CAFE
Yes, a good idea, that. I parked the car—I could probably have left it in the middle of the street—and we got out and went in.
We seated ourselves at the counter, the only customers, and ordered iced tea. The day was warm. It probably didn’t look strange that I was sweating.
“Do you know a BelPatri family, living around here?” I asked the tired-looking waitress with blue fingernails.
“Who?”
I spelled it out.
“No.” She could have been the owner, one of the owners or a relative. She had an indefinable look of having lived here for many years. “There was a family named Bell, I think,” she added, “over in Perronville.”
“No.”
We sat there drinking our tea. I watched a frighteningly experienced fly work his way into a glass case to explore the coconut topping on a wedge of something yellow and dry-looking. I did not want to look at Cora. I answered her small talk with monosyllables.
After I paid we went out and got back in the car, to drive slowly south. I stared up each of the ways that passed as side streets. Nothing. Nothing at all was right There was nothing at all that looked as it should.
At the edge of town, I pulled into the Standard station and ordered gas. No recharge service here, I noted; few or no electric cars yet in the backwoods this far north, away from the Sunbelt and easy recharging. The new Angra station that I thought I remembered (I did remember!) had had a charger facility, though, hadn’t it?
With the station attendant I again went through my futile questions about a BelPatri family. I spelled the name. Cora listened, giving silent, patient support. He’d never heard the name.
When we were back in the car, before I started the engine again, she spoke:
“Do you remember what sort of street your house was on?”
“Sure,” I said. “The only trouble is, that memory is wrong.”
I was shaken by the discovery—yes. But not, I realized, shaken as badly as I ought to have been. On some deep level, perhaps, I had known all along that the home I remembered, and the childhood, were elaborate lies. It had been important to come here and face the fact, though, and very important to have Cora with me when I did it
I spelled it out a little more fully, as much I think for myself as for her:
“Sure, I remember a street, and a house. But they’re not in this town. None of the streets that I remember are here, and none of the houses, and none of the people. And of the people and things that are here, I don’t remember any. I’ve never been in Baghdad, Michigan, before.”
There was a long silence. Then, “There couldn’t possibly be two… ?” she said.
“Two towns with the same name, in Upper Michigan? Both just a few miles northwest of Escanaba, on the same road? The road I do remember, and what I remember fits. Right up to the edge of town. Then… It’s as if something else has been—grafted in.”
I did not know as I said it whether I meant that the graft was in geography or in my memory. Either way…
“And your parents, Don? If they’re not here…”
Their images were still as clear as ever. But impersonal, as if they had never been closer to me than film or page. Mom and Dad. Great folks. I didn’t want to think about my parents any longer.
“Are you all right?”
“No, but—” I realized that in some way I was at least better off now than I had been, back in Florida without a worry in the world. “Come back with me to Florida?”
Cora giggled a little, I suppose with partial relief at the fact that I was handling it so well.
“I don’t think—I really don’t think that I want to spend the rest of my summer vacation here.”
I pulled out onto the familiar road. Good-bye, Baghdad, thief of my youth. You could have been Samarkand, for all I knew.
Chapter 3
unset 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.