Change Places with Me(38)
“A trance,” Rose said. Clara’s life in the glass coffin had been a kind of trance. Had she traded in that trance for a new one?
“It is most certainly not a parlor trick. Just like the woman in the ad said, Memory Enhancement is a proven technology that works with a person’s own memories and realigns the emotions attached to those memories. That’s all.” Dr. Star peered at her computer. “I’ve never dealt with a case like this before, though it’s part of the training, of course. Here we are, breakthrough, blue light . . .” She took a few moments to read, and then she gestured toward the tall standing lamp. “We use the red light during ME, which gives the room a lovely glow.”
“Red light—I see it when I wake up.”
“That has been reported in extremely rare cases, as well. Harmless and temporary,” she added with emphasis. “Now, the blue light; that’s what we need to use in case of breakthrough.” She got up, fiddled with the lamp. “Wait, I have to change the setting—it’s stuck. My first time doing this— There!” She clicked it on.
Rose had to adjust to the light, the color of the ocean when a storm approaches. At first she thought maybe she was seeing things behind her eyelids, but she was blinking, which meant her eyes must be open. She felt she was half awake, half asleep, and half something else . . . but that was too many halves. . . . Would she be waking up to blue light from now on?
“Does the light affect you, too?” she asked.
“I wear special contacts,” Dr. Star replied.
“So your eyes aren’t really green?”
“They are not.” Dr. Star sounded a little disappointed. “Now, I’ll walk you through it. You will remember things as I tell them to you. We began by talking about memory, which we hold sacred here at Forget-Me-Not; we honor and cherish it. Without memory, one philosopher said, we’d be no better than a looking glass, constantly receiving images and reflecting them back, never the better or worse for it.”
“You mean mirror.”
“It was a quote, Rose; no one says ‘looking glass’ anymore. Memory molds our personalities, shapes our possibilities, lends depth to our consciousness, depth like the buried cities near Mount Vesuvius, one on top of the other, the present cities on top of increasingly long-ago ruins of cities.”
“I tried talking to Mr. Slocum about Mount Vesuvius. He didn’t want to hear it.”
Dr. Star ignored this and adjusted the lamp.
The blue light seemed to intensify, as if the ocean was darkening, or maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her.
Dr. Star’s teeth looked like smooth glowing stones. “When a person suffers a terrible experience, the memory is seared into the brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is beneficial. Next time there’s a challenge to be faced, she’ll remember what happened, remain alert, and handle things better. But in some cases the memory is as fresh as the trauma itself and doesn’t diminish over time. It’s like a dog that keeps bringing the pain back to you, wagging its tail. The young woman in the car? She put it all behind her. Accidents happen! In your case—your father died seven years ago, and you weren’t, shall we say, moving on?” Dr. Star smiled briefly; was that kindness shining through? “Here is the beauty, the art of Memory Enhancement. While the red light is on and Alitrol is in your system, we come up with new perspectives, new feelings to attach to your memories, to your sense of yourself. Think of it as a salad bar. You pick and choose. A slice of cucumber, a tomato wedge, a radish flower.”
Yes. Clara had wanted so much. She was starving.
“Best to narrow it down, I told you. You can’t take everything; your plate would be overfull and you would never finish. We chose happiness, of course. Every day was like a gift you didn’t need to unwrap. If sadness reared its ugly head, I told you there’s no sadness, no need for it; if anger flared up, it could be banished like a bad king, never to return. You said you had no friends, that you had one long ago but she was lost to you now. I said that once you became happy, bursting with happiness, you would find yourself with lots of friends, the old one and many new ones, and do all kinds of fun things together, and have a boyfriend, too, why not? Most of all, you wanted to live your life fully, not sit at the bus stop and miss the bus or some such thing. I told you that you were at the center of your life, not the edge. Oh, and you had to love animals.”
“Because the girl in the jean jacket had a dog. She’d put a sweater on the dog.”
Dr. Star shook her head. “You kept saying, ‘Make me like her’—even though she was a stranger.”
But to Clara the girl in the jean jacket wasn’t a stranger. Clara knew her through and through, inside and out.
“I asked you to come up with a new name or nickname for yourself; that often helps the enhanced person seal the deal. You latched onto Rose immediately. ‘My name is Rose,’ you said. ‘I am Rose Hartel.’”
Of course she was Rose. On the back of the jean jacket, for all the world to see, there was an embroidered rose, lovingly sewn by the girl’s mother.
“Then you took a virtual visit to the zoo. It was Rose who saw the animals; Rose had a perfectly wonderful time. You were so eager to have people call you by your new name. I specifically told your stepmother it would help things along if she called you Rose. I wonder if she decided not to—?”