Aphrodite Read online

  I have to tell him about Aphrodite.

  And then the terrible feeling that had been with Maura Greer her entire life disappeared. There were no more shadows. No more terrifying shapes. And no more fear.

  There was only a new and different kind of darkness.

  London, England

  March 2

  The lecture hall was packed.

  The turnout was more than a little surprising to Joseph Fennerman because over the past twenty-four hours a steady stream of cold, hard rain and a numbing winter dampness had re-arisen, and the combination seemed to permeate not just every English person’s clothes or even skin, but life.

  Fennerman was delighted with the event. For one thing, the size of the crowd guaranteed that his lecture fee would remain at the exceedingly high level he now commanded for an appearance. For another, he was autographing the hardcover edition of his latest book, The Morality of Numbers, already a best-seller on the other side of the Atlantic, and judging from the buzz in the room he’d sell every copy on hand. Finally, prior to taking the stage he had been approached by a rather awestruck grad student, a somewhat bony brunette wearing a man’s rose-colored collared shirt, a short black skirt, and black leggings. She was not particularly attractive but, after a remarkably easy ten-minute conversation, she not only seemed charmed by his awkward demeanor, facial tics and all, she also agreed to meet him after the lecture to continue their discourse over a late supper at his favorite London restaurant, Rule’s. Fennerman was astonished by his successful pickup, and he was so eager to meet up with her he did something that went totally against his normal behavior pattern: He rushed through his material, knowingly omitting several salient and key points, trying to get to the end of his speech as quickly as possible. When the moderator opened up the floor for questions, forty-eight-year-old Dr. Fennerman, for the very first time in his distinguished career, was wishing that his audience would stop making him the center of their world and let him get off the damn stage.

  “Of course, we are just beginning to explore the complicated questions of limits,” he heard himself saying in response to a rather smug, long-winded comment from someone wearing a corduroy jacket and a beard sitting in the third row. “By limits, I am referring to our own population, to the extension of human life into prolonged senescence, as well as limits to our own consumption and exploitation, of both resources and our very nature. The question of limits is probably our most difficult one to grapple with because biologically we are designed to increase at will and acquire whatever is available. The matter is complicated further because any kind of thorough historical perspective shows that people will exploit anything they can as completely as their technology and force permit.”

  Another question. This one from a singularly unattractive woman near the back. He barely let her finish her sentence before he roared into his answer.

  “You must understand the difference between what is visible—and thus easy to ascertain and comprehend—and what is underneath the surface, which is, in almost all cases, far more defining than something that can be touched and seen. When it comes to the question of human existence, understanding that difference is essential. All of us carry a unique genetic profile in our cells. That profile includes expressed genes, those things easily recognizable, such as eye and hair color, size of various features, et cetera, and that is called a phenotype. But we also have genes that are not expressed, recessive if you will, that make up an individual’s genotype. If I can use a mundane but clear example: Think of a birthday present, nicely wrapped and handed to you. The wrapped package is a phenotype. You can tell something about what is inside by the size and the weight and possibly the sound. But you can’t tell exactly what it is—you can’t define it—until you open it. The contents—in many ways, the essence—are the genotype.

  “What I hope you take away from our conversation this evening is the complexity of the ethical dangers inherent in tampering with either phenotype or genotype. Does it really matter to the moral structure of the universe if we use transgender engineering to produce perfect-looking strawberries? No, of course not. But does it matter if, because of our interference, we create something that looks beautiful but has no taste? That is no longer functional or serves the purpose for which it was originally created by nature? That’s what each of us must decide.

  “Thank you and good night.”

  Joseph Fennerman practically raced off the stage, sat at a small desk off to the side where he impatiently signed books for half an hour, then threw his coat and muffler across his shoulders and, waving away his well-wishers and admirers, rushed outside to his stretch limousine that was waiting in front of the University of London’s urban campus. He tapped on the dark, tinted window to alert the driver to his presence and jumped into the back, a good six feet away from the front seat, rubbing his hands together to brush off the cold and the rain. The driver didn’t bother to turn around.

  “I’m waiting for a young woman,” Fennerman said, smothering his nervousness with an awkward cough. “She’ll be here momentarily.” He tried but was unable to make out a fragment of the man’s face in the rearview mirror. He remembered from the initial pickup that he was handsome and young, with smooth, pale features and well-groomed blond hair. Not the sort of face that would be surprised or anxious at the thought of his having dinner with a too-skinny woman.

  “She was already here, Dr. Fennerman,” the driver said. “She said she’ll meet us a couple of blocks away, at the corner of Melton and Euston Square.”

  “Why?” Fennerman asked. The little twitch in his left eye was suddenly back and doing its work. It occurred to him that the driver had an American accent. Not a very refined one, either. Broad and harsh. He hadn’t noticed that earlier. “Why didn’t she just stay here?”

  “It’s where she parked her car. I guess she had to get something out of it. I told her I could drive her, but she didn’t want to wait.”

  Fennerman grunted and nodded, said, “Fine, fine,” and kept rubbing his hands together as the driver took him two blocks away. When the long black car pulled up to the curb at Euston Square, the back door opened. Looking up in anticipation, Fennerman was more than a little annoyed when a man slid in next to him.

  “You’ve got the wrong car,” Fennerman told him with an exasperated sigh. When the man didn’t move, he added an impatient “You’ve made a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so,” the man said. Then, turning to the driver, he said, also in a jarringly harsh American accent, “Have I made a mistake?”

  Fennerman, facing the front seat, demanded to know what was going on.

  “Just taking on another passenger,” the driver told him. “It won’t be for long.”

  “This is unacceptable,” Fennerman said. “In my hotel room I have the name of the event organizer who booked your car service and I will definitely make a complaint. Now take me back to the lecture hall.”

  “You flying to Washington tomorrow?” the man in the backseat now asked.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m a psychic.” The man held his hand over his eyes as if envisioning the future. “Three o’clock meeting at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building. Two hundred Independence Avenue. Southwest. You want the room number?”

  “Take me to the lecture hall,” Fennerman told the driver again. “Take me back immediately and let me off.”

  “Meeting your young lady?” the man next to him said.

  “Yes.” It took Fennerman only a moment to make an unpleasant and frightening connection. It was what he did for a living: make connections between thoughts. “How do you know about her?”

  “Move forward. There’s something up there I want you to see.”

  Fennerman hesitated, then slid toward the driver and jutted out his chin until it almost touched the glass shield that separated the front seat from the back. Slumped all the way forward in the seat, unmoving, her head resting limply between her knees, sat the woman he had talked to a
t the lecture hall. He also saw the large, ugly wound running from her spine around to her ribs and the pool of blood that was still accumulating under her body.

  “Oh my God,” he said, his eyes blinking furiously and uncontrollably. He looked at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror now, then turned to stare at the face of the man sitting beside him. “What’s happening?”

  “I read one of your books. The one about actions and consequences,” the man said. “You should have realized. You made that appointment; now there are consequences.”

  “What consequences?” Fennerman asked, his voice hoarse and his throat dry.

  “We’re gonna have to fuck with your genotype,” the man said and moved so quickly that Fennerman barely saw what happened. All he knew was that there was a sharp stinging at his throat and the black leather car seat was suddenly splattered with red. Fennerman felt himself choking, heard a loud and harsh gurgling noise, like a clogged drain trying to disperse its contents or a neglected fountain struggling to increase its water pressure.

  Dr. Joseph Fennerman, physiologist, scientific ethicist, and internationally esteemed observer of the complexity of human life, was dead before he could even realize that his throat had been cut. The man whose reputation was made by connecting abstract theories to form precise and practical applications did not even have time to make the connection that the unpleasant noise he was listening to, the last thing he would ever hear, was the sound of himself drowning in his own blood.

  Long Island, New York

  June 14

  Up until nine-fifteen this morning, Susanna Morgan had loved everything about her life. She adored her work, she was crazy about where she lived, and since the two things were so intertwined on a day-to-day basis, she felt safe in assuming it was the combination that made her so content.

  Some might say too content. Two of her best friends recently broke it to her that being around her was a little bit like going into diabetic shock. They told her if she didn’t cut down on her sugary disposition, they’d have to come over and slap some sense into her. This conversation came after she’d explained to them why she didn’t mind staying at the office until ten o’clock at night sometimes and why she wouldn’t think of asking for overtime. It was after she said “I’d pay them to let me work” that the whole slapping issue came up.

  She’d come to New York from Dayton, Ohio, to be a writer, and while she was toiling away at her first and sure-to-be-epic novel, she decided she’d do what she’d done in Dayton, which was work at the local paper. So she had gone to the New York Times and waited for them to be impressed by her perkiness and her extremely literate application form. After several months of waiting, she decided they had indeed been impressed but they were not going to be hiring her, so she started looking elsewhere. In a couple of months she’d been turned down by both New York tabloids, several small papers in New Jersey, and an Upper West Side giveaway. In the meantime, she went to a temp agency, and they sent her from ad agency to publishing company to, while they lasted, dot-com start-ups. At one of the ad agencies, she met a guy whom she dated for a while. In their third week of dating, he took her for a weekend to the Hamptons house he shared with six other people, and within an hour of driving and strolling around she fell in love with that part of Long Island. She and the guy broke up at the end of the summer, but she couldn’t get Long Island out of her mind. She decided it was the perfect place to write her novel, so she gave up her city sublet and rented a small two-bedroom apartment, half of an adorable Victorian house, right on Main Street in the center of the town of East End Harbor, which was a bit more blue-collar and not quite as chic as the Hamptons but was only a few minutes away. And what do you know: Her first week there she went to a yoga class, just two doors down from her new digs, and not only was the yoga instructor the woman who rented the other apartment in Susanna’s house, but one of the people in the class was the man who owned and ran the local newspaper. Two days after that she began working at the East End Journal. A dream come true.

  She started out at the low end of the totem pole and did a little bit of everything at the paper: editing, writing, rewriting, reporting, making coffee. It was a staff of only five. Four years later, she was still writing the same novel but she was no longer at the bottom of the pole: She practically was the East End Journal. She’d added a food page and now traveled all over Queens and Long Island looking for quirky ethnic-restaurant stories, interviewed all the top chefs who were gradually opening upscale eateries in the area, and from time to time even tossed in some recipes of her own because she was not a bad cook herself, thank you very much. She reviewed the local summer-stock theater, which wasn’t very good, but she did get to have a drink with Alec Baldwin to discuss the local writing talent. At the drink she happened to mention that she was working on a novel and that it would make a terrific movie if she ever actually finished the damn thing, and he told her he’d love to look at it—if she ever did finish it. Susanna also wrote about local gardens and covered the twice-yearly house tours of the town’s old homes and, as of three months ago, she was even writing the obituaries. She didn’t tell this to many people, but the obits were actually her favorite things to work on. She didn’t mind that she was writing about dead people and talking to bereaved relatives several times a week. She loved digging into the family histories and hearing about the community roots that went back years and years. There was a wonderful graveyard in East End Harbor—some of the tombs went back to the early 1700s—and she had even begun to think about doing a book based on all the history she’d uncovered from talking to so many grief-stricken people.

  Yes, everything was absolutely lovely.

  Then, two days ago, it all began to unravel. She didn’t understand how life could get so screwed up in a mere forty-eight hours.

  Wednesday afternoon she’d been in the office working on a piece about an athlete, the only local football player who’d left East End High and gone on to play in the NFL. He used to play for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1980s and once ran an interception back 102 yards for a touchdown. But after he retired from football he got into crack, was arrested for armed robbery, and spent several years in a homeless shelter. Earlier that morning he’d jumped off the roof of a building in Dallas, Texas, leaving behind a note that said A hundred and two yards my ass. Except that “two” was spelled too and “my” was spelled mi. She was trying to decide whether to mention that the player had gone through four years at a Texas college when she looked up and saw Harlan Corning, the owner of the Journal, standing over her desk. He looked like he’d been standing there for several seconds. And he looked uncomfortable, she thought. He looked as if someone had died.

  “I got a call,” he told her. His voice was softer than usual and soothing in that way people spoke when they thought they had to be gentle. “Bill Miller died.”

  Susanna didn’t swear very often, but the first thing that came out of her mouth was “Oh, damn,” and she turned her head down toward her desk because she felt her eyes welling with tears and she didn’t particularly want to cry in front of Harlan.

  She composed herself, nodded, accepting the news she’d heard, and instead of crying, said, in as clear a tone as she could muster, what she thought a good journalist should say: “I’d like to write the obit.”

  Which she did.

  Susanna did not have to do a lot of research for her obituary on Bill Miller. Over the past two years, she had gotten to know him extremely well.

  Since working nearly twenty-four hours a day clearly wasn’t enough to keep her busy, twice a week Susanna did volunteer work at the East End Retirement Home. The Home was a series of small apartments, near a bay of the Long Island Sound, around which the town was originally built. The apartments had been built as a condominium project but, in the mid-seventies, the developer had gone broke. Before the 1980s boom struck, another developer, a local this time, bought the half-finished buildings on the cheap and turned them into an assisted-living comp
lex, mostly so his grandmother would have a nice place to live out the last years of her life. Susanna, who spent her afternoons there talking to the inhabitants, reading to them, mostly just showing them that someone cared, soon got very personally involved. She got to know many of them intimately. She loved hearing their stories about the old days—it all fit in with her growing interest in the town’s history—and she never tired of their fascinating, often odd perspectives on the world. She had always liked old people. Her attitude was, I’m going to be one of them some-day—might as well find out what I’m going to be like.

  Her absolute favorite was William Miller, who had been living there for quite some time, as long as anyone could remember, and who was friendly and garrulous and had extraordinary energy. Susanna often would start out reading to Bill only to have him take the book out of her hands, explain to her about the need for dramatic inflection, and end up reading to her. She would try to entertain him with stories about her most recent date or something crazy that happened at work, but he would usually interrupt with far more compelling reminiscences about a woman he’d dated when he was a teenager or anecdotes about a lunatic boss from fifty years ago, and Susanna would find herself sitting, sipping iced tea, and listening to his yarns, their roles once again reversed. Bill Miller had been an actor, and he was a marvelous storyteller. He entertained her with Hollywood tales and stories of his days on Broadway. Since she was not a showbiz-type person, it all was new and fascinating to her. Soon she knew his credits by heart, and was a little in awe of the fact that Bill, when he was young, had actually been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was for a movie called The Queen of Sheba. Susanna had tried to rent a tape of it once—she wasn’t ready for a DVD player, she had just figured out how to work her VCR—but the kid at the local video store said they mostly kept new stuff on hand. One of these days when she went back into the city, she figured she’d get a copy. In the meantime, she’d been content to listen to Bill yak away, particularly when he spoke about Cowboy Bill, the character he’d played on TV in the early fifties. It was a series for kids, and Susanna’s mother got extremely excited when she heard that her daughter had met the real Cowboy.