The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

“Why can’t they hire real writers?”

  “After we answer that we can work on world peace, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Now find me a mystery to drive episodes five through eight. And look, my offer to you to do the voiceover—at least at the top of each episode—is still on the table.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Okay—but think about the mystery to drive episodes five through eight first.”

  “It’s out there, Trish. Trust me. The Junction has secrets—big, complicated secrets.”

  “Good, find them, ’cause we need them. Look, I gotta go.”

  “Heavy date?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Lock up for me. And keep the keys.” She tossed them to him, her smile delightfully malicious. Then she was gone. Decker thought about doing the voiceover for the show, then forgot about it, but he didn’t forget to take the computer or keep her keys.

  19

  THE END OF A LONG DAY

  LEONARD HARRISON REREAD TODAY’S TESTIMONY OF THE terrorist suspect being held in Dubai, then tried to cross-reference it with the other jihadi’s interrogation from Pakistan. They still didn’t jibe. One of them was telling the truth—but which one? They had a week to figure that out. Two new suspects had been taken in for interrogation. With any luck, one of them would confirm which of the two threats was real.

  And now this Decker Roberts fire in Toronto.

  His National Security Agency had spent too much time and effort on Decker Roberts for this all to go south now. And there were still too fuckin’ many things they didn’t understand about the whole world of synaesthetes—especially about their inner circle—important things that the NSA needed to understand before they became of interest to other… interests. Enemy interests.

  Leonard Harrison pulled the file on an early test run he’d made on Decker using a North Carolina law firm and an insurance deposition. The guy had nailed it—called a truth a truth.

  He put the file next to the two terrorists’ testimonies, thought for a moment, then called in Yslan Hicks.

  Her file on synaesthetes was still considered by many a joke just as the Mad Mullah file had been the brunt of many a joke until nineteen men and four airliners changed the world.

  After an abrupt knock, Yslan entered his office.

  Harrison pointed at a plane ticket and a sealed letter on his desk.

  She picked them up.

  “You’re going back to Leavenworth. The letter’s a reintroduction—it’s required to see our friend there.” He noticed her hand tremble a little. “It’s time to go see him again. That’s first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re missing pieces—whole hunks of basic knowledge. And our time’s running out.”

  A wave of darkness crossed her beautiful features, “Is the clock ticking on one of those interrogations?”

  “Again, Agent Hicks, that’s not your purview. Decker Roberts is your concern, and he might soon be on the move.”

  “He travels at least four times a year without fail. And he just got home, so he won’t be leaving for a while.”

  “May not be true this time.”

  “Why?”

  “His house burnt to the ground last night.”

  “What?”

  “The police claim it’s arson.”

  “Someone tried to kill Roberts?”

  “I think so.”

  “But he escaped?”

  “Through the steam tunnel in his basement.”

  Yslan thought about that. So whoever set the fire didn’t know about the steam tunnels. They must have been new to the Junction. “Any idea who, sir?”

  “No. And when they find that Roberts is still alive they may try again.”

  Yslan threw her hands up in the air. “All this work and now this?”

  “Is it possible that someone on the oversight committee knows about our special synaesthetes?”

  Yslan hesitated.

  “Well, there better not be!”

  “I said before I don’t think they know.”

  “Well, fucking find out.” He indicated the plane ticket in her hand. “Go.”

  “And if they try to kill Decker Roberts again?”

  “You won’t let that happen, will you, Special Agent Hicks? I’ll authorize as many men as you need to keep him safe. How many do you want?”

  “We have four up there already. He’s not a pro, so I assume four will be enough.”

  “Take six—and you makes seven. Keep him safe, Yslan. The NSA needs his services.”

  He pointed to the airline ticket and said, “That first. We need to know more—we need to understand how there can be synaesthetes like Roberts out there. If he even is a synaesthete.” He threw his arms up in the air as if he wanted to pull something down to him and turned away from her.

  “We’re in the dark about way too much of this whole thing. We need to know how guys like Roberts work.” He turned back to her. “Set your guys on Roberts.”

  She waited for a moment longer to see if there were more orders forthcoming. Evidently there weren’t, so she turned on her heel and headed toward the door, offering Leonard another enticing view. At the door she turned back to him, almost catching his eyes watching her backside. “I’ll report from Leavenworth.”

  “You sure as hell will.”

  She closed his office door. Harrison turned to his window and stared at his view of Capitol Hill and thought of the approaching danger and his need of the services of a man like Decker Roberts.

  Decker turned his head in profile to the class and pointed a slender finger to the side of his head, “There is a part of the brain stem attached to your nose. It is the storage depot of memory. Everything that’s ever happened to you or you did to someone else is catalogued there. Every thought, every feeling, every smell, taste, touch and everything you’ve ever seen or heard—music itself—is there. It’s the brain’s flight recorder—its black box. It is, in a very real sense, you.” He listened to himself as he introduced the fundamental methods of how to recall memories, but as so many times before he was thinking of a fourteen-month span in his own life from which he had no memories whatsoever except the feeling of something metal in his right hand and a coldness surrounding him.

  He completed his explanation of keying—his own method for accessing a specific memory from the black box. “Acting is about selecting, not pretending. Everything you need to act is stored in that black box. Your job is to figure out how to access your memory centre—accurately—then be able to repeat that mental voyage with ever-increasing speed so that your acting partner says her line and you instantly respond with your line fully backed with the emotional reality of your memory. It’s like playing a Chopin piece. No one jumps in and just plays that complicated music. You go at the hard parts slowly, working out the fingering. Then gradually you increase the speed until the notes blend and become music. It’s the same with acting. You slowly work out the synapsal links to the exact memory that you need for the emotion of the scene, and then you increase the speed of access until it simply becomes you feeling what you need to feel when the text requires that you feel it.”

  He turned once again in profile to the class and pointed at the upper part of his brain stem. And even as he repeated the salient points of his method he knew that anatomically what he said was not strictly true—that a memory is most likely a reformulation drawn from many different aspects of the event or place or person being recalled. He knew that anatomically there wasn’t a single place in the brain in which memories are stored. Memories recalled are not replications of time and place, etc. but are strands of responses to the remembered thing. But these facts—these truths—don’t help actors. Despite the fact that Decker’s black box simile was false, it still worked for actors in accessing past memories. False but it works, he thought. An untruth leading to a truth. A lie leading to something valid. A sugar pill that cures a fatal disease.

  For a moment he th
ought he had been speaking aloud, but when he looked at the class it became clear that he had just paused—and they were still waiting for his next idea. “Good,” he said, “let’s give it a try.” He sensed them pulling back in their seats. He smiled. He’d been here many times with many different groups of actors. “Write on a fresh page the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to say to someone, then on the flip side write the most joyous thing that has ever been said to you. These lines are called drone notes. Every scene has one. It’s the moment of most intense pleasure or pain that you as a character experience. You have to use your heads to find them, then use your hearts and keying to open them up so that they come to life inside you and reinforce your sense of being present. Drone notes. Big-time actor tool—professionals only, please.”

  He looked at the attentive faces and said, “Scot, you start.”

  Scot had studied with Decker for just over two years, and his work was extraordinary. This was talent that walked and talked—and the industry had discovered this gift of the gods.

  The exercise took the better part of two hours. At the end of it he turned on the cameras and called for the first scene.

  Eleven scenes and four and a half hours later Decker assigned the scenes for the next class and closed up shop.

  Once the actors were gone it occurred to him that this was his only home now. Could be worse, much worse.

  He stood in front of the large window facing Adelaide Street. The rain/sleet continued its pit-pat rhythm. He reached out and touched the cold pane. Home, he thought—my home.

  He heard the notes of a piano sonata from across the street. He’d never heard anyone playing before, but then again he was seldom in the studio this late at night. A phrase popped unbidden into his head: “If I sense the trees, I enter the forest.”

  Years ago he’d stumbled upon a fabulous singer/songwriter named Paul Scheel in a tacky piano bar on the Lower East Side. The first time he heard Paul play the song he called “Ordinary Day”—about a man who completes his normal day, goes home, and then ends his life—Decker knew he was in the presence of something special. He tracked Mr. Scheel from club to club, from Far Rockaway to Queens to New Jersey and back to Manhattan. Some nights Paul would play “Ordinary Day”—many nights he didn’t. Finally after a midnight set Decker approached Paul as he was packing up. “Oh, my one and only real fan,” Paul said before Decker could speak. “Are you stalking me or something?” Then Paul laughed. Up close Mr. Scheel was more impressive aurally than visually. “You want an autograph?”

  “No. But thanks.” Decker suddenly felt a wee bit nauseous.

  “Then what?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not my question.”

  “So what’s your question?”

  “Some nights you play “Ordinary Day” and some nights you don’t.”

  “That’s a statement, not a question.”

  “Why? That’s my question. Why do you play it some nights and not others?”

  Paul lit a cigarette and looked at Decker.

  “You like that song?”

  “I wouldn’t say like is the right word.”

  “So what do you want to know about it?”

  “I told you, I want to know why you play it some nights and not others.”

  Paul put his hands on the piano keys. For the first time Decker noticed his fingers were badly crippled. “I have four songs whose endings have a chord progression that could lead me easily to ‘Ordinary Day.’” He played the simple progression. Then he played it again. “So I play that progression at the end of each of those four songs, and if I can sense the trees, I enter the forest.”

  “And the forest is where ‘Ordinary Day’ lives?”

  “Like a black mamba in a tree—ready to fall on me once I enter the woods.”

  For an instant Decker saw deep red welts on Mr. Scheel’s crippled hands—what he now knew was the price—then they were gone and Paul Scheel was heading toward the door of the bar. He turned back and said, “I see your forest and you see mine—but that’s it. I’m not hidden from you or you from me. So now I have to move on. Never really liked New York anyways.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Someplace where you can’t find me. Your forest will infect mine, or mine yours. Only one of us can live in the same place—don’t you know that?”

  Decker sat over that last thought. Across the way a truck was backing up to a loading dock. Decker wondered what was being shipped at this hour of the night. Then he heard a loud knocking on the studio door.

  It was clearly not a student wanting to deliver an application for class. This was a demand to open. Then came a clearer demand; “Mr. Roberts, open the door, police.”

  Decker felt the beard on his face. The cell phone was on the couch. He pocketed it and went to the door. He didn’t know exactly why the police would be at his studio, but he assumed it was about the fire. After all, he had made no effort to hide his identity as the owner of the house in the Junction and as the artistic director of the Professional Actors Lab. His secret identity was reserved for his truth-telling business.

  He opened the door. Garreth presented his ID and Decker stepped aside to let him into the studio.

  “Nice,” Garreth said.

  “It’s open—way better than teaching in a church basement.”

  Garreth made a sound that could have been affirmative or negative—it was hard to tell which.

  “Can I help you, Officer? I assume this is about my house.”

  “Why would you assume that?”

  Decker did his best not to roll his eyes. “My house burned down yesterday.”

  “And where were you before that happened?”

  “I’ve already answered…”

  “Indulge me.”

  “In the States.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Business.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Why should I have to prove anything?”

  “You have your ticket handy?”

  Decker stepped back. “Should I get a lawyer?”

  “Why would you need a lawyer?”

  “Because it sounds like you’re accusing me of something.”

  “Is there something I should accuse you of, Mr. Roberts?”

  Decker let out a long breath. “No! My fucking house burned down. If I’m anything I’m a victim here.”

  “Of what? A victim of what?”

  “Of bad wiring or I don’t know what—whatever burns down houses. I’m a victim of that.”

  “Of arson.”

  “What?”

  “Arson. Your house was torched, Mr. Roberts.”

  “What?”

  “Torched. This wasn’t an electrical fire. Or a gas leak that found a spark. It wasn’t a carbonated beverage shorting out a wall socket.”

  “That can cause a fire?”

  “In an old house with copper wiring, yes.”

  “It wasn’t any of that, so what was it?”

  “Incendiary devices set inside your front and back doorways, Mr. Roberts.”

  Decker took a few steps back into his studio. Incendiary devices! Fuck—bombs!

  “How did you manage to get out, Mr. Roberts?”

  “I wrapped myself in wet towels and ran down the stairs, then out through the steam tunnel exit in the basement.”

  Garreth looked at him.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t increase the value on your insurance lately, did you? Remember, we can check.”

  “No.” Then it dawned on Decker what this man thought. “You’ve been watching too many movies, Officer. No one in their right mind would set fire to their house while they’re still in it. It’s like that crap in novels where the least likely person is the one who did it.” Decker put on a bit of a swagger and said, “Hey, it’s got to be the blind, Alzheimer quadriplegic whose wife beats him on a daily basis—hey, it’s g
ot to be him. Wake up, Officer. I almost burned to death in my own house.”

  Garreth ignored Decker’s rant. “Have you got a passport, Mr. Roberts?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Is it here with you? Because it’s not in your safety-deposit box.”

  “How did you…?”

  “Banks like police officers. Now where is your passport?”

  “It was in my house.”

  “Really? Did you use it to cross into the United States? Officer Randall at the scene of the crime reported that you said you’d just returned from the States—as you reiterated to me just now. And as you are no doubt aware, our American neighbours don’t allow anyone into their fine country without a passport—something about terrorists, I believe.”

  “Okay. That’s enough. I don’t have to answer any of these stupid questions. Now get out of my face.”

  “Mr. Roberts…”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No but…”

  “Then I don’t think you have any right in my place of work, which is now my home as well. And yes, to save you the trouble, Stafford Street is zoned for work/living spaces. This isn’t the nineteen-sixties; we have rights now.”

  “Indeed we do.”

  “Get out.”

  “Here’s my card.” He almost added “Don’t think of leaving town,” then stopped himself and asked instead, “Have we met before?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been in trouble with the law, Mr. Roberts?”

  Decker closed the door in Garreth’s face then shouted, “No!”

  Decker did his best to wash in the bathroom sink, then unfolded the couch and stretched out. He heard the hum of the city all around him. He placed the cell phone beside him in case Seth called in the night—much of Western Canada was three hours behind Toronto time. His last thought before falling asleep was to charge the phone in the morning.

  20

  HENRY-CLAY

  HENRY-CLAY WATCHED MR. MACMILLAN’S VIDEO OF DECKER’S house collapse then glanced at the small newspaper photo on page twenty-two of the very dead Ratio-Man. He nodded and tossed the paper aside.

  Henry-Clay smiled. He knew that he was never special. He had no secret talent, he wasn’t blessed with particularly good looks or a powerful physique, he wasn’t even, if truth be known, all that bright—he just fucking worked harder than anyone else around him. He thought of films like Wall Street and Boiler Room as instructional videos.