The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

  Charlie stared into it and felt that he was staring into his own head. Thoughts and memories arose, half formed, out of the swirling mists of time, but disappeared before he could seize on them and give them names. Though he knew that, if he waited, one memory would emerge. He knew what it would be. It was the memory that always came back to him in this frame of mind and about this time in the morning.

  Kathy Ryan was the first girl he’d ever loved, and the first girl who had loved him. She had taught him what love meant when he most needed it. Looking back he knew it had been real, not just some adolescent crush. It must have been in the sixth—or was it seventh?—school they’d sent him to. (Out of how many? Who cared? Too many, and not enough. I le hadn’t learned a damn thing that whole time. Just an endless round of fights and punishment and truancy and more fights.)

  They’d just been kids, he and Kathy. It had never been a sexual thing, though it would have become one if they hadn’t got picked up that time they ran off together. They’d just lammed out one morning. Without a word spoken, just a look between them, they’d known what they wanted. They took off with just the clothes they wore and the change in their pockets.

  He remembered it still as the best day of his life. In a sense it was the first day of his life. He’d broken out and found freedom with someone he cared for and who cared for him. Someone who, by the time they’d walked hand in hand through the city and reached the rail yards on the far side, he knew he wanted to be with and protect and make love to for the rest of his life. She told him she felt the same way. All they both wanted was somewhere private, someplace they could be alone.

  They were caught trying to jump a freight train. He’d fought like a tiger against two cops bigger than himself, but in the end they’d got the cuffs on him. Instead of spending the night of his dreams with Kathy, he’d spent it alone in a police cell. Next day he’d been driven back to the orphanage in the kind of armored van that was used for carrying prisoners to jail. Then he’d been left alone in a room with the three gorillas who were responsible for “security” in the place, and who told him they were going to teach him a lesson he’d never forget. Except it didn’t all go their way. He’d hurt one of them pretty badly before the other two got hold of baseball bats and laid him out with a brutal beating. After that they’d thrown him in “the hole.” He’d been there more times than he could remember, but never this badly hurt. He knew he’d get nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours, maybe longer. For all they knew or cared he could die in there. In fact he thought he was going to. As the numbness wore off, the pain got worse. Later he must have passed out. When he came to, the pain started again. He tried to think of Kathy. That helped some. But the pain was still bad.

  When they finally dragged him out and had him checked over by a doctor, he was told he was being moved—right then, that morning. He was put in another prison van and taken on a long drive, way out into the country. They went in through the gates of some place that looked like a big park or private ranch. He could see groups of young men working out and playing sports and scrambling over obstacle courses. It looked like some kind of training camp. That was his first sight of the Farm, and the first day of his new life.

  His only regret was that he didn’t know how to get in touch with Kathy. All he’d known was that when she wasn’t in school she lived in the girls’ orphanage a couple of miles away. He didn’t have the name or address of it or anything. Even if he had, he didn’t know if he’d be able to write to her—or, for that matter, what he’d say. And anyway, maybe they’d moved her on the way they had him. Maybe her life was better now. Certainly his was getting better, no question about that; but he’d have liked her to be a part of it. Maybe one day, he told himself, she would be. That was his dream.

  Meanwhile he had his memories. But memory, he had come to realize, played strange tricks. Like the way he couldn’t remember color from before the Farm. Or Kathy’s face. Even though he remembered everything about her better than he remembered anything in his life, he still couldn’t conjure up an image of her face. Maybe he’d thought of her too often and too hard and somehow worn out his mental picture of her. Or perhaps, he told himself, we only think we remember people clearly, whereas in fact all we retain is a kind of general impression, enough to know them when we see them again, but not enough to conjure them up like a picture on a TV screen.

  Yet he could remember other people. He could remember Debbie in the next room, just the way he’d seen her a few minutes ago. If he closed his eyes he could picture almost anybody he chose, male or female. So why did Kathy’s face escape him? Obviously there was some kind of self-censorship going on. Before the Farm was a rotten part of his life that he wanted to forget. It was as though he’d scooped out that part of his memory, leaving only fragments and echoes that no longer formed a coherent whole. Kathy had been the only good thing in that life, and it saddened him that he seemed to have blocked her out with the rest of it. He wondered if he’d know her if he saw her again. Then he wondered, as he often wondered, what had become of her.

  “Charlie…? Where are you… ?”

  Debbie was calling his name from the bedroom, her voice drowsy and thickened by sleep. Normally he would have found it sexually arousing, but now his thoughts remained stubbornly elsewhere.

  But where exactly? If not here, then where were his thoughts?

  “Charlie, come on back to bed, sweetie…. I want some more of what you gave me earlier…?”

  That sounded good. Wasn’t that what he wanted, too?

  And yet… and yet… what was he struggling to remember? And why did it matter? After all, it was only in these moments when he had nothing more urgent to occupy his mind that he found himself turning to the past and trying to make sense of it. Mostly he had better things to do.

  “Charlie…?”

  Like now.

  “Right here, honey. I’m coming.”

  He turned from the window and retraced his footsteps to the bedroom, shedding his robe along with his fragmented memories as he went, preparing to bury himself in something more substantial than the past.

  Chapter 9

  AMERY HYDE WAS a tall man with the lean frame of the athlete he once was, and the agility of a man much younger than his sixty-four years. Susan knew that he was attractive to women. She also knew he’d had affairs since her mother’s death, and in a way she was surprised he hadn’t remarried. But she’d never asked any questions, and he hadn’t volunteered any details—until these last few weeks while he’d been seeing her through John’s death.

  She didn’t learn anything particularly new about him. What was interesting was hearing him tell her things himself. It was, she felt, the way they would have talked if they’d spent more time together in the past. It was a sad irony that they were spending it together now only because of John’s death.

  Logically, that made it tragic that she should have grown so close to her father. Yet that was absurd. Would things ever, she wondered, go back to making sense?

  She and Christopher had come to Washington for the long weekend. He was in bed now. They were leaving him with Mrs. Collier, her father’s housekeeper, and were having a drink before going to a dinner party around the corner. It would be only the second time she’d left him since John’s death. He hadn’t been disturbed the first time, nor did he object when she asked if he minded her doing it again. It was good, she thought, that he should feel relaxed about it rather than clinging fearfully to her.

  Her father poured her a glass of Chablis, then added an exquisitely measured fraction of water to his whiskey. He took a sip and savored it as though its taste might give him an answer to the question his daughter had just put to him.

  “I don’t think,” he said eventually, “that you should do anything about this man Samples unless he contacts you again.”

  “Then what? Have him arrested? Questioned?”

  “I’m afraid you’d have insufficient grounds. After all, he didn’t threaten y
ou in any way.”

  “But if there’s anything in what he said…”

  “Let’s take it a step at a time.”

  Their eyes connected. That was what he’d said when he was getting her through the first shock of bereavement. A step at a time.

  “Yes,” she said, “you’re right. I’ll wait until he contacts me.”

  They fell silent. He stared into the flickering fire in the grate.

  “Do you think it’s possible that your work could be used in the way this man was suggesting?” he asked, without looking at her.

  “I’ve thought about it. In theory, of course it is. But then, that’s true of every advance in medicine or science in general. You have to balance that risk against the positive things you can achieve. But in the end a scientist’s job is to find out how the world works, not pronounce on it morally. And a doctor’s is to give the sick any help you can, not withhold treatment in case you’re blamed for some misuse of it later.”

  “Nobody’s talking about blame here. Human beings do what they’re capable of—on every level, unfortunately, good and bad.”

  Again they sat in thoughtful silence for some moments.

  “You’d have to solve a few problems before you could use what I did the way Samples was claiming.”

  “But could those problems be solved?”

  “Yes, in principle. I can think of ways, experiments you might try.” She paused and looked at her father. “But they’remot the kind of experiments that a civilized society would condone.”

  Amery Hyde frowned, drawing out a white—spotted blue handkerchief that he ran across the base of his nose several times, sniffing softly. Then he glanced at his watch.

  “We’d better be going,” he said.

  They were dining with a former secretary of state, the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, a member of the Joint Chiefs, and a couple of editors. Even by Washington standards it was a pretty high-powered group, and the conversation would be as entertaining as it would be interesting. She had been looking forward to the evening, as she knew her father had. Now she felt she’d almost spoiled it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have brought this up now. But I couldn’t earlier with Christopher around, and I didn’t want to on the phone….”

  He waved his hand to stop her. “You’re right to tell me. I’m only sorry I can’t be more helpful. I’ll make some inquiries— discreetly. But there was no hint of anything wrong when I checked them out last time.”

  At her request, her father had “asked around” about the Pilgrim Foundation after they had first approached her. A man named Latimer West had called her out of the blue one day and made an appointment to see her. He’d spent an hour telling her about the Pilgrim Foundation and what it was doing for scientists like her. At the end of their conversation he’d given her his card and invited her to get in touch if she was interested in going further. She needed research funding, but she was trying to avoid sources like the big drug companies because they tied you up for life. That was when she had turned to her father for advice.

  “As you might guess from the name,” he had told her, “quite a number of the trustees trace their families back to the Pilgrims. There seems to be no religious or political bias in what they do, or any kind of bias so far as I can see. They’re not a pressure group, their funding is real and its source isn’t suspect. They seem genuinely to want to back worthwhile independent research.”

  That was how it had started. Without them, she would never have been able to help Brian Kay, or any of the others she had helped and would go on helping in the future.

  A clock struck in the next room. Her father looked at her, concerned. “We don’t have to go,” he said, “if you’re not feeling up to it.”

  “No, I’m fine. I want to go. I feel better now I’ve talked about it.”

  He gave her a quick smile and squeezed her hand briefly. Then they walked through to the hall, where he helped her put on her coat.

  Chapter 10

  ONE OF THE FIRST things that Susan had done after her conversation with Dan Samples had been to check him out on the Net. On the first search engine she tried, his name brought up over thirty references; on the second and third even more— mostly articles written by him about the usual grab bag of paranoid conspiracy theories.

  In a way, she felt, the sources carefully indexed at the end of his various pieces said it all. Titles like: OPERATION MIND CONTROL, THE ZAPPING OF AMERICA, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, WERE WE CONTROLLED?

  To be honest, one among them gave her pause for thought:INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE FEDERAL ROLE IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION—prepared by the Staff of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, United States Senate (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974).

  However, that impressive effect was diminished by the acknowledgment that followed it: BEEPERS IN KIDS’ HEADS COULD STOP ABDUCTORS, Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 7, 1987.

  And she thought that before making up her mind she would have to know more about THE CONTROL OF CANDY JONES (Playboy Press, 1976).

  The obsessions of Samples and those like him centered on the idea that some amorphous and shadowy group of power brokers was intent on establishing control of what George Or-well called “the space between our ears.” Samples differed from some of his peers in that he believed these would-be controllers to be entirely human, whereas others remained convinced they were at least partially made up of visitors from space.

  Susan found it hard to believe (despite pictures) in people being radio-controlled by implants in the head. Or radiation disks hidden (though seldom found) under the dash of victims’ cars to give them cancer. Or the idea of bombardment by high frequency waves from helicopters, or from some truck next to your car in a traffic jam.

  She had sat back from her computer with a sigh, as she had earlier in the cafeteria, putting a distance between herself and the world Dan Samples lived in. She hadn’t wanted any part of it. The worst thing about it, and perhaps the hardest part to believe, was the degree of institutionalized evil it implied not just within dictatorships and fanatical cults, but equally in so-called democracies.

  She had realized she was going to need powerful proof.

  As the days went by and no call came from Samples, her conviction grew that he was just a harmless crank with insufficient evidence to back up his fantasies. With this came a growing sense of outrage that he should have intruded into her private tragedy to gratify his taste for paranoid invention. She decided she wasn’t just going to let the matter drop. Genuine science had enough prejudice and ignorance to overcome without neurotics and charlatans like Dan Sample obscuring the real issues with crude superstition. She decided to go after the man.

  In one of his articles he listed a number of organizations that he accused of being fronts for the channeling of money, public and private, into illegal experiments. Many of them were august and widely respected bodies. One of them was the Pilgrim Foundation. She didn’t know whether this reference had ever come to the knowledge of anybody in the foundation, but she decided to make sure that it did. Their lawyers would doubtless take over from there.

  Latimer West, who ran the Pilgrim Foundation—officially he was its general administrator, with a seat on the board of trustees but no voting powers—received the news of Samples’s libel with equanimity. “It’s something that happens from time to time,” he told her. “Eruptions of confabulatory nonsense like pimples on the face of an adolescent. Most people grow out of it. It’s rarely worth suing—for one thing they don’t have any money. And if you use the law to close them down, you just make yourself look like the kind of bogeyman they say you are. But you’re right, I’ll have this looked into. Sometimes, when they go too far, you have to fire a warning shot across their bows.”

  Susan had never been sure if she liked Latimer West. There was an unappealing plump sleekness about the man. He managed somehow to be both unctuous and condescending at th
e same time, and he wore an eternally hovering smile behind which she was sure lurked a killer instinct. He had degrees in medicine and business administration, and clearly relished the entree into the higher levels of both social and intellectual chic that his position afforded him. Nonetheless, the idea of his being in any way an evil man struck her as patently absurd. Samples’s charges against the Pilgrim Foundation just didn’t make sense on any level. The people behind it as well as the people supported by it included some of the country’s elite. Only paranoid fools—and embittered losers—could convince themselves that there was a rottenness at the heart of such a thing.

  Aside from whatever the foundation might do, she felt an urge to confront Samples himself and demand an apology for involving John’s death in his infantile games. He wasn’t going to get away with his hit-and-run treatment of her. However, one of his claims that proved true was his boast of being a hard man to find. There was no e-mail or any other kind of address for him on the Net. As she didn’t even know where he lived, she didn’t know where to begin searching for the possibility of a phone number, though the likelihood of his being listed anywhere was remote.

  When she spoke with her father on the phone, his advice was to let the whole thing drop. No real harm had been done, and provided the man didn’t harass her further, she should just forget about him.

  Yet she couldn’t. She went back through the stuff on the Net. This time she found a publisher’s name listed at the end of one of Samples’s articles, along with an address—in Baltimore—to which you could write for further material or for copies of some of the books quoted. It was probably, she imagined, a desktop operation working out of somebody’s apartment over a Chinese take-out. She checked, and discovered they had a phone number. She dialed it, and after several rings a youngish male voice answered.