What Happened to Jacques
It was a disturbingly still night among the dunes. The air was thick, cold, dark. The sky was all marbled blues and purples and grays, watercolor washes spotted by burning dots of stars.
I stood arms akimbo with my face glued skyward, my boots packing down the sand beneath them. Ursa Minor, my favorite constellation since I knew the word, was sniffing the horizon. As my neck began to ache and I started to lose my balance, I heard panting breaths approaching. Helpless without me to follow around, Oliver had trailed me into the desert.
“Ma’am … are you okay?” He was out of breath. “You just ran out, I was worried!”
I kept my neck craned and explained tersely, “I just watched a man die, Oliver.” I rotated my head to the appropriate angle. “And please stop calling me ma’am.” My eyes locked on his, which were too small for his face, lost among the flesh.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I mean Dr. Welles. It’s just, don’t you think we should call someone?”
Jacques had collapsed at dinner, fell right over in his chair. By the time I got to his side, he wasn’t breathing and I couldn’t find his pulse.
I was crouched on the cafeteria floor with him when Oliver came into the room with a freshly opened bottle of wine. I imagined myself through Oliver’s eyes, doused in guilt. Earlier that day I had complained to him about the old man’s endless monologues. And there I was, just a few minutes unsupervised with him, and he’s dead as a bug on the floor.
I nodded in response, ashamed at my lack of leadership during a crisis. “Wait, you didn’t call 911?”
“No, I came to find you. Come on.” Oliver started pushing his way through the sand, seemingly a slog for his short legs. Our roles somehow reversed, I followed his lead.
I was on a six-month residency to study a meteor shower that was expected to have a few near-misses with Earth in the next year. The University refused to grant me tenure, but offered these travel opportunities (not quite sabbaticals) as consolation. They usually served as a respite from my research assistant, but Oliver had weaseled his way into this assignment.
We arrived in the desert on February 14, 2020. I remember the date because I had made a joke that it would be the first notable Valentine’s Day for me in recent memory.
One month later we received notice that the campus was closing for at least two weeks and that we should evacuate. We hadn’t set out to disobey the orders, but with hotels closing down and cross-country travel nearly impossible, Oliver and I agreed we would silently hunker down.
We met Jacques on our second day of lockdown. He worked as the head custodian at the observatory campus and was checking the rooms in the dormitory. We told him we were planning to stay and he let us in on a secret: he’d been living there since his wife kicked him out a few months back. All he took with him from the house was a backpack of clothes and a trunk full of wine. He showed us around behind the scenes: the cafeteria kitchen, the campus golf carts, and where the extra toilet paper was stored.
While it had been less than two months between the first time Jacques rapped at my door and when I left him lying on the floor of the cafeteria, it felt like years had passed. Oliver and I had been relieved of our research work, there were no tourists visiting, and all we really had to entertain ourselves was Jacques’s cache of wine and some powerful telescopes. So we whiled away the hours, us three, in the scope room. We’d lose track of time, catching naps as we needed and snacking on cheese and baloney from the cafeteria. It was like some kind of surreal summer camp without any counselors.
Oliver occupied himself by obsessively monitoring the news and giving us dire updates by the minute:
“Have you seen what’s happening in Italy?”
“They’re digging mass graves in India!”
“I think this might be the beginning of the end, you guys.”
Jacques prattled on, in what I took to be a fake accent, about past lovers and gallivanting across the globe. He was ashamed that he was a janitor, and told endless stories about his former Greatness, without ever naming what was so great. I imagined him young and suave, a starving, swindling artist, like that clever Dutch guy who sold a blank canvas for $80,000. I was convinced his name was actually Jack.
As for me, I sat between the two, dulling the sharp monotony of their voices with Grenache, and felt a constant glimmer of gratitude that I wasn’t in Virginia for the onset of the pandemic. I’d be alone in my condo, climbing up the walls.
As I followed Oliver back to campus, I was overwhelmed by the endless nothingness around us. The quiet of the desert at night rang in my ears, a steady hum. The silken sand shifting under our feet was silent, though I expected to hear it creak and moan like packed snow. It was cold out there, and I was underdressed. I clung to the present moment, putting off the inevitable future of dealing with a dead body.
“How did you find me out here, anyway?” The silence was killing me, I needed distraction.
He turned his head over his right shoulder, keeping pace as he moved forward. “I followed your footprints.”
“Ah, of course.” What a stupid question. I stayed behind him, retracing my vector.
The artificial glow from campus was a hazy orb behind the telescope’s silhouette. The magic of the desert at night quickly dissolved as the sting of reality returned like needles on my skin. There was a dead man waiting for us.
The fear in my stomach, a pulsating mass that I imagined burning green, nuclear waste ready to blow at any moment, kept me warm. I realized it had been with me since Jacques’ last gasp. Since his fork clattered to the table, freeing his right hand to clutch his throat, or was it his chest? His eyes bulging toward me helplessly, as though if they could leave his head and poke me I’d be able to save him. And me with my stomach heavy with beef stew, I couldn’t move fast enough. I couldn’t catch him. And then he fell, and he convulsed, and he died.
Why had I run out so suddenly, anyhow? Heading back toward campus, I felt ashamed at my reaction. Alone, I was able to pretend it was all a dream. But here, following Oliver back to base, those two eternal minutes I spent next to a dead Jacques played on a treacherous loop through my mind:
My hand in front of his nose feeling for breath.
Rolling him onto his back to put my ear to his chest.
Clumsily checking for his wrist and his neck for a pulse.
Gently shaking him by his shoulders to jostle him from sleep.
I didn’t have access to language, didn’t know what words could possibly change anything in that moment, could bring Jacques back. And then Oliver entered the room and said the only two words that made sense: “He’s dead.” How had he known?
I slowed my pace, took one step for every two of Oliver’s. Shame washed over me again, this time for not having realized the murderer in my midst. Passing comments I had discounted as weird or needlessly dark in recent weeks took on new meaning.
I stopped walking. I deepened my shallow breaths and I looked again to the sky. My own insignificance frightened me. What if I was next? How long would it take for my family to realize I’d died?
He kept moving forward and I grasped for what my options were. It was at least an hour drive to anything resembling a town, and I wasn’t sure what vehicle I would drive, anyway. There was no point in running away, as my footprints would give me away.
So I started walking again, following Oliver. In all our years working together, I had never given him much credit. I had stifled his professional growth because of my own insecurities and impatience. And now as I trailed him through the desert to an abandoned research facility, I started to worry about exactly how much I had underestimated him.
***
I followed Oliver into the cafeteria, squinting against the harsh fluorescent lights.
Jacques remained in a heap on the terracotta tiles, exactly as I had left him. I knew from watching true crime shows that rigor mortis would be setting in, stiffening his limbs. A medical examiner would be able to determine the time of his death and would know that Oliver and I failed to alert authorities in a timely fashion. Would that make me an accomplice in the eyes of the law? I resented being dragged into such a brutal crime.
Of course I had no proof that he was murdered in the first place.
Oliver knelt at Jacques’s side. We hadn’t spoken since we entered the building. Out by the dunes I had felt safer. The distance from death was part of it, but also knowing that I could scream and maybe someone somewhere might somehow hear me.
I approached the men and slyly, I hoped, slipped Jacques’s steak knife from the table and tucked it into my sleeve.
Oliver looked up at me and broke the silence. “What’s our next move, ma’am?”
He was the most indecisive scientist I knew. It was annoying in the lab. In this moment of did-he-or-didn’t-he, it was terrifying.
“How did Jacques die, Oliver?” I stood still, one step away from both a corpse and its likely killer. I needed to assert my dominance, to let him know he wouldn’t take me down so easily.
He shook his head. “I wasn’t here, remember?” He looked up at me with his too-small eyes. “I thought you saw it happen.” His doughy cheeks flushed and I knew he was guilty.
I slipped the knife from my sleeve and held it in between us. My voice stayed strong, steady, confident. “Oliver, tell me right now what is going on.”
He slowly rose to his feet, hands up in surrender. “I’m really scared, Doctor.” His voice cracked.
We looked at each other — me with a cheap steak knife at the ready, Oliver with both hands up, Jacques’s body between us. The room was fragrant, our three bowls of stew still at our places at the small square table.
“Why did you do it, Oliver?”
“I didn’t.” He was panting, like when he found me in the dunes. Stepping slowly backward. “You have to believe me. I don’t know what happened!”
Oliver had been prattling off death counts and infection rates for weeks. He had made his own charts to track the metrics he found important. He had given Jacques and me a lecture — PowerPoint and all — about how this was all pointing toward the end of days. Even the Nephoron system we’d been flown to New Mexico to study was a sign, according to him. He had explained to us that while the three of us were pretty safe from infection given our deep isolation and considerable food supply, that we might be worse off in the end without acquiring immunity. He described to us a zombie apocalypse scenario, and under the influence of Jacques’s old world varietals, it wasn’t hard to get swept away by Oliver’s paranoia.
But why did he have to kill Jacques?
I stepped toward him, knife still out. “I don’t believe you. Why didn’t you call 911?”
“What? Why didn’t you call 911?” A tear was sliding down his right cheek as he inched backward.
He spun and ran through the saloon-style doors into the kitchen, and I bolted after him.
Harsh sounds jolted my anxious mind: his body slamming into tables, his hand smacking the wall in search of a light switch, mixing bowls and cutting boards falling from shelves onto metal prep tables.
I pushed through the swinging door determined to beat Oliver to the shiniest, sharpest butcher’s knife. I wracked my brain for other deadly cooking tools but could only imagine wire whisks and rubber spatulas. He found the light and ran toward the far wall, home to a long magnetic strip with about a dozen knives hanging.
I froze, ready for a standoff. I shuddered at the thought of what it would feel like to push a knife blade into my assistant’s body, through skin and muscle and fat.
Oliver’s indecision reared its head again as he faltered while choosing a knife. I watched his hand hover, shift left, then rapidly right, before finally landing on a mid-sized knife which looked far more destructive than my own.
“It doesn’t have to end like this.” I was ashamed of the waver now in my voice. I had been so determined to stay strong, to psych him out with my power and confidence.
Oliver held the knife up with his back to the wall, a good twenty-five or so paces from me. His breathing was labored. “I didn’t know it would work, I just thought he would get a little sick,” he croaked. “I thought you would like having a break from him.” He started sobbing and slid down to the floor, dropping the knife.
The world went quiet for me then, a high pitch signal enveloped my head. My legs felt wobbly and I realized I had stopped breathing. He admitted it. The trauma of the evening crashed down on me — watching life leave Jacques, wandering the desert with a killer, a flimsy steak knife my only defense.
Oliver’s sobs faded in and out of my awareness, and I eventually set the knife down on a table and felt my legs and feet moving me back out to the dining area to be with Jacques. I felt numb and unsure, an amplification of the dread and unease brought on by the pandemic. None of this would end simply.
I’m not one for excessive sentiment, but felt I owed him something.
The wine that Oliver had opened for dinner was still on the table. I poured some into one of the ceramic mugs we had taken to drinking from and joined Jacques on the ground.
One final nightcap to send him off right.
