The Placebo Effect (29 page)

“I wouldn't know,” Mr. T responded.

Yslan wondered if he didn't know because he'd never been a girl or because he'd never been a teenaged boy or maybe he'd never seen a bra strap—probably the last one.

The super returned with an envelope addressed to Decker Roberts and a further apology. Yslan dead-eyed him and said, “Never again. You got me, sir? Never again,” then turned and moved down Sixty-ninth Street. As she did she opened the envelope and whistled through her teeth—$4,290 in hundreds,
twenties, and one ten was impressive—even to Special Agent Yslan Hicks.

“Tenth Avenue,” Decker said. As he did he thought,
Jeez, if Calatrex really worked, Charendoff could have put his girl on the drug—made her happy without hurting the boy and saved everyone the bother.

It would have saved Decker a whole heap of trouble too, because he knew in his heart that that whole thing was not over—no matter what NSA Special Agent Yslan Hicks said. He knew he would have to deal with Charendoff—and maybe sooner than later.

On the small television in the back of the cab an ad for another drug was playing out its little morality play. The glare of a sixteen-wheeler's lights scraped across his eyes. “Happy pills and dead boys in icy streams,” he whispered as he felt for the cell phone in his pocket and begged it to ring.

Eddie's phone rang, and he saw that it was Seth. He plugged his phone into the computer and watched the sine wave. When Eddie finally answered it there was only a hum on the other end. “Seth? Did you get the money order? You can cash it at any bank. Seth?”

No answer.

“Seth? Everything's fine here—there?”

In Victoria, Seth stood in the rain, unable to tell if it was rain or tears on his face, and wondered why he'd called Eddie—then why Eddie sounded so very, very odd—and was clearly lying to him.

Decker got out at Tenth Avenue, and sure enough, the shoot was still going.

He was careful to avoid the trailer with the green-haired girl and quickly spotted four guys smoking and gabbing. Bad skin, heavy guts—certainly not actors. Drivers. If the drivers were
here, their cars had to be nearby, and so did the drive captain who controlled the keys. Twenty minutes later the drive captain stepped out for a piss and Decker slipped into the man's small cubby and stole three sets of keys. Ten minutes after that he was driving a late-model SUV toward Connecticut, and an hour and forty minutes later he parked the SUV in a large underground parking garage and walked the seven blocks to the Stamford Greyhound bus terminal.

Every bus going west from Stamford either went to Cleveland or Pittsburgh, and from there he could transfer to a Cincinnati-bound bus.

As Decker waited in the bus station cafeteria he began to play an old game. It was one of the two tangential gifts related to his truth telling. He thought of them as subsets of his gift. The first was his parlour game of being able to tell people's ages, their backgrounds, etc., which he used in his acting teaching. The second gift allowed him to find the pattern of events. It allowed him to help actors chart. He called the patterns “semblant order.”

He took out a wad of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out on the damp table, then took a quick breath and began to chart. “I'm called out to do three truth-telling sessions in one day, I arrive home a day early, Mike the balance guy tries to tell me something in my driveway—He's using us, something about a ratio—my house burns down, one of my credit cards is cancelled, my bank loan is called, my studio is condemned, Josh, Josh's lawyer, Charendoff, Yslan Hicks, What is a lie, Mike Shedloski is found murdered in his apartment in Cincinnati, a boy is frozen in ice, one of theirs killed one of ours, simple as that, I worked here, what's your ratio, who's jumping now, Yolles Pharmaceuticals… Calatrex selling at a cheaper than rational price.”

He put down his pen, folded the paper, put it in his shirt pocket, closed his eyes, and rolled these facts over and over in his head… looking for their semblant order. But he couldn't put them all together—not all of them.

For the slightest moment he closed his eyes again then opened
them. He was breathing heavily—he could feel sweat on his forehead, but his mind was clear. He repeated verbatim the definition of truth that he had given to Yslan Hicks in New Jersey, stopping at the point about placebos. Placebos—lies. Lies that work. Then he thought about Eddie's message about the price of Calatrex.

He shoved the battery back into the laptop and contacted Eddie:
Eddie, find me something stronger that connects “What's your Ratio!” and Yolles Pharmaceuticals.

Eddie stared at the request on his monitor and then did a quick search, then a second, then a third. Finally he stopped and stared at the entry on his monitor. He tore his eyes from the screen and they found their way to the old doll on the newly made bed.

He stared at the doll for a long moment—then pressed the send key.

Decker followed the link Eddie had sent him, read the data there quickly, and knew his semblant order had led him in the right direction. Now he had a name—an enemy—the man who was trying to use him.

He typed:
Is there any way to know if this guy Yolles set up my jobs in Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland?

Eddie's reply came back quickly:
Whoever ordered those jobs has as good security as I do—so it would only be a guess on my part. But I guess—Yes!

Decker nodded. He didn't need Eddie's reassurance on this one. If this guy wanted to use him, he'd have wanted to test him first—to audition him.

Boarding for his bus was announced.

As he sat on the bus waiting for it to travel west he found the address for and e-mailed that terrific kid in Cincinnati—now no longer a kid, one Steven Bradshaw. From the excited e-mail response the man was surprised to hear from Decker but was willing to return a favour that Decker had done for him almost fifteen years earlier.

“Finally! Got the fucker!” Mr. T shouted at his computer screen.

“About goddamned time!” Yslan said.

“Sorry, but this guy Eddie's slippery. Clever and slippery.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, what've you got?”

The man pulled up the entirety of the correspondence between Decker and Eddie. Yslan read it quickly.

Then he pulled up the entry off the link Eddie had sent Decker. He hesitated, then said, “You'd better read this, boss.”

Yslan scanned the text. The article was entitled “The Economic Impact of Knowing Exactly the Placebo Ratio on the Pharmaceutical Industry.” It was the kind of MS thesis that everyone had to publish to get their degree from the University of Chicago. The author was a much younger Henry-Clay Yolles.

AS DECKER'S BUS PLUNGED WESTWARD THROUGH THE DARKNESS
the motion lulled him. The last image in his head before sleep finally took him was that of a boy hanging from a lamppost—his painted nails in motion at the end of his twitching fingers—in the Junction.

He dreamt that he was watching the cult classic
Pi
and he was the only one in the theatre who thought the film was not fiction—was actually a how
not
to documentary. And when the hero put the foot-long power drill into his own head, Decker woke with a scream on his lips.

He was panting and could smell his own sweat. Some people once up in the jet stream cannot come down—if your erection lasts longer than four hours see a doctor. If you put your head up in the jet stream and can't pull it out who do you call—a shaman? Ghostbusters? Decker took a deep breath. You call Brother Malcolm is who you call—or your son.

The darkness on the bus was only broken by one or two reading lights. In the sallow tent of one of those lights he saw a tall blond-haired woman, curls atumble across her broad handsome forehead.
I have some real estate here in my bag
, he thought, then discarded the idea of approaching her because even as the bus sped west he knew that something in all this didn't fit. One of these things was not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong, but one of what—of which?

At the midnight stop Decker picked up a copy of
USA Today
—the only available paper—and was startled by the lack of
coverage of almost anything. Articles reduced to a subway ride's length—but this wasn't intended as subway reading. This paraded as real news and real commentary. And then there was the reporting about religion in everything from housing design to a school in Pennsylvania that played soccer for God—and succeeded well beyond expectation. Even the sports section had been reduced to simple sound bites.

He had a flash of a moment years earlier with Crazy Eddie. Roone Arledge was being interviewed on ABC. Eddie made the sign of the cross and pointed it at the television set. “Vampire, man. He's a vampire.”

“Why's that?”

“Guy produced
Wide World of Sports
,” he said.

“The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, that old sports show?”

“The first sports show, Decker, where they didn't bother showing you the whole game. They just cherry-picked the best moments and presented them. It removed any need to be really involved, to commit yourself and your time to a full game. Guy's a vampire, man, wish I had a silver bullet.”

“Come on, Eddie. There's a place for shows like that.”

“No there's not. It's like eating the icing off the cupcake and leaving the cake. Pretty soon they won't bother making the cake at all—just sell a slather of the sugary crap.”

“So some folks like sugary crap.”

“Human beings are not made to take shortcuts, Decker. Hasn't your wife's death shown you that—or how you treated Seth? You're to live your life, moment by moment. Your life isn't here to entertain you—it's to be lived. Fuck.” He threw something at the screen—a plastic football, as Decker remembered.

Eddie was serious. He had profound doubts about the way we were all living our lives. Eddie's library was stuffed with religious texts—but not the easy how-tos. The King James version of the Bible and four massive commentaries, an Arabic/English Koran and Hadith,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
, the Nag Hammadi
library, the Apocrypha,
The Pagan Christ, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, Men Who Have Walked with God
, and Jack Miles' two brilliant books
God: A Biography
and
Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.

Seth had spent a lot of time in discussion with Eddie and read many of the books. When Decker first feared that Seth had left he went into the boy's room, hoping that he was just oversleeping. Seth's backpack was gone. A note was on his pillow: “I'll send back your books, Eddie, once I've finished understanding them.”

The books came back one at a time—but there was never a return address on the packages.

Decker couldn't allow himself to think of that now. He turned on his overhead light and took out a writing pad. The first four episodes of
At the Junction
dealt with the rise and early success of the Junction. This fifth episode began with the city courting the Junction to join them.

Decker envisioned a meeting of powerful Orangemen—a secret meeting—out of which a young boy loses his life at the end of a rope.

Decker fleshed out the scenes over the next four hours.

In the morning the bus inexplicably stopped opposite a small grade school. Children were arriving for class. Some were running in circles. Some were making snowballs and tossing them when the teacher wasn't looking. Others were trying to perfectly balance each other on the teeter-totter.
Balance
, Decker thought.
Lots of this is somehow about balance.

He flipped open his computer and in less than five minutes wrote the voiceover as newspaper headlines of the day to begin the pilot episode of
At the Junction.
He reread it quickly; much to his surprise, it didn't need a single edit. He saved it to a USB key that he would use to e-mail Trish from an al-Qaeda café once he got to Cincinnati.

“Weapon number one,” he murmured.

The guy beside him said, “What?”

Decker replied, “Nothing, sorry to bother you,” but he hoped that that voiceover was not nothing, since it started: “‘Mountebanks Invade the City.' Beware of fakery. New drugs in the marketplace have proved to be nothing more than sugar pills. Beware of door-to-door hucksters and charlatans selling happiness pills.”

Trish finished her mojito at Rancho Relaxo and looked toward the men's room. He'd be coming out soon. Young men drank too quickly and always had to pee. She tilted her glass and watched the light refract through the liquid, casting momentary rainbows on the slate-topped table. She put an index finger into the cold liquid and stirred it.

Yet another young man, a frat-boy type, was eyeing her from the bar. She wondered if she'd had enough of young men. There was much to like about them. She and her girlfriend, who played the lead on CBC's only hit show,
Then and Now
, agreed that young men were fun to play with, but not so much fun to talk to or wake up beside. And Trish was on the wrong side of forty for all this. Maybe she should cut her hair—after all, who has long hair after she turns forty?

She looked out the window and saw the snow whipping by in almost horizontal sheets.

Her new young man made his reentrance from the washroom. She watched him self-consciously strut toward her—pride of conquest in every step as he passed by the frat boy at the bar. She liked his energy—that was for sure—but…

The door opened and a cold rush of air drew her attention. Two heavyset Scotsmen entered and nodded to her. She wondered if she knew these guys. Their piercing blue eyes should be hard to forget. But she couldn't place them.