But around 6:00 P.M., Kayla’s boyfriend Jim showed up to let Kayla take a break. They disappeared into the corridor for a couple of minutes, and Travis looked out the window. The trees were swaying—it had become quite a blustery day. An eagle flew by, passing just above a pole with a tattered, faded Canadian flag.
Jim re-entered and took the seat Kayla had been using. Travis regarded him. This guy was presentable enough, but his sister, even having aged, was better-looking. Travis said, “How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine,” replied Jim.
Travis shook his head. “Last birthday I remember, I turned twenty-two. Now, I’m forty-one.”
“Tempus fugit,” Jim said, and Travis found himself immediately liking the guy. He didn’t follow the phrase with raised eyebrows, which, Travis knew, would have been literally—yes, literally, not figuratively—supercilious; he didn’t shoot Travis a “That’s Latin” or a “Do you get it?” look. He just calmly assumed that whomever he was talking to was as bright as he himself was.
“Yeah,” said Travis.
“So, listen,” said Jim, “I asked Kayla, and she said it was okay to talk to you about this. I was at U of M, too, when you were, but I can’t remember things from back then, and, well, I thought maybe you could help me fill in some blanks about my past.”
Travis considered for a moment. Previously, words like those would have been seductive music: You know something I don’t; you’ve got something you can hold against me. But he didn’t feel any urge to… to use this poor sap. He…
He wanted to help the guy out.
Christ, Travis thought, what’s wrong with me?
I looked at Travis Huron, and he looked back at me. Travis was Kayla’s brother, but I felt in a small way like he was my brother, too. After all, he was the only other guy my age I knew who also had no memory of the first half of 2001. Yes, he’d lost so much more than that, but I could qualitatively, if not quantitatively, understand what he was going through. And even if I could somehow recover my memories of my dark period, they would presumably be old memories, faded, unreliable, like anyone’s of that long ago. But Travis remembered things from back then as if they’d just occurred.
Except…
Damn it, something was niggling at my consciousness. And, yes, consciousness was the heart of the matter. Menno Warkentin said I blacked out after trying on his Lucidity helmet. If that contraption did more than render me unconscious—if it really was what put an end to my self-awareness for the next six months—then I could sort of understand why I didn’t remember anything from the period following my blacking out, until, for whatever reason, I ceased being a p-zed.
But why didn’t I remember putting on the helmet? Why didn’t I remember going to Menno’s lab on New Year’s Eve? Hell, why don’t I remember going to McNally Robinson and buying that sci-fi paperback earlier the same day? Surely I should at least vaguely recall that stuff, but I couldn’t dredge up anything from the day I became a p-zed.
But Travis hadn’t been subjected to Menno’s lasers. He presumably had no paralimbic damage promoting confabulation; his memories should be accurate. And so, after he asked me how old I was, and he lamented how old he himself had become, I simply asked him: “Did you take part in an experiment at the university run by Professor Warkentin and Professor Adler?”
Travis managed a rueful smile. “Yup. I remember it like it was yesterday. Those guys still around?”
“Warkentin, yeah; he’s emeritus at U of M. Adler’s in Washington now. So, you remember the Lucidity helmet?”
“I don’t think I ever heard them call it that, but you mean the football helmet with all the doodads attached? Sure. I came in on December fifteenth, they put it on me, and I did some tests, thinking words without saying them.”
“Exactly. Yes. And then they had you come back again, right?”
An odd look passed over Travis’s face, as if he was surprised at how important this seemed to me. “No.”
“They didn’t?”
“No. I came in once, got my twenty bucks, and that was it.”
“What about the day you blacked out? I’d assumed you’d come in again to do an experiment. They found you on campus, and classes didn’t resume until the eighth.”
“Not that I recall.”
Damn. I’d been so sure Warkentin was responsible for what had happened to Travis. “You don’t remember the day you fell into the coma?”
“Not a thing. I remember going to bed the night before, which was January first. I’d gotten a paperback of this new thriller, Angels & Demons, for Christmas, and I started reading that—in fact, that’s just about the last thing I remember.”
There was an obvious joke to be made about Dan Brown novels; I resisted. “But you don’t recall anything at all from the next day? Anything after you woke up?”
He shook his head. “As far as I remember, the next time I woke up, I was right here—with you and my sister standing over me.”
“Huh,” I said, baffled. If Travis had been knocked down into a coma by the same mechanism as me, why didn’t either of us remember putting on the helmet? I could understand losing memories after the botched stimulation with transcranial focused ultrasound, but why would we lose ones from before that?
“You’re a shrink, right?” asked Travis, looking quizzically at me now.
“I’ve got a PhD in psychology,” I replied, “but I don’t have a clinical practice.”
He waved that away. “But you’re trained in this shit, and—funny, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I need somebody to talk to.”
I leaned forward in the chair. “I’m all ears.”
“I feel different now,” Travis said. “Different from the way I did before. I’m fighting it, but…”
“What’s different?”
“It’s hard to describe. But I keep thinking about… well, about what I’m thinking about. I was always a charge-ahead kind of guy. Never look back, no second thoughts. You know? Just do it.”
“Like Nike,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly. Hey, they still use that slogan?”
“Yup.”
“Anyway, that’s the way I used to be. But now, I keep going over in my mind things I’ve done.”
I frowned. “You never did that before?”
“Never.”
“What about planning for the future? Thinking about things you haven’t yet done?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve always done that: considering alternatives, figuring the angles. But that’s different; there’s a point to that. You can change the future, right? You can’t change the past—so why…”
“Obsess about it?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah, I guess that is the right word.”
“And you’ve only been doing this since…”
“Since Kayla woke me up.”
“Are you sure? Did you ever keep a diary?”
“No.”
“A journal? A blog?”
“A what?”
“A web blog; a public online journal.”
“Christ, no. Why would anyone do that?”