Scott stares into every plate glass window he passes, every mirror he can find. Swollen, his right eye hardly opens, and yellow creeps into the white, shot through with the red of burst blood vessels. Could he have done anything differently? He doesn’t know. He finds it hard to blame Terrell; he hasn’t been able to sort it out in the two days that have passed. The inside of his mouth’s all cut up, from being kicked into his teeth. He feels each tooth, testing them with his finger. None are loose. Maybe later today he’ll find a barber college, someone who can feather the sides of his hair right, so they come together in the back like the tail of a duck. The thought of it makes him feel better. Hopeful.
It’s morning, overcast and hot. As he walks to the hospital, the people he passes turn and look after him; they whisper to each other. His ribs are blue, black, and green, and his back feels as if it must look the same way. Working, making money, will help him feel like he’s moving forward, he hopes, making progress. He worries that he won’t be able to pass the physical for the new trial, that they’ll turn him away on appearance alone. Yet when he reaches the hospital, no one comments; they’re used to people coming into the lobby looking all sorts of ways.
Even Lisa Roberts hardly glances at him. Together, they rise in the elevator, and then she leads him down hallways, into a small room.
He sits on a padded chair with wheels on its legs; computers surround him, some on desks, some on wheeled carts. The fluorescent hospital lights that always make him sleepy hang above. Outside, in the hallway, stretchers roll and clang, voices blur. Lisa is getting things ready. She wears white running shoes over black tights; her dark skirt hangs halfway between the bend of her knees and her thick ankles. She places a white towel around his shoulders, then points behind him.
“All right,” she says.
“All right,” Scott says.
“The larger one will be more comfortable,” she says, “but the smaller one will give us a better connection.”
What look like two shower caps rest there, fit atop styrofoam heads. White plastic rings the size of lifesavers cover the caps, and thin, colored wires, intertwined, stretch from each one. The tips of the wires are gathered into a many-pronged plug. Lisa lifts the smaller cap. At her first touch, he pulls back a little, then recovers, holds himself steady. Closer, facing him, she takes hold of the cap above each of his ears and jerks it down. One side, then the other, then both at once. He gasps. His skull contracts. His eyes threaten to fall out.
“You’re not so talkative today,” she says.
“It hurts my face to talk,” he says.
“Someone sure got hold of you. I thought you were some kind of karate kid.”
“Right. That’s me.”
“I met someone who knows you,” she says. “Another subject. Man named Oliver?”
“No,” Scott says. “I mean I knew him once, but not anymore. I really don’t know him at all.”
“I usually don’t do this test,” she says. “I’m just filling in, today.”
“How’s your daughter?” he says.
Lisa Roberts stands up straight, stops fitting the cap on his head, and steps back.
“What do you know about my daughter?”
“Just remembered her picture in your office, that’s all. And your husband, with those sideburns of his. Man.”
“You see that cord,” Lisa says, pointing to a gray cable on the wall. “I pull on that and I get orderlies, security, right away. All kinds of people running toward us.”
“Whoa,” Scott says. “Whoa. Here I am, just passing the time, pleasant and friendly, you know, and you’re acting like I’m trying to latch onto you, some way. Come on, now—you and me, we’ve been through a lot together. You know I’m not like that. You know I’m dependable.”
Lisa doesn’t answer. She keeps adjusting the cap, pretending she didn’t say what she did. Talking nervously, she tells him how the test works, then explains how they can record the electrical activities of the brains of rats and guinea pigs, wires stuck right into their foreheads. Scott listens, thinking he’ll never let them put a wire inside him. He’s done plenty, though—the magnets, the flashing numbers, the faces—and he’ll do more. There’s still the sleep studies, or the cameras inside his body, or the stew with tracers in it, where they’d wave the wand over his stomach. He’s not afraid, he only wishes she wouldn’t compare the experiments to the ones they do on animals.
“This gel’s a little cold,” Lisa says, taking a tube off a shelf. “But it’s a good conductor.”
“All aboard,” Scott says. He feels the gel on his scalp, straight through his hair. “How long since you done this?”
“Electroencephalography?” she says.
That’s the only answer she gives. It’s hard to move his head, to see what she’s doing behind him. The air smells a little like Elmer’s glue.
“This isn’t dangerous at all?” he says.
“No. Not really.”
He sees her take the bundle of wires and plug them into another bundle, which stretches to the computer. The gel is hardening along his scalp, the cap gripping his head even more tightly now. Lisa keeps circling around him, squeezing the tube, making adjustments.
“Well,” he says, “since we met, you and me, I’ve done a lot of moving along since then, started some things developing. Friends, you know—a whole collection of people.”
Lisa bends down, looking at his head like a barber would, trying to get the sides even.
“You know,” he continues, “it’s more than just being familiar with people, too. I got other people’s problems I worry about, and they all look after me, too.”
“I thought you said talking hurt your face. You’re throwing off my adjustment, the way you’re moving your mouth.”
She shows him the grid of squares on the computer screen across the room; he squints his left eye to make it out. Each square flickers, between yellow and blue and pink. Once they’re dark blue, that shows the connection of the electrodes is solid.
“Then what?”
“We get a line in your arm, a tracer in your blood, and we’ll wheel you, along with all the computers you’re attached to, into that little room there, where you’ll do some tests.”
“Where I choose whether people’s faces are sad or happy or neither?”
“Maybe.”
“That gets harder the more you do it.”
“I’ll be right back,” Lisa Roberts says. “We have to wait for the connections to take hold.”
Left alone, Scott’s afraid he’ll fall asleep and his neck will slump and his head will hit something, that the cap will come loose. His neck is stiff. He can’t stand up with his head anchored like this, can’t stretch, can hardly move. He feels a little queasy, the electrodes heavy against his skull, the wires brushing the skin of his neck. Perhaps something is wrong with him, perhaps he’s being slowly electrocuted. He thinks of the magnetic fields they’d passed through his brain, and of the magnets he’d been given in grade school, when he was a child; in his mind, thoughts spin and turn toward one another, and memories. Some are attracted and join together; others are pushed away. He wills Lisa Roberts to return. At the drug companies’ trials, they’d pay him in full, let him out early, but he had to get really, really sick before that would happen. When he had thrown up, in bathrooms, watched by a monitor with a clipboard, when he was blinded by headaches, when he rocked back and forth on tile floors with his stomach twisted cold—all those times, he told himself he was feeling that way so others wouldn’t have to.
“Almost there,” Lisa says. He hadn’t heard her footsteps. “Perfect,” she says, pointing to the computer screen.
All the squares are deep purple. Scott is proud to see it. He decides not to say anything about his uneasiness, the pulses in his head, to see if he can make it through without stopping the test.
“Happy, sad, neutral,” he says. “I’m ready.”
“A few more electrodes. I’ll try to be gentle around the eye, here.”
“I got electricity in my face?”
“Oh, yes.” Lisa sticks her fingertip in a small glass jar. “A little glue.” He felt it, cold, her finger pressing at his forehead, then his temple, then below his eye. The electrodes, round and metal, with wires like legs, come next.
He loses control of his left eye. It blinks, then again.
“Whoa,” he says.
“What is it?”
It comes in pulses. He wants to pull it all off his face, but he’s afraid to wreck the test, to undo all the work. Then the pain comes around again—his eye rolls, beyond his control, like someone’s inside his skull, poking the walls with a sharp stick. He cries out. His eyelid is wild, snapping, dry.
Lisa Roberts saves him. She pulls off the wires, the electrodes. She hits the switch. Her hand is on his face.
“It’s just not supposed to do that,” she says. “It shouldn’t be possible.”
“It did,” Scott says. “It is.”
Pulling out a chair from somewhere behind him, she sets it close. She sits down and it totters, one leg short. She looks as shaky as he feels.
“Let’s try it again,” he says.
“It’ll just shock you again.”
“It might not.”
“It will.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, it’s not all right.”
Standing, Lisa takes hold of the cap on each side, just above his ears. She pulls, almost jerking him from his chair. The cap comes off with a pop.
Scott reaches up and feels his head, his hair dried into sticky ridges.
“We’ve got a sink where you can rinse that out,” Lisa says. She stares at the screen, upset, all the squares going yellow and red. Her voice is lower. “It’ll take the rest of the day to figure this out, explain it.”
“But you didn’t learn anything at all from that,” Scott says. “You want help? I could do something.”
“You’ll still get paid,” she says, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“It wasn’t.”
Reaching down, Scott slides his backpack along the floor. He unzips the pocket, then unfolds the black, plastic eyeglasses.
“Here,” he says.
Lisa takes the glasses, hardly looking at them; she sets them on a shelf.
“Didn’t mean to take them,” he says. “No one asked for them. Later, I realized I’d walked off with them, so I brought them back.”
Lisa is looking at the empty cap, folded on the floor, snarled with wires. She touches it with the toe of her white shoe.
Scott had expected more. Surprise, or gratitude. He stands. On the way out, he considers trying to slip the glasses back into his pack, but he does not. The halls stretch, blurry around him, as he walks away, heading for the elevator.