Shift: A Novel

Cambridge, MA

November 1, 1963

Once upstairs, Chandler didn’t know what to do: sit Naz down and ask her a thousand and one questions or throw her on the bed and ravish her.

“I slept for five days. Five days.”

Naz shrugged. “I know.”

Chandler pulled up short. “How do you know?”

He was behind her at that point. Her hair was looser than it had been a day and a half ago, fell down her back in lush ringlets. She wore a dark sweater, threadbare but cashmere. It clung to her back, which seemed as tiny and delicate as the thorax of a wasp. A skirt of pale gray wool rode softly over her hips; silk stockings added gloss to the curve of her calves. When Naz said, “You know how I know,” Chandler started, because he’d been so caught up in her body that he’d almost forgotten she was in the room.

“Don’t start in with that stuff about mind-reading and mental telepathy and extrasensory perception.”

“All those terms mean the same thing. And I never mentioned any of them.”

“ESP can refer to all sorts of phenomena. Remote viewing, precognition—”

“Would you be more comfortable if you predicted the results of next year’s election?”

“I do not believe—”

“Chandler.”

“—in ESP or secret CIA drug programs or two-way mirrors in seedy motels or—”

“Chandler.”

“—the existence of a part of the brain called the Gate of Orpheus—”

“Chandler!”

Chandler, pressed against the wall, looked at Naz as if she were a rising flood and he was trapped on the roof of his house.

“Your father’s name was John Forrestal.”

“Anyone could have found that out. My family is well known.”

“He hung himself from the chandelier in his office,” Naz said over him. “‘Puto deus fio. I am becoming a god.’ What was my father’s name?”

“How should I—”

“What was his name, Chandler?”

“Anthony,” Chandler said helplessly.

“And my mother?”

“Saba,” he whispered.

“Your mother disappeared after your father hung himself,” she continued. “You always suspected your grandmother chased her away. What’s Saba mean?”

“What’s—”

“Answer the question, Chandler.”

“A breeze. A gentle breeze.” He looked at Naz abjectly. “How do I—how do we know these things?”

“Answer the question, Chandler. You know how.”

“The … drug?”

Naz nodded.

“You gave me a drug. Someone—Morganthau?—made you give me a drug.”

Again Naz nodded.

“And it opened the Gate. The Gate of Orpheus.”

For the first time a look of doubt—fear—crossed Naz’s face.

“That’s the part I don’t understand. Morganthau never mentioned anything about a Gate of Orpheus. I thought I was in your mind, or that we were in each other’s. But now I think it was just you. Your”—her hands reached for a word—“consciousness somehow expanded into my mind. Into Morganthau’s.”

Chandler didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “He was really behind the mirror?”

Naz looked away. “He said he’d have me arrested if I didn’t cooperate. Solicitation,” she said, using the polite word. “He—”

“—photographs you,” Chandler finished for her. “How many—? Forty-one,” he answered himself. He answered himself because it was all there. Everything Naz had ever done. Her first sex, her first drink, her first time trading sex for drink. Somehow it was all in his mind. And he knew he was in her mind in the same way. All of him, residing forever behind those beautiful dark eyes.

He cleared his throat. “Morganthau’s real name. It’s—”

“Logan. Eddie Logan. I know. Now I know.” She shook her head in wonder. “Do you remember what you said in the hotel room? You said, ‘I’m here too.’” She took his hand, squeezed it as hard as she could. “I’m here, Chandler. I’m here too.”

Her touch sent an electric tingle through his body, and Chandler felt a dopey but wondrous smile spreading across his face. But at the same time there was fear: not of the connection, of how it came to be or what it meant for the future, but the idea that it might be lost somehow, someday. Because if he lost the piece of himself that was her, he would never be whole again.

Another quotation sprang to his mind. Not one he’d learned for his dissertation, just something he’d read somewhere, sometime. The gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed, and doomed him to meet his death at the hands of women. Plato, he remembered then. The Symposium. Unlike most classical thinkers, Plato hadn’t revered Orpheus, but considered him a coward because he was unwilling to die for love. But that’s stupid, he told himself. I’m not—

“Chandler?” Naz’s voice cut into his thoughts. Her mouth was still open, but before she could say something else a knock sounded at the door.