by Skyler White
“Delusion is different from memory,” he noted neutrally.
“But would a delusion or a false memory create a similar memory trace?” Ms. Wright leaned forward until the table pressed into her silk-clad arms. She reminded Dominic of a puppet, the way her upright body leaned and turned without ever releasing her hands from their place beneath the table.
“Delusions are thought disorders, but there’s certainly a larger confabulatory component to memory than courtroom lawyers would like us to know about.” Dominic grasped for levity but missed. “And we remember the past and imagine the future from subsystems of the same core network.”
Ms. Wright’s wealth and influence were massive. She leaned her tailored torso against the table, and the gravity of her power inexorably drew Dominic toward her, accreting his intellectual prowess and scientific skill to her private purpose. Eager to capitalize on this first sign of interest, Dominic dug into his private research for an illustration, and whether low blood sugar, the adrenal burst of grant money slipping away, or the manifest failure of his endocannabinoid experiment was to blame, made the only reckless mistake of his logical, calculated adult life.
“Now this isn’t neuroscience, just psychiatry, but let’s take, for example, an outgoing, imaginative child who believes in monsters,” Dominic extemporized. “Maybe this girl is involved in a traumatic car accident. Her parents are killed, and she is thrown from the car.” Now he had Madalene riveted. “The child recovers physically, but the emotional pain is so severe that she begins to dissociate. She might pretend to be incapable of suffering.” Madalene nodded encouragement. “The girl might start to believe she’s a monster and responsible, somehow, for the death of her parents.”
Madalene was pale, and even dull Harold looked alert. Dominic’s rouge imagination stretched itself. “The little girl, guilty and frightened, remembers being thrown from the car and the taste of blood, and she imagines herself a powerful, flying, insensate monster.”
“A vampire…” Madalene whispered.
“Sure,” Dominic took the suggestion readily. “This confabulation, tied to a trauma-related identity disruption, could become so foundational to her self-image that she might lose her ability to taste food. She starts sleeping in a coffin, develops a phobia of mirrors or crosses or wooden stakes, and becomes immune to physical pain, all in service to this explanatory story that helped her escape intolerable suffering as a child.”
“That’s nuts.” Harold collapsed back into his cushioned chair. “Immune to physical pain? Bullshit.”
“Actually, pain insensitivity in patients with psychosis isn’t unusual.” Dominic dissected a miniature quiche, sheltering in the formal, clinical language of his work like a eunuch in a power suit. He was rattled. What was the cost, he wondered, of having fallen within Madalene Wright’s heady orbit, her public event horizon?
“In fact,” he lectured Harold, “schizophrenic patients have died from a common side effect of clozapine without ever complaining of pain from the constipation that killed them.”
The fat man shuddered, and Madalene’s hovering assistant flock seemed to sink, their wings weighted by such unspeakable language.
“Schizophrenics can hear things that aren’t there, but can’t feel things that are,” Ms. Wright quipped.
“Something like that.” Dominic returned her intelligent smile. He could not tell how old she was. Her lineless face, the territory of age, from which all landmarks had been removed, was taut with surgery and glistened with unguents.
“I would like to speak privately with Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
To cover the turbulence this announcement caused in her support staff field, Ms. Wright sacrificed a secret. She reached a jeweled hand across the table and poured herself a cup of tea. Dominic repaid the confidence by looking away. Her hands would betray her age. He did not even steal a glance.
When the lumbering son, the secretaries, the waiters, and their minions had all dissolved, Madalene leaned toward Dominic again, eyes twinkling. “You’ll have to excuse Harry. He has what I call ‘chauffeured child syndrome.’ ”
“He’s been driven all his life?”
“That is correct. He has no drive of his own at all.” Madalene made a subtle beckoning gesture toward the back of the dining room. “While you, I hear, walked to our little rendezvous.”
“The convention hotel is just on the other side of the hill,” Dominic shrugged. A waiter materialized beside them.
“Bring me your best Syrah and whatever Chef Humm feels Dr. O’Shaughnessy might enjoy with it.” The waiter vanished. “We’re alone, Dominic. No need to stand on formality. I’m sure your mother would say exactly the same as I.”
“My mother,” Dominic said with complete sincerity, “has never said anything remotely similar to anything you’ve said tonight, Ms. Wright.”
“Call me Madalene.”
She acknowledged the arrival of the sommelier, whose experienced hands trembled with the honor of serving such a bottle to such a patron. His private ecstasy shone undarkened by the cloud Dominic had conjured of everything unspoken between a parent and a child. Madalene savored a sip.
“For such an energetic and ambitious young man, you have extraordinary tact. I can see why Dysart dispatched you in his stead.”
“I wasn’t aware that you and the professor knew one another.”
“I know him as one knows anyone to whom one entrusts a significant sum.”
The woman seated across from him had the kind of money that could open almost any door and discover any secret. Dominic reached for his wine, but stopped himself. He would not betray his discomfiture, despite a mouth of sand and stone. He was well trained against acting on impulse. Reason and science revealed the correct path, not instinct. He needed to think.
Madalene’s expensive face gave nothing away. “Let us just say there are questions I would be interested to hear you address,” she said. “But this is not the time.” She raised her glass. “To the present,” she toasted. Dominic gratefully mirrored the gesture and drank.
“Herb-roasted Saddle of Elysian Fields Farm Lamb with Gnocchi à la Parisienne,” murmured the starched gentleman who appeared on Dominic’s left. For a moment, the underpinnings of Dominic’s world loosened. Whispered descriptions and artfully arranged plates swirled and eddied. When the human tide receded, Dominic glanced up at Madalene again.
“You have quite a feast there, Dominic. May I suggest that you dig in?”
Dominic happily complied.
“I am prepared to write six- and seven-digit checks beginning tonight and proceeding indefinitely, if you can convince me that your research is applicable to my needs.”
Dominic glanced up, but returned his gaze to his lamb at once.
“Don’t misunderstand me.” Madalene continued, “I am interested in the public weal, but I have a very specific personal interest in your work as well. A very private personal interest. Do you understand?”
Dominic rested his knife on his plate’s edge. He met Madalene’s piercing eyes and nodded.
“I suspect you have some skill with secrets?” Although pronounced like a question, Dominic recognized the threat.
“You have already complimented my tact.” He reclaimed his utensils meticulously and began to eat.
“Let us return, for a moment, to your illustrative example of the unfortunate child who is thrown from a car and subsequently cherishes the delusion that she is a vampire. Could you, conceivably, surgically or medically remove that memory?”
“Theoretically, in time, if we’re right. If a memory is made with a specific network of neurons, and we can parse out which neurons are involved in a given memory, and selectively delete those specific neurons, then yes, we’re talking about memory erasure.”
“And if you were able to pinpoint and remove the memory of the accident, would that destroy the vampire delusion?”
Why did Madalene keep returning to his ludicrous vampire example? Way to go, D. Couldn�
�t have used alien abductions or dead presidents, could you?
“Ms. Wright, I think I chose a poor example.”
“And I think you chose an uncanny one. What do you know about Renfield’s Syndrome, Dominic?”
Dominic registered the familiar constellation of sensations that indicated activation of the sympathoadrenal system’s four Fs: fright, flight, fight, and sex, the old neuroscience joke went. She had lured him with his department’s financial future and snared him with his personal past. Rage pricked Dominic, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. “Why do you ask?” he said with brutal neutrality.
They eyed each other, the tea twisting in his stomach. Dominic felt his center of gravity drop, his weight collapsing in on itself, as his mind prepared for combat.
“Empty your mind, be formless, be shapeless,” a nasal whisper hummed below the conscious level of thought. “The hands do not leave the heart. The elbows do not leave the ribs.”
“My goddaughter is ill.” Ms. Wright interrupted the instructions Dominic dully realized had been thought in the Yueh dialect of Mandarin. “A few years ago, I moved her to New York to be with me. Now she spends all her time, and a good deal of my money, in the city’s goth bars and boutiques.”
Dominic relaxed. This wasn’t about him, only another of his bizarre coincidences. A warm relief bathed him. He took another sip of wine.
“At the moment,” Madalene continued, “the tabloids are treating it like a fashion statement and a novelty. They’re having quite a lot of fun with the ‘virgin vamp.’ But I’ve spoken to her, and I’m afraid it’s quite a bit more serious than lifestyle. She believes she is a vampire.”
Madalene shuddered imperceptibly. Dominic picked up his knife again to spare her the discomfort of being observed. His appetite had recovered from the terror that had momentarily killed it. His body was still a young man’s.
“She, of course, doesn’t recognize this as a delusion. I’ve tried to convince her to seek help, but she’s not interested. She’s convinced that she was born this way—a sanguinarius she calls herself!
“I need you to learn as much as you can about this sort of delusional thinking and use all your research and science to develop a treatment. I’m happy to support whatever additional research MIT wants to pursue simultaneously in order keep the vampire component invisible to the media, but Dominic, I can’t run the risk of dying while my only two heirs are both insane.”
Dominic drained his glass. Poor Madalene, it must be terrible to lose a child to madness. He had, at least, spared his mother that.
“And her parents?”
“They died some time back. I adopted her to solve inheritance difficulties. I would like to write two checks tonight, Dominic.” Madalene was more beautiful as a suffering mother than she had been all night, through her various incarnations as aging socialite and influential power broker. “I would like to underwrite Dysart’s new Brain and Memory Lab, and I would like to fund some fieldwork. We must start with clinical and laboratory studies right away.
“You will need research subjects, but you cannot recruit in New York or Boston. Any hint that my money is at work in that subculture would risk undoing the progress I’ve made reestablishing a relationship with the child. There are one hundred and thirty-eight so-called vampire covens in the states, and only twelve in Western Europe, so I think the UK might be the best place to acquire test subjects for our purposes. You would have to contend with a language barrier anywhere else. Or do you speak French?”
“Yes, but Madalene, I’m not a sociologist. I’m not even a trained clinical psychiatrist. I’m a researcher, a scientist. I work with brain chemistry, neurons—the tiniest parts of people. I would be a terrible choice for fieldwork.”
“And yet you are my choice.”
A soundless beauty surfaced to refill his wine glass, and retreated into the dark periphery of the dining room. Could it be that his recent experimentation with dopamine reuptake had raised his monoamine oxidase levels enough to decrease risk-aversion? He was stronger now than when he first dropped out of school at eighteen to chase memories he thought he had of an ancestral home, but was he actually considering, for Christ’s sake, re-exposure to Ireland’s insanity and hell?
“London has six covens, the highest concentration of such places.”
“Ireland might be better,” Dominic said softly. If he could study the institution and its inhabitants clinically and dispassionately, if he could stay sane in that insane place, then he would know—and perhaps, for the first time since he turned thirteen, really know—that he was not ill. That he would not be a danger to anyone he loved.
“I have people in Dublin,” Madalene said.
“The place I’m considering is not in Dublin,” Dominic answered. “And it would require me to check myself into the asylum of an eccentric, aging billionaire. As a patient.”
“An asylum?” Madalene smiled. “That’s a very old-fashioned word.”
“It’s an old-fashioned place. The hotel—that’s what he calls the place, ‘the Hotel of the Damned’—is literally underground, and everyone is required to profess some sort of terrible ancient curse to gain admittance. I’m not at all certain I could even get in there again.”
Madalene was too skillful to show surprise, but her momentary silence betrayed her. “This is very interesting. You’re already familiar with a remote society of vampires so well hidden even I have not learned of its existence?”
Divining that he wouldn’t eat again that night, a legion of waiters swept plates, glasses, and crumbs from the table. In the few seconds it took them to return the pristine tablecloth to an unbloodied battlefield between him and a woman who unbalanced him like nobody since his last visit to Ireland, a cold, sober certainty seized Dominic. No amount of expensive wine or false fund-raising confidence could shield him from the full biochemical cascade preparing him to fight or run away.
“Not all the residents are vampires,” he said. “And my association with the hotel is years out of date. It may have closed. I haven’t kept in touch—”
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, you’re prevaricating. It’s decided. Dysart will get his new laboratory, international press, and a chance to make a significant difference in the lives of others. I will rest more easily knowing that everything in my power is being done to help a child who is like a daughter to me, and you, Dominic, will have landed a tremendous fund-raising coup. Don’t think that won’t be a factor when you apply for tenure.” Madalene held his eyes and took a deliberate drink from her glass. “I’m curious,” she said. “What ‘terrible ancient curse’ did you invent to gain admittance?”
“I cobbled reincarnation to the Prometheus story, except my progenitor stole not fire, but pattern recognition.”
Madalene laughed, a pleasant, honest sound. “Dominic”—she shook her elegant head—“ever the scientist.”
“I guess so. I claimed to be from a race of titans who gave humanity the ability to see the kind of patterns that make constellations out of stars. The recognition that showed us that all living things die, and, if we are alive, we will surely die.”
Madalene’s smile wavered.
“So as punishment for introducing mortals to their mortality, my race lives and dies and is reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. At adolescence the memories of all our past lives wake up and we start experiencing the horror of the never-ending cycles of living and dying, of loving and losing, keeping forever, lifetime after lifetime, the memory of every lost love, every past death.”
Madalene looked at Dominic from eyes that could see into horror. “And now you are going back for me.”
“Let me make myself clear, Ms. Wright…” Dominic’s fingers reached for the strap of his shoulder bag beneath the table.
“Let me be clearer, Dominic.” Madalene’s keen eyes shot into the dark reaches of the room and returned to hold his. “I have told two people about my predicament—my personal psychiatrist and you,” she said. “I have no intention of t
elling another soul. You must go back to Ireland. It is the only way that I can keep my secrets”—Madalene Wright stood—“and that you, dear boy, may do the same.”
Madalene’s tribe of aides materialized around her. Tibby, slipping her fingers into the hollow of Dominic’s elbow propelled him behind the exiting retinue. At the very spot where Megan had picked him up, Tibby released him.
“Here’s my card, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.” The pretty foundation secretary smiled, but when Dominic couldn’t make his fingers take the paper rectangle, she slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Ms. Wright departs in the morning. You can call me anytime between now and nine tomorrow morning. I’m very glad you’ve signed on to help the Wright Foundation.”
“I haven’t signed anything.”
The girl smiled indulgently. “Are you always so literal, Doctor?”
3
SAUCE TO MEAT
With their painted-on pentagrams and plastic skulls, these vampire metal bars still mirror the introverted nature of the genuine beast. Elaborately dressed, artfully constructed presentations of personality, every one of us here eats alone. Vampires are inherently solitary creatures.
“Everyone you don’t love tastes the same,” I complain to Evelyn.
Maria will have been picked up from beneath the overpass by now and taken back to the Quarry’s recovery lab for an infusion and a snack. I’ve come to one of the city’s darker bars for much the same, hoping to lose the fresh pain of isolation in the familiar curse of family.
“Subtext is flavor,” Evie says and yawns. She slips her arm through mine, cuddling on the nightclub’s wretched sofa in a grotesque of sisterly affection. Bold glances cling to her every movement, but courage extends no further. No one meets our eyes or approaches. Every vampire is an exhibitionist, but between the Internet and reality TV, voyeurs are increasingly absorbed in other fare. When money and time are inexhaustible, attention is the only commodity left. I’ll trade my vain sister a little of mine so she’ll owe it to me to listen to my new despair.