Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “I could have stayed in Houston and found work. Not at another oil industry supermajor. Word gets around. But I could have found work in some weak, half-life of a consulting gig at the perimeters of the industry. I didn’t want that. Partly, out of fear, I’ll admit, of being seen by my peers in such a lowly station. Mostly because I had come to realize that the work I had done for the last twenty-seven years was a fucking bore I could no longer endure.

  “So I wandered from expat community to expat community, the art studios and bistros of San Miguel Allende, Lake Chapala, Todos Santos. There were some dalliances, some with divorced women about my own age, some with younger women who mistook my rootlessness for something exotic. I ventured deep down into South America, fearlessly traveling into barrios I never would have seen, much less visited, when I was an executive.

  “Then, while gazing at the last of the Andes tapering off at the very bottom of Patagonia, I had an inspired thought. I decided to go to Southeast Asia, where the living’s easy and cheap. Once on the beach there, I fell in with a lady from Australia. She succeeded in doing something Jane never could, getting me into yoga, on the beach no less. Then her old flame, an Australian marine, got back from Afghanistan ready to marry. She left me. After that, I fell into every bad habit you can imagine and worse. I migrated from a few ryes at dinner to a fifth of rum a day. I trolled around the red light district from midnight to dawn, not really participating, just pointlessly milling around with all the drug vampires, sex ghouls, chunky German tourists, whores and lady boys. I got deep into hashish and smoked opium more than a few times. One night, a guy from Holland convinced me to drop acid. I can’t recommend walking down the main thoroughfare of Patong, with its blinking lights and screaming whores, on acid. But when I got to the beach, I did feel a deep connection to … something … to everything and everyone. I stayed at the beach throughout the night, experiencing the sounds of the surf coming in and out as if I had my ear to the chest of the universe.

  “Sounds stupid, I know, when I say it out loud like that.

  “I remembered praying that night, to what and to whom I did not specify. I just prayed for clarity. I prayed for purpose. Above all, I prayed for a destination.

  “Two nights later, my miracle came. I had a chance conversation with a couple, hipsters from Oakland, who turned me on to Freyja. The next day, I went to an Internet café and initiated contact, just like that. Soon, Freyja and I were texting back and forth. We eventually talked face to face, too, for endless hours. She convinced me to take the course. Which I did, adjusting the frequencies as she directed, taking the treatments she sent me, pouring over her blogs and taking in all her personal advice, therapy and counseling …

  “Now don’t think me stupid. I don’t believe in Norse gods. There is a woman behind all of this. I can sense her, someone subtle, clever, wise. Someone who gets me. I do believe in symbols, in signs that lead to realities that can be perceived but to which access is quickly denied to those lacking in finesse. All along the way, I can’t shake the notion that in Freyja, I am speaking not just with her, but with an aggregate wisdom, as if the Internet has some way of distilling the most sacred, the most revealing insights of man and woman and enriching it with the wisdom of all ages. Our relationship deepened, and I began to see her as a person, as someone who loves me and cares about me, who wants nothing but the very best for me, who understood what I wanted when I say I needed not just a destiny, but a destination, someone who invited me to a deeper level, a discussion not for everyone, but for—”

  ___________

  Her smartphone buzzed. Elizabeth looked down. A text message with a phone number, a 732 area code.

  >Urgent message: To the parents and/or guardian of Max Browne. Please contact the dean of students immediately.<

  FIFTEEN

  The Hudson River sweated upward into the air, a minor portion of which condensed into fat drops of humidity that rolled down the window of the ride-share limo. Elizabeth pulled her jacket tight. It was ice-cold inside with the air on high, but she knew that if she asked the driver to turn it down, they would soon be sweltering. At least he knew the best back route from Newark International. Within thirty minutes, the red brick walls and white steeple of Old Queens, Rutger’s main administration building, rolled into view.

  Elizabeth rolled her bag on sidewalks that rippled over ancient roots from the tall elms on the main quad. The trees looked weathered and the campus lawn washed out in summer sunlight filtered through city haze. There were few students. She dragged her bag over concrete steps to the building and found her way to the Dean of Students.

  Max sat in a chair in the waiting room, madly clicking and flipping through something that commanded his absolute attention. Elizabeth studied her son for a moment. A nice-looking boy, anyone would say that. Black spikey hair, jaw blued by a missed shave, and Elizabeth’s green eyes and white complexion—legacy of the Braunsteins, German and Russian Jews who had found a safe harbor in Brooklyn from the varied insanities of the previous century.

  Max glanced up and had a little start at the sight of his mother silently standing before him.

  “How are you?”

  “Hungry.”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “I’m all signed out. The dean wants you to call her later. I signed a waiver, so it’s okay if you talk to her.”

  “I’ll do that,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s go.”

  Max knew a nice little pizza place down on Easton Avenue, a family-owned joint with creaky wooden booths. They ordered a pepperoni pizza.

  After the waitress left with their order, Elizabeth slowly reached out and placed her hand over her son’s.

  “Tell me, okay?”

  Max had always had trouble looking people in the eye, but not with his mother. But this time he couldn’t look at her.

  “I took something I shouldn’t have.”

  “What was it?”

  “Some stuff. A drug.”

  “If you don’t tell me, the dean will,” she said. “It will be better if you tell me.”

  Their drinks came, a soda for Max, a light beer for his mother.

  Max looked left and right, as if to escape and then spat it out: “DMT, okay, I took some DMT.”

  Elizabeth felt a rush of cold fear. She focused on her breathing, knowing from years of practice that calm and even was the tone for eliciting.

  “That’s unusual,” she said. “I know from my practice that LSD is making a comeback at school, but DMT? Where did you get it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, humor me.”

  “It’s kind of weird.”

  “That’s okay, you can tell your mother the shrink.”

  “I got it in the mail.”

  “You ordered it?”

  “Somebody sent it,” he said. “I started getting these weird emails from a dot-tor address. At first I deleted them as spam. But there were really personal messages in the subject lines, stuff I did, stuff I was just thinking about, I mean from somebody who knew a lot about me. All about me.”

  “What was this person’s name?”

  “Freyja, you know, like the Norse goddess that became Friday,” he chuckled. “The freaking Internet, okay? It’s all weird all the time.”

  “And?”

  “So we traded emails,” he said. “Eventually, Freyja told me that I would benefit from taking something she recommends for people with social anxiety, you know, like I got. A week later, it came in a plain envelope, no note, no instructions, just a pill in a plastic bag.”

  “And so you just took it?”

  “No,” Max said. “I let it sit around. Finally, my roommate, Stuart, couldn’t stand it, so he took it. He went into his room and tripped out. A day later, he told me it had to be DMT.”

  “What did it do for him?”

  “He said he saw what users call machine elves. He said it was really cool.”

  “I k
now about the machine elves. And so …”

  “Here is where it gets even weirder. Somehow Freyja knew I hadn’t taken it. She knew it was my roommate who had taken it.”

  “How could she know that?”

  “She’d hacked the peepholes in our laptops, obviously,” he said. “She was not happy. She said I really messed up. But I could make it right my taking my treatment, she called it, which she’d send again. I didn’t buy any of her shit, of course, but I was intrigued. Who was this person who knew and cared so much about me? And I have to admit, what Stuart described sounded pretty cool. I wanted to see for myself. A few days later, I had another envelope in the mail. So I took it.”

  “Do you still have the envelope?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No, why?”

  “Did it have foreign postage on it?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing, for about twenty minutes,” Max said. “Then I started getting all paranoid, like Stuart and his girlfriend wouldn’t stop looking at me. Like their eyes were boring into me. My body started feeling weird. I believed my heart had stopped and I was no longer breathing. Then I felt like I didn’t have a body at all.”

  “Did Stuart help you?”

  “Fuck no,” Max said. “He was a real dick. So was his girlfriend. I think they were messing with me so I left.”

  “Left for where?”

  “I went out into the quad and that’s when things got too weird to handle,” Max said. “There were things lurking behind the trees, dark things, bad things. They were all over and they were all cooperating to surround me. I didn’t feel as if I still had a body, but as if I were just a floating mind that could see. And all I could see was evil stuff. I was afraid they’d take my spirit someplace bad.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t remember much more,” he said. “The campus police found me. Apparently, they’re pretty used to this kind of thing. I remember being tied down, ceiling lights passing by as they rolled me down a hallway. I slowly came back and when I did, I felt pretty stupid.”

  “That’s because you were stupid.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me doing that or anything like that ever again,” Max said. “I hated every second of it.”

  “Max, listen to me,” she said. “The biggest danger isn’t DMT, even though that’s really dangerous. It is Freyja.”

  Elizabeth proceeded to tell her son everything that had happened in the last month, up to finding a colleague dead on a hill in Tromso.

  Max listened to her, wide-eyed and anxious, but also clearly fascinated. He asked a few questions and Elizabeth held back very little.

  “This person loves to trick people into committing suicide,” she said. “This Freyja pretends to help when all she really wants to do is mess you up and get you to kill yourself. She knows about our investigation and is trying to get to me through you.”

  “The next time she contacts me, I’ll tell her to kill herself for a change,” Max said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “The next she contacts you tell her that you’ve got a message to pass along from your mother.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “Tell her this—‘Elizabeth is ready.’”

  ___________

  “Welcome Elizabeth,” Lars said. “How is New Jersey?”

  Any number of responses came to mind, but Elizabeth knew he was really asking about her son. She had told him her son had an emergency to deal with, but nothing more.

  “Everything is fine here,” she said. “I am sorry to have missed Thor’s funeral.”

  Lars rotated the laptop, letting Elizabeth greet every member of what had come to be known as the Preikestolen Investigative Group, christened by Bowie as PIG. Nasrin looked striking, her black hair shining under the fluorescent ceiling lights, a bemused expression. Standing at the far end of the room was Thor’s intern, Ingrid, looking small and undernourished at the end of the room. With her rings, runes and roostertails, Ingrid could have been a medieval waif orphaned by the Black Plague.

  Someone else, a new member of the team, was seated along the table, too close to the lens for Elizabeth to see anything but two burly hands, lightly fidgeting.

  “First order of business,” Lars said, unseen behind the laptop. “While it is not yet official, I can tell you confidentially that the coroner believes that Thor died from a heart attack, likely the result of too much stress from running uphill, perhaps from fear as well.”

  “Whomever was chasing him was in shape,” Nasrin said. “And physically formidable enough to scare Thor into running.”

  “Not necessarily,” Agent Norris said. “Just in better shape than Thor.”

  “The coroner says, ‘fear’—does that seem psychologically likely?” Lars asked.

  Elizabeth quietly cleared her throat to speak, but was interrupted by a deep and familiar voice.

  “If Thor knew that the chaser had a weapon, he’d have every incentive to flee,” the newcomer said. “That would be a rational reaction any one of us would undertake.”

  The fingers of the two hands fidgeted a bit more.

  It took a moment to register with Elizabeth. The voice of the unseen man came from George Adler Ableman.

  “Ingrid, brief us,” Lars said.

  “It is like this,” Ingrid’s flat, heavily accented voice crackled with vocal fry. “Without access to Thor’s stolen laptop, we cannot know for certain all that was on it. The items taken from his apartment and his mother’s home in Tromso, his other computers, backup hard drives and memory sticks are yielding some data, but we believe there was more.”

  Elizabeth looked out the window of her hotel room at a gray desert of concrete and cars next to Newark International. She had spent two days with Max and was fully satisfied that he was stable. It was time to get back to the investigation.

  “Everything we found related to the case,” Ingrid said. “Thor had already reported to us—the dot-onion and tor domains, the testimonials of the victims and the like.”

  “What about the cloud?” Nasrin asked.

  “We do not have Thor’s password,” Ingrid said. “We are contacting the companies to open his account for us.”

  “Thank you Ingrid. Anything else?”

  “There is one other thing I should mention,” Ingrid said. “There was a piece of paper on his desk, with hand-copied leads and web addresses, the same ones the criminal Karl Pedersen had provided.”

  “What about it?” Agent Norris asked.

  “There was one new word written on it in different ink,” Ingrid said. “Thor had written it.”

  “What was the word?”

  “Halo,” she said.

  ___________

  They met a day later in a Scottish restaurant along Karl Johans gate. George looked sporty in an open-collar shirt and khakis, shafts of chest hair poking over his top button like white wires.

  They both ordered steaks, medium well, with Hasselback potatoes. They split a bottle of a lesser Bordeaux and a salad to start.

  “So when were you going to tell me about this?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Well, I knew you were away, with your son,” George said. “I didn’t want to inject myself into your personal crisis, at least not until asked.”

  “How did you become a formal part of the working group?”

  “You mean PIG?” he smiled.

  Elizabeth chuckled despite herself.

  “As you know, Lars and I are acquainted,” he said. “I was his therapist during my first Norwegian stay when he was divorcing. He arranged for me to join the team under his budget.”

  “But two shrinks?”

  “On this case, Elizabeth, I think you need help from me, as I would from you,” he said, leaning over, that charming half-smile. “This one is a big stumper.”

  “It also has the makings of one big paper.”

  “You we
re right, there are no ethical conflicts here. Which is why I think you and I should collaborate in writing it.”

  “Really?” Elizabeth asked. “And who’s name goes first?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Elizabeth took a bite of salad and a sip of wine.

  “Tell me,” George leaned forward, conspiratorially, “if it is not too intrusive, about your son. How is he doing?”

  “It turned out to be just a bump in the road,” Elizabeth said. “I will give you some news that reflects on the case, but you have to promise not to mention it until I’ve had a chance to present it to Lars and the group.”

  “I promise.”

  Elizabeth told George all about what had happened, the emails, the package, the pill, convincing Max not to interact with Freyja again … all except for the instructions she had left her son to tell Freyja that she was ready for contact.

  “Are you sure it was a pill?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “Very unusual,” he said. “DMT is almost always smoked, snorted or injected. To make it effective in pill form would require mixing it with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make it easy and palatable.”

  “Which is what you’d need if you wanted to convince seven professional people to take it,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t imagine any of them shooting up, or even snorting or smoking anything.”

  “Freyja, whomever he or she is, has the shamanistic touch,” George said. “It’s all about pineal gland, you know.”

  Elizabeth remembered as a medical student pinching the tiny, red-brown endocrine gland between thumb and index fingers—a tough, fibrous pinecone-shaped organ not much larger than a grain of rice. She also remembered her professor having her trace the pathways of the optic nerves all the way from the back of a cadaver’s eyes through the cortex to the gland, the pathway by which the gland helped regulate human sleep with melatonin.

  “I remember Descartes had a lot of silly theories about the pineal gland,” Elizabeth said. “Seat of the soul, as I recall.”