Did I think I could tolerate such pain to protect Michael?
My mind raced back to prior experiences of pain. One had occurred a couple of months before my first trip to visit Elio in Amsterdam. Lily and I had been playing near Carlos and his crew while they removed extraneous shoots and leaves from vines when I’d stepped barefoot onto a splinter of glass. I limped home, bloodied and crying, into Grandpa’s arms. He carried me to the kitchen, sat me in a chair, examined the bottom of my foot, then calmly said, “There’s a piece of glass lodged in your foot. I’ll remove it, and then you’ll be fine. But first, I’d like to talk with you a little about strategies for dealing with pain.”
He looked at me with a silence that indicated I’d have to stop crying before he would proceed. I did, and he began by saying that soon I would be visiting Elio and that I probably would be meeting some of Elio’s friends. He said it had been his experience that boys often feel uncomfortable around girls who cry easily and freely.
This issue of dealing with pain is not a trifling matter, he said, for as I would discover, life is full of pain. Surely I didn’t think the best strategy for dealing with something so common was to scream and cry and run away from it, did I?
“No, I don’t, Grandpa,” I answered, wiping away the last trace of wetness from my eyes.
“Good. Then this is what you do: Don’t try to distance yourself from painful sensations. Go to them. Let them fill you just as you do the minor pains that parade through you during meditation. Become their friend. Accept their heat, their sting, their insistence. They will let you feel them and tame them, and then they will pass, just as they do during meditation.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Now, I’m going to wash your cut and take out the piece of glass. Either I can eliminate the pain by applying a local anesthetic before I start, or you can begin to learn a new way of dealing with pain. Your choice.”
I thought quickly of Elio. I certainly did not want him to feel uncomfortable around me, a girl, because I cried too easily.
“I want to learn.”
Grandpa smiled. “All right. Go first to your breathing. Anchor yourself there, in your breath. Then let the pain in your foot enter your consciousness. Accept the pain. Know that it’s your friend. It’s only there to help you, to make you aware that your foot should be attended to. Nod when you are ready.”
I focused on my breathing and accepted the sting in my foot. Then I nodded for him to proceed.
“Good,” Grandpa said. “Be careful not to jerk while I’m working.”
At first there were a couple of involuntary jerks—followed by his silent, raised eyebrows—but I kept calming myself and trying to accept my difficult new friends, the painful sensations.
Now, six years later, there was a new job to be performed. Would I be able to tolerate the much greater pain of this algetor thing to protect Michael?
“Yes,” I said, feeling both determined and apprehensive.
“I’m glad you think so. And you’re probably right. But ‘probably’ isn’t good enough when it comes to protecting Michael’s life. We have to make every effort to be certain.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Indeed I can. For you, it will be easy. You are young, and you already are able to dissociate to an unusual degree the conscious parts of your mind from the parts processing sensory inputs and emotional responses.”
Grandpa was referring to my ability to relive past events at will, even more vividly when I was a young girl, it seems, than I can now. I’d simply focus on the gray outline of a remembered scene, or on the sound of a word someone had spoken, or on the prick or tingle of a sensation, and then, suddenly, the wispy gossamer of memory would flash into bright realism and I’d experience the remembered event almost as if it were happening anew.
“You mean my daydreams will seem even more real?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Your daydreams are already quite real enough. Our purpose in having you learn to dissociate yourself from sensory inputs is so that you can block out the words, threats, and pain that might be used in an attempt to force open the doors to your mind where Michael’s secret lives.”
Grandpa sighed. When he resumed speaking, all enthusiasm had drained from his voice. “The second step necessitates your having to work, at your own pace, with an algetor.”
“You can get one?”
“No. I’ll have to make one. I evaluated several designs a few years ago. When I evaluated them, I learned how they work. I should be able to recreate one here for you to use. It’ll take a little time to get some of the components, quietly, without raising suspicion. In the meanwhile, I’ll teach you how to hypnotize yourself. Would you like me to hypnotize you so you can see what it’s like?”
“Right now?”
“Yes. It’ll be easy for you. I’m quite certain of that. And you’ll enjoy it.”
He told me to remember everything he was about to say and do, and everything I was about to feel as he took me through a standard protocol of hypnotic suggestions developed to assess hypnotic responsiveness. He had me relax the muscles in my right foot, then, in order, my right leg, left foot and leg, right hand, right arm, left hand and arm. On his suggestion, my legs and arms became heavy. My shoulders, neck, and head relaxed and also became heavy. I sank more deeply into the chair, as if I were drowsy, but I remained alert to what he was saying. He had me count slowly down from five, telling me that with each number I spoke I would become ever more relaxed and that when I reached one, nothing would disturb me.
“Two, one…” He was right: The relaxation I felt at that moment was deeper than any I’d experienced. It seemed limitless and blissful. I felt as though I was nothing more than an aware conduit for Grandpa’s suggestions.
He told me to stretch out my arms and hands in front of me. He said there was a force pushing my hands together—and an irresistible force did just that. He said my arms were becoming so heavy I could no longer hold them up—and they sank, leaden, onto my lap. He said Lily was there just as she had been when I was three—and she was there: a soft, white, whimpering bundle of love I cuddled and petted while she tickled my cheek with her wet little nose and breathed on me her milky puppy breath.
Over the next few days, Grandpa taught me how to induce the hypnosis myself. He told me to pick an image I found relaxing, focus on it, then count down from five, progressively becoming more relaxed and more focused on the image and my breathing until, at the count of one, everything except the image and my breathing was gone.
The relaxing image I chose was of a grape leaf, one with an intricate pattern of venation as seen from below while it floated green and carefree in a deep blue sky frosted with cirrus clouds. This was no ordinary grape leaf; it was a huge magic leaf that during many of my daydreams had swooped down out of a mare’s-tail sky to carry me off across the vineyards, across the Sierra Nevadas, over the Rockies and the checkerboard garden of the Midwest, across the wide ocean and green England, and in through Elio’s open bedroom window. From there, he and I had zoomed and floated and fluttered, peeking our heads out over the leaf’s edges to see the Alps, the Bosporus, and the Himalayas before returning to Amsterdam as the time for Aunt Lynh to return home from work drew near.
After only a couple of weeks’ practice, I was able to go from normal consciousness to self-induced hypnosis in less than ten seconds. When fully hypnotized, awareness of my breathing—slow, deep, and relaxed—was the only salient thing in my consciousness. I could hear Grandpa and was aware of what he was doing, but such awareness seemed faint and disconnected from me.
Before the algetor was completed, Grandpa tested my reactions to various stimuli. In one test, I submerged my hand and forearm into a tub of ice water. Without hypnosis, I managed the pain, which became fairly intense within a minute, by focusing on the stinging and aching sensations and treating them as harmless, interesting curiosities, just as Grandpa had taught me to do years before. But with self-induced hypnos
is, my experience of the ice water was different. I was aware that my arm had been placed in cold water, but I was only vaguely aware of the stinging and aching sensations, which seemed not to be affecting my arm but rather someone else’s arm that had been submerged in the water.
I asked Grandpa whether there wasn’t a contradiction between what he’d taught me before—to go to the painful sensations and experience them fully—and what he was trying to teach me with hypnosis: to dissociate myself from the sensations of pain. He said that though the lessons taught two distinct methods of dealing with pain, the lessons were complementary, not contradictory. He reminded me that our bodies had evolved in a world devoid of man-made optical illusions and pain inducers, just as the ideas of Newtonian mechanics had evolved in an experiential world devoid of extremely small objects moving at extremely high speeds; and that just as Newtonian theory had failed for the extremely small and the extremely speedy, so our senses and emotions failed in many artificially imposed conditions.
He had me read a passage on reflex actions from Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:
I put my face close to the thick glassplate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.
Grandpa explained that Darwin’s experience with the puff adder presented an example of how our evolved senses and emotive systems deform heights, widths, distances, light intensities, and dangers, leading us humans to misconstrue reality and sometimes to take inappropriate and potentially dangerous actions.
“What would have happened to poor Mr. Darwin,” Grandpa asked, “had there been an exposed high-voltage wire a meter behind him as he faced the puff adder with his firm determination not to jump back from what he knew to be illusory danger?”
“That would have been bad.”
“Yes. Probably his widow and fatherless children would have preferred he face the terrible snake with a self-hypnotic suggestion not to jump back, rather than with his feeble determination.”
“Didn’t Darwin know about hypnosis?”
“I don’t know whether he did. But we do, and we can put that knowledge to good use. The algetor will be complete in two or three days. Remember, it’s nothing more than a sophisticated producer of illusions. A special helmet will cover your head so that you’ll be able to see and hear only what the operator of the algetor wants you to see and hear. Various parts of your body will be wrapped in banded strips of microsensors and stimulators. You’ll be told that unless you talk, the knife with the sharp, cold blade scraping over your leg will be jabbed deep into your thigh and twisted mercilessly. You’ll feel the cold, hard steel on your thigh. You’ll feel its sharp edge. You’ll be ordered to answer, but you’ll remain silent. Then you’ll experience excruciating pain as the large blade dives into your thigh.”
I felt my eyes widen as the story came to life in my mind.
“What will you do then?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “Nothing. The knife won’t be real. I’ll know it's just an illusion. I’ll only feel sensations, harmless sensations merely imitating sensations of hardness, sharpness, and cold. I’ll see the grape leaf floating in the sky and call it to me, counting five, four, three, two, one, and I’ll fly away from the painful sensations on the wings of the leaf.”
“Amazing!” Grandpa exclaimed. “An eleven-year-old girl foils the great algetor! What a shame I won’t be able to show this to certain people at the CIA.”
Before Grandpa attached me for the first time to the algetor, he told Michael to go to his room and close the door. Grandpa said he didn’t want Michael to become frightened by seeing or hearing me in pain, illusory or not. After Michael left, Grandpa pulled a small knife out of the pocket of his kimono, unfolded the blade from its handle, and said, “I thought we would start with a little knife blade and work our way up, if that is all right with you.”
“You’re not going to stick me with any knife, so you can make it as big as you want.”
“Do not be so sure what I’ll do when you’re all bound up in electrodes and you can’t see through the helmet covering your eyes,” he said, pretending to be menacing.
“You can’t fool me!”
On went the helmet, and on went sticky strips along the back of my neck, down my spine, and around my right thigh.
He told me not to hypnotize myself for this first session.
“Do you feel the cold blade flat against your thigh?” he asked.
“No.”
“What do you feel?”
“Just a cold, metallic sensation.”
“Do you feel the sharp point of the knife digging into but not yet breaking your skin?”
“No.”
“What do you feel?”
I hesitated, trying to resist his suggestion. “Sensations of pressure and sharpness.”
“Do you feel the sharp edge of the blade about to cut through your skin?”
“No.”
“What do you feel?”
I hesitated again. “A sensation, as if a sharp edge were pressing against my leg.”
There was a short silence.
“Ow! Grandpa, be careful! You cut me!”
No sooner had I finished exclaiming those words than I became aware of an internal struggle. Part of me was still recoiling in absolute certainty that I had just been cut by the knife, while another part of me began lecturing on the high probability that I’d been fooled.
“Oh, sorry,” I heard Grandpa say. “Let’s take a look at that cut.”
He took off the helmet. I saw a black band covering the area of my perceived cut. He unfastened the band, exposing what appeared to be my uncut thigh.
Then my fingers reported agreement with my eyes.
“Let’s do it again,” I said, perplexed and unhappy with my first reaction.
We did it again. And again. And again. But I couldn’t stop feeling the knife slicing into my skin. I knew there was no knife, yet I felt a sharp, cold edge press down and then begin to slide along my thigh. I felt the skin yield and the piercing pain, and at the same time something beyond reason in my mind became convinced—terrified—that I had just been cut by a knife. Finally, yielding not to pain but to frustration, I began to cry. Grandpa took the helmet off my head, and as I looked up at him I saw sadness and ambivalence in his eyes. But then I remembered Michael and the threats against him, and even as I cried, I redoubled my resolve not to disappoint Grandpa or endanger Michael.
Thus began years of twenty-minute training sessions with the algetor three times each week, sometimes using hypnosis, other times not. During the sessions in which I used hypnosis, the pain seemed somewhere else, and those sessions were easily endured. Without hypnosis, however, all of the illusory painful sensations remained—the perceived knife cuts, the breaking of bones, the flames scorching my skin, the ice picks piercing my eyes—and the initial motor responses of recoiling from those illusions also remained. But over time I learned to tame the fears and anxieties associated with the illusions, and I learned to befriend, and so endure, even the fiercest sensations of pain.
Or at least I thought then that these were the fiercest sensations of pain.
Grandpa never allowed Michael to witness any of my algetor training sessions. He didn’t want Michael to become frightened by watching me endure the extreme and gruesome forms of pain generated by the algetor. Nor did he want me to let Michael into my memory of the sessions.
Of course, Michael was curious about these secret algetor activities. After some of the sessions, I became aware while brainjoined with him of the murmurings—the rustling around of algetor memories, like wind playing with autumn leaves—as he attempted to sneak into forbidden territory. “No!” I would thi
nk, or even say aloud, as if he were a bad boy caught stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree.
“But it’s not fair,” he’d whine.
One day, about a month into these algetor sessions, I stubbed one of my toes. The next day, I made a “discovery”: The pain of yesterday’s stubbed toe could, in a limited sense, be remembered, but it couldn’t be felt. I was astonished to find that I was nearly as separated from my own past pain as I was from another’s current pain. This loss of sensation in the memory of physical pain seemed doubly remarkable to me, given that I could reproduce sights and sounds—and sometimes even tastes and smells—as freshly as if they were being experienced anew.
I ran to Grandpa with this discovery, telling him that past physical pain is no longer even as faint as earthlight reflected from a crescent moon; it’s only a shadow that gallops along beside us as we ride certain of our memories into the past. Grandpa chuckled at my enthusiasm, then explained that physical pain, existing as it does only in the present, is one of the conscious qualia that help us separate the present from the past, the real from the remembered or imaginary. Then, after giving due consideration to the fact that Michael was no longer an infant and that the sensations of past pain are irrecoverably gone, he said that though he still didn’t want Michael present during my algetor sessions, it would be all right for Michael to sample my memories of the sessions.
As far as I know, Michael fully entered the memory of an algetor session only once. He screamed, pulled the braincord back into his head, and began to cry.
First Brother
She removes the backpack from her shoulders and kneels on the sand. The dog sniffs at the pack. She opens the pack. In it is some brindled material (highest correlation: synthesized food) wrapped in thin, transparent material (highest correlation: polyethylene) and one cylindrical object (highest correlation: insulated bottle) tapered and capped at one end.
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