SIDLO: [After a long pause] No.
Simon broke the silence first. “Mr. Sidlo, I’m Simon Burlingame,” he said, half reaching out a hand as if to shake before realizing Sidlo couldn’t possibly know what he was doing. He let it drop. “This is my wife, Lois Cairns, and her colleague, Safie Hewsen. They wanted to ask you some questions about your work with, uh . . .”
“Iris,” Sidlo half-whispered. “Giscelia. I could never call her either to her face, Mrs. Whitcomb, not so long as she was another man’s wife. We collect names as we get older, don’t we? Too many, sometimes . . .” His voice wavered, then firmed. “Come in, please, all of you. Sit where you like.” A trembling hand lifted, swept around the room; I took the only other chair, next to a small end table, while Safie parked herself on the end of the bed. Simon, visibly uncomfortable, stayed by the door, arms folded.
“Mr. Sidlo, I . . .” I began. “I’m—that is, my family and I—we’re in a pretty bad place right now, which means I might as well cut to the chase: we need help, and I’m really hoping you can give it, ’cause . . . you’re our only option, essentially. So if you can’t—”
I stopped there, however; cut myself off as Sidlo reached across to grasp my hand, deft and sure, as though he already knew where it was. The feather-light fingertips, trembling slightly, felt papery on mine—cool, dry. Strangely soothing.
“You’ve been touched you, haven’t you?” he asked. “By Iris, yes—but not her alone. By her, that other. She, Herself.”
Capital “S,” capital “H.” I heard Safie swallow; saw Simon’s jaw work, as if he was biting back words. I opened my mouth to answer and suddenly found I couldn’t; the thickness in my throat was as much relief as anything else. Somebody else knew, somebody understood. I wasn’t insane. Not completely.
“Mr. Sidlo—” Head down, I couldn’t see Simon anymore, but I could hear the sudden wariness in his voice, maybe spurred by my reaction. “When you say ‘Her,’ who are you talking about?”
“I think you know very well, Mr. Burlingame.” Sidlo angled his head in Simon’s direction, again with uncanny accuracy, and Simon recoiled. “You mock, since you have not been touched yourself; if you had, you would not ask at all. So tell me, will you play Arthur to your own Iris? Will you leave when the worst of it comes, your loyalty not worth admitting how little you understand?”
Simon flushed; his jaw set. “Never,” he said, without hesitation. “I’d never do that.”
I cleared my throat and looked up, meeting his eyes. “I know,” I managed, and Simon gave me a painful sketch of
a smile. From the corner of my eye, I saw Safie turn her head, deliberately staring elsewhere, while Sidlo nodded, slightly.
“Good,” he replied. “After all, there’s the child to think of.”
“How—?”
“Because you came here, to me. You would have to be truly desperate to do that, far more so than on your own account. Someone else would have to be involved, someone you both care about more than you do yourselves.”
“It’s my son,” I told him. “He’s . . . special, like Hyatt Whitcomb.”
“And has he seen Her, as well?”
My voice thickened once more, the words almost choking me. “I think so, yes.”
“But he wouldn’t know what he’s seen,” Safie quickly added. “Not really. He’d never know how to respond, or what she wants from him. If she does want anything.”
“Oh, always—but what? That was Mrs. Whitcomb’s question when I first met her. Some things simply want to be seen; Kate-Mary told me as much, in my very first days with her. But She, Mrs. Whitcomb’s Lady . . . she wants more, far more, in return for her attention. A tithe, a payment for gifts received, whether those gifts were wanted or not.” Sidlo laughed, a hollow, half-cracked sound, eggshell crunching. “All muses are cruel, some say, but She—She may be the cruellest. At least, so Mrs. Whitcomb contended, having studied the matter.”
“Was Hyatt Mrs. Whitcomb’s tithe?” I asked.
“She thought so, yes. It was . . . one reason. An understandable one.”
“Because Lady Midday touched him in the womb, in the field. Chose him.”
He nodded. “She fought the idea a long time, she told me. But then he was gone, and—there seemed no point in fighting it anymore. Better to proceed according to what one feared might be true, to assume it was true, than hope in vain for better.”
I get it, I thought. Knowing, even as I formed the idea, that Simon didn’t, couldn’t—wouldn’t.
“So what does this damn thing want then?” he demanded, arms crossed. Sidlo simply shrugged.
“Worship,” he replied. “That was all she could figure, by the end.”
“I friggin’ knew it,” Safie muttered under her breath.
In the Freihoeven Institute interview, Dr. Abbott reaches across to take Sidlo’s hand and agrees to concentrate on an image inside his own head, one Sidlo can’t possibly know about, while Sidlo (in turn) concentrates on the magnetic tape unspooling inside the camera trained on him throughout. What follows—as the image literally takes shape before the viewer’s eyes, supplanting Sidlo and Abbott entirely—is a lot like watching a visual experience being reconstructed from MRI brain scan input; the details are definitely off, almost shorthanded, but the overall shape is astoundingly recognizable, far more so than in remote viewing experiments of yore. Full colour, for one thing, not sketched in black and white with the various components unstrung and drifting, like an encephalitis patient drawing whatever portion of a clock face their infection-swollen brain can process.
What’s far more impressive, however, is the sheer clarity with which Sidlo seems to channel the sensory details of the experience, providing a tiny window into the moment in question: image as still frame in a mess of linked footage, one single moment culled from an inextricably linked, forward-moving mass. Instead of a cursory, surface-only browsing, it’s as though Sidlo sinks deep beneath the crust of Abbott’s chosen memory, culling out all the parts that tweak him emotionally: not so much the beach as the feel of hot sand slipping under rubber sandals; not so much his companion’s face as the smell of her perfumed sweat, tiny soft hairs on the back of her arm brushing his; not so much the sea as the sound of in-rushing waves, the taste of salt. Not so much the day itself as the painful joy of it, their mutual intimacy already undercut with anticipation—accurate, as it later turned out—of future loss.