‘Does it hurt?’
‘No, just itches.’
The real pain was more deep-seated. The ridiculous splinter was nothing compared to the axe-stroke that had cleft his soul.
‘Well now…’ said Bleibtreu, but Marc cut him short.
‘No, that’s enough. This medication makes me feel dog-tired. I often feel queasy too, so I’ll have to lie down soon if you don’t want me to throw up all over your floor. Besides, I’ve had enough of this. You’ve been stringing me along ever since I got into your car. Instead of supplying me with answers, you and your colleague have given me the third degree. You’ve two alternatives: either I walk out of that door right now-’
‘-or I let you into our little secret at last,’ Bleibtreu interjected, flashing Marc another of his five-star publicity-brochure grins. ‘Very well.’
He heaved himself rather ponderously out of his armchair, but his smile didn’t fade.
‘Come with me. You may be only a few steps away from a new life.’
10
‘The human brain isn’t a filing cabinet,’ Bleibtreu declared as he shut the leather-covered door of his study behind him. ‘There aren’t any drawers you can open and shut as you please, to deposit information or extract it.’
He seated himself behind a massive desk, but not before having to remove a stack of loose papers from the chair and add them to the other mounds of files and books on the floor. In the meantime, Marc sat down on an upright chair and gazed around him.
The room looked almost squalid compared to the antiseptic neatness elsewhere in the clinic. On the desk, dirty coffee cups and a half-eaten sandwich kept company with an untidy jumble of textbooks and patients’ records. The harsh glare of the halogen ceiling lights showed up a gravy stain on the professor’s tie which had escaped Marc’s notice in the dimness of the limo and the examination room.
‘I used to think the brain had a quite specific place for each and every memory. It isn’t so, of course.’
Bleibtreu trundled his chair across the room on its castors, deftly avoiding the stacks of documents on the floor. He opened a laminated office cabinet and came back holding a model of a brain. This he deposited with difficulty between the telephone and a paperweight the size of a dumbbell, right on top of an open journal devoted to neuropsychology.
‘Here, I’ll give you a demonstration.’
Roughly the size of a child’s football, the model was moulded out of synthetic grey sponge and mounted on a wooden rod inserted in a polished metal base.
By the time Marc had redirected his attention to Bleibtreu, the professor was holding a glass ampoule in each hand. The liquid in the one on the left was red, in the other colourless.
‘A conjuring trick?’
‘Something like that. Watch carefully.’
Bleibtreu snapped the top off the left-hand ampoule and tilted it over the spongy grey mass.
‘A thought is like a drop of liquid.’ He dripped about a millilitre of the blood-red fluid on to the part of the model representing the cortex. Instantly, it meandered its way through the sponge’s capillary system.
‘When an experience becomes a memory, it deposits itself in billions of nerve-cell junctions.’
‘The synapses.’
‘Quite so. Watch closely, Marc.’ The professor picked up a ballpoint and tapped the model of the brain at various points, which were gradually turning red. ‘Every memory becomes stored in countless interconnections. The sound of a car’s engine, of people arguing, a smell, a certain song playing on the radio, an expanse of water, the rustle of leaves in a forest – all these things could reactivate your memory and summon up terrible recollections of the accident.’
‘So how do you propose to erase them from my brain?’ Marc asked.
‘I don’t.’ Bleibtreu snapped the top off the other ampoule. ‘Not separately, at least. I’m afraid we can only obliterate all your memories.’
‘Just a minute.’ Marc cleared his throat and tapped the last remaining grey area on the frontal lobe. ‘Am I wrong, or did you just say you propose to deprive me of all my memories?’
‘Total, artificially induced amnesia – yes, that’s the only possibility. That’s what we’re researching.’
Bleibtreu turned the model towards Marc to give him a better view of the red fluid’s continuing advance.
‘Essentially, memory loss can be caused by three factors,’ he said. ‘Severe traumatic experiences which the human mind wants to forget, brain damage resulting from a blow, and active chemical substances such as anaesthetics.’
Bleibtreu now tipped some of the colourless liquid in the other ampoule over the sponge model. To his surprise, Marc saw that in some places the red coloration was quickly fading.
‘Let me guess: you’re betting on chemicals – you’ve developed an Alzheimer’s pill and I’m supposed to swallow it, right?’
‘More or less. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course, but you’re right in principle.’
‘Purely as a matter of academic interest, what happens afterwards?’
By now, the sponge had almost entirely lost its reddish coloration.
‘After we’ve induced total amnesia, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s easy: we reload you.’
‘What?’
‘But only, of course, with memories and experiences that you really want to regain. It’s like reformatting a computer. If you can’t locate a defect in the system, the best plan is to wipe everything and gradually reinstate the programmes that work. That’s what we would do in your case. First, thorough questioning would elicit what you wanted to remember after undergoing artificial, retrogressive amnesia. Then, during the subsequent rehab phase, you’d be reintroduced to your past. Except, of course, for any experiences associated with your wife.’
‘But what about my friends and acquaintances?’ Marc objected. ‘What about my father-in-law? I’d be reminded of Sandra’s death as soon as I set eyes on him.’
‘Not if you never saw him again.’
‘Excuse me?’
Bleibtreu pushed his chair back with a smile, looking very much in his element and years younger than he had in the car. His voice, too, had gained strength.
‘That’s what makes you such an ideal subject. You’re a social worker, but you don’t have much of a social life. Your parents died young and you’ve lost touch with your brother. Your colleagues at work are forever changing and any contact you have with your clients is usually of brief duration.’
‘But my friends would miss me.’
‘The ones who work for big law firms and would forget your birthday if it wasn’t stored in their Outlook file?’
‘All the same, I don’t live in a vacuum. What exactly do you envisage? Would I have to leave Berlin?’
To Marc’s astonishment, the professor nodded. ‘We would naturally take care of your new life. That, too, forms part of the experiment. We’d install you in another part of the country, find you a job and integrate you into your neighbourhood with an appropriate legend. We would even pay your removal expenses. We work with experts from the witness protection scheme, I might add.’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Marc. It was more a statement than a question.
‘Our methods are extreme, it’s true, but no one ever discovered a new world by sticking to the beaten track.’
The professor cocked his left eyebrow again. ‘Consider the possibilities, Marc. You’d be one of the first people on this planet to start again from scratch, psychologically speaking. You’d be free from all mental ballast – as unencumbered as a newborn baby. I’m not just talking about the accident. We would make you forget anything that ever traumatized you.’