us here. Not that they intended to—on the contrary, we were his guests and would soon meet some other prominent hosts, come especially to celebrate our arrival and the wonderful discoveries that lay in the near and far future. He recounted their names and titles as we mounted the jeep and headed off to the other side of the bay, where a large building loomed: Phillip Clarke, the CEO of Pharma2001, along with a couple of his German acolytes, the secretary of defense himself, the subdirector of the Center for Disease Control—to which soon would be added the words “and Prevention,” Downey assured us, as soon as Congress voted on the new designation—a fundamental step forward for the funding of his own project. And as we were on the subject of funding, two bankers would be in the auditorium, whose names he preferred not to reveal, as well as a high operations officer from the Central Intelligence Agency. And an eminence, Professor Saltmacher, in charge of Biosafety and Toxins at the National Security Agency. Several scientists and Nobel Prize–winning economists, whose names, though I didn’t catch them, seemed to suitably impress Cam. And, of course, the academic world was also in attendance, through a member of the Board of Visitors of the National Defense University who was, at the same time, here to represent the Project for the New American Century. And, of course, Admiral Peabody, who would be our primary host.
I interrupted Downey, pointing at a large barbed-wire compound behind which dozens of black people, half naked, were grouped, watching us go by, cheering our jeep as if it were a presidential cavalcade.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s Camp Bulkeley. Haitian refugees, rescued on the high seas by our Navy—fleeing their country after the recent coup d’état. The United States can’t let them reach our shores and can’t let them die in the ocean, so here they are till things settle down in their own land or we find some place that will accept them, though who knows who’d want the poor devils. I’ve been sending them extra food rations—maybe that’s why they’re waving to us. ”
And then he kept on salivating about the renowned men who would be there for my presentation, as he called it, but I had lost all interest in his preening, couldn’t escape the image of those men and women pressed against the railings, eyes boring into mine like black candles under the same sun that had seen Columbus go ashore on an island like this one five hundred years ago.
At about this very time of day. He had waited for dawn because the night of October 11 lights had been sighted—lights like eyes in the darkness, like a wax candle rising and falling—he had waited and ordered the crew to sing the Salve and called the island San Salvador and the trees were very green and there was water and fruits of diverse kinds. And he leaped on the shore and was soon received by the inhabitants of that island, who brought parrots and other goods. The natives were well made and handsome. And they were naked.
Five hundred years had gone by and everything had changed and nothing had changed.
I looked at Cam to gauge if she was feeling my sadness but she seemed to be animated by the same sparkle of cheerful buoyancy that had gripped her since we had been assaulted just outside the Straits of Magellan, since we had first met, if you came to think of it, in that swimming pool so long ago it seemed to have happened in another lifetime.
My despondency only grew when we met Admiral Thomas Peabody, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another admiral, I thought, another man of the sea, greeting us effusively and with who knows what venomous second thoughts in his head, like that other admiral, Almirante Cristóbal Colón, back then greeting the natives, the Arawaks soon to be kidnapped and exterminated and enslaved—not one left anymore on any of these Caribbean islands.
Cam, on the other hand, was delighted with Peabody.
Not because he was jolly and rotund and received us as heroes, thanked us for so willingly serving our country, apologized for the abruptness of what he termed the “invitation.” But because she obviously perceived in him a possible ally—why? what flicker in his eyes justified such an assessment?—although she waited till Downey had hurried away to attend to preparations, waited for the door to close behind his receding footsteps, before pouncing, letting loose a wild purring animal inside her.
“You know that all this is a hoax, Admiral.”
“What’s a hoax?”
“That my husband has this sickness that Dr. Downey has been selling. That his body contains the cure to it and the cure to God knows how many other ailments and problems. It’s a lie, smoke and mirrors.”
Peabody held his ground. He had survived worse storms than one woman, no matter how bewitching. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but I’ve seen the photos, the damning evidence—and the results of Dr. Downey’s experiments. Not to mention his reputation. You have your credentials, but you’re not in line for a Nobel Prize, eh?”
“What if the photos you have are a fraud, Photoshopped with a technique created, by the way, by my husband? What then?”
“They’re not. They were snapped by two of our most reliable agents—and they fit into everything else about Mr. Foster’s life—and other proof amassed regarding other cases.”
“If they are a fraud, what then?”
For a second, a cloud passed over the admiral’s face. Then he recomposed his features, hardening them back into certainty.
“Listen, Ernest Downey, he’s the first true genius I’ve ever met. A bit eccentric—and difficult to please when he’s in anger mode or overdrive, I’ll give you that. But fraud! I’ve gotten to know him quite well these last years, and more so while we were working to get this facility ready for your visit. You’re surprised? He anticipates everything, told me as soon as you recovered from your accident, Mrs. Foster, that you’d both be heading down to Tierra del Fuego. That’s when we started prepping Gitmo for your imminent arrival, the auditorium you’re about to see and the three labs with state of the art technology where Mr. Foster will be residing until the tests are completed—”
“For how long?” I interceded.
“For as long as it takes,” he answered. “But the point is, he doesn’t make mistakes—”
“But he thought my husband and I were going to Europe, he sent the agents there . . .”
“Let’s not quibble about tactics. Strategically—and that’s what matters in a war, not minor skirmishes and maneuvers—he always hits the nail on the head. He told us to investigate the genealogy of the victims we had found with the same syndrome exhibited by your husband, and he was right. His paradigm works! And the research is flawless! He wouldn’t convene some of the most powerful men in this country—and abroad—if he weren’t certain of his data. Those two photos are irrefutable. Now, I understand you want to protect your spouse, but the needs of the nation and humanity supersede individual rights, so—”
“If it’s a hoax, will you let us go?”
Peabody was getting impatient, his civility about to turn sour. Why was Cam provoking him? We were at his mercy. I reached out to her arm, hoping to dissuade her. She shook me off.
“I want your word of honor, Admiral, that you’ll let us go if Fitzroy proves useless to you. That you’ll immediately return us home so we can peacefully continue our lives.”
The admiral sighed, won over by her passion, her stubbornness—not surprising, it had happened so often to me.
“All right then. If Mr. Foster is useless to us, and you can prove that, then, yes, we’ll let you go. I trust you’ll accept my word of honor.”
“What I’ll accept doesn’t matter. It’s whether you’ll stand by it that matters here.”
“I will stand by my promise. But you’re in for a big disappointment.”
And as if this were a signal, the intercom buzzed.
“Here we go,” the admiral said. “Showtime.”
He escorted us down several winding corridors until he reached a door, guarded by none other than Agent Wiggins. “Remember to keep Mr. Foster out of sight until Dr. Downey gives the go-ahead,” Peabody said—and before I could object, he had grabbed Cam by the elbow and moved away with her. Wiggins opened the door and, bowing to me, indicated that I was to enter.
It was a projectionist’s booth, looking out onto an auditorium. Reading an issue of Hustler magazine sat a huge-bellied black man—oversized for such a small space, even more so now that Wiggins and I were squeezed in. “At last! The guest of honor,” he said, leaving the magazine open at a particularly pornographic photo of two naked women making out. “I’m Ensign S. Henson, go by the name of Sleazy Steve, but seeing as I’m in charge of making sure you look good under the spotlight and the cameras, all that stuff, you can call me plain and simple Sleazy.”
I told him I would rather address him as Ensign Henson and he shrugged complacently and invited me to make myself comfortable—would I care for some reading material, he had a stray copy of Bound and Gagged and Screw Magazine and, if I cared for more sophisticated fare, some Playboys. I declined, more interested in the auditorium: a hundred seats, twenty-some filled with men in suits, looking up at a podium, behind which a giant screen glowed in the penumbra. The walls were cloaked in darkness, a mass of curtains covering what was behind them.
I saw Admiral Peabody steering my wife into the auditorium. They stopped in front of the assembled men and he introduced them one by one. She seemed at ease, the only woman in the room, relaxed, flirtatious, joking. I felt a surge of jealousy until she looked up in my direction—guessing where I was—and then gifted me with a little wave of her hand, mouthed the words, Trust me, it’s going to be all right, before returning to some sleek oaf with silvered hair and rim glasses who must have been the rep of the Board of the National Defense University or some such nonsense.
Cam and Peabody stood for a while, chatting with the other attendees, until the lights dimmed and everybody took their places, side by side, expectantly gazing at the podium where a bright beam of light announced the arrival of Ernest Downey—a spectacle engineered by Sleazy Steve who, as he fingered buttons, barely looked up from the photo of a petite Asian woman, full frontal and breasts budding.
“My friends,” Downey said, “we are gathered to celebrate a breakthrough with tremendous implications for the world. Thanks to your support and the organizations you represent we are about to set forth on an odyssey that will revolutionize the way in which we comprehend and replicate our bodies and our history, influencing how we practice biomedicine and warfare, helping to avoid a potential apocalypse. Decoding visual memories embedded in our genetic makeup will allow us to recuperate a past apparently lost forever, with enormous commercial benefits as well as major consequences for our national security. You’ve been frank enough to admit, at one time or another, a residual skepticism regarding this enterprise. Those lingering doubts will now be laid to rest.”
I was struck by how unruffled and rational Downey sounded. The frantic lunacy of our transcontinental night flight seemed to have drained away, depleted on my hapless ears. Aghast as I was by his procedures, and fearful, despite Cam’s reassurances, of what the impending experiments might mean for me, I couldn’t help being drawn into the serene vortex of his arguments, the conviction with which his speech was delivered. I looked at Cam’s face to see if she was equally mesmerized, but her left foot was nervously tapping the floor, a sure sign her mind was elsewhere. What could she be thinking of, scheming, strategizing?
“You all know,” Downey continued, “that Operation Memory Redux derived from a personal tragedy. I do not wish to subject you, and definitely not myself, to the recollection of those sad circumstances. I do not intend to exhibit images of my little girl before and after being assaulted by the monster Krao. But you do need to see photos of other victims of this pestilence from the past, this alien invasion of innocent lives.”
At Downey’s gesture, Sleazy Steve set aside his reading material and pressed a button. On the giant screen, a photo of a young mulatto boy in basketball garb appeared, eyes ecstatic as he hoisted a high school trophy.
“Jedediah Grant,” Downey intoned. “At age thirteen.”
He signaled again and Sleazy responded by making another photo materialize, with its all-too-familiar contours: the body still belonged to the boy we had previously seen but the round face was that of an African midget, eyes dancing merrily in skin as black as tar, teeth out-jutting and sharply filed as he grinned for the camera.
“Jedediah Grant, now age fifteen,” Downey said. “Invaded by Ota Benga, an African pygmy enticed to the St. Louis Fair in 1904 by a missionary and entrepreneur. Photographed by Jesse Tarbox Beals and displayed two years later in the monkey cage of the Bronx Zoo along with an orangutan. Puts a bullet through his heart in 1916, when, abandoned by those who had profited from his shows, he is unable to secure passage back to the Congo. Why Jedediah? His lineage, of course. On his mother’s side, a direct descendant of the photographer Tarbox Beals. On his father’s side, a bit more complicated. The second in command at the Bronx Zoo, responsible for the pygmy’s ordeal, was Madison Grant, a man later famous for having written a racist tract that inspired Adolf Hitler, warning of the threat to the Nordic race posed by inferior forms of humanity. Grant was supposed to have died childless. Not true. Ironically, he spawned an illegitimate child with a Negro striptease artist, and that son was Jedediah’s grandfather. By the time I received this information from the Pentagon, Jedediah had shot himself. A pity. The dead are useless to us.”
Downey lifted a finger and again Sleazy lifted his own finger and pushed it down, again the screen was lit up, first with a white girl in a white dress—and then the same girl, this time with the enormous head of an elephant mounted on her shoulders.
“Mary Fielding,” Downey said, “the great-great-granddaughter of Adam Forepaugh, a circus entrepreneur who brought the elephant Topsy from Africa in the 1870s. Topsy ended up at a Coney Island amusement park where, in 1902, she crushed a spectator who had burned her trunk with a hot cigar. The elephant was subsequently electrocuted by Thomas Edison’s company, a process filmed by Jacob Blair Smith who is—naturally!—an ancestor of poor Mary Fielding’s mother. Again, I was too late to save this child for science. She suspiciously died a few months after Topsy’s head invaded her photos. We lack proof that it was poison as her parents promptly had her cremated. A third death that left us with no live DNA, no blood or skin for sampling, no organs to X-ray or transplant. Just when we feel the danger of infiltration of our photographic system and even of our faces themselves may be growing, just when recent research indicates the possibility that this plague of natives and, worse still, the innumerable animals abused by our species could strike millions of victims. Regardless of their specific lineage. Your sons and daughters.”
Downey paused for this to sink in.
I saw Admiral Peabody lean over toward Cam and whisper something in her ear. She didn’t answer, turned to look up toward where she assumed I was watching, must have guessed I was desperate for reassurance. She nodded her head at me, smiling, and then let her smile vanish as soon as her eyes returned to Downey. If looks could kill.
“The eventuality of an epidemic of biblical proportions, my friends, made it all the more imperative to find a living, breathing, vibrant specimen, someone who might illuminate our search, a missing link, so to speak. A while back we learned that there was indeed such a subject, an American citizen, no less.”
And here another signal and Sleazy obeyed and this time it was me up there, the very photo that I had pinned up to remind me of what I innocently looked like before my visitor had come, the image snapped just before my fourteenth birthday. There was something obscene about being exposed like that for this audience of strangers, having them delve into my private life and strip me of the anonymity I had wasted so many hours protecting. I wanted to reach across the keyboard and press another button, but Sleazy’s large bulk dissuaded me—he’d only press the button again—and there was Wiggins breathing down my neck. Cam had half risen as if to place herself between those gaping men and the image of the boy she had loved enough to come back to save, but she must have thought better of it and collapsed into her seat—was she also giving up, did she now realize we had lost, that we were as orphaned and helpless as Henri and his fellows in that hall in Berlin while Virchow rattled off measurements and theories?
“An American citizen,” Downey went on, with evident satisfaction, “giving us an advantage over our global rivals—though the Russians and the Chinese have less of a chance of winning this race anyway, lacking the sort of zoos and universal exhibitions of more developed and civilized lands. Recruiting such a valuable asset was made more taxing by the complete isolation in which he lived, hidden from the eyes and cameras of the world. In spite of courteous efforts to coax him out of retirement through approaches to his wife, herself a promising young researcher of the intersection of DNA and visual memory, no signs of willingness to cooperate were forthcoming. To justify using more aggressive means of persuasion we required indisputable, physical proof that he was indeed afflicted. Luckily, he made the mistake of traveling abroad where our agents managed, a few days ago, after pursuing our quarry halfway across the globe, to secure a couple of damning and definitive photos. Maestro!”
“Oh, yes,” Sleazy Steven Henson whistled, pressing a button emphatically as Downey motioned his hand with a flourish in the air like a magician, and there they suddenly were, side by side, the photos procured in that bar in Punta Arenas.
I missed Downey’s explanation about who I was and my genealogy of Petits and Hagenbecks, because Wiggins hissed: “Now it’s your turn to shine.”
He nodded a goodbye to Ensign Henson, and led me out of the projectionist’s booth and along a corridor to the backstage area of the auditorium. I could hear Downey’s voice droning on—and then Wiggins gently shoved me forward, pointed to a curtain that my old buddy Nordstrom was prying open.
I stepped through it.
“My friends, my friends,” Downey said excitedly. “I give you . . . Fitzroy Foster.”
The audience rose and applauded, as I saw the curtains that shrouded the walls lift and reveal multiple screens, blank for the moment, blank but not for long. Not for long: dozens of cameras had surfaced as if out of nowhere, all of them pointing at me.
I had spent the most significant years of my life dreading this very situation, scared to even be caught momentarily by some passing stranger. Dad and Mom and Cam had been right to warn me to be careful. All it had taken to deprive me of liberty was for two fraudulent tourists to snap my picture in a bar in Punta Arenas, that’s all it had taken to shipwreck me here, in this Cuban bay plundered by Columbus and appropriated by the US Navy. There I was now, there was Henri, there was Jemmy Edén, all three of us displayed like pieces of meat on a screen for our enemies to feast on. There I was, for them to do with me as they pleased.
I panicked—and yet could not run, my limbs and lips paralyzed by that phalanx of Guantánamo cameras pinning me down, strangling my face, ready to invite Henri into me yet one more time. A thousand insect eyes on the walls, flattening my torso and arms and legs into celluloid, preparing me for the tests ahead. The ultimate showdown, these cameras that had been waiting out here in the perilous air since my fourteenth birthday, if looks could kill, oh if looks could kill, waiting for this moment of truth when I could no longer evade them, the looks or the cameras.
My time had come.
“Ready for your close-up, Fitzroy Foster?”
I did not answer, tried to will myself away, sealed my eyes and hoped against hope that when I opened them I would be in Puerto Edén where perhaps at this very moment the photos Henri and I had created between the two of us were being given the ancient burial they deserved. But it made no sense to keep those eyes locked—it was a tactic that had never warded off Henri, he would overwhelm me no matter what obstacles I placed in his path. And what hope was there that he would act differently now, why would he not want to show his persistent defiance of these military and pharmaceutical and scientific denizens, prove his power?
I was fucked.
I forced my eyelids open and I was, of course, at Guantánamo and Dr. Ernest Downey, descendant of a Downey who had photographed Krao and Prince Albert, lifted his arm and brought it down as if he were flagging the end of a race and I beseeched the gods to let me die, that a flash of lightning would obliterate me from the earth, destroy me utterly, end it once and for all, but no, no such salvation, up there a man improbably called Sleazy clicked a button, one more click in the endless snapshots of my captive existence.
Not just one click. All the cameras clicked, one after the other after the other, like sharp drops of dirty rain falling, as they had over eleven years ago when my dad had tried to capture me on my birthday. It felt like all the cameras of the universe since Daguerre and Eastman and Land had perfected this art, it seemed like every eye in history, my ancestor Petit and my nonrelative Prince Roland Bonaparte and Tarbox Beals and Jacob Smith and the Downeys, all of them and thousands more clicking away in the past so I could be the center of attention, so that Henri could make his stellar appearance and again perform his assigned role, again perform tricks in front of a select audience.
Except he didn’t.
The image that almost instantaneously took shape on the screens, spread out through that bending hall of mirrors, that image was the immaculate image of Fitzroy Foster.
For the first time since my fourteenth birthday, my startled face stared back at me, back at the audience of military brass, boring into the eyes of the CEO of Pharma2001 and his devotees, parading in front of everyone else, but above all befuddling, astonishing, enraging Dr. Ernest Downey.
Henri had disappeared!
As a murmur rose from the spectators, Downey cried out, “A glitch! A glitch!” and ordered Ensign Henson to try again—“and this time make sure you get it right!”
This time there were no coy remarks, no asking me if I was ready for my close-up. He just grabbed hold of my arm as if I were about to escape him, as if that could guarantee a different outcome. I did not attempt to free myself, did not even have the presence of mind to seek Cam’s reaction—I was too fascinated with that face of mine that I hadn’t seen in a picture for so long, too stunned that it should seem so wonderfully unrecognizable.
My initial shock changed into something else, delight, vindication, understanding, the hint of merriment in my throat, when the next clicks sounded in the cavern of that auditorium and yes, once more proof that Henri had retreated from my existence, only Fitzroy Foster grinning from each screen, grinning in the photo and grinning in reality, and then I heard a laugh and I knew it was my Cam, I knew that I wasn’t dreaming, I knew that we had won this battle, that Cam had been right to trust Henri.
Next to her, Admiral Peabody stood up and lifted his arms to placate the assembly, their murmurs of displeasure turning into irritation as they also rose, more indignant at themselves for having fallen for this scam than at Downey for daring to perpetrate it, and yet ready to indulge the famous scientist one last time, still willing to believe him when he begged them to return to their seats.
The third time—oh that third click, just like the definitive one all those years ago that had separated my existence from its past, now separating me from Henri as if cutting two Siamese twins down the middle. He had said goodbye to me, left me alone with my own identity and image, here in 1992, while he, my visitor, my Henri, returned to his existence in cartes postales gathering dust in Parisian bookstores and Old World libraries, concealed in grubby attics and arcane collections, Henri was no longer present, trapped back in 1881 forever, in silence and death forever.
“A hoax!” Cam yelled out now. “Those other pictures—Photoshopped, gentlemen, using my own husband’s computing skills to defame him, abuse him, ensnare him. As you can see, the only evidence Dr. Downey has for his farfetched hypotheses and accusations are two doctored photos of two Patagonian Indians, probably brothers, maybe cousins, a hoax, a hoax!”
Pandemonium ensued.
Admiral Peabody barked out something that must have been some sort of order, because I found myself hustled away by Wiggins, was still too dazed to object until I saw Cam dragged along by two Navy officers and that was it, I’d had enough, I began flailing and screaming, calling out to her even when she was no longer present. Nordstrom rushed over and helped to subdue me.
“Hey,” Wiggins said. “Hey, you won! You wouldn’t want your children to see you with a black eye in the family album, would you? Enjoy your victory!”
“Where are they taking her, you bastard?” I said.
“To the admiral’s office, just like you. Come along nicely and you’ll both be all right.”
I realized that it made no sense to get beaten up, give him that satisfaction.
“What happens to us now?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say you’re on your way home. But under what terms, well, you’ll just have to be patient, Mr. Foster.”
I decided to heed his advice and was rewarded by Cam, more ebullient than I had ever seen her—and that was saying something!—embracing me in the admiral’s office and then, without the slightest sense of ridicule, dancing with me. Not stopping when Peabody and Downey abruptly entered, she seemed to be savoring their amazed faces as we swung around and around the room.
Until she realized that our victory waltz was provoking the officer who still held our destiny in his hands, and she ceased the twirling and said to him:
“So, Admiral, when do we leave?”
“Right now. I’m a man of my word.”
Downey was not happy. “Against my express recommendation. I told him, I asked the Admiral”—again, Downey seemed to be speaking more to himself than to anybody in the room—“how can we be sure this isn’t a temporary lull, that tomorrow—or right this minute—our patient won’t have a relapse? And even if that were not the case, you, Fitzroy Foster, you’re still valuable, irreplaceable, unique. Not useless. No, no, no. If I could have just a year, just a few months, with his body, Admiral, we could examine what residues remain dormant, what vital signs have been altered. A month, Admiral.”
Peabody just shook his head. “You promised proof and didn’t deliver. And I promised they could leave if there was no proof and I will deliver, I will keep my word.”
“Listen, listen,” Downey said breathlessly. “This is what happened, I figured it out. I overreached. I’m to blame for frightening him out of his wits”—pointing at me—“cornering him into a near-death experience. You know what war is like, Admiral, when you’re bombarded, when someone comes at you with a knife, you know what the body does in order to survive, how the brain’s amygdala reacts automatically. If he had been alone like my poor daughter, he could have killed himself, like she did, in order to kill the marauder inside. You saw his face, you saw him pray for death. Didn’t you, Fitzroy, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I answered, even as Cam tried to shush me.
I felt sorry for him, that’s how much I had mellowed, that’s how much I had learned that revenge only destroys us, that’s what Henri had taught me before leaving—yes, I actually felt sorry for that Downey son of a bitch. He simply didn’t get it, never would. He was unable to fathom that Henri’s disappearance could not be reduced to the iron laws of biology and chemistry and physics. He would never believe that a far-off ceremony on an island lost at the southern end of the world, a burial of photos, might have any effect on this other island thousands of miles away. He did not believe that Henri—or Krao or Ota Benga or even Topsy—had agency, had a say in when they appeared and where and why. I said yes to Downey because I felt he needed some sort of consolation, he had to unearth a scientific explanation or he would go crazy and I would be responsible, I would have to carry the guilt of his darkened eyes for the rest of my life.
“You see, Admiral, you see,” Downey exclaimed. “Under surveillance twenty-four hours, unable to commit suicide, like my daughter did. So, instead, his cells accelerated and then exterminated all visual traces of that intruder from his memory and skin, an all-out attack on the enemy virus. Don’t you see, Admiral, if we keep him we can fight this plague, find a vaccine before it strikes again. Because that monster’s waiting out there, they all are, to bring down our civilization, don’t you see, don’t you see that there’s no other recourse?”
“No,” Cam said. “Bad science, Admiral. My husband never had any visitation of any sort. Those last photos prove how boringly normal he is. And even if we were to admit—we don’t, there’s no evidence, not one substantial piece that would stand the test in an American court or a laboratory for that matter—that he once had a hint of this sickness—by now it’s clearly been burned away and expelled. He’s just like any other human being.”
Downey turned to me. “Stay,” he pleaded. “I can’t lose you, my boy. Not again.”
“What do you say, Mr. Foster?” Peabody said. “Because if Dr. Downey happens to be right, it’s your children and grandchildren you’ll be saving from a possible pandemic. Would you be willing to sacrifice a week, contribute to the cause?”
“I think the cause will survive fine without me,” I said. “I’m really, really tired.”
“How about your wife then? Now that she has no fears regarding your future, maybe she’d care to join us?”
“You’re continuing with the research?” Cam asked, with genuine interest.
“Of course we are. The Pentagon was investigating this outbreak before Dr. Downey was installed as head of the team. This initiative remains one of our top priorities.”
“I think,” Cam said, “that I’d rather go back to working on cancer. I’ve been toying with a different approach, a less warlike one, to a cure. I mentioned it, in fact, to Mr. Clarke, the CEO of Pharma2001, and he said to get in touch with him if I needed preliminary funding.”
“Not if I can help it,” said Downey. “And you’re not leaving this base until certain conditions have been met.” He set out the terms in rapid-fire sequence. We were to sign a binding document stating that any revelation of the research in which Dr. Downey and associates were engaged, or our experience since our boat was boarded, would be in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and subject to immediate imprisonment. Second, Mr. Fitzroy Foster agreed to be photographed once a week by emissaries of the Pentagon’s choosing. And third, if the visual disorder recurred in the patient, he would promptly be retained at a site determined by the Center for Disease Control.
As soon as Cam and I quite willingly signed the document, Downey grabbed it, held it aloft triumphantly. “Because he will be back, you know that, right?” he crowed. “And when you relapse, there’ll be no getting away.”
He tried to follow us as we left the room, but Peabody seemed to have had enough for one day and closed the door firmly in Downey’s face. “So where do you go from here?” Peabody asked as he escorted us to a jeep waiting outside. “What’s next?”
The questions—so apparently innocent—terrified me.
This liberty, this freedom from Henri, was all that I had dreamed of since that lethal birthday in 1981 and now that the dream had come true, the truth was that I did not know what to do with my life, where I was going from here, what was next.
Henri had protected me from having to answer or even ask those questions.
And now I was alone.
Solo, solito y solo.
I missed him. I missed Henri.
He had left me, as the dead always end up leaving us. Leaving me without guidance and company. How could I possibly know what came next?
Cam, however, had ideas, was chock-full of plans and projects. She had never been inhabited by Henri and could not possibly realize how suddenly bereft I felt now that he had vanished, gone without even so much as an explanation or a goodbye or a last word of advice. Cam would soon enough tell me about all the wonders that lay ahead of us. For now, though, it was up to her to answer the admiral’s question, up to her to point north. “Home,” Cam said, laughing. “That’s next. We’re going home.”
Her enthusiasm, spilling out of her all through that trip to Boston, should have been infectious.
She spoke of returning to her research on the cancer that had deprived her of both parents—if Henri had been persuaded through kindness and empathy to cease his malignant growth inside me, perhaps this was a model for a different pathway, perhaps aberrant cells, instead of being bombed like an enemy, could be coaxed into becoming healthy again, could become partners rather than tumors. And then she spoke of my genius for code writing and computers and why not, now that I didn’t dread cameras, invent a way of creating three-dimensional representations of the inside of the body, why not create a phone that sent pictures instantly, why not break down the one-sided way in which pictures are produced, why not offer people control over their visual images so they would no longer be trapped by others as I had been trapped, why not? She spoke of the charities we could create and the millions we could help if our work and fortunes prospered. She spoke of starting to live together like any other couple today, of concerts we could attend and friends we could recover or make, of barhopping and how to enjoy the bloom of youth that had been forbidden us for so long. She spoke of dinner at exquisite restaurants tasting dishes I had never savored and excursions to museums and public squares and seaside resorts in a car that she would teach me how to drive. She spoke of Paris and Berlin and the beaches of Bali and the mosques of Morocco and the heights of Tibet, a wide-open Earth whose sights we could drink in, the resplendent artistic heritage of our species, without fearing the everlasting snapshots of a thousand tourists gone berserk. She spoke of building a house of our own and sallying forth arm in arm to furnish it and choose from every color in the rainbow, and scout for appliances and the right neighborhood, and that there needed to be a room so we could care for my dad when he was too old to live by himself, care for him as one should every elder member of the tribe. She spoke of taking care of the future as well, opening a family album inaugurated by a picture of the two of us holding hands and smiling at the camera or maybe a snapshot of our bodies racing in unison through the waters of a pool or a lake, she spoke of pictures of children we would bring into the world and their children and, if we were lucky, our great-grandchildren, and photos of Hugh’s wedding and Vic’s first baby and anniversaries and bike rides and PTA meetings and political marches brimming with other bodies, and dancing, dancing, dancing. She spoke of that night of love in Punta Arenas and what was singing inside her, how just and ethical and appropriate it would be if the seventh generation of Pierre Petit and Carl Hagenbeck were to have been conceived precisely there, were to start swimming toward the light in a place so close to where their crimes against humanity had originated. She spoke, bless her, as if all our troubles were behind us.
Full of the life inside and outside her, my Cam was already starting to forget Henri.
He had disappeared, that was true, and equally true that the living should not dwell among the dead, and also true that his refusal to cooperate with Downey and Downey’s sponsors was already a message sanctifying our future, telling us to relish the days and years left to us before we joined him in the great stillness.
What could possibly be wrong with the pursuit of happiness when there was so much cruelty and misery in the world? Had we been saved in order to feed on sorrow till the end of our days?
And yet, if the face of Henri had vanished from my photos and was no longer, for good reason, a priority for Cam, that face had not abandoned my memory or my life. It was still somewhere inside me. And other faces. The face of Jemmy Edén drunk in a bar, going blind, pimping his past to make a living. The faces of the Haitians behind their barbed wire, so close to the sea they could taste it in the wind but unable to set sail, as we could, for whatever horizon desired. The face of Captain Wolfe pressed down onto the deck, treated like a criminal because he had dared to defend his passengers and his ship and his dignity. The faces of Krao and Ota Benga and Topsy, all those who had not been given the chance to withdraw peacefully, compassionately, as Henri had, those faces that had been captured and uprooted and confined and given no redress, not even the distant satisfaction of thwarting the plans of their jailors. The face of the earth itself, the earth and the sea, speckled with oil spills and plastic bottles and rotting fish and broken birds, the face of the waters from where, according to Darwin, we had emerged. And the face of my mother who had died in a foreign land so that the land would not be foreign to those born on it since the beginning of time.
The beginning of time: when everything was sacred, the whole world a temple.
Maybe it was enough that one person had understood, really understood.
Was that, is that, enough?
If I ever tell this story, how soon will it take for Henri to fade from the memory of those who deign to listen? How long before he and I are forgotten, his love for me, what else to call what he did, his act of mercy, his quiet farewell, the reservoir of his trust in me? How long before we are forgotten?
So easily are the hearts of men, the hearts of women, smashed.
“It’s going to be all right,” Cam said—as if she had read my thoughts, the silence with which I greeted her words of prophecy and celebration, my darling always full of hope for our many tomorrows. “Twenty-five years from now, our children will live in a different world, a better world, shining and brave. You’ll see, Fitzroy Foster. Just wait and see.”
I pray she is right.
I pray we have learned something.
I pray we have fully, deeply, definitely learned something.
And that Henri will not have to come back again, one last final time.
When it may be too late.
Will you need to come back, my brother, my brother?
He does not answer.