Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Bass’s Bronco chugged. Kodie sat vacant in the back.

Bass asked, “Kev? You want to go try to find your par—”

“No.” I looked at Kodie’s garage door like it held a secret. I remembered what I had stuffed in my pocket. Just as I had it unfolded, Kodie snatched it from me and began scanning. “Hey, Bass, let’s go to the Draught House.”

“The movie theater? Which one?”

“No, not the Draft House theater. The Draught House pub on Medical.”

Kodie was reading and reading and nodding faster and faster. “Yeah, let’s start there. We can find the lab from there.”

“Lab. It’d be great if you’d fill me in as I Uber you two to your destination.”

On the way I told Bass what Professor Fleming had said to me on his doorstep and read the letter’s postscript, looking up, eyeing for Johnny every other sentence.

Bass flicked his eyes to us in the rearview. “A scientist thinks he found something important. It’s not like we can continue his research or use his work. Basically, Kevin, so what?”

“Let’s just go see, okay?”

“Yeah, let’s go see,” said Kodie. Her tone: something there worth knowing.

Kodie had read the entire letter. The first part about Fleming’s feeling about me. She put the pages on my lap and patted them, turned her head to me and shot an eyebrow, nodding to the pages. She didn’t want to discuss it in full here.

We pulled into the Draught House parking lot. There was a cairn in the beer garden. “Okay, which way?” asked Bass.

“Fleming said the lab was nearby, a nondescript building,” I said, swiveling my head up and down the street.

“ And walked into the dark ,” Kodie recited from the letter. She pointed. “There’s a streetlamp. So, he walked the other way.”

Bass drove out of the lot in that direction and within seconds lifted the index finger of his driving hand. “I’d say this right here is a pretty damned nondescript building.” He turned in without our assent.

The building was beige, squat, without signage, without windows, and set farther back off the street than the rest at an angle.

“Gotta be,” I said. Kodie held up her hand in high five. I matched my palm to hers, marveling at her positivity after what she’d just witnessed.

We were parked at the side of the building in front of a metal door. It was locked, so we went around the front and tried its glass doors.

Open. Slight sweet-sour death reek.

Beyond the tiled foyer, lights in the hallway to the left flicked and buzzed. As we went deeper into the building, the smell gathered, thickened. We made a turn and saw that at the end of the thinly carpeted hall was an open door to a dark room.

We lifted our shirts to cover our noses and mouths. Peering in, coughing and waving and blinking our way through the smell, we see that it’s a hybrid office and meeting room with a big stainless conference table stacked with neat piles of papers weighted down by brown riven stones, manila folders, and books. I flip another switch on the wall by the door and another set of lights pop on and it is then that we see the man at the desk with his back to us at the back of the long room. We take in this tableau.

Even as death worked its putrefaction upon his body now losing its rigor, Doctor Warren Jespers’s jowly cheeks were still soap-burnished and ruddy. He looked almost comfortable in his desk chair. His eyes, however, were wide and livid with shock as they fixed upon the massive whiteboard on the wall in front of his desk where it was written in large letters at the top it needs you to need it . Below that, linking it with a squiggled arrow, this man of hard science had written Matthew 16:23 .

The walls are bare save for a gilt-framed sepia photo of a young woman holding a baby which hung anachronistically small next to the huge whiteboard. Over the woman’s shoulder in the distance is the UT clock tower. I thought of the seven plunging suicides from that tower, that one’s name was Moment and she had taken off her shoes before she jumped.

His computer’s flat screen is frozen. The connection has long since been lost but the last image Jespers was looking at is of a similar scene: a man at a desk, dead. This man is slumped onto the desk. His face cannot be seen. At the corner of the screen is an instant message window. Faucheux, Guillaume. Doctorat, UPMC. En Génétique. Away 17 mins. 2 Participants. In the dialogue box, the French doctor had written simply: Mort. Près près près. In Jespers’s box below it at 7:31 a.m. CST: What’s happening??? Are you ok??

Kodie and Bass fan out. On Jespers’s desk is a thick printout. Inspecting it, I realize it’s the peer-reviewed paper Fleming had referenced replete with his acid marginalia in red pen. Wadded balls of it riddle the floor.

The ten-by-twelve whiteboard is full of equations and notes and flowcharts. Kodie air-traces them with her finger, whispering to herself as she reads. At the bottom corner she stops. She reads out loud, “Kevin March? Cody? (ask Becky).”

“Ho-ly fuck ,” Bass whisper-mused as he jogged around the desk to join Kodie and tap the board at my name.

“Indeed,” I said.

“Huh. Cody. Me?”

Bass and I shrug-nod.

“I don’t know this man,” I said. “This was Fleming’s friend.”

“Maybe he told him about you,” Kodie said.

I had the letter with me and shuffled through it. “Maybe, but there’s no mention of you in Fleming’s let… no, wait, he says here you and the young woman . Could be you. But how does he,” I gestured to Jespers, “know of you? Your name?”

Bass cleared his throat. “Clearly, Fleming and Jespers have been discussing you two. Why, though?”

I handed him Fleming’s letter. “Read the first part.”

Bass reads quickly and drops his hands with the papers to his thighs in exasperation. “Dreaming about you? You’ve got to clue me in.”

“But he knows my name. Fleming just says the young woman,” said Kodie.

“I think it has to do with this business here.” Bass read: “‘The unknown here is: What triggered this latent, doomsday gene to go into effect around the planet simultaneously this morning? And did it hear me and Warren talking over our pints? Did it become concerned that we humans had stumbled onto something we shouldn’t have?’” Bass looked at us, gobsmacked. “You guys. Fleming’s dreaming about you two. They knew you were important in regards to this, to this it he talks about here. Fleming lives across the street. You and Kodie are a thing. I’m here. Connected. But wh—”

“Why?” Kodie asked.

I walked over the conference table and picked up a copy of Lord of the Flies . “We’ve got the conch,” I mumbled.

Kodie and Bass came to the table. There was a tall stack of subscribed-to Scientific American s. And there were other books, heavier research and science texts with dense and arcane titles, but also, mixed in with them, a Bible, various translations of Lord of the Flies. Kodie held El Señor de las Moscas . Bass thumbed Sa Majesté des Mouches . The Heart of Darkness, Wisconsin Death Trip , Camus’s The Plague , O’Nan’s novel about a diphtheria epidemic, A Prayer for the Dying , wherein Jespers had dog-eared a page and underlined she jerks as if pitching a fit, thrashes her head side to side… ‘Jesus Jesus Jesus,’ she moans. ‘Jesus Jesus Jesus.’

After a quiet time of perusing, Kodie shows me an underlined passage in her Spanish copy of Lord of the Flies , a passage: cerca cerca cerca , ending with no vayas? Without talking, I simply showed her the page I had my finger on, one Jespers had also underlined. It was the same passage in English. Now Bass holds up his French copy. Same highlighted passage.