Time, like water, flows however it likes. Also like water, time acts as a diluting agent. Given enough time, even the most serious of issues can seem mundane. As time pulls us away from the events by which we measure our lives, all we can do is turn around and observe them as we inch further and farther away. When time draws us apart from these events, our view of them is worsened, the edges go fuzzy, fine details are lost entirely.
The only way to combat this is to kick against the current. You can keep living through that event, refusing to let go and allow time to carry you beyond it. Like fighting a river, fighting time is an active process. To move on you need only let go and let the waters carry you, but to remain still you have to fight. It's tiring, and the longer you keep it up the harder and harder it becomes.
You can only learn to let it go, or die from the struggle.
It was a month after my eighteenth birthday, three weeks since the last time I'd talked to Special Agent Rubino, two and a half since I'd talked to Amy, just over a week after my mom and I decided on a smaller house around Argyle Heights, and three days after I'd received my school diploma in the mail when I'd decided to let go.
Before then, I'd repeated the events over and over in my head and obsessed over the details I hadn't yet understood. I'd made dozens of crude flow charts trying to demonstrate the chains of events and command. I'd called Rubino every day for updates, he'd begun to ignore my calls. I grilled my mother on anything my father had ever said before he died, when I was born, before I was conceived, and when I was young. I pulled any event from my early memory I could reach my fingers around and tried to insinuate some meaning, some relevance.
Did my dad refuse to introduce me to any sports because he simply feared I might be hurt or because he always knew that high stress and my fight-or-flight response might break down the walls between my two personalities?
Did he simply take the fact that I was to become a government guinea pig as the price of having a child, or did he actually enjoy the idea?
His gravestone didn't answer my questions.
I went into the FBI building in DC twice to make statements. Once, a brief written statement for Rubino's benefit; the second time, a formal inquiry in front of a review board of five people whose names and ranks. I purposely did not observe. The FBI wasn't interested in satisfying my toxic need for satisfaction, however, they just wanted to waste time and look as if they were doing their job.
I'd nearly driven myself mad before that day when I finally let it all go. It was the beginning of summer, there was green all around, the air was warm but not uncomfortable. I got in my car for the first time without feeling anxious or that I needed to go shoot someone or do anything illegal; the first time I hadn't considered whether or not I should bring my gun and the first time I hadn't looked at myself in the rear-view mirror for a few seconds and wondering who was looking back.
I drove with the windows and the t-tops from my car down, felt the air on my face, found a foreign serenity in it.
I was halfway up the sidewalk to Amy's front door when she opened her bedroom window upstairs and called out, telling me not to ring the doorbell. My last conversation with her father hadn't ended well, she probably didn't want him to know I was there. While I waited for her to come down I looked around at the trees I'd never noticed and watched the clouds cascade through the sky.
Amy came out the front door and followed the sidewalk to where I stood. Her hair had grown out a bit and was pulled back behind her ears, no stray locks in her face. She'd also stopped using eyeliner under her lids. She looked her age, for once.
She stopped a few feet from me and crossed her arms. "What are you up to now?" she asked, her voice betraying the annoyance her face hid.
"Just going out for a drive," I said. "You want to come?"
She glanced at my car in the driveway. "Where?" she asked, her voice flat.
"North."
She let out a quick breath and shook her head. "I'm not going to the FBI with you and I'm not going to Quantico again, why can't you just--"
I cut her off, "I'm done with that. No more adventures, no more banging down doors. Just a relaxing drive," I paused, "to clear our heads."
She looked up at me for a few seconds with cautious eyes, then said she'd tell her dad she was going out.
After I'd navigated my way out of suburbia hell and onto I-95, I glanced at the silent girl in my passenger seat and asked, "So how are you doing now, with the thing?"
Amy looked out the window, "Fine, I guess."
"It doesn't bother you, knowing what's up there?"
"I don't know," she started, "it's different than with you, because it's all staying put. Nothing's leaking out. I guess sometimes when I think of something, I'll wonder how I know it and try to remember when I learned it. I don't remember exactly when I learned how many feet are in a mile, though, but I know it. I guess I'll always have to deal with that."
"Your training was just basic training type stuff. You don't have to worry about knowing or doing things you'd regret," I said.
She turned away from the window and looked at me. "Do you regret any of the things you did?"
I watched the road for a bit.
I asked, "If you could get rid of it, though, or even have it all activated so you'd remember it all, would you want to?"
She thought for a moment. "Get rid of it, like, have it all wiped from my memory, so it would be like it was never there?"
"Right."
"Or have it activated, so everything I was taught under hypnosis, I'd remember and be able to use?"
"Yeah. In a few minutes, know everything you'd know after a few months worth of boot camp."
She was quiet for a bit longer. "I suppose either would be better than this," she said. "Just having that stuff in my brain, but not being able to use it and not knowing what it is. Getting rid of it would be fine, I guess. Though if it's just boot camp stuff like, what, cleaning a rifle and the difference between a Sergeant and a Staff Sergeant? I suppose that wouldn't be too bad, unless it'd change who I am."
"Your personality, you mean?"
"Right. Aren't people who finish boot camp supposed to have this kind of somber, subservient attitude from all the brow-beating? If that's part of the package, I don't know if I'd want that. I could learn how to clean a rifle from a book if I wanted to."
"But if you could know the answer to that, and even if not, you'd definitely rather have it activated or have it removed than just having it sit there?" I asked.
"I guess so. Yeah."
"Alright then," I said.
"So just
where are we going?" Amy asked.
"You'll see."
The drive north was becoming rather familiar for me. Interstate 95 went through Stafford than right through Quantico, then through Woodbridge, then Lorton and Fort Belvoir, then turned into 395 and straight through to Washington DC. Northwest of the city center was Georgetown University, right on the edge of the western branch of the Potomac. Around the university were blocks of tightly-packed, ages-old townhouses. I parked on one particular street in front of one particular house, which I explained to Amy was the home of Will Secomb, professor and head of the psychology department at Georgetown.
I'd found his name in some of the earliest of Schumer's files and from online archives of the university's website found that he taught a few classes in hypnosis theory back in the 1980s but now stuck mostly to abnormal psychology. From his personal page on the psych department's site I found his work and class schedule and determined that he would most likely be home at this exact hour.
Amy and I went up the short sidewalk and handful of stairs to the front door, and I knocked. In a few moments a taller gentleman of about sixty opened the door. He was balding, thin, and dressed in an a white shirt and gray pants that looked to have been through the wash a few too many times and wore wide-framed, thick-lensed glasses.
"Professor Secomb?" I asked when the door was opened.
"Yes?" he said, squinting as if trying to recognize me, then trying the same with Amy.
"Did you ever know, or work with, a Charles Schumer over in Quantico?" I asked.
Professor Secomb squinted again, but looking past my head, as if trying to remember the name. "Are you students of mine?" he asked.
"No," I said. "This would have been a while ago. Eighteen years or so."
"Oh, right," he said, scratching his head. "I think I remember. Just some contract work. He tried to hire me, as I recall."
"I don't suppose you worked with him on some kind of platform for training a child from birth to teen years using hypnosis so as for him not to remember the training?"
"Him
or her," Amy said.
Secomb looked between the two of us for a moment. I smiled awkwardly.
"Oh dear," Secomb said, mostly to himself, after letting both of us in and we'd sat down on a small, old couch over which a brown and white afghan was tossed. "Oh dear, oh dear," he repeated, taking a seat in an old recliner opposite the couch.
"I never thought it was a practical exercise," he said. "Mr. Schumer just brought me in and asked me to determine whether it would be possible, and if so, to design a system to do it. To train or educate somebody without them remembering it. I thought it was hypothetical. I even told him that, that it may be possible but it was clearly an ethical and practical quagmire."
"But you developed the platform for him?" I asked. "One that should have worked."
"Well, yes. In the same way that in the 1940s somebody could have developed a platform for sending a man to the moon, but it wouldn't be possible or practical for another twenty years."
"Apparently it was both practical and possible," Amy said.
"Oh dear," Secomb said once more.
"Understand," he began after a moment, "that hypnosis has been around in one form or another since the 18th century, but advancements in understanding it come slowly and after long gaps. In the 1980s it, and most conventional forms of psychology, had become en vogue again. The CIA, FBI, and military started to bring in experts to see if it was possible to use it for interrogation, memory restoration, dealing with PTSD, contacting the spirits of dead people, anything. Most of my colleagues in psychological study were contracted for one program or another, developing the means to do any number of purely-hypothetical feats. Schumer's job didn't seem too far from the ordinary. Hypnosis has been shown to be a useful tool for education for decades, but using it long-term and for children was the hard part."
"So you had no idea that he was going to actually do it?" I asked.
"Heavens, no," he said.
"But for him to pull it off, then," I said, "would your... report have been enough?"
He thought for a moment. "I suppose so," he said. "In the hands of a trained psychologist or hypnotist, at least. What I outlined was just the mechanics for training a person. What was actually to be taught was left open. The platform could be used to teach somebody foreign languages or a thousand recipes for making cupcakes."
"But it could easily be used to teach somebody military strategies?" I asked.
"Sure, given the pace was slow enough."
"How does it all work?" I asked.
"I should have my notes and documents from the project here in my filing cabinet, so I could look up exactly what the process was, but the essence of it all is that, while in a hypnotic state, a person's subconscious is fully exposed and open to suggestion. The subconscious is the part of the mind that actually does the heavy lifting, coordinating the flow of information between the senses, the memory, and the conscious. Your five senses are consistently giving an extreme amount of information to the subconscious, and the subconscious actively decides how much of it to forward to your conscious, for example."
"What does that mean?" Amy asked.
Secomb took in a breath, then began explaining, "Have you ever been in a crowded room where many groups of people are having their own conversations, like a restaurant or a party, and you're having a conversation with your own group but you overhear someone in another group mentioning your name or a word that holds some significance to you, and your attention suddenly snaps over to that other conversation? Not only that, but you can somehow remember the last few words before your name or word was said, even though you weren't listening."
Amy furrowed her brow for a moment, "I think so."
"That happens," Secomb said, "because your ears are actually picking up every conversation within earshot, but your subconscious is only picking out the voices from the conversation you're having. It would be too much work for your mind to have to process every voice heard in a crowded room, so it picks out the important thing and sends the rest into your brain's version of the trash bin. But as your subconscious is filtering this out, if it hears a word that's important to you, it decides to send it to your conscious along with anything it can pick from that trash bin to go along with it."
"The Cocktail Party Phenomenon," I said.
Secomb looked over to me, a bit surprised. "Exactly," he said.
"That's also why you sometimes get a headache if people around you are speaking to each other in a foreign language," I said, "Your mind is trying to process the words to decide if it's important, but gets stuck on every word."
"Right," Secomb said. "This just shows how the subconscious acts as the messenger between your memory, your senses, and your conscious. When you're being taught something in class, or you're reading a book, there are a million other processes going on inside your mind that have to compete with each other. If a teacher tells you a new mathematical formula, for instance, that new information has to overcome the fact that you're also thinking about history class and the fact that your shirt is uncomfortable, and that your desk is tan and your pencil is yellow and the person next to you is humming.
"When you're in a hypnotic state, however, all those other inputs can be dismissed or set aside, and you can send information straight to the subconscious, so that when you're told that formula it's sent straight to the part of your brain that stores information to your memory while you sleep that night. The main problem with this is that most people learn by doing, not just hearing. To deal with that, I made a script where the subject could be instructed to actually perform whatever action and, if the instructor determines it was done correctly, the process is learned that way."
"How is the person kept from remembering all of this once he wakes up, and how does the process of 'unlocking' all that knowledge handled at the end?" I asked.
Secomb scratched his cheek and thought for a bit. "I'll have to check my notes to see the specifics for how I dealt with that," he said, standing up and heading down a hall and turning into another room.
"This is weird," Amy said quietly.
"Yes it is," I replied.
A few minutes later, Secomb came back with a paper accordion file in his hands. He sat back down and started pulling pages and notebooks out. He spent a few minutes sorting documents reading a few things to himself, before looking up at us and asking, "What was the question again?"
"How does a person not remember being trained under hypnosis daily, and how does activation work?" I said.
"Ah, yes, right," Secomb said. "Well, the memory is a tricky thing. It isn't like a big bucket where everything is dumped and can be poured out and reviewed. The best analogy I've heard is that memories are like tennis balls floating around in a vacuum. The tennis balls are all connected by strings, each one connected to different ones a number of different ways. A memory of the first time you tied your own shoes might be tied to a ball of 'accomplishments' and another called 'shoes' as well as several other, much more arbitrary connections. These string connections are created when the memories are first stored, but our subconscious is able to alter them at will. A person with a traumatic experience such as being raped or witnessing a violent crime, for instance, may just have that tennis ball dropped anywhere without any connections made. The mind does this as a way of self-preservation, repressing a memory that's too painful to process. A person could live his whole life without ever acknowledging or being aware of that memory, but most times as that tennis ball floats around it will 'bump' into a similar memory. If the event happened at a certain location or the day after something important like a birthday, it might try to make spontaneous connections to memories of that location or birthdays. This is one way for people in therapy to recall these events. The other way is under hypnosis.
"With hypnosis, the subconscious can be instructed to dive into that vacuum and start grabbing tennis balls, regardless of connections, and then the subconscious can be told to invent new connections so that the conscious mind can recall the event freely. In the same fashion, the subconscious can be told, with some restrictions, to sever connections. This can be done for entertainment in stage hypnosis where a person is made to temporarily forget his own name, or forget about the number seven, but using the correct procedure, the 'forgetting' can be made much more long-lasting. Under hypnosis, a person could be trained in whatever way, and then made to disconnect those new memories with anything else.
"This is how the 'activation' is handled, at the end of the training. If the subject wishes to be made to remember everything he learns, his subconscious can be instructed to find all those tennis balls he was told to disconnect over the years and re-connect them. Or, if he chooses to reject the training, the memories can be, more or less, thrown out."
"You said that if somebody forgets something that it isn't really gone, just disconnected. If the training tennis balls are already disconnected, how can they be removed forever?" I asked.
"That's the most complicated aspect of this whole procedure," Secomb said. "It's the thing I had to work hardest to sort out, but it's something I insisted that I include. I didn't think it would be right to, even in theory, give somebody training they weren't aware of without giving him the option of completely removing it, be it cupcake recipes or bomb making."
"So how did you do it?" I asked.
"I had to do a bit of theoretical mind-'hacking'," he said. "When you're sleeping, your subconscious is working with your memory to take all of the information you gathered that day and deciding whether it's something you should hang onto forever or just discard it. This is, effectively, what dreams are all about. Your mind is basically experiencing a vivid hallucination, a literal drug trip, but it's told to recall everything you experienced that day and go off on tangents. Important things, like things you actually did or important sensations, are sent off to your long-term memory. Things that serve no purpose, like sounds, smells, or sights you experienced that had no significance, are just flat-out removed from memory. This is why I tell my students to make sure they get plenty of rest before an exam instead of staying up all night studying. Your brain doesn't actually remember something until you've slept and it's had a chance to sort it out. Until you've slept, everything kind of swims around your short-term memory waiting to be dealt with."
"Ok..."
"Right. Well, I had to identify the actual process of the brain that does the permanent removal of useless information, and then I had to find a way to channel old memories into this process for them to be deleted. In a sense, if a person chooses to have his unconscious training removed forever, I found a way for the subconscious to grab all of those tennis balls and sneak them into that trash bin so that when the person goes to sleep, the brain just dumps it all out. That explanation kind of trivializes the size of that accomplishment, but for all I knew it was just hypothetical so I didn't care to spend any more time thinking about it."
"Let me make sure I have this straight," I said. "To permanently remove the training, you basically trick the subconscious into thinking that all training is useless and sneak it into the short-term memory's trash bin so it can be removed the next time the person sleeps."
"That's basically it, yes," Secomb said.
"Then, wouldn't the person be able to remember it all, until he was able to sleep. You said everything swims around up there until it's been sorted out in sleep. If eighteen years of training was swimming around where there's usually only a day's worth of stuff, wouldn't you notice?"
"That's true. For that, the person should be given a sedative and made to sleep immediately after the process, otherwise for the rest of the day he would, well, I'm not sure. He might feel like he'd been awake for years, or he might go insane. It's hard to estimate what would happen, which is why immediately going to sleep is required. The subject should be kept asleep for at least twenty-four hours, as well, to allow for all that information to be processed."
I let that settle in for a bit.
"Another question," I said. "Suppose a person had all this training, the tennis balls are floating around with no connections, could anything spontaneously create connections as needed. Say a person was taught how to tackle a bear but isn't supposed to remember, and there's a bear about to eat him..."
"Fight or flight," Secomb said, knowingly.
"Right."
"I made a note of it in my submission. The whole notion of tennis balls floating around with no connections only applies in an ideal scenario. Given the right stresses, or the overwhelmingly powerful reach of the FOF response, it was always entirely likely that such a situation might cause the mind to reach in and pull out anything it could use. This is demonstrated in reality, when some people are able to remember first aid or survival techniques they read about or saw on TV years ago in a life-or-death situation. The mind will do anything it can to keep itself alive, it will respect no arbitrary rules, even its own. If it thinks passing out will save you, you'll pass out. If it thinks repressing the memory will save you, you'll repress the memory. If it thinks creating a whole new personality to handle the stressing event while your original personality takes a nap in the back of your mind will help, it will do that. In the same way, if your brain knows how to escape a situation but isn't 'supposed' to remember, it will veto its restriction."
There it was. There was my answer. I then explained to Professor Secomb everything that had happened to me, that I had been in my first fight after a lifetime of avoiding confrontation, and I felt something snap and was able to fight. After that, I was in more and more life-or-death situations and each time, more and more of my training had become available. Each time, I felt more and more of myself slipping away.
"It's interesting, and completely understandable," Secomb said after I'd finished. "When you were in danger in a physical assault, your mind retrieved its information on how to handle that. When you were in danger in a car, the car training became available, then gun training as you needed it."
"I would have thought, knowing all this, that from the first time the sanctity of the tennis ball connections was broken, that I would be able to remember all of it," I said.
"No, what happened sounds about right. The training you received doesn't represent one giant memory, it's thousands of memories and skills. It wouldn't all rush out like poking a hole in a dam, it would only become available as needed, something like a reflex. If you were to be officially activated, all of the training would be moved to your active memory. Until then, it remains available on a need-to-use basis. If you tried to tell someone how to tie shoelaces without thinking about it, you might have trouble, but if your shoe is untied you can reach down and perform a complicated manipulation of two strings with two hands without applying any thought whatsoever. The motions and techniques of lace-tying just comes to you as you subconsciously ask for it. Do you understand?"
"I think so," I said. It made enough sense. I knew how to treat strychnine poisoning because I needed to, and I knew how to shoot when I needed to. When I tried shooting at the range in Lorton, I wasn't an expert when I first tried. It wasn't until I stopped thinking about it and treated it like a reflex that I was able to shoot so well. Each time I had to pull from the training, though, it seemed like more and more baggage came with it.
"You said you wrote scripts for everything, right?" I asked.
Secomb nodded.
"You have the script to remove the training?"
He blinked a few times, then said, "Yes, I believe I could do it."
"Would you?" I asked.
"On you?"
I nodded.
Secomb opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated, then finally said, "It would take a while. And like I said, you'd have to sleep right afterwards. It would be dangerous, and I'd have to review my notes and do some research to make sure all the information and techniques are current."
"What about activating?" Amy asked.
Secomb thought some more. "That would be easier. Much easier. I could do that in an hour."
Amy looked at me. "What do you think?" she asked. "If you got rid of it, you would be you again."
"Yeah," I said. "And if you got rid of yours, you wouldn't have to worry about being something you're not."
"Or," Amy said, "we could make of ourselves whatever we want. We could do it, to hell with the consequences."
"You can do whatever you want to do," I said. "You don't have to base it on what I do."
"I think we should go through it together, whatever it is," she said.
My heart began beating faster. Amy's eyes were sincere. Her hand, I'd just noticed, was on mine. I remembered saying once, "When this is over with." It felt like ages ago, of course, but I had known so clearly what I meant then. I also remembered the scar on my back, probably a remnant of an accident during knife training. I thought of what it represented, the lifetime of knife fights and gun battles I could get myself into and out of, the scars I might bear. I had an option here. I could opt for a simple life, a safe life, a life with somebody who might care enough to live it with me; or, I could opt for a life that would probably get me killed far before my time, but might just be more worth living, a road less traveled. If my training was as inclusive as Schumer made it seem, I could probably get any kind of position I wanted. "When this is over with," I'd said once, though.
"Well? Which will it be?" Secomb asked, cutting through the silence. "I'll have to prepare, whichever it is."
I looked up at Amy once more, then turned back to Secomb. With a slight smirk I said, "I think I have a different idea."
The End
...as if there wont be a million sequels
Though the book isn't technically done (I'm still going through the wording and finding all kinds of annoying mistakes) I'll start taking pre-orders for autographed pre-published copies. These will be finalized, but pre-published versions meaning they'll wont be from a publishing house or available for sale at any store. They'll be 6"x9", the size of a regular hardcover book, and they'll be autographed by me, made out to whoever you want (nobody named "eBay buyer" please). It'll look a great deal like this.
