After James by Michael Helm Read Free Book Online Page A

husband, a scholar of Greek and Latin, or was it Roman history? She’d forgotten, and their social-professional relationship was well past the point where she could ask because she’d also forgotten his name.
    “He calls the pill ‘One True,’ short for the One True God. Give us our One True, spread it far and wide. He uses terms like ‘New Enlightenment,’ capital
N
capital
E
.”
    “But not dangerous.”
    “It’s half-ironical. He means it all but he’s not, I don’t think, nuts. He’s got a sense of humour. I’m just telling you this because you should know. If you want I’ll remove him from the trial.”
    “But, given his devotion, couldn’t dropping him trigger real trouble?”
    “I doubt it, but a reasonable question.”
    They decided to switch him to a placebo and keep his numbers off the final report. He would have lost his One True anyway when the trial ended but better that he not feel singled out for the loss.
    In the park along the bay a scene was unfolding. A car had stopped by the pathway and a man in a dark suit and sunglasses emerged and was watching the runners and dogs and mothers trotting with their strollers. He stepped forward, in front of a running man in spandex shorts, who stopped. They had a brief exchange. Ali got the sense theywere neither strangers nor friends. She found herself expecting to see the man in the suit take a thick envelope out of his pocket and hand it to the runner. The runner was failing to register the inevitability of the envelope. His face read only exertion.
    Any given moment was too complicated. How was it that time itself did not just seize up?
    “Subject 11. What’s his name?”
    Together they said, “Confidential.”
    “It’s safer if you don’t know. That way you can’t follow any temptation to act. I act for you.”
    “He knows my name but I don’t know his. I’m worried I’ll be acted upon.”
    “Tricky position for us both.”
    Setting up blinds. It was what they did professionally. Now one might have been set for her, hidden somewhere in the current run of days. Ali had fed him into this state and now they were thinking of each other, she and Subject 11, each picturing the other, imagining a voice, getting it wrong. It wouldn’t just go away, this wondering.
    —
    The time was 1:47.
    On the old console radio she dialled through bands to find only dim warps in the static suggesting voices that in their failure to form were oddly beguiling. From nowhere came the memory of a resonance image she’d once seen on a med-sci site of the nameless, hollow space between an infant’s ribs and lungs. The space was common to mammals. Aliimagined it holding abstract feelings and ideas. Secreted there between the bone and tissue, love, hope, goodness, evil.
    Denise had said “evil.” Within the span of a few hours Ali had encountered the word twice, in the Henry James story and now in Denise’s. It was Denise whose presence she felt around her in traces. The woman had needed someone to believe her. She’d opened her soul to a stranger and yet Ali had trouble accepting what she’d been shown. She wanted some objective reading but had only Denise’s handwritten notes and the audio file, which she returned to, at the desk, looking for clues. According to the file signature it had been created three days before Ali arrived and last revised on the same afternoon. The time between the making and final saving was less than forty minutes. She must have recorded it straight through. But the drive contained a second, much smaller file, created earlier. Ali assumed it contained operational data, but when she opened it she saw the audio meter appear again on-screen. The needle jumped as it picked up a very slow mechanical ticking and then a low fuzz emerged and she heard a voice, a distant voice, Denise, saying, “Hello, Alice. Stefan is away in town for the afternoon and I thought I’d use the quiet to say hello.” It was a muted version of the first