He touched pause. "Ring any bells?"
"No." Cody's esophagus had clamped shut. She could hardly swallow her own spit, never mind the latte. But the cardboard was warm and smooth in her hand, comforting, and behind Richard her fish swam serenely back and forth.
"Terpazine is a good drug. We managed to calculate your dosage beautifully. Susanna's was a bit more of a challenge. Incredible metabolism."
"You said you didn't give her-"
"Not in the last couple of weeks. But you've had it six times, and she seven. Now keep listening."
Six times?
"-the exploration of memory and its retrieval. So exciting. A perfect dovetail with the work I've been doing on how people form attachments. It's all about familiarity. You let someone in deep enough, or enough times, then your brain actually rewires to recognize that person as friend, or family."
Pause.
"There are ways to make it easier for someone to let you in."
Clink of bottle on glass.
"I've told you about those studies that show it's as simple as having Person A anticipate Person B's needs and fulfill them."
"So don't tell me again."
She sounded so sure of herself, bored even. A woman who had never thought to use the world love.
"-jumpstart the familiarization process. For example, Person A works in a bookshop and is lonely, and when she's lonely chocolate makes her feel better. And one day Person B arrives mid-afternoon with some chocolate, says, Hey, you look sorta miserable, when I'm miserable chocolate makes me feel better, would you like one? and A eats a chocolate and thinks, Wow, this B person is very thoughtful and empathic and must be just like me, and therefore gets slotted immediately into the almost-friend category. It's easy to set something like that up. You just have to know enough about Person A."
Know enough.
Cody pushed the laptop from her. "I don't believe this."
"No?"
Cody didn't say anything.
"You sat in that bar, and you listened, and then you signed a temporary waiver." He placed a piece of paper on the table by her hand. It was her signature at the bottom-a little sloppy, but hers. "Then you took some terpazine and forgot all about it."
"I wouldn't forget something like this."
He held up his hand. Reached with his other and nudged the sound file slider to the right.
"Take the pill."
"All right, all right." Pause. Tinkle of ice cubes. "Jesus. That tastes vile."
"Next time we'll put it in a capsule. Just be grateful it's not the vasopressin. It would make you gag. I speak from experience."
He tapped the file to silence. "It really does. Anyhow, a week after Seattle I came here and you signed a more robust set of papers." He handed her a thick, bound document. "Believe me, they're bombproof."
"Wait." She dropped the document on her lap without looking. "You came here? To my apartment?"
"I did. I played the recording you've just heard, showed you the initial waiver. Gave you that." He nodded at her lap. "You signed. I gave you the sodium thiopental, we had our first session. You took another terpazine."
"I don't remember."
He shrugged. "It happened." He tapped the paper in her lap. "There's a signed waiver for every session."
"How many did you say?"
"Six. Four here, twice in North Carolina."
"But I don't remember!"
The fish in her tank swam back and forth, back and forth. She closed her eyes. Opened them. The fish were still there. Richard was still there. She could still remember the weight of Susanna's breasts in her hands.
"You'd better listen to the rest. And read everything over."
He tapped play.
"Okay. Think about what it would be like if you knew enough about someone and then you met: you'd know things about her and she'd know things about you, but all you'd be aware of is that you recognize and trust this person and you feel connected. Now imagine what might happen if you add sex to the equation."
"Good sex, I hope."
"The best. There are hundreds of studies that show how powerful sex bonding can be, especially for women. If a woman has an orgasm in the presence of another person, her hormonal output for the next few days is sensitized to her lover: every time they walk in the room, her system floods with chemical messengers like oxytocin saying Friend! Friend! This is even with people you know consciously aren't good for you. You put that together with someone compatible, who fits-whether they really fit or just seem to fit-and it's a chemical bond with the potential to be human superglue. That's what love is: a bond that's renewed every few days until the brain is utterly rewired. So I wanted to know what would happen if you put together two sexually compatible people who magically knew exactly-exactly!-what the other wanted in bed but had no memory of how they'd acquired that knowledge… "
It took Cody a moment to pause the sound. "Love," she said. "Love? What the fuck have you done to me?"
"You did it to yourself. Keep listening."
And she did. After she had listened for an hour, she accepted the sheaf of transcripts Richard handed her from his case.
She looked at the clock.
"Still thinking about that plane?"
Cody didn't know what she was thinking.
"Is it refundable?" he said. "The flight?"
Cody nodded.
"Give me the ticket. I'll cancel for you. You can always rebook for tomorrow. But you need to read."
She watched, paralyzed, as Richard picked up the phone and dialed. He turned to her while he was on hold, mouthed Read, and turned away again.
So she began to read, only vaguely aware of Richard arguing his way up the airline hierarchy.
After the first hundred pages of Subject C and Subject S, he brought her fresh coffee. She paused at one section, appalled.
"What?"
"I can't believe I told you that."
He peered over her shoulder. "Oh, that's a juicy one. Stop blushing. I've heard it all before. Several times now. Sodium thiopental will make you say anything. Besides, you don't remember telling me, so why bother being embarrassed?"
She watched her fish. It didn't matter. Didn't matter. She picked up the paper again and plowed on. May as well get it over with.
Somewhere around page three hundred, he went into the kitchen to make lunch. She didn't remember eating it, but when she set aside the final page at seven o'clock that evening, she saw that the plate by her elbow was empty, and heard the end of Richard's order to the Chinese takeout place on the corner. It was clearly something he'd done before. From her phone, in her apartment. And she didn't remember.
She wished there was a way to feed him terpazine so he would forget all those things she'd never said to another soul before.
She tried to organize her thoughts.
He had asked for her permission to use her in an experiment. It would mean she would feel comfortable at the club in Atlanta, that she might even have a good couple of hours, and it would further his work while being paid for to some extent by her expense account. He had traveled to the Golden Key and picked Susanna as the most likely dancer to fit her fantasies-and he knew a little about her preferences from that stupid, stupid night in Dallas -and made the same pitch to her. Only Susanna got paid.
Twice, Cody thought. I paid her too.
And so Richard had flown to Cody's apartment in San Francisco and given her sodium thiopental, and she had talked a blue streak about her sexual fantasies, every nuance and variation and degree of pleasure. In North Carolina, she had talked about her fantasies again, even more explicitly, encouraged to imagine in great detail, pretend it was happening, while they had her hooked up to both a functional MRI and several blood-gas sensors.