Dr. Adler's Statement

The envelope in the safe had said, and to no other hands, on my oath, and Marsh, one hour after a man died in his grip with a bitter smell on the air, sat in Adler's attorney's office at six in the morning with the attorney's coffee untouched and the eleven pages in front of him, and the statement began:

I, Miriam Adler, being of sound mind and failing nerve, set down the only account of Dr. Julian Voss that will ever be given by a second party, and I set it down because I have two weeks to live by every clock in my chest and by a cardiologist's printout I have chosen not to act on, and because a story that arrives without a witness is a rumor, and Julian does not deserve a rumor.

I knew Julian Voss for thirty years. I knew him as a graduate student with a hole in one shoe, explaining osmosis to a janitor who had not asked; I knew him at the height of the funding, with his name on a building; and I knew him the day the kindness stopped, which was the day I saw the first animal data from the compound the institute's internal papers called Batch 9. I called his program theology dressed in a lab coat. I said it to his face. What I did not say to the reporter, because it was not mine to say, is why I said it to his face: because the data were real. I would have testified, before the events I am about to describe, that the data were forged. They were not forged. The data said that a mammal could be folded, and Julian had found the crease.

On the Wednesday of the telephone call, at a quarter before nine, he asked me for the contents of a drawer, and I will set down the two sentences of that call that the record does not hold, because they are the only ones I cannot get out of the room. I said: Who is this? And the voice said: You know who this is, Miriam. Come to the door, and do not turn on the stair light. And later, in my sitting room, as he lifted the glass, he said: Hold the arms of the chair. I have already written down what I found and what came to my door and what I saw happen in my own sitting room, and I will not repeat the transformation here. I want to write down the conversation that followed it, on the drive, and at the lane, because that conversation is the science, and the science is all that is left.

He said: the compound is a salt, an electrolyte analog, trivially soluble, nothing. Ten years to synthesize, a hundred years to explain. It acts on the fold. Every man is a crease, Miriam, two faces pressed together all his life, the one that pays the mortgage and the one that watches. Civilization is the pressing. The salt unpresses it. For one hour the man you see walking is the watcher only, the pure second ledger, no mortgage, no name, no audit. He said it with the bench voice, the voice from the animal data, and I could not fault a syllable of the method, and that was the worst of it, that none of it was bad science. He had done everything right except the one thing you cannot do right, which is to open the door to find out what is standing behind it.

I said: the murder. The senator. And he said, in the small man's voice, before the drive was over, and the two voices in one skull asking each other questions will be the thing I hear at the end: I was asleep. I do not remember it. The account in the black card is not my account, Miriam, it is his, it was always his, I funded it as a leash and it became his allowance. He has his own history now. I wake in the morning and the news is his diary. I built a second man to carry the second ledger, and the second man has learned to keep the books at night.

I said: then stop. Destroy the salt, close the program, stand in front of a camera and confess, and let the two ledgers be audited while you are still alive to answer. And he laughed, and it was the bench laugh, and he said, I have been stopped for six weeks, Miriam. The salt has stopped working. The lot number on that pouch you carried is the last of Batch 9 in the world, because Batch 9 was never reproducible. We made it twice. The second batch was purer by every assay, cleaner by every measure, and it does nothing. Nothing. I have spent four months and the purity is a wall. And then I had the precursor retested, the enzyme stock from the old supplier, the lot we deprecated, and I found it, and God help me, Miriam, I laughed alone in this laboratory for an hour. The impurity. A trace chiral contaminant in the enzyme, half a part per million, a manufacturing error the supplier corrected years before I ever understood what I was holding. The impurity was the active agent. The impurity was the hinge. I have been trying to cure my shadow with the cure for the impurity, and the cleaner the salt, the deader the door.

I asked him what he would do, and he said, and I am setting down the words exactly, because they are the last scientific sentence of Julian Voss: I will take the last of the true salt and write everything down, and when it is gone I will write with the other hand, and when the other hand has written the last page, the question of which of us the coroner files under which name will no longer be mine to answer, and I find, Miriam, at the end of the longest experiment of my life, that I cannot bring myself to care which of us wins, because I have watched us both, and the books do not balance in either column.

I gave him the pouch at the lane. I watched the freight door close behind the man I had known for thirty years, and I drove home, and I wrote these pages, and I sealed them, and if you are reading them then the last of Batch 9 is gone and the statement you hold from the other source will say the rest. Do not pity him and do not worship him, he asked me for neither, he asked me once, at the door, in the small voice, for the one thing I had refused him for thirty years, which was my respect for the data, and I gave it, and it was the hardest check I ever signed, and I have countersigned it here.

M.A.

Marsh laid the eleven pages down. Adler's attorney said, "She recorded the custody of that statement with a notary on the last Friday of her life, and she left it to you, Mr. Marsh, with no instructions beyond the flap. You are the executor. What do you intend to do?"

And Marsh, who had spent the night with the smell of bitter almonds in the back of his throat, said the truest thing he had said in twenty years of keeping other men's secrets.

"I intend to read the rest," he said. "And then I intend to do the thing I am paid for, which is to carry out the instrument, and for the first time in my career the instrument is a dead man's own account of the crime, in the dead man's hand, and my client is both the crime and the instrument, and I am going to sit here and read every word of it before I decide which of us needs the lawyer more."