A Twisted Ladder (23 page)

NEW ORLEANS, 2009

O
UTSIDE THE DEPARTMENT OF
Psychology, Madeleine stood in the dark near a cluster of smokers. The days were getting shorter but the moon was bright, a blood moon, the first full moon after the autumnal equinox. Ordinarily Madeleine wouldn’t even notice the moon phase or any of those sorts of things, but her senses had somehow become razor sharp. Now she noticed everything. The misty halo around the street lamp even though there seemed no tangible moisture in the air; the sawflies in the loblolly pine. The loblolly itself. She was loath to give in to her usual mind chatter, lest she miss some detail of the vitality that surrounded her.

That strange fascination had continued ever since her encounter with Zenon. Though she’d gone over it time and again, she still couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Wasn’t even sure how she’d stopped it. Or whether she could again.

“Hey baby blue.” Ethan strode through the glass doors and walked over to her. He leaned over and kissed her. “Something’s wrong.”

She gaped, caught off guard that he could key in to her distress so quickly, and suddenly couldn’t think of a single word to say to him.

He took a step back and eyed her. “Hmm. Something really is bothering you. Don’t worry, ma’am, I know how to handle this. We just march you around until you settle down. Come on, you’re in good hands.”

She shook her head, feeling like a complete idiot, but mutely walked with him along Freret. He prattled about work. Gas lamps flickered on the porches, and streetlights cast sepia tones across the neighborhood, making the houses look like giant decorated graham crackers. Most had double galleries, stacked one atop the other.

Ethan was saying, “I wanted to show you my lab, but it’s not really set up yet. Just an office. Nothing woo-woo. I’m still working on the woo-woo.”

Madeleine tossed her head, giving up a half laugh, half sigh as they turned in the direction of St. Charles.

“You met with the director today?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes. I start again next week.”

“That’s good.”

She said, “Yeah, but he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about it. Between lack of funding and the debacle in D.C. . . . Anyway, are you still looking at neuroplasticity, in terms of boosting intuition?”

He nodded. “Of course. It’s an ongoing study.”

“Tell me again how that works.”

He shrugged. “It’s pretty straightforward. What is neuroplasticity? A brain change. You build neurons. How do you change your brain? By repeating an exercise, over and over, same way you would if you were trying to build a muscle.”

“But what’s the exercise? If you want to bolster your intuition, what is it that you have to repeat over and over again?”

Ethan looked at her, his face quizzical. “Well first you just pay attention. So say you have a moment when you feel like you’re being watched, you don’t dismiss it. You turn your focus inward to strengthen your sensitivity. Or when something happens like you suddenly know your father is about to call, and then the phone rings. You just kind of savor the feeling.”

They were striding quickly through the neighborhoods, and the movement of her body did indeed seem to tame her anxiety. The neutral subject matter helped, too.

And though he clearly knew something was on her mind, Ethan continued to play along. “The more you do it, the easier it gets. Meanwhile, you’re taking a thin little back-road neuron and turning it into a major highway in your head. Neuroplasticity for your intuition.”

She sighed. “I don’t even know if it’s intuition I’m going for here. Are there other factors, other ways you can heighten the effect? Grooming basic psi skills?”

“You mean aside from neuroplasticity?”

She nodded.

He said, “Well, there’s the genetic factor. Gene plasticity, if you want to call it that.”

“Change your genes?”

“Sure. Same way that what you eat or the kind of exercise you do can stimulate gene receptors, you can stimulate the receptors for your sixth sense.”

She thought about this. “Funny. It wasn’t so long ago that we thought our brains and our genes were unchangeable. Now we know better. But I imagine there’s a heredity factor, too.”

Ethan nodded. “That’s something my team is looking at really closely—how much genetics plays a role in psi.”

“Psi. It’s such a strange little word for all this.”

“I know. But there’s no other word that sums it up.”

Madeleine tried to sound casual. “You know what’s funny about that? The letter itself, the Greek character, Psi ψ, they call it the devil’s pitchfork because of its shape.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because they used to associate psi phenomena with the devil. Insanity, too. You know, Chloe actually said my father is haunted by a devil. I just think it’s funny that to this day, the two are linked by that one Greek letter.”

Ethan shook his head. His eyes were soft and inviting. She kept a measured distance. The incident in the flower shop still left her feeling like she’d been disloyal, even though she’d done all she could to fend Zenon off.

Ethan looked like he was about to reach for her, and she turned away.

“Oh, look!” Madeleine pointed to the cemetery. It spanned the block ahead, but already they could see the candles flickering. “November second. All Soul’s Day,” she said.

They crossed the street and gazed at the raised stone crypts, whitewashed for the occasion and adorned with yellow chrysanthemums and red cockscombs. On one of the farther graves, someone had draped an angel’s outstretched hands with strings of black immortelles.

Ethan put an arm around Maddy and urged her forward. “Neighborhood’s on the rough side. We should keep moving.”

She stiffened. “Sometimes I feel more at home in the rough neighborhoods than anywhere else. It’s where most of my patients are from. And it reminds me of where I grew up.”

He gave her a sideways look. “All right. We’ll stay here.”

They both frowned at the cemetery.
You think that mooncalf have any idea what a hard life is like?
Zenon had said. Madeleine wished she could shake the words out of her head. Zenon was wrong. Zenon was an animal. Zenon had said he was evolving. He’d said . . .

Ethan looked at her. “You ready to tell me what’s really bothering you?”

She turned her back to the headstones and eyed the crooked shotguns across the street, old, hurricane-worn, and yet still hanging on.

She said, “Yes. But first, what about . . . what about things like telepathy. Or even . . .”

“Or even what?”

She cleared her throat. “Implanted suggestion.”

He looked at her. She kept her gaze on the leaning porch of the house ahead.

He said, “I gotta say, Maddy, your level of interest is a little surprising.”

She said nothing.

He sighed. “All right. You know I’m approaching this from a position of neuroscience, and parapsychology is new to me. But yeah, the general opinion of telepathy is that it’s just an extension of intuition.” He waved at his head. “The same highways in the brain, only more of them. Same is true with implanted suggestion. If telepathy is two-way, then implanted suggestion is a one-way version of that, where the subject isn’t necessarily aware.”

“Not necessarily?”

Ethan shrugged. “No. Awareness tends to weaken the effect. But you’re getting a little beyond me here. I study patterns in fMRIs for a living. What you’re talking about, I mean, implanted suggestion, that’s pretty much mind control. My team’s not looking at that. There’ve been experiments along those lines in the past, but we’re talking grim wartime stuff. Or underground. Usually involving narcotics and electroconvulsive therapy.”

She said, “What about legitimate experimentation?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“What about generally accepted means of manipulating the brain? We can use brain implants to block or stimulate certain sectors of the brain, right?”

“Come on Maddy, this isn’t—”

“We can target single neurons or groups of them. We can even assist patients who are unable to move or speak by using brain implants to communicate with us through computers.”

He sighed. That tolerant patience he’d shown was still there, but it was wearing thin. “True. And? . . .”

“So if it’s possible to do that, and if telepathy does exist, we could make certain leaps. On one end of the spectrum, you have telepathic abilities like the feeling of being watched. Something just about everyone’s experienced. And on the other end, the ability to reliably,
reliably
, transmute thoughts.”

“Madeleine.”

“So if the basic fact of telepathy is scientifically proven, the question is, to what extent are we truly capable?”

She stopped and turned to him, daring to look him full in the face, her hands open. “And if we can implant mechanisms into the human brain that can communicate with a computer, isn’t it possible for a telepathic impulse to accomplish the same sort of thing? And by the way,
what other sorts of things are we capable of?
”

“Madeleine?”

“What?”

“Please tell me what’s really on your mind.”

THEY RETRACED THEIR STEPS
, walking back toward where their cars waited in the so-called “Jurassic parking lot” on campus. Madeleine told Ethan what had happened in the flower shop. She told him everything. He listened with a grim expression. When she finished, she waited for him to say something, but he just walked alongside her in silence, the only sound coming from his limping footfalls on the battered sidewalk.

Finally, he said, “Tell me this. Did you kiss him?”

“No. He kissed me and I turned away. I didn’t want him to.”

“But you didn’t tell him not to.”

She opened her hands. “It’s hard to explain. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t until I stopped fighting inside. It was weird, I just—I just thought about the wind. The wind was blowing. I heard it in the leaves of the potted ficus and . . . and then I told him to leave.”

“Are you attracted to him?”

“No.”

“Were you ever attracted to him?”

“Never.”

He stopped walking and turned to her, hands in his jacket pockets, face tense. “So how is it that at the time, you’d let me believe we were gonna take those collection baskets to the flower shop in the morning? Together. And yet you wind up going there in the middle of the night with Zenon?”

“I didn’t go with him. He just . . . Chloe . . .” She sighed.

“Tell me why you didn’t let me help you to carry them to the shop. Let’s start with that!”

She swallowed, her gaze at her feet. “I honestly don’t know why I did that.”

“You’ve never once let me help you. With anything. You tense up if I so much as open a door for you.”

“I guess with the flowers, I didn’t want to put you out. It seems so stupid now.”

He gestured back toward the cemetery. “And all this talk about belonging in the rough neighborhoods. You wear it like a badge of honor. I wonder if it’s another way to alienate me.”

Her mouth opened.

He said, “This thing with Zenon, I don’t even know what to make of that. In fact you and I should take a step back. And you should figure out what you really want. Me, I’ve laid out exactly what I want. I’m done with casual dating. I want someone who’s gonna be part of my future. Someone who wants to create some creatures, and I don’t mean splicing genes in a damn Petri dish. I’m talking about rug rats and Little League and pigtails and snotty noses. Do you even want any of that?”

She stared at him. “I don’t know, it’s just . . . I’ve always had my mind on my family and career. . . . Never really thought—”

“Well maybe it’s time to think. I’m gonna do a little thinking of my own.”