Shift: A Novel

Millbrook, NY

November 4, 1963

Chevy’d added an optional 150-hp engine to the ’62 Corvair, but the Bureau’d clearly stuck with the 98-hp mid-range model. BC could’ve sworn the little engine cursed at him, and carbon monoxide spewed from the heater vents in visible gusts, but the little minx did what she was told. The posted limit on the Taconic was sixty-five; BC stamped both feet on the accelerator if the car dropped below ninety. He had to fight the Corvair’s tendency to oversteer, a consequence of its unusual engine placement over the rear axle, and on top of that rush hour had begun. Despite this, BC covered the fifty-mile shot up the curvy, car-choked parkway in thirty-two minutes.

Once in Millbrook he had to find Dr. Leary’s community—Castle or Castille, Castalia, something like that. The directions had been in his briefcase (along with the files on Project Orpheus), but even without them he had no trouble locating his target. At the edge of town he saw a large hand-painted sign in multicolored bubble letters:

YOU ARE ON THE PATH TO TRUE

ENLIGHTENMENT

(JUST TURN LEFT!)

Beneath that, someone had added in smaller but significantly clearer letters:

FREAKS GO HOME!

BC knew nothing about either the freaks or their detractors, but his initial reaction was to side with the latter, if only for their penmanship.

A mile down the road he came to an absurd fieldstone gatehouse, complete with a turret peaked like a witch’s cap and something that looked a lot like a portcullis. Another half mile of curved driveway led to an enormous and extravagant building, a Lilliputian dollhouse swollen to Brobdingnagian proportions, with towers and gables and hundreds of feet of porch wrapping around the whole thing. Glasses and plates were strewn around the unmown lawn that stretched in front of it, along with a truly remarkable number of wine and liquor bottles, while a glowering pine forest encroached on the back. The dense trees, already losing their color in the failing light, made the giant house seem two-dimensional, as if you would open the front door and emerge on the other side of a theatrical flat. With the exception of the dishes and bottles and a few items of clothing, the place seemed to be deserted.

The Corvair sighed in relief when he killed the engine, and a moment later BC heard the sound of a distant jackhammer—woodpecker, he realized a moment later, and chuckled at himself. It had been a long time since he’d been in the country. The things of nature sounded like the things of man to his ears, when even he knew it should have been the other way around.

All at once he felt his shirt plastered to the small of his back, realized he was still sitting in the car with both hands glued to the wheel. Somewhat sheepishly, he opened the door. It was hardly better outside. A cool, cloying haze pressed wetly down on everything. Even the blades of grass sagged beneath its weight.

It was only after he was standing on the bent grass that he realized he hadn’t wanted to leave the relative safety of the car. He was a boy of the suburbs. He liked trees and grass and birds just fine, but he liked them regimented, the grass mowed, the trees planted a uniform distance from one another, the birds regulated by local ordinance. But it was more than that. There was something unnerving about this place—something distinct from the humidity and the litter scattered over the lawn and the ragged curtains flapping from the open windows like a hydra’s tongues. Something that had to do with the glowering pine forest on the far side of the house, which, like a painting by Magritte, seemed to suck up what was left of the sunlight even as each needle remained as sharply outlined as a syringe. The house was his immediate objective, of course (assuming these people hadn’t taken to living in trees), but somehow he sensed that the forest was his ultimate destination. He cursed himself for getting sucked into Melchior’s contumely instead of reading the files in his briefcase as he should have done. The scattered, spooky phrases Melchior had tossed around flitted through his head—“sleeper agents” and “psychological experiments” and “Manchurian candidates” and “mental powers.” A few solid facts would have gone a long way toward easing his nerves. As it was, he was going to have to rely on his wits and—he squeezed his arm against his side, as if it might have disappeared with his briefcase—his gun.

The woodpecker drilled, paused, drilled, paused. There was a longer pause, then a bout of drilling so sustained that BC half expected to hear the crack of falling timber.

Centering his hat firmly on his head, he began to walk toward the porch. Before he’d gone five steps the front door opened. BC stopped short. So did the girl on the porch. BC wasn’t sure why she stopped. He was wearing a normal suit, after all, whereas she was wearing a pair of denim pants that had been cut off all the way to the crease of her pelvis and—he squinted—yup, nothing else. He had to squint because the girl had exceptionally thick, long, dark hair pulled forward over her shoulders as in portraits of Lady Godiva. BC thought perhaps she was wearing a French bikini top. But no, her upper body was bare. The skin visible on the sides of her breasts was as evenly tanned as her arms, suggesting this wasn’t the first time she’d walked outside so sparsely attired, and when she lifted her right arm to wave at him, her hair fell to one side and there, as full as an apple and brown as a piece of toast, was her breast.

The closest BC had ever come to seeing a naked chest was in the intimate apparel section of the Sears catalogs he hid in his bedroom closet. Their chaste airbrushed photographs of bullet bras made a pair of breasts look as geometrically pristine as side-by-side snowcapped mountains, whereas this was a sac of living, quivering flesh—not symmetrical at all, but gently sloped on the top and softly curved beneath. At the sight of it, BC’s fingertips tingled and for some reason he found himself imagining how it would feel in his hands. Like a dove, he thought. Warm and soft, the heartbeat faintly palpable in his palm. Another man might have envisioned a less delicate animal, a more vigorous touch. Might have felt the tingle in a part of his anatomy other than his fingertips. BC, however, was a good boy, and he immediately averted his eyes.

But:

“Welcome! We’re so glad you found us!”

And of course BC had seen naked women before. But these women had been uniformly dead, toes tagged, flesh an icy blue and bearing the marks of whatever had killed them, which rendered them both sexless and asexual—and of course silent. He hadn’t realized a girl could speak with no clothes on and was unsure if he could—let alone should—reply. He stared mutely as the girl walked toward him as though she were as primly dressed and perfectly coiffed as Mary Tyler Moore greeting Dick Van Dyke just home from work. Her hair had fallen unevenly around her breast, and the nipple showed through the sparse strands, which somehow made it more prominent than when it had been completely uncovered.

The girl followed BC’s gaze down to her breast, looked up again, smiled.

“Don’t worry, come Monday you won’t even remember how to tie that bureaucratic noose, let alone why you put it on in the first place.”

It was incredible! She talked just like a girl in clothes. Fire didn’t shoot from her mouth, the syllables were perfectly intelligible (although it took BC a moment to figure out “bureaucratic noose” referred to his tie).

“Shy, are we?”

She was right in front of him. Her hands were on his upper arms. BC braced himself, as though she were going to pick him up like a doll and toss him through the air. But all she did was raise herself on her tiptoes, her breasts pressing lightly against his chest with only the flimsiest layer of hair between them and his suit—which, as far as he was concerned, was his flesh—and then, lightly but lingeringly, she kissed him on the lips.

“Welcome to Castalia,” she said, her voice huskier now, the welcome broader than it had been a moment ago.

“Jenny!” an amused but sharp male voice called from somewhere to the left. “Get away from that poor man. You’re scandalizing him to death.”

BC jumped back like a teenager surprised by the babysitter’s parents. He turned to see a slim man rounding the corner of the house. Unlike the girl, his upper body was fully covered—by a long-sleeved yellow button-down whose loose tails winked in the breeze—but it wasn’t immediately clear if he had anything on beneath it. He had a friendly, slightly crooked smile and bright blue eyes and unruly blond hair that was shedding its last respectable cut as quickly as the follicles would allow.

“We didn’t expect you so quickly. You must have made great time.”

“Ye-es,” BC said experimentally. Everything seemed to be working. “Dr. Leary? I’m—”

“Oh, let’s not stand on formalities.” Leary used his clipboard to fend off both the name and the hand that came with it. “We just call the other one Puss-n-Boots.”

“The other—”

“Or Candy Striper,” the girl, Jenny, said, cutting him off.

“Ralph calls him Spooky, which is a little on the nose, but that’s Ralph for you.”

Jenny laughed. “And poor Dickie just calls him, and calls him, and calls him.”

“Jennifer, please.”

Jenny gave BC a once-over. “I think I’m going to call this one Lone Ranger. Because his face is a mask.” She leaned forward to give BC a second, wetter kiss. “You’re going to have a long life,” she said to him quietly, “if you ever let it begin.”

Both BC and Leary stared after her retreating form. “You think her tits are nice,” the doctor sighed, “you should see the rest of her. That girl’s vagina is so agile it could lace up a pair of jackboots and tie them with a sailor’s knot.”

“I …” BC didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say.”

Leary laughed aloud. “Makes you believe the old stories, doesn’t it? That the best way to get information from a spy is via the intercession of a beautiful woman.”

At the word “spy,” something clicked in BC’s brain, and he realized that Leary had taken him not as a guest but as a CIA agent.

Leary’s blue eyes twinkled. “Believe me when I tell you that what I’m going to show you will make you forget all about Jenny.”

He turned and hurried off—toward the back of the house, BC saw, and the dark forest beyond. BC hesitated, but the doctor was skipping along like a leprechaun. Taking a deep breath, BC set off after him.

“I want to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” Leary was saying when BC caught up with him. “It’s going to be a bit shocking, and I don’t want you to panic.”

BC had heard this kind of line from countless coroners and county sheriffs, and in a slightly prideful voice he said, “I’ve seen many shocking things, Dr. Leary.”

“No doubt you have, in your line of work. But that didn’t stop Agent Morganthau from collapsing like Charlie McCarthy without Edgar Bergen’s hand up his ass.”

Morganthau? The name rang a bell, and then he remembered that the director had mentioned him in his briefing before he put him on the train. BC wondered if he and Melchior were the same person.

“Where is Agent Morganthau?”

“I left him with Forrestal and the girl in the cottage. The thing is, Agent, ah—I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

Girl? Neither Hoover nor Melchior had mentioned a girl.

“Gamin,” BC said absentmindedly. It was his mother’s maiden name. “Who is—”

“Please, Agent Gamin.” Leary’s voice took on a sterner note. “Lecture first, questions after. Just listen for a moment.”

After Melchior’s rant on the train, the last thing he wanted to hear was another lecture. But he was too busy staring into the dark trees that were closing around them to protest.

“Now then. Our work at Castalia is concerned with the human animal’s neuronal experience of the world around him. In layman’s terms, his senses. If the conscious part of our brain had to process all the raw material our senses recorded, we’d end up so flooded with data that we wouldn’t be able to walk upright or feed ourselves, let alone perform complex motor tasks like climbing a ladder or playing a cello or sculpting The Gates of Hell. Information must be excluded. Not just some of it: most of it. This process of selection starts from the moment we exit the womb and continues until death. It’s so pervasive that we might just as well say life is a process of rejecting experience rather than accumulating it.”

“Oh, um.” BC wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “Sure.” The sun had disappeared behind the dense canopy now, along with the dilapidated mansion, and the early evening had stilled to an ecclesiastical gloaming. The feeling was only emphasized by the thousands of pitch-blackened trunks receding in every direction like the sooty columns of the Mezquita of Córdoba.

BC pulled up short.

“Something wrong?” Despite the shadows, the doctor’s blue eyes twinkled, almost as if he was in on a practical joke being perpetrated at BC’s expense.

“It’s nothing,” BC answered, and, when the doctor continued to stare at him: “A word popped into my head, that’s all.” Still the expectant stare. BC suddenly remembered the man’s degree was in psychology. He disliked headshrinkers almost as much as he disliked Bohemians. “Mez-qui-ta,” he said when Leary still refused to go on. He had to sound out the syllables like a child reading a strange word, because he’d never heard it before, let alone knew what it meant.

“Spanish for mosque,” the doctor said as if reading BC’s mind. He glanced at the trunks all around them. “The Great Mosque at Córdoba is famous for the hundreds of columns that hold up the prayer hall.”

“Yes, of course.” BC nodded. Still the doctor stared at him. “It’s just that, well, I don’t remember ever hearing that word before.” It was more than that of course. He’d never heard of the Great Mosque itself, let alone knew what it looked like, and somehow he sensed that the doctor knew this.

But all the doctor did was nod, then turn and head deeper into the forest. Dark pines stretched farther than the eye could see in every direction, and, with a start, BC realized he had no idea which way the house lay. He swallowed his discomfort and hurried after Leary.

“For some time now,” the doctor was saying when BC caught up with him, “psychiatrists have theorized the existence of a mental clearinghouse that sorts the information our senses gather into usuable and unusable categories. They refer to this clearinghouse as the Gate of Orpheus. You remember that Orpheus descended into the Underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, who had been killed by a snakebite. After he failed in his task, undone by the same curiosity that killed Lot’s wife, he returned to the surface, where he was promptly torn to pieces by the Maenads. This might seem like harsh treatment for a grieving widower, but the Maenads were servants of Dionysus, who was both dismembered and devoured, only to be reborn as an even greater god—a story that clearly inspired a certain young Jewish man running around the Roman province of Judea half a millennium later. As Dionysus’ high priest, Orpheus was said to possess mysteries culled from his time in the Underworld. Dionysus’ Roman name was Bacchus, of course, and for the better part of a thousand years his followers claimed that the famed Bacchanalian orgies of drinking and sex and violence afforded glimpses into these mysteries.

“As with mythology, so with modernity: some contemporary psychiatrists have begun to search for what lies beyond the Orphic Gate in the human brain. No doubt you’ve heard the adage that we use a mere five percent of our mental capacity. This measure refers not so much to size as to functionality—mind as opposed to brain. It’s my theory that the remaining ninety-five percent hides behind the gate, and if we can somehow find a way to open it, a universe of possibility will become available to us. Memories would reappear in crystalline detail. The unrepeatable sensation of our first coital orgasm, say, or the ambrosial taste of mother’s milk. Our physical environment would acquire extra dimensions of sight and sound and smell and touch. Who knows, perhaps we might discover an ethereal bond linking all consciousnesses—the mental equivalent of a radio wave, needing only a receiver tuned to the right frequency to allow for instantaneous communication a thousand times clearer than mere words and gestures could ever convey.”

It took BC a moment to catch up to the end of the doctor’s speech—he stumbled on the term “coital orgasm,” then fell flat on “mother’s milk”—but when he thought he’d figured out what Leary was describing, he said, “Pardon me, Doctor. I was under the impression that your research was geared toward the creation of a—” He couldn’t bring himself to say “Manchurian candidate” out loud. “It sounds to me as though you’re referring to tele—tele—”

BC’s voice broke off, though his mouth hung open.

“Telepathy,” the doctor said, staring quizzically at BC’s slack-jawed face. “And yes, Agent, ah, what did you say your name—”

“Querrey,” BC said, completely forgetting the name he’d used a moment ago. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed audibly.

“Agent Querrey? Are you all right?”

“That depends. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

The doctor looked only at BC.

“Tell me.”

“The trees,” BC whispered.

“What about the trees?”

“They’re … rippling.”

For the trunks of the pines had begun undulating like strands of seaweed. A small movement, to be sure, only a few inches in either direction, and so lugubrious that BC could almost hear the grain splintering along its fibrous length. A small, slow movement, almost imperceptible. But still. Trees. Rippling.

The light was completely gone now. Or, rather, the shadows had thickened until the quivering forest was midnight dark. The only light came from—

Came from—

BC rubbed his eyes, or thought he did. He wasn’t sure if his arms had moved. At any rate, the building that had materialized in front of him was still there.

Bulky chimneys bookmarked the tiny structure; jagged fretwork gleamed like broken teeth against the shingles. Railings and balusters appeared to have been constructed from sinuous lengths of grapevine, and they slithered and danced around the porch like bark-covered lightning. In the bright light of day, the little building would have been nothing more than an overgrown dollhouse or gingerbread cottage. But lit only by daggers of moonlight—where had the sun gone?—it was a nightmare vision, full of dark omen.

A light flickered behind the curtained windows, a match-strike that quickly flared into lantern brightness. It bounced from one end of the house to the other like a goldfish leaping between fishbowls or a burning tennis ball hurtling from racket to racket or barrels of flaming oil launched by a pair of trebuchets from either side of an ancient city wall. The metaphors seemed to bloom in BC’s mind of their own accord (along with words like “trebuchet,” which he was sure he’d never heard before). With each volley the glow gained intensity—insanity—until it was nothing less than the superpowers hurling nuclear annihilation across the vastness of oceans. BC almost expected to hear screams coming from the cottage. He almost wanted to scream himself.

Suddenly a pillar of light filled the doorway and exploded over the porch. At first it was just fire. Then, impossibly, features came into focus. Arms, legs, a head. Slitted eyes and open mouth, hair flaming like a Klansman’s torch. A witch? No. A boy. A burning boy.

No: a boy made of fire.

Like all seraphim, it was terrifying in its beauty and power. Something that didn’t belong in the material world and shouldn’t be seen with mortal eyes. Something that would kill you the way you might kill an ant—thoughtlessly, because it attached no importance to your existence, or heedlessly, because it didn’t even see you.

BC’s muscles tensed and twitched. He had seconds to decide: should he run, or welcome whatever message the boy brought? But was it attacking him, or merely fleeing the house? Carrying the truth, or carrying his death? A demon, or—please, God let it be or—an angel? He wanted to run, but terror held him rooted to his spot.

Somewhere far away from him, Timothy Leary was speaking to someone who wasn’t quite there.

“You see why we thought this one was special.”