Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“You mean I should’ve been ill?”

“Or feeling ill, unless you’ve adapted to some kind of genetic mutation.” Dr Peck’s head lists slightly. “Perhaps in a manner observed in savants.”

“So I’m supposed to be a genius.”

“Yes, but you’re not,” Dr Peck blurts a little too carelessly. He breaks into a bashful laugh. “Sorry. Meant that as a question. No offence.”

“None taken.”

Dr Peck pushes up his glasses and returns to the document. “You said the hypno helped. So how much of your memories come in dreams?”

“Slightly over half of them.”

“And what were they about?”

Landon frowns. He decides to leave out the part about his corny quest for a forgotten past and a mystery woman. “You mean the content of the memories?” he says.

“I understand they might be personal.”

“It’s just that I tend to forget most of them by the time I wake up.”

Dr Peck nods. “Whatever you can remember.”

“They’re about events that happened over 30 years ago.”

“Childhood?”

“Yes.”

“Detailed ones?”

“Quite,” says Landon. “Most of them are random, isolated scenes that don’t make much sense. But I could tell their age by their details.”

Dr Peck pouts approvingly. “What kind of details?”

Landon blows air through his cheeks. “Well… telephones, street scenes, music, car types. Especially car types—they’re quite telling.”

“Fascinating.” Dr Peck grins. “We talked about semantic and procedural memories the last session. Do you remember them?”

“Yes. I’ve written them down.”

“How would you rate them?”

“Good, no problems with work or knowledge.”

“How about immediate episodic memories?”

“Worsening by the day.”

Dr Peck holds up a document and scans it with a habitual frown. “The changes in your brain patterns are quite consistent with our hypno findings. They might be affecting the temporal lobe and the brainstem physically; good or bad we don’t know yet.”

Landon says nothing.

“Then again hypnotherapy remains a controversial subject in this field. It is experimental but it generates results. With your consent I think we should continue it.”

“Bring it on.”

The doctor’s eyebrow twitches at the alacrity in Landon’s response. With a stately swing of his arm he beckons him towards the clinical bed at the other end of the room.

“As always I’ll have to regress you first,” Dr Peck says, drawing up a chair. “Whether you move forward or deeper back in time depends on your responses.”

The assistant enters the room, uncovers the EEG recorder, rolls it beside Landon, and begins to attach electrodes all over his head. She then offers him an eye-patch, which he politely declines because he has no problems keeping his eyes shut. The assistant turns down the lights. In the darkness he hears a few melodic beeps from the recorder, then Dr Peck’s trained, reassuring voice.

“I want you to liberate your limbs. Every joint, every muscle. You are soft, limp, like a doll on a couch.”

Silence.

“Your body is free. You are so relaxed that your slack limbs flutter at the lightest breeze. You find yourself slipping from the bed like the slow, viscous flow of oil. You let yourself slip, because you know you are perfectly safe.”

Silence. The shuffling of papers. A beep. The scribble of a pen on a pad.

“You are a feather drifting slowly through air, spinning. You are falling deeper, and below your feet there is a vortex. You are slowly entering this vortex.”

Silence. A gentle hush, a caressing breeze.

“You are approaching the vortex, and I shall count, from ten to one.”

Silence.

“At the end of the count you will pass beyond the vortex. At the end of it you will emerge into the daylight of a distant past. You alone know where you are going. Now you will hear my count—of ten… nine… eight…”

The body floats, the buoyancy lightens. “Five… four… three… two…”

Silence. I see light .

“One.”

Light glimmers above a rippling surface. Landon blinks repeatedly and feels moist tracks down the sides of his face. His vision sharpens and focuses upon the fluorescent light tubes with its reflector fins set into the ceiling. He inhales in alarm and lurches forward. A hand touches his chest and pushes him back onto bed. In his pounding heart he feels a subsiding rage.

The assistant waits by the bedside with water in a plastic cup. Landon takes it and almost crushes it. Dr Peck sends her outside and picks up a pen and pad and leans against a filing cabinet. “Do you remember anything?”

“Lights,” Landon drawls.

“Any sensation of pain, negative emotions?”

“Sadness, fear, anger…” Landon stares absently at the floor. “Did I do anything?”

Dr Peck scribbles. “Do you recall any physical pain?”

“No. What exactly did I do?”

“Any dialogue? Words?”

“No.”

“You recall any objects? Persons?”

Landon sighs. “I don’t remember anything.” “Nothing?”

“No, Dr Peck,” he says. “Would you mind telling me what exactly happened? Like was I running away from someone or something?”

“No, Mr Lock.” Dr Peck lowers his pen and pad and looks at him. “It appears to me that you were trying to kill someone.”

THE TAXI, A dusty little black Austin Cambridge A60 with a yellow top, sputtered away on worn-out tires, trailing a cloud of sooty exhaust. Tembusu trees and coconut palms rustled, and even in their shadow Arthur baked in the tropical heat and caught the greasy fragrance of the brilliantine in his hair. The glare of daylight leapt at him from the whitewashed walls of the two-storey house. It had a steel gate webbed in sinewy, floral motifs. He brought his hands down on it and rattled it hard on its hinges.

He had traced this place from the records of the residence hall in London. The day after Hannah left him he figured whatever that was arranged for him in London must have had some form of legitimate administration. Someone had to fix up the residences, the contacts, the jobs he took and so on. Using the pretext of a change of address, he got the residence office in London to reveal the original address to which their mails were sent.

The address they gave led him here.

Since he got back from London Arthur had visited the house so many times he had worn out his welcome. The landlady had declared him an obsessed, deranged lover who’d stab Hannah dead before killing himself in a calculated act of passion.

Now with an expression as grim as death she swaggered up to the gate like an empress en route to proclaim the execution of a common thief. Cheeks, pale and blowsy, drooped into jowls. Her hair was impossibly black, styled in an olive-shaped bouffant and held up with plenty of hairspray. Her demeaning gaze lanced into him and from her lips came a fusillade of dialect.

Arthur slid a bunch of folded notes between two fanning curves of the ornate steel motifs. She narrowed her eyes and made the money disappear into the copious drapery of her wax-print garment, simultaneously executing a remarkable feat of unlocking and unlatching the gate without having to look at it. Arthur entered, but she did not lead the way. From the shrubs that bordered her lawn she pulled out a metal rod. It was her defence.

The house was mostly what he had expected. It was cluttered and dark in the hallway. An old shoe rack stood by the entrance corridor of russet floor tiles with floral motifs. Brick partition walls with faux creepers.

The landlady prodded Arthur with the rod, and when he turned around, pointed to a flight of steps that led to the bedrooms on the upper floor. “Seung min. Yau bin dai yat gan.”