CHAPTER THREE

Oh, we were such geniuses. A company of smarty-pants. Mikala the chemistry wizard, Gil the tech brain, Edo the money man, and me—the neuroscientist with the brilliant idea that we could cure the Afghanistan of mental disorders.

The disease of schizophrenia was a quagmire, swallowing the careers of scientists of all stripes. The definition of what it was and wasn’t constantly shifted. Its causes were various and overlapping, with research pointing to everything from genetic mutations to socioeconomic status to amphetamine use … or all at the same time.

Whatever the causes, one effect showed up clearly on the MRIs: The brains of actively schizophrenic patients withered with each passing year. Frontal and temporal lobes shrank in volume, and the connections between the lobes became unreliable. The brain literally disintegrated. The illusion of a unified consciousness broke down; now when other parts of the brain spoke, the messages seemed to be coming from outside agents hovering menacingly just out of sight, whispering threats. My mother had fought this civil war for thirty years, and lost.

I’d had the idea for a drug that could trigger new growth in those withering lobes, a little sprout in the dying forest. Mikala was going to make it happen. We were as confident as marines.

But no drug, especially one that crosses the blood-brain barrier, can change just one thing. Unintended secondary effects abound. A drug for hypertension can become a treatment for erectile dysfunction. A hypothermia medicine can find new life in sex parties. And a chemical designed to grow neurons in damaged brains can destroy five lives in a single night.

Edo threw the party at Cité at the Lake Point Tower. A private room big enough for friends and family, surrounded by glass, Chicago lit up around us like an undersea kingdom. Kensington Inc. was buying us out. We were all going to be rich. True, Edo was already a billionaire, and we’d never approach his heights, but we were all going to be so much more wealthy than we’d ever been before. New Molecular Entity 110, the latest NME in a long string of disappointments (a hundred and nine, to be exact), was showing promise, and in the world of bioengineering start-ups, promises were bait, and a big fish had taken the line.

Mikala didn’t attend the restaurant, and we were all relieved. She was the only one of the partners who didn’t want to sell. Outvoted and angry, she’d told us we weren’t just wrong, we were fools. Not just greedy, but evil. She accused me of voting against her out of spite.

The marriage had come apart over the past year. However, until the buyout offer we had never argued, never yelled. We slept in the same bed, ate breakfast across from each other, drove together to the industrial park where Little Sprout’s labs were located, and worked in the same room, never more than twenty feet apart. We kept up our routine. Eventually I realized that it was the routine that was keeping us. The marriage had become a set of autonomic responses that let us absent ourselves without having to separate.

I told myself that Mikala exited first. She’d started working later hours, going in to the building without me. She no longer needed me for her work, and maybe, I realized, not at all. She’d always been smarter than I was, but now there was something new in her face, something like pity, as if she understood things I’d never comprehend. What wounded me most was her newfound calm. She was happy. Happier than she’d ever been when we depended on each other. I should have known when she began calling our product Numinous that she’d started using it. She’d found her god, and we mortals had stopped mattering to her.

The party at Cité stretched on, until the friends and spouses and parents went home and the hotel staff kicked us out of the glass room. The four of us—Edo, Gil, Rovil, and me—took the elevator down to the condo Edo had borrowed from equally rich friends. Edo, burly and towering over us all, was so drunk he kept skimming the walls of the corridor. Gil, who was a foot shorter than Edo but at least the same weight, seemed only a few drinks behind him. Rovil and I, the sober sherpas, guided them to the room.

It was sometime past 3 a.m. when Rovil said, “Guess who’s here?” Mikala had appeared, carrying a bottle of champagne, already opened. She wasn’t intoxicated—not with alcohol, anyway. She was wide awake, vibrating with energy.

Edo threw open his arms and cheered. Too drunk to realize how awkward the moment was. Edo and Rovil the only ones happy to see her.

“I came to apologize,” Mikala said.

Gil said, “You sure about that?”

“We made something great,” Mikala said. “It’s right to celebrate that.”

But only Mikala truly understood what we’d created. The rest of us knew only that NME 110 had passed the preclinical tests. The FDA had approved us to go forward with phase I trials, the “first-in-man” trials. Kensington would now finance the human testing, which could cost millions. Only then, we thought, would we find out if we’d created something that could change the lives of people, or only change the behavior of rats. The NME was a lottery ticket that Kensington was willing to pay for, one drug of thousands that went to phase I every year. Only a handful made it to phase II.

Mikala filled our glasses with her champagne. I told her no, I wasn’t drinking. Her eyes narrowed. Rovil said, “Well I am,” and held out his glass.

Edo roared with laughter. “If the Christian boy from India’s drinking, we’re all drinking.”

I held out my glass. What could one drink hurt?

I do not remember anything after that moment except fragments. Edo’s booming voice. Mikala touching my belly. A light so pure and white that it seemed to bore holes through my eyes to the back of my skull. And a knife.

I remembered staring at the blade. It was a big kitchen knife, and someone was prying my fingers from the handle. I don’t remember seeing the face of the person who took it from me. I felt the wood slipping out of my hand, and I did not want to let it go.

I lay in the hospital several days before the doctor told me about the others. Edo was weeping constantly. Gil was raving. Rovil couldn’t speak. And Mikala—she was in the morgue.

I wanted to die for my sins, but death was impossible now. I understood that my true self, this consciousness, was not located here, in this body, but woven into the fabric of all things. These lungs could stop breathing, this flesh could fall from my bones, but that had as little to do with me as the erosion of mountain ranges. Which is to say, it had everything to do with me.

I was entangled with all existence, stars and minds and particles all aspects of the same thing. As long as the universe existed, I had no choice but to exist with it. There was no escape, because there was nothing to escape from.

“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor told me. “I’m here to help you through this.” She placed a cool hand on my forehead. “Gloria in excelsis Deo.”

*   *   *

I’d sent Bobby out for a couple lattes, and by the time he returned he had lost his mind.

“They took me, Lyda!” He slapped the skin just below his neck, where he usually kept his treasure chest. “Just yanked me.”

“Slow down,” I said. It was way too early in the morning, the sun pinging through the slats like a ball-peen hammer. “Did they take your wallet, too?”

“What? No.”

“Then you couldn’t at least come back with some Goddamned coffee?”

“Be nice,” Dr. Gloria said. “The boy’s in despair.” My body ached from a night on Bobby’s couch.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Who took your … you?”

“Two guys. Mean guys.” His hands fluttered like pigeons. “I think they were terrorists.”

“Why would terrorists want your treasure chest?”

“I don’t know! They said, ‘If you want this back, tell Lyda Rose to talk to somebody named Feeza.’ Or maybe Fiza.”

“Uh-oh,” Dr. G said.

I said, “Bobby, think hard. Was the name Fayza?”

He pointed at me. “That’s it.”

Shit.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“And they mentioned me by name?”

“Yes! Now who is this guy?”

“It’s not a guy—it’s a woman. And she runs the Millies.”

“Oh.” Even Bobby had heard of the Millies.

*   *   *

On the way downtown to Millie home territory, Dr. G and I worked it out. Brandy must have passed the word on what we were looking for, and that word made its way up the supply chain to the Millies. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Millies ran a huge slice of the Toronto cannabis trade, and there was no reason they wouldn’t have branched into smart drugs. Fayza was one of those hyperentrepreneurs that make even hardcore capitalists nervous.

She and the Millies got their start in 2020 with microloans from a nonprofit that decided that charity begins at home. A dozen Afghan women, riding in on the third wave of immigration from the war zone after the Taliban reclaimed the homeland (again), formed a trust group and were given five hundred bucks apiece. They called themselves the Millionaires Club. The women set up a living room nail salon, a vegetable stand featuring bathtub-grown cardamom and saffron, a postal assistance business, and, in a metamove, a micro-microbank. Ten-buck loans, in a variety of currencies, transferrable to relatives back home.

The bank was Fayza’s idea. Utilizing her newly discovered talent for money, she began to convert other women in the neighborhood into business owners and set them up with accounts. She offered seminars on marketing, corporate strategy, and human resources (managing husbands). Then she went back to the women who ran the vegetable stand and the postal service, and explained the word “synergy.” Specifically:

Hydroponics + Shipping + Money laundering = Vast cash opportunity.

By 2025, the Millies controlled most of Ontario. They’d allied themselves with the pot farms out in the boondocks and facilitated shipments to the States, but the core of their business remained their locally grown, artisanal, organic weed, each bud glistening with enough THC to flip back your head like a Pez dispenser.

We parked the car on King Street, just inside the Afghan neighborhood. Bobby said, “I can hear them talking. I think they’ve got me under a blanket.”

The sidewalk was wet. The air smelled like an empty tuna can. Overhead, Dr. Gloria kept station between ground and gray sky. Shafts of sunlight perforated the cloud bank, which struck me as very beautiful.

“God is punching air holes,” I said.

Bobby looked up at the sky in alarm. “What? Why?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Settle.”

As soon as we walked onto Tyndall Avenue, the heart of the heart of the Millie empire, a passel of young kids ran past us flicking their pens at each other wand-style, casting spells and deducting hit points … and no doubt sending our pictures down the street to their moms and grandmothers. These free-range Harry Potters, I decided, were lookouts for the Millies.

A chubby girl jumped in front of us. “Fling me a dollar? Two dollar I can level up!”

“Kick it, kid.”

“Shopping, then? A little something from the grandmothers?”

“I’m good.”

The homes on Tyndall were tidy brick affairs, built in the 1970s, with neat lawns and midrange cars at the curb. Dr. Gloria landed gracefully in front of a house in the middle of the block.

Two kids in their twenties sat on the front steps, arguing with each other—in English. The boy in a nylon jacket, the girl wearing tight white jeans and a hot pink hijab.

I said, “I’m looking for Fayza.”

“I know,” the girl said.

I hid my surprise. First try and we’d found the headquarters? Dr. G said, “Divine providence.”

The girl nodded at Bobby. “He stays outside.”

“But I’m already in there!” Bobby said. “This is just my body!”

“Be cool, kid,” I said. “I’ll take care of this.”

He slumped to the sidewalk. Dr. Gloria patted me between the shoulder blades. “Here we go. Be polite.”

She didn’t have to remind me. Running a multimillion-dollar drug business—even a rural one—required a sociopathic outlook and a dick bigger than an ashwagandha tree. People who crossed Fayza and the Millies disappeared into the bay.

I walked up the steps and pushed through the wooden front door. The house was clean but lower middle class: twenty-year-old wallpaper, worn upholstery, pine chairs in the hallway. The air sharp with the smell of spices I couldn’t identify. In the living room, five or six old ladies, none of them younger than seventy-five, sat around a low coffee table, most of them holding old-style tablet computers on their laps. They looked like they’d stolen their clothing from a 1980s’ hip-hop crew: bright track suits, gold chains, spotless white gym shoes. Only the head scarves marked them as Muslim. They chattered at each other and tapped at the tablet screens. The grandmother closest to me glanced in my direction.

“Fayza?” I asked.

She turned back to her screen. And then I saw what she was looking at: a live picture of my silhouette, in some kind of X-ray mode. The key fob in my right front pocket glowed yellow.

Jesus, they had airport scanners? The damn thing had to be hidden behind the hideous wallpaper. I wasn’t sure what these old women would have done if I’d been carrying a weapon—bury me under a five-granny tackle?

The woman flicked her fingers at me in a gesture I took as permission to enter the living room. I skirted the circle of women and headed for the far doorway.

In the kitchen was an old man with a cloud beard, seemingly decades older than the ancients in the living room. He sat unmoving at the breakfast table, holding a fork and staring at a plate of dark meat and browned vegetables. He didn’t look up when I entered.

A woman stood at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window at the backyard. She wore a cobalt blue jacket with a wide black belt, black high-heeled boots, a gauzy black head scarf like an afterthought. The boots alone had to cost five grand.

“I so want those,” Dr. Gloria said.

The woman turned toward me. She was holding a cleaver. Dr. Gloria’s wings rustled in warning.

“Why don’t you have a phone like a normal person?” she asked me angrily.

“I mean to buy one soon,” I said—doing my best impersonation of a person who was not talking to a drug lord holding a gigantic blade. She was seventy, maybe seventy-five years old, with pale skin. But her face was made up, and the brown hair under the scarf showed aggressive highlights. “Put together,” as my mother used to say. Give me that in thirty years.

“My name’s Lyda Rose.”

“I know who you are.” She turned and put the cleaver on the wire dish rack. “If you don’t want me to use junkies to find you, join the twenty-first century.”

The old man still hadn’t moved, and neither had the plate. A battle of wills.

Fayza walked to the back door and said, “Come this way.”

I hesitated. My only backup was a make-believe angel and a brain-damaged kid who believed that his soul lived in a plastic box. I suspected that if I left this house, no one would find me.

Fayza looked back at me. “I want to show you my garden.”

“Garden,” however, was too gentle a word: It was a horticultural brothel. The yard stretched beyond the boundaries of the lot, creating a lush, shared park that ran the length of the block. Every flower and fern seemed improbably voluptuous, especially for this time of year. Naked and half-dressed statues watched coyly from behind the trees.

“It’s a lot to take in,” I said.

Fayza led me past a structure that was technically a gazebo, in the same way that a five-layer wedding cake was technically a dessert. She was heading for the back porch of the house across the way. A young Afghan man in a red hoodie held the door open for us.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” Fayza said. “They’re waiting inside.”

I held up a hand. “Fayza, please…”

She turned, frowned. “What is the matter with you?”

My brain chattered like a playing card in a bicycle wheel. Had I already pissed off the drug lord? Who was waiting in that house? And would I get out there alive? I had left the House of the Grannies, crossed through the Valley of the Statuary, and was being led into the Tomb of the Unknown Hoodie.

Jesus Christ I wish I’d taken something before coming here. Screw the pellet in my arm.

“You don’t need any of that,” Gloria said. “You have me.”

*   *   *

The young man on the couch was skinny and black with an Abe Lincoln beard. He was dressed in layers like a street kid, but his clothes were clean and his black trainers were spotless. So, either new to the street, or on his way off it. I bet on the latter.

He nodded at me with great solemnity, and Fayza said, “You know each other?”

“Never seen him before,” I said truthfully. We were in a basement rec room outfitted with cheap carpet, Arabic movie posters under glass, and chrome furniture. A terrible place to die, in my opinion. “Who is he?”

“Nobody,” the boy said matter-of-factly.

“His name is Luke,” Fayza said. “He’s an addict.”

Gloria bent to look more closely at the man’s eyes. “The pupils are slightly dilated,” she said. “Though that could be from the excitement of being trapped in a drug lord’s basement.”

“What’s he on?” I asked.

Luke looked surprised. “Nothing.”

Fayza said, “A month ago, he was one of my most faithful customers. Not only marijuana, but a variety of pharmaceuticals. Then he stopped cold.”

Dr. G said, “Good for you, Luke.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Fayza said. “Six other customers, some of them his acquaintances, have stopped purchasing from my dealers. Usually that means they’re dead or in jail, but these people are still in the city. None of them is buying from me.”

“Six people, that’s not so bad,” I said.

The boy in the hoodie looked at me in alarm.

Fayza said, “Don’t tell me my business.”

“I would never do that,” I said. With sincerity.

“Luke and the others have moved on to another product.”

“Which one?”

“I thought you could tell me,” Fayza said. “You’re the neuroscientist.”

I froze for a moment, trying to figure out what Bobby had told her. But of course she didn’t need Bobby. Anyone in Fayza’s position would have access to hot and cold running infostream.

The basics were free to everyone: my entire résumé from elementary school to PhD, the well-documented debacle at Little Sprout, my arrests. I’d been told by a certain paranoid inmate of the NAT that with a little cash, my entire online history could be downloaded as well. Fayza probably knew my every credit transaction, social media post, and geolocation ping going back decades. I normally didn’t trust paranoids, but I made an exception in Ollie’s case.

“What do they call the drug?” I asked.

“They don’t call it anything,” she said. “They think it’s the Holy Spirit.”

“If you just open your heart,” Luke said, “you’d understand.”

I squinted at him. Was he seeing his own angel right now? Or did his God take the form of, say, a blob of light in his peripheral vision?

“You ever hear of the Numinous, Luke?”

He went still, trying to give away nothing, which gave away everything.

“Yee-up,” Dr. Gloria said.

“How about Francine Selwig?” I asked.

“Frannie? Is she okay?” Luke said, genuinely worried.

“Who is this Francine person?” Fayza asked.

“Someone else who took a drug like Luke’s,” I said. “She killed herself.”

“What?” Luke said. His surface calm cracked. “I can’t believe she’d, she’d…”

“She was in withdrawal,” I said. “She’d been cut off from whatever she was getting at the church.”

Fayza said, “The Hologram Church.”

Luke looked hurt. “The Church of the Hologrammatic God is—”

“The stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” I said. “What were they giving you, Luke?”

He shook his head. “It’s not a drug. I keep telling you that.”

“Then what is it?”

His eyes flicked to the left. Consulting his higher power? Then he looked me in the eye and said, “It’s the word of God.”

Time for a new tactic. “Tell me about God,” I said. “Is he here now?”

He frowned at me. “God is everywhere. That’s pretty basic.”

“But you can see him. What does he look like?”

That eye flick again. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. “He’s more of a feeling. Watching over me.” He brightened. “I built something to portray my feelings for him. If you come to the church—”

“Right, and this feeling—it gets stronger after each church service?”

He hesitated, then said, “Every time.”

Dr. Gloria said, “This is like a Turing test for religion. So far, everything he’s said would apply to anyone going to a prayer meeting.”

Except he’d recognized the word “numinous.” I said to Fayza, “We’re not going to get anywhere this way.”

Fayza nodded. “We’ve been going around and around for hours,” Fayza said. “I can’t tell if he’s a very good liar or simply an idiot who doesn’t know what’s happened to him.”

“Have you considered that he really did just find God?”

“I might have considered that, before I heard you were looking for a drug with exactly these symptoms. Before I learned that such a drug had already been invented.”

The infostream again. No use hiding anything about Little Sprout, or NME 110. “That never left the lab,” I said. “It never got to testing, much less market.”

“No one’s marketing this, either,” Fayza said. “As far as I know, they’re giving it away for free. You can see how this would greatly fuck with my business model.” She stared at me as if it were my fault.

“Look, I’d like to help, but I don’t see how I can—”

“Bring me a sample of this drug. Confirm for me what it is. Luke will take you to this church.” She nodded to the Afghan kid. “Hootan will go with you.”

The kid in the hoodie smiled at me.

“That’s okay,” I said. I wanted no part in whatever gangland enforcer thing Hootan represented. “I’ll do it alone.”

Fayza turned to me, her gaze as impersonal as a gun barrel.

“Or he can come,” I said. “Either way.”

Dr. Gloria rustled her wings, getting my attention, and nodded at Fayza.

“Oh, right,” I said. “My friend, Bobby. He was wearing something your men took.”

Fayza dipped into the pocket of her jacket, withdrew the plastic treasure chest on its leather thong. She held it in her hand, and for a moment I thought she was going to open it, and Bobby’s mind would fly around the room like Tinkerbell.

She handed it to me, as well as a second object—a low-tech flip phone.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got a pen.”

“You will call me on this one,” she said. “Keep in touch.”

*   *   *

Hootan led me, Dr. Gloria, and Luke the black Abe Lincoln back to Fayza’s house on Tyndall Avenue. Bobby was waiting for us, pacing frantically, while the young Afghan couple ignored him. I tossed the chest toward Bobby. He screeched in panic to see it airborne, then caught it and touched it to his lips. Then he started thanking me, practically pawing me. Crazy people are tedious.

“Go back to the apartment,” I told him. “I’ll meet you there later, okay?”

“Later, right, yes,” Bobby said. Too relieved to be wondering what I was doing with these two new strangers.

Hootan said his car was down the block. He walked ahead of us, and Luke touched my elbow. His lips were pursed, a dam holding back turbulent emotion. “Thank you,” he said. “I knew when you walked into the room that we were supposed to meet today.”

I doubted that. “So how far away is this church, Luke?”

“It’s close,” he said. “And you’re going to love Pastor Rudy.”