CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Puzzled
When she woke the morning after the Fraunces Tavern dinner, Prissi knew her day’s task was to find out more about the faces in the Pequod Jones pix. However, rather than immediately going back to the NYPD, she thought it made more sense to see if she could find anything in the apartment or in the newly arrived cases from Africa that would help her.
Minutes after her father left for work, Prissi began her search in the small bedroom he used as an office. Twenty minutes of rummaging file drawers and pawing through the piles of papers stack on the badboard bookcase revealed nothing.
Although she had some guilt as she snuck around the office, those feelings were nothing compared to what Prissi experienced when she moved her search to her father’s bedroom. She found nothing more exciting than a water bottle, zines and a pen on top of the bed-stand. The edstand’s dusty drawer held paper clips, rubber bands, tissues, a pill vial, more pens and two unopened paks of gum. The sock and underwear drawers held socks, underwear and a musty smell that gave Prissi the creeps. Moving to the closet, the mortified teener had a frisson of anticipation when her hand touched something thin at the far end of the shelf above the clothes rod. Standing on her tiptoes, she caught a corner and withdrew a yellow padded Saf-Rap envelope.
With her quivering hands making the task more difficult, Prissi finally managed to split the seal. She half-pulled the sheet from the envelope. When she realized she was holding her mother’s death certificate, she wondered why her father would keep it in his closet. She flared her wings and sat down on the rumpled sheets of her father’s bed. Pulling the heavy sheet of paper free of its envelope, Prissi read the succinct recounting of a life—name, date and place of birth, and place and date of…. Her mother’s date of death was wrong. Nora Elieson had died on May 20th, 2094. That was a date Prissi could never forget. The paper Prissi had in her hands said her mother had died on May 23rd. She shrugged. That was Africa. A place so nonchalant about, so inured to death, it didn’t even know when its people died.
When she started reading again, Prissi’s quivering hands began to shaker. A snotty sob, the first one in almost two years, strangled her. In a split second, a flick of the eyes, Prissi’s life changed. The daughter’s life changed because the mother’s death changed. Instead of dying from the injuries she had sustained in a one vehicle accident along the Muyinga Gitega road, the death certificate said that Nora Elieson’s accident was no accident, that her death was self-inflicted.
As quickly as it had started, Prissi’s sobbing stopped. Yesterday’s pix. Now, this paper. Was her family’s life, and, thus, her life, all a lie? Something worse than tears started to explode from Prissi, but she slammed it back with a ferocity she didn’t even know she had. That, whatever that was, was not getting out.
Prissi shoved the death certificate back into its dark home. She tapped the edge of the envelope against her head before she put it back on the shelf at the back of a closet, a place where it did and didn’t belong.
The disturbed teener stumbled down to the basement of the Gramercy Arms. Desperate to find something to make sense of what she had just discovered upstairs, Prissi rotated the five gears of the padlock securing the door of the mesh wire storage compartment. She snapped the lock shackle and threw back the door, pushed enough things aside so that she could spread her wings, dropped to her knees and began picking up pieces of their African life with the desperation of a hurricane survivor returning home.
Suicide?
Suicide? It wasn’t possible. Her mother was happy. She was healthy. Her mother loved her. She would never kill herself. Prissi held and discarded familiar objects…and thoughts. Although she rubbed the sides of vases and lamps, no genie emerged to change her fate. She rubbed her forehead with hands that smelled of a lost life, but no thoughts came that could make sense of the crime of which the paper in her father’s closet accused her mother, a crime of which Prissi and her father, though indirectly, also were accused.
It was after five o’clock before a drained Prissi stood up amidst the mess she had made. She had found nothing that told her why her mother would commit suicide. But, she did have answers to other questions. Now, she understood why they had left Africa immediately after the funeral and why her father wasn’t able to recover from his wife’s death. Prissi wanted to be at the door when her father came home and tell him what she knew.
With the disengagement of a sleep walker, the distraught girl tried to bring order to her thinking by bringing order back out of the chaos she had created in the storage cage; however before she had made much progress, exhaustion, more emotional than physical, made her quit. Even though her father would be home from work before long, Prissi didn’t go back to the apartment. Instead, the feeling that had welled up in her father’s bedroom, the feeling whose release she feared, propelled her through the acid rain-etched glass doors of the Gramercy Arms.
It was just after 6:00 p.m. and the green glow of the aqua-phosphor street lights along 21st Street painted ghastly faces on those walkers hurrying along the sidewalk. Overhead, the pulse of the beating wings of the walkers’ bosses, and the tapestry of crisscrossing beams of flighlights, filled the air. Prissi had burst out of the door without an idea in her head except to move fast enough so that the turmoil within wouldn’t overwhelm her. But, once outside in the cool dark air, some rational fragment of her brain reminded her that it had been over six hours since she had eaten anything. While six hours was not a personal best, it was the longest she could remember going without food since starting boarding school. Even though her mind was indecisive, her belly knew immediately that it wanted to head toward the Malawi deli two blocks west of Fifth Avenue. Prissi thought that if she hurried, she just might get there before all of the mbatata biscuits were gone.
In Burundi, mbatata biscuits had been Prissi’s favorite food. Now, despite her painful confusion, the teener smiled at the thought of how she and mother would buy them from a stall at the market near their apartment building. Biscuits in hand, she would cajole her mother into buying an Irn Bru. They would walk down to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with their unhappy bodyguard in tow, eating and drinking and talking, talking, talking.
Prissi had just switched on her flightlight when she heard someone trill her name. The voice was familiar, but for a second, because it was so out of context, she couldn’t quite place it. She looked up to the balustrade that stuck out a meter from the front of the apartment building across the street and saw a shapeless figure crouching there.
“Prissi, it’s me.”
Recognition came.
“Freeieekin Caesar.”
The shadowy figure leapt off the parapet, flapped twice and landed in front of Prissi. The amorhous form pushed back a hood, pulled off a watch cap and metamorphosed into Jack Fflowers. A dirty, disheveled, intriguing Jack Fflowers.
“What’s going on?”
With a theatrical self-satisfied grin at his arrival’s effect on Prissi, Jack drawled, “I’ll tell you, but I’m really hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”
“I’m just running out to get some dinner. C’mon with me. It’s not far.”
Jack shook his head, “Not a good idea.” He nodded to the blue-black sky overhead as he pulled his hood back up.
“Why are you hiding? Isn’t it Joe that’s the fugitive?”
Jack interrupted Prissi, “Can we go some place safer?”
Although Prissi prided herself on not being thrown off course, there was something about Jack that made her willing to wait to ask her questions.
“Come on up. My dad will be home soon, but I can say I ran into you, say we’re good friends from school, you know.”
With a smirk, Jack gestured to his clothes, “Do I look like someone who would go to prep school?”
“No, you’re right. But, my dad, even though he doesn’t spend much time in this world, still might smell something snooty on you. But, it’s either up there or down in the basement.”
&nb
sp; “What’s down there?”
“Storage and a utility room.”
“No super?”
“No the building’s too small. They use Central-Super.”
Jack leered, “Down.”
Although Prissi knew that she should be in shock, she found herself happy that Jack was teasing her. She turned to see if the lobby was empty before beckoning with a jerk of her head for Jack to follow her. When she stopped to put her thumb on the lock sensor, Prissi felt Jack’s breath on her neck.
As soon as Prissi showed Jack the cage where she had spent the afternoon, he immediately said, “This is epic. I can incubate here. But what do I do if someone lands in our love nest?””
Jack’s words made Prissi’s face flush. To create a diversion she asked, “What is going on? Why are you hiding?”
Jack ignored her.
“I’ll stack these boxes and push them close to the back wall where it’s darker. I can hide there.”
Jack was still moving boxes when he said, “Hmmmm. Still not much cover. I’d be a rat in a cage.”
“But, no one comes down here.”
“It only takes one.”
Jack walked out of the cage to the end of the long room where he yanked on a door handle.
“What’s in here?”
“The heat and stuff…electricity.”
As he turned back, Jack shook his head.
“Not good.”
Prissi’s shoulders slumped.
“I’d better go.”
A wave of feeling, part panic and part pain, washed over Prissi. With a huge effort, she conquered both.
“No. Don’t go. Not yet, anyway. No one will come. I’ll go get food and be right back. What do you like?”
Jack, seemingly startled by the kindness, shrugged his narrow slouchy shoulders, “Anything. It’s been awhile.”
As Prissi raced up the basement stairs, she hit herself in the forehead with her fist. She ran through the lobby, caught a wing as she rushed through the door, flung herself from the top of the three step stoop and beat her wings madly. As soon as she was airborne, she dropped her left wing, pounded her right and made a sweeping turn down 21st Street toward the lights of Fifth Avenue three blocks away. By the time she got to the intersection with Lexington Avenue, she was over thirty meters in the air and moving fast; however the cold air rushing past her face did nothing to cool the heat in her cheeks.
Prissi kept climbing as she sped her way toward Park Avenue. When she reached sixty meters, she roared in confusion. The teener drew up her heels, dropped her head on to chest, folded her wings tight and did a triple somersault. She came out of the third flip so fast that when she flared her wings to stop her freefall, she felt the same pop in her right shoulder that she had experienced at Bissell. She dropped her legs to increase her drag before carefully beating her wings a half-dozen times to make sure everything still worked.
As she walked in to the EZ-Lam Global Market, Prissi was panting so hard she could only manage a choked As-salaam alaykum to Jiffy Apithy, the owner’s third son, second-shift cashier, honors student in molecular engineering at NYU-Man and, most importantly, fellow soccer player. Prissi had spent hours of her first months in New York playing after school and weekend pick-up soccer games with a motley crew that included Jiffy. She greatly respected Jiffy’s competitiveness, which, she was willing to admit, came close to equaling her own. Prissi grabbed a tote, and smiled at her friend before pointing toward the open deli display at the back of the store. The smile Jiffy tossed back was so big it was barely contained by the wide dimpled cheeks of his perfectly round face.
In a minor miracle, there were four mbatata biscuits left. Prissi snatched them like they were the crown jewels. She added a zip-bag of kibbe, lentils and onions, then, put it back as being too far-fetched, found nori-wrapped mahi-mahi and a container of fresh water shrimp spring rolls. She grabbed two bottles of Irn Bru, kefir and a 2 liter bottle of Arctic water. She hefted the tote, frowned, shrugged and packed it in her imagination before making her way back to Jiffy.
Prissi stood on the floor scale, wriggling impatiently as Jiffy scanned her flightcard. He put her purchases on the sale scale. The scale buzzed.
“You’re a kilo over.”
Prissi stared at the food for a second before flaring up at Jiffy.
“C’mon, Jiffy, let it go. You know I only live a couple of blocks away. Nothing’s going to happen from here to there.”
When Jiffy shook his head, the combed out hair on the top of his head swayed back and forth like sagebrush in a breeze, “I like Noramica. I want to stay.”
Prissi tried her disgusted look.
“Zeusus, Jiffy, Malawi culture must be big on drama.”
Jiffy’s dark eyes, always warm and friendly, turned ice cold.
“It is not the culture in Malawi that is a drama, it is the living…which is mostly dying.”
“I’m sorry. That was stupid…and mean.”
Prissi took out the water bottle and walked down the aisle to put it back on its shelf. She paid and then opened her kanga-pak to arrange her purchases in the suggested order and orientation shown on the receipt. She bounced up and down a couple of times to settle the pak. Half-way out the door, Prissi turned back toward Jiffy, “Sometimes I can be very stupid.”
Jiffy stared at her with his new eyes and waited five seconds before finally giving her a small nod of his head.
The energized confusion Prissi had felt flying to the market was replaced by a heavy-winged feeling of loss on the flight back. What was it about Jack that caused her to do stupid things, to hurt people she really liked?
An angry Prissi shoved open the basement door and muttered, “Hey, it’s me,” but, her anger sputtered when she opened the cage and didn’t find Jack.
“Jack? Jack?”
At first, as she listened, she heard only the hair dryer drone of the heat pump, but then she heard a muffled sound, like a sweeping broom. Prissi tentatively moved toward the noise, which seemed to be coming from a cage at the far end of the basement.
“Jack?”
Jack’s head rose from behind a wall of boxes. Prissi snapped the padlock that secured the door. It held.
“How’d you do that?”
Jack wriggled his boomerang-shaped eyebrows and offered Prissi a wry grin before he disappeared from view. Prissi heard the broom noise again, then a scraping sound like a small snow shovel cleaning a sidewalk. A second later Jack came out from behind the low wall of boxes in the Langue cage with a small screwdriver in his hand and a big smile across his dirty face. Somehow, Jack’s smile made Prissi’s elbows tingle.
“The sides are pretty flimsy.”
The riled teener unzipped her kanga and offered the mbatata muffins.
“Africa’s best.”
Jack stood still. “Africa’s best could still be Noramica’s worst. What are they?”
Those words focused Prissi’s thoughts. The tingle went away.
“I’m sure I can return them if they’re not to your standards.”
Jack’s lips formed a word, but they made had no sound. The boy slid down on his haunches and began to shove food into his mouth.
“Sorry, though rich, I’m naïve. I just didn’t know Africa had anything that was best.”
Instead of expelling her words, Prissi stomped down the corridor and banged her fist against a cage.
“Are they good?”
Jack, with his cheeks bulging like a squirrel in autumn, nodded his head.
To get rid of the excess energy that was making her feel like gnats were biting her, Prissi stalked back and forth in front of the cages. On one pass, she looked down and studied how filthy Jack’s hair was. On another pass, she thought she could smell his hair. It was kind of smoky like old bacon fat and maybe something fishy.
Jack finished the mbatata and started on the mahi-mahi. Despite the heat pump drone, Prissi could hear his mewling sounds as he ate. His sounds reminded her of a litter of kitt
ens and, somehow, made it hard for her to breathe. She coughed twice. When the fish was gone, Jack began shoving the spring rolls into his mouth in a way that suddenly began to disgust her. If he had been hurt, maybe bleeding, or covered in vomit, or had his intestines spilling from a wound, she was sure that she would have been willing to help him; but eating the way he was eating, with rice noodles stuck to his chin and his jaws crushing through the bulge of food in his mouth, was harder to accept. The eating, the smell of his hair, the self-absorption began to revulse her.
Prissi hurried to the far wall to get away from Jack. As she held onto the wire of the last cage taking deep breaths, her eyes were drawn to a gray bin amid a jumble of boxes and broken chairs. Although the light was dim, the writing identifying the contents of the bin as schoolwork was in her mother’s handwriting. During the half minute she stared at the container, Prissi could not come up with a plausible reason for why it would be there.
Feeling foolish even as she did it since she knew what the result would be, Prissi tugged on the padlock. It did not miraculously open. She cradled the lock in her palm as she studied it. Like the one of her cage door, it had five numbered wheels, which meant a possibility of 99,999 combinations. Fighting her intuition, Prissi made herself begin at 00000, tugged, advanced the far right rotor until it read one and tugged again. She was at 0027 when she heard Jack crush the container that had held the spring rolls. Reluctantly, Prissi let go of the lock and walked back down to her cage.
“This was great. The best and most I’ve eaten since I got here.”
“Which was when?”
Even to herself, Prissi’s thought her voice sounded like the eunuched charm that came from the venderators at school.
“Monday night.”
“What’s going on?”
Jack’s eyes seemed to dull as he looked at something beyond the basement door. He pinched the skin of a cheekbone before rubbing the back of his grimy neck.
“You can ask, but I’m not sure I can give you an answer.”
After a long silence, Prissi asked, “You’re not running away, too, are you?”
Like a child’s charade of a steam turbine, Jack’s shoulders rose, a hiss of air escaped his lips, and, then, his shoulders slumped.
“Kinda. I mean my folks don’t know where I am. But, really, I’m not running away. I hope I’m running toward.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah. Since I kind of feel responsible that he took off, I want to help find him.”
“How could you be responsible? I thought you and Joe didn’t talk.”
Jack flashed his biggest smile, “We don’t. But, it was Christmas, at my grandfather’s. There wasn’t much choice. Better to talk about fledging and flying than some other topics.”
When Jack waggled his eyebrows, Prissi raised one of hers and started to call him on what she guessed was a lie. Instead, her embarrassment over what he was insinuating, caused her to ask, “I thought you loved to fly.”
“I do, but I like a lot of other things, too. Part of it is just growing up. Or, maybe accepting that for the first time in my life I didn’t get to have what I wanted.”
“Which was?”
“Play now. Fly later.”
Instead of resenting Jack’s life of privilege and his nonchalant self-centeredness, Prissi took a deep breath, pushed her wings far forward, and carefully slid down the cage door to sit on the floor opposite him.
Jack continued, “Joe didn’t really have anything against flying. In fact, I know he’d love it. Obviously, he’d be good at it.” Jack stopped as if waiting for Prissi to say something. He cocked his head sideways in a manner that reminded Prissi of a crow looking at something shiny in the grass before giving her another huge, consciously vulpine smile.
To get past the effects of his smile, Prissi said, “But, Joe loves hockey and he wasn’t ready to give that up.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Indirectly.”
Although he was still smiling, Jack’s eyes locked onto Prissi’s and didn’t waver.
“Do you know where he went? That’s mostly why I’m here. I thought he might have given you a clue about he was going to do. I know he trusted you.”
Prissi shook her head resignedly. “No clue.”
A couple of greasy plaits broke free from Jack’s head when he mimicked Prissi’s action. He grabbed the ends and began to twist them. Again, Prissi felt as though he was expecting her to say something. There was an uncomfortable silence until Jack leaned toward Prissi to say, “My dad told me that it might not be long before you’ll be able to mute when you’re in your twenties. He told me that Joe might be able to play hockey for fifteen more years. Be in the Olympics…then fledge and do whatever he,” Jack laughed bitterly, “or, more importantly, the family wants.”
“Like get your butt home, now?”
“Like that.”
Prissi couldn’t contain herself, “Jack, you know they’ve been promising that for fifty years and it hasn’t happened. It’s like a cure for herpes or acne. Always just around the corner, but it hasn’t happened. How would you be feeling right now if you knew you had missed the window and never could fly? You shouldn’t have told….”
Prissi never had a chance to finish her sentence. Her mypod chirped. It was her father. He was worried. When he found out that there was nothing wrong except that Prissi had run into a friend, he wondered when she was going to be home. Should he go out to get them something to eat? Rather than tell her father that she was down in the basement, Prissi reassured him that she would be home with dinner in twenty minutes.
“Look, I’ve got to go. Stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Jack stood up. “I need to go out for awhile. I’ve got a hunch. If I go, can I get back in?”
“No.”
“Okay, maybe, I’ll stay. But don’t take too long. I’ve got to keep moving…for Joe’s and my own sake. Plus,” the smile flashed like a shooting star, “a pining heart is a…”
When Prissi reached out to Jack, he stepped forward and held her tight. They swayed together like tidal seaweed for too many seconds before a weak-kneed Prissi shoved him back. Jack’s eyes were big in surprise at the force Prissi used to disengage. She laughed.
“You misread my intentions.”
She reached forward and plucked a convenient piece of rice noodle from the sparse stubble on his chin.
Jack grabbed her again and held her tight. Prissi felt his hands smoothing her feathers and fought the urge to let those caresses go on.
Finally, when she stiffened in his arms, Jack released her as he said, “I hope you don’t misread mine.”
Like a dog to its bowl, the wolfish grin bounded back onto Jack’s face just before its owner slouched back down onto the floor.
An hour later, when Prissi pushed through the basement door after having eaten a quick Malay take-out with her father, she was surprised to find the basement dark. As she punched the light-switch, she whispered Jack’s name. She half-expected him to play Jack-in-the-box a second time. She walked past all of the cages until she was in front of the utility room door. She tried the handle to see if he might have figured out how to get past that lock. When the handle didn’t turn, she spun back around to catch him sneaking up on her, but the room was empty. She hurried back to the Langue storage area and looked behind the re-arranged totes. No Jack there, and no Jack hiding in any of the storage areas.
No Jack. No Joe.
When Prissi plopped herself down on a black crate, it protested with an angry sigh. She tried to figure out what she had done to cause Jack to leave. Her hand drifted to her face where her fingers played with her pimples like the buttons on an accordion. She sat, thought, regretted, grew angry, at him, at herself, at it, and finally, when there were no more targets, she slumped and stared at the tips of her wings. She savored her unhappiness. She probed and prodded the tenderest spots like a defeated fighter poking at the greenest of a set of bruises.
>
Finally, having grown bored with her self-indulgence, Prissi pushed herself to her feet. It wasn’t until she snapped the lock shackle to secure the Langue cage that she remembered the tote in the other cage. This time when she stood in front of the wire door, she listened to her intuition. She rotated the dials of the lock until they duplicated the combination for the lock on the Langue cage. When she gave a tug, the lock opened.
Prissi took a few seconds to listen to the building’s sighs and groans before opening the door. Once inside, the teener brushed aside her lifeless mouse fur hair and used her feet to push aside the boxes surrounding the one with her mother’s writing. She spread her wings enough to kneel down. Her hands hovered over the gray container before her trembling hands began peeling back its shipping seals.
The top layer held boxes filled with Prissi’s art and homework assignments from elementary school. As the motherless refugee opened the boxes, along with all of the memories, came the faintest smell of Africa. The next layer contained a flash album, which was all black because of dead solar batteries. It would take hours of exposure to light to see what pix it held. There was another ancient album with images on paper protected behind plastic sleeves. Prissi couldn’t remember seeing that before. Taking her time, she found two pix of the young woman who had been holding hands in Pequod Jones’ pix. In one, the woman, wearing a lab coat and a serious face, was leaning over something which looked like an aquarium. In the second image, the woman, who Prissi was sure was her mother with a half century of living removed from her face, was standing on top of a mountain in jeens and heavy boots. Prissi took the pix from the album thinking that she would add them to her arsenal for when she battled her father for her family’s past.
The third layer held banded stacks of letters. When Prissi flipped through the relics, she saw that most of them were from her father to her mother. Two were not. They were from someone named Al Burgey who lived in New Jersey.
On the bottom of the box Prissi found a red plastic filo. When she opened it she discovered a small bag covered with a pattern of tiny red and black beads. Opening the bag, Prissi found a spiral crystal, banded in gold, and suspended on a heavy link gold chain. This was a piece of her mother’s jewelry she had never seen before. When Prissi held the crystal up to the light, its interior was hazy with tiny fractures. She dropped the pendant over her head and tucked it inside her shirt. It felt good to have something of her mother’s against her skin. It was good until that feeling started to make her eyes itch.
Prissi went back to her exploring. At the very bottom of the box, she found a large, tattered composition book. It only took her a minute to realize that its pages contained her mother’s notes, ideas and observations about different scientific experiments.
As the entranced girl read, she fingered the pendant. Most of her mother’s work seemed to be focused on mutancy. There was no mention of Centsurety, but Prissi was now even more sure that her mother had worked there for Joshua Fflowers. Her hands vibrated as she held and read the evidence of a secret life her mother had lived.
After spending twenty minutes thumbing through the notebooks, Prissi had no better idea of what her mother had been working on other than that it involved a mutancy project which brought more frustration than satisfaction. When Prissi turned the last page of the notebook, she saw from the remaining scraps that many pages had been torn out.
Prissi compared the first entry in the notebook with the last and wondered why she had never heard a single word about the three years her mother had spent doing this work. She wondered why the notebook and pendant and pix were in a tote in the wrong storage area. And, lastly, she wondered if there could be a connection between the things before her and her mother’s suicide.
In frustration, Prissi used her outstretched feet to shove the boxes away from her. She flared her wings, flexed her shoulders, and rolled her neck. She took a deep breath, held it, slowly released it, and began her story: She was not the evil spawn. Instead, her mother was an evil…no, her mother was a good scientist who worked with evil ones…a good scientist who had been going to blow the whistle on the evil scientists. Who had found out what she was going to do…and tried to stop her? Someway—she would have to work that out later—the good scientist had evaded her fate by going underground. Years later, she had resurfaced in Burundi as a housewife who helped her scientist husband help mankind and adored her daughter, and….unbidden by Prissi, her story’s unwanted ending came...who committed suicide.
Prissi shook her head. That couldn’t be the right ending. It couldn’t be. She packed everything back in the box as she had found it, except for the pix and the pendant. She locked the wire door and was on her way out when she noticed a small piece of paper wedged into the chicken wire of the Langue cage.
Opening the note, she read: 213? SFE-B/TZT/K.
Since Prissi knew it hadn’t been there earlier, she assumed that it was some kind of coded message from Jack. One of the things she was beginning to hate about Jack was that when he tried to be mysterious, he came off as being either snarky or stupid.
Feeling that she didn’t have the time, Prissi shoved the paper in her pocket. She didn’t need for everything to be so cryptic. She headed upstairs to interrogate Beryl Langue…her purported father.