Book Read Free

Janus

Page 19

by John Park


  Grebbel had pushed himself to his feet. He paced stiffly then turned to Larsen. “I see,” he said. “That’s how you keep your merry men in line. I take the warning.”

  “I’ve been telling you why I do what I do, and under what terms. Now I have a few questions for you.”

  Grebbel tensed, then exhaled deeply and leaned back against the wall. “I suppose you’ve earned the right.”

  “Thank you. First, you have regained your past. What were you back there, and what made them decide to send you here?”

  “I was trained in medicine. . . . No. If you have your pride and shame, allow me mine. What’s your next question?”

  “I could insist,” Larsen said after a moment. “But we shall have to start trusting each other sometime. However: you know what you did, and you have lived another life for some weeks now. How do you feel when you look back?”

  Grebbel gazed at him and did not speak. His jaw muscles tightened, his hands locked on each other. “They took away my past,” he whispered. “They—tore it out by the roots. . . .”

  “You see,” said Larsen, “if you won’t tell me what you did to be sent here, I must at least know what you plan to do with yourself now. Have you been making plans?”

  “I thought you talked about trusting each other.”

  “Believe me, I try to and I want to. But you have to understand that you can’t have complete freedom now—none of us can. We’re too closely tied to each other. If one of us draws the attention of the authorities, we are all endangered—”

  “Only if he’s stupid enough to get caught and weak enough to talk; and this doesn’t look like the sort of setup that goes in for heavy interrogations. Or is that something else you didn’t tell me about?”

  “They’d threaten you with re-treatment. And, as I said, that would probably leave you barely fit for a zoo. What would you do then, Mr. Grebbel?”

  “I’d cut my throat,” Grebbel whispered. He met Larsen’s gaze and lowered his voice further. “I’d dig my fingers into my eyes and rip them from the sockets.”

  Larsen flinched and looked away.

  Grebbel took a step toward him. More calmly he said, “I mean, Niels, I’m not one to betray a trust. Not to someone who’s helped me as much as you. But I value my privacy. I have my own plans, for my own life, and they don’t concern anyone but me, unless I invite them to share it.”

  Larsen stiffened himself visibly and said, “I must insist. I need to know now and in the future what actions you intend—”

  “You need know nothing that doesn’t concern you,” Grebbel snapped. “And I’ll be the judge of what that is.”

  In a ragged voice, Larsen persisted. “If necessary, with a few words in the right places, I could have you reclassified as a psychiatric case. You’d find your freedom to determine your own actions much more severely curtailed then, I assure you.”

  Grebbel smiled and approached him. “But, Niels, what do you think they’d find if they examined me? And I could put a few words in the right places too, couldn’t I? No, don’t get up.” He placed his hand on Larsen’s shoulder, and Larsen sank back into the seat. “I think you’ve more to lose than I have. You’re not one to take risks. And you’ve just bankrupted your authority by making a threat you can’t back up.” He moved back a pace. “Niels, you’ve put the whip into my hand.”

  He rocked back and forth, clenching his fists and flexing his damaged arm. He watched Larsen with a faint smile as he did so.

  “As a gesture of good faith,” he said, “I think I will tell you what you wanted to know—why I was sent here. It may amuse you. First, though, let’s think about masks and faces a little. Let’s say we each have a mask, something we’ve learned to use to hide our secrets from the world. And what’s behind the mask is unsure of anything but its own existence and its mortality. How am I to know I am real and safe, and myself, unless I can be sure I’m separate from you? How can I know that you—the real, vulnerable, quivering you—acknowledge me as real, if all I see of you is the mask you wear each day? Well, I can prove I am real and different from you, I can split your mask a little and see what’s inside it. Have you guessed how?”

  He snapped his fingers in Larsen’s face, and the tendons in Larsen’s neck jerked as he held himself from flinching away.

  “It’s simple,” Grebbel said. “It’s if you hurt and I don’t.”

  He looked at Larsen, then went back to his chair and sat down. “I was a doctor,” he said conversationally. “I told you that, didn’t I? A healer of the sick, the infirm, a comfort to the dying. Where I worked last, the-patients had a name for me. They’d tell newcomers what to expect. I’d built up a reputation, you see—by hard work and initiative, the way one is always supposed to.”

  He paused and rubbed the bruise in his jaw reflectively. “It started small, of course. At the beginning—this was in my home town, still—I’d be on call at the station when they brought in a suspect. Often he’d struggle, try to use his knee or his feet—occasionally it would be a woman—but there were always four or five officers to one suspect, and they’d carry him if they had to. I’d see them go into the interview room, and then one of them would come out and turn up the rock station on the ghetto blaster outside the door, and go back in. Afterwards, they’d explain about the slippery stairs in these old municipal buildings, and ask me to do some tidying up and pay no attention to any delirious accusations I might hear.

  “After a few weeks of this, when they decided I was reliable, they showed me where the real work was done. I had to learn to treat the effects of certain drugs, often given in conjunction with electric shock or other procedures. That treatment chair almost brought back memories the first time I saw it. The work was quite delicate—not just patching up breaks and contusions—it was often a case of keeping the patient conscious, or alive, long enough for the business to be concluded successfully.

  “Then I moved to the big city and, with my references, I was able to do the same work there. And when I went abroad on an international aid program, I was welcomed into the government anti-terrorist team. I had got to be quite good at the work. I was able to make suggestions. I found I was often able to judge what approach would be most fruitful, or when a different one should be adopted. Then I began to devise improvements. They knew my worth by then, and encouraged me to experiment. I did. I learned to improvise, and when we went into the mountains after the guerillas, I acted as intelligence liaison officer and was in charge of all interrogations. About that time, I gathered I had acquired a reputation and a name. Of course, when the coup happened, it wasn’t a good idea to be famous in that way. . . .”

  He gave a twisted smile that froze on his face, and said no more. Silence filled the room.

  “What are you going to do?” Larsen whispered.

  “Go back to the clinic and sleep; they’re expecting me,” Grebbel said and gestured at him wearily. “You can get up now, you can leave. I’m sure we’ll meet again before too long.”

  Elinda sat and stared at the recorder. She sensed she was letting Barbara slip away from her. Her memories of their times together now seemed as remote and vulnerable as the whispers of her voice on the recording. The metal shell was cool and impersonal, she had to remind herself it been held in Barbara’s hand. She pushed buttons, found the list of current files, their time stamps, their sizes, the memory-space and battery power remaining when the recording was made, memory locations, signal-to-noise quality. She understood from somewhere that the latter was related to the battery level.

  She froze. “My god.” She had recharged the battery; it had quickly got too low to drive the speaker, just work the display screen. “How blind stupid can I get?”

  When Barbara had made her little sound test, there had been another two hours’ worth of battery power available. But the battery had started dying when Elinda got it home. Nothing more recent was listed in memory. So something like ninety minutes’ worth of recorded sound was gone, lost.


  Erased.

  It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it confirmed what she had known in her bones for weeks: Barbara had met someone that night and whatever she had recorded then had been destroyed. And the one who had done it had then sent her out into the night to die.

  ELEVEN

  In the clinic, Grebbel smiled for the orderly who connected him to the test apparatus; he laughed at the jokes that came with the dinner tray, and finished every scrap on the plates.

  But that night, he dreamed of Elinda. You’ve remembered, haven’t you? she said again, and her face filled his sight as though he were looking into the sun.

  Yes, I’ll tell you, he said, I’ll tell you all of it.

  The words died soundless at his lips. Her gaze pierced him. He felt it would cut out his heart.

  He ran from her. Fled along white echoing corridors, crossed shadow-filled excavations on planks that fell away as he leapt from them. Came to a closed door. It was a high wooden door, with a loose brass handle, and he knew that on the other side of it were steps leading down. He reached up to turn the handle.

  You’ve remembered everything, haven’t you?

  It was dark, and somewhere an icy wind was blowing, and he was shivering, huddled around the warmth of his body, his torn arm. . . .

  You’ve remembered, haven’t you?

  Keep back, he said, not turning to see her. Don’t make me—

  When he awoke, her face remained beside him as it had been in the dream, the face of a woman on the rack, contorting in response to his slightest movement. But when he reached out to touch her cheek, his fingers brushed a shadow on the pillow, and he fell into full awareness. And was alone.

  Elinda sat beside Barbara, and watched her sleep, while her thoughts eddied aimlessly; finally she left and went along the corridor to Grebbel’s room. At the door she hesitated. It would be the first time she had visited him since their fight. She could turn away now, and never have to deal with what he had become.

  She rapped on the door and pushed it open. He was in bed, with electrodes taped to his temples, connected to a recorder beside the wall. He looked up and saw her. His face tensed, then his eyes widened, he relaxed and smiled.

  “Friends?” she said.

  He beckoned her. “Yes. Friends. Yes, yes.”

  She went in.

  Two days later, Carlo was waiting for her, in the clinic lobby. “I’ll walk part of the way with you,” he said, fastening his coat.

  “Well, okay,” she said, preparing to continue their last exchange.

  They went out into the evening, turned towards the Square.

  “How are things?” he asked. “Are you still bent on playing detective?”

  “I’m not playing. I may not be professional, but I’m not treating it as a game.”

  “Sorry. I was wondering if you’d changed your mind about it, or anything else.”

  “Like having more sessions with your new machine you mean? No thanks, Carlo, I’ve not changed my mind about that.” Because it’s a fraud isn’t it? she almost added.

  “Have you thought about why you don’t want to go back there?”

  “Perhaps I’m not ready to recover my memories,” she said, cursing herself for the half-truth. “After this business about there being mental cases here, I’ve been getting flashes of something that feels like the past, and I don’t like them. Whatever I was, maybe I should just settle for being who I am, here.”

  “What you mean,” he said carefully, “is that you’re afraid. And that’s quite reasonable. If there are some old bones in your psychic closet, it’s quite logical that you’d be nervous about disturbing them. But that probably means that’s exactly where the problems are, and where we have to go to tackle them.”

  “I don’t mean to be obtuse, Carlo, but I had the impression that my most pressing problems were here in this pleasant little community, and right now.”

  “Some of them are,” he agreed. “Perhaps more than you realise—or you’re ready to admit. Last time, you talked about something scaring you. That’s why I got you this.” He turned towards the shadow of the Tree. “Come over here where we can’t be seen.”

  Under the leathery fronds, he pulled a cloth package from his coat and handed it to her. “I tried to find something that would be easy to use. I looked for something that would discourage an attacker without necessarily injuring him badly—but most of the devices like that are either restricted or they need training and practice. I had to settle for something under the table, and it’s nastier than I’d like. It’s what some of the cops use as unofficial backup weapons. Ankle holsters and so on.”

  It was a short-barrelled, ancient-looking black revolver. She could just see the blunt noses of the bullets in the cylinder.

  “If you have to use it, hold in both hands, point it and pull the trigger firmly. I didn’t get any spare rounds, but it’s for one emergency only. Then you’ll lose it.”

  “It’s small,” she said, thinking it looked like something you might find under a damp rock, “and ugly. Thank you, I think.”

  “I had to do it for you.”

  She looked at him questioningly.

  “Something happened,” he said, and moistened his lips. “Back there. Someone I was close to, I should have protected. I couldn’t watch it happen again, to you.”

  She shoved the gun into her jacket pocket. “Christ,” she muttered, “is everything we do driven by guilt?”

  “Elinda—I went out on a limb to get that for you. Don’t be seen with it; there’s no way you could legitimately own it. And—please be careful. If you find you need to use that thing, you’ve got yourself further into something than you should have.”

  “You’re not going to tell me any more than that, are you?”

  “I’ve told you all I know for sure.” Through a chink in the cloud ceiling, one of the moons glimmered down. Carlo’s face looked carved from chalk. With his potential arrest warrant freely handed to her, she couldn’t bring herself to challenge him directly.

  They walked on, the black metal weighing against her hip. “The last time we talked,” she said to fill the silence, “you were going to tell me something about the therapy machine.”

  “Yes. The treatment itself,” he began, sounding a bit more comfortable, “—it’s more complicated than you probably think. Several decades ago, there was a well-known psychiatrist who tried to make his reputation by a technique he called psychic driving. It became infamous later—he’d been using hallucinogens and brainwashing techniques, at a time when clinical practice was still highly experimental and standards were lax. What this machine does is a kind of psychic driving.” His tone made her sure he was leading to a conclusion she would not like.

  “You mean it reprograms—brainwashes—people?”

  He hesitated. “It can—it could, if things weren’t properly controlled. The thing is, there’s no absolute guarantee that what it restores is real. So, we do our best to minimise any distortion, we look for obvious patterns and self-consistency. . . .”

  ”But you’re mostly working on faith?” Elinda said.

  “Faith and experience, among other things. If I knew what you were asking for, I might be able to help you more.”

  “I’m not asking for anything yet, Carlo. Just let me think about it for a bit. I’m not sure what I want.” What she did want, she realised, was Carlo to stop hanging up veils of secrecy; perhaps if he kept talking, something would slip out.

  “I know you’re not asking,” he began quietly. “You haven’t asked me for anything. You didn’t ask me for protection, for the gun?” He turned to look into her eyes. “But you accepted it when I offered. If I offered this, would you accept it?” He hesitated. “If I offered more?” he said hoarsely. “I could, you know. I would”

  She wondered whom he was seeing when he looked at her, whether there were two moons in the sky for him, or just one.

  “Oh, Carlo, I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready for this. I’ve got all the
complications I can handle right now. Don’t push it. Please.”

  “All right,” he said, after a pause. “Forget I said anything, if you like. Let it go. Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry, Carlo, but it’s the best thing right now.”

  “It was stupid of me to bring it up. I knew it was, I wasn’t going to. But you started asking about the machine, and there are things I can’t tell you. And I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “It’s all right. I’m going to be careful. I’m glad you care, but let’s call it a night now. Let’s talk again later, from where we were before, okay?”

  At the start of the weekend Grebbel was released from sleeping in the clinic. In his rooms, he stared at the strange, familiar walls and thought about how much had changed. He clenched his fist and flexed his healing arm.

  That evening Elinda knocked on his door.

  They gazed at each other. Then he stepped towards her. Without speaking they held each other tightly, without moving more than to breathe. To both of them it felt as though he had come back from another world.

  The next day, Grebbel worked a full shift at the dam. The sun was down, and the evening storm roared. Spears and sheets of blue light leapt among the mountain peaks. Under the ghastly flickering, bleached faces recoiled from the reverberations of distant thunder. Rags of cloud blew low along the valley. Trees groaned and bent.

 

‹ Prev