On New Year's Eve, Joel broke his streak of several months and self-medicated. Responsibly, of course. The cabinet behind the mirror held several shelves of prescription bottles and over-the-counter boxes, including a few exotic items: Solpadeine from the UK, two years old, picked up on a trip to Belfast for a distant cousin's funeral; illegal Vicodin confiscated from a former resident; heavy painkillers from Paul's root canal four months ago, the label beginning to curl off the bottle. Joel went through the shelves, chewing on his tongue as he calculated the extent of his troubles, how much of himself he needed to keep. He was too tolerant of benzos, after using them to control seizures for so long, so the Ativan and Klonopin were out. The Solpadeine, he decided—a bit of codeine would go nicely tonight.
He swallowed three, since they were long past expired, and sat back on the edge of the tub. Ten minutes before Hodya or Paul knocked on the door.
About an hour ago, he'd been sitting in the metro station, watching the passengers ascend and descend the stairs. Paul, never very comfortable with Hodya, had refused at the last moment to pick Hodya up at the airport, so Joel had to leave detailed metro directions on her voicemail and promise to walk her up to Rue Sainte Famille.
The Montrealers on the stairs were each splendidly distinct, because the city was big. Only rarely did a face light up with recognition. Everyone walked alone, the couples alone, the flocks of girls and herds of boys alone, the old and the crazy alone. Ottawa was the same way, but there was a hidden sameness to every face on an OC Transpo bus, as if everyone in the city were related. Like shirts of different colours stacked together on a store shelf. In Montreal, the women of the city, the famously beautiful women, each seemed matchless and makeless, and the streams of people were like an old museum in which nothing was categorised, narwhal horns and Roman glass and dried sea anemones and petrified wood all together.
When Hodya got off the metro, she too had that look of solitary preoccupation, which became nervousness as she scanned the platform, looking and not seeing...Joel realised he had slipped into invisibility at some point. In daylight, in a metro station, there was little chance that he'd scare anyone by reappearing suddenly—people would put it down to being tired and distracted, if they noticed at all.
He fell back into the flesh, with a jolt like the withdrawal zaps from SSRIs. She was about eight feet away from him, her back turned, peering down the platform into the place where the light faded away into blackness. The train churned its engines and rolled off down the track, stirring up a warm wind.
She turned then, and saw him. "You were playing with me."
"I wasn't."
"I don't believe you." She put her bags down and stretched up to kiss him. A chaste kiss, the sort she usually started things off with. The spot just below the right corner of his mouth. "You're getting bold, too. I remember how afraid you used to be of being outed as a mutant in public."
"That's not what people assume," he said, picking up her bags. She took one of them out of his hands and carried it herself. "They either think I was never there at all, or they jump right to the supernatural."
"You're very hungry for ghosts in this country," Hodya said. "I think you miss them."
"Ah, the empty bush garden thesis. You've been reading Frye."
"No, but I've been watching those Haunted Canada shows on satellite. Americans are really keen for ghosts and supernatural things—and Canadians just as much, but you seem to have fewer of them. In Europe people take those stories in stride. Ghosts, monsters, curses, saints, whatever. My grandmother believes in the evil eye. It's not a big deal, she just does. Over here, to believe something.... I don't know what the Natives think about all this, but the white people in the New World definitely come off as a little lonely."
"I think it's the times, not the geography. It's not as though you believe in the evil eye, no matter what your grandmother thinks. You're as Middle Eastern as she is."
They came out in the blistering cold and sunshine, and Hodya hunched her shoulders and entwined her arm in Joel's. "She's Polish. I'm not. We're different because the land itself changed. Israelis are like Canadians in a way. We don't know quite what to think about our country." Hodya paused to look at the newspaper headlines in the boxes. "Some of us don't, anyway."
"I don't know why you're in science when you're clearly such a natural at sociology bullshitting. Do you want a paper?"
"No, I just like the way the French looks in the headlines. I'm in science because I dig microscopes. Come on, I don't bug you about your degree."
"You might as well. Everyone else does."
"My grandmother told me to be careful, you know. She said, 'You watch out, he might throw you away any time.' Very suspicious of that theology degree of yours, thinks you'll run off to join the Jesuits."
"Ah."
"When in fact you're very suspiciously silent on that topic."
"Hodya..." He wished now that he'd brought it up sooner. Arguing outdoors was awful, and felt dangerous, uncontrolled by walls and roofs and thermostats. She, of course, was perfectly calm.
"I'd just expect that you'd talk about it more openly. Most Catholic guys—the religious ones, I mean—seem to think about the priesthood at some point."
"I didn't want to make you worry," said Joel. Lame. Truthful, and yet not the whole truth. Typical. "Not, not unless I was sure about it. And my advisor doesn't think I'm right for it. So...so it's not a big deal."
"Okay." She leaned her head on his shoulder for a moment, then straightened. Awkward to walk like that. "That's all I wanted to know. You make me work so hard."
They talked about Jerusalem in winter, about a stinging red ant that had left a welt on her neck, about rich olive oil and good bagels. As they turned up Rue Sainte Famille, Hodya asked him about Neurocherche. "When's the surgery scheduled?"
"I'm not—I'm not going to let them operate," Joel said, feeling anxiety start to unwind in his guts.
"Why not?"
Long blank moment. It wasn't even hesitation or secrecy, just a feeling that his affairs were so scrambled that he couldn't sum them up in a few words. "I don't trust them."
She waited, and then said, "Will I get to hear why at some point?"
"If you want. I don't know if you'll believe me."
She frowned up at him as he held the gate open for her. "You don't trust me either, then?"
"I said I'd tell you. Inside."
In the front hall, Hodya set her bag down and asked, "Where am I sleeping?"
Joel had no ready answer—last time, she'd slept in the room presently occupied by Jeanne-Marie, and somehow he sensed that Hodya would not appreciate being given a spare room a second time. He knew what she wanted, and also knew that it was out of the question. "Uh—well, anywhere's fine..."
"Are you and Paul still sharing?" She wheeled her suitcase along with her to the stairs, and looked over her shoulder at him as he hesitated. "Yes?"
"Yeah."
"And he's here for the holiday?"
"Uh-huh."
"So third floor's not available?"
"Well...the blue room on the east side's free. Nice view of the street from there."
"Isn't there a double in the basement?"
There was. Joel could only nod, knowing what the next question would be.
"Anyone in there?"
"No."
"That's fine, then." She smiled, and headed for the other stairs. "Come show me."
He followed her down. The basement had tall windows in deep-carved wells, as in a greystone house, and only had light for a few hours a day. The east side had a double room, and the west two singles—it was rare for couples to come to the house together, and this room was rarely used for its intended purpose.
Hodya set her bags on the bed and went to the window, drawing back the curtains in amazement. The window well was half-filled with a drift of snow, pressed against the glass like sand in an ant farm, a fine dusting of powder on the inner sill. "Oh wow."
"The heating in here's a bit dodgy," Joel said, feeling the radiator pipes. "You're sure you wouldn't rather have the blue room?"
She ignored him. "The snow is so wonderful. You don't see this in Toronto. And never in Israel, of course. It makes me miss Ottawa. Does it ever fill up with snow completely?"
"I'm not down here much."
Hodya turned back from the window and gave him a solemn, unreadable look with her brown eyes, like a Byzantine saint. "Are you happy to see me, Joel?"
"Of course I am." He couldn't quite infuse it with the right sort of wounded sincerity; instead it came out as an apology. "Yes. I am."
"Sit down." She always gave the orders. He sat next to her on the bed, and she played her fingers along his back. She smelled foreign, cumin and cardamom, and today there was a trace of stale sweat from travelling, like a Vidalia onion, not unpleasant. Her hair was pulled back in a silver clip, a few brown curls escaping down the nape of her neck. Very daring, he reached back to unclip it, but the catch was too complicated for him to release it from this angle.
"Ow. Let me." She took down her hair, and he buried his hands in it. Strong yellow turmeric, ripe garlic and ginger. Like Paul, Hodya liked to eat, and her smell was that of her cooking. It travelled with her, even across oceans.
"I love your hair," he murmured, stupidly.
She kissed him, first on the cheek, then full on the mouth. Her mouth was cool, the tip of her nose still cold from outside, but he liked the rough edge of her chapped lip, the salty flesh taste of her. The machinations of French kissing had never appealed to him, as he didn't know what to do with his tongue, but he liked the taste of her mouth.
Her hand soon ventured up under his sweater, along the bare skin of his back. He didn't jerk away, as he once would have done, but he pulled back from the kiss and leaned his forehead against hers. "Hodya."
"Yes."
"Don't."
She drew her hand back, cupped his cheek in her fingers. "Why not?"
He didn't know. "I just can't."
She gave him her level ikon stare until he looked away, then said quietly, "What are you so worried about?"
He tried to smile. "You know me. Can't do anything without wracking guilt. Self-consciousness. Panic. Things are bad enough when I do normal things. This..."
"No, I mean you're worried about something else. Preoccupied."
"That too."
She smoothed his hair away from his forehead. "Tell me about Neurocherche."
"I don't want to." He felt like he was getting a fever.
"I asked a professor I know," Hodya said, "the woman in the faculty of medicine who I worked for last summer. She said the science was fine, and they passed muster with the ethics board. What she wants to know is—where's the money coming from?"
"The money?"
"Mutants are a pretty tiny minority. Mutants with mood disorders, even smaller. Mutants with neurological problems, smaller still. And in the U.S., mutants are very unlikely to have health coverage. Neurocherche got going in 1998, and they've dealt exclusively with mutants ever since. It's a small market, so who's investing in these treatments? Who's paying for the research?"
Joel had been living among other mutants for so long that he sometimes forgot how few of them there actually were. "I don't know. I thought the province..."
"The province isn't going to put that much into a private health care company. No, Neurocherche has investors who think that the company will get something valuable out of this trial. It won't be a product that will fly off the shelves, obviously. Information, maybe, but I don't know what use anyone would have for results on epileptic mutants. Rich ones."
"It's not all epilepsy. They have a lot of telepathic patients," Joel said. "I don't know how rich they all are. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them got an all-expenses-paid trip."
"Oh, well never mind, then. Research on telepathy is huge now. It's the holy grail for the military, AI guys, government, you name it. If Neurocherche can convince some corporate suits that their surgery will somehow lead to a better understanding of psionics, that explains a lot of their funding. But you think they'd be upfront about studying that—lots of people are doing it, and it must be hard to find subjects when you have to cast your net for a broad range of neurological problems and sift for psi-powers."
Joel shifted to lie on his stomach, staring down over the edge of the bed at the carpet. "This isn't the sort of problem my mind is built for. If you wanted an analysis of Martin Buber's thought as it applies to the Esau and Jacob story, I could help you out."
She made a poor baby noise. "But science is too hard?"
"This isn't science. It's—money, business. Trying to guess why someone might want to hurt someone else. I could give you answers to that question, but they wouldn't tell you where Neurocherche's funding is coming from."
Hodya lay down alongside him, kicking her feet up and down on the bed. "You're very convinced that something dirty's going on. To refuse the best chance to help the seizures is, it's a big deal."
"I...I know there are telepaths at Neurocherche. Patients. And they don't want to be there."
"No one likes being sick."
"I know that. You've never dealt much with telepaths."
"Does that matter?" Her side was warm against his, and he liked that. Dangerous as he knew it was.
"It matters." He tried to think of a good simile, and couldn't. Violinists, orators, stroke patients. Perhaps the last one. "In pastoral training—you were going to go to med school, you know this—you do a lot of visitation in the hospital. And it becomes clear to you, after awhile, without being told...you see what pain does to people. When a certain kind of man bursts into tears when the priest walks in, you know somehow that he hasn't cried in public in decades. You see the difference between someone who's in control and someone who's not. You can still be wrong, but—but an eye opens."
Hodya nodded, saying nothing.
"This particular patient is powerful and clumsy. I know that much. Telepaths like that will dump too much of the truth on people. I'm not an expert in telepathy, and probably Professor Xavier or Father Gilles would know better, but I know hospitals. And I know pain. Something's not right."
She let out a long breath. "So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know. But I'm not letting them cut my head open. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease."
"You're not going to do anything for this kid, whoever he is? Or she?"
Joel or Paul might be paranoid, too quick off the mark, hysterical, touchy, whatever else the letters to the editor said about mutant activists—granted. But Hodya was sane, human, whole, normal. And she knew how to push him. "If you think there's something..."
"I do."
"Then we have to go. Tonight." He didn't like the thought of it, because he wasn't sure what he would do. But it was a holiday, and there would be fewer staff in the building. A better chance of doing...something. "Repentigny."
"And what are you going to do?"
He got up and started for the stairs. "I don't know. Reconnaissance, I guess. Fortune favours the bold, like my dad always said."
She smiled and followed him up the stairs.
The kitchen was empty. No one in this house was ever around when they were needed. Joel climbed on a chair and pressed the TEST button on the smoke detector, holding it down as the alarm shrilled and Hodya stared up at him, fingers in her ears.
It had precisely the desired effect. Vicky thudded down the stairs and halted in the doorway, consternation plain on her face. Steph and Sabine soon followed, and Prawn stomped in from the other side of the house, Jeanne-Marie tagging along behind him. Paul, who'd evidently been on the third floor, was last.
"We ought to invest in an intercom system," Paul said, taking a seat at the table.
"I don't intend to do this often," said Joel. He got down from the chair, and wiped his palms on the back of his pants. Have to stop sweating if he was going to be a Dan Berrigan-style mutant superhero. "All right. Um, I never had any litmus test for living here, obviously. I know you don't all think like I do about...well, the violence issue and other stuff. Works of mercy, building the kingdom, all of that. But I need help with something. And the only way we're going to do it is nonviolently. I don't want you on board if you think you might lose control when you're scared, or hurt a stranger to save a friend, or strike back at someone who's hurting someone else. So—that's it. In or out."
"What's going on?" Vicky asked.
"We're going to trespass on private property and remove a sick person from his doctors, if possible. Otherwise we'll probably just snoop in their files, maybe tamper with some records. They have armed guards, which is why I mention the violence bit."
"Can we defend ourselves?" Sabine said quietly.
Joel bit his lip, then said, "No. We can avoid being hurt. But we can't strike back."
Silence. No one looked at him, except Paul, who was trying to suppress laughter, and Hodya, who was white in the face. He felt a sting behind his forehead, guts starting to clench.
"I'm out," said Prawn, a hint of disgust in his voice. "This is fucking ridiculous. I thought you were the ones supposed to keep me out of trouble."
"Okay. Good, in fact—you stay here. Hold down the fort, or whatever. Who else wants to stay?"
Slowly, looking down at the tabletop, Sabine raised her hand. She was pregnant, of course, so that was no surprise. Vicky raised her hand too.
"Shit, I'll go," said Steph, who was in her female form, dark hair hanging in her eyes. "But I don't know if I'd be too useful."
"You're useful." Joel looked at Jeanne-Marie, who was clearly herself and not that other—lost, rigid, no eye contact.
She shook her head. "I'm not—I can't go along with this. I don't want to break the law."
Joel couldn't think of any lawful way to do what he was planning. He was wagering a lot on a hunch. "All right. Steph, Paul, and me." He turned to Hodya. "Are you coming?"
Hodya took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay. Sure."
The divide was complete. Joel found himself thinking of mitosis, perhaps because Hodya was there, but he knew it was more like amputation. He'd never forged a deep rapport with Vicky or Sabine, and now he probably never would. Probably they'd leave within a month or two, because he'd drawn that line. Never able to relate well to more than two or three people at a time. Too many people in the house, too many affairs kept secret amongst a few.
"Meeting over?" said Prawn, and one by one the others drifted off. Prawn was his own problem, of course.
That was when Joel realised that he needed something to take the edge off. He felt like he'd stuck a pin in an electrical outlet. In the bathroom on the third floor, he counted out the three Solpadeine tablets.
Sitting on the edge of the tub, he wondered what exactly he was going to do, what he suspected, what he was risking. No ideas. Not enough information. Not enough energy—you needed a lot of fuel to overcome the gravity of the everyday, to stop seeing doctors as helpful and governments as harmless, to plan for anything other than eating and sleeping and working and consuming. All the thrust and lift of the saints, whatever made Clare cut her hair off and Francis sell his clothes, that was the real miracle. Never mind the healed demoniacs and tamed wolves. Their feet left the ground the moment they took that first impossible risk.
Dinner was a rather desultory affair, since a Catholic Worker house divided against itself cannot cook. Nobody got the roast in on time, and the coconut Thai curry for the vegans in attendance came out with soft, overcooked vegetables. Paul's mealworms and sake-soaked raw shrimp were excellent, he thought, but no one much wanted to share them. Joel even dispensed with the grace, half standing up and then slowly easing down again, staring down at his plate. He evidently felt guilty for forcing them to make a decision, and didn't want to bring the topic up again. Paul, on the other hand, thought it was better to maintain some semblance of discipline. He said the blessing in French, with a firm "Amen" to declare the matter settled.
Around nine, after a few dispirited toasts with Spanish champagne, dinner dribbled to a finish. Paul put his boots on and hunted for his hat and gloves in the hall closet. Steph, in his male form, made sandwiches, which seemed both practical and a little ridiculous. Hodya sat on the stairs while Paul leaned in the doorway, waiting for Joel and Steph to be ready.
"You do this sort of thing often?" she asked, pulling her hair back with an elastic taken off her zipper.
It was a joke; she knew as well as he did what they did at St-Jean-de-Dieu most of the time. Paul smiled a bit to show some goodwill. "Oh, not in a long while. We used to chain ourselves to the War Museum gates sometimes at St Rita's, pour blood on CRIM records at the Clermont Building here in town."
"You're kidding."
"Aren't you?"
"I don't know anymore. I used to think I understood this place—the country, I mean. When I first came here, what I liked best about Canada was how, hm, unnecessary all of that stuff seemed. No, that's not the word I want. Activism is always necessary. But it didn't seem urgent, there were no, no moral emergencies, I guess. In Israel there's a lot of urgency, even though it's easy to forget that. It's easy to move from the everyday to...to the political, I guess." She sighed. "I'm not making myself very clear. Probably still jet-lagged."
"You can stay here, if you want." Joel came around the corner, adjusting the collar of his coat. "I don't even know if we'll get anything done tonight. There'll probably be other chances."
"I want to go with you," Hodya said, standing up and kissing him lightly. Paul still wasn't used to seeing that, and thought that Joel wasn't accustomed to getting kissed either. The smell that wafted from him was a curious mixture of shame, like cooking beets, and a sharper tang of fear. But he liked it, that smell too was present. Don't think about it, Paul told himself, but he couldn't stop himself from noticing, from perceiving, and then from thinking. No control. Thoughts without a thinker, as some article he remembered from university had said. He missed school, even though he knew he still couldn't go back, because he'd always thought that if he stuck with the psych major he'd understand all the secrets there were. Every secret, after all, was rooted in psychology.
Steph came out of the kitchen, sandwiches completed, and they left in the little blue Volvo with the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror. The drive to Repentigny was long, the roads icy, and Paul was glad that Steph was there to drive, even though it meant listening to some bad French metal.
It was a little after nine when they got to Neurocherche, whose parking lot was almost empty.
"We shouldn't park there, right?" said Steph. "I assume we're worried about getting caught?"
"Kind of. Yes." Joel peered through the iced-over side window. The lab was right fucking on the highway, no side streets or driveways to make them more inconspicuous. "Wait, no. Park there. There's no place else."
Steph took a spot in the furthest corner of the lot, turned off the motor, and glanced over at the others. "Well?"
"Well. Okay. You stay here. Getaway driver." Joel took off his gloves, wiped his palms on his coat. "I'll go in first, see if I can open the doors. Hodya can try to find something in the records, I guess?"
"What am I supposed to be doing?" said Paul.
"I don't know. Go with Hodya?"
"For what, protection?" Steph said, snickering at the idea. "A hundred fifty pounds of danger, that's Paul."
Hodya was insulted. "I know Krav Maga, you know."
"What did I say about hurting people?" Joel snapped. "Paul goes with Hodya because he'll be able to sniff out what's wrong. Anything goes wrong, either run or try to talk your way out. I'll try to find you. Steph, leave after two hours."
"Dude..." Steph sounded unconvinced that this was the best plan ever, and Paul had to agree. But nobody else had any better ideas.
Joel waited for Steph, but when he trailed off, nodded and said, "Okay. Uh, see you in a bit. I hope."
He disappeared.
Paul and Hodya got out and walked across the icy parking lot. They didn't hurry—running over ice like this would have been dumb, and Paul had a weird feeling of being under surveillance. Better not to attract any more attention.
"Are you nervous?" Hodya murmured to him.
"Fuck yes."
"Okay. Good."
They said nothing more to each other until they reached the building. The main doors were locked, and Paul saw a keypad lit up inside—no opening those from the inside or the outside without the code, at least not without Niko or someone else good at electronic subterfuge. Sensible for anyplace that had "flight risks", like St Rita's.
The sound of metal on concrete nearly gave Paul a heart attack, but investigating it he only saw a plain metal side door standing open around the corner of the building. Nobody was visible inside or outside; Joel had found the way in.
It was, apparently, a maintenance room, completely dark and full of oil-smelling equipment. Hodya held Paul's hand as they picked their way across to the inner door, where a thin line of light shone. "You're bright," she whispered.
He was. He should have worn the makeup, but it didn't block out all the luminescence, not in darkness. The light he shed was also too faint to stop them from tripping on a snowblower. "All right?"
"No lost fingers."
The door to the maintenance room was propped with one of Joel's gloves, which Paul carefully replaced. They came out in a dark corridor that didn't smell particularly interesting, and they wandered for several minutes before they passed an office door that twigged Paul's interest. He could smell nothing, but something...
One door was marked "fire door – alarm will sound", but something made Paul stop. When he first came to work here, his supervisor had rapped the glass with his knuckles and said, "The guys in accounting use this door a lot so the alarm's disabled. Not a good idea in a real emergency, but handy to get to the basement when the elevator's down." A lot of the business of security was lies: the visible cameras that were turned off, the hidden cameras that were real, the burly guards who didn't give a shit about stop loss or anything less than a knife fight in the waiting room. Neurocherche was tougher, but they kept their loopholes open too.
Hodya nudged him. "How did you know this door was okay?"
"I didn't." The phantom pop between his ears was easier this time, because he'd been expecting it. "Later."
At the bottom door, which was not locked, Paul began to be something more than nervous or panicky. It was more distant, like reading a newspaper article or watching a movie, and knowing that the world had a rotten patch. More than a patch. And he was responsible in some way, but worst of all, he could turn his back very easily. Much better when circumstances forced you to do the right thing. Paul wondered if he was getting the feeling from Hodya, or from something residual in the building, or if perhaps it was his own.
But when they opened the door, nothing very terrible was in evidence. No wives of Bluebeard hung up on the walls, certainly. Just a vast concrete basement full of shelves of file boxes, rather like in the post office. Paul turned the lights on, and Hodya opened one of the boxes, flipped through a file.
"What is it?"
"Payroll or something, I think." She picked another box at random. "Here, I'll read, you put things away again."
They did. After about twenty minutes of reading, Hodya said, "This might be...oh, it's patient intake. Huh. This person had Sturge-Weber Syndrome."
"Which is?"
"It's, um, congenital. Seizures, port-wine birthmark. It's rare. There are notes from the lumbar puncture, attached...'positive for 143 factor, low potency.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea. I'm just..." She read on. "This patient's another telepath, apparently."
"Telepaths sure seem inclined to have broken brains."
"They don't, actually. Not according to the stats I've read. We don't have very good data. But telepathy's definitely not common enough for this to be coincidence."
"What did they want with Joel, then?"
She shrugged. "Maybe they're actually treating seizures, I don't know. As a sideline. Or maybe they were interested in mutants immune to telepathy, or maybe they're testing sensitivity rather than read/write ability. But this note from the lumbar puncture is weird. 'Patient CSF-143 results on rhesus monkeys.'"
"They're keeping monkeys here?"
"It's a lab, Paul. Sort of, anyway. But what do I know, I go to U of T." Hodya flipped a page, and her eyes widened. "How much time do we have left?"
He checked his watch. "Half an hour."
"Right, we're taking this box then."
"The whole thing?"
"I'd take that whole shelf if I could. And I'd still have to read more to have any real clue what they're up to here, beyond—well, it's a bit fucko, far as I can tell." She wrinkled her nose, and then grabbed a sheaf of papers from the box and slipped them between her coat and sweater, zipping up and holding her side to keep everything in place. "Okay. Think that'll hold. We can go."
The whiteness was still there, Joel had learned. The seeing was some other level, above or below the whiteness, some layer he'd never known before this year. It was comforting, almost, to know that he still had the snowblind emptiness, since it had taken so long for him to learn what it meant.
But he left the whiteness alone, and let himself go unblind, seeing everything. Fore and aft, above and beneath, more than the brain should have been able to process—but the brain was gone, the skin was gone, the eyes and the ears and the flesh and the bone all gone. Nada nada nada. And nothing was everything. Everything was not nothing, though. That was the point, after all.
A ward. He knew wards. Beds four to a room, bored guards at either end of the well-lit corridor. Half-asleep, he thought, but wouldn't test it tonight. He drifted through the rooms until he found a patient who was awake, a gleam of eyes in the darkness.
He faded into presence, barely visible but not solid, and crossed the room to stand by the girl's bed. She looked a bit like his young cousin Clare, curly red hair and sharp, fierce features. When she saw him she lifted her head, probably expecting a nurse on checks and not used to anyone standing there for so long. "What?"
"I need information about this place," he whispered back.
She squinted, then sat up and scooted back slowly towards the head of the bed, not taking her eyes off him. "You're not real."
"I'm real," he said.
"I can't sense you. Even when people wear an inhibitor I can sense them. And I can see past you."
He decided not to argue. "How old are you?"
"Sixteen," she said warily, adjusting the white hospital blanket around herself. "You didn't know that?"
He shook his head, and she let her shoulders relax a bit. "Usually when I see things, they try to impress me with how much they know. They ask questions they know the answers to."
"You see things a lot?"
"Not in a while. And usually I can sense them. They seem real." She reached over to the bedside tray for a styrofoam cup of water.
"Not since the surgery?" he guessed.
"Uh-huh."
"Schizophrenia?"
"They thought so. No one was sure. I'm too young."
She was. Joel wondered if perhaps the surgery had deadened some unusual aspect of the girl's powers, rather than removing a symptom of mental illness. Or maybe body thetans were to blame. "Why are you still here, if you're not seeing things anymore?"
"I still have symptoms. They say they're getting better. Listening to me. Of course, now they'll think I'm buttoned again, since I'm talking to nothing. Almost nothing. My roommate will hear but she won't talk. Doesn't talk." The girl winked at him solemnly—she'd started to talk faster, sounding a little agitated, like the schizos at St Rita's. She was still sitting composed on the bed, though, sipping from her water. "I'm happy to help with a little interdimensional corporate espionage, though. What do you want to know, then?"
He lowered his voice, even though he knew he wasn't very audible in this state. The other patients probably couldn't hear him. "I need to know if they're hurting you here."
"Me specifically? Everyone? We're all hurt, I can tell you that much, but they don't bind it up when they go. I haven't got anything to do with that. We couldn't tell you if we're getting hurt. We wouldn't know what you meant."
Rephrase. "Do they do things to you that seem weird, things that other doctors don't do?"
The girl shrugged. "They go in through the back like old vaudevillians—in through the kitchens, in between the butcher's blocks. No one else does that." And she bent her head and lifted up her hair to show him a dark circle on the back of her neck, barely visible in the moonlight streaming in through the window.
Joel was tempted to touch it, but in a ward full of telepaths he thought it better to stay in stealth mode. The circle looked raw, almost like a burn, and there was no dressing on it. "Who did that?"
"Simon did it. Simon tells us all what to do."
"Simon says," Joel replied, beginning to follow her threads better. "Is he a doctor or a guard?"
"He doesn't talk directly. Everyone talks for him."
"And what happens when...when people talk for Simon? When they do this to you?"
"They line up and get me in their sights and then I shoot. I'm all clockwork inside, see. It doesn't look it but I am. Simon says and I have to do it. I don't do it if he doesn't say." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I don't like him. He makes us pretend we do."
Mind control of some kind, perhaps? Abuse? "Does anyone get discharged?"
"Simon takes a few of them. Other freaks, people like you, the cripples, legally headblind—they get to go home. We're the special ones. The medical mysteries."
"And why can't you use your powers on them?" he asked, remembering that psychic concussion she'd given him.
"If someone got close enough," she whispered, "someone with no inhibitor on—they can scramble my signals, it's no good trying to mess with them—but an ordinary person, oh, I could do it. Your friend the French boy, he and I came pretty close. If he'd got through the vents. He and the germ girl, they're here too, aren't they? What I need from you, okay, is I have to have someone get the inhibitors off the guards first. With a little more help...I could do it. I know I could."
Joel looked over his shoulder at the other beds, and thought of the other rooms on the ward. He was glad that he wasn't solid enough for his hands to sweat anymore. Yes, it could probably be done. Joel could remove the inhibitor equipment from the guards at minimal risk to himself, and presumably the patients could take over the prison break from there, manipulating the mentally vulnerable staff into opening doors, turning off alarms, and deleting records. But if something went wrong—how did the "Simon says" phenomenon actually work? Maybe all the patients would suddenly turn against them in response to some secret command from the authorities. And if any of the guards managed to call in backup, things could turn bloody.
And God, what would Joel do with thirty-odd kids? How would he even get them back into the city in one four-door Volvo sedan? No. He was not going to endanger that many lives when the chances of success were so low.
Besides, what was the difference between holding a gun on someone and forcing them with telepathy to do what you wanted?
"I can't," he told her, forcing himself to meet her eyes. He wished he'd never read Kant. "Not tonight. But I'll find a way. I promise."
She sank back on the bed. "Sure. Whatever."
"No, I will. What's your name?"
The girl held up her left hand, the wristband visible in the light from the window. Morley, Kathleen. "You?"
Joel had always thought the X-Men's codenames were a little silly, but he saw now that noms de guerre might sometimes be useful—"Simon" might well be able to pump Kathleen for information. Coming up with a good alias in a few seconds was harder than it seemed, though, and he ended up choosing a name from his theology textbooks. "Uh...Richard McBrien."
"I'll be waiting," said Kathleen, and she lay back down on the bed, pulling the blankets up. "Nothing else I can do."
Thirty-two mutants on the ward. St John of God held a maximum of fifteen. Where else could he send them? St Rita's and St Christina's in Ottawa were stuffed to the gills. A few of Joel's relatives could be convinced to billet a kid or two, but even that might not be safe. Joel then remembered the Professor's words: Your children are welcome at the mansion if they make it that far. Building an underground railroad to Salem Centre would be difficult, but it was the most viable solution he'd thought of so far.
Logistics. Logistics were going to kill him.
In the car, Hodya and Paul were waiting with Steph. Everyone alive. He hadn't really been expecting that. Hodya flicked a stack of printed forms with one finger. "Exhibit A," she said.
"Someone got something done, then. I'm glad."
"Didn't think I could do it?"
"I don't know. I don't know what I thought."
As they drove out on the highway, Steph repeatedly glancing up in the rearview mirror, Paul leaned forward between the front seats. "Twelve-seventeen. Happy New Year, then."
"Happy New Year," said Joel. "Sorry the party isn't more fun."
"Oh, I wasn't expecting much. That's life as a charity worker."
"They might still be on the second Back to the Future when we get home," Steph said hopefully. "Although the rye'll probably be gone. And the drunken groping will be over with."
"What drunken groping?" Joel demanded.
"I'm just saying, if you're not there then they're probably having drunken groping. It's traditional."
"Kissing is traditional. Groping is assault."
"Everybody needs a little grope sometimes. 'Specially Beaubier. Ten bucks says she and Prawn made out after a few drinks." Steph leaned back and flicked on the CD player. "Anyone want a sandwich?"
They pulled up to St John of God House at twenty past one. The lights were all burning downstairs, but the TV in the main sitting room was silent. All Joel could hear was a low mutter of conversation from the kitchen. As much as he'd tried to stimulate the sort of round-table discussions that Catholic Worker houses were known for, the kids in the house didn't often stay up until the small hours of the morning just talking. They were too disparate, with no common mission, and anyway, there should have been another Back to the Future movie left.
Prawn met Paul and Joel in the kitchen doorway. "Something's happened," he said. "Jeanne-Marie's gone."
"Gone where?" Steph's bet was the first thing Joel thought of. "What did you do?"
Prawn seemed too frayed at the edges to even get insulted. Tanné, as they said in Quebec. Fed up, annoyed, worn out, but literally weather-beaten. "I didn't do nothing, mate. Ottawa. Department H. They came for her."
"Tonight? They came for her tonight?" Shady government organisations, all right, but shady government organisations that worked after hours on holidays?
"About an hour and a half after you left." Prawn rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. "She...there wasn't any struggle, mind. She went willingly. No one hurt her. They let me stay."
Paul let out a long, shaky breath. "They're watching the house."
"No." Joel went into the kitchen and turned on the water for the kettle.
"They waited for us to leave and they came for her, Joel. Or would you rather believe that a government agency runs like a 7-11? They came for Prawn and Jeanne-Marie on Christmas because we'd be distracted. They followed the car from the house."
"No."
"Well, what other explanation is there? Luck? Here's what I think. I think they have mutants with long-range psi-powers watching the house, and probably other places in the cities where mutants pass through. That wouldn't be hard. Or they could have conventional spies watching, or bugs, I don't know. They lie in wait for the kids and get them as soon as they leave your sphere of influence—either they don't believe your rhetoric about nonviolence or they're afraid of your political connections. Both, maybe. They at least know you're not afraid of making a big public stink, after that fracas with the kid hiding out in the church. They know kids like Prawn are dangerous even if you and I aren't. And they also know that we don't do much if it doesn't happen on our doorstep. I bet this explains quite a few disappearances in the last year or so."
"Paul—" Joel stopped himself and lowered his voice. "We don't need to get all...alarmist."
"If not now, when?" Paul took his CRIM card out of his pocket and held it up, the holographic fleur-de-lis shimmering under the kitchen light.
"Very dramatic. It still doesn't follow from there that there are spies watching our every move—"
"Then where's Jeanne-Marie? Where's Niko? Where are Darren and Rishi and Colombe and all the others?"
"They're human beings and they made their choices. God help them. I'm not their father. I'm not their employer or their teacher or their father confessor. Whether they go west to work on the oil rigs or walk down the wrong street some night or take a job in Ottawa—it's them, it's their own lives. I don't believe any of them got snatched off the street."
"Joel, you're too smart for this shit. They're minors, they're oppressed, and their economic options are very fucking limited. You can't make truly free choices without money and a civil right or two. The government is preying on them. And why not? They're very easy pickings. That is a fact. Are they using mutants to watch us? I don't know for sure, but I'm not going to rule it out. It fits the facts."
Joel sat down at the table and rested his head on his arms. Paul, as usual, was right on substance and a bit questionable on the practical details. Sabine and Prawn had said nothing throughout the argument, but Joel knew whose side they were on.
Prawn now said, "You're not talking about the other option."
"What's that?"
"Jeanne-Marie called them."
"Why would she do that?"
"Why wouldn't she?" Prawn played with the edge of a placemat. "She's not afraid of Department H, not like you are. And meanwhile you're running off to fuck around in laboratories at night like some Animal Liberation Front activist. I think she trusts them more than you. I bet her bugshit nun school taught her to respect the authorities and take a dim view of leftists doing B&E."
The Solpadeine was wearing off. "Did you see her make a phone call?"
"No. But—"
"We'll assume Paul's right, then. Safer that way. Or fuck, maybe they're watching the house and Jeanne-Marie hates me. Lord knows that's plausible enough."
"Naturally it's all about you," said Paul. "We should talk about this in the morning."
As they left the kitchen, Paul noticed that Joel was headed downstairs with Hodya. "Oho. Hot revolutionary love."
"Shut up, Paul."
In the room in the basement, Hodya undressed, her back to Joel. "You know we don't have to do anything you don't want to."
"Yeah, I know. My virtue's safe with you." He started unbuttoning his shirt, to make the nakedness less one-sided.
"Is that the problem? Really?"
"No."
"No virginity fetish? No secret belief that vaginas have teeth? I won't laugh."
"You laugh at me plenty. No." Knot in his laces. Twenty years of untying shoelaces and suddenly he couldn't do it.
"Good," said Hodya. "If you thought I was really hellbound for having sex, I'd want to know about it. So I could break up with you."
"That's not funny."
"You're right."
He was down to his boxers and one shoe with that stubborn knot. The room was cold. "Should we get the grilling over with? I'm not impotent. I'm not gay. I'm not a eunuch. I haven't forsworn women for three years of study. I didn't get fucked by Cardinal Law."
"You swear a lot when you don't want to talk about something."
"And you seem determined to make me feel like shit about this."
"No." She sat beside him, nude, breasts moving as she moved. She was built like a Degas nude, perfect in her imperfection, but Joel couldn't think of a tactful way to phrase that. "I want to make you worried about it. The way I'm worried. It doesn't need to be this way. I know you like me, I mean, you get—it's clear. When you let yourself. But you always draw back, you fight it."
He picked at the knot in his laces. "In the NT, there's a word that means a stumbling block, comes from the verb 'to limp.' Rene Girard said that a limping man, seen from behind, seems to be constantly wrestling with his own shadow. A stumbling block is something that repels you and attracts you both, and you can't leave it alone. In English we call it a scandal."
"I scandalise you?" she said. "Sex scandalises you?"
"Sex does. Yeah."
"How do you get unscandalised, then?"
"If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off..."
"Yoel. No." She kissed him gently, on the earlobe. "Don't be cruel to yourself."
"You don't like that solution? You won't like this one either. There's a painting of the Virgin Mary, comes from Germany. Our Lady Untier of Knots." Joel kicked off his shoe. "How's that?"
Hodya traced the ridged scars on his chest. "I don't understand you at all sometimes. Do you think you understand me?"
"I've never understood girls."
"Good. We're even, then." She smiled. "Oh, I have a bit of Greek for you too, actually. One of my old boyfriends was Orthodox. Religious boys drive me crazy. He told me once that—well, I was complaining about a line I heard once from the Christian Bible, 'Be perfect, as God is perfect.' And this boy told me no, in Greek the meaning is be whole. I don't believe in God but if He's real, I bet that's what He'd say. Be whole."
Joel felt all his blood rush to his face, and he could say nothing. Hodya turned off the lamp and tucked herself in on the far side of the bed. He lay back on the pillow, listening to the quiet rushing of traffic, like the sea.
Notes: The painting of Mary as "Undoer of Knots" can be seen here, and the final scene is one of my larcenous homages to theologian James Alison.