The Syndrome (38 page)

“What’s that one?” Duran asked, stabbing his finger at an entry that came up, time and again:

Adrienne shook her head. “It’s like she went there every day.”

Duran nodded. “And who’s Jacko?” he asked.

“Her dog,” Adrienne explained. “I guess she named her computer after her dog.” She continued scrolling.

“It’s every day,” Adrienne said. “Sometimes, a couple of times a day.” She looked at Duran. “Shall we?”

He nodded.

She closed the Control Panel windows, clicked on the AOL icon, and waited as it went through its routine. Finally, there was a rush of white noise, some honks and beeps—and she was on.

“You want a beer?” Duran asked, getting to his feet.

“Sure,” she replied. Moving the cursor to the window at the top of the screen, she typed
theprogram.org
, and hit
Return.
A moment later, Duran was back with a couple of bottles of Hop Pocket Ale, which he set on the table beside her as he took a seat. Her foot was tapping impatiently on the floor. “I hate how long this takes,” she muttered.

And then:

With a groan, she cleared the screen and tried again, typing the address exactly as it was in the Temporary Internet file. Hit
Search.
Once again, the site started loading. Sipping her beer, she watched the little blue bar filling up at the bottom of the screen: 24% 25% 32% Finally, the screen flipped, and the same message popped into view:

She swore to herself, and sighed. Took a long sip of beer. “Why don’t you try?” she asked. “I’ll be right back.” Then she got to her feet, stretched, yawned, and wandered off.

Returning to the dining room, Adrienne sat down beside Duran, and asked, “Did I leave out a hyphen, or …”

He was tapping away at the keyboard, and didn’t answer. Annoyed, she peered over his shoulder at the laptop’s screen—and what she saw made her feel as if she’d been given an injection of ice water at the base of her spine. There was a cascade of images and text, scrolling and flipping so fast that she could not focus. No one could. It was moving at warp speed to a strange, electronic beat—a kind of nonmusic.

“What the … what
is
that?” she asked, but Duran still didn’t answer.

Then the screen shimmied, steadied, stopped. Against an emerald green background, a message began to blink:

Duran typed something, and hit
Return.

Once again, Duran typed a brief message, and tapped the
Return
key.

“What is this?” Adrienne asked. “What are you doing?”

“‘Thank you, Jeffrey’? Who are you talking to?” Adrienne demanded.

Duran maneuvered the cursor to the AOL logo and double-clicked. The computer emitted its usual
Good-bye.

“Is this the Web site?”

But Duran still didn’t answer. Instead he shut the computer off, and picked up something from the counter—something she hadn’t noticed before. This was a transparent plastic sheet imprinted with little squares.

“What’s that?” she asked, reaching for the sheet, which Duran held on to in the dogged and determined way of a toddler. Silent and unsmiling, he tried to pull it away from her.

“What
is
it? Give it to me!” she insisted, tugging at the sheet to no avail. After a few seconds of wordless struggle, Duran put an end to the contest by closing his free hand around her wrist with such force that she gasped.

“Hey!”

He ignored her complaint, squeezing harder and harder until her knees began to buckle. As she sank toward the floor, he pried open her fingers one by one. Then extracted the piece of plastic from her grasp, and placed it carefully inside the instruction book for Nikki’s computer, making sure that its edges did not protrude. This done, he replaced the instruction book in one of the side compartments of the computer’s carrying case, and zipped the case shut.

Setting it down on the floor he looked at her with a smile that made her take a step back. It was a jack-o’-lantern smile with nothing behind it, a smile as big and empty as the desert.

Jesus
, she thought.
What’s the matter with him?
His grip had
been ferocious.
What if he’d wanted more than a piece of plastic? What if … For the first time, she was afraid of him, and the fear arrived like a sucker punch, unexpected and sickening. She felt a weakness in her legs, as if she were melting from the ankles up.
One minute, he’s so caring and kind …
She thought of the arm he had put around her shoulders on the beach.
And the next … It’s so easy to forget: he’s insane. A psychopath.

A
sharp little sound fell from her mouth and, hearing it, Duran turned to her on his way to the living room. “You okay?” he asked.

He still had a lights-out look in his eyes, and there was something funny about the way that he moved, as if he were gliding on well-oiled tracks. And his voice—his voice was perfectly normal, which was chilling, because his smile was so airless and cold, his eyes so distant and unfocused that it seemed to her that he was gazing toward the horizon.

Adrienne nodded. “Yeah, fine,” she managed, leaning back against the dining room table.

With a shrug, Duran continued into the living room. Sat down on the couch. Turned on the TV.

Call Shaw. Now.
She took a sip of beer, and searched through her purse for the scrap of paper on which she’d written the psychiatrist’s home and office numbers. Finding it crumpled in the bottom of the bag, she flattened it out and began dialing. Then she leaned to her left to see if Duran had noticed what she was doing, but no, he was sitting on the couch in the living room, encapsulated in the soft glow and relentless good humor of the television.

Shaw answered on the fourth ring and, as soon as the psychiatrist said hello, she said, “We’ve got a problem.”

“What’s up?”

“Duran,” she told him. “He scared me.” She related what had happened, feeling a little silly because it didn’t sound like much when you said it out loud. But Shaw was understanding.

“Have you ever seen this … lack of
affect
before?”

“No,” she replied.

“And what’s he doing now? You’re whispering, so I assume he doesn’t know that you’re talking to me. Is he alert? Is he cognizant?”

“Sort of. He’s watching television. But he’s really blitzed, Doc. I mean, I could be a lamp, for all he cares. It’s like I’m not even here.” Shaw was quiet for what seemed a long time—long enough, at least, for her to prompt him. “So … what do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” Shaw replied. “Sounds like a trance state. And you say he was sitting in front of the computer when—”

“Right.”

“Well, I suppose… it could be some kind of entrainment—”

“‘Entrainment’?”

“—caused by flicker.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the rhythm of a flashing light—flicker—synchronized to the electrical rhythms of the brain. That’s ‘entrainment.’”

“Okay, but—we’re not in a disco, Doc!”

“I understand that. But you said he was using the computer.”

“Right.”

“Well … most monitors are in a constant state of flicker—because they’re ‘refreshing’ the video signal.” He paused, and asked, “Was there any sound on this Web site, or was it just—”

“There was some kind of sound,” she told him. “Electronic music, or … maybe it was just noise—whatever, it was
something
”

Shaw grunted.

“What!?”
Adrienne asked.

“Well, it could be a problem with the monitor, but … it could be
the Web site.
I mean, it’s a classic recipe …”

“
What
is?”

“What we’re talking about—combining rhythmic pulses of light with certain frequencies of sound.”

“To do what?”

“Induce a trance state. Shamans have been doing it for thousands of years, playing drums around a bonfire. Though I’d hate to think there’s a Web site—”

“But—”

“Let me talk to him,” Shaw suggested.

“Really?”

“Ummm. Can’t hurt to try.”

Adrienne took a deep breath, turned, and called out to Duran in as “natural” a voice as she could manage: “Jeff—Dr. Shaw wants to talk to you for a second.”

When he didn’t reply, she went into the living room, where he was sitting on the couch, watching television. Seeing her, he pressed the
Mute
button, and looked up. His face had an expressionless and somehow out-of-focus look, as if he were wearing a mask of himself.

“Phone call,” she told him.

They were on the phone for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, with Shaw doing almost all the talking. Duran sat with his eyes closed and every once in a while, said, “Ummm-hmmm,” or “Yessss,” his voice low and indistinct. Finally, he put the phone down, and heaved a huge yawn.

“Adrienne? I think Dr. Shaw would like to talk to you now.” His voice sounded normal, if sleepy. “I’m really tapped out,” he explained, handing her the phone. “I think I’m gonna crash.” With a yawn, he turned, and made his way to the bedroom.

Adrienne was astounded, watching him as he disappeared down the hall. “What did you do?” she asked, her voice in an urgent whisper.

“I hypnotized him,” Shaw replied.

“Over the phone?”

“Yes. It wasn’t that hard. He was already in a trance.”

“And—”

“I gave him a couple of posthypnotic suggestions—did he go to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’ll be fine in the morning. Refreshed, and feeling pretty good about himself.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“If he gives you any more trouble—and I don’t think he will, but
if-
—the best thing to do is just: walk out. Play it safe. Give me a call, and I’ll take it from there.”

When they’d said good-bye, Adrienne went into the kitchen for a glass of water, then wandered back to the dining
room to take another look at the plastic sheet that she and Duran had been struggling over.

Removing the sheet from the computer handbook, she saw that it was embossed with a grid, almost like graph paper, although the spaces were rectangles rather than squares. There were two- or three-hundred of them, she guessed, and judging by its size, it was obviously meant to fit over the screen of Nikki’s computer.

Which it did. Perfectly. Indeed, there were small holes in each corner of the sheet that corresponded to markings on the monitor’s frame. Placing the sheet over the markings, she saw that it created a precise, transparent overlay.

With the sheet in place, she turned on the computer, signed onto AOL and went to the Web site.

Just like before. But the grid revealed nothing at all, it spidery lines crisscrossing the error message. She sighed. Duran must have gone to another Web site, while she’d been in the bathroom, brushing her hair. Then she remembered the trick Duran had shown her earlier and, with a little experimenting, she found the icon for the “Temporary Internet Files.” What she wanted, of course, was to identify the site Duran had visited—the interactive one with the
Hello, Jeffrey
message. It should have been the second site on the list, but, no: the first and second sites were the same.

Which was frustrating because that was the nonsense site, the one Nikki had gone to, the one with the error message. She stared for a while at the letters, wondering what they meant, thinking
, Maybe Duran erased the address …
But no,
he hadn’t. She’d watched him sign off AOL, and close the computer. Then they’d argued. So …

She needed a nerd. And she knew where to find one.

Carl Dobkin was famous for sleeping four hours a night, so if she could get him on the phone, he might be able to talk her down. It was unlikely that he’d be at work, but you never knew with Carl. So she tried Slough, Hawley, punching his name into the voice mail system—which then patched her through to his extension. He wasn’t there and she didn’t leave a message. She knew Carl lived in Potomac with Caroline Stanton, a partner in the firm. Bette had been there once for a cookout and (cattily) described the place as “E-
nor
-mous! Faux Tudor. No landscaping.” Adrienne got the number from Information, and called it.

She hoped Caroline wouldn’t answer. She didn’t want to be grilled about where she was. And she got lucky.

“Hello, Hello.”

Relief darted through her. “Carl! Hi, it’s Adrienne Cope.”

“Hey, Scout. What’s up? I suppose you know: they’re taking your name in vain down at work.”

“I’m sure they are.” There was a long pause that she made no attempt to fill.

Finally, Dobkin asked, “So what can I do for ya?”

“You could be a genius for me.”

Carl laughed, his lazy chuckle. “No problem. It’s what I do best.”

She described her attempts to investigate Nikki’s travels in cyberspace. “And I got to this one site that she seems to have visited almost every day—sometimes, several times a day—and it won’t boot up.”