*
I stood in the entrance of the Soothing Zone. As before, I walked down to the t-junction. I went the same way as before. I expected to have a paranoid feeling about branches, but there were none. I crept cautiously along to the point where I had been hit by a branch the first time. Jim and Penelope had repaired the wall where I had smashed through, and it looked the same as before. The imprint of the seat of my pants was still in the sand where I had fallen. This time, though, no branch swung out to meet me.
I walked on, and turned another corner. There was a tunnel made of a large corrugated iron pipe and covered in sand, mounded up several feet high so that it would be difficult to climb over. I felt apprehensive about going in, but I did not feel paranoid. I got down and crawled through.
There were a few more turns where nothing smacked me in the face or bit me or was thrown at me, and then in the distance I could see that the walls ended and opened up on the desert. Between the walls there was a small brown dot in the sand. As I drew closer, the dot grew larger, and spikier. Closer still, and I saw that it was a hedgehog. Mr. Hodge sat in the middle of the path, looking at me. When I reached the finish line, he trundled off to the side where Jim’s waiting hands scooped him up.
“What went wrong?” I asked Jim.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I can feel that the redness on my face is starting to fade, which means it’s been minutes since I was hit in the face by anything. I came all the way through the maze—”
“The Gauntlet,” he said. I just looked at him until he explained. “We’re calling it The Gauntlet, now.” I looked at Mr. Hodge. Trust him to come up with a name like that. “Me and Penelope, I mean,” Jim said. I knew it was Mr. Hodge, though.
“I came all the way through the… ah… the maze, and nothing happened. It was just a nice walk, except I was a bit worried that something might happen, although nothing did, which was a nice surprise.”
Penelope came up to us.
“How was The Gauntlet?” she asked.
“Guys, I would really prefer that we don’t call it The Gauntlet or The Winding Corridor of Doom or anything like that,” I said, “at least not while I’m the one going through it. I’ve been calling it The Soothing Zone in my head, maybe we could use that, and then I’d feel great about going in there.”
We all looked at each other, and by the look on their faces I wished that I hadn’t suggested The Winding Corridor of Doom.
“Nothing happened in it, anyway,” I said. “What went wrong?”
“That’s how it was supposed to be,” she said. “It was supposed to be a surprise. Maybe you’d feel paranoid when you went through. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d pee your pants with the extra tension from nothing happening.”
“I didn’t,” I said, although that didn't stop them looking at my crotch. “Guys, I didn’t,” I said again.
“I don’t think The Gau... the maze is going to work out,” I said. “Not if you guys don’t tell me the plan anyway, so we can work together.”
“It’s already working, though,” Penelope said. “This is just what we were hoping would happen. Rationally, someone might expect for you to feel worried going through the maze because when you went through it before you were hit in the face with a branch, had a bag of sand thrown at you, and were bitten by a hedgehog.”
I looked at Mr. Hodge. “Was I bitten by a hedgehog? I don’t remember that part.”
Penelope looked at Jim out of the corner of her eye and he shook his head slightly. “Oh, that’s… no, you were not bitten by a hedgehog,” she said to me. “I don’t know why I said that. But other things did happen to you. So, anyone going into The Gauntlet after that is likely going to experience some worries, maybe a little paranoia about things like that happening again. In your case, though, you didn’t experience any paranoia, which is the opposite of what someone might expect from you.”
She looked at me expectantly, but when I didn’t respond, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, she went on. “Don’t you get what this means?” she asked. “It means that somehow your amygdala knows if bad things are going to happen. We had no traps prepared for you this time, but although there was no way you could know that, you did know it, and you weren’t worried, at least not in the paranoid way.”
“Me and Jim believe that your mind and mine—and yours more so—are aware of potential dangers in an almost precognitive way.”
“Precognitive?” I asked, skeptical. “Like we can see the future?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “If we could see the future we’d know when Dr. Boggs was going to get a cold and we’d just go that day while he was in bed eating chicken soup and take the city back from him. It’s more like, say, an acorn falls from a tree as you’re walking through the forest. You didn’t know it was going to fall because if you did then you wouldn’t have walked under that tree, but something—a disturbance of the air, or the tiny sounds it creates—and then you do know—”
“And you step out of the way,” I said. “I get it.”
“Not exactly. Most likely you get the warning too late, and the acorn hits you on the head. You don’t have acorn radar. But for a few hundred milliseconds before, you knew it was going to happen.”
“That’s great.”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” she said. “It is great. Basically, our senses are heightened by our amygdalae; it’s like having a sixth sense. It’s a skill we think we can train, or at least we hope we can train. If we can then it’s going to be very useful for us against Dr. Boggs.”
“For example, we’ll know about it just before a pair of bullets penetrates our skulls,” I said.
"You don’t have to be so negative, Oscar."
“I’m not being negative, I’m just being cautious. I like you, Penelope. I like me. I like us being together, but if we take risks like that and go back into the town and try to take on Dr. Boggs, who knows how it’s going to end up? One way for it to end up is with both of us dead and buried.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said, flatly.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“Because of you, Oscar. I believe in you. You rescued me from Dr. Boggs before, because of your extraordinary amygdala. You saved all of us from death. Your paranoia is the whole reason all of us are together, because you discovered Dr. Boggs plot before anyone else, and you tracked him down.”
“And then I ended up in a Maple Ridge for several months and became basically an invalid because of the Psylocybin even after I was out of the mental hospital. It was because of me that Dr. Boggs captured you in the first place!” I said, reminding her that it had been me who had told the Doctor that she wasn’t taking her Psylocybin anymore, leading him to suspect that she was working against him. I had thought I was doing the right thing because of the effect my own Psylocybin was having on me.
“That’s true,” she said, “but you’re not talking sensibly. Yes, Psylocybin did take you out of the game for a while. And yes, you were the one who tipped Dr. Boggs off about me not taking my Psylocybin prescription and therefore being paranoid. The only reason you did that though was because of the Psylocybin you were taking—which, by the way, I encouraged you to take—and which you had been told by medical professionals would be good for you. You weren’t in your right mind at the time, because your amygdala wasn’t functioning as it was supposed to, or as it’s supposed to in your mind at least.”
I knew she was right. At the time I took the Psylocybin I was convinced that my paranoia was due to a dangerous and anti-social mental illness I had, and I thought that Psylocybin was a medicine which would cure me. It did ‘cure’ me, in a sense, in the sense that Dr. Boggs wanted, at least. It numbed my paranoia so I didn't suspect anything he was doing, and he was easily able to conduct his takeover.
“Even if that's true,” I said, “it still seems like too big of a risk to me. We're happy here
, aren't we? We've got each other, Jim and Mr. Hodge have each other, we have all the oranges and sand we need. If we go back into town we're throwing all that away.”
“What about your friends. What about Winslow?”
I looked away, but she didn't stop.
“What about your mother and father? Anything could have happened to them, and you're just out in the desert drinking juice. What about my family, Oscar? I can't live the rest of my life in this orange grove, as pleasant as it is.”
I turned to face her. “Why do you have to bring them into it? Don't you think I remember them? I know about my family! Every day I wonder what's happened to them. I don't need anyone to remind me. Every day I'm under one of these trees, thinking about them.”
“How is thinking going to help them?” She asked.
“I don't know. Don't ask me that. You're the one who was just talking about my spectacular brain and how it's the answer to all our prayers. You figure it out,” I said, and walked away from her.
I paced beneath an orange tree on the other side of the oasis from them. I hated arguing with Penelope, but I didn't want to be forced into anything. There had to be something we could do, something other than just going back into the middle of town, facing Dr. Boggs and all his men with their guns. I knew we couldn't stay in that oasis forever, living in our burrow.
I went back to her.
“Maybe we can go into town,” I said, “but just a little bit. We'll go to the outskirts, and just look at what's going on. We'll get an idea for how many fingers of the Red Fist are stationed there, and maybe it won't be as bad as I think.”