Angiostrongyliasis - A mystery in many parts

Exhibit I. Missing Persons

She feels the cup in her hand. The outside cardboard is lukewarm against her skin only slightly shifted from the late March cold outside. There is a moment before she lets go of the cup. Her fingers weaken. Felicity thinks about Zeno’s arrow paradox. Her husband had told her about it the autumn before they moved into their new house three years ago. He explained to her how it described the impossibility of motion. An arrow launched at a target is like the coffee cup slipping from Felicity’s hand. At every moment where the arrow is in motion it occupies space in that moment. The cup has fallen and is now halfway between the ground and Felicity’s hand. For Zeno in this moment the cup is motionless. There is coffee spilling out the front spout, its liquid in the shape of a small wave lit by one of the last lamps left in the space between the foyer and the living room. Jude would have told Felicity, “so long as the moment remains the same, the coffee cup will remain in space between the ground and you forever.” In this one moment the cup and its contents are stationary forever.

Felicity’s eyes haven’t cracked yet. Her eyes’ lacrimal glands are frozen in time just before the realization that something is severely wrong. Across from Felicity’s gaze is the living-room that she had shared with her husband Jude for nearly three years. It is what is missing that led the tension in her flexor tendons to relax letting loose the coffee cup into its suspended state. Two loveseats, wall tapestries, sconces, all but one floor lamp, end tables, a marble dining room table, self-lit 18th century paintings, a metal painting easel - gone. Every piece that Jude had brought to merge with her furniture is gone. Then in every picture frame, her husband Jude’s face is cut out of each photograph, the empty black or white faces piercing through the frame backs. In the middle of the room is Jude and Felicity’s cat tree for their Siamese discovered last year while they were on vacation. But most of all, lit by the final lamp in front of red curtains near the front of the house are what some officers will later describe as signs of a struggle. Long cuts into the hardwood floor more like burns as if fingernails could be heated to 250 degrees celsius to leave scrapes, gashes and handprints on the ground. The ghosting hands and gnashes flow from the floor lamp out to the far hallway completely dark like a void leading to Jude’s home office and next to it their shared bedroom.

Just visible among the wood scrapes are pools of liquid black or dark red smeared onto the floor.

The coffee cup strikes the floor. The lid pops off. Its contents spill on the ground with lines stretching out onto Felicity’s ankle-boots the rest spiraling out like a flower, petals spiking and crossing with the adjacent streaks of what Felicity knows after thinking about Zeno and the arrow, is definitely blood.

Her breathing speeds up. She starts hyperventilating. Felicity tracks every picture frame in the room. The hairs on her back stand up, a fight or flight response visible in the micro-tremors of her right hand still open shaking against the air for the cup that isn’t there. Her eyes almost zoom in onto the empty faces on every photo of Jude. Someone cut out every photograph’s head leaving only her in every frame. Felicity steps back. The door behind her is only eight feet away, her coat still swinging in the foyer closet. She curls her right hand into a fist and slowly reaches inside of her purse slumped on her left shoulder to pull out a cell phone. No one ever thinks if they’re going to have to use the emergency function on their phone. It’s an afterthought. “Why would I ever?” Without raising it to her face she clicks through 911. The ring tones feel like Zeno’s arrow. Can a sound tone be just as real as a falling coffee cup? What about claws on an oakwood floor?

The operator on the 911 line answers

“911, what’s your emergency?”

Felicity pauses and thinks, “what’s happened here? Where am I? Where is my home? Where is my husband? What is inside my house?”

The thoughts rush but only with the intent, “what do I say to this woman?”

With a whisper Felicity pulls back to the foyer slowly, not making a sound with her heels she walks on the balls of her feet,

“I think someone’s broken into my house, it looks like there’s blood, please I don’t know what to do.”

She inhales and grabs her coat slipping it over herself and her purse. As the woman on the line responds she hears a door close deeper inside the house down the dark hallway. It doesn’t set off Felicity the opposite happens - she stop shaking.

“State your address, we’ll send over officers now, can you describe what is happening, get to a safe place, can you get out of the house?”

Adrenaline can have an odd effect on people. Fight or flight, but sometimes more. Ask anyone who’s gotten on a roller coaster, who’s gone for a bad time instead a good time to explain why the body, perhaps the soul can lead down strange pathways. Felicity touches the the band of her work badge swinging from around her neck reading for the company she works for as an insurance claims investigator. She inhales deeply, paces her breath and thinks about the situation.

“nothing about this room makes sense” is a thought, a brain tumor, one that will never be excavated from Felicity.

“yes of course” Felicity whispers to the 911 operator as she she drops her coat to the ground.

“93 Shepherd Terrace, Loudonville, New York. I’m going to step out”

Felicity instead walks back into the living room following the path of slashes and blood on the floor to the dark hallway leading to her bedroom and husband’s office. The phone is still locked. She clicks the light icon shining it into the hallway casting over a trail of the same marks and liquid leading to the office room. The office door is closed. The bedroom door is open, shadows of the hallway sconces casted inside over the bed.

The woman on the 911 lines is still speaking, the only sound in the house other than Felicity’s muffled footsteps. She passes the office door, her eyes following it as she quickly turns to the bedroom shining the phone light inside. Just like the living room, every photograph of Jude has his face cutout. a white envelope lies in the center of the bed with the name “Felicity” written on it in Jude’s handwriting. Felicity controls her breathing, listens through the house if there is a step, a noise, a breath, her missing cat. She puts her hand out and closes the bedroom door behind her turning to face the hallway. Down the hall outside her living room window Felicity can see the first blue and red lights beyond her driveway moving up her block. She moves right in front of the office door and grips the antique door knob, same hand that held her coffee cup, her cell phone in her left hand. Flashes of red and blue light arc inside of the house onto her face in the pitch black hallway.

She forces the door open and shines the light inside.

For a moment, Felicity can hear the sound of another door closing but coming from the ceiling. She points the light up. First there is nothing there but then she notices it, the smallest detail of the room that is off. Something that doesn’t belong there. A circle like a door knob, a dot really, maybe the size of an old JFK half dollar right above her. She arcs the light around the office. Unlike the living room, the office is untouched. Books, papers, and a laptop on the desk in front of several large monitors. the trail of floor gashes ends exactly at the door, with a single line of blood leading to the center of the room beneath the ceiling dot. Felicity checks the whole room. She looks at the ceiling. The discoloration is the same color as the blood on the floor. She moves the papers on Jude’s desk. Her search is broken by the sound of a banging on the front door.