After James by Michael Helm Read Free Book Online

had not wanted Denise to be hurt, of course, or to fill her heart with destruction. Stefan asked her if that was what happened, if she’d been trying to destroy the forge. But she hadn’t. She’d only wanted to release the fire, by spade, by hand, and burn everything Shoad put his name to.
    Yet though she believed Stefan, he doubted her. He arranged to have her kept in the hospital longer than necessary. She was “formed,” they called it, and when the young woman doctor who seemed frightened of Denise reduced the painkillers, they put her on other medications. Over the next weeks Stefan and the doctors, there were three of them by then, tried to convince her not only that Shoad hadn’t killed Irina but also that Irina never existed, or rather existed in Russia, and on the internet, but not there. At first Stefan had believed her stories of Irina and the visits, he told her, but on the night of the storm he began to have doubts. They said Denise’s visions had crossed into her reality and confused it. As if she was the trouble, and it was only trouble they had to stand against. As if they didn’t believe in evil.

3
    N ine weeks into the phase one trial, the qualified investigator asked Ali to breakfast. They met at their usual place, an old hotel with a view of runners and dogs along English Bay. The trial updates were documented but Ali liked feeling close to the human particularity unrecorded in the numbers and graphs. They were not above swapping stories from their fields, she and Anja Seding, and Anja was not above exaggerating hers for comic effect. For a physician she was not especially circumspect or prone to displays of excessive professional gravitas.
    Anja announced that she had to “present a circumstance.” One of the trial subjects had begun sending her things.
    “The subjects have my contact info through the clinic, and he’s started to email me his writings. Pages every day.”
    “He’s a writer.”
    “According to his declaration he began the trial as a thirty-one-year-old B-negative eco-activist and poet with no drug allergies or history of mental illness.”
    “Hard enough being a poet, but to be a sane one.”
    “The point of interest being you’re a recurring character in these things, poems, mini-essays, pages from what seems to be a novel. Or not you exactly but someone he calls ‘Maker.’ ”
    Ali had wondered at times who the subjects thought was behind the tests, the drugs, the money, who exactly was playing with and reading their blood. She did not want to be thought of. She tried to feel sheltered in the company name.
    “Is this a known syndrome? Is he fixated?”
    “He’s likely not dangerous, Ali. It began he was just singing your praises. Then he speculated upon a life, what you think, personal history stuff. I repeat, not dangerous.”
    From what Anja and the research nurse had learned in their brief conversations with Subject 11, he was a full-time test subject, a so-called guinea pigger, who bussed around the country, getting paid to be injected, blood-drawn, electroded, cardio-tested, whatever the trial required. It used to be the tests were done on the local poor. Now the poor had organized. They mass-communicated about new trials and flocked here and there. Even if they declared what they’d already had done to them, you never really knew what hadn’t been flushed from their systems.
    “Does he know my name?”
    “Well, you head out onto the internet, you find things.”
    “Maybe he’s fixed on Carl.”
    “He’s imagining a woman. That’s part of the adoration.”
    “But he hasn’t used my name.”
    “It feels like he’s on the verge. He might be withholding it out of decorum.”
    “Or so you don’t think he’s dangerous when maybe he is.”
    They wouldn’t have been there if a lot weren’t hanging on Anja’s reading of Subject 11, on her own reading of Anja. She tried to remember what she knew of the woman’s life. There was an unemployed