Green Eyes

  That day, as her mother would have said, was a judgement upon Jocundra. Not that it began badly. Richmond went out around ten to scout the area for a change of cars, promising to return at noon, and she buried herself in Magnusson’s notes, fearful that she had misread them the night before. She had not. The bacteria were passively steered by the geomagnetic field toward the dopamine and norepenephrine systems, and there they starved to death; the two systems were centers of high metabolic activity, and in performing their functions of brain reward and memory consolidation and - at least so said Magnusson - running the psychic machinery, they used up all the available energy. Of course the bacteria bred during their migration, and their breeding rate was so far in excess of their death rate that eventually they put too much of a burden upon the brain’s resources. What Magnusson did not say, but what was implicit, was that if the bacteria could be steered more rapidly back and forth between centers of low and high metabolic activity, this by a process of externally applied magnetic fields, then the excess might be killed off and the size of the colony stabilized.

  She discussed with Donnell various lines of investigation, how much money they would need - a lot! - and tried again to convince him to return to Shadows.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ he said. ‘But I know that’s not the way.’ He had just taken a shower, and with his hair sleeked back, his sunglasses, he looked alert and foxy, every jut of his features pointed toward some dangerous enterprise: a small-time hood plotting a big score. ‘Maybe New Orleans,’ he said. ‘Not as much problem getting money there. Libraries, Tulane.’

  She marvelled at the changes in him. There was such an air of purpose and calculation about his actions, it was as if he had thrown off a cloak of insecure behaviors and revealed himself to have been purposeful and calculating all along. He was, she knew, still uncertain about a great many things, but he seemed confident they would work themselves out and she no longer felt it necessary to soothe his doubts and fears. In fact, when Richmond did not return at noon, he undertook to soothe hers by leading her on a tour of the cabin, describing to her the things she could not see: the weird spindly structures fraying at the edges of spiderwebs, insect eggs joined together and buried in a crack like crystals in a rock, a fantastic landscape of refracted light which he saw within a single facet, of a dead fly’s compound eye. Then he led her outdoors and described what Magnusson believed to be the geomagnetic field.

  ‘I can see it better at night,’ he said. ‘Then it’s not as translucent, more milky white, like the coil of a huge snake lying across the sky, fading, then reappearing in a new configuration.’ He scuffed his foot against the cabin steps. ‘I can always tell how it’ll look before I look. Magnusson says that’s because the bacteria are interpreting its movements, conveying the knowledge as intuition.’ He took off his sunglasses and looked at her with narrowed eyes. ‘Human fields are different. Cages of white fire flickering in and out. Each bar a fiery arc. When I first saw one, I thought of it as a jail to keep the soul in check.’

  Two o’clock, three, four, and Richmond did not return. He had been preparing for violence, and Jocundra was certain he had met with it. Even Donnell’s confidence was sapped. He brooded over the ledger while Jocundra kept watch. A few cars passed, several stopping at Sealy’s Restaurant: a building of white concrete block just up the road. Once Sealey himself crossed from the office to the restaurant, pausing to spit on a clump of diseased agave that grew on an island at the center of the parking lot. Palmetto bugs frolicked over the floor, the cabin stank of mildew, and Jocundra’s thoughts eddied in dark, defeated circles. When Richmond finally did return, drunk, at dusk, he announced that he had not only found a car - it would be safe to pick up in the early morning - but he had also arranged a date for the movies with Sealey’s day-shift waitress.

  ‘Good ol’ country girls,’ he said, rubbing his groin, grinning a tomcat grin; then he looked pointedly at Jocundra and said, ‘Ain’t like them downtown bitches think their ass is solid silver.’

  Both Jocundra and Donnell argued vehemently against it, but Richmond was unshakable. ‘I ain’t got my cooze with me like you, man,’ he said to Donnell. ‘Now you can come with me if you want, but you sure as shit ain’t gonna stop me!’ He put on his Hellhounds T-shirt and a windbreaker, slicked back his hair and tied it into a pony-tail.