Free After James by Michael Helm Page B

strawberries. They took a bench seat.
    “What if he’s cut off his hand or something,” Anja said.
    “He couldn’t have wrapped it so well with the other one. Maybe it’s fresh strawberries. It’s for me, I’ll open it.”
    The box had weight but wasn’t metal-heavy, more fruit than cannonball. The hand-printed letters in the address looked sane, unhurried.
    She opened it to find a glass ball the size of a grapefruit, inside of which was one of the plastic identity bracelets issued to test subjects, with bar-coded personal and vital information. He’d twisted the bracelet once and reattached it into a loop, then suspended the resulting möbius strip inside the clear ball.
    It came with a typewritten note.
Maker.
    Are you there?
    You’ve left me unfinished.
    So I’ve left you and your pharma con.
    I wanted, then needed what you were making of me.
    But you weren’t up to the making.
    This ball is all you get.
    Take it and fuck off.
    No other ending.
    Eleven.
    “That’s literally twisted,” said Anja. Her voice, though not yet her face, expressed relief. “But I practically expected a bomb.”
    Ali held the object up against the water, the sky, the new ugly condos across the inlet. It maintained a sure beauty. Subject 11 had lost his faith, lost his sense of irony about their relative positions, lost his belief in her.
    “He used to be charming,” said Anja. “You okay?”
    That night Anja called her at home to say that when she’d quoted the note to her unemployed classicist husband, he’d found another twist.
    “He says ‘pharma con’ is a pun on a Greek word.” Somewhere in Plato was a story about an Egyptian god who offers a king a remedy for forgetting, the
pharmakon
of writing, writing as a memory aid. The king turns down the offer, knowing it will have the opposite effect and cause forgetfulness. The king uses the same word,
pharmakon
, to mean poison. Remedy and poison. “One and both, so either, depending.”
    The ball sat now on a small china plate on Ali’s dining table. Maybe mornings before work it would catch a little grey windowlight that might, in time, disarm it.
    “So it isn’t just he thinks I conned him. He thinks I poisoned him.”
    “I don’t know, Ali. I don’t see how.”
    “Poisoned by loss. Withdrawn revelation. Before the trial he was happy knowing what he knew, seeing what he saw. Then he took the pills and saw more. Now he knows he’s blind to the real size and intricacy of things. He’s been poisoned with a knowledge of his blindness.”
    “That sounds pretty grand, actually. You haven’t read the pages he sent me. He’s not some great visionary. He’s just a guy telling a story, and then we switched him to the placebo and he couldn’t finish it.”
    When she asked Anja to describe the story, she said she’d put her husband on, said his name, Roland, who was better at these things.
    “There’s nothing so original about it.” Ali remembered him now, his voice, a kind of high-snouted tone. “The usual horror themes and tropes. Violated Nature. Science and Art, fire and flood, madwomen and monsters. It clips along for a while but he never sent the ending.”
    They forwarded the file that night. Ali read the first page. There was already a body, a gun going off, the usual dumb mystery, cheap violence. It settled her to know that the story was only an entertainment. If this was all the vision he’d had, all he’d lost, she’d done Subject 11 a favour, she thought. Four days later he was dead.
    She went to Carl with the news. His house had a cedar porch that in damp weather smelled like a sauna. He invited her to sit on his fraying string chairs but she stayed on her feet. She couldn’t find the words at first and they ended up looking out at the neighbours’ lawns and houses in the soft focus. Evenat plus two degrees the grey could get so thick you expected whales to float by. There hadn’t been sun for a week.
    When she told him, he tried to come close