(Simon tells me the inmost part of it is still etched on the glass, black and slightly puffed, impossible to clean away. As though the very composition of its molecules has changed forever.)
Simon was the one who called the paramedics, once he saw what was happening with me. Your eyes were all rolled back, he’d later tell me. Tonic-clonic, looked like; the full deal. You . . . pissed yourself, maybe more, I don’t know. It smelled weird, like you’d been eating asparagus. Flailing everywhere, and this time you were chewing; I think you got your tongue a couple of times—
Feels like it, yeah. Raw.
Well, there was blood, that’s all I know. I almost . . . Here he stopped, had to, till he’d gathered himself enough to go on. The paramedics waited till it stopped, then they rolled you on your side, got you onto a stretcher. Elevators were all unlocked again by then, so we took you down that way. And that’s when we realized Lee and my mom and dad were already there, with Clark—had been since the alarm went off. They couldn’t go up, obviously, so they just stuck around in the lobby, waiting.
Turned out it was Lee, Simon Senior, and Bella who came with me to St. Mike’s, though I couldn’t remember them doing so. Simon and Safie would have come along, but they were prevented—one of the firefighters had tipped off building security, told them about Sidlo’s body, and they were held till the cops got there. After which they got carted off to 54 Division while our place was cordoned off, Sidlo removed, with everything judged potentially relevant taken into evidence.
Correa insisted on playing what Safie had recorded for me on her iPad, once it’d been emailed over by the on-site techs. “There we go. Ms. Cairns, if you could—well, I suppose you can’t look, but please listen. Tell me if any of this rings a bell.”
I listened, hard. Straining for anything that would make sense.
On the file, in what passes for the dark of our apartment, Vasek Sidlo grips my hand tighter as his other set of fingers slips to touch the silver nitrate reel. He closes his eyes, or tries to; can’t do it all the way, not anymore, thin lids straining together over bulging, occluded corneas. I simply sit there, Safie would later tell me, when we were going over it ourselves—my own eyes raising by very long degrees, seeming to focus on something over his shoulder this time. Something she can’t see, and her camera doesn’t register.
“The field . . .” Sidlo whispers, eventually, so low Safie’s mic almost fails to catch it. “Light, heat . . . the insects, singing. That smell.”
“Yes,” I reply, my voice all of a sudden gone equally slow, equally sleepy. “I see it too.”
“Oh, and that voice.”
“Her voice, yes.”
“Yes.”
“And . . . the sun, high above. The noontime sun. You see it?”
“Feel it, yes. The dust cloud forming. Far out, where the stalks bend. Above the harvest.”
“Yessss . . .”
A silence then. Probably not as long as it sounded.
Is it still playing? I asked Safie after a moment. What happens next?
Unable to see her shrug, I nevertheless still heard it shadowing her words when she finally spoke: I’d say ‘you tell me,’ except you can’t, apparently. But . . .
This is where everything starts to go wrong, my brain supplied, as she hesitated once more. Knowing from the ever-so-slightly increased length of this next pause, that I must be right.
“Okay,” Correa said, surface-patient as Valens tapped his foot somewhere behind her, arms probably crossed. “Explain again what’s supposed to be happening with you and Mr. Sidlo, because that doesn’t look like an interview to me.”
I sighed. “He was psychic, or claimed to be—used to pal around with a Spiritualist group in the early 1900s, so that’s how he met Mrs. Whitcomb. Supposedly, he could imprint images on film with the power of his mind.”
Valens scoffed. “And you believed that?”
“I believed he believed it, and it’s hardly the weirdest method I’ve used to get interview subjects to open up, either. We thought it’d be like . . . self-hypnosis, maybe; take him back in the moment, make it easier for him to talk. So we didn’t have to do it again.”
“Yeah, well, second kick at the can’s not exactly gonna be an option now.”
“You think I don’t feel bad about that? He was a nice guy, from what I could tell. Not to mention I’m also not real happy about the idea of anybody dying in our apartment, no matter who he was. . . .” I trailed away. “But you can’t think we made this happen, for Christ’s sake.”
“Can’t we?”
Could they? I seriously didn’t know; not only was I not a lawyer, it suddenly occurred to me I didn’t even have one. Nor did I know what my rights were under the Canadian Charter, how they might or might not differ from your average Law & Order episode.
“Are you charging me with something?” I finally asked. “Or my husband, or my friend?”
Correa answered, “Not at this moment, no.”