We Will All Go Down Together (27 page)

I’ll admit I’d expected it to be larger or—at least—more impressive. The website Vivia’d found had been well-organized, spell-checked, blessedly free of funky flash effects or blobby
Scariest Places on Earth
photomontages; the address was central, thus not necessitating any sort of back-of-beyond GO Train pilgrimage to Mississauga, or what have you. But all this sort of slipped away once I realized the fabled “Institute” was just a set of offices (located, conveniently enough, above a dusty neighbourhood dollar store), whose layout reminded me strongly of my worst job ever, matching telemarketer mailing address lists with phone numbers gleaned from all over North America. Each hour I’d worked during that particular summer had been spent somewhere ill-lit and ill-ventilated, doing something which was probably potentially illegal—a fairly easy conclusion to come to, since they’d move us to a new site whenever a fresh contract came in.

I paused at the foot of the stairs, eyes shaded, squinting up. “Mmmm,
musty
.”

“Picky,” Vivia snapped back, nudging me forward.

We had to sign in to use the elevator, which took us to the third floor. Freihoeven occupied suite 300B, in the building’s extreme southwest corner; the adjoining suite belonged to a company I was pretty sure I’d recently heard named in a pyramid scheme bust.

“Vivia Syliboy and Janis Mol for Dr. Abbott, 2:00,” Vivia told the woman behind the desk, who seemed dangerously intent on excavating the space beneath her nails with a straightened paperclip. “We’re here about the experiment.”

“Uh huh.” Not looking up: “Which one?”

“Oh. Well, we did that select-o-matic quiz generator thingie, and it recommended we try out for. . . .”

“. . . the Mental Radio recreation,” a voice from behind us chimed in, though “chime” is putting it strongly. I glanced sidelong, caught a flash of glasses—some girl, awkwardly hunched over a magazine with her hair all in her face, colourless in every conceivable way. She hauled the overflow away for a minute, and as her sleeve fell back, I saw her thin wrist was patterned like some reversible flesh jacket: bruises on top, close-packed as angry fingerprints; scar tissue underneath, an angry half-bracelet of pink-tinged white.

“Carra,” the receptionist said, almost warningly. While Vivia replied, at the same time:

“Yeah, that’s it. How’d you . . . ?”

But the girl—Carraclough Devize, her name turned out to be—just sighed.

“Through there,” Nail-lady told us, jerking her head towards the nearest door, and started digging at her thumb like she expected to strike gold. I took the hint, skirting Little Miss Know-Too-Much’s personal space to knock at the pebbled glass door; Vivia hung back a minute, frankly interested, only to get the High-Functioning Autist silent treatment in response.

A few minutes after, we sat across from the famous Dr. A. himself, skimming our release forms while he filled us in on the program’s specifics—a sixteen-week trial, one hour’s worth of work a day, plus various types of documentation. The pay worked out to a thousand two hundred every two weeks, plus “commission.”

“Commission for what?” I wanted to know.

“That all depends on how effective the experiment eventually proves.” Dr. Abbott paused, steepling his long fingers. “Have either of you ladies ever heard of Upton Sinclair, the author?”

“Same guy who wrote
Babbitt
? Not since American Literature 101.”

“Exactly. Around 1930, he and his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, decided to embark on a series of inquiries into the realm of extra-sensory perception—not laboratory-based, naturally, but rather interesting all the same. At the time, Mrs. Sinclair had already spent a large portion of her adult life recuperating from a long and physically excruciating illness . . . ‘a story of suffering needless to go into,’ her husband called it. ‘Suffice it that she had many ills to experiment upon, and mental control became suddenly a matter of life and death.’”

And: “Oh,” said Vivia. “Um . . . cool.”

I let a slow breath out through my nose and tried not to roll my eyes.

So, anyways. The story goes that instead of using ESP cards or any other set of fixed symbols, Upton Sinclair—or a close friend of theirs—would make pencil sketches of some object, real or imaginary; Mary Sinclair, lying alone in the dark in another part of the house, would try to “see” something, then reproduce what she thought she’d “seen.” This system evolved until the couple could rope in acquaintances like Robert L. Irwin, a young Pasadena businessman, who agreed (on the morning of July 13, 1928) to help them out by spending an hour concentrating on any random thing in his house, starting at the prearranged time of half-past 11:00
A.M.
He chose a fork, made a drawing, stared at it, tried to clear his mind, and waited.

At the same time, in Long Island, Mary Sinclair dutifully filtered out the various aches she lived with, one by one, and tried to put a name to whatever might be left over. Eventually, once twenty minutes had elapsed, she got up and wrote on a small piece of paper—

“See a table fork. Nothing else.”

Out of 290 drawings made, the total complete successes numbered 65—around 22 percent. Partial successes, on the other hand, went as high as 155, or 53 percent. And the number of complete failures? “Only” 70, a.k.a. 24 percent.

Dr. Abbott showed us reproductions of Mary Sinclair’s portfolio. The successes seemed dubious, almost a bit too perfect to be true. But it was the mistakes, the partials, which really stuck with me . . . not that I believed any of this crap, you understand.

In one case, the “sender” had doodled a roller-skater’s leg, upflung after some headlong sprawl. In Mary’s version, somehow, shoe and calf had blurred into the head and neck of an obscure animal—half stallion, half giraffe. The wheels became this thing’s bulging eyes, skewing in either direction like a demented bullfrog. About this phase of the experiment, Black Magic “expert” William Seabrook writes:

“There was a general similarity of outline, as of something ‘seen through a glass darkly,’ which is more disturbing to me as a skeptic than a clearer sketch would have been.”

“We thought, what with your artistic background, you might make a quite perfect sender,” Dr. Abbott told me, gesturing, then turned back to Vivia. “While, as for you, Ms. Syliboy—”

A bit too fast: “Hey, that’s okay, no problem. I actually have a job already.”

Abbott gave her a gentle frown. “So . . . why are you here, then?”

“Moral support.”

They gave me a bunch of forms to fill out, a log-book, and a digital camera. The latter I was supposed to use to document my sketches, even though the Institute also expected me to mail each sketch off to them pretty much as I did it—wanted to make sure the time-signatures checked out, I guess. Which was fine with me; I’d always wanted one, and this counted as one up (or down) from a free test-drive.

“Who’m I supposed to be ‘sending’ this stuff to?” I asked, almost absently.

“One of our control group.” At my look: “I’m afraid I really can’t elaborate, Ms. Mol; might taint the findings. Suffice it to say they’re all names from our files, all proven sensitives. . . .”

I just nodded, thinking for a minute about how the word “sensitive”—used in that context, at any rate—always made me want to laugh out loud. Like hypo-allergenic soap:
My mind is cleaner than your mind, neener neener neener.

And then, I don’t know why . . . not even now. . . .

. . . I saw Carra Devize again, just for a second: the mere slumped outline of her, right through that pebbled glass separating Abbott and us from the waiting room outside. A stick-figure woodcut girl, all shadow, no definition, with nothing but a hole—dark and flat, yet contradictorily deep—where her hair-hidden face should be.

Carra Devize like some Hiroshima negative on my eyelids’ inner screen, some lost silver nitrate silent film’s edge-of-melt flicker-start; a synaptic pop, flashpaper brief, then out and done and
gone
. After which there was me and Abbott, Vivia watching—me scribbling my name at the base of the very last form, and did I say second, back there? I meant half-second, tops. Quarter-, maybe.

I dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, and Abbott cut me an advance cheque for fifty bucks, right there and then. It bought two Green Goddess bowls at Juice for Life, with yam frites and a side of blueberry Tofutti.

“The gates of hell lie open, night and day/Wide is the path, and easy is the way. . . .”

One of those things that gets in your head, ’specially if your skull’s got cracks as big as mine does, these days. Making you wonder: was that Dante, for real, or does it just sound like it? Or could it be something I saw in a movie, once—one by Clive Barker or Guillermo del Toro?
Se7en
, even?

Can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. We’re talking generalities, not specifics—echoes, not events. That ever-present noise which rides forever side-saddle under your thoughts gone first loud and white, then
off
like bad milk; murky and odorous like chum dumped in deep water, inviting all manner of sharks to share the meal.

The one thing I know for sure, now, is that after I left 676 Euclid, my life (as I’d hitherto known it) sort of fell to jack-shit. Lost the asshole job I’d ended up in the following June, couldn’t get another no matter how I tried. I knew I had seven months ’til my rent was re-evaluated, nine months ’til Welfare kicked in, but nothing mattered as much as keeping my apartment. As long as I had a place to stay, I wasn’t
really
poor. I wasn’t
really
a failure.

Which is why I sold my TV to keep it, why I sold my blood. And yes, there was time and money between the two stages, but less than I would’ve liked . . . far, far less.

So it all went, piece by piece, quicker than I could ever have imagined. Everything that burned juice, everything that distracted: books, CDs, my walkman, my hair-dryer, my furniture. I sold my computer, kept my disks, worked off the system at the local library; when space got tight, I printed out and wiped my back-up files. I had my phone disconnected, had to save my change just to return calls. When Mr. and Mrs. Mol came (at long, long last) to find me, I was living in the closet, literally—renting out the rest of the space under the table I didn’t have anymore, sharing that dim box with a mattress and my notes while two other girls had the run of “my place,” one a hooker, one a junkie. Plus their various customers.

The Mols took one look, then came back with the cops.

If they’d got to me any later, I often think, I might well have been living in a doorway. And simply . . . not . . . 
noticing
.

This noise in my head, these patterns, rough like wood and dark like textured charcoal. Max Ernst’s shells and creepers spreading like mould over every surface, and the light of my room flapping back and forth, back and forth—sky like an incipient bruise all day, every day, constantly dimming and shifting with the onset of some incipient storm. Like the phantom wings of some gigantic, low-flying bird, one surely huge enough to merit worship at the petrified altar of any former Dadaist turned Surrealist turned just plain artist.

I’d stand in front of my cupboards making an inventory of all the food I had, what I might be able to sell, and how long that might last. I’d lie down weeping and wake in greyness, then feel for the clock with both hands and touch something—cool, smooth, dry—that skittered from my grip like a plastic cockroach.

And I’d think: Ah. Somebody’s put a razor by my bedside —a “safety” razor, ha ha. “Somebody” meaning me, ’cause nobody gets in here, and I sure as hell don’t go
out
.

A razor. Very . . . 
suggestive
, that is.

And how could I
do
that, without even knowing I did it? How?

. . . easy.

Easy as anthrax pie.

This is where I found myself, where the Mols found me. And it wasn’t until a whole year later that I ever had more than the tiniest inkling
why
.

When I came down to get my coffee that morning, I found my fellow tenant Aaron Coby already occupying the common-area kitchen, eating Captain Crunch while watching tentacle porn on his laptop: squishing, squelching, and breathy little manga-girl squeals hung heavy in the air. “Hey, man,” he said, not looking up. “Didn’t know you were in.”

“Well, I am. So could you please not?”

“Dude, it’s research.”

“You know, that’d ring just a bit more believable if your hand
wasn’t
down your pants.”

He flipped me the bird, then took another bite. And asked, muffled, through a gooshy mouthful of peanut-flavoured milk:

“Yo, Janis. You know that thing around the sun—”

“Mercury?”

“No, man. Like when there’s an eclipse? The part you can still see, where everything’s black except this thing. . . .”

I poured myself a cup, added Sucrose. “That’s called the penumbra.”

“Oh. So what’s that mean?”

“It’s Latin.
Umbra
’s like ‘shadow,’ so—uh. ‘Beside-shadow.’ Or—’under-shadow,’ Or—”

“‘Inside-shadow?’”

. . . maybe, sure.

He glanced back at the screen and took a sec, seeming to admire the staging of what looked like yet another particularly wet and sucker-burnt DP. Then said, musingly—

“It’s pretty weird, when you think about it. Like, the colour black. . . .”

“Black is the absence of colour, Aaron.”

“No.
White
is an absence—”

(—like black is a presence?)

“Take your word for it,” I told him, and went back upstairs.

It wasn’t like I had
no
furniture up there: a desk too small for much except my monitor, a chair in front of it, my printer and hard drive stowed underneath. A futon on the floor. Four bankers boxes full of clothes, six bankers boxes full of books. A print of one of Ernst’s “Forests” hanging like an extra window between two scabby posters I’d bought from the campus art show my first year and just forgotten to ever take down—Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies” on the right-hand side, Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” on the left-.