This face stands out so strangely from its surroundings, it seems like a painting while all around it is what's real. I know it and do not. Deep furrows on the brow and lines under the eyes appear darker than I remember; had the colorless hair not receded so far, it might have covered something of the bandage. The hair itself is a mess, and not just from lying on a pillow for who knows how long: for years, I've cut it myself whenever it annoyed me. The eyes appear to retreat from being studied too closely.
He joins me in the mirror. “What do you see?"
I say, “Something terrible.” I meet his gaze for the first time. “I lied. I lied about remember—” I'm overwhelmed again, cover my face, lose my balance, and am caught. Weightless, it seems, I'm borne back to the bed and settled.
He says, “That's good. I'd hate to think I damaged your memory."
* * * *
Half awake, I shuttle through fragmented scenes from my past. I see the gray rooms where I worked, offices, file cabinets that groaned when opened and closed, operating rooms in which my breath hung before me like a ghost reluctant to move on. Certain moments without notable value appear vividly, palpably: I'm crammed in a car with too many people on a narrow mountain road. Cigarettes pile up in a glass tray. Low-lying buildings crowd together across a subarctic waste; the sound traveling across my ears might be the wind rattling the blond weeds in the field or humans moaning in pain, but I smoke my cigarette until it sears my thumb and index finger. The cold was ever conniving to get inside—into the buildings where I worked, under my clothes. Then I think of ice fishing with my grandfather. He used a propane tank to heat the ice shack, but you felt the cold pressing in from all sides, working from below . . .
Though I see these events playing out, as of yet no thoughts from the scenes attach themselves, only a detached curiosity. I can witness my life but not listen in.
* * * *
He sits me up, his spread hand supporting my back, to prop another pillow behind me. Great power is contained in that grip, but he distributes the pressure in such a way there might be nothing there at all, as if I were supporting myself.
Inspecting the bandage, he leans close. He slips a silver penlight from his breast pocket and probes my eyes as I stare straight ahead.
"Looking better,” he says. “Water?"
"Sh—” is all I say, meaning “Sure,” but I'm shaking and dry mouthed. He tilts a glass to my lips. My slurping sounds inhuman. Embarrassed, I pull back sooner than I want.
My hands fumble together atop my stomach. They become more awkward the more I study them.
"I'm so sorry,” I say.
"That's a good sign. And we'll deal with that. But tell me. Are there more people?"
There isn't an answer I can readily locate. He must see this.
"How about another approach: What device were they working on, the people we stopped?"
"Device."
"You had them constructing something. In New York. Last year. You'd given instructions, we assume, because the people had been chosen opportunistically, it seems. The homeless, largely."
"Constructing? But I can't build anything."
But I remember again my grandfather and our ice-fishing on the frozen lake. One year, he had me help him build his shack, sawing the pieces for the walls. Out on the ice, having hauled them to the lake in his friend's truck, we set up the walls and used a tarp for the roof. We sat on boxes and fished through square holes cut in the ice.
Black and depthless, the water fronted another world. He warned me about falling through. You'd be dead in moments, he said. The cold. The shock.
I didn't like being in that shack. But then, I had never wanted the close company of others. I do remember that.
The big man touches my arm and I jerk. The memory had hold of me. “Where are we?” I ask.
"A safe place,” he says, rising. “The Arctic."
* * * *
He helps me to the bathroom, just down a brief and narrow corridor whose walls angle strangely. A light pings on automatically when I enter. The bathroom is clean and small; out of place, my body contaminates the space as I go about my business. After I splash my face, I keep my hands over my eyes, my head in the basin, and listen to the water rush from the spigot and gurgle downward.
"Lukic?” he calls, the voice faint, and I shut off the water. I avoid looking at myself as I towel dry.
In the hall again, I let him take my arm to guide me back to the first room. My feet are bare, but the floor is warm, throbbing.
He returns me to bed and proceeds to check the limits of my memory.
"Do you remember returning to the U.S.?"
"Yes. Yes. That was 19 . . . 59?” It shouldn't be so uncertain.
"Who's President now?"
Why is this one difficult? “Kennedy."
We continue. Squares and roots, numbers and words memorized and repeated in reverse order. Word association responses. This goes on for a while, keeping me busy, keeping my emotions from seizing me again.
He asks what I was building, but still I'm no help.
"This is unusual. I don't alter people's memories. I alter people's moral capacity. Yours was damaged, presumably from childhood, and I repaired it. If your memories seem altered in any way, it's because your understanding of events has changed. But you shouldn't have lost anything. Unless you're blocking it out."
As a neurosurgeon, of course I know something of psychiatry. “I had a good childhood.” The facts are vague, true, but I want to defend my parents. “They died, you know, my parents. When I was—"
"—in college. Yes, I know."
"My sister took her life."
"I have a file,” he says, and I imagine a wall of cabinets in this place, white cabinets and white walls. He'd trundle open a drawer. My folder would be black.
"They were all good people."
"I have no doubts in that regard,” he says.
I think of him reaching inside my head—not with a scalpel, but with his bare hands, molding and realigning what lay displaced behind my eyes.
"You're like me,” I say. “You cut into people's brains. You make them . . . impressionable."
"No,” he says firmly. For the first time I notice the gold flecks in the pale brown of his eyes. When he fixes you with his gaze, those flecks appear to move, to rotate and catch the light. “No,” he repeats. “I make it possible for people to be good."
* * * *
2. Mainsprings
How can I know whether it's day or night? My door remains open at all times, and at all times there's a glow on the hallway wall. I awake from what seems to have been a prolonged sleep and, discomfited by the loose utilitarian pajamas, recover my clothes from the dresser. Below the topmost layer lie folded and laundered the articles I wore when I was apprehended.
Except for the slippers, I change, but I do find my shoes in the lowest drawer. I take them out and turn them over; even in the faint light, I see the state of them; it's been years since I bought shoes. Just now it seems like something I ought to have done. A new wardrobe, as well. Starting over must include such changes.
My slippers slap into the hall and immediately I'm disoriented. The wall isn't in the right place. Light comes from the left, and I follow it, though I'd gotten up in the first place to use the bathroom.
To round the corner and find him seated there, legs apart, arms across his knees, hands together, looking fixedly at me, is to encounter even more disorientation. He's too still. And then he isn't, rising so fast I stumble backward.
He moves quickly enough to catch both my arms. He steadies me to standing.
"That's twice now,” I say.
"You'll find your legs soon."
"I'm not so sure."
"Feeling more clear about the recent past?"
"Uh,” I say, uncertain how to go about the process of recollection, and conscious of my body's demands. “Can I use the bathroom first?"
"Certainly."
Again, I delay in the
close space, entranced by the sound of water in the sink, the noise shutting out all other senses and keeping my memories at bay.
He's waiting for me in the hallway. “The walls look different today,” I say.
"They've been moved,” he says, phrasing it as if something came through while we slept and rearranged. “I can alter the room sizes here, and I didn't need the operating room."
"Of course."
"And the design makes the place more difficult to reconnoiter, should anyone find it."
I follow him back to where I'd come upon him and take one of the metal seats at a table. He puts his hand atop some papers.
"So how is your memory? Anything on the latest surgeries? Anything about Chicago?"
"Nothing's clear for years. The places I lived . . . they're like dreams."
He produces two black and white images on glossy paper. Fuzzy blobs of light lie alongside one another like pearl necklaces.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It's . . . I know this. Wait. Koryodin. These are the fibers Koryodin made."
"Koryodin."
"A man I knew. A scientist. Soviet."
"'Fibers.’”
"That's what he called them. He stumbled on them, I think. I'm not a chemist or a physicist, you know. They're carbon on the surface. Over some kind of nickel substrate."
"And what are they for?"
"He . . . passed current along them at very low temperatures. Aside from that . . ."
"And what were you doing with them?"
"Me?"
"Yes."
"That's a puzzle. I wouldn't know what to do with them."
"Nevertheless,” he says, then pauses to squint in my eyes. “I removed these fibers from the brains of men on whom you operated in New York. I repaired your work. Had I not been using an electron microscope to identify the areas you'd affected, I'd never have spotted these. So what were they doing there? Can you picture those surgeries?"
It's like watching movies of another man's hands, and, complicating matters more, the film jumps and stutters.
"I've done so many. But nothing . . . I can't see anything about those fibers."
"Were you working for someone? Taking orders?"
That sounds familiar, but also incorrect. “I can't think . . ."
"Lives may be at stake."
My eyes tear up. Of course. Every life is important. How did I never appreciate that? Did I know, but not act as if it meant anything? What allowed me to do these things to people?
"Again . . . truly, I have no idea. I can't . . . locate it. There's a blank.” I wish I could. I want to. I touch the bandage and am surprised it's dry. It should be drenched with blood. I deserve to suffer for what I've done.
* * * *
My past is a tale of obsession unchecked by any moral concerns.
Weary of my profession before I'd taken a residency, I traveled to occupied Berlin after the war. I met men who shared my interests, interests I could never pursue in the States. The purposes must have fascinated me, excited me, though from this distance it's hard to feel it. Condemned prisoners volunteered for our experiments. After two years, the Soviets moved me to the other side of the Urals, to the penal centers.
The first task was to create a soldier who could feel no fear. My early efforts at this . . . succeeded, after a fashion. Numbing someone's survival instinct, however, led them to make, moment to moment, the most foolish decisions. Half of the first test group used their guns on themselves—more out of dim curiosity than anything else.
A separate set of trials explored the possibilities of diminished or inactive responses to pain. Here another load of difficulties presented itself: how to create a soldier who could operate in any effective capacity with an impaired nervous system; how to eliminate pain without eliminating other necessary tactile and neurological responses. My sponsors imagined a being who would continue fighting despite damaging wounds that, though not debilitating, would, because of the pain, curl an ordinary man into a fetal ball. And think of the awe this force would evoke when an enemy encountered such an advancing army.
But single-minded armed fury was better achieved with drugs and devotion. My work did not prosper. Instead, we settled for making people suggestible. This proved useful for the intelligence services, if not for the military.
As for the nickname, it came from a British ex-pat who'd come upon me one day in my lab. I used ultraviolet light to study certain tissue samples I'd stained. “Dr. Blacklight,” he said. “You're like some mad scientist.” I'd made what passed for a laugh, and he'd explained the name to one of my handlers. It stuck.
Eventually, I recognized the need to move on. No one trusted me, as I lacked an ideological framework for my labors, a belief system that justified the operations. All I possessed was a deranged work ethic that troubled even my superiors.
I bribed my way back to the West. A private firm in Brussels employed me for a time; I have no idea what government or former government kept them running, but I had my suspicions. It rained every day; I recall contemplating suicide, but, remembering the fate of those men in the prison camps—to whom I'd felt so superior—I kept myself from putting an end to things out of disdain.
At some point I learned that an operation run by the same Brussels firm that oversaw my work had been put out of business by a mysterious figure from the United States. As a young man, I'd heard something of him, though the tales seemed like narratives from the movies, stories for the purposeless people who kept themselves going by reading fantastic and impossible adventures. Such people needed heroes. They needed God as well. Pulp accounts and rarer news exaggerations—rarer still when I lived overseas—were all I had, nothing that might suggest I was pursued or that I had any authority to worry about except the usual governmental sort.
Nevertheless, I thought to elude detection by moving closer to the enemy, especially since I suspected that the men who employed me might sever our association via means not amenable to me, torching the evidence, as it were.
And sometime after coming to New York, my recall grows less certain.
* * * *
He's patient. I'm allowed time to sleep, to read from his extensive library (I linger over vibrant anatomical line drawings in a book composed in Arabic; I start a Wooster and Jeeves novel inscribed to my host by, apparently, his mother in a stately rolling script), even to wander the chambers of his hideaway. He shows me how to use the microwave oven—the first I've seen, a roaring metal cabinet—to prepare the various foods he takes from the vast freezer. I stand nearby as he works on a gun of some kind in his workshop, amazed that he lets me be so close to items that might cause harm. (An armory he indicates to me is locked, however.)
"What will this do?” I ask in regards to the gun.
"It's a project,” he says, a slight smile curling his lips and remaining.
"A project” is also what he calls a lower chamber he opens and climbs down into. He's building something in there, welding, an arc light flashing. I lean down and feel air rushing past, fresh air that smells nothing like the Arctic air pumped from the overhead sluices. And there are sounds in the distance.
When he calls this tunnel “a project,” I dare to ask, “What kind of project?"
"Something long-term,” he says, and I receive that grin again.
"Is someone else working in there?"
"Sorry,” he says. “I hate to jinx a work in progress."
Every mechanism requires power. I'm inserting one of those frozen dishes into the microwave oven when that thought comes. How is this base running? I decide there must be some geothermal source of energy. Whoever—or whatever—is drilling a tunnel might have drilled downward as well to tap the earth's own strength.
As for the man himself, what's the source of his strength? Conceivably, a good family, an intellect fully fed by his raising, a regimen of learning, moral education, and fitness. My own body is a paltry thing next to his and renders me, by analogy, lacking in personal
vitality. For all his talk of allowing me free will, his implications regarding my potential for goodness, I cannot sense such possibilities in myself. Nothing lodges in my hollows.
* * * *
I sit at the table with him and poke apart a microwaved fish. I feed my body. But it will never be a body such as his. I study how he uses his fork and find myself emulating his grip.
I talk to him about what I've done. When I'm silent, I hear him thinking. Truly. He makes sounds, perhaps unconsciously, when dwelling on some subject. Little clicks. A kind of whistle that seems to come from other rooms. I've watched him when these noises recur; nothing's moving in his face, his jaw, to suggest that some muscle or passage of air or grinding of bone is producing the sounds, yet there they are.
I imagine cutting away his skull, that beautiful skull. I'd never do such a thing; it's merely an image, like from the old book on anatomy.
I ask, “When will I leave?"
He says, “When I'm satisfied you're no longer dangerous. And when we've got some more answers."
"Why don't you just send me to jail?"
"Why do we incarcerate people? Do we expect change? Does the punishment serve as a threat? No threat could have stopped you. You proceeded to damage the minds and bodies of your fellows as if they were mere mechanisms to be disassembled and tossed aside. The sheer callousness of your behavior transcends what most people can even conceive. So what punishment would suit your crime?
"You thought you were choosing, but you couldn't even choose. You were past choosing. Consider: Who was the man who tortured those people?"
Tears start. It's pathetic, the way I collapse so readily.
"I was,” I say. “I was."
"I don't believe that,” he says. “Any more than I'm the same person I was when I was two years old and smashed a family heirloom. Nearly every part of my body has changed, been replaced, grown.” He places the fingers of one hand on the side of his forehead. “I have the memories of that person. Vaguely. But I'm not that person."
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 11