Free The Placebo Effect by David Rotenberg Page A

headed in the other direction.
    The tile-roofed buildings of the old city seemed to loom forward, crowding the street. He felt hundreds of eyes, angry eyes, watching him. A man held his daughter’s hand as she lifted her skirts and peed on the sidewalk. Then he shouted. Had he been staring? Where the hell was he? He headed back uptown—made a sharp left and there was the river again! The river?
    How late was it? He looked to his wrist. No watch of course. Lost—utterly lost in Shanghai, in the middle of the night, without money, without identification, without even knowing what the time was—adrift in a vast foreign sea and the opium snake still alive and now very, very angry in his veins.
    A sharp female voice stopped him. He turned. The tiny peasant woman dressed in filthy rags stepped out of the blackness of the alley as she always did. She held a baby so dirty that it looked like it was made of mud. Her left hand was outstretched toward him, clearly begging for money. He stepped back, his heel hit the curb, and he found himself on the ground.
    Then the mud baby was on his chest.
    He looked up and the woman was speaking, and despite his extremely limited Mandarin he understood every word. “This child is you. Has always been you. And will always be waiting here for you. You will return to the filth that you came from. If you refuse to do what must be done, you will be abandoned by your friends and family—lost in a dark room that has no windows and no doors. And you will search—endlessly—for a way out. But you will never find the way out. Everything you fear will happen to you—as it has happened to this child.”
    He suddenly realized that he was seeing the woman from an odd angle. This was fucking new! With a cold shock he knew that he was seeing the peasant from the baby’s eyes. Then those eyesturned, and there he was—crazed, banging his head over and over and over against a wall. Tears staining his cheeks—a scream in his throat. Then an older voice—his older voice—pleaded, “I couldn’t do it! But please don’t forget me, please don’t forget me here.” And he held up his left hand and there was blood—and he shivered from the cold.
    And he knew it was a dream, and he knew the dream was part of the burden of his gift, and he knew that one night he would dream the dream and never awaken from the nightmare.
    Then he smelled the smoke. There was no smoke in his dream, but he smelled smoke. Then he felt intense heat rising through the floor of his second-story bedroom floor.
    Decker threw aside his bedcovers. The tendrils of smoke coming through the bedroom walls immediately shocked him into the present.
    He flipped the light switch—nothing. But in the orange glow of the growing fire on his balcony he could see billows of smoke swirling into his bedroom from under the door. When he stood the floor was warm—fuck, it was hot. He reached for the door handle to the balcony and it burnt his hand. He stepped back as the glass shattered and the window frame burst into flame.
    He grabbed his shoulder bag, pulled on his shirt and pants and made himself take a slow shallow breath and think. The balcony was of no use to him; flames were everywhere out there. The smoke from under the door to his bedroom was increasing by the second, and the floor was so hot that it scalded his feet. “Heat rises, heat rises,” he repeated to himself. So the way out is down. If he couldn’t get out the front door, he’d try to get to the basement and escape through the steam tunnel that used to connect the older houses of the Junction to the generating plant up by the now-abandoned train station. He knew he’d have to open the bedroom door and that he might be engulfed by smoke when he did. If the fire had started down there, it could be working its way up the stairway—but the stairway was the only way down.
    He threw open the