1910
The Colonel called on Opal by post. His handwriting was neat, with broad, confident strokes.
No named was signed, but no name was necessary for Opal to understand who the sender was.
I apologize for the way you were treated.
And, now, I request your services. I’ll send my driver at quarter to ten tomorrow morning. It’s a matter of some urgency. Please.
It was the please in his note that intrigued her. The hint of desperation.
Right on time, an automobile pulled up, a black Model T with a shiny, thin frame.
The driver was young, pink-faced, with a nose that looked like it’d been fashioned with clay and then flattened.
She didn’t recognize the man—a domestic, she assumed, from the way he dressed, thick work boots and a tailored work coat.
He offered her a hand to step up into the car.
They drove away from the city, up the giant hill of Sycamore Street, passing the EARTHSHINE sign as they picked up speed and made their way out of town. She drew her hood over her head. Jagr could be anywhere.
“Where are we going?” Opal shouted over the wind.
That was the problem with automobiles, so loud it was difficult to hold a conversation.
Opal preferred carriages, the rhythmic clopping of horse hooves, though the papers said it’d be only a matter of time before all horses were retired to the rural areas.
“Up the Swing Line. Indian Hill. The Colonel prefers a bucolic setting. For his work.”
She coughed, inhaling dirt. Perhaps he wished to discredit her. And yet, she remembered the tenderness in his eyes. The delicate manner in which he held his hand to his chest. The way he’d reached out and, with a peck of his slender finger, saved Opal. What must she pay for it?
The road soon gave way to a winding country lane paved in gravel. Woods on either side opened to wide swaths of fields. Though they’d been driving for only half an hour, she felt far from the city. She spotted a farm in the distance and large patches of grass still browned from the winter.
A few moments later, the driver turned down a lane marked only by a stone fence. They passed a stable and a carriage house, a maple tree just beginning to bud. Then they came to a stop in front of a stately manor.
The foyer opened into a square room with a hearth, a fire already blazing, a woman’s portrait hanging above it.
The room was lit by gas lamps, for electrical lights were a thing of the city, and he had chosen a quieter life.
The walls were made entirely of beadboard; stuffed birds hung about, their heads small, their eyes dark and dull, their short thick wings stretched as though about to take flight.
Set about the room were several contraptions, metal boxes with wires and nodes attached to circular leather bands, shaped and sized proportional to the human skull.
Colonel Bloodworth was a medical doctor whose phrenology experiments had gained him some notoriety, according to the papers.
These must be his tools, sturdy when she picked them up.
They’d feel heavy, no doubt, attached to her.
“Hello,” a man’s voice said, and she stilled herself when she heard it. “Thank you for coming.”
Please and thank you.
There stood Colonel Bloodworth in the flesh, his beard well-trimmed, his hair coiffed, his scar white and feathery in the light. She surveyed the room again, the portrait of the woman on the wall. His late wife.
“You see, I study the human body,” Colonel Bloodworth said.
He stood near the hearth; his cheeks were pink.
“But I also study the human mind—how the two are connected.” Now they were sitting.
He had brought her a cup of tea and a biscuit and offered to hang her coat on the rack in the corner.
Opal refused, worried he’d see her gravid form.
“There’s so little we know of this connection.
And yet, this modern world of ours pushes us forward, to the brink of new discoveries.
X-rays, telegraphs, radioactivity, electricity—look around at our transforming lives.
Only a decade ago we were living crudely, in the dark ages. ”
“Thank you for this little history lesson,” she said. She held her hands over her teacup, balanced on her lap. The steam dampened her fingers. She focused on that, the pleasure of it.
“I’m sorry. Pierre Curie. You know him?”
“Not personally.”
“Pierre Curie, the famed scientist. He studied all the most modern advancements,” he said, though he explained he’d died the most old-fashioned way, by stepping in front of a horse-drawn carriage.
He believed the spirit realm was the key to unlocking unknown energies that held answers to the scientific realm—the human realm.
“And I agree,” he said. “If one can tap into the mind of the dead, one can potentially unlock some fundamental aspect of the human mind that isn’t limited to the physical brain.
The mind without a body—the essence of consciousness, as it were. ”
“So you believe cadavers will tell you something,” said Opal. She was suddenly alert to her senses being filled: the air pressing against her skin, the mossy smell of the wood near the fireplace, the snapping of logs.
He sat back. “Is this too much for you to take in at once?”
“You assume me to be delicate,” Opal said.
She swallowed the last of her tea and set the cup down on the table beside her.
She felt her innards warming, her blood pulsing in places other than her heart.
This was a symptom of her pregnancy, she had to assume, this flowing of blood, this electrical sensation, this desire to touch and be touched.
At home, nude in her bed, she’d run her hands over the hill of her stomach, her breasts, between her legs where it was wet.
“Very well, then. I want to show you something,” the Colonel said. She followed him past the hearth room with the stuffed birds and portrait of his wife, past the fire with its low burning crackle. He led her to a door, recessed behind a bookshelf, hidden so well that Opal had not noticed it.
Opal knew it was his laboratory before he lit the lamps to illuminate the room.
She knew it from the coolness of it, from the astringent smell of formaldehyde that burned her eyes.
As the room was lit to a glow, she did not recognize what she was looking at, lined in large jars along the farthest wall.
The jars reminded her of the pickled vegetables she once stored in the cellar. These, however, contained something large and putty-colored with ridges like the markings of river worms.
“The human mind,” he said.
She touched the outside of one of the jars gently, like she may startle what was floating inside.
“You say you are not delicate,” he said.
She picked up the jar and was surprised by the weight of it. Then she felt the urge to vomit.
“This is the essence of human life,” the Colonel said, taking the jar from Opal and setting it back down. “It may unsettle some, but the brain houses the human mind and personality. What lives here during one’s life, if I’m correct, can survive on the astral plane.”
“The Other Side,” Opal murmured. She moved along the table and picked up another jar. The brain contained the same folds, the same deep crease down the center of it, the same weight—three pounds, according to the Colonel. “Do you know who they were in life?”
“I have record of their names, occupations, cause of death. This one, right here,” he said, picking up the smallest jar among them. “Wallace Quinn. A farmer. Influenza.”
“What about this one?” she asked, pointing to another, the largest jar. “Who is he?”
“She. Margaret Beard. Mother of five. Consumption.”
Opal lifted the jar and held it close to her face, peering into the liquid. The contents looked not too dissimilar from the pickled pig’s brains she often saw at the market, and this thought made her queasy.
He took the jar from her once again and set it gently on the table.
Clearly, he thought tenderly of its contents.
“Structurally, at least, it seems to be an unsexed organ. Dr. Harvey Cushing—an Ohio man as well—has made a career of stimulating the brains of patients with epilepsy, meningitis, or injury, to locate which parts of the brain are responsible for what. Someday we’ll know for sure.
Science is moving along at a rapid pace.
In a decade hence we’ll understand it completely. ”
But what would that change?
She imagined her own brain, which she’d never see. Would he someday point to the organ and say, This was Opal? And what was this? Who was this?
The Colonel drummed his fingers on his cabinet. “An impressive performance the other night. You convinced some of us,” he said.
“Only some?”
“Some men are suspicious of the spirit realm,” he said. “It makes them feel impotent, small, so they look for ways to overcompensate, to display strength. That’s what the bell was all about. Not about you—but about them.”
“I should say thank you.”
“They don’t understand how it works.”
She observed the shape of his face, the cut of his shoulders, broad and square. He was a man that Oren would never grow to be.
They returned to the hearth room, and Opal took a seat.
The Colonel moved behind her chair. She was aware of his hands so near to her shoulders. He struggled to find the right words. He cleared his throat. Nervousness. “There is someone I wish to reach, someone I’ve been trying to reach for the better part of a decade,” he said.
A log snapped on the hearth. “Shouldn’t you consult the committee?”
“This is a personal matter,” the Colonel said.
“This person you wish to reach, she’s a woman, is she not? A relation.”
“Yes,” he said. He cleared his throat again and moved to stand by the fire. “Technology will soon allow us to communicate with those who’ve crossed over.”