The nurse, a man who wore ordinary street clothes, a blinking yellow phone in his ear and a short ponytail behind his massive red head, led the couple into the doctor’s office, looked at them briefly, as if wanting to memorize the look on their face, and then, without saying a word, closed the door.
The room looked enormous, the walls covered with bright moving pictures of seascapes, cornfields and, near one corner, deer trotting through a wood.
The woman sat down almost immediately on the soft, plush couch but the man remained standing, plucking at the buttons near the top of his shirt, rocking on his heels and staring at waving, sun dappled stalks of corn.
There were no clocks on the wall or on the desk, he noticed. The only sounds he could hear were the soft, low wind in the corn and the breathing of the woman.
When the doctor came in the man remained standing for a few seconds more and then sat down next to the woman, resting his hands between his knees.
“Hello,” the doctor said, sitting down on a swivel chair, watching the screen on his desk light up as retinal scans turned on the computer.
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. I’m doctor Clarkson and you must be Peter and Lorain? Yes, yes well, ah, I suppose we can get right to it if you both don’t mind. Talking to a doctor is never a lot of fun, at least not the doctors I talk to. It’s, ah, a bit nippy outside isn’t it? Heard it may rain tonight. You don’t have far to go do you?”
“No, not far,” the man said. “We’re staying at the hotel just down the street.”
“Oh good,” the doctor said, looking now at the woman. “That’s tremendously convenient don’t you think? Lorain, how are you feeling?”
The woman looked down at the empty hands on her lap and took a deep breath. She had a thin, pinched nose, stringy yellow hair and small, close set eyes. Her skin was as pale as the inside of a sea shell, which made her look even more like someone who had lost subtle features, skin tone and color by some kind of grit applied directly to the flesh.
She looked, literally, worn down.
“Tired mostly. Other than that okay I guess.”
“Has trouble sleeping,” the man said.
“Ah,” the doctor said, nodding sympathetically. “Well, ah, I hope we can help that. So then, so, I’ve read over the questionnaire you filled out and based on your answers and the recommendations of your personal physician we can move on to the next step which is to talk to me. I, ah, always try to keep this brief and informal. What is important for us to make sure of is that the memory in question is not what we call deeply enmeshed or one that is vital to your identity or way of life. This sounds terrible and I do apologize for the analogy, but it’s like, well, you could compare it to a tumor, you see. Only a mental one.”
The woman winced and then nodded.
“So then, Lorain, if you could,” the doctor said, standing up and then walking over to her. “If you could I’d like to hear from you what happened, in your own words.”
He pulled his chair from behind the desk and then sat down again, this time only inches from the woman’s knees.
“Do you want Peter to stay here?”
She nodded.
“That’s fine,” the doctor said, looking up into her eyes. “Go ahead when you’re ready. Start anywhere you please. If I have a question I hope you won’t mind too much.”
“I was twelve or, maybe, just thirteen,” the woman said. “My father and mother had split up but then, for a while, they were living with each other again. So we were staying in the little apartment together and I shared a room with my sister Mattie who was just two years younger than me. They argued a lot, my parents, but they, well, they were pretty considerate of my sister and I and didn’t blow up at each other but there was always this air of unhappiness that made me feel as if I were always walking on egg shells. They didn’t talk about one another to us and they didn’t blame anyone for anything but you know how kids are. I felt, deep down, that I was somehow to blame.”
“It was a tense situation,” the doctor said. “A sort of Cold War going on in the home?”
“I guess you could call it that,” the woman said, moving a stray lock of stringy yellow hair from one eye. “A constant, cold tension, like twisting and snapping a wet twig. My sister and I spent a lot of time visiting friends, staying late at school and weekends with Grandma, my mother’s mother.and sometimes with an Uncle, my father’s brother. So, most of the time, it wasn’t that bad.”
“You had some support,” the doctor said, putting the tips of his fingers together.
“Yeah, we did.”
“What happened then?” the doctor said.
“Oh we got on,” the woman said, leaning back slightly, crossing her legs. “Mattie and I played together a lot, games we made up like the one we called ghosts in the house. There was a field behind our place full of dandelions and wild strawberries. We dared each other to jump over a ditch and climb to the top of a red brick wall. We made up almost a whole city full of imaginary friends, invented stories, adventures each of them had. And then one day father left, like he usually did but this time he didn’t come back.
“Well, life went on, we just acted as if everything were normal. Almost all of our friends had parents who had split up so it didn’t seem all that traumatic at first. The apartment was less tense and father seemed happy to see us when we went to visit him, a lot happier than when he was at home although he made it pretty clear that he really didn't want us around.
“And then, I don’t know, maybe it was about my first year in high school that everything started to go seriously wrong. Mattie started having trouble in school. Notes from teachers at first, and then the bad grades, fights, suspensions. My mother tried the best she could but it was like my sister had become a different person. Arguments and screaming matches every night. My poor mother just didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t much help. Mattie had become even more of teenager than most teenagers, I guess.
“And then one summer, it was the hottest summer I could ever remember, for some reason I started getting ear aches and had to keep going to the hospital. No one could explain what brought them on but they were really excruciatingly painful, just made me want to cry. I remember lying curled up on my bed, waiting for the drops to relieve the pain and Mattie throwing stuff around the room, bitching and whining again that she had to share a room at her age and being shoved around by Mom and talking about running away.
“I had put up with so much of this that I snapped, I just couldn’t take her tantrums anymore, and I sat up and I said.”
The woman put both feet on the floor and sat very still. She leaned forward slightly, parted her lips, then buried her face in her hands. Her slender body shook. The man, looking miserable and perplexed, rubbed her back with one hand, looking at the floor while biting his lips.
“Do you want some water?” the doctor said.
“I told her,” the woman said with her head in her lap. “I said, ‘if you want to run away, go ahead. No one. No one wants you here’.”
She sobbed in her hands, making gurgling sounds and trembling.
The doctor got out of his chair and then knelt before her, putting his hands on her shoulders.
“I know this is hard,” he whispered. “And it’s sometimes hardest when we least expect it. You were a girl with an earache and you lost your temper because Mattie was acting up. These are things children say to one another.”
He stood up, then walked to his desk to retrieve a box of facial tissue.
After the woman dried her eyes and blew her nose she sat starring at the moving picture of the deer in the wood while blinking and taking short breathes.
Finally, after taking a long, deep breath, she said in a jagged voice, “Mattie did run away. We couldn’t find her. For four years we frantically looked for her. And then one day I got a tip from someone and took a plane to New Mexico, found her in some kind of commune. A religious community, very strict.”
“Those four years must have been a nightmare,” the doctor said quietly, sitting down again.
“It was all a nightmare, even after I found her,” the woman said, twisting a piece of tissue in her hand. “I mean, she seemed dazed, as if hardly remembering me. All I could do was tell her how much I loved her and missed her.
“But she was a different person. She wouldn't agree to even see me unless I promised that I would never tell anyone that I had seen her. That wasn’t Mattie, not the Mattie I had grown up with. Well, she didn’t want to leave and what could anyone do? She was, after all, an adult by now.
“Then, a year ago, I got the news that she had died of cancer.”
“It’s fairly rare for people to die of cancer these days,” the doctor said after a few minutes of silence.
“This cult or whatever it was she belonged to doesn’t believe in doctors and hospitals. So they just watched her die. I didn’t even know that she was sick.”
“You know that Mattie’s decision to run away was hers to make, don’t you?” the doctor said quietly.
“All I know,” the woman said. “All I really do know is that I could have made that decision just a little. Just a little harder to make.”
After the memory of what she had said to her sister had been removed, the doctor stood alone in his office, peering at the screen of the computer, reading words that seemed to float like pieces of silver in dark water.
She would go back to her hotel room, fall into a light sleep and have no memory of ever being in his office, of ever having seen him.
This had been her second time to his office.
He looked at a faint red dot in the lower left hand side of the screen, expressed a desire for the computer to turn off, and then looked at the picture of the deer in the wood.
Mattie hadn’t died of cancer in a commune. That was an implanted memory from her first visit to his office. Her sister, in fact, had never been found. Police had only been able to recover blood samples and bits of clothing found in an abandoned house. The girl most certainly had been murdered.
The doctor looked at a red dot in the lower left hand side of the deer picture, expressed a desire for it to turn off, then stared at the blank wall.
-James Hazard
Posted by james-hazard
at 8:07 PM PST
Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 6:31 PM PDT
