Lippe Simone - Blank

Leonard burst through the door as though he’d had a running head start down a steep hill. Ray slumped to the floor as Leonard bounded over him and caught up the shrinking orderly with a hand around his neck and another on his thigh and tried to fit him horizontally through the door of Ray’s former cell. The orderly didn’t fit through the door in this manner but the effort had the happy side-effects of slamming the door shut, locking his lieutenants in with the man in the straight-jacket, and knocking the orderly into, at the very least, a long-term state of unconsciousness.

Ray crawled in the darkness until he found the keys and then he climbed up Leonard.

“Thank you Leonard. You’re not quick but when you put your mind to shit, shit gets done. Now, you wait right here, Leonard, okay?”

Ray backed slowly and clumsily down the hall, subtly entreating Leonard not to follow. He backed through the swinging doors and may have detected a confused sadness on Leonard’s face as he let them close behind him.

Once through the doors Ray saw that night was falling. As unwelcoming as Los Angeles was certain to be with its population of millions of primitive beings, it would only be worse after dark. He determined to escape the hospital and the city before then.

As he sifted through the keys Ray looked back to make sure that Leonard wasn’t following. Doubtless he’d assume leadership of the tribe and impose a benign rule and eventually find the cafeteria. As he looked Ray’s eyes settled momentarily on the door to the office of Dr. Spivic.

The office of Dr. Spivic was large and luxurious and in the main a model of an organized mind. It had windows to the exterior on the wall facing the door and a trim carpet and the few surfaces that could be seen behind hundreds of books were a refreshing, plain white. On the wall to Ray’s right was a single swinging door with another portal window and to his left was a busy desk scattered with what looked like furiously competing works in progress.

Ray took a seat in the modest swivel chair behind the desk and pushed the papers about idly. Exhaustion and agony competing with curiosity, he hoped that something obvious would appear with a title like “The Cure” or “The Last Eight Hours Helpfully Explained, With Illustrations”.

And it did. Ray shifted some clinical forms with dosages and frequencies to reveal an open file folder with notes in a trained, scholarly hand in which he saw his own name.

“…sometimes difficult to keep in mind Ray’s extraordinary capacity for spontaneous invention. The patient claims to no longer recognize the step-father’s photograph or those of any other victims but Ray has made similar claims in the past in an effort to shorten the treatment.

However the current scans of this and other patients indicate that the progressively increased dosage is simultaneously effective and necessary. Speculation is that a form of scar tissue on the cortex is building as a natural response to the neurotoxins, resulting in an effective immunity to the radiation and requiring stronger doses with each treatment.

It’s worth noting a possible correlation between this unexpected side-effect and the mass memory-loss phenomena accompanying the solar flares. Radiated neurotoxins could theoretically act as a functional vaccine against the sun’s radiation with a limited but unpredictable effect on long-term memory. There’s little time for further study but even if this is so it would mean that as long as the solar flares last communities at risk will have to receive continuously increasing doses. The logistics for an area even the size of the Oahu Beach site are mind-boggling.

I’ve raised this issue with the symposium and the consensus is that the situation is dire enough to try at least a focused trial but the challenge at the moment is determining the location of the next flares. The best analysis at the moment suggests that the flares have settled into a 24 hour cycle and that the next large area to be affected would be affected again within the day but by then, of course, it would be too late.

Our best lead at the moment is Ray, who’s scheduled to return to the federal penitentiary to continue serving the initial sentence now that the treatment trial period has officially ended, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be allowed time for further study in light of the public health emergency.”

Ray was unsurprised to discover that he was a mental patient but he was a little shaken by the news that he was at one point a homicidal maniac. He genuinely had no memory of a stepfather or “other victims” and he resented slightly being cured of an illness that might have been of tremendous use when his face was being pounded against a tile floor.

But if Dr. Spivic’s speculation was close to correct then the treatment that expunged whatever traumatic memories had turned Ray into a killer had also hardened his brain against the effects of the solar radiation. He’d lost his worst long-term memories to save the rest and that would be a fair deal were it not for the total breakdown of society. At least he wouldn’t be going back to prison.

And now it was all going to happen again in, possibly, a few hours when the sun came up. The entirety of Los Angeles had been affected, possibly the entire state of California and, for all Ray knew, the entire planet was at that moment remaking scattered caveman societies only to have them all wiped blank again the next day. Worse again, from Ray’s perspective at least and he had a hard time caring about any other, was this indefinitely increasing dosage that had been necessary to make Ray receptive enough to finally put his rocky past behind him.

Ray needed another dose. A stronger one, apparently, whatever that might mean, and he didn’t even know what a dose looked like. He pulled the laboratory documents back into view and was disheartened by a complete lack of context. Radiated benign neurotoxins, it turns out, are complex, unstable and hard to come by even with all the advantages of a functioning society.

The only hope was a prepared dosage. If such a thing existed Ray could last another day, possibly long enough to get to safety or obtain a degree in advanced pharmaceutical chemistry. There were no medicines of any kind in the office. Ray looked then to the remaining door and saw in the window another a face looking back at him.

The door pushed open and a middle-aged man stepped into the office and stood looking at Ray in a manner that suggested that introductions would be unnecessary. Beneath his otherwise pristine white lab coat the man’s shoulder had been bleeding much as it would had he barely escaped a fight with a homicidal maniac. He looked directly in Ray’s eyes as no one had done in his short memory.

“Dr. Spivic? Are you in there?” Ray said. “I’m guessing that I did that to you and I think you know that I’m very sorry if I did. That was before I was cured, you see. I know that I apparently lie about these things but I swear I have no memory of whatever happened between us.”

Dr. Spivic didn’t answer. He held his hands to his sides like a gunfighter and Ray saw then in each he had a long hypodermic like the one last seen in Leonard. And neatly threaded into the front of his coat were a dozen more hypodermics, like the bullet-belt of a Mexican revolutionary. He began to approach Ray.

“I don’t suppose that’s the next dose is it?” Ray asked. He eyed the door and considered making a run for it but was unwilling to abandon the promise behind the very last door. Dr. Spivic seemed to understand Ray’s dilemma and he may have betrayed the slightest smile.

The doctor had lost some blood but so had Ray and Ray was suffering a broken nose, fat lips, a general beating and he was covered in tar. Also the doctor was armed. Ray weighed the odds, gathered his remaining strength, and ran out the door.