Factoring Humanity, Page 5

  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.”

  7

  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.”

  “But you didn’t just say repressed memories. You mentioned false memories.”

  “Well, it’s either one or the other, and that’s the problem. In fact, it’s been a bone of contention in psychology for decades now—the question of whether the memory of something traumatic can be repressed. Repression itself is an old concept. It’s the basis for psychoanalysis, after all: you force the repressed thought into the light of day and whatever neuroses you’ve got should clear up. But millions of people who’ve had traumatic experiences say the problem is the opposite: they never forget what’s happened. They all say things like ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my car blowing up,’ or ‘I have constant nightmares about Colombia.’ ” Heather lowered her eyes. “Certainly I’ve never forgotten—and never will forget—the sight of Mary lying dead in the bathroom.”

  Kyle nodded slowly. His voice was soft. “Me neither.”

  Heather took a moment to compose herself. “But those things—a war, a car exploding, even a child dying—they are common enough occurrences. They’re not unthinkable; indeed, there’s not a parent alive who doesn’t fret about something happening to one of their children. But what if something occurs that is so unexpected, so out of the ordinary, so shocking that the mind just can’t deal with it? Like a little girl seeing her daddy rape and murder her best friend? How does the mind react then? Maybe it does wall it off; there certainly are some psychiatrists and no end of putative incest survivors who believe that. But . . .”

  Kyle raised his eyebrows. “But what?”

  “But there are many psychologists who believe that that simply can’t happen—that there’s no mechanism for repression, and so when traumatic memories suddenly appear years or decades after the supposed event, they have to be false memories. We’ve been debating this in psychology for a quarter-century or more now, without ever coming up with a solid answer.”

  Kyle took a deep breath, then let it out slowly “So what does it come down to? Humans can either shut out memories of traumatic events that really did happen—or we can have vivid memories of things that never occurred?”

  Heather nodded. “I know; neither is an appealing idea. No matter which one you accept—and, of course, there’s a chance that both happen at different times—it means that our memories, and our sense of who we are and where we came from, are much more fallible than we’d like to believe.”

  “Well, I know for a fact that Becky’s memories are bogus. But what I don’t understand is where such memories could come from?”

  “The most common theory is that they’re implanted
.”

  “Implanted?” He said it as if he’d never heard the word before.

  Heather nodded. “In therapy. I’ve seen the basic principle demonstrated myself, with children. You have a child visit you every day for a week. On the first day you ask him how things went at the hospital after he cut his finger. He says, ‘I never went to the hospital.’ And that’s true, he didn’t. But you ask him again tomorrow, and the next day and the next day. And by the end of the week, the child is convinced that he did go to the hospital. He’ll be able to tell you a detailed, consistent story about his trip there—and he’ll really believe it happened.”

  “Kind of like Biff Loman.”

  “Who?”

  “Death of a Salesman. Biff wasn’t a young kid, but as he says to his father, ‘You blew me so full of hot air, I could never stand taking orders from anybody.’ He really came to be convinced by his father that he’d had a much better job in a company than the lowly position he’d actually held.”

  “Well, that can happen. Memories can be implanted, even just through suggestion and constant repetition. And if a therapist augments that with hypnosis, really unshakable false memories can be created.”

  “But why on earth would a therapist do that?”

  Heather looked grim. “To quote an old Psych Department joke, there are many routes to mental health, but none so lucrative as Freudian analysis.”

  Kyle frowned. He was quiet for several seconds, apparently contemplating whether to ask another question. And at last he did. “I’m not trying to be argumentative here, but your endorsement of my innocence has been less than ringing. Why do you think Becky’s memories might be false?”

  “Because her therapist suggested that my father might have molested me.”

  “Oh,” said Kyle. And then, “Oh.”

  8

  After Kyle had gone home, Heather sat in the darkened living room, thinking. It was past time she went to bed—she had a 9:00 A.M. meeting tomorrow.

  Damn, maybe Kyle’s insomnia was contagious. She was bone-tired but too nervous to sleep.

  She’d said something—words tumbling out without thinking—to Kyle, and now she was trying to decide if she’d really believed it.

  But those things—a war, a car exploding, even a child dying—they are common enough occurrences. They’re not unthinkable; indeed, there’s not a parent alive who doesn’t fret about something happening to one of their children.

  But it wasn’t an undefined “something” that had happened to Mary. No, Mary had taken her own life, slitting her wrists. Heather hadn’t been expecting that, or even fearing it. It had been as shocking to her as . . . as . . . well, as what Eileen Franklin had supposedly seen, the rape and murder of her childhood friend by her own father.

  But Heather hadn’t walled off the memories of what had happened to Mary.

  Because . . .

  Because, perhaps, suicide was not unthinkable to her.

  Not, of course, that Heather had ever contemplated taking her own life—not seriously anyway.

  No, no, that wasn’t it. But suicide had touched her life once before in the past.

  She did not often think of it.

  In fact, she hadn’t thought of it in years.

  Had the memories been repressed? Had recent stress brought them to light?

  No. Surely not. Surely she could have recalled it all at any time and had just been choosing not to.

  It had been so long ago, and she had been so young. Young and foolish.

  Heather had been eighteen, fresh out of high school, leaving the small town of Vegreville, Alberta, for the first time, coming halfway across the continent to giant, cosmopolitan Toronto. She’d tried so many new things that wild first year. And she’d taken an introductory astronomy course—she’d always loved the stars, crystal points above the flat prairie sky.

  Heather had fallen head over heels in love with the teaching assistant, Josh Huneker. Josh was six years older, a grad student, thin, with delicate, surgeon-like hands, soulful pale-blue eyes, and the gentlest, kindest demeanor of anyone she’d ever met.

  Of course, it hadn’t been love—not really. But it felt something like it at the time. She’d so wanted to be loved, to be with a man, to experiment, to experience.

  Josh had seemed . . . not indifferent, but ambivalent perhaps, to Heather’s obvious attention. They’d met at the beginning of the academic year in September; by Canadian Thanksgiving, five weeks later, they were lovers.

  And it was everything she could have hoped for. Josh was sensitive and gentle and caring, and afterward, he would talk with her for hours—about humanity, about ecology, about whales, about rain forests, and about the future.

  They’d dated off and on for much of that academic year. No commitment, though—Josh didn’t seem to want one, and, truth be told, Heather didn’t either. She’d been looking to broaden her experience, not to settle down.

  In February Josh had had to go away. The National Research Council of Canada operated a forty-six-meter radio telescope at Lake Traverse in Algonquin Park, a huge area of untamed forest and Precambrian shield in northern Ontario. Josh was slated to spend a week there, helping monitor the equipment.

  And he’d gone. But the other astronomer who was there with him had gotten sick: appendicitis. An air ambulance had taken him from the telescope building to a hospital in Huntsville.

  Josh had stayed on, but then snowstorms had prevented anyone from coming up to join him. He’d been alone with the giant telescope for a week, snowed in.

  It shouldn’t have been any problem; there’d been food and water enough for two for the entire duration of the planned stay. But when the roads finally were cleared and someone could get up to the observatory from Toronto, they found Josh dead.

  He had killed himself.

  Heather had had no special status; the police never notified her directly. She’d first learned about it from an article in The Toronto Star.

  They said he’d killed himself over quarrels with his lover.

  Heather had known that Josh had a roommate. She’d met Barry—a philosophy student with a closely cropped beard—several times.

  But she hadn’t realized just how close Josh and Barry had been, or how much of a—well, if not a pawn, certainly a complicating factor in their troubled relationship she’d been.

  No, she didn’t often think of that.

  But no doubt it had had an impact. Perhaps she was less surprised than most mothers would be when her own daughter had turned out to have hidden demons and undisclosed issues—when her own daughter had taken her life.

  And if it hadn’t been a great, unthinkable shock, then she couldn’t have repressed the memories of Mary’s death . . . regardless of how much she wanted to.

  Kilometers away Kyle lay in bed in his one-bedroom apartment, also trying to get to sleep.

  False memories.

  Or repressed memories.

  Was there anything in his life that had been so traumatic, so painful, that if he could, he would have shut out its memory?

  Of course there was.

  Becky’s accusation.

  Mary’s suicide.

  The two worst things that had ever happened to him.

  Yes, if repression were possible, surely he’d repress those.

  Unless—unless, as Heather said, even they weren’t sufficiently unthinkable to trigger the suppression mechanism.

  He racked his brain, trying to recall other examples of things he might have suppressed. He was conscious of what an impossible task that was: trying to remember things that he wouldn’t allow himself to remember.

  But then it hit him—something from his childhood. Something he’d never conceived of. Something that had cost him his faith in God.

  Kyle had been brought up in Canada’s United Church, an easygoing Protestant denomination. But he’d drifted away from it over the years and today was seen in a hall of worship only when weddings or funerals required it. Oh, in moments of quiet
reflection, he thought there might be some sort of Creator, but ever since that day when he was fifteen, he had been unable to believe in the benevolent God his church had preached.

  Kyle’s parents were out for the evening, and he had decided to stay up as long as he could. He didn’t get to play with the remote when his father was home, but now he was flipping channels madly, hoping for something titillating on late-night TV. Still, when he came across a nature documentary, he paused. You never knew when some topless African woman was going to wander into the scene.

  He saw a female lion stalking a herd of zebras beside a water hole. The lion’s tawny hide was almost invisible in the tall yellow grasses. There were hundreds of zebras, but she was interested only in the animals at the margin. The narrator spoke in hushed tones, like the commentator on his dad’s golf shows, as if words added long after the footage was shot could somehow disturb the unfolding of the scene. “The lioness looks for a straggler,” he said. “She wants to pick out a weak member of the herd.”

  Kyle sat up; this was much more vivid than the ancient, grainy Wild Kingdom episodes he’d seen before.

  The lion continued to stalk. The background noises consisted of zebra hooves falling on baked earth, the rustling of grass, the calls of birds, and the droning of insects. The shadows were short, hugging the animals’ legs like shy toddlers clutching their parents.

  Suddenly the lion surged forward, legs pumping, mouth hanging wide open. She leaped onto a zebra’s haunch, biting deeply into it. The other zebras began to gallop away, clouds of dust rising in their wake, the footfalls like thunder. Birds wheeled into flight, squawking loudly.

  The attacked animal now had stripes of red running between its black and white ones. It fell to its knees, propelled down by the impact of the lion. The blood mixed with the parched soil, forming a maroon-colored mud. The lion was hungry, or at least thirsty, and it bit deeply into the zebra’s flesh again, scooping out a wet mound of muscle and connective tissue. All the while, the zebra’s head continued to move and its eyelids beat up and down.