The Heart's Eye

Trust

She pauses.

Her expression is calm. Her emotions are at bay. This is the calmness that comes with certainty, with finality, with acceptance of one's fate.

I rise up to my knees on the low mattress and she walks over and kneels across from me. I stare into her velvety brown eyes and inhale her sweet scent of coconut and vanilla.

Without her makeup, she is more than naked. I can read every shade her emotions. There are many, but they are curbed, contained, tiny pops on the surface of otherwise still water. This level of control is an indication of resolute determination and iron will.

"It takes all the trust in the world to be here with you right now," she says. I can do nothing but admire her willful vulnerability, even if it is a result of desperation.

She takes a slow, deep breath, her eyes glaze over a little, and she opens up like a petal. There are no filters now. She is an open book. I follow her lead, take a deep breath too, and we connect, mentally, emotionally, a spiritual embrace that forms a protected space, where everything is literal, and true.

We speak softly. We build careful, gentle hypnotic bridges with each other, we share, we read, and we understand each other. It is only through understanding that trust is built.

I see my arrival at her minka from her vantage point. She is watching me thank my guide as he unloads my suitcase from his mule. She slides open the checkered door to greet me. Her primary emotion is fear. She knows who I am. She knows that I am likely there to kill her. She is determined to kill me first, hoping that she would get the chance before I realize that she is the person I have come here to find. There is a gun tucked in the back of her obi.

Her face is covered in makeup. That is the only way she can think of of concealing her emotions. She doesn't know that I don't yet know how to read emotions. I am an enemy with unknown skills and capabilities.

Her fear quells a little when I step on the wooden engawa veranda and she reads me. I don't appear to be cognizant of who she is. Maybe she has time to figure out how to eliminate me in a cleaner way than shooting me at the first opportunity.

She leaves the gun in her room as she prepares our first dinner, but tucks in a small package of poison in the fold of the sleeve of her new kimono, just in case. As our dinner conversation progresses, she notices that something is missing – my attachment to a person. She is aware of someone I cared about. Allegedly, this is someone who her Russian-paid comrades used to get to me in D.C., a person, whose existence I am not aware of.

She cannot find any trace of this apparently known attachment, despite her carefully asked questions. "No Mrs. Black? Not even... romantic interest?" She is confused. How is it possible that someone forgets a person they have been in love with without any trace of that emotion?

It is not just professional curiosity for her to want to know how that happened. She, herself, is in a bind. She has a daughter whom she desperately wants to protect. She knows that as soon as she teaches intelligence agents how to read emotions, they would be able to read her too. And they would do so, no doubt, so that they are certain of her loyalty. They would find out about the girl. She, Dr. Klein, would not be able to hide that. From that point on, her daughter would never be safe, no matter how far away Dr. Klein sends her.

The only way for them to never find out is if she, Dr. Klein, were not aware of her daughter's existence... Then, her emotions can never betray her, because they would not exist.

Suddenly, my presence has turned into an opportunity – a risky, insane, life-changing one -- but an opportunity nonetheless, unique in its nature. Dr. Klein decides to find out more, and to gauge whether I, the enemy who had come to eliminate her, would be willing to help her instead.

It is not a straightforward decision. She is conflicted, scared. What if she has mis-read me? What if I am actually somehow capable of hiding my emotions after all? She herself may not be aware of such a skill, but what if it exists? I am an enemy. I might have something up my sleeve that she doesn't know about.

So, she digs deeper. She is aware of a dance connection with my alleged romantic partner. She explores that angle, trying to poke holes into my apparent memory gap. "Dance?" she invites me after dinner. I show no emotion. My dancing, whatever it might have been, is also a memory I no longer have.

She takes one more leap, driven by determination to confirm as much as she can. She walks over to my room and comes into my bed. It is a desperate move, because she is opening herself up and making herself vulnerable too, but the benefit of the confirmation outweighs the risk. She observes me and reads me carefully as I lose control in the peak of my climax, and there are still no traces of a romantic connection with someone else.

Finally, she is convinced. Somehow, I must have gotten specific memories erased, without erasing the rest of me. That is what she needs done to herself too, as painful as the decision for that may be, and I am the only person capable of performing this operation on her.

Dr. Klein reads me as she is telling me her story and lets me confirm her honesty by allowing me to read her. I understand where she stands. There is no sugarcoating of her position. She is not an angel, nor a victim, nor a friend. She is someone who has willfully chosen to open herself up unconditionally to her arch-nemesis in the hope that he would help her protect her daughter. In exchange, she would teach him her art.

We gaze into each other's eyes as we kneel opposite to each other. I open my arms and she surrenders into my embrace. She places her head gently on my shoulder as I whisper soft, rhythmic, rhyming words into her ear. Her body relaxes. She melts into my embrace. Somewhere outside, birds exchange melodic chirps with each other in the early morning hour.