Human Sister (18 page)

The relaxing image I chose was of a grape leaf, one with an intricate pattern of venation as seen from below while it floated green and carefree in a deep blue sky frosted with cirrus clouds. This was no ordinary grape leaf; it was a huge magic leaf that during many of my daydreams had swooped down out of a mare’s-tail sky to carry me off across the vineyards, across the Sierra Nevadas, over the Rockies and the checkerboard garden of the Midwest, across the wide ocean and green England, and in through Elio’s open bedroom window. From there, he and I had zoomed and floated and fluttered, peeking our heads out over the leaf’s edges to see the Alps, the Bosporus, and the Himalayas before returning to Amsterdam as the time for Aunt Lynh to return home from work drew near.

After only a couple of weeks’ practice, I was able to go from normal consciousness to self-induced hypnosis in less than ten seconds. When fully hypnotized, awareness of my breathing—slow, deep, and relaxed—was the only salient thing in my consciousness. I could hear Grandpa and was aware of what he was doing, but such awareness seemed faint and disconnected from me.

Before the algetor was completed, Grandpa tested my reactions to various stimuli. In one test, I submerged my hand and forearm into a tub of ice water. Without hypnosis, I managed the pain, which became fairly intense within a minute, by focusing on the stinging and aching sensations and treating them as harmless, interesting curiosities, just as Grandpa had taught me to do years before. But with self-induced hypnosis, my experience of the ice water was different. I was aware that my arm had been placed in cold water, but I was only vaguely aware of the stinging and aching sensations, which seemed not to be affecting my arm but rather someone else’s arm that had been submerged in the water.

I asked Grandpa whether there wasn’t a contradiction between what he’d taught me before—to go to the painful sensations and experience them fully—and what he was trying to teach me with hypnosis: to dissociate myself from the sensations of pain. He said that though the lessons taught two distinct methods of dealing with pain, the lessons were complementary, not contradictory. He reminded me that our bodies had evolved in a world devoid of man-made optical illusions and pain inducers, just as the ideas of Newtonian mechanics had evolved in an experiential world devoid of extremely small objects moving at extremely high speeds; and that just as Newtonian theory had failed for the extremely small and the extremely speedy, so our senses and emotions failed in many artificially imposed conditions.

He had me read a passage on reflex actions from Darwin’s 1872 book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
:   

I put my face close to the thick glassplate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

Grandpa explained that Darwin’s experience with the puff adder presented an example of how our evolved senses and emotive systems deform heights, widths, distances, light intensities, and dangers, leading us humans to misconstrue reality and sometimes to take inappropriate and potentially dangerous actions.

“What would have happened to poor Mr. Darwin,” Grandpa asked, “had there been an exposed high-voltage wire a meter behind him as he faced the puff adder with his firm determination not to jump back from what he knew to be illusory danger?”

“That would have been bad.”

“Yes. Probably his widow and fatherless children would have preferred he face the terrible snake with a self-hypnotic suggestion not to jump back, rather than with his feeble determination.”

“Didn’t Darwin know about hypnosis?”

“I don’t know whether he did. But we do, and we can put that knowledge to good use. The algetor will be complete in two or three days. Remember, it’s nothing more than a sophisticated producer of illusions. A special helmet will cover your head so that you’ll be able to see and hear only what the operator of the algetor wants you to see and hear. Various parts of your body will be wrapped in banded strips of microsensors and stimulators. You’ll be told that unless you talk, the knife with the sharp, cold blade scraping over your leg will be jabbed deep into your thigh and twisted mercilessly. You’ll feel the cold, hard steel on your thigh. You’ll feel its sharp edge. You’ll be ordered to answer, but you’ll remain silent. Then you’ll experience excruciating pain as the large blade dives into your thigh.”

I felt my eyes widen as the story came to life in my mind.

“What will you do then?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. “Nothing. The knife won’t be real. I’ll know it's just an illusion. I’ll only feel sensations, harmless sensations merely imitating sensations of hardness, sharpness, and cold. I’ll see the grape leaf floating in the sky and call it to me, counting five, four, three, two, one, and I’ll fly away from the painful sensations on the wings of the leaf.”

“Amazing!” Grandpa exclaimed. “An eleven-year-old girl foils the great algetor! What a shame I won’t be able to show this to certain people at the CIA.”

Before Grandpa attached me for the first time to the algetor, he told Michael to go to his room and close the door. Grandpa said he didn’t want Michael to become frightened by seeing or hearing me in pain, illusory or not. After Michael left, Grandpa pulled a small knife out of the pocket of his kimono, unfolded the blade from its handle, and said, “I thought we would start with a little knife blade and work our way up, if that is all right with you.”

“You’re not going to stick me with any knife, so you can make it as big as you want.”

“Do not be so sure what I’ll do when you’re all bound up in electrodes and you can’t see through the helmet covering your eyes,” he said, pretending to be menacing.

“You can’t fool me!”

On went the helmet, and on went sticky strips along the back of my neck, down my spine, and around my right thigh.

He told me not to hypnotize myself for this first session.

“Do you feel the cold blade flat against your thigh?” he asked.

“No.”

“What do you feel?”

“Just a cold, metallic sensation.”

“Do you feel the sharp point of the knife digging into but not yet breaking your skin?”

“No.”

“What do you feel?”

I hesitated, trying to resist his suggestion. “Sensations of pressure and sharpness.”

“Do you feel the sharp edge of the blade about to cut through your skin?”

“No.”

“What do you feel?”

I hesitated again. “A sensation, as if a sharp edge were pressing against my leg.”

There was a short silence.

“Ow! Grandpa, be careful! You cut me!”

No sooner had I finished exclaiming those words than I became aware of an internal struggle. Part of me was still recoiling in absolute certainty that I had just been cut by the knife, while another part of me began lecturing on the high probability that I’d been fooled.

“Oh, sorry,” I heard Grandpa say. “Let’s take a look at that cut.”

He took off the helmet. I saw a black band covering the area of my perceived cut. He unfastened the band, exposing what appeared to be my uncut thigh.

Then my fingers reported agreement with my eyes.

“Let’s do it again,” I said, perplexed and unhappy with my first reaction.

We did it again. And again. And again. But I couldn’t stop feeling the knife slicing into my skin. I knew there was no knife, yet I felt a sharp, cold edge press down and then begin to slide along my thigh. I felt the skin yield and the piercing pain, and at the same time something beyond reason in my mind became convinced—terrified—that I had just been cut by a knife. Finally, yielding not to pain but to frustration, I began to cry. Grandpa took the helmet off my head, and as I looked up at him I saw sadness and ambivalence in his eyes. But then I remembered Michael and the threats against him, and even as I cried, I redoubled my resolve not to disappoint Grandpa or endanger Michael.

Thus began years of twenty-minute training sessions with the algetor three times each week, sometimes using hypnosis, other times not. During the sessions in which I used hypnosis, the pain seemed somewhere else, and those sessions were easily endured. Without hypnosis, however, all of the illusory painful sensations remained—the perceived knife cuts, the breaking of bones, the flames scorching my skin, the ice picks piercing my eyes—and the initial motor responses of recoiling from those illusions also remained. But over time I learned to tame the fears and anxieties associated with the illusions, and I learned to befriend, and so endure, even the fiercest sensations of pain.

Or at least I thought then that these were the fiercest sensations of pain.

Grandpa never allowed Michael to witness any of my algetor training sessions. He didn’t want Michael to become frightened by watching me endure the extreme and gruesome forms of pain generated by the algetor. Nor did he want me to let Michael into my memory of the sessions.

Of course, Michael was curious about these secret algetor activities. After some of the sessions, I became aware while brainjoined with him of the murmurings—the rustling around of algetor memories, like wind playing with autumn leaves—as he attempted to sneak into forbidden territory. “No!” I would think, or even say aloud, as if he were a bad boy caught stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree.

“But it’s not fair,” he’d whine.

One day, about a month into these algetor sessions, I stubbed one of my toes. The next day, I made a “discovery”: The pain of yesterday’s stubbed toe could, in a limited sense, be remembered, but it couldn’t be felt. I was astonished to find that I was nearly as separated from my own past pain as I was from another’s current pain. This loss of sensation in the memory of physical pain seemed doubly remarkable to me, given that I could reproduce sights and sounds—and sometimes even tastes and smells—as freshly as if they were being experienced anew.

I ran to Grandpa with this discovery, telling him that past physical pain is no longer even as faint as earthlight reflected from a crescent moon; it’s only a shadow that gallops along beside us as we ride certain of our memories into the past. Grandpa chuckled at my enthusiasm, then explained that physical pain, existing as it does only in the present, is one of the conscious qualia that help us separate the present from the past, the real from the remembered or imaginary. Then, after giving due consideration to the fact that Michael was no longer an infant and that the sensations of past pain are irrecoverably gone, he said that though he still didn’t want Michael present during my algetor sessions, it would be all right for Michael to sample my memories of the sessions.

As far as I know, Michael fully entered the memory of an algetor session only once. He screamed, pulled the braincord back into his head, and began to cry.

First Brother

S
he removes the backpack from her shoulders and kneels on the sand. The dog sniffs at the pack. She opens the pack. In it is some brindled material (highest correlation: synthesized food) wrapped in thin, transparent material (highest correlation: polyethylene) and one cylindrical object (highest correlation: insulated bottle) tapered and capped at one end.

“Okay, now. We can’t tear into this like a couple of famished dogs.” She shelters the pack with her left hand and arm and attempts to push the dog away with her right hand and arm. “Sit! Sit down, Rusty. Sit. Good boy. Now, stay. Stay!”

The dog sits on its hindquarters. It exhibits a high level of attention directed both at the pack and at her. “Stay,” she says, pointing at the dog with her right index finger. The dog licks the finger. “Stay,” she repeats, directing a stern facial expression at the dog while she slowly withdraws her right hand toward the pack. She keeps her eyes directed at the dog as her right hand searches in the pack.