I told myself to breathe. Bring the air in for a full count of ten, hold it for a couple of beats, then out, pushing it low from the diaphragm. But I noticed I wasn’t as nervous as I had expected to be. It was still half an hour until airtime, and I stepped back out of everyone’s way, there in the studio, and tried to imagine how I’d feel once I was in front of the camera.

I reminded myself, this is where I wanted to be. Here in the heart of Serpientes Y Escaleras. To uncover a mystery that had been gnawing at me, keeping me up at night. True, I assumed my work at La Vida Tower would remain of an administrative nature; but, regardless of which side of the camera I stood, I had made it to the place where the answers to that mystery were certain to be found.

In the beginning it felt like I was an undercover investigative reporter, finally putting my college journalism classes to use. But at some point I came to feel like I was a spy. Betraying those around me. That dull throb of nervous guilt eventually transformed into a disturbing sensation of shame now that I had been elevated above my trainee status.

It was made worse by the fact that I liked these people. Especially Silverio and Saligia.

The day had been so long already, but I felt like it was only now just beginning.

Could it really still be Monday? It seemed like ages ago when I arrived at work this morning. Dawn had not even broken. I walked in the revolving doors of La Vida Tower a full hour early. Wouldn’t you? I mean, it was my first day as an Associate Producer.

In this business, one should arrive before the posted time—the general rule of thumb was 20 minutes early. But today I was more than a little unnerved.

I was supposed to be on TV this evening, as a—and I can’t believe I’m using these words—featured performer!

I really should have told Aunt Marta. When she tuned in tonight, she’d get a surprise. A major surprise. I hoped she wouldn’t choke on her tapioca pudding.

They’d given me Bianca’s office, but had not yet taken her name off the door.

The room was down a corridor had been off limits to me in the past, and as I’d never seen the offices of the Associate Producers, I didn’t have any expectations. When I stepped inside I was surprised to find it not much bigger than a closet. The desk took up most of the room. In a corner sat a potted ficus tree, spindly, plastic, but at least the leaves were clean and glistening. A soft glow of early morning sunlight came in through a window which was mostly blocked by a pair of filing cabinets. I flipped a switch on the wall, and two fluorescent tubes overhead washed the room in a yellow hue.

Not much, but it was mine. My own office!

I slipped behind the desk and sat in the only chair. The desktop was empty but for a square bundle wrapped in butcher paper. Beside it sat a lavender envelope, with my name written in small, neat letters.

I opened it.

Dear Ms. Rose Aguilar, welcome to the longest day of your life. You should find a parcel from our wardrobe department containing your outfit for the show tonight. Go ahead and wear it for the rest of the day to get used to it. Three words of advice. Trust No One. And for God’s sake, have fun! Sincerely, Silverio Moreno.

How cryptic.

The package from the wardrobe apartment had a red dress that was certainly not the sort of thing I would have chosen. The hemline wasn’t particularly high. No racy décolletage. Nothing like that. But it did, well, cling. And the dress didn’t have shoulders to hide my bra straps. This meant I had to put on the strapless bra that came with the dress. I’d never worn one before, but it proved easy enough to get into.

I was zipping up the back of the dress when Michael walked in. Unannounced.

He leaned against the desk and watched as I smoothed the fabric along my hips.

“Wardrobe?” he asked.

“You could have knocked.”

“It’s show business,” he said. “Nothing I’ve not seen before. A perfect fit. Raul only needs to see you once, and your measurements are locked into his mind.”

I put on the shoes. Thankfully they had low heels and some pleasantly squishy insoles.

“So, how do I look?”

Michael stepped back. He tapped a finger on his lips for a moment, then nodded.

“After hair and makeup do their magic on you before airtime, I think you’ll look fine.”

I had to assume that was Michael’s attempt to appear as the practical-minded mentor who—all things considered—had more important things to do than to educate some clueless girl.

He looked at his watch. “Let's do a quick tour. I understand you have your key. But there are a few places you should have some, well, context, before you go charging about, exploring sections that used to be off limits. Like the Processing Lounge. Unfortunately, we’re pressed for time. Lydia wants you for some intensive Reader training sessions. It’s going to be a chaotic day.”

If Michael could play a role, so could I. I squared my shoulders and gave him the best approximation of the Brave Smile seen so often on awkward ingenues in those old screwball comedies Aunt Marta loved so much.

“Understood,” I told him.

“This isn't just grabbing coffee and filing reports, or whatever you used to do, Rose. You’re in the big league now. It’s up to us all to shine this week. We’re under scrutiny by the Network brass.”

Michael’s a type. I’ve read about them, even met a few. These people need to be seen as important to those they respect. I have no doubt that Michael would have thrived in Stalin’s Russia. The naive and the needy can always find a place in cynical environments, such as despotic regimes and show business. They think they’re climbing to positions of power, but they will never be allowed to ascend that high—they’re too useful as tools for those who hold real power. Yes, naive and needy. Now, with Ida lurking around, Michael had found the perfect person to cozy up to. He was already polishing that particular Network brass.

###

It was a short tour. I found little opportunity to ask any questions because Michael would quickly move us on to another part of that formally off-limits domain. I now knew that, yes, the audience from whom we selected our daily contestants for the show lived in little apartments—more monastic cells, really—on the 28th floor. Each of their rooms opened onto the fabled Processing Lounge. It was a multi-purpose suite: a game room, library, and dining hall, complete with a full-service kitchen, staffed around the clock. Who would have guessed! And not just for the audience. Now I knew where so many of my co-workers went during lunch while I sat in the lonely breakroom with my sad carton of yoghurt I brought from home.

The audience members behaved as they did when brought to their seats for the live broadcast. Subdued and accommodating. From some of what Ida had said the previous day, I no longer could entertain the fantasy that these people were actors paid to live here, constantly on call. I would have asked Michael for a straight answer, but how to even phrased the question?

After we made a quick visit to the wardrobe department, I turned to go down a corridor where a sign pointed the way to Arrivals, but Michael told me we didn’t have time for that.

Instead, he escorted me through an unmarked door into a darkened room.

When the latch clicked behind us it took a moment for my eyes to adjust enough to realize we were in a rather large room. It made me think of visiting the aquarium as a girl. But instead of illumination coming from a huge lighted fish tank, the room was lit by a long window.

Michael headed to the middle of the room where Dr. Hetzel and Ida Mayfield sat on a sofa. But I was drawn to that window. It didn’t look out onto the city below. It was a window on an interior wall and on the other side was a small room painted white with nothing in it but an adjustable chair like what they had in a hair salon.

I knew that Dr. Hetzel and Ida, and maybe even Michael, were engaged in a conversation behind me, but I hadn’t been paying attention to their words. When I finally turned away from the window, Dr. Hetzel called me over.

The entire room was painted black and it was hard to judge how far away the walls were. I moved silently across the deep pile black carpet. Michael had taken a seat on the sofa between the two women. That was when I saw that Saligia was also in the room with us—she was dressed, as usual, in black, so I hadn’t noticed her at first. She sat in an armchair in a shadowy area of the room with her head down and was busy at work knitting.

Ida watched me approach.

“Your star pupil,” she said to Dr. Hetzel. Ida then picked a manila folder off a low coffee table. I stood there, looking at the photograph stapled to the outside of the folder. It was me. But I didn’t recall anyone ever taking my picture when I was wearing that blue jacket. As Ida flipped through some pages in the folder her nose wrinkled with displeasure.

“Have a seat, Rose,” Dr. Hetzel said.

There didn’t appear to be much room left on the sofa, but then I realized Dr. Hetzel was pointing at a chair behind me. It was so dim I hadn’t even seen it. It resembled that barber style chair on the other side of the window and it had been situated so that it faced the sofa, not the window.

When I sat in the chair, there was something familiar about how it felt, the give of the seat cushion, the support to the lower back. Then it made sense.

I had been in that room before. The room on the other side of the window. I had sat in that other, similar chair. But that white room didn’t have a window.

That explained why I didn’t recognize it from this vantage point. Until today, I had never before been in a room with a window so long as the one in this room. But I had been in a small white room with a single chair that had a very long mirror—a mirror that ran the length of the room.

The day I came in for my job interview, I had been seated in that other chair on the opposite side of the window. It never occurred to me that the huge mirror was one of those two-way surveillance mirrors. It seemed laughably obvious now.

What a thing for a spy to discover. That she had been spied upon. I wondered how many people had been in this big dark room at the time of my job interview.

Though, as job interviews went, it was far from standard. It was just me and Dr. Hetzel in that room. She had paced back and forth, holding a notebook, asking me a series of what I thought unusual questions. Was that the Fitzroy test?

Another memory of that day came to me. I had been wearing that blue blazer. Did someone take that photo of me through the mirror?

At the sound of a door opening, I turned and saw Myra walk into the room, clutching, as always, her clipboard.

She nodded at me as she walked over to Saligia.

“I see Rose’s hoodoo training sessions have begun,” Myra said.

Myra was the production floor manager of Serpientes y Escaleras. She couldn’t be over thirty, but because she darted about like she was forever two minutes behind schedule, she seemed much older. Frazzled and not too happy about it. She was small, wiry, and kept her frizzy red hair in check beneath a black paisley kerchief. Most people were afraid of her, especially Michael. But she always had a smile for me.

As she and Saligia conferred over some point of production, I realized Ida had lifted her head from my folder and was glaring at me.

“Is this what’s considered appropriate office attire these days?” Ida asked. “Form-fitting red dresses?”

Without turning away from Saligia, Myra said, loudly: “Wardrobe. For tonight’s broadcast.”

“Still,” Ida protested. “Rather bold for our audiences. A bright red dress?”

“The dress stays,” Myra said, not looking up from her clipboard. She had finished her business with Saligia and began walking back to the door.

Ida cleared her throat. Myra stopped and turned, an eyebrow raised.

“Young lady,” Ida said, her voice taking on a brittle edge. “We’re not going to get along, are we?”

“That would be entirely up to you, ma’am.” With that, Myra turned and left the room.

Saligia had been watching this unfold. As the door shut, she looked at me with a pained expression before returning to her knitting.

Then another door opened.

This time it was the door into the that smaller room. I twisted around in my chair to see. Through the window I watched as Valerie entered, leading one of the subjects. One of the audience members who had on the white cotton scrubs most wore when not dressed for the show. Once the man had been seated in the large padded chair, Valerie walked up to the window—well, for her it was a mirror. She pretended to be fussing with her hair, but she covertly held up her thumb and winked to us.

She exited the room, leaving the man in there, alone.

Ida put down the folder and looked through the window at the man in the chair as he stared expressionlessly at the ceiling.

“Those zombies give me the creeps,” she said. Then she turned to Michael. “Don’t we have a meeting scheduled about this time with the Marketing Department?”

Michael nodded. The two of them departed.

We had a Marketing Department?

The day was filled with surprises.

Once the door clicked shut, Dr. Hetzel stood and crossed over to the window and gazed into the classroom. I walked over to join her.

We were so close, Dr. Hetzel and I, that our shoulders touched. I noticed that Dr. Hetzel was bobbing her head, just slightly, to the clicking sounds of Saligia’s knitting needles.

“This is why we are here,” Dr. Hetzel said in almost a whisper. She lifted a hand to indicate the man in the chair. “For them. And it’s all because of Saligia.”

At the mention of her name, Saligia stopped knitting. But when she realized Dr. Hetzel wasn’t speaking to her, the clicking of the needles returned.

“You will no doubt remember the test we gave you on your first day,” Dr. Hetzel said to me. “If you hadn’t scored high enough, you’d have been let go. But you did well. Better than we could have hoped.”

“And people were watching?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“When you interviewed me…gave me that test…whatever. People were watching through this window?” I reached out to touch the glass.

“Saligia was here. Watching. Helping you. She’s the conduit. The proximity is useful for her. Others? I can’t remember. Maybe Sy.”

“He was,” Saligia said quietly over in her darkened corner.

“So this is real?” I asked. “This psychic stuff?”

Just what sort of doctor was Lydia Hetzel? And what did that make Saligia? Conduit?

“Saligia has a gift,” Dr. Hetzel said. “She can see into the minds of our contestants. See things about their lives they may no longer even know themselves. She can then broadcast these impressions into the minds of very special individuals, such as yourself.”

“But I’m not special.”

Dr. Hetzel laughed. She pointed to the man in the other room.

“He’d probably say the same thing. But the both of you are very special. Very special, indeed. In different ways, of course.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Rose, we’re going to move fast for today’s session. We should have begun your training right after hiring you. That had been the plan. An understudy, as it were, if Michael or Bianca had to take a sick day. Or, well, what happened last week. But, here we are.”

“And him?” I looked to the man in the other room.

“He won’t feel a thing,” she said. “But you will.”

“Meaning?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Saligia will select memories from our subject in the adjacent room, and then she will do what she does every night on the show. She will push those thoughts, images, memories directly into your mind, Rose.”

Well, that seemed unlikely. But I did my best to appear agreeable.

“Should I sit?” I asked, making my way back to the chair I had been sitting in.

“No time for the beginner sessions,” Dr. Hetzel said. “Keep on your feet. Just the way you’ll be doing it on the show. Saligia, if you could dip into the mind of our subject, um, it’s Carl, right?”

“And me?” I asked. “What do I do?”

“Relax,” Dr. Hetzel told me. “Don’t allow your mind to dwell on any one thought. Be receptive.”

I relaxed my shoulders. Dipped down my head. Took a deep breath and straightened my back, chin lifted up, hands limp and down with the palms opened and waiting.

I was about to ask for further instructions, when I heard myself gasp.

It all rushed into my head at once.

A memory as clear as if it had happened a minute ago. But not to me. It was a memory of that man seated in the barber’s chair. It was when he was a boy. Maybe twelve. It was summer, and the cicadas buzzed like race cars roaring around a track. The boy was launching himself off the bank of a river on a rope swing hung from a tall cypress tree. He swung out far over the water and arced up high before slipping free and flying through the air.

It was like I was living it myself.

I was breathing hard and grinning like an imbecile. I even felt a trickle of sweat making its way along my neck—but it wasn’t my sweat, nor was it my neck.

“Clarence,” I said to Dr. Hetzel. “His name is Clarence.”

And I felt the joy of landing in the cool water of the river.

“You take to it well,” Saligia said. I could hear the clacking of her knitting start back up again.

I had never felt anything like that before. It was like discovering a new sense beyond hearing and seeing and the rest. My whole body tingled.

Clarence. I leaned in closer to peer at him through the window.

He sat there, in his chair, staring into space.

Dr. Hetzel had it all wrong. He wasn’t special, really. So very ordinary. But he was special to me! I had just lived a little piece of his life!

“But who are these contestants?” I had so many questions. I didn’t know where to start.

“We don’t have time to get into that today, Rose. This is a unique situation of accelerated training. In brief summery, there are two things we do on this show. One is to provide entertainment for the television audience. The other is connected to metaphysics—there really isn’t any better word—and it is all very complicated. Suffice to say, you’ll learn it all as have the rest of us have, at your own pace. The thumbnail description of our work here is that we provide entertainment, overtly; and we provide a necessary service, covertly. A service for our contestants. They are very special people, indeed. Try and keep them in mind when you’re on camera later in the evening.”

This remark got a sharp laugh from Saligia.

“Lydia, dear,” she told Dr. Hetzel, “I can guarantee that Rose will be unable not to keep the contestant in mind while the show is happening.”

“Ah,” Dr. Hetzel said. “I suppose you’re right.” Then she turned to me. “Let’s get back to work. Again, relax. Receptive.”

That was how I spent the next three hours until the lunch break.

And then it was back to it, with another audience member seated in the chair in the white room.

###

Finally, I was truly a part of this show. And as I paced at the back of the studio trying to calm my nerves before we went on air, I felt I was getting closer to some real answers to my questions. I had been in places on the 28th and 29th floor of La Vida Tower I had never been allowed before. I even had lunch in the Processing Lounge with members of the audience and many of the show’s staff.

Now I could go anywhere. Open any door. Snoop about unimpeded. I still couldn’t believe my good fortune. I found that my hand had crept up to my chest to feel the outline of my master key I now carried with me everywhere. I just wish this silly dress had some proper pockets so I didn’t have to tuck the key into my bra.

Of course, there was still so much I didn’t understand. But I had to clear my head. The broadcast would begin in thirty minutes. That’s what Myra had just shouted out. I could do this. I looked down and was encouraged to see that my hands weren’t trembling. The fact was, I had seen hundreds of episodes of the show. I knew what to do. And I was surrounded by the best in the business. They wouldn’t let me down. It would all go fine…if I didn’t vomit.

I realized I was looking forward to seeing Clarance. After our sessions earlier, I felt an overwhelming intimacy toward him. Like family.

Of course, he had no idea what all I knew about him.

And then it hit me.

Was I as transparent to Saligia as Clarence had been to me? Was she listening in on my thoughts right now? My schemes? My snooping?

I turned to stare at the curtain in the corner of the studio. She’d be sitting behind it right now, waiting for the show to begin.

I let the words form in my mind clear and measured and precise, as if I were speaking to a visitor from another country.

Please, Saligia, don’t tell anyone why I’m here. I can’t lose this job. I can’t!

I couldn’t believe I just did that.

There was something comical about it. Or, more to the point, there would have been something comical to that Rose Aguilar from this morning—that earlier version of me who had been ignorant to the existence of psychic abilities.