Fifteen Years before the Accident
MAY 1968
In Jude’s mind, looking back, the basement was not an omen but a gift. True, the stairs descending into it were splintered and creaky, one good stomp away from collapse; and the ancient shoebox windows gathered more light than they dispensed; and the flickering shadows always seemed to follow her, coalescing into a single roving cloud right behind her shoulder, vanishing the moment she turned around. But the basement was where their father lived when he was not executing the unenviable task of being married to their mother. It was where he invented things—momentous things, brilliant things, incredibly foolish and dumb things—that seemed like portals to an imaginary world, one far away from the crying and screaming and shattering of glass that sometimes happened upstairs. It was where Jude and Kat made the first memory that they were able to keep: their father opening his engraving machine and proclaiming: “Voila! I’ve created necklaces spelling your names, just so you never forget who’s who.” It was where their father pulled them aside and told them something that, at age seven, seemed at once a grand and fanciful conspiracy and a solemn promise that their mother would never win. “She thinks she is shutting us in,” he said in the soaring cadence of a preacher. “But no, my darling girls! She is wrong, so very wrong, because we are shutting her out.”
And Jude and Kat laughed and agreed. It was still so easy to feel safe.
People had gathered upstairs, strange people laughing in nervous and unnerving ways—their mother the loudest among them—but the hum and click of their father’s newest invention pushed that laughter into the background. “Check this out, girls,” their father said. Kat took Jude’s hand and led her toward a boxy contraption with blinking lights and spinning reels. “Come closer,” he beckoned, his thin, veiny fingers making hooks in the air. Behind his glasses, his eyes were bright and kind and vaguely bulging, the eyes of someone who lived in a perpetual state of surprise. Jude could hear the machine’s hum, feel the heat of its tangled wires, see an object that looked like a futuristic version of a human head.
“What is it?” Kat asked.
With slow, careful effort, their father lifted the head from its base. It was white and plastic, with a clear, vented visor across the front and a cluster of red buttons along the sides. “This, girls, is a Subliminal Helmet,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Jude asked.
He set it atop Jude’s head and gently pushed down. She swiveled her face inside of it, looking right and left.
“It means that it can help your brain to work the way you want it to. It flashes pictures in front of your eyes that send secret messages to your brain. It works magic on your brain without you even noticing it. It is called subliminal messaging. Can you girls repeat that word with me?”
“Sub-lim-mabble,” they said.
“Very good! Do you want to try?”
“Yes!” Kat shouted, and jumped up and down. “Let’s do all the buttons!”
Their father took Kat’s hand in his, placed his finger on top of hers, and guided her to push the buttons across Jude’s head.
“What do you see?” Kat asked. “Leltem!” Tell me.
The images appeared like fully developed photographs and lasted no longer than a second: a bottle inside of a circle bisected by a straight line; a bright yellow smiling face; a puppy nosing a ball; a pile of money; a man and a woman smiling and holding hands; a lush landscape beneath a pastel sky.
“A bottle, a smiley face, a doggy, money, a mom and dad, and a garden,” Jude reported.
Kat twirled in a circle and repeated her words.
“Very good, Jude,” their father said. “If you are feeling sad, it can show you pictures of things that would make you happy. If you are feeling angry, it can show you pictures of things that will make you calm. If you need to do something you don’t want to do, like your homework or listening to your mother”—and here he laughed, to show he was not entirely serious and that it was, at times, necessary to listen to their mother—“it can give you the little push to complete your tasks. If you are doing something that is bad for you, like too much drinking, it can help you stop. If you’re not doing enough of something good, like exercise, it can help you do more. Wear this for just an hour a day, and you’ll be a brand-new person.”
Jude liked this idea, but she did not trust it. She had questions. “What if it turns bad? What if it shows you wrong things on accident? What if it shows you a monster?”
Kat stopped spinning. In between the flashing pictures, through the visor, Jude could see her sister’s dark eyes fastened on her own. “Yes,” she said. “What if?”
In unison, they looked to their father. His own gaze had drifted away from the helmet, away from his daughters, away from anything or anyone present in the moment. He had turned his focus upward and somehow inward, as though studying a slide of his own brain. Jude watched his expression change from one of excitement to one of fear, and wondered what he had seen.