Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘But the woman I saw – her place was cluttered. I’d almost call it filthy.’ Daniel frowns. ‘Did you ask the family about her?’

‘Of course we did. But they wouldn’t talk. Which is why I’m talking to you.’

‘What do you want to know?’

Eddie pauses. ‘What I’m about to ask you – I’m aware it’s sensitive. I’m aware you might not want to discuss it. But I’m asking you to try. Like I said: we haven’t found much. Sure, this woman isn’t registered, but we’re not gonna charge her for that. What we’re interested in is the fact that we’ve linked her to a number of deaths. Suicides.’

It’s so simple, so instantaneous, the body’s response: Daniel’s hunger is gone. He could vomit.

‘Now, we’ve found no direct, causal relationship,’ says Eddie. ‘These are people who’ve gone to see her two, ten, sometimes twenty years earlier. But there are several of them – five, including your sister. Which is enough to make you wonder.’ He folds his hands and leans toward Daniel. ‘So here’s what I want to know. I want to know if she said anything – did anything – to push you in that direction. Or if she did it to Klara.’

‘Not to me. I told her what I wanted from her, and she gave it to me. It was transactional. I didn’t get the sense she cared what I did with the information once I left.’ There’s a crawling feeling on his neck, many-legged and swift, like a centipede, though when Daniel uses his index finger to probe beneath his shirt collar, he feels nothing. It occurs to him that Eddie has not mentioned whether this is a conversation or an interview. ‘As for Klara, I’m not sure. She never told me she felt pressured. But she was different to begin with.’

‘Different how?’

‘She was vulnerable. A little unstable. Susceptible, I guess. Which may have been something she was born with – or maybe it developed over time.’ Daniel pushes his food away. He doesn’t want to look at the squid’s mantle, sliced in perfect rings, or the arms curling inward. ‘I know what I told you after the memorial: I thought it was a very strange coincidence, the fact that this fortune teller predicted Klara’s death. But I was distraught. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Yes, the fortune teller was right, but only because Klara chose to believe her. There’s no mystery in that.’

Daniel pauses. He feels deeply uneasy, though it takes him a moment to identify why.

‘On the other hand,’ Daniel adds, ‘if you do think this woman had something to do with it – if we entertain the thought of that very slim chance – then frankly, I blame myself. I was the one who heard about her. I was the one who dragged my siblings to that apartment.’

‘Daniel. You can’t blame yourself.’ Eddie’s hand is poised above the notebook, but his brow softens with compassion. ‘You doing that is like blaming our man Jim for going to see Rosa. You doing that, it’s blaming the victim. It can’t have been easy on you, either, going to this woman at such a young age. Hearing when she says you’re gonna die.’

Daniel has not forgotten his date – the twenty-fourth of November, this year – but neither has he given it credence. Most of the people he knows who died young were the unlucky recipients of hellish diagnoses: AIDS, like Simon, or an untreatable cancer. Just two weeks ago, Daniel had his annual physical. On the way there, he felt rattled, but afterward he was embarrassed for having let the superstition of it get to him. Apart from a bit of weight gain and borderline elevated cholesterol, he was in excellent health.

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I was a kid; it was an unpleasant experience. But I shook it off a long time ago.’

‘And what if Klara couldn’t?’ asks Eddie, jabbing his index finger in emphasis. ‘This is what scammers do: they go after whoever’s most vulnerable. Look – this susceptibility you’re talking about? Think of it like a gene. The fortune teller may have been the environmental factor that triggered it. Or maybe she noticed it in Klara. Maybe she preyed on it.’

‘Maybe,’ echoes Daniel, but he bristles. He realizes that Eddie likely invoked a medical metaphor to appeal to Daniel’s expertise, but the idea sounds pseudoscientific and the effort feels condescending. What does Eddie know about gene expression, much less Klara’s phenotype? Eddie is better off sticking to what he does best. Daniel would not tell him how to run an interrogation.

‘And what about your brother?’ Eddie glances down at his notes. ‘He died in ’82, didn’t he? Did the fortune teller predict that?’

Something about Eddie’s gesture – the brief peek at the open folder, enough to suggest he had to look to find the date but too short to actually do it – irritates Daniel more. He has no doubt that Eddie knows the year of Simon’s death, as well as a host of other things about Simon – things Daniel surely doesn’t.

‘I don’t have any idea. He never told us what she said to him. But my brother was always going to do exactly what he wanted. He was a gay man who lived in San Francisco in the eighties and contracted AIDS. To me, that seems pretty damn clear.’

‘All right.’ Eddie keeps his wrists on the table but lifts his fingers and palms. A gesture of appeasement: the edge in Daniel’s voice was not lost on him. ‘I appreciate what you’ve given me. And if anything else comes to mind’ – he passes a business card across the table – ‘you have my number.’

Eddie stands and closes his folder, tapping it once on the table to level the papers inside. He tucks the folder into his briefcase and slings his jacket over one shoulder.

‘Hey, I looked you up,’ he says. ‘Saw you’re still working with our troops.’

‘That’s right,’ says Daniel, but then his throat becomes plugged, and he finds himself unable to go on.

‘Good stuff,’ says Eddie on his way out, clapping Daniel on the back with the genial encouragement of a Little League coach. ‘Keep it up.’

Daniel walks briskly to his car and departs with a lurch. He feels both wired and drained; he didn’t realize how disturbing it would be to revisit the story of the woman in such detail, or to hear the scope of her family’s transgressions. It’s so painful to contemplate the deaths of his siblings that Daniel has done it only in isolation: lying awake while Mira sleeps or driving home from work in winter, the road lit by headlights, the radio rattling in the background.

What he told Eddie is true: he doesn’t buy the fortune teller’s claims. He believes in bad choices; he believes in bad luck. And yet the memory of the woman on Hester Street is like a minuscule needle in his stomach, something he swallowed long ago and which floats, undetectable, except for moments when he moves a certain way and feels a prick.

He’s never told Mira. She grew up in Berkeley, the studious child of musicians – her father Christian, her mother Jewish – who produced interfaith songs for children. Mira loves her parents, but she can’t bear to listen to ‘Oy to the World’ or ‘Little Drummer Mensch,’ and she has little patience for New Age institutions. It’s no wonder she gravitated toward Judaism: she likes its intellectualism and morality, its lawfulness.

Before they married, Daniel thought she would find the story of the fortune teller childish. He didn’t want to drive her away. After Klara’s death, he longed to share it, but again, he did not. This time, he feared Mira’s brow would furrow with concern – a tiny, delicate v , like a goose sure of its direction. He feared she would see in him an alignment with Klara: her eccentricity, her lack of reason. Even her illness. And he was not aligned with Klara – this much Daniel knew. There was no reason to make Mira think so.