Vicious Grace

SIX

Looking back at my childhood, I couldn’t say my father had done me many favors. The lessons he’d tried to instill in me—things like “never wear a skirt that goes above the ankle” and “Jesus died because kids sneak into movie theaters”—never really took. But that’s not the same as saying I never learned anything from him. Throughout the weird, judgmental, just-barely-repressed Christian rage-fest that was my childhood home, I’d picked up quite a bit about how the world works. Not all of it had immediately applied, but some bits still came in handy.

For instance, when I was ten years old, the doctors found a suspicious lump on my big brother Jay’s spinal column. My mother called from the doctor’s office in hysterics, saying that no one was telling her anything, and they were running tests she didn’t understand. I could hear every word she said, even though my father had the telephone handset to his ear. He sat at the kitchen table, scowling and fighting to interrupt my mother’s litany of fear and confusion. He was in a white T-shirt and the battered canvas work pants he always wore on his days off. In the end, he told my mother to sit down, be quiet, and wait. Then he told me to find my little brother, Curtis, and get him in the car. That I was too young to stay by myself, and he didn’t have time to find someone to watch us. His tone of voice left no room for disagreement.

By the time I’d done what he said, little Curt squirming in his car seat and demanding cartoons, my father had transformed himself. His hair was combed back. He had a good gray suit on with a deep red tie. He smelled of cologne, and he looked like a movie star or a president. I’d never seen him this way, even for church.

When we got to the doctor’s office, he dropped Curtis and me in the waiting room with my mother, and went back to speak to the doctors and nurses. Five minutes later, he came out with answers to every question Mom had asked him. My mother drank all the information in—yes, Jay was going to be admitted overnight; yes, cancer was a possibility, but it wasn’t the best suspect; no, there wasn’t cause for immediate alarm. I watched relief pour over her like cool water on a burn. But I didn’t miss my father’s little smile or my mother’s near-subliminal frown. The gray-suited man had been given a level of courtesy and respect that a woman couldn’t get.

Lesson learned.

Truth was, Chogyi Jake looked amazing in the right outfit. Brown linen so light it was almost blond, a black linen vest of matching cut, pin-striped shirt and tie that coordinated like a symphony perfectly in tune. He’d let the stubble of hair grow out just enough for the scattering of gray at the temples to show. When he chose not to smile, he could look seriously dangerous. By comparison, Aubrey, even in his best suit, never quite gave off the air of command, and Ex’s long hair wasn’t quite overcome by his quasiclerical black and humorless attitude. And me? Yes, I was the money behind everything. Yes, I was the one Kim called. Yes, I was Eric’s heir and successor with the weird supernatural powers and protections. I was also twenty-four and a woman, and even in my best clothes and most understated makeup, I looked more like Jennifer Connelly than an international demon hunter and occult expert. So by common agreement, Chogyi Jake took point.

“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Oonishi. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to your office.”

“Thank you,” the man said. “It’s probably good if we don’t meet at Grace.”

“There are reputations to protect,” Kim said, only a little bitterness in her voice. Her dress was sherbet green and didn’t suit her. She wore it like a smock.

The restaurant sat on the river, broad windows looking out over water glowing gold with sunset. A yacht had tied up while we were being seated, and now a young man had climbed up one of the deck ladders and was paying for his to-go order. The skyscrapers of downtown rose up around us like trees above rabbits, and the cool evening breeze mixed the smells of water and freshly grilled steak. Oonishi sat forward with his elbows on the table. His gaze shifted between us, restless and uneasy.

“I take it,” he said to Chogyi Jake, “you understand why I need help with this problem?”

“Of course,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I understand why discretion is important. We have experience with this kind of issue. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

He delivered the lines with a conviction that almost had me forgetting that we’d had a small riot on the Cardiac Care Unit earlier in the day. Oonishi either hadn’t heard about it or hadn’t put it together with our arrival, because he looked reassured.

“What can you tell us about the problem?” Ex asked.

“You’ve seen the data sets?” Oonishi asked, turning his head almost imperceptibly toward Kim. When Chogyi Jake nodded, he continued, “We’ve been running the tertiary tests for almost three months now. Three nights a week, the subjects come to the lab. There are anomalies as early as the second session.”

“Can you give me the date on that?” I asked. It was a safe question. The kind of thing that even a jumped-up secretary might ask.

“I’ve brought a copy of the study logs,” he said. “Everything’s there. Dates, names, times.”

“Great,” I said, keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’d asked him for a piece of information, not where I could go to look it up. But I let it slide.

“At first, it wasn’t simultaneous. It was only a common set of images. I thought it was day residue.”

“I don’t follow,” Ex said.

Watching Oonishi shift from embarrassed client to popular scientist was like watching the playback of myself in Trevor’s dojo. He didn’t exactly move, his expression didn’t quite change, but he was suddenly more grounded than he’d been before. His nervous half-smile vanished.

“What we’re learning about perception,” he said, “is that it’s very dependent on priming. The actual experience of vision, of seeing, is associated with activity in the V1 and V2 layers of your visual cortex. What the neuroanatomists have found is more neurons enter V1 and V2 from the deeper parts of the brain than from the optic nerve.”

“Implying what?” Ex asked.

“That your conceptual and emotional knowledge affects not just your interpretation of what you see, but what you actually see,” Oonishi said. “Five years ago, a man in Madison, Wisconsin, had a heart attack. Fell over in the street. An off-duty paramedic happened to be there. He started administering CPR.”

“They shot him,” Aubrey said. “I heard about that.”

“Yes,” Oonishi said. “The paramedic was black. One of the passersby saw a young black man straddling an older white man and shot him. When the police arrested the shooter, she swore the paramedic had been stabbing the man. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen the knife. There had been no blood. No knife. But she was adamant she’d seen it.”

“And you say she did?” Aubrey asked.

“I say she did. Not because it was there, but because she expected it to be. There are any number of simple experiments that prove your knowledge and emotion affect your actual perception. If you look at a sign just at the edge of your visual range, you can experience the letters becoming sharper when someone tells you what they are. This isn’t even controversial.”

“Okay, but back to the data,” I said. “The thing in the dreams. Day residue?”

Oonishi glanced his annoyance at me. I wasn’t doing a great job of letting Chogyi take point, but the further we veered from the issue at hand, the more impatient I got. I saw Kim nodding as if in agreement. Someone at the table behind us laughed at something, a high, masculine sound.

“If there was something,” Oonishi said, “that all the subjects had seen—a movie or a popular commercial—I would have had an explanation of the image’s recurrence. They would all have seen it recently, and so when they lost the input from their optic nerves, they would be primed to impose that image on the visual cortex from below, as it were.”

“Didn’t work out,” Chogyi Jake said.

“No. It didn’t. I talked to the subjects after that session. None of them identified the images. They didn’t even remember having dreamed them. And then, when the images started coming at the same time . . .”

“So it began two months ago,” Ex said.

“This did,” Oonishi said. “My study did. But I wasn’t looking before then. It might be something that’s been happening for years. Decades.”

Kim didn’t bring up the anecdotal evidence she’d heard—the walk-aways or the people coming up from anesthetic saying foreign phrases. She was paging through Oonishi’s study logs. Her mouth pressed thin, and her eyebrows drew in toward each other.

“Do your subjects have any recollection of the dreams now?” Chogyi Jake asked.

“I haven’t asked,” Oonishi said, and then, pronouncing each word very carefully, “I have been afraid to.”

“We may need to explore it,” Chogyi Jake said.

In the uncomfortable silence, our waiter appeared with our meals. I’d gotten the fourteen-dollar BLT. I took a bite as the waiter passed the other plates around and asked if he could get any of us anything. My tomatoes tasted a little like cardboard, but the bacon was good. Oonishi was quiet until the waiter had gone, and even then spoke in a low voice.

“I would rather that we kept this among ourselves,” he said. “I haven’t even spoken to the other researchers.”

“They must know something’s up,” Kim said. “Unless you invite parasitologists to your lab at midnight on a regular basis, they’ll wonder why I was there.”

“They think I’m trying to bang you,” Oonishi said. Kim’s eyes went a degree wider, and I felt some of her shock. My cough meant I was offended on her behalf, but Oonishi only gave a surprisingly boyish smile and shrugged. I found myself liking him less.

“We can be discreet,” Aubrey said coolly, “but we can’t work without evidence. Would you prefer that we address the subject outside your study, or would you like to present it as part of the research?”

Oonishi looked to Chogyi Jake in appeal, but he only got an enigmatic smile in return. After a long moment’s silence, he gave in.

“I can interview them about the dreams,” Oonishi said. “You’ll need to tell me what to ask.”

“One of us should be there,” I said, and Ex scowled at me. Having one of us present at the interviews would probably mean going back into Grace.

“We’ll discuss that,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we should also address the price.”

“Price?” Oonishi said.

Chogyi Jake spread his hands toward the plates before us.

“We have to eat somehow, Doctor,” he said.

Over the next fifteen minutes, Chogyi Jake and Oonishi haggled quietly while the rest of us ate. I didn’t care what the answer was. My attention was on the others. Kim chewed slowly, her face a blank, but her eyes kept moving to Oonishi. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Aubrey was watching her too, and the anger on his face was like the perception experiments Oonishi had told us about. Even though it was subtle, I could see it clearly because I was prepared to see it. What I couldn’t say was what it meant.

They settled on three hundred dollars a day with a one-month cap, payable when the inconvenient data stopped appearing in his study. Any longer than a month, and he wouldn’t have time to get enough fresh data, and he’d have to push back publication of his reports. We’d build a list of questions. He’d record the interviews, and if we needed follow-ups, they could go through him. Oonishi got to keep us his dirty little secret, and none of us had to go back to the hospital. Except Kim.

We got back to the condo in the last gloom of twilight. Lake Michigan spread out before us. With the storm clouds blown off, it was a darkness scattered with the lights from boats still on the water. Ex threw himself onto the couch. Chogyi Jake shrugged out of his jacket and went to the kitchen, followed quickly by the beep of the microwave and the smell of green tea. Aubrey and Kim and I sat at the dining room table, our chairs turned so that we could see Ex in the next room. When Chogyi Jake returned, cup of too-hot tea held gingerly before him, he was shaking his head.

“This place still feels small.”

“All right,” Ex said. “Thoughts and opinions?”

Aubrey was the first to speak.

“I don’t think he has much to tell. Apart from the data we’ve already gotten, he doesn’t know much. He’s resistant to actually working with us. I think he’s going to do as little as possible.”

“He did call us in,” I said. “That’s something.”

“It may have been a desperation move,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I think he’s regretting it.”

“Exactly,” Aubrey said. “That’s exactly the feeling I get.”

Kim cleared her throat, a small sound.

“I think you’re all being too harsh,” she said. “And what’s more, you’re missing the point.”

Aubrey stiffened like he’d been slapped.

“Well, you are,” Kim said. “Oonishi’s a scientist, but he’s also human. He’s stumbled into something outside his frame of reference. It throws everything he’s ever done into question, so of course he’s frightened and trying to make it all go away. As I recall, your first experience with Eric wasn’t all that different.”

“Mine?” Aubrey said.

“You babbled for a week,” Kim said. “You did everything you could to convince yourself it was all some kind of elaborate joke. At least he’s not doing that. If you give him a year or two to get his head around the idea, he could be very useful. But, as I said, that isn’t the point. Even if he’s totally recalcitrant, something is happening at the hospital. And as of today, something with the potential for real violence. That makes it our responsibility.”

“Does it?” Aubrey said. “I mean, does it really?”

“Yes,” Kim said.

Aubrey’s laugh was short and exasperated. A vague unease grew in my gut, like I was six again and listening to my father chiding Mom: an intimate disagreement between people who knew each other very, very well. For the first time, I wondered how Kim had felt about Oonishi’s joking suggestion of sexual impropriety. And whether Aubrey might be jealous.

“We do have some access to the dreamers,” Chogyi Jake said, and sipped his tea. “And the sooner we get our questions together, the sooner we’ll know what they said. It may be that nothing comes of it, or we might get lucky.”

“I’d like him to replay the dream for them,” Ex said. “Before any of the questions are asked, I want to see how they react physically when they see the thing.”

For a long moment, Aubrey seemed caught between two conversations: the argument with Kim and the planning session that Chogyi Jake and Ex were offering up to redirect it. Kim looked away, out the wide, dark windows. The angles of light and shadow made her look old. When Aubrey spoke, the effort in it showed.

“What kinds of questions do we want him to ask?”

For the next two hours, we built up a rough questionnaire and speculated on different kinds of riders, different flavors of magic. Kim and Aubrey relaxed slowly into the conversation, and my own unease faded even if it didn’t go completely away. Ex and Aubrey went on a long side track about the causes of shared dreams, including one particularly unpleasant one we’d all had once when something very powerful was looking for us. Kim suggested taking Oonishi’s dream data to someone who could do image enhancement, maybe put together the six versions of the dream to find more detail than we had in the raw feed. I had my laptop out and was typing up the instructions to my lawyer almost before Kim was done pitching the idea. It was nearly ten o’clock when, between one breath and the next, my BLT wore off. We hadn’t done anything sensible like grocery shop, but I found a late-night sushi bar that delivered.

By the time the five boxes of nigiri sushi and assorted hand rolls appeared, Kim and Ex were sitting on the floor together, going over the wording on our final list of questions, while Chogyi Jake and Aubrey and I watched the data files from Oonishi for what must have been the hundredth time.

It was like the air we were breathing had changed. Working together, all of us prodding at the same problem, exploring the same terra incognita, took all the history and baggage and awkwardness away, and left me with this small family I’d made for myself. We fought some; we pushed each other’s buttons sometimes. That was what family meant.

There was a moment just before Kim left at midnight when I stood back and let myself watch us all like we were on television. The way Ex sat, leaning forward, pushing back the lock of hair that had escaped his ponytail. Kim’s pinched, serious expression, and the dark circles under her eyes. The windows behind us all, night making them into mirrors so that the boat lights seemed to blink and shift through Chogyi Jake’s shoulder and past Aubrey’s head. It was a moment of real peace.

My high-water mark.