After the Apocalypse (13 page)

There is something compelling about the idea of someone who has lost their memory. It taps into an almost universal desire to wipe the slate clean, to start over. In fiction and in film, it is often a chance for a person to redeem themselves.

Doug Bruce walked into a Coney Island police station on July 3, 2003, and said that he didn’t know who he was or where he lived. He had woken up on the subway without wallet or identification. He could speak, he had skills—since he knew how to swim before he lost his memory, he still knew how. But he could not remember ever having seen the ocean. He couldn’t remember family or friends. Police found a phone number in a knapsack that Bruce was wearing, and a friend came and picked him up. He was a stockbroker with a loft, cockatoos, and a dog. He became a cause célèbre, in no small part because he was so charmed by the world. Everything was new. It was his first rain, his first snow, his first exposure to the Rolling Stones, his first shop window. Friends said that before he lost his memory, he was somewhat arrogant, and that afterward he was much more … delightful.

He has never had MRIs, which would go a long way toward verifying whether or not he has amnesia (recall of memories cause certain kinds of visible brain activity), and there is considerable doubt as to whether or not he is lying. Complete retrograde amnesia, the kind of amnesia Doug Bruce claims to have, is extraordinarily rare. It rarely persists for more than a few months. In 2005, Bruce was the subject of a documentary called
Unknown White Male.
After it was released, he stopped giving interviews.

A boy with no identification but who said his name was Simon Weiss was found on the streets of downtown Baltimore five days after the bombs exploded. He was hungry and mildly dehydrated, but he had obviously eaten and drunk during the five days. He was brought to a Red Cross relief center, where his name was entered in a data bank for missing persons. When he was asked where his family was, he said he didn’t know. He was asked his mother’s name and said he didn’t know. Area hospitals were still overwhelmed with people who had been, or thought they had been, exposed to radioactive waste from the bombs. His file was marked for follow-up with a psychologist and he was transported to the refugee center outside Richmond, Virginia.

A number of refugees were moved to the Virginia National Guard station at Fort Pickett and put in barracks-style housing. The boy who called himself Simon was there for five months.

“Yeah, I remember it,” he said. “It wasn’t so bad. Boring. I watched a lot of television. I had never seen
Lost,
so I watched the whole thing from beginning to end in reruns. They were showing two episodes a day from 9:00 to 11:00. I remember that. And then one night I saw the
Simpsons
where they did the last episode about
Lost,
where they all get rescued, and they mixed
Gilligan’s Island
in with it, and Homer Simpson was the old guy, the Skipper.” His face crinkled with laughter. He was animated. He was present in the memory. Asked about what he remembered from before Fort Pickett, he described the Red Cross worker who asked him questions—a somewhat scary lady with gray hair, he said. Asked about before that and his face changed, went oddly slack.

“Do you remember going to school in Pikesville?”

“Yeah,” he said. Pressed for what he remembers. he said, “The monkey bars.” He shrugged. Looked away.

Eventually, when no one came forward to claim him, Simon Weiss was placed in the foster-care system and ended up with a family in Brookneal. (The family did not want to be identified in this article.)

Jim Dwyer, the mechanic whom the boy eventually came to work for, believes that there is a reason that he doesn’t remember. “I don’t know exactly what happened,” Dwyer says, “but something obviously wasn’t right with the family.” He won’t be pinned down, but the implication is he suspects abuse or at least neglect. He believes that the boy separated mentally and emotionally.

Luz, Robert (now 16), and Inez (now 11) deny that there was abuse. “We were never abused,” Robert says. “I don’t know who said that, but it’s not true.”

Robert is a soft-spoken boy who remembers William as “a great kid. A great older brother.” He remembers that William was the one whom their mother left in charge sometimes, but until that last year, he says, they always had a babysitter. Inez has memories, but they are more vague. What she remembers better is the home after Baltimore. “We were always hearing about William,” she says. “About where he might be. Mom was always calling someone because of something on the internet or on television.”

No one but Luz and the children believed that William was alive. There are about a hundred people who have never been accounted for, and it was assumed that William had either been killed during the bombing or had died in the day after. Luz moved them back to Pikesville as soon as they were able, in case William was looking for them. In the year before the Woodholme Country Club took her back, she worked a series of jobs. The kids remember going to a school that was mostly empty, so few people came back. There is no doubt that William’s disappearance affected the family both financially and emotionally. Robert had nightmares, and Inez wet the bed. Both were afraid that things were contaminated. Inez got food poisoning from a hot dog and refused to eat for days. Even now, she is in therapy once a week because she is afraid to eat.

Luz was haunted by the fear that William had been exposed to radiation and was sick. The amount of radiation in the bombs was small, and it dispersed in plumes that trailed south and east, nowhere near Pikesville. She obsessively tracked down as much information as she could about the dispersal of the contaminants. She knew that William’s school trip should not have exposed him (and it didn’t), but she wondered if he had left the museum for some reason. She couldn’t understand, if he wasn’t sick, why he hadn’t shown up on a list of displaced persons, somewhere.

But she couldn’t give up. Finally, a relief worker found a list of children who had been placed in foster homes and gave Luz the number of the social worker who had Simon’s case. The social worker wasn’t sure that Simon and William were the same person, but she gave Luz the phone number of the foster parents. That was on Friday. I asked Luz if she called right away.

“I couldn’t,” she admits. “I started thinking, ‘Why didn’t he call us? What’s wrong?’ I thought that it couldn’t be him. I thought a thousand things. I thought he was angry because I hadn’t come and gotten him.” The next morning she put the kids in the car, and they drove to Brookneal where she rang the doorbell of the foster parents. They sent her to Simon’s job.

“I did it all wrong,” she says. “I should have called him. I didn’t know about the memory thing. I thought maybe something had happened to him, that he had been hurt or abused or … I didn’t know.”

But she had to make the trip. Had to see him. She didn’t know what she would do if it was William and he didn’t want to see them. “When we in Pennsylvania and I kept driving back, trying to get into Baltimore to look for him, every time I got to a barricade and they turned me around, I felt as if William thought I was abandoning him. I wasn’t going to abandon him. I promised him every night, lying in bed, I would not give up. I would find him.” She looks fierce. “And I did.”

Finally in therapy, Simon/William was unable to talk much about either his life in Brookneal or his life in Pikesville. In the presence of his family, he became almost mute. It was too much. Something triggered the creation of Simon, but Stein Testchloff, an authority on Dissociative disorder at Cornell University Medical, says it didn’t have to be either abuse or some terrible event in Baltimore—or, at least, nothing more terrible than getting separated from his class. It appears that some people are predisposed to disassociation. “When someone goes missing for weeks,” he explains, “it usually turns out that they have experienced fugue states before, usually for only a couple of hours.” Luz says that as far as she knows, William never forgot who he was and left home, but as Testchloff points out, William was young and may not have had a fugue experience before. But if he did have a predisposition toward fugue, then the fear and chaos of his experience in Baltimore could certainly have brought it on.

Usually the treatment for someone with dissociative fugue is to bring them out of the fugue state, but William Weir/Simon Weiss doesn’t appear to be in a fugue. Testchloff says appearance can be deceiving. “We think of this as a dramatic thing, a kind of on/off switch. He was William, now he is Simon. But the brain can be much more fuzzy. I think after he’s spent five years of living as Simon Weiss, it is going to be very difficult for him to bring those two histories together.”

Testchloff feels that what has happened to William is close to Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called Multiple Personality. He is reluctant to make that statement, because there is so much misinformation about DID. “Everybody thinks Sybil,” he says. But there is a lot of doubt about Sybil, and, again, everyone assumes it is like the movies—that the separate personalities don’t leak over into each other—when in many cases, some personalities know all about other personalities, and there can be a kind of fluidity in which personalities merge and break apart. Again, popular literature and movies have given an impression that is perhaps less complicated than reality. Testchloff has not seen William and has only reviewed his chart (with the permission of William, his therapist, and his family). He says it seems that Simon now has memories of growing up in Pikesville, but there is some sense in which he has assigned all that to William and holds it at arm’s length.

When asked what he wants, Simon says he wants to keep working for Jim Dwyer. Does he want to continue to see his family?

He does, although he expresses no enthusiasm.

What does he think of his family?

He looks shy. “They’re nice,” he says, almost too soft to hear. “I like them okay.” Then, after a moment, “I always wished I would have a family.”

(Shortly after this piece was written, Simon disappeared for seventy-two hours. He called Jim Dwyer from Norfolk, Virginia, saying he didn’t know how he had gotten there. Dwyer drove to Norfolk and picked him up. Luz and Robert and Inez are still living in Pikesville, but they see William almost every weekend. He has plans to spend Thanksgiving with them.)

The problem line lit up in BHP DMS IT.

“Sydney, phone,” Damien said.

“You get it.”

“You’re the least Asperger’s person in the department. It’s that having two X chromosomes thing.”

Actually, the only people in the department who were clinically Aspergers were probably Dale, who was a hardware guy, and their boss, Tony.

“In the kingdom of the blind,” Sydney said. “The one-eyed girl is king.”

“The difference between see/not see is a lot bigger than the difference between one eye and two eyes,” Damien said.

Sydney picked up the phone. “Hi, this is Sydney.” It was 4:49 EST, and the lights went out.

“Fuck,” said Vahn, a couple of cubes down. “There goes two hours.”

“Save early, save often,” Dale said.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

The lights came back on, and everyone’s systems started booting up.

“Hello?” said the voice on the phone.

“Sorry,” Sydney said, “we just had a power glitch.”

“Well, you and everyone else,” said the man on the phone. “The system is screwy again.”

The system had been screwy for months. Sydney thought someone had probably been messing with it, introducing bugs or maybe even writing some sort of virus. BHP DMS was an elaborate system. Sydney, Damien, and the ten other people who took care of BHP DMS actually worked for Cronaut Labs, the company that had put BHP DMS together. Cronaut contracted them to Benevola.

BHP DMS had been engineered by using genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms weren’t genetic, actually. Damien had had an AI class in college, and they had talked about genetic algorithms. Programmers wrote a couple of different programs that solved a particular problem. Then they wrote some code that chopped and recombined chunks of programs and generated hundreds of program offspring, most of which didn’t work at all. They tested those programs by having them solve the problem, threw out the ones that didn’t work, and did the same thing all over again with the programs that were left. The result was messy and full of odd quirks, but sometimes the results were more efficient than traditionally written code. It had a lot of apparent junk. Spaghetti code that made no sense. BHP DMS made a Microsoft operating system look elegant and streamlined, but it could do some amazingly complex stuff. Damien was really interested in genetic algorithms. He had written some stuff into SAMEDI so that he could have it run a report that output variables at different points. He had shown Sydney a place where SAMEDI seemed to be reading stuff in and out of memory for no particular reason.