The Experiment of Dreams Read online

  “He’s a, well … an interesting man. I don’t think the cost of sending us overseas bothers him in the least, not as long as we continue to get results.”

  “Right. Okay, I guess it’s best to not ask questions.” Because they’re not going to give me answers.

  “Mr. Kalispell would like for me to inform you that there will be no shortage of work for a long time to come. That is essentially why I’m calling you, as well as to tell you that the results we processed from Paris are extraordinarily good. I wasn’t supposed to mention anything about the Vatican, but it is such exciting news. When Iain calls, act surprised.”

  “I will.”

  “We’re going to Italy, Ben! And who knows where to after! Spain, Belgium, Austria, Germany …”

  Ben smiled. He was excited, even though he was still jet lagged from Paris. They had only just returned.

  “You’re right, Doc. This is great news.”

  “We also have a few smaller jobs for you, closer to home, before we go. The Met in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we’re looking at a few in Baltimore.”

  Ben agreed to do any job that came up. He felt it was his duty. Over the years, he had never turned down an assignment with Dr. Wright, and the money Mr. Kalispell was paying made it possible to work fewer shifts at the bar. It was not like years ago when he was working side by side with his wife. Putting the bar business behind him would be relieving, but he could not quit just yet. He needed to stay on payroll. The money coming in from Lucy was all in cash—illegal but essential. With a pay stub from the bar, he could deposit small amounts of the cash at a time.

  In Ben’s bedroom, in a shoebox under a loose floorboard, he kept stacks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. If everything stayed the way it was going, he could survive that way for a long, long time.

  Chapter 10

  The flight to Rome was long, but Ben barely noticed. He was flying in business class again, a luxury he could get used too. The flight would have gone much faster, though, if Ben had Sophia on the seat beside him. Instead, he had Dr. Wulfric as a neighbor, and the doctor had no problem sleeping the entire duration of the flight.

  The hotel was only a half-mile outside of Vatican City. The architecture of the building was not quite as inspiring as the hotel in Paris. As they checked in at the front desk, Iain Marcus informed Ben and Dr. Wulfric that the hotel had a rooftop lounge with incredible views of the city and an open-air bar at night. They agreed to meet in the lounge in two hours, after they freshened up.

  “Grazie,” Iain said to the receptionist.

  “Of course you speak Italian,” Ben laughed.

  Iain passed out their room keys. Ben’s room was next to Iain’s, and Dr. Wulfric’s was across the hall. The view from Ben’s room window overlooked an alley, but the interior was bright, vibrant, and incredibly modern.

  Ben put his luggage on the carousel, removed the toiletries, and stood before the bathroom mirror to brush his teeth. It was a marvelous bathroom, with large white marble tiles accented by smaller black tiles lining the edge of the floor. There was a bidet, a heated towel rack, and a large marble bathtub with a mirror spanning the wall behind it. This large mirror reflected the vanity mirror, creating multiple images that appeared to stretch to infinity. Next to the bathtub was a separate standing shower with a glass door. Mr. Kalispell had spared no expense in their lodgings. Ben opened the balcony doors and stepped outside into the open air. The sun was warm on his face, and the breeze felt dry and cool.

  There was plenty of work to do the next nine days. The thought of craning his head and staring up at the high ceiling for hours on end, in a poorly lit chapel, sent Ben’s mind in a tizzy.

  He already had a slight headache from the last three weeks when he, Dr. Wulfric, and Iain visited several local museums in the New York and Baltimore areas. Three days before departing for Rome, they spent hours in the Met.

  The day before departure, Dr. Wulfric asked Ben to come to the lab to discuss what to expect in Rome. When Ben walked into the lab, Dr. Wulfric was in the process of laying out large, square photographs on a cleared work desk, like a puzzle. When he finished, a panorama of the cathedral ceiling and walls lay before them. Dr. Wulfric divided the room into a grid, one through nine, each representing a day of work. They went over the art and compositions so they would not waste time when they arrived.

  After preparing for over an hour, Iain Marcus joined them and took Ben to a different desk.

  “Mr. Kalispell is offering you six thousand dollars for your work in Italy, and, of course, all of your meals and lodging will be taken care of.”

  It would take Ben over a month to make that kind of money at the bar. Ben knew he should not bargain, but he thought, what the hell, I have something to bargain with—they need me.

  “Ten thousand. Let’s make it ten thousand dollars, one thousand dollars a day. I’m not looking forward to craning my neck at the ceiling for hours on end; it’s not going to be easy, not by any means.”

  Iain didn’t flinch. He picked up his leather briefcase and removed a black binder. He flipped it open, trailing his eyes over a page. “Eight thousand,” he said.

  Ben remained silent. It was an old trick Emily had taught him years ago when they were buying a new car. ‘Don’t say anything when he makes us an offer,’ she would say. ‘Stay quiet, like you’re thinking, even when it gets uncomfortable.’

  The trick worked. After a few tense minutes of silence, the car salesman had cleared his throat and came back with a better offer. Iain, however, did not wait until the silence became uncomfortable. He flipped a page in the ledger.

  “You received a thousand dollars each night for the first three tests. You received five thousand for your work in Paris, and then one thousand dollars for your work at the Met; one thousand dollars at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and one thousand dollars at the Walters Art Museum. That gives us a total of eleven thousand dollars. Let’s meet at nine thousand for Italy, giving you a total of twenty thousand dollars for your work with us so far. I think that’s adequate, don’t you? We’re going up three thousand dollars from our original offer, and you’re going down one thousand from your counter offer.”

  Ben had the feeling Mr. Kalispell would not care if it cost him fifty thousand—the man had bottomless pockets, but it was Iain’s job to set boundaries.

  “Okay, Iain. That’s fair.”

  “Excellent.”

  Iain Marcus took out a stack of money from his briefcase, counted out four-and-a-half-thousand dollars, and placed the money in a blue zippered bank bag.

  “That’s half of the sum we agreed upon. When we return from Rome, you’ll receive the rest.”

  Ben’s original idea was to include a tape of his dreams into the bargaining. Perhaps they thought he no longer wanted to see it since he stopped bringing it up, but he did. Not only that, but Ben also wanted to know what was going on in the room next to the lab, behind that door in the center of the room. He’d spent six nights in the same bedroom on the second floor, and each morning subsequent each night, he heard the noises behind the wall: ticking, like that of a cab meter, with various mechanical bumps and grinds. Sometimes the sounds were very loud—like an auto garage with power tools and compressors.

  The noise did not bother him, but whenever he asked Dr. Wulfric or Dr. Egan, they stuttered some excuse, changing the subject. Moreover, there were always cars and trucks parked along the side of the lab that seemed to belong to no one; but they had to belong to someone, because they came and went without Ben ever seeing anyone. What Ben really wanted was knowledge, but in the end, after some thought and consideration, he felt it was better not to bargain and leave the subject for another day. Maybe it was better to be kept in the dark. Why should he care? As long as they were paying him, and paying him well, he would quell his pursuit of knowledge, at least for the time being. Later, maybe, after Rome, he would rethink his strategy.

  Ben left the balcony,
closing the double doors behind him. He laid on the bed and flipped through the various channels on the television. Italian soap operas and foreign news reports flashed on the screen. One channel was showing American sitcoms—currently an episode of Friends was playing. Another channel showed world news anchored by a heavily accented newscaster speaking English. He should be concentrating on the work ahead, but his mind kept wandering to his last day in Italy, the day when Sophia Lorenz was flying to meet him. She could not spend the night in Rome; taking two days off from work was impossible. Somehow, Ben persuaded her to fly in for just one day, returning to Paris that very same night. It was silly, impractical, stupid, exhausting, and a waste of both time and money, but that was all the more reason Sophia agreed to do it. The fact that Ben would pay a round-trip ticket just to see her for only a few hours made her swoon. It was something people did in the movies, not in real life, and that made it even more exciting.

  ***

  The men stood inside the Sistine Chapel, in complete and utter awe. The art in the building was all encompassing, everywhere to be seen, impossible to take in all at once. For nearly an hour, they didn’t say a word, but wandered around in astonishment. Dr. Wulfric broke the silence.

  “Breathtaking. Absolutely beautiful.”

  “We have our work cut out for us, don’t we, Doc?”

  “It’s Peter, Ben. Peter.”

  Dr. Wulfric locked eyes with Ben, and the intense feeling of being in over their heads, drowning in a sea with no horizon in sight, made them break out in laughter. Iain Marcus snapped out of his hypnotic wandering and began elbowing past the crowd of people to get back beside them.

  “My god,” Iain said. “This is amazing.”

  Dr. Wulfric nodded, “Let’s get to work, Ben. We have a long day ahead of us.”

  They began in Zone One: The Last Judgment. An enormous fresco spanning the entire wall behind the alter. Dr. Wulfric swung his satchel bag in front of him, removed two small binoculars, handing a pair to Ben. He rummaged through the bag for his sketchpad and charcoals.

  “All right, Doc—Peter—where do we begin?”

  “Let’s just take it in for a few minutes.”

  Three hours later, they were still standing before the enormous painting. The image of Saint Bartholomew, with his face contorted in contempt, his hand holding out his own flayed skin, was etched in Ben’s mind.

  “It is believed that the face of Bartholomew is a self-portrait of Michelangelo himself,” Dr. Wulfric informed Ben, squinting through the binoculars.

  “Why does he look so mad?”

  “Well, because he was flayed alive.”

  “No, I don’t mean Saint Bartholomew. Why did Michelangelo depict himself angry?”

  “Because Michelangelo never wanted to do this—to paint the ceiling, paint the Sistine Chapel. He told the Pope he would prefer not to be commissioned, if possible. But the Pope commissioned him anyway.”

  “That’s crazy. I wouldn’t think an artist of his caliber would turn down an offer to compose something of this magnitude. Arguably, the greatest artistic achievement ever created—in the world. Something to live on long after his death.”

  “At that stage in Michelangelo’s life, he thought of himself as more of a sculptor and was frustrated that he would have to spend years of his life painting the Chapel instead of doing what he felt was his calling. But who knows, it’s just a theory.”

  ***

  On the third day of the trip, Iain Marcus made an appointment at a local spa for Ben and Dr. Wulfric after seeing how fatigued they were becoming. They had both spent hours staring straight up at the ceiling, squinting through binoculars, developing headaches that aspirin couldn’t cure, and painful cricks in their necks that became unbearable at times. Dr. Wulfric often joked that it would be easier for them to lie on the floor while studying the ceiling. It would be so much easier. The spa was enjoyable, and when they left they felt recharged, but the pain came back the moment they reentered the cathedral.

  The fifth night, Ben retreated to his room so completely drained and mentally fatigued that his knees were wobbly the last few steps in the hallway. He opened the door to his room and collapsed on the bed. An hour later, he was still in bed, his hands and feet tingling with exhaustion, and his stomach growling audibly with hunger. However, he didn’t feel he had the strength to leave the bed to get food. He sat propped up with pillows and swaddled with blankets, aware that he had to use the bathroom, but unwilling to get up to do so.

  A news anchor on TV was covering a story about a small earthquake that had hit a rural area in southern Italy. The olive-skinned, clean-cut man explained the level of devastation in a coarse accent that matched the rugged and earthy terrain of the small town he was describing. A clip of an old woman in a black shawl played along with his commentary, crying and howling outside the rubble of what was only minutes ago her family’s home.

  The scene changed to an interview with a dusty-looking, sunbaked man speaking in rushed Italian. An English translation followed: “I don’t know where we’ll sleep tonight. It happened so fast. I felt the earth rumble and didn’t know what was happening, and then the buildings around me started to shake, and I started hearing loud crashes. Everything was coming down. My house is destroyed; it’s gone. I don’t know what we’ll do, but I am so thankful that my wife and children are safe. I praise the Lord for saving them. So many were not as fortunate.” Behind the man, people stood in a group beside the rubble of his home, staring into the camera with drawn faces. Everyone looked grey, as if they belonged to the rubble that was all around. A group of sheep appeared in the distance, followed by a Shepherd, and even their white fleeces were grey with dust.

  Ben blinked his eyes away from the television. He saw the bright outline of the screen on the blank wall, etched in his vision. He blinked again—the image stayed, burned in his retinas. He closed his eyes for several seconds, taking deep breaths in and out. The colors became brighter in the darkness, twinkling like lights on a Christmas tree.

  “Oh hell,” he said. “Oh shit.”

  He kept his eyes shut.

  In the darkness, the crisp lines of the screen blurred around the edges, branching out in crystalized colors, zigzagging in thunderbolt arrays both colorful and blinding. Bright white patches and black spots grew and changed form.

  He turned off the TV and picked up the phone next to the bed, dialing Dr. Wulfric’s room. The numbers on the keypad were hard to make out, and he had to use his memory.

  “Hello?”

  “Doc, it’s Ben.” There was a waver in his voice and his hand was trembling on the receiver.

  “Ben, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m getting a migraine. The aura is starting.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Ben hung up, and not a moment later there was a knock at his door. Ben let Dr. Wulfric in.

  “How bad is it? Are you in any pain?”

  “No pain. It’s dull.”

  “Lie on the bed.”

  Dr. Wulfric turned off all the lights in the room except for one small reading lamp. He gave Ben two Triptans, popping the pills out from their protective shells. The pills instantly dissolved on Ben’s tongue like snowflakes.

  “How bad is the aura? Can you see?”

  It was impossible to focus on any one area of the aura; it grew along the edge of his vision, along the border, like how a camera flash might leave an impression in the corner of the eye. It had grown now to the point where it encompassed his complete field of vision, and Ben could only see the outline of Dr. Wulfric through patches of pitch-black and bright, colorful lights. If he had to count how many fingers the doctor held up, it would be difficult.

  “It’s bad, Doc.”

  “Follow this pen with your eyes. Don’t move your head, just your eyes.”

  Dr. Wulfric moved a pen back and forth before Ben’s face.

  “I think we’ve been overworking ourselves. We’re on break, as of right
now.”

  “Can we do that? I mean, we have to finish on schedule, right?”

  “We’re ahead of schedule, and judging from our results so far, we can start spending less time in each zone. Rush things a bit. And we can always stay an extra day or two if need be. But that’s not important right now. Right now, you don’t worry about any of this. You have to relax.”

  “Do you think it’s from the serum, the umm …”

  “Nano. No,” he shook his head, “I can’t see that being possible.”

  The serum they used, the red liquid with the microscopic robots swimming around, had been altered slightly before the trip to Paris and again this time in Italy, to compensate for the different machinery they were using—Lucy III. It looked about the same, just a little darker. Ben would not have noticed at all if Dr. Wulfric had not told him.

  The next big leap for Lucy was to run off the neuronal signals themselves, without the aid of the serum. Soon, Dr. Wulfric hoped, a serum would not be needed at all. When the project was ready to hit the market, a Nano pill would replace the serum and eliminate the need for an injection. That would be fine for hospitals as long as the FDA approved the pill—but if they intended to sell a model of Lucy to private consumers, they would have to do away with the serum altogether. That sort of thing—pills, injections, and medicines—would not sell to individuals. The next big step in Lucy’s evolution was to work unaided.

  “I’m doubtful the serum has anything to do with this, although I am not going to rule it out. If you were going to have a reaction to the formula, it would have happened immediately. I think the intense focusing and strain, along with having to use binoculars for hours on end, caused too much stress in your mind. You need to get plenty of sleep—not just tonight, but tomorrow as well.”

  Dr. Wulfric left the room and returned a minute later holding his leather medical bag. He opened it and removed a bag of IV solution and a length of thin tubing. He held Ben’s arm tightly to stop it from trembling as he drew a blood sample and connected an IV drip.