Naïda

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Michael’s apartment was in an older house transformed into a duplex: stucco below faded pale green wood siding, with white trim around a three-paned bow window that faced the street. His landlords, Gerry and Emma Smith, had rented out the upstairs once their kids left home. Michael had been there for eight months, pleased that the quiet street was a dead end. There was even a small balcony at the back where he liked to sit and grade papers. At least he had, until the neighbours had inherited a terrier of some fashionable crossbreed. He couldn’t decide what was more incredible: that any living creature could make that much noise sixteen hours a day, or that its owners could possibly be so ignorant as to allow it.

Gerry had trimmed the lilac bushes again. With his constant attentions, it was a miracle that they ever had a chance to bloom.

Michael took the stairs two at a time and flung open the door of his apartment, wishing Nicole was there so he could tell her about his discovery. He pulled out his iPhone. A voicemail message said that she'd dropped by on her way home from City Hall, then gone to her own apartment for the night to catch up on paperwork. That meant she wouldn't want to be disturbed.

Shit! He itched to tell somebody.

Diving made him hungry. He opened a can of stew, made toast, and ate while he watched the last two thirds of Jaws on TV. He felt a new empathy for the embattled Chief Brody, trying to convince his willfully blind community of a deadly shark threat in their waters. Did Michael have some responsibility to report what he’d seen in Evergreen Lake? What if it really did have a harmless explanation? A practical joke, like Phil had claimed? Michael knew that he wouldn’t do his prospects at the university any good by crying wolf.

Which was why he had to go back to Evergreen Lake.

He called Phil in the morning to carpool. Marcia Rodriguez told him that Phil had left early for some reason. Michael thanked her, and the last swallow of his coffee tasted bitter.

In the hallway to his office, one of the interns told him that his department head, Laura Wood, wanted to see him. Wood was big on “face time” with the faculty under her supervision, but she rarely had anything important to talk about, and her efforts to be chummy were painful. Maybe he’d go close to lunchtime so he’d have an excuse to keep it short.

Grace McDonald looked up from the more comfortable of the two chairs in the small office they shared.

“Hear about Harcourt’s paper at the conference in Brussels?”

“Good morning to you, too. What’s Harcourt on about this time? RNA degradation?”

“No, I think he let that bone drop for now. The results of his latest study, though—the one with victims of Catholic priests…”

“Alleged victims.”

“Sure, alleged. He claims his results prove that such memories can be implanted unintentionally and are completely unreliable. Of course, he is Catholic. Maybe that’s the field you should go into.”

“The Catholic Church?”

She laughed. “Repressed memory. You could do a better job than Harcourt.”

It was a reminder that Michael’s research choice this year, the addictive implications of brain-computer interfaces, had exploded in popularity and the better-funded universities were leaving him behind. He might have to return to his previous field, the psychological implications of living in the high-stress artificial environments of submarines, spacecraft, and space habitats. He didn’t resent Grace for bringing it up. She was only trying to help.

Repressed memory. Were his memories about Evergreen Lake reliable? He opened his mouth just as Grace slid her iPad across to him with Harcourt’s executive summary displayed. The opening of the second paragraph and the graph below it caught his attention, and he forgot what he’d been about to say. Soon after that, another intern showed up with the department’s preliminary scheduling sheets, and that work lasted until lunch time. He and Grace grabbed some club sandwiches at the Tim Horton’s restaurant a few buildings over.

He had no classes that day, but he was pleased that his Psych courses were among the most popular. Students liked debating whether the comic strip kid in Calvin and Hobbes or the X-Files’ FBI agent Fox Mulder was the most typical of the Dreamer personality profile. They liked seeing clips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to illustrate the difference between extraverts and introverts, and exploring Jungian concepts via episodes of Star Trek. Not to mention that Michael did a mean Sigmund Freud imitation.

It had taken a couple of years to develop his style (and forget his fears of his late father watching over his shoulder), but the offbeat stuff was his way of finding pleasure in a career that had never been his first choice.

The afternoon filled itself with busywork; and when he pulled up at his apartment at 5:30, he realized that he hadn’t got around to seeing Laura Wood. She’d be pissed.

Nicole arrived soon after him. She pulled her car in behind the Smiths’ Subaru, a sign that she didn’t expect to spend the night. It was a new BMW she’d bought a month after the election that made his ten-year-old gray Honda Civic look like a brick on wheels. He did his best not to be jealous—she worked hard for her toys.

A lot had changed since he’d first met Nicole, the night his brother Jay dragged him out to audition for a community-theatre group. Jay had done a few shows with them and got a big kick out of it. To Michael’s surprise, his nerdy brother was actually a pretty good dancer and could hold a tune, though he only did chorus parts—no leads yet. Jay introduced him to a woman who’d done one show with the company—The Sound of Music—and nailed the part of the Baroness, though there was nothing aristocratically reserved about her. This time Nicole was auditioning for the bold and brassy lead in Mame, a much better fit. Michael wasn’t surprised that she got it, but was astonished to find out he’d been cast as her husband Beauregard.

The part wasn’t huge, but all of those nights singing “Loving You” turned fiction into fact. She was beautiful, smart, and sassy, thoroughly feminine but refreshingly earthy. He fell for her hard, and she returned his feelings with surprising passion. Three years later, he was still amazed that a woman like her had picked him.

At the time, she was working in the auditing department of the local taxation center and when she decided she could do a better job of running the city than the clowns in charge, her insightful criticism of the municipality’s financial practices convinced the voters she was right, and she was elected mayor of the city. Michael had been thrilled.

He hadn’t foreseen how the new job would change things.

“Hey, you. How come you didn’t call me last night? Where were you anyway—cruising Elgin Street?”

The dig took some of the heat out of his kiss. A year earlier, eager to impress a class of grad students, he’d taken them out to interview some hookers and been caught in a police sweep. His explanation had satisfied the cops, but Nicole wouldn’t let it go.

“Phil and I went for a dive south of town. Want to hear about it?”

“Got anything to eat?” She pulled the fridge door open for a few seconds then gave a slightly more thorough inspection of the freezer. “OK, pizza, then. Your pizza place or mine?”

The question was moot. Michael preferred Pizza Hut, but she always ordered from one of the hometown operations instead because it wouldn’t do for the mayor’s boyfriend to have any other kind of pizza boxes stacked in his recycling bin. She picked up the phone.

He tried to bring up the dive again while they ate, but she was obsessed with a public input session scheduled for the next night.

“We just finished the last goddamned budget and we’re already asking people what we should do better next time. It’ll be the same old s**t: roads and health care and lower taxes. As if the city has any control over the hospitals. Jesus.” She washed down her third slice of pizza with a long chug of beer.

As he cleared away the few dishes, she was already opening her city-supplied laptop and quickly immersing herself in the numbers. An hour later, when she asked him to make tea, he seized the opportunity to talk.

“We saw something. Phil and I. On the bottom of Evergreen Lake. There’s something down there that glows. Bright enough to see from a long way off.”

“s**t, don’t tell me it’s toxic waste! Clay Developments applied for a permit to dump some stuff into one of the lakes down there. If Amanda’s jumped the gun, I’ll shove a big, fat fine up her ass.”

“I don’t think so. It looks like…well, some kind of structure, but totally strange. I don’t think it’s…from here.”

“From Sudbury? What, you think Elliot Lake’s been dumping radioactive stuff in our territory?”

“From Earth. I don’t think it’s from Earth. I think it’s…alien.” He stood looking at her open mouth and realized his hands were shoved into his pockets. He pulled them out.

Nicole laughed.

“Jesus, I thought you were serious for a second.”

“I am serious.”

Her mouth clamped shut, then she laughed again. “s**t on a stick. I knew I shouldn’t have let you go to that Sci-Fi convention.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! I’m telling you what I saw. I didn’t imagine it.”

“What? What did you see?”

“Something glowing. Something…like giant petals of clear gelatin, but arranged like a structure.”

“Down at the bottom of a lake, stirred up with floating muck?”

“Yes.”

“What does Phil say?”

“I don’t know. He thought it was a practical joke, but…”

“So you figured it was worth trying out on me? You’ve got a weird sense of humour, Michael. And the kettle’s boiling.”

“Forget it. I’ll go back…take some pictures.”

“Sure.” She put her glasses back on and turned to the screen again. He went into the kitchenette and got out the tea.

She gave him a perfunctory kiss on the cheek when she left for home around ten.