by Michael Helm
He said it was blasphemy to call a spell a vision. He said it was not a communication but something stirred up by her nerves, and so she kept the next episode to herself. She was hanging sheets in the laundry room when it came upon her, brief but intense, and she let it play out. A cold fall day. She is running scared behind a naked woman in the creek, the water splashing their legs, and someone unseen is chasing them. Then there’s just her, or rather she has become the other woman, Irina and not, and everything surrounding her now has a strange name. She is running without clothes or English words. Then she’s falling into a hole or animal den and she’s hurt and can’t stand. She reaches as she can and covers herself with leaves and dead branches and tries not to breathe. The steps come near and pass by. The spell ends and she is standing at the fuse box with a black towel draped over her head.
What was between Denise and Stefan now would always be between them, she knew. She had no choice but to deceive her husband. He stayed with her at the house and worked from home, and took her to town when he ran errands. Her escape wasn’t planned but rather enacted as if it had already been scripted by Another, and so when she found herself waiting in the car for him to emerge from the post office, and getting out and going around to the driver’s side and starting away, she knew not to look in the rearview mirror, knew he wouldn’t have come out of the building yet, and then she was out of town and on the highway. And the certainty and the fear cleaved as one, and for the first time in her life she understood that the trials endured in Scripture by Jonah and Job were not a way of putting modern human fate in perspective, or a way of seeing our own small troubles in dramatic stories, but were real. For the first time in the life of her faith she felt truly descended from Eve and from Noah’s wife, and she drove with images flashing in her from her dreams of the previous night, which had fired into puzzling shapes and happenings so that all morning she felt more alone for not understanding them and having no Old Testament Daniel to interpret the dreams for her.
From the highway Denise saw the hard grey stem of smoke marking Shoad’s hill and she covered the miles feeling directed, confirmed in her direction. She turned onto Shoad’s property and started up the winding, wooded road, past the hand-drawn Private Do Not Enter sign, and the store-bought No Trespassing sign farther up, and came out at the clearing that held Shoad’s house and outbuildings. She stopped the car between the house and the barn and sat looking at the clapboard building, weather-spackled green, with a few steps up to the front door, two large blind windows in front, and a simple, medium-pitched roof, not the peaked, terrible thing that was its truer form. The yard was orderly, dominated by the solid-looking barn. Shoad’s truck, the one Irina had driven to the house, was nowhere. There were no cars or trucks at all. The only presence was the smoke coming from behind the barn.
She got out of the car and stood for a second in the silence with the door open and the keys in her hand, scenting something on the air she thought was time itself burning up, revealing a new character in the shadowless noon light. All moments in Scripture are eternal, the time of the resurrection and the time of the Lord’s dying, and in the certainty of her righteousness she advanced on the house thinking that whatever would happen had already happened and the only choice before her was no choice but to act according to the examples handed down through the turning ages that began upon the first disobedience and expulsion. She climbed the steps and looked through the window in the door into a mudroom leading to a kitchen. Covering the floor as far as she could see, from the door to the cupboards under the counter, were the horns of animals, cow horns and deer antlers strewn and tangled in a small apocalypse. Shoad wanted no one stepping inside. The door was either locked or in some way composed into a trap and so she stepped back down and moved along the length of the house and around to a padlocked door, up the other side, barely able to see into the windows and then finding in each only dull yellow blinds admitting nothing. The whole place was the shape and dimension of the sickness of despair.
Somewhere in crossing the yard she opened herself to guidance and knew again what she had tried not to know since the highway. She headed for the pillar of smoke that somehow pointed to the ground even as it pointed skyward. When she came around the barn she did so without fear or with fear secured by her conviction and watching her so that Shoad would be equally there and not there regardless of what or whom she found, and she felt every living thing for miles, every leaf on every tree felt distinctly without falling to senselessness or the lie of words like green. And so she approached the forge as the lone human but not the lone soul and saw it in all its terrible design. The two propane tanks, the petroleum pipes, and the huge brick oven. When she was little she’d asked her father who made the forge and he said God made the forge in which He fashioned all things, but he himself made the forge beside the shed. He said you need a sheet of paper and five hundred pounds of brick. Shoad’s forge was bigger, a stack chimney on top, so that it looked like a small house, and she pictured herself and her father in their house placed in sight of the town and the church, a scene she’d painted once, sitting with their ball-peened copper bowls and spoons. You light the paper, throw it in, he said. Turn the valve. In time you’ll have three thousand degrees standing there staring at you like something pulled up from hell on a chain. He had made her scared of the furnace, scared for her own good, but now she knew the early lesson was only so she’d remember it in this moment as she approached the forge and thought of Daniel’s friends who were thrown into the furnace on Nebuchadnezzar’s order but kept their faith and were saved by the archangel Michael.
There was a steel door the size and shape of a knight’s shield. When she took hold of the lever handle she felt the heat on the back of her hand and she pushed the lever down and swung the door and let go of it so that the furnace yawned open and then seemed to wake upon the new air and the heat bolted and caught her and she felt it on the skin and the hairs of her arms and face and she stepped back.
In the mouth of the furnace something moved or seemed to in the heat-furled light. She narrowed her eyes against the burning and tried to make sense of the mouth and saw forms there or imagined them, a metal skid like a small bed frame, a torso of fire and ash, a wooden dummy dying in a garment factory blaze, and she saw stars and planets there, the low wet moon of autumn in transit, the stars now high-shouldered animals lifted from the disturbed breathing of the coals. And then it was only flame and ash and the smoke called up, and no more sense could be made of it. She looked at the pillar, open to revelation, but saw only the column of smoke rising inside itself and she thought of the visions that had come to her, in the fireplace, in the field, and she looked back down and there it was. Not in the forge but on the door. Melted to the bottom hinge, a blackened raised spot catching pins of light that she knew, was given to know, were cast by the quartz in the small tin setting of Irina’s wedding ring.
She knew it but the light didn’t hold. The pins of light were there for Denise but not for Stefan later when he went to the yard, still empty, the forge spilled out. His only evidence, her hands, burned and bandaged, the blood on the steering wheel of the car, and her report from the hospital bed. There was no ring, no rock on the hinge, no sign that anything had been chipped off. Whatever she had seen had disappeared, maybe when she’d taken hold of the door. He’d found nothing at the base but a spade with a charred handle. And though Denise knew he would lie to her, for her sake or for his, she believed him, and so came to understand that it was Irina who had shown her the melted ring, as if to communicate the end of her story. She had not wanted Denise to be hurt, of course, or to fill her heart with destruction. Stefan asked her if that was what happened, if she’d been trying to destroy the forge. But she hadn’t. She’d only wanted to release the fire, by spade, by hand, and burn everything Shoad put his name to.
Yet though she believed Stefan, he doubted her. He arranged to have her kept in the hospital longer than necessary. She was “formed,” they cal
led it, and when the young woman doctor who seemed frightened of Denise reduced the painkillers, they put her on other medications. Over the next weeks Stefan and the doctors, there were three of them by then, tried to convince her not only that Shoad hadn’t killed Irina but also that Irina never existed, or rather existed in Russia, and on the internet, but not there. At first Stefan had believed her stories of Irina and the visits, he told her, but on the night of the storm he began to have doubts. They said Denise’s visions had crossed into her reality and confused it. As if she was the trouble, and it was only trouble they had to stand against. As if they didn’t believe in evil.
3
Nine weeks into the phase one trial, the qualified investigator asked Ali to breakfast. They met at their usual place, an old hotel with a view of runners and dogs along English Bay. The trial updates were documented but Ali liked feeling close to the human particularity unrecorded in the numbers and graphs. They were not above swapping stories from their fields, she and Anja Seding, and Anja was not above exaggerating hers for comic effect. For a physician she was not especially circumspect or prone to displays of excessive professional gravitas.
Anja announced that she had to “present a circumstance.” One of the trial subjects had begun sending her things.
“The subjects have my contact info through the clinic, and he’s started to email me his writings. Pages every day.”
“He’s a writer.”
“According to his declaration he began the trial as a thirty-one-year-old B-negative eco-activist and poet with no drug allergies or history of mental illness.”
“Hard enough being a poet, but to be a sane one.”
“The point of interest being you’re a recurring character in these things, poems, mini-essays, pages from what seems to be a novel. Or not you exactly but someone he calls ‘Maker.’ ”
Ali had wondered at times who the subjects thought was behind the tests, the drugs, the money, who exactly was playing with and reading their blood. She did not want to be thought of. She tried to feel sheltered in the company name.
“Is this a known syndrome? Is he fixated?”
“He’s likely not dangerous, Ali. It began he was just singing your praises. Then he speculated upon a life, what you think, personal history stuff. I repeat, not dangerous.”
From what Anja and the research nurse had learned in their brief conversations with Subject 11, he was a full-time test subject, a so-called guinea pigger, who bussed around the country, getting paid to be injected, blood-drawn, electroded, cardio-tested, whatever the trial required. It used to be the tests were done on the local poor. Now the poor had organized. They mass-communicated about new trials and flocked here and there. Even if they declared what they’d already had done to them, you never really knew what hadn’t been flushed from their systems.
“Does he know my name?”
“Well, you head out onto the internet, you find things.”
“Maybe he’s fixed on Carl.”
“He’s imagining a woman. That’s part of the adoration.”
“But he hasn’t used my name.”
“It feels like he’s on the verge. He might be withholding it out of decorum.”
“Or so you don’t think he’s dangerous when maybe he is.”
They wouldn’t have been there if a lot weren’t hanging on Anja’s reading of Subject 11, on her own reading of Anja. She tried to remember what she knew of the woman’s life. There was an unemployed husband, a scholar of Greek and Latin, or was it Roman history? She’d forgotten, and their social-professional relationship was well past the point where she could ask because she’d also forgotten his name.
“He calls the pill ‘One True,’ short for the One True God. Give us our One True, spread it far and wide. He uses terms like ‘New Enlightenment,’ capital N capital E.”
“But not dangerous.”
“It’s half-ironical. He means it all but he’s not, I don’t think, nuts. He’s got a sense of humour. I’m just telling you this because you should know. If you want I’ll remove him from the trial.”
“But, given his devotion, couldn’t dropping him trigger real trouble?”
“I doubt it, but a reasonable question.”
They decided to switch him to a placebo and keep his numbers off the final report. He would have lost his One True anyway when the trial ended but better that he not feel singled out for the loss.
In the park along the bay a scene was unfolding. A car had stopped by the pathway and a man in a dark suit and sunglasses emerged and was watching the runners and dogs and mothers trotting with their strollers. He stepped forward, in front of a running man in spandex shorts, who stopped. They had a brief exchange. Ali got the sense they were neither strangers nor friends. She found herself expecting to see the man in the suit take a thick envelope out of his pocket and hand it to the runner. The runner was failing to register the inevitability of the envelope. His face read only exertion.
Any given moment was too complicated. How was it that time itself did not just seize up?
“Subject 11. What’s his name?”
Together they said, “Confidential.”
“It’s safer if you don’t know. That way you can’t follow any temptation to act. I act for you.”
“He knows my name but I don’t know his. I’m worried I’ll be acted upon.”
“Tricky position for us both.”
Setting up blinds. It was what they did professionally. Now one might have been set for her, hidden somewhere in the current run of days. Ali had fed him into this state and now they were thinking of each other, she and Subject 11, each picturing the other, imagining a voice, getting it wrong. It wouldn’t just go away, this wondering.
—
The time was 1:47.
On the old console radio she dialled through bands to find only dim warps in the static suggesting voices that in their failure to form were oddly beguiling. From nowhere came the memory of a resonance image she’d once seen on a med-sci site of the nameless, hollow space between an infant’s ribs and lungs. The space was common to mammals. Ali imagined it holding abstract feelings and ideas. Secreted there between the bone and tissue, love, hope, goodness, evil.
Denise had said “evil.” Within the span of a few hours Ali had encountered the word twice, in the Henry James story and now in Denise’s. It was Denise whose presence she felt around her in traces. The woman had needed someone to believe her. She’d opened her soul to a stranger and yet Ali had trouble accepting what she’d been shown. She wanted some objective reading but had only Denise’s handwritten notes and the audio file, which she returned to, at the desk, looking for clues. According to the file signature it had been created three days before Ali arrived and last revised on the same afternoon. The time between the making and final saving was less than forty minutes. She must have recorded it straight through. But the drive contained a second, much smaller file, created earlier. Ali assumed it contained operational data, but when she opened it she saw the audio meter appear again on-screen. The needle jumped as it picked up a very slow mechanical ticking and then a low fuzz emerged and she heard a voice, a distant voice, Denise, saying, “Hello, Alice. Stefan is away in town for the afternoon and I thought I’d use the quiet to say hello.” It was a muted version of the first recording, as if someone in another room had secretly recorded Denise leaving her message for Ali. The theory made no sense. No, the time code told the story. The file was just an earlier attempt in which something had gone wrong with the recording, and Denise had forgotten to delete it. The voice broke off suddenly and the needle went dead.
In the new silence Ali had a sudden, sharp memory of sitting by the woodstove yesterday with Crooner at her feet. She could see the page she’d been reading in The Turn of the Screw, the very words on it. It was the scene in which the young governess is herself reading a novel—“I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with hi
s spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room”—and then, though this hadn’t happened at the time, Ali was presented an inward vision that dropped before her, obscuring the remembered page, a vision of what she came to understand was Alph itself crossing the blood-brain barrier. The chemical appeared as small attenuating swirlings in the blood, like tornadoes whose tails bent toward the tissues and elongated into thin vessels that slipped into the cortex. The image lasted only a few seconds, but it was as certain as the remembered lines of text or the fur bunched into furrows on Crooner’s curved neck. The vision was even more vivid than her present moment as she stood at the desk, the remembered words from the novel returning with more force than they’d had when she first read them.
She was two places at once, in two times at once. When the sensation abated she walked back to the kitchen and looked into the living area, half-expecting to see herself there. In this stage of the drug’s effect she was able to distinguish between an extreme vision and reality, but was the border between these states eroding? And was her present reality itself already compromised? She had no way of knowing.
Certainly she was experiencing slight jump cuts in time. Without seeming to have returned to it, she was at the desk, trying to record her thoughts. Her awareness of the missing transition complicated her notes. The possibilities for memory enhancement alone should have brought on an elated focus of concentration, but as she looked through what she’d written, it seemed disordered, random. There were lines on mRNA synthesis and transcription factors, others on interactions between brain substrates, circuit-specific regulation of discrete memories, the possibility of accelerated networks and dynamic methylation changes. Whatever knowledge she should have been able to access had been lost in a jumble of half-recalled data she’d studied on unrelated aspects of memory and waking visions. How could she explain the drug producing a vision of itself and its progress through her system?