A pinkish, grayish flower atop a fat stalk—I had never seen my brain before. Fragile-looking thing. Was that really what I was—Sherrington’s “enchanted loom”—where billions of cells fired to weave me? Or was it a radio receiver through which my soul broadcast? Or Minsky’s “meat computer”? Or—
Whatever it or I was/were, Daggett broke my train of speculations by removing his pipe from his mouth and using its stem as a pointer.
“This looks like a bit of scarring in the temporal region,” he said. “Neat, though. Interesting… Have you ever had convulsions of any sort?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Ever wake up and find your tongue badly bitten, your pants wet, muscle aches?”
“No.”
He poked forward and the pipestem penetrated the image. I winced.
“Things can get very tricky down in the hippocampal area,” he remarked. “Lesions there can do amazing things to memory, but—” He paused and made an adjustment. “Tell me more about what happened on this trip to Michigan. There! Your hippocampus looks okay, though… Go ahead. Talk.”
He continued to play games with my brain-projection while I recited the entire story of the trip and its antecedents. Cora was present to confirm that these memories at least were accurate.
Finally, he threw a switch and my hovering brain-image vanished. Unsettling.
He turned to face me.
“I would like to try hypnosis,” he said. “Have you any objection?”
I wasn’t given much time to register one if I’d had one—a sign, I supposed, that my case was at least interesting.
“Have you ever been hypnotized before?” he asked.
“No, never.”
“Let’s get you into a more comfortable chair then.”
He released me from the stereotactic unit and conducted me to a padded reclining chair, tipping it back about three-quarters toward the horizontal. A device within the chair itself detected my brain rhythms, matched its own gentle output to certain of them and then gradually amplified its output while at the same time introducing a subtle alteration. I could somehow sense the activity of the computer chip controlling this device. Its waves flowed through me like water and then I went unconscious, as I was supposed to, in a burst of white noise that flared inside my skull.
“How do you feel?”
Dr. Daggett’s professionally intense face was bending closely over me. Cora was right behind him, looking over his shoulder.
“All right, I guess,” I said, blinking and stirring.
It felt as if I had been asleep for a long while. It seemed as if there had been dreams, of the sort which just miss making it over into waking consciousness.
“What do you remember about Baghdad?” he asked.
There were still two sets of memories, one for the town that I had actually seen and another, tattered now and beginning to go dreamlike itself, of the Baghdad that until recently I had thought I genuinely remembered. And now I could vaguely sense, behind this dream-like fabric, another reality, shapes moving behind a curtain. I couldn’t see yet what these shapes were. I told him this.
He asked me a few routine questions then, to make sure that I was at least fairly well oriented now, knew who I was (at least to the extent I’d believed I knew me when I entered his office) and what year this was and so on. He nodded at my answers.
“And for how long have you actually been living in Florida?”
The shapes behind the curtain shifted. Something vital was almost in view, but it slipped away again at the last moment
I shook my head.
“I’m not certain,” I said at last. “Several years for sure, though. What’s been happening to me?”
“For one thing…” Daggett began, and then took his time about continuing, “…you told me on the medical history form that you had never had any serious head injuries.”
The scars… Of course. Yet, oddly, they seemed to exist only in some other context. But it was obvious, logical and necessary to conclude that if I had them I’d gotten them from some sort of bashing.
“The scan is pretty conclusive, Don,” he continued. “You’ve had at least one severe skull fracture. Do you recall anything about that now?”
The almost visible shapes came and went. Then they stayed away. I shook my head again. At least, now, I knew that there was something in my past to be discovered—and this felt like some kind of progress.
“And,” he went on, “from what I’ve seen and heard so far, I’d say those old fractures aren’t your only problem—not even the main one. In fact, it could be that they are not all that important in the etiology of your condition. There are indications here of deliberate abuse in the past, with some form of hypnotism, and probably drugs.”
Why? I asked myself. It just seemed too improbable. For a moment, I doubted Daggett. But then he showed me the printout. Before I had awakened, he had run the results of his examination through his office computer terminal, which was connected to a large diagnostic data bank in Atlanta.
“My electronic colleague here concurs, you see.”
I looked at Cora. She was biting her lip and staring at the printout as if it were a corpse.
“What does it all mean?” I finally managed.
He lit his pipe before answering.
“I think it means that someone has done a job on you,” he said at last. “Whether the physical damage to your head was deliberate, I can’t say. But the false memories you’ve been carrying around must have been intentionally implanted.”
“Who?”
“Anything I said in answer to that now would be the sheerest speculation.”
“Then speculate.”
Daggett shrugged lightly.
“Certain governments have been known to treat people in such a fashion. But afterwards the people are not usually found living such a prosperous and carefree life.” He paused. “You’re native-born American, I’d say by your speech.”
“I think so, too. Not Upper Michigan, though.”
“Anything real about that period come back yet?”
For a moment, just for a moment, as he spoke, I thought I had hold of something, and then I almost had it. It was so close that I could nearly taste it. And then it was gone entirely. Out of reach. Kaput. A big piece of the truth, I just knew it, of the reality lurking right around the corner.
I made a face. I closed my eyes and knitted my brows. I clenched my teeth.
“Shit!” I said.
Daggett’s hand was on my shoulder.
“It’ll come, it’ll come,” he said. “Don’t try so hard, just yet.”
He turned away and began to scrape clean his pipe above a large ashtray on his desk.
“I could push harder with hypnosis,” he stated. “But then there’s the danger of building a new construct, of trying so hard to find something that we make up a new falsehood to fill the need. No more today. Come back in three days.”
“I can’t wait three days. Tomorrow.”
He put away the pipe and the scraper.