Tiny dynamite

Duncan seems to be recovering well from his tryptophan problems. His parents took him to Toronto over the weekend so he could have Bajan non-poultry food with his relatives, as well as a trip (courtesy of Perdita and some contacts she has with the Barbadan consulate) to see the Leafs lose at the Air Canada Centre. I haven't been doing much with him besides help him out with his homework. He's been catching up on what he missed when he was under Eva-thrall.
Arne's been over a lot to watch World Series games with my father. My father has one set of theories about baseball, most of which involve decades worth of statistics. Arne's are much simpler.
"They really should let magicians pitch. I could hide tobacco juice on my hands a hell of a lot better than Kenny Rogers can." My father pointed out that there was no proof, even with the replays, that Rogers or any other pitcher was using illegal substances on the ball. "Ha," was all Arne said. They were watching that game in the living room, since my mother was working late. Arne was getting tanked but there was no sign of Wilco.
"Where's Wilco?" I asked when I went downstairs to get an apple.
"Oh, he's back at the apartment catching up on episodes of Hockey: A People's History," Arne said. "Every rabbit's got to have a hobby." He had taken a cab to the house. I went back upstairs and finished up my English homework.

Speed and sleep

I called Duncan early this morning, and asked if he wanted to go into Toronto this afternoon. He sounded groggy, but said yes. I told him to meet me at the GO station in an hour. Charles Wallace was put out that I wasn't taking him, but got over it when I told him his job was to watch Eva. I then called Enid and asked if she and her boyfriend could meet us at Union Station. I explained to her what was going on and she said she was happy to help, even though I sounded crazy.
Duncan needed three double-doubles in order to get on the train. I bought maple dips, too, in case he needed anything else to wake up. He said he felt like he hadn't had any sleep, and that he really couldn't remember anything of the night before except that he and Eva did something somewhere. I had the camcorder with me and showed him the recording Charles Wallace made. Duncan was stunned.
"I did her homework? I did my homework? She watched the hockey game? I missed Mats Sundin scoring in overtime? Oh man, this is bad." By this time we'd pulled into Union Station. Enid and her boyfriend were waiting for us on the concourse. We bought Duncan more coffee and went to find the squeegee squat.
Unfortunately it had been torn down and was now a gaping hole waiting for a condo. Duncan looked confused. I told him that I was just trying to remind him, and his subconscious, of who he was and what he liked. Duncan then said he liked food, and could we get lunch? Enid's boyfriend wanted nachos, so we went to Sneaky Dee's downtown. We got the King's Crown nachos and three combination plates and Duncan explained to Enid and her boyfriend what he thought was going on. At least he was sounding more like himself, and he looked really happy when the tv over the bar showed highlights from the Leafs game. After we ate we walked down College towards Kensingston Market. Enid's boyfriend stopped in front of a set of stairs, and said, "It's the Reindeer Restaurant! I haven't been here for years! Cheap beer!" We followed him down and sat at a corner table. The waitress came over to take our order. She looked familiar, and I realized why when Duncan looked up at her and said,
"Bambi?"

Pusher

Charles Wallace is really starting to enjoy stalking Eva too much. He decided to go follow Duncan and Eva after they left the Tim Hortons last night. He took his camcorder and said he'd be back when he got something good, and would I keep either or both of our parents diverted. I told him to phone immediately if Duncan got to first base.
I went home and looked through old X-Files episodes on DVD, hoping to find a few on mind control. I set up a pile to watch, and was on the couch in the living room with them when my mother came home from the hospital. She was surprised to see me in on a Saturday night, but was happy to watch the X-Files with me. She said it was just like when I was little. I think I fell asleep, since when I woke up to Charles Wallace waving his camcorder in front of me I had an afghan on and was still on the couch.
"So, what did you get?" I asked Charles Wallace.
"Lots. They went back to her house, and you can see what they got up to." He connected the camcorder to the television and we watched a wobbly, but fairly clear, view of what Eva did to Duncan.
"Homework?" I asked.
"Look carefully," my brother said. Duncan was doing both his and Eva's homework, while Eva watched a hockey game.
"She watched a hockey game?"
"Not just any hockey game, Sandra. The Leafs were playing Calgary, and they won in overtime on a Mats Sundin goal."
"There's no way a normal Duncan would have wanted to miss that," I said. My brother nodded. He fast-forwarded through the dull spots until we got to the only evidence of contact between Duncan and Eva: a handshake before he left. "This is bad. We're going to have to do something fast. Monday after school we're all going to see Arne, but I have to do something tomorrow." Charles Wallace pouted when I told him he couldn't come along.

The thing with feathers

Jeremy called me after he met with Arne, and warned me that I might not really like Arne's ideas on how to deal with Eva, and that Arne owed him $40.00. Arne came over later to watch the NLCS with my father, but I got to him before the game started.
"Breast hypnosis? That's the best you can come up with?" I asked him.
"Well, what's wrong with that? Anyway, you know that Jones guy likes you--why don't you just cut your losses and date him? You act old, he looks old--it's a perfect match."
"That's not the point. Duncan is under some kind of deep hypnosis that's making him think he's doing things he's not. There's got to be more to this than mammary tissue." Arne sat for a bit.
"Let me think. Talking to Jerome gave me some ideas. Do you still have that dress you wore in that play?" I didn't like the direction this was going in.
"You're going to talk to Jeremy again, and this time I'm going. With Charles Wallace. And his camera."
Arne looked defeated. "The act would have been great--trust me! I'd cut you in on the door, too. All you'd have to do is..." My father came into the room at this point and Arne shut up.

Bicameral mind

I didn't have to wait long to have a talk with Arne. He took me out driving yesterday, since my father reminded him that I was taking the G1 road test at the end of the month. I walked over to Arne's current temporary workplace, the Milborough Durbar in Miniscule Mumbai (Milborough's half-block sized Indian neighbourhood).
Arne was cleaning up the plates after the lunch buffet rush.
"Arne, I've got a problem," I started.
"I know. Just go really blonde and wear lower cut tops," he said.
"Damn it, not that kind of problem. Duncan is under some kind of mind control and I can't figure out what's wrong." Arne didn't look very impressed.
"Don't any of your weird friends do Wicca or something? Can't they just put a reverse spell on him?"
"Zapata's already tried that, and it didn't work. Charles Wallace and I think that it may be a type of hypnosis, and, well, Arne, you're our only hope." Arne started gloating. "Stop audibly gloating."
"I'll think of something while I'm running the dishwasher. Have a seat and don't touch the butter chicken, it's been under the lights too long." Arne then went into the kitchen. After about twenty minutes he returned, and said he'd tell me his plan once we drove around town a few times.
After our third trip to the Beer Store to return his empties, Arne said that he needed some background on the whole thing.
"Who's the previous boyfriend?"
"Jeremy Jones. He claims that Eva was invisible for a while this spring, too." Arne's eyebrows went up.
"Invisible? That's strange. I really need to talk to her--I could use her in my act, once I find a venue."
"That's not helping. You're supposed to be stopping her from mindcontrolling Duncan, not giving her a job." Ultimately we settled on him meeting with Jeremy and then later doing first-hand observation of Duncan's interactions with Eva.

The resisting reader

Had I but known then what I know now, I would have come up with some feeble excuse not to go to see my grandparents this weekend. Mrs. Anderson had asked me over for Thanksgiving dinner on Monday, and I went over to the house after we got back from Ottawa. The first thing I noticed was that Duncan was in track pants and moving very slowly. He seemed a little puffy, too.
"Are you all right? If you're sick..." I started to say, but he cut me off.
"No, not sick. Not yet."
"So, what did you do this weekend?" I asked. "Did you see April?"
"Eva and I had a pleasant weekend, thank you very much." That was bad. Then he continued. "I had Thanksgiving dinner with Eva on Friday, and then I went over and had Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday, and then on Sunday we had Thanksgiving dinner together, and we had Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon."
"Well, you actually didn't have Thanksgiving dinner with her on Friday, at least. You were over at my house, and here's a photograph to prove it." The date and timestamp were pretty obvious. "However, that still means that you've had three turkey dinners so far and you're about to have your second in one day. At least my grandparents had the turkey yesterday." Duncan started moaning.
"Don't say turkey. Oh man oh man, I don't know what's happened to me."
"Well, it looks like you're gained weight, and a well-founded fear of turkey," I said.
During dinner, Duncan kept trying to give bits of food to the cats, but only Falstaff seemed interested. Faustus just slept, and seemed to be bigger than the last time I saw him. Duncan had a hard time staying awake after all that turkey. I managed after dinner to haul him over to the bathroom scale, and found out how much he'd gained over the weekend.
"That's it. You're going to the Y with me until you get rid of that," I said. Duncan looked surprised. "Yes, the Y, and if you tell anyone that I actually go there and work out I'll let Eva feed you forever." It was kind of mean, but I really didn't want to run into anyone from school while I was lifting weights. Anyway, at that point Duncan was more afraid of food than anything else.
When I got home Charles Wallace was sitting at the desk in my room.
"Well, how was he?" he asked.
"Not good. Eva managed to trap him into multiple holiday dinners. He's gained about 7 kg and cringes when you mention poultry."
"I know you're not going to like this, Sandra, but you know who can give you some real answers about hypnosis and mind control." He was right.
"Damn it. All right, I'll call Arne."

Absence

In about twenty minutes or so we're leaving to go to my grandparents' in Ottawa for Thanksgiving. Arne's coming too, but at least he's driving by himself. Last night Duncan was over to watch the hockey game, and I convinced Charles Wallace that I could operate the camera on my own and that he could go see a movie with Arne instead. I hope Duncan will be all right this weekend. Ordinarily (wait, what's ordinary about this problem), I'd just make sure he spent all his time with April, but April's got family problems that are keeping her depressed and worried when she's not at the hospital. So I just have to hope Eva doesn't do too much to him, whatever it is she does.

Spellbound

Duncan's having some relapses into thinking he's dating Cowboy Eva, but on the whole he's more or less back to normal. We watched the hockey game last night and he was really happy the Leafs won. We didn't do very much else, as Charles Wallace insisted on videoing Duncan watching the game. I wish he had a better sense of where science and my personal life separate.
"Mom, how does hypnosis work?" he asked as we got ready to go to school this morning.
"Honey, we don't know," my mother said. "We still don't know much about the human brain and how it works in a normal state and no, you can't experiment on human brains when you grow up."
Charles Wallace turned up in the library during my spare period.
"What the hell are you doing here? Don't you have a school of your own to be miserable in?" I asked him.
"My teacher won't notice," he said. "And your math class was more interesting anyway. Do you think Eva has special powers? Maybe she's really a Class 5 mutant..."
"Charles Wallace, X-Men III is not a documentary, unlike Hitchcock's The Birds."
"You only say that since you're afraid of birds. Maybe Eva's got some hypnosis thing going on. Or maybe there's a hidden white noise transmitter somewhere that's scrambling your cortex." He looked at his watch then. "I better get back to Glenallen. We're watching filmstrips today, and I want to see if my teacher's figured out how to get the sound and strip synchronized yet." He left as Zenobia walked in and sat at the computer.
"There goes the creepy kid from The Ring," she said. I told her that that was my brother. "Isn't he supposed to be in school?"
"Yes, but he's helping me with this Eva thing."
"Was it his idea for you to go to a concert with Jeremy Jones?"
"No, Jeremy had tickets and we didn't go together, we just went together." It made sense to me. Zenobia then bypassed the library computer's nanny program and read movie news.
"The Ring 3 is in production," she announced.
"What the hell are they going to have possessed this time? A haunted DVD? An evil video case? Can't that brat just get over it and go into oblivion?" Right then the librarian was getting near us, so Zenobia went back to the catalogue page and I pulled out my English homework.

Blessed rage for order

I had a nice time out with Jeremy in Toronto last night, although he looked a little bored at times when I talked about Duncan. He's a really good listener otherwise. During lunch I talked to Duncan in the library.
"So, what did you do last night?" I asked. He was sitting with a copy of the newspaper in front of him, and for some reason he was staring at the Sudoku page.
"Eva and I went out to Tim Horton's and had a pleasant evening, thank you," he said mechanically. I reached into my bag. Finally, having a budding evil mastermind for a younger brother was paying off.
"No you didn't--you stayed at your home and played Scrabble with your mother and my brother, and here's the proof." I showed him the photographs. Charles Wallace had used my mother's camera, and had Arne take them to a 24-hour 1 hour developing store somewhere. Duncan grew increasingly alarmed as he looked through the photographs.
"I won a game against my mother? I helped Charles Wallace do the walking cards illusion? What the..."
"Yes, you actually stayed in all night, but for some reason have a masking memory of going out with Eva. I think she's got more than just botox behind that smirk." We fell silent at that point.

Living in oblivion

"You never see extreme cataclysm coming," Charles Wallace always says, and he's usually right (although "extreme cataclysm" is redundant, and he gets annoyed when I remind him of that). I called Duncan last night to see what he was up to this week, but his mother said he was out with Eva. She sounded a bit surprised about that, but I thought it was normal enough, as they are in the same band. I assumed that April, Gerald, Luis and Jeremy would be around, too.
I finally ran into him at lunch. I wanted to tell him that Gerald had been thrown out of my English class again today (my English teacher is showing us the Canadian film version of Beowulf, and for some reason Gerald keeps trying to get in to watch it). Duncan was sitting alone, staring blankly at his gelatin dessert.
"Duncan, are you all right?" I asked. He nodded. "How was rehearsal last night?"
"Eva is fine, thank you. We've been together for a few weeks now," Duncan said mechanically.
"Er, you've been with me for the past few weeks--you haven't had any time to date Eva." Duncan nodded his head rapidly.
"It's really strange. I was so worried about April and her grandfather that I didn't feel weird and paranoid like usual. Then I woke up yesterday and Eva called and reminded me we'd been dating for a while and nothing had changed. Nothing's still changed--now she's trying to flirt with Gerald and Luis at the same time, and April's too depressed to notice." Jeremy had come over to the table by this time. "Man, I didn't steal your girlfriend. I keep telling you that." Jeremy didn't look very happy.
"So, did Eva tell you yesterday that she'd been dating Duncan for weeks?"
"Yeah, it was kind of sudden," Jeremy admitted.
"Did she smirk on the phone?"
"That's not nice," Jeremy said, without much conviction. "I've been with her all this time--when'd she have time to date Duncan? In her sleep?" Right at that point Eva herself was coming into sight, so I took my lunch over to an empty table and reread my French homework.