“Sure. Okay.”
“Alright …” I search unsuccessfully to say the right thing. “So then. Good night. And… just be careful with that arm.”
“I will.”
“Don’t roll on it or anything.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise.”
I pass the blanket to my other hand. I really have no idea how to wrap up this conversation. “We’ll see what it looks like in the morning. I still want to take you to the hospital.”
“Noted.” She smiles. “Good night, Petunia.” Her tone is light, the blush is gone, the moment feels natural and familiar. She glances at the couch. “Seriously, if you can’t sleep, you’re welcome to the other side of the bed.”
I nod. “Gotcha.”
With that, she leaves for the bedroom and I drop onto the couch. It’s a little short, but I usually sleep kind of scrunched up anyway and I figure I’ll be alright.
As I lie down, I can’t help but think of the attacker in the chamber, and I realize that what bothers me most is the fact that I wasn’t able to stop him from hurting Charlene.
I promise myself that if we run into each other again, I won’t make the same mistake, then I close my eyes, hoping to sleep, to clear my head, hoping that the dreams I’ve had so often over the course of the last year won’t return.
But I’m anticipating, of course, that they will. After all, the nightmares of my children drowning while my wife sits just a few feet away and waits for them to die have been plaguing me for months.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a dream. But it’s not. It’s history.
For a while I’m caught in the time-between-times world of waking and sleeping where you wander into and out of awareness, then I’m vaguely aware of the fact that scientists don’t really understand sleep, why we do it, what biological purpose it actually serves. We’re never more vulnerable than when we’re asleep, and if the most vulnerable members of a species die out, then natural selection should have weeded us out. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes no sense.
Never more vulnerable …
And then I drop away from where I am and tip into the world of my dreams.
The twins stepped into the conference room.
Gentle-looking, both of them, with an easy, measured confidence. No swagger. No posturing. Medium build. Wiry. Clean-cut. Soft-spoken.
If it wasn’t for the scar snaking across Darren’s left cheek, Riah wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.
She noticed that Cyrus was keeping his distance from them, and though it didn’t entirely surprise her, she did find it informative.
She greeted each twin with a half-hug. Their friendship allowed for this, made it seem like the natural greeting. After all, when you’ve inserted nanowire electrodes up someone’s artery and into his brain, it tends to engender a certain degree of trust.
Deep-brain stimulation used to be highly invasive and involved dozens or even hundreds of electrodes implanted in the brain through small burr holes drilled in the skull.
Not anymore.
Now, tiny polymer nanowire electrodes less than six hundred nanometers wide are used. Since their width is far less than that of a red blood cell, they can be inserted through an artery in the arm and guided through the vasculature up and into the brain, where they’re used to deliver electric signals to stimulate the neurons in the hardest-to-reach parts of the brain.
The process had been around since 2006, but Riah had made advances that allowed for electric stimulation of the Wernicke’s area, the temporal lobe’s language-recognition center. She’d implanted the electrodes in the brains of the twins three weeks ago.
After a brief “How are you doing?” conversation back and forth, Cyrus cleared his throat slightly and offered Riah a smile that wasn’t really a smile. “Riah, really. I think it would be best if you waited outside the room, gave us just a few minutes alone.”
The words were condescending, but her feelings weren’t hurt, though she had the sense that given the social context, they should have been.
Daniel and Darren watched Cyrus quietly. Before Riah could reply to him, Darren spoke up: “We trust Riah. She can stay. It’s time we brought her in on the broader nature of the project.”
“No.” Cyrus shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s—”
“Nonnegotiable,” Daniel said firmly. He gestured toward his brother, who was still staring steadily at Cyrus. “We’ve been talking about it, my brother and I, and we were going to tell you tonight. That’s one of the reasons we requested you come. She needs to know about Kabul or we don’t move forward. It’s time to integrate the findings from Oregon. It’s the only way to make things work. As my brother said, we trust her.”
Riah watched Cyrus. Having the twins contravene what you’d said like that would cause most people to squirm or backpedal or acquiesce immediately, but she could see a storm of resistance on Cyrus’s face, a narrowing of his dark eyes. If he had been afraid before, he didn’t appear to be so now.
It struck her that for all of his talk of trusting her, he hadn’t been all that forthcoming but had been keeping things from her — that the twins were back in Pennsylvania, the nature of this visit tonight, why he wanted her to step into the hallway even though she was the head researcher on the electrical brain stimulation program.
Had he lied to her? Perhaps not lies, technically, but not the truth either.
As she thought about that, she realized that all the men she’d been with over the years, even her father when she was a little girl, had deceived her at some point, and eventually — some sooner than others — betrayed her in the most intimate ways possible.
A thought came to her, an epiphany about human nature that was both disquieting but also quite possibly the truth: Betrayal is a facet of love.
Could it be?
She waited for Cyrus to respond.
Could betrayal be as natural to our species as attraction is?
And another thought, almost poetic in its simplicity: If familiarity breeds contempt, then what kind of dark children does intimacy breed?
She was considering this when Cyrus replied to Daniel, “I’ll have to clear it with Williamson.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll be in bed by now. I’d be waking her up.”
“Yes.” Daniel reached into his pocket, produced his Droid. “Would you like to use my phone or yours?”
Testing Love
I wake up, tense, my heart clenched tight in my chest.
The residue of my dreams still circles through me. Dark and restless and unnerving.
I check my watch.
5:02 a.m.
An hour earlier than I’d planned on getting up, but I know I won’t be able to fall asleep again.
I stare at the ceiling, rub my eyes, try to forget the places my sleep took me, but the harder I try to put the images out of my mind, the clearer they become.
So I tell myself again that it was just a dream.
Only a dream.
I’m the one driving the minivan, Rachel sits beside me, and we’re talking about something like the bills or getting the boys to their T-ball practice or something — it’s not really clear, and of course that’s the way dreams work — and then suddenly I’m not on the highway but veering off the road. Rachel gasps, “Where are you—”
I drive through the parking lot.
“Jev—”
Toward the pier.
“—Stop! You’re going to—”
We fly off the pier, hit the water. The impact is jarring, and almost immediately Rachel is shouting and the boys are crying loudly, scared, terrified.