“D’ran.”
Suddenly, Adrienne was by his side, saying, “Hey, guy… “ He felt her hand take his, and give it a squeeze.
Doctor Shaw said, “I owe you one, Nick—that was damned good!”
Duran lay where he was, with Adrienne holding his hand, listening to the doctors chat. Allalin said, “Keep me posted. I’ll be very interested to know what Materials has to say.”
“Count on it,” Shaw replied.
Duran tried to shift himself into a sitting position, but everything in his visual field swayed, then slewed off to the left. He closed his eyes, and grabbed the sides of the bed.
“Hey,” Shaw said. “Take it easy. You had brain surgery this morning.”
Duran felt for Adrienne’s hand, found it, and closed his own around it. “What was it?” he asked.
“You mean, in your head?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to take a while,” Shaw replied.
“What do you mean?”
“He means it’s being analyzed,” Adrienne told him. “They sent it out to have it studied.”
“Studied?” Duran asked.
“Let me tell you what I thought we’d find,” Shaw suggested.
“Okay.”
“I was guessing a surgical staple—something like that. Especially after we saw you’d had the operation before—or something like it. And if it wasn’t that, I thought it might have been a bullet fragment, or debris from an automobile accident. Something that was overlooked in the initial extraction.”
“And?” Duran asked.
“It’s something else,” Adrienne said.
Duran glanced from Adrienne to the doctor. “What?” he asked.
Shaw pursed his lips in a moue. “We don’t know.” When Duran began to protest, Shaw overrode him. “What we do know is that it didn’t get there by accident.”
Duran frowned, his eyes following Shaw as he walked over to the window. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s an implant.”
“What? What for?” Once again, Duran struggled to sit up, but failed.
“Ahhh, now that—that is the question. When Nick took it out, I thought it was a piece of glass—because that’s what it looks like. Then we looked at it under a microscope…”
“And?”
“It’s something else,” Shaw said. “It has some kind of wires in it. It’s some kind of micro-device.”
Duran moaned.
“We’ve sent it out to the Applied Materials Laboratory” Shaw told him. “They have a biomedical component—”
“Are you telling me you took something out of my head, and you don’t have a clue what it is?”
Shaw smiled. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I know what it is: it’s an intercerebral implant. The question is: what does it do? For the moment, at least, its purpose is obscure.”
“When you say it’s obscure,” Adrienne asked, “what are we talking about? I mean, what are the possibilities?”
“To be honest?” Shaw replied. “Aside from some very preliminary animal work on Parkinson’s, the only implants that I’m familiar with have been used to control seizures—severe seizures.”
“And that’s what you think I have?” Duran asked.
“On the contrary. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Duran asked: “How long before we hear back?”
“Three or four days,” Shaw replied.
“Will I be walking by then?”
Shaw chuckled. “You’ll be out by then.”
“You’re kidding,” Adrienne said.
The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not at all.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Duran told him.
“Don’t thank me—thank managed-care.” Shaw smiled. “And in the meantime, I’ll be very interested to know if that… object… had anything to do with your amnesia. Given its location, it may well have.” His eyes glowed. “What I’m hoping, obviously, is that you’ll start remembering quite a lot. We’ll have some sessions. If you’re up to it, we can begin tomorrow.”
After the operation, Duran realized that he was living with a sense of elation that was as real as it was difficult to describe. He was lighter, somehow, as if he’d been subject to a gravitational field that had only now begun to subside.
He slept for twelve hours the first day, tried to watch television, but didn’t feel like it—then slept some more. Adrienne called from the Mayflower to ask how he was feeling, and to tell him that she’d found a cheap parking lot, way over on the West side, “only fifteen blocks from the hotel.”
On the morning of the second day, one of the residents subjected him to a battery of tests and quizzes, calculated to measure various aspects of neural function—touch, taste, smell, and vision. His recall rate was assessed, as were his motor skills and sequential memories. He took the Bender gestalt test and, when he was done, the resident suggested that he walk the halls.
“No jogging,” he joked, “just take it slow. If you get dizzy—sit down. Otherwise… keep moving—it’s good for you.”
After lunch, Shaw came to the hospital for “a little regression work,” and to ask how he was doing.
Duran told him that he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but that he was disappointed that his memory hadn’t returned.
“Doesn’t work that way,” Shaw told him. “Even with something more basic—blindness, for example—once the stimuli return, it often takes a while for the patient to resolve them in a meaningful way. Someone who’s been blind from birth—restore his vision and, chances are, he’ll be bumping into walls for the first time in years. Why? Because he’s adjusted to being blind. He’s found a reliable way to cope with it. So if you take his blindness away, what’s left is a riot of light and color that means nothing to him. The point being that it takes a while to learn how to process things. In your case, though we haven’t identified the trauma, you’ve obviously worked out a way of getting along in the world, substituting this ‘Jeffrey Duran’ identity for your own. Since we haven’t tried to disturb this particular perceptual filter, it makes sense that it’s going to persist until it’s weakened.”
“And how’s that going to happen?”
“Well, we’ll do some hypnosis work, try to regress you with guided imagery—see what we get. We know a few things about you. Adrienne says you like chess, and… I gather the Caribbean has some meaning to you, and… you seem to know how to sail a boat.”
Duran smiled. “I’ve got a good idea,” he suggested, “why don’t we charter a sloop, and play a few games on our way down to Jamaica?”
Shaw chuckled. “Don’t tempt me.”
Two hours later, Shaw sat back in his chair in one of the consultation rooms at the end of the hall. It was a clean and pleasant space, not at all hospital-like, with track lights, museum posters, and upholstered furniture set around a chrome coffee table.
The psychiatrist crossed an ankle over his knee and found Duran’s eyes. “I know you’re disappointed,” he told him, “but I think we made some progress.”
“What? I remember sailing? I remembered that before.”
Shaw swung his head to the side. “No you didn’t. Not like this. You didn’t remember sailing in a regatta. You didn’t remember that you’d raced. Which means you were a competitive sailor, at some point. Probably—given your age—when you were a student. That gives us something to work with.”
Duran frowned. “Like what?”
“It seems likely you lived near water, at one time or another. Maybe went to a school that had a sailing team.”
“‘Maybe,’“ Duran said. “Then, again…”
“Give it a chance,” Shaw said. “With most amnesiacs, memories don’t come back all at once. They surface in a piecemeal way and often, quite slowly. It’s typical that the memory of the traumatic event—a car crash or whatever it was that triggered the amnesia—which you’d think would be particularly memorable, will be the last thing to come back. If it comes back at all.”