Robert Sawyer - Triggers

Griffin’s tone was neutral. “Oh?”

“Yes. Except…” He looked at the doctor for a moment, then turned his head toward the windows. “Except it wasn’t my life that I saw.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Someone else’s memories,” said the president. “Not mine.”

Griffin said nothing.

“You don’t believe me,” Seth said, with effort.

“All sorts of weird things can happen when the brain is starved for oxygen, Mr. President,” Griffin said.

Seth briefly closed his eyes—but the images were still there. “That’s…not it. I…have someone else’s…memories.”

Griffin was quiet for a moment, then said, “Well, you’re in luck, sir. As it happens, we’ve got one of the world’s top memory experts here—a fellow from Canada. I can ask him—”

Griffin’s BlackBerry must have vibrated because he fished it out and looked at the caller ID. “Speak of the devil,” he said to Jerrison, then into the phone: “Yes, Professor Singh? Um, yes, yes. Wait.” He lowered the handset and turned to Susan Dawson. “Is your middle name Marie?”

Susan’s eyebrows went up. “Yes.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Griffin said into the phone. “What? Um, okay. Sure, I guess. I’ll tell her. Bye.”

Griffin put the BlackBerry away and turned to face Susan. “Our resident memory expert would like to speak to you up in his office.”

Eric Redekop continued down the hospital corridor, accompanied by Dr. Jurgen Sturgess. They were both still a bit rattled from their encounter with the distraught woman named Nikki, and Eric was exhausted from the hours of performing surgery on the president. Sturgess soon headed off in another direction, leaving Eric walking alone. In the middle of the corridor was the nurses’ station, and he smiled as he saw Janis Falconi there. She was thirty-two, and she was a knockout: leggy, stacked, with long straight platinum blonde hair and icy blue eyes.

He normally saw her only in her nurse’s uniform, but he’d run into her on the street once during the summer when she’d been wearing a tank top, and he’d been surprised to discover she had a large, intricate tattoo of a striped tiger stretching its way up her left arm onto her shoulder. As a doctor, Eric had an instinctive dislike for tattoos, but this one had been so elaborate, with such subtle shading and vibrant coloring, he’d had to admire it; he admired it even more when Janis told him that she herself had done the original art it had been made from.

Of course, right now, he could see no sign of the tattoo as he approached, but his memories of her on that summer day, arms and shoulders exposed, came to the fore, and—

And— ouch!

Getting a tattoo hurt!

And getting one as elaborate as Janis’s really hurt.

Eric found himself looking for a way to steady himself. An empty gurney had been pushed against the corridor wall next to him; he grabbed one of its tubular metal railings, and—

And he couldn’t take his eyes off Janis.

She hadn’t looked up yet, hadn’t noticed him, but—

But he found himself reliving that summer’s day—that August day, standing outside Filomena, a restaurant he’d never heard of or even noticed, he was sure, but he knew that was its name.

His grip on the tubular railing tightened.

Cute.

Yes, yes, she was—very. But it wasn’t just the word “cute” that had popped into Eric’s brain. No, no, no, there was a pronoun in front of it.

He’s cute.

And, although Eric had thought this before about some babies or toddlers, this wasn’t a reference to a tyke with a teddy bear. It was about a man, a grown man. And yet Eric was, as he himself liked to say, flamingly heterosexual. But this thought was about an adult man with a bald pate and a graying beard, and—

Oh!

It was a thought about himself.

Yes, he kept his beard neat with a barber’s electric razor, and, sure, he did try to hit the gym a couple of times a week, but he was no narcissist; he didn’t think of himself as cute. In fact, if anything, he thought he was kind of funny-looking with beady eyes and a nose so short it might fairly be called “pug.”

And, hey, he’s checking me out.

Eric was so discombobulated that he was about to turn on his heel and head back the other way when Janis looked up and smiled a huge, radiant smile at him, and—

It’s her, he realized. It’s what she thought about me, back on that August day, but—

But how?

The pain of the tattoo.

A house—small, cramped.

A dachshund waddling along.

Pink cross-country skis.

He continued walking toward her, drawn to her.

He knew how much she made. Knew her birth date. Knew all kinds of things.

“Hello, Jan…iss.” He paused, having to force the second syllable out, it coming to him in a flash that only people at work ever called her “Janis.” Everyone else in her life called her just “Jan.”

“Dr. Redekop,” she said. “Good to see you.”

His eyes dropped—not to her breasts, although they were certainly noteworthy, but to her shoulder; he was thinking of the tattoo, and—

And the bruise…

Not bruising from having the tattoo made, but—

My God!

But bruising from…from yesterday.

She saw where his gaze had gone, and she turned a little, as if to hide her upper arm from his sight, but then she must have realized that her nurse’s smock covered it completely, and yet, when she turned back to him, it was a long moment before she met his eyes again.

“Um,” he said, “you look well.” And as soon as the words were out, he realized it was an odd thing to say, but—

But his mind was filling now with thoughts that—God!—that must be hers.

He’d never believed in telepathy, or mind reading, or any of that garbage. Jesus!

But, no, wait. It wasn’t that; not quite. She was looking at him quizzically now, and he had no idea what she was currently thinking. But as soon as he thought about the day he’d run into her in the tank top, memories of that came to him—from her point of view.

And other things kept coming to him, too—information about patients in this wing; details about some online game called EVE; a bit from The Colbert Report, which he never watched; and—yes, yes—more thoughts, more memories, about him. About the first time they’d met. He didn’t remember the specific day, but she did; it was her first day on the new job here, nine months ago. It had been—ah, yes, now that he thought about it, he did remember…or she did. All the decorations: it had been Valentine’s Day.

And she’d thought, after meeting him, of this bald, thin man, “Slap a British accent on him, and he’s everything I’ve been fantasizing about since I was fifteen.” She liked older men. She liked Patrick Stewart and Sean Connery and—

And Eric Redekop.

He’d always liked Janis, but he’d had no idea—none!—that she felt that way about him, and…

And she was speaking, he realized, and he’d been so lost in thought he hadn’t heard what she’d said. “Sorry. Um, could you repeat that?”

She gave him another quizzical look, then: “I said, that was quite a surprise when the power went off, wasn’t it? I didn’t think that could happen here.”

“Oh, yeah. Yes, it was.” He was only about three feet away from her now, and he could see that her makeup was perfect—a little eyeliner, a little blue eye shadow—and her eyebrows had been recently and expertly plucked; in fact, he had a flash of seeing herself as she’d leaned toward a bathroom mirror, and he recalled a constellation of pain-points as she’d done the deed.