In the Court of the Yellow King Read online

  They trailed off into silence.

  “And you?” she continued. “What do you do?”

  He explained. It had something to do with mathematics, computers, and insurance. Connie didn’t really follow it.

  “You like it?”

  He shrugged. “Beats working on a loud, hot assembly line. It can be tedious but... I like tedium, maybe? I handle being bored better than a lot of people.” He sat up and forward. “I mean, I guess that I have a tolerance for problems and tasks that are just the right amount of busy work? Not really really hard problems, but the kind of thing that you know will... that you know you can solve if you just, like, keep chiseling away at it.”

  She nodded.

  “How are you sleeping?”

  He sighed.

  “Well that’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

  After their first session, Connie’s secretary Griffin wound up calling Chet’s insurance company.

  “Hi,” Griffin said. He had a beautiful phone voice, deep and resonant. “I’m calling from Stearkwether Therapeutic Associates?”

  “Hello, my name is Jennifer,” said a voice with a thick Bengali accent. “How may I help you today?”

  “We’ve got a new client, he’s insured through Allied Health Programs.”

  “Can I have his account information please?”

  Griffin gave it, the name ‘Chet Wegler,’ his Social Security Number, his account number, and the Single-Payment Service Identification Code.

  “Was Chet Wegler’s referring physician Dr. Weinbaum?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Weinbaum isn’t in our office.”

  “Can you describe the therapy Mr. Wegler is receiving?”

  “Of course I can’t, c’mon. Patient confidentiality precludes.”

  “I’m going to transfer you to my supervisor.”

  Her supervisor (“Jeremy”) had a Punjabi accent and asked for the client’s name, SSN, account number and Single-Payment Service Identification Code.

  “And he is taking the therapies from Dr. Constance Stearkwether?”

  “She’s not a doctor,” Griffin said, “But yes, Connie Stearkwether is his therapist.”

  “And what sort of therapy does she do, please?”

  “Traumatic association reductive therapy.”

  “Please hold.”

  The music was an R.E.M. song from the early 1990s. It played twice before breaking off.

  “Hello, my name is Anthony,” said the man with the Marathi accent. “Can I have the name of the client please?”

  Griffin sighed, but he gamely provided name, SSN, account and SPSIC again.

  “The code you provided is for psychotherapeutic services,” Anthony said.

  “Yes. That’s what Mr. Wegler is getting.”

  “But Constance Stearkwether is not a psychiatrist, nor is she a psychologist.”

  “She’s a counselor.”

  “What is it that she does, again?”

  “Traumatic association reduction therapy.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “She reduces the traumatic associations between memories,” Griffin told him.

  “...we don’t have a code for that.”

  “It’s a new therapy.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Wegler’s insurance does not cover experimental therapeutic modalities.”

  “In process, they sit and talk. It’s no more ‘experimental’ than any other talking cure.”

  “I’m going to have to transfer you to a mental health expert. Please hold.”

  Griffin sighed.

  They had several sessions, talking about Chet’s dad, before Connie asked, “How much do you know about the brain chemistry of memory?”

  “Um... very little.”

  “It’s interesting how many different tasks we talk about when we speak about remembrance. Your son’s name is... Brett, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t consult my notes,” Connie said, with a little smile. “I accessed recollection—I drew up the fact from within the pattern of electrochemical signals in my brain, right? And when you hear the name ‘Brett,’ you don’t have to dredge it up to know it’s your son’s name, you instantly feel its rightness. That’s the difference between recognition and recollection. One’s active and one’s passive.”

  “Okay...”

  “It’s not that difficult,” she insisted. “There are memories you have to work at, and there are memories that jump out and surprise you because something triggered them, like a photo or a turn of phrase or a smell.”

  “The taste of a... oh, what are those cookies in that French novel?”

  “Don’t remember?” she asked.

  He smiled back.

  “Madelines, from A Remembrance of Things Past,” she said.

  “I bet you talk about that book a lot, in your line of work,” Chet said. He finally seemed comfortable on her sofa.

  “A fair bit, yes. I’m also a fan. But if you think of it, reading—where you blast past the words so quickly that meaning builds up through their collective action, not from individual letters—is different from writing, when you’re going much slower and trying to find just the right word for this or that situation.”

  “Got it. Some memory is automatic, some you have to fight for.”

  “Right! The division between directed memory and reflexive memory is an important one. But if those are the X-axis of the chart, there’s also a Y-axis. Make sense?”

  “Rows and columns, oh yeah. I spend... a lot of time with spreadsheets. What’s the other axis then?” Chet asked.

  “Some memories are functional—remembering how to ride a bike or juggle. Those usually start out conscious, like when you’re picking out notes on a piano or letters on a keyboard, but become instinctive over time.”

  “Got it.”

  “Other memories are emotional.”

  “Oh, now we’re getting to it.”

  “These different categories are largely disconnected from one another. Someone with total retrograde amnesia, where they don’t even know who they are? They retain skills, Bourne Identity style.”

  “Now there’s a story I know better,” Chet said. “The movie, anyhow.”

  “People who’ve damaged their ability to form new memories, or who’ve lost old ones, often recognize,” she said, drawing attention to the word, “People from their past who were important to them. A man who couldn’t tell you his own name or where he was from knew he loved his wife when he saw her. Similarly, some experiments with electroconvulsive memory erasure indicate that patients feared the doctor even when they didn’t and couldn’t consciously know her name or what she’d done with them previously.”

  “That’s kind of spooky,” he said. “It also sounds like bad news. I mean, isn’t it? My... baggage...” he twisted away in the sofa, looking out the window.

  Connie reached over and took one of his hands, tugging lightly until he turned to look at her.

  “Your problem is that you have deep, traumatic emotional memories,” she said, staring deep into his eyes. “They are reflexive and they are set off by commonplace stimuli—lying flat in bed, darkness, late night. You are re-experiencing old abuses.”

  Chet eyes were reddening, but he didn’t look away.

  “I can break that, Chet.” She let go and leaned back, but held his gaze.

  “How?” he whispered.

  She handed him a box of tissues.

  “There are stimuli that have profound impacts on the mind,” she said vaguely. “In the past, they’ve been applied haphazardly, or accidentally, or... um, recreationally. But I believe these factors can be used with precision. They can alter your sense of what life is and what life can be.”

  “What sorts of... I mean, how would that work? I’
m not sure I want to get my mind rewired. I just want to not have to think about... you know.”

  “I know Chet. Look. Emotive memory is stored in the amygdala,” she said. “Procedures are spread throughout, which is why they can be so resilient. Visual, intellectualized data resides in the hippocampus. But all memories—functional, feeling or fact—are plastic. We trust what we know as if it was iron, but it’s actually as supple as rope.”

  “How can that be possible?” Chet asked. “I know what happened. I was there, I wish I could forget or misremember, but it comes back exactly the same every time, it’s like a broken record, it never changes, I’d rather be delusional than be stuck in a loop with what actually went on!”

  “It’s an illusion,” she said steadily. “Memory is the graveyard of facts.”

  “That’s crazy! God, how can you tell me that I don’t even know what happened when I was there and you weren’t?”

  “Because all memories are illusions. Your father isn’t here right now, is he? He died in...”

  She checked her notes even as he said, “1997. I’m not wrong about that, am I?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are you going to convince me that I’m wrong about the... the rest of it?”

  “You don’t have to be right or wrong,” she said. “We just have to convince your amygdala that it’s not happening right now. Because we can agree on that, right? That it’s not in the present, but the past?”

  “Who said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’?” he asked.

  “I’ll have to look that one up,” she said.

  When he checked out, he asked Griffin about the insurance situation. They spent a few minutes going over it.

  “Today,” Constance said at their next appointment, “I’d like to talk about homeopathy.”

  “It’s interesting,” Chet said. “Of all the therapies I’ve tried, and most of them were the ‘talking cure,’ this is the first time I feel like I’ve done the minority of the talking.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Kind of a relief,” he admitted. “But—excuse me, please, don’t take any offense—it does make me skeptical.”

  “I’m not offended.” Constance had a pretty smile. “Look, this isn’t like other therapies. They’re a process to help you construct mental and emotional tools for living your life. Like... like a seamstress who won’t make clothing, but who talks you through every step of measuring yourself and threading the needle and putting it together?”

  “Um... ”

  “Sorry about my metaphors,” she said. “Let me conclude this one. I don’t want you to have a bespoke suit of psychological techniques. I want to hand you a set of one-size-fits-all pants to, um, go over the naked memories that are troubling you.”

  “So you’re a specialist.”

  “A very narrow specialist, which is why I don’t have an M.D. or a Psy.D.”

  “Which is why the insurance company is having a conniption,” Chet said.

  She grimaced a little. “Sorry about that.”

  “Look, it’s fine, if this works I’ll happily pay it out of pocket. Though, again... that’s a reason for some... concern? I guess?”

  “Memory is plastic,” she said. “Every time you remember an event, you edit it and consolidate it. Often, several similar scenarios are melded together.”

  “See, that’s the part that I can’t...”

  “How many times did your dad do it?” she asked.

  He moved back into the sofa as if slapped.

  “Too many,” he said at last.

  “You do not remember an exact number.”

  “Well, it’s... you can’t...”

  “You recall several archetypal encounters, and those are probably the result of multiple events being compacted together. Anything you remember with particular clarity, I’m guessing had some extraneous element involved.”

  He was quiet for some time.

  “The scent of gingerbread,” she said quietly. “The Christmas episode. That one stands out. Doesn’t it? You said.”

  He nodded.

  “Because that time was a little different, it didn’t get combined with the times that were all the same.”

  He said nothing, just stared, blank.

  “I’m not trying to belittle your suffering,” she said, leaning in and putting a hand on his knee. “I’m not trying to tell you it wasn’t every bit as awful as you think. But you did change them. The memories did get loose from the actual events. Can you agree to that?” She bit her lip.

  “I guess I have to,” he whispered.

  “It is hard to admit that we not only don’t know something, but that we can’t,” she said, reaching out to take one of his hands in both of hers. “But this means that you can alter how you respond to those memories. You can change it. You can take control of your past.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you believe me?” she persisted.

  He nodded again. Satisfied, she sat back and let him withdraw his hand.

  “So,” he croaked. “Homeopathy? It’s some kind of... New Age thing, right?” Chet asked.

  “Actual homeopathy is, yes. Sure. The theory says that if an ounce of the chemical irritant from poison ivy causes an itching rash in a healthy person, a hundredth of an ounce of it would heal a sick person’s rash. Or, something that makes you nauseous when you take it healthy would—if carefully diluted down to a fraction of its initial intensity—settle your stomach if you were already throwing up.”

  “Okay, how is that even supposed to work?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not claiming it works for snakebites, although exposure to small doses of venom can let people build up immunities. Really, if you think about it, the process of getting vaccinated with a small sample of dead disease cells sounds very similar to homeopathy. But I’m not trying to sell you on it for the body, but for the mind.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  “Think of psychoactive chemicals. If you give lithium salts to a healthy person, the bad effects are going to outweigh the positive ones. Give the same dosage to someone suffering mania, and it can be, can be very helpful.”

  “All right,” Chet said slowly. “It’s like... like that stuff Adderall? Or am I thinking about Ritalin? The stuff that makes normal... normal people hyper, but makes hyper kids more normal?”

  “That’s quite an oversimplification,” she said, “But that does speak to the fundamental theory at play here. A stomach, say, that’s functioning just fine might be thrown out of balance if you add too much of an acid to it. But if it has insufficient acid, adding some might restore it. Something that has an effect is a better starting place than something that has no observed effect.”

  “I thought you didn’t prescribe medications,” Chet said.

  “I don’t. Have you ever heard of The King in Yellow?”

  “We think our memories are like pictures,” Connie said. “When we think of our first kiss, it’s usually an image, even though we probably had our eyes closed. We see ourselves from outside, very often.”

  “So that’s another example of how we change our memories?” Chet asked. “I was in ‘first-person view’ when I got married, but I imagine it in third-person because that’s how I see the wedding video and pictures?”

  “It’s partly due to those reinforcers, and partly due to our tendency of make narratives, with meaning, out of events, which are merely observed. But memory isn’t really like a picture, because pictures don’t change. We want it to be fixed and steady, but it’s not.”

  “If I wanted my memories to be unchangeable, I wouldn’t be here,” Chet said.

  “Very true.” Constance stood, produced a key from her pocket, and unlocked a gray metal box on her desk. Inside was a small Tyvek envelope, which she set aside. Under it was
an old book, in rather poor condition.

  “The King in Yellow,” Chet said, staring at it.

  “Memory is more like clay,” Connie said, sitting with the book in her lap. “Think of an unfired statue, in a dark room. To find out what it’s like, you have to feel it. But because it’s still soft, each touch makes tiny changes. That’s memory. Every time you call something up, the fingers of your mind leave streaks or imprints on it.”

  “So you think things weren’t really as bad as I remember them?”

  “In many ways it does not matter objectively what ‘really’ happened. The flexibility of the mind—the plasticity of recall—lets you choose a better reaction.”

  “Tell me again about the book,” he said, lips dry.

  “No one’s sure why The King in Yellow produces drastic effects on consciousness. It seems to operate almost like a hallucinogenic drug.”

  “Yeah there’s... there are some scary stories about it, on the Internet.”

  She waved her hands. “Oh, the Internet. They must be true, right?”

  “Well, nothing is, is it? If our memories are all plastic?”

  “Something that changes isn’t necessarily false,” she said sharply.

  “It’s just, people talk about it like it’s a drug. Or a religion. That everything changes in the, what’s the phrase, ‘in the shadow of the King.’ People say they get their wishes coming true, or that people with masks chase them out of paintings. Crazy stuff.”

  “Let’s assume this literature has the ability to alter memories,” she said. “If you didn’t know that’s what it did, what would that feel like? It’s not unusual for confabulated memories to be weirdly dramatic, even horrifying. If you accidentally reworked your mind so that you remembered a nightmare of a past, wouldn’t normalcy seem like a granted wish?”

  “Once again, we come to the idea that my memories are false... ,” Chet said.

  “I don’t care if they are! Real, fake, something in between, if they’re hurting you I want to make that stop.”

  “So the guy who said everyone around him had a mask on over their real faces and was trying to rebuild his house to convince him he was still on Earth and hadn’t been kidnapped to some weird lake somewhere?”