“So you stopped?”
“Sure.”
“But—” I caught myself before the words “you are having treatments” could pass my lips, half closed my eyes, put my head on one side, looking for a better way in.
“But I’m beautiful?” she offered, into my silence.
Not quite where I was going, but…
“I choose to look good,” she exclaimed, highlighting every word with a stab of her finger. “The world admires me, and I like being admired. I know it’s bullshit, but it’s easy, it helps me get where I want to be, and I want to be at the top.”
I counted bricks in the pavement, held my bag tighter, the weight of books that weren’t even mine — must have stolen them from somewhere — pulling me down. “Did you hear about treatments?” I murmured.
She looked up, sharp, then smiled, hiding the knives in her eyes. “Sure.”
“The 106, they say…”
“Sure, I heard that.”
“I hear they make you perfect.”
She didn’t reply, and that night, I followed her to the lab, and watched through a hole I’d drilled in the walls three days before, fibre-optic camera pushed through the gap, as she sat in the chair, didn’t flinch when they gave her the injections, smiled when they put the goggles over her eyes. A man in blue plastic overalls — who I’d never seen before — parted the hairs around the crown of her head, pushed a needle, four inches long, a round sort of antennae at the top, into her skull, all the way. Her heart rate didn’t rise, her breathing was steady, O2 99, BP 122/81. They put headphones on her, a metal node on her tongue, a tube up her nose. They waited. Machines ran and someone made coffee, and they waited.
Thirty-six minutes later, they disconnected her, a little bit at a time, and nothing had changed, but when she opened her eyes the man in blue overalls said, “A simple child that draws its breath, and feels life in every limb, what should it know of death?”
And she smiled, in no apparent pain, and answered, “I met a little cottage girl, she was eight years old, she said; her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered round her head.”
They gave her a lift home, after the procedure, and she waved at them from the door of her house, and the next day got a 78 in her paper on cognition and culture, which was a ridiculously high mark, and went to English beaming, until her lecturer said,
“The little maid would have her will, and said, ‘Nay we are seven!’”
At which point Meredith turned, still smiling serenely, and, with the corner of her expensive grey laptop, smashed the brains out of the student sitting by her side.
Chapter 73
An ambulance on the left, the police car on the right.
Meredith screamed for a very, very long time when they dragged her off the boy she was trying to kill. She screamed until they sedated her, and lay, handcuffed, in the seat of the ambulance, its gurney already occupied with the man whose brains now showed visible and pink between the broken bones of his cranium. I stood in the crowd of onlookers, some silent, some crying, more attempting to take photos, until a furious anthropology professor roared, “If I see a single photograph of that poor boy anywhere, anywhere at all, I will bounce you! I will bounce you so hard you’ll wish you were a fucking tennis ball!!”
The professor was fifty-five at a pinch, diminutive, bespectacled and an expert in the meaning of meaning, whatever that meant. She had the lungs of an opera singer and the fury of a pitbull, and the crowd dispersed before her wrath, and so did I.
At night, I returned to the labs where Meredith had been treated, and found them empty, gone; just the smell of bleach.
I went back to the house of Agustin Carrazza, and he too was vanished, departed in a hurry, lights off, no one home.
I locked myself in a motel room, piled cushions around the doors and walls, and listened once again to the sound of Byron’s voice, turned up full, as she proclaimed, “For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have a rest…”
Hey Macarena!
This time, the urge to vomit came entirely from me, from the experiences I, myself, had found, and not from any implant in my mind.
Then I put on recordings of every Wordsworth and Lord Byron poem I could find, and lay back on the bed to listen to them all, and had no adverse response to either, and kept the clock in my line of sight to ensure I lost no time.
After six hours of poetical digestion, I put my running shoes on, and went to visit Meredith in the hospital.
They had her in a private room, handcuffed to the bed. A sleepy man in a blue cap sat watch outside, empty paper coffee cups crushed on the chair beside him, a packet of tortilla chips nearly finished, a nicotine stain around his fingers. I stole a nurse’s badge from a woman in oncology, scrubs from a surgical ante-theatre, and a clipboard off the end of a bed. I tied my hair back, smiled at the policeman by the door, who didn’t bother to check my badge as he let me in.
Meredith was dozing the fitful sleep of a woman unlikely to sleep well again. I sat down beside her, woke her gently, my hand on hers, and at her start said, soft, East-Coast American, “It’s all right. I wanted to check on how you were doing.”
“Is he dead?” she asked. “Did I kill him?”
“No.”
“Christ! Christ oh God Christ…”
Relief, I thought, in her face, but there was too much anxiety to let the relief last long. “Meredith,” I said, “the doctor needs to know if you’re on any other medical protocols. Have you been having any sort of treatment for other conditions?”
“Treatments? No.”
“There are needle marks in your arm.”
“Oh… yeah, sure… I gave blood, or something.”
“There’s more needle marks than that.”
“I… I’m not having any treatments.”
Either a damn good liar, or she can’t remember. “Do you remember an industrial estate out towards Walnut Creek? People in overalls, a reclining chair?”
“No. I don’t. Why, is there… did I do something? I mean… did I… is there…”
Words trail off. She has no idea.
The girl has no idea at all.
“No,” I breathed, pushing the dishevelled hair back from her blotched face. “It wasn’t you — not you at all.”
I let myself out, and didn’t smile at the cop on my way to the exit.
Chapter 74
A question, the only one that matters: where is Byron?
Perhaps also another: why do I need to know? She said “you will come to me” and I am looking for her, is this just a compulsion? Has she embedded something in my brain, needles and antennae and…
… but no. First things first, I get a full medical, all in one day, fast so the doctors can’t forget mid-test. Nothing embedded, no chips, no wires, no nothing, today is not the day I start wearing a tin-foil hat.
Discipline: if you cannot trust in yourself, trust in others. If you cannot trust in others, trust in the scientific method. Everything else is conjecture and doubt, dogma, fantasy and fear. I will not be afraid. I will not be mad.
I looked for Byron, and Byron was gone.
Vanished from America, vanished from the darknet, simply… vanished.
I searched the 106, I searched laboratories and lecture halls, scoured the airports and the border posts, rummaged through the internet, digging for her, luring her out, and nothing.