“C’est quoi, ça?”
The inspector didn’t bother with a greeting. It was Monday morning, and Nathan had arrived for Julie’s interview. He had been escorted directly to the inspector’s office, as discussed, but as soon as he entered, the inspector pulled open his desk drawer, withdrew a sheet of green paper with childlike, crayon handwriting on it, and laid it in front of Nathan. He didn’t even bother speaking in English, knowing Nathan would perfectly understand what he wanted to know: What the hell was this?
Nathan bent over the colored piece of paper, as if he’d never seen it before, and shrugged his shoulders, “I don’t speak French.”
“No. You don’t, do you?” The man was capable of sounding exactly like the exaggerated, pompous francophone you would see in films, with his ‘you’re an idiot and even you know it’ tone.
“You went home on Friday and put up a bunch of posters.” He looked down at the paper on his desk, purple crayon showing up brown against the green background.
“Looks a bit like an announcement for an Easter egg hunt,” Nathan offered.
The inspector glared at him, then read the translated slowly, “I’ve lost my monster. Have you seen him?”
“Aaaw, sounds like some little kid is looking for his stuffed animal,” Nathan offered, smirking.
“Does it?” the inspector spat.
“Kids get quite attached to their comfort objects. I took my teddy bear to college with me—”
“I’m not speaking of your teddy bear! These are glued all over Plainpalais!”
Nathan shrugged again and pointed at the paper, “Did you try writing the email address? It must be for the parents. Someone went to a lot of trouble to put up all these posters.”
“We’re not looking for a child’s stuffed teddy!”
“Monster.”
“Are you meddling in our case?” The inspector’s face twisted in a snarl. “If I had any choice, I’d cancel your contract, tout suite. But I have a murdered little boy, a principal witness in custody, who also happens to be the key suspect, she speaks no French or English, and no other interpreter available. You do know you’re just the interpreter, n’est-ce pas? No one hired you to be a private-eye. I could have you removed from the country for this! –you haven’t forgotten the NDA’s, have you?”
“I would not dream of interfering,” Nathan said as truthfully as he could. He truly had no intention of interfering with any aspect of the work the inspector and his team might be doing. But the man had made it clear that they would waste zero man hours hunting down what they considered to be a figment of a desperate girl’s imagination.
Nathan knew the inspector was studying his face, and he hoped truthfulness was on full display. Nathan was telling the truth. The inspector hadn’t asked if they were his posters.
The inspector, either satisfied with Nathan’s countenance or unwilling to waste more time on deniability, turned and removed his blazer from the back of his chair, and draping it across his arm.
“We will speak with Ms. Jiang,” he said with finality, opening the office door and leaving without waiting for the American.
Nathan grabbed the door before it closed to follow.
“This better not be a mistake,” the inspector said when Nathan caught up to him. “Everyone said it was a mistake, signing on an American of whom we know nothing about. I said we needed you, needed clear access to the sole witness. But if you screw this up for me, endanger my retirement, Mon Dieu, I’ll ensure you never enter the Schengen Zone again!”
“Understood,” Nathan replied, with his most contrite and I’ll-play-ball voice.
***
Inspector Villeneuve opened the door of the interview room and stepped inside. Nathan followed and studied the young girl who sat on the far side of the table, head slightly bowed but still, like a stone angel over a grave. Only when they had both entered and stood across from her did she looked up expectantly, with the childish innocence of a little girl, wrongly scolded by her mother for an act she didn’t commit.
Or perhaps she was a great character actress. Nathan couldn’t trust himself to know.
He was struck by how pretty she was, even after a weekend at the precinct. Her eyes weren’t as puffy as they had been when he last saw her. He was struck by their disproportionate dominance of her face, like an anime cartoon character. Her skin was pale and clear, and her black hair had the sleek gloss of an otter’s wet fur, shining in the dim light. She was stunning, not just for her petite cuteness, but for the kindness she exuded. That she could have strangled a little boy was completely unfathomable to Nathan.
Her face revealed relief that Nathan had accompanied the inspector.
“Ni hao,” he said as he and the inspector sat in the chairs across the table from her.
“Ni hao,” she replied, and then began chattering, surprising Nathan, after he had witnessed only meekness and grief in her demeanor before. “My French is so poor,” she was saying in Chinese. “It has made the last few days so difficult! My English is not very good, either. What a relief to speak with someone who knows Chinese! Have you been to China? Your accent is perfect. But I think perhaps you are from the South? Well, not the South, obviously you’re a Long Nose, but you understand. Did you study in the South? I’m from Beijing. A real Northerner. Not the child of an immigrant from the countryside who thinks that they should get Beijing residency hukou cards, just because they were born there. But real Beijing. My mother can trace her lineage back to the courts of the Qing Emperor. Really! They was probably just courtyard sweepers, but she thinks it was definitely a concubine.” The girl giggled, then caught herself, remembering in an instant why they were there.
Nathan smiled at the looseness of her tongue. After a weekend of silence, she evidently needed to make up for all the things she hadn’t been able to say. He wondered how she’d gotten by in Madame Rochat’s household, being so separated by language.
“Madame Rochat said you were from the countryside?” Nathan asked.
“The agency said that. Some families like the girls to be from the countryside because it sounds more ‘authentic’. So they often put ‘Hubei province’ on the forms.” Nathan knew Hubei was the province surrounding the city of Beijing.
The inspector drummed his fingers on the desk. Nathan suddenly realized that they had not formally begun any conversation, and also that he was unsure how much he needed to translate. “Ms. Jiang was clarifying that she is actually from Beijing, not Hubei province, as the agency suggested” Nathan said.
“Ah, oui?” the inspector said with interest, jotting a note in his small notebook.
Everything in the room was being recorded, but Nathan knew he needed to share the nanny’s information as accurately as possible. If the inspector felt she had falsely represented her origins, it would be one more brick of trust, removed from her image as a truthful witness.
“Let us start the interview,” the detective said. “You are Jiang Ying Yue, correct? And you use the Western name Julie Jiang?” Ms. Jiang nodded, now looking suddenly self-conscious of her babble to Nathan. The inspector continued, “Going back to Thursday night—”
The relief of having a language companion drained fully from Julie’s face as Nathan translated the reminder of why she sat in this interview room.
“I didn’t hurt little William,” she insisted immediately. “I loved him. Madame Rochat was a good employer, I loved her too. Why would I kill her son, the reason I was here in Switzerland?” The defense arguments rolled out of her, circumstantial in nature, but persuasive in their simplicity. “When may I go home?” she asked abruptly, her earnestness increasing as she spoke. “I need to see my mother.”
It pained Nathan to hear her speak with the openness of the innocent, not even thinking to ask for legal representation, or that her own words could be twisted against her. But Nathan urged himself to remain guarded. Assumption of innocence may be the letter of the law, but belief in guilt governed people’s treatment of one another. She was too naive to realize there were plenty of people who would wish for her conviction, simply to close a high-profile case that might otherwise be left untidily open.
“Who else was in the square the night William was strangled?” the inspector asked.
“I don’t know when you’ll be able to go home,“ Nathan replied kindly, “but you need to tell us who was in the square when William was killed.“
Julie’s face darkened.
“I didn‘t do it!“ she insisted, not answering the question. Tears pushed up on the bottom edges of her large eyes.
“Then we need proof,” the inspector responded.
She slumped down in her chair, an unnatural look for the girl.
She took a deep breath, “It was getting dark,” she said quietly. “And cold. William wanted to play and run. I couldn’t keep up with him, and he wouldn’t listen. He runs ahead. He doesn’t want to eat.” The Chinese language can make verb tense ambiguous, but Nathan wondered if she had switched to present tense as she relived the moment. “I think, if he runs around, maybe he gets tired and is ready to eat. So I have my hands over my eyes and my head in my lap, counting.” She stopped to allow Nathan to repeat her words in English, but didn’t immediately continue when he was done. It was a detail she’d not given before, and he noted hte inspector making another note on his pad. In the silence Nathan saw Planpalais, heard her soft voice counting off, ‘yi, er, san, si—’. He felt the wind getting into his coat, the cold coming through his thin leather soles—shoes meant for a party, not scuffling around on frozen gravel. ‘Ou, liou, zhi, ba—’. A tram comes and goes. There’s the announcement of the doors closing, the whooshing of the electric motor as it pulled away, the warmly lit carriages moving off, leaving the square darker than before.
He returned to the interview room when Julie spoke again. “I am cold. When I finish counting, I look up. I don’t see William. I am looking for a single boy. But then I see a large figure, bent over, as if struggling with a belt buckle—” The girl’s voice faltered again. Her mental condition was far more stable than last time, but Nathan sensed it was a fragile calm. He translated for the inspector. “Yāoguài,” Julie said.
She had been looking at Nathan throughout the interview, but now dropped her eyes and wouldn’t look up. “It has him,” she said, speaking to the tabletop. “I can see William’s small figure struggling in the beast’s grasp. It is so big. William can’t call out. He is caught by the throat—” she paused for Nathan to translate. “There is no sound. Nothing. Not the traffic, not anyone going by, not William.” Just a shape in the dusk, Nathan thought. “I know it is William. But I am frozen. I am afraid of what to do. I call the police? I try and rescue him? The figure was huge. I was afraid of it as well. I’m just girl”
“You didn’t call anyone?” the inspector clarified after Nathan translated.
“Not at the moment. I didn’t have time. I looked around to shout for help, but the square is empty. It is cold. No one is out. Finally, I started screaming and running toward the figure, but by the time I reach William, the monster runs off. It left William—it let him crumple to the ground.” A wet tear slithered down her cheek. “I thought he was unconscious.”
Julie had ended her story.
“Why do you say it was a monster?” the inspector asked.
Ms. Jiang looked at him like she hadn’t understood the translation.
“It was Yāoguài,” she repeated, as if the beast she’d seen would be self-evident to anyone. The inspector asked her to describe it, but she looked confused and only shook her head, unable to use words any further.
Inspector Villeneuve shifted in his seat, and pulled something from his blazer pocket. A plastic evidence bag. Nathan saw the glint of something gold. He laid it on the table in front of the girl.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked.
The nanny nodded, emotion catching in her throat. She knew exactly whose it was. “Madame gave it to William when Pierre went to University. It has a photo of his brother inside.”
“Ah,” was all the inspector said, as if hoping she would go further. When she didn’t, he asked her directly. “The clasp is broken. Do you remember how that happened?” She nodded her head. “Do you remember where this was last, before William died?”
She nodded, her head bobbing up and down, her black curtain of hair rippling with the motion.
“It was in the pocket of your coat when we booked you in,” the inspector said.
She nodded again, tears coming down her cheeks.
“Do you know what I think?” the inspector asked.
She looked at him with her manga eyes. The girl was full of emotion, but Nathan was finding it hard to tell which emotion was on display. Grief? Fear? Sorrow? Guilt?
“I think William was misbehaving. I think you were both tired after a long day. I think he ran away from you and wouldn’t come back. This new detail you added, the,” the inspector looked down at his notebook, “–playing hide and seek? I think you added that after strategizing your version of the story over the weekend. I don’t think you were playing at all. I think you caught him, and in frustration you grabbed him and shook him. I think you broke the chain when you grabbed him. Everyone says William was a sweet boy, but even angel children have their moments. Every child can be a brat. A monster even–” the inspector paused for Nathan to translate, “I think you lost your temper. You were maybe angry, hungry, and tired. Maybe all of it. But he kept running away and you wanted him to stop and eat so you could go home. Maybe you had something planned for yourself that night—a manicure, perhaps. Or a TV series you wanted to watch. I think you grabbed him and shook him, and didn’t realize how fragile he was. I think you strangled him. I think he died in your hands.”
Nathan’s stomach tightened as he tried to keep up with the inspector, interpreting as fast as he could, shocked at the words he had to say. The nanny’s whole body shook as the words reached her, dry sobs struggling out of her despite her miserable attempt to hold them back.
“Maybe there was a monster that evening. But maybe it was you. Maybe that’s why you can’t describe it, because you would be inventing yourself. You saw your own evil spirit go out of control.”
Julie hid her face in her hands, shuddering as she shook her head. “Bu, bu bu,” she sobbed between her fingers. No, no no.
Chapter 11
Victor carefully took the glass syringe from the steel kidney tray with his thumb and forefinger, as if selecting a truffle from a premium box of chocolates.
The lights of the penthouse rooms in a certain Belle Époque building in downtown Geneva glowed brightly, even at 2am. Victor raised the syringe until the neon light above him shone through it and the liquid in the barrel of the glass tube seemed to emit a radiance. Or perhaps he was imagining it. Perhaps the glow was more than just the electric light. This serum was so precious to him, so altogether holy, that the meaning of what he held created an aura of illumination which only he could see.
Victor closed his palm around the syringe—a baton he would hold until he crossed the finish line that would bring him to the next irreversible layer of his research. Of his discovery. Of his life’s work.
The glass was cold in his fist. He put his hands together and quickly rolled the barrel of the syringe back and forth, warming it and the liquid inside, the friction burning his palms, as though he were making fire with two sticks. Fire. This was his own invention of fire. What he held in his hand had as much potential to transform humanity as fire had. He would be the Prometheus of his generation. Of his century. He would change the very evolution of man, just as fire had changed the very biology of the homosapiens.
Victor relaxed his left hand and opened it face up, ready to receive the holy sacrament. But the offering wouldn’t be placed in his palm. His right hand brought the needle of the syringe to the soft inner crease of his left elbow, the needle point barely indenting the skin before sliding through layers of dermis and into the blue vein beneath. He depressed the stopper of the syringe slowly, the steel needle emptying into the median cephalic vein. The sacred result of years of sacrifice, years of single-minded focus, was now part of his own physical transformation. The self-treatment had begun years ago as he subjected his own body to the initial tests of his work. But as he adjusted the recipe and honed the formula, he had continued to use the serum on himself to study the extent to which it could affect him, a full grown adult.
The stopper made contact with the bottom of the syringe. Victor removed the needle and let himself fall slowly back on the steel table, his body relaxed on the cold, unyielding surface. He liked the hard operating table. It was unlike a bed that one became immersed in, blurring the lines between a lifeform and non-biological matter. No, he liked the strictly defined separation of steel and biology, as it should be.
His arms rested at his sides, palms up, the syringe slipping from his grasp and lying empty on the table. His legs flayed slightly, toes pointing to opposite corners of the room. The transfusion machine worked at his side—pistons compressing, valves opening, sphincters closing, fluid rushing. Artificial veins ran from his body to the heart of the machine, artificial arteries exited the machine and brought the elixir of its purpose back to his body. The lullaby of its functions hummed him into a trance, like a babe soothed by its mother.
Sweat broke out on Victor’s hairline. He’d been making the treatments more aggressive. He was pushing the limits of what his body could handle. Gene therapy was already being explored for use on human zygotes—early-stage egg and sperm fusion, just after fertilization. But what amount of change was possible on a fully developed human? From birth, a human had so many millions of cells that actually altering a genetic trait, however minor, seemed beyond the reasonable limits of therapy.
Beyond reasonable limits for a normal person, anyway. But Victor wasn’t satisfied with ‘reasonable.’ He didn’t want to just improve the physical structure of a human body. Ultimately, he wanted to change the human brain. Not only increasing mental capacity, or IQ, as normal people called it, but changing the way it functioned. The things it desired. The very needs of the human organism.
“I follow the footsteps of those before me. But I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation,” he whispered, the tincture of his impromptu poetry inviting his eyes to drift closed. He was a new creator, like the mythical creator that had once formed humanity from earth.
As a young boy, Victor had resolved to become a surgeon. A plastic surgeon. The best plastic surgeon. He had been driven by the desire to fix his own facial deformities, which had been stitched together poorly in his infancy, as though with clumsy yarn and plastic needles. The jagged scars of his cleft palate, with its misshapen upper lip and nose, haunted him from Kindergarten well into adolescence. He had been horribly bullied, attacked for his inadequate appearance and mocked for his speech. His teachers had been apathetic, or simply incapable of intervening. He was a Cain among Abels.
Finally, in adulthood, he’d undergone extensive reconstructive surgery to fix the scars. He had painstakingly practiced to perfectly pronounce every word that had once been impossible for him. He had grown an impeccable mustache that covered the last pale traces of his disfigurement.
But he didn’t just want to gloss over defects. He wished to perfect. He would take what nature had drafted, and make a new ideal. A new body, mind, and soul. He would develop the tools to make man strong when he was weak. Make him resolute when he wavered. Make him humble when he was proud, make him smart when he was dumb. Forming the body was just the beginning. He might never get back at the particular bullies of his childhood, but he would change the world that made them.
It was at university, studying with the medical faculty in Munich, that he made himself a fortuitous apprentice to the best plastic surgeon in Europe. “You cannot just study medicine,” his mentor had said. “You must study all realms of natural science. But also art. And beauty. And philosophy. You must understand what humans once were, and what they must become. And to do that, you must understand the broadest realm of where they belong.” The words resonated. After Victor had earned his medical degree, he continued his education, devouring material from the emergent fields of genetics and gene theory. As his career and practice grew, he threw himself obsessively into what he foresaw as the future of humanity, so obvious to him, but which no one around him seemed to recognize.
Plastic surgery was an ax to a dead tree. It was an archaic manipulation of form, beginning with a medium full of impurities and hewing it with rudimentary tools. But Victor did not desire superior tools. He wished to refine the medium itself. He wanted to shape the very genetics of a person, not just hack and shave with scalpels and stitches. The body’s ability to destroy, shape, and rebuild cellular structure was already perfectly developed, he needed only the expert sculptor’s hand, to chisel a new Statue of David out of the purest marble.
Even as he first became famous in Geneva, then Switzerland, and eventually all over Europe for his artist’s skill with the scalpel, he continued to research how to control the cells of the body to form naturally what he did with a knife. To do this, he had to scavenge the world for equipment and knowledge. Like the borders of every new science, the latest knowledge was not always published in medical or scientific journals. But Victor collected snippets of cutting edge research just as Merlin sought out eccentric ingredients for his potions. Some details were openly available, buried in professional journals if you knew how to interpret what was said between the lines. Others could only be gleaned by getting your hands dirty, so to speak. Like the first medical doctors who robbed graves to study the human form, he went to the dark web, far from the unknowing public, to the underworlds of unvetted communities. Places respectable people didn’t go. Places governments couldn’t monitor or control. Places where free exchange of knowledge and information and tools could flow—places where the muck and scum and the darker shadow of man could flourish. Digging through the graveyard of man’s buried ego, he exhumed what he needed, wading through the rotting filth of all that must be hidden to find his treasures. It was not just knowledge. Any sundry thing one could need, mechanical or biological, was available to those who could pay. Much of the machinery which now stood around him, buzzing and humming, pumping and sucking, could be bought directly from factories in China and overseas.
Meanwhile, the biological “equipment” which required refrigeration and came air-mailed in styrofoam coolers could be sourced from clinics and mortuaries in Eastern Europe, if one didn’t shrink from dealing with the more nefarious actors of the medical profession who bought and sold tissues and human remains under the table.
But dead tissue, even of the highest quality, wasn’t enough for the evolution of his work. He needed living samples on which to experiment and hone his craft. To this end, living animals sacrificed their biological secrets for his work. Victor’s soul hardened as he pursued his ends with an obsessive mind, driven by an irresistible impulse to advance. Through long periods of isolation and at the neglect of all relationships, subsisting on coffee and dark bread, his eyes watering from fatigue and his limbs sometimes shaking with exhaustion. He pursued his work beyond moderation and would not stop until he had repaired the broken human form, infusing it with beauty.
Finally, he had applied the depth of his knowledge to himself. All his work had led him to this point. Four years ago, he had prepared to experiment on the one animal which was the ultimate test of his knowledge. He had calibrated his viruses with precisely the gene manipulation that would reshape and perfect the very structure of his face, which had plagued him in its scarred grotesqueness since childhood. It was his most daring application up to that point. It was that application which had shown it could accomplish more complex, localized changes to his body. He had discovered how to use the bloodstream to deliver genetic adjustments to every cell, causing them to morph and change their own structure. He was not only changing phenotype—outward representations—but also genotype, as he encoded his very DNA.
In this moment, as he delivered what had become his routine bi-weekly treatment, he no longer feared the results. These were not the drastic changes which had horrified him upon waking that first pre-dawn morning. This was the slow and steady dosing that would methodically change his body. He was the first of the new species.
The machinery at his head worked doggedly at its task. Icy rain glazed the windows and made a solitary car in the street below whoosh noisily as it passed. Now, completely relaxed and acutely aware of every sensory input in his environment, he reached toward the kidney tray to locate the micro-dose of Psilocybin and anesthesia, using two fingers to bring them into position under his tongue—a carefully calculated cocktail—which he used to take his mind beyond the threshold of ultimate awareness as he controlled his sleep and consciousness. The machines would regulate the further dosage of anasthesia during the experiment as needed, keeping him submerged in a comatose state until the procedure had run its course, but he intentionally reserved the ritual of taking the initial dose from his own hand.
He laid his arm back down on the table beside him. His body went limp as the chemicals swam through his system and crossed the blood-brain barrier, pulling him down to dream and darkness.
Chapter Notes :
When I was in college, I had the brilliant luck to spend a summer semester in Florence, taking a course on art history and the philosophy of beauty. I hate to sound all cheesy and terrible, but, Florence really does hold far more than its share of beauty. It was overwhelming.
If you’re into that sort of thing.
Which for me, just as it’s hard to imagine anyone not being into Physics, how could anyone -not- be into Renaissance art and sculpture. It’s absolutely breathtaking. Even the replicas of great works that stand in the Piazza della Signoria, mobbed by thousands of tourists, even then they are stunning.
One of the stories I learned while there was about a very famous statues, perhaps you’ve heard of it, the David by Michaelangelo. According to the history books, the 7-ton block of white Carrara marble which David was carved from had sat collecting dust for years in some nearly forgotton warehouse. A massive piece of very expensive material, three other sculptors (including Donatello) had tried to work it, but eventually abandoned the idea. For 26 years the mammoth slab lay collecting dust, waiting for the right hands to take it up. Enter Michaelangelo, a 26yr old sculptor. (Yes, I double-checked — it sat for 26 years till a 26yr old won the bid to sculpt it).
What three other masters had abandoned, due to flaws in the marble, politics or whatever else, this young man turned into one of the most famous articles of Renaissance art. Obviously it’s not the only sculpture to have been made at this scale. But just as obviously, Michaelangelo took something that was flawed, and brought into existence something truly stunning. Only because of the flawed nature of the stone did he get to work on it. And according to legend, only because of certain flaws and veins in the marble, did David take the form he did. Only Michaelangelo was able to work the natural shape and limitations of the raw material to form it into the sculpture we all know so well today.
I snuck this metaphor into the thoughts of Victor intentionally. To me, this bit of history is the reverse of how Victor is looking at humanity. This scientist sees the flaws in humanity as the weaknesses. As causing weakness. And although I don’t believe flaws are beautiful, I do see a certain necessary tension between the limitations of the human form and the beauty that it creates. To me there’s a difference between seeing the terrible, broken, and often miserable reality of how the world is — cancer and abuse and deformities — and acting within the reality of those problems to redeem what is broken and transform to something better.
I see what Victor is doing as a sort of denial of reality. Going beyond just fixing what is broken, and changing the nature of humanity itself. He’s playing with what it is to be human, and what it is to be God.
— much philosophy to be further explored.
What are your thoughts? This is a theme we’re confronted daily with now as AI becomes more powerful and the nature of machine and lines between humanity gets more complicated.
Let me know what’s going on in your thoughts as you read—
And share with a friend !
Life :
It was snowing as I ran through the edits on this chapter. We’re putting up Christmas decorations and getting excited about holiday parties planned and all the excitement squished into this one busy month.
This weekend was also the opening weekend of a new church I’ve been a part of in Lead. St Jacobs, ‘a place to wrestle with God’. It’s been a lot of work bringing this project to life, but also, it’s gone shockingly fast. One day it was just an idea, and now it’s happening. If you’re in the area, come by. Friday nights I’m leading the study, starting with Genesis, where we wrestle with hard ideas and stories we’ve perhaps not looked at critically as adults. We did Genesis 1 & 2 this last week and had some really cool discussion about the ideas these origin storiues are bringing to light, and what the two creation stories imply about the nature of reality.
So much fun. I love these archetypal stories and every time I revisit them, I see something new… which… is part of the beauty of an archetypal story.
Visit the Saint Jacobs substack if you want to learn more.