She glanced at the clock. Only five more minutes before the end of the session. The man was still talking. She wriggled on her chair. Her body was already prickling with the sensations in perspective-the dryness in her throat when she pronounced the concluding words after a long silence; the smoothness of her fountain pen on her diary when she jotted down the next appointment; the rustling of leather when she got up…
A little later, in the hallway, the patient turned around and asked her anxiously, "I didn't go too far, did I. Doctor?"
Mathilde shook her head with a smile and opened the door. So what had he revealed this time that was so important? It did not matter. He was sure to do even better next time. She went out onto the landing and switched on the light.
She screamed when she saw her.
The woman was hunched up against the wall, clutching her black kimono. Mathilde recognized her at once: Anna something. The one who needed a good pair of glasses. She was white and shaking from head to foot. What was this all about?
Mathilde pushed the man downstairs and turned angrily toward this little brunette. She did not tolerate it when her patients just showed up like that, without warning, without making an appointment. A good psychiatrist should always be a good bouncer.
She was about to give her a piece of her mind when the woman beat her to it, holding up to her nose a face scan.
"They've wiped away my memory and my face."
28
Paranoid psychosis.
The diagnosis was clear. Anna Heymes claimed that she had been manipulated by her husband and Eric Ackermann, as well as by some other men who were members of the French police force. Against her will, she was supposed to have been brainwashed and part of her memory removed. Her face had been altered using plastic surgery. She did not know why or how, but she had been the victim of a plot, or an experiment, that had damaged her personality.
She explained all this while hurriedly brandishing her cigarette like a conductor's baton. Mathilde listened to her patiently noting as she did how thin Anna was-anorexia could be another symptom of her paranoia.
Anna Heymes then came to the end of her unbelievable yarn. She had uncovered the plot that very morning, in the bathroom, when she discovered the scars on her face while her husband was about to take her to Ackermann's clinic.
She had escaped through the window and had been chased by policemen in civilian dress who were armed to the teeth and equipped with radio transmitters. She had hidden in an Orthodox church, then had had her face x-rayed at Saint-Antoine Hospital to obtain tangible proof of her operation. Then she had wandered around till nightfall, waiting to take refuge with the only person she now trusted Mathilde Wilcrau. There we are.
Paranoid psychosis.
Mathilde had treated hundreds of similar people at Sainte-Anne Hospital. The first thing to do was to calm the patient down. After a good deal of comforting words, she had managed to give her an intra-muscular injection of fifty milligrams of Tranxene.
Anna Heymes was now sleeping on her couch. Mathilde was sitting behind her desk, in her usual position.
All she had to do now was to phone up Laurent Heymes. She could even see to it that Anna was sectioned, or else contact Eric Ackermann, who was treating her. In a few minutes, everything would be sorted out. It was just routine.
So why hadn't she called? For the last hour, she had been sitting there, without picking up the phone. She stared around at the furniture, which glinted in places, reflecting the light from the window. For years, she had been surrounded by these rococo-style furnishings, most of which had been bought by her husband. She had fought hard to retain possession of them during their divorce. First to piss him off, then, she realized, to keep something of him. She had never made up her mind to sell them. She was now living in a sanctuary, a mausoleum of varnished antiques that reminded her of the only years that had really counted.
Paranoid psychosis. A textbook case.
Except that there were the scars. The traces she herself had observed on the young woman's forehead, ears and chin. She could even feel the screws and implants under her skin that were holding up her face's bone structure. That terrifying printout then gave her the details of the operations.
During her years of practice, Mathilde had encountered many paranoiacs, but very few of them went around with concrete proof of their delusions written into their faces. Anna Heymes was wearing a sort of mask that had been stitched onto her flesh. A rind of skin that had been fashioned and molded to dissimulate her smashed bones and atrophied muscles.
Was she quite simply telling the truth? Had these men-including even policemen-made her undergo such treatment? Had they shattered the bones of her face? Had they interfered with her memory?
There was another disturbing element in this business: the presence of Eric Ackermann. She remembered a tall redhead with a face pitted with acne. One of her countless suitors at university, but above all a man of extraordinary intelligence, which verged on the sublime.
At the time, what fascinated him was the human brain and "inner travel." He had followed the experiments on LSD conducted by Timothy Leary at Harvard and, via this approach, he claimed to be exploring uncharted regions of consciousness. He took all sorts of psychotropic drugs while analyzing his own altered states. He sometimes even spiked fellow students' coffee, by slipping LSD into it, "just to see." Mathilde smiled as she remembered his weirdness. It had been a crazy period, with psychedelic rock, protest movements, the hippies.
Ackermann had predicted that one day machines would allow us to travel inside the brain and observe its activity in real time. And time had proved him to be right. He had become one of the best-qualified neurologists in his field, thanks to new technologies such as the positron camera and the encephalogram.
Was it possible that he was conducting an experiment on this young woman?
She looked in her address book for the phone number of a student who had taken her courses at Sainte-Anne in 1995. On the fourth ring, the woman answered.
"Valerie Rannan?"
"Speaking."
"This is Mathilde Wilcrau."
"Professor Wilcrau?” It was past eleven, and her tone of voice was suddenly alert.
"What I am going to ask you will probably sound rather odd, especially at this time of the night…"
"What do you want?"
"I just want to ask you a few questions about your doctoral thesis. It was about mental manipulation and sensory isolation, if I remember correctly"
"It didn't seem to interest you very much at the time."
Mathilde noticed a slightly aggressive tone in the woman's answer. She had in fact refused to direct the student's work. She had not believed in this line of research. For her, brainwashing was more part of a collective fantasy or an urban legend.
She soothed out her voice with a smile. "Yes, I know. I was rather skeptical. But right now I need some information for an article I have to write on a short deadline."
"You can always ask."
Mathilde did not know where to start. She was not even sure what she wanted to find out. She started at random. "In the synopsis of your thesis, you wrote that it is possible to efface someone's memory. Is it… is it true?”