The Speed of Dark

“Two. We would like to do two at a time, three days apart — this ensures that the primary medical team can concentrate on those during the first few critical days.”

“What about waiting after the first two until they complete treatment to see if it works?” Bailey asks.

The doctor shakes his head. “No, it’s better to have the whole cohort close in time.”

“Makes it faster to publication,” I hear myself say.

“What?” the doctor asks.

The others are looking at me. I look at my lap.

“If we all do it fairly quickly and together, then you can write it up and get it published faster. Otherwise it would be a year or more.” I glance quickly at his face; his cheeks are red and shiny again.

“That’s not the reason,” he says, a little loudly. “It’s just that the data are more comparable if the subjects — if you — are all close in time. I mean, suppose something happened that changed things between the time the first two started and finished… something that affected the rest of you—”

“Like what, a bolt from the blue that makes us normal?” Dale asks. “You’re afraid we’ll get galloping normality and be unsuitable subjects?”

“No, no,” the doctor says. “More like something political that changes attitudes…”

I wonder what the government is thinking. Do governments think? The chapter in Brain Functionality on the politics of research protocols comes to mind. Is something about to happen, some regulation or change in policy, which would make this research impossible in a few months?

That is something I can find out when I get home. If I ask this man, I do not think he will give me an honest answer.

When we leave, we walk at angles, all out of rhythm with one another. We used to have a way of merging, accommodating one another’s peculiarities, so that we moved as a group. Now we move without harmony. I can sense the confusion, the anger. No one talks. I do not talk. I do not want to talk with them, who have been my closest associates for so long.

When we are back in our own building, we go quickly into our individual offices. I sit down and start to reach for the fan. I stop myself, and then I wonder why I stopped myself.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

Starlight, one writer said, perfuses the entire universe: the whole thing glows. The dark is an illusion, that writer said. If that is so, then Lucia was right and there is no speed of dark.

But there is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias. So I think there may be positive darkness, and I think dark can have a speed.

The books tell me that my brain works very well, even as it is, and that it is much easier to derange the functions of the brain than to repair them. If normal people really can do all the things that are claimed for them, it would be helpful to have that ability… but I am not sure they do.

They do not always understand why other people act as they do. That is obvious when they argue about their reasons, their motives. I have heard someone tell a child, “You are only doing that to annoy me,” when it is clear to me that the child was doing it because the child enjoyed the act itself… was oblivious to its effect on the adult. I have been oblivious like that, so I recognize it in others.

My phone buzzes. I pick it up. “Lou it is Cameron. Do you want to go to supper and have pizza?” His voice runs the words together, mechanically.

“It is Thursday,” I say. “Hi-I’m-Jean is there.”

“Chuy and Bailey and I are going anyway, so we can talk. And you, if you come. Linda is not coming. Dale is not coming.”

“I do not know if I want to come,” I say. “I will think about it. You will go when?”

“As soon as it is five,” he says.

“There are places it is not a good idea to talk about this,” I say.

“The pizza place is not one of those places,” Cameron says.

“Many people know we go there,” I say.

“Surveillance?” Cameron says.

“Yes. But it is a good thing to go there, because we go there. Then meet somewhere else.”

“The Center.”

“No,” I say, thinking of Emmy. “I do not want to go to the Center.”

“Emmy likes you,” Cameron says. “She is not very intelligent, but she likes you.”

“We are not talking about Emmy,” I say.

“We are talking about the treatment, after pizza,” Cameron says. “I do not know where to go except the Center.”

I think of places, but they are all public places. We should not talk about this in public places. Finally I say, “You could come to my apartment.” I have never invited Cameron to my apartment. I have never invited anyone to my apartment.