HE HATED DOCTORS and doctors’ offices and hospitals. He couldn’t stand being asked to undress, or feeling a paper gown against his skin, or knowing he’d be touched with impersonal, efficient hands. His mum had died in hospital. His dad, too, an ocean later. The slimy guy who’d photographed him at age thirteen, Floyd, had divined this revulsion somehow. He’d worn a stethoscope around his neck while he took the shots of Linus, posed half-naked on the brown, carpeted podium. The hidden tension was what gave the photos their power, Floyd had said.
Sweating in his suit, Linus sat in the waiting room of the top eye surgeon in the country and tried not to think about the past. To look at his eye, they weren’t going to make him undress, that was for sure. He could keep it together. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He wasn’t subject to Floyd’s sick power.
He couldn’t live with a camera lens in his eye anymore. He couldn’t have Berg spying on every tiny, intimate detail of his life. His gut tensed with hunger. He hadn’t been able to eat since he’d found out his eye belonged to Berg, and no matter how much he faked his normal confidence, he was shaking and fizzing inside like a faulty firecracker that spun around on the street and never fizzled out.
If Rosie were here with him, he could calm down, but that wasn’t realistic. If she would just return his calls, he would quit wanting to rip her apart. How many times could she break his heart?
A teenage girl and her father looked his way and whispered to each other. They recognized him, no doubt, but he hoped they’d stop at the friendly, knowing smiles and not approach to talk to him. He wore shades, and he had a patch over his left eye. If that wasn’t a big enough hint that he didn’t want to interact with the public, he didn’t know what was. Twenty other patients were waiting as well. The TV beside the receptionist’s window was tuned to The Forge Show, low volume, and even though he didn’t watch it, he could feel the light of it washing over him personally like a punishing, scalding X-ray.
The inner door opened, and the famous doctor herself leaned out. Dr. Keane’s long nose and silver hair matched the photos he’d seen. Her dangling blue earrings were a surprise.
“Mr. Pitts?” she asked, glancing up from the clipboard she held. Her eyebrows lifted as her gaze settled on him. “Won’t you come in?”
As Linus rose, the girl whispered audibly to her father, “See? I told you.”
Linus expected to face an examination room, but instead, the doctor led him to a small office with wall-to-wall diplomas and awards. A snow globe rested on the corner of a shiny mahogany desk, and he relaxed slightly at the whimsical object. Inside, a pair of tiny skaters were poised on a glassy pond. When she gestured him toward a leather armchair, he was too restless to sit.
The doctor crossed her arms in her crisp white coat. She was nearly as tall as he was, meeting his gaze straight on and patiently, as if she didn’t have a crammed schedule.
“This is a pleasure,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed following your career, but I never expected to meet you in person.”
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” Linus said.
“Not at all. What can I do for you?”
“It’s of a confidential nature.”
“Of course.”
“I have a camera lens in my left eye,” he said, pointing to his patch. “It was put in while I worked at Forge, and I didn’t know about it until Saturday. I called you as soon as I could.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You didn’t consent to the camera?”
“I was never even asked about it. The cook at Forge hit me in the eye, and I couldn’t see, so I went to the infirmary,” he said. “The doctor there told me I had a hyphema. She said she had a procedure to make it clear, and she worked on me for maybe half an hour. Not long. She put me out while she did it. Then I wore a patch afterward for twenty-four hours, but that was it. When I took the patch off, I could see again. Things were a little bright, but the doctor had told me to expect that, so I didn’t think anything about it.”
“You want me to testify? Is that it? What you’ve described is a serious breach of ethics,” the doctor said.
“I want you to get it out,” Linus said.
She took a penlight out of her pocket and gestured toward his eye. “May I?”
He stiffened. “What? Right here?”
“We can move to an examination room if you prefer,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Here’s fine.”
She tilted her face, smiling oddly, as if she were reading exactly how nervous he was.
“It’ll only take a minute,” she said. “I’ll need you to take off your glasses and your patch. Here. Hold this for me.”
She passed him the snow globe, which was cool and heavy in his hand. The glass was so smooth it was almost oily, but it felt good, too. Calming. He gave it a tilt, and the snow drifted around the skaters. When the doctor smiled, he set aside his sunglasses and his patch. Then he held the snow globe in both hands and offered her his face. Lightly, she pressed her cool thumb and forefinger around his left eye, stretching wide his eyelid.
“Look up?” she said. “Now down. To the left? Now the right.”
Her light beamed into him, creating a blind, silent hollow. He concentrated on the cool sphere of glass in his hands until she lowered the light away, leaving a ghost glare behind. She examined his right eye, too, and then dropped her pen back in her breast pocket.
“All done,” she said. “You were right. You have a camera in your eye.”
Linus felt an ugly twist of vindication, and then a new shot of anger. He couldn’t help wondering if Berg was watching this very scene.
“Have you seen these before?” he asked.
“Yes. Quite a few times. I’ve installed a couple dozen, usually for the military, but in a few civilians, too,” she said. “It can be very stressful for people psychologically, like an invasion. This is the first time I’ve heard of anyone having a camera inserted against his will, however. Normally, you’d carry a receiver on your person to relay the signal, but I don’t suppose you had that?”
“No.”
“It could have been bugged into your phone easily enough,” she said. “Or while you were at Forge, you could have had any number of receivers in your environment. Do you understand how the camera works?”
“Not exactly.”
She held out her hand for the snow globe. Linus turned it over to loosen the snow once more before he gave it back. She set it on the desk and pulled over a pad of paper. She drew a little diagram with an eyeball and a couple of boxes and arrows.
“The camera in your eye has a lens that was inserted between your cornea and your iris,” she said. “It collects your visual data. It also has a tiny, built-in, wireless transmitter, which sends a signal to a nearby receiver, usually carried on your body. That receiver, in turn, powers up the signal and passes it along to whoever’s watching.”
“Is the camera always on?” he asked.
“The camera is, but that doesn’t mean you’re always transmitting data,” she said. “If you’re out of range of a receiver, the camera can stockpile data until you’re back in range and send it then, in a batch.”
At best, then, some of his visions were delayed, but Berg still saw everything eventually. Even if Berg hadn’t bugged Linus’s cell phone, he had certainly planted a receiver somewhere in Otis’s house, where Linus went back often to visit. Possibly a receiver was in Linus’s bedroom. He searched his room often enough for camera lenses, but he’d never thought to look for a small box that could be out of sight.
That scene in his bed with Rosie, the one that Berg had a clip of, could have been watched live. Linus seethed. No wonder Rosie didn’t want to be with him. All of their most private moments together had had a voyeur along. He could practically feel Berg smirking. Sick old bastard.
“How long have you had this? Dr. Keane asked kindly.
Linus glanced up. “Months,” he said. “Since last September.”
She made a quick grimace. “Are you sure you don’t want to sue? You’d have quite a case.”
“I just want it out,” he said.
She leaned back against her desk and crossed her arms again. “The good news is, I can take it out for you. The bad news is, removing it is far more complicated than putting it in, and I’m booked solid for the next six months. I could refer you to a colleague who might be able to help you sooner, but probably not by much.”
His heart sank. He couldn’t face Rosie again with the camera still in.
When he didn’t reply, the doctor moved around to the back of her desk and skimmed a finger over her computer pad. “I can fit you in on September fourteenth, eight a.m. That’s a Wednesday. Does that work for you?”
He couldn’t wait half a year.
“Isn’t there anything sooner? Please?” he said. “I can pay double. Triple.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s my first available date.”
He refused to accept this. There had to be a way.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’d be better off half blind. Can’t you fry the sucker with a laser or something?”
The doctor considered him for a long moment. “There is one other option. I don’t recommend it.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I could affix a black membrane over your pupil, for now. It would meld to the surface of your eye and block your vision. You’d be completely blind in that eye.”
Linus felt the first bit of hope he’d had in days.
“Would it show much?” he asked.
“It would to anyone looking carefully,” she said. “Your pupil would appear to be always the same size, not changing with brightness. But it’s reversible. When you come back six months from now, I can give you a cornea transplant and a new lens. You’ll be back to normal.”
That was what he’d been longing to hear. “When can you do this?”
She looked back at her calendar and shook her head. “I can try to squeeze you in Friday. That’ll give you a little time to think it over.”
“I don’t need any time,” he said.
“Nevertheless,” she said, coming back around her desk and reaching past him for the door. “Think it over.”