1
I gave the vintage teddy bear to Lucy when she was ten and she named him Mister Pickle. He sits on the pillow of a bed made military tight with institutional linens tucked into hospital corners.
The chronically underwhelmed little bear stares blankly at me, his black thread mouth turned down into an inverted V, and I must have imagined he’d be happy, yes grateful if I rescued him. It’s an irrational thing to think when we’re talking about a stuffed animal, especially when the person having these thoughts is a lawyer, a scientist, a physician presumed to be coolly clinical and logical.
I feel a confusion of surprised emotions at the unexpected sight of Mister Pickle in the video that just landed on my phone. A fixed camera must have been pointed down at an angle, possibly from a pinhole in the ceiling. I can make out the smooth fabric bottoms of his paws, the soft swirls of his olive green mohair, the black pupils in his amber glass eyes, the yellow Steiff tag in his ear. I remember he was twelve inches tall and therefore an easy companion for a speeding comet like Lucy, my only niece, my de facto only child.
When I found the toy bear decades ago he was toppled over on a scarred wooden bookcase filled with musty-smelling obscure coffee table tomes on gardening and southern homes in a boutique-y area of Richmond, Virginia, called Carytown. He was dressed in a dingy knitted white smock, and I stripped him. I repaired several tears with sutures worthy of a plastic surgeon and placed him in a sink of tepid water, shampooing him with antibacterial color-safe soap, then drying him with a blow dryer set on cool. I decided he was male and looked better without smocks or other silly costumes, and I teased Lucy that she was the proud owner of a bare bear. She said that figured.
If you sit too still too long my Aunt Kay will rip your clothes off and hose you down and gut you with a knife. Then she’ll sew you up and leave you naked, she added gleefully.
Inappropriate. Awful. Not funny really. But after all Lucy was ten at the time, and her childish rapid-fire voice is suddenly in my head as I step away from decomposing blood that is brownish red with watery yellow edges on the white marble floor. The stench seems to darken and dirty the air, and flies are like a legion of tiny whiny demons sent by Beelzebub. Death is greedy and ugly. It assaults our senses. It sets off every alarm in our cells, threatening us with our very lives. Be careful. Stay away. Run for the hills. Your turn could be next.
We’re programmed to find dead bodies off-putting and repulsive, to avoid them literally like the plague. But embedded in this hardwired survival instinct is a rare exemption that is necessary to keep the tribe healthy and safe. A select few of us come into this world not bothered by gruesomeness. In fact we’re drawn to it, fascinated, intrigued and it’s a good thing. Someone has to warn and protect those left behind. Someone has to take care of painful unpleasantness, to figure out the why, how and who and properly dispose of rotting remains before they further offend and spread infection.
I believe that such special caretakers are created unequally. For better or worse we’re not all the same. I’ve always known this. Give me a few strong Scotches and I’ll admit I’m really not quote normal and never have been. I’m not afraid of death. I rarely notice its artifacts beyond what they have to say to me. Odors, fluids, maggots, flies, vultures, rodents. They contribute to the truths I seek, and it’s important I recognize and respect the life that preceded the failed biology I examine and collect.
All this is to say that I’m unbothered by what most people find upsetting and disgusting. But not by anything that has to do with Lucy. I love her too much. I always have. Already I feel responsible and to blame, and maybe that’s the point as I recognize the plain vanilla dorm room in the recording that’s just ambushed me. I’m the master designer, the authority figure, the doting aunt who put her niece in that room. I put Mister Pickle there.
He looks pretty much the same as when I spirited him away from that dusty Richmond shop and cleaned him up at the beginning of my career. I realize I don’t remember the last time I saw him or where. I have no idea if Lucy lost him, gave him away or has him packed in a closet. My attention flickers as loud spasms of coughing sound several rooms away inside this beautiful house where a wealthy young woman is dead.
“Jesus! What is this? Typhoid Fucking Mary?” It’s Cambridge Police Investigator Pete Marino carping, talking, joking with his colleagues the way cops do.
The Massachusetts state trooper whose name I don’t know is getting over a “summer cold” supposedly. I’m beginning to wonder if what he really has is whooping cough.
“Listen meat puppet. You fucking give me what you got? You get me sick? How about standing over there.” More of Marino’s bedside manner.
“I’m not contagious.” Another salvo of coughing.
“Jesus! Cover your fucking mouth!”
“How am I supposed to do that with gloves on?”
“Then take them off dammit.”
“No way. It won’t be me leaving DNA in here.”
“Oh really? Coughing doesn’t spray DNA from one end of the house to the other every time you hack up your toes?”
I tune out Marino and the trooper, keeping my eyes on the display of my phone. Seconds tick by on the video and the dorm room stays empty. Nobody is there but Mister Pickle on Lucy’s military-looking uncomfortable, ungenerous bed. It’s as if the white sheets and tan blanket have been spray-painted on the narrow thin mattress with its single flat pillow, and I hate beds made as tight as a drum. I avoid them every chance I get.
My bed at home with its plush Posturepedic mattress, its high-thread-count linens and down-filled duvets is one of my most cherished luxuries. It’s where I rest finally, where I have sex finally, where I dream or better yet don’t. I refuse to feel shrink-wrapped. I won’t sleep trussed up and restrained like a mummy with the circulation cut off in my feet. It’s not that I’m unaccustomed to military quarters, government housing, lousy motels or barracks of one sort or another. I’ve spent countless hours in unwelcoming places but it’s not by choice. Lucy is a different story. While she doesn’t exactly live a simple spartan life anymore she also doesn’t care about certain creature comforts the same way I do.
Put her in a sleeping bag in the middle of the woods or a desert and she’s fine as long as she has weapons, technology and can bunker herself against the enemy, whatever that might be at any given moment. She’s relentless about controlling her environment and that’s another argument against her having a clue she was under surveillance inside her own dorm room.
She didn’t know. Absolutely not.
I decide the video was filmed sixteen, at the most nineteen years ago with high-resolution spy equipment that was ahead of its time. Megapixel multicamera input. A flexible open platform. Computer controlled. Facile software. Concealable. Remotely accessible. Definitely New Millennium research and development but not an anachronism, not faked. It’s exactly what I would expect.
My niece’s technical environment is always ahead of its time, and in the mid- to late 1990s she would have known about new developments in surveillance equipment long before other people did. But that doesn’t mean Lucy is the one who installed covert recording devices inside her own dorm room while she was an intern for the FBI, still in college and as excruciatingly private and secretive as she is today.
Words like surveillance and spy dominate my internal dialogue because I’m convinced what I’m looking at wasn’t
