Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “That’s because it’s the seat of all light,” George said. “In evolutionary terms, the pineal gland is a vestigial photoreceptor, close enough to the skin in amphibians and reptiles to actually respond to light directly. Mystics and other pseudoscientists hold that in humans it evolved into our third eye, situated as it is in the midbrain behind the sixth chakra just above and between our eyes. Properly stimulated, it supposedly pulls back the curtain on hidden realities.”

  “What does this have to do with DMT?”

  “DMT, ayahuasca and other harmala alkaloids hyper-stimulate the pineal gland,” he said. “So users see strange beings in strange lands. The pineal itself also makes trace amounts of DMT, so it might be responsible for people who believe they’ve been abducted by demons or aliens and related hallucinations.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about it,” Elizabeth said.

  “I tried it.”

  “George!”

  “DMT, LSD and ketamine,” he said. “Peyote as well. All part of my lifelong research into the human psyche.”

  “What about sound?” Elizabeth asked. “Can you stimulate the pineal gland with certain frequencies?”

  George looked at her in silence for a moment.

  “Interesting question.”

  “So?”

  “Well, certain aural frequencies can stimulate various parts of the brain,” he said. “I don’t see why the pineal gland would be different.”

  “How?”

  “Ever been to a tent revival?” George asked. “Ever wonder how a slick man in a suit who couldn’t sell a used car manages to convince people to fork over their hard-won money by the fistful?”

  “Have you?”

  “I went to several tent revivals in the Central Valley when I was doing research at Stanford,” he said, “just to study the technique. The preacher was a ghastly fellow, pasty, dough face, dripping sweat all over his black suit. Looked like an undertaker in a sauna. But in the end, he picked all their pockets.”

  Elizabeth had to laugh at the idea of George Adler Abelman in a tent revival.

  “So what did you learn?”

  “There’s a lot of technique involved, but it’s the music that sets up the pigeons,” he said. “These preachers have an organist playing melodic hymns just as everyone is filing in, always at about 75 beats a minute, roughly the same frequency as the human heart. Even going in as an impartial observer, I couldn’t help but feel the pull of the music. And when I looked around at my fellow congregants, everywhere I saw the glass-eye stare of people slipping into an alpha state. A waking dream state, almost hypnosis or a fugue state. Very suggestible.”

  “And if you paired the right frequency with, say, DMT?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Effective,” George said.

  “Effective for what?”

  “For control.”

  SIXTEEN

  Ingrid did not look happy to see her, although Elizabeth doubted if Ingrid looked happy to see anyone in the morning.

  The young woman led Elizabeth past Thor’s office. It was already a bare cube with an empty desk and faded patches on the walls left by old concert posters. Elizabeth had a sad image of Thor’s mother in Tromso opening the box of her late son’s things. She wondered what Thor’s mother would make of his nerdy knickknacks and toys.

  She would dote over them, of course.

  Ingrid showed Elizabeth to the same office and computer where she had earlier watched Ken Woods’ testimonial. The young woman was wearing a sleeveless blouse and when she reached forward to plug in the computer, Elizabeth gasped. Ingrid’s forearm sported a full-color tattoo with a realistic depiction of the underlying musculature of her arm. It was as if someone had peeled her skin off.

  For all her understanding of people, Elizabeth could not grasp why so many young people were intent on disfiguring themselves like this for life.

  Ingrid left. Now it was time to watch another victim explain why, despite good health and affluence, he or she felt the need to join with some new friends and leap off the edge of Preikestolen. Elizabeth started the computer. Before he had left for Tromso, Thor had created an interactive screensaver, one with images of the seven … fallen.

  Elizabeth studied their faces.

  Sophia Goddard? A mousey woman with a thin smile that failed to mask her lack of confidence.

  Sandra Armstrong’s face projected intelligence and confidence. That would be a very interesting one, a Fortune 500 CEO. But the playbar on her tile showed it was very long. PIG had a meeting in the late afternoon, so Elizabeth decided it was better to watch a shorter one. Elizabeth zeroed in on Daryl Parnell, the Atlanta restauranteur, a man with a square face and outthrust jaw. He stared straight into the computer lens, a stark, confused expression that was often the signature of deep depression.

  Her eyes wandered down to Anne Shrewsbury. She would likely remain a mystery. Shrewsbury had left no recorded statement, just a cryptic note on her website that all she had to say to the world was in her books. The author had a smug, self-satisfied half-smile not in view when Elizabeth had last seen her laid out flat and naked on a steel autopsy table.

  Elizabeth’s eyes moved to Lionel Jacobson, the roundness of his head accentuated by salt-and-pepper hair shorn so close that it gave him the appearance of a tonsured monk. Jacobson’s stare was intense, as if he had just discovered you doing something incriminating and he wanted you to know he was going to memorialize all your failings.

  Elizabeth clicked the tile image of Jacobson and waited for it to load.

  While the computer clicked and gurgled, Elizabeth’s felt a flash of anger from the day before, when at the end of dinner George had pressed her to co-author his paper. She had demurred and now she was proud of herself for standing firm. It wasn’t right for him to horn in on her like that, was it?

  Of course, it was not clear that Elizabeth ultimately had any choice about accepting George as a co-signer. Given George’s connections in Norway, and now his official involvement, what would happen if Elizabeth didn’t write the paper with him? George had the bigger name. Unless she flatly refuted him on some point or another, it was likely his paper would bury hers.

  But at least she could make George wait. It would feel good to make him wait, if for no other reason than to let George know how betrayed she felt.

  “Sod off,” Jacobson said. “Sod off you wanking tosser if the only reason you’re watching this is to gain some masturbatory pleasure from my pain, you barking cunt … Sod off especially if you’re grasping for a fat contract to be my biographer with some second-rate house with piles of cash and a readership of morons, you talentless pillock, how dare you try to use words to define my life … But if you’re watching this for the right reason, to understand where I am at, where I am going, then settle in, pour yourself something tasty, for I have quite a tale to tell.”

  ___________

  Lionel looked up from his beach lounge and scanned the waters of Cala Mastella Bay for any sign of Robert. He could, of course, go down to the water to check on the lad, but in this isolated—and quiet—corner of Ibiza (no English pubs here to turn out singing, puking, fighting drunks at 3 a.m.), the beaches were littered with white pebbles that required one to slip on rubber beach shoes.

  Lionel had a pair of such shoes by his lounger … but drained of all energy by the sun and iced sherry, he could not summon the initiative required to slip into his beach shoes and stride into the placid bay. He scanned the waters, a riot of every slice of the blue end of the spectrum, from pale turquoise to violet. Lionel shrugged and took another sip of his ice-cold sherry-tini. The little orange umbrella in the drink bothered his nose, so he tossed it to the side, adding to the pile of them beside his lounge for the beach server to pick up.

  If Robert had drowned, well, he had likely already drowned.

  Robert’s head and shoulders finally broke the water. He spat his snorkel out of his mouth and raised a pale, spiny lobs
ter in the air, its antennae whirling madly. Robert smiled and expected Lionel to be pleased.

  Lionel smiled back and nodded, any flatness of expression hidden by his sunglasses.

  Robert walked out of the surf, his sandy hair plastered on his head, his lean hips well defined by his black bikini bottom, waving his prey in the air with the triumphant gestures of a child. He took a towel from his lounger with one hand, the other grasping the sea creature, its eyestalk rotating wildly out of sync with its antennae.

  “I should put this in a tub of water, catch a few more, and throw them on the grill tonight,” Robert said.

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

  “Da fuck?”

  Robert’s command of the Queen’s English had all the grace and originality one would expect of a former high school star quarterback from Torrance, California. He was a car dealer’s son who had earned a degree at Cal State Long Beach in sports management, although he occasionally made earnest attempts to appreciate Lionel’s plays and poems.

  “I thought you might have drowned,” Lionel said.

  “Yeah?” Robert said. “And you just sat there sipping sherry? If I thought you had drowned, Lye, I’d be all over this bay. Do you realize how fuckin’ tragic that shit would be?”

  “If I were to drown swimming in the Mediterranean, Robert, it would not quite meet the definition of tragic, but some might consider it plagiarism.”

  Robert squinted at him, knowing that Lionel was once again speaking above him.

  “Throw that thing back in the water. We’ve got dates tonight. With the girls.”

  ___________

  One could say that the Peacock sisters were in rare form, but that would be inaccurate. They were always attired flamboyantly and spouting “I hear” rumors with the abandon of teens tossing empty bottles out of a speeding car.

  “He really said that?” Robert asked.

  “Does that surprise you?” Pam said.

  “He’s always popping off like that,” Penny added.

  Lionel did not bother to catch the identity of the victim of this latest bit of chinwag. He ignored them and just enjoyed the scene. The restaurant was well selected, a series of interconnected, high stone grottos that opened to a vista of blue sea. A mistral swept across that sea from Africa, bringing a delicious coolness to the room, though it also bore a film of microscopic grit from the Sahara that crunched between one’s teeth.

  Tired of hearing what passed for conversation between Robert and the Peacocks, Lionel finally had to say something.

  “I see two more settings,” Lionel said. “Who is joining us tonight?”

  “You will be delighted, so let it be a surprise,” Penny said. “Lionel, you’re the dog’s dinner this evening. What is that?”

  “It’s my old rowing blazer,” Lionel said. His Cambridge crew blazer still fit him well, all dark red and blue stripes, with the heraldic shield of Gonville and Caius College sewed on the breast. Underneath, he wore a thin, light blue T-shirt matched by a snug pair of white shorts and leather sandals.

  “What about me?” Robert asked.

  Penny reached out and lightly caressed Robert’s well sculpted cheekbones.

  “You are always something else,” Penny said softly. “My dear Robert.”

  Robert blushed and smiled. The truth was he liked women as much as men, perhaps even more.

  “Yes, something else,” Pam said tartly.

  Penny withdrew her hand and giggled at Robert’s canine satisfaction at being caressed. Lionel realized he’d better keep an eye on them tonight. Robert could slip away all too easily.

  A bottle of Taittinger arrived, iced up in a silver bucket.

  While Robert poured around the table, Lionel reclined in his chair of woven seagrass and regarded their dates for this evening. Pamela and Penelope Peacock were the daughters of a Texas computer magnate and a London socialite, a couple that was once society page fodder on several continents. Now the father was long dead and the mother was strumming her breastbone with aums in an Indonesian ashram, leaving her daughters to tend to the family fortune by making shrewd investments in clothes, travel and Mayfair flats.

  “So when do our guests arrive?” Lionel asked. “I am hungry.”

  “You should be, with a frame like yours,” Pam said.

  “Quite a witticism, Pam,” Lionel said. “I should write that down for my next play.”

  Pam and Penny looked up at someone behind him. The restaurant was sparse this early in the day, but there were enough patrons for Lionel to notice several heads turning around the room to stare at the new party entering the dining room.

  “Oh good, they’re here,” Pam said.

  Never one to relinquish his dignity over a scene, Lionel rose from his chair and slowly turned to greet whomever it was who was joining them for dinner.

  Edward Lear, in the flesh, along with his wife, Judith Roberts.

  Well practiced in stifling any sign of being impressed by celebrity, Lionel calmly welcomed them to dinner as if he had been expecting them all along, introduced them to Robert, who was almost choking with disbelief, and bid the pair to join them at the table.

  Lionel had met them both before, of course, in the madness of some charity function at an ornate room rented out from the Royal Society of Medicine. Something about scoliosis, with several inebriated, inbred royals to boot. But this would be different, a chance for conversation, perhaps something more.

  Edward buffed the cheeks of both Peacocks while Judith slipped around him and took a chair. A patron walked forward with phone in hand, seeking a selfie with one or both of them, but Judith gave the man a hard stare and shook her head. He returned to his table.

  “Well, this is a rare privilege,” Edward Lear said. “To have dinner with the Peacocks and with England’s greatest living playwright … I’m referring to you, of course, Robert.”

  Giggles all round.

  Over drinks, a polite discussion ensued about the best places to get away from the crowds on the island, favorite tapas and cities in Spain.

  “So Edward, are you just off a job?” Lionel asked.

  Edward turned to look at his wife, smiled at her over some private joke, and cast his green eyes straight back at Lionel.

  “We both are just out of Pinewood, wrapping the last retakes of the latest comic book monstrosity.”

  Edward had one of those winsome mid-American accents reminiscent of the old stars.

  “Exhausting, four-thirty in the morning to a martini take around nine. Some horrible misalignment with the green screen didn’t show up in the dailies, so we had to completely redo some of the most intricate scenes. It felt like we were shooting pure shit, but I’m always amazed at what they can do when the computer animation gets plugged in.”

  “God, the fight scenes were such a slog,” Judith shook her head and took a sip. “Try doing leg swings for six hours straight. I don’t think I have it in me to do another one of those.”

  “So you won’t do a leg swing for us now?” Lionel asked playfully.

  Judith laughed. “More than that—I mean another superhero movie.”

  Edward looked at his wife with undisguised affection and raised a glass of champagne.

  “Honey, with the stash we’re getting from this one, you can do indies for the next decade.”

  She clinked his glass.

  “Fine by me. And you can do multiplex blockbusters to your heart’s content, Eddie. But they’ll look like shit in a hundred years, and people will still be watching me in the indies.”

  “Yes,” Edward said, “they’ll be watching you in small, almost empty cubicles in the NYU Cinema Studies Department in the year 2121.”

  She gave her husband a superficial smile and the finger. He smiled back. They had only been married a year, just before they signed up for the blockbuster, and were still obviously in the teasing mood of newlyweds.

  Ed turned to Lionel.
<
br />   “What about you, Lionel, what are you up to?”

  “We’ll, I’ve just put the finishing touches on my latest play, Holland Park, the money says yes, and it looks like the Old Vic will give us six weeks in the fall season.”

  “Wow,” Robert said. “You never said that.”

  Lionel shot him an irritated look.

  “Of course, if the reviews are good and the crowds are thick, we can renew at the Vic for the spring or take it on the road.”

  “Did I ever tell you that the first contemporary play I ever did on a proper stage was Canary Wharf?” Edward said.

  Lionel shook his head and smiled in response, overcome by a warm rush of satisfaction. Canary Wharf was his first, the one that had won him the Bruntwood and put him in profile pieces in every Sunday supplement. “If Shakespeare were alive today to write a play about sex, intrigue and high finance, he would have to change his name to Lionel Jacobson,” The Times drama critic had gushed. A bit over the top, but one could never have enough of that.

  In the train of that one play, and the millions in royalties that rolled in from its production throughout the English-speaking world, Lionel had gained entrée to a world he had long imagined. Then came further commercial success with Marble Arch and several other plays with London place names, though the reviews were not nearly as good. Not bad for the son of a Jewish mailman from York and a pint-pressing Scottish mother from the council houses of Glasgow.

  “In that event, if you have got your fill dodging ray guns and killing robots, perhaps you ought to consider the lead,” Lionel said to Edward. “The role of Stewart.”

  The actor turned to his wife, giving her a ‘what-do-ya-think’ look.

  “We’d need to sound it out with Ira, but it sounds like it could be a good career move,” Judith said. “Something to balance out the popcorn. Something I’d certainly be interested in—what’s the female lead?”

  “Charlotte,” Lionel said.

  “Yes, Charlotte,” Judith said.

  “Two for the price of one,” Edward smiled. “Well, two for the price of two. It’d be a thrill to be back on stage with you, hon.”