Nothing bad was going to happen, says Logan. I think we’re too happy to create an accident.
And in that moment, the realization falls on him. Flora’s accident.
He can already name the ingredients. The terrible words that spilt from his wine-fuelled mouth. Her shock that she arose not from love, but from error. His monumental fear that he would lose her. The story about herself she couldn’t live with.
Daddy’s girl. What a dutiful daughter she was. He told her she was an accident and she became one.
Jules is saying something about voodoo and naturally, when one is a powerful shaman, but she sees his eyes and trails off.
Fin, are you okay?
He cannot see. Her face and the dog are blurring. There are only two words in his mouth.
Oh God.
Epilogue
Opening
Dusk is falling. Inside the building, lights are coming on automatically in occupied rooms. As Logan walks through the Alterman complex, tonguing the twinge of his wisdom tooth, the corridors light up ahead of his footsteps like a pinball’s high-score totalizer. Whether he is illuminating them, or they him, he isn’t sure. Nor is he sure where he might walk that would be roomy enough to lay out his thinking; away from Dr Salmon it feels tangled and chaotic. Preoccupied with unravelling pros from cons, he allows his unconscious mind to dictate his direction at junctions: left or right, straight on or turn. Now, directly in his path, a wall of glass, a glass door. Behind the glass is darkness: an internal oasis of shadow he can only make out dimly in the failing light. A ghostly reflection: half him, half darkness, one overlaying the other.
Pass through the glass or let himself be deflected? To go forward, he will have to walk through himself; push himself out of the way and enter the darkness. It will surely be cold. And who knows what’s in there?
To his right, a corridor that seems to have life at the end of it: the bright illuminations of an eatery, people murmuring anonymous conversation. But he wants to be alone.
This isn’t the choice he needs to make. It doesn’t matter either way.
Acknowledgements
The Alterman Centre is a fictional conflation of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (noetic.org) and the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science (sussex.ac.uk/sackler). The consequences of daily EFT (‘that tapping bollocks’) inspired Salmon’s fictional ‘process’. The book Logan reads is Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death by Chris Carter. Credit for the radio analogy must go to Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief. ‘Then a miracle occurs’ is a cartoon by Sidney Harris. ‘A fascinating study of baseball players’ refers to Abel, E. L., & Kruger, M. L. (2010), ‘Smile intensity in photographs predicts longevity’, Psychological Science, 21, 542–544.