Rememberers

by C. Edward Baldwin

  Kallie shrugged her shoulders. “Mind if I wait for her?”

  “Suit yourself.” He turned back to the monitor, putting the goggles back on.

  “Are you playing a game?” Kallie asked, looking at the computer screen.

  “No, this is part of our research. We use this to help recreate déjà vu sensations in our test subjects. The onscreen images are replicates of real life images, of real life places. When you put on these goggles, you're immersed into another time and place. We expose our test subjects to the scenes on the computer screen, and afterwards, we'll hypnotize them, making them forget that they'd ever seen the scenes. Later, we'll take them to a real world recreation of a particular scene. Using this technique, we've found that we've been able to recreate déjà vu-like sensations in many of the subjects.”

  “Why would you want to create déjà vu?” Kallie asked.

  “So that we can study the sensation. Since it's so fleeting when it occurs naturally, we haven't been able to interview someone who's right in the middle of one or even right at the end of one. When we do talk to them, they can remember very little about the sensation, mostly only about how weird they'd felt during it.” He took off the goggles and lifted them up to her. “Want to try?”

  She took the goggles and sat down at the computer. She looked at the goggles for a moment before slowly putting them on. They fit like the ones she used for swimming.

  “Looking around works the same way in virtual reality as it does in reality. You simply move your head. But to walk or move around, you need to use the mouse,” he told her.

  She nodded her head and instantly saw what he meant. The effect was negligible, no different from if she'd nodded her head in real life. Nothing in the room itself moved. But moving her head enabled her to look around the room. Before, when she'd stood over him, the images in the room had looked computerized, appearing to grow larger and smaller as he moved his head. But with the goggles on, everything took on a realistic quality. She was in an actual house! Still in the kitchen and standing by the refrigerator, she continued looking around. There was a stove, above which was a microwave oven. The countertops were granite and there was a butcher's table in the middle of the room. Weirdly, it was a kitchen not too dissimilar from one she'd often fantasized about having in her own home one day. Anxious to see more of the house, she rolled the mouse, moving her virtual-self out of the kitchen and over to a set of stairs.

  The first room she entered upstairs was a nursery. The room was done in lovely shades of blue. A crib with a light blue quilt hanging over its railing was catty-cornered against the back walls. Next to it was a rocking chair with an oversized stuffed teddy bear sporting a huge welcoming grin sitting in it. Kallie moved to the center of the room, standing there for a few moments. In an odd way, she felt as if she was peeking into a version of her future. Closing her eyes, she could almost picture her future husband. She couldn't make out any of his facial features, but she sensed love for her in his heart. She smiled as she imagined him putting the crib together in anticipation of their first born. After another moment, she slowly inhaled and reopened her eyes, looking around the room nostalgically, although it wasn't decorated exactly the way she'd have done it. Instead of blue, she'd probably paint the walls in pastel pinks if they were having a girl or deep reds if they were having a boy. She'd hang red-framed pictures of smiling and happy animals on the walls. I'm being silly, she thought; marriage and family are years away, if ever. She'd first have to find a man. She moved the mouse again, walking her virtual-self out of the room.

  The next room was the master suite. A king-sized four-poster bed stood boldly in the center of the room. As her virtual-self approached it, her real-self, for whatever reason, felt anger start to boil within. Totally immersed in the virtual room, she looked off to the side of the bed and saw his and hers walk-in closets. She turned her head to the other side and saw a dresser that was almost as long as the wall itself. She spotted a framed picture atop the dresser. From where she was standing, she could tell it was a picture of a family—a husband, wife, and three children. But she couldn't make out any of their faces. Moving the mouse, she walked over to it and picked it up. Her real-self was holding her hands up to her face. In the picture, all the members of the family remained faceless, except that of the man. She stared long and hard at his face. It was the face of her father. Her real-self squeezed her fists together as her virtual-self squeezed the framed picture, breaking the glass before slamming the frame down on the dresser top. Meanwhile, her real-self pounded the desktop, rattling the mouse, almost knocking it to the floor. Angrily, she removed the goggles, violently shifting herself back to the present.

  The man gingerly took the goggles from her trembling grasp. His voice was strained. “What's wrong? What happened?”

  Before she could answer, a tense female voice called out from the doorway of the lab. “What in the dickens is going on in here?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dr. Karen Frost's cramped, windowless office was located in the back of the lab as if it had been created as an afterthought. It was hardly larger than a prison cell. But Frost, like a budget conscious warden, had made efficient use of its limited space. It contained a small bookshelf, filing cabinet, and a desk sandwiched between two similar-style chairs. The room's off-white walls were bare save a framed picture of Frost, her husband, and two children. There was no evidence anywhere in the room of Frost's academic or professional successes. No framed degrees, certificates, or pictures of Frost shaking hands with anyone of supposed importance.

  At four-feet-eleven inches tall, Frost was a petite woman in physical dimensions only. She had a commanding presence and she spoke in a thorough but efficient manner, as if she'd only allotted a certain amount of time for talking. After entering her lab and seeing Kallie at the end of what appeared to have been a mini mental breakdown, she escorted the teen to her office and soon had her relaxed and extremely open to divulging every detail of her life.

  “We used to think that memory was like putting groceries away,” Frost said. “You put your bread in the pantry. Your salt and spices in one cabinet, rice and pastas in another. Later, when you needed something, you knew exactly where to retrieve it. Conventional thinking was that memory operated in much the same way with the brain storing an event into memory and later recalling that memory if and when it's needed.”

  “Memory recollection,” Kallie offered.

  “Exactly,” Frost said. “However, in the 1970s, a Canadian cognitive psychologist named Endel Tulving discovered that memory retrieval wasn't quite that simplistic. He found that there were actually two kinds of memories, episodic and semantic. A semantic memory is recalling facts like knowing the capital of North Carolina is Raleigh. But your episodic memory would recall your actual trip to Raleigh. You may even recall how the food smelled at a bakery you visited there or even how loud the trains were. You mentally relive the experience. That is the process of remembering. Being able to recall a fact and to remember an event are actually two separate abilities, which subsequently means that there is a distinct difference between recognition and recall.”

  Kallie furrowed her brow. “I don't understand.”

  “Okay,” Frost said. She appeared to relish the opportunity to explain. “Have you ever been to a zoo?”

  “Yes,” Kallie said.

  “What kinds of animals are usually found at a zoo?”

  Kallie paused for a moment, recalling her last visit to the zoo. It had been a second grade field trip. “Monkeys, gorillas, elephants, giraffes.”

  Frost smiled. “What you just utilized was semantic memory. And if I'm guessing correctly, you were recalling a specific time you went to the zoo?”

  Kallie nodded her head. “It was my second grade field trip.”

  Frost settled back in her chair. “Tell me about the trip.”

  “I don't remember much about it,” Kallie said. “Other than a gorilla picking his nose and flicking a booger at us.�
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  “Close your eyes,” Frost said gently.

  Kallie closed her eyes.

  “Now describe for me the zoo experience. Do you remember the size of any of the animals or how they smelled?”

  Kallie paused, searching her memory. “The elephants,” she said finally. “I remember how huge they were.” After another moment, her nose twitched. “And the stench.” In her mind, she could see the huge pile of crap. One of the elephants had defecated. “A wind had caught the smell just as we approached, pushing that foul odor toward us. I remember us giggling and running away to see the alligators.”

  “You can open your eyes now,” Frost said confidently. “That is episodic memory. You didn't simply rattle off facts. You relived it. You recalled sights, sounds, smells.”

  “I guess I did.” She hesitated. “But where does déjà vu fit in all of this?”

  “We believe déjà vu is a false memory.”

  “False memory?” Kallie repeated.

  “Yes, a false memory is a recollection of something that hadn't actually happened.” Frost's mood suddenly darkened. “Perhaps the most vivid and recent examples of false memory occurred in the nineties during what I can admit now was a bleak period in the field of psychology.” Her face twitched slightly as she added, “And yet another reason for scientists to disrespect the field.”

  There existed a contentious relationship between scientists and psychologists, with the former critical of the latter's supposedly lackadaisical attitude toward scientific testing and an unwillingness to submit psychological theories to rigorous testing before unleashing them onto the public as truisms and proven facts, often, according to some scientists, to disastrous results. To emphasize this point, scientists often cited a few inglorious moments from psychology's past. The creation and advancement of eugenics, a practice rooted in the belief that desirable genetic traits were hereditary. This scientifically unproven and untested belief led to many atrocious acts, including the castrations and/or sterilization of men who had so called undesirable genes, the abortions of otherwise healthy fetuses, and forced pregnancies. And then there was the lobotomy craze of the 1950s, when psychology had somehow convinced the populace that snipping off a bit of the brain could cure all types of mental illnesses. Countless people were irreparably harmed by a procedure that could accurately be described as psychological horse manure.

  But in the nineties, psychology had supposedly reached a new low, not necessarily because of the commission of deadlier procedures or even an increased number of victims, although a significant number of lives were affected and thus were also irreparably harmed. No, the main issue with psychology's nineties' 'repressed memory recovery' crusade was that it had occurred in the nineties. It was a time when one would have thought that both psychology and the public authority would have learned from the lessons of the past and would not have based so much of society's legal and public policy on what was basically unscientifically proven hogwash. Yet, everyone from lawyers, to school teachers, to wives, and to juries accepted wholeheartedly any psychologist's declaration that he'd recovered evidence of child abuse or sexual molestation or some other vile act buried deep within the recesses of the victim's mind, sometimes decades after the alleged incident. Marriages broke up. Families were ruined. And people went to prison, and least of all, psychology suffered yet another black eye, all because the public had once again accepted another of its untested theories as scientific gospel.

  “Is that why you have that sign over the lab entrance about psychology not being descriptive science but rather simply psychology?” Kallie asked.

  “Yes,” Frost said. “I'm a scientist as well as a psychologist. I know that may seem like a misnomer. But it's really not. Every scientist is a psychologist. But every psychologist is not a scientist. The imagination of a psychologist is what gives scientists all those wonderful theories to test in the first place. But, unlike a scientist, a psychologist is not willing to disavow something simply because he can't prove it.”

  “Okay,” Kallie said, detecting a bit of bitterness in the professor's voice. “But the example you just cited was a false memory supposedly planted by someone else. That's different from déjà vu, right?”

  “Technically, but the concept's the same. In déjà vu, you have a recollection of something that you can't connect to anything because there's nothing there to connect it to. It doesn't exist. In the repressed memory craze of the nineties, psychologists planted recollections in people and then insisted that the attaching memories were repressed when, in fact, they hadn't actually existed in the first place.”

  This was all interesting, Kallie thought. But she didn't know what it had to do with her. Why had she felt anger when she'd been in the virtual reality bedroom? Why had she seen her father's face on the picture frame?

  “Anyway,” Frost said, eerily sharing Kallie's thought. “Let's go back to your experience in the virtual reality scene. You're sure you've never seen a similar room or been inside your father's house?”

  “Yes ma'am,” Kallie answered softly. When they'd first retreated to Frost's office, Kallie told Frost that there'd been nothing familiar about that room. She'd never seen it before or been in one like it. But all of a sudden, she'd felt herself getting angry just standing in the room. Then she'd spotted the picture on the dresser drawer. She'd spoken with her father exactly three times in her lifetime and had not once been in his home. According to her mother, her parents were once high school sweethearts who had broken up shortly after Kallie's birth. Kallie hadn't spent much time thinking about her father during the years. She hadn't suspected that she'd had any pent up frustration toward him.

  “Let's go back to that picture frame,” Frost said.

  “Okay.”

  Frost regarded her solemnly. “There was no picture frame. The picture hadn't been digitally created. It'd existed only in your mind. The virtual scene had only included a bed and dresser.” Josh Levy, who'd allowed Kallie on the computer, to Frost's chagrin, had told Frost that he'd seen Kallie's virtual-self walk over to the dresser and pick up air, in conjunction with what her real-self had been doing at that exact moment.

  “Am I going crazy?” Kallie asked.

  “I don't think so,” Frost said. “I don't have answers now. But I would like to schedule you for a MRI scan so that we can run some tests.”

  “Why a MRI scan?” Kallie asked, feeling uneasy.

  “There's no need for alarm,” Frost said. “We run MRI scans on all our test subjects. We study the images and use them for comparison purposes amongst the subjects.”

  Kallie felt her throat tightening. “Should I be concerned?”

  “No more than you already are.”

  “Have you ever found something serious in the scans—I mean amongst the test subjects?”

  “Truthfully, we found a tumor once. It was small and the young man had apparently been living with it for a while without any problems. We advised him to set an appointment with his doctor. It ended up being no major deal and he went back to living with it. Simply having a brain tumor is not necessarily cause for concern, unless it's malignant.”

  Kallie nodded. “My mother had brain cancer.” She swallowed hard. “Do you think it could be cancer?”

  “I'd hate to answer that question before running the scans. I'm sorry to hear about your mother. But only about five percent of brain tumors are related to hereditary factors. So I wouldn't immediately jump to that conclusion. Besides, your sensations may not have anything to do with a tumor. We'll just have to run the scan. Besides, there are other possibilities.”

  “Like what?” Kallie asked.

  “It could be simple memory malfunction. Some issue with the cells in the temporal lobe area. The temporal lobe region is the area of the brain responsible for memory retention and storing new memories. Epileptic seizures also occur in this region.” Seeing Kallie shift uneasily in her chair, Frost quickly added, “But I wouldn't go worrying about having epilepsy now either
. Let's just run the scans before conceiving all the possible dire outcomes. I can schedule a MRI scan for as early as this Friday.”

  Kallie bit her lip, but couldn't suppress her growing concerns. “If the sensations aren't related to epilepsy or tumors, why would I start getting frequent déjà vu all of a sudden? I mean, why now?”

  Frost considered the question for a moment before answering. “If we take those known possibilities off the table, then the question becomes a little challenging to answer. Despite the fact that déjà vu has been around about as long as written history with St. Augustine having made references to it in 400 A.D., scientists are yet to have a full or consensus understanding of it. New types of it have even surfaced in recent years, including one named déjà vecu. This condition afflicts a person with the belief that he’s already lived through most of his life at least once previously. The cause of the déjà vu condition remains under dispute, with such wildly different opinions such as it being related to reincarnations, to it being evidence of past lives, or to it being a misfiring of memory cells. I consider myself a psychologist by heart and practice, but a scientist by nature. The nature of déjà vu itself is hard to quantify, much less its cause or meaning. The scientist in me wants scientific proof of something before declaring it so. And Friday's MRI would go a long way in ruling out disease or epilepsy as a cause for your sensations. Ruling out reincarnations or past lives would be next to impossible. But, unlike most scientists, I'm not foolish enough to deny the existence or possibility of something because I'm unable to prove it. But I would be the first to admit that while the 'what' of déjà vu can often be a shapeless figure hard to fully grasp and ever-changing, the 'why' of it could prove even more elusive. But again, I'm hesitant to speculate at this point. Let's run the scan first.”