The Syndrome

by John Case

  She dressed quickly, pulling on a T-shirt and running shorts, although her plans for a morning run seemed overruled by the rain. Duran had been up for hours. He sat on the couch, showered and shaven, the remote in his hand. When she entered the room, he pressed the Mute button.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “You watch a lot of television, don’t you?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but the irony went right past him. He thought about it. Finally, he said, “Yeah. I do.”

  Like it was a realization.

  He snapped the TV off, and tossed the remote aside.

  “You should have woken me,” she told him.

  He shrugged. “Why? It’s pouring outside.”

  “There are things to do—before we go to New York.”

  “Like what?”

  “Coffee first,” she replied and, turning, went into the kitchen to put the teakettle on the stove. There was a plastic Melitta cone and a box of filters on the counter. Putting a filter into the cone, she placed it atop a blue cup, and spooned a couple of tablespoons of coffee into it.

  “Did Nikki ever go away that you know of?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” Duran replied, joining her in the kitchen.

  “I mean, did she ever go out of town—as far as you know?”

  Duran frowned.

  “It would have been in the beginning of October,” Adrienne continued. “About ten days before… “ The teakettle began to scream, and she let the sentence die as she poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds.

  “She missed an appointment,” Duran told her. “Around that time.”

  “Did she do that often?” Adrienne asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Hardly ever.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  Duran shrugged. “No, but… when she came back, she was tan. I remember kidding her about it. I asked her where she’d been.”

  “And?”

  “She said she’d gone to the beach.”

  “Which one?” Adrienne asked.

  “She didn’t say. And I didn’t press it.”

  “Why not?”

  “She didn’t want to get into it. And, I guess I wasn’t that curious.”

  The wind had begun to kick up, the rain turning into a storm of interesting proportions. Lightning flared behind the windows, which rattled to the thunder. For a moment, it seemed as if the sky was coming apart.

  “Nikki was terrified of lightning,” Adrienne remarked.

  “She never said.”

  “Really? She used to put on tennis shoes when she was a kid—for the rubber soles. Then she’d hide in the basement.”

  A shutter tore loose outside and the wind bashed it against the house, smacking the wall over and over again. Duran headed outside to fix it, but Adrienne stopped him at the door, tugging at his arm. “Are you crazy?” she asked, and they laughed like kids, giddy with excitement.

  Her hand was still on his arm, and for a second it seemed as if a kiss might happen. But then the air exploded like a bomb outside the windows—the lights blew, Adrienne jumped, and the house was plunged into a dark and sudden twilight.

  When she caught her breath, Adrienne gulped and said. “Well, there goes the power.”

  Duran grinned. “For a second, I thought it was the Rapture.”

  So they played chess, which seemed safe enough, and didn’t require a lot of light. Duran improvised some missing pieces, using bottle caps as pawns and saltshakers for rooks. Adrienne wasn’t much good at the game, and Duran beat her in just a few minutes, playing in an effortless and distracted way.

  “I think you’ve played this game before,” she remarked.

  Duran shrugged. “Seems like it.”

  “Take it from me,” she said, setting the pieces back in their squares. “I’m not much of a player, but Gabe…”

  She stopped herself. “I had a friend once who was pretty serious about it—I mean, he was in a club or something. Anyway, he tried to teach me, so… it’s not like I’m an idiot at it.” She thought for a moment, then swivelled the board around and replaced the pieces she’d lost. “This time,” she said, “you play black. And don’t be so polite. See if you can really kill me.”

  He did. And it didn’t take long. In fact, the only time it took was the time that Adrienne took to think through her moves. Duran’s moves were almost automatic, as if he knew every situation by heart—whereas she had to think her way through every pitfall and trap-that he’d set for her. After her ninth move, he looked at her and said, “Mate.”

  She stared at the board, then shook her head. “I don’t see it.”

  He shrugged. “It’s there.”

  She looked at the board and frowned. “Where?”

  “Coming right at you.”

  Her eyes darted from piece to piece. Finally, she looked up, suspicion dawning in her eyes. “What are we talking about?” she asked.

  Duran gave her a look of puzzled innocence. “Chess,” he told her. “What else?” Then he took her pawn, en passant, and in so doing, placed her king in check. Two moves later, and the game was over.

  It was in the middle of the fourth game that the shutter blew off. Torrents of water gusted against the glass, surging with the wind. “Do me a favor,” Adrienne asked, sitting back in her chair. “Close your eyes, and tell me what comes into your mind when you think about chess.”

  Duran humored her. Closed his eyes, and thought.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “The board,” he said. “And the pieces.”

  “Right, but—”

  “Black and white. Red and black.”

  “What else?”

  He thought some more. Said, “Rum.”

  She blinked with surprise. “Rum?”

  “Yeah. The way it tastes. Sharp. And the… the bouquet, like cognac, the way it fills your lungs.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  For a moment, he could feel the heavy glass in his hand, see the dark surface of the drink, a single small ice cube floating in it, melting to oblivion.

  “What else?” It was as if her voice were being piped in from far away.

  “Heat. I remember playing where it was hot, somewhere hot—my shirt sticking to my back.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not really a memory. It’s more like a… like a memory—of a memory.”

  “What else?”

  “Music.” He even cocked his head, as if somehow this would allow him to hear it, but the motion broke his concentration and he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Stay with it,” she told him.

  He tried, but it was gone and, finally, he said so.

  By now, the rain had slackened, and the sky was brightening to a jaundiced gray. “That was strange,” Duran said. “Like being at a seance.”

  She leaned back in her chair and regarded him, tumbling a rook in the fingers of her left hand. “And that was all you got? Rum, heat, and music?”

  He shook his head. “I was free-associating, and it was more a sensation than anything else. But, yeah: that’s what I got.”

  Adrienne frowned and, in her lawyer’s voice, asked, “Don’t you think it’s weird that Nikki had this prolonged amnesia—and all these phony memories—and you do, too?”

  Duran looked confused, as if he wanted to answer her, but couldn’t. Finally, he said, “We have different points of view.”

  “You listened to yourself on tape, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Well?”

  He sighed. “You think I have amnesia?”

  “I hope you do.”

  Duran’s brows dipped. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s the lesser of two evils,” she replied.

  As the afternoon headed toward evening, Adrienne sat with her sister’s laptop. After an hour or so, the battery light began to flicker, and she switched it off.

  “What about her credit car
d statements, and her checking account?” Duran asked. “If she went out of town in October…”

  Just before five, Adrienne called her sister’s bank, and requested copies of the last six months of statements and checks. The clerk was reluctant to comply, but her supervisor finally agreed to mail the documents to the client’s “address of record.” It was the best they could do.

  Listening to the conversation, Duran was impressed by the way Adrienne refused to take no for an answer.

  “You’re tough,” he told her, as she hung up the phone.

  “Like you said: I can be a bitch.” Then she smiled, and added, “Let’s go out.”

  Leaves were everywhere—and branches and limbs of trees, strewn across the streets and lawns. Raw gouges of bright blond wood on the dark trunks of trees marked the places from which they’d been ripped. Sirens howled in the distance. And the air fizzed with the rinsed feel that sometimes follows a downpour.

  They took their shoes off and walked along the beach, the sand littered with debris tossed up by the thunderous surf: horseshoe crab skeletons, strands of rope and fishing line, ragged hunks of Styrofoam, driftwood, fish.

  When they returned to the cottage, Adrienne went out for a run. Duran had neglected to buy running shoes so he stayed by himself, sitting in the kitchen, trying to come to grips with the sense of loss he’d felt when they’d turned the corner and come to a stop in front of Beach Haven—and it was not there. He couldn’t articulate the way he felt, but it was as if he’d stepped onto the landing of a flight of stairs, only to find that there were no stairs—and that he himself was suddenly in free fall, plummeting through space. The only thing he could trust, really trust, was the here and now. The world in front of him—not as it had been or would be, but as it was.

  The kitchen. This moment. Even the memory of playing chess with Adrienne, as rich in detail as it had been—as recent as it had been—was unreliable. His memories of “Beach Haven” had also been rich with detail. And yet, Beach Haven was a figment—as imaginary as “Jeffrey Duran.” Which left him with the possibility that Adrienne might also be an illusion. As might yesterday, and the day before. Nico. De Groot. And the Towers. All of it: a figment of his own imagination. Or God’s.

  Maybe—

  “That was great!” Adrienne exclaimed, coming through the door, glistening with vitality.

  He watched as this very real woman drew a glass of water from the tap, and turning her eyes toward the ceiling, drank in long, slow gulps. His eyes washed over her, lingering here and there, then moving on, as if she were a banquet.

  The glass drained, she set it down on the counter and cast a questioning look in Duran’s direction. “Penny for your thoughts,” she told him.

  He opened his mouth to answer. Thought better of it. “No way,” he said.

  She’d just come out of the shower when the telephone rang, and she picked it up.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Of course… yes. Yes it is. It went out three, four hours ago.” Because Duran was looking at her in a puzzled way, she put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Trish.”

  The real estate agent.

  Then back to the phone. “Sure… no. No, it’s no problem. I keep a little penlight in my purse.” She rubbed at her hair with a towel, and laughed. “Yes I am one of those people. My nickname is Scout.” She leaned over, wrote something down. “Okay, if we have any trouble, we’ll give you a buzz.” Hung up the phone.

  “What was that?” Duran asked.

  “There’s a sump pump in the basement,” she told him. “And when the electricity goes out, it does ‘t work—and the basement floods. Which causes problems with the furnace. There’s some kind of generator that’s supposed to kick in, but half the time it doesn’t. So she asked if we’d go down and flick on the emergency switch.” Adrienne disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the tiny, plastic penlight that she carried in her purse. And, together, they went down.

  It wasn’t a basement, really. It was a cellar with a dirt and gravel floor. The entrance was outside, behind the house, where a pair of angled metal doors opened onto a short flight of concrete steps. Adrienne led the way.

  “Kinda spooky,” she muttered, as her flashlight cut through the darkness, a dim orange beam.

  “The sump pump’s over there,” Duran told her, pointing to a contraption beside the south wall. Adrienne went over to it and, reaching down, flipped a switch. The pump clattered, and roared into action.

  It was a little after nine when the electricity came back on. They were eating a pizza by candlelight, and drinking beer, when half the lights in the house flared. For a moment, it was as if they were caught in a photographer’s flash. They froze as the television revived with an accelerating growl of sound, followed by a spurt of canned laughter.

  Duran began to chuckle, then fell silent when he saw the look of desolation on Adrienne’s face. Her eyes surged with tears.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She shook her head, and looked away, hiding the tears.

  “What is it?”

  Finally, she said, “When I was looking for Nikki, in her apartment… the lights were off… because there’d been a short circuit. From the heater. And then Ramon threw the breaker and… suddenly, there she was. In the tub.” Tears rolled. She looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Duran told her.

  He washed up—not that there was much—while Adrienne got back on the computer. She logged in their start and finish points on a mapping site, which then provided directions to Dr. Shaw’s office in New York. Finally, she searched for a hotel, grumbling about how expensive they were.

  The thought of money made Duran frown because it was obviously an issue with Adrienne and, so far, she was paying more than her share. He didn’t have his checkbook with him and he didn’t have a bankcard. Adrienne found this unbelievable. “Everyone has an ATM card.”

  “There was a bank in the basement of the Towers,” Duran told her. “I just went there when I needed cash.”

  Adrienne tapped and clicked on the computer, as Duran drifted toward the living room. He’d been resisting the impulse to watch television because he knew that she disapproved of it, but he was exhausted by the uncertainties that, taken together, seemed to be his only real identity. He needed to not think. And television was good for that.

  “I can’t see paying that kind of money just for a place to sleep,” Adrienne remarked as he walked past her. “I’ll take some numbers along. Maybe we won’t need to stay there.”

  “Whatever,” Duran replied and, dropping onto the couch, picked up the remote. Ghosting from one channel to another, he finally settled on Dharma & Greg. Sat back. And disappeared into himself.

  Chapter 25

  They left in the dark like thieves in the night, with Duran riding shotgun.

  Adrienne drove the entire way using cruise control, the speedometer frozen to sixty-five. The trip was pleasantly tedious, thankfully uneventful—and mostly silent. They could have been anyone. As they followed the shafts of their headlights north, Adrienne worried about her absence from work, while Duran sat beside her in a carefree mood, gazing into the darkness. If he closed his eyes, it was easy to imagine that he was leaving town with his girlfriend, heading off on a long vacation. Even when dawn overtook them, and the rising gray light revealed the bleak landscape of exurban New Jersey, Duran’s buoyant mood dimmed only a little.

  Eventually, the Dodge carried them through the Lincoln Tunnel to Midtown, where they turned north, heading for the Upper West Side. When they found the address that Doctor Shaw had given her, Adrienne circled the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, waiting for a parking space to open up. Finally, one did.

  “I hate to pay for parking,” she explained.

  “I’m not surprised,” Duran replied. “After all the gas you’ve wasted, we probably can’t afford it.”

  Shaw’s office was on the twenty-third floor of a smoked glass skyscraper that had probably
seemed the height of modernity when it was built, circa 1965. Now, it had a forlorn and grimy look, as if the future had passed it by.

  The office itself was more cozy than tidy, its walls hung with paintings, diplomas, and memorabilia, most of which were slightly askew. Books and papers stood in stacks on every horizontal surface but the floor—which lay beneath one of the most exquisite Oriental rugs that Adrienne had ever seen.

  Shaw had the comfortable look of a Dutch uncle. A heavyset man with watery brown eyes under unruly brows, he wore a soft, almost regretful, smile. Greeting them with a firm handshake, he led the way to an overstuffed sofa and bade them to sit.

  He wore a corduroy jacket, khakis, and running shoes, and sported a bright red, plastic Swatch that he’d buckled over the cuff of his shirt. The watch had such a large face that Duran could read it halfway across the room. Adrienne guessed the doctor was in his midfifties, though his face was as unlined as a baby’s—and somehow radiant.

  “Coffee?”

  They agreed to some, then got down to business.

  “I’m intrigued by what you told me on the phone,” Shaw began. “I suppose you might say, I collect case histories of unusual memory loss. So I think the best way for us to start would be for you to go back over what you said on the telephone. You might start,” he continued, focusing his brown eyes on Adrienne, “by telling me when the man next to you first crossed your radar. And then,” he said, inclining his head in Duran’s direction, “we’ll get to you.”

  Shaw propped an ankle on one knee and sat back in his chair, fingers interlaced behind his head, elbows out, as if he had all day.

  They broke at noon, with Shaw signaling an end to the session by stretching, massively, in his chair.

  “Well, it’s a remarkable story,” he told them, “but even psychiatrists have to eat. What I’d suggest is this: I have a luncheon engagement with my daughter, and a 1:30 appointment after that. If you’ll come back at three, I’ll do an intake interview, and we can go on from there.”