by M. E. Roufa
“Come on,” Ed said. His voice was tired. The morning’s excitement seemed to have sucked all the joy out of the log cabin experiment.
“I’m feeling really good, Ed,” Abe said, realizing it was true. “Something about this room is really… inspiring.”
“Oh yeah?” Ed’s face lit up briefly.
“Oh yeah. I think it’s definitely working. Especially the chicken. You have any more of those?”
“I could look into that.” Ed sounded unsure.
“Good.” Abe smiled, a dangerous smile, and handed Ed the denuded drumstick. Ed looked at it, unsure what to do with it, then put it back on the desk with the rest of the bones.
“Oh yeah, just put it there,” Abe said. “Unless you think I’ll use it as a weapon later. You know, maybe I’ll keep it.”
“Come on,” Ed said. He linked his arm through Abe’s and headed out of the room. With the two bodyguards standing only a couple of feet away from them to make sure Abe wouldn’t flee, Ed placed his palm on the panel of the next door room, and half-led, half-pushed Abe inside. The door shut behind them.
Dr. Lamb, Nita, and Brian the intern were already in the room waiting for him, all in the same places he had left them the day before. It was almost as if no time had passed. He had a seat in the chair, and proffered his arms for the various straps of the device. This time, however, something new was added. Once he was fully strapped in, before he had the chance to see what was going on and possibly put up a fight, another needle was inserted into his arm and another shot injected.
“What was that?” He asked.
“Oh nothing,” Dr. Lamb answered. “Just a little something to try to make you more cooperative. Since your response to hypnosis was so unsatisfying.”
“Let me guess. You lost the pen,” Abe said.
“To be honest, Abe, your almost phallic fixation on the pen was a bit alarming. If it weren’t for its possible significance in light of the Jonathan Speed memories…”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Sometimes a pen is just a pen, Steve.”
“I’d rather you call me Dr. Lamb from now on.”
As it was the first time Abe had called him anything, and as Dr. Lamb had been the first one to initiate the idea of Steve-calling, Abe debated whether the downgrade was something he should worry about. But it didn’t make much difference to him. Exchanging one name for another seemed more than arbitrary here; it was meaningless. Abe didn’t know who these people were or whom they worked for. The doctor’s name might or might not be Steve Lamb to begin with. There was no way to know whether the “doctor” meant an M.D. or a Ph.D. or a chiropractor or just a word that went with his seniority in the system. He wore a white coat and was called “doctor” by others; therefore officially he was a doctor. So it stood to reason that so long as they continued to exclusively call him “Abe” or “Mr. Lincoln,” and kept him wearing Lincoln’s clothes, they had no doubts he would eventually produce the past-life recollections they were looking for. If Abe asked for a swimsuit and bathing cap and insisted on only being called “Esther Williams,” in time he might convince them he had synchronized swimming flashbacks instead. The threads of DNA that tied him to the original Abraham Lincoln were the reason that brought him here. But he was starting to feel certain that it was only blind faith in appearances that was keeping them from letting him go.
The shot didn’t make Abe feel any different than he felt before he received it, but he wasn’t sure it was supposed to. The cuffs and cups were giving off the same warm tingle they had the day before. The warm woodsy smell was softer, more inviting.
“Let’s begin, Abe,” Dr. Lamb announced. “It’s a sunny spring day, June 1842. You’re in Indiana, in your boyhood home. Looking out, you see the family chickens. Tell me about the chickens.”
Abe snorted. Then he started to feel the effects of the injection he had been given. While he could find the question hysterical, he couldn’t fight it beyond a certain point. He wasn’t certain that he had been given a truth serum—but he did feel compelled to cooperate. “I don’t see any chickens. There are no chickens.”
“What happened to the chickens, Abe? Can you remember?”
“I have no idea. I’m not getting any memories of any of it. I don’t have any memories of anything. You’re barking up the wrong—chicken.” It was hard to make the joke. The diodes in his finger and temples actually burned. But it still felt good to resist.
“Was there an important chicken at the White House, then? Or during the Civil War? Perhaps at Ford’s Theater?”
“Was he calling Frederick Douglass a chicken?” Brian the intern piped in. It was the first time he had spoken in the entire session. All heads turned to look at him. “Never mind,” he corrected quickly.
“No—no—no,” Abe insisted. “I wasn’t having any chicken flashbacks. I swear.”
“So why did you attack Ed? What was the importance of the chicken?”
Abe felt himself compelled to answer, though he tried to keep the full answer as much to himself as he could. “I needed to know if the trees are real.”
There was a long pause as Dr. Lamb looked at the screen of his little box, and Ed looked at Dr. Lamb. Dr. Lamb looked back up and shrugged. “If it’s an act, he believes it.”
Nita stood up. “I told you your experiments were silly and unlikely to work. Now it looks like he’s becoming mentally unstable because of them. I can’t let this continue. You’ve had your fun. You’ve had twenty-four hours. We’re taking him upstairs and having him cracked open to see what’s really there.”
“Nita!” Ed protested.
“Don’t be so hasty,” Dr. Lamb said. “Twenty-four hours is nothing—and we only just started. I haven’t had my twenty-four hours.”
“We were supposed to have a week, Nita,” Ed added.
“You heard him,” she responded emotionlessly. “Chickens and trees? He’s delusional. We’re getting nowhere and possibly moving backwards. And you’ve already spent a fortune in taxpayer money. I can’t allow it.”
“Taxpayer money?” Abe cut in. “I thought you didn’t work for the government.”
“Who says we work for the government?” Ed said, grateful for the change of subject.
“You did. She did. She said taxpayer money. Taxpayer money means you work for the government. You lied to me.” He looked Nita in the eyes.
“So we’re from the government. That gives us the right to lie.” She shrugged.
It was the most he had heard Nita speak since meeting her the day (could it only have been one day?) before. And the more she spoke, the more he understood why everyone feared her. The unspoken menace she exuded was apparently only the dainty lace trimmings on the leather overcoat of her true outspoken menace.
Then the fog of his thinking cleared up just enough to let through the jist of her first statement. “And what do you mean, have me cracked open?”
“She doesn’t mean anything,” Ed said. “Just work with us here, and we’ll see if we can’t come up with all the answers we need right here. We don’t need to do anything invasive.”
Dr. Lamb corrected him. “We don’t want to do anything invasive prematurely, certainly. But until we know for sure we can’t get there, we really shouldn’t rush to drastic measures. Think of the loss of historical information…”
“There’s no information,” Nita replied curtly. “He keeps telling us it was a fluke. Obviously some synapse snapped or something. That’s all they care about anyhow. No one upstairs cares about the ‘historical’ loss. They just want to know why his brain did what it did. You know that.”
“Hello?” Abe said. “Third person in the room here! Who can hear you!”
“Um… fourth person…?” Brian said, waving his hand and attempting to correct him, then lowering it as he felt the comment made as little impact on the room as his presence.
“Abe,” Nita said, looking at him dead-on, “at the press conference. Did you remember anything, or was it a f
luke?”
This question again. After twenty-four hours of insisting that he hadn’t, that it was impossible, that there was no conceivable way for anything resembling a memory to have taken place. But he could see both Ed and Dr. Lamb standing behind Nita, both making desperate yes-faces, and he knew that more than just historical verisimilitude was at stake. He didn’t know how to reverse course though. And even though he wanted to, he couldn’t. His body—or whatever they had injected into him or the device attached to him or both—wouldn’t let him. All he could do was dance as closely to the answer he wanted to give without it being a lie.
“I don’t know. I’ve never felt like that before. I was him. Somehow. I just knew the answer to the question.” Was that the right answer or the wrong answer? It wasn’t admitting to a memory. But it was agreeing that something had happened in his brain—would that shore up her argument that he needed to be “cracked open”?
“Right.” She responded. “And since you’ve been here, have you had any memories again?”
Again he saw the almost desperate looks on the faces of the two men. But he couldn’t say what wasn’t true, no matter how much he wanted to. He held out saying anything for as long as he could. He tried to make it look like he was thinking back, trying to remember, replaying the events of the last twenty-four hours in his mind. And in a way he was, though more from the perspective of one long inner primal scream.
“No,” he said, finally. She nodded. Her case, it seemed, was closed. And then he had it—a possible way out. “But—”
“But…?” she asked.
“But…?” Ed echoed
“But?” Doctor Lamb asked immediately afterwards.
“But early this morning, looking at the trees out of the window… I almost felt I could get there… somehow. Maybe if I had more time.”
“You see?” Ed said. “He just needs more time. Let him have the week settling in. You’ll see.”
Nita closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and eyed Abe with suspicion. “No. No week. He goes upstairs tomorrow for the exploratory. I can let you have tonight. They need that long to prep the surgery anyhow. If he comes up with anything earth-shattering between now and then, you can write it up and we’ll let the guys upstairs make the call. Deal?”
They looked at each other. It was a long look that took a lot of the air out of the room with it. Or at least Abe wasn’t breathing while it lasted, he was so busy waiting for Ed to say “no deal,” to fight, to do anything that would either get him more time to hide under the mattress or make that word “surgery” sound less like “cut him open” and more like “drive him home.”
“Deal,” Ed said. And then he laughed. “Wow—you are tough! I am never playing cards with you.”
“No one ever does,” Nita responded, smiling.
Abe couldn’t believe it. Just like that, they had bargained down his fate, and were now cracking jokes. The same as if he had been a box of surplus office supplies. Or a lab rat.
“Well, I guess my work here is done,” Dr. Lamb half-joked, as he began unstrapping Abe from his machine. He seemed genuinely crestfallen. Brian bounded up to help him, but as soon as he reached his hand toward the finger cuff, his hand touched his superior’s and was rudely swatted away. Then the doctor backhanded him across the shoulders for good measure.
“Dammit, Brian—Just stop getting underfoot.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, dazed.
“Well, I didn’t say just stand there and do nothing!” The device fully detached, Dr. Lamb practically threw the case at Brian and stomped out of the room, leaving him to wrap the cords and put everything in its place. Abe wanted to feel bad for him.
But he was still too busy feeling worse for himself. “Um… if it’s okay for me to ask…” he said. “What’s this surgery you keep talking about?”
“It’s nothing,” Nita said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ed added. “Maybe you’ll have all sorts of flashbacks before morning comes and the whole thing will go away.”
“Please tell me—what’s this surgery?” Abe was doing everything he could to control his voice, to maintain the calm he knew he needed to get them to answer the question. If anything could get them to answer it.
“It’s nothing. You’ll be sedated,” Nita reassured him, if you could call it reassurance.
“They’re just going to examine your temporal lobes and dissect a section or two to see whether any pieces of them are bigger or shaped differently or unusual in some other way…” Brian began, his head still buried in the briefcase as he continued winding and rearranging the device’s cords. “It’s a pretty standard research technique.” He was so completely absorbed in that he didn’t realize he shouldn’t have spoken.
“You’re going to cut out my brain?” Abe yelled.
“Abe, calm down.” Ed said.
“Calm DOWN? How am I supposed to calm down when you’re going to cut out my brains? I NEED my brains!”
Ed gave another of his Brian’s-an-idiot conspiratorial glances. “You’re overreacting. No one’s going to cut out your brains. We’re not monsters here.”
Abe felt his heartbeat start to return to something approximating its normal levels. But only approximating. He had still heard what he heard. “But the surgery…?”
“Totally routine procedure. They just need to take out some tissue from various parts of your brains. It’s no big deal. Maybe fifteen, twenty percent tops. Spaced out all over—you look at an x-ray, I bet you won’t even know the difference. So to speak. Not you necessarily. Anyhow, I hear they’ve had tons of success with this on mice, monkeys—even dogs!”
“Oh, even dogs?” Abe’s heart rate had stopped approximating normal, and was now bearing a much closer resemblance to that part in the middle of the song “Wipeout” where the drums go airborne.
“Well you know they’re the closest biologically to people in a lot more ways than monkeys, or so I’m told. And this is a top-notch facility you’re dealing with. We’re not just talking mutts, Abe—they use Golden Retrievers.”
Once again, Abe took a flying leap toward Ed’s throat. Ed made a high-pitched squeaking noise, almost like a piglet, and ran out of the door to escape his grasp. Just as the door was closing, he called out again, “Don’t worry, Abe!”
Nita meanwhile, was putting her own things away and paying him almost no attention at all. Was she really that convinced that he wouldn’t run? Or only that certain that he’d never get away?
Brian had the briefcase all packed up and his back turned, and Abe knew he had to go for it if he was going to. Torn between the first door that led to the white corridor and his log-cabin room, and the original door that would lead him (he hoped) back to the ordinary hallway and maybe the parking lot, he chose the latter. He yanked on the door handle as hard as he could—and ran straight into the arms of one of the giant guards.
“There you are,” Nita said, still smiling. “He’s just going next door for now. I can take him from here. But we’ll need you back here at eight tomorrow morning.”
As he was being led back to his room, Abe stopped and looked at Nita. It was the first time he had been alone with her. Surely she couldn’t be as hard-edged as she seemed.
He touched her on the arm, then grabbed her wrist. She stiffened, then relaxed when she saw that he meant no harm. Abe again scanned the room for any way out he hadn’t found yet, and continued to not find it. His options were limited to violence and giving in. His eyes pleaded with Nita’s, hoping to send the message as one of the meek to one of the clearly stronger, that he really was hoping to inherit his tiny share of the Earth just a bit sooner.
“Come on, Nita, please—you can’t let them do this to me,” he begged. “Please. Don’t let them cut my head open. You have to help me.”
“Oh for Pete’s sake, Abe,” she said. “Haven’t you been paying any attention? I’m Bad Cop.”
43
Abe tried to count the seconds, the minutes, anythin
g to keep him from thinking about whatever it was that was lying ahead. He needed to form a plan, but what sort of plan could he possibly form when he was faced with such a widespread government monolith that had clearly been mapping out every step of his journey since they had forced him into the car so few days ago. Hours ago, really—though they had stretched into such a mass of time that it might as well have been months, years, even the century-plus they had told him to bridge. He couldn’t have been more trapped if they had thrown him backwards through time and thrown away the key to getting forward again.
Though at least that would have kept him safe from the scalpel. He tried not to think about it all over again. Amazing how much effort it took not to think about something.
His only hope, if there was any, was to play their conflicting motives against one another. To try, somehow, to get them to keep infighting over what to do with him while he was still conscious and able to be done-with. So what did they want?
He crossed Dr. Lamb off the list immediately; he was clearly a charlatan and was probably already off the payroll and would never be heard of again. Or at least he would make himself scarce until the next subject came along for him to test another harebrained device on. So he was out.
Nita wanted whatever the government wanted, which in this case was a speedy conclusion. Was there a way to change what the Government wanted? Probably not in the next six to eight hours. Four hours? Ten? He knew he had until 8 a.m., but without any clocks, there was no way of knowing how soon that would be. Yet another in the long list of questions he realized he should have asked them, if he hadn’t been so busy screaming. Though if he had the chance to do it all over again, he probably would have done the same things he did do, only possibly tried a little less hard to fail.
Ed wanted him alive, that much Abe knew. But Ed’s voice had been effectively silenced. By Abe. No, Abe thought. By his project being boneheaded and stupid and my not playing along. So is it too late to play along? Abe mulled it over, feeling a glimmer of hope. What if he suddenly remembered all sorts of details? Gay romps through the woods with Joshua Speed, if they wanted, or pillow fights in the Oval Office with Mary Todd, even a torrid foot-fetishizing affair gone wrong with John Wilkes Booth… whatever it would take if it bought him some extra time.