The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

  He hated comic book heroes. He thought it unfair that superheroes won because they had superpowers. The bad guys just used their brains and worked hard—like him. They, as far as he could see, were emblematic of the American work ethic. They were rightly American heroes making something from nothing using only their brains and willpower. The superheroes might have represented the values of Jupiter or Neptune or something but certainly not of this earthly plane.

  Henry-Clay had spent his undergraduate years at all-fun Tulane in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where he made the first of his great business decisions and quite a name for himself on campus—in his mind the daily double. He kept book for the Green Wave’s basketball team. As a natural adjunct to his bookmaking he also arranged for point shaving in the games. As a short guy it was his only access to the basketball court. He also thought of it as one of the few things at Tulane that the black and white students did together—fix basketball games, that is. When—after Tulane inexplicably blew a ten-point lead in the final minute and a half of a game against Ole Miss—it became obvious to anyone with eyes that something was up, Henry-Clay exiled himself to Europe, where he completed his degree and latched on to an idea he knew would eventually have to take hold in America—the morning-after pill.

  Then he spotted an obvious business opportunity in the good ol’ religious U.S. of A. So upon his return to this side of the pond he set up the first of what would quickly become twenty-seven abortion clinics in the Midwest.

  The returns were good, and he was about to double his empire when some nut shot one of his doctors. Then another, and Henry-Clay decided to return to a safer line of work—pharmaceuticals. A pill for every problem—and new problems to unearth for which pills would be needed.

  He knew he’d have to get a graduate degree to bust into the pill racket, but he had no real aptitude for math or sciences. He returned to his alma mater and bulled his way through math and physics, but chemistry actually required some finesse—which Henry-Clay knew he lacked. But he kept at it and eventually at age thirty-two he earned an MS in chemistry from the University of Chicago, although writing and publishing his thesis almost killed him. But his real work at that fine institution of higher learning was recruiting. All around him were some of the brightest young scientists in the world, and few if any had twenty dollars to their name or any business savvy—of which he had an abundance.

  Two failed marriages and several millions of dollars over the dam and with the help of the Ratio-Man he found himself sitting on a gold mine. Until Ratio-Man found his way to the Junction and told Decker about the drug ratio—that left him no choice but to have both dealt with.

  No choice. Fuckin’ no choice.

  It made him feel helpless—like a damned kid. Infantilized.

  That’s what the idiot shrink he saw exactly one time called him.

  “You’ve been infantilized, Mr. Yolles,” he’d said.

  “Explain that to me, Doc.”

  “It’s one of the few conditions that are passed down from one generation to the next.”

  “What are you talking about? Down syndrome and dozens of other dysfunctions are passed from one generation to the next.”

  “Yes, but those are genetic.”

  “And this infantilizing is passed down from one generation to the next how, if not by genetics?”

  “By behaviour. It’s passed down by behaviour.”

  “What? My parents taught me to be this infantilized person?”

  “No doubt without meaning to, but, yes, they taught you. What did your father do? Was he in business?”

  “No. He didn’t do much of anything to the best of my knowledge. He got up each morning and went for a swim in the university pool, but I don’t ever recall him working.”

  “And he’s dead now?”

  “A long time back.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Just sort of—of old age.”

  “How old was he when he died of old age?”

  “Not that old.”

  “How old, Mr. Yolles?”

  “In his forties.”

  “Too young to die of old age, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that.”

  “Do you remember much of him?”

  Henry-Clay looked away.

  The shrink tried another tack. “Did he ever share his memories of his youth?”

  “Yeah. As a young kid he remembered going to New York and catching the boat to Europe for the opera season. He talked about that a lot, and opera—he loved opera.”

  “And what did his father do?”

  “He was a builder. Owned the biggest building in this city.”

  “Owned—as in past tense?”

  “Yeah, he lost it.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “The market crash in twenty-nine—you may recall the stock market had a wee bit of a problem that year.”

  “Yes, but most people didn’t lose their buildings in the crash.”

  Henry-Clay took a deep breath. “My grandfather was one of five brothers. They all invested together. When the market crashed in twenty-nine my grandfather and his youngest brother convinced the other three brothers that now was the time to get seriously into the market and make a killing. They all mortgaged everything they owned—their homes and their buildings—and put it all into the market. They lost it—everything. Everything.” Henry-Clay stood up suddenly and walked to the window of the psychiatrist’s office. “See that building across the Ohio River?”

  The psychiatrist nodded. “The Treloar Building?”

  “Didn’t used to be called that when my grandfather and his brothers owned it. The day after they lost everything my grandfather held hands with his youngest brother and they jumped off that building. Apparently that was the family agreement. Their insurance money was split evenly between the five families, but—and here’s an interesting but—the families of the brothers who didn’t jump never talked to the families of the two brothers who did. Never talked to my father. I never even met my cousins except in passing, and even then the tension was so great we had nothing to say to one another.”

  “So you see?”

  “Their suicide infantilized my father, who then infantilized me? Is that what you’re saying?” Henry-Clay turned and picked up his coat. “Thanks for the advice, Doc, but by the by—I’m the richest of all the progeny of those five morons and I could buy that building back if I wanted to, and the rest of the buildings on that street.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Because I’ve been infantilized—don’t ya know?”

  Henry-Clay banished the memory then turned to his computer—time to find a new freak. Using the algorithm that Ratio-Man had given Nasty Natasha and yesterday’s date he entered his web master codes for the synaesthetes website and got a shock. Decker Roberts was lurking in the chat room.

  21

  A VISIT TO LEAVENWORTH

  LEAVENWORTH FEDERAL PENITENTIARY LOOKS LIKE A TURN-of-the-century high school gone crazy on steroids. Its front capitals and portals are formal and could have been those of a post office in a large city, but they weren’t—they were the gates to a world of pain and suffering.

  Yslan had only been in a federal penitentiary once before, and had promised herself that she wouldn’t return, but here she was at Harrison’s request—showing her letter of introduction and her ID to a fully armed guard who sat behind a bulletproof plexiglass screen.

  The guard shoved a metal tray through the hole in the glass and Yslan deposited her wallet, ID, cell phone, her dad’s ring and her watch. Then she emptied her pockets of change and added those to the rest. She walked through a metal detector and the thing buzzed. She held up her arms and the guard took his time establishing that her metal belt buckle was the culprit.

  Forty-five minutes later she was sitting in an interview room that smelled vaguely of fear and vomit covered by antibacterial soap, waiting for Martin Armistaad, a convicted fraudster an
d mathematical genius who had predicted too many market highs and lows for it to be an accident.

  Before his arrest he was number one on her NSA special synaesthetes file. Now he was an aging, balding man with a greying beard.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Armistaad,” Yslan began.

  The man scratched a red patch on his flabby left forearm and nodded.

  “I know you didn’t have to agree to this meeting, sir.” That last made her feel queasy—more Clarice Starling crap. She reminded herself that Hannibal Lecter was a fiction, then stopped herself from such sophistry. The man sitting in front of her was as otherworldly as Thomas Harris’ nightmare creation—not a cannibal but someone with uncanny abilities. And both she and Mr. Armistaad knew it.

  For a moment Yslan wished that she’d never been introduced to the idea, let alone the reality of synaesthetes—that the ground beneath her feet was the solid terra firma that she thought it was before she met the likes of Martin Armistaad. That the world was a real place with real rules. Not the shifting miasma of Martin Armistaad—and Decker Roberts.

  She looked up and felt as if the creep somehow read her thoughts. “How’s the food in this joint?” she said, unable to stop herself from poking out at the man across from her.

  “The dining lounge leaves something to want but if you’re bad enough you get room service, so…” He allowed his voice to trail off as he raised his eyes to hers. Pretty eyes, he thought, then he corrected himself; Hider’s eyes. It almost made him laugh.

  “You don’t know, do you, Special Agent Hicks?”

  “Know what, Mr. Armistaad?”

  He winked at her then said, “Nothing that I could tell you. Something you’ll just have to figure out for yourself.” Before she could respond he added, “So what do you say we start again. You pretend that I didn’t have to agree to this meeting—I believe we were on that lie, weren’t we.”

  Yslan took a breath and spat out, “Thanks for taking this meeting, Mr. Armistaad.”

  He opened his arms and then laced his fingers behind his head, shimmied down in his chair so that his pelvis was aimed more directly at her face. “What can I tell you, Ms. Hicks? My social calendar is very full but I was able to sneak it in—as I did the last time we met.” He smiled, the antecedent for his “it” obvious to both of them. He was missing a front tooth.

  “Thank you for seeing me again.”

  “Not a problem.” More scratching.

  “In your early essays you state that all your thinking is purely mathematical. That there are natural cycles in the world and that they relate to the figure eight point six, which is generated from the mathematical reality of pi.”

  He stared at her. No more scratching.

  “Do you still believe that, sir?” Still too much Clarice fucking Starling!

  “Yes… and no, Ms. Hicks. I think I believe, as you are learning, that there is something else at work in the universe. Something that Hamlet sensed when he saw the ghost of his murdered father, something that great artists see—something other.”

  “I see.”

  “Not yet you don’t.” He smiled again then added, “Do you?”

  “No. Not personally. No I don’t see ‘something other.’”

  “That’s why you are here, isn’t it, Ms. Hicks. You could read my writing online—everything I’ve written is in the public domain. You see, I’m not allowed to charge for anything I write in here—am I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’m not.” This last was very hard. Angry. “So I ask again, Ms. Hicks, be honest with yourself and answer my question: why exactly are you here?”

  “To understand what I can about how you worked.”

  His surprisingly thin tongue licked his lips, leaving a glistening sheen as he whispered, “Liar.”

  “Tell me how it works, Mr. Armistaad.”

  “Fine,” he said. Then just as she thought he wasn’t going to speak again he added, “I closed my eyes, Ms. Hicks, and the world aligned—the other world.”

  The rest of the interview was unhelpful. He tinkered with her—enticed her—then threw cold water on any idea that she thought she’d understood. But he had confirmed something that she and Harrison needed confirmed—that there might well be an “other” out there.

  And Yslan was convinced that somehow her special synaesthetes were the access—the path—to that “other.”

  22

  A NOOSE TIGHTENS

  DECKER EXITED THE SUBWAY AND HEADED TO THE BANK OF pay phones. He knew where almost every remaining pay phone in the city was located because Eddie preferred that he used them whenever possible.

  He called Visa for the third time to see if they had finally figured out what the problem was with his card.

  Six prompts later he was informed by an electronic voice that his account at the RBC had been emptied of all its funds and as a result his last payment check had bounced so his card had been cancelled.

  After swearing at the electronic voice and trying in vain to find a real person to talk to he flashed his Metropass and got back on the subway and headed first north then west—to Eddie’s place.

  The city was doing its rain/sleet dance. No doubt the local news would try to pacify the public by mentioning that although our weather was bad, Buffalo was getting slammed. But who cared? He pulled up the collar on his coat and bent into the wind. The city was quickly being transformed from its usual overpractical unhandsomeness to just plain old ugly—and fast.

  “But Eddie, you said they were secure.”

  “Did I say that? Doesn’t sound like me.” Eddie moved the old doll from its perch on the counter to the table.

  “Eddie!”

  “Well, it’s simply not possible to make anything one hundred percent safe any longer.”

  “So someone could hack into my bank account?”

  “With ease, I’m afraid. The only thing that keeps any individual bank account safe is how many individual bank accounts there are. But if the hacker has you personally in his sights—then forget it. He’s got you—game finito—kill la musica.”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do to keep your money secure?”

  “Not a damned thing.”

  “Then how’s all that razzle-dazzle with blind websites and digital drop boxes and closed chat rooms keeping my identity safe—or secure, for that matter. You were the one who said I needed all that stuff.”

  “You do need all that ‘stuff’—your truth-telling business could get dangerous, which is why I bounce your data through fifty different servers in thirty-five different countries and of late I’ve looked into using quantum cryptography.” Seeing Decker’s quizzical look he explained, “It uses photons on dedicated dark fiber remains of laid cable.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me, Eddie?”

  “Soon it will be in every home—but not yet.”

  “Would that keep information safe?”

  Eddie thought for a moment then said, “Not for long. Any lock one human being can invent another can pick. It’s just a natural process.”

  “So there’s no real way to keep my identity safe?”

  “Well there is—sort of.”

  “How?”

  “By balancing things.”

  “What?”

  “I keep your identity safe by balancing things.”

  “Balancing things between what and what?”

  “Between simple and complicated, Decker. Your identity is digitally kept safe by being too simple for the smart guys to consider but too complicated for the uninitiated to figure out—balance.”

  Decker looked at him. Something was different about Eddie, or was it about this conversation? He didn’t know. Finally he said, “So balance keeps my identity private and secure?”

  “And safe.”

  “Unlike the money in my bank account, which is neither and hence is gone.”

  “Like dust under the bridge,” Eddie said, then added, “You’ll just have to use t
he money in your other bank accounts and the cash in your safe. Come on, Decker—we should all have such problems.” Eddie stood and hobbled over to the sink. He plunked a bit of dishwashing liquid on his hands and scrubbed.

  Decker watched Eddie’s back for a moment, then grabbed his coat, felt for his car keys, and left.

  Decker sat in his Passat across the street from the remains of his house and watched as two heavyset men secured floodlights to the tops of several metal stands. They were evidently preparing to continue their work through the night. Decker counted two cars, two trucks, and half a dozen police techs—most of whom were dressed in white protective coveralls. He knew they would shortly be going over every charred beam and fragment of what had been his life.

  An hour later, from the pay phone at the corner of Bloor and Runnymede, he called into the answering service that Eddie had set up for him. He punched in his thirteen-digit PIN number—s-e-t-h-m-y-o-n-l-y-s-o-n. There was a single new message.

  A tense male voice identified himself as representing the TD Bank, and that “as of this moment the bank is canceling your line of credit and calling in your two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan. Any failure on your part to respond to this phone call within twenty-four hours could result in criminal proceedings.” He then went on to list a series of numbers for Decker to call.

  Decker stepped out of the glass phone enclosure.

  “You all right?”

  Decker turned. The drunk who stood outside the liquor store and usually banged a tambourine as he massacred “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” had just asked him if he was all right.

  I must look as awful as I feel, Decker thought as he put coins into the man’s battered ball cap on the sidewalk between his feet.

  “Any requests?” the man asked.

  Decker resisted saying, Can you sing “Far, Far Away,” thought of Seth and instead asked, “Do you know anything from Tea for the Tillerman?”