The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(66)

She let go and pushed him aside. She sat up and looked at her hands, her legs, not quite understanding what she’d done or how.

She noticed him stirring.

He slowly opened his eyes, blinking, staring up at the ceiling, confused, as though he were waking from a pleasant dream. “What are we doing on the kitchen floor?”

Dorothy hesitated. You grabbed me. I reacted. She wanted to try to explain. Instead she said, “I don’t know. You fainted. Did you guys have drinks at breakfast?”

She helped him to his feet, then suggested he go lie down and rest as he wandered to the bedroom, in a daze, rubbing his sore neck.



* * *



“Please state your full name,” Dr. Shedhorn asked.

“Dorothy Margaret Moy,” she answered as she tried to relax at her latest treatment, to breathe normally. Which was quite difficult considering the assortment of wires and monitors attached to various parts of her body, along with an IV, and Dr. Shedhorn’s assurance that this time Dorothy’s treatment would be even deeper.

“Are you expecting me to forget who I am?” Dorothy asked.

“Would it stop you if I said yes?”

All the tubes and equipment made Dorothy feel uneasy, like she was fourteen again and running away from a temporary foster home after her mother was gone. Back then on a cloudy evening, the kind where everything seems to get dark an hour before it should, Dorothy walked to the International District and found the last surviving phone booth. The box of rusted metal and broken glass smelled like urine-soaked pine needles and pigeon droppings. She stepped inside, closed the door, sat down, wrote a letter of apology to herself, and consumed an entire bottle of Tylenol PM. She fell asleep to the sound of rain and woke up in the ER, where she overheard one of the doctors say, “It figures. Poor kid. Her mother was the one caught up in that local tech scandal. Her whole company imploded, billions lost, and then she went completely off the rails.”

“I’m joking, Dorothy,” Dr. Shedhorn said. “Though most of my patients do have residual memories for several weeks, fragments, which are to be expected. But it’s piqued my curiosity enough that I’ve considered creating an app for my patients. It would let them keep track of their new memories, and then let them see if there are any correlations to the memories of others. I realize it must sound a bit far-fetched, but listening to my patients talk about their recollections makes me wonder if we’re not all genetically interconnected in some larger way. It’s a theory I’m excited to explore.”

“Interconnected, how?” Dorothy asked. “You mean like parent to child?”

Dr. Shedhorn sat back. “I mean, have you ever met someone for the first time and felt like you’ve known them forever? I went into this thinking that if I’m able to help a patient change how they remember trauma, it will free them up to make different choices in the future. It’s based on a theory called Hebb’s Rule that says, ‘Cells that fire together wire together.’ An engram is thousands of cells in the brain firing all at once, which creates a neural network that can be passed down epigenetically. But what if we’re passing down all high emotion memories—not just trauma? What if we’re passing down a neural network that encompasses attraction, temperament, kindness, and familiarity, not just pain, anger, sadness, anxiety, and other things that can lead to suffering and sociopathy? If we pass along the bad, it stands to reason that we pass along the good.”

Dorothy stared up at Dr. Shedhorn. She wanted to explain what had happened in the altercation with Louis, but she feared the doctor would halt her treatments, which were confusing but also gave her feelings of hope. They’d shown her a light at the end of a very long tunnel, and she felt compelled to keep moving in that direction.

“Our future is determined by choices we make in the present,” Dr. Shedhorn said. “But if our present is a collection of routines that were created in the past, by changing how we remember, we will inevitably change future outcomes.”

“Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying we’re creatures of habit?” Dorothy said with a shrug. “We’re trying to break those habits by re-remembering.”

Dr. Shedhorn’s eyes widened. “But those patterns fall into the category of systems biology, which reduces all human behavior to information—raw data—that can be examined through the lens of physics, in a field that my colleagues call quantum biology. Because our habits are generally based on interactions with other people, if we change our memories, we’re inevitably going to change who we interact with in the future and how we engage with them. A theoretical physicist might suggest that if we make different choices in those memories, we’re literally altering the trajectory of a future reality. And if we’re exploring your epigenetic past, who’s to say your great-grandchildren aren’t doing the same thing, and their epigenetic past is our present?”

Dorothy furrowed her brow. “I feel like you just sent me on an untethered spacewalk. You may have to explain that to me again, slower, and in plain English. I wouldn’t be insulted if you resorted to stick-figure drawings.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll talk more as we progress through your treatments. It’ll make more sense as patterns emerge.” Dr. Shedhorn touched Dorothy’s arm. “You okay?

“I’m fine,” Dorothy lied.