This was worse than any other time. Then, he had been connected, however spiderweb-weak, with… Whom?
The violet light was gone, and now there was the naked and light-brown body of Baker No Wiley before him, the only thing he could see. He dropped with it through illuminationless space, whirling over and over and also rotating around and around. Center, as a concept, was lost. He had no axes, yet he was spinning along all three at once.
The blackness pressed around and on him.
There was light in which his shrieking voice was almost visible.
“No! No! I don’t know you! I don’t want you!”
Then, nothing. He was stone, one who had seen the Medusa, and was no more conscious than stone.
26
“You’ve seen all the known records of your life up until now, Jeff,” the psychicist said. “Isn’t there even the slightest stirring of a memory of any of your previous personae?”
“Not an iota,” he said.
He thought of himself as Baker No Wiley. But, since everybody at the rehab center insisted on calling him by his natal name, Jefferson Caird, he answered to it.
He was sitting in a semireclined chair. Above him, the detector machine moved back and forth on its rails. Its sonic, electromagnetic, and laser frequencies probed the top, front, and back of his head and the naked skin on his legs and torso. The psychicist, Doctor Arlene Go-Ling Bruschino, sat facing him. Her gaze flicked from his face to the monitoring display on the wall behind him and back to his face. On the upper part of the wall behind her was a screen which was also registering his expressions. These were on a grid and were being analyzed by the computer. Next to the screen behind him was another which was reading out the interpretation of his facial movements and the frequency changes of his voice.
The machine above also had a sniffer which analyzed the molecules rising from his body. Its computer was alert for any change which might indicate that he was fearful of lying. This was still used though he had proved to her that he could put himself into a “fugue” and make his body emit the particles of the fearing and the lying man. He could turn them off and on almost as swiftly as pressing a button. That had impressed Bruschino, but she could not understand why he was able to do it. She had said that he should not be able to remember how to do it.
“But, Arlene,” he had said, “it’s true that I have no memories of my former identities. I also am unable to create any new personae. I’ve tried many times since I came here and have failed. But I have somehow retained some of these powers, including the ability to lie when TMed.”
They were now in the big room where he spent several hours each Tuesday. To his left was a big window looking out upon a sprawling meadow which ended in a sudden drop. When he turned his head, he could see parts of the valley below. On its other side reared a steep-sided mountain with fir trees on its lower slope, rock in the middle, and snow on the peak. He had no idea where he was except that he was probably in an upper temperate-zone or lower arctic state. Though he was allowed to mix with the other rehabilitation patients, he could learn nothing from them about their location. Like him, they had been shipped here stoned.
Arlene Bruschino was a middle-aged very pretty, blue-eyed blonde. Her long hair was coiled in a Psyche knot through which was stuck a silvery pin with a large artificial diamond on one end. The neck pendant was a twelve-rayed star in the center of which was her ID card. It was concealed by a silvery boss in the shape of a labyrinth in the middle of which was a minotaur’s head, half human, half bull. Any of the twelve tips of the ornament could be inserted into a transmitting-receiving machine to read off or insert data into the card.
She was wearing a white see-through midriff blouse with a high-necked lace collar, a green calf-length skirt, and sandals. From the few answers to his many questions about her personal life, he had learned that she was living with two men. She had said, laughing, that she had a big enough love to encompass more than two males and her two children.
“Yes, and breasts big enough, too,” Caird had said.
That had made her laugh even more.
One end of the cruising machine above Caird was pointed toward Arlene. That was registering her own neural and metabolic changes during the therapy. During these sessions, the psychicist needed to know her own subtle responses. But Bruschino was at ease and not filled with fear. The psychicist in Manhattan, Arszenti, had been afraid that she had learned from Caird too much about the government’s illegal activities and that the authorities would dispose of her when she was no longer treating Caird. Caird, of course, did not remember that. Arlene, having seen the tapes of Caird and Arszenti, had told him about them. She had not been at all reticent about revealing what she thought was significant. He had asked her what had happened to Arszenti. She had wrinkled her brow and said, “I do not know. But you can be sure that she did not suffer. Otherwise, the tapes would never have been given to me.”
“I’m not so sure,” he had said.
He again looked through the window. It was early summer out there. Daisies and other flowers the names of which he did not know sprinkled the meadow. Deer browsed along its edges. They were small creatures, brown with large white spots. A large dark bird, too far away to be defined as either a hawk or eagle, soared on an updraft. The snows on the mountain tip were dazzling from the late afternoon sun. At one time, before the coming of this warm era, the snows would have been down to the midline of the mountain. Or so an inmate had told him.
“I don’t need the machine to convince me you’re telling the truth,” she said. “As you know it, anyway.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“I sent in my report validating that you are now another persona who IDs himself as Baker No Wiley,” Arlene said. “In the normal course of bureaucratic events, the report would be studied by a panel of psychicists and organics. You might even be required to submit to some examinations by other psychicists. But you would then be given a battery of tests and released. These final tests would determine what your trade or profession should be, and you’d be sent somewhere to start life anew.”
She leaned forward. Her hand came across the small table between them and floated gently onto his.
“The trouble is that you are like no other patient any rehab center has ever had. You claim that you are now unable to form a new persona. But you can still lie when TMed or injected with other drugs. The government can’t be sure you won’t revert to a previous persona or create a new one.”
She sighed and withdrew her hand.
“However, I have suggested that you be handled just as any other rehab would be.”
She flashed a smile.
“I’ve told them that, in my opinion, you will make a good citizen. But, since you’re not a genuine rehab candidate, just a newborn baby who is able to speak his native language fluently, you should go to an English-speaking country. You’d have a wide choice of locations and climates. Of course, you can’t get work as an organic, and I wouldn’t advise religion as a profession. It doesn’t pay, and the government would not believe in your total rehabilitation if you were a religionist.”
“That’s not an element in my character,” Caird said.
“It is, but it’s buried,” she said. “You once were a street preacher—when you were the persona of Father Tom Zurvan. Anyway, you could go back to college and get a new profession. Your education would be free.”
“What’s the use of speculating about a new life if there is, as yet, no assurance I’ll be freed?”
“Freed? That makes this place sound like a prison. We prefer to say you’ll be discharged.”
Caird smiled, and he said, “Do you believe that?”
“It’s not really a prison. You’re not sentenced to a determinate number of years. When you get out depends on you.”
“Maybe for others. Not for me.”
“That’s not true. For one thing, if you were released, you’d be a bright cursor for the government. It could point
to you as a prime example of its humane policies.”
“The cursor who became a cursor,” he said.
She smiled, but she said, “Ugh!”
“Sorry. I should have eliminated that deplorable program for puns, I guess.”
He had no hard-disk memory of his lives as a subversive, but all the tapes he had seen had given him an excellent diskette memory. He had no desire to do anything but cooperate with society, a government euphemism for itself. That is, it was a euphemism if one of his fellow rehabs, Donna Cloyd, was correct. He saw her now and then in the nutrition hall and on the exercise yard. She claimed to have known him in Los Angeles and to have accompanied him to Zurich. He believed her since he had seen her in the tapes of the chainings at the Sin Tzu monument. She still was not altogether real to him. Though he could touch her, see her sweat, hear her laugh, he regarded her as a TV simulation.
That was one of his problems, perhaps the greatest. Nobody was real. He expected the people here to fade out at any moment. They never did, but his feeling that they would or could do so was always with him.
The only one he had revealed this to was Arlene Bruschino. She had done some work with him on the “alienation,” as she called it. Though she had not stressed it, she probably was convinced that he could not be discharged until the “distancing” was solved. That is, until he regained his sense of the hardness and permanence of things and people.
He had told her that, sometimes, he saw her, not as a very beautiful and desirable woman but as a pattern of atoms. She had a form, but its edges were fuzzy. She was enclosed and protected by an electromagnetic field which, at any moment, could fail. Then she would expand outward and become a bright chaos.
That disturbed him but at the same time was comforting. He could not get close to her or to anybody. He could not be hurt when he saw others as simulations that could be turned off.
Yet, what caused this fugue? To this question, she had suggested that he had rebuilt his persona too many times.
“Analogous to the site of ancient Troy,” she had said. “You know about Troy?”
“I remember Homer’s works. That’s peculiar because I don’t remember in what persona I was when I learned about him.”
“Troy was only one in a long series of cities on the same site. The first people to live on it were Old Stone Age tribes. Their artifacts were covered over by succeeding occupants. The little hamlets became villages and then towns and then cities. Each was build on top of its predecessor. You’re a living Troy. You’ve built one persona after another, one on top of the other. Only the latest, like the final Troy, is visible, aboveground. But all the others are there beneath that persona you call Baker No Wiley.”
“What’re you trying to say? The final city was not influenced by those beneath it. As far as I know, anyway.”
“No analogy is perfect. Besides, I’m not sure that it wasn’t affected. There’s such a thing as psychic influence.”
“You, a scientist, believe that?”
“I don’t believe or disbelieve. It’s possible, though not at all proven. However, in your case… Suppose that the final Troy, your Troy, was undermined. It has a shaky foundation which an earthquake rocks, and the subterranean tunnels and caves collapse. That makes the effects of the earthquake worse than they would otherwise have been. You…”
“I was subjected to an earthquake, in a manner of speaking, when this persona came into being? You notice I say ‘came into being.’ I feel strongly, though I can’t prove it, that I didn’t make Baker No Wiley. It was forced on me.”
“Who did the forcing? Anyway, you succeeded in making a new self. But you had put too much storm and stress on your self…your previous selves. Something went wrong, I don’t know what, as yet. May never know.”
She leaned forward again and took his hand. It felt cool and soft, but it was too light. He saw it float; it would rise if the arm attached to it did not give it added weight.
“You have played with reality, your basic person, too long and too severely. Now, you have paid the price, and you’re out of credits. Your psyche does not want to have much to do with reality. You don’t want to have much to do with it.”
“Maybe it’s not reality as we usually know it that I see,” Caird said. “There are different levels of it. I see the atomic level. My gaze pierces through the reality I was born to see and perceives the other kind. One of the other kinds.”
“You don’t really see us as a dance of atoms?” she said. “It’s just a mental image, isn’t it?”
“Most of the time. Sometimes, I see…there’s a shift, as if my eyes had switched to another state. I see the molecular saraband moving within its electromagnetic field. It’s very disconcerting…or was. You can get used to anything, well, most things.”
“You’re not lying, I think. Why should you?”
“Why should I?”
She removed the hand and sat back.
“It’s possible that you’d like to be classified as a permanently mentally ill person.”
“Why?”
“Because you cannot face reality. Or I should perhaps phrase that cliché differently. You don’t want to deal with human beings. Tell me, when you look out the window and see the deer, do you ever see them as atoms?”
“No,” he said slowly.
“Have you ever looked into a mirror or at a tape of yourself and seen yourself as a configuration of particles?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s possible that you feel, unconsciously, that you are the configuration, not the people you see. But you reverse the bottom-line psychology because you could not, for some reason, bear that. You project; you see a mirror image of yourself in others. They are not the enclosed atoms. You are.”
He shrugged, “It’s possible.”
“Think about it. Also think about why you consider that possibility so calmly. Many patients would find it upsetting.”
“It’s my nature,” he said, “this persona’s, anyway, to look at both sides of an argument. Still, there can be only one truth. All that stuff about there being many truths is nonsense. Truths don’t have clones.”
“Ah!” she said, sitting up straighten “What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“That truths don’t have clones.”
“I really don’t know,” he said. “It just popped out. But what I said must be true.” He laughed. “Unless what I said was a clone of the truth, and I’m wrong. But that’s silly, isn’t it?”
“Silly?”
He felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew that when a patient said that his remark was silly, he was getting too close to something he wanted to avoid. At least, that was what Bruschino had told him, and he had read the same comment in one of the tapes on psychics transmitted to his room from the library.
“If it means anything, I don’t have the slightest idea what,” he said.
Abruptly, she switched to another subject. Or was it linked to the previous in some way she could see but he could not?
She clasped her hands and pressed them against her chest.
She looked as if she had captured a truth, or an intimation of a truth, a rare bird she wanted to warm against her breasts.
“As you know,” Arlene Bruschino said, “I’ve studied the tapes that Doctor Arszenti made when she was treating you in Manhattan. Also…”
“Some of the tapes she made. I doubt that you were given all of them. The government…”
“Please don’t interrupt,” she said. “Also, the tapes made when the psychicist treated you starting when you were three and ending when you were six years old. You were a very timid and shy child, almost pathologically so, according to the reports, though I myself think that was far too strong a judgement.
“Then, suddenly, almost overnight, as it were, you became a very gregarious, aggressive, and outgoing child. This was at the edge of five…”
“You let me see the tapes,” he said. “They didn’t stir u
p any memories. It was like watching a stranger.”
“They stirred up something,” Bruschino said. “The detectors showed that. But you shut your reaction down. Anyway, your childhood psychicist was thoroughly puzzled by the change in you. Another psychicist did a followup study when you were twenty-two, shortly after your parents died. She reported you as more courageous and aggressive than the median citizen type. But the psychicist who examined you when you applied for entrance to the organics academy liked that.”
Her eyes, which had been directed to the screen behind him, now looked at his face. “No perceptible reaction,” she said. “But I believe that you are reacting way down there, deep.”
She glanced at the wall digital display behind him.
“Five minutes past our time.”
They both stood up. He said, “It must be tough dealing with a patient who doesn’t have any childhood. And tougher if he doesn’t have any adulthood to remember, yet he’s not a genuine amnesiac.”
“I’ve never had a tougher,” she said. “I’m thankful for you. There are no boring cases, as far as I’m concerned. But some do get a little wearying, and most are not out of the usual. You’re a unique. I’m not sure…”
He said, “Why the hesitation, Arlene?”
“It could be you’re a mental mutant.”
“Meaning you have no precedents for treating me?”
“Perhaps. No. You’re right. I don’t. That makes you a tremendous challenge, and…”
“My case will make you famous.”
She laughed, and she said, “I’ll confess I do think about that. But it’s not overpowering me. No, the main thing is that you’re unique and quite unexpected. You can’t be classified as a schizophrenic. I really don’t know yet how to classify you.”
“How about really fucked-up?”
She was still laughing when he left the room.
He did not feel like laughing. As soon as the door slid shut behind him, he was out of the sunshine and laughter, her radiance, and closed in by the darkness. The Leviathan had swallowed him. Trapped in its lightness and oppressive stomach, he was being reshaped by its acids.