Eric McCormack - Cloud

All at once, I realized we weren’t alone in the room. A thin woman was sitting at the bottom of the bed. Even though her blue dress was much the same colour as the walls, I wondered how I could possibly have missed seeing her. She seemed to be fortyish, with close-cropped grey brown hair and grey eyes. Her face was heart-shaped and her skin quite pale. On the left side of her forehead, a livid scar about three inches long ran from her hairline to her eyebrow.

The woman was certainly aware of our presence. She smiled a wan, grey smile at Dupont and he smiled back.

“Good evening, Griffin,” he said. “Just a quick visit. I hope you’re feeling well.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was just resting. I’m so tired these days.”

I had to strain my ears, she had such a soft voice and what might have been a slight foreign accent.

Dupont gestured towards me.

“This is my old friend, Harry,” he said.

I was going to reach my hand out to shake hers, but Dupont put his hand on my arm to stop me.

Griffin was looking me over, up and down, head to toe. Her grey eyes had brightened and she was even, I thought, sniffing the air a little in my direction.

“I just wanted to check and see if you needed anything to help you sleep tonight,” Dupont said.

“No,” she said. “Not at night.”

“Good,” Dupont said. “That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll be back to see you in the morning for our usual session.”

We left without another word. I glanced back as we went out the door and saw that she was still watching me. The soldier locked the door behind us.

EVEN THOUGH IT WAS only a short walk to the parking lot, in those few minutes darkness seemed to have grown like a mushroom. Dupont chose an institute van and we got in and headed towards Waterville. By the time he’d driven a mile, the first stars were making their appearance.

“We’ll be there in about an hour,” he said as we sped along the tree-lined road.

I’d been thinking about only one thing: why hadn’t I seen that woman, Griffin, when we went into the room? Was there a secret compartment, or somewhere she might have been hiding? Dupont laughed at my question.

“I understand just how you feel — it can be disconcerting,” he said. “But let me assure you, Griffin was there in plain view when we went into her room, though you didn’t see her at first. Why not? Well, as has been observed over and over again by scientists and philosophers, our eyes aren’t all that reliable in many things. Those stars you see up there?” He pointed at the night sky through the windshield. “Our eyes tell us they’re there, but we know from astronomers that many of them don’t even exist anymore.

“Or, take the movie screen. Our minds grasp a single image, but a film actually consists of thousands of them strung together and we can’t see the joins, they move so fast. Then again, even the slowest movement isn’t visible to us either — for instance, the minute-by-minute growth of a tree.

“Or, closer to home, what about you and me, Harry? You must have noticed I’m quite elderly now, just as I noticed how you’d aged, too — though not quite as badly! But if we’d been in contact daily over the years, we’d barely have noticed the ravages of time on us.

“Anyway, you know the kind of thing I’m getting at. For example, you recognize someone at a party and go over and speak to them, only to discover your eyes were mistaken. Or you see your cat asleep in the corner and it turns out to be a pair of socks rolled together. And so on.

“Now, in the case of Griffin, it’s not quite the same thing, but similar. You know that sensation everyone sometimes experiences: you’re looking for something — say, your car keys — and you just can’t find them. When you’re about ready to give up in frustration, suddenly you spot them more or less where they ought to be and you can’t believe you could possibly have missed them.

“Well, Griffin’s had something of that characteristic since she was very young — of being almost undetectable at times, even though she’s right in front of you. A lot of animals have that gift, like the chameleon in the way it changes colour to blend in with the terrain. And there are birds that are so adept at fitting into their backgrounds, even trained birdwatchers have difficulty spotting them.”

I suddenly remembered that time on the truck in Africa when he’d pointed out the nightjars. I reminded Dupont of how surprised I’d been that those great black birds were almost invisible even though they were sitting on tree stumps in broad daylight.

“I remember them, too,” he said. “But in Griffin’s case, unlike the nightjars, she wasn’t born with her gift — she had to develop it. Her family situation was probably at the root of it. Her mother died young and she was left to be brought up by a deeply religious father who should never have been a father in the first place.

“He was a man congenitally unable to imagine the devastating effects of his words on a small child. Whenever Griffin did something he disapproved of, he’d tell her she’d die in agony as a result of her sins, or that her flesh would be devoured by fire in perpetual darkness.

“For a certain type of child these were terrible things to hear, especially coming from the voice of authority.

“Griffin’s aptitude for disguise, if that’s the word, seems to have developed as a response. She tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, first of all to her father, and afterwards to the world at large. By the time she was in high school, she’d become so adept she could be amongst other students and they’d barely notice her.

“Sometimes her near-invisibility didn’t really protect her — in fact it often brought her even more grief. After she left school, for example, she managed to get a job in a typing pool. Her co-workers used to gossip about how unsociable and weird she was, not realizing she was right there in the room, listening to them. In the end, situations like that became too much for her. She had a breakdown and was hospitalized.

“That was when she came to our attention,” Dupont said. “We’re always on the lookout for people who might be suitable for our research.”

BY NOW WE WERE approaching the main highway and a full moon made everything almost as clear as in daylight. This seemed the perfect moment to ask Dupont outright what exactly the purpose of Institute 77 was and what his function was within it. So I did.

He didn’t begin answering till we were on the main highway.

“Look, Harry, what’s going on at the institute is all very hushhush. We sign nondisclosure agreements when we agree to work there. But you’re not a scientist and we’re old friends, so I trust you to keep to yourself what I tell you. Okay?” he said.

I was gratified by his faith in me.

“It’s not a simple matter to explain, but I’ll do the best I can,” he said. “The institute is the base for a collaboration between the government and experts in the fields of medicine and anthropology. I’m in charge of the surgical side of an experimental procedure that deals with those areas of the brain that distinguish human beings from the other primates. Our patients — we prefer to call them volunteers — are individuals who’ve suffered from severe kinds of recurrent psychological problems that have ruined their lives. We ask them if they’re willing to act as subjects for a certain type of brain research we do. They all have to be clear-headed enough to understand what our program is about, and to participate of their own free will. Griffin’s a good example.” He glanced at me. “Following me so far?”

More or less.

Dupont now launched into a little lecture on the makeup of the primate brain and the various components of its two hemispheres. I tried to follow him as best I could, but the bevy of technical terms — ventromedial cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, amygdala— soon overwhelmed me.