It was well past dark when we arrived in Meaford, a little town on the shore. My mother had grown up there. The car directed Bobby west of town. Bobby pulled in the driveway and cut the lights. The windows of the farmhouse were dark.
“This is it, right?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah, I just thought … Well. You want to come in? It’s too far to drive back to Toronto tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“You like sleepovers, don’t you?”
We went up the steps. The email I’d gotten said the key would be under a ceramic pot, which I hoped I could find in the dark. Before I could look down, the door opened and the lights flicked on.
Ollie. Her expression was worried. She looked at my face, but her eyes weren’t quite tracking mine.
“It’s me,” I said.
Her face lit up. The visual was hard for her when she was on her meds, but voices always broke through.
She pulled my face down to hers and kissed me fiercely. We stood like that for a long time, unwilling to let each other go.
Something brushed past my ankles. I broke the kiss and looked down. “Is that Lamont?”
“Still clean and sober,” Ollie said.
“Poor bastard.”
* * *
Ollie had made a cake, but wouldn’t let us eat it.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
She wouldn’t answer. Playing coy.
Bobby lay on the floor, trying to get Lamont interested in a catnip-filled mouse, but the cat was taking a hard-line antidrug approach. Ollie and I sat on the couch, leaning into each other, holding hands like teenagers. We didn’t need to talk; we’d done nothing but talk for twenty-four months. In prison, no cell phones, pens, or internet-capable devices were allowed, but it was impossible to keep them out; just about everything these days was an internet-capable device. My second day at the EMDC I traded my dessert for a piece of smartpaper with a Wi-Fi connection. On our first call, Ollie walked me through installing what she called “real” encryption software. Every night we talked about the past—including everything she’d learned from Rovil and his sociopath-for-hire—and about the future. We burned up the airwaves with our words.
While we waited for the proper, secret time to have cake, Ollie showed me the latest news on one of our most frequent topics. Numinous was spreading through the States and Canada’s biggest cities. The Landon-Rousse scandal, and Rovil Gupta’s video confession, recorded just before he disappeared, had only accelerated curiosity about the drug. Stepladder was dead, but NME 110 was alive and well. It had spread beyond the walls of the Church of the Hologrammatic God. The chemjet blueprints were all over the internet. Numinous was a recreational drug now, with all that entailed: theme parties, overdoses, suicides, novelty T-shirts.
“I didn’t think it would happen so fast,” I said.
“We’ve never had something like this before.”
“Sure we have,” I said. “It was called the Great Awakening. But this time the crash is going to be bad.”
The message icon on the screen blinked on, and Ollie flicked her hand at it. The screen changed to show a hand-lettered sign that said WELCOME HOME!
The sign dropped away. Sasha, looking sophisticated in a pale green dress, opened her arms in a ta-da.
She had only a few minutes until Eduard and Suzette checked on her, so we ate quickly. On her side of the screen Sasha bounced on the edge of her bed while eating one of Esperanza’s cookies.
I leaned over to Ollie and whispered, “She has little girl boobies.”
“I know,” she whispered back.
“Should we tell her about bras?”
“Not in front of Bobby we don’t,” Ollie said.
The eating didn’t interrupt Sasha’s texting; the words scrolled across the bottom of the screen almost too fast to read. It seems like we should have a chair for Dr. Gloria, she said.
“That party’s over,” I said. “She’s long gone.”
YOU CAN’T JUST THROW HER AWAY!!
“Kid, there’s nothing to throw away.”
Just ’cause she’s imaginary, doesn’t mean she’s not real, Sasha said. You can’t throw away yourSELF.
* * *
Meaford was a small town, but even here there were cameras in the stores. Our faces would eventually pop up in some database, and anyone with enough money and energy would be able to find us. Fayza, for example. We’d have to keep moving, even if it meant breaking my parole.
But there was one person I wanted to find me. It took a few days, but I finally was able to get a message through to him. The call came on what felt like the last day of fall, a cold wind whipping off the lake, picking off the last of the leaves from their limbs.
“Hey, Gil. Thank you for calling me.”
“Gil is pleased to see you,” the god said. His face was still thin and bony, with the strong cheekbones of a prophet.
“I’d rather we talked in person, but…”
He nodded. We were both convicted felons. He could never cross over to Canada, and I’d never set foot in the States again. Legally, at least.
“I never thanked you,” I said. “For what you did.”
“Thanks aren’t necessary. We did it not only for you, but for the child. And we knew that Gil needed to be in prison, among those people, to start the ministry.”
Sure, I thought. That’s always the way with divine plans. No such thing as an accident.
“Can I tell you a story?” I said. “About three months into my sentence I got cornered. A couple of women I’d pissed off—it’s too complicated to explain. They caught me in a bathroom. One of them had a knife. I should have died.
“But here’s the crazy thing. Four other women I’d never met burst in and saved me. I didn’t get a scratch. Afterward, they gave me a slip of paper. You know what it said?”
He smiled.
“Half of EMDC is on Numinous,” I said. “The male units, the female unit I was in—paper is flowing through there every day. Some of the guards are converts. They think it’s their duty to spread the word. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of your chemjets was running in a back room.”
“It’s been known to happen,” Gil said.
“The first time I ever saw one of them was in a church in Toronto. I thought, Edo built this. I thought only a rich man could afford to make it.”
“Churches raise money,” Gil said. “That’s what they do. Even peasants can build a cathedral.”
“But you’re losing control,” I said. “Numinous may have started in the prisons with you, but it’s out there on its own now. It’s a party drug. Frat boys are getting religion.”
“We never wanted control,” Gil said.
“What do you want?”
He smiled deprecatingly. “For people to know me,” he said. “That’s why I sent the printer and pictures to Edo, so that he would see what I was doing, and share. I wanted him to know me. And you as well, Lyda.”
“I know you,” I said. “You’re not a god; you’re a symptom. Now that people can get the drug outside of your church, it’ll lose its mystique. Once people understand how NME affects the brain—”
“It won’t make any difference,” Gil said. “The more people hear of it, the more people will try it—and then they’ll never go back.”
“Unless they overdose or die,” I said. “Numinous can’t escape the physics of tolerance. People will stop being able to feel God’s love as intensely as before, and they’ll have to ramp up the dosage. It’s already happening.”
“Then we’ll print more,” Gil said.
“Jesus, Gil, you want more overdoses? Freaks like us? And what about the people who can’t get the drug after they’ve used it? Emergency rooms are already filling with Francines, looking for a shortcut to the afterlife.”