Three Years with the Rat (14 page)

“We can do the same with the rats,” she told me. “We train them to raise and lower their paw every five seconds, and the movement registers as muscle activity on our recordings. If they do it too early or too late, they get nothing, but if they're very close to five seconds they get rewarded with a sugar pellet. And just like I guessed, their behaviour correlates extremely well with their elect­rophy­siolo­gical activity. Later we take away the time restrictions and let them press whenever they think five seconds has elapsed.”

We went back to the computer and she hit the start button on the program. A number of sketchy, sweeping lines began to fill the screen.

“Look,” she said, pointing to one of the lines, “he's already started lifting his paw.”

And in fact, I could see large, dense squiggles appear every few seconds. We watched the waves draw across the monitor until a thought hit me. It was my turn to laugh.

“So what you're telling me,” I said, “is that you've taught these rats to dance in exchange for candy? Grace, what the hell is the point of this?”

She put both her hands on the counter and lowered her head. “Jesus, you really don't understand anything at all, detective. You can't see why this is useful? Think about things for once in your life before you speak.”

“Clearly you're the brains of the family, so why don't you just enlighten me and save me from my crippling stupidity.”

She bristled at my response. “Once we understand how to measure subjectivity, then we can
manipulate
it. Then we can manage a degree of control over it. Then we can begin to overcome the
limitations of the objective world, escape these awful, incontrovertible facts of reality.”

She turned, faced me, and spoke slowly. “Then, little brother, for once in our ignorance-congested, noise-saturated lives, we can be
alone.
We can have time and space to really think.”

I didn't hesitate. “What you're saying doesn't make sense. No matter how you manipulate these rats, you can't take out the part where they all live in the real, objective world.”

She stopped the Telemetrics program and removed the rat from the cube, throwing it brusquely into its cage. Her every move was harsh and deliberate. She propped open the procedure room door with the wedge and shut out the lights before I had time to leave the room. I could hear her slamming the cage into the rack and making her way back to the anteroom. Why my last statement had made her so angry, I had no idea. By the time I caught up with her she had stripped off most of the extra layers, her gown in a hamper, the rest in the garbage. I followed her example.

We wound our way back through the corridors in silence. I phoned Nicole while I changed back into my street clothes and we agreed, in the hushed and excited tones of a young relationship, to meet at Shifty's for a bite and whatever mischief might follow. Grace was waiting impatiently on the other side of the door, shawled again, shifting her weight from foot to foot, arms crossed under innumerable layers of wool and fabric.

The sun had broken through the clouds by the time we left the animal facility, but it actually felt colder than when we'd entered. We made our way to College Street and headed west.

“Look,” I said. “Look. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to insult your work.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “You still don't get it. Every other sense remains
constant
despite changes to the environment. Apples look red regardless of whether you're in the sun or artificial light, even though the reflected wavelengths are totally different. John's voice sounds the same on the telephone, even though all the fundamental frequencies are absent. And that makes sense, right? You want an apple, or John, to remain constant in every situation. You want to be able to trust your senses.”

I shrugged and turned my attention to the street. A bicyclist was shouting into the window of a car at the intersection.

Grace said, “So why is time the only exception to the rule? Why does time perception vary so wildly? Why do hours feel like minutes sometimes, or vice versa?”

The light went green and both car and bicycle sped away as if nothing was wrong. We crossed Spadina, continuing west, and I spent a moment thinking about my sister's question before speaking again.

“I don't know, Grace. Maybe time is difficult for our brains to measure.”

“Or maybe there's something fundamentally different between the objective and the subjective,” she said. Her voice became quiet and I struggled to hear over the noise of traffic. “If objective time is a one-dimensional arrow, maybe subjective time is a two-dimensional wave. Or a three-dimensional spiral. Maybe clocks are only measuring that movement in one dimension, its length, but our brains are sensing our depth and width through time.”

“ ‘We're living on a sphere of time,' ” I quoted her, only then beginning to dimly understand what she'd been ranting about a month ago.

“Yes,” she said. “Or maybe it's four dimensions. Five. We don't know yet.”

Grace seemed calmer now, almost at peace.

As we got close to Bathurst I could see Nicole smoking outside of Shifty's. She wore a black-and-white striped dress, dark stockings, and her heavy wool coat. The angle at which she stood made the hair blow away from her face, and she took each drag of the cigarette coolly, without notice of the world bustling around her.

When I turned my attention back to Grace, she was looking at me carefully. Compared to Nicole, she looked dishevelled, wind-whipped, and frightened. I thought about what she was telling me, about multi-dimensional time and subjectivity and the repulsive little rats she played with all day.

“There's still the issue of the real world,” I said. “How do you take experience out of reality? How can you use real-world measurements to measure things that aren't in the real world?”

Grace said, “You cheat.”

We reached the corner of College and Bathurst but neither of us was ready to cross the intersection.

“It's John,” she said. “He hasn't explained it to me yet. Refuses to tell me, in fact. When we implant the telemetry devices, he adds something else he keeps in a pouch. He made me swear not to tell our supervisor. The box, the telemetry recordings, most of it came from his—”

Her gaze caught something behind me, and then her jaw dropped.

“What the hell is
she
doing here?” Grace asked.

I turned and saw Nicole crossing the street toward us.

“You mean my girlfriend? The person I live with?”

“I'm leaving,” Grace said.

“For Christ's sake,” I grunted under my breath. “Be friendly for two minutes before you run away.”

I turned and embraced Nicole. She was warm and soft and smelled great. I put my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “Mmm.”

“Good afternoon, Grace,” Nicole said when we separated. “Joining us for lunch?”

“No.”

“Hey,” I said to Nicole, “did you know that Grace is finding a way to separate subjectivity from reality?”

“Oh,” Nicole said coolly to Grace. “Why?”

“Isn't it obvious?” my sister said.

“Do you hate the world that much, Grace?”

“Yes.” My sister, the shortest of us, kept her gaze on the ground.

“And do you expect that solipsism will suit you better?” Nicole asked. “Or that you would even know what to do with it?”

Grace gritted her teeth, said, “What do you know of knowledge? You prepare people's food for a living.”

Nicole didn't hesitate, and in fact smiled. “I know my limitations. ‘I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.' ”

The way that Nicole spoke made it clear that she was quoting, but I didn't recognize the words or even understand what she meant, at the time. Grace kicked at the ground and muttered something too quiet to hear.

“I'm sorry?” Nicole asked. She arched her back and stood tall.

Grace cleared her throat and looked up into my girlfriend's eyes. “I said, fuck you, Nicole. You are intellectual and emotional poison, for all of us.”

“Oh, you mean for the friends you haven't bothered to call in months?” Nicole forced a laugh that sounded both cruel and hurt. “Or for the boyfriend you frequently chastise in public?”

Nicole tried to hold it back, glancing at me, but her anger got the better of her. “Or for your own brother, whom you treat like an imbecile? I'm the one poisoning their loyalty to you? You're not doing a good enough job of that on your own?”

There was a long pause in the conversation, Nicole's wrath spent, Grace huddled and defensive, my own jaw slack with shock. Pedestrians veered around us as the lights at the intersection went
from red to green to yellow to red again. I should have spoken up, but I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

Finally Grace looked at me, pressed her mouth tightly closed, and shook her head once. Then she turned and walked north.

After watching her for about ten seconds, I turned to Nicole and pulled her close to me. I'd never see her eyes glisten before.

“I love you.” I think it was the first time I'd said it to her. “But I have to go.”

“I'm trying, you know, to be understanding—” she began but then her voice cracked. She nuzzled my cheek with her nose, squeezed my upper arms once, tightly, and then pushed me away. I ran north after Grace.

When I returned home that night, Nicole and I had our first genuine argument, a shouting match that ended in mutual tears, apologies, and promises never to fight like that again.

OFFICER
2510
RAPS
her knuckles three decisive times against my door. I can see her through my small window, dressed in civilian clothes again, nothing but her tomboyish stance to suggest she's any sort of authority figure. She looks bored.

I crack the door open but block the entrance with my shoulders. “What kind of a police officer plays club shows with a band?”

“This is the part where you let me in,” she says, “for your own good.”

I consider the state of my apartment and how I must look to her. I pat some of the sawdust off my jeans and clap my hands together to clean them. Oh well. I go back into my apartment but leave the door open for her.

She takes a moment to look around. The large wooden box is reconstructed and sitting in the middle of my freshly emptied living room. No doubt she saw my corner tables and couch outside, sitting at the curb. One panel of the box is missing and so she takes a slow, deliberate look at its interior. Then her attention shifts to the removed panel, the open plastic bag full of bits of broken mirror, and the fine sandpaper I was just using.

“Arts and crafts?” she asks.

“A machine with no mechanisms, I think. Like meditation, only more pretentious.”

She looks to my bandaged arm. “Nobody told me meditation was dangerous.”

“I'm supposed to be leaving soon. Mind if I go change?”

I don't wait for a reply. In the bedroom I crawl out of my clothes and wish vainly that I could shower off the grit that sticks to the sweat on my neck and causes my scalp to itch. I peel away the tape on the edge of the bandage to look underneath. It's healing but still ugly. Officer 2510 is likely wandering around my living room and it won't be long before she finds Buddy.

She shouts from the other room. “I looked into your stolen car trouble.”

“Oh, great,” I say.

“Turns out you never owned a car. At least not with that VIN, and not in this province.”

“That's what your colleagues told me. You should tell it to my bank account.”

I leave the bedroom, fresh clothes already feeling soiled, and sure enough she's standing in the kitchen. She sticks her fingertips between the bars on the cage lid, and though Buddy noses at her, he's sadly uninterested in taking a bite.

“Considering pursuing a career in science?” she asks.

I look at her, unimpressed. She's wearing a crooked grin that, if the situation were a little different, might be cute.

“I only ask because I got word that somebody broke into your sister's old lab. John's lab.” She takes the lid off the cage and scoops up Buddy as if she's had plenty of practice with rats. Buddy, that traitor, snuggles contentedly into the crook of her arm. That grin of hers again. “Bearded guy, from the tapes. Not that you're bearded
these days. Thing is, he didn't take anything from the lab, not as far as anyone can tell.”

“Do you want to come right out and say it, officer?” I ask. “I'm tired, I feel like shit, and I have a million things to do.”

“Oh?” She hands me Buddy and I put him on my shoulder without thinking. “A million things? Your old boss tells me you haven't worked for her in over a month.”

“For fuck's sake. Have you interviewed my friends, yet? My ex-girlfriend?”

“Should I?” she asks. “Maybe later. Your mom says she's worried about you. Says she hasn't seen you for months.”

“My mother should be used to that.”

By now we're two feet from one another, within each other's personal space. She exhales and steps away from me to inspect the room, her eye quickly landing on the sheet of paper on the kitchen counter, the one with the
tabula recta.
She walks to it, picks it up, asks, “You coding or decoding?”

I cross my arms. “Why am I not surprised that you're not surprised?”

“Anyone with an internet connection and a bit of free time could tell you all about it.”

I hold my hands out toward the room, palms up, as if to show her there is no internet here.

“Yeah, you don't seem like the smartphone type.” She grins again. “What's your cipher?”

I raise an eyebrow.

“The code,” she says. “The repeating word or phrase that you use to encrypt or decrypt the text. You know, first letter of the cipher for the first letter of the passage, second for second, third for third,
et cetera ad infinitum
and such.”

“It was a sentence,” I tell her, “but it only worked for part of the message. I haven't been able to figure out the code for the next section.”

But she's already moved on. She nudges the bag of broken mirror with the toe of her boot and runs her finger along the smooth edges of the wooden panel.

“Looks like you're almost finished,” she says.

“Just waiting on the hardware store to get me a big enough pane of mirror.”

“And then what? Care to tell me what you're going to do with your codes and your rats and your boxes?”

She is almost being polite but it bothers me. Her kindness irritates me. The sight of her in my living room irritates me.

I take Buddy off my shoulder and put him back in his cage. “Is there anything I can do for you, officer?”

She pinches her pretty face as if she's going to spit. “Don't you know what it looks like when someone's trying to help you?”

“Help me with what? Sanding? Gluing the mirror to the wood?”

“
This
I haven't seen before.” She nods at the box. Then, as though she's shooting from the hip, she points to me. “
This
I've seen. I saw it last year, in fact. I gather you've seen it twice already, this sudden case of misanthropy and obsession. And look how it ended the last two times.”

She steps toward me again, close enough to be considered either intimate or pitying, but I'm not sure which. My spine straightens and my breath catches in my throat.

“You seem decent,” she tells me, her mouth near my shoulder. “A bit dopey, I gather, but decent. What I know of your sister is less flattering, and what I know of John is more pathetic. It's a shame what happened to them, whatever happened to them. But it would be foolish if it happened to you, too, after everything you've seen.”

“I didn't see enough,” I say to the top of her head. “That's the problem: I wasn't paying attention.”

“Pay attention to me, now.” She looks up at me and her eyes are a cold, hard, bluish grey, like a slab of concrete a few feet under ocean
water. “Let them rest. Learn from their mistakes. Nothing good can come of following in their footsteps, not for you, not for anybody. Are you paying attention? If you keep following them, everything else will slip away until all you have are silhouettes in a reflection.”

I take a step back. “What?”

“This is the part where I leave,” she says, “and you thank me for coming.”

“Just a second. What did you just say?”

She smiles a crooked smile, turns, and walks to my door.

“Do you know something?” I ask.

She pulls open the door and leaves me standing in my living room.

It takes hardly a moment to put on my boots and John's jacket, and while I'm clearly underdressed for the weather, I don't want to waste any more time. The sky is saturated white with clouds and my ears burn in the air. She's not up the street so I run down to Dundas.

I keep close to the edge of the Portuguese bank on the corner and lean out a little to look. Officer 2510 is about two streets away and walking without hurry. Her confident gait is unmistakable. I follow.

I make up a little of the distance between us, but not too much. She stays on Dundas Street, crossing Bathurst and following the southern edge of the hospital grounds. She slows for a moment to stare north into Kensington Market, toward the fruit shops and cafés, but then continues eastward. I stay behind pedestrians wherever possible, hunched and unassuming, but she never looks back.

She moves quickly through the Chinatown bustle, crosses Spadina and continues east until she reaches the southern parts of the university district, where she disappears down a tiled stairway into the subway. I hold the metal railing as I descend. Daylight fades behind me.

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the artificial lighting. St. Patrick station is appropriately green, though it's been dulled by grime and years of use. I dig through my pockets for change and find less than a dollar. The rush-hour gate is still open, despite it not being rush hour, and a tired attendant watches while people drop their money into the glass cube. I stall until a crowd of university students files through, then jam my change in with theirs and cross the gate. The attendant looks at me foully, knows exactly what I'm doing, but says nothing.

I can hear the deep rumble of a train pulling in below. I skip down the stairs as fast as I can and scan the platform. I don't see Officer 2510 at first but then she takes a step backward and practically pops out of the crowd, about fifty feet to my right. The northbound train arrives and she gets on it. I get in, one car behind hers, the doors closing behind me with their characteristic three-note chime.

I weave through the standing passengers until I'm at the doors that separate the two subway cars. Though there are empty seats, Officer 2510 prefers to stand near the exit. She is staring through the doors' windows, out into the black tunnel. Or maybe she's staring at the reflections.

It's only a few minutes, but it feels like forever. We pass a few stations: Queen's Park, Museum, St. George. At Spadina station, she slips out onto the platform. This doesn't make any sense. If she'd wanted Spadina, she could have taken a streetcar north from Chinatown. I've either let myself be seen or she's been toying with me all along. I set my teeth hard and walk briskly to catch up with her.

But I can't. No matter how quickly I move, she keeps ahead. She weaves effortlessly through the crowds while people seem to block my way forward. She glides up the stairs while I fight my way around shoulders and elbows.

I'm blinded by the white sky when I emerge from the underground. It's cold. I look in every direction until finally I catch her
rounding the corner onto Bloor Street, now heading west. I cut through traffic and hear car horns, shout some noncommittal apology. I reach the corner where I last saw her and scour the view in all directions. She's gone.

I curse. I continue on, searching for Officer 2510 in the crowds on the sidewalk ahead of me. Something tugs at my unconscious, something unsettled and agitated. The storefronts along Bloor Street become familiar and that feeling tugs at me harder until my shiver turns into a shudder and I'm hugging myself for comfort. As I look down the street at the Fortress, I can't help feeling that something is very wrong.

And then it dawns on me.

John and Grace's apartment is missing.

It's as if a chunk of Bloor Street has been seamlessly removed and the two adjoining pieces fit together perfectly. The building, with its stairwell and sushi restaurants, has been cut out of the city. The fucking apartment building is gone. I reel, lurch, crouch near the pavement. Thick drool drips out of my mouth and I think I'm going to vomit, but it doesn't come.

For a while I stay on one knee with my face near the sidewalk. I can feel pedestrians moving by me, some slowing, concerned but too hesitant or polite to ask if I'm all right. My head throbs until it doesn't. I concentrate, spit a mouthful of saliva on the ground beneath me, and force myself to stand up.

I run my hand along the curve of my skull, through the centimetre of hair I've grown on my scalp over the last month. The wind picks up and bites at my ears a little. My huddled image is in the shop window that used to be just east of the sushi restaurants, and I'm no longer surprised to see my eyes in that gaunt and serious face.

And then I see her. In the reflection, not six feet from my mirror image, Officer 2510 stands and watches me losing my shit. Her eyes are fixed on me and her hands are on her hips.