Sole Survivor

experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.
        Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.
        The blue brightness snapped to a small point in the centre of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.
        Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.
        Joe peered into her commanding eyes-and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw-or thought he saw-some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.
        As though reading his thoughts, she said, “Joe, what you're afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you're truly afraid of is opening your mind to something you've spent your life refusing to believe.”
        “Your voice,” he said, “the whisper, the repetitive phrases- Open your heart, open your mind -like a hypnotist.”
        “You don't really believe that,” she said as calmly as ever.
        “Something on the Polaroid,” he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.
        “What do you mean?” she asked.
        “A chemical substance.”
        “No.”
        “An hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.”
        “No.”
        “Something I absorbed through the skin,” he insisted, “put me in an altered state of consciousness.” He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.
        “Nothing on the photograph could have entered your bloodstream through your skin so quickly . Nothing could have affected your mind in mere seconds.”
        “I don't know that to be true.”
        “I do.”
        “I'm no pharmacologist.”
        “Then consult one,” she said without enmity.
        “Shit.” He was as irrationally angry with her as he had briefly been angry with Barbara Christman.
        The more rattled he became, the deeper her equanimity. “What you experienced was synesthesia.”
        “What?”
        All scientist now, Rose Tucker said, “Synesthesia. A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied in a different modality.”
        “Mumbo-jumbo.”
        “Not at all. For instance, a few bars of a familiar song are played-but instead of hearing them, you might see a certain colour or smell an associated aroma. It's a rare condition in the general population, but it's what most people first feel with these photos-and it's common among mystics.”
        “Mystics!” He almost spat on the floor. “I'm no mystic, Dr. Tucker. I'm a crime reporter-or was. Only the facts matter to me.”
        “Synesthesia isn't simply the result of religious mania, if that's what you're thinking, Joe. It's a scientifically documented experience even among nonbelievers, and some well-grounded people think it's a glimpse of a higher state of consciousness.”
        Her eyes, such cool lakes before, seemed hot now, and when he peered into them, he looked at once away, afraid that her fire would spread to him. He was not sure if he saw evil in her or only wanted to see it, and he was thoroughly confused.
        “If it was some skin-permeating drug on the photograph,” she said, as maddeningly soft-spoken as any devil ever had been, “then the effect would have lingered after you dropped it.”
        He said nothing, spinning in his internal turmoil.
        “But when you released the photo, the effect ceased. Because what you're confronted with here is nothing as comforting as mere illusion, Joe.”
        “Where's Nina?” he demanded.
        Rose indicated the Polaroid, which now lay on the table where he had dropped it. “Look. See.”
        “No.”
        “Don't be afraid.”
        Anger surged in him, boiled. This was the savage anger that had frightened him before. It frightened him now, too, but he could not control it.
        “Where's Nina, damn it?”
        “Open your heart,” she said quietly.
        “This is bullshit.”
        “Open your mind.”
        “Open it how far? Until I've emptied out my head? Is that what you want me to be?”
        She gave him time to get a grip on himself. Then: “I don't want you to be anything, Joe.