by Anise Eden
Ben and I stood by quietly. After Kai wound down his bowl playing, he went over and placed his hands on top of Asa’s. “To whom am I speaking?” he asked.
“That was beautiful playing, my dear Kai,” Asa said, but in a register slightly lower than his usual voice. “And this is Braz, of course. Asa is very generous to let me speak through him.”
“Yes, he is,” Kai said. “Ben has brought Cate over for your session.”
“I know,” Braz said through Asa. “I caught the scent of her lovely soap—coconut, is it?”
“Coconut milk,” I acknowledged, marveling at his keen sense of smell.
“Ah, yes. Well, greetings, Amada. That means beloved, and I can tell that you are, so that’s what I’ll call you. And please call me Braz.”
“Are you going to be okay?” Ben whispered.
“I’ll be fine,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
“There are two marines at the end of the corridor,” he added as Kai tugged at his arm. “If you need help, just holler, and they’ll come get us.”
“Got it. I’ll let you know as soon as we’re done.” I did my best to sound reassuring.
“Ta ta.” Kai closed the door behind them.
My nerves began to fray around the edges. I looked at Asa, sitting there with a Mona Lisa smile on his face, and this man I didn’t know in a coma with his eyelids being forced open. Panic rose in my throat. I swallowed it down, but then jumped as Braz again used Asa to speak. “Amada? Is everything all right?”
A man in a coma was asking me if I was all right. My anxiety was making me horribly self-centered. I needed to focus on him and concentrate on the task at hand.
I pulled a chair up near Dr. Belo’s head. “I’m fine,” I said, “just a little nervous. I want to help you, but I’m sort of new at this. I want to make sure I do it right.”
“My dear, don’t worry. I am going to die; at least you can’t make things worse.” Asa broke into a throaty laugh very different from his own. Then he said in a more serious tone, “I’m sorry. This must be very uncomfortable for you. But please don’t be nervous. You have a God-given gift, this ability to submerge into other people. Ben told me about it. All you have to do is open yourself up, and your gift will do the rest. It should be effortless. Surely you have experienced this?”
I nodded. Then I remembered that he couldn’t see me and said, “Yes.”
“Then do what you do, my dear. Look into my eyes. I only wish I hadn’t lost my vision, so that I could look back into yours.”
I clasped my hands so that I wouldn’t bite my nails. “Are you uncomfortable? I mean, with that contraption holding your eyelids open?”
“Not at all. I can’t feel a thing, only your presence. I am perfectly comfortable and in no pain.”
Somewhat reassured, I tried to slip into therapist mode. “Well, the way this works is that I’ll ask you some questions to get us started. You simply answer them. Then at some point I’ll enter your consciousness. I may ask you about what I’m seeing in there. Tell me as much as you can, but if at any point it becomes uncomfortable for you—emotionally, I mean—just say so, and I’ll pull back. Okay?”
“Oh, that sounds very intimate,” he said. “I look forward to having someone as lovely as you exploring my psyche. Please, start at any time, and don’t hold back.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Vani was right; Braz was a horrible flirt. But I got the feeling that he was also trying to put me at ease. I leaned forward so that I could look into his eyes. It was difficult at first. They appeared so tortured under the device he wore, but I reminded myself that he could feel nothing. His eyes were pools of deep brown. I stared into them and began.
“Ben tells me that you’ve been having trouble remembering the day before you went into a coma. Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
“My last clear memory was making my morning coffee in the lab. I guess that would have been a week ago Wednesday. I was waiting for an e-mail from Dr. Ahmad in the oncology department. We were expecting some results from one of his clinical trials that day. I was watching the coffee drip into the pot.”
“Do you remember how you were feeling in that moment?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I was anticipating how delicious the coffee would taste. It was Ethiopian. I had bought it not long before from a specialty store in Adams Morgan.”
As I looked into Braz’s eyes, his longing for coffee drew me in and allowed me to submerge into his consciousness.
At first, I found myself floating through a sea of strange images that evoked a profound sense of sadness. “Dr. Belo—I mean Braz, sorry—what is it that I’m seeing? A stream running through a desert, hands untying knots… and two people—it looks like they’re in some sort of, um, intimate embrace?”
“Ah, yes,” he said with a sigh. “Don’t worry, Amada, that’s just Lewin Lima. He is a famous Brazilian-American poet—famous in Brazil, that is. Not very well known here before his death. He wrote poems of love and revolution, and his writing has been keeping me company these days. The images you see are from ‘The Desolate Kiss.’ For some reason, that poem in particular has been circling around in my head.”
“Oh, I see.” I could only imagine how desolate he must feel under the circumstances. I dived down further until I landed on something solid. When I looked up, I was standing on the patio of a penthouse apartment, high up with a view of a massive city. A movement caught my attention. There was a woman, young and beautiful, wearing a gauzy white dress. She laughed as she turned and ran through the patio door into the apartment. I looked back out over the city, only to have the woman catch my eye again, playing the same scene over. This vision kept repeating in an endless loop. I described it to Braz.
“That is my beloved wife, Pedra,” he said tenderly, “and one of my favorite memories from our life in São Paulo. Right after that, I chased her inside, and we made love like the world was ending. She was my heart, my anchor in life. A large part of me died already, five years ago, when cancer took her from me.”
Suddenly, the whole patio scene darkened as though a storm cloud was rolling in. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be, Amada. You cannot travel inside of me without finding Pedra. I talk to her every day. But perhaps we should move on.”
“Of course.” I tried to pass through the clouds of grief as I held in my mind what I was looking for: a memory so disturbing that Braz’s brain had blocked it out.
All at once I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside of the Friendship Heights Metro Station. It was around midday, and people were bustling in every direction. A dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties swept up next to me, kissed me on the cheek, and asked, “Are we going for coffee?”
“Braz,” I said, “now I’m in Friendship Heights. There is a woman here asking if we’re going for coffee. She is small, petite, with long black hair.”
“Ah, yes. That’s Jennifer, my Jenny.” Within the scene, the sunlight brightened. “She is my—well, you could say my paramour. We met soon after I arrived in the States. She is a graduate student in psychology and a fellow lover of poetry—especially Lewin Lima’s. Our mutual love of his poems was the first thing we bonded over, in fact. I asked Skeet to contact her, to give her the official story about my illness. But he said she did not reply to his voicemail or e-mail.” He sounded pained. “I am worried about her. I hope she is not in jeopardy because of her association with me.”
“I’ll check with Skeet. Maybe we can contact her another way.”
“I would appreciate that, Amada.” Relief was evident in his voice. “She is not my Pedra, but I still care for her. If anything happened, I would never forgive myself.”
When I looked for Jennifer again, she was gone. I was surrounded by shops and restaurants but felt a strong pull toward one store in particular, a small newsstand. I walked inside and saw a man behind the counter. He greeted me and asked if he could help me with anything.
“Do you know a newsstand near the Friendship Heights Station?” I asked Braz.
“Yes, of course!” he said excitedly. “That’s Ernesto’s store. He’s a friend of mine from university. We lost each other for years but found one another here of all places. I happened to walk into his shop one day searching for a Brazilian newspaper, and we were reunited.”
“What a coincidence!”
“Yes. But I am wondering why you find yourself there.”
“I don’t know, but he’s asking if he can help me. What should I say?”
There was a moment of silence, then Braz said, “Ask him for the usual—a pack of Derbys. I tried, but never could give up smoking. Ernesto always keeps my favorite brand.”
A pack of Derbys, please. I directed the thought at Ernesto. He reached under the counter and handed me a cigarette pack, but it was all black with no label.
Ernesto’s response slipped into my thoughts: A black box. The key is inside.
I’d never seen such an odd-looking pack of cigarettes before. “Braz, what does a Derby pack look like?”
“White, with a blue ribbon. Why do you ask?”
I described the pack Ernesto had given me and shared what he’d said.
“Ahhh,” he said in a voice filled with wonder. “I believe I am remembering something now. I think you may have hit upon the core of the mystery—and I think I know exactly what we need to do to solve it.”
With a poof, the whole newsstand scene disappeared. I felt something pulling at my consciousness, drawing it back up through the images from Lima’s poem. Then, like water pouring into a glass, I flowed back into my own body.
“Braz,” I asked in amazement, “did you just kick me out?”
He chuckled and said, “Why, yes! Did you think I would let you stay in there forever and discover all of my secrets?”
I laughed as much in delight as surprise. “That was so cool! No one has ever done that to me before. I didn’t even know it was possible.”
“You know what they say. When you lose some senses, the others become stronger. Truthfully, I didn’t push you out on purpose. But I could feel you inside of me, and after a while, it became uncomfortable, like a splinter. I think my mind expelled you. I hope you are not offended.”
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s your mind; you have every right to decide who gets to be in there.”
“A very democratic attitude. Besides, we found out what we needed to know, didn’t we?”
“Did we?”
“Yes, my dear, we did.” Asa wore a self-satisfied smile. “All you have to do now is go to Ernesto’s store and pick up a pack of Derbys.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry, do what?”
“The black box—a symbol for all things secret, for information that is unknown. Back when we were university students in São Paulo, Ernesto and I were activists organizing protests against an oppressive regime. We used to send each other secret messages in packs of cigarettes. Obviously, whatever the secret is that my mind doesn’t want me to remember is hidden in a box of Derbys at Ernesto’s shop. I must have had enough wits about me to entrust it to him before whatever happened to me happened.”
The poisoning, he meant. My heart went out to Braz. He was so courageous, but clearly it was too upsetting for him to say the actual words.
Braz continued, “You bring the pack here, and we’ll see what’s inside. It will no doubt hold the key to open up this locked memory of mine.”
“You really think so?”
“Definitely. What else could it mean?”
The submergence had actually worked? Along with sheer amazement, I felt a hint of hope. “Okay, that shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll talk to Ben. I’m sure he can convince Captain Abbott to send a couple of marines—”
“Oh no!” Braz shouted in alarm. “No, no, Amada. You cannot do it like this.”
“What?” My nascent hope wavered. “Why not?”
His voice dropped low and intensified. “I don’t know how much time I have left. You must listen to me very carefully. After one of our student protests, Ernesto was arrested and tortured by the secret police. He can smell a soldier or police a mile away,” Braz explained, “and he can also smell a liar. Whatever secret is in that black box, it must be quite important if I hid it in that symbolic way and entrusted it to Ernesto. You will have to go on your own, I’m sorry to say, without these marines. He knows I would never send someone like that in his direction. Ernesto will trust you only if he can tell that you are a civilian, and that you are genuine. Otherwise he will not believe that you have truly come on my behalf.”
My skin turned into gooseflesh. “But Braz, you don’t understand. None of us are allowed to leave this floor without the captain’s permission and a marine guard.” I racked my brains for a solution. “He might let me go if I talked Ben into going with me.”
Braz snorted. “I’m in a coma, and I can feel Ben’s military pedigree every time he enters the room. One look at him would put Ernesto on high alert. Perhaps some other member of your group could accompany you?”
“Not an option,” I explained. “Captain Abbott already told us that he won’t let civilian staff members go anywhere without marines guarding us. Ben will back him up, and the other members of our group will back Ben up.” Even as I spoke, I realized that there was a chance Kai might help me. But he was growing protective of me, too, so there was an equal chance he’d try to stop me. And if I only had one shot at getting the cigarettes, chances were something I couldn’t afford take.
“Besides,” I added, “Ben has a… a thing about me putting myself in risky situations.” Not that I really blamed him. He had been completely torn up about my cardiac arrest incident. And having to rescue Elana and me from Don and his friends had only intensified Ben’s over-protectiveness. He had even asked me outright not to put myself at risk for other people again. Although I’d told him I couldn’t promise that, I had just promised him over coffee that while we were on our mission, I would talk to him before I tried to deal with any problems on my own. In this case, though, I knew exactly how the conversation would go, and it would not end in Ben sending me off to Ernesto’s store with his blessings.
Asa held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged. “Where’s the risk? A sexy young woman walking into a newsstand to buy cigarettes—why should that raise anyone’s suspicions?”
I had to admit that he had a point—at least about the not-raising-suspicions part. It wasn’t as though the CIA knew who I was or had any reason to be on the lookout for me. For goodness’ sake, we’d arrived in an SUV with tinted windows and hadn’t left the subbasement since. Still, I couldn’t believe I was actually considering doing something behind Ben’s back. The mere thought made the blood pound rapidly through my veins.
“You could be right, but even if I agreed with you, Captain Abbott has this place under tight control. They won’t even let us leave the floor, let alone the building.”
“No problem,” Braz said confidently. “I am an escape artist from way back. I can tell you how to get around this Captain Abbott. It’s quite simple.”
Oh God—this is for real, I thought. He can actually tell me how to do this. I dropped my head into my hands. “If I sneak out of here and get caught….”
“You won’t get caught, my dear. I can tell you how to slip in and out unnoticed.” Braz’s tone became grave. “But Amada, I can hear the anxiety in your voice. If you like, we can forget we made this black box discovery and speak of it to no one. I will simply go on to the next life, and whatever is locked in my brain will go along with me. However, if my physician is correct, should you choose to take this adventure, you should do it very soon.”
I knew he was right. Braz’s subconscious had signaled very clearly that it wasn’t going to take us any further into his memories without whatever information was hidden in the cigarette pack—and for all I knew, that information could be cryptic or coded in such a way that only Braz could make sense of it.
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So I had to retrieve the pack before he died—and I had to do it without letting Ben or Captain Abbott know. Even if they approved the idea of my going to the newsstand, I knew they’d insist on sending some marines with me for protection—in which case, according to Braz, Ernesto wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone the cigarette pack.
I felt backed into a corner, but I knew it wasn’t Braz’s fault. After all, sneaking out was the only workable idea we had. It was also probably our only chance of finding out what we wanted to know: who poisoned him and why. Without that information, we couldn’t deal with his killer—not to mention the mysterious dark armies Eve had seen in her vision.
My thoughts churned desperately. If I couldn’t help solve the poisoning mystery, then why had Ben brought me in the first place? What would be the point, if I couldn’t even make use of the information I got from Braz? What use was I as an empath if I couldn’t contribute anything of substance? And what was the point of giving up my psychotherapy career and all of my clients if joining the MacGregor Group turned out to be a wasted effort?
If what Braz said was true, I could slip in and out of the building and no one would be the wiser. I’d get Ben what he needed before anyone even realized I had left. That settled it: I would go. I would do it for Ben—whether he liked it or not.
I steeled myself and straightened up in my chair. Taking a notepad and pencil from the table, I said, “Okay, Braz. Tell me how to sneak out of here.”
Chapter Nine
“Thanks, Hector. Thanks, Kevin.” As I shook their hands, I smiled the most charming smile I could muster. Like the other members of Yankee Company, they reminded me of big cats, moving with the controlled, confident ease of predators who were prepared at any moment to make a deadly strike. I was grateful once again that in the interest of keeping things casual and non-intimidating, the marines had asked us to call them by their first names. It was going to require enough courage for me to give the slip to two massive, intimidating men in uniform. I wasn’t sure that I could do it at all, had I just addressed them as “Corporals.”