Pressure Chamber, page 18
Anna is getting dressed in her room when Daphne passes her door.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks.”
She places her dream journal on the kitchen table and fills the kettle. While she’s still busy preparing their coffees, Anna walks in, dressed in jeans and a black blouse. As she’s not in the field, she has the privilege of spending most days in civilian clothes. She sits down and reaches for the journal. She doesn’t open it, she simply holds it in her hand.
“Still writing?”
“I don’t really know how to define it, it’s like being in another life, which keeps changing. Like a parallel universe. It’s frightening and beautiful at the same time.”
Anna puts the diary down and sips her coffee. “You’re trying to steal more dream time.”
“What?”
“I’m on to you. You’re going to bed earlier and getting up in the middle of the night. You’re trying to work in more dreams every night. You’re developing an addiction.”
Daphne tries to respond, but Anna says, “It’s the same with junkies who always need another fix. Perhaps you should lower the dosage.”
“Let me get to grips with the nightmare and then I promise I’ll quit. I’m not doing it for any other reason. I have to get it out of my head.”
Anna fixes her with a long stare. “Just watch yourself. I’m genuinely worried about you.”
“It’s fine.”
Daphne lights a cigarette and stands at the window with her coffee in hand.
“Are you going to Jerusalem today?”
“Yes.”
“Dress warm. The news says it’s going to be freezing. In the low forties.”
“Brrrrr.”
49.
Lior Goldman wakes up and reaches for his phone to check the time. Five-ten in the morning. He sits up in bed and rubs his eyes. Rinat’s side of the bed is empty, and there’s no dent in the pillow to indicate that she slept for even a short while.
He goes downstairs to the living room. Rinat is sitting on a stool at the kitchen island with a steaming cup of coffee. But she isn’t drinking from it. Her eyes are fixed on her cell phone and the landline’s cordless handset that lie on the island in front of her.
“Nothing,” she says without looking up at him. “No call. No knock at the door.”
“Did you not get to sleep at all?”
“He said he would make contact after one year.”
He stands behind her and hugs her, and she closes her eyes.
“Why hasn’t he called?”
“He’s a psychopath, and you expect him to be precise to the minute?”
“I don’t get it.” Lior tightens his embrace, readying himself to hear what he’s been hearing every day for an entire year. “How can the police not have found anything? He walked into Ichilov and took our child like he was walking into a supermarket for a bag of chips. Why didn’t anyone stop him? How could they have let it happen?” She sounds exhausted, but her eyes remain glued to the phones. “How could they let it happen? How did they let it happen?”
He kisses her on her temple. “I’ll go check outside, perhaps he left something.”
Outside, the dawn is already rising, to the accompaniment of the lively chirping of birds all around. Lior walks down the pathway to the gate, casting his eyes over the front garden. He opens the gate – there’s nothing on the sidewalk – and goes to the mailbox, reaching in to retrieve its contents. Flyers, the electric bill, the community center’s annual activities booklet, and a white envelope.
He opens it, takes out a folded sheet of paper and starts reading; a moment later, he throws aside the rest of the mail and runs back into the house.
“Rinat!” he yells. “Call the police! Quickly! Call the police!”
50.
Dear Goldman Family!
I’m pleased to inform you that your little Rag is growing and developing nicely!
He’s already a year old and certainly suits his name because he loves to crawl along the floor of the cell in which he’s being held and gather up all the dust onto himself. He cleans the entire floor very admirably!
It’s funny.
A few weeks ago, he found a piece of glass on the floor and put it in his mouth. Fortunately, I was right there! I pulled it out of his mouth and his tongue stopped bleeding a few minutes later. Tough baby!
When I yell: “Rag!” he looks at me and smiles. He already knows his name.
Soon, when he starts talking, I’ll teach him all the profanities I know. I promise to be a wonderful father to him. We’ll sit together in his cell and howl like dogs.
A few days ago, when I was changing his diaper (You can’t believe how much he shits!), he jumped off the dresser headfirst, and I managed to grab his ankle at the last second before his head hit the floor. It was so funny. Lucky I wasn’t drunk at the time.
I love red wine.
White wine too.
And vodka.
I think I’ll allow him to drink a little too.
How long can a person drink only supermarket low-fat milk that has passed its expiry date?
What is he? A calf or something?
Huh!
Don’t worry. I’m holding each baby in a different room so that they don’t end up fighting over their living space when they grow up. Each will have his own room. Forever. I know that teenagers become territorial as they grow up. Like hyenas. Like dogs. If we allow them to run free, they’ll kill one another.
I’ll keep writing to you from time to time.
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
Regards from Rag
51.
Along the winding road through the Jerusalem Forest, on her ascent towards the capital, she sees a naked body on a branch among the pine trees. Anat Aharon peers at her from behind a gnarled tree trunk. When she blinks, the vision disappears. She slows a little, takes her hands off the wheel for a moment and does a reality check. She’s awake.
She presses her foot down on the gas again and her finger on one of the speed-dial numbers on her phone.
“Hi, Daph.”
“What’s up?”
“On my way to work.”
“Me too. Remember you asked me if there’s a character that appears in my dream and takes me into it?”
“Has one appeared?”
“Yes. In a few dreams already. A young girl.”
“Who is she?”
“My friend.”
“A friend in your dream?”
“Yes.”
“Someone you know from the waking world? You as a child?”
“No. She looks Japanese. Black hair, straight bangs.”
“What’s her name?”
“I haven’t asked her, but I know her name is Makoto. She appears in almost all of my dreams. She leads me into the lucid state.”
“When you’re with her, are you a child too? And when she leaves, do you return to your true age?”
“How did you know?”
“Does she try to persuade you to remain?”
“Where?”
“In the dream.”
“No.”
“Let me know when she does.”
Makoto. And Anat’s there too. And Lee. And Carlos. And the wolf that reappears sometimes. And the man who kills her again and again. The parallel world that takes shape for her at night.
“Sometimes, I have flashbacks during the day. I see Anat or Lee or something I’ve dreamed about for a moment and then they disappear.”
“Makes sense. There’ll be some spilling over now and then.”
“It’s really unpleasant.” Daphne knows all about flashbacks. They already bother her at unexpected times. But now the dreams have joined them too.
“Look at it this way: That three-pound chunk of meat between your ears works.”
Daphne laughs ruefully.
“The body is designed to soak up stimuli from the outside, and from within, and relay them to the brain,” Rotem continues. “You have receptors precisely for that purpose – eyes, nose, tongue, ears, skin. But when it comes to internal stimuli, it’s the opposite. There are so many internal systems to monitor that if we were to pick up on everything happening inside our bodies, the inner noise would drive us crazy.”
The beep of an incoming call sounds on Daphne’s end of the line, but she ignores it.
“Inside us are four sensations only – pleasant, unpleasant, stimulating and relaxing. These four sensations are coursing through our bodies all day, from the body to the brain, which convert them into emotions based on our past experiences. Fear, anger, disgust, love, happiness, everything. It’s a little different in a dream, due to the fact that the brain’s center of reason is shut down during the REM phase. Those emotions are supposed to be blocked, but now you’re aware of them. Bottom line, let me know when your friend starts trying to persuade you to stay.”
The silence on the line is broken by the sound of another call-waiting beep. “Okay, thanks, Rotem. I need to hang up. It’s Nathan.”
“Bye.”
Daphne reaches for her phone, which is resting on a car phone mount on the dashboard. She hangs up on Rotem and picks up the waiting call.
“Hi.”
“Are you on your way?”
“Yes. Just past Motza now.”
“He’s made contact.”
“The Babysitter?”
“Yes. Four letters. One to each family. They’re here in the lab now and I’m about to begin examining them. You’re welcome to join me. That is, of course, if you don’t have more important things to do.”
Daphne knows he hates call-waiting. She puts her foot down and starts zigzagging between the three-lane trail of cars on the climb to Jerusalem, sparking angry honks and hostile stares from the drivers around her.
“What does he say?”
“Sick sadist. I’ve only read one of them so far. He’s tormenting them. He’s enjoying causing them pain.”
Pain. And intellect. The pain is mental. Just like Rotem said.
“What does the letter say?”
“I can’t read it out to you over the phone. You’ll see when you get here.”
She veers from the left lane into the right, recklessly cutting in front of a truck in the center lane and drawing another volley of honking.
“Wait for me before you move on to the others.”
52.
A little more than a quarter of the cases are fused from the upper chest to the lower chest. Some twenty percent from the upper thorax to the lower belly. Ten percent at the lower abdomen only. Ten percent in an asymmetrical fashion with the one totally dependent on the body systems of the other. And six percent can be conjoined at the back, front or side of the head but never the face or the base of the skull.
When the initial stage in the development of a new organism, the zygote, is impeded by a mitosis inhibitor and the fertilized ovum splits only partially, you don’t get two separate identical twins but conjoined twins instead.
There are rarer cases too. Two faces on opposite sides of a single, conjoined head, or one head with a single face but four ears and two bodies. In general, these don’t survive. There have been cases in which the lower half of the two bodies is fused, with the spines conjoined end to end at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle. Sometimes, they’re fused side by side with a shared pelvis. And sometimes they share only the skin and soft tissue from the neck down to the coccyx. Those are the easiest to separate; it’s only skin and soft tissue.
Such foolishness. Why separate them? Something so rare. One in a hundred thousand. One in a million.
He’s holding a series of postcard-size X-rays, and he places them one by one on the table in front of him, reciting the names.
Thoraco-omphalopagus
Omphalopagus
Cephalopagus
Xiphopagus
Omphalo-Ischiopagus
Rachipagus
He fashions the individual X-ray images into a square mosaic. From the desk drawer, he retrieves a large X-ray image and places it over the others, covering them perfectly. He’s gone through the same procedure a thousand times by now. At least. He’s perfectly familiar with each and every one of the images. Each and every bone. Each skull. Every connection point.
He reaches for a jar from the shelf above the desk and studies the fetus suspended inside. Large eyes under closed lids in an off-white body. Four small legs, a narrow spine with its vertebrae protruding through almost-translucent skin. Two hands, each with five fingers. One thumb tucked into the mouth. Frozen in time.
Before Thailand became Thailand, it was Siam. The conjoined Bunker brothers were the first to be called Siamese Twins. When one died just before the age of sixty-three, his brother knew his time was coming too. He yelled for three hours until he died. Medicine has come a long way since then, since 1874. His eyes are so close to the jar his nose touches the glass.
On the computer screen, the Four are sleeping soundly. The Guardian is asleep too, in her flannel pajamas. Her blanket moves slightly with each mint-scented breath.
They all need to have the same blood type. That information wasn’t on the blue cards at the hospitals. He’ll have to check. It’s time to move on to the next stage.
53.
It must be so frustrating to hold such a senior position yet be unable to influence anything. You sit there in your office, with all the authority you have over those who are looking for your grandson, and you can’t do a thing.
When your grandson grows up, I’ll tell him how his grandfather did nothing for him despite serving in one of the government’s most senior positions. He’ll probably be very angry. He’ll probably be so angry that it’ll grow inside him like a bush of black thorns that will prick and stab his stomach until it kills him.
Minister of the Interior!
“Your grandfather is a loser,” I’ll tell him.
I’ll tell him you didn’t even try. That you weren’t persuasive enough with the prime minister. With the police. With the official entities under your authority that are laughing in your face. You failed to convince them to make a concerted effort because you’re incapable of doing so. Because you’re a wimp.
They must have been able to invest more in the search, but they had more urgent matters to deal with. More important than your grandson. There’s a police convention in Eilat. They have young female volunteers to sexually harass. They have donuts and coffee with two spoons of sugar to drink in their air-conditioned offices.
I’m sending a copy of this letter to your daughter and her husband too. To show them the real you. To show them you haven’t lifted a finger for them.
Huh!
A finger!
Maybe one of these days I’ll send your daughter and her husband a small foot in a beautiful white box tied with a red ribbon.
That would be a laugh!
I’ll attach a little note to one of the fingers that says: “A gift from Grandad. If he had made a little effort, this wouldn’t have happened.”
I didn’t kidnap them for money or for gold. I have other plans for them.
You’ll hear from me again soon.
54.
“Sick, delusional and totally fucked up. What does he have to gain from torturing them?” The letter is lying in front of Nathan as he wipes a white cotton swab over its surface.
“Pain and intellect. The families’ mental anguish is part of what he’s looking for.” Daphne examines the first letter under a microscope.
“The families’ mental anguish?” Nathan pauses his work with the swab.
“Yes, it’s part of his plan. Suffering and pain as a precursor. A sacrificial offering to make something happen. He abducted a medical student because he needs medical know-how for whatever he’s going to do to them. He’ll force her to cooperate. The pain and suffering are prerequisites. Like he wrote in the letter with the chocolates. He’s going to make a change. Something big. The entire world will be talking about it if we don’t get to him in time.”
Nathan looks at her, frowning.
“Where did that all come from?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” Her head is bent over the eyepiece of the microscope. She reaches for the button to adjust the focus. “How did he manage to get the letter into the interior minister’s mailbox? Is there no security detail there?”
“Wearing a red shirt and carrying a mail bag. Baseball cap, sunglasses. Dropped the letter in and walked on. Footage from the security cameras offers nothing special. That’s what they told me when I asked who’d touched the letter. Just him, the minister, and the minister’s PA.”
“And did all the other letters arrive without a postage stamp? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply mail them?”
“He probably wanted to drop them off himself, so that they’d all arrive the same morning. A day after the anniversary of the abductions. He couldn’t have accomplished that if he’d mailed them.”
“That’s for sure. Half the things I order on eBay disappear in the mail.”
Nathan sits down on the chair at the station alongside Daphne and places the letter he’s been working on back in its evidence bag. “There’s nothing there aside from the fingerprints of Lior and Rinat Goldman. And the only DNA is from these stains here, which are Rinat’s tears. The same printer for your one?”
“Yes, the same steganography. It’s not the same printer that was used for the letter with the chocolates. I’m capturing an image now and will run it through the database in a moment.”
The microscope sends an enlarged image of a cluster of yellow dots. The decryption software scans the pattern for a few seconds, spits out several numbers on the screen and stops.
“That was quick.”
“A Lexmark C510 from 2004. A real antique. Serial number 55C4MC5. Page count 1,022. This particular page was printed precisely two weeks ago. At two thirty-three in the morning.” Daphne prints the results of the scan and hands them to Nathan.
“Strange that such an old machine has only printed 1,022 pages until now.” He looks at Daphne. “What’s the next step?”
