The Clarity Read online

  I’m getting worse, Janice thought. Only a few years before Dr. Song’s gonna have to sleep me like the others. Wonder what that’s like, living in a dream like some fairy-tale princess until Prince Science comes along to fix you.

  For a moment, just between heartbeats, Janice saw a man reflected in the mirror. He was tall and white. His head was shaved and he wore a salt-and-pepper beard. Janice could see a scar on his forehead. His aquiline nose had been broken sometime in the past and it bent slightly to the right.

  Janice closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  When she opened them, the man was gone.

  Janice pulled out a medicine pack from the cabinet over the sink. Then she punched two yellow-and-white capsules stamped METROCHIME from their protective silver blisters and popped them into her mouth. She’d been taking these drugs for seventeen years and they went down easy. Drugs on board, she crouched and reached behind the toilet, and pulled out a plastic bag bound with duct tape to the underside of the toilet bowl. Inside was a Glock 17—9 mm. Janice ejected the magazine, counted the bullets, and then reloaded it, all in one smooth motion.

  Nine seconds. You’re getting rusty, girl.

  Rusty. Worn. Built to degrade. Staring down at the gun in her hand, Janice considered what it would be like when the capsules stopped working. When Dr. Song gave her that permanent IV and put her adrift into her own mental abyss. Before she even knew what she was doing, Janice put the muzzle of the Glock in her mouth. It tasted like old silverware. She imagined the contents of her head spattering Pollock-style on the green tile of the bathroom floor. But the thought passed quickly. If nothing worked, if the voices got to be too loud, if Ashanique was lost or Dr. Song found, there would be time enough to end it quickly. Always disappointed in her pessimism, Janice forced herself to be positive: You’re acting a fool. Let the medicine work. Let it do its job, Janice told herself. Ashanique has the solution. You know in your heart of hearts that she does.

  Janice took the gun from her mouth and wiped her lips.

  It’s so early. You’re just stressed and losing your cool.

  Can’t lose your cool. Can’t ever lose it like that again.

  Janice stood and tucked the Glock into the waistband of her sweats.

  Looking back at her reflection, she flashed a toothy smile.

  “Let’s go, Fifty-One. You can do this.”

  4

  11:43 A.M.

  NOVEMBER 13, 2018

  UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  THE LECTURE HALL was full.

  Looking out over the faces of the two-hundred-plus undergrads scribbling in their notebooks, Matilda recognized only a handful. They were two months into the semester and most of the kids hadn’t yet attended a lecture.

  But they were certainly there for hers.

  Of course they are, Matilda thought.

  She knew the reality of it: the undergrads weren’t there for her speaking skills or even to hear her hypotheses. Matilda wasn’t like her mentor, Dr. Clark Liptak. She could never push away the lectern and wade up into the seats like a rock star. No, the coeds weren’t crowding the seats to catch a glimpse of the department’s hottest professor. Or be razzle-dazzled by academicspeak. They didn’t want to hear her lecture on the atomic correlate of memory or synaptic plasticity. They were sitting in the half-light, sharpened pencils at the ready, recording apps open on their phones, because of the topic. It was the message that brought them, hardly the messenger.

  “How many people in this room believe in life after death?”

  Half the hands went up.

  Matilda had done this lecture fifteen times in the preceding two years. And every time, the number of students who believed in the hereafter decreased.

  Guess what, Maddie, another five lectures and it’ll just be the homeschooled kids at the front of the hall with their hands up.

  “Ghosts?”

  Half the hands stayed raised. The biggest showing she’d seen.

  Most of the undergrads, Matilda found, rejected their parents’ clouds-and-sunshine heaven but went whole hog on ghosts. She chalked that up to pop culture. All the ghost-hunter reality shows, the now near ubiquity of Halloween. If she were a sociologist, she’d have called it trading one fable for another.

  “How about reincarnation? The rebirth of the soul in a different body?”

  Only six kids kept their hands up.

  “Well, today we’re going to talk about past lives,” Matilda dived in. “About what that term means, why we want to believe in past-life regression therapy, and the pitfalls of hypnotism.”

  Matilda dimmed the lights and put up the first slide.

  It was a droll New Yorker cartoon she’d inherited from her undergrad adviser, a badly cropped and overpixelated image of two men sitting at a desk across from each other. The bubble over one guy read, “I’m here to learn more about reincarnation.” The other guy’s bubble read, “Welcome back!”

  The slide got a few chuckles.

  “Belief in reincarnation is as old as civilization itself. Even though my esteemed colleagues in the physics department two doors over tell me that time doesn’t actually exist, everything we do is dependent on it. We are creatures of time. Locked into seasons, driven by cycles. The clock rules everything we do, from the minute we’re born to that final second before we die. As humans, we’re always looking to rise above nature. Bust out of our earthly bonds. To break the stranglehold time has over us? That’d be the ultimate.”

  The room was silent, focused.

  The undergrads weren’t scribbling in their notepads. They were leaning forward, breathing slowed, fixated. Everyone—from the freshman with the broken leg to the sophomore with the pierced eyebrows—was tractor-beamed on slides, ratcheted in on Matilda’s voice. Unlike Early American English Literature, where they had to dissect a poem by a recluse holed up by an algae-choked pond, this was the kind of lecture the students were happy their parents were paying for.

  Another slide flashed on the screen:

  New Age artwork of an oak tree spinning in outer space.

  Cheeseball, Matilda thought, but effective.

  “The idea that we’re not the end of a line but a continuum is a universal one. Every human culture, throughout history, has built itself on the foundations of the cultures that came before it. Civilizations don’t just spring up ex nihilo, out of nothing. They are carried forward. They are built with our grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ bricks. That’s poetic, but you get what I mean. We are nothing without our pasts.”

  The next slide popped up.

  In it, a 1950s-styled woman reclined on a couch. She had black hair cut short and her eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep.

  She’d been hypnotized.

  Matilda said, “This is Virginia, a housewife from just down the road. In the midfifties she began recalling the past life of a nineteenth-century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy. Her case was one of the very first modern past-life cases. It’s a benchmark, one that came to define thousands and thousands of others. And, yes, she is hypnotized in this picture.”

  The slides continued to click by.

  Photo after photo, face after face.

  Normal people. Old and young, black and white. Matilda scrolled through their stories as she rattled off their names. “This woman recalled a past life as the pharaoh’s daughter. . . . This man was the reincarnation of a decorated World War Two fighter pilot. . . . She was once a general in the War between the States. . . . All of them recalled the lives of people they could not possibly have been related to. You’ll be surprised to learn they all shared one thing in common: a therapist. A therapist consciously, or more often unconsciously, caught up in his or her patient’s stories.”

  There was an audible sigh from the audience.

  Already, she was letting them down.

  “But, of course, it’s not just that the therapist is primed to find past lives in a subject. Turns out, people who
most often claim to have past-life memories also believe in reincarnation. They want the memories. They want to feel as though there’s something bigger than themselves, that they are more important that just a sales clerk or a lawyer.”

  She went on. Slide after slide, point after point. Matilda never lost sight of her goal: These undergrads weren’t going to walk away well versed about the Bloxham tapes or with deep knowledge in neurolinguistic programming. But they would become better critical thinkers. Matilda’s job, the real reason she was standing at the podium, was to shake these kids’ foundations just enough to ensure they walked out of the room a little dazed. And she was feeling it; she was in the zone. On track to have her best lecture yet.

  Until the door at the back of the hall opened and Clark slipped inside.

  God damn it.

  He stood against the wall, hands folded neatly behind his back. Matilda noticed he was wearing the suit she made the mistake of telling him he looked really sexy in. She knew it would never come off after that. Her mistake. He was even growing out his beard. She had to admit it looked good and added to his already distinguished, late-forties, in-his-academic-prime air, the same air that had attracted her to him eighteen months ago.

  “That’s why,” Matilda continued, distracted, “we often find that the past lives people claim to recall are typically grandiose. No one wants to have the past-life memories of a Russian peasant or a Neolithic hunter. They want the memories of kings and queens. Of powerful people, respected people they would rather be like. Who would you rather have a conversation with? The ghost of Einstein or the sad specter of some failed businessman?”

  “If it was real . . .”

  Matilda looked up to see one of her sophomores, the boy from Wisconsin who stayed late after every class with reams of questions, the same one always looking to poke holes in her theories. He stood and finished.

  “. . . then what would that mean for your chemistry research? If there’s evidence of some sort of afterlife, then maybe memory isn’t a biochemical thing. Maybe it’s a spiritual thing and that’s why people remember past lives? You know, like people have kind of been saying for thousands and thousands of years.”

  “I, uh . . .”

  And, just like that, Matilda was thrown off.

  It actually wasn’t because of the Wisconsin kid’s question (really, it was more of an emotivistic statement) or his overconfident tone. It was the memory that flashed into Matilda’s head. The memory she never realized she’d had.

  For a split second, Matilda saw her mother, Lucy, in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a BLT stacked high with bacon and heirloom tomatoes. Matilda had been in high school at the time, and Lucy was showing the first signs of the neural degeneration that would slowly take her mind apart, brain cell by brain cell. In her memory, Matilda sat on the kitchen counter, putting the utensils Lucy handed her into the sink. Lucy laughed to herself and said, staring down at the sandwiches, “What if one day scientists prove that being spiritual is just another mental illness? What if they make a pill to treat it?” The comment came out of the blue. Lucy hadn’t attended church since she was six and lived in Iowa. Matilda asked her mother what she meant, but Lucy just shook her head and suggested she was just getting old.

  She was forty-three at the time.

  Flashing back to the classroom, Matilda stared out at her students but didn’t see them. She pulled a Post-it Note from her purse and scribbled a few shorthand notes about the memory. As she did this, she distractedly tried to wrap up the lecture.

  “I think that question is . . . not worth answering actually. It presupposes that this is a . . . Okay, listen, I have sat in on hundreds of past-life regression-therapy sessions. I’ve personally done in-depth interviews with seventy-five people who claimed to have vivid memories from a past life. I have yet to see a convincing case. Regardless of mechanism, be it spiritual or chemical, the fact remains that our memories end when we end.”

  Tucking the Post-it into her purse, Matilda looked up to see Clark wink.

  5

  AN ELECTRONIC CHIME broke the tension.

  The students were up and out of their seats and choking the stairs before Matilda had time to mention that the next week they’d be discussing operant conditioning. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail. Two weeks ago she’d dyed it blue. The class got a kick out of seeing it, and her graduate students seemed to think it spoke to her rebellious nature inside the institution. They considered Matilda that professor, the one willing to rock the boat and contemplate outsider ideas. Well, they’d find out soon enough that when it came to science, she was as much a traditionalist as the others. She just did things with a little more color, a little more verve. As Matilda gathered up her papers, Clark walked over and pecked her cheek.

  That’s new, she thought. He must want something.

  “So how was it? Tell me honestly.”

  “Good,” Clark said. “You have their attention, that’s clear.”

  “I threw in the Barnum-effect thing last minute. Not sure it added much.”

  “It didn’t.”

  Barely hiding her frustration, Matilda stuffed her papers in her messenger bag. They went in wonky and got caught in the zipper, but she didn’t have the patience to sort them out. Clark got the hint. Thinking he knew exactly what to say, he leaned in and whispered, “You look stunning.”

  “That’s great, but I’m actually going for professional.”

  “You’re young. Professional is dull. Come on.”

  Clark put his hand on Matilda’s shoulder, gave it a soft squeeze.

  They’d been having sex for ten months. It began the way these sorts of affairs always did, with naïveté traipsing into the darkened woods of hedonism. She’d caught Clark’s eye during one of his infamous subjective validation lectures, infamous because he’d always end them with a demonstration. A sacrifice. He’d pull some poor grad student up onstage and break them down—tear apart all their core beliefs; leave them psychologically shrunken and traumatized. The audience ate it up. And after the psychological bruising had worn off, the victim always became a true believer. Always. A week after the lecture, Matilda stopped by Clark’s office in a skirt shorter than she normally wore, with her hair up, and asked him about a 1998 paper he’d written on the Dark Triad of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. His eyes wandered. She was there to impress.

  It worked.

  Forty weeks, two weekend getaways, and six crying jags later, here they were—the most open secret in the psychology department. The sex was good, but his lies were terrible. It amazed her that a man so practiced in how the mind works wouldn’t be able to juggle his own deceptions.

  Matilda hated being the other woman. Hated the hot swell of shame she felt when she caught a glance of the family photos on Clark’s desk. No matter how lifeless, how unloving his marriage was—and he insisted it was “at the organ-donation stage”—the idea that she was breaking something, even something already broken, was unsettling. Still, she’d never felt so enjoyed before. For Clark, this affair with Matilda was like the first full meal he’d had in years.

  As they stepped out of the lecture hall, into the teeming hallways, Clark scratched at his chin. It was a familiar nervous affect, one of his blatant tells for when he shifted into passive-aggressive mode—his worst mode.

  “So I got a call yesterday I’d love for you to check out this afternoon.”

  “Let me guess, a parent calling about their daughter?”

  Clark said, “Yes, but not what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking she experimented with ’shrooms, had a nasty trip, wound up in a psych hold over at U.C. Med and her father is threatening to sue. Dean Gilovich wants you to mediate, do some of your patented angry-parent whispering?”

  Clark laughed and touched her hip. “That’s my sexy hate machine.”

  Matilda pushed his hand away. “Yuck. You know I hate that.”

  Clark apologized as they stoppe
d at an elevator bank.

  “Look,” he said, his voice a lower register to not-so-subtly communicate his displeasure at being reprimanded, “this is outside the U. It’s a favor for a friend. And, yes, by friend I mean someone who’s given very liberally to the campus and our program in particular.”

  “So another nutjob?”

  “I thought you were going for professional? The girl was in a car accident. She wasn’t drunk or anything. She’s a good kid. Got knocked out, concussion, the works, and woke up recalling her time aboard a merchant marine vessel at Incheon.”

  “You know traumatic brain injury stuff is unreliable. I can’t do anything with a case like that, Clark.”

  “Please. Just see her. For me.”

  “I still haven’t gotten through last quarter’s Gardner essays. There’s that proposal for the APA, and Teresa and I are still crunching numbers on the assisted-living study. Todd and I are heading over to the Marcy-Lansing Apartments this afternoon, and that always leads to . . . Anyway, just feels like every free hour between here and March is well accounted for.”

  The empty elevator arrived and as they stepped inside, Clark pulled Matilda close and crushed his lips against hers. She melted, even with his newly emboldened whiskers tickling her cheek, and his left hand clenching her ass.

  “First off,” Clark said, as he let her go and adjusted his tie, “it’d be doing me a huge favor. I have back-to-back meetings all week. Then there’s the whole Aspen deal on Saturday, and I was hoping to get a few runs in. Second, and most important—”

  “So it should have been first.”

  “I was building the dramatic tension. Anyway, despite your pooh-poohing, it’s right up your alley. You need more structural stuff in your work. Turn that chemist side of your brain loose on it. How about tomorrow morning we meet up early? I’ll bring coffee and doughnuts, we’ll meet at your office, and I’ll tell you everything there is to know. Then you can decide. But I think you’ll love it.”

  The elevator stopped. The doors slid open.