The Syndrome (37 page)

“Is it possible,” Adrienne asked, “that that
thing
… is interfering with Jeff’s memory?”

Shaw shrugged. “Absolutely,” he said. “It’s quite possible.”

“But you can’t say for sure,” Duran suggested.

“Not without examining it.” Seeing Adrienne deflate, Shaw gave her a sympathetic smile. “Memory is a very strange thing,” he told her. “People like to think that we store memories in the brain the way librarians store books—side by side, in categories of one kind or another. But it’s not true. We know it’s not true because we’ve done experiments—lots of experiments. And what we’ve learned is that memories aren’t localized, but
distributed.
Like smoke, they’re
diffused
through the brain. So if you teach a rat to run a maze—then mutilate its brain to the point where the rat can barely walk—it will still remember how to get from A to Z. Not as quickly, perhaps, but it will remember.

“What’s particularly interesting about your case,” Shaw continued, “is that we’re not seeing any of the usual profiles of memory loss. Your short-term memory is undamaged. And you seem to retain the
ability
to form long-term memories.”

“So what’s your theory?” Duran asked.

“I don’t have a theory,” Shaw replied. “All I have is an object
.” He tapped one of the images on the light panel.
“That
object.”

Duran stared at the image on the wall, and felt a surge of elation. The psychiatrist might be right. The object could explain a lot. Not everything, of course—not the murder of Eddie Bonilla. But … a lot.

“So where do we go from here?” Duran asked.

Shaw hesitated. “Well,” he said, “that’s up to you.”

“How so?”

“We could go in,” the psychiatrist answered. “Take it out. See what it’s made of. See what it is.”

“Is that dangerous?” Adrienne said.

Shaw’s pointer beat out a rhythm on the table, then faded to a slow, monotonous tapping. The shrink seesawed his head back and forth. “Not
especially.
It’s in an area that’s relatively easy to access. You’d be in a semi-sitting position, and we’d enter the sphenoid sinus cavity through the anterior nasal septum.”

“My nose.”

Shaw stopped tapping the table and slapped the pointer into his open palm. “Right. You’d need broad spectrum antibiotics, but otherwise—I should think it would be a piece of cake.”

“But there are risks,” Adrienne suggested.

Shaw nodded. “There are always risks.”

“Like what?” Duran asked.

“Damage to the optic nerve.”

“He could go
blind?”

“It’s very,
very
unlikely. I’d be more concerned about leakage.”

“Of what?” Adrienne asked.

“CSF. The brain’s floating in a pool of cerebrospinal fluid. In surgery of this kind …?” He ended the sentence with a shrug.

“Christ,” Duran muttered.

“The mortality rate is less than one percent.”

No one said anything.

“Of course,” the psychiatrist went on, “there might be consequences to leaving it in place, too. It could be the cause of some localized infection or swelling—the PET scans show a sort of odd …
excitation …
around the object.” He shuffled through a sheaf of large colored prints of Duran’s brain. The colors were intense—cerise, magenta, sapphire—so that

Duran’s brain had a psychedelic look, as if it might be the model for a line of retro T-shirts.

The doctor placed a photographer’s loupe over one of the images. “Here. You can see the excitation quite clearly. Take a look.”

They did, in turn. Duran saw a tiny yellow blip surrounded by a halo of purple.

“So what do you want to do?” Duran asked.

“An exploratory—see if we can get in and out without a lot of ancillary damage. If we can, we’ll remove it. See what it is.”

“And you’d be doing the surgery?” Adrienne asked.

Shaw shook his head. “I’ll find someone with better hands.” He whirled to a bank of files behind him, pulled open a drawer, extracted a folder, selected some papers. He tapped them into a neat stack, then clipped them together. “Here,” he said, handing the papers to Duran. “Consent forms. You’ll want to read them carefully. Get a good night’s rest and … call me in the morning.”

They found a Cuban-Chinese takeout a block from the hotel, and returned to their room with cartons of rice and beans, and a six-pack of Tsing Tsao.

Duran glanced through the consent forms as Adrienne brought their plates to the little table in the corner.

“I could go blind,” he told her. “Or go through a personality
change. Then, there’s my favorite: ‘loss of cognitive function.’”

She handed him a beer, and asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I could be an idiot.”

“Jesus!” she said. “I don’t know …” She threw him a glance.

“What?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to
say
anything. I mean, I don’t want the responsibility.”

The food was terrific.

“Chinese-Cuban,” Adrienne said. “Not a combination I would have come up with. I wonder how that came about.”

Duran shrugged. “There are lots of Chinese all over the West Indies,” he said. “At least in Jamaica and Haiti there are. So it stands to reason they’d be in Cuba, too.”

She paused, chopsticks suspended on the way to her mouth. “How do you know?”

“What do you mean, how do I—”

“I mean really,” she said. “Think about it. Have you been there? To Jamaica? The Caribbean.”

He thought about it. “I think so,” he said. “To Haiti, anyway.”

“Well, let’s think about it! See what you can remember.”

He savored another spoonful of rice and beans, then closed his eyes, and sipped his beer. Finally, he said, “Big, white house. Verandah. Palm trees.” He stopped for a moment. He could hear the traffic in the street, the dull roar of white noise. “When the wind came up and blew the palms around,” Duran said, “it wasn’t a soft sound, like wind moving through the leaves. It was a thrashing sound.” He paused, and then went on. “There was a gardener who used to climb the trees when a storm was coming …” He fell silent.

“Why?” Adrienne prompted.

“To cut the coconuts—so they wouldn’t damage the verandah.”

“Keep going,” Adrienne encouraged. She put the chopsticks
down. “It’s like when we were playing chess. Remember? The rum, the heat, I think—”

Across from her, Duran’s face had been relaxed, with just a tiny frown of concentration pinching at his eyes. Suddenly, he was on his feet, eyes wide.

“What’s the matter?”

He shook his head, looked away, then took a couple of deep breaths. Finally, he turned to her. “Sometimes … when I start to remember things … I see this room—and it scares the shit out of me.”

“What room?”

He shook his head, and walked to the window. Looked out. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You
have
to.”

He kept looking out the window, as if he was searching for something. A minute passed, and then he said: “I’ve been trying to figure out the color.”

“What color?”

“Of the room. It’s not yellow, but … ochre. And there’s blood everywhere.” He heaved a sigh. “I really don’t want to think about this.”

“But you should, that’s exactly what you should do—you should think about it.
Keep going.
Maybe—”

“No!”

“Fine,”
she said, picking up her chopsticks again. She ran them through the reddish sauce, then concentrated on capturing a single black bean.

“I’m sorry,” Duran told her. “I just can’t do it. It’s … I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“No problem,” Adrienne replied in a dismissive tone. “Whatever.”

“Look—”

“I just think, you know, you’ve got some kind of memory trace there, something important happened—I’d think you’d want to go with it.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. A lock of his dark hair, which he kept combed back, had fallen down onto his forehead
and he pushed at it with his fingers. “I’m not explaining this very well, but it’s like—I
can’t
go with it. I can’t
stand
it.”

She sighed.

“I see that room and … it’s like I’m going to pass out,” he told her. “It’s like I
want to
pass out.”

She shook her head, as if it were a way to change the subject. “I guess you’ve got enough on your mind,” she told him.

He looked puzzled. “I do?”

“Well, brain surgery.” She placed the pointed end of one chopstick atop a single black bean, punctured it, then tried to obscure what seemed like an unfortunate metaphorical action by messing around with the rest of the food on her plate.

“Do you always do that?” he said after a while, his tone light.

“What?”

He indicated the little mounds of rice and vegetables she’d constructed. “Because Dr. Freud has some pretty interesting opinions about that kind of thing.”

She laughed. “Playing with my food,” she said, pushing the food into a single mound, then squaring it off. “My detractors would say it’s the only kind of play I’m capable of.”

“You have detractors?”

She drew diagonal paths through the square of food, separating it into four triangles. “Ummmm. ‘I’m not much fun. I’m a worker bee. I’m all business.’”

He laughed. “I think your detractors are jealous.”

She smiled. Said, “Thanks.” Thought,
Uh-oh.

She was starting to get attached to this guy. In fact, she was starting to like him—and maybe
more
than like him (which would be a
real
disaster).
Probably the Stockholm Syndrome
, she thought. While Duran wasn’t her captor, they were captive together in this weird situation, and it was natural, she supposed, that she would begin to feel that they were some kind of …
team.
She ran her thumb down the side of the Tsing Tsao bottle, leaving a clear path through the condensation. Then she picked it up and drained it.

An hour later, she was standing in the kitchen, washing up,
when she heard him make a call. Turning off the water, she set the plate in the drainer, and listened.

“Yeah, Doc,” he said, “It’s Jeff Duran … right. Fine, thanks. Listen, I just wanted to say—I’ve thought it over, and … I’m in.”

Shaw telephoned at eight in the morning, waking Adrienne even as Duran pulled a pillow over his head.

“We can do it on Tuesday,” he told her. “I’ve got Nick Allalin on board—he’s the neurosurgeon—and I’m lining up the O/R. I may have to do a bit of camel-trading, but … we’re there.”

Adrienne swung her legs out of the bed, and sat up. “Tuesday?”

Shaw could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Best I could do,” he said. “Even that—”

“Tuesday’s fine,” she decided. “It’s just that … I was wondering what we’d do in the meantime. New York’s so expensive, and—another three days …”

“Why not go home? Tell Jeff to put his feet up for a while, and—I’m sure you’re missed at Slough, Hawley.”

“Mmmnnn …”

They rolled into Bethany at dusk, and stopped at the supermarket, first thing.

“I wish I could cook something fabulous,” Adrienne said, as she requested a rotisserie chicken from the clerk—who expertly plucked it free of its metal prongs and slipped it into a bag lined in aluminum foil. They continued down the aisle, stopping to get a prepackaged salad. “But the truth is,” she continued, “the kind of things we ate at home, well, I’m not sure you’d be too happy.”

“What,” Duran said. “You mean, like meatloaf? I happen to like meatloaf.”

“Meatloaf—that would be haute cuisine. My personal specialty was tater-tot casserole,” Adrienne said. “And Hamburger Helper was pretty big. Tuna wiggle. Chicken à la king. And you know that thing with marshmallows and coconut that someone always brings to potluck dinners? I used to
love
that.”

“What’s a tuna-wiggle?” Duran wondered. “Sounds like—”

“Don’t ask. You need noodles, and cream of mushroom soup. And lots of Ritz crackers.”

Returning to the cottage, parking behind it, hearing and feeling the familiar crunch of the pea gravel under their tires—all this gave Adrienne a brief flush of pleasure, a spurious (she reminded herself) sense of coming home.

When they’d eaten, she changed into jeans and a sweater and, accompanied by Duran, went for a walk on the beach, braving the cold. She loved the smell of the sea, the thump of the surf, and the clatter of pebbles dragged by the undertow. But the air was freezing. She could see her breath, and it made her shiver. Noticing this, Duran put his arm around her shoulders, even as he lowered his head against the onshore wind. For a moment, Adrienne stiffened—then, warming, relaxed, sagging into him ever so slightly.

After a while, she asked, “Are you worried about the surgery?”

Duran shrugged.

“You’d be crazy not to be.”

He chuckled. “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?”

After a couple of hundred yards, they returned to the house, invigorated. “I want to take another look at this,” Adrienne said, sitting down at the dining room table with Nikki’s computer. “I’m sure there’s something on it that I missed.” She waited for the machine to boot up. “You any good with these things?”

Duran shrugged. “I could take a look.” He leaned over her shoulder.

“I’ve been through everything I could think of: calendar, address book, e-mail, accounting programs. I’ve called up every file I can find, and there’s nothing.”

“You look at the temporary Internet files?”

She rolled her eyes. “No.”

Duran sat down beside her. “Go to
Start
,” he said. “Then
Settings.
Then
Control Panel
.” She moved the pointer as he directed. “Now hit the Internet icon and … you see where it
says, ‘Temporary Internet Files’ … click on the
Settings
button, and—”

“‘View Files’?”

He nodded. She clicked, and a window appeared with scores of Internet addresses, listed by
Name, Address
, and
Last Access.

The two of them scanned the addresses together, scrolling down the page. Besides the usual assortment of cookies, banner and GIF files, there were lots of URLs, though most of them had been accessed only once or twice: