Robert Silverberg: The Dead Man's Eyes

On a crisp afternoon of high winds late in the summer of 2017 Frazier murdered his wife’s lover, a foolish deed that he immediately regretted. To murder anyone was stupid, when there were so many more effective alternatives available; but even so, if murder was what he had to do, why murder the lover? Two levels of guilt attached there: not only the taking of a life, but the taking of an irrelevant life. If you had to kill someone, he told himself immediately afterward, then you should have killed her . She was the one who had committed the crime against the marriage, after all. Poor Hurwitt had been only a means, a tool, virtually an innocent bystander. Yes, kill her , not him. Kill yourself, even. But Hurwitt was the one he had killed, a dumb thing to do and done in a dumb manner besides.

It had all happened very quickly, without premeditation. Frazier was attending a meeting of the Museum trustees, to discuss expanding the Hall of Mammals. There was a recess; and because the day was so cool, the air so crystalline and bracing, he stepped out on the balcony that connected the old building with the Pilgersen Extension for a quick breather. Then the sleek bronze door of the Pilgersen opened far down the way and a dark-haired man in a grubby blue-gray lab coat appeared. Frazier saw at once, by the rigid set of his high shoulders and the way his long hair fluttered in the wind, that it was Hurwitt.

He wants to see me, Frazier thought. He knows I’m attending the meeting today and he’s come out here to stage the confrontation at last, to tell me that he loves my famous and beautiful wife, to ask me bluntly to clear off and let him have her all to himself.

Frazier’s pulse began to rise, his face grew hot. Even while he was thinking that it was oddly old-fashioned to talk of letting Hurwitt have Marianne, that in fact Hurwitt had probably already had Marianne in every conceivable way and vice versa but that if now he had some idea of setting up housekeeping with her—unbelievable, unthinkable!—this was hardly the appropriate place to discuss it with him, another and more primordial area of his brain was calling forth torrents of adrenaline and preparing him for mortal combat.

But no: Hurwitt didn’t seem to have ventured onto the balcony for any man-to-man conference with his lover’s husband. Evidently he was simply taking the short-cut from his lab in the Pilgersen to the fourth-floor cafeteria in the old building. He walked with his head down, his brows knitted, as though pondering some abstruse detail of trilobite anatomy, and he took no notice of Frazier at all.

“Hurwitt?” Frazier said finally, when the other man was virtually abreast of him.

Caught by surprise, Hurwitt looked up, blinking. He appeared not to recognize Frazier for a moment. For that moment he was frozen in mid-blink, his unkempt hair a dark halo about him, his awkward rangy body off balance between strides, his peculiar glinting eyes flashing like yellow beacons. In fury Frazier imagined this man’s bony nakedness, pale and gaunt, probably with sparse ropy strands of black hair sprouting on a white chest, imagined those long arms wrapped around Marianne, imagined those huge knobby fingers cupping her breasts, imagined that thin-lipped wide mouth covering hers. Imagined the grubby lab coat lying crumpled at the foot of the bed, and her silken orange wrap beside it. That was what sent Frazier over the brink, not the infidelities themselves, not the thought of the sweaty embraces—there was plenty of that in each of her films, and it had never meant a thing to him, for he knew it was only well-paid make-believe—and not the rawboned look of the man or his uncouth stride or even the manic glint of those strange off-color eyes, those eerie topaz eyes, but the lab coat, stained and worn with a button missing and a pocket-flap dangling, lying beside Marianne’s discarded silk. For her to take such a lover, a pathetic dreary poker of fossils, a hollow-chested laboratory drudge—no, no, no—

“Hello, Loren,” Hurwitt said. He smiled amiably, he offered his hand. His eyes, though, narrowed and seemed almost to glow. It must be those weird eyes, Frazier thought, that Marianne has fallen in love with. “What a surprise, running into you out here.”

And stood there smiling, and stood there holding out his hand, and stood there with his frayed lab coat flapping in the breeze.

Suddenly Frazier was unable to bear the thought of sharing the world with this man an instant longer. He watched himself as though from a point just behind his own right ear as he went rushing forward, seized not Hurwitt’s hand but his wrist, and pushed rather than pulled, guiding him swiftly backward toward the parapet and tipping him up and over. It took perhaps a quarter of a second. Hurwitt, gaping, astonished, rose as though floating, hovered for an instant, began to descend. Frazier had one last look at Hurwitt’s eyes, bright as glass, staring straight into his own, photographing his assailant’s face; and then Hurwitt went plummeting downward.

My God, Frazier thought, peering over the edge. Hurwitt lay face down in the courtyard five stories below, arms and legs splayed, lab coat billowing about him.

He was at the airport an hour later, with a light suitcase that carried no more than a day’s change of clothing and a few cosmetic items. He flew first to Dallas, endured a 90-minute layover, went on to San Francisco, doubled back to Calgary as darkness descended, and caught a midnight special to Mexico City, where he checked into a hotel using the legal commercial alias that he employed when doing business in Macao, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Standing on the terrace of a tower thirty stories above the Zona Rosa, he inhaled musky smog, listened to the squeals of traffic and the faint sounds of far-off drums, watched flares of green lightning in the choking sky above Popocatepetl, and wondered whether he should jump. Ultimately he decided against it. He wanted to share nothing whatever with Hurwitt, not even the manner of his death. And suicide would be an overreaction anyway. First he had to find out how much trouble he was really in.

The hotel had InfoLog. He dialed in and was told that queries were billed at five million pesos an hour, pro rated. Vaguely he wondered whether that was as expensive as it sounded. The peso was practically worthless, wasn’t it? What could that be in dollars, a hundred bucks, five hundred, maybe? Nothing.

“I want Harvard Legal,” he told the screen. “Criminology. Forensics. Technical. Evidence technology.” Grimly he menued down and down until he was near what he wanted. “Eyeflash,” he said. “Theory, techniques. Methods of detail recovery. Acceptance as evidence. Reliability of record. Frequency of reversal on appeal. Supreme Court rulings, if any.”

Back to him, in surreal fragments which, at an extra charge of three million pesos per hour, pro rated, he had printed out for him, came blurts of information:

Perceptual pathways in outer brain layers…broad-scale optical architecture…images imprinted on striate cortex, or primary visual cortex…inferior temporal neurons…cf. McDermott and Brunetti, 2007, utilization of lateral geniculate body as storage for visual data…inferior temporal cortex…uptake of radioactive glucose…downloading…degrading of signal…degeneration period…Pilsudski signal-enhancement filter…Nevada vs. Bensen, 2011…hippocampus simulation…amygdala…acetylcholine…U.S. Supreme Court, 23 March 2012…cf Gross and Bernstein, 13 Aug 2003…Mishkin…Appenzeller…

Enough. He shuffled the printouts in a kind of hard-edged stupor until dawn; and then, after a hazy calculation of time-zone differentials, he called his lawyer in New York. It took four bounces, but the telephone tracked him down in the commute, driving in from Connecticut.