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Holly inspects me through her dark lenses; she last saw me through a fug of medication, so I doubt she’ll recall me, but I’ll stay prepared: “Were you a colleague of Crispin’s here at the college?”
“No, no, I work in a different field. I’m a fan, though. I’ve read and reread Desiccated Embryos.”
“He always suspected that book would outlive him.”
“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.” A blue jay swoops onto a fungus-ruffled tree stump by Hershey’s grave, emits a volley of harsh jeers, then a breathy trill.
“They don’t make those birds where I’m from,” says Holly.
“A blue jay,” I say, “or Cyanocitta cristata. The Algonquin name was sidesoand the Yakama called it a xw б shxway, but their territory was over on the Pacific, so now I’m merely showing off.”
Holly removes her sunglasses. “Are you a linguist?”
“By default. I’m a psychiatrist, here for a meeting. You?”
“Just here to pay my respects.” Holly bends down, takes an oak leaf from the grave, and puts it into her purse. “Well, nice talking with you. Hope your meeting goes well.”
The blue jay threads a flight path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark. Holly begins to walk off.
“So far so good, but it’s about to get trickier, I fear.”
Holly is struck by my strange answer and stops.
I clear my throat. “Ms. Sykes, we need to talk.”
Down come the shutters, out comes her hardscrabble Gravesend accent. “I don’t do media, I don’t do festivals.” She steps backwards. “I’ve retired from all that.” A frond of pine tree brushes her head and she ducks nervily. “So, no, whoever you are, you can—”
“Iris Fenby this time around, but you know me as Marinus.”
She freezes, thinks, frowns, and looks disgusted. “Oh, f’Chrissakes! Yu Leon Marinus died in 1984, he was Chinese, and if youhave a Chinese parent, then I’m … Vladimir Putin. Don’t force me to be rude. That’srude.”
“Dr. Yu Leon Marinus was indeed childless, Holly, and that body died in 1984. But his soul, this ‘I’ addressing you now, is Marinus. Truly.”
A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind. Holly’s walking off. Who knows how many Marinuses she’s met, from the mentally ill to fraudsters, after a slice of her royalties?
“You have two hours missing from July 1, 1984,” I call after her, “between Rochester and the Isle of Sheppey. I know what happened.”
She stops. “ Iknow what happened!” Despite herself, she turns to face me again, properly angry now. “I hitched. A woman picked me up and dropped me off at the Sheppey bridge. Please, leave me alone.”
“Ian Fairweather and Heidi Cross picked you up. I know you know those names, but you don’t know you were at that bungalow that morning, that day, when they were killed.”
“Whatever! Post the whole story at bullshitparanoia.com. The crazies’ll give you all the attention you need.” Somewhere a lawnmover chugs into noisy life. “You digested The Radio People, sicked it up, mixed in your own psychoses, and made an occult reality show, starring yourself. Just like that wretched girl who shot Crispin. I’m going now. Don’tfollow, or I’ll call the cops.”
Birds crisscross and warble in the stripes of light.
That went well, subsays Фshima the Unseen and Ironic.
I sit down on the blue jay’s stump. It’s a begi
April 4
“MY FAVORITE DISH on my menu, sweetheart, swear to God.” Nestor lays the plate in front of me. “People come in, they sit down, they see ‘vegetarian moussaka,’ they think, If moussaka ain’t meat it ain’t moussaka, so they order the steak, the pork belly, the lamb chops. They du
“Ski
Off he drifts, deftly avoided by higher-speed younger staff. I fork an eggplant and squish up some white sauce, smoosh on a mushroom and eat. Taste being the blood of memory, I remember 1969, when Yu Leon Marinus was teaching only a few blocks away, Old Nestor was Young Nestor, and the white-haired lady in the frame, upon learning that the Greek-speaking Chinaman was a doctor, held me up to her sons as the American Dream incarnate. She gave me a square of baklava with my coffee every time I came here, which was often. I’d like to ask when she passed away, but my curiosity might attract suspicion, so I downstream today’s New York Timesand flick to the crossword. But it’s no good.
I can’t stop thinking about Esther Little …
IN 1871 PABLO Antay Marinus turned forty. He had inherited enough Latino DNA from his Catalan father to pass as Spanish, so he signed as a ship’s surgeon aboard an aging Yankee clipper, the Prophetess, at Rio de Janeiro, bound for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, via Cape Town. Notwithstanding a typhoon of Old Testament fury, an outbreak of ship fever that killed a dozen sailors, and a skirmish with corsairs off Panaitan Island, we limped into Batavia on Christmas Day. Lucas Marinus had visited the place eighty years before, and the malarial garrison town I remembered was now a malarial city. One ca