The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

  Harrison was not pleased, to say the least, when he heard the news. “We need a serious talk when this is over—and it better be over soon.”

  “Can I ask about the two interrogations?”

  “They are progressing. Three new people have been brought in. I’m a bit more hopeful we’ll get some corroboration on which one of these thugs is telling the truth.”

  “Then you don’t need Decker Roberts.”

  “Nonsense! We may not need him for this, but we’ll need him in the future. He’s your responsibility, Hicks. Find him—and fast.” Harrison ordered the New York and New Jersey offices to join the search. “Now this Princeton snot, Emerson Remi, he’s a former of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Nothing’s private here, Hicks. Nothing. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” She looked at Mr. T and Ted Knight and reaffirmed, “Yes, sir.”

  “So get this creep to bury the story. Promise him whatever you have to, do him against a tree if that’s what he likes, but I don’t want to see this on the evening news. Got it?”

  Yslan did the best she could to hold her temper, then organized her troops. Within the hour she received news of Decker’s airplane ticket to Atlanta—and the whereabouts of Emerson’s car.

  When she summoned Emerson, he claimed that Decker had taken the car at gunpoint. “I wasn’t going to die for a 2004 Benz. I mean, you know me better than that, I hope.”

  The image of doing something to Emerson against a tree that included two large spikes and a mouth gag entered her head, but she cast it aside and ordered Emerson to stay at hand.

  “Sure, anything to help the constabulary.”

  Why Princeton guys imitated the very worst of the British was beyond Yslan.

  She established that Decker never got on the plane to Atlanta.

  In fact, the plane had been delayed when it was discovered that a ticket had been purchased but no one had taken the seat. Every bag had been off-loaded and each passenger had been forced to identify his or her luggage. When it was established that every bag had a passenger, the bags were reloaded and the flight took off—just short of three hours late.

  Yslan didn’t care about any of that. She wanted to find Decker Roberts. It was her job to find Decker Roberts. And after two days of debriefing him she was completely certain that she and Harrison were right: there was an entire world out there that they didn’t understand, and Decker Roberts was part of and maybe their point of access to that other world.

  She pulled Ted Knight and Mr. T back into the safe house’s kitchen and quickly went through the list of things they’d found when they picked up Decker. The list included his three USB keys, his computer, his tiny digital recorder, his wallet, cell phone, and key ring—all of which Yslan had given back to Decker as evidence of good faith, back when she thought she understood him, believed they were on the same team. She threw aside the itemized list, then said, “Give me that again.” She read through it quickly a second time and swore, “Fuck. Money.”

  “What?” Mr. T asked.

  “How much money was in his wallet?”

  “Just over a thousand dollars,” Ted Knight said. “It’s in there,” he said, pointing at a kitchen utensil drawer.

  Yslan’s thoughts were miles away.

  “He had two credit cards as well.”

  “The Visa was cancelled. What was the other card?” Yslan demanded.

  “MNBA, MasterCard,” Ted Knight said.

  Yslan nodded. “That’s how we found out about the airline ticket. I’m pretty sure he used it just to throw us off the scent. He won’t use it for anything else.” She turned away and said, “Money.”

  “What, boss?”

  “Money. He must have a way of getting money.”

  “Bank accounts?”

  “Only if he’s stupid—and he’s not stupid.” Yslan picked up her notes.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “When he first got to New York, where’d he go?” Yslan demanded.

  “Patchin Place, then the Upper West Side, then East Fifty-eighth Street, and then back to Patchin Place.”

  “Did we photograph his key ring?”

  “Sure.”

  Yslan grabbed the photo and swore, “Fuck me rigid.” Before either of the men could comment on her extraordinary statement, Yslan was punching Decker’s previous New York City addresses into Google Earth. “Son of a bitch! We thought he was going to sightsee his old homes.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “I don’t think so,” Yslan said, looking at the photo of the keys again. “Get us a car and tell our Manhattan guys to stake out both places and every post office box near either of Roberts’ addresses. Then have them check if the front doors and the mail box keys have been changed at Decker’s former apartments on West Sixty-ninth and East Fifty-eighth.”

  Before they were halfway to Manhattan, Yslan received the bad news. Neither the front doors or the mail box keys at either of Decker Roberts’ New York City addresses had been changed for years. Yslan lowered her window and affixed a red flashing light to the car’s roof. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  41

  A COLD DAY IN NEW YORK

  DECKER TURNED UP THE COLLAR ON HIS COAT—LIKE BOB Dylan in that wonderful old album cover, he thought, except that there was no tousle-haired woman on his arm or song in his heart. Alone—again. Then he felt the cell phone in his pocket and tears came to his eyes and the word “lost” flew into his mind and gouged deep valleys there. He entered the Canal Street subway stop and went down to the third level where there are no trains—just a lot of bodies trying to find some warmth on a bitterly cold New York City night.

  Decker awoke to a none too gentle kick from one of New York City’s finest’s boots. “Night’s done, make like a bread truck and haul buns,” the cop said.

  Decker did his best to stretch. He’d slept on top of his laptop to keep it safe, and it had rewarded him by bruising the muscles of his side.

  In line with the other men he made his way up to the surface. A cold wind greeted him. He knew he couldn’t spend another night in the open—or in the bowels of the subway system. But hotels were out of the question. Since 9/11 you couldn’t get a hotel room without presenting a passport. He couldn’t figure out how to get around that, so he headed over to Tenth Avenue and began to walk south. Twenty blocks down he found what he was looking for. A TV show was doing a location shoot. The honey wagons were illegally parked on both sides of the street.

  Decker hitched up his pants, tried to get the $12,000 comfortable in his shorts, and stepped into TV land. A place he knew very well. TV sets always had security guards, but no one wore ID, so there was no real way for the security guards to keep outsiders out. And if you knew your way around, and Decker did, there were lots of places to hide on a location shoot.

  He realized with a shock that Don Turk was the show runner. Decker had worked for Don in the past—the distant past. The man was a genius. He was the guy who figured out how to shoot an hour-long prime time show in under a week—sometimes in less than six days. He’d saved the networks millions of dollars. They rewarded him by firing his ass—TV typical.

  He’d changed the industry single-handed and inadvertently lined Decker’s pockets. The demands of fast shooting put tremendous stress on actors to act without the input of directors—something that few people could teach actors. It was Decker’s specialty. Actors raced to Decker’s classes and to his home to get prepped for shooting.

  Decker watched the comings and goings on Tenth Avenue—the relentless self-congratulatory attitude of everyone from the lowest gaffer to the leading actors—and it sickened him. Hubris was a real thing. These folks’ overloud voices and swaggering walks tempted thunderbolts as far as Decker was concerned.

  Decker passed by the hair and makeup trailer, thought about it, then moved on. He entered the snack wagon and watched a green-haired girl put out any number of sugary treats. Decker wa
ited until the camera crew guys left, than approached the girl.

  He awoke later that night in the green-haired girl’s Queens apartment. She had been only too happy to stay at her partner’s place in return for $500 and for another $200 had given him her passwords to her laptop.

  That night he spent hours lurking at the syn website’s chat room. Watching and listening, desperate to ask “Who’s Mike?” but his desperation to know did not overcome his need for secrecy.

  As he watched the interactions in the chat room he remembered the balancing man’s weird signs: “I worked here” (wrong tense), “What’s Your Ratio!” (wrong punctuation), “Who’s Jumping Now?” (wrong everything).

  Then the weird statement “He’s using us!”

  He contacted Eddie, who “met” him in the blocked-off room.

  Where are you?

  Out.

  Swell. How was New Jersey?

  Fine.

  More verbosity!

  Decker typed in the link he’d managed to find to the image of Mike holding the two signs “I worked here” and “Who’s Jumping Now?” then typed, “Where is this, Eddie?”

  Give me a few hours. Then Eddie was no more, and Decker felt as alone and as frightened as the day he found that Seth was gone.

  42

  EMERSON REMI

  EMERSON STARED AT THE MOVING DOT ON HIS BLACKBERRY screen and thought, So, you do exist. He quickly corrected himself. No, we do exist. Not just me. Us!

  He remembered the touch of his grandmère that final night. He was six years old, a boy who seldom spoke. She’d called for him and shooed away his parents. Once the door had closed, leaving him alone with her, she reached for him. “Boy, give me your hand.” He put out his left hand and she grabbed it with surprising force. She ran her rice-paper-dry palms over his. “Look,” she said, pointing at the crazy quilt that kept the ebbing heat in her frail body. “Look at the pattern, the order.” He did. “Don’t try to see it. It’s not there to be seen, boy. It’s there to be sensed if you have the sense to sense it.” She took a deep breath then barked, “Do it, boy!” He felt like she was going to call him Pip or something, but he knew that this was no Dickensian fantasy. This was the hidden world he’d sensed from the very beginning. The other place. The place where he belonged. A world that stretched back and back in time—a world of genetics itself. His grandmère was a mistress of the other world and she was testing him. Trial by crazy quilt.

  “Find me in the quilt,” she ordered. Her voice was firm. A duchess voice. An aristocrat of nature itself, crowned by the rising of the sun and the movement of the tides.

  He stepped back a pace, away from the gentle reek of decay that was only slightly hidden beneath her rosewater perfume. He took in the literally thousands of odd-shaped and coloured pieces randomly sewn together generations ago—in the English backcountry with the standing stones in the far distance and the boulders in concentric circles radiating out from the farmhouse where old hands drew out pieces and made from nothing a history of their kind—able to be read only by their kind.

  He allowed his lashes to gently close, then saw her face on his retina. But she was young and so beautiful that for a moment he thought his heart had stopped in his chest. He opened his eyes. He pointed to the foot of the quilt.

  She nodded slowly and a smile took her face. With a single breath she released the tension from her body. And a calmness came into her voice. “Yes, boy, yes, boy…”

  Later that night he stood by his grandmère’s side as the last of her light faded, then blinked out. She left this world proud, without a whimper or a cry. For an instant right after her passing, her image on the quilt shone like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, and then it receded back into the welter from which it had come. He took the quilt from her and pulled the sheet up over her head. He did not kiss her forehead or close her eyes. He felt her burden now heavy on his young shoulders.

  He never explained to his parents what he had been doing in his grandmère’s room that night—and they had never asked. The most he ever heard about it was the odd whisper: “He’s got the shine, like Ma”; “He’s the witch’s boy”; “He’s something very old”—“But he’s just a boy,”—“You ever see a boy with eyes that old?”

  And so he had begun to hide. To find a blind in which he could function—Groton then Princeton were perfect. Within the effeteness he could pass as just another snot-nose. Another know-nothing trust-fund boy.

  But he was hiding—another column of smoke within a fog—looking for his place in his grandmère’s quilt.

  And he’d sensed from the beginning that Yslan was the means—the access—to some important end. She was not the end in and of itself, although he had enjoyed his time in her bed. But she was just a means to an end. So when he’d heard of her odd posting at the NSA he began to track her, and sure enough…

  The dot on the screen began to move quickly. Emerson thought, Run, Decker Roberts, run—but you and I have a date as surely as there is a sun in the sky. Emerson felt strong. Felt the blood rushing in his veins. He wanted to stretch his neck back, open his jaws and howl like a wolf in the night. But he didn’t—what would his fellow reporters think of such behaviour? And besides, Hollywood had made such a mockery of all that.

  It was the thing that bothered him most. The easiest access to the jet stream was through sex. The pornographers accessed it without even understanding what they were doing. And people consumed it with the hunger of the starving. But this debased the jet stream. Made it common. The only other simple access to the jet stream was through faith. Twenty prostrations on the third Tuesday after the new moon and you get a gulp of the stream, but you don’t even know what it is. You name it god, or angels, but it is neither. Like the pornographers, they denigrate the greatness, make it common, debase the truly sacred, the special, the real gift of the gods.

  43

  SEMBLANT ORDER

  DECKER SAT IN THE BAR ON AVENUE A THAT HAD A WI-FI HOT spot and waited for Eddie’s response.

  The evening news was on the surprisingly old TV over the bar. An item about a local politician caught cheating on his wife was finishing its tawdry reportage. The item finally ended and a commercial break followed. The first ad was for a new razor that had three hundred and seven blades or some such nonsense and made the usual wild claims. Decker thought of Theo’s diatribe against new shaving products, then of the older man’s rant about how some of his bronchitis pills worked while others didn’t do a damned thing.

  The ad finished with a swipe, naturally, then a dark screen held for a beat—an incredibly expensive moment of prime time nothingness. Sappy strings swelled. Decker feared that Celine Dion was going to warble but the music segued to a Keb’ Mo’–like upbeat blues as a scene of a New England autumn filled the screen—in black and white. A sincere male voice announced the name of a new drug: Calatrex. “Calatrex is guaranteed to return colour to your life as surely as autumn brings colour to the trees of New England.” Naturally the black and white scene turned to glorious gazillion-pixel colour. A happy young woman wandered through the scene, her smile glorious. A second voice-over followed, this one more matter-of-fact and lawyerly, announcing in staccato rapid-fire the potential side effects of Calatrex, which included such niceties as thoughts of suicide and rectal tears. Then a sultry female voice purred, “Another fine product for a better life from your friends at Yolles Pharmaceuticals.”

  At the end of the newscast the business update included a story about the new drug.

  Calatrex, Yolles Pharmaceuticals’ new antidepressant medication, made its appearance in American drugstores earlier today. Original information claiming that the cost of producing the drug was prohibitively expensive has proved incorrect, and the drug is now priced at a very competitive price point—and the shares of Yolles Pharmaceuticals were the big winners today on the New York Stock Exchange.

  Decker noticed the guy to his left staring at him. Decker picked up his drink and said, “Do you mind?�
� To which the drinker replied with a sneer, “No one ever brings anything small into a bar around here.” Decker recognized the quote. It was from It’s a Wonderful Life. The bartender says it to Jimmy Stewart in the dream sequence when Jimmy Stewart entered the other world. Decker thought it might also be from a Tom Waits song, but wasn’t sure which one.

  Decker took his drink and moved to a table, nearer the Wi-Fi hot spot. Once there he opened his computer. “I worked here—what’s your ratio—who’s jumping now—yeah, I’m thinking about that,” he whispered as he waited for the computer to boot up. When it finally came online he quickly navigated to the syn site and then to the blocked room. No message yet from Eddie.

  He was about to turn off the computer but found himself drawn to the chat room. Once at its entrance—its portal—he found that he was holding his breath. He’d never entered the room before—only lurked. He hit the command and entered the chat room, then watched as his fingers typed, “Who is Mike?”

  That sat in the emptiness of cyberspace for less than five seconds, then image after image after image of impossible yet somehow beautiful examples of balanced junk filled the screen.

  At the corner of his screen Eddie’s icon—a naked cross-legged yogi with a huge erection smoking an equally huge joint—popped up.

  Decker exited the chat room and reentered the blocked room. Eddie’s message was clear and unambiguous. You can just see over the top of one of his signs a logo on the top of a building. It took me a while to clarify it—but it’s Yolles Pharmaceuticals in Cincinnati, Ohio. And your guy’s name is Michael Shedloski—and hope you’re sitting down Decker—follow this link.

  Decker hit the link to cincinnatipost.com/civiccrime and up came an image of Michael Shedloski, murdered in his apartment—no suspects.