The Placebo Effect by David Rotenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

of the Florida Panhandle painter-taped the coast. Industrial patches sprouted by the water—petroleum and its invariable partner, pharmaceuticals.
    Then the mighty Mississippi River segued into hundreds of snakelets heading home—to the sea. A sudden mist along the Gulf obscured the division between land and sea and then, before the modern, haunted pall of Dallas, ancient myths loose their emanations and dragged you inland toward the Deep South. An old land in a new world, where corpses lie in shallow graves—and never get to tell their tales. Beyond it the new Industrial South beckoned—telling you to forget the old and embrace the new—but its argument is not convincing. The shining towers of the insurance industry only distract from the underworld, the real Deep South, where ancient, ivory-white bones poke through the ground in winter rains.
    Decker watched, knowing there was something important here, something he needed to understand—to be able to understand himself.
    As Decker settled back to watch the Mississippi, Henry-Clay Yolles tracked his every move. From what he thought of as his “big chair” he watched the replay of the interview on one screen and read Decker’s response on another. He thought, Very impressive, Mr. Decker Roberts, very impressive indeed.

9
THE FURTHER VOYAGE OF MICHAEL SHEDLOSKI
    MIKE WASN’T SURE IT HAD BEEN DECKER IN THE FRUIT SHOP . Things were getting mixed up—off balance—in his head. Now he was standing on another manhole cover staring at a lamppost—or that’s what it looked like to anyone who was passing by. Some sad misbegotten man, crying his eyes out under a lamppost on Annette Street in the Junction in West Toronto.
    That’s what it looked like from outside.
    From inside Mike saw the boy struggling against the rope. Reaching up and trying to relieve the tension on his neck—to stop himself from strangling.
    Then the boy turned toward him and held out his hand. Mike saw the fingernails—the boy’s fingernails—the painted fingernails and his face.
    He stepped back then he heard the gurgle. Death really does have a rattle , he thought. Then he looked around him. Across the way the old library. Beside it the Masonic Temple. Down the block the old Heintzman House, but here the lamppost from which a fourteen-year-old boy had hung by the neck until death.
    There was always evil around the portals. Mike knew that. And churches nearby trying to fend it off. But the evil was winning—Mike could feel it. He needed to find Decker and warn him, or else he could be hung from a lamppost like that poor boy had been more than a hundred years ago.

10
PITTSBURGH
    DECKER SAT IN AN INTERNET CAFÉ—PLACES HE ALWAYS thought of as al-Qaeda cafés—just down the road from the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and tried to recall what play he had directed there; something by Christopher Durang or maybe it was Joe Orton, he couldn’t remember. Back then he was directing six or seven plays a year—often reading the script for the first time on the plane the day before rehearsals started.
    Decker always liked Pittsburgh. He admired the people who had toughed it out after the big steel mills closed down. Those who remained loved their hometown and the surrounding countryside. And they’d made themselves a clean, smart little city.
    He checked his watch; he still had more than half an hour to kill before his second of three truth-telling sessions.
    He looked up—nothing but potential terrorist operatives and teenagers playing games their folks wouldn’t let them play at home. Fine.
    His fingers opened the synaesthetes web site as if they were leading and Decker was just along for the ride. He entered the chat room—and lurked. For a moment the screen was blank then a video popped up. A young monk stood, back to the camera, in a perfectly cylindrical, domed building. The young man tilted his head back