The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  I decided it was pointless trying to conceal it, so I said, “Wieder asked me questions about our relationship. And—”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Strange questions . . . He also asked me whether anybody had approached me about him and asked what you told me about the research the two of you are doing.”

  “Aha.”

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

  “What’s more, he insinuated that you might have been lying to me and that you went to New York for some other reason.”

  For a few moments she said nothing. Then she asked, “And you believe him?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know whether I have the right to question you about what you do or don’t do. You’re not my property, and I don’t think I’m a suspicious guy.”

  She was holding her cup between her palms as if it were a bird she was about to release.

  “All right, so do you want us to clear things up?”

  “Sure.”

  She put the cup on the table and turned off the TV. We’d agreed not to smoke inside the house, but she lit a cigarette. I regarded it as an exceptional circumstance, one in which the rules were momentarily suspended.

  “Right, let’s take things one at a time. When I moved here, it never even crossed my mind to embark on a relationship, either with you or with anybody else. At the end of my first year, I started seeing a guy majoring in economics. We spent the summer apart, since each of us went home. We picked up our relationship again in the fall, and for a while everything seemed good. I was in love with him, or so I thought, even if I was aware that the feeling wasn’t mutual—he was flighty, would never make any emotional commitment. I suspected he was seeing other girls, so I was angry at myself for tolerating it.

  “It was during that time that I started working for Wieder. At first, I was just a volunteer, the same as some twenty or thirty other students, but soon after we started to discuss his work, I think he grew to like me. I got involved at a higher level. I became a kind of assistant to him, if you will. The boyfriend I’ve been telling you about got jealous. He started to follow me and question me about my relationship with Wieder. The dean received an anonymous letter accusing me and the professor of being lovers.”

  “What was the guy’s name?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “His name’s Timothy Sanders. He’s still here, studying for a master’s. Remember when we were at Robert’s Bar, on Lincoln, right after we first met?”

  “I remember.”

  “He was there with a girl.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “After that letter to the dean, Wieder got mad. I was very eager to continue working with him, as I was already involved in his research program. It was my chance to make a career for myself in the field. I wasn’t going to let Timothy ruin that chance.

  “I confessed to Wieder that I had certain suspicions as to the sender of that letter. He made me promise to end my relationship with Timothy, which I’d been intending to do anyway. Timothy and I talked, and I told him that I didn’t want to go on seeing him. Ironically, it was only then that he seemed to genuinely fall in love with me. He followed me wherever I went and sent me letters with long sob stories, warning me that he was seriously thinking about ending his life and that I’d have to live with the guilt. He had flowers delivered to me at home and at school, and begged me to meet him for at least a few minutes. I kept my resolve and refused to talk to him. Wieder asked me once or twice whether the guy was still a part of my life, and he seemed to be satisfied when I told him that I’d broken up with Timothy for good and that whatever happened, I had no intention of changing my mind.

  “Then Timothy adopted a different tactic and started making veiled threats and dirty insinuations. He seemed completely obsessed. Once, I saw him hanging around outside Wieder’s house, sitting in his car, which was parked under the streetlight on the corner. He’s the reason I moved out of my old place and came here.

  “He vanished for a while, until I saw him again, as I told you, that evening at Robert’s. After that, he came up to me on campus, and I made the mistake of agreeing to have a cup of coffee with him. I was sure that he was okay with the fact that it was all over, given that he’d stopped harassing me.”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” I said, “but why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “I didn’t want trouble. Timothy wasn’t violent—he never once tried to hit me, so I didn’t feel like I was in any physical danger. And I doubt that the cops would have been very interested in some lovesick guy pining for a grad student, as long as he hadn’t broken the law. But after that coffee together, he started all over again. He told me that he was sure I still loved him and that I didn’t want to accept the idea, but sooner or later I’d realize it. That he’d been so upset when we broke up that he’d been going to therapy sessions in New York. I was worried he might come here and cause a scene, and that you’d get angry.

  “In short, I agreed to go with him to one of his therapy sessions, to demonstrate to the psychologist that I was a flesh-and-blood person and not some figment of his imagination, some kind of invented girlfriend, as he suspected the psychologist had begun to believe. That’s why I went to New York. He’d already found out my new address. After the visit to the psychologist, I met Dharma and spent the night at her parents’, like I told you. And that’s all. Timothy promised never to try to find me again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth? Wouldn’t it have been easier?”

  “Because I’d have had to tell you everything I’ve just told you, and I didn’t want to. That guy is nothing but a shadow from my past, and that’s where I want him to stay, with the other shadows. Richard, we all have things we’d rather forget about, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And things from the past shouldn’t be displayed in public for all to see, because sometimes their meaning is too complicated, and sometimes it’s too painful. More often than not, it’s best just to keep them hidden.”

  “And that was all? You went to the session, talked to the shrink, and then you each went your separate ways?”

  She looked at me in amazement.

  “Yes, I told you, that was all.”

  “And what did the doctor say?”

  “He’d been convinced that Timothy had been making up the whole story about our relationship. That this ex-girlfriend was a kind of projection he’d created for himself and that it probably didn’t have any connection with a real person named Laura. It all had something to do with him being brought up by a stepmother who didn’t love him, so he couldn’t bear the idea of being rejected. But why are you interested in all this crap?”

  It had grown dark outside, but neither of us got up to turn on the light. We were sitting in the shadows, like in a Rembrandt canvas entitled Laura Begging for Richard’s Forgiveness.

  I realized that I wanted her—I couldn’t wait to take her clothes off and feel her body next to mine—though at the same time I felt like I’d been lied to and betrayed. I was at a dead end, and I didn’t know how to move forward.

  “Did Wieder know about all this?” I asked. “Did he know the real reason you were going to New York?”

  She told me he did.

  “And why did he feel the need to alert me to it?”

  “Because that’s just what he does,” she snapped angrily. “Because he probably doesn’t like that we’re in a relationship. He might be jealous and couldn’t resist lighting a fuse, because that’s what he knows how to do best—to manipulate, to play with other people’s minds. I warned you that you don’t know what he’s really like.”

  “But you described him as a genius, a sort of demigod, and told me you’re good friends. Now—”

  “Well, it seems that sometimes even a genius can be a real jerk.”

  I knew I was taking an enormous risk by asking the q
uestion, but I went ahead regardless. “Laura, have you ever had a relationship with Wieder?”

  “No.”

  I was grateful that she gave me a straight answer, without any hypocritical indignation or the (almost) inevitable How could you even think such a thing?

  All the same, a few moments later she added, “I’m sorry such a thing crossed your mind, Richard. But given the circumstances, I understand.”

  “I was a little surprised to find out you have a set of keys to his house. Wieder told me.”

  “If you’d asked me, I’d have told you, too. It’s no secret. He’s all alone, doesn’t have a partner. A woman comes every Friday to do the cleaning, and a former patient of his who lives nearby goes over whenever he needs a handyman. He gave me a set of keys just in case. I’ve never used them so much as once, believe me. I’ve never been there when he wasn’t at home.”

  Her face was barely visible in the gloom of the living room and I wondered who Laura Baines really was, the Laura Baines I’d met just a few weeks before and about whom I ultimately knew nothing. Then I answered my own question: she was the woman I was in love with, and that was all that was really important.

  That evening, after we agreed never to talk about the incident again—I was young enough to make promises impossible to keep—Laura told me about the experiments Wieder was doing. Not even she knew all the details.

  The professor’s connections with the authorities had begun about seven years previously, when he’d first been called as an expert witness in a murder case. The accused’s attorney had insisted that his client couldn’t stand trial by reason of insanity. In such cases, explained Laura, a team of experts is assembled, and together they draw up a report on the mental state of the accused; the court then decides whether the defense attorney’s claim is justified or not. If the experts confirm that the accused is suffering from a mental illness that renders him incapable of understanding the nature of the charges against him, he’s committed to a forensic mental hospital. Later, at the request of the lawyer, the patient can be moved to a regular psychiatric hospital or even released, if the judge rules in his favor.

  Wieder, who was teaching at Cornell at the time, argued that a certain John Tiburon, age forty-eight, accused of murdering a neighbor, was faking amnesia, although the other two experts believed that he was psychotic, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and that his alleged memory loss was real.

  In the end, it was proven that Wieder was right. The investigators discovered a journal that Tiburon had been keeping, in which he described his deeds in great detail. The neighbor hadn’t been his only victim. Moreover, he’d been collecting information on the symptoms of various psychoses that might constitute grounds for acquittal. In other words, he’d made sure that in the event that he was caught, he’d be able to playact convincingly enough to persuade the experts that he was mentally ill.

  After that case, Wieder continued to be called upon as an adviser, and he became increasingly interested in studying memory and analyzing repressed memories, which were all the rage after the publication of Michelle Remembers, a book written by a psychiatrist and a supposed victim of satanic ritual abuse in childhood. Wieder examined hundreds of such cases, even using hypnosis to further his research. He visited prisons and forensic mental hospitals to speak to dangerous criminals and studied countless cases of amnesia.

  Finally, he reached the conclusion that certain instances of repressed memories, especially when a subject had suffered serious psychological traumas, occurred when a kind of autoimmune system kicked in—the subject quite simply erased the traumatic memories or sanitized them to make them bearable, the same way a white blood cell attacks a virus that has invaded the body. So, our brains are endowed with a recycling bin.

  But if such processes occurred spontaneously, might their mechanism be deciphered to allow it to be triggered and managed by a therapist? Because spontaneous triggering of the mechanism more often than not caused irreversible damage, and benign memories could be erased along with the traumatic ones, a patient’s attempt to evade the trauma would result in a new trauma that in some cases was greater than the original one. It’d be like solving the problem of an ugly scar or burn by cutting the whole arm off.

  Wieder continued his research, meanwhile moving to Princeton.

  It was there that he was approached by the representatives of an agency, as he’d mysteriously put it in a conversation with Laura, to become the supervisor of a program developed by that institution. Laura didn’t know anything more than that, but she suspected that the project involved erasing or “tidying up” traumatic memories suffered by soldiers and secret agents. Wieder was reluctant to talk about it. Things hadn’t been going smoothly, and the relationship between the agency men and the professor had grown tense.

  What she was telling me sent chills down my spine. It seemed strange to me to discover that what I believed to be indubitable pieces of reality might have been in fact just results of my subjective perspective about a thing or a situation. As she said, our memories were nothing but a kind of film reel that a skilled image editor could splice at will, or a kind of gelatin that could be molded into any shape.

  But Laura contradicted me.

  “Haven’t you ever had the impression that you’ve already experienced something—that you were in a particular place, for instance—and then you find out that you’d never been there but had just heard stories about it, like when you were a child? Your memory merely erased the recollection of your being told the story and replaced it with an event.”

  I told her that for a long time I’d thought I’d watched the 1970 Super Bowl on TV, that I’d seen the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings. But really, I’d only been four back then and had thought I’d seen it just because I’d heard Dad tell stories about that game so many times.

  “See? And a typical example is how hard it is for investigators to manage eyewitnesses’ statements. Most of the time, one eyewitness’s information contradicts another’s, even down to details that ought to be obvious: the color of the car that was involved in a hit-and-run accident, for example. Some say it was red, others are ready to swear under oath that it was blue, and in the end it turns out to have been yellow. Our memory isn’t a video camera that records everything that passes in front of the lens, Richard, but more like a screenwriter and director all rolled into one, a being that makes up its own movies from the snatches of reality.”

  I don’t know why, but I paid more attention than usual to what she said that evening. In the end, I couldn’t care less about what Wieder was up to. Though I did wonder whether she’d been telling the truth about Timothy Sanders.

  Laura had been right about the power of names, and that is why I can remember his almost thirty years later. I also wondered again that evening whether her relationship with the professor was strictly professional. Sexual harassment had become a fashionable subject in the 1980s, and universities were not immune to scandals. A mere accusation was sometimes enough to destroy a career, or at least cast suspicion on a professor. So I found it hard to believe that a figure of Wieder’s standing would be capable of risking everything for the sake of a sordid affair with a student, no matter how attracted to her he might be.

  I remember that that night we both slept on the couch in the living room, and that long after she’d fallen asleep I stayed awake, looking at her bared body, her long legs, the curve of her thighs, her straight shoulders. She was sleeping like a baby, with her fists clenched. I decided to believe her: sometimes we purely and simply need to believe that an elephant might be pulled out of a top hat.

  FOUR

  We spent Thanksgiving together. We bought a cooked turkey from a small family restaurant on Irving Street and invited a couple of fellow students over, friends of Laura’s. My brother, Eddie, was ill—he had a bad cold, and my mom had had quite a scare when she found him one morning in the throes of a high fever—and I spoke to them on the phone for over an hour, giving
them the news that I’d found a part-time job. Neither Laura nor I mentioned Timothy Sanders or Wieder. We stayed up until almost the next morning, having fun, and then we went to New York, where we spent the weekend at a small B&B in Brooklyn Heights.

  During the week that followed, I went to Wieder’s house twice, using the keys he’d left Laura, while he was on campus.

  I liked that quiet, spacious place; it was almost magical to somebody like me, who’d spent his entire life in dark, noisy hovels. The silence inside the house seemed almost unnatural, and the windows in the living room had a view of the lake. I could stand there for hours, looking at the outlines of the willows leaning over the water, the scene like a pointillist painting.

  I made a discreet survey of my surroundings.

  Downstairs there was a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a pantry. Upstairs there was the library, two bedrooms, another bathroom, and a dressing room large enough to be used as an additional bedroom when needed. In the basement there was a small wine cellar and a gym, with weights scattered on the floor. From the ceiling hung a red Everlast heavy bag, and a pair of boxing gloves dangled from a nail in the wall. The gym reeked of sweat and male deodorant.

  I’ve always been a bookish guy, so organizing Wieder’s library was more of a privilege than a job. The shelves were full of rare editions and titles I’d never even heard of. About half of them were medical, psychological, and psychiatric textbooks, but the rest were literature, art, and history. I worked out my time in such a way that half of it would remain for reading, as I doubted the professor would be willing to lend me any of his more precious volumes.

  The second time I was there that week, I took a short lunch break. Eating a sandwich I’d brought with me and gazing at the lake through the window, I realized that the house had a strange effect on me, just like its owner. It attracted and repelled me at the same time.