Coils

Chapter 3

Sunset and evening star, horizon garlanded with faded roses—

We had managed a quick connection down to Detroit and a close one for Miami. Cora did not want the window seat, so I sat there watching star holes get poked through the dark.

“You going to see someone when we get back?” she asked me.

“Who?” I said, already knowing. “And about what?”—knowing that, too.

“A doctor, of course. Someone who specializes in things like this.”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“No. But we know that something’s wrong. If your car isn’t working right, you take it to a mechanic.”

“And if thy right eye offend thee?”

“Nobody’s asking you to play Oedipus. I’m talking about a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst. It may be something organic, a bone splinter pressing somewhere—from your… accident—or something like that.”

I was silent for a long while. I couldn’t think of anything better, but, “I just don’t like the idea,” I finally said.

“There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it,’” she said almost bitterly.

“Huh?”

“ ‘Sweet Lethe is my life. I am never, never, never coming home!’ Sylvia Plath,” she said. “From a poem about amnesia. You want to go on not knowing?”

“Count on an English teacher for a quotation,” I said, but I didn’t like that last line at all.

I couldn’t just forget about the trip to Michigan and slide back into happy ignorance, I told myself. No. And maybe, now that I knew, I could work things out on my own. But then again I had a funny feeling that perhaps I could slide back, dismiss all of this and start drifting again, never, never, never coming home. It scared me.

“Do you have any idea who’s a good doctor for this sort of thing?” I asked.

“No. But I’ll damn sure find out.”

I reached over and touched her hand. I met her eyes.

“Good,” I said.

Besides the houseboat, I owned a condominium down in the Keys. But we checked into a hotel in Miami, where the medical choices were considerably greater, and Cora got to work on the phone, talking to an acquaintance of a friend of a friend attached somehow to the administration of the medical school. Her theory was that you choose a doctor by finding out who the other doctors in the area go to with their own problems. A couple of hours after checking into the hotel I had an appointment with a psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Daggett, set up for the next morning.

As if trying to prepare for the experience, my subconscious obligingly laid in a store of dreams that night. Willy Boy Matthews peered from behind a gas pump somewhere in the far north woods, warned me that the next time I rode an airplane I’d be in trouble, and then turned into a bear. Cora, having taken off all her clothes so she could better climb into my home computer and repair it, announced that she was really my mother. And still dreaming, I arrived at the psychiatrist’s office to find a squat black monster waiting in ambush for me behind the desk

The real presence, after I had duly awakened and shaved and had some breakfast, was not all that intimidating. Dr. Daggett was an engaging, outgoing man of about forty, built short and compact, husky rather than fat, like a somewhat enlarged, cleanshaven hobbit. On his desk before him he had the medical form I’d just filled out. He looked at it with a professional poker-face while we chatted a little about my reason for coming to see him.

There wasn’t much of substance on the form. As far as I could remember, I’d been disgustingly healthy all my life.

After giving the form to an aide to be fed into his office computer, the doctor peered into my eyes with a small light. He asked about headaches, of which my recent one on the houseboat had been a rare exception. He checked my reflexes, coordination and blood pressure. Then he had me seat myself in an uncomfortable chair where he affixed a stereotactic frame about my head and against the chair-back itself. The aide then wheeled in a machine, to take a CAH-NMR (computerized axial holography via nuclear magnetic resonance) scan of my brain. Unlike the earlier X-ray mediated mappings, this technique, which had come into use during the past several years, produced a holographic image of the organ upon a small staging area—somewhere out of sight, if you were squeamish; right before you, if you were not. I was glad to see that my physician was up to date, and I was not squeamish. While he had started out studying the image behind a folding screen, he removed it when I asked for a look.

A pinkish, grayish flower atop a fat stalk—I had never seen my brain before. Fragile-looking thing. Was that really what I was—Sherrington’s “enchanted loom”—where billions of cells fired to weave me? Or was it a radio receiver through which my soul broadcast? Or Minsky’s “meat computer”? Or—

Whatever it or I was/were, Daggett broke my train of speculations by removing his pipe from his mouth and using its stem as a pointer.

“This looks like a bit of scarring in the temporal region,” he said. “Neat, though. Interesting… Have you ever had convulsions of any sort?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Ever wake up and find your tongue badly bitten, your pants wet, muscle aches?”

“No.”

He poked forward and the pipestem penetrated the image. I winced.

“Things can get very tricky down in the hippocampal area,” he remarked. “Lesions there can do amazing things to memory, but—” He paused and made an adjustment. “Tell me more about what happened on this trip to Michigan. There! Your hippocampus looks okay, though… Go ahead. Talk.”

He continued to play games with my brain-projection while I recited the entire story of the trip and its antecedents. Cora was present to confirm that these memories at least were accurate.

Finally, he threw a switch and my hovering brain-image vanished. Unsettling.

He turned to face me.

“I would like to try hypnosis,” he said. “Have you any objection?”

I wasn’t given much time to register one if I’d had one—a sign, I supposed, that my case was at least interesting.

“Have you ever been hypnotized before?” he asked.

“No, never.”

“Let’s get you into a more comfortable chair then.”

He released me from the stereotactic unit and conducted me to a padded reclining chair, tipping it back about three-quarters toward the horizontal. A device within the chair itself detected my brain rhythms, matched its own gentle output to certain of them and then gradually amplified its output while at the same time introducing a subtle alteration. I could somehow sense the activity of the computer chip controlling this device. Its waves flowed through me like water and then I went unconscious, as I was supposed to, in a burst of white noise that flared inside my skull.

“How do you feel?”

Dr. Daggett’s professionally intense face was bending closely over me. Cora was right behind him, looking over his shoulder.

“All right, I guess,” I said, blinking and stirring.

It felt as if I had been asleep for a long while. It seemed as if there had been dreams, of the sort which just miss making it over into waking consciousness.

“What do you remember about Baghdad?” he asked.

There were still two sets of memories, one for the town that I had actually seen and another, tattered now and beginning to go dreamlike itself, of the Baghdad that until recently I had thought I genuinely remembered. And now I could vaguely sense, behind this dream-like fabric, another reality, shapes moving behind a curtain. I couldn’t see yet what these shapes were. I told him this.

He asked me a few routine questions then, to make sure that I was at least fairly well oriented now, knew who I was (at least to the extent I’d believed I knew me when I entered his office) and what year this was and so on. He nodded at my answers.

“And for how long have you actually been living in Florida?”

The shapes behind the curtain shifted. Something vital was almost in view, but it slipped away again at the last moment

I shook my head.

“I’m not certain,” I said at last. “Several years for sure, though. What’s been happening to me?”

“For one thing…” Daggett began, and then took his time about continuing, “…you told me on the medical history form that you had never had any serious head injuries.”

The scars… Of course. Yet, oddly, they seemed to exist only in some other context. But it was obvious, logical and necessary to conclude that if I had them I’d gotten them from some sort of bashing.

“The scan is pretty conclusive, Don,” he continued. “You’ve had at least one severe skull fracture. Do you recall anything about that now?”

The almost visible shapes came and went. Then they stayed away. I shook my head again. At least, now, I knew that there was something in my past to be discovered—and this felt like some kind of progress.

“And,” he went on, “from what I’ve seen and heard so far, I’d say those old fractures aren’t your only problem—not even the main one. In fact, it could be that they are not all that important in the etiology of your condition. There are indications here of deliberate abuse in the past, with some form of hypnotism, and probably drugs.”

Why? I asked myself. It just seemed too improbable. For a moment, I doubted Daggett. But then he showed me the printout. Before I had awakened, he had run the results of his examination through his office computer terminal, which was connected to a large diagnostic data bank in Atlanta.

“My electronic colleague here concurs, you see.”

I looked at Cora. She was biting her lip and staring at the printout as if it were a corpse.

“What does it all mean?” I finally managed.

He lit his pipe before answering.

“I think it means that someone has done a job on you,” he said at last. “Whether the physical damage to your head was deliberate, I can’t say. But the false memories you’ve been carrying around must have been intentionally implanted.”

“Who?”

“Anything I said in answer to that now would be the sheerest speculation.”

“Then speculate.”

Daggett shrugged lightly.

“Certain governments have been known to treat people in such a fashion. But afterwards the people are not usually found living such a prosperous and carefree life.” He paused. “You’re native-born American, I’d say by your speech.”

“I think so, too. Not Upper Michigan, though.”

“Anything real about that period come back yet?”

For a moment, just for a moment, as he spoke, I thought I had hold of something, and then I almost had it. It was so close that I could nearly taste it. And then it was gone entirely. Out of reach. Kaput. A big piece of the truth, I just knew it, of the reality lurking right around the corner.

I made a face. I closed my eyes and knitted my brows. I clenched my teeth.

“Shit!” I said.

Daggett’s hand was on my shoulder.

“It’ll come, it’ll come,” he said. “Don’t try so hard, just yet.”

He turned away and began to scrape clean his pipe above a large ashtray on his desk.

“I could push harder with hypnosis,” he stated. “But then there’s the danger of building a new construct, of trying so hard to find something that we make up a new falsehood to fill the need. No more today. Come back in three days.”

“I can’t wait three days. Tomorrow.”

He put away the pipe and the scraper.

“The ice is broken,” he said. “The best thing for a few days now will just be to give the truth, the real memories, a chance, so to speak.”

“Tomorrow,” I repeated.

“I don’t want to push hard again that soon.”

“Doctor, I have to know.”

He sighed.

“All right,” he relented. “In the morning. See the receptionist. She’ll fit you in.”

I looked at Cora.

“I suppose I ought to go to the police,” I told her.

Daggett made a noise. I couldn’t tell whether it was a snort or a chuckle.

“I am not saying that you should or shouldn’t,” he said slowly. “I would suggest, though, that if you can’t tell the police any more than you know now, about all they’ll be able to do is recommend you see a doctor.”

The Catch-22edness was not wasted. The receptionist, who must have been used to every variety of emotion among the clientele, batted not an eyelash at my expression’s inconsistency with lingering giggles. She fixed me up with the appointment and nodded me out. Exit pursued by clownsuited Furies tripping over one another’s heels.

It was several blocks before the reaction set in.

“I’m scared, Don,” Cora said.

She was driving. I was slouching and conjuring demons to wrestle with. They ignored me.

“I am, too.”

And it was true, so far as it went. There was more, though. It was apparent from her manner that she was more frightened than I was. My deepest feeling was one I had not known for so long that now its touch was almost unfamiliar: I was beginning to get angry.

Angels? I was dead and in heaven, maybe? No. The musical tones were not really harp-like, and departed spirits shouldn’t have the sour aftertaste of a six-pack in their mouths. I moaned and followed the notes back to the land of the living and the phone which was chiming. I had forgotten to switch the thing to Record before I’d gone to sleep, back when the demons might finally have stopped by. If they had, the final score was something like Demons Six, BelPatri Nothing. The clock flashed 8:32 and counting. I answered the phone.

The voice was sort of familiar. Yes. Daggett’s receptionist Something wrong about the way she sounded, though.

“…We have to cancel your appointment,” she was saying. “…Dr. Daggett passed away during the night.”

“He what?”

“Dr. Daggett passed away. We… I found him in the office this morning when I came in. He’d had a heart attack.”

“Sudden.”

“Very sudden. He’d no history of heart trouble.”

“He was working late, then?”

“Going over some patients’ records. Listening to recordings…”

There was little more that she could tell me. Of course I wondered whether the recordings he had been listening to when he died had been mine.

I got up and washed up and dressed and brought back some coffee from the bathroom unit. Cora accepted hers gratefully and gave me a questioning look over the cup’s rim. I told her what I had just learned.

She was silent for several heartbeats, then, “This thing is full of bad vibes,” she said. “What—How—Hell! Do we start again with another doctor, or should we try to see his file on you?”

I shook my head.

“We won’t get anything out of that office today,” I told her, “and another doctor would just repeat what Daggett did yesterday—which seems kind of redundant. He’d said that things should start coming back to me now. I’d rather wait awhile and see. I think that he was right. I do feel different, as if something might be rearranging itself, clearing up, somewhere in my head.”

“But—damn it!—we were so close—to something! This is almost too coincidental. Perhaps we ought to call the police. Let’s tell them what he said and see if—”

“Hearsay and speculation,” I said, “and from a psychiatric patient, at that. And even if they listened more than politely, there’s really nothing to go on. A heart attack’s a heart attack. He wasn’t done in with a blunt instrument, or anything like that. We have nothing for the police. They have nothing for us.”

She took a drink of coffee, set her cup on the bedside table.

“Well, what do you want to do?” she said then.

“Head down for the condo in Key West,” I answered. “The bank should be getting in my next payment the day after tomorrow. We can just relax and wait for the therapy to take its course.”

“Relax?” she said, swinging her feet over the side of the bed and sitting up. “How can we relax now, knowing as much as we’ve learned?”

’What else can we do?”

“We can wait for things at his office to settle and then try to see Daggett’s records on you. He might have recorded more than he told us.”

“We can check that out by telephone in a day or so, from my place. Get dressed and let’s go get some breakfast—unless you’d rather eat here. Then we can get our stuff together and check out.”

“No,” she said, brushing her hair back with a forceful gesture. “I mean, yes to the breakfast—and no to the checking out.”

“Well, get ready then,” I said, turning away. “We can discuss the rest while we eat.”

We wound up with a compromise. We would hang around for the rest of the day and stay over that night. We would try to get at my records that afternoon. If nothing came of it, we would be on our way in the morning.

Nothing came of it.

That is to say, Daggett’s office was closed. The answering service could not or would not reach his family. I could not get hold of his receptionist. We finally got in touch with his nurse. She told me that there was no way I could get what I wanted right away. Psychiatrists’ records, because of their sensitive nature, were sealed at the time of the physician’s death, until a patient’s new doctor requested them or a judge issued an order for their release. She was sorry, but—

Nothing came of it, on that front. However…

“Let’s get a court order,” Cora said.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t want to bring any more people into this than necessary. I kept my promise. We waited. We tried. Tomorrow we check out.”

“Without learning?”

“It’ll come back. I know it will. I can feel it now.”

“You felt Baghdad pretty strongly, too.”

“That was different.”

“Oh?”

It was a rough evening. To top it off, the demons came back for another round, bearing armloads of nightmares. Mercifully, most of them faded in morning’s light, save for the final war-dance of horrors around the Angra Energy pump while the earth opened before me as a fat man minced a gigantic holo of my brain with a blazing axe. All the little things that make sleep an adventure.

Cora was not overjoyed at our departure, but I’d kept my part of the bargain and she would not give me one up on her. A light rainfall pursued us much of the way as we drove on down. Pathetic fallacy. We were neither of us in good humor by the time we got there.

Once we were settled in at my place she started talking lawyers again. Didn’t I have a local attorney I trusted, one who could pursue matters from here?

“No,” I lied, because I was sure that Ralph Button, who I sometimes ran into, would handle it for me.

I simply did not want to go that route and I was sick of hearing about it. She wouldn’t let it rest, though. I felt that anger again, this time turning toward her, and I didn’t want it to come out. I told her that I did not care to talk about it any more, that I was getting another headache and that I wanted to be alone till it went away. I excused myself then to take a walk.

I wound up at a bar where I sometimes had a few. It was near Ernest Hemingway’s old house. Did Hemingway really steal a urinal from another bar, I wondered, rip it out and take it home with him to make into a watering trough for his cats?

Jack Mays stopped by as I sat there drinking a beer. Big, freckled, always grinning, blond hair sunbleached nearly white, he had a perpetual schoolboy air about him which many people found engaging on first encounter. He was the most completely unserious person I knew. He was often in trouble, though there was nothing really malicious about him. He was basically a pleasure-seeker and, like me, he received a monthly deposit in his account. Only he knew where his money came from. His parents kept putting it there on the condition that he never return to Philadelphia. Jack and I had always gotten along well. It might be that he thought my situation was similar to his, if he thought about it at all. On those rare occasions when I hung one on, I liked to have him around, because he could hold a lot more booze than I could and still function, and he would keep an eye on me, keep me out of tight situations.

“Don!” He slapped me on the shoulder and sat down on the next stool. “It’s been a while! You been away?”

“Yeah. Traveling a bit. What about you?”

“Got it too good here to want to leave,” he said, slapping the bar. “Hey, George! Bring me one of those!”

“Got a couple of girls banked up with me,” he continued. “You’ll have to come by later. Fix you up.”

His beer arrived, and we sipped and talked. I didn’t tell him my troubles, because he’s not the sort of person you tell your troubles to. He’s great at small talk, though, which was exactly the size I felt most like dealing with at the moment. We talked about mutual friends, about fishing—which we sometimes did together—about politics, movies, sports, sex, food, and then started on a round again. It was a relief, it was such a relief, not thinking about the things that bothered me most.

Before I knew it, it was getting dark. We had something to eat then—I forget exactly where—and stopped in another place afterwards for a couple of more drinks. My head was swimming by that time, but Jack still seemed in great shape and kept up the steady flow of talk till we turned up the walk to his place.

Then we were inside and he was introducing me to a couple of girls, turning on some music, mixing drinks, more drinks. After a while we danced a bit. After another while I noticed that he and the tall one, Louise, had disappeared, and I was sitting on the sofa with Mary, my arm around her shoulders, my drink in my lap, hearing the story of her divorce for the second time. I nodded occasionally and kissed her neck every now and then. I am not certain that she was interrupted in her narrative by this.

After an even longer while, we were in one of the bedrooms in a state of undress, hugging. Later still, I woke up briefly with vague memories of having disappointed her, and I noticed that I was alone. I went back to sleep.

I did not feel well the next morning, but I remembered that Jack’s bathroom was a virtual pharmacy, and I staggered off after a mess of remedies.

As I was gulping vitamins, painkillers, stomach settlers and a muscle relaxant I had come across, a shape suddenly moved into sight from beyond that magic curtain. At first, I didn’t quite realize what it was. When I did, I paused in the midst of rinsing my mouth, afraid that I’d choke myself.

There was a noise in the hall. I spit out the mint-flavored stuff, rinsed the bowl and stepped outside.

It was Jack, wrapped in an orange and yellow beach towel, coming to the john.

“Jack! I used to work for Angra Energy!” I told him.

He just stared for a moment, bleary-eyed, and then, “Commiserations,” he said and went on in.

He’d been to almost all the Ivy League schools. You can always tell.

I went out to the kitchen and made coffee. I got dressed and I drank some orange juice with a raw egg and Tabasco Sauce while it finished brewing. Then I took a cup out onto the porch.

The sun was several meters above the horizon, but the morning was still somewhat cool. A breeze full of moisture and salt reached me. Birds were questioning one another in the bushes on both sides of the house.

It bothered me when I thought about Cora, but in some ways I felt better than I had in a long while. I was remembering, and that pushed everything else out of my mind…

Yes. I had worked for Angra. Not as a roughneck, a driller, or anything like that. It had not been out in the field. Not manning a station… I almost said to myself ‘nothing technical’, but something told me that that was not strictly true.

I took another swallow of coffee.

Data processing, maybe. I did know something about computers…

Somewhere in a central office, or laboratory, something… Yes, a lab of some kind. That might be it.

Then, for just a moment, I had a vision—whether memory, imagination or some combination thereof, I could not say for certain—of a door, a door paneled in old-fashioned frosted glass. It was swinging shut, leaving me on the outside. Its black lettering read COIL DEPARTMENT.

Of course, electrical coils of wire, inductances, still played a part in some devices such as relays, not having been superseded by the chip and the microchip…

How about this, I suggested to myself, for a scenario? A laboratory accident, resulting in a head injury, accounting for the scars. Then false memories implanted, covering years of my life, a step somehow necessary to cover up the liability, the responsibility, of some people in the company? And then a pension, to keep me away and quietly secure?

But a lot of people were in accidents of one sort or another—and I’d never heard of anything so exotic happening to anyone as a result. Big companies can afford to make settlements. They do it all the time.

No, it didn’t sound quite right.

But I could feel that there was more coming. I finished the coffee and rose. I set the cup on the railing.

It was time to go and square things with Cora. At least I had some good news.

I entered my place and called out:

“Cora?”

No answer.

Well, it was understandable. I expected her to be miffed. I’d only said that I was going for a walk. She’d probably done some worrying, too. It made me feel a little more rotten. I formed instant resolutions to do all sorts of nice things for her—dinner and flowers and…

“Cora?”

I looked into the next room. Empty. Could she have gone and checked into a motel? Really mad? Well…

MESSAGE WAITING said the light on the phone/computer screen, right where it would be if someone had phoned—or left. My stomach clenched itself and a taste of coffee came into my mouth.

I crossed the room and touched the switch. The screen read:

I looked through the other rooms with sufficient thoroughness to be certain that all of her things were really gone. Then I returned, sat down, stared at the screen again. On a display screen, of course, there is no way of checking handwriting, no signature to scrutinize. But any English teacher who switched her apostrophes around like that…

I was almost surprised by my reaction. I felt neither depression nor hysteria, not sadness, not fear. Something else, altogether.

My mouth was dry, though, and I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the only cold drink in sight, a can of beer, flipped the lid open and drained it in a short series of gulps.

My hand holding the empty can was shaking slightly, partly doubtless with hangover, but partly from fresh adrenalin. The adrenalin was from anger, not from fear. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be this angry.

My fingers could move under my control with perfect ease. Why not? And yet, to a part of my mind, this seemed an oddity. Later, later… Think about that later. I watched the empty can crumple in my fingers like a flower.

The use of muscles seemed to clear the way for the use of other things. Intelligence, I hoped, was one of them. But not the only one…

Staring at the computer screen, I tried to see or not-see Cora’s fingers on the keyboard, typing that message. The timing of the arrival of the bits of data at the CPU…

Intellectually, I had no clear idea of what I was doing. But at some deeper level I knew that I was seeing into the computer, probing its electrical life. It was a feeling akin to the half-dazed empathy I had in recent days felt for the Radio Shack navigator on the houseboat

The shock of the discovery, or re-discovery, of this power in myself was deadened by my greater need. I could not find Cora’s fingers. Those of a stranger had been there…

I had to switch to thinking now, to get any further. Adrenalin wasn’t much help for that, and even my new-found ability stopped here. I cursed my quarrel with Cora, my leaving her alone to be attacked, kidnapped. I had only come back to Key West because it felt like my home ground, the place to make a last stand—not, as I thought she might have believed, because my money was due to come in today at the bank…

The bank.

In a flash, I saw again the old-fashioned door of frosted glass, swinging shut, as I had seen it in my reverie. COIL DEPARTMENT wasn’t quite right, though; it was dream-language, the language of my unconscious, for something I had named in secret years ago, for my thoughts only.

The bank.

I went out of the condo and got into my car. I drove to the bank, pulled into the lot there. I parked in a spot shaded by a coconut palm.

I looked at my watch. The money was due to arrive at mid-morning—in the form of electrical impulses, flowing through the slender fiberoptic cables that brought information into and out of the Keys, cables slung under the same long bridges the cars and trucks traversed.

It had grown hot, humid. I left the motor and air conditioner running (nobody looked at you for that anymore, as they might have before solar power came on so fast—solar power and Angra Energy) and I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes.

The computer inside the bank was a whole city, as compared to the small electronic outpost I had at home. But it was a city logically laid-out, with well-marked thoroughfares.

Hour by hour, minute by minute perhaps, I was remembering more. My mind reached for the bank’s computer. The Coil Effect began.