How It Was When the Past Went Away Page 3

  He saw a mirror. In it was the reflected upper half of Nathaniel Haldersen, Ph.D. Nate Haldersen smiled at himself. Tall, stringy, long-nosed man, absurdly straw-colored hair, absurd blue eyes, thin lips, smiling. Bony body. He undid his pajama top. Pale, hairless chest; bump of bone like an epaulet on each shoulder. I have been sick a long time, Haldersen thought. Now I must get out of here, back to my classroom. End of leave of absence. Where are my clothes?

  “Nurse? Doctor?” He pressed his call button three times. “Hello? Anyone here?”

  No one came. Odd; they always came. Shrugging, Haldersen moved out into the hall. He saw three orderlies, heads together, buzzing at the far end. They ignored him. A robot servitor carrying breakfast trays glided past. A moment later one of the younger doctors came running through the hall, and would not stop when Haldersen called to him. Annoyed, he went back into his room and looked about for clothing. He found none, only a little stack of magazines on the closet floor. He thumbed the call button three more times. Finally one of the robots entered the room.

  “I am sorry,” it said, “but the human hospital personnel is busy at present. May I serve you, Dr. Haldersen?”

  “I want a suit of clothing. I’m leaving the hospital.”

  “I am sorry, but there is no record of your discharge. Without authorization from Dr. Bryce, Dr. Reynolds, or Dr. Kamakura, I am not permitted to allow your departure.”

  Haldersen sighed. He knew better than to argue with a robot. “Where are those three gentlemen right now?”

  “They are occupied, sir. As you may know, there is a medical emergency in the city this morning, and Dr. Bryce and Dr. Kamakura are helping to organize the committee of public safety. Dr. Reynolds did not report for duty today and we are unable to trace him. It is believed that he is a victim of the current difficulty.”

  “What current difficulty?”

  “Mass loss of memory on the part of the human population,” the robot said.

  “An epidemic of amnesia?”

  “That is one interpretation of the problem.”

  “How can such a thing—” Haldersen stopped. He understood now the source of his own joy this morning. Only yesterday afternoon he had discussed with Tim Bryce the application of memory-destroying drugs to his own trauma, and Bryce had said— Haldersen no longer knew the nature of his own trauma. “Wait,” he said, as the robot began to leave the room. “I need information. Why have I been under treatment here?”

  “You have been suffering from social displacements and dysfunctions whose origin, Dr. Bryce feels, lies in a situation of traumatic personal loss.”

  “Loss of what?”

  “Your family, Dr. Haldersen.”

  “Yes. That’s right. I recall, now—I had a wife and two children. Emily. And a little girl—Margaret, Elizabeth, something like that. And a boy named John. What happened to them?”

  “They were passengers aboard Intercontinental Airways Flight 103, Copenhagen to San Francisco, September 5, 1991. The plane underwent explosive decompression over the Arctic Ocean and there were no survivors.”

  Haldersen absorbed the information as calmly as though he were hearing of the assassination of Julius Caesar.

  “Where was I when the accident occurred?”

  “In Copenhagen,” the robot replied. “You had intended to return to San Francisco with your family on Flight 1o3; however, according to your data file here, you became invovled in an emotional relationship with a woman named Marie Rasmussen, whom you had met in Copenhagen, and failed to return to your hotel in time to go to the airport. Your wife, evidently aware of the situation, chose not to wait for you. Her subsequent death, and that of your children, produced a traumatic guilt reaction in which you came to regard yourself as responsible for their terminations.”

  “I would take that attitude, wouldn’t I?” Haldersen said. “Sin and retribution. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I always had a harsh view of sin, even while I was sinning. I should have been an Old Testament prophet.”

  “Shall I provide more information, sir?”

  “Is there more?”

  “We have in the files Dr. Bryce’s report headed, The Job Complex: A Study in the Paralysis of Guilt.”

  “Spare me that,” Haldersen said. “All right, go.”

  He was alone. The Job Complex, he thought. Not really appropriate, was it? Job was a man without sin, and yet he was punished grievously to satisfy a whim of the Almighty. A little presumptuous, I’d say, to identify myself with him. Cain would have been a better choice. Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. But Cain was a sinner. I was a sinner. I sinned and Emily died for it. When, eleven, eleven-and-a-half years ago? And now I know nothing at all about it except what the machine just told me. Redemption through oblivion, I’d call it. I have expiated my sin and now I’m free. I have no business staying in this hospital any longer. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. I’ve got to get out of here. Maybe I can be of some help to others.

  He belted his bathrobe, took a drink of water, and went out of the room. No one stopped him. The elevator did not seem to be running, but he found the stairs, and walked down, a little creakily. He had not been this far from his room in more than a year. The lower floors of the hospital were in chaos—doctors, orderlies, robots, patients, all milling around excitedly. The robots were trying to calm people and get them back to their proper places. “Excuse me,” Haldersen said serenely. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” He left the hospital, unmolested, by the front door. The air outside was as fresh as young wine; he felt like weeping when it hit his nostrils. He was free. Redemption through oblivion. The disaster high above the Arctic no longer dominated his thoughts. He looked upon it precisely as if it had happened to the family of some other man, long ago. Haldersen began to walk briskly down Van Ness, feeling vigor returning to his legs with every stride. A young woman, sobbing wildly, erupted from a building and collided with him. He caught her, steadied her, was surprised at his own strength as he kept her from toppling. She trembled and pressed her head against his chest. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked. “Can I be of any help?”

  Panic had begun to enfold Freddy Munson during dinner at Ondine’s Wednesday night. He had begun to be annoyed with Helene in the midst of the truffled chicken breasts, and so he had started to think about the details of business; and to his amazement he did not seem to have the details quite right in his mind; and so he felt the early twinges of terror.

  The trouble was that Helene was going on and on about the art of sonic sculpture in general and Paul Mueller in particular. Her interest was enough to arouse faint jealousies in Munson. Was she getting ready to leap from his bed to Paul’s? Was she thinking of abandoning the wealthy, glamorous, but essentially prosaic stockbroker for the irresponsible, impecunious, fascinatingly gifted sculptor? Of course, Helene kept company with a number of other men, but Munson knew them and discounted them as rivals; they were nonentities, escorts to fill her idle nights when he was too busy for her. Paul Mueller, however, was another case. Munson could not bear the thought that Helene might leave him for Paul. So he shifted his concentration to the day’s maneuvers. He had extracted a thousand shares of the $5.87 convertible preferred of Lunar Transit from the Schaeffer account, pledging it as collateral to cover his shortage in the matter of the Comsat debentures, and then, tapping the Howard account for five thousand Southeast Energy Corporation warrants, he had—or had those warrants come out of the Brewster account? Brewster was big on utilities. So was Howard, but that account was heavy on Mid-Atlantic Power, so would it also be loaded with Southeast Energy? In any case, had he put those warrants up against the Zurich uranium futures, or were they riding as his markers in the Antarctic oil-lease thing? He could not remember.

  He could not remember.

  He could not remember.

  Each transaction had been in its own compartment. The parti tions were down, suddenly. Numb
ers were spilling about in his mind as though his brain were in free fall. All of today’s deals were tumbling. It frightened him. He began to gobble his food, wanting now to get out of here, to get rid of Helene, to get home and try to reconstruct his activities of the afternoon. Oddly, he could remember quite clearly all that he had done yesterday— the Xerox switch, the straddle on Steel—but today was washing away minute by minute.

  “Are you all right?” Helene asked.

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m coming down with something.”

  “The Venus Virus. Everybody’s getting it.”

  “Yes, that must be it. The Venus Virus. You’d better keep clear of me tonight.”

  They skipped dessert and cleared out fast. He dropped Helene off at her flat; she hardly seemed disappointed, which bothered him, but not nearly so much as what was happening to his mind. Alone, finally, he tried to jot down an outline of his day, but even more had left him now. In the restaurant he had known which stocks he had handled, though he wasn’t sure what he had done with them. Now he couldn’t even recall the specific securities. He was out on the limb for millions of dollars of other people’s money, and every detail was in his mind, and his mind was falling apart. By the time Paul Mueller called, a little after midnight, Munson was growing desperate. He was relieved, but not exactly cheered, to learn that whatever strange thing had affected his mind had hit Mueller a lot harder. Mueller had forgotten everything since last October.

  “You went bankrupt,” Munson had to explain to him. “You had this wild scheme for setting up a central clearing house for works of art, a kind of stock exchange—the sort of thing only an artist would try to start. You wouldn’t let me discourage you. Then you began signing notes, and taking on contingent liabilities, and before the project was six weeks old you were hit with half a dozen lawsuits and it all began to go sour.”

  “When did this happen, precisely?”

  “You conceived the idea at the beginning of November. By Christmas you were in severe trouble. You already had a bunch of personal debts that had gone unpaid from before, and your assets melted away, and you hit a terrible bind in your work and couldn’t produce a thing. You really don’t remember a thing of this, Paul?”

  “Nothing.”

  “After the first of the year the fastest-moving creditors started getting decrees against you. They impounded everything you owned except the furniture, and then they took the furniture. You borrowed from all of your friends, but they couldn’t give you nearly enough, because you were borrowing thousands and you owed hundreds of thousands.”

  “How much did I hit you for?”

  “Eleven bigs,” Munson said. “But don’t worry about that now.”

  “I’m not. I’m not worrying about a thing. I was in a bind in my work, you say?” Mueller chuckled. “That’s all gone. I’m itching to start making things. All I need are the tools—I mean, money to buy the tools.”

  “What would they cost?”

  “Two-and-a-half bigs,” Mueller said.

  Munson coughed. “All right. I can’t transfer the money to your account, because your creditors would lien it right away. I’ll get some cash at the bank. You’ll have three bigs tomorrow, and welcome to it.”

  “Bless you, Freddy.” Mueller said, “This kind of amnesia is a good thing, eh? I was so worried about money that I couldn’t work. Now I’m not worried at all. I guess I’m still in debt, but I’m not fretting. Tell me what happened to my marriage, now.”

  “Carole got fed up and turned off,” said Munson. “She opposed your business venture from the start. When it began to devour you, she did what she could to untangle you from it, but you insisted on trying to patch things together with more loans, and she filed for a decree. When she was free, Pete Castine moved in and grabbed her.”

  “That’s the hardest part to believe. That she’d marry an art dealer, a totally noncreative person, a—a parasite, really—”

  “They were always good friends,” Munson said. “I won’t say they were lovers, because I don’t know, but they were close. And Pete’s not that horrible. He’s got taste, intelligence, everything an artist needs except the gift. I think Carole may have been weary of gifted men, anyway.”

  “How did I take it?” Mueller asked.

  “You hardly seemed to notice, Paul. You were so busy with your financial shenanigans.”

  Mueller nodded. He sauntered to one of his own works, a three-meter-high arrangement of oscillating rods that ran the whole sound spectrum into the high kilohertzes, and passed two fingers over the activator eye. The sculpture began to murmur.

  After a few moments Mueller said, “You sounded awfully upset when I called, Freddy. You say you have some kind of amnesia too?”

  Trying to be casual about it, Munson said, “I find I can’t remember some important transactions I carried out today. Unfortunately, my only record of them is in my head. But maybe the information will come back to me when I’ve slept on it.”

  “There’s no way I can help you with that.”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  “Freddy, where is this amnesia coming from?”

  Munson shrugged. “Maybe somebody put a drug in the water supply, or spiked the food, or something. These days, you never can tell. Look, I’ve got to do some work, Paul. If you’d like to sleep here tonight—”

  “I’m wide awake, thanks. I’ll drop by again in the morning.”

  When the sculptor was gone, Munson struggled for a feverish hour to reconstruct his data, and failed. Shortly before two he took a four-hour-sleep pill. When he awakened, he realized in dismay that he had no memories whatever for the period from April 1 to noon yesterday. During those five weeks he had engaged in countless securities transactions, using other people’s property as his collateral, and counting on his ability to get each marker in his game back into its proper place before anyone was likely to go looking for it. He had always been able to remember everything. Now he could remember nothing. He reached his office at seven in the morning, as always, and out of habit plugged himself into the data channels to study the Zurich and London quotes, but the prices on the screen were strange to him, and he knew that he was undone.

  At the same moment of Thursday morning Dr. Timothy Bryce’s house computer triggered an impulse and the alarm voice in his pillow said quietly but firmly, “It’s time to wake up, Dr. Bryce.” He stirred but lay still. After the prescribed ten-second interval the voice said, a little more sharply, “It’s time to wake up, Dr. Bryce.” Bryce sat up, just in time; the lifting of his head from the pillow cut off the third, much sterner, repetition, which would have been followed by the opening chords of the Jupiter Symphony. The psychiatrist opened his eyes.

  He was surprised to find himself sharing his bed with a strikingly attractive girl.

  She was a honey blonde, deeply tanned, with light-brown eyes, full pale lips, and a sleek, elegant body. She looked to be fairly young, a good twenty years younger than he was—perhaps twenty-five, twenty-eight. She wore nothing, and she was in a deep sleep, her lower lip sagging in a sort of involuntary pout. Neither her youth nor her beauty nor her nudity surprised him; he was puzzled simply because he had no notion who she was or how she had come to be in bed with him. He felt as though he had never seen her before. Certainly he didn’t know her name. Had he picked her up at some party last night? He couldn’t seem to remember where he had been last night. Gently he nudged her elbow.

  She woke quickly, fluttering her eyelids, shaking her head.

  “Oh,” she said, as she saw him, and clutched the sheet up to her throat. Then, smiling, she dropped it again. “That’s foolish. No need to be modest now, I guess.”

  “I guess. Hello.”

  “Hello,” she said. She looked as confused as he was.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” he said, “but someone must have slipped me a weird weed last night, because I’m afraid I’m not sure how I happed to bring you home. Or what your name is.”
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br />   “Lisa,” she said. “Lisa—Falk.” She stumbled over the second name. “And you’re—”

  “Tim Bryce.”

  “You don’t remember where we met?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  He got out of bed, feeling a little hesitant about his own nakedness, and fighting the inhibition off. “They must have given us both the same thing to smoke, then. You know”—he grinned shyly—”I can’t even remember if we had a good time together last night. I hope we did.”

  “I think we did,” she said. “I can’t remember it either. But I feel good~ inside—the way I usually do after I’ve—” She paused. “We couldn’t have met only just last night, Tim.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’ve got the feeling that I’ve known you longer than that.”

  Bryce shrugged. “I don’t see how. I mean, without being too coarse about it, obviously we were both high last night, really floating, and we met and came here and—”

  “No. I feel at home here. As if I moved in with you weeks and weeks ago.”

  “A lovely idea. But I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “Why do I feel so much at home here, then?”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way.” She walked to the bedroom closet and let her hand rest on the touchplate. The door slid open; evidently he had keyed the house computer to her fingerprints. Had he done that last night too? She reached in. “My clothing,” she said. “Look. All these dresses, coats, shoes. A whole wardrobe. There can’t be any doubt. We’ve been living together and don’t remember it!”

  A chill swept through him. “What have they done to us? Listen, Lisa, let’s get dressed and eat and go down to the hospital together for a checkup. We—”

  “Hospital?”

  “Fletcher Memorial. I’m in the neurological department. Whatever they slipped us last night has hit us both with a lacunary retrograde amnesia—a gap in our memories—and it could be serious. If it’s caused brain damage, perhaps it’s not irreversible yet, but we can’t fool around.”