Page 92 of Radar

Elyssa hadn’t seen them leave.

Hiro and Finley moved forward joining their teammates on the floor. Elyssa thought she should probably feel bad that everyone was sitting on the carpet. But they were adults and could make their own choices, so she let that guilt go.

“Elyssa agreed to ramble for a bit,” White said.

They both nodded; it seemed like a tactic they liked.

“Here I go with my rambling. I get why Orest would want me. I even kind of get why they’d want the cheese scientist and Eddie. What I don’t get is Paca. It turns out that because I did some consultation work with NASA on food, and Paca has been back and forth talking to them, we have someone in common. Belinda Hopkins. And in the pattern of rambling, I was thinking about Belinda because Orest had been very interested in her work with enclosed groups.”

“It’s so odd to want to go back to being the USSR,” Elyssa said. “There’s a word for that,hiraeth.I think it’s Gaelic, maybe? It means nostalgia and grief for a place you long for but can never return to. Although it appears that Orest is doing hisbest to go back. But I was talking about Belinda, and the last conversation I had with her really sounds like it might apply here. She’s part of an advisory group for NASA – seems all I talk about lately is NASA.”

“For the Mars expedition?” Hiro asked.

“For over a decade, Belinda has been working on the psychology of confined groups. Astronauts are one kind, but also oil rigs, remote science installations, and submarines, things like that.” Elyssa scratched the back of her neck. “Sorry, I feel like the kid who was just told she was adopted, and while mommy and daddy love me very much, they didn’t make me.” Elyssa grimaced. “No, that’s not a great comparison. I don’t really have one. Rug pulled from under my feet.” She reached a handout. “I’m a big girl. I can readily admit that I am as gullible as anyone else. Naïve with a major case of wanting to be connected to a family. Which is why, when this amazing, warm, funny, supportive uncle showed up—no, he’s an uncle-figure. An uncle-figure who apparently kidnapped one of my best friends—I easily accepted him at face value.” She frowned deeply. “You told Eddie’s fiancé, Ben, right? How’s he holding up?”

“We didn’t,” Finley said. “This information is in a chain of authority, and I’m not at liberty to act. None of us in this working group is able to talk with him.”

“Shit.” Elyssa blinked.

“You were saying about your social psychologist friend?” White reminded her.

Elyssa stared at White, trying to remember why she’d even brought this up. “Yes, she’s been talking a lot lately about understanding the problem with how American society is having an addiction crisis. I know everyone is a bit addicted to the algorithms on social media and what have you. But she said that there’s a big chunk of the human race that has an addiction-prone brain. And that recent peer-reviewed A++ kinds of research studies say that revenge is addictive.”

“What’s this?” Finley asked.

“They did MRIs and found that revenge lights up the same space in the brain associated with other addictions, porn, drugs, gambling, and alcohol. Revenge, in these kinds of brains, releases dopamine to reinforce that revenge-seeking behavior. And Belinda said that in some people, the pleasure of the chemical reward means that the drive for the reward supersedes self-control and good judgment. There’s this powerful ‘happy brain’, if you will, created in the presence of retribution. It can become compulsive and unhealthy. And, like any addiction, revenge addiction can both run in families and ruin families. I think anyone with two eyes can see that in the wild. White, you said that the Zorics have a grievance from their entire way of life getting upended. I’m imagining that the Zorics and Kalinskys are Russian mafia-type families. And if they have the genetic predisposition for revenge addictions—as mafia-type families often do—it sounds like they might be trying to OD. That’s kind of scary.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” White said.

“Yeah, well, Belinda says that grievance, the feeling that ‘I didn’t get mine’ or ‘someone took something away from me’ is a trigger that pushes people with the propensity for revenge addiction to drug-seek. In this case, that drug is secreted when they can say ‘gotcha!’ It’s the cruelty that’s the point. There’s an internal drive to see suffering, so the addict doesn’t undergo withdrawal symptoms. This is physiological in nature.” Elyssa scratched behind Radar’s ears, then reached into her backpack to pull out an envelope of electrolytes. Shaking the crystals to the bottom before tearing them open, she said. “I mean, schadenfreude is a thing. And, for example, I’m thrilled that thesnowmobile guy got some instant karma when Radar bit him. But what I’m talking about here is another level.”

“Dr. Belinda Hopkins,” White said. “You said peer reviewed, so this study is published?”

“Yes, and there was more to it, like, if the results of the revenge were short-lived, the person had to keep gathering personal grievances so that then they could have reasons to seek retribution, which, can I say, is a pretty messed-up way to live a life. And the vengeance can come by proxy like I got mine through Radar.”

“Someone can take revenge on your behalf, and you’ll still get the dopamine hit?” Xander asked.

“Like a whole family might all feel really good when one of their family members does something that makes people they don’t like suffer. You don’t need to be mad at someone specific; a group works fine. The addiction is obsessive-compulsive. The same as any addictive cycle: craving, tension, arousal, revenge (which is the drug hit), and around and around and around.”

“Well, I can’t see anything wrong with that hypothesis as it applies to the Zorics,” White said. “That’s the pattern we’ve been documenting.”

“Maybe we just need to send the Zorics to a revenge rehab center with a twelve-step program to treat them for their addictions,” Hiro said.

“Not saying it wouldn’t be beneficial to them,” Finley said. “So as long as it’s in a MAX security prison system where they’re serving life.”

“Looking forward to the dopamine hit of the perp walk?” White asked.

“I am looking forward to the world being a safer place,” Finley said. “If I wanted a dopamine hit, it would be much more extreme. The family would be wiped off the face of the planet. Kidding.” He pressed his lips out as if he was reconsidering whathe’d just said. “Okay, only partially kidding. They’ve done a lot of bad things to innocent people, and I would like that to stop.”

“Like what?” Elyssa whispered, still trying to put together that jovial, life-loving Uncle Orest was Orest Kalinsky, a terrorist. “If they did something really terrible, I would have heard about them, right?”

“The kinds of things they do? It’s likely that they killed the power in a hospital and wiped out all of the medical records in Syria. It’s likely that they messed up the instruments on the flight and disappeared a plane,” Hiro said.

Elyssa paused her hand as the envelope emptied into her bottle. “Not possible.”

“Completely possible.” Xander reached for the packet and bottle, then finished pouring in the salts. After mixing the solution, he handed the bottle to Elyssa, pressing it into her hand as she stared at the wall.

She blinked, and she was back focusing on White. “I’m sorry, White, my ramblings didn’t get me anywhere nearer to understanding why you have a fistful of my photos. But I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”

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