Spiral

It happened so fast. One minute he was shuffling along. The next minute he was running. Fast. Then he was up and over.

Gone.

7

FOR JAKE, THE NEXT FOUR HOURS WERE A LONG, SLOW WALK underwater. The first stop was Barton Hall, home of the Cornell police department. A lieutenant named Ed Becraft had led Jake to a dingy little room with plastic chairs and a white table. He looked to be in his late forties, with a wrinkled brown suit and tired blue eyes. He had a soft, high voice, incongruous, given his bulk and his job. When he told Jake the video camera on the bridge had caught Liam jumping, Jake was stunned.

Becraft showed Jake a picture of the woman who’d been with Liam on the bridge. “You recognize her?”

Jake shook his head.

Becraft nodded, then stood. “I need a minute,” he said. He gave Jake a voluntary statement form and asked him to fill it out, then left him alone.

Jake tried to get his head around it, but the whole episode didn’t register as real. Like a string of words said over and over until they lost their meaning and became just a stretch of sound: Liam Connor is dead.

He picked up bits of conversations in the hallway. Rumors were spreading, speculation about what could have made Liam kill himself. The leading theories revolved around an incurable disease, cancer or incipient Alzheimer’s, affecting either his health or his judgment. It was all noise, Jake knew-the desperate attempt of people’s brains to adjust to a suddenly shifted reality. Whenever something big happened, there was always a great deal of Sturm und Drang. Jake was trying to see through it. To pick the signal out of the noise. To understand why one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century, a man surrounded by family and friends, all of whom adored him, chose to kill himself. And why would he do it in such a sudden, dramatic, out-of-character way, with absolutely no explanation?

When Jake was done filling out the form, he poked his head into the hallway. Becraft saw him and came back, a mug in hand. “You okay? You want coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Jake said.

“Let me just say again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Becraft settled into his chair, picked up a pen. He made a couple of notes on a pad before looking up. When he did, it was all business, the questions coming fast. “Any reason you know of why Connor would want to end his life?”

“No.”

“Was he depressed?”

“No.”

“Was he sick?”

“No.”

“Any unusual behavior?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Was he tired? Slowing down?”

“You have to be kidding. He worked twelve-hour days. Nights and weekends, he’d be there, fiddling in the gardens.”

“Gardens?”

Jake gave him a quick rundown on Liam’s fungal research, the granite-topped tables in the Physical Sciences Complex. Becraft took copious notes. The interview went on for another ten minutes, but the only thing that Becraft reacted to was the information about Liam’s labs. He’d grabbed his superior, a police chief named Stacker, and they dispatched a team to seal it off.

Then they’d asked Jake to wait.

He drifted up to the main part of Barton Hall, a cavernous space so big you could park a 747 in it. In addition to housing the Cornell police, Barton was also the home of the ROTC, as well as an indoor running track. It had been an airplane hangar in World War I, an armory during World War II. At the time, it was the largest freestanding enclosed space in the world. Now undergraduates took final exams there en masse, row upon row toiling under the watchful eyes of TAs and professors. When Jake taught Physics 1112, this is where they took their final.

Jake stared out over the hall, imagining Liam running the track, eight times around for a mile. Liam had been a dedicated runner when he was younger, a good one. He’d gotten within fifteen seconds of the world record for the mile in the early fifties. Jake ran a bit himself, but he was more of a lifter. He liked the clarity of weights. The steel went up or it didn’t. Success or failure. With running, you were never done. You could keep going forever.

Jake tried to get inside the old man’s skin. How many times had Liam stood in this hall over the years? The New York Times did a survey, asking where the greatest Grateful Dead show ever was. The answer was Barton Hall, 1977. Liam would have been what? In his fifties then?

Liam listened almost exclusively to old Irish folk tunes, sad, sonorous ballads about lost love and delayed revenge, but he and Jake had once talked about the music of the sixties and early seventies. Jake had been surprised by Liam’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene through the Byrds, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead. Jake had said it was a revolutionary time, but Liam had a different take. He said it wasn’t a revolutionary period in music at all. Rather, it was a reactionary one-a throwback to when the popular art of a society was a dialogue about the issues of the day, not simply bread and circuses.

Liam’s take on things always made you think, whether you agreed with him or not. Jake rarely emerged from their wideranging discussions with his initial perspective intact.

Jake was going to miss him like hell.

A voice behind him: “Professor Sterling? You ready?”

BECRAFT LED THE WAY AS THEY WALKED DOWN EAST AVENUE toward Liam’s laboratory in the Physical Sciences Complex. The air was crisp and cold, carrying the scent of autumn leaves. The sun was out, normally a cause for celebration in perennially cloudy upstate New York, but today it seemed garish.

To their right was the Andrew Dickson White House, named after Cornell’s first president, followed by Rockefeller Hall, built in 1906 with $274,494 from John D. Rockefeller. To their left was the Arts Quad, a large open space overseen by a statue of Ezra Cornell. It was surrounded by a mix of old and new buildings, some dating back to the university’s founding in 1865.

Below the Arts Quad and past the library was the “Libe Slope,” a steep hill that ran from the edge of the library down to the West Campus dorms. This was the site of the traditional end-of-the-year blowout party that invariably filled the Gannett Health Services center with overindulgent undergrads. Beyond Libe Slope and the dorms was the eclectic mix of buildings and houses that made up downtown Ithaca, and beyond that the wide, flat expanse of Cayuga Lake.

They turned right, toward the stone-and-steel facade of the Physical Sciences Complex, tucked in between Baker, Clark, and Rockefeller halls. Five minutes later they arrived at Liam’s lab. A uniformed officer stood guard outside. Technically, B24F was one of Jake’s labs, but in practice it was Liam’s domain. Jake had arranged for the space, saving Liam the trouble and paperwork. Liam was never an empire builder, always preferring to keep a low profile. He’d never bought into the science-as-industry model, where progress came by having a swarm of students and post-docs toiling away, picking a field clean like locusts. Even at the height of his career, the world’s leading expert on fungi was a perennial outsider, always preferring to work with just one or two students, lost in the unknown, tracking the craziest, most interesting idea he could find. His was so different from Jake’s way. Liam threw the long ball. Jake ran it right up the middle, making a few yards each carry.

Becraft said, “Professor Sterling, is there anything in here that could be dangerous? Anything potentially explosive? Any chemicals we should be aware of?”