The Last Witness

by Jerry Amernic

  “I don’t know but I couldn’t catch my breath. Is that what caused this?”

  “What?” said the nurse.

  “The swastika?”

  He said it like a German.

  “The what?” the nurse said.

  “Swastika.”

  “What?”

  Jack looked at Hodgson.

  “He found it on the back of his door,” Hodgson told the nurse. “It was from Nazi Germany.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “It may have a lot to do with why Jack is here. It really upset him.”

  “Why?”

  Jack was hooked up to the monitor and the oxygen was connected to his nose, but Hodgson could still see the exasperation on his face.

  “It was a shock to his system,” Hodgson said.

  “That’ll do it every time,” said the nurse. “Any shock to your system could do it but it has to be a severe shock.” She spoke over her shoulder to another nurse standing behind her. “He seems to have no history of angina or angina pectoris but he does have a problem with high blood pressure.”

  “For a man his age that’s not bad,” the second nurse said.

  “Mr. Fisher.” The policewoman again. “The reason Lieutenant Hodgson and I are here is because of what you found on your door. Do you have any idea how it got there?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Look, Mr. Fisher,” she said. “I have to ask you a question and it’s not a question I want to ask you but I have to. You understand?”

  “What question?”

  She and Hodgson exchanged glances. “It isn’t possible that you put it there by any chance, is it?”

  Jack looked her in the eye. Even deeper than that. It penetrated.

  “What?” he said.

  “That you may have put it there yourself?”

  “Why would I put a swastika on my door?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. To make a point.”

  “To make a point? To make what point?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jack’s rage started boiling through the surface. “How could you say such a thing!” he said. “And to me of all people!”

  She put her hands up and said to calm down. He was getting flushed.

  “Don’t you understand that a swastika means murder and death and torture and millions of innocent people being exterminated like they were fleas? Why would I make a swastika?”

  She shrugged again, uncomfortable with his outburst.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fisher. I didn’t realize how strongly you would feel about this.”

  “You didn’t realize how strongly I would feel about this? Do you have any idea what the holocaust was all about?”

  “You mean the Great Holocaust?”

  “No I don’t mean the Great Holocaust! All holocausts are great or they wouldn’t be called holocausts! I’m talking about the Holocaust! Six million Jews!”

  Jack just glared at her.

  “Look,” she said. “I realize a lot of people have suffered at one time or another.”

  Hodgson broke in.

  “Jack,” he said, “no one came here to argue with you about what people know and don’t know. Kathy is a police officer and a highly respected person on the force. She’s a great cop.”

  “An expert interrogator?” Jack said. The sarcasm was thick.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Fisher,” she said.

  “I think she just apologized to you,” Hodgson said.

  Jack made a grudging sigh.

  “Look,” said Hodgson, “we don’t know exactly what happened to you yet but whatever it was got triggered by something.” The nurse who was attending Jack agreed. “And when you saw your door I can imagine how you felt.”

  “You can?”

  “Well …”

  “I was dreaming about Christine and it was a crazy dream. It was just the two of us. We were together. At Auschwitz.”

  “Where?” said the nurse.

  Jack was getting really frustrated now.

  “Jack, we told you what happened to her,” Hodgson said. “Remember? Christine I mean?”

  Jack’s head sank back into the pillow. He opened his eyes wide. Now he remembered. They found her at the bottom of the gorge.

  “I never told you something,” he said.

  “You never told me what?” said Hodgson.

  “She had Tay-Sachs disease.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a disease. A Jewish disease.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Another nurse was coming over.

  “Just a minute,” Hodgson told her. “Just a minute.” He leaned over Jack. “What are you talking about?”

  “It wears you down. There’s no cure.”

  “What do you mean a Jewish disease?”

  “Jews have it more than anyone else. Christine … comes from Jews.”

  Hodgson brought his face in closer. “Christine had a disease?” he said.

  Jack nodded.

  “What do you mean it wears you down? How?”

  Jack remembered the day he found out about it. It was a bad day. A terrible day. Ralph had phoned and told him and then there was a flurry of calls. Ralph. Bill. Bill’s daughter-in-law Emma, the nurse. She was the one who provided the details.

  “She was in her early twenties when she got it,” Jack said. “And it’s all my fault.”

  “What do you mean, Jack?”

  The nurse said they had to take him away for tests now, but Hodgson wanted more time.

  “You said it wears you down?” he said. “How?”

  “It wears down the muscles. It’s a progressive disease and there’s no cure. She had it. She got it in her early twenties. Right out of the blue. We had no idea. Lately it’s been getting worse.”

  Hodgson was saying something to his colleague Kathy, while the nurse standing behind them was growing impatient. Hodgson told her he still needed another minute with Jack.

  “Jack, listen to me. We didn’t know anything about Christine being sick. How come you never told us?”

  “She didn’t want people to know.”

  “So she had this disease and there is no cure? And it was getting worse?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was depressed about it?”

  Jack said she was.

  “You know they found her at the Elora Gorge.”

  Hodgson waited for Jack’s reaction, but then Jack already knew this. They had told him. Jack moved his head up and down. He knew.

  “It would appear that she fell,” said Hodgson. “That is … unless she didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean based on what you’re telling me now … maybe she didn’t fall.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Hodgson bit his lip. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “Maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe she jumped.”

  Jack shook his head. “No,” he said. “Christine would never do that.”

  “We have to consider every possibility.”

  “She would never do that! You don’t know her. Not Christine. Not in a million years would she do something like that!”

  He was shouting again and the nurse told him to calm down. She said they had to go. She got behind the bed and started wheeling Jack away, and as she did he lifted his head and turned to Hodgson.

  “Not in a million years would she do that! Not Christine.”

  32

  Jack didn’t know much about God when he was in the ghetto at Lodz and he didn’t know much about him at Auschwitz. When he was a little boy, the one thing evident about God was that he had been forsaken in such places and they were the only places Jack knew. His Aunt Gerda always mentioned God when she talked about her dead husband. “Yiskor Israel,” she would say. May God remember Israel. Jack was glad that God remembered his Uncle Israel because he didn’t. The man died of tub
erculosis. A lot of people died of it. They said Shmuel Zelinsky died of tuberculosis and so did Shimek’s grandfather and if people didn’t die from tuberculosis then they died from other diseases like dysentery or typhoid. But TB was the big one and whenever there was a death someone would mention God. Jack’s father would recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.

  “Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba.”

  It said how God was great and that he had created the world, but if the ghetto was the world he had created Jack didn’t see what was so great about him. Before going to Auschwitz they would celebrate the Sabbath every Friday night and every Friday night God was mentioned. “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha-olam.” God was blessed. King of the universe.

  Jack’s universe was the ghetto.

  When he found out about Christine’s Tay-Sachs disease, he didn’t resort to prayers or think about God except for maybe asking him why. What had she done to deserve this? Emma explained how the disease led to deterioration of the central nervous system. The symptoms could be everything from slurred speech to hand tremors to dizziness. No one noticed anything like that with Christine, but the doctor made his diagnosis and there was no doubt.

  They said Tay-Sachs was carried by one in every thirty Jews of Ashkenazi origin, those from eastern Europe. It appeared in little children, even babies, and sometimes it meant an early death. Late-Onset was rarer still. It had to do with chromosomes and a missing enzyme, but at least this type wasn’t fatal. You could learn to live with it. There was no cure, but one thing they did know for sure was that over time it would get worse.

  Sometimes Christine told Jack about it when she called or wrote. Not those crazy 3D things, but letters she would send him in the mail. She used to do that a lot before she got him that box. She said the first time she noticed anything was while teaching a history lesson at school. She was writing with an e-wand and then her hand started to shake and she dropped the wand. So she bent over to pick it up and her fingers wouldn’t move. After that there were little things. She would be talking to someone and miss a word or run into trouble with alliteration. Later still it started to affect her balance and it was all because of him. Jack. That was what he thought. He didn’t know it then, but he was a carrier of the disease, too, even though he didn’t have symptoms. But he was the one who had passed it on. It had to do with mutations in the genes. No other person in the family was affected. Only Christine.

  33

  Hodgson called the procedure a functional MRI and said it was becoming common in police investigations. He said Christine’s case was a natural for it because of the Elora Gorge. Christine had known about the gorge for a long time and so had Jack. They were both there when she was a little girl, and later Christine would go on her own when she was older. It was a place of retreat, so Hodgson wanted to know more about it, especially if there was a chance Christine committed suicide. He didn’t like that word – it was an ugly word – but a young woman was dead and police on both sides of the border were determined to find out what happened to her. That was when Hodgson asked Jack to take a brain scan.

  The way Hodgson explained it, many people had repressed memories. If someone was abused as a child, they might push it from their mind to the point where they no longer remembered, but technology was showing that such memories could be hidden, lurking in the deep recesses of the brain. A functional MRI could reveal what they were.

  “We know the brain can block an unwanted memory,” Hodgson said. “There is a biological basis for it. By stimulating your memory we can sometimes jolt your subconscious into recalling something you may have forgotten. It could help us learn what happened to Christine.”

  “Will it hurt?” Jack asked and Hodgson said no.

  After it was confirmed that Jack had not suffered a heart attack, Hodgson got the go-ahead. Doctors at the hospital said Jack was under stress, that he should try and relax, but the police had unfinished business and Jack was still the only person Christine had contacted.

  St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York had an fMRI machine. It stood for functional magnetic resonance imaging. After signing the consent form, Jack had to empty his pockets, take off his shoes and remove anything with metal – his watch, his wedding ring, his glasses, his belt. He was asked if he had seen a dentist recently for dental implants and he said no. He was given paper slippers for his feet. Then Hodgson and a woman named Fatma – Jack had never heard such a name before – led him down a hospital corridor to a room housing the fMRI machine. Hodgson said Fatma was the technician who would operate the scanner. Jack asked her what kind of name that was and she said it was Egyptian, and that she had studied at Alexandria University before coming to the United States. When they got to the room with the scanner, they met someone else.

  “This is Dr. Jordan,” Hodgson said. “He’s a psychologist with St. Vincent’s and he also teaches at Columbia. We’re lucky to have him. He knows a lot about the brain.”

  “Hello,” said Jack. “Are you a medical doctor?”

  “No,” was all the man said.

  Then they got down to business. Hodgson explained that once inside the scanner, Jack would be subjected to stimulation. Those were the words he used. Subjected to stimulation. Jack would see and hear things, and all the while his brain would be scanned as he reacted, and it would only take fifteen minutes. But Jack couldn’t wear his glasses because the machine worked with magnets, and metal was taboo.

  “I can’t see too well without my glasses,” Jack said.

  “You’ll have to do what you can,” Jordan said. He said anything Jack saw would be displayed through a mirror reflection of images inside the scanner and anything he heard would be magnified by headphones. Once the headphones were applied, Jordan and Fatma helped Jack onto the long platform that fed into the scanner. They put him on his back, making sure his head and body were secure.

  “You understand why we’re doing this?” Jordan said.

  “To see if there’s anything I know about Christine that I forgot,” said Jack.

  “That’s right. You know how it works?”

  Jack had no idea.

  “We take brain imaging scans and then identify the neural systems that suppress memory.”

  “That means you read my mind?”

  “Something like that.”

  The long platform carried Jack into the big donut hole inside the scanner. It was dark. The machine began to whir and the next thing Jack knew he was looking at a photograph of the Elora Gorge. It wasn’t sharp – he didn’t have his glasses – but he recognized it. There was the river with the rushing water and a few seconds later something else – a photo of the rapids where the river breaks into two streams. He recognized that, too. Then it stopped being a photo and the water started to move and everything came to life. There was the waterfall with all the rocks at the bottom and even sound. Jack could see the water and hear it.

  Then Christine appeared, first in a photo as a little girl, then in another photo as a teenager, then yet another one when she was older and this time she was waving. And moving! She had come to life! She was waving at him and talking. He could hear her voice.

  “Hi Dad! Hi Mom! Hi Grandma and Grandpa! Hi Jack!”

  The power of this strange machine suddenly dawned on Jack. It was something that could tear his heart out, and the more he saw and heard the less aware he was of being inside the machine at all.

  Then there were more photos with different angles of the Elora Gorge and an aerial shot that made it look huge and then everything began to move. For all he knew, Jack was standing right at Lover’s Leap looking over the edge. There was Eve talking and waving with Christine, the menacing gorge behind them, and Christine was just a little girl. She was talking about getting up on that railing. No don’t do that, Jack wanted to say. Only the birds can do that. Suddenly, Jack felt his whole body shift forward. Eve and Christine were getting further and further away from him.

  “Come back! Come back!” he cried.
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br />   The next thing he knew there was bright light everywhere and he was staring into the face of Jordan.

  “Mr. Fisher?”

  “What? What? Where are they? What happened to them?”

  “They were only pictures. And a video. You were watching a video.”

  “That was a video?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack collected himself. It was like waking from a dream. He stared at the ceiling and blinked. His eyes were wet.

  “There was significant alteration in the neural circuitry linking the prefrontal cortex to the hippocampus. Especially with that last one.”

  It was Jordan’s voice.

  “Are you all right, Jack?”

  Hodgson.

  Jack had tears in his eyes.

  “Are you all right, Jack?”

  Hodgson’s face was looking down at him.

  “What?” said Jack.

  “Are you okay?”

  Then he realized where he was. The machine. They had pulled him out.

  “Was that fifteen minutes?” Jack said. “It didn’t seem like fifteen minutes.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Hodgson. “We’re not finished yet. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

  Hodgson had a damp cloth in his hands and wiped Jack’s brow. “That was quite an experience for you, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Jack. “It’s kind of tight in there but you forget all about it when you see the pictures. And the video. You forget about everything.”

  Now Jordan was talking to Hodgson and the Fatma woman. He said something about voluntary memory suppression and the right frontal cortex and other things Jack didn’t understand.

  “Did you learn anything about me?” Jack said, looking up at him. He was still on his back on the platform.

  “Possibly,” said Jordan, his face buried in his mini.

  Hodgson said they were going to put Jack back in, but this time they would show him other things. He said some of them might be disturbing, but the whole point was to study how he reacted and try to get at those suppressed memories.

  “Are you ready?” Hodgson said.

  The machine started to whir and the long platform carried Jack back inside again. The first picture he saw was an old black-and-white photo. Jack didn’t have his glasses and had to squint, but then it got clearer. A German soldier had his arm raised and people were piling furniture onto the road. Jack thought it was the Lodz ghetto. The next photo was also black and white. Two German soldiers were kicking a man in the street and the soldiers were laughing. Then there was a photo of children begging in a laneway. The one after that was grainy and hard to make out, but it was a crude caricature of an unshaven man with a bulbous nose, and below it the German words Wer beim Juden kauft ist ein Volksverrater.