1001 Dusks will be published in December, 2020

CHAPTER ONE

I discovered who—or what—Ewan Megiveron was quite by accident.

No--let me be honest. It was burning curiosity. My father never talked about his clients until he’d taken on a mysterious one over whose world-spanning financial portfolios he’d been given patronage. Father took us out to Delmonico’s and said he had landed a client who made all others look like charity cases, a billionaire broker and entrepreneur in the burgeoning data mining and security industries, Ewen McGiveron.

“So, Harvard law for me?” my twelve-year old brother Ravi threw out there.

“I would have to buy a seat on the trustees—but yes, certainly,” he humored Ravi. “No, no, no. You can do better. The world is glutted with lawyers—Harvard lawyers. I’m picking lawyers from my pocket like lint, I’m shoveling them out of my way like snow. I’m sure you’ll agree? Rav? Physician is much more noble. Pure.”

I laughed. My younger sister Divya frowned and sucked her inner cheek.

I was ten at the time. I remember the party he’d thrown for his accounting firm, Seshadri Enterprises. I recall subdued lighting, a few dozen suits milling before the panoramic windows showing Manhattan. A small contingent of women. A tremendous table full of finger foods and punch bowls and the lighted fountain of dancing water that entranced me. I recall pulling at my wavy hair and long fingers in boredom and Ravi trying to sneak himself some booze from cups people had put down, father introducing us to a line of white men with the exact same haircuts and tans and confident demeanors, his under-executives and section chiefs. My mother Priya being her reserved self and letting others speak first and almost chewing on her hair, a nervous tic that she waylaid by compulsively folding her sari.

The Mystery Man took his time in showing up. And then there he was, pummeled by an applause-storm. Tall and handsome is all I remember, and a beautiful golden blonde wife who’d stepped from a fashion magazine, with a thick Slavic accent. Ravi stared and stared at the woman’s long tanned legs and bustline freely displayed. I pinched him when I caught him gawking.

That’s all I remember, but mostly what comes to mind is my boredom sitting there and then finally shaking the Man’s long-fingery hand, the hand of the man who made my father—or could soon break him. I didn’t even look him in the eye, I think, because I could not. I knew about Ewen Megiveron even then.

SHORTLY AFTER THIS it started. Previously dad had worked for international companies and was personal accountant for two of the richest entrepreneurs in the world. We’d spent months at a time living in Dubai hotels when he conducted serious business. But at the advent of this singular client, Ewen Megiveron—one of the top 20 richest people in the world—I’d overheard him tell my mother that Megiveron been hired by some big shot in the CIA, and swore her to secrecy about it, an industrial espionage-type arrangement. The air conditioning ventilation system padding in our West Orange mansion was of very poor quality.

Our house also had a huge, labyrinthine basement. After about a year into his employment with Megiveron, Srikant built a “study” down there that was both a safe for his records and appointed as a panic room for the family (so he claimed). It was seventeen by nine in size and sported a seven-foot metal door with a reinforced frame and was always locked. He’d gone so far as to forbid us from even being in the basement when he was in that room, and told us to be quiet upstairs while he spent hours down there every Saturday afternoon. We came to call it “quiet time.” My mother looked forward to it. These “quiet Saturdays” went on for years, however, and we simply accommodated this eccentricity. Srikant said it was his time for dealing important work-related material, but that it could “endanger national security” if we ever told anyone of his habit. We never knew if he was serious or not. Of course we didn’t tell anyone anyway—who’d want their friends laughing about their freaky dad’s freaky obsession, or joke, or whatever it was?

But after a few years we began to hear these unidentifiable…sounds down there. Ravi and Divya and I thought maybe he was doing experiments of some kind. Priya looked up from her novels but said nothing. It was only when we heard the sound of his shoes tromping back up the stairs that we’d sigh with relief that quiet time was over.

Some of my middle-school friends’ parents also worked for financial big shots—all of whom turned out to be this Ewan Megiveron, I eventually learned. Back then, we’d all been told not to talk about what our parents did, and no “outsiders” were permitted—like the Mafia. We were like a private club. And they don’t call spies “spooks” for nothing.

All this secrecy centered on something far more awful than any of us could imagine, as I was to find out.

CHAPTER TWO

SHARD, MEET BRAIN.

Brain, meet Shard.

My brain had failed to quiver in protest as the sliver passed in an instant through my hair and scalp and parietal bone, just missing the Lambdoid suture, to slip through the upper occipital and parietal lobes both and, nicking the corpus callosum, touch the hippocampus. Sometimes I imagine, twisted like helices, miniature worlds entered my head like time bombs. Sometimes I like to think it was launched from the future, from some weapon yet to be invented, bending its way by unnameable angles to enter our time-space and my skull.

Alternately I fancy one of those friendly hidden Others shot it at me from Their side for a reason only time would unfold to me.

THE METALLOID SPLINTER that entered my skull was three centimeters in length, fashioned of an indeterminate alloy, and had lodged in my hippocampus without my knowing it on March 19, 2003. It happened to be my 13^th birthday. I sensed it as a sort of snap in my head and my ears suddenly felt like I’d dropped a thousand feet in an airplane. I was dizzy for a few seconds and that was it. I was in Secaucus, scouting possible film locations with my smartphone and a Nikon for my friend Derry’s short project. Dangerous, I know—my parents would’ve cloistered me for months if they’d known I was out alone, exploring in the chemical wastelands of Secaucus. On top of the location, crews were doing controlled demolition of some watertowers about a half-mile away that day.

I didn’t realize I’d been invaded until I lounged, dazed, on the train back to South Orange. Something hot and viscous oozed down the back of my neck and some guy behind me told me I was bleeding. I found the source amongst my hair, a small furrow on my scalp at the back of the head that stung to the touch. Then I remembered: it had happened just a few seconds after a huge explosion in the distance amongst the smokestacks. I’d been hit with shrapnel!

I got home and told my parents and the hospital x-rays showed an irremovable piece of metal in the temporal lobe, buried deep in the brain, whose tip was just embedded in my hippocampus. The neurological team were stunned that I was still walking around and functioning, although a bit woozy. Apparently it wasn’t large enough or mean enough like a hollow-point bullet to do major damage. I was placed in the hospital for two weeks and monitored around the clock for signs of infection. But nothing further happened.

I was even written up (pseudonymously) in a NEJM article. I should not have survived.

I attended weekly brain shop evaluations for the first eight months. Although my parents protested the parade of X-rays and fMRIs and CAT scans the neurologists impressed upon them that these were absolutely necessary.

Within two years it appeared my brain tissue had adapted to the Shard’s presence, and the neurons had even grown around it in accommodation.

THE CHANCE EVENT of turning my head to face a fenced-in boiler, a second after the detonation, had altered my universe, for shortly after my recovery I discovered the Thing: I had been given something like an eidetic memory. I use a comparative because after noticing it my parents had me tested at 15 and it was suddenly found that I could recall pi to 43 places from a glance and could recite entire pages from books I had read.

Subsequent to this discovery, another effect of the Shard (and if not, I thank Goddesh for the gift) became apparent in that I found I could suspend my hypnagogic state for an hour at a time into which entire movies unspool and stories, like text, appeared to me. I used to leave running my phone’s voice-note taker and would hardly remember a thing until I listened back. I practiced reciting these liminal stories. My parents were alarmed at first then just accepted it as an overactive imagination. It annoyed Divya to no end when she was eleven—we shared rooms at that point—and I took to calling her “Waxy-Maxy” for all the earplugs she used. I was sorry for keeping her awake at times it but I couldn’t help it. She thought I was a total weirdo on top of everything else the Shard had done but then when I asked her to help me transcribe some of the stories she became enthralled. “I’m not the one imagining it, Dee,” I’d always reply, spooking her but half-meaning it. I had no idea where these ideas and plots and characters were coming from. She suspected as much and believed it as well, for how could I know details about 15^th-century Turkish pirate swords or Russian cosmonaut training procedures or the deposit system of the Alexandrian library and the tattooing symbols for those scholars authorized, for life, to use the papyri stacks (which, to my amazement, had been discovered as an ancient practice only last year?)

It worked like this: when I’d get sleepy and lay down flat on my back and my thoughts would no longer have the normally willed egoic direction—much like anyone else’s when approaching slumber—the one difference occurred: a melodious humming filled my head, then a series of crunching sounds, and I’d find myself in a wooden cabin, for instance, tending a fire in a brazier and surrounded by a forest of thick glassware and huge cabinets filled with minerals and crystals and herbs, breathing fumes from the alembic and telling my young apprentice to write down the formulas I muttered, then be rudely interrupted by an angry mob of clerics and armed knights at the door with righteousness in their eyes...

That story, of “The Alchemist’s Trial,” went on for 25 dictated single-spaced pages. I remembered speaking none of it.

I couldn’t do this at will, you see, but I could summon the Thing—and only if it complied then I could do it. I never told anyone (including the psychologists and neurologists) about it and my ritual summoning. I knew I would get put on some nasty chemicals, like all the other “strange” kids.

CALLING UPON THE Thing helped me in school, of course. I was bored. If spitting back all that I’d read constituted learning, then learning hurt. I didn’t know I was any different until I started acing tests and then I kept my mouth mostly shut and my pencil busy during class.

All over those middle school years I retreated into the Shard’s gifts and read a lot. I did crossword and logic puzzles during “Quiet Saturdays”, solved mini-mysteries on Sundays, played chess with Ravi on Mondays and Wednesdays, Go with Divya on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I started making up fantastic stories to confuse people, tales about our travels on vacation, ghosts and bogeymen and UFO encounters, meeting actors on Manhattan excursions, claiming outlandish genealogies. “Testing boundaries,” my shrink called it. It’s been under control for some years—you’ll have to trust me.

I HAD ONE serious love in high school, and had overcome the earlier Little League incomparable damage to a teenage ego that had no perspective by which to judge it, watched the graying of dad’s mane and beard, and the hollowing of his eyes, surmounted Ravi calling me “chub” in middle school then having this confirmed through rude comments from his friends’ network and my subsequent obsession with my developing body that, once I starved off the extra pounds, it seemed needed double angst just to erase that six months of teasing, the clothes I brought to school to change into in the girls’ bathroom—with about a dozen others who did the same thing—to use my midriff and tits and oft–mehndied ankles and biceps and jewelry as revenge weapons. My mother never mentioned a word about what my body was becoming but my father threw away bits of my clothing regularly and it was eyeliner only for my big brown eyes and a regularly-checked cellphone log and “who is this” and “who is that” once Ravi had seen me during open lunch in my smuggled-in ho-wear and snitched instantly and dad threatened unlimited grounding unless I disclosed the stashed and stuffed travel-bag full of clothes beneath old cans in a box outside the garage. It was strict sartorial regimentation for the rest of the year, thank you, Ravi.

I did my best to join mom in graying Srikant’s beard. I had found power. Thanks to the Thing I excelled in school to throw a wrench into things. Nevertheless I stayed out all night on weekends and started a girl band and started smoking weed, etc., etc…I was a supreme flake on deadlines and appointments and my friends all had dwindling patience with “Maya-time” and her “being at the call of muses” or visions or whatever the hell 24–7 now, subject to images that ended up materialized beneath my brushes or my custom-carved and painted packing peanuts or an encausticked hand-made parasol I’d made…

Then, like that, I snapped into recluse mode the summer after my junior year. I first read Srikant’s accounting and economics tomes then his collection of ancient and modern translations of classical religion and some New Agey physics and biology books. I read Mom’s Rushdie and Marquez and her collection of Pulitzer and Nobel winners. With my library card I worked my way through Irish and Italian and Icelandic folklore, then Gilgamesh and the Greeks and Romans. I read D.F. Wallace and T. Pynchon, Z. Smith and M. Danielewski. I devoured Woolf and Pound and Joyce and Joseph Campbell’s dissertation on Finnegans Wake before trying and failing that melty linguistic orgy.

After that fiasco (which really was not Joyce’s fault) I switched to science. At my father’s suggestion I started with the information revolution Claude Shannon had begun at Bell Labs, then read books on computing, then E.O. Wilson’s and Richard Dawkins’s oeuvres on biology and evolution, then Kauffmann and Schrodinger and Langton on organic and artificial self-organization. I read fourteen books on the First and Second World Wars, ten on the French and American Revolutions. Then the big metanarrativists: Spengler and Toynbee and (ack) Hegel and Gebser. Those took a month. I was all over the map but I was reading four to five books a week—“Doorstops Done in a Day,” my father pealed. I kept Bactine spray on hand for the paper cuts I endured every hour or so.

I retained a good portion of it all, and could call up by memory via the Thing. Dad quizzed me on what I’d read that day at dinner (when he could make it home for dinner) and we’d end up sparring over some historical misinterpretation with Ravi and Divya frowning at things as if we’d been speaking Sumerian. Dad’s unlimited Amazon account, first-class overnight shipping, helped. Boxes came delivered every day. I read the history of espionage, cryptography and coding. When I started in on philosophy I knew I’d need a tutor. I was going to start with Wittgenstein, who in his mature philosophy I learned took games as his model for the mind’s frames of reference. I liked this. So I read on game theory first, from John von Neumann to John Nash to Martin Gardner. Then Godel Escher Bach and the rest of Hofstadter’s works. This didn’t help with Wittgenstein. I dashed through Plato and Plotinus—the latter’s a tough a slog as Hegel—and did Rumi and Lao Tzu to unwind. I read the rest of the Pashtun and Indian poets, then Gibran, Aurobindo, and Watts.

My parents wondered where my social life had gone that summer. Then three weeks into my senior year, I discovered Elizabethan literature. Spenser, Shakespeare, poor Chris Marlowe, Jonson, and the esoteric psychonautica that burgeoned in that age—John Dee and Cornelis Agrippa, the Rosicrucian tracts, Michael Maier’s alchemical works. Jung’s long exegeses helped with this latter, so I plowed through the psychologist's later works, as well as straight-up chemistry to cross-fertilize the metaphors and analogies of the alchemists.

The boxes kept coming and dad paid the bills.

Pencils taught me how to sketch. I could draw things with my eyes closed. I stealthily did portraits of my friends in class. My art teacher saw them and recognized them and recommended me for competitions then, my senior year, to apply for scholarships and enrollment at RISD but I wanted Rutgers, to be close to my friends, and thankfully I got in.

All the words and the ideas I’d absorbed percolated and sedimented. Solve et coagula! I began to see fully formed plays in my mind’s eye, and listened to the dialogues in my head from who-knows-where, consciously now.

But where was the context for this learning, you might ask? The give and take of a mentor?

I’d found one, but you probably wouldn’t believe me.

CHAPTER THREE

ONE DAY I noticed dizziness would overtake me when I rode my bike down a certain stretch of Glen Avenue, and when I tried to set up a sculpture-making space in the basement near the fuse box and Smart-meter I passed out for a few minutes…and went somewhere else, clouded with bright flashing lights. I tried this again and felt woozy within ten feet of the circuitry but didn’t pass out. On the ground floor above, the meter and box sat in a corner where dad’s big antique bookcases filled with bric-a-brac, backed in by a lamp and couch, table and chair—so I'd never before came close to that area in the house.

On a walk one day I took Glen Avenue and passed out in the zone where I’d experienced the passing dizziness. Again, there seemed lights and faces, indescribable landscapes and geometries folding back into themselves. A passerby called an ambulance. I awoke in the ER in a complete panic, surrounded by beeping and clicking machines. I knew at once I had become one of those electronic sensitives, at least in a milder form, when in close proximity to transformers and heavy power lines.

When I told my parents what happened they immediately connected it to the Shard.

“Why didn’t the fields of the MRI affect me?”

The ER neurologist later shrugged. “Could be the smallest change in your neural circuitry. Small changes can have big effects.”

Great. I’d been reduced to a conductive machine, by a doctor with ketchup in his goatee.

I TESTED MYSELF carefully one afternoon. Divya came along and paced behind me.  When I approached the junction box on Glen the blurred vision and tingling in my head crept steadily. I entered and retreated to its horizon. Then I surged forward and felt muscle spasms and my head buzzed. I fought hard to remain conscious. The sunlight went prismatic and a grey foggy tunnel spiraled into my line of vision. It darkened and pinched. The compacted prism shone like the sun.

Then I felt a wave of emotion, wholly separate from my fear and determination, impinging and effacing it. A wave of love and empathy, warm fingers of affection and thoughts that intensely focused upon my face and trembling body, pulsing gusts of images of me lifeless here on the sidewalk and ambulances and depthless grief.

It was Divya.

She’s had enough oh damn she's gonna go down go down and hit her head oh my Maya...

A small hand around my arm, my palm pulling me backwards. I laid on the sidewalk with Divya sitting on the grass crosslegged next to me and it took a moment for my senses to come back.

I groaned. “You thought I was gonna pass out, didn’t you.”

“I felt weird, Em!” she squeaked. “I saw something like a diamond...”

I was astounded.

She held my hands. “You were gonna pass out for sure, I mean your legs were shaking!”

“Please, can you go over to that box and take a picture of any writing and numbers you see on it—you know, the technical information that’s on its side?”

She did this for me and I studied it.

I READ TWO books on electrical engineering over the next three days. Then a book specifically about the engineering and electromagnetic propagation fields from power lines, substations, and junction boxes. I was certain my parents were correct: the fields were activating the Shard and making my brain’s electrical activity go woo-woo.

But the emotions I’d felt, and Divya’s confession, meant something wondrous was also occurring.

I enticed my friends to try it with me near the junction box over the following weeks but it didn’t work with them. The surge of emotion and mental images only worked with Divya. I swore her to secrecy about this experimentation. My parents would go crazy. I wondered if there was a threshold under which I could remain conscious yet contact the fields of minds other than hers.

I bought an ammeter, a frequency counter, and a multimeter, all with shoulder straps.

I stalked the power box late one night with my friend Amen. From what I’d already learned with the meters, I could take a field of about 35 volts while just on the edge of passing out. My musculature quivered with the stimulation. Veridical memories of childhood had popped up in a rushing succession—and some which I had no idea what they were—the neighboring residents’ memories? Images of my future? The neighbors’ futures?

By this time I’d chalked the sidewalk with lines and my degrees of reaction at each.

I’d discovered a most surprising fact with Div: if I bent forward and just let the top of my head into the horizon of the field, I got the telepathic effects without my body feeling as if it were shaking itself apart.

I told Amen about this on that night. He’d dragged out his parents’ wood massage table and we set it up on the sidewalk so that when I laid upon it my head would just be inside the perimeter sweet spot. I lay on it and tugged myself forward as he stood beside me. The swirling and jittering began, the lights like a crown...

...and Amen licked my naked body. His head rested upon my inner thigh as he sucked and licked. Then he was on top of me and the huge, bare breasts appended upon me were shaking at his rhythm. Then I was giving him head but there was such a yearning and pain in the images. With a leap I was standing on the sidewalk.

Big mistake.

“Did it work? Is it working?”

“No,” I stuttered. “Not at all. We can stop.” I began packing up the massage table and he helped.

“You got nothing? Nothing at all?”

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, Maya, wasn’t there anything? I could see your, like, eyelids moving. Like fluttering. It affected you, didn’t it?”

I folded the table’s arms, clamped the parts together.

“I got the lights and that’s all.”  

 So Amen had a crush on me. I was trembling with a sense of violation that was difficult to pin down…I had intruded upon his fantasy—that obviously, given his knowledge of the experiment, he had consciously willed for me to sense. His image of my body was like something from some disgusting anime porn, a gross amalgam of the Space Barbie and myself. 

I MADE A kokoshnick-like tiara out of a thick, 7 1/2 inch wide triangular copper piece. I meticulously tiny-hammered it into a horseshoe-scoop shape that fit my head and could be slipped comfortably into my dreads. I edged it with rubber stripping. I managed to attach 22 hearing aid batteries on its surface with contacts, generating 30 volts. This mild field was enough to stimulate the Shard and grant me the Hypnagog. I then bought all sorts of cheap jewelry with which I made a series of Celtic friezes upon its surface.

I tried it with Divya and it worked.

Such ended my experimentation. But it would be resurrected again—in much dire circumstance, and with purpose.

CHAPTER FOUR

OUR WASHER AND dryer were in the basement, so for years every time I did the laundry I’d stand there with this big reinforced silver door resting across the room—whispering to me to try to open it. Srikant had installed security cameras inside and outside it.

After a while I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I demanded he tell us what was in there and he got incensed and ordered me never to ask him again.

At seventeen I started using a stethoscope to listen for the beeping of his punching in a security code into a keypad. I could never make it out; all I’d heard was nine taps. Then I went down there and tossed a towel over the security camera from behind and placed an old camera covered in some towels across the room with an extreme close-up of the keypad. I also left a tape recorder down there to maybe capture the sounds of the keypad. I hurriedly looked for the parts specs on this custom safe room. A company named Cerberus had built it, and I found a small legend CARREFOUR in the corner of the six-foot door. The room was a modified concrete model reinforced with sheets of steel and Kevlar. The door was three-inches of steel with a handle that took both hands and a heave to open outward—and was hinged with springs that whipped the door shut with bone-breaking force. This explained the gnawed cubes of wood that were always on the wall shelf to the right, one of which changed position every week, when he would apparently exit the room without wanting to key himself back in—a doorstop.

The AV recording plan didn’t work; he stood directly in front of it and the keypad was silent, of course. 

I came up with a plan. Divya is an angel—confused and easily influenced sprite, though she is very smart and eventually aced all of her SATs and got into Princeton without Srikant leaning on admissions people. She’d had no problem telling me all the details of Blair Academy and while she pulled back on her affections when I started in on my body mods at 17, the tatts and studs and dyes were all too much for her 15-year-old soul—to say nothing of my  parents and then Ravi’s calling me “Ringo” and “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”—she got over it though and scowled when I asked her to get a double-helix armband tattoo with me. I always protected her against Ravi’s putdowns when he got in a certain mood. There was a Prank Campaign year in which we collaborated for a merciless gaslighting assault on Ravi’s sanity his senior year at Shepard.

I trusted her. I told Divya because my obsession had gotten to her and it was now driving us both nuts. It took some convincing but she went along with it. We had to wait for a time when mom and brother had gone out. This turned out to be nine Saturdays later, when the two of them had gone to look at a new car for Ravi. I opened the locks on the only (and small) window in the laundry room. I told everyone I was going out biking that morning, and watched from the woods down the street as mom and Ravi left ten minutes later. Divya sent me a text message that all was clear—she’d turned off the property’s outer motion-detectors and dad was nowhere near the camera screens. I snuck back through the woods behind the house up to the laundry room window. I had my camera in my pocket. I crawled painfully through that little window, ripping my tee shirt. I crouched and positioned myself behind a drape that hung from an ironing board a few yards away, beneath which I’d already deposited a flashlight. Even though the safe room was soundproofed, Srikant had a one-way receiver installed within that picked up sounds in the house above. I had told Divya to scream her head off ten minutes after he’d entered the room—and, when he came running up, claim the Biggest Freaking Wolf Spider in History was roosting on the living room couch.

I waited forty minutes beneath the drape before he came down the stairs. I parted the curtain and watched him punch in the nine digits so rapidly, with three fingers in three wave motions, that I thought it had to be some horizontal/diagonal/vertical sweep across the keypads. 

A few minutes later Divya screamed. She caterwauled it and stamped as she ran. She did well.

The door opened and my father, sure enough, grabbed one of the wood blocks and dropped it and nudged it into the doorframe, pushing against the springs’ force. I saw the light turn off automatically within the space. With effort he let the door snap back and dig into the stop.

He ran across the basement and vanished around the corner. At his first footfall on the stairs I leapt up and strained at the door.

I turned on the flashlight. The walls were painted a glossy black color, like coal. There were eight filing cabinets, five safes and a desk like a sort of altar at one end of the room.

I had enough time to examine four opened filing cabinets. He had neatly arranged photocopies of the entire bureaucratic history of Megiveron Enterprises, and their financial records going back thirty years.

Then I opened a fifth one full of thick manila folders. The contents were files on what must have been several hundred women—missing person reports. Police records, and records of everything these women did—information on their habits, their friends, files on them, all their medical records.

With trembling fingers I took dozens of pictures as I listened to the muffled thumps upstairs. I felt sick as Srikant shouted at Divya over the chamber’s receiver. Where is it? Beneath? She did a fantastic job at sounding terrified and begging him to get the broom and clear the hand-sized beast out from beneath the couch. I photographed individual documents and even took a short video until the memory was maxed, closed the massive door (making sure the same edge nicked the same rut as before), dashed from the room back onto the dryer and climbed out the window, still able to hear the echo-sound of his shouting and its tinny amplified counterpart in the room. I closed the window and went crouching around the pergola in the hot summer afternoon until I received her all clear twenty minutes later. Dad was afraid of spiders. He’d removed all the cushions, Raid atomizer in hand, and moved all the furniture in the living room in his search for the non-existent wolf, then gave up.

When I returned to the house on my bike I went straight to my room and stared at my camera without examining any of the pictures. I lied to Divya about what I’d found; I just said confidential corporate records, and told her the camera’s battery had died. There was no use in nauseating her.

I couldn’t look for about a week and just considered all the possibilities for those files on the missing women. I kept the pictures a few months, then uploaded them to a dark web site called Muybridge Dump and erased them from the camera.

My father never knew what I’d done, until recently.

I automatically discounted they were women with whom he’d had affairs. He simply wasn’t the type (I know—the type that doesn’t seem the type always turns out to be a serial philanderer or even a serial killer). I thought perhaps Ewen Megiveron was keeping track of certain missing person cases and helping the families financially. But they were all women. I remembered most vividly one name, Sherry Ann Jungler, and looked her up on the Net. She had gone missing from Brooklyn three years earlier and had never been found. A cold case. Was my father keeping track of these women for some reason? Was he responsible?

It was too much to consider. I just sort of blanked it from my heart and mind and moved out within a month before attending Rutgers. 

CHAPTER FIVE

AT ONCE I found I needed people—friends, lovers, the whole panoply of these mysterious individual worlds, each hermetically wrapped in flesh and alien experiences. My natural introversion waxed and waned in a sort of courtship with humanity. I kept the Gifts under lock and key for the most part during those next four years, simply using the Hypnagog for creative writing and the texts with which I sometimes adorned my canvasses. I made friends and partied and made many mistakes. I weeded out the studied art school eccentrics you’d always suffer from the class of students whose deviance was grounded in major unconscious personality problems and hence made genuine works from their split hearts and befriended these latter. I used all manner of drugs, in experimental style after reading all the works of Shulgin and psychopharmacology textbooks beforehand.

It all worked to keep Srikant’s—my—secret from the mind. It all served to partition the significance of that vault from ruining my daily equilibrium.

But on drunk Saturday nights, late on a couch, or sprawled in a bed full of my inebriated crew, those women’s names would come welling up to sour me and erect the wall. The Gift as Curse. It would take all my effort not to call my father in the middle of the night and demand he tell me what it all meant, on penalty of my simply calling the police about it.

What would Ravi and Divya think?

It was the only thing that prevented my dialing.

Sure, I was taking his money for my education, from wherever it came. I felt good doing it. I would put it to use.

During the summers I could stay at home only for a few days, sometimes hours, at a time. I could not be under his roof, or above his secret. I drove to California with my friends Derry and Lisa and Marcy, went to France and Spain and England with Alex and Luanne. Cathedral and museum tours, ancient cairn and rath and crop circle trips. We slept in ratty hostels and sometimes out in parks. I always had to have a few books close to feed the monster.

Sherry Ann Jungler.

Yulia Petrovna

Johnette May Kennedy.

Wendy T. Yancy.

Vasilisa Andronikov.

Gillian K. Wellner.

Sarita Singh.

I could see their files, and some of the photographs with heartbreaking clarity. The list went on.

I was haunted by black filing cabinets.