Chapter 3

3

In the end, Jess was keen on my pitch to interview Dr. Reid for a cover story. What she really wanted, like any magazine editor, was to get inside his mind, find out who he really was and how he felt about his wife's death, living alone in that sprawling riverside house without her. And, of course, what this meant for his research. I crafted an email to his publicist, reassuring her that my interview would focus mainly on his recent guide to neuroscience, The Pain Matrix .

I wake early on the day I'm due to meet him, just to make sure I have everything I need. The pens must be blue fine-tip rollerballs, the batteries Duracell, the printed list of questions bolded up. The wrong font or a battery that has already been used, even once, is enough to derail me. My mind has always been a little bit obsessional, seeking out patterns and rules that protect and comfort me. These are the rituals that shore me up before every interview. Although this time, there's more to lose.

It will be a delicate balancing act, steering him toward territory that he will instinctively want to avoid, risking his hostility but, at the same time, inviting his admiration too. It's a line I've become an expert at toeing, over the years. If there is a memoir in the pipeline, I want to seem like the perfect candidate, the right choice. Every detail will need to be just so.

I scrutinize myself in the hallway mirror, wipe away the sheen of lip gloss and the blusher too. Nearly there, except for the hair scraped high in a tight ponytail. Too austere. I let it down so it falls onto my shoulders, do up the next button of my shirt so only a glimpse of neckline is exposed. I dab away a smudge of eyeshadow with the pad of my thumb. This display of effortlessness has taken me over half an hour. I test out my quizzical gaze, open my eyes a little wider. Tilt my head to affect empathy.

My strategy is always the same: ease my subject into conversation, feel the satisfaction as they uncoil, revealing everything. I can't help envying that moment when they let go without intending to, how that freedom must feel. The less you offer about yourself, the more they really talk.

Over the years I've heard it all. The personal revelation in all its tawdry detail. They've had an affair; their marriage is over; the tumor is malignant. The subjects of their confessions vary. But it's the kick of reeling them in, question by question, letting them think their decision to speak openly is entirely voluntary. A lot of it is also timing, knowing exactly when to drop in that deceptively simple question: "Why?" The shortest word that can often elicit the longest answer. Then I sit back and say nothing, knowing they will be compelled to speak. The less self-assured they are, the more they feel a lingering silence is their responsibility, their problem to solve. So I circle and return. Navigate the push and pull of disclosure, how we fly back and forth between the need to be hidden and the desire to be known.

The thrill for me always comes in breaking down their defenses, watching them let go without intending to, until I discover what I'm there for. How consuming curiosity can be, without any of us ever really knowing why. An itch and a drive, and for me, one that also happens to pay the bills.

My phone vibrates, the cab is waiting.

I check my handbag for everything one more time before I leave. Outside it's about to rain, the air is swollen and damp. The driver sets off and West London slips by, comforting and familiar, dry cleaners and kebab shops, barbers and money kiosks. I close my eyes, lulled by the warmth in the back of the car, the sweet smell of plastic seating and vanilla.

I visualize the interview, imagining Dr. Reid's wary demeanor. I'll make him comfortable, let him seduce himself with the power of his own words. Be the mirror that reflects his expertise back to him. Then follow his fault lines; pick at the edges of his discomfort, like the newly formed skin around a scab. I never flirt or use feminine charm. I've found that simply by being a woman, a male interviewee assumes you are there to listen, to be deferential, grateful to absorb the details of whatever their arcane specialism may be. It's not about tricking them, but playing with their assumptions. Beware the sympathetic female ear.

But, in the long run, it's the writer who has the final say. Deciding how they come across is down to me.

The car picks up speed, its tires hiss on the surface of the Westway, vertiginous and exhilarating, a strip of road that rises like a Scalextric high over the streets of Paddington and north Kensington. Rows of elegant stucco terraces line up stiffly like piano keys. The market stalls along Portobello and garish letters of street graffiti flash below us before we're tipped down into the gridlocked traffic of the Euston Road. Eventually, the taxi stops outside the Rosen Institute, a Gothic Victorian building in Bloomsbury, darkened by centuries of grime.

"Ah, the Rosen, I've always wondered what goes on in there," says the cab driver, peering upward at its turrets and towers spiraling into a granite sky.

"The Pain Laboratory." I smile. "It's the only one of its kind in Europe."

Deep in that basement lies a state-of-the-art research lab. Designed by Dr. Nate Reid, dedicated to observing human pain in all its infinite variety. Here, I know, volunteers offer themselves up to be physically hurt. The more extreme, the better. Willingly they are prodded and poked, scalded and scraped, burned and pierced. Precisely how they suffer, the state of their neural responses, has been scrutinized and reported upon, peer-reviewed and published around the world, making Dr. Reid something of a celebrity beyond the world of neuroscience. It was the New Yorker profile that originially crowned him the King of Pain.

He met his wife, Eva, six years ago when he began researching her rare condition known as congenital analgesia, or congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). It's a rare disorder where the sufferer can walk on hot coals, place their hand in fire, walk on a broken limb for weeks and feel nothing more than a light tingle or a dull ache.

As he once wrote, pain defines our quality of life, its presence can wreck the activities that make us most human: thought, sexual activity, sleep. If Dr. Reid could identify the gene that "switched off" certain receptors in her brain, he could be the first to find a universal cure, crucially, one that wasn't addictive, that was opiate free. She became the focus of his research paper, and then they fell in love.

"Can you give him ten minutes, please?" his assistant asks, motioning me toward a reception area at the end of the corridor, spare and bland.

The room is preternaturally quiet. I focus on the small courtyard outside where water pools on the mottled paving stones in the rain. The voice of the city seeps through a half-opened window. On the pinboard opposite me, there's a poster inviting sufferers of trigeminal neuralgia to join a research group. It's a condition that can, apparently, feel like someone's inserting crushed glass under your skin. I remember that one from my interview research. I can recite the symptoms of several others too. I like the words, the chewiness of them and how they resonate. Postherpetic neuralgia, the searing nerve pain that can follow shingles. Ilioinguinal neuralgia—a stabbing pain that radiates to the genitalia. Cluster headaches, sometimes known as the "suicide headache" for the extremes to which they drive their sufferers.

It takes several days for me to read around my interviewee. I will have forgotten every detail about them and their work by the time the article is printed but, for a short while, I am fluent in someone else.

"Dr. Reid will see you now."

His assistant has come to fetch me. I follow her into his office, arid, white and windowless. I wait and I wait.

I hear him before I see him: brisk, urgent footsteps along the corridor that proclaim self-importance. He stands in the doorway, talking into his cell phone, and turns away from me. "We don't need to overcomplicate this. Those reports are pivotal and we can't wait any longer on the results. What's the hold up?"

I take him in, a wall of defensive energy, tapping his fingers on the door frame. Impatient, not quite at rest even when standing still. He talks rapidly, as if he wants to wrap up the conversation but can't resist prompting more questions, as if to assert his authority.

I have spent so many hours like this. Out of sight. Waiting, observing these unconscious displays. You could say it's an early calling. As a child, I'd consume Agatha Christie novels and treat my home life like a mystery to be solved. No one told me anything so I was the detective searching the dust for fingerprints. I was always the mouse in the corner, watching everyone, from the neighbors across the street to the arguments between my parents and my brother. Mining details from a distance, inferring meaning from sighs and glances, from the sort of silences that seep under doors and settle like layers of snow, what's left behind in the room long after the adults have left.

"Sorry, with you now," he says, his tone shifting as he slips his phone in his pocket, walking toward me. "Nate Reid. Dr. Nate Reid."

"Anna Tate." I stand up and extend my hand, aware of that visceral jolt whenever I meet a stranger who is highly recognizable. His photo has stared back at me from the paparazzi shots, the portraits in broadsheet profiles, TV shows, TED Talks. His hair is short, still dark except for that one distinctive bolt of silver at his temple. He glowers a little, heavy dark eyebrows knit together in appraisal. A fleeting tension ticks away below the surface, the muscle working in his jaw. His eyes are dark brown with specks of amber.

"Pleasure to meet you, Anna."

"I know how busy you must be. Thank you for meeting me."

He shakes my hand, assessing me before turning away. "Okay, let's go. Follow me." His accent snags on me. English private school flecked with the odd drawn-out mid-Atlantic vowels.

"Go? Where? I thought we were doing the interview here?" I look back to where my recorder and notepad are laid out on the table. I want to scribble all this down, hold on to my early impressions.

"Oh, you can bring them with you. We'll walk and talk."

I scurry into the room to get my things and follow him, irritated by the way he's taken charge and my hardwired eagerness to comply. He strides ahead of me, oblivious. "My postdocs are excited they've got you as a volunteer this morning. You're the first journalist to try them out—I've never let reporters inside here before. We have some interesting tests lined up for you."

This was the part of the interview my editor had insisted on when we talked through the angle it should take. I agreed, reluctantly, to subject myself to his techniques for measuring pain to add an "extra dimension" to the profile, an idea I still hadn't really warmed to for obvious reasons.

"But we are coming back afterward to talk alone?" I say, quickening my pace to keep up with him. "Your book PR Rhik agreed I'd get at least forty-five minutes..."

"Your hair," he interrupts, his dark eyebrows shooting up in a sideways glance at me.

"My hair...?"

"Is it naturally red or do you dye it?"

"Oh, it's natural."

He peers more closely at me as we walk, and for a brief second I think he's about to pick up a strand of my hair and roll it between his fingertips.

"Redheads generally tend to be more sensitive to pain," he says, looking at me thoughtfully. "Although their pain threshold can be impressively high. I'm doing a study on it, and these tests will provide valuable data."

"Well. Glad you're getting some use out of me," I say dryly, which he doesn't seem to register.

We reach a set of stairs that take us down into a maze of corridors. Exposed steel pipes run along the low ceilings. The doors ahead of us are molded aluminum with small glass portholes, like the bowels of a wartime submarine.

He stops under a sign that reads Strictly No Entry, and below that I notice someone has scrawled No Pain, No Gain in black marker pen.

"You should put that on a T-shirt."

"One of my hilarious students." He rolls his eyes, pressing a small buzzer next to the door. "Welcome to my lab," he says, and I follow him inside.