The Last Night

Nate Brody came to the house at ten past two in the morning and rang the bell four times the way a man rings a bell when he has stopped caring who he wakes.

He was sixty-four and had been at the institute for twenty-two years, and he had been the man who maintained the basement — not the experiments, never the experiments, the water lines and the seals and the bad lock on the door at the foot of the stairs. He stood in Amos's hall dripping on the rug in a windbreaker over a work shirt, and he said, "He hasn't come up in nine days. I've heard him moving in there. I fed him twice through the door last week, and the second time he wouldn't take it. And tonight there's no sound at all, and the whole panel's dark, and I have a key and I am not going down there alone."

They drove across town with the heat on because Brody was shaking and did not want to admit it.

The basement smelled the way a place smells when a person has been in it too long and stopped opening windows: chemical on top, and under that the other thing, the sweet thing, the thing Amos had smelled once before in his life, in 1994, in a house on Sullivant Avenue where he had gone to tell a woman that her husband had left everything to somebody else, and had been able, with effort, not to think about since.

The stairs came down between two walls of storage. The lights did not work. Brody went first with a flashlight, and Amos followed with his hand on the rail, and at the bottom the beam found the bench, and the rack of glassware, and the freezer with its door standing open and its racks half pulled out, and a folding chair knocked over, and a second folding chair still upright with a coat over the back of it — his own overcoat, folded the way he always folded it, on the chair he had been sitting in when it started.

And a man in the middle of the floor.

Amos had prepared himself for a body. He had not prepared himself for a body in the middle of a change. It was on its side, curled in a way that a grown man cannot curl, in a dark coat that was three sizes too big for it, and its face was no longer one face — the first still there, and a second already coming up under it, the way a bruise comes up — and it was breathing, or doing something that used the same equipment. The hand that had its fingernails on the concrete was the hand of a man of fifty-six. The wrist above it was not.

Brody said, "Mr. Voss," and stepped toward him.

"Don't," Amos said, and then, more quietly, "that's not what he's called."

They stood there for nine minutes, by Brody's watch, which he looked at twice, and then the breathing stopped. They watched it stop. It did not stop the way a machine stops; it stopped the way a conversation stops when the room empties.

What was left on the floor, when the change had finished and gone still, was neither of them, or both of them — a small man of perhaps thirty-five years with a somewhat distinguished nose, crumpled in an oversized coat, nameless, on the concrete, in a building that had his fingerprints on nothing at all. Brody came back down the stairs with a blanket from the car and put it over the small man's legs, and then knelt there and folded the too-large sleeves in against the sides, the way you fold a coat over a sleeping child, and did not ask again who it was.

Brody sat down on the bottom step and put his face in his hands, and Amos stood there in the dark and did the last thing he ever did as Adrian Voss's attorney, which was not to touch anything, not to call anybody, and to look around the room by flashlight for a piece of paper with a name on it.

He found it on the bench under the fume hood: a tablet, still powered, one document open. He read the first page of it sitting on the floor, and then sat there next to Nate Brody until the light came over the parking lot, because he had not been prepared for the fact that a man would write all of it down.