This place doesn’t seem very clinical, even with the lab coats walking around. Except for the spaceman gear with the wires and the blanket-heating apparatus, this looks like someone’s office. Not an expensive one, mind you, but it has the extra bonus of a cop loitering in the hall, waiting for me. The desk and shelves are made of that fake wood laminate that doesn’t even pretend to be real. The carpet isn’t exactly the plush variety, but the place looks clean enough, I guess. Like my shrink’s office. Back before the shrinks gave up and just put me in jail.
Someone sits down on a chair beside me, and I shift only my eyes, because the nurse with the painted-on eyebrows told me not to move my head while she’s making a mess of my hair.
“Almost time, Alex,” Doctor Williams says, sounding jolly. I’m suspicious of jolly people with degrees. I suspect them of having studied how to be jolly. He’s holding a clipboard, but I’ve already signed the forms. I’m of sound mind and body these days, so I’m allowed to do that.
They didn’t have to put much energy into convincing me to give this a try. Of course, now that I’m here with the wires and that needle sitting on its little towel, I’m not so sure anymore. I doubt Doctor Alana, as she likes to be called, would approve of this. I didn’t ask her. She’s had her chance to analyze my little episode for the past twenty years and came up with nothing. No childhood trauma, no physical abnormalities, and a clean drug test. All good to go for trial; this patient is perfectly lucid. I still see her sometimes, but we just chat a lot about any urges I might have to blow things up. I don’t have any. I’m not sure why she thinks I’d tell her if I did.
Doctor Williams didn’t ask me to get her approval. His profile as a cognitive psychologist is impressive, even if this clinic seems a bit cheesy. Memory regression isn’t really something you’d expect a big-shot cognitive psychologist to bother with. Unreliable, discredited, something for the movies or those stage shows where a hypnotist pretends to put everyone under, when really the subjects just don’t want to be next to get kicked off the stage for not performing for the crowd.
This one’s different, though. The secret is whatever’s in that needle. It’s going to let me remember why things turned out the way they did. A nootropic cocktail full of magical words like methylphenidate and tryptophan, and maybe a dab of cough syrup, for all I know. Doctor Williams is going to open up my memories like a six-lane highway and let me drive. And when I get there, I’m going to take a look around.
“I’m ready,” I say, but that comes out as a croak. Probably because I’ve got my chin tucked down so I don’t squish the wires around my head. I’m sure that’s it.
“It’s all just memories, remember that,” Williams says. He’s got a little bit of an accent, but I can’t place it. Probably Canadian. “We’ll be monitoring you every second of the way. You’re trying to access a traumatic experience, so prepare to get upset by it. If things look too dicey, we’ll pull you up, all right?”
I nod, which gets me a sigh from the eyebrow-lady. I didn’t even nod that hard.
“Yes, I understand. I used to be a graduate student. I read instructions.” And, though I don’t say that out loud, disclaimers that say whatever experimental soup they’re about to shoot me up with has side effects that make those lists at the end of pharmaceutical commercials sound like shits and giggles.
“No apprehension?”
“Of course. I’m going to remember what I did. Maybe figure out why. That’s the important part. I don’t suppose it matters to anyone except me by now. I’ve paid for it with a big chunk of my life behind bars. Still scary as hell, though.”
“Good, good,” he says like he hadn’t heard my answer. He looks up at someone who’s now sitting down on my other side. “This is Nick Tomlinson,” Williams says. I notice the lack of ‘doctor’ before the name. “He’ll take you through. He’s very good at this.”
The not-doctor smiles at me. “We’re going to ask you to remember the day of the incident, as far as you remember it.” He raises his hand to show me a photograph. It’s pretty grainy and looks like it was taken from a CCTV recording. “Do you know this place?”
I squint at it. A big room, a common area with beat-up couches, an old cathode TV, and a stereo on an old dresser. Sagging posters of beer labels and Nine Inch Nails thumbtacked to the walls. We called it The Pit, like thousands of other hang-out places on thousands of other campuses. There is a kitchenette in the back, basically a fridge and some counter space with a sink. It might have been a storage area once; another door leads down into the basement. “Rec space. Lots of partying going on there. Hey, that’s Mike Radley. No one else with hair like that.”
“This is the best of a bad lot of images,” Tomlinson says. “Do you know the others there?”
“Hard to tell. I think the guy by the door is Ralph Redding. Don’t know the bald guy. Might even be faculty. That girl’s first name is Sue. Someone’s girlfriend, I think. It’s mostly the nerd crowd. Computer science freaks. They had a lab downstairs.”
“That’s you over there, right? So we know this was taken just before things went bad.” His finger moves, and now he points at someone in the back, half hidden by a tall bloke with a backpack. A woman, maybe. They’re walking to the left, and their movement is blurred. “Do you know who this is?”
“No.” I remember not to shake my head.
“Was this any sort of special day? A party?”
“Not that I remember. There were always people hanging around there.”
“Well, we’ll try to get you back there, see what else you remember,” Nick the Hypnotist says, sounding chipper and confident. He turns to the wire-fiddling technician. “Paula, let’s proceed.”
I don’t look at Paula. Or the needle. I don’t really have a needle-phobia. I just think they hurt.
Whoever this Paula is, she knows her stuff. She didn’t even have to say that I should expect a pinch (weird how doctors seem to think needle jabs feel like pinches instead of stings) because I barely feel the thing going into my vein. I try to come up with something funny to say about taking her along next time I have bloodwork done, but things suddenly get very busy.
The place where the needle was is warming up for some reason. Maybe there’s something in there that needs to show up in the scans they’re doing of my brain. Let’s not forget this is an experiment in regression therapy, not some personal favor to help me find out why I killed two people and blew up half of the school residence.
“This dosage will wear off quickly,” Nick assures me. “Time may seem slower to you; people have epic dreams in just minutes. This may feel similar.”
“So I’ll wake up when it wears off? What if I’m not ready?”
“Then we’ll try again another time. Try to relax now.”
Nick starts talking to me pretty much like the hypnotists on TV, in a smooth voice that feels like butter in my ears. I’m not really sure what he’s saying after a bit, so I guess he’s doing his job. He tells me to start thinking back, like climbing a ladder down, one rung at a time. The dope has me pretty relaxed, and I ask him if I’ll fall. He doesn’t laugh. Sure sounded funny to me.
Fine, then. I go down. There isn’t much to remember at first. Prison life is a whole lot of nothing sprinkled with bits of unpleasantries. I’ve been shuffled from one minimum security pen to another until it seemed like everyone’s forgotten about me. My sister kept track, but she didn’t write much, and visited even less. She cares a lot about the neighbors, so I’m sure I’m not discussed much around my hometown. I didn’t even mind jail all that much. I got to read a lot. Teach a little, mostly literacy and high school subjects, but it passes the time. I even get internet access. The other inmates are too busy with their own misery to add to mine, which suits me fine. I’ve never been a people person.
Nicky nudges me along. He has a script based on my history and my own accounts, but he doesn’t prompt me. False memories aren’t what they’re after.
I tell him about
some drama over a blanket where someone got roughed up, and a birthday thing for one of the guards. We actually sang Happy Birthday, but without the cake. That was my favorite lockup, but I got transferred soon after because of overcrowding. I guess I’m lucky that for these past five years my bunkmates have been old repeaters or white-collar miscreants. No idea why they’d get thrown in with a convicted murderer. Manslaughterer. Maybe it’s because I’m from a good family.
The first few years of prison weren’t so great, and I don’t want to go back there. Not the sort of environment you want to be in after spending your first twenty-three years in a good family. No birthday parties worth remembering.
“Can we go faster?” I say, not opening my eyes. I don’t want to go back there, and I’m not staying one second longer than I have to.
Ol’ Nick obliges, and we breeze past the trial. Was a mess, anyway. I’m a lunatic, the papers said. I just snapped for no reason. Or maybe because of the exams coming up. I suppose they were right. I don’t remember. They found me outside on the lawn, ranting about people with guns. Of course I wasn’t a lunatic by the time Doctor Alana and the rest were done with their analyses. So it was the slammer for me, but not as a dangerous offender. My good family has good lawyers, and I got easy time.
“We’re going to take a bit of a jump now, Alex,” Nick says. Almost a whisper. I notice a sound now, coming from somewhere nearby. Or maybe even from the things attached to my head behind my ears. I can hear my own heartbeat swooshing around. It’s slow and it makes me sleepy, in a stoned sort of way. “We’re going to the residence now, back before things happened. Can you do that?”
“Yes, though all this just feels like regular memories. I had a room in Fenton Hall that year. Drafty old mansion, older than the school. Mostly the science bunch lived there. Geology, physics, computers. Some really cool projects going on back then.”
It was the laughter that got my attention that night. Whooping, like someone scored a touchdown. I’m working on the Enceladus paper. Cassini just dumped a massive bombshell onto our desks, and everyone is scrambling to make sense of it. How I wished there’d been more than 24 hours a day, free of that pesky sleep-requirement, to bathe in what those cryovolcanoes were spewing into space. But, like the good doctors would later attest, it wasn’t my habit to give up brainpower by skipping sleep or indulging in drugs beyond shots of espresso. That little moon was my ticket to acing the semester.
Apparently there are some spooky sound files coming back from Saturn. That sort of stuff just tickles me, even if it’s probably nothing to do with cryovolcanoes. Of course, sound files were massive back then.
“Who was laughing?” Nick says, apparently uninterested in my life’s work. “Try to remember details. Even if they seem unimportant.”
I think back to that day. Night. Just the one lamp on in my room, and the light from the monitor. A quiet space, mostly. I guess I could have afforded an apartment in town, but I liked this place fine. It’s comfortable. Solid, somehow, like a castle, even if it’s a bit drafty. I can hear fat rain drops, the sort that only fall in November, hitting the panes of my window. “This is weird,” I say. My mouth feels dry, like I hadn’t spoken for a long time. “It’s very clear. It’s like I’m watching through my own eyes. Credit card bill beside my mousepad. There is a cut on my finger. It bothers me when I type.”
“Good, excellent,” Nick says. “That’s what we want.”
I’m in the hallway now. Whoever had laughed out there was gone, but I hear voices by the stairs. The feeling that I’m watching this as it happens is making me a bit queasy, almost like I’m looking at a video taken by someone’s phone camera.
I was lucky, having an in with the computer science department, on account of where I was living. Computers were nothing like they are today, and there was no way I’d be able to download those files over our piddly network upstairs. No Wi-Fi up here, just miles of Ethernet cables stapled to the ten layers of paint on the baseboards. But downstairs, Ralph and his geeks had all the toys and were always happy to put their skills to work when it came to knocking on NASA’s cyber doors.
So I head for the basement. Like most times, there are people down in the pit, although not many. Tim and Ralph are huddled over a backgammon board. Doctor Who’s on TV, but no one’s watching. I’ve never seen that TV turned off. It’s kind of dark here—no wonder that picture Nick showed me is so blurry. There is Sue coming back from the fridge. She gives me a smile before flopping into the sprung couch. The bald guy in the picture is nowhere to be seen.
I report all this back to Nick, still feeling stoned, and most definitely feeling like I’m some sort of spy. This doesn’t feel like a memory anymore. It feels like I’m there. I remember going over to look at the backgammon board and making some wisecrack about Tim’s bad play. It’s an evening like any other, and none of this feels like I’m about to turn into a psychopath. I ask them if they’d seen Tom Delaney, and they tell me he might be in his den.
Tom’s den isn’t exactly a den. It’s one of the downstairs work rooms that he and his hacker pals have tricked out in the sort of gear that’s probably frowned upon in the campus labs. Separate internet connection and servers, hard drives cabled together, wires running every which way, monitors piled up, and fans blowing the air around. They’ve probably made it look like something out of the X-Files on purpose, I guess. They did a good job with that. I got to know Tom during my first year here, when I still had time for online gaming. He’s a good guy and gets me anything I want in a tenth of the time it would take to download it myself. I never ask for anything illegal. I wouldn’t even know what’s out there for hacking into. I don’t ask him about it.
Sue and Radley got up and are going for the door. She lives in town, so he’s probably walking her out. They almost run into people coming in from the hall. Two of them, a couple.
“Sorry, sorry,” the woman says. She sounds like someone in a hurry.
“Who came in?” I hear Nick say. He seems far away. “Try to focus on what you’re seeing. What you’re hearing.”
“Why?” I ask him. “Do they have something to do with what happened?”
“We’re testing a therapy, don’t forget. The amount of detail you can recall is what we’re looking for.”
“Right. I wasn’t really paying attention. People came and went all the time.”
He mumbles something. It doesn’t sound like he’s happy. “Go on, what do you recall next?” he says.
I think back. I see myself walking toward the left, to the back stairs and down to the basement. Tom’s den is beside the furnace room. The ancient monster in there is chugging along, already overheating the building even though it’s barely November. The utility-slash-laundry room is next along the corridor, and then some jumbled storage spaces lead to the walkup to the parking lot. I’m sure there was a lot of sneaking in and out through that door back when curfews were still a thing. This is a bit of a spooky place. Was a spooky place. It smells of damp and heating oil.
I’m just past the furnace when I hear people behind me. I turn and see the woman that had just arrived at the pit. Her companion is with her. He’s got a backpack on and walks with a limp.
“Did you look at her?” Nick says. “Describe her face.”
I look at her, amazed again at how precisely I can now access this memory. She still has her coat on, a waterproof nylon number that looks expensive. It’s been raining all day, and she’s dripping water on the floor. Her dark hair is thin and tied back; her face is very pale. She’s mid-, maybe late-twenties, I’m guessing.
I don’t tell Nick that. I don’t say anything at all. That face doesn’t require description. It’s pretty enough, but there’s nothing memorable about it. I doubt even a police sketch artist would make much of it. It doesn’t matter. Even twenty-odd years younger, I recognize it from dozens of newspaper stories.
“Alex?” Nick says. “What are you seeing?”
“I…I didn’t see her face.�
�� Why did I just say that?
“Try to remember!”
I must have flinched a bit when he said that. Maybe this experiment isn’t going so well. “I’m trying. What does it matter who she is?”
“Everything matters,” he says. His voice isn’t as mellow now as it was before
The two pass me in the hall, just about shoving me out of the way, and run into Tom’s den without even knocking. I see now that the man’s trouser leg is stained. It pretty much looks like blood, and a lot of it. It drips to the floor, too.
“Did you go into your friend’s lab?” Nick wants to know.
“Yes,” I say. I’m not sure if I was just nosy about this strange scene, or if my First Responder training kicked in, but I remember looking through the dryers in the laundry room. For once I was glad to see someone’s clothes left there, and I grab a towel. “I followed them in there.”
I’m feeling dizzy, I’m having too many thoughts, and I’m pretty sure that cocktail they shot me up with isn’t doing my body much good, either.
“Try to relax, Alex. Deep breaths. What are you seeing?”
Dimly, I can feel a blood pressure cuff squeezing my upper arm. Someone is talking—Williams maybe —but there is pounding in my ears on top of the ringing now. It all seems far away, like they’re in a different room. In a way, I guess, they are.
Tom’s lab is gloomy, as always. It takes me a moment to see that the man with the bleeding leg is slumped in a chair, and the woman is kneeling beside him, looking at his wound.
Tom is standing nearby, looking helpless. When he sees me, he grabs my arm to pull me inside, and then slams the door to the hall. Maybe he’s glad he’s not alone with these two.
The woman looks up, obviously surprised to see me, but leans over to snatch the towel from my hand. She presses it to the man’s leg.
“What are they saying?” Nick says. “Describe what you see. Did someone mention their names? The woman’s name?
“Not that I remember…”
“Try!”
I try. I see the woman fumbling through her pocket until she comes up with a disk. “Quick! Get logged in!” she snaps at Tom. “Get this sent!”
The Dogs of God Page 41