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Authors: Michael Helm

BOOK: After James
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There was a steel door the size and shape of a knight's shield. When she took hold of the lever handle she felt the heat on the back of her hand and she pushed the lever down and swung the door and let go of it so that the furnace yawned open and then seemed to wake upon the new air and the heat bolted and caught her and she felt it on the skin and the hairs of her arms and face and she stepped back.

In the mouth of the furnace something moved or seemed to in the heat-furled light. She narrowed her eyes against the burning and tried to make sense of the mouth and saw forms there or imagined them, a metal skid like a small bed frame, a torso of fire and ash, a wooden dummy dying in a garment factory blaze, and she saw stars and planets there, the low wet
moon of autumn in transit, the stars now high-shouldered animals lifted from the disturbed breathing of the coals. And then it was only flame and ash and the smoke called up, and no more sense could be made of it. She looked at the pillar, open to revelation, but saw only the column of smoke rising inside itself and she thought of the visions that had come to her, in the fireplace, in the field, and she looked back down and there it was. Not in the forge but on the door. Melted to the bottom hinge, a blackened raised spot catching pins of light that she knew, was given to know, were cast by the quartz in the small tin setting of Irina's wedding ring.

She knew it but the light didn't hold. The pins of light were there for Denise but not for Stefan later when he went to the yard, still empty, the forge spilled out. His only evidence, her hands, burned and bandaged, the blood on the steering wheel of the car, and her report from the hospital bed. There was no ring, no rock on the hinge, no sign that anything had been chipped off. Whatever she had seen had disappeared, maybe when she'd taken hold of the door. He'd found nothing at the base but a spade with a charred handle. And though Denise knew he would lie to her, for her sake or for his, she believed him, and so came to understand that it was Irina who had shown her the melted ring, as if to communicate the end of her story. She had not wanted Denise to be hurt, of course, or to fill her heart with destruction. Stefan asked her if that was what happened, if she'd been trying to destroy the forge. But she hadn't. She'd only wanted to release the fire, by spade, by hand, and burn everything Shoad put his name to.

Yet though she believed Stefan, he doubted her. He arranged to have her kept in the hospital longer than necessary. She was “formed,” they called it, and when the young woman doctor who seemed frightened of Denise reduced the painkillers, they put her on other medications. Over the next weeks Stefan and the doctors, there were three of them by then, tried to convince her not only that Shoad hadn't killed Irina but also that Irina never existed, or rather existed in Russia, and on the internet, but not there. At first Stefan had believed her stories of Irina and the visits, he told her, but on the night of the storm he began to have doubts. They said Denise's visions had crossed into her reality and confused it. As if she was the trouble, and it was only trouble they had to stand against. As if they didn't believe in evil.

3

N
ine weeks into the phase one trial, the qualified investigator asked Ali to breakfast. They met at their usual place, an old hotel with a view of runners and dogs along English Bay. The trial updates were documented but Ali liked feeling close to the human particularity unrecorded in the numbers and graphs. They were not above swapping stories from their fields, she and Anja Seding, and Anja was not above exaggerating hers for comic effect. For a physician she was not especially circumspect or prone to displays of excessive professional gravitas.

Anja announced that she had to “present a circumstance.” One of the trial subjects had begun sending her things.

“The subjects have my contact info through the clinic, and he's started to email me his writings. Pages every day.”

“He's a writer.”

“According to his declaration he began the trial as a thirty-one-year-old B-negative eco-activist and poet with no drug allergies or history of mental illness.”

“Hard enough being a poet, but to be a sane one.”

“The point of interest being you're a recurring character in these things, poems, mini-essays, pages from what seems to be a novel. Or not you exactly but someone he calls ‘Maker.' ”

Ali had wondered at times who the subjects thought was behind the tests, the drugs, the money, who exactly was playing with and reading their blood. She did not want to be thought of. She tried to feel sheltered in the company name.

“Is this a known syndrome? Is he fixated?”

“He's likely not dangerous, Ali. It began he was just singing your praises. Then he speculated upon a life, what you think, personal history stuff. I repeat, not dangerous.”

From what Anja and the research nurse had learned in their brief conversations with Subject 11, he was a full-time test subject, a so-called guinea pigger, who bussed around the country, getting paid to be injected, blood-drawn, electroded, cardio-tested, whatever the trial required. It used to be the tests were done on the local poor. Now the poor had organized. They mass-communicated about new trials and flocked here and there. Even if they declared what they'd already had done to them, you never really knew what hadn't been flushed from their systems.

“Does he know my name?”

“Well, you head out onto the internet, you find things.”

“Maybe he's fixed on Carl.”

“He's imagining a woman. That's part of the adoration.”

“But he hasn't used my name.”

“It feels like he's on the verge. He might be withholding it out of decorum.”

“Or so you don't think he's dangerous when maybe he is.”

They wouldn't have been there if a lot weren't hanging on Anja's reading of Subject 11, on her own reading of Anja. She tried to remember what she knew of the woman's life. There was an unemployed husband, a scholar of Greek and Latin, or was it Roman history? She'd forgotten, and their social-professional relationship was well past the point where she could ask because she'd also forgotten his name.

“He calls the pill ‘One True,' short for the One True God. Give us our One True, spread it far and wide. He uses terms like ‘New Enlightenment,' capital
N
capital
E
.”

“But not dangerous.”

“It's half-ironical. He means it all but he's not, I don't think, nuts. He's got a sense of humour. I'm just telling you this because you should know. If you want I'll remove him from the trial.”

“But, given his devotion, couldn't dropping him trigger real trouble?”

“I doubt it, but a reasonable question.”

They decided to switch him to a placebo and keep his numbers off the final report. He would have lost his One True anyway when the trial ended but better that he not feel singled out for the loss.

In the park along the bay a scene was unfolding. A car had stopped by the pathway and a man in a dark suit and sunglasses emerged and was watching the runners and dogs and mothers trotting with their strollers. He stepped forward, in front of a running man in spandex shorts, who stopped. They had a brief exchange. Ali got the sense they
were neither strangers nor friends. She found herself expecting to see the man in the suit take a thick envelope out of his pocket and hand it to the runner. The runner was failing to register the inevitability of the envelope. His face read only exertion.

Any given moment was too complicated. How was it that time itself did not just seize up?

“Subject 11. What's his name?”

Together they said, “Confidential.”

“It's safer if you don't know. That way you can't follow any temptation to act. I act for you.”

“He knows my name but I don't know his. I'm worried I'll be acted upon.”

“Tricky position for us both.”

Setting up blinds. It was what they did professionally. Now one might have been set for her, hidden somewhere in the current run of days. Ali had fed him into this state and now they were thinking of each other, she and Subject 11, each picturing the other, imagining a voice, getting it wrong. It wouldn't just go away, this wondering.

—

The time was 1:47.

On the old console radio she dialled through bands to find only dim warps in the static suggesting voices that in their failure to form were oddly beguiling. From nowhere came the memory of a resonance image she'd once seen on a med-sci site of the nameless, hollow space between an infant's ribs and lungs. The space was common to mammals. Ali
imagined it holding abstract feelings and ideas. Secreted there between the bone and tissue, love, hope, goodness, evil.

Denise had said “evil.” Within the span of a few hours Ali had encountered the word twice, in the Henry James story and now in Denise's. It was Denise whose presence she felt around her in traces. The woman had needed someone to believe her. She'd opened her soul to a stranger and yet Ali had trouble accepting what she'd been shown. She wanted some objective reading but had only Denise's handwritten notes and the audio file, which she returned to, at the desk, looking for clues. According to the file signature it had been created three days before Ali arrived and last revised on the same afternoon. The time between the making and final saving was less than forty minutes. She must have recorded it straight through. But the drive contained a second, much smaller file, created earlier. Ali assumed it contained operational data, but when she opened it she saw the audio meter appear again on-screen. The needle jumped as it picked up a very slow mechanical ticking and then a low fuzz emerged and she heard a voice, a distant voice, Denise, saying, “Hello, Alice. Stefan is away in town for the afternoon and I thought I'd use the quiet to say hello.” It was a muted version of the first recording, as if someone in another room had secretly recorded Denise leaving her message for Ali. The theory made no sense. No, the time code told the story. The file was just an earlier attempt in which something had gone wrong with the recording, and Denise had forgotten to delete it. The voice broke off suddenly and the needle went dead.

In the new silence Ali had a sudden, sharp memory of sitting by the woodstove yesterday with Crooner at her feet. She could see the page she'd been reading in
The Turn of the Screw
, the very words on it. It was the scene in which the young governess is herself reading a novel—“I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room”—and then, though this hadn't happened at the time, Ali was presented an inward vision that dropped before her, obscuring the remembered page, a vision of what she came to understand was Alph itself crossing the blood-brain barrier. The chemical appeared as small attenuating swirlings in the blood, like tornadoes whose tails bent toward the tissues and elongated into thin vessels that slipped into the cortex. The image lasted only a few seconds, but it was as certain as the remembered lines of text or the fur bunched into furrows on Crooner's curved neck. The vision was even more vivid than her present moment as she stood at the desk, the remembered words from the novel returning with more force than they'd had when she first read them.

She was two places at once, in two times at once. When the sensation abated she walked back to the kitchen and looked into the living area, half-expecting to see herself there. In this stage of the drug's effect she was able to distinguish between an extreme vision and reality, but was the border between these states eroding? And was her present reality itself already compromised? She had no way of knowing.

Certainly she was experiencing slight jump cuts in time. Without seeming to have returned to it, she was at the desk,
trying to record her thoughts. Her awareness of the missing transition complicated her notes. The possibilities for memory enhancement alone should have brought on an elated focus of concentration, but as she looked through what she'd written, it seemed disordered, random. There were lines on mRNA synthesis and transcription factors, others on interactions between brain substrates, circuit-specific regulation of discrete memories, the possibility of accelerated networks and dynamic methylation changes. Whatever knowledge she should have been able to access had been lost in a jumble of half-recalled data she'd studied on unrelated aspects of memory and waking visions. How could she explain the drug producing a vision of itself and its progress through her system?

She dropped her hands from the keyboard and let them fall to her sides. They had never felt so empty. She wanted to run them over Crooner's back and neck and for a second she could feel him beside her, breathing fast, afraid.

—

All connection to the outer world had disappeared by 3:11. The internet was dead. The landline was out. When the power died at 3:34 she put on her boots and went outside, behind the house to the ravine. Before seeing it, through the sound of the rain, she could hear that the stream was something greater now, and then there it was, the black surface turning dozens of catbacks and fluted shapes, seemingly hand-formed, breaking and overrunning the bend, flooding the small field on the east side of the property with mud and branches. The house was on low ground and if the water rose
much farther or the new lake grew in her direction, she would be in trouble.

It was now possible that the day, the landscape, had changed enough to fool Crooner. He wasn't that bright to begin with. And neither was she, apparently—it had been stupid of her not to have gone online for the forecast. There would have been warnings. She pictured townspeople lining up for provisions or taking to the highways in advance of the occurrence, whatever it was. Was there a name for it, a sudden, obliterating thaw? The seasons had gone out of turn, there'd been a skip in time, some error in the vernal code. The instability was general. Denise held distorted, maybe hallucinatory, perceptions, but it was the murder, the events of the story that gave her away, not the story's telling. The telling was controlled. And though you didn't want the story to be true, her voice, intent with concern, made you want to believe her. Ali could still hear the voice inside the sound of the building stream, as if the water itself were striving to make human sense, or as if all sense were drowning. She listened until there was only the rain and the water sounding like a hard summer wind in the trees.

She called Crooner's name again, then again with full lung, and as if her voice itself had broken it, one of the trees in the ravine began to move. As she looked down at the surge, a fifty-foot maple slid upright into her view, a parallax shift that dizzied her for a moment as if the earth were pitching beneath her rather than beneath the tree, and then the bank gave way altogether and the tree fell, twisting from its anchoring, into the stream. Immediately a dam began to
form and it seemed the water was intent on engineering its ascent, eddying higher, then shoring the gaps with whatever it carried, climbing to her, pulling itself up hand by hand.

She found sometime later that she hadn't taken her eyes from the rising water. She'd been thinking about this place, about what had brought her here, and the way some people felt elected to their misfortunes when their fates emerged slowly. She understood these people now. She was not without empathy, but used to think that there was no mechanism that could deliver one person's experience and understanding into another's. Before reading the subjects' statements about Alph she thought that when people said they empathized they were just saying they felt sorry for someone, not that they felt what the other was feeling. There was little scientific evidence of selflessness. Even grieving death could be seen as self-directed. There was a master design, that much she had always known, but it had seemed disregarding of so paltry a thing as human feeling. Now it was possible to believe in a clear, calm, visionary emotion that connected you to others, maybe to the planet itself. Without belief in true empathy, you would always be utterly alone. Without belief, standing there, she would have been in bigger trouble, without means, nearly cornered into prayer.

Could she trust the run of her thoughts? Her dog was lost and the water was rising, and the day had turned into a dark anomaly. Circumstances were, if anything, a bit too sobering.

Something was moving above her. Birds, dozens and dozens, mostly gulls, flying east in advance of the system. She turned and went through the back door, closed it, removed
her boots, and saw on the windows facing her the underbellies of countless insects. She went across and looked closely at one larger than her thumb, with four membranous, spotted, transversely banded wings. It was out of season, out of place, blown in from somewhere far south.

She focused now on the bare maples in the distance waving at her in the wind, a rush in the dendrites. The ramified shape was there in an image from Denise's story, in the antlers tangled on the floor of Shoad's house. And there again in the lines on the insect's wings, though the wings were still, flakes of ice waiting for the warm breath of consciousness and motion. Waiting to wake inside a waking state. She looked at the wings and saw invisible planes, like the pane of glass between her and the insect. And there, across the window, in the crowded peripheries of her attention, insectile, came something brown, not on the glass but moving through the trees up the road. It emerged just as she'd imagined it, had been made to imagine it in Denise's story. It emerged from its turning, the brown pickup. Emerging as if Denise were rising inside her, as if their times had run together, looking out at the truck with the rust-red hood moving on the property, coming down the road. Carrying its lone soul.

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