The Syndrome

by John Case

  “Remember that divorce case you worked on when you were interning with Nelson?”

  He thought about it for a moment, then said, “No.”

  “I think it was a divorce case. The guy worked for the SEC—”

  “Oh, you mean the Brewster case!”

  “Right!”

  “That was a lot more than ‘a divorce case.’ But, what about it?”

  “You had an expert witness—a shrink or something. Knew a lot about memory.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well,” Adrienne said, “I was wondering if I could get his name—”

  “Ray Shaw!” Fellowes boomed. “Neuropsychiatrist to the stars!”

  “You know where I could find him?”

  “Last I looked—Columbia Medical School.”

  “And he’s good?” she asked. “On memory?”

  “Bulletproof. He wrote the Encarta entry.”

  She laughed. “Okay, but… is he in court a lot?”

  It was Fellowes’s turn to chuckle. “You mean, is he a professional witness?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I think Brewster was his first time out. And he only testified then because he went to school with the guy.”

  “So he’s the real deal,” Adrienne said.

  “Absolutely. Hang on. I’ll get you his numbers.”

  She did and he did, and then she thanked him and they said good-bye. Canned laughter rose and fell just past the door. What would she say to Shaw? And what did she expect from him?

  I’m with this man, Doctor, who thinks he’s a psychologist—but he’s not. He was treating my sister when she committed suicide and, since then, someone’s been trying to kill me—or maybe us, I’m not sure. Anyway, he isn’t who he thinks he is—that person’s dead, too—and I was hoping you could help him recover his memory—so we can figure out what’s going on—and maybe I can get my life back together.

  Hmmmnn. Maybe not. He gets that call, and the first call he makes is to Bellevue. There’s a madwoman on the phone…

  She turned to a new page in the pad, and wrote Shaw at the very top. Then she tapped her pen against the page a few times, and added: Lawyer—Fellowes—Brewster case

  She sighed. If she knew a little more about the Brewster business, that would be good. It wouldn’t seem as if she were coming out of left field. The easy thing to do would be to look it up on Nexis.

  Nikki’s laptop was in the car. All she needed to access the Web site—which archived the full text of more than five thousand newspapers and journals, going back twenty years—was the law firm’s user-ID and password. Which she knew by heart. Everyone did. The user-ID was 1SLOUGH1, the same as Curtis’s license plate. And the password was torts—one of the boss man’s little jokes.

  Leaving the kitchen to get the laptop, she passed through the living room, where Duran was lying on the couch. She paused to see what he was watching. Jenny Jones. “You watch this stuff a lot?”

  He thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “I guess.”

  He was completely affectless, as if he’d been tranquilized to the point of sleep. It was weird. Weird enough to make her think of Gertrude Stein’s remark about America (or was it just Berkeley?), saying there was no there, there. That’s the way Duran was in front of the TV. There wasn’t any him, in him.

  Removing her sister’s laptop from its pink carrying case, she set it down on the kitchen counter and waited for the machine to boot up. The first thing she’d do was send the McEligot memo to Bette and Slough, attaching it to an e-mail—that way, at least they’d know she hadn’t been slacking.

  Searching in the carrying case for the external modem, she found a pack of Orbit gum, two pink hair clips and a little bottle of pills. Although the bottle resembled the kind you’d get from CVS or Rite-Aid, there wasn’t any refill number or physician’s name. All it said was:

  #1

  Nicole Sullivan

  Take as Directed

  And under that, in Nikki’s bold hand: Placebo 1. What? She opened the bottle. The pills inside—she spilled them into her open palm—were capsules, filled with a dusky brown powder. They bore no pharmaceutical imprints or identifying marks. What were they? Vitamins? Maybe. But it didn’t look like a vitamin bottle. It looked like a medicine bottle. And Placebo 1? Was that supposed to be a joke?

  She put the bottle on the counter, thinking she’d ask Duran later. But first: Nexis.

  She found the modem in the carrying case, hooked it up and rebooted. Then she logged on to Nexis-Lexis, using her firm’s password and ID. The Web was slow, and it took her half an hour to download the stories she was looking for: a New York Times profile of Doctor Shaw, a handful of articles about memory, and a couple of shorter pieces about the Brewster divorce.

  Shaw was fifty-seven years old, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn College, and Yale Medical School, where he’d studied neurobiology and psychiatry. A photograph showed a genial man with unruly eyebrows, wearing a turtleneck sweater under a tweed sports jacket. According to the profile, Shaw was “the dean of research biologists” at Columbia University’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, as well as a popular lecturer in the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. A frequent contributor to The New England Journal of Medicine, he’d written as well for general interest magazines like Harper’s and the Atlantic.

  All his articles were available from Nexis, and she downloaded them to a floppy. That done, she spent an hour reading about explicit and implicit memory, cognitive displacement, hypnosis, and the role of the hippocampus in long- and short-term memory.

  None of it stuck.

  So she turned her attention to the Brewster case, which was discussed at length in an old issue of The American Lawyer.

  Shaw was a witness for the defense. At issue was Mrs. Brewster’s “assisted” recollection of her husband’s allegedly violent behavior, behavior that was otherwise undocumented.

  Under questioning by Socrates Nelson, Shaw undertook to explain the relationship between learning and memory. According to the neurobiologist, memories were dynamic, rather than static, and had a physiological basis. In other words, they changed, and the changes took place on a physical and cellular level.

  “If this didn’t happen,” he told the court, “we couldn’t learn.” By way of example, Shaw discussed the complex task of learning to hit a baseball. This task involved at least three different kinds of memory—motor memory, visual memory, sequential memory—each of which took place in a different part of the brain.

  Most people never got very good at hitting a baseball. But even the most limited competence at the task required repeated trials, efforts in which the most recent attempt was compared to its predecessor. This was what physical learning was all about—the refinement of technique by feedback. And what made it possible was the fact that each attempt to hit the ball changed the neurological framework of the memory itself. When the novice finally made contact, the relevant neurons encoded the information as a successful attempt. Whereupon, the encrypted data became a kind of template for all future at-bats.

  “It’s just common sense, really. Memories are transformed by new experiences. We understand this on a gut level,” Shaw testified, “but what we may not understand is that the same mechanism which allows us to learn—that is to say, which allows us to modify memory—makes it possible for us to remember the past in a defective manner.

  “When my wife and I recall a shared incident—a concert, an argument, a trip—we seldom remember the same incident. Through a process called ‘chunking,’ our memory of the concert is affected by memories of other concerts, including concerts we’ve seen on television and in the movies, even concerts we’ve only heard about. And all of these memories exchange details with one another—so that our recollection of an afternoon at Lincoln Center is changed by the documentary that we saw about Woodstock, and also by what we’ve read of Wagner—not to mention the dream we had of porpoises swimmi
ng through La Scala.

  “It works like this: every memory is connected by neuronal highways to every other. But inasmuch as no two people have had the same experiences, each of us has a unique matrix of memories and neuronal connections. So when my wife and I attend a concert, we have similar, but different, experiences—and similar, but different, recollections of that same event. And not only that: since these memories are themselves subject to constant and further evolution, my wife’s recollection of the concert may one day be entirely unrecognizable—at least, to me.”

  Over the objections of plaintiff’s counsel, Shaw had then gone on to review various experiments concerning eyewitness testimony—citing the work of Elizabeth Loftus and others. The studies revealed that although most people—“the general public, doctors, lawyers, even psychiatrists”—tend to hold the belief that “memory” represents a procedure of review, the reality is quite different. In fact, “memory” represents the reconstruction of an event in the mind. It sounded like “splitting hairs” Shaw said, but the “difference could not be more profound.”

  The key point was that such reconstructions were unreliable. “Memory is a novelist, not a photographer,” Shaw told the court.

  To illustrate his point, Shaw described a series of experiments in which short films were shown to students, who were then asked misleading questions about what they’d seen. When the students were questioned a second time, about a week later, it was found that most of them had integrated the misleading data into their own recollections. They now “remembered” things that they’d been asked about—but hadn’t seen. “In other words,” Shaw said, “they formed pseudomemories.”

  Adrienne’s eyes were beginning to strain—despite the overcast day, the cottage was flooded with light, and Nikki’s laptop screen wasn’t active matrix. Was she ready to call this guy? Maybe yes, maybe no.

  Getting to her feet, she stretched, and went to the front door. Stepping outside, she took in the damp air and the smell of the ocean.

  It’s all about memory, she told herself. About Nikki’s confabulations, and Duran’s. Doctor Shaw was the Memory King, and if he couldn’t help her, no one could. But would he?

  She took in another lungful of salt air, and returned to the kitchen, passing Duran on the way. “You want some coffee?” she asked. He shook his head, caught up in the histrionics of a soap opera.

  In the kitchen, she made a cup of instant coffee, and sat down in front of the laptop. Logging onto the Web, she ran a search in Dogpile, telling it to fetch pseudomemory. A minute later, she had dozens of hits, most of which revolved around the use of hypnosis to “recover” memories of alleged sexual abuse—precisely what had happened with Nikki. The phenomenon appeared to be epidemic, the debate intense. There were even dueling nonprofits: the False Memory Foundation, which set out to debunk such accounts, and Believe the Children (Inc.), which sought to shore them up. Nikki, she remembered, had left some money in her will to the latter.

  By now, the “recovery” of memories had become so commonplace—and so controversial—that The National Association of Psychology had instituted guidelines. First, therapists should be on guard against unconsciously guiding their clients toward the “discovery” of long-repressed incidents of abuse—which, in fact, may never have occurred.

  A second guideline suggested that therapists should be aware that memories recovered through the use of guided imagery or hypnosis were likely to be challenged in court—should any litigation occur. Since these “memory enhancing” techniques had been shown to increase “suggestibility” and the formation of pseudomemories, most insurance companies now required that sessions of this kind be taped for the protection of the therapist.

  And, in fact, it was this very practice that won the Brewster case. According to The American Lawyer:

  Shaw’s commentary on the therapist’s tape recordings of his sessions with Mrs. Brewster was particularly trenchant.

  “He’s cajoling her,” the professor told the court. “If we listen to the questions he asks, it becomes clear that he’s proposing scenarios by implication—scenarios which she then adopts. The process becomes a true collaboration, a kind of pseudotherapeutic conspiracy, when she amends the scenarios in idiosyncratic ways that he then embraces, rewarding her with well-timed bursts of sympathy and congratulations.

  Adrienne shut down the laptop, got up and stretched. The pounding of the surf was beginning to get on her nerves.

  “Hey,” she called to Duran. “You awake?”

  He appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, looking rumpled and sleepy. “More or less.”

  “You know those tapes you made?” she asked.

  “For the insurance company?”

  Adrienne nodded. “I was wondering if you could call about them. Maybe you could get copies.”

  Duran gave her a quizzical look. “You mean… now?”

  She looked him up and down. “Well… yeah, now. Unless you’re too busy—”

  He glanced at his watch, gave her a lazy smile. “I guess I’ve got a little window here.” Going into the living room, he picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Then he went to the phone, and called Information. Five minutes later, she heard him say, “Just don’t turn me over to the machine, okay? Because I already made this call once. I want you to check Mutual General Assurance, all right? M-G-A. Mutual General Assurance anything. Limited. Inc. Company. Whatever.” He listened in silence for a while, and then hung up.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I can’t get a number for the company. Which doesn’t make sense, because I know the address. I mean, I sent tapes out two or three times a week. In fact—” he patted the pockets of his sports jacket. “I’ve still got one.” He removed a cassette from his inside jacket pocket, and laid it down on the counter. “I never got a chance to mail it, but… I know the address: 1752 Avenue of the Americas. Suite 1119. It’s… Manhattan.”

  “Let me look it up,” she suggested, and turned to the laptop. “Anywho’ll have it.”

  “Mutual General Assurance,” he said. “Not Insurance. A—”

  “I know,” she said. “I heard you.” As the modem dialed into the Web, she picked up the pill bottle she’d found in the computer’s case, and held it out between her forefinger and thumb. “You know anything about this?” she asked.

  He took the bottle from her and examined it while she searched the Web for Mutual General Assurance. Finally, he put the bottle back down on the counter, and shook his head. “Maybe it’s some kind of clinical trial,” he suggested. “Though… ‘Placebo 1’? I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe she went to an herbalist,” Adrienne supposed.

  “You think?”

  She put the vial in her pocket and shrugged. She was thinking, Maybe I’ll get the pills analyzed… The blue bar completed its slow crawl across the bottom of the screen, and a list of insurance companies snapped onto the page in front of her. All in all, there were nine listings for companies whose names contained some combination of the words Mutual, General and Assurance. But there was no Mutual General Assurance Company, or anything like it, in New York State.

  “Take a look,” she said, as Duran leaned over her shoulder and studied the screen. She scrolled down. “Worth calling them?”

  He shook his head. “No. Different name, different address. There’s no point. If we had to, we could go to New York, but…”

  “What’s on this tape, anyway?” she asked, tapping it with her fingernail.

  “A client. Dutch guy.” As soon as he said it, his face turned ashen. “Oh, Jesus! What’s today?”

  “Monday.”

  He looked stricken. Turned on his heel. Turned back again. Ran his hand through his hair. “This is not good,” he told her.

  “What isn’t?”

  “I missed my appointment!” Duran glanced at the ceiling, and sighed.

  “No kidding.”

  He didn’t hear the sarcasm in her voice. He was beyond it.
“Disappearing like this—I don’t know what he’ll do. The relationship between a client and his therapist… sometimes it’s the only relationship they trust! You break that trust and—”

  “Earth to Duran?” Her fingers enclosed “Duran” in quotes. “You’re not a therapist, remember? In fact, you’re not even Duran. We don’t know who you are. You’re a—a ‘disturbed person’ with bogus credentials. This Dutch guy? Trust me: he’ll be okay without you!”

  He looked at her for a long moment, seemingly confused, then flopped down on the couch in front of the television. “Y’know something?” he asked. “You can be a real bitch when you want to.”

  The remark took her by surprise, and she started to laugh. He was right, of course.

  Then he reactivated the sound on the TV, and disappeared behind a wall of chitchat. It was a talk show of some kind—Jenny Jones or Ricki Lake or Sally Jessy—Adrienne didn’t know the players. And she didn’t care. But it was interesting in its own way. A couple of dirt bags were sitting together on chairs, sharing a smirk of guilty pleasure. Their eyes shone as the women in the audience swayed and bounced, faces contorted, shouting, hooting, and rolling their eyes.

  What had he called it? Adrienne wondered. What was the term Shaw used? A pseudotherapeutic conspiracy… Live, in your own living room.

  Chapter 24

  She hated calling people she didn’t know.

  It wasn’t a phobia, exactly, but it made her uncomfortable enough that she procrastinated whenever she had to do it. And procrastination almost always backfired. Like this afternoon: if she’d called Shaw earlier, she wouldn’t have to do it now. She wouldn’t have to be doing it at night. And she wouldn’t be calling him at home—which was worse, somehow. Instead, she and Duran had gone to an outlet mall to buy some things they needed (which was basically everything) and here it was, a quarter to eight.

  Reluctantly, she lifted the receiver and punched out the numbers, thinking I’ll hang up if he doesn’t answer by the second ring. If he doesn’t answer by the second ring, he’s probably busy, he’s probably—