The angel did not appear. I hugged myself, the wind tugging at my jacket, as the bench turned my ass into a frozen pork chop.
After a while I said, “I admit it. I’m using her. But I would say in my defense that she’s using me, too. She wanted out of that hospital. She wanted me to … want her.”
I kept my butt planted on the freezing bench. Trying to score points by enduring some discomfort. I said, “I promise that as soon as I can, I’ll get her back in the hospital. And if she won’t go, then we’ll figure out what dosage she should be on, and I’ll do it. I just need her sharp enough to help me.”
The homeless guy squinted at me. He’d stopped talking to himself. I ignored him.
“I need her right now, okay? You know how important this is. And I need your help, too.”
A minute passed. She refused to appear.
“Jesus Christ!” I said to the air. The man shook his bushy gray head at me, looked away. Everybody’s a critic.
After a while I reached into my boot and withdrew the green box cutter I’d borrowed from Ollie’s duffel bag. I turned it in my hands. “Please,” I said. “Don’t make me do this.”
Dr. G was an Old Testament girl. She knew the story of the binding of Isaac. Abraham climbed the mount with his son, making the kid carry the wood for his own sacrifice, all because his God demanded proof of obedience.
I slid open the catch on the box cutter. The blade, when it touched the skin of my inner arm, made a dimple, then summoned a dot of blood. There were other, older scars in the vicinity. I had done this before, and Dr. G knew I could do it again. She had to.
Abraham’s biggest problem was that God was omniscient. Yahweh couldn’t be bluffed. There was no way for Abraham to fake his way through the preparations for the sacrifice, counting on a holy interruption, because God could see into his heart each moment and know whether he was absolutely ready to kill his own son. I had the same problem. Dr. G lived in my head, and even when she wasn’t talking to me, she saw what I saw, heard what I heard. My mind was an open book.
“Hey now,” a voice said. It was the homeless man. He was hunched over, looking at me and the knife.
I breathed in. One, I thought. Two.
I opened my eyes. The man was still staring at me with frank interest. But he made no move to stop me. And neither did Dr. G.
I screamed, an extended, primal “Fu-u-u-ck!” I jumped up and threw the box cutter behind me.
“Hey now,” the man said again. “You can’t just leave that there. A little kid could pick that up.”
“And fuck you, too,” I said. “You were just going to sit there and watch me cut myself?” The bright plastic box cutter was easy to find. I closed the blade and put it in my pocket.
“What kind of sick god would let you murder your own child?” I asked him. “Not one worth worshiping, that’s what. It wasn’t God testing Abraham, it was Abe testing God. If God let him do that to Isaac, then fuck it, the holy covenant is null and void.”
The man did not quite nod.
“That’s right,” I said. “Ruminate on that.”
CHAPTER NINE
Later, I started referring to it as the Greenland Summit. I had called the meeting, and I was determined to forge a treaty, or perhaps “covenant” would be a better word, among three clinically insane people—me, Edo, and Rovil—and their gods. It was on a Sunday seven months after the party, on the day before Gil’s trial was finally to begin.
My situation dictated the meeting place. Greenland House was a private hospital in the suburbs of Chicago where I’d been staying since the night Mikala died. I chose to use the café. It was midafternoon, between meals, and I had the place to myself except for a nurse who hovered in the hallway. I took a table near the fireplace where I could watch the door. The décor was a cut above any medical building I’d ever been in, and the café was like an upscale restaurant. It had atmosphere. Edo was paying for it, of course.
They came in at the same time, as if they’d traveled together. Probably they had. Edo opened his arms, but I was not going to hug him. I stayed behind the table. Edo sat down awkwardly. Rovil, polite as ever, shook my hand before sitting. Dr. Gloria sat to my right. Edo and Rovil’s gods did not seem to require their own seats. Only my divine presence was a diva.
“Tell me how you’re doing,” Edo said.
“I’m fat, sad, and crazy. How ’bout you?”
He laughed, but it wasn’t the typical Edo guffaw that he once deployed like a weapon in negotiations. The laugh was a warm, commiserating chuckle. “Are they taking care of you and the—”
“They take care of everybody,” I said.
Edo seemed to take up less space than he used to. He was still a physically big man, a giant who overwhelmed the seat like a visiting parent squatting at an elementary school desk. But he was subdued, watchful.
Dr. Gloria said, “Ask them if they want something to drink.”
I ignored her. At that moment, I knew she was a hallucination manufactured by fast-growing neurons in my temporal lobe. Other times I was equally sure she was the manifestation of God on this plane, sent to guide me. When this happens to sane people, it’s called cognitive dissonance.
We’d all been warned by our lawyers not to talk about the murder. They didn’t want us to pollute our testimonies in case we were called to the stand, as if three people with verifiable mental disorders could possibly be trusted to relay facts of the case. I was in the worst shape: clinically depressed and minimally medicated, and the only one of us still in a facility. Edo and Rovil, at least, had managed to impersonate the sane and the unsainted long enough to escape the psych wards.
“You could leave if you wanted to,” Dr. Gloria said. “I’ll be with you.”
Again I ignored her. “Let’s talk about the NME,” I said.
Edo and Rovil glanced at each other. They didn’t know where this was going.
“We bury it,” I said. “It can never see the light of day.”
Edo frowned. “I don’t think…”
“The intellectual property stays locked up. We get the lawyers to write something for us. We make sure that Little Sprout never gets re-formed to make the drug, and we don’t sell the IP to anyone, for any reason. Promise me.”
“Of course,” Rovil said. “I would never—”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said.
Edo thought for a long moment. “I know you’re hurt,” he said. “I can feel it. But Numinous is not the problem.”
“Jesus Christ, Mikala’s dead because of it.”
“I can’t tell you why Gil—why he did what he did,” Edo said. “But that was an overdose; we were all … disoriented. Most of us were knocked unconscious. That doesn’t mean Numinous can’t—”
“Stop calling it that.” Numinous was Mikala’s name for it. The trial had turned up her computerized log books. She’d been taking the drug, ramping up dosages week by week. Sometime during the experiments she stopped calling it by its number and gave it a name.
“One-Ten can still help people,” Edo said. “Not in the amounts that we took, of course. Perhaps tiny dosages. Something that would open the door just a little bit.”
“What fucking door?”
“To God,” Edo said. He was perfectly sincere.
That’s when I realized he’d been taken in by the drug. He wasn’t even struggling to keep himself sane. He’d given in.
I turned on Rovil. “What about you? Is Numinous a doorway to Jesus?”
Rovil glanced at Edo, then looked at his hands. “I cannot say that, but it has certainly helped me.”
“You fuckers.”
Edo stared at me. His eyes gleamed.
I pushed back from the table and started to get up. My belly was huge, a thing with its own gravity. Dr. Gloria put out a hand to help me up, but I shoved her away. “After all this,” I said to Edo, “you would still put the drug out there. You think people can take just one small dose, then stop? What do you think M
ikala was doing before she lost herself? She became a fanatic. She made a neurochemical bomb, then she dropped it—on her own child. Why? So we could all see God together.”
“Please, sit down…,” Edo said.
“Promise me.”
“I can’t—”
“Swear on your fucking god!”
“I can’t do that,” he said.
The nurse was hurrying toward me.
“If you ever let it out in the world, I will hunt you down like a fucking dog,” I said to him. “And no god will save you.”
* * *
When I returned to the hotel room, Ollie had turned it into a command center. She’d moved the bed and desk to the center of the room, then laid the two chairs on the bed. Dozens of floppy screens had been taped up on three walls. To the left was a rectangular arrangement of screens ten feet wide and five feet tall. Another row of screens were taped end to end, forming a band that ran across the glass balcony door. The right-hand wall was a random selection of single screens.
Ollie stood before one of the singles, flicking through text. She’d showered and changed into a new T-shirt. Without looking away from the screen she said, “You missed breakfast.”
She was annoyed with me.
“Missed more than that, looks like,” I said. On the screen nearest me was displayed a column of long numbers separated with dots, like foreign telephone numbers. “So what are you up to, Ol? And where did you get all these screens?”
“Have you been in contact with Edo Anderssen Vik?” she asked. Still not looking at me.
“Contact? Not yet.”
“Anything—calls, messages…”
“Well, I tried to get messages through.”
She turned to face me. “Have you been crying?”
“I’m fine.”
“Lyda, you can tell me if—”
“I’m fine. Edo never called me back. Rovil hasn’t gotten an answer, either.”
“I wish you had told me that,” she said. Her gaze shifted from me to some mental screen.
“Why?” I asked.
She walked along the balcony glass, one hand raised, and the text and graphics rippled as she passed, seemingly following her across the room. “You’ve tipped him off. If you’re hunting someone, you don’t give them advance notice.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing—hunting him?”
“Last night you said you didn’t want anyone to get the drug, and you mentioned Edo especially.”
“I did?” I did. At the diner, I remembered it now. “Okay, yeah. I’m hunting him.”
“Then we’re on the same page.”
“Uh, you look like you’re on fifty pages at once.”
“It’s been tricky,” she said. “Your friend Edo keeps a low profile.” She swiped away a graphic, and it was replaced with a picture of a smiling Edo at some business affair, wearing a jacket with no tie. “This is his last public appearance, five years ago.” He looked even bigger than in the old days. His eyes gleamed, perhaps from the camera flash. Something about that smile seemed false.
She called up another photo. The man looked like a younger, thinner, and humorless version of Edo. His hair was blond to almost white, and pulled back high on his forehead. The last time I’d seen him had been at the trial, ten years ago. He’d looked less like his father then and more like a shaggy blond hippie.
“Little Edo,” I said.
“Don’t call him that to his face,” Ollie said. “He hates it. Eduard Junior is handling all the business now—he’s the public face of the company. He has a beautiful wife, an adopted daughter, and is active in several charities.” She flicked through several pictures. Most of them of Eduard Jr., but in several he appeared with his wife Suzette, an ice-blonde Nordic princess in size zero dresses.
Their daughter appeared in only one photo, which seemed to have been taken at an airport. She was eight or nine years old in the picture, with curly hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was looking at something in her hands. Eduard had his arm around her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Ollie asked. “You’re flushed.”
“I’m—she’s just very pretty.”
Ollie’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, she is.”
I cleared my throat. “So is Edo still calling the shots for the company?”
“Opinion’s split,” she said. “Nobody can get close enough to ask him.”
“So we can’t reach him?” I said, frustrated. “Rovil said the same thing. He wasn’t even sure what country Edo was in.”
“This week he’s in his place outside London.”
“What?”
She turned back to the screens. “London right now. Before that, he spent fifteen days in the US, most of it on his estate in New Mexico, but he was in New York City for two days. He also has a home in Norway, but he hasn’t visited there in years, most likely because of his tax situation.”
I was stunned. “You got all that from—” I gestured at the walls. “What? Illegal wiretaps? Your spook friends in the government?”
Ollie shook her head. “They’re not allowed to talk to me anymore. If I even reach out, it could cause problems for them. So I don’t. This is all from public or semipublic sources. No TSA data, no wiretaps. I’ve got bots crawling the social web, and a cloud-based analysis engine that’s just a generation behind what I used to work with professionally.”
“This is what Fayza did to me. She hired a hacker and got all the details on me.”
“This isn’t hacking, it’s data mining.” She pointed at the big wall, where dozens of pastel spheres pulsed and shifted. “Everybody leaves a trail. It’s almost impossible not to leave footprints all over the online world, and that easily maps to your location in the real world. Unless you’re rich—and Edo Vik is very, very rich. He’s got a top-notch reputation company scrubbing his tracks. His personal footprint is null, as far as recent data goes. But you can infer a lot from second- and third-degree associates. Like this guy.”
She gestured toward one of the smaller circles, and it expanded. “The husband of one of his assistants is a twenty-five-year-old amateur foodie microfamous for his restaurant reviews. He lives in New York, but two nights ago he raved about a meal he’d just had at the 8-Ball, an Uzbek mobile restaurant in Hampstead. That’s north London.”
“So maybe they’re on vacation,” I said.
“Maybe. But you have to look at the data in aggregate. I’ve got the org chart for Edo’s whole company, and I can keep track of most of them. The handful of people who assist Edo and Junior are in the UK right now, but they’re leaving soon.”
I touched one of the spheres, and it shrank. The graphics told me nothing. “Are you telling me you know where Edo will be, and when?”
“I can make a pretty good guess.”
I breathed in. “When is he coming back to the US?”
“Next Thursday. Afternoon. New York City.”
“Holy shit!” I laughed. “How can you possibly know that?”
“I asked.” She allowed herself a smile. “That foodie husband? I friended him and asked him if he was going to be home in time for the Taste of New York festival, and he said he was out of town for the first day, but he’d be back in time for Friday. All the commercial flights are arriving in the afternoon.”
Five days.
“I have to be there,” I said.
Ollie said, “Where? New York?”
“Yes, New York. I’m hunting him, right?”
“So … you want to cross the border.”
“That’s right.”
“Lyda, if they catch you on the other side, you could end up in prison—American prison, not some nice Canadian hospital.”
“You said people do it all the time. I’ll just hop over, then hop back before the devil knows I’m there.”
She put out a hand. “I know you don’t want anyone to make the drug, but it’s not worth doing time for.”
“You don’t know how dangerous this stuff is,” I
said.
“Try me.”
I took a breath. “Okay. The problem is not that it causes these hallucinations; it’s that it’s so damn convincing—and you stay convinced. Look at Rovil. He knows the chemistry, yet he still thinks that fucking Ganesh is there guiding him. Numinous not only installs a supernatural chaperone, it makes you believe in it.”
“Even you?” Ollie asked.
“I know, in the deepest recesses of my ‘heart,’ that Dr. Gloria is real, that she was sent by God to save me from killing myself. It’s a Wonderful Life, courtesy of an overactive temporal lobe.”
“But you’re handling it,” Ollie said. “You can keep track of what’s real.”
“Barely,” I said. “I know, in an abstract way, that she’s a symptom of an overdose, but that doesn’t feel true. Half the time I can’t stop myself from talking back to her. Every day I tell myself, ‘Think like a stage magician.’”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Know it’s a trick and don’t forget it’s a trick,” I said. “The rabbit is already in the hat. Do not clap for fucking Tinkerbell. Believe nothing.”
“Sounds tiring.”
“Exactly. How many people can do that every day? Rovil can’t. Gil can’t. Not even Mikala. And what about—?” I started to say What about kids? “What happens if this spreads? The planet’s already too full of fanatics. Numinous could convert millions of people into true believers—each of ’em one hundred percent certain they’ve been personally handed the fucking stone tablets.”
Ollie stared at me. I said, “I’m sorry, was that too ranty?”
“You’ve been rehearsing this speech,” she said.
“What? No. Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. But you get what I’m saying, right?”
“Sure,” Ollie said. “You’re saving the world.”
“It sounds dumb when you say it like that.”
She shrugged.
“This really is a dangerous drug,” I said.
“I believe that part. I just don’t think that’s why you’re doing all this—breaking out of the hospital, crossing international borders…” She shook her head. “Is this about the girl?”
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