“We?” I asked.
“I have a lot of people working on the problem.”
“How do you fund it all?”
“I steal,” she replied simply. “Like you, I am an exceptionally good thief, although I mostly steal through stock markets, which doesn’t even count as theft.”
Her hand, resting on the back of the chair, like the proud owner of a prize horse, wondering whether now is the time to sell.
Then she said, “Do you still want treatments?”
“I want to be remembered.”
“But do you still want treatments?”
I don’t remember what I said in reply.
Headaches.
A doctor who’d seen me eleven times already said, “Ah, you’re new here!”
Yes, I’m new here. I’m always new here.
Blood drawn; how much blood did I have left to take?
Brains, brains scanned, students brought in, introduced, Hello, you’re new here, still new, still always new, always and for ever just like yesterday, like tomorrow, goodbye, hello; hello, goodbye.
Byron woke from a nightmare, cold and shaking, saw me in the dark across from her, reached for her gun, froze, lips moving, struggling to find recollection. I saw her eyes white in the gloom, heard the rumble of a fat lorry passing by outside, waited, heard her breath slow, saw her lower her head back onto the pillow, close her eyes, go back to sleep, and I did not sleep.
I did not sleep.
On the sixty-eighth day of my association, I broke my own rule, and followed her, discreetly, to a meeting. It was the perfect evening for it, fog rising off the bay, a thin drizzle of rain obscuring the lights high in the hills, winter coming. I carried an umbrella, hid my face behind a scarf, wore a new, shop-stolen coat that I could discard on the way home. I followed her to the edge of Berkeley, watched her walk through the mist to the front door of a detached, two-storey white-timbered house with an American flag flying on the porch and a bright pink plastic rocking horse abandoned by the path, and when she looked back over her shoulder before knocking, I hid behind a car and counted to ten before peeking round to see who answered.
The man was in his fifties, olive skin and pepper hair, a checked shirt and grey jogging bottoms, a pair of slippers each with a rabbit face and a pair of floppy ears on the front. He shook Byron’s hand quickly, and led her inside.
I looked up his address when I got home. Agustin Carrazza, retired MIT professor, quietly shuffled into obscurity when it was suggested he’d had a few too many links with questionable experiments, of which the highlight had to be a 1978 case in which the water supply for a small town in Missouri was laced with a mild hallucinogenic, resulting in two days of confusion and chaos, three deaths, six pet deaths including one iguana, two car crashes, ninety-four injuries of varying degrees, the slaughter of two hundred and seventeen dairy cows and a statistically significant jump in the birth rate nine months later.
When asked in interview in 1998 if he’d ever been part of unethical or illegal experiments, his reply was classically Nixonian: “If the government says it’s ethical, then that’s good enough for me.”
That night I bought a couple of sleeping pills from a pharmacy that advertised itself with the picture of two grinning, Stetson-wearing snakes coiled round a crucifix, and slipped one into Byron’s water when she went to sleep.
One hundred and fifty snores later, I rolled out of bed, took her notebook from her bedside table, turned on the torch at the back of my phone and sat, like a child, under the duvet covers to read.
Her name is Hope, said the first page. You will forget her.
Pages of notes. Reflections and musings, scrawls in the corner –
Scared of ECT? Possible sister? Northern English accent sometimes. Reluctant to talk about family. Drinks tea with milk. Runs, average 10k per day. Steals habitually. Unaware of own habit? Stole pair of running shoes, bar of chocolate, apple, bottle of brown sauce, multitool and knife (hidden, taped under bed — weapon?).
Late home tonight.
Did I pull a gun on her? In my dream I woke, and held a gun against an intruder, but there was no one there, and I went back to sleep, but in the morning my gun had moved. Why?
Smell of alcohol on her shirt this morning.
Today I like her.
Today she is uneasy.
Today she is calm.
Today she is funny.
Today I felt pity for her.
Today she spoke of honour.
Today she stole a new mobile phone, hidden behind bathroom cistern. (Must move hotel; see what she does with change.)
Too many recordings, too many videos, not enough time to track. Will record all notes here, attempt to compile.
She does not trust me.
She is frightened.
She hasn’t heard the screaming.
She will not accept ECT; do not ask her again.
She is beginning to suspect that these tests will not cure her condition.
And fairly soon:
Is she following me?
Is she the she I think she is? Performance, a face in the camera, voice on the tape, what is she when there is nothing digital to recall her? What might she do? Who is she when I cannot remember her?
After nearly sixty pages of notes, the writing transformed into a language I couldn’t recognise. Alpha-numeric, characters and symbols, numbers and dashes. I took a stab at deciphering it, but it resisted monoalphabetic frequency analysis, and I didn’t have time or expertise to break it down into anything more complicated. Still Byron’s handwriting, but a code, and my head hurt, and I was tired, so I photographed the pages and put the notebook back, and re-sealed the hair she’d left stuck over its pages, and tried to go back to sleep.
On the seventieth day, she said, “Have you been following me?”
“No.”
“I shouted at a woman in the street today who I thought was you.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.”
“I know. When I went back the other way, she was crying down the phone, and I remembered her face.”
I shrugged.
“I mean to say… if I say anything, I think I should apologise now.”
“You haven’t said anything that bothers me,” I replied, and that same evening she said, “Have you been following me?” and I said no, and we had the conversation again, but this time she didn’t manage not to look afraid.
That night I stole a book on cryptography, and by the white light of the bathroom, studied while she slept.
On the seventy-first day, alone in an internet café in Bayview, I started an email to Luca Evard. I wrote it five times, and on the sixth attempt, deleted the draft and went for a run instead. That evening, as Byron held her secret twice-weekly meeting with a group of underemployed postgrad Berkeley computer-science students who were busy breaking Perfection down into its component parts, I caught a cab into the hills of San Rafael, and with two hundred stolen bucks walked into the China Creek Casino. I counted cards, made no effort to hide my methods. CCTV cameras watched, but no one came. I was a stranger who bet lucky
now
and now
and now
all past patterns forgotten.
At five thousand US dollars, I was ready to go home, when I saw the 106 Club. They were secluded from the rest of the casino by a sliding glass partition, playing high-stakes games in a function room where clean water rolled down the inside of the walls and champagne bubbled from a fountain ensconced in a bed of ice. I considered walking away, didn’t. I stole a drunk woman’s mobile phone, used the invite recorded in pixel form on its memory to get me through the doors of the club.