I hear a palpable chill in her words from the dark memories that haunt her.
The ground draws closer. My ears pop from the pressure, refuse to equalize.
“Right as he was walking up our steps, they shot him. The police did. He wouldn’t put down the knife. I was watching through the window, just a few feet away. He died right there on our porch, his blood splattered across the glass right in front of me. That’s when I ran to hide. I’ve never told anyone I saw him die. Not even my parents or the police knew I was there when he was shot. They thought I was downstairs watching TV.”
When she pauses, I sense that it’s just to regroup, not to give me a chance to respond, so I wait and at last she goes on, “Since that day, I sometimes see Mr. Dailey. I’ll look up from reading and he’ll come around the corner in my bedroom and hold that knife up and smile and just stare at me. I’ve seen him in restaurants and at bus stops. Sometimes I’ll be sitting talking with my friends and he’ll walk into the room, just like you or me, and I can’t tell if he’s real or not. And then he pulls out a knife. Sometimes he’ll walk up to me and swipe it toward me, toward my stomach.”
I’m reminded of what happened in the chamber last night when Banner tried to kill her by swiping the blade toward her abdomen.
Apparently she’s thinking the same thing because I notice her gazing at the arm where she got her stitches. “I guess it’s a hallucination, but I’ve always thought of it as a nightmare that I have while I’m awake. A daymare. I know it’s not real, but everything inside of me tells me that it is. That’s how powerful our thoughts can be. They really do change things, Jev, our thoughts do.”
There’s not a whole lot of difference between her daymares and my observer memories. In both cases our minds were filling in details, forcing us to see what wasn’t real.
Why don’t we just call observer memories what they are: retrograde hallucinations?
The saying about our eyes playing tricks on us comes to mind. But the saying isn’t true, I’ve known that since my early days of magic. Our eyes don’t play tricks on us, our minds do. Our eyes only gather information; our minds interpret it. We perceive the world not so much by what we actually see but by how our minds expect it to look, by what construct we use to make sense of the data.
Observer memories.
Fictionalized truth.
Hallucinations.
Perspective.
Our wheels touch down. The landing is a little rocky, as if the plane is unsure of itself as it settles onto the runway.
Clearly, Charlene is deeply moved and upset from sharing the story about Mr. Dailey. I reach across the aisle, put my hand gently on her shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
It’s not true what they say about things being “only in your head.” If it’s in your head, it’s in you, and you can’t escape your thoughts, can’t flee their effect on you. Call it psychosomatic if you want, but when thoughts affect your physiology, the problem is never just in your head.
Misdirection.
Seeing what you expect to see.
Why did the suicide bomber put the shirt on over his vest? If the video was simply of a malfunction in the vest, what did it have to do with RixoTray? With Dr. Cyrus Arlington?
I consider that for a moment. The implications for what we’re trying to do here.
Eyes playing tricks on you.
A different perspective.
Captain Fontaine stops our taxiing beside the charter jet terminal.
Charlene folds up the blanket. “I hope Dr. Tanbyrn will be alright.”
“So do I.” But my thoughts are still on the video, on the behavior of the suicide bomber, the ways perspective and expectations affect what our minds tell us is real.
I’m not sure what any of it means and I make a decision to look into it later, but it’ll have to wait. For now Fionna McClury and her four children are already waiting for us just outside the nearest hangar.
Socialization
I put a call through to the hospital in Oregon and find that there’s been no change in Dr. Tanbyrn’s condition, and by the time I’m done the door is open and Fionna and her kids are lining up to board the plane.
Fionna has a shock of red hair that she always seems to have a hard time taming and endearing green eyes that beg you to look deeply into them, but it’s not easy to. One of her eyes wanders, and when we first met, I found it difficult to guess which of her eyes to look into when I spoke to her. For a while I kept switching my focus from one eye to the other until she abruptly told me to just choose one because going back and forth like that was making her dizzy.
She has two girls and two boys, all four years apart, almost like clockwork. Mandie is five, Maddie nine, Donnie thirteen, and Lonnie is seventeen. I’m not sure why she gave her boys and girls names that sounded so much alike, and I have no idea how she keeps the names apart, but from the first time I’d met her, I’ve never heard her call any of the children by the wrong name.
After two marriages that didn’t work out, she’s sworn off men, but she’s also mentioned to me how important it is for her kids to have a good male role model, and I could tell she was conflicted about the whole issue.
Amil stows the McClurys’ luggage in the back of the plane, and Fionna lets the kids troop aboard first, their eyes wide, mouths gaping.
“Sweet.” It’s Donnie, the ponytailed thirteen-year-old who has looked up from his cell phone just long enough to take a quick glance around before texting someone again. Last year he’d somehow convinced his mom that he needed an earring, and in his tattered jeans and long hair, he looks more like an aspiring rock star than your typical Midwestern homeschooled kid.
Lonnie strolls aboard, confident, perceptive, lean, and already handsome at seventeen. Mandie, the youngest, has both arms wrapped around a stuffed dog that’s nearly as big as she is. Nine-year-old Maddie wears stylish glasses and is toting a well-worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Fionna ascends the plane’s steps just behind them. She’s wearing two buttons on her jacket: “Moms against Guns” and “NRA Member.”
She is not an easy woman to figure out.
She offers me a nod and a smile. “Jevin.”
“Hey, Fionna.”
Because of how often we use videoconferencing, it’s been a few months since we’ve all been together face-to-face. She leans in for a peck-on-the-cheek greeting.
As the kids pass by Xavier, they all greet him as “Uncle Xav.” Then they settle into their seats.
“It’s great to see you, Fionna,” Charlene tells her.
“You too.”
Xavier shakes her hand. “Hello, Ms. McClury.” He lends a degree of respect to her name.
She regards him lightly. “Hello, Mr. Wray.”
“And how is the homeschooling going these days?”
“Quite well, thank you. How’s the search for the Loch Ness Monster?”
“It’s coming along.”
It doesn’t take long before we’re in the air again. Fionna asks for an update and I quickly brief her on what’s going on, what we’ve found out.
When she hears about the documented negative effects of mind-to-mind communication and the idea of using a thought-borne virus to stop someone’s heart, she shakes her head. “That’s about as unnerving as a warm toilet seat at a highway rest stop.”