9. Rough Drafts of Men

With eyes that gradually stab you to death

Previously—In episode 8, FBI station chief John Spillers arrives at building one of the Grass Cutting Area, and quickly makes it clear to Captain Sepulveda that he and Ramler are there only to interrogate Jesus Santiago. Sepulveda, who’s meeting Spillers for the first time, instantly feels there’s something off about him—he just can’t quite put it into words. After some awkward introductions, Spillers and Ramler leave the captain’s office to confer privately. When they’re gone, Sepulveda calls his old acquaintance Pedro Alvarez, who runs la Princesa prison in San Juan—hoping to learn something that might explain Spillers’ motives in all this. Pedro tells him about the FBI’s aggressive questioning of hospital employees on the day of the break-in, the vast network of informants throughout Puerto Rico, and the arrest of the Ortiz brothers. When Sepulveda learns of Anton Ramler’s involvement in the case, he’s unsure if this is reason enough to distrust everything Ramler told him earlier—about the secret tissue samples and the medical experiments done to his men during the summer. Another thing he can’t quite figure out—what does Spillers really want and what part does Jesus Santiago play in all of this? Just as he’s wrapping things up with Pedro on the telephone, Spillers enters the room, and suggests they go for a walk.

Part 1: Walking with Spillers

They moved down the stairway column without exchanging a word. It was a wide space. Unlike the Army buildings Sepulveda was accustomed to back in San Juan, this one was built along dimensions with a different planning mindset. Ceiling heights were high, and windows were extra large. There were concrete partition walls a foot thick. Even the chairs seemed sturdier. Building one seemed to be designed to withstand some catastrophe Sepulveda couldn’t imagine—or maybe the people who built it anticipated a decades-long planetary eating bonanza that would result in an explosion of fat-asses into the ranks of the entire human race. It seemed to the captain, gratuitously big at every turn. And yet, this particular stairwell column—with Spillers walking next to him—seemed smaller than it had with Ramler. The captain kept his eyes forward, not wanting to get entangled in a flurry of visual distractions—the pecorino hair, the facial tics, the pencil-like tongue. So he walked slightly out front, glad that the only noise that filled the empty space was the muffled sound of boots and shoes scraping against the horizontal runners of sandpaper stair treads.

When they finally exited the building, he cocked his eyes, anticipating Spillers would immediately complain about the humidity. Building one, like all the structures inside the grass cutting area, had no awning, so the sudden rise in air temperature, even after just fifteen minutes indoors, could take the breath out of you. The gringo didn’t seem to be bothered though. He adjusted his hat, grinning and squinting, and walked out into the flat opening of the courtyard, toward a semicircle of gravel and compressed dirt. He took long brisk strides, not bothering to unbutton his suit jacket. Sepulveda observed him from behind for a few seconds before following, pinching and tugging at his own shirt a few times to get some air blowing against his neck and chin. When he caught up, his eyes went left—past the helipad and perimeter fencing. He saw the sun climbing high above the tree line. He thought back to his telephone conversation with the warden; to the last words Pedro spoke into the phone before hanging up—don’t call me for a few days. The seriousness in his voice worried Sepulveda.

They had met thirteen years ago, queued up in a long line of teenage boys in the back of the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, all trying to hustle a job at noon on a blistering hot Sunday in 1937. Back then, Pedro didn’t cough into handkerchiefs. He was just Pedrito—a light skinned boy from Santurce who knew how to make rich people laugh, and the only one in that line who showed up wearing pants with sharp creases down the front. When it was his turn to sit down at a large round table with the hotel manager, he stood up in less than two minutes holding a folded up slip of paper. “Clubhouse,” he announced as he walked past the other boys, smiling. Puñeta, they said. Sepulveda stared at Pedrito as though he had seen a magic trick he hoped would be explained later to him in private. When it was Sepulveda’s turn to sit down at the table, the manager leaned back in his chair, nodding and ogling at his arms and chest. There was no slip of paper—just instructions to go to the coatroom to be sized for a porter’s uniform. By the second week, Pedrito was moved to the poolside lounge, where he shuttled martinis and moscow mules out to guests like Bunny Bancroft.

Adjacent to the lounge, running along the interior of the hotel, was a long well-lit vestibule. Its floor was white penny tile with a dark red carpet runner down the middle. Sepulveda must have walked up and down that carpet runner ten thousand times, hustling ice and dirty glasses back and forth from the lounge to the prep kitchen. On any given day, there would be three or four hotel guests—older men tucked away in the nooks of that vestibule—legs crossed, noses buried in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post or Fortune magazine, always slightly overdressed, slightly uncomfortable. Those men, who looked used up and broken down in the same way as Spillers, liked to point and snap their fingers to communicate their needs—light this cigarette, bring another spoon, fetch me the telephone. It was like sign language for the rich. Sepulveda never knew for sure what line of work they were in, but imagined big job titles consisting of four or five words strung together—doing the kind of work that would be impossible to describe without lengthy preambles.

One day, in that vestibule, there was a woman—far up and to the right—sitting alone along a section of banquette closest to the swimming pool. At a distance, she reminded Sepulveda of Bunny Bancroft—similar in terms of style and dress—not as rich probably, but somehow in some way, her equal. She wore a comically large brimmed beach hat, and lazily alternated between poking at a plate of toast and jam, and scribbling in a notebook. He thought it unusual for a woman to be in that vestibule, without a husband. But she wasn’t alone. Next to her was a portable wicker bassinet. Sepulveda, who was fast-walking four buckets of ice down the carpet runner—two in each hand—heard a few whimpers, followed by a full-throated cry that quickly reached lawn mower levels of intensity. Sepulveda advanced down the carpet runner in a series of four inch strides, and heard another sound to his left—legs of a chair moving against tile. A bald bearded man stood up and marched over to where the lady sat, a magazine rolled up and jammed in his left armpit. Some words were exchanged that Sepulveda didn’t hear. He saw the lady make eye contact with the man though. She smiled the entire time. When Sepulveda closer, he put the buckets of ice down on the floor, to fiddle with some buttons along his smock. Really, he just wanted to hear their conversation. He noticed the woman had dark skin, almost as dark as his. And her hat, now in a different position, was tilted up to reveal jet black hair with tight kinky curls.

The bearded man was standing a foot away from the woman’s table, his hands and feet fidgeting in place. “Miss,” he began, as though delivering a eulogy, “that baby is terribly noisy. I am trying my best—to ignore the noise, but, I’m sure you could find a more suitable spot out there?” Here, he lifted his eyebrows and signaled with his extended hand a spot somewhere to the left… anywhere but here—perhaps at the bottom of the ocean. He paused, giving her ample time to fully absorb his offer, then smiled tightly and explained, “I simply want to enjoy my magazine… as I always do. I’ve been coming here a very long time, and I have never seen a child in this area of the hotel.”

Something must have dawned on him because he stood up taller. “Are you a guest here?” he asked. “Perhaps I should inquire at the concierge desk.”

At this, the woman’s smile widened to the point where her upper teeth became visible. Sepulveda noticed they were unusually straight, each tooth lined up next to its neighbor like porcelain hammers of some stupendous typewriter. “Where in the world are you from?” she asked the man, as she rocked the bassinet slowly. “Where are your manners?”

She must be American, Sepulveda thought, doing his best to appear utterly engrossed in straightening the buttons of his uniform. But her accent had no trace of a regional dialect—at least not that he could hear. And the way she spoke to this man—her words; her composure; those gorgeous teeth.

The baby was no longer crying, but the bald man didn’t seem to care about that. He brought his rolled up magazine out from the tucked away spot under his arm, and held it tightly in his fist, down low by his side. “How dare you raise your voice to me.”

She hadn’t raised her voice, Sepulveda thought.

The woman crinkled up her eyebrows and spoke again, this time very clearly, but with a bit more volume. “As my mother used to say, this situation here has all the telltale signs of a YP—not an MP.”

Sepulveda winced, thinking things might get physical. But he desperately wanted to know—what is a YP? He wondered if it was some kind of gringo code.

The woman, who wasn’t worried at all, went on. “When I say YP incidentally, it’s an acronym—which stands for… your problem. Would you like to know what MP stands for?”

The bald man’s eyes went up and down as his face pinched up even more. He needed time to take a complete inventory of what was happening, to mount a coherent response. He snapped his head around and scowled at Sepulveda, who stood there next to his four buckets of ice, adjusting gold buttons on his shirt. Then he turned back around to the woman. “My family is very close with Blanton Winship.”

The woman didn’t say anything else. Just picked up a wedge of toast on her plate, and spread some apricot jam on it. Sepulveda grabbed the handles of all four ice buckets and stood up as quietly as possible.

The bald man stood there, wrenching at his magazine, as though wanting above all, to roll it down to tatters—to demonstrate to anyone who might be looking that he could obliterate photographs and words with the force of his outrage. The woman was completely unfazed by this and munched at her toast. After a few seconds, the bald man did an about face on the penny tile and barreled down the red carpet runner like a one hundred and eighty pound ham sandwich. He collided into Sepulveda after two steps, sending a few ice cubes tumbling out over the side, on to his shoes. “My God!” he said, slamming the magazine down on the floor, exhaling forcefully. His face went dark red, like a plum. “Are you blind?”

Sepulveda had never been spoken to by a hotel guest, and apologized profusely, wondering genuinely if the impact of the ice bucket had somehow injured the man’s foot. He calculated the odds at close to zero, but asked any way if he should call for a doctor. The man just gestured downward with both hands, flexing his foot and pointing the toe of his shoe up in the air. After a moment of this, he stomped away along the carpet runner, leaving the magazine right at the spot he had thrown it. Sepulveda wondered if he’d be fired. Grabbing a hold of the buckets again, he stood and turned back around, looking in the direction of the woman and the baby. But they were gone.

The memory of that woman made Sepulveda smile. He wondered if she really was a guest of the hotel, or just happened to be on her way somewhere else. Strange, he thought to himself—how memories surface for no reason at all. Maybe it was all that conversation he had with Ramler earlier in the morning, dredging up old things from the past. Not quite done pulling at that thread, he pictured Spillers walking into the Condado Vanderbilt of 1937, slinking around in his dark double breasted FBI suit until he zeroed in on that vestibule—mystery man from the future world of 1950—on a mission to evaporate into a rocking chair while reading the New York Times and avoiding ice cubes. That image, though funny to Sepulveda, was dead wrong. He knew it in his bones.

The men of the Condado Vanderbilt, the ones who enjoyed reading glossy magazines in quiet rooms and sitting not far away from the Bunny Bancrofts of the world as they got drunk at two o’clock in the afternoon, were really just portents of a more aloof, indifferent different kind of man. They were rough drafts of John Spillers, someone whose every molecule seemed to shout the word goddammit! Perfectly intolerant of and hostile to the notion of crying babies, chitchat, jokes and horsing around of any kind. And that intolerance extended to anyone who did not hate those things. Spillers didn’t just want those people to sit down and shut up, he wanted them to permanently disappear—perhaps even schemed to bring it about in both small and elaborate ways that he kept locked up behind his eyes—those pale green circles he seemed to always be gradually stabbing you to death with. Sepulveda wondered if that was the thrust of what made the warden so uneasy around him. He smiled as he thought of Pedro—the skinny teenage version of him from 1937.

Then his eyes want back to Spillers, tracing his gait, taking note of the manner in which his suit draped over him as he moved. He looked to be perpetually frozen in his late fifties, always leaning with a slight forward stoop—maybe the result of years at a desk. And there was that small bulge around his middle, the sag of his ass, his slightly sunken chest, and narrow shoulders—all evidence of a sedentary life in a chair. Sepulveda considered that maybe when Spillers was a younger man, he was athletic. He tried to assemble a picture of what that might look like, but found it impossible to sustain. There was something intrinsically unfit about him. Not that he seemed weak or lazy—miserly seemed more on the nose—as if his entire body were saving itself up for a rainy day, stubbornly refusing to spend a single calorie chasing pursuits that didn’t serve the mission requirements of whatever was behind those pale green eyes.

Just then up ahead, Spillers turned and pointed further down the road. Sign language, Sepulveda thought. He nodded and quickened his pace to catch up. “Let’s walk along the road awhile captain. You don’t see much traffic here I imagine.”

“No sir.”

Spillers fiddled with the brim of his hat, then stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and shrugged. “I feel as though you and I are connected—through this place.” He turned to face the captain so their eyes met briefly before turning around again. “Does that sound funny?”

Sepulveda lied. “No sir. I think I understand what you’re getting at sir. You created this place—I mean—you set everything up. And I help run it. So in that way—”

“Yes, exactly.” he said, smiling.

They had slowed down a bit, and were ambling down the right side of a flat two lane asphalt road. It was beginning to pitch slightly downhill when Sepulveda pointed left toward a large black tarmac. “You see that black square sir?”

Spillers followed the captain’s finger. “The helipad?”

The captain had never heard this word before, but nodded quickly. “Yes.” He explained that this was one of the spots where the new helicopters practiced their landings. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Sepulveda said. “They have propellers, but they’re not like airplanes. We call them Chickasaws. And they can hold ten men. The cabins are completely enclosed.”

“Completely?” Spillers asked, sounding impressed.

“Oh yes sir. It’s necessary.” He explained that the cabin enclosure was a major improvement from previous designs—all the more important when a pilot approached the top speed of 100 mph.

Spillers laughed when the captain said this. “A hundred miles an hour? Is that right?”

Sepulveda nodded and made his eyes go big like a pair of jawbreakers. “I’ve seen the specs.” This was a lie. Sepulveda had never seen specs or blueprints of any kind. Spillers, who was still walking out front by a foot or two, didn’t seem to care though. A month earlier, Sepulveda overheard a table of officers talking loudly at the O club, bragging about how the Air Force had just leapfrogged the Army and Navy. He recognized one of the men speaking as the quartermaster who handed him the keys to building one, back in August. He couldn’t make it all out, but the context of the conversation was clear—a big defense contract with the Sikorski aviation company for some new aircraft. By the time the second pitcher arrived at the table, the quartermaster spoke as though he were briefing General MacArthur in the lead up to the surrender of Japan.

“We got our guys into YH-19 cockpits back in November. Army and Navy were left holdin’ their dicks doin’ all kindsa’… I don’t even know what they call what they do. Stubby pencil work?” He laughed and poured himself another beer. “Don’t get me wrong fellas, we’re all on the same team here. But the helicopter is the future of air mobility. And shit, last time I checked, we’re the goddamn Air Force.”

This was the kind of breathless puffery and armchair quarterbacking that dominated conversations at bars on and around Ramey Air Force base during the summer of 1950. And now, Sepulveda was parakeeting it to Spillers.

The captain reached up to tug at his shirt again, blowing down into it like playing an invisible flute. Spillers just walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets, seemingly pleased, muttering halfhearted acknowledgements now and then.

Sepulveda had just queued up a few more helicopter facts, when he looked up to see Spillers had turned back around so that he was facing him. Something was off. The skin along the edges of his face seemed to wobble and move—the light bent in a strange unnatural way.

“Is everything OK captain?”

Sepulveda blinked once or twice. It was like looking through a blurry membrane. “Yes sir,” he said, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his right hand. He looked out toward the tree line, and back at Spillers, who now pointed at something off in the distance. “Would you mind if we walked toward that tree over there?”

Part 2: Area J

Vandyck, still up at the lectern in front of the large aperture, peered down and out, into the first row of silhouetted attendees—at the men representing each of the seven compartmented research units of Area J. The low lighting of the conference room occasionally bounced off of flecks of silver in her tunic as she shuffled her feet up on the dais. Drumming at her notes with her thumbs a few times, she stared out at the rows of chairs, trying to gauge from the noise level how many women were seated. Not enough, she thought. When things quieted down, she spoke again.

“We don’t understand the mechanism, but apparently, Spillers is able to induce energetic changes in humans… through some kind of hand or voice manipulation. As we saw in the aperture a little while ago, he’s managed to figure out how to use this knowledge to revivify people he’s killed—re-assembling and moulding them like—”

A male voice shot out from a place high up in the audience. “Clay.”

Vandyck’s eyes went up and to the right, toward the source of the interruption. “Yes, clay I suppose is not inaccurate—which I guess would make this man Spillers a potter of sorts. Or a ceramicist. Or maybe even a landscaper.”

There was the sound of scattered laughter. Vandyck flashed a perfunctory smile in the direction of the interruption and waited for the sound of squeaking wood to die down before resuming. “OK then, in simple terms, Spillers can bring humans back to life. Like he did with Anton Ramler. As I mentioned earlier, there are no documented cases regarding this kind of capability in humans. It’s completely new. When Spillers does it to people, they’re not the same as before.”

She brought her hand up to her chest and pressed the small stone in her necklace between her thumb and forefinger. Immediately, the aperture began to thrum. In response, the ambient lighting of the conference room lowered to almost nothing. The enormous black rectangle up on the wall lit up again—slowly at first, but within half a minute, there were swirling dots across the entire expanse.

“I said earlier that the Taino man Santiago is… a sort of countermeasure to Spillers. Regardless of whether or not you’re ready to accept that, I’d like to show you why I believe it to be true. Please watch the aperture.”

Vandyck turns again to face the aperture now, standing in neutral position, left hand down, right hand up by her neck. The screen, still mostly black, begins to reveal clusters of white dots that begin to jitter and swirl. She focuses her attention on a particular patch of those dots, modulating the pressure her fingers apply to the stone dangling around her neck—turning it over once in a while, like a drummer moving his lips while building up to syncopation. Aside from the occasional squeak of a chair behind her, the conference room is a coffin. She releases a breath, and ever so slightly tightens up the girdle of muscles holding up her rib cage. Ridge lines of taut tendons rise up at the spot where her right bicep attaches to her lower arm.

She knows that if what they’re about to see doesn’t convince them, nothing will. Details begin to emerge—a labyrinth of stone. The aperture viewport tilts and zooms. It is like an eye with wings that can pass through walls, oceans, time. There are two prison guards walking down a corridor, smoking cigarettes. Along this corridor, a row of doorways, each with iron bars. Someone in the audience mutters the word calabozo. The floating eye hovers closer to a particular set of iron bars. The aperture viewport goes black for a moment, but once on the other side—inside the calabozo, smaller shapes and lines come into relief—a bucket, mortar joints, a maze of cracks intersecting with streaks of mold. And silhouetted on the concrete floor is an old man they recognize as Santiago. He’s sitting, legs folded, hands tucked into the nook down by his groin. His eyes are shut and his chest is barely moving. The floating eye of the aperture hovers to within three feet of him before resting at eye level. Vandyck shoots a nervous glance over to Esteberger before snapping back to the screen.

Santiago opens his eyes and smiles. His voice is soft and reassuring. He looks directly into the eye of the aperture. “Vandyck, I know you’re there,” he says.

The room erupts. People are shaking their heads, pounding their hands against armrests, stomping their feet. Vandyck doesn’t bother to look away from the aperture—just pauses it, then shushes the audience with her right hand, which goes up into the air, and pantomimes pressing down against an invisible air mattress. When things die down, she resumes playback.

“Right now, this is a one way mirror. So I’ll do the talking.”