The Syndrome (42 page)

In the evening, Shaw stopped by with the neurosurgeon, Nick Allalin, a rabbity man with a pinkish nose, large teeth, and a high-pitched voice.

Shaw introduced the two of them, and Duran noticed that Allalin’s hands were amazingly white, as if, when not in use, they were kept in a box. They were the long and muscular fingers of a pianist, immaculate, and perfectly manicured. Designer hands.

The procedure was explained to him for the second time. “Doctor Shaw will make a small incision in your upper gum, just under the nose. Then he’ll tunnel back through the nasal passages to the sphenoid cavity. At that point, he becomes an observer. I’ll be sitting in a special chair,” Allalin said, “next to the table, working a surgical microscope with my foot, so I can see what I’m doing with my hands in close-up—on a
monitor. The object is embedded in the hippocampus, and we’ll take it out.”

“How long will it take?” Duran asked.

“Thirty or forty minutes.” He paused, and then went on. “You’ll be sitting up, with your head back, for most of the operation—and semiconscious.”

Duran blanched, and Shaw smiled. “You won’t feel anything,” the psychiatrist assured him. “Some discomfort the day after, but that’s about all.”

“One thing I wanted to ask you about,” Allalin remarked, “is your previous surgery. What can you tell us about it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Duran replied.

The neurosurgeon frowned. “This isn’t your first time,” he told him. “The scar’s right there, under your lip.” Leaning over, he took Duran’s upper lip in his fingers, and rolled it back for Shaw to see. When Shaw nodded, he let go.

Duran worked his lips. Finally, he said, “I think if I’d had brain surgery, I’d remember it.”

Shaw nodded. “Of course you would—unless you’re suffering from amnesia—”

“Which I seem to be.”

“Indeed.”

Shaw gave him another consent form to sign, then left with Allalin when Adrienne called to see how things were going.

It wasn’t much of a conversation. The Valium he’d been given kicked in right after the first hello. And yet, when he hung up, ten or twenty minutes later, it seemed to Duran that he’d heard something in her voice, something that sounded a lot like concern—concern for him. Could it be?

Nah.

In the morning, precisely at eight, a male nurse wheeled him down the corridor to the O/R, where he was intubated and given a series of injections that left him in a state of limp and indifferent paralysis. The operation began some ten minutes later, and proceeded, as nearly as Duran could tell, exactly as Allalin had described.

Most of the time, he kept his eyes closed, listening in a disinterested way to the underwater voices of the surgeons, the rhythmic symphony of the various machines. He couldn’t feel anything, but sensed the movement of those around him, the change in the light as Allalin leaned in, or moved away.

He heard clinks and dinks, instruments being picked up and put down on metal trays. At times, their words seemed to turn into nonsense syllables and he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

At one point, Shaw seemed to say, “Radashay at the semaphore,” and Allalin replied, “Dirapsian snide.”

Once or twice, he opened his eyes, and when he did, the lights in the O/R starred and shimmered. It was almost beautiful, the way it all pulsed in time with the blurred symphony of machine sound.

And then, quite clearly, Allalin announced, “Got it!”

Someone heaved a massive sigh.

And then he heard Shaw say, “Jesus! What the hell
is
that thing?”

Doctor Allalin’s face swam slowly into focus, fell apart into bands of light, and regained its form. Duran could see his mouth moving in an exaggerated way, but it seemed as if the sound took a long time to arrive.

“Effff.”
Like the letter of the alphabet. Duran was tempted to continue with the exercise: “Geeee, Aitch, Eye.” But his mouth was too dry. Then he realized what the doctor was saying: Jeff.

“Wha?” It was as if he had a mouth full of toothpaste.

“At least he’s vocalizing,” Allalin said with an air of relief. He leaned over Duran again, his rabbitlike face slightly foreshortened—he was so close.

“Tell me, Jeff. What is your last name?”

Duran thought about it. He remembered he was in a hospital, remembered he’d had surgery. The surgery must be over. And he was all right. Neither dead, nor blind—nor a vegetable.

“Jeff?” The voice was patient, high-pitched. “Tell me. Do you remember your last name?”

Duran nodded.

“What’s your last name, Jeff?”

“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.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t?”

“Quite often. Quite often that particular memory—since it has few associations and isn’t chunked with other recollections—well, it’s just gone.”

“Really.”

“So don’t be discouraged. The truth is, you’re suffering from as extreme a dissociative state as I have ever encountered. To cope with that, you’ve reinvented yourself. Now the task is to get you back to who you really are. This will bring you face-to-face with a lot of the trauma you’ve repressed. It’s not going to be easy. I can tell that, already.”

“What do you mean?” Duran asked.

“I’m getting a lot of resistance—deep resistance. Even in a trance, you’re constantly dancing away from anything that might connect you to your real past. The resistance is profound.”

“Why would that be?”

Shaw smiled, his eyes kind and reassuring. “Something happened to you. Something your mind can’t accept. Maybe there was a sailing accident, and someone you loved drowned. Perhaps you felt responsible. Perhaps you
were
responsible.” The psychiatrist paused. “It’s just a possibility,” he added. “Who knows?” He paused a second time. “We’ll try another tack tomorrow.”

After dinner, Duran walked the halls for a while, and talked to Adrienne by telephone. Then he sat down with a copy of
Sail
that Shaw had left for him. It was strange. The beauty of the boats was a delight, but occasionally, his eye would fall on something in the background—a swatch of landscape or the figure of a person hiking out—and it would be as if the sun were sliding behind a cloud. A low and anxious feeling would come over him, and …

He tossed the magazine aside, and snapped on the television.

Fresh from the shower after a long, cold run in the park, Adrienne toweled off and put on her underwear. Then she slipped into a skirt and sweater, and made herself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette beside the door. Moving to the desk in front of the window, she looked out upon a construction site that was even deeper than it was wide. Finally, she sipped her coffee, and began to sort through her sister’s mail.