Frozen Solid A Novel

32




AFTER BARNARD LEFT, DAVID GERRIN SAT BEHIND HIS DESK AND gazed at a large, framed photograph of Dhaka that hung on his wall. Barnard had asked about it. Once they learn where I came from, he thought, they all ask the same things. Is that rush hour? How many people live there? When do the typhoons hit? What are the slums like?

From television news they knew about the storms, floods, and famines, epidemics, genocide, death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. Some recalled a concert to raise funds, very famous musicians and entertainers. So many years later, though, not many knew much beyond its name.

We were so poor, Gerrin thought now, staring at the picture, reflecting on Barnard’s visit. Not poor as they understand the term in this country. The poor here live like royalty by comparison. They walk into some office once a month and are handed money, free and clear. They do nothing for it. Nothing. Unimaginable for a Bangladeshi.

He recalled sitting beside his mother—these were his first memories—in a vast, steaming, stinking dump that stretched as far as he could see. That was his world. There was simply no way to tell people here about the smell: rotting food, putrefying flesh, burning shit. And hot. One endless compost heap. She had to keep picking him up so that he would not be burned. When she found anything edible—apple cores, fish bones, moldy bread—she ate half and made him eat the other half.

They lived in Karail, Dhaka’s worst slum. Perhaps the world’s worst. He pissed and shat in any open space, as the urges struck. Most water was life-threatening. He and two brothers and two sisters and his mother slept underneath an abandoned truck trailer. The trailer itself was full of others. He did not remember his father, who died of typhoid when he was still an infant. They scavenged clothes from people who were dead or dying. They ate dogs and cats when they could catch them. He saw people eating corpses.

He remembered his mother dying from malnutrition and dysentery when he was eleven. She had grown too weak to move, had lain in her own filth, blanketed with flies, unable to eat or drink at the end. After, both sisters were taken away by men who, he learned later, raped ugly women to death and sold pretty ones to pimps. He watched from a hiding place while a gang killed one of his brothers for the clothes he wore. They did not want to soil the shirt and pants with blood, so they strangled him with a soft rope. The second brother disappeared one night while he slept, and Gerrin had not seen him since.

Hunger never left him. His body ached constantly. There were times when his bones felt like they were on fire. He became covered with sores that would not heal, and living scabs of flies covered the sores. He passed blood from all his orifices and walked about nearly blind some days, barely able to think with a starving brain. Much of the time he was too weak to defend himself, and people took advantage of him constantly. He did the same to others who were even weaker.

To survive, he did horrible things. Even now he had nightmares about them. Many people would rather die than do the things he had done. Others had the will but lacked the wits. He had been born with unusual intelligence. Pure luck of the draw, as they said here. The brain in his head kept him alive.

A year after his mother died, he broke into a black Mercedes-Benz. He would never forget the silver circle with the three-pointed star that was a few inches from his face as he slid under the car. He had learned how to defeat alarm systems from beneath. He smashed a window, let himself in, and was looking for anything of value when a huge hand wrapped around his neck and pulled him out. The man held him up in the air with his feet dangling. He was that skinny, and the man was that strong. He had very white skin and a reddish beard so perfectly trimmed that each hair was clearly visible, like a nest of wires.

He expected that the man would beat or maybe kill him. It happened all the time to thieves who ventured out of the slums. No one knew or cared.

“Tell me why you broke into my car,” the man said.

No one had ever asked him such a question. Lies would earn him a beating. He told the truth as clearly as he could: He was starving to death. His parents were dead. His sisters and brothers, too. He began to describe his life.

The man set him down and listened. Anger changed to mild interest and eventually became attention. The way he spoke, how his eyes worked. He did not know it then, but he understood later: intelligence recognizes itself.

Finished, he simply stood before the man and waited, watching his hands, because when they clenched into fists he would curl up into a ball and take the beating lying down. But they never turned into fists.

“I want you to come with me,” the man said.

They drove in his car to a place like an orphanage. It was that but, as he learned later, full of children who were, like him, extraordinarily intelligent. So began his journey out of Karail, from which only one in ten thousand escaped.

Here, in the beginning, he had told people about that time of his life. But seeing faces contort with disgust and pity was as unpleasant for him as hearing details about Karail was for them. So he’d learned to keep it short and, if not sweet, at least devoid of horror.

Thus he had not told Dr. Donald Barnard any of that, though he’d sensed that Barnard might have listened with more attention and less revulsion than most. Gerrin was no stranger to the land of nightmares, and he thought that Barnard had seen and probably done some of the things that black dreams are made of. He looked about the right age to have fought in Vietnam. Intelligence was not the only thing that recognized itself.

Barnard’s reason for coming seemed genuine: a decent man’s desire to know how a valued former subordinate had died. But surviving a place like Karail instilled an exquisite sensitivity to threat. Something felt odd about Barnard’s interest in someone so far removed from him by time as well as work.

He’d pretended not to know who had been sent to replace Durant, and felt confident that the lie had passed unnoticed. Deceit had been another essential survival skill in Karail. It was, as they said here, like riding a bicycle. Once learned, it stayed with you forever, ready to be retrieved as needed.

But of course he knew exactly who had been sent to replace Durant. That person had been chosen with great care. Emily Durant had been the only female scientist at the station who, before winterover, would be returning to North America. She’d made her own death inevitable after becoming suspicious and asking too many questions about Triage. Her death was not the problem, at least not by itself. But it meant that one entire continent would be left uncovered when Triage launched. And after everything they had done, all the planning and testing, the money spent, risks taken—that was simply unacceptable.