by Jacob Gowans
They had pancakes for breakfast on Monday the 25th. Sammy noted the date because Brickert’s birthday was only a week away, and he had hoped to be back in time to celebrate it. Toad ate like he wanted to break the world record for most pancakes downed in one meal. Lara watched him with a bemused expression. Twice during the meal Sammy caught Thomas glancing nervously in his direction. Each time he met the older man’s gaze, Thomas’s eyes returned to his holo-tablet where he read the morning news.
It was Lara who spoke up. “You know, Sammy, I think Dr. Vogt wants to examine you again.”
Sammy noticed that soft tone in her voice. Careful, he thought, she’s being careful.
“Oh yes,” Thomas added in a similar tone. “He’s been out of town, but he should be back sometime today. I think he did mention that.”
“What for?” Sammy asked.
Thomas shrugged. “Just to check a couple things.” The look in his eyes told Sammy that Thomas wasn’t being completely truthful.
“I—uh—I told the doctor about what happened to you in Rio,” Toad admitted.
Sammy threw down his fork. “What did you do that for?” he yelled. Thomas stood up quickly, and Lara moved closer to Toad.
“Toad did the right thing, Sammy,” she said.
“It’s not his place to say anything about me!” Sammy stared at Toad, who would not look back at him.
Lara and Thomas exchanged a wary glance, and this made Sammy even madder.
“The doctor’s not here,” Thomas reminded him, “no need to worry. You can see him after lunch.”
Sammy stared at Toad, who, in turn, stared at his plate, occasionally sniffing. Again he had to fight back the darkness inside of him that wanted to do violent things to those who made him angry.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be in my room.”
The afternoon came quickly. Sammy read Great Expectations on his bed until Dr. Vogt came for him.
“Ready, Sammy?” the doctor said with a light tap on the door. He was wearing neither a doctor’s coat nor a stethoscope, just a pair of relatively new jeans, tennis shoes, and a maroon and gold t-shirt with the word MONARCHS printed across the chest. “Back upstairs we go.”
“What’s this all about?” Sammy asked when they sat down in Dr. Vogt’s office.
“I want to talk some more about what you went through in Rio. Not just what the Aegis did to you, but the time you spent in isolation before that. You must be pretty messed up inside.” He tapped the side of Sammy’s head.
“I’m fine.” Sammy’s statement came out monotone and unconvincing.
Dr. Vogt put his hands in his lap and stared at Sammy for a good ten seconds. “To be perfectly honest with you, I’m a medical doctor. I have a degree in psychology from Hastings College, but that was almost twenty years ago. After that, I went to Johns Hopkins Medical School.”
“So, you’re a psychiatrist?”
“No, I was an internist. So I’m about as qualified to treat whatever is going on in your brain as you are to treat my ulcers.”
Sammy saw the smile in Vogt’s brown eyes, even if it didn’t reach his mouth.
“Then how are you supposed to help?” he asked the doctor.
“I thought you said you’re fine.”
“I am.”
“I didn’t bring you up here to waste time, Sammy. Just admit you have a problem so we can get on with it.” Dr. Vogt’s tone of voice wasn’t harsh, but frank.
It angered Sammy to be spoken to that way. Fresh memories of his time spent with Stripe played in his mind like an out-of-focus holo-film. Tears crept into his eyes, and he had to bow his head to hide them.
“You were tortured, Sammy,” Dr. Vogt said in the same, frank voice.
A barrage of emotions slammed into Sammy, and he found himself reeling from betrayal, fear, anger, and shame all at once. Each emotion was like a different anvil pressing down on his chest and shoulders. It was so much that he didn’t know how he could cope with it.
“You don’t know anything about it!” He glared at the doctor as he spoke.
“Do you want help?”
Sammy tried to gain control over his emotions but couldn’t. A pump inside him was regurgitating up his darkest feelings, and he couldn’t find the off switch.
The tears kept flowing.
“Because if you want help, I’ll try. It’s got to be better than having all the junk stewing in your brain. Right?”
An old wooden clock on the wall ticked the time away and rain pellets tapped on the window panes. Sammy hadn’t noticed until now, but a big storm was rolling through.
“Have you suffered any hallucinations? Any distortions in reality? Anything odd or upsetting?”
Sammy mumbled a few words about a crocodile and his leg.
“I didn’t catch that.”
It sounded so stupid to Sammy that he wouldn’t repeat it.
Dr. Vogt folded his arms across his chest and sighed impatiently. “Look here. From the short time I’ve been observing you, I’ve been very impressed. You seem to be extremely emotionally stable and—”
This time Sammy shook his head madly.
“What?” the doctor asked.
“I’m not—I’m not . . . stable.” The things he wanted to say were humiliating, but he wanted to be rid of the demon inside him. He’d managed to bury the memories by focusing on making it to Wichita and fighting off gnawing hunger, but over the last few days they had been resurfacing. Reading had helped a little. “I—I’m—I wake up from horrible dreams every morning scared so badly I think I’m going to pee on myself. Sometimes Toad annoys me so much I want to kill him . . . and I imagine ways of doing it. He sniffs all the time!”
The doctor looked up from the paper he’d been scrawling on as Sammy spoke. “He has a badly deviated septum and it clogs his nose. Combine that with his ultra-kinetic anomaly and it’s a recipe for a Tourrettes-like tick.”
Sammy shook his head in the same irritated way. There was one more thing he had to say. Swallowing hard, he forced himself to tell the doctor the most embarrassing thing of all. “And I’m not smart.”
“Oh? I beg to differ. Just getting here proves you’re very smart.”
“No! I figured out all that stuff before I was—before everything happened. I used to be able to—to see!” He shouted the last words and banged his fist on the arm of his chair. The chair trembled lightly. Tears flowed again, but he wiped them away as if they were acid.
“See what?” the doctor asked, jumping slightly in alarm at the unexpected outburst.
“I don’t how to describe it. My brain,” he explained, tapping his head just as the doctor had. “It figured things out so clearly that I could see it sometimes.”
“You mean your Anomaly Eleven?”
Sammy nodded slowly.
“And now you can’t? You can’t see?”
Admitting it made Sammy feel naked, even more than when the doctor had examined his skin from head to toe and every part in between. He wasn’t the same person anymore, and a part of him he’d loved so much—a part he’d come to depend on—was gone. And the idea that he might never get it back was unbearable. All because of Stripe, because he had been stranded in Rio, and because all the Psions back home thought he was dead. Sammy wished now that he could go back to Rio and do worse things to Stripe than what he had. He wished he had fought the Aegis in Floyd’s store, and even if he’d died, at least he wouldn’t have suffered through all this crap.
The doctor’s hand gently rested on his shoulder. “I’d like to help you, Sammy.”
“How?” Sammy cried. “I’m so screwed up! Even if I make it back home, no one’s going to know me.”
“Half of that is right. You are messed up. But your youth and your intelligence will help you heal. Are you willing to try?”
Sammy gave a great sniff.
“Who’s sniffing now?” the doctor asked.
An abrupt laugh came from Sammy, and he felt a little better.
Dr. Vogt left his hand on Sammy’s shoulder and continued speaking. “It’s funny because I was fascinated by psychology in college. It was my major. Then I went to medical school and never got to use it. I fell in love with surgery, and it was more exciting. Now all I ever do is give people stitches or antibiotics. I’d love to help you. We can work through this. I’m not saying I can cure you, but I can help. Since you got here, I’ve been looking through different resources and studies on torture victims, abused children and spouses. Things to help rebuild the psyche.”
“What’s a psyche?” Sammy asked.
“I’ll teach you all of that. But the kind of therapy I have in mind is intense, and it’ll last about a month. You’ll have only limited contact with Toad and Thomas and Lara. You and I will have very involved discussions about yourself and what happened to you when you were tortured. It may very well be as hard to go through as what caused the damage to your mind. Do you think you can handle that?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t give me an ‘I guess’ answer, Sammy. I need a commitment. A month is a long time, and I know how badly you want to get back home—”
“NO!” Sammy rose out of his seat. “I want to be whole again before I go back. I want to feel . . . like myself. And I’m not myself.”
The thought of his friends whispering behind his back, knowing they thought of him as a psycho . . . If he went back to headquarters, he needed to be the person that they knew, otherwise he would never really be home.
“You’re okay with beginning right away?” Dr. Vogt asked.
Sammy didn’t answer. He was still absorbed in daydreams of his friends staring at him with frightened expressions.
“Did you hear me?”
Sammy jerked out of his reverie. “Huh? No.”
“I said we’ll start right away. Again, I’m no psychologist. I’m not trained to do this, but I’m as qualified as anyone you’re going to meet around here. And I want to see you through this.”
Outside the window, rain and hail came down in sheets. Wind blowing off the windows and walls of the building howled like ghosts. A tiny sliver of sunlight broke through the vast cover of gray-black clouds in the sky.
Sammy sighed. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Dr. Vogt got up from his chair and went to his bookshelf. “I sleep here, you know. The infirmary is my apartment. You’ll be here with me after breakfast until dinner every day. I’ll give homework to keep you busy at night.”
“Oh, great.” Sammy tried to grin, but his face felt tight as though he hadn’t smiled in ages. He watched Vogt pull several books down off his shelf. Nine total.
“These are for you,” he said, carrying the pile to Sammy. He handed the books to him one at a time. “Freud, Skinner, Lacan. You’ve heard of those guys, right?”
“I think so. Freud for sure.”
“Here are some more names. Freud Jr—his daughter, not son. Rogers, Bandura, Chin. Chin is still alive, I think.”
“Am I going to read all these?” Sammy asked with wide eyes. The books were not small. Not small at all.
The doctor smiled and handed Chin’s book to him. “Not cover to cover, but much of this you’re going to learn.”
“How will it help me?”
“The platform of the theory I’m going to use revolves around combining several different psychological thoughts into one. That’s what Chin’s books teach. You have to learn to apply the therapy, which means you need to have a decent understanding of psychology. Education begets implementation. Since you’re the one who needs the help, you have to fix yourself. I’m going to guide you and give you the tools to do it.”
Dr. Vogt was true to his word. He sent Sammy home with a reading assignment and the next day they met from breakfast ‘til dinner. For the first few days he taught Sammy psychology: psychoanalysis, behavioral psychology, brain function, humanism, classical and operant conditioning, personality construction and deconstruction, abnormal psychology . . . they touched on everything and delved deeply into many subjects.
The schooling frustrated Sammy. For someone used to picking things up so quickly, he struggled to grasp some of the concepts, and often needed Vogt to explain things two or three times. After they finished each day, he’d eat and spend time with Toad and the Byrons. Then he studied late into the night after Toad fell asleep, snoring from his deviated septum.
Dr. Vogt didn’t have patience for Sammy getting distracted or being sarcastic. He didn’t chit-chat much, either. Occasionally he had to leave for other duties involving his medicine. In these instances, he gave Sammy chapters to read or documentaries to watch on famous psychological experiments.
Their lessons went on for ten to twelve hours a day, breaking only for lunch and restroom visits. After their tenth day, when Dr. Vogt called it quits, he stopped Sammy at the infirmary door.
“Get a good night’s rest, Sammy. The easy part is over.” He scrawled something down on his notepad and tore the paper from it. After crumpling the sheet, he threw it at Sammy. “Read that.”
Sammy read it.
Who are you?
“Okay.” He looked to Dr. Vogt for an answer. “I don’t get it.”
“We’re going to have a truth talk.”
“Truth talk?” Sammy repeated. “You mean I’ll lay on a couch and talk to you about my mother?”
“Not quite.” There was no indulging smile on Vogt’s face. “Think about the question. You’re going to spend the entire day answering it.”
Weary, worn, and with heaps of undigested information floating around in his brain, Sammy went to bed. Toad asked a few questions about how the lessons had gone and told Sammy about how he’d spent another day eavesdropping with Thomas.
“It’s boring,” he explained. “I’d rather be in class with you. Really. But when our shift finished Thomas and Lara started working on my Ultra skills with me. They’re going to try to help me start learning what I can do. Lara thinks that if I’m good with a bow and arrow, I’m probably good with a gun, too.”
Sammy wasn’t listening. How am I going to spend an entire day answering that one question?
He doubted it would be as hard as Vogt said. After all, he’d accomplished some amazing things before and after leaving Beta headquarters. Telling the truth seemed rather low on the scale of difficulty.
That was what he thought . . .
“You must talk the entire time we’re together,” Dr. Vogt explained the following morning. “If you can’t think of anything more to say, I’ll prompt you from the notes I will be taking. You can have all the water you want during our sessions, but you’re only getting two bathroom breaks. Don’t drink too much.”
The doctor pulled out a thick notebook and five pens, laid four of them above the notebook, and kept one in his hand.
“So . . . who are you?”
Sammy dragged out his answer for twenty minutes before he ran out of things to say. He stared at the doctor with a blank look, silently asking what more he wanted from him, but the doctor continued to scribble notes down onto the notebook. After a bit of pondering, Sammy talked about his favorite foods. From there he moved to other preferences and dislikes. Those took another twenty-five minutes. His forehead began to ache from searching for things to say.
After an especially long pause, Dr. Vogt commented, his eyes still on his notes, “So far everything you’ve told me is superficial. Who are you?”
Sammy’s mouth opened to answer but all that came was “deh—ah—mmh . . .” and then a long sigh.
It was the longest day he could remember. Longer even than his days walking through the plains of Mid-American Territory. Anytime he stopped for longer than a minute, Vogt prompted him to expound on something he had said. The talking took unusual turns. Sammy discussed aloud his lack of conviction of anything spiritual, mentioning how some of his friends had firm beliefs in God and an afterlife, but he had none. His parents had raised him that way, believing that if he relied on himself rather than
a god, he’d be more likely to succeed. But on the other hand, he knew people like Al, Marie, and Kawai who were very spiritual and also successful.
His oratory then dipped into shallow philosophical waters and skimmed the surface of the more sordid details of his personal history, intentionally omitting some things. He knew he’d talk about them sooner or later, but preferred later. To stall for more time, he drank sips of water. After using both his bathroom breaks, he had to go again. He bore the pressure for about an hour before begging Dr. Vogt to let him go.
“You can use the restroom,” Dr. Vogt said, “but I’ll start rationing your water if you do.”
When their day came to a close, Dr. Vogt packed away his things with a satisfied expression, and gave Sammy his homework and another question. With a scratchy voice and a throbbing headache, Sammy ran for the bathroom. Later in the evening, Toad tried to talk to him through dinner about figuring out a way to teach him how to use his Anomaly Fifteen, but Sammy had no desire to speak. He excused himself and went to bed.
After reading two chapters from Abnormal Psychology by the light of his bedside lamp, he unfolded his little piece of paper and read:
What do you want?
He whispered a silent swear word, tossed the paper into the waste bin, and turned off the light.
He woke early the next morning so he could do his exercises. Toad usually joined him, but Sammy decided to let his friend sleep. Toad knew where Sammy would be, anyway.
Dr. Vogt took breakfast with the group, but he never spoke to anyone about his work with Sammy. He ate quickly and then asked Sammy to join him upstairs.
Sammy sighed and got up.
He talked about wanting to be whole again, wanting to be home, wanting to win a war that he didn’t even fully understand. He told Dr. Vogt about his friends in Johannesburg who were locked up in the Grinder and how he wanted them to have good, productive lives. He wanted a family again. He wanted to make sure Stripe was dead. He discussed more intimate thoughts like how he wanted to know if there was a god. To lose his virginity before he died. To go into space. To own a dog. To live by a large body of water. He even mentioned how he wanted Toad to be able to train with other Anomaly Fifteens since he, Sammy, didn’t know how to help him.
