Biblical (28 page)

McLean Hospital, just outside Belmont, had always seemed to Macbeth to be a cross between a very upscale country club and an Ivy League university campus. It wasn’t a single building, but a spread-out collection. There were a few larger, more modern, more institutional-looking structures, but in the main McLean comprised red-brick and stucco Colonial-Revival or Jacobethan-Revival buildings, simulating architecture that had been pasttense even to the Victorian designers who had conceived them. It was all set against an expansive backdrop of trees and parkland. Affiliated to Harvard, McLean was probably New England’s top psychiatric hospital and it was an environment that gave some outer peace to those suffering from inner turmoil. Macbeth had enjoyed his time here. Until his last case.

The taxi dropped him off outside the main administration building.

*

“Glad you could make it, John,” Pete Corbin said as he led Macbeth back out of the building. “My patient’s over in one of the residences – we can walk. Did you feel the quake?”

“Like everyone else. You?”

“Joanna too. What’s happening, John?”

“Some kind of Mass Psychogenic Illness … maybe viral in origin, like you thought, maybe not. In the meantime, they’ve tagged it as Temporary Non-Pathological Hallucinatory Syndrome, meaning it’s a sure bet everyone’ll stick with Boston Syndrome. You still getting presentations?” asked Macbeth.

“More every day. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Did you know Deborah Canning worked with Melissa?”

“No. I knew she was connected to the Golden Gate suicides, but like you I never connected them with Melissa. I can’t believe it.”

“You and me both,” said Macbeth. “So, if you were unaware of the connection, why do you want me to see her?”

“Because she’s exhibiting delusions that remind me of Gabriel Rees before he jumped from the Christian Science roof. And I’ve this gut feeling that it’s all connected to what’s going on – to Boston Syndrome – in an odd way.”

The path they took, dappled by the bright spring sun probing through the trees, eventually opened up to immaculate lawns on either side. The residence was a Colonial-Georgian mansion that looked more like the private home of some New England bluebloods than an institutional facility.

“She’s in here?” Macbeth asked, suddenly uneasy.

“Yes.” Corbin’s expression became grave. “Dammit, she’s actually in the same room. Sorry John, I didn’t think.”

“Forget it.” Macbeth forced a smile. “Ancient history.”

“You sure?” asked Corbin. “I could bring her down into the main building …”

“No need. I’d forgotten myself until I saw the residence.” All physicians lost patients at some time during their career. For psychiatrists, the threat that hung over them was always that a patient, sometimes with a sudden and unpredicted change of mood state, would take their own life. It had
happened here, with someone in Macbeth’s charge. His last case in clinical medicine had occupied the room now taken by Deborah Canning. There had been accusations of poor judgment and a deeply flawed diagnosis; but Macbeth had been his own biggest critic and his doubts about his own ability to relate to people, to read them, had led him away from patient care and into pure research.

“You sure?” Corbin asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.” Corbin led the way into the residence. “As you know, Debbie worked in the gaming industry, as Melissa’s deputy, designing and programming computer games. She’s a hugely intelligent woman and when an intellect of that size turns in on itself, it’s a strong enemy to overcome. She’s a paying patient here and started off as a self-admission. Her family are here in Boston and about six weeks ago she turned up at their door from San Francisco without warning and in a real state of distress. She had simply walked out of her office, bought an airline ticket with her credit card and had flown across the country without stopping to change her clothes or pack a bag. Four days after Debbie arrived in Boston, Melissa and the entire company committed suicide.”

“Does she know?”

“I made a clinical ruling that she shouldn’t be informed – and that caused problems with the police, who were desperate to question her – but I’m pretty sure she knows. She has either intuited the fact or maybe she ran away because she knew what was planned.”

“So what are you treating her for?”

“Her condition is very difficult to define. Unlike Gabriel Rees, she does have a clinical history: bipolar symptoms for most of her post-adolescent life, and treated for ADHD as a teenager. When she admitted herself she was in the depths of a Psychotic Major Depression. I started her on Asenapine, but have eased
her off. I just don’t feel the answer to what ails her can be found pharmacologically, so I’ve been carrying out intense therapy sessions.”

“Why did you want me to come and see her?” asked Macbeth. “I mean before you knew the connection with Melissa?”

“Over the past four weeks … I guess the best way of putting it is it’s like Debbie’s started to fade away. She’s the most florid yet logical case of derealization and depersonalization I’ve ever come across. She simply doesn’t accept that she exists or has ever existed. I hope you don’t mind, but after what happened with Gabriel, and given that you have some personal experience of depersonalization, I thought you could give some extra insight. To be honest, I’m despairing a little with her: she has detached herself so much from any sense of self that I can’t seem to reach her, far less bring her back.”

“So you’re looking for a second opinion from a colleague with a similar screw loose, is that it?” Macbeth said, smiling.

“Let’s say from someone who can empathize with at least some of what’s going on in her mind. Listen, John, this really is the most extreme case I’ve come across. It sounds crazy, but sometimes I find myself believing her: that the reason I can’t reach her is because she really isn’t there …”

*

The corner room, with its double-aspect windows looking out over the lawns and copses of trees, was exactly as Macbeth remembered it. Other than the official fire notice on the back of the spring-hinged safety door, it was as un-institutional as the building that housed it. It was a bright, airy room with pale blue walls and the large abstract painting that hung above the single bed was a bland arrangement of shapes in pastel blues and greens; no strident geometries or colors to agitate here. The furniture was certainly new and functional, but an attempt had been made to fit with the residence’s period and style.

Deborah Canning, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a dark blue T-shirt, was sitting in an upholstered armchair by one of the windows. Macbeth recognized her instantly from the photograph on Melissa’s company website. She sat erect but not stiffly, her elbow on the small table, her hand resting on a large hardback art book.

The first thing Macbeth noticed about her was her serenity. The calm in her face and posture was almost infectious and seemed to fill the room with a sense of peace. An attractive woman in her early thirties, Deborah would have been beautiful had her mouth not been a touch too small and her nose a touch too long. Her eyes, though, were striking: large, bright and emerald. She had a pale complexion and her hair was an unremarkable shade of light brown. She turned and smiled a quiet, polite smile when the two physicians entered.

“Hello Debbie,” said Corbin. “This is a colleague of mine – the one I told you about – Dr John Macbeth.”

“Like the Scottish king?” she asked, turning to examine him.

“Like the Scottish king,” said Macbeth.

“But which Macbeth are you like?” she asked.

“I don’t understand—”

“There are two Macbeths,” she said, her voice calm, the intonation soft. “The historical Macbeth – the ‘real’ Macbeth, a very successful and much-loved king – and the fictional Macbeth, Shakespeare’s ruthless murderer and tyrant. It’s the bigger fiction that everyone remembers, not the smaller truth. So which of your namesakes are you more like – the remembered fiction or the forgotten fact?”

“I’m afraid I’m not in the slightest bit regal or made of Shakespearean stuff … I’m the Macbeth who struggles to balance his credit card. Do you mind if we sit down?”

She nodded and both psychiatrists pulled chairs across to the window and sat facing her.

“What have you been doing today?” Corbin asked.

“Doing?” she frowned. “There have been sounds from outside. Voices. Birds, mainly. A couple of trucks, faint.”

“Do you like to listen to the sounds, Debbie?” asked Macbeth.

“I don’t listen, I hear. And I only hear them because other people hear them.”

“But you do hear them … You are here to listen to them.”

“
Cogito?
”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Descartes’s Cogito … the hammer you’re trying to use to crack open my delusion. If I perceive, then I think. If I think, therefore I am.
Cogito ergo sum
.”

“Well, maybe something like that.”

“You want to know the joke of it? Descartes got it almost right … it should be: I think therefore I
think
I am.”

“You’re wrong, Debbie,” said Macbeth. “You know you exist, but because of the problems you’ve been having, because of some trauma, you are trying to distance yourself from that reality. It’s a defense mechanism, that’s all. I know you exist. Dr Corbin knows you exist. We can both see you and hear you.”

“I’m afraid that logic doesn’t hold. I know something about these things, about cognition and perception. In my work I used tricks and devices to play with people’s perception. Because I exist as a percept in your mind, it doesn’t mean that I really exist as a distal object in reality … Am I using the right words?”

Macbeth smiled and nodded. “Yes, Debbie … you’re using the right words.”

“What if I’m just in your head?” She looked at him earnestly, for the first time something breaking through into her expression. “Haven’t you ever wondered that? Haven’t you ever considered that all this – everything and everybody around you – is all just in your head? How do you know I was here before you walked into the room? You think I’m delusional, but the truth is there’s really only one difference between me and
everyone else: I
know
I don’t exist, everyone else has suspected it at least once in their lives – questioned the reality of the world around them or of themselves.”

“So why do we all accept we exist?”

“Because the deceptions are piled up, layered one on another, from the time we’re kids. Deceptions, concepts, social constructs. We build a consensus about what reality is, about our own existence, and anyone who questions it is considered delusional.”

“What about philosophers? Quantum physicists? Neuroscientists? Don’t they question reality? No one considers them delusional.”

“They’re considered abstract thinkers. No one questions their take on reality because no one understands it. They dress up what is simple and observable in everyday life in a language that no one else can understand. They cloud the truth instead of illuminating it.”

“What is this truth?” asked Macbeth.

“You know about Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness?”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Macbeth.

“The eighth circuit is where the truth lies. The Overmind. The quantum mind. Consciousness is the most difficult thing to pin down; why I see the world from my window and you from yours. Have you never wondered if we all share the same, single consciousness and we just experience it one viewpoint at a time? That maybe when you die you will wake up as me, or Gandhi, or Hitler, or the starving African child you saw on the TV? We don’t think about it because our thinking is suppressed. This so-called reality is contingent on the suppression of cognitive liberty. We ban mind-altering drugs, we create religions, to confine and channel the thoughts of others and ourselves. How do you know that I am not an invention of your perception?”

“Because I’m not that imaginative, Debbie. I know you exist.”

“Like I said, I know a lot about perceptions of reality. I am considered to be the best ARG programmer in the States. One of the top three in the world.”

“ARG?”

“Alternate Reality Games. Total immersion in another reality. I learned all the tricks – and invented more than half of them – of how to fool the human mind into believing it is somewhere it’s not and experiencing an environment that isn’t there.” She smiled again and Macbeth noticed the corner of her mouth tremble. “Would you do me a favor? Look behind you. Humor me … Please, both of you, look behind you and take a note of what you see.”

They both turned and took in the room.

“Now turn back to me and don’t look behind you again.”

They turned back.

“Tell me what is behind you. Whatever you do, don’t look to remind yourself.”

“Behind us? Your room, Debbie,” said Corbin. “Your bed, the dresser, the robe … the painting on the wall, the door into the corridor …”

“You see,” she said. “You are looking at me now but you are picturing the room you saw. Re-creating it in your mind even though you can no longer see it.”

She looked into the space between them, beyond them, behind them. Her face lost its serenity: for a moment there was pain and despair in her expression, then it faded, replaced with cold, empty calm.

“Do you know what I see? Now that you’re not looking? Everything you described was there, but only when you looked. It was there
because
you looked. It’s gone now. I can’t see it because I can’t generate it. It does not exist because I do not exist to create it.”

“So what
is
there, Debbie?” asked Macbeth.

“Nothing. There is nothing there. Just a void that I cannot describe to you because it has no dimension, no color, no shape.”

Her face remained calm, but her eyes glossed and a tear found its way from the corner of her eye, tracing its way down her cheek.

“I am looking past you and there is nothing there. I am looking past you into the most terrible emptiness.”

Zhang Xushou screwed her eyes against the harsh, too-bright sunlight. Like the other pale-eyed Lijian from her village, she was sensitive to the desert light, but today was different. Today, as she sat once more at the village’s edge, the sun seemed to have spread across the sheet of sky, intensifying instead of diffusing in it; the horizon indistinct between the sky’s brilliance and its sand reflection. She felt as if she stood before a brighter sun of some unremembered past time. The vague feeling became a cogent déjà vu that became a potent sense of unease and unreality. She stood at the edge of the village and closed her eyes tight, taking a moment to calm herself, to collect her thoughts. Maybe she was coming down with something; or maybe it was just the stress of going off to university.