“Did it make you uncomfortable?”
“No. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already. It just showed what was wrong with collectivism. You know—Communism represses the individual, destroys initiative. It claims it has the interests of the majority at heart. And it denies all human values. That’s what I got out of 1984, though to hear that professor talk about it, it was all about Nixon and Vietnam.”
Evans kept still. Havelmann went on.
“I’ve seen the same mentality at work in business. The large corporations, they’re just like the government. Big, slow: you could show them a way to save a billion, and they’d squash you like a bug because it’s too much trouble to change.”
“You sound like you’ve got some resentments,” said Evans.
The old man smiled. “I do, don’t I. I admit it. I’ve thought a lot about it. But I have faith in people. Someday I may just run for state assembly and see whether I can do some good.”
Her pencil point snapped. She looked at Havelmann, who looked back at her. After a moment she focused her attention on the notebook. The broken point had left a black scar across her precise handwriting.
“That’s a good idea,” she said quietly, her eyes still lowered. “You still don’t remember arguing with me this morning?”
“I never saw you before I walked in this door. What were we supposed to be fighting about?”
He was insane. Evans almost laughed aloud at the thought—of course he was insane—why else would he be there? The question, she forced herself to consider rationally, was the nature of his insanity. She picked up the paperweight and handed it across to him. “We were arguing about this paperweight,” she said. “I showed it to you, and you said you’d never seen it before.”
Havelmann examined the paperweight. “Looks ordinary to me. I could easily forget something like this. What’s the big deal?”
“You’ll note that it’s a model of the Lincoln Memorial.”
“You probably got it at some gift shop. D.C. is full of junk like that.”
“I haven’t been to Washington in a long time.”
“I live there. Alexandria, anyway. I drive in every morning.”
Evans closed her notebook. “I have a possible diagnosis of your condition,” she said suddenly.
“What condition?”
This time the laughter was harder to repress. Tears almost came to her eyes with the effort. She caught her breath and continued. “You exhibit the symptoms of Korsakov’s syndrome. Have you ever heard of that before?”
Havelmann looked as blank as a whitewashed wall. “No.”
“Korsakov’s syndrome is an unusual form of memory loss. Recorded cases go back to the late 1800s. There was a famous one in the 1970s—famous to doctors, I mean. A Marine sergeant named Arthur Briggs. He was in his fifties, in good health aside from the lingering effects of alcoholism, and had been a career noncom until his discharge in the mid-sixties after twenty years in the service. He’d functioned normally until the early seventies, when he lost his memory of any events which occurred to him after September, 1944. He could remember in vivid detail, as if they had just happened, events up until that time. But of the rest of his life—nothing. Not only that, his continuing memory was affected so that he could remember events that occurred in the present only for a period of minutes, after which he would forget totally.”
“I can remember what happened to me right up until I walked into this room.”
“That’s what Sgt. Briggs told his doctors. To prove it he told them that World War II was going strong, that he was stationed in San Francisco in preparation for being sent to the Philippines, that it looked like the St. Louis Browns might finally win a pennant if they could hold on through September, and that he was twenty years old. He had the outlook and abilities of an intelligent twenty-year-old. He couldn’t remember anything that happened to him longer than forty minutes. The world had gone on, but he was permanently stuck in 1944.”
“That’s horrible.”
“So it seemed to the doctor in charge—at first. Later he speculated that it might not be so bad. The man still had a current emotional life. He could still enjoy the present; it just didn’t stick with him. He could remember his youth, and for him his youth had never ended. He never aged; he never saw his friends grow old and die, he never remembered that he himself had grown up to be a lonely alcoholic. His girlfriend was still waiting for him back in Columbia, Missouri. He was twenty years old forever. He had made a clean escape.”
Evans opened a desk drawer and took out a hand mirror. “How old are you?” she asked.
Havelmann looked frightened. “Look, why are we doing—”
“How old are you?” Evans’ voice was quiet but determined. Inside her a pang of joy threatened to break her heart.
“I’m thirty-five. What the hell—”
Shoving the mirror at him was as satisfying as firing a gun. Havelmann took it, glanced at her, then tentatively, like the most nervous of college freshmen checking the grade on his final exam, looked at his reflection. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He started to tremble.
“What happened? What did you do to me?” He got out of the chair, his expression contorted. “What did you do to me! I’m thirty-five! What happened?”
DR. EVANS STOOD in front of the mirror in her office. She was wearing her uniform. It was quite as rumpled as Havelmann’s suit. She had the tunic unbuttoned and was feeling her left breast. She lay down on the floor and continued the examination. The lump was undeniable. No pain, yet.
She sat up, reached for the pack of cigarettes on the desktop, fished out the last one and lit it. She crumpled the pack and threw it at the wastebasket. Two points. She had been quite a basketball player in college, twenty years before. She lay back down and took a long drag on the cigarette, inhaling deeply, exhaling the smoke with force, with a sigh of exhaustion. She probably could not make it up and down the court a single time any more.
She turned her head to look out the window. The blinds were open, revealing the same barren landscape that showed before. There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” she said.
Havelmann entered. He saw her lying on the floor, raised an eyebrow, grinned. “You’re Doctor Evans?”
“I am.”
“Can I sit here or should I lie down too?”
“Do whatever you fucking well please.”
He sat in the chair. He had not taken offense. “So what did you want to see me about?”
Evans got up, buttoned her tunic, sat in the swivel chair. She stared at him. Her face was blank, pale, her thin lips steady. It was the expression of a woman terminally ill, so accustomed to her illness, and the necessity of ignoring it, that all that showed of the pain was mild annoyance. I am going to see this through, her face said, and then I’m going to kill myself.
“Have we ever met before?” she asked.
“No. I’m sure I’d remember.”
He was sure he would remember. She would fucking kill him. He would remember that.
She ground out the last inch of cigarette. She felt her jaw muscles tighten; she looked down at the ashtray in regret. “Now I have to quit.”
“I should quit. I smoke too much myself.”
“I want you to listen to me closely now,” she said slowly. “Do not respond until I’m finished.
“My name is Major D. S. Evans and I am a military psychologist. This office is in the infirmary of NECDEC, the National Emergency Center for Defense Communications, located one thousand feet below a hillside in West Virginia. As far as we know we are the only surviving governmental body in the continental United States. The scene you see through this window is being relayed from a surface monitor in central Nebraska; by computer command I can connect us with any of the twelve monitors still functioning on the surface.”