As he was about to slide off the examination table to look for a nurse, the door opened and a scowling man walked in. He was in his late fifties and the only hair left on his head consisted of tufts of gray above his ears.
“Morning. I’m Dr. Noble.” He took a seat on the stool in front of the counter and started to jot some notes.
Great bedside manner.
“Dr. Assad gave me a report of his two visits with you, and I just received your medical records from your prior doctor’s office, Manfred his name is. Or was.” Noble hmmphed a few times while reading the chart. “Director Knox wanted me to take a real thorough look at you today.” He flipped to the back of the file, looked at a lab test. “Other than Dr. Assad, have you had an exam in the past six years?”
“Wish I could tell you, Doc, but I honestly don’t remember.”
“Hmm, so I’m told.” Noble continued to leaf through the chart. “How’s your memory been the past few days?”
“I can’t remember,” Payne said with a smile.
Noble sat there staring at him, his face a piece of rough-hewn stone.
Payne cleared his throat. The man obviously didn’t have a sense of humor. “I’ve been getting some very vivid images. They seem to be from my more recent life. Nothing but fragments. A woman, a house, what I think is my car, and… well, some emotions, too. It’s hard to describe, but I sort of feel a sense of yearning for the woman I keep seeing in my mind. I think she’s my wife, but I don’t really remember much about her. I just feel drawn to her for some reason.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got an e-mail from her, so now I know a little bit about my life after I left the Bureau. But I’m torn, because I want to talk to her, have her fill in the blanks. At the same time, I don’t want to know more about my recent past because it’d mean having to choose between my Bureau life and my life back home in some small town called Placerville. I made a mistake leaving the Bureau. Regardless of the risk, I shouldn’t have run from it.”
Noble looked at him, his face a blank. “Do you need something from me?”
“Need?”
“Counseling. I don’t practice that area of medicine, but I can call in a colleague.” Noble reached for the telephone on the wall.
“I was just making some observations. I didn’t say there was anything wrong. I just thought… no, everything’s fine.” Payne felt like a fool. This man obviously did not care about what he was going through; all Noble was concerned about was the clinical examination. What’s on paper, and what’s in the body. The black and white. Diagnosis and treatment. Refer him to someone else to deal with the esoteric, emotional baggage. It’s not my job.
“Let me check that thigh of yours,” Noble said, having Payne lie on his left side. After slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Noble prodded the wound, nodded, and then sat down to make some notes. “It’s not my specialty, but it looks good, healing nicely. If you don’t get too gung ho with all that macho FBI stuff you people do, it’ll heal fine, with no residuals.”
Payne sat up. “No macho FBI stuff, got it.”
“Anything else bothering you?”
“Sleep. I can’t remember the last good night’s sleep I had. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I think it’s probably related to the dreams, or fragments of memories, I’m having. I toss around until I finally wake up, and then I spend the next few hours lying there trying to make sense of what they mean.”
Noble pulled his prescription pad from a pocket and scribbled a few lines of chicken scratch. “Valium, ten milligrams. One before bed. Should knock you out pretty good.” He handed Payne the slip and clicked his pen shut. “Any other problems?”
Payne shook his head. “I think that’s enough.”
For the next twenty minutes, Noble performed a comprehensive neurologic examination. Payne stood and hopped on one foot, smelled coffee grounds and cinnamon, smiled and frowned, and had his face poked with a needle. After that pleasant experience, he was taken through a mental-status examination. He counted by threes and fives, forward and backward, answered questions of general knowledge having to do with time and place, and ended with his recollection of the first thing that Noble had asked him during the examination.
Finally, Noble had Payne lie back so he could perform a general physical exam. All the while, he was questioning his patient on a variety of topics with health-related implications: Any problems moving your bowels? Any unexplained night pain? Does the room ever spin? And so on.
Noble jotted some notes in the chart, then placed an ice-cold stethoscope on Payne’s chest. He listened, moved it around, and listened some more. “Hmm,” he said, crinkling his brow and then thumbing through his patient’s chart, beginning in the front with the earliest entry.
“Anything wrong? Did you find something?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, nothing’s wrong,” he said in a voice devoid of inflection as he continued to read. A few moments later, he returned to the exam table and listened again to Payne’s chest for what seemed like several minutes. Payne was instructed to stand up, sit down, hold his breath, lie down, and jump on one leg.
Noble made a few more notes, rose from his stool, then pressed a button on the wall. “Please send Jan in with a cart.” He released the intercom and turned to Payne. “Okay, I’m going to have a nurse draw some blood and take an ECG tracing of your heart. Radiology will then take you downstairs for an MRI of your brain, and after that you’ll be free to go.”
Payne sat up. “Wait a minute — you found something. Something’s wrong.”
“Did I say that?”
“No, but—”
“Everything’s fine, Agent Payne. Don’t worry.”
Payne looked hard at Noble, who broke eye contact. He doubted the doctor was telling him the truth. “At least tell me what you think of this amnesia, how long I might have it.”
Noble clasped the file in front of his chest and folded his arms. “All right, I’ll tell you what I think. I’ve never heard of the type of memory loss you’re claiming to have. I’ve never seen such a case either in practice or in the journals. When someone has a head injury like what you’re describing, if it’s substantial enough to cause such considerable memory loss, it usually causes other neurological disturbances.”
“In English, Doc.”
“You’d probably be brain-dead or damn near a mental vegetable.”
“Probably?”
“I can only tell you what I know, Agent Payne. But, I can also tell you that it seems like every day I see something I haven’t seen before. There was a case I heard about on TV, of all places, that dealt with a man who would disappear for weeks at a time. Whenever he returned home to his wife and children, he’d claim that he didn’t even know he’d been gone. This went on for years. This neuropsychiatrist from Stanford they interviewed went on about episodic memory and procedural memory, and how you can retain one and lose the other. I’d never heard of that. I called him up, we chatted, and he quoted a dozen references for the condition. So, Agent Payne, just because I haven’t come across something in the journals I read doesn’t mean it wasn’t written up in one of the dozens of others I don’t read.”
Payne sat there, staring at the doctor, his eyebrows bunched together.
“Medicine isn’t as much of a science as we’d like to think,” Noble continued. “Sometimes we’re just guessing, is all. Follow me?”