After James (2 page)

She came down the road and set off to the east across the field where they walked at night. Crooner left trenches in the deeper snow in open fields, but now there were no trenches. He must have gone into the forest or down into the ravine. She veered left and passed into the turning woods where the light was weaker and moved along the edge of the creekbank where the snow thinned. Streams of melting water ran down the steepest falls. She called his name, stopped walking and listened, heard the water, called again. She kept walking and the place, now changing before her, was strange twice over. Her tracks were already dying into the general thaw, and she'd have to stay to the creek to find her way back. She walked at an angle out into the field to look for his passage but didn't find it, and turned and continued along the edge of the ravine.

Just past the point where she told herself to turn back she discovered a print, a single, canine step. But was it of coyote or Lab-shepherd cross? How could she not recognize her own dog's track? She squatted. Up close the shape was a little too large, maybe. How could it have kept its neat integrity in such a rapid melt? It would have to be fresh but she had seen nothing, and Crooner would have come if he'd heard her call. Then, ahead, she saw a clump of snow fall from a branch and form a crater pattern. She looked up and saw above her a branch, a break in the ridge of snow it held. The print was false, she decided, an accident, a trick of the brain's tendency to mistake nothing for something, related to the life-saving, god-imagining instinct called “agent detection.” We mistake rocks for bears, but never bears for rocks. Returning to the house with the shadows angled differently she passed dozens of small, soft, doubtful depressions. Tracks or not, he must have come through here, she reasoned, and so he could find his way back by following the bank.

Just as she made it to the door she thought she heard something, a distant barking maybe, but the wind covered it. She waited to hear it again but there was nothing. She called for him once more, waited, and went inside.

In the study she opened the window a few inches and for the first time in her stay a warm wind gained the house. She was approaching the desk when she heard something else, like a great branch snapping far away. She listened. It was a wind of phantom sounds, as if the limb had broken years ago.

She had just been getting used to the place and its perfect winter solitude and now it was changing. Stefan had left a list of duties for each season—the spring ones ran for three tight pages—and she was likely to stay through the spring, maybe summer. She had committed to three months but could extend it to six. She would have to solve problems on her own, Stefan said, because he'd be out of reach, but if she wanted to stay longer she was simply to send another three months' rent electronically to their account and they'd get the message. The simple arrangement suited her needs, and she liked the thought of them, the Dahls and herself, at work on their respective missions.

On the desk were coloured scans of the voxel-based morphometry and printouts of the test subjects' written statements. One believed that she could suddenly make connections she was not in the habit of making. Everything was more vivid. Prose seemed musical. Subtext showed through text. It became easy to distinguish the good from the less so, the great from the merely excellent. One wrote, “It's like I've been cured of a vision deficit.” These were not false certainties. The subjects were not simply high and happy. Their feelings of well-being came not directly from Alph, but from the world to which their capacities were opened and they knew they'd be returning. When the drug wore off they lost their eye but retained the new love, as if joy and beauty existed apart from the person who felt it, apart from the physical brain.

She'd devoted her life to brains and compounds, delivery systems. For some time—a half hour? more?—she
studied the scans until she sort of didn't see them, until they formed abstractions and she felt close to recovering the half knowing she'd felt that morning of discovery in the lab. When she looked up from the images the room seemed to float for an instant.

Here she was, at the end of a week without voices. She'd left her phone behind. She hadn't turned on the TV or radio or opened her email. She hadn't watched clips on the internet or checked the news headlines. Other than a few words to Crooner and the woman at the till in the grocery store in the small town twenty minutes away, she had spoken only once since arriving. Last night under a sliver of moon she had taken Crooner out on the snow and prepared for her monthly call from her father.

She was beginning to understand that difficult emotional problems and decisions could not always be worked through directly, that they were best put in mind and then left to roll around on their own while her attention was elsewhere, until some tilt of the skull dropped them into the right place. And so she'd walked. They crossed over the unmarked property lines, into the woods. She watched Crooner and tried to examine the quality of her attention. The dark obscured all particulars, it was just the dog and her, Ali, whoever, and shapes and the cold air, the slow treetops passing overhead. These days she received all things in their distinction. Walking through her hanging breath and an air textured with the general ridiculousness of wagging joy. When they came out into a sloping pasture the night sky resumed, the blackest she'd ever seen, with the brightest stars. It was a dull paradox that the blackest sky
should best illuminate the night. The light was not distant—it was here, reaching her—but ancient beyond time, and the blackness ancient too. At some evolutionary moment the mind resolved to take the measure of all magnitudes. Most people described numbers out toward infinity as “astronomical,” unsuspecting of the numbers inside themselves. There were more nucleotides in the genes in your jeans than there were stars in the galaxy, and a hundred billion neurons in the brain.

Crooner began to flag but couldn't stop bounding on. He seemed likely to run himself dead of exuberance. When she called to him he looked at her with a mask of ice on his mad face. Without a bribe he wouldn't come to her. She said “cookie” and watched him stunned for seconds in tortured ambivalence. She turned and a moment later he was on her flank, happy, near spent and half-composed, and they walked back through their tracks to the house.

She towelled him off, left the ice in his coat to melt. She put on dry pants and took her laptop to the chair by the woodstove, held the machine in one hand and the iron poker in the other, disturbing the coals. She watched them for a long time before the call arrived.

Her father came up on-screen as if conjured out of the reflected firelight.

“Can you see me okay?” he asked. Where were the familiar book spines? He was not in his study.

“You look good.”

“I'm affecting calm. You send a note that you're disappearing, no explanation, and then you disappear. And then your boss, Carl, calls me, failing not to sound alarmed.”

“I'm sorry. Sorry to you, not to him.”

“Where the christ are you, Alice?”

He leaned forward into the camera with a face of mock anger meant to denote the real thing. He used to avoid subjects not parsable in rational terms. For this reason he had failed to understand Ali or, especially, her sister, or to understand why he'd been unable to reason them free of their most troubling emotions. Now that he was getting old, he asked more direct questions.

She said she was off in the country, in the woods. She said things at Gilshey went south and she went east.

“Okay, east. I'll write that down. Is this a love thing? Are you with someone or is it just you and your dumb dog?”

“Just us.”

“And your stolen goods. Carl said you've run off with company goods. What goods? What do you do out there in cyberspace with goods?”

“I'm a researcher. I haven't stopped working.”

He switched on a desk lamp and his face flared briefly, then settled into regions of sand and pitch.

“Where are you, Dad? That doesn't look like your place.”

“I'm down the coast, with friends. We're going scuba diving tomorrow.”

“I didn't know you dove. Dived.”

“I don't. None of us do. A local kid's coming to teach us, take us out.”

“But you're not even a good swimmer.”

“It'll be all right. I'm with friends.”

She couldn't picture the friends, let alone her father with an oxygen tank on his back.

“So you've found a new place to live out your convictions for a while,” he said. “I understand that. Claire would understand it, too.” Her sister sang and played piano and had spent years in ever-dissolving and re-forming bands. A few months ago she'd married a producer with a recording studio in his basement. “How long has it been since you've spoken to her?”

“Since you saw us.” The Christmas rituals. They exchanged gifts, Claire found occasion to insult Ali's life, and Ali called her naive. Then another silent new year.

“You're envious of each other.” In his often implied, never stated view, Ali wanted a good man and Claire wanted to have done something with her brain.

“And she's naive.”

“Well, she's more than that now.”

And so it arrived, as she had known it would, somehow. Not straight from her sister but through him. Ali had been waiting for years and now came the annunciation.

“When?”

“She's almost four months. That puts it late summer.” Claire wouldn't have been able to tell her. She'd feel she was playing a cruel, winning card. A small, foreign part of her wouldn't want to play it.

“And she's good?”

“Yes, good. They're all good. It bothers me she didn't tell you.” He raised his eyes above the screen, as if looking out a window. “The oddest sunset tonight.”

“I had one, too.” The sky had cleared in the late light. The colours in the west had seemed wrong, the wrong red holding in the rim.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course. I'm happy for her.” She supposed she was happy for her, if not happy herself at the news. It was not so simple as being happy. And he was not, in fact, looking good. He was looking old, worn out by the turns in his fortunes, by his daughters, their opposing lives, their failure all but five days a year to appear to him in the flesh. She wanted to reach through the screen and clasp his shoulders. “Will you tell her you told me, please. I don't want her worrying about it.”

“I will.” His eyes flitted slightly to another window on-screen. He was looking at himself as he looked to her. “She adores you, you know. It's no fun to be disappointed in the object of your adoration.”

“Are you disappointed, too?”

“I just want you to be happy. I look for signs of it.”

They depended on one another, the three of them, for their disappointments. In that respect they really came through.

She felt the end of the call coming. This minute, this hour, this day, each month.

He rocked back slightly in the desk chair and reached up and brushed his earlobe with a finger and she saw, in the veins in his wrist curling around the tendons, a snake eating its tail. The gesture, touching his ear, was odd. She'd never seen it before or hadn't noticed. It was almost nothing, one of those nonthings that didn't normally register between
the things that did. Ouroboros. The nonthings strung the world together.

“I've been having nightmares lately,” he said. “I had a dream last night that the ceiling in my bedroom had eyes. They just opened and watched me as I slept.”

In so many ways he was a little boy.

“No more spicy food for you, Dad. Scary dreams are the worst.”

“No they're not. Sad dreams are the worst.” He never used to admit sadness, the invisible given. She fended off another request for her whereabouts. “Are you inland?”

“Inland? Yes, why?”

“You can escape anywhere but it's safer inland than up the coast.”

“I'm not escaping. I'm just going to ground for a while.”

A note in her voice wavered, sounding not grounded at all, and she knew its expression would concern him, so she said things were okay. Everything was okay and more than okay. He received the news silently, then said it himself, “Okay,” and assented to say good night, and she closed him away.

A
blue jay dropped to the feeder and dispersed the smaller birds, order asserted in a bright blue swoop. Ali drifted to the study, caught in a thought below her awareness. It was a few seconds before she realized her eyes had come to rest on the drive Denise had hidden for her. She'd forgotten about it but now the day made a space for it in her attentions. She supposed she could use the company, and opened the drive to find an audio file.

Hello, Alice. Stefan is away in town for the afternoon and I thought I'd use the quiet to say hello. I'm sorry we didn't talk on the phone. Now you'll be here in three days and we'll be gone. I hope you like our place, that it feels like home. I always thought it was funny how the same place could be home to different people.

Stefan's gone—I guess I said that already—and so I'm here doing what I shouldn't be, or what he thinks I shouldn't, and that's talking to you. Talking to you
and you're not even here. You're probably out on a highway somewhere right now and here I am sitting where you maybe are, in the future, listening to me. The only thing that feels strange about all this is that it doesn't feel strange and it should, don't you think? Guess we get used to any old magical thing.

Somewhere under the voice's rhythm was another, running more slowly, as if Denise breathed only while speaking, never in the pauses, and the effect was a punctuation of small, loaded silences. As Denise told the story of the house and how they'd come to own it, Ali got up from the desk and let the voice run without listening to it. She wondered vaguely about her future, then saw herself where she was, amazed at where she'd landed. You spend years building small armatures to fit around the life you believe you're living, and then the supports are gone, blown clean away, and you have to learn the motions all over again.

It was warm now in the living room. With barely an updraft, the fire was dying. She closed the woodstove doors and shut off the feed to smother the last flames. Out the window the line of towering black locusts had a sheen where the ice had melted, except near the tops, where the bark was already dry. These creatures that lived and died in the same spot of earth. Their thorny branches might have made them remote, untouchable, somehow more beautiful, but they were simply themselves, present to her if she paused over them. Nothing was more or less than itself. No matter that selves were immeasurable.

She sank into the green plush of what had become her favourite armchair and took up yesterday's reading. She'd been researching nineteenth-century experiments with mind-altering chemicals and gases and ended up on a site devoted to the James brothers, William and Henry, whom Ali knew almost nothing about. Beginning in 1870, William, the philosopher, had recorded his experiences with chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, peyote. Here she might find an antecedent for her subjects' experiences with Alph. William claimed he could understand certain philosophers only when reading them under the influence of nitrous oxide. He described an “intense metaphysical illumination” during which “Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.” The problem was that, on evidence of the jottings he'd made while high, many of his insights were nonsensical. “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” Ali's test subjects were more lucid and felt grounded in a heightened condition that was self-regulating and continuous with sober understanding. The pill's little trips held them steady.

William's interest in alternate mindstates extended to the supernatural. In one of his letters to the Society for Psychical Research in London he reported an evening with a medium who when entranced seemed able to render the names and details of dead family members. Having reasoned through the possibilities, he concluded that the medium possessed “supernatural powers.” The letter was read aloud to the society by the other brother, Henry, a skeptic whose use
for the supernatural was expended in writing fiction. The site contained a link to one of his short novels,
The Turn of the Screw
, which she'd printed off and read half-through.

Now she found her place—how strange to read without Crooner at her feet—and resituated herself into the tale, a sort of ghost story. After another ten pages of what continued as it had seemed yesterday, a stylish but dated entertainment, she detected an interference in her reading. It originated somewhere other than the obvious—life upheaval, dead test subject, dog off the range—and searching for the source led her to a thought. She needed a focusing aid to hold her steady. She went to the bedroom and removed the sealed plastic bag from her suitcase. She lifted out a single pill, thirty milligrams. For her, Alph had always been numbers and graphs, measures and behaviours, nothing she'd actually experienced. In the kitchen she poured herself a small glass of orange juice and tried to gauge her mood. The objective view was that her motives were complicated, and yet she would use the excuse of a reading experiment to sample her drug and see what she would be availed to see.

The yellow rectangle against the lines of her palm. She brought her hand to her mouth and there, in the interval between feeling the pill on her tongue and taking a sip, she met doubt. In minutes it would dissolve to a single grain and yet she knew already that it would never wash out of her. It was as if the doubt, necessary to sharp perception, were in the pill itself. Had she engineered it into the drug? Did it hide by some greater design in the mastered arrangement of nucleotides? All her life doubt had been something
to be abolished, an impediment to understanding. Now she wasn't so sure.

She waited for her body to begin the absorption and respond with its reported flush of recognition. What else could she expect? A numinous lifting she wasn't to trust, present too in the placebo results. The stronger effects were unbordered, without a clear onset. They fell under one name, one syllable. It took time for the substance to release, took time for it to run its course and subside, but the space between these times was described as “clockless.” The drug brought a feeling of simultaneity, not tick or tock but both at once, sustained. It opened the mind to connections otherwise obscured by temporal distances, by fading and forgetting. One of the subjects had written of “absolute presence.”

A memory surfaced that retained the distraction, the private commentary in her thoughts at the time. She saw Carl, a thin man with a paunch, nearing fifty, leading her into the boardroom. Two days before things went wrong. They took their usual seats at the same end of the long conference table and he rolled the chair back and put one hiking boot on the table. “The modern mind was born six million years ago. It belonged to the common ancestor. The next advances in self-awareness will turn our gaze out from the self.” Already writing promotionals, she thought. He'd chosen a twenty-four-year-old because he didn't want to be challenged. Ali would have been a better match. “Until now,” he said, “time was a narrow prison cell. All we've needed to escape it wasn't an open door, but the slit of a window, an opening in perception. True vision is now available to all of us. We just swallow it.”

She told him to avoid the word “vision.” It conjured clouds parting, eyes rolling up in the head. Based on their descriptions, the test subjects, while conscious, never left the world as it was, hard reality with its stuck doors and broken shoelaces and just enough milk in the carton. The things they called “visions” simply turned up. Some had no clear source, some were variations on the day. Some were spatial, a map of connections, and others sequential, with characters and causality. The fantasies could maintain themselves coherently for minutes or hours. It occurred to Ali to wonder if their nature derived from the structure of the drug or the structure of pictures and stories, something in the air, ancient and popular, that everyone knew at a subconscious level.

To have the fantasy and the thought about it, all while beating eggs or shaking a shampoo bottle, this was the new modern consciousness. Alph generated faith, another word they couldn't use. “What if everyone was this aware, this open to beauty? Before now we all had a waking life and a dream life. Your little magic pill opens a third state of heightened possibility inside the real world, the one we're born into, where we really live and die.” The note in his voice was conviction. She knew it then. He'd sampled the pill. The night before she left, she went to the lab and found the stash in his office. It was hers now. But then Alph had always been hers. He wouldn't easily get more until the next trial stage began. By then she'd have told her story and posted it online, though she'd keep the chemistry to herself, here in her fugitive hard drive.

She heard it on the roof, a rain had started, and now
there it was through the window. Crooner hated rain. He'd be at the door within minutes.

She returned to the chair to see if the ghost story opened up differently. She read the rest of the pages with calm focus and the sense that, yes, she understood something rarely conveyed. The story seemed to confirm the existence of a thing not yet named, like an invisible planet postulated through math, the evidence of bending light, gravitational forces. Whatever the social worlds of late nineteenth-century Europe, Henry James understood them from the inside. Both the insider's report of them and the interior, psychological report. Both the mind of the times and the mind of the lone soul in time. And whether or not writing ghost stories suggested a belief in ghosts, he certainly understood the compulsion to believe, and that this compulsion could be connected to an experience of evil, a being or act of ungoverned appetites, isolated from empathy.

In the real world evil wasn't supernatural. And yet Alph brought to her the presence of something unseen. Not the apparition in the story, but the story itself, even after she had finished it and sat looking at the dead embers. The story had a ghostlike being of its own, and to the extent that she still felt close to this spirit, she could say it haunted her.

In the study her computer stood open. Only then did she remember Denise's audio file, which had finished playing with no one to hear it. She started it again, skipped ahead a couple of minutes. She thought the voice sounded different,
a bit strained. Ali listened more closely and gathered as she could the part she'd missed. There was a woman named Irina, apparently a friend of Denise's. For mysterious reasons never explained, she'd needed to leave her home in Russia suddenly and ended up here, married to a neighbour.

I need to tell you about her. She was the sweetest woman, even despite everything that had happened to her. She must have known from the minute she came here that she was the unluckiest person in the world, and yet she'd come by every Tuesday and we'd sit here and talk, and she'd tell stories about growing up in Russia and there was never any sadness in her voice. She just accepted her life. At least at first.

Because we've travelled a bit in mission, Stefan and me, I told her about Mexico and Africa and Jordan, places she would never go, and somehow she thought I was interesting, though I'm not. I know I'm not an interesting person. I showed her pictures from all these places. She was so curious about them. I think it was because if she'd had a bit of luck she might have ended up in one of them herself. Or maybe she was pretending to be curious because she wanted to stay longer in our house so she wouldn't have to go back to hers.

I never asked her about luck.

But I did tell her what I thought of her husband, the very first time we met.

His name is Clayton Shoad. Clay Shoad. You don't want to have anything to do with him, Alice.

It's possible, when first hearing a name, to feel a space inside in the exact shape of the sound it makes. What Ali felt now wasn't dire portent exactly, that note was coming from Denise, but rather like, in Ali's experience, a surprise finding that makes sense the moment it appears. Some principle forever in effect, waiting to be discovered.

She listened. She came to understand that she'd done a disservice to Denise and Irina both by having skipped ahead, and her failing to listen to their stories wasn't to be excused, wherever her own mind was today, whatever the weather.

Pooled in her thoughts, feeling them without seeing them whole, she clicked back to the beginning—“Hello, Alice”—paying attention this time to everything being told to her.

Irina. 35. Cheboksary, Chuvashia, Russia. My preferred man should be affectionate and a friend, who can treat me with respect and to protect me in case of need. There is no place for suspicions. I don't smoke so prefer nonsmoker man.

Denise had named the website. The page on-screen showed a smiling, narrow-faced woman with thin, darkened lips, huge brown eyes, and badly dyed yellow hair. Behind her was a wood-panelled wall and a window with a prospect of what seemed to be a residential street in summer, a car roof in motion spilling open a bead of sunlight.

Taking all she could into account, Ali had to conclude that Denise was right. Irina had been unlucky. For evolutionary reasons in the development of the brain, failure to account
for the factors that worked into what most people thought of as luck led to superstition, myth, religious thinking, false hopes. But you could eliminate the factors—adaptability, attractiveness, intelligence, community, education, genetic coding—only if you ignored the role of chance in the making of each of them. It was luck, good or bad, to be born in a certain time and place, looking and thinking a certain way. Ali imagined luck as a particle byproduct of chance. She pictured vectors of contingencies, moving at high speed through each life, colliding when they intersected. Some things just came down to the wind on a given day. On learning Irina's story, many would say, there but for the grace of God go I, when they could as easily say, simply, there I go. Ali could feel her connection to Irina. They had both once been hopeful and in need of escape. They had both arrived here knowing no one. What else? Irina's Russian history wasn't known, but Ali could see it looming in her features, the darkness that belonged to a good soul under threat.