Broken Mirror (10 page)

—Jefferson Eastmore’s
The Wheel of Progress
(1989)

After work Victor drove to his box-shaped apartment on Alameda Island, went inside, breathed stale air, and opened a few windows to let in a moist breeze. Granfa Jeff’s medical records sat on a side table next to his couch. They exerted a pull that he resisted by picking up the herbalism book and taking it into the kitchen. He flipped through the book, looking for an entry on black cardamom, the herb that Ric from the juice shop said his brother always asked for. Each turn of the page revealed dense descriptions of growing seasons, harvesting methods, and possible health effects. Victor had never heard of most of the herbs in the book.

The entry on cardamom—the run-of-the-mill kind
—
was disappointingly brief and said nothing about a black variety. The scientific name,
Elettaria cardamomum
, appeared in ornate script at the top of the page, and the line beneath indicated in smaller block letters that the plant was part of Zingberaceae, the ginger family. A drawing showed a stalk composed of round pods and flanking leaves. Under the heading “Uses,” only two words were written: “calming” and “exorcism.”

Victor flipped the pages in frustration and found an inscription inside the back cover, written in a different handwriting than the rest of the text. It read, “Jefferson: This reference belongs to your family. I have been a faithful student. May nature’s bounty help you find peace at the end of your journey. Come by the store anytime. Respectfully, Ming Pearl.”

Victor paced in his living room, clutching the book in both hands. His thoughts raced like a jet plane about to take flight. Who the hell was Ming Pearl? What did she know about Granfa Jeff?

His doorbell chimed. He put the book down and moved to the door. He opened it a crack. Elena pushed through, and he jumped back.

“How did you find me?” Victor asked. “My address is unlisted.”

“Not to your parents. I want to talk.”

“Fine.” He closed the door behind her.

She looked at his furniture, a collection he’d selected at random from a Mesh catalog to shortcut what would have been many hours of deliberation. She inspected the few colorful abstract paintings that he used for meditation and ran her hands over the back of his dun-colored sofa as if it were a large, docile pet.

Elena moved on, disappearing down the hall into the bathroom and then reemerging a moment later, returning to the living room, eyes flicking around as if she were deciding whether to rent the place. She fidgeted with the couch pillows, not meeting his gaze. “Are you still on your medication?” Elena asked.

“Of course,” he answered, more loudly than he’d intended. “It’s mandatory.”

“You can’t hide anything from me, Victor.” She pointed at his face. “Your eyes go blank when you lie.”

“I’m adjusting my dosing schedule. In fact, I was just about to take the next one. You can watch if you want.”

A flicker of embarrassment moved across her face
—
a creased brow, a twitch in her lips. “Sure, I guess.”

Victor retrieved the pill bottle from his medicine box in the bathroom and returned, wondering why she wasn’t yelling at him for the way he’d treated her when she’d moved to the Republic of Texas. She had always confronted problems directly. He led her by the elbow into the kitchen. The faucet squeaked when he ran it, filling one-third of a glass. He held up the Personil pill so she could see it. Then he popped it in his mouth, making a show of washing it down with gulps of water.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

Elena nodded.

He led her back through the living room, stopping next to the couch at the threshold of the foyer. “Why are you back in SeCa?”

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

“How long are you here?”

Her fingers dipped into the gap between the couch’s back cushions, a gesture he found strange and oddly erotic. “I haven’t decided.” The anxiety and falsehood written in her knotted brow were clear.

“You’re not very good at hiding things from me either. Something’s going on with you.”

Elena pressed her lips together. “I’m here to help you, Victor
—
that’s all. You look like you’re hanging by a thread.”

He snorted. “What’s new about that?”

“They’re going to lock you up one day for no good reason.”

“I can think of a few perfectly good reasons.”

She frowned. “Alik was an accident.”

He glanced down at his feet. “You don’t need to make excuses for me.”

“Be happy someone is on your side.” She took a step closer.

Victor felt backed into a corner even though he stood in the middle of the room.

A feeling passed back and forth between them, a desperate longing, not anything sexual
—
it was a desire to be acknowledged, to be valued, to be surprised by someone’s capacity to love unconditionally. They’d been crucial partners during difficult times, and a bond like that could withstand years apart and mountains of resentment. If only they could let each other admit it.

“It’s time for my meditation,” he said, looking at the door.

Elena stiffened. “You’re pushing me away.”

Victor felt her disapproval like a punch in the gut. “I don’t know what you want, Elena, but I can’t deal with it right now. Someone may have murdered Granfa Jeff, and everyone is pressuring me to take my stupid pills and forget about it. I’m barely holding it together, and I haven’t had a good cry about my granfa dying because it’s all jumbled in my head, and
you’re not helping
!”

Elena’s eyes softened, but there was something cold in them as well. “I’ll go. But you’re going to need me.” She left after one more glance around.

Victor bounded to the kitchen, leaned over the sink, and spit out the softening pill. Everyone kept telling him what to do. He was tired of it. His suspicions
—
about Granfa Jeff, about Elena, and about his own decline
—
throbbed in his head.

In the living room, he looked at the herbalism book again. Ming Pearl, whoever she was, might be able to help him put his suspicions to rest, or at least help him find some black cardamom. With that name, she must live in Little Asia, a virtually lawless pocket of SeCa created by the Refugee Act. That was the place to look.

Victor Eastmore was diagnosed with mirror neuron synaptic transmission and excitatory resonance syndrome in June 1979. That was the previous, longer name of the syndrome, before the third revision of the guidelines changed everything. I was hired by the family to help Victor understand and cope with his condition, which, I might add, remains poorly understood by the biomedical community, in part because of the regulatory regime put in place after the Carmichael incident.

One of Victor’s most debilitating cognitive traps was his tendency to fixate on a mistake or misunderstanding, which then resulted in a spiral of related emotions, memories, and physical sensations. This would lead to blankness, which I interpreted as a nullification of self. What a neurotypical person might experience as a brief flash of jealousy, confusion, or anger was for Victor a limbo-like and time-suspended experience of pervasive negativity. Blankness would then come as a relief, an autonomic self-preservation mechanism to counteract self-destructive thoughts and feelings. His brain was at war with itself, and I was charged with helping keep the peace.

—Statement by Dr. Laura Tammet, the Eastmore family’s neuroscience advisor (1998)

The next morning Victor woke around five and couldn’t get back to sleep. He paced his apartment, waiting for dawn, as Granfa Jeff’s face appeared everywhere he looked: on a blank wall, in the toilet bowl, in a shadow cast by the leaves of a small potted ficus next to his living room window. His chest felt empty and sore at the same time. The one person who’d believed in Victor was gone and had left only confusion in his wake.

The herb book sat on his couch, opened to the inscription written by Ming Pearl, someone who must have known Granfa Jeff and who’d probably seen him more recently than Victor had. He couldn’t stand the questions ringing in his head, most of all,
Where’s my cure
?

Around eight a.m. Victor sent Karine and Circe a message saying he’d be at the university reading about gene expression and that he’d be at work later. As he drove up the spiraling ramp of the Trans-Bayshore Rail Depot parking structure, he reminded himself that he wasn’t investigating a murder. He was simply going to find an herbal replacement for Personil
—
no, he’d have to call it a complement if he were asked
—
from someone who happened to have met his granfa near the end of his life. An innocent excursion.

Victor parked in a stall on the tenth floor and walked to the elevator. A tidy grid of warehouses, commercial buildings, and apartments surrounded the parking structure on three sides. On the fourth, toward the bay, dozens of rail lines threaded through a labyrinthine complex of train platforms, food markets, restaurants, and shops. Victor rode the elevator down and made his way to the westbound platform.

Trade had propelled Oakland & Bayshore into its preeminent position as the largest city in Semiautonomous California. The city was also the nation’s capital and main port. Two million souls were packed into 150 square kilometers running up and down the flatlands and hills on the east side of the bay. Many transit lines converged at the rail depot, making for a daily crush of passengers, but in public spaces civility was valued as much as efficiency, and no one looked twice at Victor.

The train was not the sleek European-built model he’d expected, but an older one, perhaps transferred from the Southeastern Confederacy many decades ago and continually refurbished. Its metal looked rusted and almost worn through in places. He pressed himself into the last compartment. The train shuddered to life.

As the train mounted the Bayshore Bridge, a concrete causeway that funneled passengers to and from San Francisco’s decrepit waterfront, Victor peered out the window at the Golden Gate Strait. A few yachts were headed out to sea through a narrow water gap in the steep hills along the coast. Barely seaworthy fishing boats with an early morning catch were entering the bay and tacking south toward the San Francisco peninsula, while larger cargo ships headed for Oakland & Bayshore’s port. Two steamers were being towed to immigrant processing centers on Angel Island, named for those unfortunate enough to arrive in poor health and who had never made it to the mainland. The island gave Victor the creeps, but he supposed that it represented salvation to the refugees fleeing conflict and poisoned lands in Asia.

On the San Francisco–Little Asia peninsula, wrecked hilltop buildings served as a reminder of the earthquake that had struck the growing town just two decades after the 1829 Gold Rush. A few crumbling mansions perched on the city’s hills, overlooking refugee slums.

Inside the train, odors of sweat, filth, and urine forced Victor to breathe through his mouth. Unions had successfully barred civilian road traffic on the bridge, reserving adjacent automobile lanes for emergency vehicles and freight trucks, so anyone who wanted to travel to the peninsula had to take the train. Proper paperwork was only necessary for the return journey. Victor guessed the passengers around him included aid workers, tradesmen, and more than a few unsavory lowlifes peddling drugs to communities that couldn’t afford the harm they caused.

Victor wondered if Karine and Circe would direct the company’s resources to places like Little Asia or if they would focus only on the well-heeled patients in Oakland & Bayshore. He knew so little about the company. His curiosity, long slumbering, seemed to be awakening, and the world around him, which had seemed so orderly and understandable, was becoming something he no longer recognized.

The train pulled into the terminal, which was infested with beggars, buskers, harvesters of trash
—
both human and their rodent brethren
—
and corrupt police looking to shake down unsuspecting travelers. Victor dodged several pickpockets and hustlers, never slackening his quick pace, and entered SeCa’s stinking underbelly, a human wilderness ravaged by refugee gangs and private security forces.

A tall, wooden, red-and-gold gate marked the entrance to Little Asia, which in reality could be said to occupy the entire San Francisco peninsula. Victor passed beneath the gate. Signs protruded from buildings, blasting swaths of neon. Doors hanging from their hinges beckoned people into shops where thrill-seeking tourists often disappeared
—
so said the dark Mesh. Sometimes they reappeared missing a kidney, a lung, or other essential organs, if non–Mesh-licensed sources of news could be trusted. Victor was having trouble believing anything these days and doubted himself most of all.

Victor recalled the worst rumors about Little Asia, wondering if they could be true. Feral cats and wild dogs were said to be scarce because they were trapped and fed into bioreactors, harvested for their animal protein. It was cheaper to pick ingredients off the streets than to synthesize them. The practice was illegal but supposedly permitted to flourish. It helped maintain a steady supply of black-market narcotics. Hawkers called out the names of stimulants, tailored euphorics, and other drugs. One man, his face a mass of sagging wrinkles and a wispy beard, repeated the word “aura” again and again, stringing the words in an unbroken wail.

Victor pushed through the crowds, at one point stepping off the sidewalk into a filthy gutter to avoid people yelling in front of a salesman’s kiosk. He found a shop that sold spices but was hustled out the door as soon as he mentioned mirror resonance syndrome. When he found another shop with many dried herbs but no black cardamom, he explained that he was looking for Ming Pearl. The owner, a young Chinese man around Victor’s age, nodded gravely, and said, “Front Street, left two blocks. Make sure you bring motas. MeshPay no good here.”