The Rule of Stephens Read online

  And did her management team always rise above it? Kali, Hapok, old friend Yohai? They did not. Not before the accident. And certainly not a year after. But she let them all just be who they were, do what they did. And they seemed to like her for it. Year two had not yet begun to punish her in those first months, not in ways that she could actually measure.

  So why agree to see a therapist? She wondered now about that detail, if talking about things had nudged events into negative motion. Maybe she shouldn’t have listened to Phil on that one.

  “Is it about that stupid article?” she asked him, when he brought it up.

  He laughed. “Of course not.”

  “What then? Something Morris said. We’ve had delays. I’m aware of that.”

  Nothing like that. This was a friend talking, he reminded her. And it was her friend who’d noticed her increasing distraction. It was her friend who’d noticed her getting behind on things.

  “And it’s me, your friend, saying that I saw you sitting in the car outside before coming into the café just now,” Phil said. “It was me who saw you crying.”

  Phil was looking at her, eyes concerned but kind.

  “Was I…?” she started. She had a hand on her face, on her cheek, as if to find evidence of tears.

  “I believe in experts,” Phil said. “I believe in finding the specific ones you need in specific moments. It’s no shame. It’s just smart.”

  There had to be someone in your life whose advice you really took seriously. So she went. She said: “This is my lawyer’s idea. He’s super-smart, though I’m not sure what he knows about therapy since I don’t think he’s ever done it himself.”

  Catherine twisting her hands into nervous knots, squirming on the leather Corbusier chair in the therapist’s office up on Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver.

  “Maybe he’s never needed one,” said the therapist, a psychologist originally from Ecuador, with three PhDs judging from the certificates on her office wall. Ximena Briana Diaz. Absolutely Latin gorgeous, Catherine thought. And the faint trace of moustache did nothing to detract.

  “Probably not,” Catherine said, shredding a Kleenex now, hands tremoring. “But what about me? Do I need to be here? I ask in the means-tested sense of it. Am I typical of the kind of person you’d see?”

  “How long has it been?”

  A year, Catherine told her. Well, more now. God, time was really flying. Fourteen months. No, she’d never sought help previously. In the immediate aftermath it hadn’t seemed necessary.

  “Do you still have bad dreams?” Ximena’s voice was capable of a pragmatic hardness. She had not been coddled in life. And even the plants in her office seemed to advertise this: a ball cactus, a mescal agave plant, a Manua Loa succulent. These things made rocks their home.

  “Do you still startle when people approach you from behind? Are you scared in elevators? Do you feel grief and guilt at the same time? This feeling of grieving at the exact same time that you are feeling that you have no right to grieve?”

  Ximena had a photo on her desk of a man Catherine presumed was her husband. He stood in a wool sweater on the deck of a ship, Vancouver’s inner harbour over his shoulder. Tugboat captain, Catherine mused. How romantic was that? Wool sweater, black watch cap, a Band-Aid across one knuckle. But admiring the sureness evident in the man’s expression, and what that implied about Ximena’s own life, only drove Catherine to consider how sureness had been draining from her own. The point was precisely that in the immediate aftermath she hadn’t felt very much of any of the things Ximena had mentioned, the startling, the claustrophobia, the toxic duality of grief and guilt. They’d only started to crop up later, growing, organic things somehow spreading in her with every nightmare, every glimpse in peripheral vision of some dark gathering there at life’s fringes. And Catherine found a panic rising in her chest as she thought that through, at the same time registering with sudden and painful clarity all the real-world work that still had to be done in the face of these inner realities. They were finally in test on the mooring tech. She needed to contact the lab. She needed to talk to the technicians there. She needed to talk to Yohai about device tolerances and about whether or not they knew yet definitively that stomach acid concentration variances would or would not affect device transmission rates in certain circumstances. A lot was riding on factors like this one and dozens of others. The Red Pill 2.0 completion dates. The beta test. The rollout that Morris had been pushing them towards, pushing and pushing.

  Ximena was still talking. Catherine herself had been talking, answering questions she did not remember. Fielding another one, just now.

  “Do you ever find yourself crying without having felt the tears on the way?”

  Catherine was biting her fingernails. And given the tears that were appearing on them, she knew that she was now crying too. Like now? she wanted to ask, but somehow could not speak the words. You mean like what’s happening to me right now?

  She never told Phil when she stopped going. Catherine didn’t think he’d disapprove exactly. Phil didn’t really do disapproval. But he might think quietly less of her for being insufficiently clear-minded to accept professional advice. Too high-strung to analyze. Too emotional to pay for help.

  But then, muted disapproval and worrying were always more jobs for sisters. And Valerie had been registering her worry lately. She was calling more, suggesting coffee dates, suggesting Catherine come over for movie nights with her two sweet kids. She owned an antique shop in West Vancouver’s Ambleside Village that she populated with textiles and dishes, handmade candles, old apothecary bottles and ivory-handled cutlery that she found on her trips to France, or that her network of buyers otherwise sourced. She was good at finding things. Catherine could never really picture the houses and lives into which these objects fit. But Valerie Bach Design was a thing now, apparently. She was doing remarkably well. And she seemed happy, too, married to a guy who ran an ethical green-energy mutual fund. Mark, whom Catherine felt guilty for finding incredibly boring. How different their lives had always been. And in the moments Catherine thought about that—approximately every time she’d been in Valerie’s shop or home—she would also invariably remember their own lawyer father and his chauvinist ideas about women’s careers. Their mother, she of the original flowing red locks, suffered in silence her entire foreshortened life. Catherine had always been the one to argue, to fight and rail against her father’s various oppressions, may he of course also rest in peace. But Valerie had been the pleaser, the striver, smarter than Catherine almost certainly, but destined somehow to sell beautiful things to beautiful women with lives much like Valerie’s own.

  “The rational fact of it is that you can’t really work on the past,” Catherine said to her sister, when the abandoned therapy finally came up a month after she’d quit. That’s what they said: work on it. But by definition, it was in the past. It was a previously sampled data set. It was beyond working, beyond being changed. So why even talk about it?

  Valerie didn’t think that Catherine quite understood what talk therapy was supposed to be about, but she was gentle saying so. Sometimes people worked on their feelings about the past, she said. They changed their relationship to the past. They changed the way they reflected on or possibly fixated on the past.

  “Like I’m fixated?” Catherine said.

  “No, no, no. Well a bit,” Valerie said.

  “I’m healthy!” Catherine said. “I’m really good. I did yoga yesterday.”

  Which was a flat-out lie. She had not even contemplated doing yoga. And since when did she lie to her sister?

  “Well if you ever want to talk to me…”

  “I’m so good,” Catherine said again. And her sister pretended to believe her. Pretended to be unconcerned. Pretended that the dinner party she and Mark were hosting over the weekend would be something Catherine might actually attend and that she would not come up with last-minute excuses. But of course Catherine knew all along that she would. She
could see herself on Saturday night and she knew where she’d be. She’d be at the Warehouse in front of a screen. She’d be reviewing data from the lab or from Hapok on the site or from Kali on the market view.

  And that’s exactly where she was then. On that Saturday. On the following Saturday. On a string of Saturdays that grew and grew to the point that one Saturday she experienced a deeply strange sensation, which shaped itself in the air around her like a vision: a fractured view of her own profile, in place across all those Saturday nights stretching into the future. Repeating and repeating and repeating.

  Yohai was there, he was on the other side of the desk. He’d come over to talk with her about the reports that had just come in from the lab. And she knew from the arrangement of his features that he was about to give her bad news, but she found herself unable to quite hear him speaking, awash as she was suddenly with that flickering vision of herself in place on multiple days, in multiple moments. And as she sat there, more or less frozen, a chilling interpretation of the experience suddenly came to her, the sense of those future iterations of her body not quite being her own, that in that moment she was seeing some other version of herself alive in the world.

  Someone turned on the jukebox, just then. Beck. De La Soul. Run-DMC. One of those.

  Here it comes, Catherine thought. And she seemed to blink awake. She caught herself there and returned to the person that she understood people needed her to be.

  “Say again, everything that came after hello,” she said, back in a sheering dive from the ether of visions and into her own chair.

  The device had failed to moor, Yohai was explaining. The lab had been feeding dummy Red Pills for two months to a chimpanzee named Mickey who was unharmed by the experience, but whose stomach was not letting the tiny device remain in situ as was required.

  Catherine paused and sat back. She chewed her lip.

  “I hate to say I told you so,” Yohai said.

  “Don’t then,” Catherine said. “Ideas would be better.”

  “We go subcutaneous.”

  Catherine dropped her head to the desk, forehead down. “Not this,” she said.

  “The device is good. We know it works. We’re loading the diagnostics as they come online. Where we park it is the outstanding question, and subcutaneous is known and tested.”

  “We’re not giving up on ingestible.”

  “Let’s talk to Morris,” Yohai said.

  “Fuck that,” Catherine said, and heard her words echo in the rafters above, refract through the dust motes floating there.

  “Whoa,” Yohai said. “I’m just saying get his opinion.”

  “We tell no one,” Catherine said.

  “What is this then? What are we doing?”

  “We’re tweaking the formula,” she said. “We’re testing again.”

  “We’re nowhere near a real full feature test,” Yohai said. “Because we’re hung up on this one feature that we could work around.”

  “I’m not going to market with an idea that requires people to have surgery,” Catherine said. “That’s just sending them back to the doctors we’re supposed to be helping them avoid.”

  “You say surgery like it’s an organ transplant,” Yohai said.

  “It’s a matter of principle,” Catherine said. “We’re promising people control.”

  “We’re talking about a routine procedure with a local anesthetic,” Yohai said. “You’re on the street in five minutes and back in control.”

  “We’re going to make this work!” Catherine said, voice raised.

  “Our timetables are going into serious skew here, Cate,” Yohai said. And now his voice was up in volume also. “Device functions are coming together. We’re getting stable data on a good range of diagnostic modules. Hapok is building out the site. Kalmar is kicking motherfucking ass out there on the user side. We have pre-regs like crazy. Where we’re hurting is delivering an actually testable product. Where we’re hurting is right here.”

  He meant her. She knew it and it made her furious. But she did not budge. And she did not ask a second time. Yohai had his orders and he would follow them through. They would make the mooring tech work. Meanwhile, she would hide anxiety. She would not let them know. Not Kalmar, who still brought her snacks in the afternoon when she was looking like she could use it. Who did not know anything about the mooring tech, but who did not ask unwelcome questions about the schedule either, even as the months stretched. He seemed to keep his faith, perhaps even strengthen in it, while she struggled herself with darker thoughts of betrayal. Of Morris in the wings. Of Yohai’s fragile loyalty. Of falling and falling and falling.

  “Your bones don’t break, mine do.” Kalmar at her desk, but with a smile she understood. He had in his hands a hot bowl of kimchi ramen from the kitchen. He had the chopsticks. He had the packet of extra soy and the shaker of shichimi peppers he knew she liked.

  She took the bowl in her hands. She lowered it to the desk between her and the keyboard. She looked up at him. “Kali,” she said, her voice quiet.

  He waited. Head just a bit to one side.

  “Would you stop with that whole Unbreakable thing, Kali, please? It feels old. I took the poster down months ago.”

  He smiled. Of course he would stop. She knew he would.

  “Thanks for this,” Catherine said, straightening up in her chair. “Thanks generally.”

  “Nei,” Kalmar said. “Takk fyrir.”

  “You going to teach me some of that one day?” she asked him. “Icelandic?”

  “Any time,” he said. “What do you want to say?”

  “Good swears?” she answered, picking up the chopsticks.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well we can probably do better than that.”

  Off he went. A flash of blue eyes and a smile. Then he was walking away in his characteristic fashion, no glance back, a word with the lads as he passed, only this time walking all the way across the Warehouse, past the teepee and on to the bikes where he found his own old road bike—chipped paint, warped leather seat, all the handlebar wrapping long gone—and pushed it on out the door and into the sunshine. He could go, of course. He was himself admirably under control, in his work at DIY and seemingly in everything else too. Catherine watched him and felt, herself, only the fractures within. The setback and the mounting fear. And she would not dream of Kalmar later either, three in the morning in twisted sheets. Again and again, mounting in intensity: water and fire and the blackest birds. She swam in those images, the dense cold and the searing heat, the feathery black shroud. And when she awoke she was drenched in sweat, trembling, spilling the bedside glass of water on the hardwood floor, glass breaking. Catherine cursing at three o’clock in the morning at herself and this highly breakable thing that she had become.

  And then, the leak.

  Was that the factor that finally changed things forever? Someone broke confidence. Someone broke ranks. Someone broke the code. Eighteen months out from AF801. Catherine remembered going to sleep the night before thinking of the now seemingly distant anniversary, wondering with dark seriousness if she had the stamina to make a second. Terrible sleep that night. The usual terrible dreams. But she woke with an unusual, trembling type of energy. Woke and piled out of bed into unwashed clothes, headed in to work only to stop at a café not far from the Warehouse. She’d driven in but could not quite let herself arrive. She’d stopped short, gone to caffeinate. Sitting at a side table with a matcha tea, surfing the news and there it was: the skunkworks projects weren’t so secret any more. It was all over everywhere. They’d made Gizmodo. They’d made ZDNet. They’d made WIRED and Mashable. Red Pill 2.0 would have a serious payload if it was ever delivered and managed to stay in place. And there it all was in clickable black and blue and white: tumour markers, pre-cancerous tissue detection, early alerts on diseases mundane and exotic. Her own plans for the company too, her own more personal visions. Social justice causes. Everybody seemed to know everything. Not the working details, clearly
. Nobody was that stupid. She had the information mapped down to the person, who knew what and when they knew.

  “This is a fucking leak.”

  Catherine in a rage. An intern stood at the foot of the picnic table where they were meeting, tears brimming. She had nothing to do with anything. She’d just brought over coffee from the canteen and got caught in the crossfire.

  Yohai, trembling with indignation. Hapok looking distant, hand stroking his dog’s golden head. Kalmar brooding for his part, tip of his handsome chin balanced on one fist.

  “Talk to me,” Catherine said. “Talk to me now. How would they know we’re working with the TRIUMF collider on tissue markers? Tissue markers are a new, new thing. TRIUMF doesn’t talk about it. We don’t. Or we didn’t. Kali, you’re supposed to be market-facing. What the honest fuck?”

  He looked at her, beautiful eyes now sorrowful, the light blue carrying the trace of a deeper colour. He spread his hands. “I come in. I work with my team. I build this thing. I don’t talk to other people. I don’t know any other people.”

  Hapok’s eyes had drifted to the window. Like this meeting didn’t concern the website boys. She turned on him, let him have it. What did he think a designer was supposed to be doing? Design, goddamn it. Design things.