Mesmerized
Page 3
It was a stunning courtroom triumph, which made Beth even more impatient to return to Edwards & Bonnett so she could collect on the managing partner's promise of an accelerated timetable to partnership.
It was not just the money she wanted, although that was important. She had heard others make the same claim and had not believed them—after all, a guaranteed $450,000 a year base salary, plus bonuses, was hard to ignore. But in this uncertain life, where one could not trust even one's own heart to keep beating, where one's mind seemed no longer under control, the firm was more than ever her anchor. There on Sixteenth Street, just four blocks from the White House, she had known who she was.
She gave her clients twenty-four-hour care whenever necessary. Instead of tennis or dates with friends, she had been known to spend a rare free weekend investigating a legal question posed by one of Edwards & Bonnett's overseas offices, for which she could not bill or receive any sort of official credit, since it was a professional courtesy. Other attorneys twisted themselves into intellectual pretzels to find reasons to avoid such requests. She, on the other hand, had enjoyed the research.
And then there were her files, which were always up to date, as if they were children whose daily routine meant security. At Edwards & Bonnett she had invested everything, including her heart-felt commitment. Which was perhaps why she had such a high success rate—she won ninety percent of her cases—and why she attracted the kind of wealthy and powerful clients who were the backbone of the firm. Considering all this, she figured it was time for payback: She had earned partnership. She wanted it. She wanted to belong.
But now she was worried. Because she would be absent a full year, Zach Housley—the managing partner—had reassigned her clients to other attorneys in the firm. It was the right thing to do, of course, since it took care of both the clients and the business.
Yet if enough of her clients decided to stay with their new lawyers, her base of power might weaken. As she mulled this, something inside her seemed to shift. She had always had an even, calm disposition, but now anger exploded through her. She shook with it. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She clenched her jaw and hugged herself, fighting back a sudden urge for violence.
It was the dark, early hours of morning, and she was carrying an old Soviet assault rifle, an AK-47. It felt comfortable in her arms, reassuring. Nearby, the sound of gunfire split the quiet night air like a long burst of thunder.
As she dove for cover, voices shouted from the shadows, and this time they were understandable. Surprised, she realized they were speaking Russian. She tamped down her fear and forced herself to listen: They were warning each other—Yuri, Mikhail, Alexei, Ivan, Anatoli—and arguing about who should make the phone call that could save them. They yelled a number over and over—703 . . . 703 . . . 703. . . . It was a Virginia area code, but she could not make out the rest of it. She pressed her palms to her ears, trying to stop the voices.
And awoke abruptly, her hands over her ears as she breathed in nervous pants. She sat upright in her hospital bed and shook her head to clear it. She began to wonder. This dream had been clear—it was about Russians speaking Russian. The names, the weapons . . . all Russian. And she was one of them. She shuddered, trying to understand whether there was some meaning she had missed.
That afternoon, Dr. Jackson arrived to discuss her home-care program. She was grateful to see him. She gazed at his reassuring, lined face with the slightly hooked nose and the glasses perched precariously on the end. And then she looked over his shoulder.
"Where's Dave?" she asked. "I thought he was going to come with you to show me some exercise charts." Dave had been the aide with the assured movements and aggressive shoulders who had spooked her soon after surgery. Since then, she had forced away her suspicions and grown to look forward to his many small acts of kindness.
The doctor sighed. "We had to let him go. I'd forgotten about the charts. I'll have someone else bring them."
"Let him go? He was fired? But why?"
"You liked him. Most everyone did, and that was part of the problem. I'm sorry, but you might as well know he was arrested this morning for stealing from patients."
"Arrested!" She was stunned, disbelieving. And yet . . . the truth was . . . in the beginning she had felt there was something not quite right about Dave, something treacherous. She should have listened to that inner knowing, but it had seemed so outlandish at the time.
The doctor had moved on. He was saying, "Whatever exercises you choose, make sure you build up to an hour at least five times a week. You said you used to be a marathon runner. You could take up running again."
"How about karate?" She sat back and shivered. Where had that come from?
"It's a great workout. No problem."
"If I want, I can do something as strenuous as karate?" An idea was beginning to form in her mind.
"Sure, as long as you don't overdo it. Plus, of course, you've got to keep to a strict schedule of taking your meds, eating right, and getting enough sleep. You know, the routine we've been discussing. If you and your heart weren't a good match, I wouldn't be as enthusiastic about karate. But I've seen enough successes now that I think I can safely predict you're one of them. For instance, another of my patients is a triathlete. His sport can be a lot more grueling than karate. Another, who's in his sixties, is a serious jitterbugger. A third's building a house by hand. Think of all the lifting and hammering that go into that." He crossed his arms, considering. "One of my colleagues has a patient who climbed Half Dome in Yosemite ten months after her transplant. Then she went to the tops of Mount Whitney and Mount Fuji. Imagine climbing to those high altitudes and the demands on the heart and lungs even for someone with all her natural body parts."
She blinked slowly, thinking. "Tell me about my donor again."
He hesitated. "Your new heart came from a man. He was in his early forties. He was athletic and had a good, healthy heart. You know I can't reveal who he was."
"Was he Russian?"
The doctor frowned. "I gave you his age and sex, and I can tell you he died in a motorcycle accident within four hours of the District. Four hours includes flight time, of course. That's the most a heart can be kept outside a body for optimum results in transplant surgery. But I can't tell you anything more. The transplant center has ironclad rules to protect his privacy, and yours. You signed an agreement not to try to find out his identity or to locate his family."
"I'm a lawyer, an officer of the court. Of course, I'll honor any document I sign. But surely you can tell me whether he was Russian. In the scheme of things, that seems like a minor piece of information. After all, there are tens of thousands of Russians living here now."
Travis Jackson studied her. "What makes you ask if he was Russian?"
She paused. "This is hard to explain . . . but I've never thought much about Russian poetry. In fact, I don't recall memorizing any, but phrases of it began floating through my mind this week—in Russian. I've never really liked Russian food, but now sometimes I crave it. For instance, I often order sliced tomatoes with sugar and salt. One of the nurses told me that's an old Russian favorite. I've never drunk much black tea, but now I want it all the time. In some places in Russia, it's more popular than coffee." She reminded him of her request for vodka and that she had even named the kind she wanted—Stolichnaya, Russia's foremost brand. She told him about her nightmares. "In the beginning, I couldn't understand what they were saying. But now I know they're speaking Russian." She paused. "There's a song that keeps coming to me. I think it's from a Soviet movie." She sang the earthy, proletariat tune: " 'Harvest, our harvest is so good . . . ' "
"Interesting." He was looking at her oddly.
"Do you know where this quotation is from?" She closed her eyes and recited: " 'If you love, love without reason. If you threaten, don't threaten in play.' "
"Never heard it before."
She sighed, frustrated, but said stubbornly, "I think it's been translated from Russian."
"I'm not the only one? If there are others, then I'm not going crazy. Give me an explanation, because it makes no sense. I don't want to believe my new heart could be changing me, telling me things. This is crazy."
"You're not crazy. But you're hyped up on the miracle of your survival and all the medications you're taking. I can't impress upon you enough how very powerful the wonder drugs are that you have to take to stop infection and organ rejection. In fact, if you were to go just two days without them, you'd probably do irreversible damage to your body. On the one hand, they're life-giving, while on the other, they're industrial-strength and potentially lethal. They can impact the way you feel. The taste of food. What you remember. Your dreams . . . all your sensory perceptions. Still, you must never miss a dose. Those side effects are minor compared to losing your life."
"You mean what I've been experiencing is in my head? That because of the drugs, I'm making this up? Because if that's what you think, you're wrong. You were here when I wanted vodka."
"Right. I have no problem believing everything's happened just as you say. But that doesn't mean you 'inherited' any of it from your donor. Maybe when you were a little girl you heard some adult say vodka was good for the heart. So because of your cardiac problems, that old memory percolated up from the depths of your unconscious to remind you about vodka."
She pursed her lips. "Okay. That makes sense. But I've also had nightmares about Russians and cravings for Russian food."
"Well, you've done legal work for Russians. You've traveled extensively in Russia, and you even learned to speak the language."
"A fair amount, yes. Polish, too."
"You probably saw the movie years ago and have simply forgotten it. The Russian words you heard could've triggered the memory, and the memory could've triggered the Russian nightmares. See? One thing leads to another." He patted her hand reassuringly. "When you finally relax, as you will, and you begin to take your new heart for granted, things will quiet down. Your body's going to adjust, and all these unusual experiences will stop."
She heaved a sigh of relief. She was an attorney, trained to dispassion. For her, logic was almost religion. Her rational mind knew he was right. To think anything different was to turn her back on her past and everything she had worked so hard to achieve, including the person she had made herself.
"Thank you." She smiled. "If someone had said to me what I've said to you . . . I would've advised, 'Go immediately to a therapist. You are in desperate mental-health need.' But since I was living it, it seemed real."
"It is real. It's just not caused by what you think." The surgeon stood up. "Take my word for it: All of this is simply a combination of your imagination, your personal history, and the meds. Stop worrying. Your new heart isn't speaking to you. I guarantee it."
She nodded happily. He was the expert who had saved her life. She trusted him implicitly. Of course, he was right.
Freed of the machines and tubes that had monitored her, she could at last leave her room whenever she wanted, and the world seemed new and exciting. With a sense of gratitude, she visited other patients who were waiting for transplants. They were dying, just as she had been. Their fear and pain pierced her to the marrow. She sat beside their beds and asked them about their families, their hometowns, and their dreams for the future. There was a visceral bond between the dying and the saved in a transplant hospital, and each day she extended her hand across the chasm, paying back for the generosity of her donor and his family in the only way she knew.
As she grew stronger and less vulnerable, she did not discuss her odd, post-op experiences again. Whenever one of them reappeared or a new one tried to take hold, she firmly dismissed it.
In May, a month following her surgery, she signed the paperwork that allowed her to return home, where care-givers would stay with her until she could live on her own again. As the nurse left with the documents, Beth turned excitedly to gaze through the window at the spring day, at the blue sky and the grassy hospital lawn with the towering trees and the bright iris beds in bloom. The sun shone down in a warm, hazy light, and it almost seemed to her the world was beckoning her back. Her old familiar world where the future was filled with important contracts and dicey negotiations, glamorous embassy parties and business trips to St. Petersburg and Gdansk, interesting people with accents and different cultural backgrounds who needed her help as they created a new Eastern Europe.
She smiled to herself. Her colleagues at the firm called her the Ice Princess for her single-minded pursuit of success, but they did not know the joy she took from the small moments: The taste of a hot breakfast torte in Cracow after an all-night conference. The sight of autumn leaves blowing down one of Old Moscow's cobblestoned streets when just twenty-four hours earlier she had been at work in Edwards & Bonnett's futuristic glass-and-chrome Washington headquarters. She would never forget the first sight of the scarred conference table in the old Communist meeting hall in Warsaw. It had been built for apparatchik meetings but was now the birthplace of a new private company that would revolutionize the telephone system of Poland.
Suddenly a voice interrupted her reverie. "Could you give me a few minutes, Ms. Convey?"
Beth turned to look at the open doorway, where a woman stood. She was in her late forties with swept-back auburn hair touched with gray.
"My name is Stephanie Smith," she continued. "I'm working on a study for the Walters Institute for Learning. Do you know about us?"
Beth smiled and gestured at a chair. Already her world was growing more interesting. "Sorry, but I've never heard of you. Please come in."
Stephanie Smith sat beside the bed and laid a leather portfolio on her lap. "You've had a heart transplant. How are you feeling?"
"Fine, thanks." No way was she going to discuss her aches, pains, and worries. There was no point. Life was going to be much better from now on. "Tell me about your study."
"Have you ever heard of cellular memory?"
"Never."
"I'm not surprised. Few people outside the scientific community have. And within the community, it's controversial. I'm a psychoneuroimmunologist, meaning I'm a licensed psychologist who studies the relationship among the immune system, the brain, and our experiences in the world. The hospital has agreed to let me talk to patients on their last day, the assumption being you'd feel well enough to answer some questions about your experiences since your transplant."
Beth was taken aback. She asked cautiously, "What experiences do you mean?"
"Have you had any unusual incidents? Thoughts or tastes, perhaps?"
"I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at."
Dr. Smith's face remained neutral. She opened her portfolio. Beth saw files.
The woman removed one, read, and looked up. "Ah, so you're a lawyer. That explains it. A skeptical mind. Good for you."
"You have a file on me?"
"As a matter of fact, I do. I'm a scientist, also skeptical. It's a healthy approach, particularly when a research study is involved, wouldn't you agree?"
"Yes. Have you spoken to my surgeon, Travis Jackson, about me?"
"Would you like me to? Maybe you already know he finds no merit in what we're studying."
"He probably thinks it's a waste of money."
"He does. But the funding comes from outside, and it's a legitimate scientific pursuit that other doctors support. What's your opinion? Do you think it's foolish?"
For a long moment Beth was tempted to speak. There was something in her that urged her to unburden herself. Still, she believed the logic of her surgeon's explanation, and she trusted his years of transplant successes. Everything he had said made sense.
So she compromised. "Travis mentioned s
ome patients have strange experiences after surgery, but he said they were due to the heavy medication and all the enormous life changes. What do you think?"
Dr. Smith shrugged. "That's what we're trying to find out. I'll tell you a story that may help explain why our institute is investigating these questions." She paused. "Paul Pearsall, another psychoneuroimmunologist, has worked in the field for years. He wrote a book called The Heart's Code. He describes an eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a ten-year-old. When the child started having nightmares and screaming out that she knew who'd murdered her donor, the mother took her to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist called the police. They discovered her donor had indeed been murdered. The child described the time, weapon, and place, and the police used her information to develop new evidence. They arrested the murderer."
Beth was silent. She felt numb. "She saw someone killed in her nightmares." It was a statement, not a question. In her mind, she saw the motorcycle again roll out of the garage. She watched herself leap on, ram the motorcycle into the man, and kill him. She shuddered. Every time she had the nightmare, she felt as if she personally had murdered that poor stranger.
Dr. Smith continued: "Yes. Gets one's attention, doesn't it? I suppose it could be explained away as coincidence. But science doesn't like to be ignorant, and we've shamed ourselves over the centuries by taking our prejudices for facts. Five hundred years ago, the world's best minds believed the sun and all the planets revolved around the earth. Wrong. In the eighteen-hundreds, our top medical specialists were convinced it was 'utter nonsense' that tiny, invisible 'germs' could make us sick. Wrong again. And now, of course, what used to be far-fetched science fiction has become fact with the cloning of sheep. It's hard to look at those lambs and believe that there aren't more 'impossibilities' that we're on the verge of confirming."