This is an excerpt from Suddenly Free, Purpose of Joy, about the disappearance of one of the protagonists.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME – “For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky." Eighth episode of the third season of the original Star Trek, written by Rik Vollaerts, “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky."
He awoke suddenly. It was daylight and from the looks of it, the sun had been up for a while. Maybe it was 8 or 9 o’clock. He rolled onto the floor and shuffled to the bathroom nearby. He could hear his feet scrape across the wooden floor.
He did not turn on the light in the gloomy bathroom, but instead, stood with one hand against the wall while he peered down at his own stream. The toilet flushed automatically as he stepped in front of the sink to wash his hands and face. He gasped when he looked into the mirror. He turned on the light.
Looking back at him was a man who looked only vaguely familiar. His hair was completely gray. It was very curly, almost kinky because of its length. His nose was a little bulbous, lips swollen and his eyelids puffy with bags underneath. He leaned in to examine the reflection.
He thought to himself, I must have looked like this yesterday. Why do I look so strange to myself? He examined his own teeth, and the skin under his neck. He shook his head.
Leaving the bathroom, he wondered what he was going to do today. At least, he thought, I should go outside and get some sunshine. And maybe some exercise. He looked down at his own body. There was a little paunch there. He couldn’t see his own feet. Sunshine. I’ll get some sunshine.
He had found a tank top, khaki shorts and running shoes to put on. The sun felt HOT on his skin. It was invigorating. The sun made him feel energetic, so he started to trot down the pathway that led away from his front door. He didn’t think about a destination, just that he wanted to run.
He remembered running and how free it made him feel. Running as a boy, with another boy. A friend? And inside on a treadmill, or something. Still, there was sky and a breeze. Hills. He liked interval training. Up hills, down hills, flat terrain, in the rain. He laughed aloud. This feels soooooooo goooood!
A man stepped into his path. He attempted to run around him but he stepped back into his way. He slid to a stop, running in place. “What can I do for you?” He panted.
“You know you shouldn’t be running.” The blond young man was very fit.
“I don’t know you.”
“That’s another reason you shouldn’t be running. The dementia could make you run off somewhere and forget how to get back home. Let me help you.” The man reached an arm out to assist him.
“Dementia? I don’t have dementia.” He stopped bouncing in place.
“Really? What’s your name?”
“It’s….,” He became anxious. His hand went to his forehead as he blinked. “Wait, my name is….” The memory was just out of his reach. “J…j….j” It just wouldn’t come!
“C’mon. I’ll take you to the clinic. We’ll sort this out. I was on my way to get you anyway. You have a session scheduled.”
“Session?”
“With your neurologist. She’s also your counselor. You’ll feel better after a session. Let’s go.”
“So are you going to tell me my name?”
“Ah, no. I can’t tell you if you can’t recall on your own. The doctor will tell you during the session.”
“Uh huh.”
The “clinic” was a ten-story building nestled among eighty-foot trees. There was an emergency department, with the mandatory canopy and driveway to receive patients and squads, and a main entrance that, oddly, had a giant sign above it that read “MAIN HOSPITAL ENTRANCE.”
They entered the main entrance. His escort seated him in a waiting area. “Stay here until someone comes to get you.” There was a receptionist, and beyond her, a door with the name “Dr. R. Olivier” neatly lettered thereon. When his escort left, he stood and walked over to the receptionist. She was attractive.
“How you doin?” He used a tone that he somehow knew he used when he approached attractive women. He thought, Dementia. Hrumpf.
“Yes, sir, may I help you?” She smiled at him with a familiar air. “Are you thirsty?”
“You know me don’t you?”
“Why yes. You’re one of Dr. Olivier’s current patients. She’ll be out in a moment. I’ll get you that drink.” She sprang up from her chair and bounced cheerfully to a tall cooler behind her desk. While she retrieved a bottled drink, he admired her anatomy. When she turned to offer him the bottle, he admired her front anatomy, too. “I caught you!” She giggled like a school girl.
He took the proffered bottle. “How long have you known me?” “Ever since you got here.” She sat down and looked up at him with a smile.
“Um hum. So when was that? What’s my name?”
The door labeled “Dr. R. Oliver” opened and a woman in a white coat said, “Margaret, please send the patient in.”
He looked past Margaret, and Margaret turned to look at the Doctor. She was brown, dark brown. And shapely. She made him stop breathing. She looks like my…my…. He turned away from them to think. His heart was beating out of his chest. Her name is j..j…j. The doctor’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
“Please come in.” She stood next to the open door with her arm indicating that he should pass through. He examined her carefully as he passed her by.
The office was a typical doctor’s office: desk, chair, sofa, upholstered chair, window, file cabinet. Spartan. He sat down on the sofa. She sat in the upholstered chair and faced him.
“I’m told you don’t remember your name today.” She used her finger to tap something on her tablet.
“I guess not. What is it?” He was growing impatient with his inability to remember, not only his own name, but his acquaintances and their names.
“We’ll get to that. I just want to assess your overall memory. Just answer some questions for me. What’s today’s date?”
He thought about what month it was. It was warm, so spring or summer. Finally he said, “It’s summer.”
“Yes. Correct. But what month is it?”
Sun’s hot, high in the sky in the morning. Could be June. “June,” he said with sarcasm.
“You don’t know, do you?”
He took a deep breath and blew it out impatiently. “No I don’t, doctor. But I would like for you to tell me my name.”
“Just a few more questions.” His eyes rolled to the ceiling. “What year is it?”
He opened his mouth to say it, but it wouldn’t come to mind. He stood.
“Doctor, if you don’t mind my saying so, this is simply not therapeutic. We have established that I have a recall deficit. What have you been doing about it?” He was surprised at his own words, yet understood that he just told the doctor that this assessment was getting them nowhere.
She looked at him with a smile. “Good! That sounded more like the old you. Your name is Max. Maxwell. Please sit down.”
“It is not! That’s not my name. I may not be able to remember what my name IS, but I know it’s NOT Maxwell.” He was surprised again at what he said. But he sat down.
She continued to smile. “You’re right. It’s a name we gave you to help assess the progress you might be making. This is good, Max.”
“Don’t call me that. Call me by my name, please. Tell me what it is.”
“Before we get to that….”
“Yikes,” he interrupted the doctor.
“….I want to know more about what you do remember.”
“Recall,” he said.
“What?”
“Memory and recall are two different things. I can’t have recall if I don’t have memory. If you’re trying to assess recall, then you have to know what my memory might be holding. Not knowing what it is I know is useless, if you’re trying to discover if my recall is working.” He crossed his long legs at the ankles and put his hands, fingers laced, behind his head. He leaned back on the sofa and peered at the ceiling.
The doctor’s brow furrowed, but she plowed on. “Yes. That’s exactly right. Doctors are not accustomed to being precise with patients. I apologize. Now then, let’s talk about what you recall about your life and work. Where is the last place that you lived?”
“A white house. Why can I recall that but not my name?”
“Good. Let’s keep going. What metropolitan area did you reside in?”
“Maryland. Well, I lived in the District…..I lived in the District!” He sat up and looked at her with a big grin. “And I was planning to move to Maryland.”
“Do you recall where in Maryland?”
“Just outside the 495.” Something unpleasant tickled at his brain. He suddenly became suspicious of the doctor.
“Exactly where in Maryland, just outside the 495?”
“At a place where I was building a house for my….for my…..for my family.” Images started to play through his consciousness like bad digital video. Images pixilated and unpixelated unpleasantly. “A site near….near…..”
“We’re almost there, Max. Near where in Maryland?” The doctor leaned toward him and prompted him.
“My name is NOT MAX!” He leaped to his feet as he shouted. Two burly attendants entered through a door behind him. The doctor raised her palm to them. They halted.
“I won’t call you that again, if you’ll sit down. If you’ll sit down, then I can help you recover more of your memories.”
He looked at her angrily, and turned to sneer at the attendants before he re-took his seat on the sofa. “Recall,” he said sarcastically.
“Can you…recall…the place in Maryland where you were building a house for your family?”
“Outside the 495, in Maryland, north of the District, near the ocean, in a community where…….” He was interrupted by the concussive force that blew down the door to the receptionist area. Simultaneously, people burst through the door behind him and violently caused the two attendants to become unconscious.
The doctor stood and pushed her chair out of the way. Attackers appeared through the smoke of the explosion with laser handguns. Whereas the doctor had been prepared to engage in hand to hand combat, when she saw the handguns, she pointed her finger at her throat. A light shone brightly for just a second, and she fell down dead, gushing blood.
It all happened too fast for him to react. He heard someone screaming. He realized it was him. The attackers who had come in the front and back doors had their hands up in front of them as they approached him.
“Sir. We’re here for you. To rescue you. Stay calm.”
“I am calm, so long as you don’t call me Max. Would you do me one favor, though?”
“Yes sir.”
“Tell me: what’s my name?”
HOSPITAL IN PHILLY
They still wouldn’t tell him his name. He was waiting for someone named Ives to arrive. He was in a hospital bed with the usual hospital gown. There were men standing outside, and a very tall, very dark man standing inside the room with him. I bet he knows HIS name.
“So,” he said as he sat in his bed with his arms folded angrily in front of him, “what’s your name?”
The tall and dark one laughed a wonderful laugh that revealed gleaming white teeth that shone unnaturally. “My name is Michaels.”
“What’s my name?”
“Suh, I am not permitted to say your name at this time. Doctor Ives is on his way.”
“Is that some kind of explanation? You have an accent. The Sudan?”
“Very good, suh. You recalled.”
“No. You sound like you come from the Sudan. Do I know you or somethin'?”
“Yes, suh, you do. And very well.”
In another room in the hospital, Joy and Ives are arguing. Joy, very loudly.
“What do you mean I can’t go in with you? He’ll know me right away!”
“But,” said Ives patiently, “it doesn’t mean that he’ll regain his full memory. I need to do this in an orderly fashion so I know everything is there.”
“How could it not be? You have told me repeatedly that he recalls everything eventually. All we have to do is wait, right? I want him all back, right now!”
“Yes, I said that, but this is different. You engaged in gentle suggestions to a relaxed and trusting mind. These people…,” Ives did not know how much to tell her.
“What?” She stopped pacing right in front of him. “What did they do? Did they permanently damage him?”
“I don’t think so. He’s the most resilient person I have ever met. I’ve treated a lot of people with neurological deficits….”
“Deficits?!”
She almost screamed.
“….and impairments…”
“Oh the God in heaven, impairments!?!” She shouted in tongues, and produced copious tears.
“But I think I can avoid all of that if I proceed slowly and carefully. Let me explain what I think they did. First, they removed all of his bots. All gone. They did that, according to Grey, to make him impossible to find by satellite after they removed his GPS. The medical reason, though, was they used drugs to induce narco hypnosis. The bots would have chosen completely against these drugs if he had retained them.”
“What does that mean?” She sniffed. Joy sat down and wiped her eyes. “They would have dismantled the hypnotic drugs and sent out the detritus, without them ever inducing any kind of hypnotic state. That’s programming that is necessary, first, because he used to be a spy, and next, because he is the President.
“So with the bots gone, they induce a hypnotic state with the drugs and immediately in the first trance, they give him a suggestion to selectively forget who he is, where he is, who they are, the whole shebang.”
“First trance? They did it over and over?” She started to cry again.
“He’s only been gone about 36 hours. I suspect it was only twice. At least one of the drugs they might have used would make him sleep for 4 to 8 hours.”
“Might have used. You don’t know what they used?”
“No. It’s the bots that give us that kind of information. They do everything for us. We can’t now know for sure what they used. We know it has all been metabolized because we gave him a new load of bots in the squad.” He walked over and sat beside Joy, and gave her a comforting hug, and soothing pats on the back.
“They wanted him not to fight with them about the information they wanted to retrieve. They had to disable his recall for a while. But, Joy, they also knew that, sooner or later, he would recall on his own.” He continued to look at her.
“Then they were going to kill him.” She blew her nose and took a deep breath. “Ives, who is ‘they?’“
Chaos on Earth began with an evil snake in the garden, peace can be restored by a Divine snake from the light of the small chandelier that has no power source. Can Jenny and Joseph get help from the planet Jupiter, in time?
