In the Court of the Yellow King (17 page)

Those shallow sad little souls—they didn’t know anything. They certainly didn’t understand that there was no absolute truth toward which anyone could be guided. The very concept was a shell shuffle with an infinite number of shells and no pea under any of them.

The game of civilization was rigged, not from the top down as if the rich and powerful were standing on the necks of the rest, but from the bottom upward. Every possession was a buckling strap, every dollar, each pot and pan, every trinket yet another weight welding one in place. But
The King
, seeing
The King
, having its own peculiar truth presented so one could pull their own understanding from within it,
The King
revealed all.

The King, one of the three primaries, so vast and multi-colored, so wrapped around everything, his power and influence in every yellow hue—how could it not be obvious? How could anyone not see him when he reveals himself everywhere? Of course, the answer was that he was known. In the same way the sky was known. Is known. So obvious is the sky, so always present, it is not noticed. One only notices the sky—filled with our atmosphere—when it is gone.

So too, once one sees
T
he King
, it becomes obvious that he too is everywhere, his hand on every shoulder, his breath within all lungs, unseen only because he is so large he can not be comprehended by such mundane senses as sight and touch.

In the beginning, when thoughts first solidified in reproducible form—stone tablets, crushed reeds, animal skins, whatever—in every corner of the world the first play written was always his. Men called them bibles or commandments or other lesser titles to encourage familiarity, if not understanding, but it mattered not. It was all his truth, and it has crawled forward toward mankind over thousands of years—

Waiting for humanity to become conscious enough to grasp its presence.

The King In
Yellow
is nothing more than the core truth revealed. The universe making witness—giving testimony to the fact that it has secrets, and that they are easily understood.

Madness... to call the clearing of one’s eyes to all that is irrelevant in life insanity is so very tiny. And, to not understand the place of all that is tiny, is so very sad.

Sadness and all its terrible siblings will disappear, though—it is foretold. To say that such will be soon would most likely be misleading. The King but showed the barest of interest in the Earth and the paltry few planets around it but a moment ago to his own reckoning. Think of it as if you had taken note of something in the morning paper. While at work, you allowed the notion to inhabit the back of your mind. Arriving at lunch, the nagging little thought returns to where you finally consider it. That is the history of The King and mankind.

Some ten thousand years ago, his attention flickered past our random little globe. Millennia later, he has actually begun to exert some small desires concerning our small reality off in the corner of existence as it is.

A distraction is all we are to The King.

“Just give in... in the end, you know it’s so much easier.”

Yeah... easier. It really is true. The easy way. The easy way out. Take it easy. Ease up, friend. Why resist? Why bother? Don’t you know that no one cares if you put a lot of effort into your work, into your life? Into anything—

Why do you struggle so? What a waste of time. Stop being so damn stupid and just relax—

Take it easy
—

“After all, a hundred years from now, who’s going to know the difference?”

It’s what the entire world has been saying to me my whole life. In so many ways, a part of me wants to struggle, to fight onward. But to what purpose? When is the lesson finally learned?

If you want to know the day I learned I had been wrong so very long, to believe in humanity, in the nobility of the grunting apes to every side of me, just read the date on my ticket stub. The play is the thing, they say.

They’re right.

het’s posture was entirely that of a man trying to relax. He sat in the corner of the sofa, self-consciously leaned back against its yielding floral-print pillows, hands in his lap, then off to the sides—cushion and arm—then back, but folded instead of resting on his thighs.

“So,” he said.

Connie, the therapist, smiled reassuringly.

“What shall we talk about?” she asked.

He laughed, nervously. “Um... I don’t know. I mean, things are OK. They’re all right. My... wife, my children it’s all... fine.”

“Kids getting good grades?”

“Brett kind of struggles with motivation.”

“Hm. No work troubles?”

He shrugged. “If a job was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it. My dad used to say that.” He looked away.

“Is that my cue to say ‘tell me about your father?’”

She chuckled. He smiled back in reply.

“What did your dad do? For a living, I mean,” she asked.

“Oh! Well, he put together washing machines in a factory.”

“That does not sound like a fun job.”

“He did his share of complaining about it.”

They trailed off into silence.

“And you?” she continued. “What do you do?”

He explained. It had something to do with mathematics, computers, and insurance. Connie didn’t really follow it.

“You like it?”

He shrugged. “Beats working on a loud, hot assembly line. It can be tedious but... I like tedium, maybe? I handle being bored better than a lot of people.” He sat up and forward. “I mean, I guess that I have a tolerance for problems and tasks that are
just the right amount
of busy work? Not really really hard problems, but the kind of thing that you know will... that you know you can solve if you just, like, keep chiseling away at it.”

She nodded.

“How are you sleeping?”

He sighed.

“Well that’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

After their first session, Connie’s secretary Griffin wound up calling Chet’s insurance company.

“Hi,” Griffin said. He had a beautiful phone voice, deep and resonant. “I’m calling from Stearkwether Therapeutic Associates?”

“Hello, my name is Jennifer,” said a voice with a thick Bengali accent. “How may I help you today?”

“We’ve got a new client, he’s insured through Allied Health Programs.”

“Can I have his account information please?”

Griffin gave it, the name ‘Chet Wegler,’ his Social Security Number, his account number, and the Single-Payment Service Identification Code.

“Was Chet Wegler’s referring physician Dr. Weinbaum?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Weinbaum isn’t in our office.”

“Can you describe the therapy Mr. Wegler is receiving?”

“Of course I can’t, c’mon. Patient confidentiality precludes.”

“I’m going to transfer you to my supervisor.”

Her supervisor (“Jeremy”) had a Punjabi accent and asked for the client’s name, SSN, account number and Single-Payment Service Identification Code.

“And he is taking the therapies from Dr. Constance Stearkwether?”

“She’s not a doctor,” Griffin said, “But yes, Connie Stearkwether is his therapist.”

“And what sort of therapy does she do, please?”

“Traumatic association reductive therapy.”

“Please hold.”

The music was an R.E.M. song from the early 1990s. It played twice before breaking off.

“Hello, my name is Anthony,” said the man with the Marathi accent. “Can I have the name of the client please?”

Griffin sighed, but he gamely provided name, SSN, account and SPSIC again.

“The code you provided is for psychotherapeutic services,” Anthony said.

“Yes. That’s what Mr. Wegler is getting.”

“But Constance Stearkwether is not a psychiatrist, nor is she a psychologist.”

“She’s a counselor.”

“What is it that she does, again?”

“Traumatic association reduction therapy.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“She reduces the traumatic associations between memories,” Griffin told him.

“...we don’t have a code for that.”

“It’s a new therapy.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Wegler’s insurance does not cover experimental therapeutic modalities.”

“In process, they sit and talk. It’s no more ‘experimental’ than any other talking cure.”

“I’m going to have to transfer you to a mental health expert. Please hold.”

Griffin sighed.

They had several sessions, talking about Chet’s dad, before Connie asked, “How much do you know about the brain chemistry of memory?”

“Um... very little.”

“It’s interesting how many different tasks we talk about when we speak about remembrance. Your son’s name is... Brett, right?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t consult my notes,” Connie said, with a little smile. “I accessed recollection—I drew up the fact from within the pattern of electrochemical signals in my brain, right? And when you hear the name ‘Brett,’ you don’t have to dredge it up to know it’s your son’s name, you instantly feel its rightness. That’s the difference between recognition and recollection. One’s active and one’s passive.”

“Okay...”

“It’s not that difficult,” she insisted. “There are memories you have to work at, and there are memories that jump out and surprise you because something triggered them, like a photo or a turn of phrase or a smell.”

“The taste of a... oh, what are those cookies in that French novel?”

“Don’t remember?” she asked.

He smiled back.

“Madelines, from
A Remembrance of Things Past,
” she said.

“I bet you talk about that book a lot, in your line of work,” Chet said. He finally seemed comfortable on her sofa.

“A fair bit, yes. I’m also a fan. But if you think of it, reading—where you blast past the words so quickly that meaning builds up through their collective action, not from individual letters—is different from writing, when you’re going much slower and trying to find just the right word for this or that situation.”

“Got it. Some memory is automatic, some you have to fight for.”

“Right! The division between directed memory and reflexive memory is an important one. But if those are the X-axis of the chart, there’s also a Y-axis. Make sense?”

“Rows and columns, oh yeah. I spend... a
lot
of time with spreadsheets. What’s the other axis then?” Chet asked.

“Some memories are functional—remembering how to ride a bike or juggle. Those usually start out conscious, like when you’re picking out notes on a piano or letters on a keyboard, but become instinctive over time.”

“Got it.”

“Other memories are emotional.”

“Oh, now we’re getting to it.”

“These different categories are largely disconnected from one another. Someone with total retrograde amnesia, where they don’t even know who they are? They retain skills,
Bourne Identity
style.”

“Now there’s a story I know better,” Chet said. “The movie, anyhow.”

“People who’ve damaged their ability to form new memories, or who’ve lost old ones, often
recognize
,” she said, drawing attention to the word, “People from their past who were important to them. A man who couldn’t tell you his own name or where he was from knew he loved his wife when he saw her. Similarly, some experiments with electroconvulsive memory erasure indicate that patients feared the doctor even when they didn’t and
couldn’t
consciously know her name or what she’d done with them previously.”

“That’s kind of spooky,” he said. “It also sounds like bad news. I mean, isn’t it? My... baggage...” he twisted away in the sofa, looking out the window.

Connie reached over and took one of his hands, tugging lightly until he turned to look at her.

“Your problem is that you have deep, traumatic emotional memories,” she said, staring deep into his eyes. “They are reflexive and they are set off by commonplace stimuli—lying flat in bed, darkness, late night. You are re-experiencing old abuses.”

Chet eyes were reddening, but he didn’t look away.

“
I can break that, Chet
.” She let go and leaned back, but held his gaze.

“How?” he whispered.

She handed him a box of tissues.

“There are stimuli that have profound impacts on the mind,” she said vaguely. “In the past, they’ve been applied haphazardly, or accidentally, or... um, recreationally. But I believe these factors can be used with precision. They can alter your sense of what life is and what life can be.”

“What sorts of... I mean, how would that work? I’m not sure I want to get my mind rewired. I just want to not have to think about... you know.”

“I know Chet. Look. Emotive memory is stored in the amygdala,” she said. “Procedures are spread throughout, which is why they can be so resilient. Visual, intellectualized data resides in the hippocampus. But all memories—functional, feeling or fact—are plastic. We trust what we know as if it was iron, but it’s actually as supple as rope.”

“How can that be possible?” Chet asked. “I
know
what happened. I was
there
, I wish I could forget or misremember, but it comes back
exactly the sa
me every time
, it’s like a broken record, it
never
changes, I’d rather be delusional than be stuck in a loop with what actually went on!”

“It’s an illusion,” she said steadily. “Memory is the graveyard of facts.”

“That’s crazy! God, how can you tell me that I don’t even know what happened when I was there and you weren’t?”

“Because
all
memories are illusions. Your father isn’t here right now, is he? He died in...”

She checked her notes even as he said, “1997. I’m not wrong about that, am I?”

“No.”

“Then how are you going to convince me that I’m wrong about the... the rest of it?”

“You don’t have to be right or wrong,” she said. “We just have to convince your amygdala that it’s not happening
right now
. Because we can agree on that, right? That it’s not in the present, but the past?”

“Who said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’?” he asked.

“I’ll have to look that one up,” she said.