Pandora sat back down in the guest chair next to the railing of her grandmother’s bed. Still nothing from George. And so she thumbed some more words to her increasingly reticent collaborator. “Maybe pork too,” she wrote before hitting send.
52
He’d tried talking to Roger about it but couldn’t—not all of it.
“Have you heard about those sonic attacks in Havana?” he’d asked—an unusual way to start a session, even by George’s standards. And he could see through the screen what Roger was thinking—that George was looking outward as a defense against looking inward. Sure, Roger had good reason for thinking that, because his client often deflected in precisely that way. But how far could George go in explaining that this time was different?
“No, I haven’t,” Roger admitted. “Would you care to explain?”
George tried to, sticking to the facts that were public. He explained that according to numerous reports, several embassy workers had heard a noise, followed by headaches, vertigo, confusion, and pain. Many in their management chain dismissed these symptoms as psychosomatic, maybe mass hysteria. But when the embassy workers were examined by medical professionals, they were found to have “significant brain insult,” meaning they all showed signs of concussion but without any blunt head trauma.
“The people who’ve studied them don’t think sound in the audible range was capable of doing the damage they’ve seen,” he said, “but they’ve also suggested the audible noise could have been a red herring or maybe a byproduct of what actually did do the damage.”
“Such as?” Roger prodded.
“The candidates mentioned so far are low-frequency infrasound, high-frequency ultrasound, or microwaves,” George explained. “Oh, and it’s happened to embassy workers in China too,” he added. “So it probably wasn’t the Cubans. Or not just the Cubans.”
“And what do you make of that?”
“It’s interesting,” George lied—as Roger would know if, in fact, he knew anything about Quire’s connection to these events as relayed to him by one Milo LaFarge.
“I see,” Roger said, jotting something in his notebook, probably a placeholder diagnosis pending subsequent symptoms, which he proceeded to encourage with a simple “Go on.”
But George didn’t. Not this time. Not yet.
“No,” he said, shaking his head perhaps a bit more aggressively than necessary. “That’s it. Just wondering if you’d heard anything.”
“I see,” Roger said, even though he didn’t—not at all.
Roger looked at the blank screen where George had signed off, thinking of a line from Hamlet: “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” Which was a shame. As combative and deflective as the kid could be, Roger liked and worried about him. He was a good kid, smart, reminded him a lot of his own daughter—so much so he was glad there were about three thousand miles between them. That’d be the last thing he needed—having to take Pandora aside and explain, “I’m sorry, sweet pea, but I think your boyfriend is going crazy.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to use demonizing labels like ‘crazy,’” she’d rebut because she was a teenager and that was her job: bucking whatever parents happened to be in the vicinity.
“There’s the DSM and there’s family,” Roger would explain, “and I don’t want you dealing with a crazy person.”
“Allegedly crazy person,” she’d continue to quibble, the daughter in his head as talkative and combative as the live version—sometimes more so.
The point was, he’d seen this before with prescreens that became clients, though never quite this bad. Call it “mission creep,” maybe, or “cancer of the curiosity.” Factoids and “interesting tidbits” had begun to occupy his imagination more and more, their conversations a pastiche if not a word salad of conversational hyperlinks and non sequiturs. And whenever he asked George what was on his mind, the answer was always the same: “Research.”
“What research?”
“Work related,” he’d say. “Confidential. Proprietary.”
“Yet covered by doctor-client confidentiality.”
“Nice try,” George said the first time Roger hauled out that old chestnut, followed by a pause and then, confidentially: “Do you really want to know?”
Roger nodded.
“’Cause I could tell you,” his client had continued, “but then I’d have to kill you,” followed by a laugh that sounded more crazy than amused.
During their next meeting, Roger decided to confront the issue directly. “Do you lose time, George?”
“You mean, like misplace my watch?” George asked back. “Not like anybody wears watches nowadays but . . .”
“You know what I mean,” Roger insisted.
“Zone out? Get so into something I don’t know where the time went?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” George admitted. “But what’s wrong with that?” Inspired by the need to forget what Milo had told him about Cuba, he’d begun mining a particularly rich vein in his search to understand consciousness. Which led to quantum physics, which fed into astrophysics and the problem of dark energy and dark matter and the observation that the universe wasn’t just expanding, but accelerating as it expanded, which ran afoul of the Newtonian rules of thermodynamics that maintain matter and energy can’t be created or destroyed, only changed from form to form, while the level of organization in a system can’t increase. But then what are planetary formation and biological evolution, especially when the latter leads to consciousness? And why limit ourselves to human consciousness? More and more research was suggesting that plants could be conscious and were practically quantum computers in their own right, because photosynthesis was only possible by exploiting the particle-wave nature of light, with photons zeroing in on chlorophyll molecules by smearing themselves everywhere at once across the leaf (thereby exploiting the wave aspect) until they’re “observed” by the chlorophyll and become particles hitting the bull’s-eye in the dark. Think of it: a whole green planet full of quantum computers, networked underground by their roots, an entire forest a single organism, like a stand of aspen and . . .
“What was your question again?” George asked.
“Has your research ever led to your forgetting to eat for more than, say, a day?”
More slowly this time, “Yes?” The truth was, George had given up eating so many things it was almost easier to just not eat. Realizing that was a suboptimal conclusion, he parsed. He wouldn’t eat anything that destroyed the whole organism or prevented it from reproducing. So no roots like carrots, potatoes, or beets. No fruits or vegetables that included eating their seeds. If you could remove them and plant them, fine, but bananas were out, and strawberries were more trouble than they were worth.
Meanwhile: “Shall I do the projection,” Roger said, “or do you want to?”
He had, he was, and he thought he could make his diet work. So: “I’m not going to starve to death in front of my computer,” George said, resisting the urge to add, “Dad.”