“No, that’s fine,” said The Mother.

  The Daughter, though, looked untroubled; smiling as if she were on a stage. And they didn’t rush either. Both walked as if the ground were made of eggshells and below them, a chasm of infinite nothingness.

  “Poise, persistence, perfection,” said The Mother before they both entered a toilet stall.

  Then, without much ado, The Daughter and The Mother both stuck two fingers into their mouths – deep into their throats until they choked and gagged; long enough until their bodies shook and convulsed, bringing up the five hundred calories they had had only half an hour before.

  Both of them vomited quietly with poise, persistence, and perfection. And when they were done, they stood side by side in front of the mirror with even smaller mirrors in their hands, putting light touches to the foundation on their faces before redoing their lipstick, smacking their lips, and the gargling for several minutes with a mouth wash that The Mother always kept on hand.

  Neither one spoke of or even thought about the vomiting, but instead imagined themselves, like mermaids, sitting upon their pageantry rock whilst waves of applause crashed around them. Much like plucking their brows and waxing her lips, this was just a minor discomfort for the sake of unmistakable beauty.

  “Today we cement your place in history,” said The Mother straightening The Daughter glittering pink crown. “While those other little bitches are handing out cookies, you, my future pageant darling, are on the cuff of greatness.”

  “Is it true that I’ll die?”

  “It’s just an expression,” said The Mother admiring how her smile creeped backward, almost to her ears. “A euphemism. You’ll be fine.”

  “So I won’t actually die?”

  For the first time, she sounded like a seven-year-old girl.

  The Mother grabbed The Daughter and shook her like a carton of milk.

  “What does it matter?” she said as the child’s head rocked back and forth. “As long as you win.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said The Daughter, trying to sound stoic again.

  She wouldn’t beat her; not here.

  “That’s more like it,” she said, lovingly brushed the girl’s hair. “Now, do you have poise?” she said.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Are you persistent?”

  “Yes, Mother, I am.”

  “And do you want to be perfect?”

  “Yes, Mother. I want nothing more and nothing less.”

  “Then stop acting like a god damn runner up.”

  The Mother pushed the little girl so that she tripped and landed on her bum. The Daughter, though, didn’t bat an eyelid, for poise was a language that one spoke with their eyes. If the stage should collapse and her legs were to fall from under her, not a judge would notice for they would all have been captive to the grace of the look in her eye. And as she had practiced a hundred times before, The Daughter merely stood back on her feet and smiled as if she had never fallen in the first place.

  “Listen here,” said The Mother. “It doesn’t matter what they do to you, do you understand? As long as it improves your chance of success. If you want to put a shine on your shoes, what do you do?”

  “Spit on them,” said The Daughter.

  “Good,” said The Mother. “Then you understand. Success is the only thing that matters. Do you want to be famous? Do you want to be a celebrity?”

  “Of course, Mother.”

  “Then you do whatever you have to and you do it with poise, persistence, and perfection. Whatever!” she said, poking The Daughter in the chest. “You will not ruin this for me.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said The Daughter, smearing her gums in Vaseline.

  Then they both returned to smiling at themselves in the mirror until the muscles in their faces could bear no more.

  “We’re ready for you,” said The Nurse, tapping on the restroom door.

  “One second,” said The Mother.

  Then she turned to The Daughter who once again looked like a shrink-wrapped version of herself. Her eyes swelled with pride, maybe more so than her heart which ached with happiness.

  “Felicity,” she said her face as sheer as a granite wall. “Who you are is how I feel.”

  The Daughter nodded. This was neither the time nor place for smiles.

  “Do not let me down.”

  Track 22 (Red)

  Today was unlike any other day for the two scientists. Whereas their trials would normally be carried out with causal banter with only themselves and The Professor present; today they were joined by The Rector as well as the heads of various committees in the university; all of them whispering amongst themselves in patent conspiracy. The atmosphere, needless to say, was heavy and subversive.

  “I understand this is not ideal,” said The Rector, himself conspiring with the two scientists. “But we have three deceased participants to date and your trial is gaining quite a reputation amongst faculty and academic circles – and not the good kind mind you.”

  He had a way of speaking that disguised his disappointment as worry. He spoke like a mother with little to no control over her unmannered, unruly, and unreformable sons. He spoke as if he loved their endeavour as much as he feared their reprisal.

  “Why are they even here?” said Graham. “Is it a legality issue? They’ve seen the consent forms.”

  “The Ethics Committee is worried less about the legalities and more about your practices.”

  “What would they know about scientific practices?”

  “Now, Graham. You know all too well that the social sciences are as much a science as the natural and the formal. We’ve had this discussion before. It’s not nice to make fun of other people, especially when they are making a real go of it. We’re an inclusive university now. Every science gets a gold star.”

  “It’s distracting. How is someone…?”

  “A scientist,” said The Rector, correcting.

  “An academic,” said Graham, being fair. “How is someone in one field of academia supposed to evaluate a practice they don’t understand? All they do is bitch and protest – at most, they conduct a half-arsed thought experiment. And that’s me being generous. You, yourself know. If it can’t be measured…”

  “Graham, you have to meet me halfway. I’m on your side. It’s a different world now. You know more than I do; if I shut them out, they’ll jump to ridiculous conclusions and within a day this whole campus will be a clusterfuck of moral thuggery. You know that. I know that. And look at us. We’re three white males. We’d be shamed and homeless by the end of the day. It’s not about science when it borders on a morality issue, Graham.”

  “Morality? There is no place in science for morality. Morality is a shifting paradigm; it’s entirely subjective.”

  “I think it comes down to public perception.”

  “It comes down to money, that’s what it comes down to.”

  “And that’s public perception, Graham. And in the end, we depend on their endowments. If we tread on the wrong toes…”

  “Everything’s business.”

  “Yes, Graham, yes it is. Everything IS business. And a trial full of dead participants is very bad for business. So please, can we just do this just for this one day and I promise for the rest of your trial you’ll be free to your own devices.”

  It’s not like he had a choice.

  “Fine,” he said, making no effort to mask his disdain.

  Relief swept over The Rector like a cool breeze on sunburned skin. More than anything, he owed it to his positive thinking. A week ago his anxieties would have taken hold and, feeling hostage to his insecurities, he would have blurted out something he would have surely regretted and there would have been no resolution whatsoever. This, though, was proof that as long as he believed he was a winner, he would be a winner. What he wished for, the universe would give. The law of attraction.

  “I’d like to thank everyone for being here this afternoon,” he said, taking everyone’s attention to a series of monitors. “The participant you see here in our fMRI machine today is….”

  He was about to say her name.

  “XT-419,” said Graham, reminding the room once again that this was not a dental exam.

  “Yes,” said The Rector. “That is correct. Now, the premise of this trial is to – correct me if I’m wrong, Graham – to make a physiological roadmap of the brain as it experiences a near-death experience.”

  “And how does that happen?” said one of the committee heads, busily scratching notes on paper, already thinking out the title for their blog.

  “We make it happen,” said Graham.

  He had little patience for their line of questioning.

  “It’s a tentative process,” said The Rector. “Not all people have this experience but it is ubiquitous enough to warrant research. If I’m not wrong, all of our participants in this study have, at one time, experienced or have had a family member go through a near-death experience.”

  This was not the case, though. Each of the participants had lied to enter the trial. None had ever had or ever known anyone who had ever had an experience of this nature. Each had their own reason for partaking in the study with money and fame being amongst the most favoured.

  “How do you know they had a near-death experience?”

  “Aside from the data, we rely on the participant’s account when they are brought back to consciousness.”

  “How do you know they aren’t lying?”

  “Data doesn’t lie,” said Graham. “We know more or less what we are looking for. That, and obviously, we have a control.”

  Even a first-year would refrain from such trite questioning. The committee heads, though, all of them in fact, had the same estranged look on their faces as if the instructions they should follow were transcribed in some otherworldly codec.

  “The participant is asked a serious of questions,” said The Rector. “And if I’m quite right, exposed to imagery that might associate with what one would associate with a near-death experience. They are asked questions about their family, their loves, their regrets, and what they think of any possible afterlife. As they answer, their neural activity is measured here through the fMRI and this works as a base or a control so that when the participant undertakes the drug, Graham and Isaac here can see how the unwilling conscious experience compares with the control.”

  “What is this drug? This is a double-blind trial?”

  “Yes, of course,” said The Rector. “I’ll let one of our esteemed scientists take bat on this one.”

  “There are two drugs, assigned randomly without I nor the participants knowing. One of which is a drug designed to put the heart in cardiac arrest. Most, if not all cases of NDE have been linked to cardiac failure. It is the easiest to replicate in the lab.”

  “And the other drug?”

  “N-Dimethyltryptamine,” said Graham. “There is a specific receptor in the brain – the Sigma-1 receptor – which responds to this drug, N-Dimethyltryptamine, and provides a hallucinogenic response that, in previous studies, has, unlike drugs that bind with 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors, been characterized as being akin to an ego death, and in its symptoms, remarkably similar to what have been described in countless recounts of near-death experiences.”

  “So you think near-death experiences are just delusions?”

  “It may very well be that in cardiac failure, the sigma-1 receptor activates and provides patients with this similar experience at the point of trauma until death.”

  “Why would the brain do that?”

  “Why is a redundant question,” said Graham. “We are scientists. We ask how.”

  If the questioning continued any further, it was clear that Graham would say or do something that would put the university in disrepute; The Rector could feel this so he turned everyone’s focus to the screens that showed a young girl lying on a table, being spoken to – and maybe even comforted – by an odd looking man dressed in Victorian attire, with a host of strange brooches pinned to his lapel – all of them shaped like some kind of insect.

  “Who here has seen an fMRI before?” he asked.

  Graham sighed. They should have been well underway by now; instead they were playing tour guides to the emotion police – who, like canaries in a coal mine, called themselves men and women of science but were merely advocates for the hypersensitive; thrusting themselves into the work of others, measuring its merit by the extent of their moral offence.

  The Rector talked for another ten minutes about the machine and explained all its ins and outs; to the best of his ability anyway. All the while, in the other room, The Professor explained to The Daughter what she should expect and what he expected of her.

  “So in a second,” said The Rector, pointing to The Professor. “Our other esteemed colleague here will go into a separate booth and communicate directly with participant XT-419, asking her a series of questions as I mentioned before, to help the scientists here map out the control neural framework. I said that right?” he said in a doubt riddled whisper to Graham.

  “Let’s just get this underway,” the scientist responded.

  This was not how anyone should have to go about their science. The stress was already overwhelming. They were halfway through the trial and already they had no data to work with. As it was, even vanity publishing seemed like a long shot. He didn’t need this extra burden. What choice did he have, though?

  “This is so exciting,” said The Rector, his enthusiasm, just a tad inappropriate.

  In the other room, The Professor adjusted The Daughter on the table and placed a set of goggles over her eyes and earphone buds in her ears. Her mother sat in the waiting room that was six floors above, reading a fashion magazine and chewing on mint gum.

  When The Daughter was ready, he quietly exited the room and positioned himself in the dark booth with nothing but a microphone and a series of questions

  “OK, let’s start with imagery,” said Graham.

  The machine was started and all those disastrous sounds clinked and clanked and clunk with such deafening volume that The Daughter was shaken out of her well-rehearsed bravado and charisma, and instead was reduced to a typical seven-year-old girl – frightened at the thought of being left alone.

  The first images were of nature; little waves lapping on the shore; seagulls swooping on morsels of bread and leftover fish; a kitten playing with twine; dogs chasing their tails; owls perched in trees; and rainbows, spread across cloudy but sunlit skies. The two scientists watched on the many screens as different regions of The Daughter’s brain lit up in reds and oranges, pulsing as if there were something living inside her head, scampering from one place to another. But when it came to the images of her family, there was only one part of her brain the lit up.

  “You see that?” said Graham.

  The image the girl was seeing was of her father sitting in his favourite chair.

  “Her amygdala is running a damn marathon.”

  The same was true for her brother. The photos of her mother, though, produced the most damming evidence of all.

  “Poor kid,” said Isaac, as if the swarming colours were purple bruises.

  “Alright,” said Graham. “We have enough. Let’s go to stage two.”

  In the small booth, The Professor prepared his questions.

  “Hello little girl,” he said. “This is your good friend. There is nothing to fear.”

  Only The Daughter could hear what was being said. In their room, the two scientists – and their uninvited guests – had nothing but the images on the screen to work with.

  “Hello,” said The Daughter. “You’ve gone. Where did you go?”

  “I’m right here beside you,” said The Professor. “Very close. Not very far. Could I ask you a few tiny questions?”

  “Ok.”

  She sounded relieved by The Professor’s voice. He spoke in an accent that was a mix of every country he had ever lived in and, as a result, though quite articulate, to The Daughter, he sounded like what she thought a French teddy bear would sound like if it came to life.

  “What is it like to be on a stage?”

  The question he was supposed to ask was about candy canes and puppy dogs.

  “What do you feel? Are you frightened? Are you scared? Are you enthused? Are you thrilled? What is it? What do you think? What do you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” said The Daughter.

  There were so many questions; she didn’t know which one to answer first.

  “If you would be so kind as to close your eyes. I want you to picture yourself on that stage. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” said The Daughter.

  She’d been doing this her whole life. For as long as he could remember, her mother had her closing her eyes, imagining all the most important people in the world, watching her, judging her.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at my mark. Downstage centre.”

  “What do you see?”

  “The floodlight. And I can see the knees of the people in the front row. Mainly I can just see all the lights. There’s so many. Mother is stage left. She’s always stage left. She’s saying something to the director. She can’t see my dance at all.”

  “Imagine you’re dancing. Forget your mother. Forget the lights. Go where you go when you dance. Go to that special place in your mind. Pretend you are on the stage now and go through your routine just as you would in your performance. The audience is cheering for you. They are throwing roses and chanting your name. They love you. You are a star.”

  The scientists watched the screens in the other room as the images of The Daughter’s brain lit up in an explosion of colour. The more she spoke, the more vibrant were the shapes and colours that, like wildflowers, erupted, seemingly out of nowhere in her brain.

  “It’s like New Year’s Eve,” said The Rector.

  It was, though, nothing like how her brain had responded to the images of her mother, and especially her father. Every neuron in her brain was firing one after the other. This was nothing like the past controls; nothing at all like the two scientists had expected. At the end of stage one, they had, without knowing, mapped a performer’s brain.