Devil's Plaything (14 page)

G
randma can't run. I can't carry her—or tell her what to do. What do you do when fighting and running aren't viable options?

“Let's play possum,” I whisper to Grandma as I close the door gently.

I walk Grandma to the couch, and I sit her down. “We were just here,” she says.

“Act natural.”

Seconds later, there is a knock.

I open the door. The guard looks alert, but not worried. Maybe he's thinks he's been sent on a routine call from a paranoid clerk. “You're not pizza delivery,” I say.

“What?”

“A joke. It's never too early in the day for sausage and mushroom.”

He looks around, sees the place is intact. He looks at Grandma, who has her hands folded in her lap.

“Where's Pederson?”

“In the Ocular Lab. If you're headed that way, could you tell her we're getting tired of waiting for her?” I add with a whisper: “Our study subject can be a little difficult to handle. She's got advanced dementia.”

Grandma says, “Does this place have cocoa?”

I look at him and shrug.

He's in his late twenties, with a blue-collar feel; his face is shaved but he's missed a patch of hair under his chin. The corner of his mouth is cracked with herpes. A coffee stain shaped like a clenched fist graces the right breast of his uniform. He might well be underinvested in this job.

“Where's your visitor name tag?” he asks.

“I work in Building Five. John Johnson.”

“Where's your badge?”

I explain that I told the guy at the counter that I'd lost it—in the bathroom. He considers this. “I'll call the lab to see if I can get Pederson to come down here.”

“Great.” I gesture to Grandma. “Our guest is impatient.”

The guard raises his cell phone to his mouth, pushes a button on the side, then pauses. His eyes have landed on the lock on the floor. He quickly looks away from it and at me. Into his walkie-talkie phone, he says: “Can I get security backup in Twelve, third floor?”

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

“Take a seat, sir.”

He juts his chin to the love seat. I take two steps toward Grandma. I'm walking slowly, trying to calculate our options. They have diminished considerably. I cannot afford to get detained and arrested, or have Grandma taken from me, or worse.

I turn around. He's a step behind me.

“Keep moving,” he says.

“May I tie my shoe?”

He looks at my feet. As he does so, I yank his heavy metal flashlight from his belt.

I clutch it in my fist, a thick, squat metal bat. I hold it like I might hit him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he says. More surprised and aggravated than frightened.

“Leaving unobstructed.”

“You're going to whack your way out of here with a flashlight?”

“That's the plan.”

He smirks.

“Give me your phone,” I say.

“No.”

“Give me your fucking phone!”

“Don't shout,” says Grandma.

The guard tosses the phone to my right side, just out of reach.

“Stand up, Lane.”

“I just sat down.”

“Stand up. Walk to the door.” Emphatic.

She stands.

“Go ahead,” the man says. “I won't stop you.”

I walk to the phone. I put it under my foot and step. It remains intact. As a tough guy, I'm way out of my league; I'm a pen-wielding freelance writer, not James Bond, or James Dean; maybe James Taylor.

“Have a seat,” I tell the guard.

The guard takes two steps past me, and then whirls. Before I can process, he's lowered his head and is rushing at me.

I slam the flashlight down on his back, or try to.

His attack is much more effective.

He wraps his arms around my waist and tackles me. My back hits the floor with a thump. And then adolescent fury takes over. Both of us scramble, driven by self-preservation and our own versions of rage and sense of victimization. It's more wrestling than fighting. We're in close, punching, elbowing, and scrapping, ineffectively. Mostly. I feel a hand claw at my chin, and my neck wrenches to the side in pain. And before I know it, I'm on my stomach, and the guy is trying to pin my arm behind my back. I'm vaguely aware that he is trying to get me into a wrestling hold that I won't be able to escape from without breaking my ulna.

“Stay the fuck down,” the guy says.

I'm toast. We're toast.

And then, miraculously, he lets out a painful groan. “What the fuck?!” he screams.

He loosens his grip.

I take advantage of the moment to turn over. As I do, I see the flashlight lying within reach. I grab it.

I look up and see Grandma, and so does he.

“I raked his eyes,” she says.

It dawns one me that Grandma came up behind the guard and ripped her hands and fingernails across his face.

He looks incredulous. And then she pulls her foot back, and she kicks the guard in the balls. It's not very hard, but the surprise factor is huge.

Then she drops into a geriatric version of defensive karate crouch.

Under almost any other circumstance, it would be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.

“Old lady, I'll . . .” the guard says.

He steps toward her and I hit him square in the back of the head with the flashlight. He crumples. I drop the weapon and take a step away, then pause and lean down over him. He's moaning. He's not mortally wounded by any stretch. But it's going to take him a few minutes to get his bearings.

I snag Grandma, practically sweeping her in the air.

We rush to the stairwell.

Remarkably, we make it down the stairs and out a side door without capture.

Breathless, we get to our car and drive from the lot, just as a cadre of security guards enters the building.

Ten minutes later, we're parked in the lot of a chain grocery store, hidden among many cars, sandwiched between a minivan and a roadster. If any of the Biogen guards suspected us and our departing Toyota, they either didn't act or move quickly enough.

I look at Grandma. Her hands are folded in front of her and she's looking at me.

“I'm angry with you, Nathaniel.”

“With me?”

“You don't visit me as often as you should. I'm sorry to speak like this, but we were very good friends when I was younger, when we were both younger, and I don't think we see each other that often. I know you're very busy, but it would be nice if we could spend some time together.”

“Grandma, do you remember what just happened? At the office? Do you remember the fight?”

“A man was going to hit your head. You have to protect them from getting inside your head.”

“A fight. You saved us. You were amazing. You were tough, and strong, and instinctual. Holy shit. I was saved by my eighty-five-year-old grandmother.”

“My hand hurts.”

I reach for it. Her fragile skin is unbroken. I prod gently at the bones beneath her fingertips and she winces only slightly. No fractures; maybe ultimately a bruise.

“Unbelievable,” I say. “Grandma, do you remember
The Karate Kid
?”

“What?”

“You're the Karate Curmudgeon.”

“Okay.”

“It's a joke,” I say. “I . . .”

I pause mid-sentence. I'm struck by something Grandma uttered a few moments earlier. She said: “You have to protect them from getting
inside
your head.” She didn't say: “You have to protect your head.” That would be the phrase.

“They've gotten inside your head,” I say.

“If you'd visit me more, we'd be making more sense to one another. We'd be speaking the same language.”

“Grandma, I'll try to do better.”

But even at that moment, I'm not totally invested in the conversation. I'm lost in an idea about what's going on, my first sense of the nature of the bizarre conspiracy we've stumbled into, and how Grandma might be involved.

I
t's an idea that seems utterly remarkable, almost totally absurd.

“It has something to do with Biogen—and something called Advanced Development and Memory 1.0. ADAM,” I say. “That sounds like software to me, a program of some kind. What does it have to do with you?”

“Nathaniel.” She wants to say something, but I can't pause my train of thought to indulge her.

“They were observing you at the fake dentist's office,” I say. I don't want to say aloud what I really mean: They were experimenting with you, Grandma. In the radiology clinic below the dental offices, they were scanning your brain, using the MRI to look at images of it. They were studying your hippocampus. Why?

“Grandma, I'm just going to say it.”

“What?”

“They were fiddling with your memory.”

“I can't remember things the way I used to.”

“Adrianna Pederson was in the middle of it, and she reached out to me. She knows what's going on. Now she's missing.”

“I feel like I'm watching
Jeopardy
,” Grandma says, and laughs. She feels like she's made a joke.

“I know someone who can help me figure out whether I'm onto something—or losing my mind too.”

I pull my phone from a pocket.

“Grandma, have you heard of Henry Gustav Molaison?”

I dial. Grandma doesn't answer my trivia question.

“He was the most famous amnesiac.”

He died near the end of 2008 after making a lifelong scientific contribution, all unbeknownst to him.

When he was in his twenties, in the 1950s, he underwent experimental surgery to stop terrible seizures. The surgery destroyed his hippocampi and, inadvertently, his short-term memory. He couldn't remember a person he'd met minutes earlier.

He was famously nice, willing to participate in endless observation, which he did as a kind of petri-dish-in-residence at MIT. He was lucid, thoughtful, and able to communicate his experiences with researchers, even though he couldn't register new memories. His brain was a veritable blank slate on which to study the science of memory.

I learned about him in medical school—no med student ever forgets H. M. (how he was known until his death)—and then read his obituary. Researchers learned from H. M. that there are two different kinds of memory: a mental one and a physical one. Intellectually, H. M. could retain no new information. But physically, he could learn tasks. For instance, he learned to draw, and his skills grew over time, suggesting his memory for physical tasks remained intact.

This is partly what prompts me to call Grandma's neurologist. H. M. showed that such memory bifurcation is possible. But what doesn't make sense is how markedly Grandma's physical and intellectual experiences are diverging.

“You not only remember karate. You're adroit and able,” I say to Grandma as Pete's cell phone rings.

“Okay.”

Pete finally answers. “Hello.”

“Dr. Laramer. Pete. It's Nat Idle.”

“Is everything okay with your grandmother?”

“No. I mean, her decline has been so precipitous.”

“Where are you, Nat?”

“Listen. It's not normal.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Is there evidence in the literature of highly accelerated cases of dementia, unusually rapid deterioration? Memory loss at hyper-speed.”

“As I told you, trauma can exacerbate memory loss.”

“No. Not something so . . . organic,” I say, emphatically. “I'm thinking about drugs, or, I don't know, maybe some kind of technology that hastens decay of the hippocampus.”

“Whoa. Stop.”

“What?”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like the people who come into my office caring for a loved one who has dementia. This is a difficult time.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nat.”

“Sorry, Pete. Something is not right.”

He sighs. “May I posit a theory?”

“Please.”

“You're involved in some story, an investigation, not getting enough sleep. I've heard how . . . excitable you can be when the muse hits. I respect that. You're creative. There's a colloquial word for it: ebullience. You're not hypo-manic, but just energetic. It's not bad, but it can color your perspective.”

“Thanks,” just shy of exasperated. I'm not looking for a theory about me. “You're sure there's nothing—no deep brain scanning technology, or . . . I don't know what? Nothing that might speed dementia.”

“Where are you?” His voice sounds grave.

“South San Francisco. In the car.”

“Is Lane with you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you returning her to the assisted-living home?”

“No, we're . . .” I pause. “Why do you ask?”

“Bluntly, she needs to be getting the proper care.”

“I . . .”

He cuts me off. “You and I both know you've got a penchant for the dramatic. You're a storyteller. Good for you. But whatever you're doing now—whatever wide-eyed ideas you have about your grandmother, while understandable, should not divert from her care. You must get her someplace safe.”

I sigh. I want to yell at him, get him to address my questions. Earlier he told me to get her out of her environment, now he wants me to put her back in it. Why contradict himself, or change his counsel?

Regardless, part of me knows he's right—about getting Grandma into a safe setting. The Witch said so too. Is Lane my ward or my pawn?

“If you don't want to take her to the home, bring her to me and let me examine her,” he says. “Let me make sure she's okay—and I can suggest where you might take her.”

“Really?”

“You're a family friend. How about this afternoon?”

“Let me think about it.”

He pauses.

“I'll come to you,” he says.

“Pardon?”

“I'll come get your grandmother. I'll take care of her for a few days if that's what it takes.”

I want to reach through the phone and strangle the patronizing ape. He must really think me incompetent.

“I'll call later,” I say. And I hang up.

It's 1:20 p.m. We've got a little more than four hours before I pick up Grandma's care file from Betty Lou.

We're still parked at the grocery store. We walk inside and buy macaroni salad from the deli, sharing it while we sit together back in the front seat.

“I'm glad they invented this food. It's yummy,” she says.

I smile. “Time to visit a farm,” I say between bites.

“With cows?”

“Servers.”