by Jim Nelson
I returned to my leather equipment satchel I'd left at the safe. I undid the clasp and stretched its hinged mouth open like a lion tamer drawing open the feline’s mandible. I needed thirty minutes to assemble my equipment and connect it to the engram-lock. The work was slow-going. I sweat easily. The task of assembling the equipment on my hands and knees left me with a sore lower back and sticky armpits. I’d removed my jacket before starting. Halfway through the setup process, I stripped off my tie and dress shirt and tossed them on the patient’s couch. The air in the closet grew ripe.
Two dull knocks came from deep elsewhere in the dark office. I froze in my preparations. Breath held, I waited.
Another dull thump sounded. I crept to the waiting room with flashlight in hand.
No one was there. My ad hoc barricade remained in place. I tried the door handle. It was unlocked. I relocked it and waited. The minutes crawled like a roach across linoleum. No more sounds arrived.
On the other side of the receptionist’s desk, where I'd left the money at the end of my last visit here, I searched quickly for a monitor to a security camera outside the door. I found nothing so convenient, but I did notice a large rolling cart in the corner behind the desk pushed up against several filing cabinets. The cart had a deep basket for medical laundry. I did not recall seeing it in my last visit.
Reluctant to turn on all the lights, I trained the flashlight into the basket. I did not need to search hard. A bluish-white arm poked out from under a mess of smocks and towels. I threw back the linen to reveal Ellis Brandt's corpse. His head was tilted to one side as though down for a quick nap. Blood made a red atlas on the white linen around his head, but not nearly in the quantity as the bathroom once held.
There was nothing more to do for him. I threw the linens back over him and returned to the closet.
The safecracking setup was complicated by the restriction that, without a reader to activate the engrams, I would have to recite the Shakespeare and study the lock’s responses simultaneously. Ellis Brandt’s participation last time was not for show. It had nothing to do with the engram lock being keyed to his brainwaves. Like changing a carburetor on an old internal-combustion engine, it sometimes helps to have a second pair of hands.
The encrypted message I received in the Palace elevator was from Gillette Dalt. It told me Michael Aggaroy wrote the rabbithole, and if he wrote it, I bet he installed it too. I was not up against a neurotrap some paska-eating kid from Eastern Europe had cobbled together. This was Agg's handiwork.
Sniffing around the lock’s software verified the rabbithole remained in place. It was dormant, waiting for the next fool to try their hand at cracking the safe. If I rushed in brazenly, I’d be snared in the rabbithole once more. The neurotrap would harvest my memories and echo them back to me amplified a hundredfold, like a rock guitarist building feedback.
Needing a break, I retreated to the office kitchenette. The cabinets were bare save for an assortment of enameled coffee mugs and a stack of mismatched dishes. The mugs bore trade names of pharmaceutical drugs and memex-based therapeutic software.
A graphite cord was wrapped about the refrigerator's door handles and looped through an exposed steam heating pipe in the rear wall. It was the kind of cord used to lock up bicycles but significantly longer. The ends of the cord were held fast by a thick combination padlock. I filled a coffee mug with water from the tap, staring at the cord. What could be in that refrigerator?
Stacked on the floor of the opposite wall were the refrigerator’s wire shelves and plastic drawers. It looked as though they’d been removed to clean out the insides. The cord on the refrigerator handle was as tight as a python’s grip.
The tap water was warm and tasted of calcium. I drank two mugs of it, pondering the locked fridge and removed shelving.
Brandt told me he’d rented the office after Lund died. He also put on a little show how he was a psychiatrist himself. What little I dug up about Ellis Brandt on my walk to the Medical/Dental Building indicated he was an Orange County actor who’d picked up a few bit parts in hypernovels. At least, until someone had widened his scalp free of charge. What the hell was he doing in this office? How did he gain access? What connection did he have to this place?
*
This time, it was trivial to bypass Aggaroy’s trap. Via my memex, I connected to the engram-lock and tumbled down the rabbithole. I found myself in a room of identical white doors on every wall, the ceiling, and the floor. Open one door and an identical room was revealed. Once I managed to prop open all the doors, the first stage of the rabbithole collapsed.
I was transported to the audition for Detachment. Cline led me to the parlor. Melody lay across a couch wearing a thin T-shirt and short denim shorts. The cameraman adjusted the lights mounted over the futon couch.
“Let’s get you two on the couch together,” Cline told me. “Why don’t you take off your shirt.”
“Are the cameras on?” I asked.
“They’re not recording,” Cline said. “We need to see what you both look like through the lens.” She placed a hand on the largest mounted camera. “Peering through the lens of the camera is like looking through someone else’s eyes. Details we would normally miss magnify a thousandfold through the camera's eye.”
Melody looked up at me from the couch. She bore come-hither eyes. “It’s all professional.”
I took the camera by the tripod grip and swung it about. A video screen connected to the camera blurred wildly with the motion. On screen, three bewildered faces peered left and right and up and down, now trapped in the confines of the lens itself.
“Let’s see you through the camera,” I told Cline. “Let’s see what the lens picks up now.” And the rabbithole collapsed a second time.
The rabbithole had a third stage, one I’d not experienced before. It forced me to relive fourteen months of court-ordered visits to Dr. Lund’s office, the same office I was now lying on the floor in and trapped inside my mind. Twenty-seven years ago, a young Dr. Daryl Lund occupied this office. She was a diminutive woman a few years older than me with a bookish-librarian vibe. Over the course of fourteen months, I incidentally learned she enjoyed fly fishing, which her father had taught her in Montana. I learned she owned a Corgi, was probably childless, and had divorced and remarried. Otherwise, she walled off her personal life from me.
Those twice-a-week visits with Dr. Lund were my only option between living a semi-normal life and spending the next twelve to twenty years in state prison for multiple charges of targeting and unauthorized access of computer systems for illicit purposes. The Federal prosecutor threatened to file additional charges if I didn’t accept the plea bargain. My career as a programmer worked against me in court, just as a judge might throw the book at a journalist accused of anonymously penning a defamatory book. I’d spent my entire professional life building computer systems for people to communicate, learn, and share. Now I used my talents to make threats against the people I was supposed to be helping—“struggling, hardworking artists,” as the judge called Melody and Cline. When my lawyer attempted to introduce as evidence that they’d distributed video of my audition without my written or verbal permission, it was thrown out as irrelevant.
“File a separate suit,” the judge told my lawyer in chambers. “This case is concerned with your client’s odious behavior.”
The rabbithole zipped through the therapy sessions. In those fifty-minute sessions, twice a week, I spilled my guts to Dr. Daryl Lund. In the rabbithole, I sped through a hundred and twelve sessions in a matter of seconds. Every session ran in fast-forward and my mind raced to keep up with each of them. I relived every session tens of thousands of times. Every repeat was as fresh and painful as the first time.
I’m ashamed to recount them. I felt plenty sorry for myself. I told Dr. Lund about being hurt in my suburban schooling, the usual high school complaints about being ignored and mocked. In college, thinking I was finally freed of small-town pettiness, I attempted to buil
d new friendships with more open-minded people, but there too I found myself a nonspeaking character in a movie of starring roles. My presence at beer parties and marijuana-smoking circles was treated as a kind of charity, as though inviting me in earned the others virtuous tax write-offs.
Guys tore me down to make girls laugh. I was mocked to my face, and only sometimes by strangers. As a young adult, a stand-up comic at a comedy club spent five solid minutes ridiculing my weight and appearance from the stage, earning howls and applause. He redeemed himself at the end with a give it up, he's a good sport and a bow to the audience.
In the neurotrap, I relived those hundred sessions ten thousand times. Computers perform loops within loops within loops with a deadly exponential efficiency.
Reality is consensus. Humans ask each other for reality checks, like ships in the night sending beacons across the water. Enough votes and a version of reality wins. All other versions are rejected.
Everyone voted against the basic truth I was experiencing. Dr. Lund and the few people I knew socially assured me I was being too sensitive. What I was going through was not as bad as I'd let on. My problems were not real problems, they told me. I began to go a little crazy.
I began fantasizing about amputation. I imagined myself without an arm or a leg. Unemployed, I would spend entire afternoons doing chores around my apartment with my left hand tucked inside the sleeve of my shirt. I cooked lunch, did my laundry, and cleaned the bathroom one-handed. The next day, I would do the same, but this time, with my right hand unavailable. I practiced using a cane with my right foot retracted from the floor. Hundreds of thousands of times in the rabbithole, I practiced living with one hand or one foot.
For years, I had saved to buy a house. The trial defense decimated my savings. With my remaining money, I made my amputation real.
In the rabbithole, ten thousand times my face was cut open. The doctor peeled back my skin, peeled back my skin, peeled back my skin. He shaved down my nose, he shaved down my cheekbones. Ten thousand times he pinned back my Howdy Doody ears as though taming cowlicks. Ten thousand times my face was left black-and-blue by his rush job.
When I presented Dr. Lund my new face—bruised and mottled from the plastic surgery, the scars and fold lines like black varicose veins—she recoiled. She recoiled ten thousand times. She told me plastic surgery had set back all our progress. When I asked her to explain what progress she was referring to, she stared back at me, disgusted. She stared back at me in disgust ten thousand times.
The next day, I violated my parole. Through an online service, I purchased a one-way airline ticket to Sapporo, Japan. I’d considered a number of places I might move to, out-of-the-way places where I would have to interact with no one. I investigated buying a cabin in Montana on the Canadian border. I looked into mobile homes in the Nevada desert near the old atomic testing sites. The boundless chrysanthemum fields outside of Sapporo is the Japan few Westerners are familiar with. From the photos online, it reminded me of the Great Plains, vast fields of grain and green.
I made a secluded little life in the Hokkaido countryside teaching myself Japanese and teaching English for money. After fifteen years, I returned home. The yearning was indescribable. Mortality forced me to consider where I wanted to die, and America is the place I chose to die. I landed at San Francisco International with a new face, a new outlook, and a new name.
And with that memory, I defeated the rabbithole.
*
I emerged from the neurotrap on my back, dry-heaving. A clammy sweat coated my face and chest. The rabbithole left me feeling ten thousand years old and worn thin.
Staggering out of the closet, I discovered the pending thunderstorm had arrived. Sheets of rain beat on the office windows like barbarians besieging a castle. The skin around my memex was inflamed and hot to the touch. I pried the memex out to give the skin a chance to heal.
The touchscreen panel on the safe was blank. I tapped it a few times to call up the control panel. The system wasn’t responding. With my equipment still in place, I sniffed around the system internals.
Agg’s rabbithole was tied to the engram lock. When the rabbithole collapsed, the safe was disarmed. I retracted the handle embedded in the face of the safe and twisted it ninety degrees. A smug mechanical schluck sounded inside the carbon-graphite box. The safe door swung open.
Hundreds of manila file folders were neatly organized in the rear of the safe. A thick squared stack of folders waited on the safe floor. A paperweight sat atop them. I removed the stack and flipped through them one at a time.
They were Dr. Lund’s files all right and there were plenty of names I recognized. There were San Francisco hotshots, members of the city’s political machinery, even a couple of Hollywood hypernovel superstars who owned Russian Hill and Pacific Heights pied a terres.
Buried in the middle of the stack was a folder with my old name on its tab. In it, I discovered Dr. Lund didn’t think much of me. She used words like grandiose and delusional to describe me. When I confessed my loneliness to her, she remarked in quick pen I was hypersensitive and over-obsessive. In the file were tens of pages of my hand scrawl, my pathetic attempts at reframing my negative thoughts into positive affirmations. Dr. Lund observed I was alcoholic, bipolar, a synestheste suffering from body dismorphia syndrome. A lifetime of turmoil boiled down to a series of psychiatric labels. She didn't need a file folder for me. Her diagnosis would have fit on a recipe card and there would have been room left over for the recipe. There was nothing more to me.
*
The other files weren’t worth reading. I resigned myself to my final task, one I’d put off.
Thinking I might have to force the safe open, I’d brought a hammer, crowbar, and a vial of acid from the office. In the kitchenette, I used the acid to weaken the padlock’s clasp. After ten exhausting minutes of hacking and prying, my shoulders and arms sore, the padlock snapped. The graphite cord unwrapped like a python finished strangling a baby deer. The cord fell away and the refrigerator door heaved open.
Dr. Daryl Lund’s elfin body slid forth like bread dough from a greased pan. Her corpse splayed across the laminated kitchen floor. In the years since I’d last seen her, she’d gone gray and her face had wrinkled considerably. A week in a fridge didn’t help either. It was nowhere near cold enough to stifle rigor mortis, but it had slowed decomposition. Her eyes bulged from their sockets. Her black tongue lolled out the side of her mouth. Black spots the size of dimes mottled the sides of her throat. Their spacing suggested a pair of hands. An oblong hematoma on her left temple suggested trauma to the head.
A knit throw blanket covered the back of the patient’s couch in her examination room. In the kitchen, I snapped it open and lowered it over her body. Her feet made horns at one end of the blanket. Her death gaze affixed its beam to the ceiling above.
I returned all the files to the safe save my own. I searched for and discovered a floor shredder beside the desk in the private office. It took Dr. Lund fourteen months to arrive at her diagnosis; the plastic surgeon four hours to shave down my face; and sixty seconds to julienne my past and my ills.
*
That paperweight in the safe was a data brick. This particular model was manufactured through a process of doping an azure neuro-mimetic gel with mercury flakes, then crystallizing it into form within a pressurized chemical bath. A three-prong optical socket was embedded at one end where it could be connected to a data server’s backplane.
Stamped across the bottom in silvery ink was a simple declaration:
PROPERTY OF THE OLD INTERNET PRESERVATION COMMISSION
31.
I returned to the stage well beneath my office and emptied the equipment from my leather satchel. I wrapped the data brick in an old rag and nestled it among the black satin folds at the bottom of the satchel. I locked up the office and exited the building carrying the satchel at my side. After losing my retention server, I did not place my faith in the security of the Golden Gate Theat
er.
I hauled the data brick eight wet blocks north to Bush Street. At my usual corner bodega, I gathered ingredients for a dinner suggested to me by my memex. Without setting down the satchel, I filled a hand basket with foodstuffs for a makeshift Mexican meal. It was awkward. At each shelf, I would set down the basket, select a can or package with my free hand, place it in the basket, and take it up again, never releasing the satchel with the data brick. It reminded me of the time eons ago I practiced living with one hand chopped off.
In my apartment, I showered, bathed, and set about preparing my meal. I carried the waterproof data brick into the bathroom with me and throughout the apartment. It sat on the nook over the sink as I cooked a chicken breast in a premade chile verde sauce with onions and green peppers. My memex led me through each step. In a small ceramic pot, I simmered a carton of black beans. Using a pancake griddle, I warmed flour tortillas and stashed them between a pair of kitchen towels. For bachelor fare, it was supreme. I did not want to eat in a restaurant. That was one of those nights where I found the presence of humans nauseating. I ate with the data brick on the table across from me, candlelight flickering between us.
In the dark, I consumed half a milk carton of red wine, a 2035 Malbec. The storm was dumping sheets of water now. The wash across the windows made the city’s neon an Abstract Expressionist mural. I set the translucent data brick against the window. Through its blue gel, the city’s colors distorted and blended and glittered. Thunder over the bay grumbled. I reminded myself it was warm and dry at Lands End. The electromagnetic storm out there seemed to be generated in a bell jar, a stark reality completely isolated from the fiction surrounding it.
I’d fooled myself in Hokkaido. I thought I could return to San Francisco a new man. I never really abandoned myself. My time abroad was a mere vacation from this reality. When I returned, I buried myself in work and routine to avoid facing the truth. Now my life was circling like rainwater about a drain. It had been circling for twenty-seven years now.