by Keith Thomas
“I tried, but . . .”
“It’s okay,” Dr. Song said. “You couldn’t have known. I’m only thankful that there were so few subjects. We were making such great progress, I had hoped we could help the Null when we’d completed our primary goals, but then Dr. Theriault killed herself. She was our guiding light, you understand? The only way we were going to make thought reform a reality was with her research. But she felt like she was getting nowhere. . . .”
Matilda kneeled down beside Dr. Song, level with his face.
“I’m going to assume you’re telling us the truth. That you and Ashanique’s grandmother spent millions of dollars and did unthinkable things to children just to get at a truth that most people can read on someone’s face for free. No tests required. No drugs. Just using the most human of skills: empathy. I’m going to assume you’ve already realized this, that you’re truly trying to atone for it, and accept your word. But comas, drugs, that’s not going to do. Tell us how we fix Ashanique.”
Dr. Song took a moment, pulling several folded sheets of paper from his pocket. He held them up for everyone to see. They were photocopies of a journal. The lined pages were filled with complicated diagrams that were surrounded by passages written in a strange symbolic language.
“This, Clarity, is all about mind control. Since time immemorial, there’s been a concerted, though usually secretive, attempt to develop techniques to erase and reprogram people’s minds. From poisons and electricity, to mysticism and the occult. With the advent of modern medicine, however, new avenues have shown significant promise, mostly pharmacological, but sometimes surgical. Dr. Theriault focused on epigenetics, engrams, and mutation. She believed that the core of a person’s . . . identity, so to speak, centered on the hippocampus. If you could ablate, essentially, reprogram the mind. She recorded the process in a series of encrypted journals. She was paranoid, delusional. We were never able to decipher the encryption—the process she’d developed was incredibly complicated. Under their breath, some of the Clarity researchers took to calling her journals the Voynich notes, named after the infamous, un-crackable medieval manuscript. The solution is the key to unlocking those notes. Because Ashanique has Dr. Theriault’s memories, she knows the solution. With the information, we can reprogram a linear particle accelerator and fix Ashanique’s mind. Stop the voices. Make her normal.”
“But Janet had her mother’s memories too, right?” Kojo asked. “Why couldn’t she have given you the solution? Why wait till now?”
“Her real name was Janelle,” Dr. Song said. “And memories fade. Even though Ashanique’s are vivid, it is because they are fresh. And some people deal with afflictions differently. Unlike her daughter, Janelle fought the memories that flooded her brain. She drowned them with drugs, alcohol, and rage. She likely didn’t know what was hidden there. And if she did, she certainly wasn’t willing to delve into it. We tried to convince her to try. We begged and pleaded. But more than anything, Fifty-One wanted to forget. And when she had a daughter, her life was transformed, renewed, and we all hoped—Janelle most especially—that what she had forsaken, Ashanique might embrace.”
Matilda looked back at Kojo.
He nodded and lowered his weapon.
“Okay,” Matilda said. “Where do we start?”
Dr. Song stood and motioned to the door.
“Down the hall is a washroom. There is a cabinet with hair dye and trimmers. I’d suggest that you lose the beard, Detective. Matilda, you should cut and color your hair. Ashanique will need a makeover as well. Childers will help out, I’m afraid I’m not very good with . . . this sort of thing.”
56
6:12 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
WEST GARFIELD PARK
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
RADE STEPPED OUT of a rented Honda Civic and surveyed the house across the street.
Kojo’s house.
It was evening, and most everyone in the neighborhood was home for supper or already full and gorging themselves on TV. The block was largely quiet save for the incessant barking of a drop-kick terrier stymied behind a vinyl fence.
Over his lifetimes, Rade has had many dogs.
He loved all of them. When he lived in the Caucasus Mountains as a trapper, he had a borzoi that would hunt alongside him. The dog had no name; it never needed one. They would spend days wandering mountain trails in search of game—brown bear was a particularly challenging and thrilling quarry.
Rade ignored the barking dog and walked up to the front door of Kojo’s house. He was limping from the bullet wound in his side and the spot where one of Kojo’s rounds had grazed him on the thigh. Rade was adept at sewing flesh. He’d stopped by a Walmart, grabbed supplies, and then did a little self-surgery in a bathroom stall next to a man evacuating his bowels between pained groans.
Ten stitches, six butterfly bandages, no big deal.
Reaching Kojo’s front door, he rang the doorbell and waited, looking over the house carefully. It was not a place he’d ever have chosen to live. It was too old; there would be too much upkeep. Rade was good with his hands. He prided himself on mechanical skills. But spending his weekends repairing siding and replacing roofing tiles would sap his energy. He had a hard enough time keeping his own body at bay—he didn’t have a second to waste on some crumbling pile. But he did find it odd that a detective lived in the house. It seemed a bit cultivated for a police officer. There was an art to the place and, briefly, he wondered if he’d been underestimating Kojo.
The door finally opened, and Ophelia appeared behind the screen door.
“What can I do for you?”
She didn’t open the door. Didn’t even unlock it.
“This is Detective Omaboe’s residence, correct?”
• • •
Ophelia crossed her arms.
She was in no mood.
After Kojo’s brusque phone call and Brandon’s difficult afternoon, the very last thing she wanted was to deal with some weirdo. Twice a week this seemed to happen. Someone rapped at the door and stood there expecting to talk with the police detective as though he’d be willing to solve any problem in his off-hours.
In her hometown of Assin Foso, there were people who would show up at the priest’s house at all hours of the day. They would show up and demand, yes, demand, special attention. A prayer for their sick cousin, a petition to the Lord Jesus that their daughter gets good grades in school despite her attention deficits, or a plea to God to ensure that their grandmother finds her way into heaven. Here, it seemed, the police were like the priests. So long as they weren’t in their cars patrolling, they were the ones everyone turned to when they needed guidance.
“He is not available at this time,” Ophelia said perfunctorily.
She found the man’s demeanor strange, but the look of him was even stranger. Her first thought was that he must be suffering from cancer. Ophelia had several good friends who’d undergone chemotherapy treatment. A few of them wore their bald heads as a badge of courage, a fist to the cancer attempting to destroy them. This man, however, was as bald as they were (it seemed even his eyebrows were missing as well) but he didn’t appear ill. If she were forced to say, she would have concluded it was a fashion statement. If that was indeed the case, it was a poor choice. Ophelia considered the man hideous.
“Oh, I remember now,” Rade said. “He’s across town.”
Ophelia moved to close the door but she was too slow, hesitant even though she was unnerved. Rade sliced through the screen door with a box cutter that he seemed to pull from nowhere and, in one fluid motion, grabbed Ophelia by the throat. He squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. Her head swam as carbon dioxide instantly began its deadly buildup in her blood.
“Who is at the door?”
Brandon’s voice bounced from behind Ophelia.
Oh, God, he needs to run and hide!
Scramble as fast as he can up the stairs and lock himself in his bedroom.
Ophelia wanted to scream t
o him: Don’t come any closer! Go to your room, right now! But she could barely get a sliver of air down her crushed windpipe. Ophelia knew she’d lose consciousness in a matter of seconds. Desperate to forestall the man entering the house, she tried to grab his arms, to dig her long nails (just shellacked yesterday) into his flesh. But her vision was dimming, and the screen door was still in the way. Her nails raked the metal mesh. Before she blacked out completely, the man pulled her closer, dragging her face through the screen door; the sharp edges traced a bloody grid across her chin and forehead.
“You will pass out,” Rade said. “And I will take the boy.”
Ophelia’s body went slack; the sensation was like being dunked in freezing water. Her toes and then feet went numb. Her fingers and hands followed.
Finally, emptiness swept up through her burning chest and into her head.
She was almost thankful when it extinguished the furnace of pain and grief raging inside her oxygen-starved brain.
Then a sweet, effortless darkness overwhelmed her.
• • •
Brandon was frozen to his spot on the stairs.
He couldn’t take his eyes from the pale man stepping through the ripped screen door and into his house. The pale man closed and then locked the front door. He had a knife in his hand; the blade glimmered in the half-light like one of those deep-sea fish that Brandon saw on a Discovery Channel show once.
Brandon had seen a horror movie once too.
His dad didn’t know, but one time Ophelia left the TV on when she thought he was asleep. He was thirsty, so he crept downstairs to get a drink of water and that’s when he saw it. On the TV there was a man with no hair and deep black eyes. He had a knife and he chased two teenagers through a dusty old room.
The pale man looked like the same man from the horror movie.
He had a knife.
Ophelia was lying there, bloody and dead.
“Hello,” Rade said. “You and me are going to take a little drive.”
57
6:42 P.M.
NOVEMBER 15, 2018
NEW BEGINNINGS REHABILITATION BASEMENT
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
ASHANIQUE FELT LIKE she hadn’t eaten in forever.
“Come on, in here.”
After Childers had done the girl’s hair up in cornrows, she directed Ashanique to the concrete room she’d arrived in. Dr. Song had set up a folding table in the middle of the room. Sitting there, waiting for the food Childers had promised to bring, Ashanique looked around the room and remembered something her mother had told her. She said that the other people who were on the run, the ones who could see things other people couldn’t, were excellent at hiding. They could hide almost anywhere. For Ashanique, those words conjured up images of people hiding in the forests or on boats in the middle of the ocean.
But now she knew the truth.
They were hiding in the basements of drug rehab centers.
They were in cramped, nasty basements with roaches and silverfish and people hanging in sad hammocks.
Ashanique’s stomach rumbled. She wondered about what sort of food Childers could possibly get. Maybe McDonald’s? Maybe a submarine sandwich? Ashanique hadn’t had one of those in years. The last one she’d eaten had ham and tomato and a ton of mustard. She devoured every inch of it—even the pieces of bread that were soaked in mustard and had no meat or even tomato to squeeze between them.
Childers walked in with a small plate of food and a bag of maxi pads.
She put the maxi pads down on the table first and then positioned the tray right in front of Ashanique. Apparently, Childers didn’t have to go far to get the food. It was from the cafeteria in the treatment center fifteen feet overhead. The night’s dinner was turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, a side of green beans, and a thing of bright orange Jell-O. Ashanique was hungry enough that she wasn’t going to complain about not getting McDonald’s. She’d never really been a fan of Thanksgiving food, though. At least there weren’t cranberries in the stuffing.
“Thank you,” Ashanique said.
“Sorry,” Childers replied, reading Ashanique’s less-than-excited expression. “It’s pretty much that or some saltines and peanut butter.”
“No. This is great, really.”
Childers turned to go, but Ashanique cleared her throat and asked, “Do you mind? Just sitting with me for a little bit?”
• • •
Childers hadn’t spent more than fifteen minutes talking with anyone other than Dr. Song for nearly three months.
Even though she wasn’t exactly the most extroverted person, she found she craved some casual conversation now and again. Even from the Null. Childers wasn’t like them, but she wasn’t like Dr. Song either—neither fish nor fowl, as her religious and long-dead mother would have said. Childers tried to look that expression up once. Apparently, it wasn’t biblical at all but some sixteenth-century monk claptrap. Regardless, it fit Childers to a T. That was another of her mom’s expressions.
Ashanique took a few bites and chewed them slowly.
She swallowed and sipped some water before she asked, “You watch TV?”
“Sure,” Childers said. “You?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of stupid, but I like cartoons.”
“That’s not stupid.”
“I’m eleven.”
“Cartoons aren’t for babies. Some of them are pretty clever.”
“You don’t watch them, though.”
Childers didn’t have a childhood that included cartoons. When she was little, still a boy and called Caleb, a name she always hated because it sounded harsh, like a weapon, Mom forbade any and all filmed entertainment. No TV, no movies. Plays were okay, so long as they were religious. Childers’s dad was only a photograph and a blurry one at that. Her mother said he was a great man and nothing more. For a while, when she was in middle school, Childers wondered if maybe—just maybe—her father was an angel.
How else to explain a girl being trapped in a boy’s body?
Surely, there had been a divine mistake. Perhaps her father had been a rogue angel—one of the flukes from Genesis, the messiest part of the Bible. The first cartoon Childers saw was at a shelter. She was fifteen and she’d run away after her mother found her wearing a dress in her room. All it took was a single glance; the rage in her mother’s eyes was enough to convince her never, ever to look back. And she hadn’t. Shelters, couches, excruciating acts, one underground—the “trans” express—led to another: Childers met Dr. Song at a shelter in Logan Square.
Well, met was wrong.
She’d been threatened by another resident—a skinhead with a thing for curb-stomping “homos”—and ran to hide in the basement. That was how she found the sleeping Nulls and Dr. Song. Turned out he needed help, after twenty-some years on the run, his body was finally showing the wear and tear. She offered. He accepted.
Over the last five years, they’d moved in and out of eight different facilities. Childers had never seen the agents of the HED (or the bald man Dr. Song seemed to fear the most) but she didn’t doubt their existence either—she’d seen enough of the horror of the world to know that people were capable of the worst possible acts.
“Those people in the other room . . .”
“Yes.”
“How long have they been sleeping?”
“Two of them for at least three years.”
“That’s not good for them, right? To sleep that long?”
“They don’t really have a choice.”
“But that’s going to change,” Ashanique said. “I can fix them.”
“That’s what Dr. Song tells me.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Childers took a moment.
“Dr. Song’s told me all about the science of it. Even though I don’t exactly get all the words, I get the core of it. And it makes sense. I’m a living example of how wires get crossed and things don’t exactly turn out the way they were supposed to. Same time,
it has me worried. How often do you go to the doctor with a cold and he gives you another cold to fix it?”
“The solution is different.”
“You remember it now?”
Ashanique nodded. “I think so, but . . .”
“But what?”
There was a knock at the door. Matilda stuck her head in. She’d dyed her hair blond. Childers thought it looked good, though it was something of a sloppy job. Kojo stood behind her, clean-shaven. He looked different. More refined.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Matilda said. “Do you guys mind if we come in?”
Ashanique finished her meal with her plate on her lap as Dr. Song, Kojo, and Matilda joined her and Childers at the folding table.
Dr. Song spread some file folders out before he passed out key cards and badges. None of them had Matilda’s or Kojo’s or Ashanique’s face on them, but there were two for Childers and Dr. Song. He also had a duffel bag. Inside was a Taser, a few rounds of 8mm ammunition, and several coils of rope.
“I can get us into the facility. When the LINAC went live a few months back, I made some, uh, reconnaissance missions over there. That makes it sound like spy craft, but really, it was a matter of sneaking into HR and convincing them I was still an employee. The best thing about HED is that it’s far too big for its britches now. You picture these conspiratorial groups as being highly sophisticated, lean black ops machines that can turn on a dime. They’re not. They’re just as clumsy and overburdened as the rest of the government. Unlike Health and Human Services, however, the HED has a team of hired hit men.”
“What’s your game plan?” Kojo asked as he thumbed through the things on the table. “We’re all just going to follow you in?”
“It’s a hospital. We can get in just fine. But we’ll need a vehicle to load up the Null patients. Something like a van.”
“I can get that,” Kojo said. “Matilda and I will go.”
• • •
On her way out, Matilda found Ashanique in the clinic with the sleeping Nulls.
She was standing by Alice, staring down at the woman’s slack face.