by Michael Helm
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.
Irina had first appeared at the house on a hot July day. From the kitchen window Denise saw Shoad’s brown pickup with its rust-red hood coming down the driveway and felt the pricks of fear in the soles of her feet. She was already calling Stefan’s cell number when she saw through the windshield that it was a woman. She didn’t finish the call. The woman stopped and stepped out of the truck. She was thin and foreign-looking, and right away Denise could see what had happened. She knows it came all at once because, later, when Irina told her the story of having come as a bride, Denise felt she already knew it, though until she’d seen the woman standing there by the truck, looking toward the house, the thought of Shoad buying a foreign bride was too cruel for her to have imagined. There was no car in the driveway so Irina must have wondered whether anyone was home. Then she leaned back into the truck and took something from the seat—it was a cake, Denise could see—and she started toward the house.
Denise met her at the door. They introduced themselves. Irina presented the cake.
“I am the wife of Clayton.”
Denise didn’t know what to say. The pause seemed to have trapped them both.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he got married.” She’d forgotten even to take the cake, but she took it now, and invited Irina in, and felt that in doing so she was making a passage for ill fate to enter her home.
She learned that Irina had been living there for almost three weeks, that this was the first time she’d left Shoad’s place, and she’d done so when he was out on his tractor, and that she couldn’t stay long or he’d realize she was gone.
Denise nodded. The women understood each other.
“I remember about the truck, how it was. When I go back, I put it same way.”
Otherwise she would have to explain the truck, Denise thought, just as she herself would have to explain the cake. Stefan would question her, give her that look. He pretended Shoad was other than he was. She would transfer the cake to her own plate and wash the other and return it to Irina before she left.
“Do you know my husband, Clayton?”
Denise took in the woman’s cheap wedding ring. It looked like it was made of a bent tin spoon handle and a bit of chipped quartz.
“We’ve known him. My husband, Stefan, and I know him, yes, but we don’t see him much. We don’t see him often.”
“Will you tell me about him?”
“About Stefan?”
“No. Will you tell me about Clayton.”
“Oh.” Denise said they didn’t know him well. “I don’t think he has many friends.”
Irina looked at her, deciding.
“My English is not so good, and there is no time. Tell me what you know, please.”
—
Irina went missing on a Tuesday in mid-October. They had arranged to meet at the house at ten in the morning, their usual time, when Stefan was at work and Shoad drove his truck to town for his weekly food and supplies run. If she followed the creek Irina could walk to the Dahls’ place in about forty minutes, which left her forty-five minutes before she had to return. Over the summer and fall Denise and Irina spent their time together every Tuesday talking about gardening, their husbands, the wide world, Jesus Christ, how hope could be maintained in these, the end times.
Only once did Irina appear other than on a Tuesday morning, though Stefan believed she had not appeared, that Denise had imagined the appearance, fooled by the night itself and the wind rushing through it. On the Sunday before she vanished, the Sunday after what would come to be their last Tuesday meeting, the last time Denise and Irina ever spoke to each other, Denise and Stefan were reading by the fireplace in their small living room when all at once the fire stood to its feet upon a sudden, powerful updraft, and Denise, who had been reading one of her favourite old British mystery books, found herself looking with horror at the flames that were growing, twisting, not unlike a burning woman turning at the waist, and then not a woman at all, but still something other than flames, and she heard the huge sucking of wind, as if the whole house were rising into a vortex. Then the house went dark and the wind was gone, and the fire sat down in its usual place.
Stefan went for the flashlights and candles—outages were common, they had their routines—but when he returned to the living room he found that Denise hadn’t moved. She was supposed to be calling the power company. He asked what she was doing, and she said, “There’s something wrong out there.” He went outside to collect firewood to heat the house through the night, and she followed and walked around the property in the dark, without a flashlight, and for no reason that she’d ever been able to explain. The storm, if that’s what it had been, had passed as suddenly as it had arrived. The sky was full of stars. There was still a strong wind up in the trees but she knew it was being pulled behind the storm, and promised nothing in itself. She was halfway around the house when she noticed the serpent—that’s what she called it, the word was there with the thing itself—and began walking toward it. When she got to within about forty yards she stopped. The power line running eastward was down and thrashing in the field, shooting sparks, arcing, striking the ground with its mouth, and Denise had the urge to continue walking and to pick it up, to correct it somehow, an act that she knew should kill her, and so she saw it, too, as a serpent to take up in test of her faith, thinking this even though she didn’t agree with such practices, such readings of every last word of Scripture as if the Lord Himself had no poetry in Him when every book of both testaments was filled with it.
For a long time she stood watching the snake in its wheeling as if tormented by the stars, she and the snake both, feeling the pull to go closer. The line popped its speech and she was in the throat of it when she saw Irina, or the shape of her, standing, as the line strobed this way and that. Though never fully illuminated, even as the sparks flew upon her, the figure was there in the field as surely as was Denise herself, bent in on itself somehow, as if, impossibly, one side of it, from shoulder to waist, was crouching or broken. It looked like the figure in the fireplace, the burning woman. Denise had this impression in seconds, for when the line showered light on Irina again, she seemed only half there, floating, and then upon the next showering was gone, and Denise knew that she had been addressed.
When he got the story out of her Stefan tried to convince her that the vision was a mistake in perception. Denise said that whatever it was, it had not been an ordinary moment and shouldn’t be explained as such. She refused to talk about it further.
At four thirty that morning, Stefan asleep, she got out of bed with the intention of driving to Shoad’s farm, but Stefan had hidden the car keys. She put a log on the fire and returned to the cold bedroom. The firelight coming through the doorway made shadow planes like great silent herds moving to near extinction. He spoke without opening his eyes. “If something has happened to your friend, I don’t want you going, and if it hasn’t there’s no need.” When the flashing lights came into their room she was still awake. The power trucks had turned off the road. Men in hard hats were making their way across the field.
So you see he understood, did Stefan. It wasn�
��t hard to attribute the understanding. Shoad had bought the farm eight years ago, and Stefan had visited him a few times. Denise had met him twice then, and though they didn’t have much conversation she sensed there was something troubling about the way he kept to himself. There was something inside him he didn’t want others to see. Then he went to Europe and came back many months later, much changed, changed to his true self. He looked different, spoke differently, the halt and lurch of it. It was as if he’d fallen into an accent. Stefan tried to explain it away but she put into evidence the day Shoad entered the feed store where he bought seeds and supplies, and behind the counter the old woman was watching a little TV she had propped on a stool. On the midday news a mass grave was being exhumed—the woman, who’d told her husband, who’d told the man at the butcher counter standing next to Denise, didn’t say where the grave was—and Shoad stared fixed as if he’d never seen images on-screen before. Then he looked at the woman and she was “horror-struck,” her word, because the set of Shoad’s face was wrong, as if he were having some kind of vision or seizure. She would never forget that face, the woman had said, not for as long as she lived.
Stefan understood, yes, but his understanding wasn’t the same as a certain kind of knowledge, the kind Denise gained that night and carried with her into the next days. The days themselves lost meaning. Tuesday was not Tuesday, the day Irina was expected, because Denise no longer expected her. She seemed in fact to be somehow outside of expectation, of a world of approaching events, as if resigned to them, even though in any other time in her life this feeling, a red certainty was how she described it, would have been fear, the most acute form of expectation. This was a terrible time, of heavy hours. Though he didn’t say as much, Stefan wanted her to pretend the knowledge away. He himself had a limited ability to pretend, and he used it. But the knowledge Denise had been stricken with was bodily, and she knew it could not be expelled and that trying to do so would be not just folly but a turning away from her friend and from one of God’s mysteries and so she held the red certainty, became its keeper. Nothing, not the doctor Stefan called in, not the medications, not the Scripture he read to her of Naomi’s bitter sufferings relieved (Stefan not hearing how it only confirmed her as a chosen subject of the Lord), nothing could uncolour the knowledge.
