The therapeutic walk, pexels.com
Late into the next morning, I awoke. My sleep had been different. It had been full of pleasant, personal dreams, especially towards morning. I had no idea I’d been missing them over the last months, but now that they were back I indulged the old habit, waking up and nodding off time and time again well into the day.
Claire was lying beside me sound asleep, which I thought strange as there was so much to do today. It would be like a Christmas morning to a child, opening up boxes and setting up a new lab. I showered and shaved and went to Claire and shook her gently to wake her up. Her eyes opened, and she smiled and said to me: “you go on, my love, and leave me here to rest. What I did yesterday was quite an effort. I still need to recuperate.”
I did just that, eager to see what was going on. The beach was empty, our row of bungalows deserted but up the hill, in front of the warehouse, there was a flurry of activity. Tables and chairs were carried in, with all the old contents moved out. Inside, our whole crew and most of Mr. Tanaki’s staff were busy. Jaime looked to be in fine form, a conductor before his orchestra, telling half a dozen people to put this here and that there. Everyone was busy helping or waiting for his next instructions while Mr. Tanaki and his daughter watched, smiling and greeting me warmly as I strolled in.
“This feels like the most important day in my life” he said to me, “all thanks to you. I’ve owned many large factories filling whole city blocks, rolling out all sorts of wares. But in this one little room, we shall be manufacturing something infinitely more valuable to humankind.”
Samantha came over to us and asked why Claire wasn’t with me.
“She’s still in bed. She said that what she did yesterday taxed her quite a bit, so she’s still resting. Maybe you should go and see her if she doesn’t come up soon.”
I started helping Jaime and was soon pleasantly engaged in the business of setting up the new lab. We’d been idle for so many weeks with nothing to do, that this bundle of work before us felt like a godsend and we jumped at the opportunity of a mission.
It was mid-afternoon when Scout came to me from her mother, telling me I was needed at my bungalow. When I entered it wasn’t just Samantha, but Mary, Jane and Helen huddled around her bedside looking concerned.
Samantha turned to me and said, “she’s ill Roland, very ill. Her mind is agitated, out of control. We tried to calm her with every trick we know but it’s a fright for us to even glimpse her thoughts, there’s so many, all running wild. But the one thing she keeps repeating is your name. She’s calling out for you. So could you sit with her and hold her hand?”
I did, and the women quietly closed the shutters and door to the bedroom and left us alone in the dim light. I could hear them talking in the living room but not what they said. I tried to commune with Claire, to read her mind and tell her I was here, over and over, and this did have some effect because a half hour into it she awoke and sat up in bed, saying that she was hungry. The women came back in and we spoon fed her some soup, after which she told us she was feeling better but weak. She even got out of bed. The women bathed and dressed her and she asked me to take her for a stroll along the beach in the evening air.
That night and for many nights after I witnessed a war raging inside Claire’s head, the battle was for her sanity, and it often seemed desperately close to being lost. I wished I could enter her head and help fix it as I’d done for Scout, what felt like eons ago. But these were no little nipping creatures in a forest. From the closest I could get, I saw a World War 1 scenario playing out with constant artillery barrages all around, lighting up the night sky. And Claire would often wake and sit up in bed, trembling like some soldier from the trench, her forehead covered in sweat, disoriented and scared. I would hug her and lay her down again and try to rock her to sleep. Other times, in her sleep, she would mumble profanities and then curse Bob’s name and swear to kill him.
The nature of the conflict slowly dawned on me. She had taken so much out of his mind that, inadvertently, she had assimilated him also. A large portion of his identity, his personality, was inside her. His habits and tastes and recollections were all mixed up with the data she had downloaded. She had to go deep into his memory to find the lab and its combinations but now these other pieces kept surfacing up as if her own, like a ghost of Bob in her head, asserting itself, demanding to be heard and always getting mixed up with her voice and self, a true case of dissociative identity disorder.
By day she was somewhat better. She wanted me by her side at all times, to which I complied, taking only an hour off each evening when Samantha and Mary and Scout would sit with her and bathe and feed her dinner. We took longer strolls on the beach, arm in arm, mostly silent. But in lucid moments she would thank me for all my love and talk with me as her old self again.
She even confessed to me many things, always crying. One day she told me exactly how she took control of my mind.
“It was easy my love. It was just a matter of a simple program tasking a few of your processors with a single chore like counting to ten in a loop, an unending loop, a cat’s cradle, and having them spread that task to all the thousands of others making them all hum in perfect sink, happily busy but doing nothing, like counting sheep. This would lull you to a hypnotic state, and I’d roam through your beautiful head and do as I please. Your lights were on, but nobody was home. This is what I meant by singing you lullabies.”
“And you taught this trick to all the other women?” I asked.
‘Yes, but it was well-intentioned and only meant to comfort you. I perfected it almost at your own request when you were in such anxiety about leaving the house, that last night. That was the second time I sang to you. I’m going to teach you when I can how to sing to me because I’d like such a dear caress, especially now.”
But I have one more thing to confess to you Roland, to ease my heart, if you’ll forgive me. That day long ago when you had food poisoning, it wasn’t just that, it was also me. I put a program in your head as we were sitting on the Abbott’s back deck. I thought it would make you love me more, but it all went wrong. I sat at your bedside the whole night long, often weeping, but at other times trying desperately to help you and that’s when the idea first dawned on me. I thought you might never wake up and I had to undo what I’d done, putting such an alien prompt in your mind that your whole being was fighting against it. But I couldn’t remove it; it had spread too far. That’s when I came up with the idea of just soothing you and erasing it in a flood of distraction and love. And it worked. You woke up for me, and we were both saved.”
Her confessions put the last lingering doubts in my mind to rest. I thought we would be soulmates, forever. But I still wondered about my best friend and had to get to the bottom of his relationship with Samantha. That evening on my free hour I pulled him away from his lab and insisted we take a walk. I began by telling him everything Claire had told me.
Then I asked, “Jaime does she let you in?”
“Yes, Roland, a little more each day. It’s wonderful how she works with me. She’s the best helpmate I’ve ever had, and I can feel her even admiring me. We have the whole lab in operation, and we’re going through the wafers one by one. I’ve already identified seventeen that are fit for consumption, and they’re all big ones, two hundreds. It’s the dates on the binders that tell me everything. They all came in just days before the blasts, from several sources, and Bob and his associates were just starting to program them.”
At this point I interrupted him. “No Jaime let’s talk about Samantha. I think she might be controlling your mind and that you’re just preparing all these chips like a lackey to empower thousands of more women to control more men’s brains. What about the four chips she took from you, did she return them?”
“Yes, yes she did, she returned two which I needed for a baseline.”
“And the other two she gave to two more women. Don’t you see what’s going on?”
“No you’re wrong, dead wrong. Everything has changed since we came back and Claire fell ill. That night Samantha cried in my arms. She did let me in. I’m starting to see her as a person, how she thinks, even down to her feelings and fears of inadequacy. She’s thankful for all that I’m teaching her, how to set up and examine the wafers on the screens to see where they’re at and how to fix them.”
“And my mind is clear. She can’t be controlling me. It’s funny, while we were on the boat and our first weeks here I just worshiped her. To me, she was life, light, like a blazing sun. I couldn’t even look at her. I just basked in her radiance. But now she’s human to me. We talk about our feelings.”
I was still not convinced.
“Did she tell you about how she can lull you to sleep?”
“No” he replied reluctantly.
“Well that sums it up for me” I said. That was the end of our discussion that day.
But our talks continued over the next five days for an hour or so every evening. He confronted Samantha on that issue, and she told him she was trying to help him sleep and that she was sorry for doing it without his permission.
I continued to nurse Claire, but she wasn’t getting any better. One night was especially bad. She kept waking up and screaming Bob’s name when suddenly it hit me; you get nowhere yelling at a person not present. You have to confront him face to face.
