Triggers Read Online Free PDF Page A

worked out for him in the past, he wouldn’t have failed to get that scholarship, he wouldn’t have been working at a McDonald’s, he wouldn’t have enlisted because it was the only halfway-decent-paying job he
could
get, he wouldn’t have ended up on the front line in Iraq.
    Still, he was grateful for Professor Singh’s attention. Kadeem had never met a Sikh before—there’d been none in the ’hood—and he hadn’t known what to expect. At first, they’d had trouble communicating; Singh’s accent was thick, and his speech was rapid-fire, at least toKadeem’s ears. But slowly he’d gotten used to Singh’s voice, and Singh had gotten used to his, and the seemingly endless alternation of him saying “What?” and Singh saying “Pardon?” had fallen by the wayside.
    “Okay, guru,” Kadeem said. He knew it amused Singh when he called him that, and Singh’s beard lifted a bit as he smiled. “Let’s do this.”
    Kadeem walked over to the low-back padded chair and sat down. Next to it, on an articulated arm, was the latticework sphere. Kadeem had once quipped that it looked like the skeleton of God’s soccer ball, but he knew that wasn’t quite right. It was about two feet in diameter, and it was, as Singh had told him, an open geodesic, made up of triangles fashioned from lengths of steel tubing. Singh unclipped its two halves and opened it. The hemispheres, joined by a hinge, swung apart.
    There was an open section at the south pole of the sphere. As Singh jockeyed the articulated arm to move the hemispheres closer to Kadeem’s head, that opening allowed for his neck. Singh rejoined the two halves, enclosing Kadeem’s head. There were about eight inches of clearance on all sides, and Kadeem could easily see through the open triangles. Still, it was unnerving, as if his head were now in some bizarre jail cell. He took a deep, calming breath.
    Singh loomed close—like an optician adjusting glasses even Elton John wouldn’t wear. He moved the sphere on its arm a bit to the left, and a bit up, and then, apparently deciding he’d gone too far up, a bit down. And then he nodded in satisfaction and stepped away.
    “All right,” Singh said. “Relax.”
    “Easier said than done, guru,” replied Kadeem.
    Singh’s back was to him, his turban piled high. But his voice was warm. “It will be fine, my friend. Let me just calibrate a few things, and—yes, yes, okay. Are you ready?”
    “Yeah.”
    “All right, then. Here we go. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
    Singh pushed a button; it made a loud click. At the vertices of each triangle in Kadeem’s vision, blue-green lights appeared, like laser pointers. In the demos Singh had done for him, colored dots had shown up on the dummy head. They’d stood out brightly against the white Styrofoam,but were doubtless hard to see against Kadeem’s dark skin. He’d thought there might be some sensation associated with them: heat, maybe, or a tingling. But he felt nothing at all. The lights weren’t strong enough to blind him, but he did nonetheless shift slightly to stop one of them from hitting his left eye.
    Singh moved around, looking at Kadeem again. He seemed satisfied, and said, “Okay. I’m going to run the program now. Remember, if you feel any discomfort, tell me and we can abort.”
    Kadeem nodded. Since the sphere was supported by the articulated arm, it didn’t bob at all as he did so. Singh reached over to a laptop computer sitting on a surgical-instrument stand, moved the cursor with the trackpad, and finished off with a rapping of his forefinger.
    The program started executing. The blue-green lights began to dance; they were on tiny gimbals and moved in patterns Singh had programmed. It was impossible to keep the teal points from hitting his pupils every few seconds, and rather than fight that, Kadeem just closed his eyes. The beams were bright enough that he could still tell when one was touching his eyelid, but it wasn’t irritating, and