Chapter I. Ariadne’s Thread #2
Ms. Terebê opened the minibar and took a blood bag from it.
She had several stocked inside, her own personal blood bank inside the comfort of her house, along with bone broth and several plastic boxes containing pureed meat.
According to Terebê, everything was provided by friends who worked at local hospitals and morgues, but Ariadne never tried to check the veracity of this claim, and never would.
“I have something for you, too.” The elderly woman took another plastic bag from the minibar, but instead of blood, it was a packet of human food. “Let’s eat.”
Ariadne recognized the bear-shaped chocolate graham crackers from her childhood, but the memory was foggy; it reminded her of something happy, something like being praised after a tough day, but she couldn’t recall why or when.
Close your eyes and open your mouth, someone had said, and she had stuck her tongue out in response, feeling the graham cracker melt against it.
“I didn’t know they still made these,” commented Ariadne, and her eyes fell on the expiration date: September 1996. The red packet remained untouched in her lap, and she almost gave up on asking any other questions.
“It’s been a while,” Terebê said after some moments of silence, her eyes barely visible under the creases of aged brown skin. The top of her head had only a few strands of fine white hair, and her mouth had withered to a thin pout. “Since you last said his name.”
Only outside of her head. Inside, Erik’s name always lingered, a dictionary entry with many synonyms: teacher, savior, protector, friend, object of adoration, traitor.
Ariadne straightened the packet, still with the faint memory of the graham crackers’ taste, the kind of taste that, once, Erik would have fought to replace—I can’t stand seeing you in pain, he would have said.
“I had no reason to talk about him before.”
The old woman muted the television. On the screen, an adviser answered questions in front of the Civil House, his right hand held close to his chest, all fingers gone except the thumb.
Every other secretary seemed to be missing a limb, nowadays.
Ariadne clenched her jaw at the sight, refusing to look at it.
She couldn’t do it, not with a gul around.
“Erik was only friends with my kind,” said Terebê while Ariadne emptied the blood bag into a porcelain cup for her. She made an appreciative sound, nodding emphatically. “Yes, yes, good.”
“Anyone you might recall? A foreigner, perhaps?”
Terebê sipped from the white cup, leaving a dark red mustache over her toothless mouth. Like many guls her age, she had two pairs of molar fangs left, but the incisors were all gone. Ariadne gently wiped her lips with a napkin, and the little gul continued to drink.
“I remember a woman. Tall, short hair, loud. Spaniard or French. Something of the sort.”
“What about a man?” insisted Ariadne.
“Then it’s the freak with the tattoos.” Ms. Terebê drank all the blood eagerly and left the empty cup on the floor next to their feet. “Why do you ask?”
“He visited the clinic.”
“Didn’t he and Erik fight? It’s been months since the last time I saw him.” Terebê touched the popping veins of her own arm. “I haven’t seen him since you were little, I’d say. Before Erik even brought you here.”
“Years,” corrected Ariadne. “Many, many years.”
Ms. Terebê caressed the back of Ariadne’s hand with affection.
“Years,” she repeated with a smile. “I forget how quickly you people grow.”
The old woman said that Boniface might remember him as well, and that was her last word on the subject. After the telenovela Terebê watched every night at nine, she would no longer hold any kind of conversation, and the next day she had forgotten all questions about Quaint.
On Sunday, Ariadne left in the early morning, when the street was deserted.
A few stray cats ate the remains of an Eshu offering, tearing apart the red and black paper, and one of the candles rolled down the pavement.
She knocked on the front window of the coffee shop, and the door opened on its own.
There were cracked glasses on the floor, and the tables had been flipped upside down. Ariadne knelt down to right one of the fallen chairs and noticed one of them had gouge marks, as if they had been chewed by a large animal.
“Mr. Boni? What happened here?”
If he were human, Boniface would have been around sixty, with his receding hairline, his thick mustache, and the carved lines in the olive canvas of his face, but he looked like a young adult when close to Ms. Terebê. He was on all fours, washing up spilled soda, and gestured irritably as he spoke:
“Oh, those, those—those fascistas, you know who I mean! The boys patrolling the streets at night … My blood’s still boiling because of them.”
Not only his, it seemed, as there were reddish-brown stains on some of the discarded rags.
“The death squads?”
“They think they own everything!” Boniface got up and threw a broken bottle into a trash bag.
His Bolognese accent was more apparent, and there was a gash closing slowly on one of his hands.
“They came here last night, talked to me like we are on the same side—I’ve left my home to avoid their kind, Christ—and made a mess out of my place, as you can see.
” Ariadne raised her eyebrows, and Boniface slapped his own stomach with a grin. “They’re here now.”
“I’m trying to treat your dental damage, yet you refuse to follow my liquid diet.” Ariadne sighed. “But that’s not why I’m here. Mr. Boni, do you recall any of Erik’s friends?”
Boniface stopped sweeping the trash. “Erik’s friends?”
“More specifically, a gul with tattoos?”
“Tattoos and glasses. A good-looking fella. Yes, I talked to him once. Had a loud argument with Erik in the clinic, you could hear them for miles.” Boniface brushed his mustache with a finger. “Came here later and called a taxi to the airport. And that was it.”
Further investigation proved to be even less fruitful, and Ariadne gave up on finding anything about Quaint; if it was important, he would come again.
She treated a woman from Chile the following month, a middle-aged gul who was finally expecting after several miscarriages.
A geriatric pregnancy, considering her age, but the future mother swore that this time she was feeling well.
It’s always been hard for us to have children, she said while Ariadne performed an ultrasound. But in the last two hundred years, the birth rates …
When the woman left, an unknown number, code +86, tried to contact the clinic incessantly.
At first, Ariadne thought of ignoring it; most of her patients appeared without warning, and the few calls she received were scams from prisons in S?o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro or relentless harassment from telemarketing agencies.
The ringing continued from the first hours in the morning to late in the afternoon, and when she finally decided to take the call, she heard the same words as before:
“Hello, gul doctor.”
Ariadne held her breath. “It’s been a while, Quaint.”
“Yes, I realized only now that I should have called a couple days after our meeting, not two months. If you’ll forgive my insolence…” His voice was muffled by car horns on the other side of the line. “Can I invite myself to your home again today? It’s about Erik.”
As much as she wanted the subject to stay buried and forgotten, she felt compelled to accept.
“I’m free for the rest of the day.”
Ariadne went straight to the bedroom to find another shirt.
She had been wearing sweatpants—gray, loose, and as insipid as they could get—and a long-sleeved black shirt to hide the synthetic skin of her arms; with the pregnant patient, she hadn’t cared, but knowing that Quaint was coming made her find an additional layer of clothes that made the volume of her breasts look a little smaller, as if that could protect her in any way.
It’s about Erik, she thought, slapping her own cheeks to take the thought out of her head.
Maybe something bad had happened. Maybe he really was dead.
The mirror stared back at her: her thick lips, the dark circles around her narrow black eyes, her shaved head.
I need to know; after this, I won’t think of him again.
Quaint arrived at 4:20, wearing a dark green three-piece that made her feel underdressed inside her own house. Ariadne made a gesture for him to follow her to the living room, and they sat on the armchairs facing each other.
“I’ve been thinking about your tattoos,” she started before he could tackle the unwanted subject. “If you insist on continuing to hurt yourself, we should try to add heavier metals to the ink. Mercury, lead, antimony, maybe arsenic.”
Quaint crossed his legs, resting one hand on his knee. This one had a blooming peony tattooed on the back, its spread petals covering up to his wrist. There were inked dates scattered on his long fingers, but the memento mori rings made them unintelligible.
“Sure, let’s do it,” answered Quaint. The white Angora she had found roaming the street the year before rubbed against his legs, meowing, and Quaint bent down to scratch her ears. “What’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have one yet.”
“Are you feeling well? You look upset.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Let me guess,” continued Quaint, and the cat jumped onto his lap like she’d known him for years. “Erik never mentioned me, right?”
“He didn’t,” Ariadne admitted.
“How typical. He didn’t tell me about you either. Which is too bad, as you inherited his clinic and I have the key to his storage. If anything happened…”
“Storage?” The word made her look up. Ariadne had been staring at his rings for the past minute: a skull and crossbones with rubies, another made of gold with braided hair inside a crystal enclosure, a thin ring painted with black enamel.
Quaint took a key from his breast pocket, twirling it around his index finger.