My departure was assisted by the bartender and one waitress. They did not toss me into a back alley like a 1930s’ drunk, but the exit was just as firm. It was three in the morning, and the sidewalk was empty, not an angel in sight. I was free.
For the next two days, the space in my head was cavernous, an empty warehouse in which I heard only my own footsteps, my own voice. Paradoxically, I had to work twice as hard to muffle those few remaining thoughts. But I was ready; I had trained for this moment for ten years. Yes, I’d dabbled with many substances over the past decade, but booze was the mortar of my addiction, making all other abuses possible. I knew how to build that wall. My body, like a good horse, had learned the way home to Rovil’s place, and whatever crime-stopping fairy circle was in effect continued to protect me. On none of those early-morning trail rides home did I run into anyone who made me nervous, much less made me fear for my wallet. When I passed a figure sleeping in a doorway it was almost a relief.
I started to point him out to Dr. Gloria, but of course she was long gone, missing for days. I walked on, then stopped. There was something odd about that homeless person, and I walked back to him.
He lay on his side upon a cardboard box, one arm under his head, his face toward the street. A black garbage bag was wedged into the space behind him. Most of his face was in shadow, but I could see that his eyes were closed. His hair was a wild expanse of gray.
No, I thought. Information that is too strange to process is literally too strange to process. The mind’s first defense is to recoil, retreat, deny. My body, responding to that mental whiplash, jerked back. I told myself, It’s not him.
Then he opened his eyes, instantly focusing on me. “Hey now,” he said.
It was the homeless man from the park in Toronto. The man who’d watched me try to summon Dr. Gloria with a box cutter.
I backed away from him, then stumbled as I stepped off the curb. I crossed to the other side of the street, already trying to shove down the memory of what I’d seen, my head roaring like an ocean.
* * *
“I need to show you something,” Ollie said.
It was daytime, though I wasn’t sure of much more than that. I tried to roll back over, but she dragged me out of bed. “It’s important.”
The living room was lit up like Times Square, every wall screen vibrating with color. I winced and said, “Why would you do this to me?”
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.
The images kept changing. Each one was a digital re-creation of an abstract oil painting, and each done in fireball colors of yellow, red, and orange. There were dozens of them, varying in size from a few feet square to rectangles three meters long. They faded in and out on the walls according to the apartment’s slideshow program, so there was no telling how many paintings were in the collection. But it was clear that they were all by the same school, if not the same artist.
“I’ve seen these,” I said. “Or something like them.”
“You said that Eduard Jr. told you that if you sent Edo a picture he’d pass it on. That seemed like an odd thing to say. So I started looking at Edo’s art collection.”
“He posts his entire collection online?” I said. “People do that?”
“These are special,” she said. “They weren’t on Edo’s personal site, or his corporation’s. They’re on a government site, for artwork created by federal prisoners in a rehabilitation program.”
“Edo funds it or something?”
“Through the Vik Group. There are thousands of pieces, almost all of them crap. But these are the paintings that are highlighted in the collection. They’re the only ones available in archival-quality hi-res files. And they’re the only ones that the Vik Group bought outright.”
“So where are they now?”
Ollie looked smug. “Edo’s private residence.”
“All of these? They went directly to Edo?”
“One a week, for months.”
I looked up to see a four-foot by four-foot painting start to fade, and I jumped up. “Bring that one back.”
Ollie touched it to make it stay. “This one was hanging in the pastor’s office,” I told her.
“We didn’t go in the pastor’s office,” Ollie said.
“I did, the first time I was in the church. There were two other posters just like it on the wall.”
“All these are a series,” Ollie said. “They’re numbered with major and minor version numbers, like software: one point one, one point two, two-oh. The major numbers get more and more dense, like sketches getting filled in. The minor versions seem to be alternates of the same picture.”
“There’s something else,” I said. “They remind me of something, not just the church posters … shit.”
I sat down on the couch, trying to concentrate, but I couldn’t put my finger on where else I’d seen them. My brain felt … dull. It wasn’t just the alcohol, though there was enough in my system that any traffic cop would qualify me as drunk. No, my body could handle that. It was that I was trying to function without Dr. Gloria.
We shared the same memories because we shared a brain, but having memories meant nothing if you couldn’t access them. Access depended on associations, one neuron tripping another, and her initial set of associations was different from mine. We had two different maps to the territory, and some locations weren’t on my map at all.
“Fuck,” I said. “I need Gloria.”
“Why?” Ollie asked. “What for?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
I told her about associations and maps, about the chain of firings that led to this thing in the prefrontal cortex called “recognition.”
“Okay then,” Ollie said. “Why don’t you pretend to be Dr. Gloria?”
“Uh…”
“Look, I used to talk to people all the time, try to help them remember details. It was one of my jobs. Pretending can help. Just treat it like a game. Maybe it leads somewhere, maybe it doesn’t.”
All I wanted to do was go back to sleep. “Okay, what do you want me to do?”
“You’re feeling like Dr. Gloria has something to do with this memory, and you remember seeing the posters in the church. She was with you when you were there, right? So start there. What else did she see?”
“We started in the sanctuary,” I said.
“Walk around as Gloria,” Ollie said. “What does she see? Where does she go?”
I pictured myself as the doctor, walking around the edge of the sanctuary as I—as Lyda—talked to the pastor and Luke. There were dioramas and art projects, all depicting the members’ gods. None of them rang a bell. After that, I waved Lyda into the back rooms: the warehouse, the pastor’s office, the bathroom. The smell of amines was in the air. Then Lyda pulled back the rubber curtain to reveal the printer. She lifted off the lid—
“That’s a painting of the chemjet engine,” I said. I said the words, knowing I was right, but without knowing why I was right.
I looked up at the picture, trying to reconcile the shapes in that image with my memory of the internals of the chemjet. The intense colors of the painting made this difficult, because the machine was all silver and black inside. Also, the orientation was wrong.
“Flip the painting,” I said. “Can you do that?”
Ollie grabbed the edge of the current image and turned it.
“No, the other way,” I said. “Ninety degrees.”
And then the two images—one in front of me now, the other hovering before my internal eye, but both firing the same neurons—seemed to snap into place.
Ollie saw the change in my face. “What is it?” she asked.
“This isn’t just a painting,” I said. “It’s a blueprint.”
Ollie thought for a moment. “That kind of makes sense.”
“Tell me who painted them,” I said, though I could already guess the answer.
“That was my big surprise,” she said. “These were all painted by Gil Kapernicke.”
* * *
Rovil sat on the couch facing the wall and the camera. His palms lay on his knees, the two fingers of his left hand still taped together. He wore a business suit, and his face was locked into a pleasant expression. He was on hold.