Prophet of Bones (12 page)

He slid the last remaining DNA sample into his pocket.

He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with beautiful teeth like dentists might dream. She reminded him of someone. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island, fashioning tools from bits of stone.

He handed her the flower. “For you,” he said.

He hailed a cab and climbed inside. “Take me to the airport.”

As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye patch. He saw the driver glance into his rearview and then look away, repulsed.

“They lied, you see,” Paul told the driver. “About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways.”

The driver turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul pulled off the bandage. He grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips, pain exploding in his skull. It was more pain than he’d ever experienced in his life, a white-hot nova in his head. The gauze made a small, bloody pile on the seat next to him.

“A prophet is one who feels fiercely,” he said, and then he slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

PART III

Nature does nothing in vain.

—ARISTOTLE

13

Gavin stepped out into daylight and spit blood onto the sun-bleached concrete. New South Wales, the sound of jets.

He scanned the faces at the airport entrance, looking for the familiar, the unfamiliar, the out of place. He saw people coming and going. Taxis and buses and cars. People in a hurry, people laughing or frustrated, people towing suitcases or duffel bags or children. He stood, and he watched, and he saw no one he recognized. He saw not a single thing to arouse his suspicions.

Gavin nodded to himself, accepting finally what he had before only suspected. They hadn’t even bothered to have him followed.

He understood that for what it was: a parting insult.

He started walking, for the first time feeling like the nightmare of the last four days might really be over. The reality of being in Australia gradually sank in. He was home.

Unconsciously, he rubbed his swollen jaw.

It was his fault, of course. The beating. Everything.

He opened his cell phone and punched in the numbers.

“It’s Gavin,” he said. “I’m here.” Then, after a silence: “It’s bad.”

He spoke for another minute, explaining what needed to be done. He snapped his phone closed and slid it back into his pocket. There were other calls he needed to make. Calls to the university, and to the embassy, but he didn’t have the energy right now. There would be time for that soon enough. There would be official inquiries, investigations, an official response to everything that had happened. It would be out of his hands. For now, though, he just wanted to get to his office. Prepare himself for what was to come.

The soldiers had taken his briefcase and his papers. Of his various forms of ID, only his passport remained, and they’d let him keep that only because he’d needed it to board the plane. The soldiers had stood with him in the Jakarta airport terminal. They hadn’t taken off his handcuffs until he’d stepped onto the aircraft.

A bus horn sounded. Gavin tasted blood in his mouth and spit again. Bright red. Like betel nut juice.

The beating hadn’t been planned, because it hadn’t been necessary. An overzealous guard said, “Move,” and Gavin had been shoved hard down the hall to the interrogation room. Gavin hadn’t liked that, being manhandled, and he’d glared over his shoulder at the guard. The guard only smiled. He was short and fat, maybe five-six, flat Malaysian nose, face like a fist.

Gavin slowed his walk and prepared for the next shove, rolling his shoulder away when it came—and the guard had lost his balance, embarrassed in front of the others. Then came the guard’s roundhouse, splitting Gavin’s lip against his teeth and sending him careening against the wall.

It’s hard to fight back when you’re in handcuffs.

He should have known better. Indonesia was not a place to confront authority. And the short cops, anywhere, were always the biggest assholes.

Gavin waved down a taxi. He collapsed inside and slammed the door.

“No luggage?” the driver asked.

“No.”

“Where to?”

Gavin gave the address.

The driver looked skeptical. “A long drive,” he said.

“And a big tip.”

The taxi pulled away from the curb. The miles rolled by, and the shadows lengthened outside the window. By the time the taxi pulled up to the university offices it was evening, and the campus was in the process of emptying itself. Most of the faculty had already left for the night. He was grateful for that.

Gavin paid the driver and crossed the street to the building’s entrance. He took the stairs up to the second floor and continued on to his office door, fidgeting the key into the lock. He stepped inside and hit the lights. He closed the door, being careful to lock it again behind him. He turned.

The envelope looked wrong on his desk. The stark white alienness of it.

Gavin sank into his leather swivel chair and pulled a bottle of good whiskey from his bottom desk drawer. He had the only key to this office. He wondered what would happen next. There were several different ways this could go. The envelope hadn’t been there when he’d left.

He closed his eyes and thought of Margaret and his dig team.

During his interrogation, the Indonesian officials had done their best to impress upon him his good fortune. They’d done their best to communicate their extreme leniency, their kindness for not having him charged with the many crimes for which he was so obviously guilty, for not having him imprisoned, or tortured, or confined in close quarters with sodomites. The lead interrogator had sat across the table from him and said, “We are a forgiving people, a forgiving country, we Indonesians.” He spoke in a thick Bahasa accent, his hands folded in front of himself on the table as if in prayer to a merciful and forgiving god. “We are tolerant to the point of indulgence. Tolerant beyond the point of our own best self-interest. This tolerance is taken for weakness by some. Tell me, do you think we are weak?”

Gavin said nothing.

“We are a kind people, and this kindness is often taken advantage of by foreigners. Tell me, do you think we are kind?”

Silence. A drop of blood dripped from Gavin’s lip to his shirt.

The interrogator seemed to take this as a response. “You are a lucky man, Professor, and you shall just be deported for your crimes. If it was my choice, it would be different.” He stood. “You are hereby expelled and your research visa revoked.”

“What crimes?” Gavin asked.

“Attempted theft of national heritage materials,” the interrogator said. “A very serious offense.”

“I had the permits.”

“That is strange,” he said. “We have no permits on file.”

Hours later, when Gavin was sitting in a dark cell, they told him, too, about James. An unfortunate “incident,” they called it. His body found in a hotel room. A robbery gone wrong. A young life cut short. “We will, of course, be searching for the perpetrator.”

Gavin wondered about Paul but did not ask. Wherever he was, Gavin couldn’t help him. He hoped the boy wasn’t hurt. He felt responsible for Paul, as he’d once felt responsible, in some ways, for Paul’s father.

Gavin took another long pull of whiskey.

He looked down at the envelope that should not have been there. He saw his name written in a familiar hand. A hand he hadn’t read in a long time. He tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. A ticket fell out. Gavin looked at it. It was a plane ticket.

He turned the paper over; on it was written a single word:
Come.
Gavin took another long pull of whiskey, concentrating on the burn.

14

Hospital white. The distant beep of an alarm.

Paul hauled himself to a sitting position when the nurse entered the room.

She was young and blond and might have been pretty on other nights, in other situations.

“You received quite an injury,” she said while going over his chart.

Hospital small talk, Paul decided. That was one difference between the hospitals in the United States and those back in Indonesia.

Paul said nothing. There was nothing to say.

She glanced up from the clipboard. “It says here the enucleation procedure was performed out of country?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Maumere.”

“They did a decent job, but you have some recent infection in the orbit. We have you on two hundred and fifty milligrams of penicillin via the IV, every six hours. It’s working, so you got lucky. You’re also on four milligrams of morphine, as needed. You have to ask for that, but we also give it through the IV, so it works fast. Do you have much pain?”

“Yes.”

She injected morphine into the tubing of his IV. “This should help.”

He felt the change by the time she walked out the door. A spreading warmth in his veins.

He slept. And saw James walking on the ice—the sky above scrawled black with branches.

Snow fell. The wind blew through the trees, while a lure dangled, swaying in the wind. James smiled, teeth bright red with betel nut.

A new sound woke him, and this time it was a man looking over the chart at the end of his bed. A man in a white doctor’s coat. Over his shoulder, the windows had gone dark. Night had fallen.

The man caught his stare. He smiled. “I’m Dr. Harcoff. How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know.” It was an honest answer. What Paul felt was disconnected.

The doctor nodded like he understood. His stethoscope was silver. He wore a silver watch. “Your body has suffered a major insult,” Dr. Harcoff said. “But in addition to the physical trauma, the loss of an eye can be an enormous psychological blow. We have counselors who can help if you feel you need it.”

“No,” Paul said. “I’m fine.” He was alive, after all. James wasn’t.

The doctor’s brow furrowed. He scribbled something on the chart.

“An ocularist will fit you with a more permanent prosthetic in six to eight weeks. Right now you have something temporary.”

“Why do I have to wait so long?”

“There’s a window of best opportunity. If we tried to fit you with an artificial eye before that, there won’t be enough healing. If we wait too long after that, then the socket can atrophy and it’s hard to get a good functional result.”

“Functional?”

“Your existing eye muscles will be attached to a new motility implant and you should get near-normal eye movement. That’s important from an aesthetic perspective. Right now you have a silicone conformer in place to retain orbit volume.”

“It’s in there now?”

“Yes.”

Paul nodded. The doctor moved closer. He placed the clipboard on the bed and opened the bandages around the wound. He studied it for a moment, then closed the bandages again.

“It looks like there will be some exterior scarring from the initial traumatic injury, but the wound has clean edges, and the stitches are good. Eye shape differs widely among individuals and you’re fortunate; to be perfectly blunt with you, ocular prosthetics often seem less noticeable in people with epicanthic folds. For patients with prominent eyes, it’s sometimes a challenge to reproduce a natural appearance.” He paused and regarded Paul closely. “You’ll have a diagonal scar across your eyelid, but the artificial eye itself shouldn’t be noticeable at all. We’ll be able to match your eye color exactly, and by the time we’re done, the only difference between your new eye and your old one is that you won’t be able to see out of it. Do you wear glasses?”

“No.”

“How is the vision in your good eye?”

“Good.”

The doctor nodded. “As for the silicone conformer currently in place, you just need to be careful when you wipe your eyes for the next few weeks. Most people opt to wear dark glasses or an eye patch until the conformer is replaced by a full prosthetic. The conformer doesn’t simulate a natural appearance.”

“When can I leave?”

“We’re going to keep you a little longer for observation and to watch for infection. I should be able to let you know tomorrow. Do you have any other questions?”

Paul shook his head.

“Good. I can recommend a plastic surgeon later to deal with soft-tissue scarring.”

“No, no plastic surgery. Scars don’t bother me.”

The doctor nodded and left. When he was gone, Paul stood and walked into the bathroom, pulling the IV pole behind him. He stood in front of the mirror. Being careful to keep his injured eye closed, he lifted the bandage to survey the damage.

He stared at himself.

His eye was fucked, he decided.

The scar neatly bisected his closed eyelid, crossing at a slight angle to the vertical and extending up to put a notch in the bottom of his eyebrow. It occurred to him how close he’d come to dying. If the knife had just gone a little deeper …

Then he opened the ruined eye. He stared at himself.

One eye was dark and piercing—like his mother’s eyes. The other was a smoky white, the eye of a ghost.

The eye of the dead.

*   *   *

They kept him in the hospital for two more days. Time enough to hit bottom. Time enough to think about where things went wrong.

Mr. Lyons came to visit him on the second day. “We’re so sorry about what happened, Paul. This was a tragedy.”

And then other people from the lab.

“You gave us quite a scare.”

“We’re glad to have you back.”

“The doctors are gonna have you up in no time.”

And Hongbin, his coworker from the lab, ever the clown. “Someday they’ll come up with a bionic eye,” he said. He leaned close and whispered, “Then
you’ll
have the advantage.”

Later that evening, Mr. Lyons returned, a lawyer with him this time. Another suit. Hands were shaken, introductions made. “You don’t need to worry about the bills,” the man said. “The company is going to pick up everything.”

Paul sensed that they expected a response. “Thank you,” he said.

Mr. Lyons looked different.