Crosstalk (39 page)

No, the smart thing for him to have done was definitely to have kept quiet and let her deal with the voices on her own. She was infinitely grateful that he hadn't.

She watched him a while longer and then shut her eyes again. And even though she knew her hand was tucked beneath her cheek and he was on the far side of the room, the instant she closed her eyes he was there beside her again, his hands crossed on his chest and her hand held tightly under them, pressed safely against his heart.

Who says you can't communicate when you're sleeping?
she thought, smiling, and went back to sleep.

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
A Midsummer Night's Dream

When Briddey woke again, the lamps were back on, and the chair—and the room—were empty.
C.B.?
she called.
Where are you?

Out rustling us up a midnight feast,
he said, and she automatically glanced over at the clock behind the checkout desk. Five thirty.

Okay, an early breakfast,
he said.
Don't worry. I'll be back in two shakes.

I'm not worried,
she thought wonderingly, and went into her courtyard so he wouldn't be able to hear what she was thinking. Because he wasn't gone. Even with the room full of lamplight and her eyes open, even with her having pushed off the throw and stretched her arms up in a luxurious yawn, he was still holding her hand close to his chest.

Hurry up,
she called to him.
I'm starving!

Be right there,
he said, and a minute later burst through the door. He had a large, bulging plastic grocery bag in one hand, a paper plate full of cake in the other, and a bag of chips under his arm.
I found all sorts of goodies.

He put them on the table and emptied out the bag, naming his finds as he did. “Birthday cake, Doritos, salsa, grapes, half a pepperoni pizza, a package of peanut butter crackers, a partially eaten Snickers, olives—”

“Did you steal all this from the staff lounge?” Briddey asked.

“Just the salsa, the olives, and the cake—I heard Marian wondering how she was going to get rid of all of it. The rest is contraband I found in the stacks. Except for these,” he said, bringing out two cans of soda, “which I got from the vending machine. They didn't have lattes. You'll have to settle for Pepsi or Sierra Mist.”

“Pepsi,” she said, and reached for the pizza. C.B. produced paper napkins from his flannel shirt pocket and handed her one. It was obviously from the party, too. It had bluebirds on it and the words
A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME YOU WERE HAVING A BIRTHDAY
.

Everything tasted wonderful, even the Doritos, which must have been up in the stacks for weeks. They were very stale. “But good, huh?” C.B. said. “Oh, and you won't believe what else I found. While I was out foraging, I did a little research to see what the other marshmallow was—”

“Research? You mean you found someone who happened to be thinking about Lucky Charms?”

“No, I googled it on Marian's computer.”

But I thought the offices were locked.
And wouldn't a computer have needed a password?

“We were right about the pink hearts, blue moons, and green clovers—
not
shamrocks,” C.B. was saying, “but they're
shooting
stars, not stars. There are also horseshoes, rainbows, balloons, and for some unknown reason, hourglasses. And then what do you think I found up on the top level of the stacks? A box of…ta-da!”

He reached in the food bag and pulled out a cereal box with a flourish. “Lucky Charms!” He poured out a handful of cereal onto the table. “So we can confirm my findings.”

“Or not,” Briddey said, looking down at the multicolored blobs. She picked up a pale green one with a lump of bright green in the middle. “This does not look like a shamrock.”

“Clover,” he corrected her.

“It doesn't look like a clover either. It looks like a hat with a bow on it.”

“What kind of Irishman would have a bow on his hat?” C.B. said, taking it from her, turning it upside down, and squinting at it. “Maybe it's a pot of gold.”

“Then why is it green? And look at this one,” she said, picking up a purple U-shaped marshmallow. “What's this? The rainbow?”

“No,
this
is the rainbow.” He showed her a multicolored half circle.

“Or a slice of watermelon.”

“They're all supposed to be Irish. What's Irish about a slice of watermelon?”

“Or a dog bone?” she said, picking up a brownish yellow marshmallow.

“At least this pink thing is definitely a heart,” he said. “And this blue blob is a moon.”

“But what on earth is this?” she said, fishing a white marshmallow out of the pile. It was oblong and had an orange line down its middle and an irregular splotch at one end.

“I have no idea,” C.B. said, taking it from her and turning it one way and another. “An albino eggplant?”

“An albino
eggplant
?” she said, laughing. “Why would they put an albino eggplant in a children's cereal?”

“Beats me,” he said, popping it into his mouth. He made a face. “The real question is, why would they put pieces of chalk in a children's cereal and call them marshmallows? Speaking of which, unless you want to be stuck reciting, ‘Albino eggplant, dog bone, purple U-shaped thingy,' the next time the voices hit, we need to get back to work. Your safe room needs to be—”

“Totally automatic. I know.”

“And after we've done that, I want to teach you some auxiliary defenses. It's a good idea to have ramparts, and an inner sanctum for backup.”

And even with all those defenses, he still has to wear earbuds and hide from the voices down in the sub-basement,
she thought, feeling afraid all over again.

“I don't actually have to stay in the basement,” C.B. said. “I partly stay down there because when you're talking to people, it's easy to make mistakes and let slip that you know stuff they haven't told anyone—”

“And they'll find out you're telepathic.”

“Exactly. I'd much rather have them think I'm crazy. I also stay down there by choice. Years of listening to the innermost secrets of your fellow human beings gives you such a low opinion of them, you don't
want
to associate with them. It doesn't have anything to do with the effectiveness of my defenses. Don't worry, your courtyard will keep you perfectly safe. Provided we get it finished,” he said, and for the next solid hour he had her practice talking to him while remaining safely inside her courtyard. And not looking like that was what she was doing.

It was hard to master, but she was eventually able to see both the adobe walls and blue door
and
the book-lined walls of the Carnegie Room, to stand simultaneously under the cottonwood tree and in front of the fire, carrying on a conversation about “Ode to Billie Joe.”

“The song was a huge hit,” C.B. told her, “and people came up with all kinds of theories as to why he jumped.”

“Why do
you
think he did it?” Briddey asked, trying to keep both C.B. and the courtyard in focus. “I mean if he and the girl were in love, why would he commit suicide?”

“Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was just trying to get away from the voices.”

“Did you ever do that?” Briddey asked.

“Do what? Jump off a bridge or try to kill myself?”

“Either. Both. Did you?”

“Yeah, once, when things were going pretty bad. My stepdad had pretty much written me off—I don't blame him. I couldn't exactly explain
why
I was refusing to have a bar mitzvah or go to college. And the voices were…” He shook his head in disgust. “So, anyway, I thought taking a bunch of tranquilizers would be a good way out. But it just made the voices worse. That's why I told you no alcohol or Xanax. Relaxants just make you more receptive to the voices—and less able to keep them out.”

Briddey thought of what that must have been like, the voices out of control and roaring over him, and him nearly unconscious and helpless to fend them off.

“Yeah, well, but it had its advantages,” he said lightly. “One, I learned that there are things even worse than the voices, stomach pumps being one. And two, it's kept me from turning into a drug addict or an alcoholic, which just goes to show you that not all unintended consequences are bad.”

He grinned at her, but she didn't smile back. She was busy following a different train of thought. “If relaxants make the voices worse, then wouldn't stimulants—?”

“Nope, no effect. And every other kind of drug makes them worse, too. Defenses are the only thing that work for the long term.”

“But if you can visualize defenses that keep the voices out, why can't you visualize something that shuts them off altogether?” she asked, and waited for him to tell her it didn't work like that.

“You can,” he said.

“You
can
? Then why—?”

“Because you can only do it for brief periods, and it takes an enormous physical and mental toll. You can't sustain it, and the minute your attention wavers, the voices come roaring back.”

“But there must be some way to…surgery or—”

He shook his head. “Surgery's out. In the first place, it's not like a blood vessel you can tie off. It's a network of neural pathways, and there's no guarantee that messing with it wouldn't make it permanently worse. And in the second place, to get a doctor to do the surgery, you'd have to tell him about the telepathy—”

“And that's out. I know. But couldn't you make some kind of device—?”

“I've tried. That's another reason I spend most of my time in the basement, because I've been trying to come up with a jammer.”

“And have you made any progress?”

“No. I thought interference—and crosstalk—might cancel the voices out, but they didn't, and creating the voice equivalent of a spam filter didn't work either. Or an electronic version of the safe room.”

“So you haven't found anything that
does
work?”

“Yeah, Victorian novels. And frequency hopping.”

“Hedy Lamarr's invention,” Briddey said, thinking,
That's why he's got her picture hanging up in his lab.

He nodded. “The idea was to keep the voices from finding me instead of blocking them directly, and it works pretty well in the short term. But in the long term it requires an enormous amount of energy—far more than any device could ever generate.” He smiled apologetically at her. “Sorry, Briddey. If I had a way to shut the voices off for good for you, I would,” and she realized how ungrateful she'd sounded—as if his rescuing her and teaching her and protecting her weren't enough.

“C.B., listen,” she began, but he was listening to something else, his head raised and a faraway look on his face, which quickly turned to a frown.

“What is it?” Briddey asked.

“It's time to get out of here,” he said, pushing back his chair. He stood up and began clearing the table.

“But I thought the library didn't open till eleven.”

“It doesn't,” he said, scooping the Lucky Charms off the end of the table into one of the “a little bird told me” napkins and putting them both in the bag. “But the later it gets, the more people will be around. I don't want anyone seeing us leave.”

He was lying. He'd heard something and he didn't want to tell her. “There's someone in the building, isn't there?”

“No,” he said, and then, as if he realized lying wasn't going to work, “not yet. But the person who left the phone here just realized she doesn't remember having it when she got home, and unfortunately it's Marian the Librarian.”

Who had the keys to the building. Briddey glanced nervously at the door. “Is she on her way back?”

“Nothing as dire as that,” he said, screwing the lid on the salsa jar. “In fact, she's still home in bed. She hasn't even figured out where she left it, but she's mentally retracing her steps, so it's just a matter of time before she figures out where it is. Besides,” he added, closing the top of the cereal box, “I'm guessing you don't want to be seen coming home on a Sunday morning dressed like that.” He gestured at her green dress. “Especially since one of your neighbors is bound to be on Facebook.”