Robert Sawyer - Factoring Humanity

“Oh?” said Heather. “You’ve had other patients go through this?”

“Many.”

Heather wasn’t sure how hard to push it. “Anyone recently?”

“Well, I can’t really talk about other patients…”

“Of course not. Of course not. Just in general terms, I mean. What happens? An average case.”

“Well, one of my patients did confront her abuser just last week.”

Heather felt her heart begin to race. She tried to be very careful. “Did it help him?”

“Her, actually. Yes.”

“In what way? I mean, is she free of whatever was bothering her?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? I mean, how can you tell it made a difference?”

“Well, this woman—I guess it won’t hurt to tell you she had an eating disorder. That’s common in cases like this; the other common symptom is trouble sleeping, like what you’re having. Anyway she was bulimic—but she hasn’t had to purge since then. See, what she really wanted to purge, what she really wanted to get out of her system, is out now.”

“But I don’t think I was abused. Was she like me, unsure?”

“At first, yes. It was only later that it all came out. It’ll come out for you, too. We’ll find the truth and we’ll face it together.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think this happened. And—and—I mean, come on. Incest—sexual abuse. That’s the stuff of tabloids, no? I mean, it’s practically a cliché.”

“You’re so wrong, it’s staggering,” said Gurdjieff sharply. “And it’s not just you—it’s society in general. You know, in the nineteen-eighties, when we really started talking about sexual abuse and incest, the topic did get a great deal of exposure. And for people like me—people who had been abused—it was a breath of fresh air. We weren’t a dirty little secret anymore; the horrible things that had been done to us were out in the open, and we finally understood that it wasn’t our fault. But it’s an unpleasant truth, and people like you—people who saw their neighbors and their fathers and their churches in a whole new light—were uncomfortable with it. You liked it better when it was hidden away, something you didn’t have to deal with. You want to force it into the background, marginalize it, remove it from the agenda, prevent it from being discussed.”

Heather thought about this. Incest, pedophilia, child abuse—they were all things that might naturally come up in psychology classes. But how often did she mention them? A passing reference here, a brief aside there—and then moving on quickly before it got too unpleasant, to Maslow’s drive for self-actualization, to Adler’s introverts and extroverts, to Skinner’s operant conditioning. “Perhaps,” she said.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Gurdjieff, apparently willing to concede a little if Heather was also willing to do so. “Maybe nothing did happen in your past—but why don’t we find out for sure?”

“But I don’t remember any abuse.”

“Surely you have some anger toward your father?”

Heather felt it hitting home again. “Of course. But there’s no way he could have done anything to me.”

“It’s natural that you don’t remember it,” said Gurdjieff. “Almost no one does. But it’s there, hidden beneath the surface. Repressed.” She paused again. “You know, my own memories weren’t repressed—for whatever reason, they weren’t. But my sister Daphne—she’s two years younger than me—hers were repressed. I tried to talk about this with her a dozen times, and she said I was nuts—and then one day out of the blue, when we were both in our twenties, she phoned me. It had come back to her—at last the memories, which she’d suppressed for fifteen years, had come back. We confronted our father together.” A pause. “As I said, it’s too bad you can’t confront your father. But you will need to deal with this, to get it out into the open. Eulogies are one way.”

“Eulogies?”

“You write out what you would have said to your father had you confronted him while he was still alive. Then you present it at his graveside.” Gurdjieff held up a hand, as if she realized how macabre this sounded. “Don’t worry—we’d do it during the daytime. It’s a wonderful way to bring closure.”

“I’m not sure,” said Heather. “I’m not sure about any of this.”

“Of course you’re not. That’s perfectly normal. But, trust me, I’ve seen lots of cases like yours. Most women have been abused, you know.”

Heather had seen studies suggesting as much—but to get the “most” conclusion, they included everything down to having to kiss a disliked relative on the cheek and schoolyard tussles with little boys.

Gurdjieff looked up above Heather. Heather rolled her head and saw that there was a large wall clock mounted behind her. “Look,” said Gurdjieff, “we’re almost out of time. But we’ve made a really good start. I think we can lick this thing together, Heather, if you’re willing to work with me.”

Heather called Kyle and asked him to come by the house.

When he arrived—about 8:00 P.M., after they’d both eaten separately—he took a seat on the couch, and Heather sat down in the easy chair opposite him. She took a deep breath, wondering how to begin, then just dived in. “I think this may be a case of false-memory syndrome.”

“Ah,” said Kyle, sounding sage. “The coveted FMS.”

Heather knew her husband too well. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Well, no.”

“Do you know what repressed memories are—in theory that is?”

“Oh, repressed memories. Sure, sure, I’ve heard something about that. There’ve been some court cases, right?”

Heather nodded. “The first one was ages ago, back in—oh, what was it now? Nineteen eighty-nine or so. A woman named… let me think. I taught this once before; it’ll come back. A woman named Eileen Franklin, who was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, claimed to suddenly remember having seen the rape and murder of her best friend twenty years previously. Now, the rape-murder was an established fact; the body had been found shortly after the crime was committed. But the shocking thing wasn’t just that Eileen suddenly remembered seeing the crime being committed, but she also suddenly remembered who had done it: her own father.”

Kyle frowned. “What happened to the father?”

Heather looked at him. “He was convicted. It was later overturned, though—but on a technicality.”

“Was there corroborating evidence, or did the original conviction rest solely on the daughter’s testimony?”

Heather shrugged a little. “Depends how you look at it. Eileen seemed to be aware of things about the crime that weren’t generally known. That was taken as evidence of her father’s guilt. But upon investigation, it was shown that most of the supposedly telling details had indeed been reported in the press around the time the little girl had been killed. Of course, Eileen wasn’t reading newspapers when she was eight or nine, but she could have looked them up later at a library.” Heather chewed her lower lip, remembering. “But you know, now that I think about it, some of the details she reported were in the newspaper accounts—but were wrong in those accounts.”

Kyle sounded confused. “What?”

“She remembered—or claimed to remember—things that turned out to be untrue. For instance, the little girl who was killed was wearing two rings, a silver one and a gold one. Only the gold one had a stone in it, but one of the newspapers reported that the stone was in the silver ring—and that’s exactly what Eileen said when she told the police about the crime.” Heather held up a hand. “Of course that’s a trivial detail, and anyone remembering anything that long ago is likely to mix up some facts.”