Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  Dr Blake switched off the torch and straightened herself. ‘You’re Harry Dick,’ she said. ‘You had an accident. Your wife can’t be here with you yet, but she knows you’re safe and well, and you’ll see her soon. Can you remember her name?’

  Harry tried a few guesses and eventually hit on Margaret.

  ‘Well done!’ said Dr Blake, making a note on her clipboard. While she scribbled, he looked around the room, trying to make sense of it all. There were few furnishings: an armchair for the unknown wife who was due to visit, a tilting table on wheels, a locker, a moveable screen.

  ‘Do I have children?’ he asked.

  ‘Can you think of any?’

  He couldn’t; Dr Blake said his wife would supply all the relevant details. He remembered many things: what a hospital was, for example, or a doctor. Yet there were gaps in all the most important places, which he became aware of only at Dr Blake’s bidding.

  She said, ‘What day is it today?’

  He didn’t know.

  ‘It’s Tuesday,’ she told him. ‘And it’s ten past nine in the morning. Can you tell me what year it is?’

  He offered several candidates until the flicker of Dr Blake’s smooth, sternly attractive face finally guided him to the right answer. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘And can you tell me the name of the First Minister?’

  Now he was stumped. ‘First Minister? What do you mean?’

  ‘Can you tell me the name of the First Minister of Scotland?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it’s a standard question we ask everyone with a head injury.’

  Her comment merely added to Harry’s confusion. He said, ‘Do you know who the First Minister of Scotland is?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘And do you have a sore head?’

  She wrote something down, then said, ‘The First Minister is called John Fraser. Do you think you can remember that?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he told her. ‘But what about the accident? What happened to me?’

  ‘You were crossing the road and got hit by a car,’ she said. ‘You could easily have been killed. Better be more careful in future.’

  Harry tried to picture it, but in his mind there was only a dark void where his past was meant to be. One small memory alone surfaced into consciousness. About to step into the road, he was carrying something in his hand.

  ‘Do you recall your mother’s name?’ said Dr Blake. Again they went through the guessing game, ending with a tick on Dr Blake’s clipboard that denoted either his success or her ultimate boredom. ‘Father?’

  The reconstruction of Harry’s family tree was an exercise in arbitrariness. Suddenly a name came to him. ‘Thomas Mann,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Might have been a relative. Or a First Minister. Or somebody famous.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Dr Blake. ‘Interesting though; the name sounds symbolic. Thomas could be from John Thomas; which would give us Penis Man.’

  Harry wondered who else in his family might be no more than a phallic symbol. ‘Why can I remember some things and not others?’

  Dr Blake sat down on the edge of the bed, placing the crisp outline of her thigh not far from Harry’s idle fingers. ‘Let me try to put it in simple, layman’s terms,’ she said. ‘Memories, Harry, are somewhat like pencils.’

  ‘Like pencils?’ he parroted. So far, he was with her completely.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And our heads are full of them.’

  ‘Like a pencil case?’

  She didn’t appreciate this interjection. ‘One must never push a scientific analogy too far,’ she warned, then resumed her idiot’s guide to metaneurology. ‘You see, it isn’t only the pencils themselves that constitute our memories, but also the way they’re arranged.’

  Clearly Harry’s pencil case had been badly jumbled. Perhaps he’d even been left an HB short of a full set.

  ‘When you look at the end of the pencil,’ Dr Blake enthused, ‘you see a small hexagonal shape.’

  ‘Or circular,’ he suggested.

  ‘Actually in the case of the human brain it’s neither,’ she said dismissively. ‘The point is …’

  ‘The other end of the pencil?’

  ‘No, Harry. The point is that the smooth end of the pencil …’

  ‘The one opposite the point?’

  ‘Yes, that end, is quite small. But when you turn the pencil sideways, it looks long and straight.’

  ‘And hard,’ he contributed, while Dr Blake’s eyes narrowed beneath her sleek brows.

  ‘Interesting,’ she said, then made a note on her clipboard.

  ‘I see you use a ballpoint,’ Harry observed.

  She looked up. ‘Yes, why shouldn’t I? Pencils are only an analogy, remember?’

  She made him promise not to interrupt any more, then told him that the end of the pencil – the antipoint, so to speak – represented a memory’s trigger, while the shaft (as they eventually agreed to call it) was the memory itself. ‘For example,’ she said, ‘I once read about a French writer who tasted a piece of cake after dipping it in his tea, and immediately it made him think of his childhood.’

  ‘Flaubert,’ Harry announced proudly, the name leaping forth out of nowhere, to his considerable delight, proving that his memory was returning by leaps and bounds.

  ‘Very well, Flow-Bear, if that’s what you want to call him,’ said Dr Blake. ‘For him, the cake was the end of the pencil: the trigger.’

  ‘So memories are like guns?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No, pencils.’

  ‘And what about cakes?’

  ‘They’re triggers. When Flow-Bear tasted one, it became the end of a pencil in his head. Then Flow-Bear could turn the pencil, inspect it from another angle, and retrieve the entire memory. It was all there in his brain, but the problem was finding that pencil among the others.’

  ‘I see,’ said Harry. ‘So he took the pencil and started writing a book with it.’ In Dr Blake’s hands, the very frontiers of metaneurology were a piece of tea-sodden cake in Flow-Bear’s kitchen. Unfortunately, however, Harry’s own pencil box was in a complete mess.

  ‘Your mind is still in the dark, Harry, and you’re grabbing those pencils at random, mixing them up like a child. You’re drawing strange, swirling scribbles. But if we gaze carefully enough at those infantile efforts, we may be able to unlock the meaning that must lie within them.’

  It was good to know he was being looked after by an expert. He said, ‘Shall I tell you more about Flow-Bear and Penis Man?’

  ‘No,’ Dr Blake instructed firmly, standing up again and straightening out the few creases that had dared intrude upon her crisp white medical coat. ‘By telling me, you’d only reinforce the false memories.’

  Harry gave a start. ‘False? You honestly think my own memories could deceive me?’

  Dr Blake lowered her voice. ‘Harry,’ she said, in the earnest tone medical practitioners are trained to use when delivering bad news. ‘We still need to do a few more tests to confirm it, but it appears you have AMD.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘AMD is a name covering a collection of symptoms whose cause we frankly still don’t understand. It involves altered states of consciousness characterized by hallucination or false memories. And you’ve already offered me at least two false memories, with your Penis Man and Flow-Bear. So if all the tests for other conditions turn out negative, we’ll have to conclude you have AMD.’

  ‘And how will you be able to eliminate AMD from the list of possibilities, assuming I don’t happen to have it?’

  Dr Blake couldn’t help smiling at Harry’s difficulty in fathoming the methods of modern medical science. ‘The only way to eliminate AMD is by finding a problem we can explain with some other cause,’ she clarified. ‘Now, I’ve been looking at the cranial endograms: all the results are consistent with the CTM scan and the dinoxene analysis. You’re in the clear, Harry. Everything’s n
egative.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘In other words,’ she continued solemnly, ‘we must conclude you’re AMD-positive. We’ll have to keep you in for a while.’

  He wasn’t going to put up with this. ‘If all the tests are negative, then how can you conclude I’m positive?’

  ‘Didn’t you do maths at school? Two negatives make a positive – everyone knows that. There’s clearly something wrong with you, and AMD is the only remaining possibility.’

  Dr Blake was sympathetic. She said she’d seen this sort of thing countless times. Somebody feels perfectly healthy; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Then a minor irritation arises; a sore leg, dizziness, an inconspicuous mole. They see their GP, get a few tests done. The next thing they know, they’ve got a life-threatening illness.

  ‘You’re very lucky, Harry.’ Dr Blake placed a hand on his arm; a gesture no doubt calculated to appear emotionally meaningful. ‘You’ve probably had AMD for months. That’s how you got yourself run over; walking into the road, not looking at the traffic. But at least it means we’ve been able to diagnose you. You could have gone on living with this for years, without you or anybody else knowing.’

  ‘Can you cure it?’

  ‘No,’ said Dr Blake, ‘but you’re a valuable addition to our statistics. You can help us with some experiments, and we can maybe get to the bottom of this strange new condition. I’m sure you must have read about it in the newspapers – I’ve even given a few interviews.’

  Harry had no recollection. He asked her to outline the symptoms.

  ‘There are many,’ she told him. ‘Though no single patient ever exhibits more than a handful. Do you have any stiffness in your limbs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Blurred vision?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Irritability?’

  ‘Only when irritated.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Blake. ‘Well, that’s all perfectly consistent with acausal AMD. Now, have you been feeling depressed recently?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Dr Blake, ‘I suppose not. But would you like to take a guess? Had you begun writing poetry, perhaps?’

  ‘I told you, I can’t remember.’ Except that it was a book he was carrying, when he came out into the street and stepped onto the busy road.

  Dr Blake was continuing her search for symptoms. ‘Itchiness while urinating?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Loss of appetite?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Inappropriate desires?’

  ‘What are they?’ he asked. Dr Blake told him to imagine he was standing on a high bridge. Did he want to jump from it? Did he ever feel a devilish impulse to thrust his hand into a burning fire, or hit a stranger for no reason?

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Dr Blake suggested several other inappropriate desires, the list growing more and more detailed and elaborate in response to Harry’s negative answers.

  ‘You go into an off-licence and buy a bottle of wine,’ she said. ‘The person behind the counter is watching a small portable television and hasn’t noticed you. Are you tempted to walk out without paying?’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I’d be caught on the security video. I’m an honest man, not a professional criminal. At least I think I am.’

  ‘Very well,’ she continued, unperturbed. ‘You pay for the wine and walk out into the street. An expensive car is parked nearby and no one is around. Though you have no intention of doing it, do you think of smashing the bottle over the car?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I do now. But only because you made me think of it.’

  ‘So we’ve found two symptoms of AMD.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘One is a tendency to lie – everyone has inappropriate desires from time to time – and the other is the spontaneous creation of false memories, produced without the intention of deceiving anyone except perhaps yourself.’

  Dr Blake started trying to tell him that as well as pencils, the human brain also contains tubes of paint which sometimes get trodden on, squirt their contents all over the place and totally spoil the picture, but Harry was having none of it. ‘Why do you keep insisting the few memories I have are false? Why won’t you trust my own judgement about what’s real in my life and what isn’t?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ she said. ‘A person with AMD simply cannot be trusted. Everything you say, to me or to yourself, has to be treated with suspicion.’ Then she added, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll learn to live with this. There are thousands like you – I’ll make sure you’re given details of the AMD support group before you’re discharged. Try to think of it not so much as a disability, more as a new opportunity. A lifestyle option. It takes time to adjust, but believe me, you’ll get there.’

  Then she glanced at her watch, scribbled another note on her clipboard, and went out, leaving Harry to ponder his strange predicament.

  He had been carrying a book in his hand, and he was about to cross a road. Perhaps the book had something to do with Thomas Mann, or was even by him, which was why the name had come into his head. Or was it a false memory?

  He tried to remember what his wife Margaret looked like. All he could come up with was a fruit shop and a display of melons.

  Then he noticed a woman standing beside his bed. ‘Are you Margaret?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. She was wearing a hospital dressing gown, and Harry realized she must be another patient. ‘Good dream?’

  Harry didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘You were out of it,’ she explained. ‘I’ve been standing here for at least ten minutes watching you.’

  Harry was puzzled. Surely only a moment had passed since Dr Blake left the room?

  ‘Your eyes were open and it looked like you were mumbling to yourself,’ his visitor told him. ‘At one point you stared straight through me and said something about the square root of minus one. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it was quite entertaining.’

  Dr Blake had mentioned altered states of consciousness: here was the evidence. He wondered how long it had lasted. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked.

  The visitor shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Evening, I suppose.’

  ‘And what day is it?’

  ‘Thursday or Friday, I think. Maybe Monday. Mind if I sit down?’ She drew up the bedside chair. ‘You’re AMD, aren’t you? Me too.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t still Tuesday?’ said Harry. ‘Dr Blake told me it was Tuesday.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  ‘Yes, why shouldn’t I?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t trust anything Dr Blake tells you.’ From the pocket of her dressing gown she took a crumpled scrap of paper and smoothed it out. ‘One of the cleaners left a newspaper in my room by mistake. This article was in it.’ She handed it to him.

  Unlocking A Medical Mystery

  Ever felt you might be losing your marbles? Relax, you’re probably only showing signs of stress, tiredness or age, according to leading expert Dr Sharon Blake. But if you start remembering things that never happened, you could be a victim of Anomalous Memory Disorder.

  ‘First let’s dismiss all those clichés about designer illness,’ says Blake, who – as head of a new privately funded metaneurology unit in northern Scotland – is a world authority on the condition. ‘When first diagnosed in the US,’ explains attractive 41-year-old Dr Blake, ‘cases were mainly professionals with high-powered careers. Hence the notion that this was a disorder somehow brought on by an affluent lifestyle.’ The comely doctor explodes. ‘Poppycock!’ she declares. ‘This is a condition that can affect anyone.’

  In fact, says Dr Blake, AMD had already been predicted as a theoretical possibility, and had even been named and studied, before the first patient – a dentist in Milwaukee – came to light. Since then there have been thousands more in every country of the world.

  ‘There are A
MD cases in Europe, Asia, Africa,’ Sharon Blake warns. ‘I’ve seen reports of AMD being found in the rainforests of New Guinea. This is a worldwide epidemic.’

  An outbreak typically begins with the victim experiencing a flash of memory that is vivid, detailed, yet completely false. A place that never existed. A name or face that seems important but cannot be recognized.

  ‘Throughout all human history there have been cases of AMD,’ says Dr Blake. ‘They have given rise to tales of reincarnation, telepathy or second sight. Nostradamus was almost certainly a victim of AMD,’ she adds. ‘He showed many of the classic symptoms, including unusual dietary preferences.’

  Rather than prophecies of the future, says Blake, the visions of Nostradamus were recollections of a fictitious past he could not explain except by means of obscure verses that have puzzled generations, until now. Composer Robert Schumann and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were also victims, according to Dr Blake. It even seems that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, may have been a mild case, basing some of his theories on patients who never lived. Ironically, says Blake, one of those theories was that people invent false memories to satisfy subconscious needs.

  ‘That view is totally discredited,’ says Blake. ‘We now know it was Freud who was deceived, and the reasons were organic.’

  Dr Blake and her colleagues have gathered strong evidence showing AMD to be related to chemicals called neurotransmitters. These send signals between brain cells, enabling memories to form or be recalled. With characteristic aplomb, the vivacious Dr Blake puts it in everyday terms. Memories, she says, are like pencils: they last a long time but need regular sharpening. With the aid of several free-hand sketches, Dr Blake clearly shows how bright red neuroactive hexagons of epiphremanine erase relative percentages of dark blue serotonin in a bimodal distribution of standard deviation.

  ‘So what we really need,’ Blake concludes, ‘is a blank sheet on which to start afresh.’

  Dr Blake is doing this by studying a small group of patients diagnosed with AMD following bouts of amnesia. Unable to separate real memories from false ones, these unlucky people offer hope to the thousands who must do battle each day with an endless deluge of junk memory. Various drugs are being trialled, with promising results.