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  God, the idea that she might be going crazy scared the hell out of her, but at least no one could say she was doing a half-assed job of it.

  6

  Daley’s phone alarm woke her at 3 P.M.

  She opened her eyes and rubbed her face. She’d returned home exhausted and figured a nap would be good before she headed for Dr. Holikova’s. She’d been watching excerpts from The Tonight Show on YouTube and had dozed off during one of them. And now she awoke to find herself propped up on three pillows with her phone in her hand. She was sure she hadn’t gone to sleep like this.

  (“Your smartphone is the most fascinating instrument,”) said a voice in her head.

  She sat up straight. “What? Who?”

  (“Just me. Remember?”)

  Unfortunately, she did, as it all came back. The hallucination. As she’d dozed off she’d harbored a vague hope she’d wake up cured. But here she was, barely conscious, and already the craziness was starting. Just a disembodied voice at the moment—all audio, no visual. Yet.

  “Everybody has a smartphone,” she grumbled. “Even homeless people.”

  (“They’ve been all around you for as long as you can remember, so you’re jaded. I’ve been sentient less than two days. This is completely new to me and totally miraculous.”)

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  And then she saw all the hair on her pillow.

  “Aw, no! Is it still falling out?”

  (“I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question,”) the voice said. (“But as I told you yesterday, the follicles are still alive. The hair will grow back.”)

  “A lot of good that does me now!”

  Dressed in panties and her Lakers T-shirt—her sleepwear—she jumped out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom for a mirror.

  “Shit!”

  An ugly oblong bald spot dominated the top of her head—okay, not completely bald but definitely might-as-well-be-bald, considering the scant strands that remained. She rubbed her burning eyes but the patch remained.

  (“Terribly sorry, but—”)

  “Shut up! Just shut up!”

  She headed for the kitchen. Caffeine … she needed caffeine to wake her up and help her deal with—

  She yelped in shock and did a ridiculous little dance while stretching her T down to her upper thighs—because Jimmy Fallon was sitting at the counter dressed in a voluminous terry cloth robe, sipping coffee …

  “What—? How—?”

  (“Oh, sorry, Daley,”) he said with his crooked smile. (“Did I startle you?”)

  “But—!”

  Wait-wait-wait. How could Jimmy Fallon get into her apartment? And why would he want to? Yet … here he was.

  (“Oh, wow, I see that I did. My bad.”)

  I’ve gone so crazy … or …

  “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  He gave that impish, patented Jimmy Fallon grin. (“Of course it’s me. Well, that is, unless you know another me.”)

  Daley winged a throw pillow from the couch. He didn’t give the slightest flinch as it tumbled straight though him.

  “It is you! Why would you do that?”

  The hallucination reappeared as the surferish dude, still dressed in jeans and flannel. (“Well, I was sensing your attraction while you watched the replays so I thought a little visit from him might distract you from, you know, the, um, hair problem.”)

  “That’s what you thought? You thought I’d be happy to wake up and find a stranger in my home?”

  Jimmy Fallon flickered back long enough to say (“I’m not really a stranger!”) and then it resumed the previous look.

  Daley picked up her phone, activated the camera, and took a shot of him.

  (“What’s that for?”)

  “I’m gonna post it on Instagram and see if anybody recognizes you.”

  (“No, you’re not.”)

  “Really?” She already had her Instagram account open. “Who’s going to stop me?”

  (“It’s not a matter of stopping you, it’s a matter of you not being able to photograph me.”)

  She checked her gallery and found a photo of an empty chair in her kitchenette.

  “What the—?”

  Crap, he was right.

  (“As I told you before, I’m simply an image in your visual cortex. You’re the only one who can see me. And by the way, I already am.”)

  “‘Already am’ what?”

  (“Used to your smartphone. What we were discussing when you woke up.”)

  She was developing mental vertigo from the sudden change in subject.

  “I don’t…”

  (“I’m telling you I’m already used to your smartphone. In fact I was doing some medical research while you were asleep.”)

  “How the hell did you do that?”

  (“Quite simple, really. While your mind was sleeping, I used your eyes and your fingers to do searches on your phone.”)

  She had a vague, dreamlike memory of staring at her phone’s screen while her finger swiped through the pages at blinding speed.

  “Do you read fast?”

  A nod. (“Really fast. I can scan screens and store everything away for later digestion because there’s an awful lot of wasted space in the human brain. You’re not living up to anywhere near your potential. Neither is any other member of your species, I gather.”)

  As Daley rubbed her irritated eyes again, something occurred to her.

  “Hey, what right have you got to pull something like that with my body?”

  (“Our body, you mean.”)

  Daley ignored that. “No wonder my eyes are burning. I’ve been reading when I could have been—should have been sleeping.”

  (“Don’t get excited. Your conscious mind got its time-out and I built up our vocabulary. You’re fully rested, so what’s your complaint? By the way, I can now answer your question about how I entered your head. I seeped into your pores and then into your scalp capillaries, which I followed into your parietal emissary veins. These flow through the parietal foramina in your skull and empty into the superior sagittal sinus. From there it was easy to infiltrate your central nervous system.”)

  Daley opened her mouth to say she really didn’t care, then realized she understood exactly what it was saying. She had a clear picture of the described path floating through her mind.

  “How come I know what you’re talking about? I seem to understand but I don’t remember ever hearing those words before … and then again, I do.”

  Weird.

  (“Yes, it must seem rather odd. What happens is my new knowledge gets stored in your memory and is thus available to you. The result is you experience the fruits of the learning process without having gone through it. You know facts without remembering having learned them.”)

  “Bullshit,” she said, turning on her Keurig and inserting a dark-roast pod. “I’m just dredging up things I already knew but forgot.”

  (“What will it take to convince you? How about: I found some abnormal cells in your right ovary.”)

  Daley froze. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer—died horribly.

  “A tumor?”

  She needed to get to a doctor before it metastasized!

  Somewhere within her growing panic rose the thought that a few hours ago she would have been worrying about “spread” rather than “metastasis.”

  (“No need for concern. The cells had a long way to go, maybe twenty years before they became a threat. But I killed them off.”)

  “How’d you do that?”

  (“Cytolysis: I pumped excess sodium into their cytoplasm, causing them to absorb more and more water until they burst.”)

  Stunned, Daley could only stare at it.

  (“Do you know you inherited a mutation from your mother that leaves you prone to ovarian cancer?”)

  Her mother’s oncologist had urged Daley to get tested for the gene but she’d been putting it off and off and off.

  (“No matter now. I’ll keep watch for any nascent probl
ems and nip them in the bud. Oh, and you don’t have to thank me. I’m doing this for my own good as well as yours. We’re partners, remember? And I don’t relish the idea of walking around in a cancer-riddled body any more than you do.”)

  “How…?”

  (“My consciousness extends down to the cellular level and beyond.”)

  “How is that possible?”

  Wait … she was treating this figment as though it was a real thing … another person. It wasn’t. Just the result of some screwed-up neurotransmitter ratio in her brain—too much serotonin or too little norepinephrine or—

  Wait again … serotonin?… norepinephrine? How did she get to know so much about neurotransmitters? Or, for that matter, anything about neurotransmitters?

  Then she remembered what it had said about doing research on her phone while she slept …

  Could it be? Could she really have another mind sharing her body?

  7

  Dr. Holikova had been truthful when she said the EEG would be painless and noninvasive. What she hadn’t said was that it would also be messy. Not a word about the conductive goop they used to glue the contacts to your scalp, which in Daley’s case at the moment had been easy to apply to the bald patch.

  She’d worn a Dodgers cap on her walk over to the office. And a Lakers warm-up because another cool day was predicted. She wasn’t a sports fan, but these were cheap knockoffs that came in useful now and then.

  The EEG tech had given her a strange look when she’d removed the cap, so she’d made up some semi-lame story about a toxic spill on her head. The only good part about the bare patch was how the goop cleaned up easier from there than from her hair.

  The test took about forty-five minutes total, with flashing lights and the whole bit. After a fifteen-minute wait, Dr. Holikova called her into her office.

  “This looks perfectly normal,” she said, flipping through the seemingly endless stack of fan-folded graph paper.

  (“What did I tell you?”)

  “You’re sure there’s nothing there?”

  “Quite sure. Sometimes TLE can cause hallucinations, but I see no sign of it here.”

  “TLE?” Somehow that sounded vaguely familiar.

  The hallucination appeared wearing a white lab coat with a stethoscope looped around its neck. (“Temporal lobe epilepsy, my dear. I stored it in your memory bank.”)

  “Temporal lobe epilepsy,” said Dr. Holikova.

  He pumped a fist. (“Nailed it!”)

  “Would you please shut up,” Daley said.

  Dr. Holikova stiffened. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Not you. I was talking to the hallucination.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course.” She stared at Daley a moment, then, “I most definitely want to pursue this further, with a psychiatric evaluation—”

  “Now wait a min—”

  “Just a formality,” she said quickly. “And a PET scan to see if any areas of your brain show unusual levels of activity. All covered by the grant, at no cost to you, of course.” She gestured toward the door. “My receptionist will schedule you.”

  (“I guess that means we’re dismissed,”) the vision said and faded away.

  Out in the waiting area, the receptionist called the psychiatrist—just down the hall—and informed Daley that the doctor didn’t have an opening until next week but wanted Daley to come back tomorrow morning to take some sort of preliminary written test called the “MMPI,” whatever that was.

  “Really? On a Saturday?”

  She nodded. “She does her testing on Saturday mornings. The imaging center is down on the first floor; they said they’ll have to get back to me on the PET scan, which means I probably won’t hear till Monday.”

  Fine with Daley. She was heading for the exit when a middle-aged woman in the waiting room began to shake uncontrollably.

  “She’s having another seizure!” the lady next to her cried.

  The woman toppled from her seat, landing on her back, making garbled noises as she continued to thrash about. Daley dropped to her knees beside her and grabbed her wrists to keep her from hurting herself.

  (“Hold her!”) the hallucination said.

  The thrashing continued for maybe another fifteen seconds and then suddenly stopped. Slowly the woman’s unfocused eyes blinked back into awareness.

  (“Whatever you do, don’t let go!”)

  “But—”

  (“I can go in!”)

  “What?”

  It disappeared.

  “Thank God!” said her companion. “Oh, Doctor! She’s just had another, even after you increased the dose.”

  Dr. Holikova had rushed in. She squatted opposite Daley, saying, “Can you hear me, Grace?”

  Grace nodded from the floor. “I guess I had another one.”

  The vision reappeared. (“It will be her last.”)

  “How can you say that?” Daley said.

  Realizing that everyone in the waiting room had heard her and was suddenly looking at her, she released the woman’s wrists and rose.

  (“You don’t have to talk out loud. Just direct a thought at me and I’ll catch it.”)

  Like this?

  (“Exactly.”)

  Okay, so how can you say—?

  (“I was able to go inside her!”) He sounded excited. (“As you were holding her, I sensed a passage forming. Eventually it opened enough to allow me to make a connection and enter her. I explored her nervous system and almost immediately saw what was going on. I calmed the electrical storm in her brain that was causing the seizure. I also found the source of the problem: a little scar on her right parietal lobe.”)

  But how can you say she won’t have another?

  (“Because I started a lytic process to dissolve the scar. It should be complete in a few minutes. Her EEG will be normal now.”)

  “We’ll have to further increase her dose,” Dr. Holikova said.

  (“Tell her that won’t be necessary.”)

  I can’t do that.

  (“You must. Otherwise she’ll be taking medication she no longer needs.”)

  Not my problem.

  (“Daaaaaleeeey. You have important information about her medical condition. Be a good girl now and tell the doctor.”)

  Damn!

  “Grace,” Daley said, “you don’t need a bigger dose. In fact you don’t need any medication.”

  “Don’t go telling her that!” Dr. Holikova said. “That’s reckless and irresponsible!”

  Grace blinked up at Daley. “How is that possible?”

  “I just cured you.”

  (“Hey! You had nothing to do with it!”)

  Well, I can’t very well say you did it.

  “That’s impossible!” Dr. Holikova cried. “I can’t have you filling my patients’ heads with nonsense! Leave my office! Immediately!”

  “Okay,” Daley said. “But if you’re so sure I’m wrong, maybe you should prove it. Do another EEG and I guarantee it will be normal.”

  She had no idea if she was right, but saw no downside for anyone.

  Dr. Holikova huffed. “Nonsense!”

  “What if she’s right?” Grace said.

  “She isn’t,” the doctor told her.

  “I believe her,” Grace said.

  Dr. Holikova shook her head. “You want to believe her.”

  “What I want is another EEG. Right now.”

  The office door closed behind Daley then, cutting off the voices.

  (“This is exciting,”) he said, appearing beside her. (“We’ve reached a milestone.”)

  “What? In the doctor’s office?”

  (“No—you and I. You’ve accepted me as real.”)

  “I absolutely have not!”

  “You have. You’ve stopped thinking of me as ‘it’ and started thinking of me as ‘he.’ That’s a milestone.”

  As much as she wanted to deny it, she couldn’t. She couldn’t touch him, but he’d become real to her.

  (“The next step is accepting
me as a partner.”)

  “Never. You may be real, but you’re a real parasite.”

  (“I resent that! We’re partners … a symbiosis!”)

  “Parasite.”

  (“Symbiont!”)

  “You hijacked my body!”

  (“We’ve been through this. So, now that I’m real to you, I say again, I want a name. I still like ‘Pard.’”)

  She didn’t want to give it a name, she wanted to give it the boot. And she’d find a way.

  “What happened back there with Grace?”

  (“What?”) he said, holding a hand to his ear. (“Is someone speaking?”)

  “You know damn well I am.”

  Still looking away, he said, (“Yes, I believe I do hear a voice, but it’s not addressing me by name, so I’ll simply ignore it.”)

  Not addressing me by name …

  Did this thing really want her to call it Pard? She couldn’t. She just … couldn’t.

  “All right, all right, damn it. But come up with another name.”

  (“Well, the human name for me is ‘alaret,’ so—”)

  “No, I will not call you ‘Al,’ either.”

  (“Well, we’re back to ‘Pard’ then.”)

  “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  (“Try it. It’s not as if you’ll be introducing me to anyone. It’ll be just between the two of us.”)

  “Okay … Pard.” Ugh. She still almost choked on using any name, especially this one, but … “As long as it’s just between you and I—”

  (“‘Me’ … just between you and me.”)

  She repressed a scream. “Just because I accept your existence doesn’t mean I accept your presence. I still want you gone.”

  (“Understood. Not going to happen, but understood. All that aside, do you realize that I actually got into Grace’s brain? When you’re in physical contact with someone, I can enter and interact with them just like I can with you.”)

  A possibility occurred to Daley and she didn’t want to seem too hopeful as she asked, Can you transfer yourself over to them?

  (“No. You’ll be relieved to know that you and I are bonded and I won’t be leaving you for anybody else.”)

  Oh, joy.

  (“I’m not sensing a burst of relief.”)

  I’m hiding it.

  As they started down the stairs, Pard said, (“Isn’t it wonderful? I just performed a miracle cure.”)

  You only believe you cured her. You’ve no proof.