Chiral Mad 3

by Stephen King

  A woman carrying a small basket of laundry stepped out at that moment and came to an abrupt halt in front of me, unexpectedly dropping her basket.

  “Look out!” she shouted, taking a protective step toward the street; and with one hand she snagged a ball out of the air that had been headed in my direction.

  Across the street two young boys—one with a bat, one with a glove—scattered, darting back up Jones. They stopped a block away and warily watched us.

  The woman smiled and said to me: “Hey, kids play ball in the street, what are you going to do, right?”

  She tossed the ball up and down in her hand a couple of times, then held it out and asked: “You need a baseball?”

  I said no, and she immediately turned and fired it in a straight line the entire block back toward the boys. The boy wearing a glove managed to catch it on the fly, jerked the glove off, blew on his fingers, and shouted: “Ya outta be pitchin for the Giants, lady.”

  But back a moment ago, when she still held the ball in her opened right palm facing toward me, I’d noticed the now familiar tiny three indigo dots. And, on closer inspection of her features, I realized the woman looked more than a bit like Flo-Jo. They both were dark-eyed, tall, and demonstrated terrific reaction time.

  “My friend is a good athlete just like you,” I said, looking into her exotic, almond-shaped eyes. “Her name is Flo-Jo. Do you happen to know her?”

  She hesitated briefly, then shook her head, smiled, bent over, and lifted up her basket.

  “May I help you carry that?”

  “No, it’s okay, I’m just around the corner, staying temporarily at the Hotel Reo.”

  “Ha, so am I. Let me take that. My name is Phil.”

  She let me take the basket and said: “My name is Kayle.”

  We walked together back to the hotel, Kayle telling me she was moving soon over to the Sunset area of the City, taking a job as a clerk in a book store very near UCSF Hospital. She planned on taking classes from a nearby SF City College extension, and some day entering the medical field. For now, she was thankful to be working around doctors and nurses, who were the main customers of the bookstore.

  We climbed to the second floor, where she lived only two doors down the hall from Flo-Jo—Room 213.

  After dropping off the basket in her room, I stopped at my place to wash up before lunch. I still hadn’t recovered any pieces of my memory as I’d hoped. But I’d met two interesting women, both living nearby right here at this run-down old hotel. And of course I was intensely curious about their duplicate palm tattoos, the meaning. With their exotic eyes, large size, and athletic presence, I wondered if the two women were perhaps both adherents of some kind of foreign martial arts lifestyle. I decided to ask one of them about the significance of the three-dot tattoos, first chance I got.

  But for the next day and a half I saw neither again, as I soon discovered the Main SF Library at nearby Civic Center. An amazing place, where I spent most of the rest of my weekend, reading up on my memory loss condition and other bits of intriguing information. I even searched back through the last four months of the San Francisco Chronicle, looking for a mention of the other four amnesiac arrivals in the Tenderloin. But I found nothing.

  And I took Ms. Jilly’s advice, staying in my room after dark.

  Monday morning Ms. Jilly was right on time, meeting me in the lobby of the Reo.

  We sat down together on one of the threadbare gray sofas.

  “Remembering anything yet, Phil?”

  I shook my head.

  “What have you done with yourself the last two days?”

  “I wandered around, looking at people. Met two very nice women who live right here at the Reo on the second floor. But mostly though I spent time up at the City Main Library, researching amnesia and many other topics of interest. A remarkable place. The reading and research services are free.”

  Ms. Jilly nodded as if she approved of me meeting the women and spending most of my time at the library. Then, she asked hesitantly: “Did you happen to see anyone that seemed to recognize you on the street? Perhaps someone just staring, like they knew you from the past?”

  “No,” I said, noticing her change of expression at my answer.

  She almost looked relieved.

  She took in a deep breath. “Okay, Plan B. We are going up to Napa State Hospital, and sign you in for a procedure that has worked well in the past with amnesiacs, including all of my recent clients. The doctors up there are experts on your condition.”

  “A procedure?”

  Ms. Jilly smiled and said: “They use a series of three electro-shock treatments—”

  She held up her hands, palms out. “Wait, it’s not as gruesome as it sounds. You are heavily sedated. And after each treatment, you recover more and more of your memory. Eventually one hundred percent successful after the third treatment … Does the sound of the procedure frighten you, Phil?”

  I laughed. “No, actually I’ll pretty much try anything to find out who I am, and where I come from.”

  “Okay, let’s go. I have a City car parked outside.”

  I would have liked to have said goodbye or something to Flo-jo and Kayle, if either had been around; but when I went up to my room to get the paper bag of personal items that Ms. Jilly had given me Friday night, my door knocks on both 209 and 213 went unanswered.

  The drive was about an hour, on highways through first a heavily urban area and then a rural agricultural setting featuring gnarly grapevines. During the trip Ms. Jilly talked mostly about the history of the State Hospital. She said that it was now housing a majority of PCPs. Penal Code Patients, who had committed some crime to land them in the correctional system, but were drug addicts or others who needed more intensive psychiatric/psychological services than a prison usually offered. In addition, the other non-criminal patients here were mostly court commitments. Few patients nowadays were subjected to electro- or insulin-shock treatments. The archaic procedures used only on the most severe cases of depression or anxiety. And of course for amnesia. But amnesiacs represented only a tiny percentage of the population at Napa State Hospital. She also mentioned that I would have a friend here. She had called ahead and a man named Tem would meet us in the receiving ward. Ms. Jilly said that Tem would explain some things and help me negotiate my way through the next few days while recovering my memory.

  She signed me into the hospital and walked me to the receiving ward. There we met a man who could have been Ms. Jilly’s older brother. The resemblance, including dark eyes, large size, and the efficient way they both moved was uncanny. She eventually left me in his care, saying that she’d return in five days, expecting my memory recovery to be complete by then.

  “Hooray for you!” she added, and then she gave me a high-five, both uncharacteristically exuberant behavior for her.

  I laughed and struck her open right hand … But the smile instantly froze on my face as she turned and walked out the ward door. During the high-five I’d glimpsed her three-dot palm tattoo.

  Tem noticed my shocked expression and led me into the small TV and rec room, which was relatively vacant at this time of morning. We sat on a couch. He said that most patients in receiving were elsewhere during the morning hours, going through medical or psychological screening, or being assigned counselors, or perhaps completing legal documents if they were self-commitments.

  But I was more interested in Tem’s forthcoming explanation of how I ended up in the Tenderloin and why and eventually who he thought I was.

  He spoke in a kind of shotgun style, splattering me with awe-inspiring information. Tem began: “Jilly explained to you that you are amnesiac, and here at the State Hospital for shock treatment. She also told me that you have met two others in addition to her, who are also three-dot people living at the Hotel Reo. In fact, all three of these women kept a close eye on you over the weekend, insuring your safety …”

  He paused at that point and revealed his own tattooed palm.

&nbs
p; Stunned again, I looked up. “W-W-Who are you Three-Dot People?” I said in a strained stammer. “Are you some kind of secret religious sect … or maybe even aliens?”

  He shook his head and smiled more fully.

  “No, we are not aliens … Well, not exactly. We come from a place we call: Earth Prime. It is located in a parallel universe, but it’s the exact twin of Earth here. Except it is much older and we think it is dying, strangling on both its own pollution and terrible autocratic rule … The destination point between the two Earths is located in the San Francisco Tenderloin. The transfer is enabled by a teleportation process using Earth Prime advanced techniques in extending the research that Earth scientists here are calling Quantum Entanglement. Okay so far?”

  I nodded, but stared at him with perhaps a still baffled expression. I pointed at his hand enclosed around the tiny triangle. “Okay. But what exactly is this? What does this tattoo mean?”

  “It distinguishes our minority class on our home world; we think of ourselves as the enlightened people, who developed the teleportation process to save all the three-dot people,” he said, speaking a bit more slowly now. “We are dominated by the majority, who look like us, but wear only a single indigo dot on their right ear lobe. They are the dictatorial upper class, who view us as lower class terrorists, disturbing their benevolent rule through illegal protests, slanted propaganda, and fake solutions, including the promise of teleporting three-dot people to safety here …”

  Tem paused, staring at me and waiting for a comment.

  I just gestured for him to go on.

  He continued: “In recent years the rulers have used their secret police to begin rounding up our people, locking some of our leaders in terrible dungeons. This elite force wears two dots behind their right ear lobes. They are actually trained assassins, murdering with impunity many for just wearing three dots. It is rumored that the rulers have recently accessed our teleportation procedure and have sent an assassin through to the Bay Area. They consider all us escapees as traitors, with a capital sentence on our heads. We are small in number, centered here in Northern California. Okay, I know you must have dozens of questions …”

  He paused again.

  Still processing all that he’d said, I asked: “And you think I came from your parallel Earth?”

  Tem smiled kindly, reached out, and without saying anything, he turned over my right hand.

  I gazed down into my own palm at the now familiar little triangle of dots.

  I was shocked speechless … I was obviously one of the Earth Prime three-dot escapees.

  But I finally pulled myself together, looked up at Tem, and asked: “I will regain my memory of everything about Earth Prime in the next few days?”

  “Yes, you will,” he said confidently. “I, too, originally came here as the first amnesiac for the electro-shock treatment, about three years ago. Ms. Jilly brought me. I’ve met and helped all of the others needing treatment since then …”

  He paused again, gathered his thoughts, and said: “We usually allow each amnesiac to regain some of his past naturally before explaining too much ahead of time. But you, Dar, are very special indeed. You see, the portal from Earth Prime ending here is imperfectly structured. It opens only sporadically about once every seven to eight weeks. There have actually been only twenty-five three-dot people teleported successfully here in three years. The trip has the disturbing amnesiac effect on about half of us—you, too, have experienced this blanking out of memory. We are not sure why.”

  He sucked in a deep breath, obviously deciding to continue his explanation. “You, Dar, are one of the group of theoretical physicists, all experts on extending quantum entanglement principles, who originally developed the teleportation portal. You have been sent here now to try to correct whatever is adversely affecting the exit portal in the Tenderloin of San Francisco and the disturbing effect on memories of some of the three-dot travelers. Open up the pipeline, so to speak. Not only to help more of our people to escape. But in large enough numbers to become influential here—eventually affect change environmentally and politically before it is too late for Earth. Do you understand your importance now?”

  I slowly nodded and rubbed my chin.

  What he said made perfect sense now; but me being an important Earth Prime scientist, the fate of the three-dot people and Earth in my hands—?

  Tem jumped up with a frown on his face, saying: “I have to go now, the new doctor is here. He does not like me.” He pointed back at the doorway, and quickly made his exit past the man in gray scrubs. “I will see you later.”

  The doctor made his way to where I was sitting. “Hello, Phil Shepherd, I’m Dr. Scott Berke.” In addition to a strong scent of aftershave, I detected the faint aroma of a rich cigar smoke.

  He reached down and turned over my right hand, shaking his head in a humorous, dismissive manner. “That is simply three dots from a ball point pen. It will easily wash off, as you will soon find out. Our Mr. Tem is a highly functioning paranoid schizophrenic suffering from a very detailed grand delusion. He infects some of our patients with his idée fixe, at least the ones who are amnesiac and come here for electro-shock treatment, like yourself.”

  “He’s only a patient here?” I blurted, finding it hard to believe that the fascinating and bright man I’d just met was crazy.

  “Yes, he’s relatively harmless, but a chronic case, I’m afraid. His delusional system quite unshakeable.” Dr. Berke smiled kindly. “I must admit that he tells a very convincing and plausible tale about an alternate Earth, and the three-dot people escaping to come here and help save us on Earth. Right?”

  I nodded absently, a number of vague questions trying to surface in my befuddled mind.

  Dr. Berke stood before I could ask anything more and said: “Get yourself ready by going to the bathroom and whatever else you might need to do, Phil Shepherd. A psych tech will be down in a few minutes to bring you up to surgery. We will begin your memory restoration treatment immediately.”

  I nodded and made my way to the restroom.

  I emptied my bladder and tried to scrub the fake tattoo from my palm, but with no initial luck. Someone must have used an indelible ballpoint pen on me, but who and when? I looked up at myself in the mirror. And what about Ms. Jilly? She knew Tem … and those other three-dot people? Were they all crazy, too, like Tem? But before I could think clearly about these or the other questions trying to surface in my mind, a male psych tech came into the rest room.

  He said: “Mr. Shepherd, I’m here to take you to surgery. Take these pills.” He handed me a paper cup to wash down the two pills.

  Everything is a vague swirl from that point in time …

  Eventually, I find myself wearing a backless hospital gown and situated on a gurney, wheeled into an operating room, drifting because of the preliminary drugs already administered by the tech …

  I look up at the five masked people bending over me in their dark gray scrubs, like wolves at a fresh kill. But I recognize Dr. Berke’s soothing voice, as he gently pats my chest with a gloved hand, peering down with his dark eyes, and saying: “You are going to be just fine now, Phil. No more worries about any of our friend’s silly delusions.”

  Then, he turns and announces: “Okay people, let’s prepare for a suborbital lobotomy.”

  I’m stunned, wanting to shout: No! Wait! But the drugs flooding through my veins are paralyzing my throat. My vision is beginning to blur.

  In a distant voice, the doctor says: “Nurse, yes, that one, the longest and sharpest probe.” As he turns toward the instrument nurse, I see the two tiny indigo dots behind his right ear lobe.

  I close my eyes, trying to regain my voice—

  “No, there will be no lobotomy today,” the instrument nurse replies sharply, still holding the probe.

  I blink.

  She is dropping her mask, as are the three others in gray scrubs tightly encircling the empty-handed assassin.

  Despite my blurry vision, I
recognize and grin at the four familiar faces: Flo-jo, Ms. Jilly, Kayle, and Tem.

  BLACK RIVER #2

  ELIZABETH MASSIE

  Sunlight drifts like dragonflies,

  Dragonflies drift like sun-dust;

  Tiny feet against tiny feet, eyes looking down to

  gaze at themselves upon

  My transparent skin.

  She kneels beside me, dark as Mother Earth,

  Sees her countenance in tiny whirlpools that

  catch and spin back.

  I watch as she touches her lips then the image of

  her lips, stirring silent ripples

  that in moments become nothing,

  While he studies the damp, sloping land,

  The trees and their axe-sharp shadows,

  Dead leaves tumbling in a warm wind,

  Looking over his shoulder, across my glistening shallows,

  Watching beyond tiny white flowers and

  White granite stones for peaked white hoods.

  He whispers, “We’s safe.”

  Next to her now, his blond hair sweat-plastered, sweet as summer,

  He pledges love in whispers so faint they are heard only by dragon-

  flies and sunlight;

  Their smiles mirrored, caught in my memory,

  Then swept away.

  SILVER THREAD, HAMMER RING

  GARY A. BRAUNBECK

  “I wish to offer a glorious crown for labors done, by singing the praises of him who descended into the darkness of the earth’s realm of shades … For the renown of noble deeds is a joy to those who have died.”

  ‒ Euripides, Heracles (352-356)