After I got out of the hospital following the crash, I couldn’t get out of my head the memory of what had happened to the man. How clear it was to me that he’d changed, in a flash. It was like flipping a light switch.
I began reading about sudden changes in personality and rage and impulse. That research led eventually to the writings of Dr. Pheder and other researchers and therapists. I grew fascinated with the concept of nemes, considered a theory by some, a reality by others.
As to their origin, there are several theories. I subscribe to one I found the most logical. Nemes are vestiges of human instinct. They were an integral part of the psychological makeup of the creatures in the chain that led to Homo sapiens and were necessary for survival. In the early days of humanoids, it was occasionally necessary to behave in ways we would consider bad or criminal now. To commit acts of violence, to be rageful, impulsive, sadistic, greedy. But as societies formed and developed, the need for those darker impulses faded. The governing bodies, the armies, the law enforcers took over the task of our survival. Violence, rage, and the other darker impulses became not only unnecessary but were counter to society’s interests.
Somehow-there are several theories on this-the powerful neuro impulses that motivated those dark behaviors separated from humans and came to exist as separate entities, pockets of energy, you could say. In my research I found a precedent for this migration: the same thing happened with telepathy. Many generations ago, psychic communication was common. The advent of modern communication techniques eliminated the need for what we could call extrasensory perception, though many young children still have documented telepathic skills. (However, it’s interesting that with the increased use of cell phones and computers by youngsters, incidents of telepathy among young people are dramatically decreasing.)
But whatever their genealogy, nemes exist and there are millions of them. They float around like flu viruses until they find a vulnerable person and then incorporate themselves into the psyche of their host (“incorporate” is used, rather than a judgmental term like “infest” or “infect,” and never the theologically loaded “possess”). If someone is impulsive, angry, depressed, confused, scared-even physically sick-nemes will sense that and make a beeline for the cerebrum cortex, the portion of the brain where emotion is controlled. They usually avoid people who are emotionally stable, strong willed, and have high degrees of self-control, though not always.
Nemes are invisible, like electromagnetic waves and light at the far end of the spectrum, though it’s sometimes possible to tell they’re nearby if you hear distortion on a cell phone, TV, or radio. Usually, the host doesn’t sense the incorporation itself; they only experience a sudden mood swing. Some people can outright sense them. I’m one of these, though there’s nothing “special” about me. It’s simply like having acute hearing or good eyesight.
Do nemes think?
They do, in a way. Though thought is probably the wrong word. More likely they’re like insects, with a sense of awareness and instinct. Survival is very strong within them, too. There’s nothing immortal about nemes. When their host passes away, they seem to dissipate also. I myself don’t believe they communicate with one another, since I’ve never seen any evidence that they do.
This isn’t to minimize the damage they can do, of course. It’s significant. The rage, the impulsive behavior that arises from incorporation leads to rape, murder, physical and sexual abuse, and more subtle harm like substance overuse and verbal abuse. They also affect the physiology and morphology of the host’s body itself, as a series of autopsies several years ago proved.
After my devastating personal encounter with nemes, I decided I wanted to work in a field that would help minimize the damage they could do. I became a therapist.
The thrust of my approach is behavioral. Once you’re under the influence of a neme, you don’t “cast it out,” as a practitioner (now former) unfortunately joked at a psychotherapy conference in Chicago some years ago. You treat the symptoms. I concentrate on working with my patients to achieve self-control, using any number of techniques to avoid or minimize behaviors that are destructive to them or others. In most cases it doesn’t even matter that the patient knows he or she is a host for a neme (some patients are comfortable with the reality, and others aren’t). In any case, the methods I use are solid and well established, used by all behavioral therapists, and by and large successful.
There’ve been occasional defeats, of course. It’s the nature of the profession. Two of my patients, in which very potent nemes had incorporated, killed themselves when they were simply unable to resolve the conflict between their goals and the neme-influenced behavior.
There’s also something that’s been in the back of my mind for years: risk to myself. My life has been devoted to minimizing their electiveness and spread and so I sometimes wonder if a neme senses that I’m a threat. This is probably according them too much credit; you have to guard against personifying them. But I can’t help but think back to an incident several years ago. I was attending a psychology conference in New York City and was nearly mugged. It was curious since the young attacker was a model student at a nice high school near my hotel. He’d never been in trouble with the police. And he was armed with a long knife. An off-duty policeman happened to be nearby and managed to arrest him just as he started after me with the weapon.
It was late at night and I couldn’t see clearly, but I believed, from the boy’s eyes, that he was being influenced by a neme, motivated by its own sense of survival to kill me.
Probably not. But even if there was some truth to it, I wasn’t going to be deterred from my mission to save people at risk.
People like Annabelle Young.
THE DAY AFTER RUNNING into her in Starbucks, I went to the North Carolina State University library and did some research. The state licensing agencies’ databases and ever-helpful Google revealed that the woman was thirty years old and worked at Chantelle West Middle School in Wetherby County. Interestingly, she was a widow-her husband had died three years ago-and, yes, she had a nine-year-old son, probably the target of her anger on the phone. According to information about the school where she taught, Annabelle would generally teach large classes, with an average of thirty-five students per year.
This meant that she could have a dramatic and devastating impact on the lives of many young people.
Then too was the matter of Annabelle’s own well-being. I was pretty sure that she’d come under the influence of the neme around the time her husband died; a sudden personal loss like that makes you emotionally vulnerable and more susceptible than otherwise. (I noted too that she’d gone back to work around that time, and I wondered if her neme sensed an opportunity to incorporate within someone who could influence a large number of equally vulnerable individuals, the children in her classes.)
Annabelle was obviously a smart woman and she might very well get into counseling at some time. But there comes a point when the neme is so deeply incorporated that people actually become accustomed or addicted to the inappropriate behaviors nemes cause. They don’t want to change. My assessment was that she was past this point. And so, since I wasn’t going to hear from her, I did the only thing I could. I went to Wetherby.
I got there early on a Wednesday. The drive was pleasant, along one of those combined highways that traverse central North Carolina. It split somewhere outside of Raleigh and I continued on the increasingly rural branch of the two, taking me through old North Carolina. Tobacco warehouses and small industrial-parts plants-most of them closed years ago-but still squatting in weeds. Trailer parks, very unclosed. Bungalows and plenty of evidence of a love of Nascar and Republican party lines.