Life was grinding him down to a nubbin, too.
I sat by the window looking out on the air shaft, feeling a roiling burn of dread. Banning wasn’t telling us everything he knew, perhaps not even everything he had told Rob. Nor was I telling him everything. I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. We were at an impasse.
Lissa was caught up in our suspicion and confusion. I felt sorry for her.
The shaft outside the window darkened. Banning had become Sleeping Bigot, locked in eternal slumber. The air conditioner was on the blink; a sticky, hot breeze poured through the heat exchange. I turned the machine off, opened the window, and leaned out, staring up at the twilight sky, a vagrant curl of cloud, a contrail savaged by high winds.
Banning had laid in some supplies, a bag filled with cans and bottled water in the bathroom. My throat was parched, and I needed some reward for the miseries of the day. I opened a can of peaches and drank down the nectar, started to suck my fingers to recover spilled juice, thought better of it, and washed my fingertips five times with soap, without wetting the bandage. Then I finished off the slices and sluiced my head with water from the tap. The dressing around my neck got damp, but that wasn’t a problem. It felt good as it cooled.
Canned food and vitamin tablets. No way to live. I wanted desperately to get back to the laboratory, any laboratory, and perform work, however menial. That was my life, not this unending lunacy.
My stomach couldn’t decide whether it liked the peaches. I could feel shadows gathering in the corners of the room. My hand and neck ached, and Banning’s irregular snores allowed neither thought nor rest.
I tried to ignore the distractions. I carried the valise to the desk, unsure where to resume, pulled out the wobbly desk chair, and sat.
Finally, my fingers opened the valise and worked through Rob’s stack. I found a small airmail envelope and pulled out five strips of blue paper. Columns of three-letter nonsense words—abbreviations for the twenty common amino acids that make up proteins—filled both sides of each sheet. I laid them out on the desk. They could have made up one or more peptide sequences, running left to right, top to bottom, or in some other fashion, if arranged properly. A puzzle or a code. I rearranged them, and read them several different ways after each arrangement, trying to find something I recognized. No luck. I slid them back into the small envelope.
A letter in Russian, inked with a fountain pen, protruded halfway from one of the typed manuscripts. I tugged, and it fell out with an airmail envelope attached by paper clip. Inside the envelope was a Polaroid photo, yellow-brown and fuzzy. It showed my brother and me standing on a city street, perhaps somewhere in Europe, both of us smiling. Rob had evidently kept the photo as a keepsake—touching, but I could not remember where it had been taken.
Perhaps Banning could translate the letter.
But would I want him to? If he was holding something back from me, how could I trust him? And yet—if he had wanted to read the contents of the package, wouldn’t he have done so already?
I set that conundrum aside for the moment and returned to where I had left off in the diary.
Parasite persuasion and bacterial communications with gut cells, skin cells. G. goes to Beria, Beria goes to Koba. Beria was much more than just boss of the secret police. Koba would later put him in charge of nuclear weapons research. But this—this would end up bigger even than atom bombs. Beria told Koba that Golokhov could give them a pipeline right into the human psyche.
G. makes his case. Koba gets it instantly; G. gets funding, assistants, and a full-blown factory-lab in Irkutsk. This much is clear. Ch. and T. tacitly concur that’s how it happened: The questions they won’t answer—how did G. survive Lysenko?—and the way they smile when I tell them my suppositions. They are hiding a lot but it’s with a peculiar Russian guilt and shame. They don’t want to hide anything, I’m thinking.
I tried to remember Russian history. Beria had been executed after Stalin’s death. But what in hell did that have to do with our research? We were interested in life extension, not mind control.
Ch. and T. decided to take me to a place outside Irkutsk. Shame or truth or something compels them.
They drove me in a beat-up Opel truck fifty kilometers outside Irkutsk. Through a wire fence, past a pond, a forest of trees maybe sixty, seventy years old, a clay road flanked by torn-up asphalt and cobbles. Into a ghost city. Well-made stone and brick buildings, wooden houses, paved streets. All deserted, windows gaping.
“This is City of Dog Mothers,” T. told me in his broken English. I’m sure I missed half of the story. Do I believe?
Beria put this place together in ’38–39, as testing ground for Silk. G. involved—to what extent, T. and Ch. don’t know or won’t tell. Modern power and water, an internal phone exchange, even a post office, comfortable, but isolated from Irkutsk and all surrounding villages.
Five thousand political prisoners were brought here—Jews, of course, military types and their families, intellectuals from Moscow and points as far west as Lithuania and Georgia. A fancy Gulag, I think, but T. and Ch. tell me not a Gulag, a research center. It never had a name just a number. 38-J.
I don’t like this place. Nobody comes here, nobody lives here now. It doesn’t feel right. We walk through the streets and it’s still clean, but empty, not even cats or dogs or rats. T. and Ch. only allow me an hour or so to look around. They can’t stand any more. They seem to want to say more, but at first they can’t, they are ashamed in a way I have not seen in them before.
I gather from what they do say that everybody brought here was encouraged to believe this was a model city. A chance to redeem themselves and live out the purges. Then, bit by bit, the stores were supplied with foodstuffs prepared by Silk. Beria and Koba wanted to know how much and how long it would take.
Now T. finally opens up. He wasn’t even born then but he weeps.
A few weeks after the special food arrived, the inhabitants of 38-J were walking naked in the streets, fornicating in public. Human meat—mostly children—was being sold in the butcher shops. Beria brought in truckloads of guns and gave them to every citizen. He showed off by walking unguarded through the streets in a town filled with armed dissidents and political prisoners who should have hated his guts.
Squads took instructions by phone, or from planted neighbors, and hunted down people who visited the library, who were bald or bow-legged, who carried their babies in public. Some were told to go out and whistle and others were told to go out and shoot all of those who whistled.
In 1940, Beria decided to shut it down, a big success and nearly everybody dead. The last women left alive in the town walked on all fours through the streets. A few who had been pregnant smiled and opened their blouses to nurse Beria’s guard dog puppies while photographers made movies.
Koba laughed to see such fun.
They insisted I return to the truck. They had had enough, and so had I.
That evening, they gave me a video tape. The visual history of Silk.
There was no videocassette. I stuffed the diary and papers back in the envelope, and the envelope into the valise. I don’t think I had ever read anything so ugly and disturbing. My head hurt. I had to get outside. I had to get some fresh air, no matter what the risk. But I didn’t move. I needed a signal, something I could use as an excuse. A fly buzzing through the window would do it. A car horn. Anything.
An hour passed, two.
I lay down on my bed, wondering what was wrong with me. Cowardice, indecision, a head full of cotton. I tried to read more, but the letters swam on Rob’s pages. Sleep would not come. The room got hotter and the air more still.
Outside, traffic seemed to recede, car engines grow softer, voices more distant.
The room phone rang, mechanical and shrill. I jumped, then turned to Banning. His snores continued. The phone rang again. I picked up the receiver.
“Yes?”
“This is Rob,” said the voice on the other end.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Wrong again. How’s my lovely Prince Hal?” It sounded like Rob.
“Quit fucking with me,” I said.
