Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

“He won’t,” C.B. assured her. “He’ll assume you drove yourself home. He doesn’t know the nurse said you weren’t supposed to drive.”

  “Your order, sir,” the boy at the window said.

  C.B. paid, and the boy handed him the sack. Briddey reached for it.

  “Not until you send the text,” C.B. said. “He could get out of that meeting any minute.”

  He was right. She stared at her phone, trying to think what to say. “I found someone to take me home?” No, that would invite him to ask who…

  “Oh, for—I’ll do it,” C.B. said, snatching the phone from her and handing her the McDonald’s sack. “Eat.”

  “What are you typing?”

  “ ‘No need to come to hospital. Transportation situation taken care of.’ What’s Charla’s number under?”

  She told him.

  “ ‘I’m back,’ ” he recited as he typed. “ ‘Meeting with C.B. Schwartz about new app. Move all afternoon appointments to tomorrow morning.’ ” He hit SEND and then turned off her phone and handed it to her. “There. Now eat.”

  Briddey dug eagerly into the sack as he pulled out of McDonald’s and headed toward her apartment. “You were going to tell me what you found out when you went online?”

  “Well, for one thing, I found out there’s a lot of junk on the internet.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. You wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff on there—people claiming they can hear the voices of Napoleon and John Lennon.”

  “And Hitler, I suppose,” Briddey said.

  C.B. shot her a delighted smile. “You’re right. They also claim they can hear their pets. And their plants. And bring about world peace by all thinking ‘Give peace a chance’ at the same moment. Between them and the lunatics who think they’re communicating with Martians or the spirit of Ramtha, it’s no wonder telepathy’s got a bad name.”

  “So you didn’t find any evidence of people actually experiencing telepathy?”

  “I didn’t say that. Some incidents seemed to be authentic…”

  “And?” Briddey prompted.

  “And unfortunately, most of those support Dr. Verrick’s bonding theory. Almost every verifiable incident involved people with an obvious emotional connection. Parents, spouses, children, lovers.”

  He recounted the instances as he drove. In the middle of the night on April 6, 1862, Patience Lovelace had heard her betrothed calling her name, and a month later had received a letter from his commanding officer telling her he’d been shot at that exact time at the Battle of Shiloh and died a few minutes later. In 1897, Tobias Marshall, while traveling on a train, had heard his wife say clearly, “I need you,” and two days later he got a cable saying that she’d gone into labor six weeks early.

  “They’re nearly all like that,” C.B. said, glancing at her. “A mother who hears her son call out to her that it’s dark and wet, and it turns out he’s fallen down a well. A man who hears the girl he’s in love with say, ‘Alas, we shall not meet again,’ and finds out she’s died suddenly. A son who hears his mother call out his name as she’s dying half a continent away.”

  Briddey had heard dozens of stories like that. Aunt Oona had said her great-great-grandmother had heard a lad she knew cry out, “It’s done for, I am,” as he died at the Battle of Ballynahinch.

  “And there was an emotional bond between them, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Briddey admitted grudgingly. “But you said almost every instance. That must mean you found some instances where the people weren’t emotionally bonded.”

  “Yeah, but those—” He broke off to ask, “Where do I turn?”

  “Jackson,” she said. “Those what? Did you find instances where the people were strangers?”

  “Yeah. A bunch of random people claimed they’d heard someone cry out for help at the same time the Titanic went down. Ditto the Lusitania and the Empress of Ireland.”

  “Well, there you are, then,” Briddey said. “Our connecting must be one of those.”

  “I don’t think so. Most of those people didn’t report the cries for help till after news of the disaster hit the papers, and several turned out to be professional psychics with, shall we say, ulterior motives. Speaking of which, did you know there was a psychic on board the Titanic? Though obviously not a very good one, or he wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  “But there were some shipwreck incidents that were authentic?” Briddey persisted.

  C.B. was peering through the windshield at the street ahead. “Where do I turn?” he asked. “Is it this light?”

  I thought you could read my mind, she thought. “No, the light after next. You turn left.”

  Briddey waited for him to go on talking, but he didn’t, and after they’d gone a block, she asked, “So what were they, these authentic shipwreck incidents?”

  He still didn’t answer.

  “C.B.?”

  “Huh? What? Sorry, I was thinking about something I need to do after I get you home. What did you say?”

  “I asked you what the authentic Titanic incidents were.”

  “Incident, not incidents. And it wasn’t…this is where I turn, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he promptly turned right. “No, not right. Left.” She pointed. “My apartment’s that way.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll go to the next street and then come back.”

  She shook her head. “It’s one-way the wrong way. Pull into a driveway and turn around.”

  “I can’t,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “There’s somebody coming.”

  He drove two blocks, came back, and finally turned onto her street. “How far down is your apartment?” he asked.

  “It’s the second one from the—oh, no!”

  “What is it?”

  “My sister Kathleen. She’s just going into my building. Quick!” she said, sliding down in the seat. “Go! She’ll recognize you. Hurry!”

  “Okay, okay.” He drove back to Linden and turned onto it. Briddey sat up and looked back.

  “This isn’t a spy movie,” C.B. said. “She’s not going to chase you. Besides, she didn’t see you. She didn’t even turn around when we went by. Where am I supposed to be going, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere we can wait till she gives up and goes home.”

  “How about my apartment?”

  “I am not going to your apartment,” she said. “Just go over a couple of blocks and park.”

  “Parking. Even better,” he said, turning down the next side street and pulling up next to a vacant lot. “Now what?”

  “Do you have a pocketknife?” Briddey asked, reaching into the back for her tote bag.

  “No. And what for? I told you, she’s not following us, and even if she was, you’d hardly need a knife to defend yourself.”

  “I need it to cut off my hospital ID bracelet,” Briddey said, rummaging through her bag.

  “Why? If we’re going to wait here till she leaves—”

  “But someone else could come while I’m going into my apartment.” She rummaged some more. “And the bracelet’s a dead giveaway that I’ve been in the hospital.”

  “So is that bruise on the back of your hand from where you pulled out your IV,” C.B. said. “What are you going to do about that? Wear gloves?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and continued to look for the scissors.

  He watched her dig awhile without success and then said, “By the way, how long do we need to sit here? Not that I mind. We’ve got a great view”—he gestured toward the weed-filled lot—“romantic music…” He reached forward, switched on the radio, and began turning the old-fashioned tuning knob, moving the dial’s needle through static and snippets of country-and-western music and right-wing talk and rap. “I could sit here all day. But how long does it take to knock on a door and figure out you’re not there?”

  “You don’t know my family,” Briddey said. “They all have keys, and n
o respect for privacy. Kind of like you. Kathleen will go inside and check every room to make sure I’m not there, and then try to call me. And when she can’t get me, she’ll call Charla and ask her if she knows where I am. She’ll be there half an hour at least. If she doesn’t just decide to sit down and wait till I get home.”

  And meanwhile time was ticking by—time she needed for building a neural pathway if she was going to connect with Trent before the twenty-four-hour mark. She wished she could hear Kathleen’s voice the way she could C.B.’s. Then she’d know what Kathleen was doing and whether it was safe to go home.

  “You’re kidding, right?” C.B. said in disbelief. “You really want to hear your sister’s thoughts?” He shook his head. “People always think being telepathic would be like some cute romantic comedy where you could find out secrets and use them to get what you want. Or find out what your enemies are up to. But you know what it would actually be like?”

  “What?” Briddey said, since he was going to tell her anyway. She didn’t have any way to stop him.

  “Exactly,” C.B. said triumphantly. “People always assume they’d be able to turn it on and off like a faucet and only hear the stuff they want to. But it—”

  “Doesn’t work like that.”

  “Exactly. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to pick and choose who you heard. You might not get your sister. You might just as easily get—”

  “I know. A kidnapper or someone who hates McDonald’s.”

  “Or one of those crazies schizophrenics hear, the kind who tell you to kill people. And you wouldn’t be able to pick and choose what you heard either. You might find out stuff about people that you don’t want to know. Or what people really think about you. Remember back in middle school when you were in the school bathroom and accidentally overheard your best friend saying something mean about you? That’s what being telepathic would be like. You’d be stuck listening to people you didn’t want to hear—”

  Like I’m stuck here with you, she thought. But it couldn’t be helped. If Kathleen spotted her, she’d lose even more time explaining what C.B. was doing bringing her home. She’d just have to sit here and listen to him till Kathleen left.

  “Good,” C.B. said, tuning the radio through more static and then switching it off. “Because there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “About the incident on the Titanic?”

  “No. And it wasn’t on the Titanic. It was a World War Two destroyer. But that isn’t what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Because it proves people who aren’t emotionally bonded can connect, and you don’t want me to hear those incidents.”

  “No—”

  “Then tell me about it.”

  “Fine,” he said. “In 1942 a seventeen-year-old girl in McCook, Nebraska, is sitting listening to the radio with her married sister Betty and the sister’s friend Mrs. Rouse, and she suddenly stands up and cries, ‘Oh, the ship’s going down! Somebody help him!’ So Mrs. Rouse thinks the girl’s fallen asleep and is dreaming, and she says, ‘There’s no ship here! You’re in McCook, Nebraska,’ and the girl says, “I know, but I can hear him! He’s in the water! We have to help him, Betty! Mrs. Rouse! Oh, hold on! Don’t give up!’ And when they finally get her calmed down, she tells them she heard a sailor calling to her, crying, ‘Help! We’ve been torpedoed by a U-boat!’

  “They ask her who the man was, and she says she doesn’t know, she didn’t recognize the voice. And she can’t think of anybody it could be. She doesn’t even know anybody in the navy. She wrote the whole episode down in her diary, and so did her sister in a letter to her husband, who was in the army. And both of them noted the time.”

  “Which was exactly the time the sailor’s ship went down.”

  “Yeah, in the North Atlantic, but they didn’t have any way to know that because news of naval losses was censored, so the sinking wasn’t in the papers.”

  “So he’d called out as he drowned, and she just happened to hear him. Like you happened to hear me.”

  “Not quite,” C.B. said. “And he didn’t drown. He was picked up, badly burned, by a cruiser, after hanging on to a piece of wreckage for fourteen hours, and he told the ship’s doctor he’d managed to hold on because he’d heard a strange girl’s voice telling him to. A girl from McCook who mentioned a Betty and a Mrs. Rouse.”

  “And he didn’t know anyone like that in McCook.”

  “He didn’t know anybody in McCook. Or in Nebraska. Till the war, he’d never been out of Oregon.”

  “Which means the communication was between people with no emotional bond at all,” Briddey said happily. And I can tell Trent that.

  “Let me finish,” C.B. said. “When the sailor got out of the naval hospital, he went looking for the girl to thank her, and when he found her, they realized they had met after all. At a canteen in North Platte when his train came through on his way to his deployment. She’d been passing out candy and cigarettes to the soldiers, and they’d talked for a couple of minutes.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Yeah, well, they were married three days after he located her. So I’m guessing there was some kind of emotional bond there.”

  And you’re implying there has to be a bond between us, too. Trust me, there’s not. I’m in love with—

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying if you tell Trent and he goes online, this is the kind of thing he’s going to find, and it’s not exactly going to convince him that our being connected is a case of tangled neurons or crosstalk.”

  “So what do you suggest I do?”

  “Stall. Give me some time to—”

  “To what? Come up with more stories about sailors and psychics and people falling down wells?”

  “No, to figure out what’s going on and what caused it.”

  “What caused it? We know what caused it. The EED—”

  “Really? None of those people I told you about—Patience Lovelace or Tobias Marshall or the McCook, Nebraska, girl and her sailor—had an EED or even a head injury, and I didn’t have one either. And nobody else who’s had an EED has started hearing voices.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe they did, but they just didn’t say anything.”

  “You really think Jay Z and Beyoncé would keep something like that to themselves? Or Kim Kardashian? She wouldn’t just broadcast it, she’d have a reality show about it.”

  “I thought you said people would have them committed.”

  “It doesn’t apply to celebrities. People already think they’re crazy. And you’re the only EED patient this has happened to, which means it probably wasn’t the EED that caused it. And until we find out what did cause it—”

  “There is no we.”

  “Yeah, well, try telling that to your boyfriend,” C.B. said. “Look, all I’m asking is that you not say anything to him or Verrick till we figure out what caused this and what else is going to happen—”

  “What do you mean, what else is going to happen?”

  But he wasn’t listening. He was staring up the street.

  “What is it?” Briddey asked, afraid he’d seen Kathleen. “Is it my sister?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “C.B.?”

  “No,” he said abruptly, and started the car.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking you home.” He pulled away from the curb and started back to her apartment. “Don’t worry, we’ll check to make sure your sister’s gone first.” He drove quickly to Briddey’s street and parked just around the corner. “What kind of car does she drive?”

  “A white Kia.”

  He got out. “Stay here,” he said, and ran around the corner.

  He was back almost instantly. “She’s gone,” he said, getting back in and starting the car.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” He drove around to the front of her building, parked, and opened his door.

  “You don’t have to get out,” Briddey said.r />
  “You can’t carry all this stuff by yourself.” He handed the violets and the throw-up pan to her and retrieved everything else, including Trent’s bouquet of roses, from the back seat, raced up the stairs with them, and came back down to help her.

  Once inside her apartment, he set the roses on the coffee table and took everything else into the bedroom. “This was on the bed,” he said, returning with a note. He handed it to her.

  It was from Kathleen: “Sorry I missed you. What’s the favor you need? Call me.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” C.B. said. “The nurse said you should rest. Is there anything you need before I go? A cup of tea or something?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she said, and he immediately went to the door, clearly in a hurry to be gone. Why? Where was he going?

  “To do some more research,” he said, opening the door. “If anything happens—you connect to Trent or start feeling those ‘flickers’ Dr. Verrick talked about, or if your head falls off—let me know,” and went racketing down the stairs.

  Briddey shut the door and looked at the clock. It was a quarter past one. She still had forty-five minutes to connect with Trent before he began wondering why they hadn’t. She turned on her phone to see if there were any messages from him and then turned it off again so Kathleen couldn’t call and went into the kitchen.

  She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, clasped her hands together, and squeezed her eyes shut. Trent, she called. Come in, Trent—

  I forgot to tell you, C.B. said, that app we were discussing—

  What app?

  The one I was showing you in my lab this afternoon when nobody could reach you. Just in case anybody asks. Rule Number Three of Lying: Have a cover story ready in case people start asking questions.

  I thought you said I didn’t need—

  He ignored her. It was an app to use with Twitter. For when you send out a tweet you shouldn’t have. It automatically holds it for ten minutes so you can decide, “Jesus, what was I thinking? I can’t send this!” and delete it before it goes out to everybody and destroys your career. I call it SecondThoughts, which is what you should be having if you’re still thinking about telling Trent or Dr.—

  I thought you had research to do, Briddey said, and, just in case he came back, went over to the front door and put the deadbolt on. She wished there was one that would work against his voice.