Placebo

by Steven James

  Elevator—no problem.

  Stairwells and exit doors—chain them shut.

  Glenn would light the fire just outside Tanbyrn’s door. The campus was isolated enough so that the county’s volunteer fire department would never be able to arrive in time to save the building, and the center had only rudimentary fire suppression resources on-site.

  Either the flames would get Tanbyrn or the smoke billowing up the vent just outside his door would do the trick.

  Glenn could use the furniture in the waiting area along with a petroleum-based accelerant to create the thick smoke he was looking for. Yes. And since fire destroys most, if not all, forensic evidence, and fire investigations usually take weeks to complete, Glenn would have plenty of time to disappear.

  Admittedly, he wasn’t an expert at arson, but he had torched two buildings: a warehouse and a duplex. Both assignments had gone well, both resulted in the intended insurance payouts—although he did have one small regret. He hadn’t meant to kill that little girl in the apartment. He’d been told it was empty.

  Well, you know what? Live and learn.

  In this case, fire would be a good choice.

  But it’ll destroy the computer files you were looking for.

  Screw it.

  Let that be.

  Just get this done, get the money. Find the couple from last night. Take care of them. Close this thing up.

  And then move on.

  He reviewed his plan for the next couple hours: check out of the motel, grab a copy of USA Today, stop by the hardware store in Pine Lake and pick up the items he would be needing, then get back to the center by two to make sure he had enough time to get everything ready for the big show at three o’clock.

  Flocking

  12:43 p.m.

  2 hours 17 minutes until the fire

  Dr. Tanbyrn, Charlene, and I walk down the hallway of the research center. Philip trails behind us as if Tanbyrn is royalty and he’s giving him the wide berth he deserves.

  Charlene has changed shirts, and the sleeve puffs over the fresh bandage on her arm.

  No one comments on it.

  I notice that the drops of blood that were on the floor in here last night have been washed off.

  Again, I think of how Tanbyrn studied Charlene when he saw the blood on her arm earlier. I can’t imagine that he’d helped mop the floor or clean up the blood, but regardless of who did—or even whether or not Tanbyrn knew about it—somebody had seen the blood, so someone was aware that there’d been at least one wounded, bleeding person in here last night.

  Entering the room where we encountered the assailant is a bit surreal.

  I look around, searching for any sign of blood or of a struggle in here—or in the chamber whose door is now wide-open—but I don’t see any.

  Illuminated by the overhead fluorescents, the room has an entirely different feel than it did when I was directing my flashlight around here last night. A slightly built but stately African American woman stands near the desk, introduces herself as Abina; she’s apparently another research assistant. She gives us the same reverent prayer-gesture bow that Serenity offered us when we checked in last night. Charlene and I respond in kind.

  “That’s a pretty name,” Charlene tells her. “Abina. What does it mean?”

  “It’s Ghanaian. It means ‘born on Tuesday.’ I was born on a Wednesday, though. Wishful thinking on the part of my mother. She was in labor, actually, longer than she expected.”

  Charlene smiles. “Ah.”

  Abina is wearing a flowing, colorful African dress that swirls around her resplendently as she moves through the room. A myriad collection of metal bracelets jangles from her delicate wrists.

  A photograph of a shimmering mountain vista sunset glimmers on the screen of the computer that our assailant was using last night. From the view, it looks like the picture might’ve been taken from one of the LRC’s scenic overlooks.

  I wish I could get alone with the computer, look up any recently accessed files.

  Specifically those opened last evening.

  “Well.” Dr. Tanbyrn smiles. “It looks like we’re all set.”

  I decide to say goodbye to Charlene before she enters the Faraday cage, and I offer her a hug. “See you in an hour, dear.”

  She holds me. “Goodbye, honey.”

  I whisper to her as softly as I can, “If you get a chance, check the computer.”

  She nods. Kisses me on the cheek.

  Though simply for show, the terms of endearment and the show of affection impact me, and I gaze into her eyes a moment longer than I probably should.

  As I step back, Abina smiles at us.

  Well, at least we were being convincing.

  Dr. Tanbyrn still doesn’t seem sure of himself with his cane as he leads me and his impressively sideburned graduate research assistant 120 feet down the hall, to the room where I’ll be watching for Charlene’s face to appear on a video screen.

  I don’t want him to lose his balance again, so I stay close as we travel down the hall.

  We enter the room and I look for transmitting devices, video cameras, anything the researchers might be using to alter or fake their findings. While I do, I make sure that I surreptitiously turn in a full circle so that the button camera gets a 360-degree view of the room.

  Obviously, Dr. Tanbyrn could simply have programmed his computer to print out fake results—that was something we would need to check on before we went on air with our show, but for now I wanted to eliminate as many other factors as I could.

  I see the window, the reclining chair, a desk, a few office chairs, the same view as the photo in the center’s brochure.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Positioned in front of the reclining chair is a widescreen, hi-def television, blank now, but I anticipate that it’s where the video of Charlene sitting in the chamber will appear once we get started.

  Dr. Tanbyrn picks up a tablet computer from the desk and finger-scrolls across the face of it. The TV in front of me flickers on and a video starts, but it’s not Charlene in the chamber; it’s a nature special about how birds fly in flocks, simultaneously changing direction as if they have a collective consciousness.

  A collective consciousness.

  Well, that made sense, considering the doctor’s area of interest.

  Philip stands quietly by the door. “We’ve found that leaving people alone helps them to not be distracted or nervous.” He smiles, but for some reason it makes him seem less trustworthy. His teeth are just too straight, too white. A televangelist’s grin.

  I decide I’d rather keep an eye on the two of them during the test to make sure they don’t alter any of the test conditions. “Thank you, Philip. But feel free to stay. You won’t be distracting me. I assure you.” I indicate toward the two chairs near the window. “There’s plenty of room.”

  His momentary hesitation is a red flag to me, and I begin to not trust the graduate student from Berkeley.

  Dr. Tanbyrn gives Philip a glance, then tells me, “Of course, Mr. Berlin. Whatever will help you relax.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Somewhat reluctantly, Philip takes a seat, and Dr. Tanbyrn dials the Venetian blinds down so they shut out the meager light that’s seeping in from the fog-drenched day outside.

  So now, relax.

  When you’re doing water escapes, especially cold-water escapes, if you don’t learn to lower your heart rate at least a little, you end up using your oxygen too quickly, and it dramatically decreases your chances of escaping in time, so all escape artists learn to control their heart rate, at least to some degree.

  In the days when I was performing my stage show, I not only had to learn to hold my breath for up to three and a half minutes, but I had to learn to relax enough to lower my heart rate to fewer than thirty beats per minute. Now that I haven’t done it in over a year, it seems pretty impressive. Back then it was just me going to work, doing my job.

  Right now I figur
e I’ll relax as much as I can, try to stick as closely as possible to the test procedures. After all, we were making our own recordings of Charlene’s physiological state, so we would know if their test results were faked or in some way falsified.

  I lean back in the reclining chair and lay my hands across my stomach, not just so that I can relax, but so I’ll be able to tap the lap timer button on my stopwatch every time Charlene’s image appears. This way we’ll have an accurate record of the instances when her image was being transmitted onto the screen, and we’ll be able to compare it to changes that might appear in the printed record of her physiological states.

  Dr. Tanbyrn dims the lights and takes a seat while I watch the birds flock across the screen in unison and wait for the video of Charlene to appear.

  The Placebo Effect

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and Riah had spent most of the day so far reviewing the journal articles written by Dr. Tanbyrn and his team at the Lawson Research Center in Pine Lake, Oregon.

  Some of the material, particularly the unconscious communication between two lovers, she found unbelievable, but yet surprisingly well-supported by the center’s detailed documentation.

  And she did agree with a few things.

  She knew that the mind is a powerful thing, that it’s possible to alter your own physiology through your thoughts, a puzzling fact that physicians and scientific researchers have known since the 1780s.

  The placebo effect.

  Just give people a harmless pill, a sugar pill, an aspirin, whatever, tell them it’s the latest pain medication or a drug to treat a severe medical condition they have, and depending on the ailment, 30 to 95 percent of them will be helped, at least to some degree—more than those in a control group that isn’t receiving any treatment.

  Of course, the effectiveness of the placebo isn’t the same with every illness or injury or with every patient, but in some cases the placebo group actually experiences more of a positive effect than the people taking the drug that’s being researched.

  Yes, at times the brain can heal the body even better than medicine can.

  And astonishingly, according to a 2011 study, patients even benefited if they took a placebo and were told it was a placebo.

  Honestly, no one really had a clue how that worked.

  And the placebo effect was far-reaching.

  Placebos hadn’t been used just to control pain, but people taking them had been healed of cancer, had controlled their schizophrenia, and even, in a few isolated cases, had been cured of Parkinson’s disease. Body builders who thought they were taking the newest anabolic steroids gained muscle mass as fast as those who were taking steroids—and even suffered the negative side effects they would’ve if they were actually taking the steroids.

  How is it possible that our thoughts alone can cause us to feel less pain—even allow patients to feel no pain during amputations? How can our thoughts cure us of cancer, or manage the symptoms of schizophrenia or Parkinson’s, or help us build muscle mass?

  All of that? Just by our thoughts?

  It was a medical mystery.

  Riah also knew that thoughts can do more than heal, they can have a negative effect as well—sometimes called the nocebo effect.

  In her research into humanity, she’d read the aptly titled book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who was a survivor of the Nazi death camps in World War II.

  In the book he tells the story of another prisoner who’d had a dream that the war would end on March 30, 1945. But as the day approached and the men heard reports of the battles, it seemed less and less likely that the fighting would end on that date. On March 29 the man became ill. On March 30, when the war didn’t end, he became delirious. On March 31 he died.

  In his case, he hadn’t died from any diagnosable medical condition, he had died from lack of hope.

  His thoughts had ended up being fatal.

  Undeniably, thoughts can heal and they can kill.

  And as far as affecting another person’s physiology, we do that all the time. All you have to do is kiss someone or aim a gun at his head or slap him in the face. He may get aroused or afraid or angry, but in every case his heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response will change. In fact, when two people are alone and in close proximity, their heart rate and respiration begin to emulate each other’s and they begin to breathe in sync with each other.

  But the issue here wasn’t the physical effects of thoughts on your own body, or the effect of your presence with or actions toward someone else. The question was: could your loving thoughts affect another person’s physiology when you’re not present, when you’re not communicating with him in any tangible way?

  Medical science, of course, said no.

  But the quantum physics that Dr. Tanbyrn was researching seemed to say yes.

  All of this made Riah increasingly interested in what would be on the video that Cyrus was going to show her at seven o’clock tonight.

  With traffic in central Philly, she would need to leave her apartment by six.

  That gave her just over two hours.

  And there was one thing left that she needed to do.

  Someone named Williamson would be at the meeting as well.

  Riah was going to find out who that person was.

  I see Charlene’s picture appear on the screen.

  Without letting Philip or Dr. Tanbyrn notice, I gently tap the button to start the lap function of my watch.

  “Okay, Mr. Berlin.” It’s Dr. Tanbyrn from behind me, speaking softly. “I’d like you to concentrate on the image of the woman you love. Imagine what it’s like being with her, holding her hand, kissing her, having intimate relations with her.”

  Admittedly, I’m a bit surprised by the bluntness of his request. Not only would it be a little distracting to take things as far as he’s suggesting, but the idea of sexually fantasizing about Charlene while watching her on the screen has a sleazy, voyeuristic feel to it. Doing so would’ve made me feel more like a Peeping Tom than a co-worker and friend who respects her as a woman. So instead of following his request to the letter, I focus on my affection for her rather than my physical attraction to her.

  Think loving thoughts.

  Loving thoughts.

  Concentrate on the image of the woman you love.

  The woman . . .

  She looks relaxed and comfortable sitting in that metal chamber, and I can tell she has no idea that I’m watching her.

  . . . you love.

  Despite my efforts to keep my thoughts on a purely platonic level, I can’t help but notice how attractive she is—not runway-model beautiful, but naturally pretty—the kind of woman who doesn’t need makeup to turn heads but can really dial up the volume and be striking when she wants to be.

  What really is love? At its essence? Action? Emotion? Attraction? All three?

  Think about the woman you love . . .

  When I first started looking into this research, I’d thought I might end up inadvertently thinking about Rachel during the test, might return to the feelings I had for her while she was still alive. But although those feelings are present to some degree, they’re bookended by time—we met, we fell in love, we married, had kids, and she died. I’ll never stop caring for her, loving her, but I’ll also—

  No, Jevin, she didn’t just die, she killed herself and she murdered your sons.

  Grief marked with a sting of caustic anger grips me, making it harder to be present in this moment, and while I’m trying to focus on Charlene again, her image disappears and the bird documentary comes back on.

  I tap the watch’s lap function button again to record the end of the video segment of Charlene.

  I’m not sure how well I did in sending my positive thoughts through the building to her, but at least I couldn’t be accused of not putting forth my best effort. Dr. Tanbyrn encourages me to try to stop thinking about Charlene now and let my attention drift toward other things.
<
br />   I’ve already started to do that, but it’s not easy to put her out of my mind, or to obviate my thoughts of Rachel and the boys.

  The birds flock across the screen, moving together just as fish do, as if guided by an unseen hand, and watching them, I can’t help but be struck with a sense of wonder at the natural world.

  An admiration, an awe, a sense of marvel I’ve always had.

  Ants build intricate tunnel systems. Bees build hives. But how does each member of the hive know what his job should be? How does each ant know where to dig? Ask a biologist and she’ll typically answer “instinct,” but that’s like explaining how you saw a woman in half by saying it’s “magic.” It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain anything; just more smoke and mirrors, misdirection, to keep you from asking the questions that really get to the heart of the matter.

  Instinct.

  Really?

  That’s the explanation for every adaptation, trait, and inborn desire of every species? Even of behavior that could not possibly be taught to offspring, or of environmentally cued responses that could not be passed on in the genetic code? There’s a gap in logic there that most people simply overlook or aren’t willing to acknowledge.

  Charlene’s picture appears again, and I turn my attention to her, start the timer on my watch.

  Over the next half hour or so, her image appears twenty-six times—I keep track as I tap the button on my watch to record the exact timing of the appearances.

  And although I’ll need to analyze it later, the timing of the image generation certainly does seem to be random.

  Sometimes the segments come on only a few seconds apart, other times several minutes pass between them, so unless I’m missing something, I can’t imagine how Charlene could ever guess when her image is being played for me—and even if she could, there’s no believable way she could alter her heart rate and respiration within a handful of seconds in ways that would coincide with each of the video segments.

  Every time her image disappears, I do my best to lend my attention to the bird video, but with each passing minute I become more and more curious about what the tests will show, about whether or not Charlene’s physiology will have been altered, even in the slightest degree, by my thoughts.