Finally she got up, and went downstairs, and rummaged through their collection of backpacks, suitcases, and tote bags, and found a fairly large plastic tote bag that read
INTERNATIONAL MEMORY CONFERENCE, MADRID, 1989
. Beneath that was printed
INHANCEX
, which was the name of a drug that claimed to impede the progress of Alzheimer’s disease.
Good. The board fit. She zipped it inside and set it by the front door, next to her briefcase. She didn’t want to leave it in the house, where Abbie could get to it.
She’d given herself an extra hour so that she could have a proper breakfast at her favorite café in the station. She would call Brian and have him or Jill meet her in front of Union Station in the morning to pick it up.
She lay down on the couch to rest just a minute before getting dressed.
Megan
MEGAN’S VERY LONG DAY
July 13
T
HE HISS OF THE
METRO
doors opening woke Megan. The doors clamped shut and the train gathered speed. It took her about two seconds to realize where she was—three stops past Union Station.
“Crap!” She should have driven, but she never drove downtown. She’d left her car at the Metro station in Virginia.
The woman across the aisle glared at her; she had broken the somnolent silence of the early morning commuters. At the next station, she jumped off, paused below a long escalator she’d never seen before, and realized she hadn’t transferred at the Pentagon.
It was Saturday morning. It might be twenty minutes before the next train arrived. She dashed up the escalator and emerged about six blocks from the station. “Taxi!” she yelled. “Taxi!”
Right. There were no taxis on this mostly residential street. She could use her phone, but could probably get to the station before a taxi arrived. No zip kiosks in sight.
She launched into an awkward run, handicapped by her low heels, passing boarded-up town houses and a pit bull who raced her from his side of a wrought-iron fence, telling her, in the unmistakable language of barks, growls, lunges, leaps, and snaps, that he would tear her limb from limb as soon as an opportunity presented itself.
Her throat burned by the time she rounded the corner to the station. Inside, she slipped on the marble floor, grabbed a countertop to keep from falling, and scanned the gate announcements. The Magline, an express bullet train that went two hundred miles an hour, was usually at Gate 9. It had left. That would have only taken an hour.
“Last call for New York,” echoed through the station. She’d missed the express, but at least the local Metroliner was leaving right away.
She grabbed the iron handrail next to the train stairs and clanked up the stairs of the last passenger car as the train inched forward. She flung herself into a seat, thankful for the air-conditioning, and wiped her forehead with a crumpled paper napkin from her purse.
“Ticket?” The conductor stood over her, nervously clicking his puncher.
“I’ll have to buy one.” She got out her wallet and bought a ticket to Penn Station, and watched the train yard drift past as the train picked up speed.
A man sat next to her. She was startled and annoyed, because there were only about five people in the car. She managed to smile briefly, just the corners of her mouth, and said, “Do you mind finding another seat? Most of them are empty.” Ordinarily, she would have just moved, herself, but she was not in the mood.
His face was round and pudgy. Long strands of thin, black hair, combed so meticulously that they formed near-parallel lines, surrounded his bald spot. He stared at her with unfriendly blue eyes for a second, and then he smiled himself. With a nod, he got up and moved one seat back, across the aisle. He carried a homburg. What was this, Megan wondered, some kind of homburg revival? Maybe she’d missed a few Style sections. He wasn’t her Walking Man; she could see that in an instant.
When the cart came, she was pleased; she only rode the bullet train and didn’t realize the local train had such good service. She bought a Danish and two cups of drab coffee that would do nothing to improve her malaised state. She needed raise-me-from-the-dead espresso.
Her first trip to Europe, so long ago, when they were trying to find Dad, was when she realized the limitations of American coffee. They’d flown all night and arrived in Frankfurt around five in the morning. After customs, they found themselves out on the street with their backpacks. Jill and Brian wanted to find a hotel. She was agreeable until they stopped at a bakery for breakfast. The strong German coffee and the exquisite pastry ignited a fire in her brain. She dragged them to the train station and they were on the next train to Munich. In fact, when she shook her siblings awake at the Munich station, they didn’t even remember going through customs.
It had turned out to be a melancholy trip. The village of Oberammergau, still picturesque and small, reminded them that their parents were no longer with them. They had visited their parents’ friends, mostly German, and found that Sam had indeed been there on his last known trip. Dr. Schmidt, a historian and one of their mother’s best friends, was quite surprised to see them. She invited them inside and served them thin dark bread, gelbwurst with mustard, and cold beer, exclaiming how much they had grown. Megan still had a very strong feeling that there was something Schmidt held back, but they left with nothing more than an invitation to come back anytime. Brian took them up to the caves and insisted that they winnow their way inside the damp, inky-black plane factory of the Third Reich, but they found nothing that would help them in their quest, although Brian claimed that the fact one of the tracks that had carried the rocket planes decades ago showed signs of more recent use was important. He couldn’t say why, though. They checked old newspaper records to find out if any unsolved deaths had been recorded. And then they went on to Mönchengladbach, where their father had been stationed, in still-enemy territory, at the end of World War II. Nothing there except paved-over metropolis.
Of the three of them, Megan felt that she was the most clearheaded and objective. Jill had the sometimes silly (in Megan’s opinion) temperament of an artist. Brian was much better, but he sometimes formed opinions too soon and could be stubborn about changing them. She always had to go about giving him new information in a careful, sideways fashion so that he didn’t dig in his heels, and let him think that a different point of view was his own idea. The fact that he was older than her, and a boy, clouded his vision sometimes, even though their childhood was long past.
Her phone buzzed. It was Jim. “Did you make the train?”
“Barely. I missed the bullet train; I’m on a local.”
“Well, Abbie’s still asleep. I’m working. Keeping an eye out for Rover.”
“Rover?”
“Our mystery man. I’m a little nervous after Jill’s break-in.”
“Right. Good.” She hung up thinking, time to get to work; but everything was so topsy-turvy. Carrying the damned board around made her nervous too, and when she opened her briefcase, she felt as if the annoying man behind her was looking at the contents. She looked back: he was.
She quickly removed her conference program, then snapped the briefcase shut and set it on the floor between her feet and the window. Some impulse made her fold the program back on itself so that he wouldn’t see the cover. She wasn’t a presenter at this one, but she wanted to see Dr. Elizabeth Nickolassi, whose work on the biochemistry of intent and will fascinated her.
Damn the man! She really
did
have work to do. Outside, a summer shower fell for about ten minutes; then steam rose from the streets of Baltimore. She fought off the urge to nap, picked up her briefcase, and headed toward the club car.
Once there, she got a double espresso, got out her Q, and wedged her briefcase between herself and the window. Not that she held the secrets of the universe in it, only the secrets of NIH. Opening the paper she wanted to read, this one about memory storage in sea snails, she gulped the coffee with faint hope.
Her brief spell of concentration ended when the club door slid open and the man she now thought of as her stalker walked in. He hoisted his short self onto a bar stool and ordered a … what? A Rolling Rock? He grabbed the unmistakable squat green bottle and took a gulp.
Maybe he was just a random businessman. She watched him as he got out his phone and spoke for a moment, glanced directly at her, then closed it and slipped it back into his pocket.
The train slowed, then stopped at a small station. The man chugged the rest of his beer, grabbed his sandwich and stuffed it in his pocket, and left the train. He didn’t go into the station, but disappeared past it, heading toward the end of the train. She turned and watched him until he disappeared from view, feeling rather ridiculous. She was risking a strained neck to spy on a stranger she suspected of spying on her. All this mysterious stuff was driving her around the bend.
But she caught her breath when she saw him picking his way across the tracks a moment later. He climbed onto the opposite platform just before a southbound train pulled in.
She saw him take a window seat in the southbound train just as her train began to move.
* * *
Exasperated with herself for the tenth time that morning when she had to pay for a cab to get her to the meeting because she was so late, she missed the talk that she’d wanted to see, but got a Q’d transcript.
Megan stepped into a talk she would not have gone to about objects and memory. It was packed. She found a seat in the back row and watched the video screen.
“Objects are quite clearly nexes of information,” the speaker was saying. “But why? We are visual creatures, and many of us think in images. Images and objects elicit emotion quickly and directly, oftentimes, it seems, more powerfully than if we used words. Not only do we cling to physical objects that are emotionally meaningful to us, but we grieve their loss. Why? Because the object itself is the last real link we have with that past? We are relatively incapable of truly fixing memory and emotion; we want desperately to make it concrete, rather than abstract.
“Many images are universal icons that elicit innumerable emotions. Think of the cross, which can reinforce positive ideas about the nature of God and the Christ for Christians. There! A lot of thoughts flowed through the mind of each and every one of you. What neurons were activated?”
The words “quantum memory” caught her attention. Suddenly, the woman segued into a riff about changing the brains of all humans in such a way that they would value peace, cooperation, aiding the less fortunate, education. Megan had gotten the same message from the numerous papers Hadntz had Q’d her. “I realize that these are just emblems of a liberal point of view. But what if these ideas were truly embedded in action in a widespread manner? What if, for instance, it became apparent not that we all had to pick up weapons and fight other humans for our survival, but that international cooperation was the only way in which we could all survive some specific, looming threat? How would we react?”
What did this have to do with memory? Megan wondered.
“The threats are real. Starvation, subjugation, slave labor, are all real. But they might be abstract to us. What if a ‘memory’ was released worldwide, piggybacked on a virus, putting each individual, briefly and vividly, into that reality? News reports are ephemeral, and lack a mechanism for specific response, except for those innumerable, ridiculous reader comments. No, no”—she held up her hand as a low murmur threatened to become an uproar—“I am not proposing that we actually
do
this. But I am saying that it may be possible, and that we need to guard against such occurrences. I am trying to alert all of you to the dangers. This is a new paradigm of thought, behavior, and education that we all need to be aware of. We need to think about the possibilities. How, for instance, can we decide empowerment issues? Whose version of what is best will prevail?”
Megan perked up, tremendously interested. For instance, she thought, you own a factory and make a certain profit. Then a new safety feature comes along and if you buy it, your employees will be less likely to be injured or disabled. But it will cut down on your profits. You will have to raise your prices to implement it. If only you implement it, you may go out of business, and then your employees will have to work in more dangerous places anyway.
What would most business owners choose?
Of course. They would choose more money. But what if everyone had a visceral memory of painful rehab when a saw sliced one’s hand? Or, if, perhaps, it was required “reading” if one were to open a factory.
Megan thought about the mice, and their memories, or at least their knowledge of how to run a maze, and about how it could be transplanted from one mouse to another. Memory was, indeed, physical.
Well, Megan thought, let’s take this one step further. Let’s sublime the memories of mice and think of an easy, nonpainful way to share their memories. Like a pill. HD-50, perhaps. Move a few molecules around …
Could we then all be made to share one mass, false memory?
Surely, emotions were shared by a lot of people at once. Love for not the specific person, but for one’s country. Or, at least, loyalty to whatever myth of country had arisen over the years or had been planted in the populace’s mind.
She stopped listening to the talk and began mulling this over.
All children were socialized—even in the womb, once they could hear the cadences of what would be their native language. They acted like their parents, and were taught to obey social mores and customs of the society into which they were born. Most societies emphasized in thought, if not in deed, kindness, politeness, generosity, and so on. She recalled that Abbie’s Montessori school did not emphasize sharing, because if children were concentrating on some piece of material they ought not fear that it might be yanked away from them suddenly in the name of being “nice” to someone else. It was theirs until they put it back on the shelf.