Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

He sulked.

I took a seat in the waiting room while Thomas went in for his session with Dr. Grigorin. There was one other patient waiting to see her. A very thin woman, late twenties, with long, scraggly blond hair that she kept twisting around her index finger. She was studying a spot on the wall with great interest, like there was a spider there that only she could see.

I glanced at my watch, figured I had a bit of time, and stepped out into the hall. I took out my cell phone, looked up a number online, and tapped to connect.

“Promise Falls Standard,” a woman’s recorded voice said. “If you know the extension, enter it now. To use the company directory, press 2.”

I struggled through the process until an actual phone rang.

“Julie McGill.”

“Julie, hi, this is Ray Kilbride.”

“Oh, hi, Ray. How are things?”

“Things are, you know, they’re okay. Listen, am I catching you at a bad time?”

“Just waiting on another call,” Julie said, her words coming quickly. “I thought this was going to be the principal from Promise Falls High. Trying to get some details on a small explosion in their chemistry class.”

“Jesus.”

“No one got hurt. But they could have. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted, first of all, to thank you for coming to my dad’s funeral. That was really good of you.”

“No problem,” she said.

“I wondered, if you had a second, if we could grab a coffee so I could ask you a couple of questions about my father. Since you did the piece for the paper.”

“It was pretty short. Not much more than a digest item. I don’t have a lot of detail.”

I was picking up, from her tone, that she was worried her other call was going to come in. I was about to tell her to forget about it, apologize for taking up her time, when she said, “But sure. Why don’t you come by around four? We’ll grab a beer. Meet you out front of the paper.”

“Yeah, sure, that would be-”

“Gotta go.” She hung up.

As I stepped back into the waiting room, the doctor and Thomas were emerging from her office. Dr. Grigorin was saying, “Don’t be such a stranger. You need to come see me more often. It’s good that we stay connected.”

Thomas pointed to me. “So you’ll talk to him.”

“I will.”

“Tell him to stop telling me what to do.”

“You got it.”

Dr. Grigorin-her first name turned out to be Laura-had fiery red hair that would have fallen to her shoulders if she hadn’t spun it up into a bun, and stood about five-four in her heels, which I guessed added at least three inches. She was a striking woman in her early sixties. Rather than wearing typical doctor garb, she wore a red blouse and a straight black skirt that came to just below her knees.

“Mr. Kilbride,” she said to me. “Won’t you come in.”

“Ray,” I said. “Call me Ray.”

She told Thomas to take a seat in the waiting room while we spoke.

“I’m supposed to prescribe you something,” she said, smiling and motioning for me to take a chair. Rather than sit behind her desk, she took a chair across from me and crossed her legs. They were nice legs.

“To keep my controlling nature in check,” I said.

“That’s right.” I liked her smile. She had the tiniest gap between her front teeth. “How does he seem to you?” she asked.

“It’s hard to tell. I know my father’s death has to have affected him, but he’s not showing it.”

“I can tell he’s upset, even though he keeps things bottled up,” Dr. Grigorin said.

“Except with Maria,” I said.

“Who’s Maria?” she asked. I explained and she shook her head with amusement. “Your father was very concerned about how much time Thomas’s preoccupation was taking up. Thomas said he’s cutting back and watched a movie with you the other night.”

“That’s not true. It was all I could do to get him to leave the house to come here today. He didn’t want to leave his work.”

“Has he explained it to you?”

“I didn’t know there was anything to explain,” I said. “He likes to explore the world’s cities online. It’s his thing.” I shook my head and grinned. “Although he did mention the other day that I needed a security clearance to see what he was up to.”

Dr. Grigorin nodded. “Thomas said it would be okay if I told you what he’s been doing.”

I sat up slightly in my chair. “What do you mean, what he’s been doing?”

“Thomas believes he’s working for the CIA. Consulting for them.”

“I’m sorry. The what? The Central Intelligence Agency?”

“That’s right.”

“Working how? What’s he doing-what does he think he’s doing for them?”

“It’s somewhat complicated, and not everything fits together quite right, not unlike dreams where you have different elements bumping up against one another. First of all, Thomas believes there’s going to be a cataclysmic event, some kind of digital, electronic implosion or explosion. I’m not sure which. Perhaps a global computer glitch, or even something orchestrated by some foreign power-an ingenious computer virus-that will cripple this country’s intelligence-gathering ability.”

“Oh, man.”

She continued. “When this happens, the first thing that will go down will be online maps. They’ll all vanish instantly. Poof, gone. All the people in the intelligence community who depend on those will be scrambling, because they’ve been under orders from on high to save paper costs-” She must have noticed my eyebrows going up and she smiled. “Really, paper costs. Budget cuts are even hitting delusions now.” She looked a bit sheepish, like maybe she shouldn’t have made the joke. “Anyway, the point is, the government no longer has any hard copies.”

My shock was giving way to fascination. Knowing Thomas as I did, it all made sense, in a bizarre kind of way.

“And when that happens,” Laura continued, “who do you suppose the CIA is going to be turning to?”

“Let me guess.”

She nodded. “He’ll be able to draw for them, from memory, all the street plans of all the major cities in the world. He’s got them all up here.” She tapped her temple with her index finger. She wore red nail polish.

“But hang on,” I said. “There’d still be old maps around. On paper, in libraries, in people’s homes. Millions of school atlases, for crying out loud.”

“Now you’re being logical,” Laura Grigorin chastised me. “The way your brother visualizes this apocalyptic event, those resources have already been destroyed. Libraries everywhere got rid of them and went digital. Every household has put their old maps out with the newspapers in the recycling and now relies solely on the computer. That’s why this is going to be such a catastrophe. It’ll be a world without maps, and the only person who will know how to reproduce them will be Thomas. And not just maps, but how each and every street in the world looks. Every storefront, every front yard, every intersection.”

I shook my head in wonderment. “So he’s getting ready for if and when this happens.”

“Not if,” she said. “It’s coming. That’s why he’s spending every moment in his room traveling the world, memorizing as many cities as he can before this event. I had a patient-this was several years ago-who worked at a paper in Buffalo, and every night when he went home he took all the various editions of that day’s paper with him because he was convinced that one day the entire newspaper would burn down, and he’d be the only one with a complete record of the paper’s history-at least for the period that he was there.”

“Unbelievable.”

“His house, every hallway, every room, every surface, was filled with newspaper. He had to squeeze his way through stacks of newsprint to get anywhere.”