“Can you give me the date on that?” I asked. It was a safe question. The kind of thing that even a jumped-up secretary might ask.
“I’ve brought a copy of the study logs,” he said. “Everything’s there. Dates, names, times.”
“Great,” I said, keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’d asked him for a piece of information, not where I could go to look it up. But I let it slide.
“At first, it wasn’t simultaneous. It was only a common set of images. I thought it was day residue.”
“I don’t follow,” Ex said.
Watching Oonishi shift from embarrassed client to popular scientist was like watching the playback of myself in Trevor’s dojo. He didn’t exactly move, his expression didn’t quite change, but he was suddenly more grounded than he’d been before. His nervous half-smile vanished.
“What we’re learning about perception,” he said, “is that it’s very dependent on priming. The actual experience of vision, of seeing, is associated with activity in the V1 and V2 layers of your visual cortex. What the neuroanatomists have found is more neurons enter V1 and V2 from the deeper parts of the brain than from the optic nerve.”
“Implying what?” Ex asked.
“That your conceptual and emotional knowledge affects not just your interpretation of what you see, but what you actually see,” Oonishi said. “Five years ago, a man in Madison, Wisconsin, had a heart attack. Fell over in the street. An off-duty paramedic happened to be there. He started administering CPR.”
“They shot him,” Aubrey said. “I heard about that.”
“Yes,” Oonishi said. “The paramedic was black. One of the passersby saw a young black man straddling an older white man and shot him. When the police arrested the shooter, she swore the paramedic had been stabbing the man. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen the knife. There had been no blood. No knife. But she was adamant she’d seen it.”
“And you say she did?” Aubrey asked.
“I say she did. Not because it was there, but because she expected it to be. There are any number of simple experiments that prove your knowledge and emotion affect your actual perception. If you look at a sign just at the edge of your visual range, you can experience the letters becoming sharper when someone tells you what they are. This isn’t even controversial.”
“Okay, but back to the data,” I said. “The thing in the dreams. Day residue?”
Oonishi glanced his annoyance at me. I wasn’t doing a great job of letting Chogyi take point, but the further we veered from the issue at hand, the more impatient I got. I saw Kim nodding as if in agreement. Someone at the table behind us laughed at something, a high, masculine sound.
“If there was something,” Oonishi said, “that all the subjects had seen—a movie or a popular commercial—I would have had an explanation of the image’s recurrence. They would all have seen it recently, and so when they lost the input from their optic nerves, they would be primed to impose that image on the visual cortex from below, as it were.”
“Didn’t work out,” Chogyi Jake said.
“No. It didn’t. I talked to the subjects after that session. None of them identified the images. They didn’t even remember having dreamed them. And then, when the images started coming at the same time . . .”
“So it began two months ago,” Ex said.
“This did,” Oonishi said. “My study did. But I wasn’t looking before then. It might be something that’s been happening for years. Decades.”
Kim didn’t bring up the anecdotal evidence she’d heard—the walk-aways or the people coming up from anesthetic saying foreign phrases. She was paging through Oonishi’s study logs. Her mouth pressed thin, and her eyebrows drew in toward each other.
“Do your subjects have any recollection of the dreams now?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“I haven’t asked,” Oonishi said, and then, pronouncing each word very carefully, “I have been afraid to.”
“We may need to explore it,” Chogyi Jake said.
In the uncomfortable silence, our waiter appeared with our meals. I’d gotten the fourteen-dollar BLT. I took a bite as the waiter passed the other plates around and asked if he could get any of us anything. My tomatoes tasted a little like cardboard, but the bacon was good. Oonishi was quiet until the waiter had gone, and even then spoke in a low voice.
“I would rather that we kept this among ourselves,” he said. “I haven’t even spoken to the other researchers.”
“They must know something’s up,” Kim said. “Unless you invite parasitologists to your lab at midnight on a regular basis, they’ll wonder why I was there.”
“They think I’m trying to bang you,” Oonishi said. Kim’s eyes went a degree wider, and I felt some of her shock. My cough meant I was offended on her behalf, but Oonishi only gave a surprisingly boyish smile and shrugged. I found myself liking him less.
“We can be discreet,” Aubrey said coolly, “but we can’t work without evidence. Would you prefer that we address the subject outside your study, or would you like to present it as part of the research?”
Oonishi looked to Chogyi Jake in appeal, but he only got an enigmatic smile in return. After a long moment’s silence, he gave in.
“I can interview them about the dreams,” Oonishi said. “You’ll need to tell me what to ask.”
“One of us should be there,” I said, and Ex scowled at me. Having one of us present at the interviews would probably mean going back into Grace.
“We’ll discuss that,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we should also address the price.”
“Price?” Oonishi said.
Chogyi Jake spread his hands toward the plates before us.
“We have to eat somehow, Doctor,” he said.
Over the next fifteen minutes, Chogyi Jake and Oonishi haggled quietly while the rest of us ate. I didn’t care what the answer was. My attention was on the others. Kim chewed slowly, her face a blank, but her eyes kept moving to Oonishi. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Aubrey was watching her too, and the anger on his face was like the perception experiments Oonishi had told us about. Even though it was subtle, I could see it clearly because I was prepared to see it. What I couldn’t say was what it meant.
They settled on three hundred dollars a day with a one-month cap, payable when the inconvenient data stopped appearing in his study. Any longer than a month, and he wouldn’t have time to get enough fresh data, and he’d have to push back publication of his reports. We’d build a list of questions. He’d record the interviews, and if we needed follow-ups, they could go through him. Oonishi got to keep us his dirty little secret, and none of us had to go back to the hospital. Except Kim.
We got back to the condo in the last gloom of twilight. Lake Michigan spread out before us. With the storm clouds blown off, it was a darkness scattered with the lights from boats still on the water. Ex threw himself onto the couch. Chogyi Jake shrugged out of his jacket and went to the kitchen, followed quickly by the beep of the microwave and the smell of green tea. Aubrey and Kim and I sat at the dining room table, our chairs turned so that we could see Ex in the next room. When Chogyi Jake returned, cup of too-hot tea held gingerly before him, he was shaking his head.
“This place still feels small.”
“All right,” Ex said. “Thoughts and opinions?”
Aubrey was the first to speak.
“I don’t think he has much to tell. Apart from the data we’ve already gotten, he doesn’t know much. He’s resistant to actually working with us. I think he’s going to do as little as possible.”
“He did call us in,” I said. “That’s something.”
“It may have been a desperation move,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I think he’s regretting it.”
“Exactly,” Aubrey said. “That’s exactly the feeling I get.”
Kim cleared her throat, a small sound.
“I think you’re all being too harsh,” she said. “And what’s more, you’re missing the point.”
Aubrey stiffened like he’d been slapped.
“Well, you are,” Kim said. “Oonishi’s a scientist, but he’s also human. He’s stumbled into something outside his frame of reference. It throws everything he’s ever done into question, so of course he’s frightened and trying to make it all go away. As I recall, your first experience with Eric wasn’t all that different.”
“Mine?” Aubrey said.
“You babbled for a week,” Kim said. “You did everything you could to convince yourself it was all some kind of elaborate joke. At least he’s not doing that. If you give him a year or two to get his head around the idea, he could be very useful. But, as I said, that isn’t the point. Even if he’s totally recalcitrant, something is happening at the hospital. And as of today, something with the potential for real violence. That makes it our responsibility.”
“Does it?” Aubrey said. “I mean, does it really?”
“Yes,” Kim said.
Aubrey’s laugh was short and exasperated. A vague unease grew in my gut, like I was six again and listening to my father chiding Mom: an intimate disagreement between people who knew each other very, very well. For the first time, I wondered how Kim had felt about Oonishi’s joking suggestion of sexual impropriety. And whether Aubrey might be jealous.
“We do have some access to the dreamers,” Chogyi Jake said, and sipped his tea. “And the sooner we get our questions together, the sooner we’ll know what they said. It may be that nothing comes of it, or we might get lucky.”
“I’d like him to replay the dream for them,” Ex said. “Before any of the questions are asked, I want to see how they react physically when they see the thing.”
For a long moment, Aubrey seemed caught between two conversations: the argument with Kim and the planning session that Chogyi Jake and Ex were offering up to redirect it. Kim looked away, out the wide, dark windows. The angles of light and shadow made her look old. When Aubrey spoke, the effort in it showed.