The Placebo Effect (24 page)

“Nope.”

“Cape Town.”

“Never been.”

“It's pretty special. At any rate, I left her. The world pursued me, and thus my fee of up to fifteen thousand dollars in small bills was born.”

“Okay. Good,” Yslan said. “What about this whole acting thing. How'd that start?”

“I had a pretty female neighbor…”

“…on Strathallan Boulevard in Toronto—Karen, wasn't it?”

“If you know, what the hell are you asking me for?”

“Because I only know the facts. You followed her to an arts summer camp. She was a drama kid so you became one. Then you acted in high school and won a few awards from Sampsons.”

“Simpsons. Simpsons Drama Festival.”

“Best actor one year, best director the next. Then you were off to Rochester to work in a summer stock theatre. Did you have legal working papers?”

“I was a kid.”

“You crossed the border without papers just a few days ago. Is this a thing with you?”

“Where's this going?”

“And you directed professionally at that summer stock for the first time.
Of Mice and Men
, as I remember.”

“Be accurate, Special Agent Hicks. You don't remember—you remember your notes.”

“Right. Then off to the Yale School of Drama.”

“After an undergraduate degree.”

“Yeah, after that. And then from there to New York and the regional theatres.”

“Well, you've got my résumé down pat. But I don't hear a question.”

“Sure, Mr. Roberts. Here's the question: did you use your gift in any of that—before you were with this Barry guy?”

“No,” he said. “My professional directing eye had gotten keen enough that I didn't need it in my work.” He knew that his “keen eye” was a subset of the gift, but he wasn't about to share that.

“So when did you begin to use it again—exactly when?”

He was going to tell her about his Broadway contract but decided against it. That was his sin. His private sin—which he felt led to his wife's illness.

He said, “When I sat at my wife's side as her doctor told her that ‘your feelings of weakness and lack of balance are probably just temporary. Your body will right things soon.'”

Decker had closed his eyes and would never forget the lines swirling in random patterns across his retinal screen. When the meeting was over he had asked his wife to wait for him outside. She'd looked at him funny but he'd said, “Do you really want to see how much this little consultation cost?” She'd smiled that wan smile of hers and slowly left the office. Once the door
was closed, Decker turned on the doctor. “You're not telling the truth.”

“I am, Mr. Roberts; the body can right itself.”

“Yeah, I get that, but what's wrong with my wife?”

The doctor signaled Decker to sit and pulled out a stack of test results. Although none were conclusive, all pointed toward a diagnosis of ALS.

“Then why not tell her that?”

“Because people who are told they
may
have a deadly illness too often succumb to the illness well before they have to. The brain is a more powerful determinant of health than the body.”

Decker had nodded; with that he agreed. “But you believe she has ALS?”

“I believe she will shortly begin to exhibit the opening symptoms of ALS, yes.”

Decker had closed his eyes—four parallel lines, and tears.

“Do you need a moment, Mr. Roberts?” the doctor asked, pushing a tissue box across the desk.

No
, Decker thought,
I need a way out of dark room that has no door, that's what I need—what my wife needs.

Decker looked up—Special Agent Yslan Hicks was staring at him.

“Now it's your turn to answer a few questions,” Decker said.

Yslan pulled her eyes away from his and said, “Okay, what do you want to know about me?”

The door opened and Mr. T stuck his large head in. Yslan turned to him; “Not now.” The door shut. Decker sensed something odd in this too—but what?

“What do you want to know?” Yslan prompted.

“I'm going to write down three statements, and I want you to read them to me in such a way that I will believe you're telling me the truth.”

“Okay,” she said and slid a piece of paper and a pen across the table.

He pulled the goosenecked lamp to him. The plug almost
came out of the old wall socket. He wrote quickly on the paper and slid it back across the table to her. “Would you say that each of those three statements are truths?”

She read the three statements.

“Are they all truths?”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine. Then read me those three statements and make me believe they're truths.” Decker gently closed his eyes and leaned back.

Yslan suddenly felt self-conscious and quickly realized that if she tried to make him—force him—to believe her, that she would sound false even if she were telling the truth. Suddenly a line that she had read over and over again in the transcripts that she had of Decker's acting class lectures came into her head; “Think the thought, swallow the thought—say the stupid words.”

And she did. “My name is Yslan Hicks and I work for the National Security Agency of the United States.”

Three perfectly straight, parallel lines moved across Decker's retinal screen.

Decker nodded, “Next.”

Yslan took a breath and said, “My job at the NSA is to keep synaesthetes safe.”

A square within a square. Decker nodded.

Yslan looked at the third statement, thought the thought, swallowed the thought, and said the stupid words: “I believe Decker Roberts is a synaesthete like the man who can recite pi out to 22,500 digits is a synaesthete.”

For a long moment there were no figures at all on his retinal screen, then he felt a moment of bitter cold and something metal in his right hand, then squiggles from all four directions entered his screen. Special Agent Yslan Hicks was lying to him.

“I'M NOT SAYING ANOTHER WORD UNTIL I CAN MAKE A
phone call.”

Yslan looked at him. She realized that something had changed. She handed him his phone and left the room.

Decker quickly dialed Eddie's number. Eddie's voice mail picked up on the first ring, and Decker hit the agreed-upon code. Eddie plugged his phone into his computer and watched the sine wave on the screen. It stabilized and he picked up. “Where are you?”

“Somewhere in New Jersey.”

“The Garden State?”

“So they claim.”

“Good movie, great sound track.”

“Yeah. Eddie, I need you to check something for me.”

“Shoot.”

“Yslan Hicks. Y-S-L-A-N. And Hicks as in
Beverly Hillbillies
kind of hicks. Claims she works for the National Security Agency.”

“Okay. So what do you want to know?” he asked, glancing at the sine wave on the computer screen.

“Does she? And what is that agency about, and what's her story?” Decker heard a curse from Eddie's end of the line. “What?”

“Hang up. Hang up now.” Eddie slammed down his phone and shouted, “Fuck me with a crowbar!” as he stared at the sine wave on the screen: it was going nuts.

Emerson Remi smiled as he clicked his handheld shut. New Jersey? Not usually classy enough for Ms. Yslan Hicks, but hell, close
enough to drive. He finished his glass of sherry—he'd come to like sherry lately—and flipped his doorman a ten-dollar bill to get his car from the garage. He'd drive out—surprise her—in New Jersey.

Decker knocked on the door to his room. Yslan said, “It's not locked.” Decker pushed open the door and saw Yslan and Mr. T at a small breakfast table. There was a bag of Chinese takeout on the counter and a plate of muffins beside a jar of organic peanut butter on the table. Mr. T had evidently just smothered a chocolate chip muffin in peanut butter. Even Guy Fieri wouldn't eat that.

“You've finished your phone call? That was quick.”

“Yeah,” Decker said. “I need my computer.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

Mr. T wiped his mouth. Yslan nodded and the large man stood from the table with a surprising grace and went into the next room. Decker noticed Yslan watching Mr. T closely—as one would a pet tiger. Moments later he came back with the computer.

Decker took it and returned to the bedroom. He looked at the door; the light beneath the door was unbroken by the shadows of feet.

His fingers raced across the keyboard as he called up the synaesthetes website. The outsiders' part of the site came up with the usual dry and offhanded stuff. Decker punched in his access code—Sethcomehome. The painted black squares came up and began to pulse. Then:

WELCOME FELLOW TRAVELER

Decker supplied his second password and waited. The wormhole entrance to the chat room appeared. He didn't enter—he went to the blocked room where Eddie's message waited for him.

He scanned it quickly. There was a small story about Yslan in front of a congressional committee defending her budget for
tracking synaesthetes, her educational credentials, a confirmation of her place at the NSA, a quick bio of her more than modest southern roots, then a down and dirty bulleted list of the aboveground work and covert activities of the NSA.

Decker read it a second time, then committed it to the abyss. So she was who she claimed she was. Southerners interested Decker. They had secrets; he had secrets.

He closed the blocked room and couldn't resist entering the chat room—where he lurked.

Images in rapid succession filled the screen, the visual equivalents of screaming. Bloody medieval crucifixions followed and seemed to scorch across the monitor. Then written responses—some in grammatically ludicrous English, others in preposterous versions of other languages—then more wild images and screeds of colours and weird mathematical shapes.

If there was an
uma
of synaesthetes—and Decker thought there might well be—the
uma
was in distress. Could it be from what was happening to him? He had no clue.

Suddenly a sound so piercing came from the speakers that Decker had to turn off the sound on his computer.

Here were people locked in a dark room with no way out.

In his head he heard his own voice, now aged: “Don't forget me. Please don't forget me here.”

Then an image materialized on the monitor of hundreds and hundreds of pieces of random junk—bottles—somehow balanced to form an extraordinary tree. A flash. Another angle of the amazing thing. Then a photo flashed on for an instant. It looked like the pear-shaped man he'd seen on Bloor West. The man on the monitor was on a street corner beside the spectacularly balanced tree thing carrying a hand-painted sign that read “What's Your Ratio!”

The image vanished as quickly as it appeared.

Decker felt a tingle deep inside him. He tried to get the image back but couldn't.

Fuck! Was that the guy he'd seen? Then he remembered the
sign—“What's Your Ratio!” Wasn't “ratio” the word that the guy who attacked him in front of his house had screamed at him?

Another image came up on the monitor. This time the man was facing away from the camera but he was carrying two signs and his head was tilted back as if he was shouting. The signs read “I worked here” and “Who's Jumping Now?”

Decker nabbed the image before it could disappear and pasted it to his desktop.

Then in simple plain English, the phrase
HAS ANYONE SEEN MIKE
? scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

The door to his room opened and Yslan stepped in. “So, did I pass the test?”

Henry-Clay was up on the synaesthetes site waiting for Decker. He snapped his computer off and called Mac. “Got him. Meet me in my office in an hour, Mr. MacMillan.” Then he hit the button on his desk's squawk box and said, “Send in Congressman Villianne.”

EMERSON APPEARED TO THE CASUAL WATCHER AS AN EFFETE
fool, but he was nothing of the sort. He hid within the guise of the overindulged, trust-funded elite. He hid and made connections to powerful friends—and admirers—at the
New York Times
and NBC.

So once he located the source of Decker's cell phone transmission he contacted his editor and NBC and organized a flotilla that formed up—and headed for deepest, darkest New Jersey.

In Cincinnati, Henry-Clay listened to Congressman Villianne's pitch for further support. “A fellow graduate of Tulane, a protector of the dream state of Louisiana, a staunch Republican bulwark against the marauding of out-of-control Democrats”—blah, blah, blah, blah. Henry-Clay was watching the congressman's mouth move up and down, but he was thinking about Decker Roberts. The danger posed by Decker Roberts. The congressman's undeniably succulent lips stopped flapping; he'd evidently completed his pitch. Henry-Clay checked a second time to make sure that the man had finished, then launched in with his description of the new antidepressant that he was bringing to market. About its undeniably good test results and its efficacy. For good measure he reminded the congressman of the extensive investment his company had made in helping the very few children afflicted with that dreadful disease—the name of which had already escaped him—“and at no profit whatsoever to my company,” he added. Then as a clincher he asked, “How much did my corporation donate to your last campaign?” Henry-Clay knew exactly how much they
had donated, and more to the point, how he and his IT expert had expunged any mention of Congressman Villianne spending time with that KKK douche bag Darryl Marmalukes. Not an easy or cheap trick. The only others ever able to accomplish this—remove an entire history from all available sources—as far as Henry-Clay's expert told him were the diamond giant De Beers and the powerful Soong family in China. But he had managed it for the congressman—and now he wanted this popinjay to do his part in return.