Afterparty Part 16

"Keep your eyes on me," Dr. Gloria said. Her wings snapped like white sails. I focused on her face, and the flames reflected in the lenses of her eyegla.s.ses. The wings sealed off the world behind a curtain of alabaster.

My chest ached with relief, and shame. Oh, I was crazy. Deep crazy. Dr. Gloria did not exist, but I was so relieved to see her.

"We are not reconciled," the angel said. "I still don't approve of the way you're treating Ollie. She's fragile, and you're using her."

"You're right. I know you're right. I promise I'll-"

"Oh please," Dr. G said. "You're in a terrible state yourself. I'm not going to extract promises from you in this situation-that would make me as bad as these waterboarding Afghan b.i.t.c.hes." She shook her head. "I blame the Americans for this."

We seemed to be talking in a bubble of frozen time. We weren't. The brain cannot stop the clock, or even slow it. The mind cannot, despite Roger Penrose's c.o.c.kamamie quantum theories, access a timeless, platonic realm of pure thought. The brain can't even process data faster when under duress. That moment you slipped off the garage roof, and you seemed to hang in the air forever; that first kiss, when the planet shrieked to a halt and your heart composed symphonies between heartbeats; that endless, jellied moment you spent in the glare of the truck lights, your life scrolling past you?

All illusions. We only remember some moments as lasting forever, because when we are frightened or thrilled the amygdala stamps every last detail with emotion, marking it as vital, worthy of instant retrieval. Our ancient ancestors could forget a thousand days of gathering berries, but remembering every detail of the saber-tooth's attack was worth its weight in evolutionary gold. Only when we recall that moment (days or even seconds later) does it seem to have happened in slow motion. The huge volume of data messes with the brain's rule of thumb (and when it comes to math, the brain is all thumbs): X Amount of Sensory Memory = Y Amount of Time.

I knew all that. But I also knew that under the shelter of Dr. Gloria's wings, I experienced not just grace but a grace period, and I was thankful for it.

The doctor said to me, "I can get you out of this. But you're going to have to say exactly what I tell you-and with conviction."

"How? What are you going to say?"

"Do you trust me, Lyda?"

Of course I did. More than I trusted myself. "Just stay with me," I said.

"That's the spirit." She tucked the sword away-into whatever nonexistent scabbard holds imaginary swords-and folded her wings around my head. The black was gone now; I saw white and only white. Her feathers were soft and dry.

Aaqila pulled me up again. The room was the same, except that now Dr. Gloria stood at my right side.

I coughed water for almost a minute, my chest heaving. Fayza grew impatient. "Get a hold of yourself," she said.

The angel bent and whispered into my ear. Then I said the words she had given me: "I can get you a sample."

"You said you didn't have one," Fayza said.

Gloria whispered again, and I said, "I don't-but I know where to get it." I coughed again, a grating bark of lungs trying to expel the last of the liquid. Aaqila handed me another towel.

"I know who sold it to the pastor," I said. "And I've set up a deal to get my own."

"Go on," Fayza said.

"After the church-the church I went to with Hootan-I realized that the wafers weren't the delivery system." I coughed into the towel, a distraction that allowed time for Gloria to speak to me. "I didn't have to send them off for testing, because I just swallowed them. I figured I could stand the dose. And they were nothing. No effect."

The lie was delivered with all the physiological sincerity I could muster. Racked by the aftereffects of the drowning, it was easy to let my voice break with emotion, to allow my body to adopt the bent and heaving att.i.tude of the penitent. The rest of the lie depended on Fayza not being the one who killed the pastor and Luke. If she was lying about that, then I was a dead woman.

Gloria nodded approvingly. "Keep going," she said.

"The next night I went back to the church," I said. "I broke in the back door. That's when I discovered that Rudy and Luke had been killed."

Fayza said, "You weren't going to tell me this?"

I looked up at her. I didn't have to force new tears. "I thought you had killed them. And I was sure I was next."

Aaqila said something under her breath. Fayza ignored her and asked, "If they were dead, how did you find out where they got the drug?"

"They had a chemjet printer hidden in the bathroom. All the c-packs had been taken-I a.s.sumed you'd gotten your sample. But there was something else in the room I couldn't figure out at first. Cigarettes. Boxes of them. Wrapped in plastic, no cartons."

Dr. G placed a cool hand on my shoulder. "Let her get there."

Fayza frowned. "He was getting it from the Indians."

I nodded, and listened to Gloria. "I have a friend of mine, somebody I met in the hospital, who used to do a lot of business with the Six Nations. She knows the people who run the smoke shacks. She said they smuggled all kinds of things, not just cigarettes. She reached out to them, and we met them tonight to set up a buy."

"For what?" Fayza asked.

"The whole thing. A new chemjet, and a full set of ingredient packs."

"And you are receiving these when?"

"Tomorrow night. In Cornwall."

Dr. Gloria said, "Here is where we make her part of the solution." She told me what to say next, and I almost rebelled. "Trust me," Gloria said.

Fortunately, my hesitation could be interpreted as shame. "There's only one problem," I said. "They want forty-thousand Yuan."

"And you don't have this money?"

I shook my head. It felt so heavy from the water. "Not yet."

Fayza leaned in, squinting, as if she didn't hear me correctly: one of the library of power moves that adults used to signal that other adults were f.u.c.king idiots. "You arranged to buy from these people," she said, "and you don't have the money?"

"I was going to call everyone I knew," I said. "Uncles, cousins, old friends. Open credit lines. Go in with loan sharks if I had to."

"Unbelievable," Fayza said. She walked away from me, thinking. After thirty seconds of silence she turned and said, "Hootan and Aaqila will go with you. And if you're lying, they will kill you. You know this to be true, yes?"

Aaqila stared at me. She seemed to be already imagining it.

"I understand," I said. I didn't need any prompting from Gloria.

"Good," Fayza said. "Until we leave, you'll be staying with Aaqila."

"What? No. I'm not-"

"Do not press me, Lyda."

Dr. Gloria bristled. "We are so going to smite her a.s.s," she said. "At the first G.o.dd.a.m.n opportunity."

My angel. My protector. Keeper of my rage.

Aaqila lived in one of the two-story houses on Tyndall Avenue. The drive over in Hootan's car was ridiculously short, like a golf cart ride from green to tee. Hootan didn't have time to ask about my wet hair or what had happened inside the salon. Or maybe he didn't dare; he seemed in awe of Aaqila, or maybe infatuated with her. Aaqila barely acknowledged him.

The house was dark, and Aaqila didn't turn on any lights. In a distant room, someone snored vigorously. I imagined sleeping parents and grandparents, rooms crowded with immigrant cousins. But in the dimness it was difficult to make out any details of the home. Dr. Gloria walked with me, but her artificial glow was no help because we hadn't been in this house before. Fauxtons, I called them; they could not illuminate what I hadn't already seen.

Aaqila led me up to a bedroom, unlocked the door, and woke up a little girl who was sleeping inside. The child was dressed in pink nylon pajamas, and her hair was long and frizzy, almost an afro.

My chest tightened. I stepped back, but Aaqila didn't notice.

"Sleep in my room," Aaqila told the girl. She climbed out of bed without a fuss and walked sleepily past us.

"How old is she?" I asked. "Nine? Ten?"

"None of your business," Aaqila said.

Inside the room, Aaqila patted me down and told me to empty my pockets. I complied as automatically as the little girl, handing over my nylon wallet, a wad of bills, some change. When I touched the pen I hesitated. I needed that to get in touch with Ollie. If we didn't talk before tomorrow night, the plan would fall apart, and they would kill me.

Aaqila took the pen. "Now your boots."

"You're kidding me," Dr. Gloria said.

She wasn't. Aaqila dumped the smaller articles into one of the boots and stepped out of the room with the pair. Then she shut the door and locked it.

I thought, who locks a kids' bedroom door from the outside? What about fires? I went to the single window and opened the drapes. They were blocked by steel bars, like the grates that had sealed off the Elegant Lady salon. So either the parents were afraid of the little girls running away, or were terrified of rapists. Or maybe the Millies required that every house in the neighborhood included a room that could double as a cell.

The girl's taste in decor indicated a future as an Elegant Lady; the walls and the bedclothes all vibrated in the same annoying end of the spectrum as the salon. The covers of the twin bed were pulled back, leaving an empty s.p.a.ce where the girl had slept in a nest of stuffed animals.

Dr. G said, "Have you noticed there are no electronics? No screens, no pens. Even the stuffed animals are nonrobotic. And look, books! Paper books." She was trying to distract me.

"That little girl," I said. "She was so pretty."

"I didn't notice. Now, about tomorrow-"

"Please, just ... stop talking." I lay down in the bed. It was still warm.

Dr. Gloria took a seat across the room. My personal night-light. I rolled away from her and pulled one of the pillows to my belly.

THE PARABLE OF.

the Million Bad Mothers There was a woman who gave birth to a beautiful child, and after the nurse washed and bundled the infant in new blankets she came to the mother and said, "Would you like to hold the baby?"

The woman noticed that the nurse did not say your baby or your daughter. The staff had been informed of the situation, and were careful to avoid possessive nouns.

The woman ached to hold the child. But should she? What cascade of effects would result from that act? This was the first decision she would have to make in the next seventy-two hours, and it paralyzed her.

The fetus had been exposed to a ma.s.sive amount of NME 110. No one knew what effect the dose had already had on the child's developing brain or what the prognosis would be. The mother knew firsthand what permanent damage the drug could inflict on adult tissue, and neither she nor the doctors had any right to expect a mentally healthy child. Initial tests were inconclusive. The girl had low APGAR scores, but she was also born four weeks premature. Only time would tell.

On the bedside table was a multipage form labeled "Final and Irrevocable Surrenders for Adoption." Not one surrender, the mother thought, but an unknowable number of them, a surrender for every day of the rest of her life.

It would be her decision to sign the form or not. She did not want to make this decision, and was surprised that anyone in her mental condition would be allowed to. She was clearly not sane. On the other hand, the law made it clear that insanity did not automatically render you unfit for parenthood (see: Everyone v. Their Parents).

There were other complicating factors. The mother was a dual citizen of the United States and Canada; the other legal parent, though dead, was survived by a wealthy family who might sue for custody; and the newborn herself was American. Any adoption forced upon the mother by DCFS would be jurisdictionally murky. So: It would be the mother's signature, and hers alone, that would deliver the child unto strangers.

But not yet. The state of Illinois mandated a waiting period after the child's birth, and the mother could not take that final, irrevocable step until the time had elapsed.

Three days. Seventy-two hours. 259,200 seconds.

The woman considered the waiting period to be a punishment. Social services did not realize that being forced to make the decision was itself a life sentence. No, more than that: the sentence of an infinite number of lifetimes. The number of variables she had to consider created not some branching tree, but a node diagram like those models of the human mind created by naive computer scientists, each node connected to the others by input and output lines, some strong, some weak. The number of paths through those nodes was impossible for her to calculate. Almost any result could come out of a system that complicated.

In some lifetimes, the girl exhibited no effects from the drug. Her IQ was high, her emotions stable, her grasp on reality as firm as any child's.

In other lifetimes, a doctor found a drug to make the mother sane, and she was released from the hospital. The mother, who had refused to sign the adoption papers, was reunited with her daughter before the girl was old enough to remember the absence.

Or, the mother signed and the girl was adopted by a loving family with all the emotional and financial resources to deal with a brain-damaged child.

In other lifetimes, the girl exhibited no symptoms of Numinous until the age of twelve, when she developed early-onset schizophrenia. There were incidents of violence. The adoptive parents-good people, but unprepared for such a destructive child-inst.i.tutionalized the girl.

In yet other lifetimes the mother refused to give up custody, and so when she failed to get better-in fact, got worse year by year-the daughter was shuffled from one foster home to another, never knowing the love of parents, never knowing a permanent home.

In some lifetimes, the inst.i.tution the daughter found herself in was full of highly trained, caring people, who knew how to help the girl achieve her potential. She managed her mental disorder and went on to public high school, where she excelled in science and math.

In some lifetimes, the mother insisted upon a closed adoption, and the daughter, confused and terrified by the strange workings of her mind, unable to tell the difference between reality and hallucination, and unable to reach out to her biological mother for explanations, stole a box cutter from her adopted father's toolbox and carved her own kind of sense into her skin. Pain was real. Pain was something she could hold onto.

In the lifetimes in which the mother allowed for an open adoption, the precocious daughter Googled her mother's name and was horrified; the girl's own anxieties, which she had been told were experienced by lots of other children, suddenly seemed more sinister, not normal at all, the symptoms of a latent defect that would cause her to live in fear of her own mind for the rest of her life.

And so on. Each node that was touched sent a ripple across the web of possibilities.

The nurse asked a second time, "Would you like to hold her?"

Again the mother could not answer. Her bones felt as fragile as balsa wood. If the nurse placed the baby in her arms, the mother would split and shatter, and if she did not fall apart she would not be able to let the child go.

It was then that an angel of the Lord who had been watching nearby spoke. "You've got to stop this," she said. The mother's mind was filled with nodes and glowing lines, the dreams and nightmares multiplying by the second.

The angel removed her gla.s.ses and said, "Listen to me. What the child needs in this moment is to be held."

The mother shouted, "You don't know that! I don't know that, so you don't!" She said this aloud. She had not yet learned the skill of talking silently to her angel. Yet immediately she realized the mistake. The nurse stepped back from the bed and turned aside, an unconscious movement to protect the baby. Then she left the room.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" the mother shouted. She picked up the plastic water bottle and threw it at her angel. The IV tube ripped from her arm. The bottle clattered against the far wall.

The mother put her hand to her bleeding arm. She was dehydrated and did not have tears to waste, but still she wept. She was delusional. She knew that this was the way schizophrenics thought. This was the way her own mother had behaved before they took her away. All her life she'd been on guard, watching for signs of her mind twisting toward its genetic predisposition. She'd armed herself with advanced degrees. She was determined that she would not become her mother. And she prayed, as only an atheist can pray, that her own daughter would not inherit the damage.

The angel of the Lord waited for perhaps a minute, then went to the mother's bedside and placed an arm around her shoulders.

"You're imaginary," the mother said.

"It's true," the angel said.

Still, the woman was grateful for that cool touch. Proof, if any more was needed, that she was unfit to be a mother.

"I'm a murderer," she said to the angel.