The Syndrome

by John Case

  As it turned out, not hard at all.

  Bakerton amounted to twenty or thirty houses scattered over a hundred acres of rolling woodland. Besides the houses, and a couple of trailers, there was a church, and a country store with a single gas pump in front of it.

  They went inside, where a man with a bushy beard, a mustache, and a corona of red hair, was standing at the register. All around him were bowls of penny candy, boxes of shotgun shells, and jars filled with pickled pigs’ feet and hard-boiled eggs.

  The P.O. box was not, as they’d expected, a bid for privacy. The town didn’t offer home delivery of mail, so every resident had a box at the post office.

  “Right through there,” the clerk said after he explained this, gesturing through a doorway where McBride could see ranks of cubicles, each with a tiny door and combination lock. Against the doorway leading into the post office, a trio of men stood drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. What they shared, beyond coffee, was a lot of hair, a lot of wrinkles, and a taste for camouflage.

  From the look of them, McBride would have guessed that they’d be talking about NASCAR or deer hunting, but what he overheard as he approached them was: “You’re telling me the NASDAQ isn’t overheated?”

  It almost made him laugh. But he kept a straight face, asked, “You know where I can find a guy named Shapiro?”

  “You mean, ‘James Bond’?”

  McBride chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “He lives up Quarry Road,” said a wizened little man in green fatigues and a baseball cap with the name of a feed company on the front: Rimbaud.

  “Which is where?”

  “Go out t’front door, across the street you’ll see a little road runs crosswise to the one you drove in on. That’s Quarry Road. You head on up there about a mile, look for a red mailbox on the left. That’s Sid.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “‘Course, you might find him praying,” said the tiny man. “And if you do, you’ll have to wait him out.”

  “Not ‘praying,’“ one of the other men said. “Meditating. It’s different. But Carson’s right. You come up on him when he’s meditating, he won’t even look at you. Seems rude, but that’s Sid for you.”

  “Is he… religious?” Adrienne asked. She frowned at the thought. It didn’t seem likely.

  “Buddhist,” the tiny man piped in his country twang. “One of them Jewish Buddhists. Says he’s got a heavy karmic burden.” He paused. “You watch A&E?”

  Adrienne smiled, nodded.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. That boy’s got some shit to come to terms with.” The other men laughed.

  “Pardon my French,” the man continued, “but I guess he’s trying to square it—” He tapped himself on the temple. “—up here.”

  Quarry Road was gravel, puddled from a recent rain. It passed through terrain that was heavily wooded, the trunks of the slender, immature trees black with moisture. They jounced up an incline, the sharp winter sun flickering on and off through the thin tree trunks. McBride turned the Dodge into the drive and a moment later, drew the car to a halt next to a battered white pickup. In the clearing stood a simple log house. Beyond it at a distance of a hundred yards or so was a large structure that looked like a greenhouse. To the right, a fenced-in pasture held half a dozen llamas. They trotted toward Adrienne and McBride as the two of them walked from the car toward the house. And then beyond them, toward the center of the pasture, they saw Sidney Shapiro—engaged in the slow, graceful movements McBride recognized as Tai Chi.

  Despite the cold, Shapiro was bare chested, wearing only a pair of grey sweat pants. He appeared to be barefoot. He moved with great concentration and composure. Adrienne looked at McBride and raised her eyebrows, but neither of them spoke. After a minute or two, the llamas lost interest in them and resumed grazing—some of them venturing quite close to Shapiro, who seemed oblivious. The old man was thin, but with a stringy muscularity, and a full, thick shock of black hair. He looked agile and strong for a man in his seventies, extending one leg out with excruciating slowness until it was straight and parallel to the ground, then gracefully lowering the limb while turning in a painstaking and unhurried spiral. It was like watching a ballet dancer in extreme slow motion and McBride felt hypnotized by the fluidity of Shapiro’s movements. For a moment, the sun poked out from behind the clouds and lit up the pasture like a stage, and McBride saw with something of a shock that if the man’s body belied his age, his face did not. It was all bone, skeletal beneath the thin, stretched skin.

  Shapiro finished his exercise with head tilted back, legs astride, both hands outstretched and upraised to the sky. He held this position for about thirty seconds, then gracefully brought his arms down and began to walk toward them, picking his way carefully through the field, stopping to stroke the neck of each llama. He let himself out through the metal gate, refastened it, and only then looked at them.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi… Doctor Shapiro?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Lew McBride. This is Adrienne Cope.”

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, swinging his focus from McBride to Adrienne and then back again. He seemed very composed, McBride thought, for a man with a “heavy karmic burden.”

  “Well, uhhh… I was hoping we could talk to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I was hoping we could talk about… “ Duran wasn’t sure how to put it.

  “Your work,” Adrienne said.

  “My work?” Shapiro turned to her. His eyes were coal-black, and glittering. “I’m retired.”

  “The work you used to do. MkUltra.”

  Shapiro frowned, and his eyes took on an irritated glint. “Are you reporters?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Because I told the young man on the telephone that I’m not interested in appearing in any other documentaries. I didn’t find the first experience all that rewarding.” He looked up at the sky, then back to McBride. “Although as a form of penance, few things could be more… fulfilling… than seeing one’s life reduced to sound bites interspersed with ads for a liposuction clinic.” He shook his head. “It’s not an act of contrition I intend to repeat.”

  “That isn’t why we’re here,” Adrienne said.

  “Oh?” Shapiro looked from one to the other. “Then why are you here?”

  “My sister and… Mr. McBride… were victims.”

  Shapiro gave her a skeptical look. “I don’t think so,” he told her. “That was a very long time ago.” He gave an apologetic chuckle. “If you think you’re a victim of mind control—”

  “Not me,” Adrienne said. “My sister—”

  “Then I’d suggest that you tell her to turn off her television set—and the ‘mind control’ will go away. That’s my advice.”

  “I can’t tell her anything,” Adrienne replied. “She’s dead.”

  Shapiro blanched. “I’m sorry.” He paused. “Look,” he told her, “this is a wholly discredited field. The territory was abandoned decades ago.”

  “Was it really?” McBride asked.

  Shapiro ignored the skepticism. “It was supposed to be the next frontier. And maybe it was. We thought the benefits of going into outer space, putting men on the moon, would be trivial compared to what we might find… “ He tapped his head. “… in here.” Then he looked at Adrienne, and shook his head ruefully. “We called it ‘inner space.’“ He sighed. “But that was a very long time ago and, while I don’t know how old your sister was, this young man would have been a toddler.” He smiled a smile that never quite rose to his eyes. “And contrary to what you may have heard, we didn’t experiment on children. So… “ He turned to leave.

  “Can we show you something?” Adrienne asked.

  Shapiro turned back to her.

  “Then—if you want—we’ll leave,” Adrienne promised.

  “Deal,” Shapiro replied.

  Adrienne dug into her purse until she found the Polaroid sna
pshot of the implant. Wordlessly, she handed it to Shapiro.

  Who, farsighted, held it at arm’s length, squinting with skepticism. But, soon, his face went slack, and he looked up. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “A neurosurgeon took it out of me,” McBride told him. “Less than a week ago.”

  Shapiro’s eyes returned to the photograph, which he studied for a long while. Finally, he gave a little shake of his head and, handing the snapshot back to Adrienne, said, “Come on in.”

  Chapter 34

  At a gesture from Shapiro, they removed their shoes. The interior of his cabin was a minimalist masterpiece. Tatami mats on scrubbed pine floors, walls so white they seemed to have been whitewashed. A green enamel woodstove stood at one end of the room, which was furnished entirely by a low table made of pine and half a dozen cushions. An ikebana arrangement—consisting of a single white orchid and two arching blades of long, dried grass—rested on the table.

  Shapiro placed the snapshot beside the flower arrangement. “Please,” he said, gesturing to the cushions. A few minutes later, he emerged from behind a shoji screen with a tray that held a squat, gunmetal teapot and three tiny cups. Setting the tray on the table, he subsided into a sitting position, and poured the tea. McBride realized that since he and Adrienne had entered the house, neither of them had spoken a word.

  Shapiro blew vigorously across the surface of his tea, took a sip, and set the cup aside. Then he picked up the photograph of the implant, held it in the light, and examined it. Finally, he shook his head and said, “My legacy… “ His mouth spread in a grimace.

  Adrienne inclined her head toward the snapshot. “What would this thing do to a person?” she asked. “Exactly.”

  Shapiro shrugged. “‘Exactly’? I don’t know. I’d have to take it apart—in a lab—and even then… there’s been a lot of water under the bridge.”

  “But—”

  “If you want to learn what this does, or what it might do, you’re going to have to do a lot of reading. Starting with Delgado.”

  “Who’s ‘Delgado’?” Adrienne asked.

  “The Times ran a front-page story on him more than thirty years ago,” Shapiro replied. “I think he was at Yale.” He paused, and sipped his tea. “There was a picture of him—standing in the bull ring with a transmitter—the bull right in front of him, pawing the ground. Tremendous showmanship!”

  “And what happened?” Adrienne asked.

  “Well, he stopped the bull, cold—in midcharge. Very dramatic. Then he pushed a second button, and the creature turned and sauntered away.”

  “So it was like a shock collar,” Adrienne suggested. “Or an electric fence.”

  “Oh, no—not at all,” Shapiro corrected. “This was nothing so simple. In fact, it was actually a dual test—the first button activated an electrode that controlled the bull’s motor cortex. The second button targeted the hippocampus, which turned the animal’s anger into indifference.”

  McBride frowned. This wasn’t anything new. He’d read all about Delgado as an undergraduate. Everyone had. “What about this?” he asked, tapping the photograph with his forefinger.

  For the first time, Shapiro looked uncomfortable.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m a dinosaur. I’ve been out of the field for… “ He caught himself, and smiled. “… a long time. But there are things I can’t talk about. I signed a secrecy agreement. So…”

  “Hypothetically,” Adrienne cajoled.

  Shapiro sighed. “I suppose it could be a miniaturized version of… certain devices… that might have been used experimentally… at one time or another.”

  McBride snorted at the old man’s circumlocution, which brought a frown to Shapiro’s face.

  Turning his eyes to Adrienne, the old man shrugged. “There’s a lot in the open literature. I don’t suppose I’d be giving anything away if I told you what it looks like.”

  “Which is what?”

  “A depth electrode.”

  “And what would that do?”

  He shrugged again. “Depends…”

  “On what?” Adrienne asked.

  “The frequency to which it’s tuned,” McBride suggested.

  Shapiro smiled. “Very good.”

  “And if you had to guess—” McBride began.

  “Four to seven megahertz might be interesting,” Shapiro told them.

  “Why?” Adrienne asked.

  “Because it’s the hypnoidal EEG frequency—and, hypothetically, it would enable the reception of a sinewave that… ummm, could entrain the brain.”

  “‘Entrain’?” Adrienne repeated the word to make sure she had it right. It was the same word that Doctor Shaw had used when she’d told him about McBride’s behavior at Bethany Beach—when he logged onto that Web site. The program, or whatever it was called.

  “It’s when the brain locks onto a particular signal,” McBride explained. “A flashing light, a repetitive sound—especially one that’s been established in a trance state. They say the brain’s ‘entrained’ to the signal.”

  Shapiro was impressed. “You’ve done your homework.”

  “I’m a psychologist,” McBride told him.

  “But what would happen?” Adrienne asked. “What would the purpose be?”

  “Well,” the old man replied, “it would allow a trance state to be continually refreshed and reinforced without the necessity of rehypnotizing the subject.”

  “So if you had one of these in your head, you’d be… what? Hypnotized all the time?”

  “More or less,” Shapiro said. “Though there’s no reason to believe that that’s its only function.”

  “Why not?” McBride asked.

  Shapiro refreshed their cups of tea, which Adrienne drank more from politeness than thirst. It tasted like burnt seaweed.

  “Because everything’s changed,” Shapiro finally replied. “An implant like this would probably use nano technology. It would have computers embedded in it. And God knows what else.”

  “But what for?”

  “Hypothetically? I suppose one could introduce certain ‘scenarios’ that, coupled with hypnosis, would go a long way toward establishing a sort of… ‘virtual biography.’”

  Adrienne and McBride chewed on the expression. “‘A virtual biography’… “ Adrienne repeated.

  “A phony past—but one that felt right. Up to a point.”

  “Christ,” McBride muttered.

  Shapiro smiled. “Memory’s not much more than a slurry of chemicals and electrical potentials—which aren’t that difficult to manipulate, if you know what you’re doing. For instance—it’s well-known—if you raise the level of acetylcholine in the brain—and you can do that by hitting the subject with radio waves at ultrasonic frequencies—the synapses begin to fire more and more slowly until… well, until they don’t fire at all. And when that happens, remembering becomes impossible. The memories are there, but they’re inaccessible.”

  “So you could impose amnesia,” Adrienne suggested.

  “Exactly. More tea?”

  It was all so civilized, McBride thought. This charming and matter-of-fact old man, serving tea in his ascetic little house. Under the circumstances, it was hard to hate him for the damage that he’d done, hard to conjure the horrors that he’d contrived. Hard, but not impossible. McBride could feel the anger rising, a primitive ruckus in the back of his mind. The bulls. The cats. The ochre room. The virtual Jeff Duran. He’d like to smack this syrupy son of a bitch—let him know what the sound of one-hand-clapping was really like. Instead, he said, “Let me ask you a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  Don’t tempt me. “Hypothetically—how would you put someone together? The whole package?”

  The old man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. After a moment, he asked: “Based on what I’ve read in the open literature?”

  “Of course,” McBride replied.

  Shapiro thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I suppose yo
u’d give the subject an EEG—get a record of his brainwaves under different stumuli. With that, and a PET scan, you could put together a map of the subject’s brain—its emotive and intellectual centers.”

  “Then what?” Adrienne asked.

  “Well, once you had that information, you could encrypt a set of audiograms that would target those centers, delivering them on the back of ELF transmissions—”

  “Elf?” Adrienne asked.

  “It’s an acronym for Extremely Low Frequency radio waves. That’s what I was talking about before: the four to seven megahertz band.”

  “And so, if you did all that, what would happen?” Adrienne asked.

  “Well,” Shapiro replied, “you’d change the landscape of the brain.”

  “What does that mean?” McBride asked.

  “Just what I said: you’d bring about some very specific—but temporary—changes in the physical structure of the brain.”

  “And that would accomplish… what?”

  “Depends on the audiograms,” Shapiro told them. “But amnesia might be one result.”

  “Total amnesia?” McBride asked.

  Shapiro shrugged. “You might remember how to speak Italian, but you wouldn’t remember how you’d learned it—or if you’d ever been to Italy.”

  “Would you remember who you were?” McBride asked.

  Shapiro looked at McBride. “That would depend.”

  “On what?”

  “On what the programmer was trying to achieve. Once the subject was prepped, and his memory blocked, he’d probably have a neurophonic prosthesis implanted.”

  “A ‘prosthesis,’“ Adrienne repeated.

  Shapiro uncurled a forefinger in the direction of the snapshot that was lying on the table. “One of those. If you were to look at the object in that photograph under a microscope, my guess is you’d find it contains insulated electrodes that receive and process audiograms on particular frequencies. The prosthesis would allow the transmissions to bypass the inner ear—the cochlea and eighth cranial nerve—delivering the messages directly to the brain.”