The Syndrome

by John Case

  They found a Gas ‘N Stuff somewhere near Bridgeville but couldn’t get the pump to accept Duran’s MasterCard. Duran turned to Adrienne for help, which made her blanch because “My purse was in the house! I don’t have a dime!”

  He called the 800 number on the back of his credit card, punched in the account number, and hit the voice-mail option that was supposed to inform him of the card’s “available credit.” Instead, a recorded voice told him that his account had been “frozen,” and that he should stay on the line for a “customer service” representative. He did, and was told that his card had been reported stolen. “We’ll have a new one to you in… maybe two or three working days. It’s in the pipeline.”

  Duran couldn’t believe it. “Look,” he said, “I have the card, right here. It’s in my hand. I didn’t report it stolen.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Ask me my mother’s maiden name.”

  “That’s not something—”

  “You’ve got validating questions. Use them!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Duran, but once a card is reported stolen, a new one has to be issued.”

  “Look. I’ve got like—” He glanced in his wallet. “Two bucks on me. I’m outta town. I’m outta gas. Isn’t there any way—”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry—there’s nothing we can do. You’ll just have to wait for the new one.”

  Returning to the car, Duran pumped $2.28 worth of gas, and explained to Adrienne what had happened. “The bank fucked up,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like it. That’s what they do when someone reports a stolen card.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I wonder who did it…”

  The way she said it, it almost sounded as if she thought he’d done it himself. And maybe he had.

  They got as far as the Beltway before the dashboard beeped a second time, and the fuel light snapped on. Adrienne directed Duran along a complex route that took them past the Capitol, and up 16th St. They were less than a mile from her apartment when the car began to lurch, and the engine died. With the help of a couple of Latinos who were waiting for a bus, they pushed the Dodge into a loading zone on the edge of Meridian Hill Park.

  “What happened to your car, man? You smash it up and then drive through a fire?”

  The trunk, dented from the Comfort Inn parking lot collision, was something Adrienne was already obsessing about. She’d heard it could be a real hassle when you dented a rental car. She didn’t like to lie, but she’d told Duran that under no circumstances should he admit that he was driving. That could really tangle things up.

  Now she followed Duran around to the passenger side, where his new friends were shaking their heads over the paint job. Which was… puckered.

  “Son of a bitch!” Duran muttered.

  “You need some bodywork, my friend.” The Latino began to fish through his pockets. “Let me give you my card—I give you a good price.”

  “It’s a rental,” Adrienne moaned.

  “For real?” the first guy said, shaking his head. “Oh, man. They going to bleed you.” Both men ran their fingers over the car door, and shook their heads sadly.

  Adrienne was writing out a note, which she stuck under the windshield wiper. Stood back. Repositioned it. Said: “They’ll give me a ticket anyway.”

  The Latinos chuckled. “They gonna tow your ass.”

  Duran had to work to keep up with Adrienne’s quick march to her apartment. Fearful of a ticket or, worse, a tow truck, she was almost jogging. In the end, they covered the mile in about twelve minutes.

  Wearing a bibbed apron and a faint look of alarm, Mrs. Spears let them in. “Adrienne! Where have you been?” she asked.

  “I lost my key. Can I get in through the laundry room?”

  “Of course,” the landlady replied, with a hopeful look at Duran.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Jeff—this is Mrs. Spears.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” Duran said.

  “We’re in a hurry” Adrienne confided, moving down the hall to a door that gave way to a flight of stairs leading down to the basement. With Adrienne in the lead, the two of them passed through a small storage room on their way to her apartment. Opening the door, she stopped so abruptly that Duran almost walked into her. “Jesus!”

  She’d forgotten how bad it was. The room was a sea of detritus, with Adrienne’s belongings scattered everywhere: books, videos, couch cushions, clothing and CDs, shoes, blankets, towels, vases. And on top of it all, like whitecaps, were hundreds of pieces of paper.

  Muttering to herself, she picked her way past some broken dishware, pots and pans, moving toward a door on the other side of the room. It was stuck, at first, but she put her shoulder into it and squeezed through while Duran remained where he was, gazing around the room, curious about Adrienne’s world.

  Which, despite the mess, had so much more texture than his own. There were romantic posters of long ago places and faraway things (Biarritz and the Orient Express), and a series of Tin Tin covers, matted and framed. Stooping, he picked up a book, and was surprised by its subject: Lonely Planet’s guide to Sri Lanka. He picked up another: Trekking in Turkey. And a third: Mauritius, Reunion, and the Seychelles.

  “You travel a lot?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied, emerging from the other room. “I never go anywhere.”

  Duran pondered that as she stutter stepped through the debris of her living room. “Why not?” he asked.

  “No money.” She paused. “Do you see a music box?”

  He glanced around, and shook his head.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?” Duran replied.

  “Do you travel a lot? Have you been a lot of places?”

  He thought about it. “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Where?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She crossed the room to a small desk and, reaching beneath it, extracted an inlaid wooden box that had fallen to the floor. “Plaisir d’Amour” began to play as she opened its cover and removed two credit cards and a passport. “Voila!”

  “Are we going somewhere?” he asked.

  “It’s the only ID I’ve got,” she told him. “Everything else went up in smoke.”

  She surveyed the mess. She’d thought they might spend a couple of hours cleaning it up, but it was hopeless. Overwhelming. It was going to take a week. But she’d have plenty of time to get into it when all this was over, she reminded herself, because she no longer had a job. She unearthed a few wearable items from the heaps, and snagged her Mason Pearson brush from the bathroom.

  She led Duran out the back door, avoiding Mrs. Spears. Together, they walked through the alley to Mount Pleasant Avenue, where they bought a gallon of gas at Motores Sabrosa—only to find a pink ticket waiting for them when they got back to the Dodge.

  “Another hundred bucks,” Adrienne wailed. “That’s horrible!” She stamped her foot, which made Duran laugh—which made her even madder. “What does it mean,” she demanded as she got into the car, “when the only thing this fucking city’s good at is parking enforcement?”

  Duran shook his head. “It’s probably the end of civilization as we know it.”

  The operation was scheduled for eight A.M. the following morning, so Duran spent the night at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, leaving Adrienne to cool her heels in the Mayflower Hotel.

  Arriving on the neurosurgery ward, Duran was turned over to an admissions nurse, who fitted him out with hospital pajamas and a robe. A plastic band was affixed to his wrist, and he was taken to a semiprivate room at the end of the corridor. Nurses bustled in and out, taking his vital signs on what seemed like an hourly basis, while his roommate (a much-intubated man) lay comatose and staring.

  In the evening, Shaw stopped by with the neurosurgeon, Nick Allalin, a rabbity man with a pinkish
nose, large teeth, and a high-pitched voice.

  Shaw introduced the two of them, and Duran noticed that Allalin’s hands were amazingly white, as if, when not in use, they were kept in a box. They were the long and muscular fingers of a pianist, immaculate, and perfectly manicured. Designer hands.

  The procedure was explained to him for the second time. “Doctor Shaw will make a small incision in your upper gum, just under the nose. Then he’ll tunnel back through the nasal passages to the sphenoid cavity. At that point, he becomes an observer. I’ll be sitting in a special chair,” Allalin said, “next to the table, working a surgical microscope with my foot, so I can see what I’m doing with my hands in close-up—on a monitor. The object is embedded in the hippocampus, and we’ll take it out.”

  “How long will it take?” Duran asked.

  “Thirty or forty minutes.” He paused, and then went on. “You’ll be sitting up, with your head back, for most of the operation—and semiconscious.

  Duran blanched, and Shaw smiled. “You won’t feel anything,” the psychiatrist assured him. “Some discomfort the day after, but that’s about all.”

  “One thing I wanted to ask you about,” Allalin remarked, “is your previous surgery. What can you tell us about it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Duran replied.

  The neurosurgeon frowned. “This isn’t your first time,” he told him. “The scar’s right there, under your lip.” Leaning over, he took Duran’s upper lip in his fingers, and rolled it back for Shaw to see. When Shaw nodded, he let go.

  Duran worked his lips. Finally, he said, “I think if I’d had brain surgery, I’d remember it.”

  Shaw nodded. “Of course you would—unless you’re suffering from amnesia—”

  “Which I seem to be.”

  “Indeed.”

  Shaw gave him another consent form to sign, then left with Allalin when Adrienne called to see how things were going.

  It wasn’t much of a conversation. The Valium he’d been given kicked in right after the first hello. And yet, when he hung up, ten or twenty minutes later, it seemed to Duran that he’d heard something in her voice, something that sounded a lot like concern—concern for him. Could it be?

  Nah.

  In the morning, precisely at eight, a male nurse wheeled him down the corridor to the O/R, where he was intubated and given a series of injections that left him in a state of limp and indifferent paralysis. The operation began some ten minutes later, and proceeded, as nearly as Duran could tell, exactly as Allalin had described.

  Most of the time, he kept his eyes closed, listening in a disinterested way to the underwater voices of the surgeons, the rhythmic symphony of the various machines. He couldn’t feel anything, but sensed the movement of those around him, the change in the light as Allalin leaned in, or moved away.

  He heard clinks and dinks, instruments being picked up and put down on metal trays. At times, their words seemed to turn into nonsense syllables and he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  At one point, Shaw seemed to say, “Radashay at the semaphore,” and Allalin replied, “Dirapsian snide.”

  Once or twice, he opened his eyes, and when he did, the lights in the O/R starred and shimmered. It was almost beautiful, the way it all pulsed in time with the blurred symphony of machine sound.

  And then, quite clearly, Allalin announced, “Got it!”

  Someone heaved a massive sigh.

  And then he heard Shaw say, “Jesus! What the hell is that thing?”

  Doctor Allalin’s face swam slowly into focus, fell apart into bands of light, and regained its form. Duran could see his mouth moving in an exaggerated way, but it seemed as if the sound took a long time to arrive.

  “Effff.” Like the letter of the alphabet. Duran was tempted to continue with the exercise: “Geeee, Aitch, Eye.” But his mouth was too dry. Then he realized what the doctor was saying: Jeff.

  “Wha?” It was as if he had a mouth full of toothpaste.

  “At least he’s vocalizing,” Allalin said with an air of relief. He leaned over Duran again, his rabbitlike face slightly foreshortened—he was so close.

  “Tell me, Jeff. What is your last name?”

  Duran thought about it. He remembered he was in a hospital, remembered he’d had surgery. The surgery must be over. And he was all right. Neither dead, nor blind—nor a vegetable.

  “Jeff?” The voice was patient, high-pitched. “Tell me. Do you remember your last name?”

  Duran nodded.

  “What’s your last name, Jeff?”

  “D’ran.”

  Suddenly, Adrienne was by his side, saying, “Hey, guy… “ He felt her hand take his, and give it a squeeze.

  Doctor Shaw said, “I owe you one, Nick—that was damned good!”

  Duran lay where he was, with Adrienne holding his hand, listening to the doctors chat. Allalin said, “Keep me posted. I’ll be very interested to know what Materials has to say.”

  “Count on it,” Shaw replied.

  Duran tried to shift himself into a sitting position, but everything in his visual field swayed, then slewed off to the left. He closed his eyes, and grabbed the sides of the bed.

  “Hey,” Shaw said. “Take it easy. You had brain surgery this morning.”

  Duran felt for Adrienne’s hand, found it, and closed his own around it. “What was it?” he asked.

  “You mean, in your head?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s going to take a while,” Shaw replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means it’s being analyzed,” Adrienne told him. “They sent it out to have it studied.”

  “Studied?” Duran asked.

  “Let me tell you what I thought we’d find,” Shaw suggested.

  “Okay.”

  “I was guessing a surgical staple—something like that. Especially after we saw you’d had the operation before—or something like it. And if it wasn’t that, I thought it might have been a bullet fragment, or debris from an automobile accident. Something that was overlooked in the initial extraction.”

  “And?” Duran asked.

  “It’s something else,” Adrienne said.

  Duran glanced from Adrienne to the doctor. “What?” he asked.

  Shaw pursed his lips in a moue. “We don’t know.” When Duran began to protest, Shaw overrode him. “What we do know is that it didn’t get there by accident.”

  Duran frowned, his eyes following Shaw as he walked over to the window. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s an implant.”

  “What? What for?” Once again, Duran struggled to sit up, but failed.

  “Ahhh, now that—that is the question. When Nick took it out, I thought it was a piece of glass—because that’s what it looks like. Then we looked at it under a microscope…”

  “And?”

  “It’s something else,” Shaw said. “It has some kind of wires in it. It’s some kind of micro-device.”

  Duran moaned.

  “We’ve sent it out to the Applied Materials Laboratory” Shaw told him. “They have a biomedical component—”

  “Are you telling me you took something out of my head, and you don’t have a clue what it is?”

  Shaw smiled. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I know what it is: it’s an intercerebral implant. The question is: what does it do? For the moment, at least, its purpose is obscure.”

  “When you say it’s obscure,” Adrienne asked, “what are we talking about? I mean, what are the possibilities?”

  “To be honest?” Shaw replied. “Aside from some very preliminary animal work on Parkinson’s, the only implants that I’m familiar with have been used to control seizures—severe seizures.”

  “And that’s what you think I have?” Duran asked.

  “On the contrary. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Duran asked: “How long before we hear back?” />
  “Three or four days,” Shaw replied.

  “Will I be walking by then?”

  Shaw chuckled. “You’ll be out by then.”

  “You’re kidding,” Adrienne said.

  The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not at all.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Duran told him.

  “Don’t thank me—thank managed-care.” Shaw smiled. “And in the meantime, I’ll be very interested to know if that… object… had anything to do with your amnesia. Given its location, it may well have.” His eyes glowed. “What I’m hoping, obviously, is that you’ll start remembering quite a lot. We’ll have some sessions. If you’re up to it, we can begin tomorrow.”

  After the operation, Duran realized that he was living with a sense of elation that was as real as it was difficult to describe. He was lighter, somehow, as if he’d been subject to a gravitational field that had only now begun to subside.

  He slept for twelve hours the first day, tried to watch television, but didn’t feel like it—then slept some more. Adrienne called from the Mayflower to ask how he was feeling, and to tell him that she’d found a cheap parking lot, way over on the West side, “only fifteen blocks from the hotel.”

  On the morning of the second day, one of the residents subjected him to a battery of tests and quizzes, calculated to measure various aspects of neural function—touch, taste, smell, and vision. His recall rate was assessed, as were his motor skills and sequential memories. He took the Bender gestalt test and, when he was done, the resident suggested that he walk the halls.

  “No jogging,” he joked, “just take it slow. If you get dizzy—sit down. Otherwise… keep moving—it’s good for you.”

  After lunch, Shaw came to the hospital for “a little regression work,” and to ask how he was doing.

  Duran told him that he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but that he was disappointed that his memory hadn’t returned.

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Shaw told him. “Even with something more basic—blindness, for example—once the stimuli return, it often takes a while for the patient to resolve them in a meaningful way. Someone who’s been blind from birth—restore his vision and, chances are, he’ll be bumping into walls for the first time in years. Why? Because he’s adjusted to being blind. He’s found a reliable way to cope with it. So if you take his blindness away, what’s left is a riot of light and color that means nothing to him. The point being that it takes a while to learn how to process things. In your case, though we haven’t identified the trauma, you’ve obviously worked out a way of getting along in the world, substituting this ‘Jeffrey Duran’ identity for your own. Since we haven’t tried to disturb this particular perceptual filter, it makes sense that it’s going to persist until it’s weakened.”