Placebo

by Steven James

  I turn to Xavier. “So you’re going to get B-roll of the mountains?”

  He pats his video camera. “I’ll get footage of everything around here. By the time you’re done with your little study, we’ll be ready to edit this puppy. Get it to the network. Actually meet a production deadline for once.”

  “Great.” I grab the gear we’ll need and join Charlene in the car while Xavier closes up the van.

  He takes off, and a moment after I start the engine, Charlene turns to me. “I saw you with that family in the parking lot. You really are good with kids, Jevin.”

  “Thank you.”

  “With everyone.”

  “Thanks.”

  A pause. “It’s been a long time since you were onstage. Do you ever think you might—”

  “No.”

  Another slight pause. “Okay.” As I’m backing out of the parking spot, she reaches over and gently places her hand on my knee. Despite myself, I feel a tingle of intimacy at her touch.

  I stop the car. Let it idle.

  “We need to get used to this,” she says softly.

  “Yes.”

  On the video we sent to the LRC, we’d portrayed ourselves as being deeply in love, and from what I could tell, it was one of the main reasons we’d been chosen for the study. Consequently, I know that if we’re going to pull this off, I can’t let on that her touch makes me uncomfortable in any way.

  But yet it does, because in the last few weeks my feelings for her have strayed beyond the kind a co-worker can comfortably have for someone if they’re going to remain simply co-workers. Part of me knows that, yes, it’s been long enough since Rachel’s death that I should be able to move on and start dating again, but another part of me isn’t so sure that I’m over the loss in the ways I should be before delving into another serious relationship.

  Charlene removes her hand. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking it’s not going to be easy being a couple.”

  “I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. If you’re not up to—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  A moment passes. The car is still idling. “We were good on stage together.” Her voice is gentle, like a brushstroke on canvas. It’s an enigmatic statement and I do my best not to read too much into it.

  She’s just trying to tell you that you’re a good actor, that together the two of you can pull this off.

  “Yes.”

  “So then,” she takes a small breath, “I’m not sure how to put this, but . . . you’re going to be alright being my lover for the next three days?”

  Pretending to be your lover. Pretending.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.” I have a sense that there’s another layer of meaning beneath my words, a layer that I may not have intended, and a wash of slightly uncomfortable silence fills the car. Rachel’s ghost seems to drift between us. Linger beside my shoulder.

  Finally, I pull out of the parking lot and Charlene nods. “Good.” But by then I’ve nearly forgotten what words of mine she’s responding to.

  I merge onto the highway and head toward the Lawson Research Center. Despite the meta-analysis Fionna ran on the test results, I’m still convinced that Dr. William Tanbyrn and his team are faking it somehow, because if they’re not, if their findings are true, I don’t have any idea how to wrap my mind around the implications.

  Hollow Bones

  From an early age Riah Colette knew that she was different.

  She would go through the motion of hugs and good-night kisses with her mom and dad and little sister, Katie, but rather than enjoying the gestures, she would only notice how firm the hug was or how wet the kiss.

  Her parents and sister spoke about love, said that they loved each other, that they loved her—but she couldn’t understand what they meant, not in the sense of feeling something nice or meaningful toward someone else, which seemed to be the case with them.

  Riah wasn’t blind to the cues of affection that her dad gave her—the smiles and winks and the way he would position himself just so as he brushed against her when he passed her in the hallway.

  He preferred her over Katie. That became especially clear by the way he began to treat her when she turned thirteen and started to look more like a young woman than a little girl.

  And then there were the nighttime visits.

  Katie wasn’t old enough yet to earn that kind of special attention from their father, and at first Riah thought she should probably feel bad about it—that there was some sort of shame or injustice in her dad’s favoritism toward her, but since he was her father, she had the sense that it was a good thing to please him. And so, the times in her bedroom late at night when he would knock on her door and she would tell him to come in, well, after a while they stopped feeling so awkward and became a way of making him happy.

  Besides, he almost always gave her a present the next morning—a hairbrush, a pair of earrings, new underwear—as long as she promised not to tell her mother or Katie about the visits and as long as she kept the gifts a secret. And she had agreed.

  One time when Riah was fourteen and she and Katie were in the woods near the stream on the edge of their property, Katie found a bird with a broken wing and brought it to her. Katie, who was nine at the time, was clearly troubled by the prospect of abandoning the bird in the forest. “We have to help it. If we leave it out here, it might die.”

  Of course it’ll die, Riah thought. All things die. So will you. Someday.

  But she didn’t say any of that.

  “Here,” she said instead, “let me see it.”

  Riah had always been good at pretending that she cared about animals, and she could tell that her sister had no idea what was about to happen.

  Katie handed Riah the bird, and she was struck by how light it was, as if its bones were made of air or the rest of its body was made entirely of feathers.

  The lightness of the bird made it seem like what was about to happen would not be all that significant—after all, since the bird was so small, so tiny and young and helpless, not much would be different in the world after it was dead. Not really.

  Riah didn’t know what kind of bird it was, but it had blue feathers with streaks of gray and an orangish-yellowish beak. She could see the concern in Katie’s face but felt only curiosity herself: What will it be like to watch this bird die?

  It didn’t struggle, didn’t try to move its broken wing or attempt to squirm from her hand.

  “What are you going to do?” Katie asked.

  “I’m going to help it.”

  A few seconds passed, then Katie said quietly, “How?”

  Cradling the bird in one hand, Riah placed her other hand gently on top of its head.

  “Let’s take it back to the house,” Katie offered. “Then we can see if Mommy can help.”

  “It’s okay.” Riah closed her fingers around the bird’s fragile head.

  “What are you doing?” Now a sense of urgency. A nervousness—

  Riah twisted her hand.

  One quick and abrupt movement. The bird let out a tiny chirp that was cut off in the middle, but that was all. It didn’t quiver, just became still.

  “No!” Katie screamed.

  That easy. That quick. Limp and still.

  Riah lifted her hand to see what the bird looked like and saw that it didn’t look very different at all. Just lay so, so amazingly still.

  She knew that sometimes nerves cause animals to twitch after they’re dead, that chickens will run around even after their heads had been chopped off. In fact, she’d seen something like that firsthand herself when she was about Katie’s age. But that wasn’t with a chicken. “I killed a snake,” her dad had told her. “But it’s not dead yet. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Riah couldn’t understand how the snake could be killed but not yet dead, but her dad led her past the line of tomatoes in the garden behind their house, where she saw a shovel with a dirty red stain lying beside the body of a three-foot-
long black snake. The head lay a couple feet away and was motionless, but the snake’s body was curling and writhing furiously on the grass.

  Killed, but not yet dead.

  After a moment Riah had gone over and picked it up, then held it while it continued to squirm and spasm, held it while its severed neck leaked warm, sticky blood onto her hands, held it until it stopped moving for good.

  And now, as she cradled the dead bird in her hand, she thought of that writhing, dead snake.

  But the bird didn’t squirm at all.

  So still.

  Katie, who was crying loudly, had almost made it back to the house. Riah wasn’t surprised by her sister’s reaction. Honestly, she wasn’t surprised by her own, either. It’d been so easy to stop that bird’s life, to quiet it into death, and now she realized that it didn’t either bother her or please her, gave her no sense of accomplishment or of loss, no satisfaction or disappointment.

  She knew that she should probably feel something, that normal girls would feel bad or guilty or sad in some way, or get upset and start crying like Katie had, who was now calling for their mother.

  Katie, a normal girl.

  Riah, the freak.

  She laid the bird gently on the ground in a patch of dandelions near the stream, hoping that the gesture would somehow make her feel more reverent or more considerate of the bird’s death, but all she really felt was a sense of curiosity at the angle of the bird’s head and how it looked so odd twisted that way.

  She tilted her own head and studied her reflection in the water, tried to see what it would’ve looked like if her head was bent in the same way as the dead bird’s, but she couldn’t quite get the angle right.

  Back at the house, her mother had yelled at her, but her father had laughed it off. “Same as a racehorse,” he said in his wet, thick-tongued way. “Those things break a leg, the owners put ’em down right there on the track. Doesn’t matter who’s in the stands—women, kids, makes no difference at all, they make everyone watch.”

  Riah’s mother gave him a scolding look. “Hank, that’s enough.”

  He gazed at his youngest daughter, who was still sniffling, and his tone became firm: “Day comes when you gotta learn that everything dies. Just a matter of time. Better to learn that now than later.”

  He went back to his corn bread and ham with a renewed passion.

  “You don’t need to upset Katie and you don’t need to encourage the older one,” Riah’s mom said.

  It’d been right around the time when Riah turned thirteen and her dad began visiting her bedroom that her mother had stopped referring to her by name and just started calling her “the older one.”

  Her dad grunted at the comment from his wife. “I’m just saying, killing a crippled bird isn’t cruel. Put it out of its misery. It’s the caring thing to do.”

  “Caring? Really?” There was unusual defiance in her mother’s tone.

  “Yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Really.”

  Riah watched Katie stifle back a tear. The girls had learned long ago not to argue with their father. He didn’t take it very well—especially after he’d been drinking, as he had already this afternoon.

  Her mother’s leg got a little jittery beneath the table. “And is that what you’d want us to do to you? Snap your neck if you broke your leg? Would that be the caring thing to do?”

  “Don’t challenge me, woman.” Each word had become a hammer blow. “Don’t make me put you in your place.”

  Riah noticed a tiny tremor in her mother’s hands and saw her throat tighten. She knew that on those nights when her father visited her bedroom, he often stopped by his own room first. She didn’t know exactly what he did to her mother on those nights, but she knew enough. There was usually yelling and crashing and sometimes sobbing. Her mother typically wore more makeup than usual the next day. But even then, the bruises were still visible.

  I wonder how long it takes her to put all that makeup on.

  Now her mother seemed to compose herself and looked at her husband harshly, but she did not challenge him. Instead she rose stiffly, picked up her plate, and headed to the kitchen. “Come on, Katie,” she said. “Help me with the dishes.”

  Katie quickly left the table and hurried to the kitchen, and then, when Riah and her father were alone, he gave her a wink and put his hand on hers.

  Your mother yelled at you and he defended you. You should thank him. That’s what you’re supposed to do when someone helps you.

  She smiled back at him, playing the role of a girl who cared about her father.

  “Alright,” she said, her voice soft, meant only for him. “After they’re all asleep.”

  She knew he would understand.

  “That’s my girl.” He stabbed his fork into his ham. “That’s my good little girl.”

  ———

  Now, twenty years later, Riah headed across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge toward RixoTray Pharmaceuticals’ corporate headquarters in central Philadelphia.

  She knew that the CEO, Dr. Cyrus Arlington, was working late. It wasn’t quite 8:30, and Riah hadn’t told him she would be swinging by. He’d been in London, and she hadn’t seen him since he’d left two days ago. Tonight she wanted to see how he would respond to the surprise.

  That’s what she did sometimes. Tested people to see how they would react to the unexpected.

  To observe what normal people do.

  To learn what it would be like to be normal.

  It might have been her curiosity into human nature that was one of the reasons she’d become a doctor in neurophysiology: to understand how people think, communicate, feel—and maybe to begin to understand more of what it means to be human.

  That was before joining Cyrus’s neurophysiology research team to work on the neural decoding studies, before seducing him to try and discover more about the meaning of love.

  Over the years she’d realized that if there was one thing she wanted, it was to find out what it would feel like to care about somebody or something the way other people did—where family members or friends mattered, where your heart might get warmed or anxious or broken. What would that be like, to feel more than just curiosity about someone else’s joy or pain?

  Riah paid the toll and guided her car toward the sixty-story mirrored-glass skyscraper that was rivaled only by the Comcast building for prominence in the Philadelphia skyline. Tonight she had a question to ask Cyrus, a proposal, as it were.

  A way she had thought up over the last few weeks to find out more about the limits and depths of true love.

  Serenity

  5:28 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time

  I’m anxious to get to the center, and it’s not far, only ten minutes or so.

  As we pass through Pine Lake, I realize it’s exactly like I remember it: the Cascade Mountains rising majestically from the horizon with Mt. Hood dominating the range, creating a picturesque backdrop to the town that the demise of logging in the region had turned into a virtual ghost town.

  I haven’t been here in over fifteen years, but when I was a boy, I used to gaze at Mt. Hood every day on my way to school to see if it had snow on it. Usually there were a few days a year when the snow on the very top would disappear. One year, though, when I was in sixth grade, the snow stayed up there all summer.

  Tapping the brakes, I slow down and guide the car off the highway and onto the winding mountain road that leads toward the Lawson Research Center’s entrance.

  I can still hear my dad talking about how the year-round snow cover was going to help the tourists stay longer. Good for the economy, the town. Good for the ski shop he ran.

  That was two months before my mom left us and moved to Seattle, where I only saw her twice before she remarried and left for France with her new husband.

  As a kid I thought that no matter how much the snow might’ve helped the local economy, it didn’t help us, and in my childhood naïveté, I blamed the snow for what happened to my family, as if it were some sort of convo
luted cause and effect. It’s funny what you associate together when you’re young, things that aren’t related at all but that seem to be somehow interconnected.

  I’d dabbled in magic before that, but that was the year I started taking it seriously. In the hope of somehow making my mother reappear.

  “Jevin?” Charlene’s voice draws me back to the moment. “Are you okay?”

  “Sorry, I was . . . Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “I was saying, we’re almost there. The turnoff is in a quarter mile.”

  “Right.” A stillness passes between us. For some reason I feel the need to explain myself. “I was just remembering the last time I was here. As a kid.”

  “Good memories or bad ones?”

  “A little of both.”

  I make the turn.

  The newly paved access road winds through the towering pines of the old-growth forest. A large sign sits at the entrance, painted with both the name of the center and a symbol of a rather rotund woman in the lotus position with lines that make me think of electric sparks emanating from her head. I can’t decide if it looks more like she’s morphing into a porcupine or getting electrocuted while meditating.

  We park and grab our bags from the back of the car.

  Charlene closes the trunk. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this study, Jevin, wondering if it might be legit. I mean, this isn’t the first research in mind-to-mind communication.”

  We haven’t been on the same page with this project since I first proposed that we debunk the research. “True. But that’s over the last seventy years, and with every year that passes, you have a more discernible decline effect: with more stringent testing procedures, the results are less and less conclus—”

  “Conclusive, yes, I know, but this one was replicated nearly four dozen times with hundreds of subjects. I just don’t see how they might have faked it.”