by Steven James
Gentle-looking, both of them, with an easy, measured confidence. No swagger. No posturing. Medium build. Wiry. Clean-cut. Soft-spoken.
If it wasn’t for the scar snaking across Darren’s left cheek, Riah wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.
She noticed that Cyrus was keeping his distance from them, and though it didn’t entirely surprise her, she did find it informative.
She greeted each twin with a half-hug. Their friendship allowed for this, made it seem like the natural greeting. After all, when you’ve inserted nanowire electrodes up someone’s artery and into his brain, it tends to engender a certain degree of trust.
Deep-brain stimulation used to be highly invasive and involved dozens or even hundreds of electrodes implanted in the brain through small burr holes drilled in the skull.
Not anymore.
Now, tiny polymer nanowire electrodes less than six hundred nanometers wide are used. Since their width is far less than that of a red blood cell, they can be inserted through an artery in the arm and guided through the vasculature up and into the brain, where they’re used to deliver electric signals to stimulate the neurons in the hardest-to-reach parts of the brain.
The process had been around since 2006, but Riah had made advances that allowed for electric stimulation of the Wernicke’s area, the temporal lobe’s language-recognition center. She’d implanted the electrodes in the brains of the twins three weeks ago.
After a brief “How are you doing?” conversation back and forth, Cyrus cleared his throat slightly and offered Riah a smile that wasn’t really a smile. “Riah, really. I think it would be best if you waited outside the room, gave us just a few minutes alone.”
The words were condescending, but her feelings weren’t hurt, though she had the sense that given the social context, they should have been.
Daniel and Darren watched Cyrus quietly. Before Riah could reply to him, Darren spoke up: “We trust Riah. She can stay. It’s time we brought her in on the broader nature of the project.”
“No.” Cyrus shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s—”
“Nonnegotiable,” Daniel said firmly. He gestured toward his brother, who was still staring steadily at Cyrus. “We’ve been talking about it, my brother and I, and we were going to tell you tonight. That’s one of the reasons we requested you come. She needs to know about Kabul or we don’t move forward. It’s time to integrate the findings from Oregon. It’s the only way to make things work. As my brother said, we trust her.”
Riah watched Cyrus. Having the twins contravene what you’d said like that would cause most people to squirm or backpedal or acquiesce immediately, but she could see a storm of resistance on Cyrus’s face, a narrowing of his dark eyes. If he had been afraid before, he didn’t appear to be so now.
It struck her that for all of his talk of trusting her, he hadn’t been all that forthcoming but had been keeping things from her—that the twins were back in Pennsylvania, the nature of this visit tonight, why he wanted her to step into the hallway even though she was the head researcher on the electrical brain stimulation program.
Had he lied to her? Perhaps not lies, technically, but not the truth either.
As she thought about that, she realized that all the men she’d been with over the years, even her father when she was a little girl, had deceived her at some point, and eventually—some sooner than others—betrayed her in the most intimate ways possible.
A thought came to her, an epiphany about human nature that was both disquieting but also quite possibly the truth: Betrayal is a facet of love.
Could it be?
She waited for Cyrus to respond.
Could betrayal be as natural to our species as attraction is?
And another thought, almost poetic in its simplicity: If familiarity breeds contempt, then what kind of dark children does intimacy breed?
She was considering this when Cyrus replied to Daniel, “I’ll have to clear it with Williamson.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll be in bed by now. I’d be waking her up.”
“Yes.” Daniel reached into his pocket, produced his Droid. “Would you like to use my phone or yours?”
Testing Love
Tuesday, October 27
I wake up, tense, my heart clenched tight in my chest.
The residue of my dreams still circles through me. Dark and restless and unnerving.
I check my watch.
5:02 a.m.
An hour earlier than I’d planned on getting up, but I know I won’t be able to fall asleep again.
I stare at the ceiling, rub my eyes, try to forget the places my sleep took me, but the harder I try to put the images out of my mind, the clearer they become.
So I tell myself again that it was just a dream.
Only a dream.
I’m the one driving the minivan, Rachel sits beside me, and we’re talking about something like the bills or getting the boys to their T-ball practice or something—it’s not really clear, and of course that’s the way dreams work—and then suddenly I’m not on the highway but veering off the road. Rachel gasps, “Where are you—”
I drive through the parking lot.
“Jev—”
Toward the pier.
“—Stop! You’re going to—”
We fly off the pier, hit the water. The impact is jarring, and almost immediately Rachel is shouting and the boys are crying loudly, scared, terrified.
I’m the one at the wheel.
I’m the one killing my family.
We begin to sink rapidly, more rapidly than I would’ve thought.
It’s a dream.
No it’s not.
It’s—
The twins are screaming and Rachel is climbing back to free them from their car seats, but I’m sitting motionless, watching the water rise inside the van. I realize that for some reason we’re tilting backward and so the boys will drown first. I notice this in my dream—notice it, but do nothing.
The murky water outside the window swallows sunlight as we sink, but not enough to enshroud us completely in darkness. I can still see, I can still—
“Help me, Daddy!” It’s Andrew, but I don’t move, I just tell him it’s going to be alright, that everything is going to be alright. Then Rachel is beside me again in the front—I don’t know how, but she is; time and space have shifted and brought her here to my side because we are still in the dream.
The boys are strapped in the car seats, helpless and about to die.
Rachel doesn’t threaten me or question me or accuse me but holds me close and tells me that she loves me. I say nothing, just turn around and watch the water rise over the terrified faces of our two sons.
Only then do I respond.
Only after it is too late do I scramble back, grab a breath, duck beneath the water that’s pouring into the vehicle, and try to save them.
Only then.
When it is too late.
And that’s when I awaken, at the same point I so often awaken when I have the dream—staring into the open, lifeless eyes of my sons with Rachel by my side. Sometimes, like tonight, she’s holding my hand. Other times she’s already dead, drifting motionless and bloated beside me.
Some days I wish I wouldn’t wake up at all but would join my family in whatever realm of eternity they ended up in, good or bad, heaven or hell, as long as we could be together again.
But so far I haven’t been that lucky.
I take a deep breath, sit up on the couch.
Exhale slowly.
The dream is fading away, but it leaves a dark thought-trail behind as it does, one that roots around inside of me and doesn’t want to let me go.
Charlene, who’d studied religion in college, once told me that in Acts 14 Paul mentioned four things that serve as evidence of God’s existence—rain, crops, food, and joy.
Joy as evidence of God. In a world as hurting and pain-filled as ours, where death always wins in the end . . . what else beside
s a divine gift of joy divvied out to the hurting could explain how people can laugh at all?
Unfortunately, God wasn’t seeming all too real to me over the past thirteen months. Not if the evidence of his love was joy.
I hear something in the bedroom, the soft, comfortable sound of Charlene turning over in her sleep. I don’t want to wake her, so as quietly as I can I find my shoes and jacket and slip out the door to the porch.
It’s still dark, but in the porch light I can tell that the emerging day is drenched in early morning mist and a sad, drizzling rain.
From growing up in the area, I know it’s a typical Pacific Northwest morning, the kind of weather people in the rest of the country might use as an excuse to stay indoors, settle down with a cup of tea and a good book. But in Oregon and Washington, rain is a way of life and mist is welcome, and being damp means feeling at home. The sayings I grew up with:
“Oregonians don’t tan, they rust.”
“Enjoy Oregon’s favorite water sport. Running.”
“I saw an unidentified flying object today—the sun.”
In order to stretch my legs and clear my head, I start on a brisk walk along the three-mile trail that loops around the main part of the campus. The decorative streetlights beside the path glow languidly through the haze. It’s as if I’ve stepped into a nineteenth-century London novel.
What happened last night in the Faraday cage seems to have occurred in its own distant dreamworld somewhere. Time does that to memories—unfurls them at different speeds and in ways you wouldn’t expect, putting more distance between events than the hours should allow.
Or sometimes it swallows the space between experiences and time becomes compacted, seems not to have passed at all.
But now it’s as if last night’s altercation happened so far in the past that the Lawson Research Center should’ve changed dramatically since then.
However, after a few minutes I see its exterior lights through the trees and it looks like it should: rustic and rugged, sedately awaiting our visit for the test later this morning.
I think of the attacker, of the blade swiping through the air toward Charlene, meeting her arm, slicing into her. I hope she’ll let me take her to the hospital later today, or at least to a clinic in Pine Lake, but based on her response when I tried to do that last night, I’m not optimistic. In the meantime, we seemed to be on the same page as far as going on with the test.
The reason we came to the center in the first place.
A test so simple it might actually be hard to debunk.
First, find a couple who are in love with each other. That’s a prerequisite, at least for this specific line of research. Isolate one of the lovers in the Faraday cage, position the other in a room somewhere else on campus. Or, in this case, 120 feet down the hall.
The person in the chamber is the receiver, the other is the sender.
Next, set up equipment to record physiological changes in the receiver, and at random intervals show the sender the video of the person in the chamber, instructing him to think loving thoughts, give focused positive attention to her. If the receiver experiences physiological changes while he does that—and only while he does—it would be evidence of some type of nonlocal, unconscious psychic connection.
And that’s exactly what Dr. Tanbyrn and his team claimed their tests showed.
According to them, in almost every instance, within seconds of the sender thinking focused, loving, positive thoughts, the receiver’s heart rate, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response change—almost imperceptibly, yes, but enough to be measured. And when the sender stops focusing his thoughts and emotions on his partner, her physiological condition returns to a baseline state.
That was the claim.
But how was that even possible? How could that happen?
Entanglement on a quantum level? That seemed to be Tanbyrn’s take on it. But even if that were the case, why would the person in the chamber be affected by only that one person’s thoughts?
In other words, what about all the other people who care about her and might be thinking about her at the same time as the test’s sender? After all, if the connection is truly nonlocal, it wouldn’t matter where the other people were, how far away they might be.
So why would their positive (or maybe negative) thoughts fail to affect the person in the Faraday cage while just her lover’s thoughts did? Couldn’t other people love her just as much? What about a mother or a sister or a child? Couldn’t their love be just as impactful? Just as resonant?
And how could you ever hope to design a test that would account for those other people’s thoughts? Tell everyone who cares about the woman not to think about her at all during the test? But even if that were possible, how could you rule out the possibility that they hadn’t done so anyway?
After all, one of the best ways to get someone to think about something is to tell him not to.
And of course, how much of a connection, how much love, was needed for any of this to work? What measurements could you ever come up with to test the depths of true love?
Really, as inexplicable as the results were, there were so many variables and confounds that at best it would only be possible to identify a relationship that was highly correlational, not one that was causal.
But still, even that much would be hard to explain naturally.
And so, as I walk the trail toward the river on the east side of the campus, that’s what I try to think of a way to do.
Pathology
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
8:16 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Riah lay awake, alone, in bed.
She had a lot to think about after her visit to the R&D facility last night.
When she and Cyrus left, he’d refused to come over to her apartment and had gone home instead to the arms of his wife.
Riah wondered what explanation he’d given Helen for his unexpected arrival—especially since there weren’t any other flights that left for Atlanta last night after the one he’d told her he was going to take out of town—but Cyrus was an experienced liar and Riah was confident he’d found a way to be convincing.
Now as she repositioned her head on her pillow and stared at the wall, it occurred to her that she was disappointed—not that he hadn’t come over to sleep with her, but because his absence hampered her study about secrets and intimacy and love.
Actually, it might tell you something about love after all.
She rose from bed, gathered the toys she’d purchased for her “sleepover” with him. Perhaps she would need them later, it was hard to tell. After all, their relationship had reached a crossroads; she was aware of that, but she was still open to seeing what the future might bring, might teach her.
Carefully, she put everything away—the chocolate sauce in the cupboard, the handcuffs and other slightly more exotic, harder-to-obtain items in the closet.
She guessed that Cyrus had gone home rather than come to her place because the twins had pressed him to tell her about the research, and sleeping with his wife would’ve been his way of punishing his mistress for tagging along and putting him in that uncomfortable situation.
But fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—Riah didn’t feel punished. As much as she wanted to, she didn’t know how to feel heartbroken or thankful or excited or sad or any of those other emotions normal people have.
No.
No shame. No guilt. No anxiety about the consequences of her choices.
And of course all of this troubled her because she knew what it meant; what her lack of a conscience and lack of empathy and lack of concern for other people, in addition to her remorselessness for her actions—she knew what all of this was indicative of.
A condition that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders described under the category “personality disorders.”
Admittedly, by themselves those traits might not have been enough to convince Riah of her condition, but when
you took into account high intelligence and charismatic charm, the diagnosis was pretty clear.
Riah Colette was a psychopath.
Not a murderer, no.
But a psychopath nonetheless.
True, many people with her disorder were violent, but not all of them were. Some were lawyers, others were used car salesmen, businessmen, politicians, athletes. Usually psychopaths took up professions in which narcissism, self-promotion, and deception served as assets. Often, of course, that meant careers with high levels of competition.
All competition requires putting aside a certain degree of empathy and understanding toward those you’re trying to beat, so it made sense that people who lack a sense of moral accountability and compassion would be attracted to it. To compete is, essentially, to participate in an act of self-promotion. After all, how can you love, serve, and honor someone above yourself while you’re wholeheartedly trying to defeat him?
Attempting to assure someone else’s failure requires setting aside concern for his well-being, and to treat anyone that way requires a certain degree of psychopathology.
Once, Riah had been invited to a volleyball game between two Christian colleges. The fans on each side cheered when their team did well, but they also cheered when the girls on the other team made a mistake that put their own team ahead. Curious about this, Riah had asked the man who’d invited her, “Don’t Christians believe in supporting each other?”
“Of course.”
“So that doesn’t apply when a girl is wearing a different color jersey?”
She’d meant no offense by the question, but he’d studied her in a subtly judgmental way. “It’s just a game.”
“Aren’t you all part of God’s family?”
“God is our Father, so all believers are brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes.”
“Then why would you cheer when your sister misses the ball or fails to make a successful hit? Doesn’t she feel bad enough already after making a mistake in front of hundreds of people? Why would you celebrate her failure or add to her embarrassment or shame under any circumstance at all?”
