Coils Read online

  It was after I'd taken care of the business. No reason then not to reach out and switch off the unit. But I didn't. Instead, I stared at the display screen, feeling a pleasant sense of accomplishment now that the ticket…

  Ticket…?

  I drifted into a kind of reverie, I guess, first thinking about the ticket and what it meant, and then about the neat, smooth functioning of the machinery itself that made it all possible, and then…

  It seemed that I heard Cora call to me once, but in a passive, general inquiring tone that hardly required a reply. I had a sort of waking dream then.

  It was as if I were traveling along lines, bright and dark, moving at a vertiginous rate, as if I rode some crazy roller coaster—up, down, around and through—traveling back, back through some familiar territory, some landscape of the mind or spirit I might have visited in some previous incarnation, or yesterday in a moment of inattention. And there, there at the end of the line was a place where some of my life was stored away. Walls surrounded it, barring my entrance when I got there. I sought to pass them and silent alarms shook about me in my course…

  "Don! Are you okay?"

  I looked up and Cora was staring at me through the doorway. I managed a smile.

  "I was thinking about home," I said, shaking off the dust of dreams, knuckling my eyes and yawning.

  "For a second I thought you'd fallen asleep, or—"

  "—freaked out?" I finished. "No such luck. I know you have to be fed occasionally. Get ready and—"

  I suddenly realized that she was wearing a dark blue wraparound skirt and a red halter.

  "Give me five," I said, "and we'll go ashore and hunt proteins."

  She smiled. I shut off my terminal. Going home. It still felt good.

  Ticketderick.

  In Detroit we changed planes for Escanaba, Upper Peninsula, on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. The bright lens of the lake, along the shoreline at least, was sprinkled with the confetti of summer sailboats—an almost electrical sensation for me. Everything became feverishly familiar the farther we penetrated into my pastoral past made present. I kept pointing things out to Cora—landmarks, facts, histories sprang to mind and tongue almost unbidden.

  We picked up our rental car almost immediately on landing, having brought no luggage other than shoulder bags. We drove on Highway 41 north out of the town along the shore. The sun struck the great glass of the lake a glancing blow and waves raced like fracture lines toward us. After a few miles, we turned inland on state road G38, heading toward Cornell. The dark green, shaggy horizon was comfortably near at hand. I sent my imagination on ahead, flowing through, peopling the terrain.

  "I still think we ought to have phoned," Cora said, not for the first time. "In five years people change, things change."

  Five years. Was that right? Was it that long since I'd been back? I'd given the number to her off the top of my head, not really stopping to measure things out. I hadn't left Florida at all last year—1994—or the year before, so far as I could recall. Then, in '92… I couldn't quite recall what I had done in '92.

  "I'm nervous about meeting your family."

  A road sign put Baghdad fifteen miles beyond Cornell, and so did I.

  I turned and smiled at her.

  "You have nothing to worry about."

  "I hope not."

  "It'll be all right"

  How could it be any other way? The closer we got to Baghdad, the less concern I felt about the specifics of what we were going to find when we got there. The important thing was… I smiled… the important thing was Cora and me.

  Cornell, small as it was, had evidently seen some changes in the past few years. Hardly anything about it struck me as familiar. But the road, and the tall trees closing it in on both sides—and the old railroad track, an occasional water tower, the placement of a faded billboard—felt crushingly familiar.

  "That," I said, "is new"—the first words spoken by either of us in several miles.

  The first gas station that we encountered on the outskirts of Baghdad was a small, weathered Standard, not the large new-looking Angra Energy that I recalled so clearly. There was a new sign, too, at the city limits:

  BAGHDAD

  POP 442

  I drove on into town, slowing to the posted 30. There was only the one thoroughfare passing through town that qualified to be called a highway, and while in town it was the only way that really amounted to much of a street. The sideways leading off of it were unpaved, weed-lined, rutted and potted in places. Tin-roofed houses, some few with yards sporting vehicles pillared on concrete blocks, worn threshing and tilling gear, burned-out household appliances, collapsing sheds and partially dismembered felled trees, crouched as if to conceal worn shingles and flaking paint behind rough hedges, stands of hollyhocks and clusters of lilacs gone wild.

  The real trouble was that this was not the main street that I remembered. But then, perhaps at the other end of town…

  Only we reached the other end of town with sickening suddenness, passed a final building and were back in the country again.

  Pop 442.

  It couldn't be that small. Surely, as a child, I'd had around me some semblance, if not of city life, then of life in a world where cities existed—not this utterly isolated backwater. I remembered… more than this. Where was the red brick school with the black iron fire escapes, the white church with the steeple, the theatre with the big marquee? Where was my parents' home?

  Cora, from the way that I was driving, peering at everything, surely knew that something was wrong. Or perhaps she supposed that whatever had been wrong all along was now taking a new turn.

  I braked, pulled as near to the ditch beside the narrow shoulder as I could and made a U-turn. No problem. There was very little traffic, even now, in summer. Nothing in sight. Slowly, I drove back to what would have to be called the business district. There were four stores—count 'em—and all of them were, behind old and weathered facades, utterly unfamiliar to me.

  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, perh
aps, 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

  Sunset 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.

  A pinkish, grayish flower atop a fat stalk—I had never seen my brain before. Fragile-looking thing. Was that really what I was—Sherrington's "enchanted loom"—where billions of cells fired to weave me? Or was it a radio receiver through which my soul broadcast? Or Minsky's "meat computer"? Or—

  Whatever it or I was/were, Daggett broke my train of speculations by removing his pipe from his mouth and using its stem as a pointer.

  "This looks like a bit of scarring in the temporal region," he said. "Neat, though. Interesting… Have you ever had convulsions of any sort?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Ever wake up and find your tongue badly bitten, your pants wet, muscle aches?"

  "No."

  He poked forward and the pipestem penetrated the image. I winced.

  "Things can get very tricky down in the hippocampal area," he remarked. "Lesions there can do amazing things to memory, but—" He paused and made an adjustment. "Tell me more about what happened on this trip to Michigan. There! Your hippocampus looks okay, though… Go ahead. Talk."

  He continued to play games with my brain-projection while I recited the entire story of the trip and its antecedents. Cora was present to confirm that these memories at least were accurate.

  Finally, he threw a switch and my hovering brain-image vanished. Unsettling.

  He turned to face me.

  "I would like to try hypnosis," he said. "Have you any objection?"

  I wasn't given much time to register one if I'd had one—a sign, I supposed, that my case was at least interesting.

  "Have you ever been hypnotized before?" he asked.

  "No, never."

  "Let's get you into a more comfortable chair then."

  He released me from the stereotactic unit and conducted me to a padded reclining chair, tipping it back about three-quarters tow
ard the horizontal. A device within the chair itself detected my brain rhythms, matched its own gentle output to certain of them and then gradually amplified its output while at the same time introducing a subtle alteration. I could somehow sense the activity of the computer chip controlling this device. Its waves flowed through me like water and then I went unconscious, as I was supposed to, in a burst of white noise that flared inside my skull.

  "How do you feel?"

  Dr. Daggett's professionally intense face was bending closely over me. Cora was right behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  "All right, I guess," I said, blinking and stirring.

  It felt as if I had been asleep for a long while. It seemed as if there had been dreams, of the sort which just miss making it over into waking consciousness.

  "What do you remember about Baghdad?" he asked.

  There were still two sets of memories, one for the town that I had actually seen and another, tattered now and beginning to go dreamlike itself, of the Baghdad that until recently I had thought I genuinely remembered. And now I could vaguely sense, behind this dream-like fabric, another reality, shapes moving behind a curtain. I couldn't see yet what these shapes were. I told him this.

  He asked me a few routine questions then, to make sure that I was at least fairly well oriented now, knew who I was (at least to the extent I'd believed I knew me when I entered his office) and what year this was and so on. He nodded at my answers.

  "And for how long have you actually been living in Florida?"

  The shapes behind the curtain shifted. Something vital was almost in view, but it slipped away again at the last moment

  I shook my head.

  "I'm not certain," I said at last. "Several years for sure, though. What's been happening to me?"

  "For one thing…" Daggett began, and then took his time about continuing, "… you told me on the medical history form that you had never had any serious head injuries."