by Keith Thomas
Matilda didn’t know what to say. She nodded, trying to be sympathetic.
“Are you afraid, Matilda?”
Unsure of how to answer, Matilda took a moment. She saw Rade cutting Clark’s throat. She saw his blood splash onto the floor. She saw the cop’s head being blown open. She saw again the horror in his eyes.
Yes, Maddie. You’re afraid. Very afraid.
“Don’t be,” Ashanique said. “I know the secret now.”
46
11:38 A.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
I-90
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
WANDERING THE AISLES of the gas station, Ashanique picked up a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, a package of strawberry licorice, and a root beer soda.
She met Matilda at the checkout counter.
Matilda paid cash for the food, two touristy ball caps, two cheap pairs of sunglasses, a pair of kitchen scissors, and two prepaid smartphones.
Walking back out to the cab, Matilda pulled the SIM card from her cell—the one she’d had for two years, filled with un-downloaded photos of Clark—before she tossed the phone into a trash can.
She handed the SIM card to Ashanique.
The girl bent it before it snapped in half.
“We have to be smarter from now on, like my mom taught me,” Ashanique said, dropping the pieces of the SIM. “No credit cards, no logging into accounts, we’re going to have to look different too. Cut our hair and change our clothes.”
The cab took I-90 out of the city.
The sun was hidden by churning clouds that turned the humid air a sickly yellow.
As the cab idled in traffic, Matilda took Ashanique’s hands. They were cold but not shaking. Not like her own.
“Everything that is happening,” Ashanique said. “It was because of an experiment. That’s why I’m like this. Why I can remember other lives.”
“You were in this experiment?”
“No. But my mother was.”
Ashanique glanced up at the rearview mirror and caught the cabdriver’s eyes beneath the bill of his cap. He immediately looked away.
“It was in the late 1970s. In Alaska.”
“And you saw what they did there? To your mother?”
Ashanique nodded. “There were fifty children, all of them orphans; some taken from hospitals, others from orphanages. A few of them snatched right off the street by the Night Doctors, or so they were called. The Night Doctors name was a boogeyman thing. Rumors swirled around, you know? People in poor neighborhoods were scared. Kids had gone missing.”
The traffic cleared and the cab sped up.
“That’s how they got their name. But the thing is, the Night Doctors aren’t maniacs. They’re scientists. Smart people who got caught up in something so complicated, and so important, that they can’t see how destructive it is. Matilda, if you want to understand this, you’re going to have to forget what you think you know. . . .”
“About what, Ashanique?”
“About everything.”
Ashanique turned and looked out the window at the quickly darkening world. The sun had been banished. The shadows were so long, they swallowed whole buildings. For a second, the world looked like it was being erased.
“Why do you care about me?” she asked.
“I made a promise to your mother that I’d keep you safe,” Matilda said. “And . . . I—well, you’re amazing, for starters. I’ve never met anyone like you. And—well, actually that’s not true. A few years ago, I saw a patient who said a lot of the same things you’ve said. This man came to me because he was worried. He knew he wasn’t ill, not in the clinical sense, but he didn’t know how else to handle the things he was seeing in his head. He came to me for help and opened up. This patient told me something I couldn’t believe at the time. I was blind and stupid and I let him down. I’m not going to do that again.”
“Did he remember past lives?”
“Yes, he did.”
“He was the man I saw the picture of in your office, right?”
“Yes. His name was Theo,” Matilda said. “And he talked about the Night Doctors. He talked about being taken by them into a lab. About being experimented on . . .”
“They called us the Null,” Ashanique said.
“The Null?”
“One of the doctors, I think it was Dr. Kadrey, said it as a joke. She said that if they weren’t careful, we’d become the null hypothesis. The null thing stuck. What she really meant was that we were a side effect. Project Clarity wasn’t about making people like me. We were the mistakes. The insignificant. The Null.”
“If you were the mistakes, were there any successes?”
Ashanique couldn’t stanch the tears welling up.
Her mind was changing so quickly. With every new memory that appeared, it felt as though new neural networks had been formed. Synaptic connections that had lain dormant since birth suddenly thrummed with electrochemical life. Neurohormones that had drifted aimlessly in the intracerebral space found themselves drawn, like iron shavings, to the magnetic pull of newly awakened nerve cells. The feeling was like a neural thunderstorm, every burst of synaptic energy a bolt of lightning. And with each new image came a new emotion. Even the slightest recollection added to the density of her thoughts.
Ashanique could feel her thinking transform, even when she spoke to herself—in that eternally quiet voice—the words were different. She used bigger words, crafted more complicated sentences.
The past was colonizing her.
Gifting her with its boundless store of knowledge.
Successes.
“When I hear that word I want to picture people breaking the tape at the end of a marathon. I want to see people smiling and laughing. Instead, I see the blank stare of the brain-dead boy, his spinal cerebral fluid leaking from his ears.”
“I’m sorry, Ashanique. I’m so sorry you have to feel all that. Having to experience all those things firsthand must be so difficult. No one should have to witness so much suffering.”
“Beauty,” Ashanique said, wiping the tears away.
“What?”
Ashanique took Matilda’s hands in her own and squeezed them tight.
“What they did was horrible. The successes were the worst. But what the Null discovered, what we became, is beautiful. It’s difficult to put into words but when you see your past lives, when you see down the chain of genetics, through all those people, all those experiences, you realize something profound.”
Matilda couldn’t look away.
Ashanique needed her to hear this.
“We are forever, Matilda. We think it ends the minute our eyes close and our hearts stop but . . . it doesn’t. There isn’t heaven, not like they say, but we do live on. I see all the way back, all that history, all that knowledge, it’s right in front of us the whole time.”
47
12:42 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
STONYBROOK ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY
BRAIDWOOD, ILLINOIS
AS MATILDA SIGNED IN, Ashanique made her way into the foyer where Rosa was watching TV and Francine sorted through another stack of National Geographic magazines.
The receptionist, in scrubs, smiled at Matilda.
“Your mother’s in the memory-care unit sitting room,” she said.
“I’d like to check her out for a few hours. She doing okay today?”
The receptionist made the comme ci, comme ça hand gesture.
“She got confused at breakfast. Do you know anything about a hairpin? She thinks her neighbor might have taken it.”
“The hairpin’s with my uncle. I explained this to her nurse.”
“Sorry,” the receptionist said. “I’ll make a note of it in her chart.”
“I think the nurse already did.”
“Anyway, it might not be a great day to take her out. You guys going to lunch or . . . ? Let me put in a call to Dr. Chaudhary. He and you can talk about how she’s doing. I’m just saying it might no
t be the best day to have her out. He’ll call us back and then I’ll patch the call through to the memory unit and you can talk to him there.”
Matilda met Ashanique by the muted TV.
The receptionist waited for the call, scrolling through her social media feeds.
The TV was tuned to CNN and continuous coverage of the second university shooting. Matilda didn’t think it was such a good idea for Ashanique to be watching it, but then a photo of Tamiko popped up; she was smiling in her lab coat, and the scrawl on the bottom of the screen read: Noted professor found dead in laboratory . . . suspect still . . .
“Terrible thing,” Rosa said.
Francine shook her head as she flipped through the January 1988 issue.
After thirty seconds of digging around the couch, Matilda found the TV remote and changed the channel to a Law & Order rerun. She took hold of Ashanique’s hand and led her toward the back of the facility.
“Come on. I want you to meet my mother.”
After the receptionist punched in the code to unlock the door to the memory unit, Ashanique followed Matilda inside. They took a wide hallway to a sitting room as the door clicked shut behind them.
Lucy was in a rocking chair, rocking slowly, staring outside at the empty bench where several Stonybrook employees took personal calls and smoked.
She was cradling a well-worn baby doll.
Matilda leaned down beside Lucy and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Mom?”
Lucy turned and examined Matilda’s face.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you know what time it is? I feel like I’ve probably been wasting most of the day just looking out the window and daydreaming. Did you know I was a professor?”
“Yes. At Colgate.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. “We’ve met before? I’m so sorry.”
“Mom,” Matilda said. “We need to go out for a bit, okay?”
“We’re going somewhere?”
“Yes. Just for a little bit.”
Lucy looked around Matilda at Ashanique.
“Who is that?”
“This is Ashanique.”
Lucy looked Ashanique over and nodded, more to herself than Matilda.
“Yes, yes. I’ve met her before. She comes regularly to visit her grandmother.”
“This is my first time here,” Ashanique said.
Lucy screwed up her face, confused.
“No. I’ve met you before. I think . . . No, no. You were a student. Yes, you were one of my very best students. Do you remember the lesson? We have a test today. I hope you came prepared.”
“Mom,” Matilda began, “we have to start packing.”
Lucy waved her off. Then, smiling to herself, contentedly ensconced in the memory of a long-ago lecture, she started speaking in French.
“Qui était au Sénégal . . . ils ont vendu les esclaves au port . . . on en parle aujourd’hui à voix basse mais ça s’est passé . . .”
Curious, Ashanique pulled a stool over from under the window and sat across from Lucy. She leaned in and listened carefully as Lucy mumbled. Matilda watched, impressed with how gentle Ashanique was but unsure of what the girl was doing.
“It’s okay,” Matilda said. “She has these moments. It’ll pass.”
Ashanique touched Lucy’s knee.
“J’étais autrefois un Igbo.”
“Qu’est-ce que vous avez dit?” Lucy asked.
“J’ai été volé de mon peuple,” Ashanique continued. “J’étais sur un très long voyage. À travers l’océan. J’étais à bord de l’Henrietta Marie . . .”
Lucy gasped.
“Il a coulé dans une tempête . . .”
Matilda hadn’t studied French in fifteen years.
She was in shambles when she tried to speak with any fluency, but she could still read the language. She got the gist of what Ashanique and Lucy were talking about. Lucy was fully absorbed in the conversation. Matilda had not seen her mother that focused, that attentive, in nearly a decade. She couldn’t help but cover her mouth as she watched the two of them converse. Lucy with her flourishing hand gestures and wide-eyed amazement, and Ashanique with a knowing, nearly wise modulation and tone.
This is miraculous. I am witnessing the miraculous.
But as miraculous as it was, they had to get moving. Matilda knew it was only a matter of time before the people coming for Ashanique tracked them to Stonybrook. She’d taken a huge risk coming to the facility, but it wasn’t until she’d watched her mother conversing with Ashanique that she truly realized the enormity of what she was doing.
Why didn’t I just check us into a hotel? Or go to the bus station? Because you’re human; you’re flawed. Where do people turn when they’re in trouble? Where do they always eventually run? Home. They always go home, Maddie. And home, for you, is your mother. Now get her the fuck out of this place.
Matilda stood up, interrupting the conversation.
“I need to get her stuff packed, okay? We should leave soon.”
“She’s coming with us? Isn’t that—” Ashanique asked.
“We’ll drop her with a friend on our way out of town.”
Ashanique turned and looked toward the entrance to the memory unit.
She was listening for something.
Matilda only heard the sound a few seconds later. She made no mental connections to the noise. She didn’t associate it with anything more than the usual sounds of daily life—a car backfiring, a balloon popping, someone clapping.
But then she heard the screaming and she knew.
He was here.
48
12:53 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
STONYBROOK ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY
BRAIDWOOD, ILLINOIS
RADE WAS STRUCK by the smell when he stepped into Stonybrook.
He stood by the receptionist’s desk and inhaled long and slow, catching the scent of something nostalgic. But there were no real memories associated with the chemical lavender smell of the facility. It was what bubbled up from underneath: the paradoxically clean smell of a clinical death.
To Rade, this was a place where malfunctioning people went to spend their last years—their bodies being slowly dragged into the abyss by the weight of their crumbling minds. This was the end of all tethered flesh. The place stood as a stark reminder of just how much more he is than the average person.
He wondered, momentarily, about others like him—surely there must have been at least a handful? How did they die here? Were their brilliant, pure selves entombed in an animal grave? The concrete shoes of flesh?
How horrible.
“Excuse me?”
Rade turned to the receptionist as she removed her headphones.
“If you’re here to visit a resident, I’ll need you to sign in and I’ll also have to see your ID.”
“Deacon.”
As a matter of habit, the receptionist stood to walk around her desk and take Rade’s ID. She paused midway. She looked beyond him, outside the front doors. He knew she’d noticed something lying just outside. A coat. And shoes. Maybe she’d even felt that tickle crawling up her spine, spilling over her shoulders, as she realized she was looking at a body. That was when she saw the blood.
The receptionist spun around, her mouth open in a silent scream.
Rade’s first round hit her neck. It severed her headphone wires before punching a nasty hole in her carotid. She hit the floor, bleeding out. Reaching over her desk, Rade grabbed her ID badge. Her name was Becky.
“What was that?! I heard—”
An elderly man tottered around the corner, waving his cane.
Rade shot the man in the gut.
He stepped over the body and walked into the TV room, where an older woman turned to glare at him.
“Where is Dr. Deacon?” Rade asked.
The woman was too terrified to speak; the words just wouldn’t form in her gaping mouth. Next to her, another woman, oblivious to everything as she turned the page
s of the November 1990 issue of National Geographic, paused to fix her hearing aid. Deaf as an adder, she turned to page thirty-two of the magazine.
“You know that murder I told you about?” she asked loudly. “Well, this is going to sound a little bit like I’m cuckoo in the cuckoo head but . . . I don’t think I actually did read about it after all. As crazy as it seems—”
Rade killed Rosa and Francine with two shots each.
Then he walked to the memory unit and studied the keypad.
Some of the keys were darker than others. He knew that was from finger grease. No one usually notices that kind of thing—on this keypad, the 3, 6, 9, 0 were the darkest. Rade stood there, staring at the numbers, working through the various combinations in his mind, when he was interrupted by the arrival of two police officers.
“Drop the weapon!”
Rade stood still, the gun tight in his right hand.
“I said drop the fucking gun!”
Rade turned slowly, glancing over his shoulder at the cops.
The first officer commanded again: “Drop the gun, asshole!”
Rade wasn’t going to comply.
He moved, faster than either officer expected.
Rade’s first bullet hit one of the cops in the left leg. As she fell, the second officer fired. That slug slammed into Rade’s right side, shattering his tenth rib before exiting through his back. Briefly spun by the force of the impact, Rade recovered.
Sharpened by pain, he returned fire with deadly accuracy.
The second officer was hit first. The bullet entered his chin, passed up through his tongue, and lodged itself behind his eyes. Before the first officer, now on the ground, could get off another round, Rade shot her in the neck. She crumpled, pressing her hand against her vertebral artery to stanch a pulsing gush of blood.
Pushing his left hand flat against his wound, Rade walked over to the cop.
She tried to speak.
Tried to plead.
He shot her in the head.
49
12:59 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018