All the Lives He Led-A Novel (32 page)

The only answer I got was from the plumper one, and it wasn’t helpful. It was just, “Shut up.” And then they hustled me into the wheelchair, hooking my ankles to the chair’s footrests and locking a seatbelt around my waist. Then they slapped a heavy blindfold on my eyes and we started to move.

It was a longish trip. It took us through several doors that whined themselves open before us, and then whined closed again when we were through, and at least two elevators. I heard a familiar voice registering displeasure, and then we stopped and someone removed my blindfold.

The place they had taken me to was shiny white and flooded with sunbright lighting. Two women were facing off at the other side of the room, next to a big and shiny tubular thing that looked like a cross between a late Twentieth Century MRI scanner and a medieval torture rack. One of the women was Major Piranha Woman, her mouth still open because we seemed to have caught her in mid-screech. The other was young and chocolate brown. She was wearing a medical gown and an obstinate expression, and I had never seen her before. She turned toward us and spoke to my captors. “Take the cuffs off him,” she said, “and then you can go.”

Piranha Woman, however, was quick to correct the order. “You can release him,” she told the guards, “but then stay here to watch him. This is a dangerous man. You’re authorized to shoot him if necessary but do your best not to make it a mortal wound. We need his testimony.”

Then, as she returned to the other woman and my captors began to release my ankle cuffs and belt chain, not looking happy about staying there, she resumed screech mode. “You may not refuse a direct order from a superior officer, Lieutenant! This man has information we must have!”

To set the record straight I called, “I don’t.”

No one was listening to me, though. Not even my two guards, who finished taking my restraints off and then went over to stand with their backs against the wall. I stayed by my wheelchair, listening to the argument and gazing around, without much pleasure, at this unpleasantly surgical-looking place, with its imitation tank of virt fish at one end of the room and quarreling women at the other.

The lieutenant, though well outranked, was standing her ground. She didn’t look like a fighter, with her uniform concealed by her medical gown. She looked more like a junior orderly assigned to bedpan detail, but I heard her say, “The regulations are specific, Major Feliciano. Civilians may not be required to undergo deep penetration without the permission of a field-grade officer. I’ve messaged Colonel Mazzini but he has not replied.”

That stopped Piranha Woman at least for the moment. “You did what?”

“I messaged Colonel Mazzini to tell him you were requesting deep penetration for a civilian and asking for orders,” the lieutenant said. “As required by regulations.”

Piranha Woman closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. “You have overstepped your authority. Sheridan isn’t a civilian. He’s a criminal in custody and not protected by the regulations.”

The lieutenant clearly felt herself losing ground but she wasn’t giving up the fight. “I am not aware that Mr. Sheridan has been convicted of a crime.”

Piranha Woman was smiling now. Over her shoulder she called, “Sheridan! Did you stow away on the cruise zeppelin
Chang Jang
and jump ship in Egypt?”

I had been listening with interest to the squabble, but I hadn’t expected to have to take part in it. It took a moment for me to answer. “Yes, Major Feliciano,” I said, “I did.”

“And did you pay the cruise line for your transportation?”

That was an easy one, and I didn’t try to drag it out. I just said, “No.”

Piranha Woman gave a little nod. She had never taken her eyes off the lieutenant; now she said, “You have heard Sheridan confess to two serious crimes, which means he has lost his civilian status. Prep the subject. I’ll be back in ten minutes to observe the penetration.” And she left. She still didn’t bother even to look in my direction. But she did look pleased with herself.

The lieutenant didn’t look that way at all as she fiddled with a keypad attached to that worrisome-looking cylindrical thing. Then she pressed a button and, as a door behind the shiny machine began to open, dismissed my guards and turned to me. “I’m sorry we put you through this squabbling, Mr. Sheridan—or may I call you Brad?” She didn’t wait for an answer but turned to that far door, where a couple of other white-gowned women were coming in. “These are my assistants.” And then to the newcomers, “Bring him over and sit him down, Shao-pin.”

To me that sounded fairly peremptory, by which I mean very much like what everybody else had been saying to me for the last while. They didn’t act that way, though. The one I supposed was Shao-pin—because she looked Asian, while the other seemed more or less Italian—even brushed off the seat of my chair before she helped me into it.

“I’m First Lieutenant Amy Everard,” the one at the desk told me. “I’ll be conducting this DP, as ordered by Major Feliciano. I suppose you know that a deep penetration is similar to a lie detector.”

I was easing myself into the chair before her, and that almost amused me. “What, again? Your guys did that to me already.”

“Ah,” she said, “but that was a different kind of machine, Brad. It was noninvasive. Do you know what that means?”

I was suddenly beginning to be afraid that I did. “You mean what you’re going to do is different?”

“Very different. Deep penetration isn’t noninvasive. For that reason, among others, the kind of interrogation we need to do with you now is not entirely lawful, under international agreements. We are only allowed to use it in cases of great emergency, and we have to get special permission each time from the global HQ. But it is very useful.”

“Because it can tell if I’m lying? But why do you think I’d lie to you anyway?”

“It’s not exactly a question of lying, Brad,” she said. “It can actually tell us the truth about things you did with Fleming that you may not even know you know.”

I held up my hand. “Wait a minute. What are you doing to my head?” When I wasn’t looking the Italian-looking one had moved behind me, and she was rubbing my skull with something that buzzed alarmingly. And suddenly there was a stabbing pain at the base of my neck.

Lieutenant Everard patted my arm. “It’s nothing serious, Brad. The scalp needs to be shaved, that’s all. Were you going to ask me something?”

I was indeed. “You said this thing you want to do is what you call ‘invasive’?”

She looked apologetic. “I’m afraid so, Brad. Definitely so. Which means, I’m afraid, that it is likely to hurt you quite a lot.”

“But you’re giving me something for the pain?” I asked, clutching at straws.

“That injection you just had? No, Brad. We need you to be awake. That needle Nola gave you wasn’t an analgesic, it was just to keep you from moving. While you still can, would you put your forearms on the arms of your chair, please?”

I said what anybody would say. I said, “What for?” But actually I was already doing what she’d told me to do, and I found out what for pretty fast. Memory-metal bands popped out of the chair arms and secured my wrists. So did the bands that secured my neck, waist, and thighs.

“That isn’t too tight, is it?” she asked politely. “It’s just to keep you still while the aldehyde kicks in.”

“The what?”

“It’s just a pharmaceutical. What it will do is help us examine your hippocampus.”

“My—?”

She said obligingly, “I’ll show you. Sometimes it seems to work better if the subject knows what’s going on.” Her fingers were busy with the keypad again. In the tank along the wall the virt fish flashed and disappeared. In their place the tank displayed a slowly rotating chunk of grayish, wrinkled meat.

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Is that my brain?”

She nodded. “It’s already mapped, so let me show you what we’re looking at.” The virt image in the tank shed a chunk of its outer layers. What I was looking at then was some inner section, the same unpleasant pinky gray color, the details meaningless to me.

But not to the lieutenant. “That,” she said, “is your hippocampus. That’s where most of your explicit, long-term memories reside, sort of distributed among the dentate gyrus, the subiculum, and—well, you don’t really want an anatomy lesson, do you? Nola,” she called, turning away from me, “is the tray ready?”

“All ready,” the Italian-looking one told her. While I wasn’t looking she had pushed over a wheeled table bearing an assortment of oddities. One looked like a football helmet; the others I didn’t really want to identify, because they looked a lot like surgical tools. The lieutenant turned back to me. “How are your toes?” she asked.

I hadn’t expected that question. I tried wriggling them and the funny thing was they wouldn’t wriggle. I got no sensation from them at all. “I don’t know what the matter is,” I told her, “but I don’t feel a thing.”

“Good,” she said. “Then I think we can begin.”

Everard hadn’t lied about the pain. Pain isn’t all there was, either. The part that hurt the most—physically, anyway—was right at the beginning. That was when they put the helmet on my head and the inside of it began sprouting little needles, needles of a kind that I couldn’t see but surely could feel as they prodded here on the surface of my shaven skull, prodded there, sought the exact right place to get to my poor, unresisting brain. And then found it.

I knew from a lot of hours of watching hospital shows on the wall screens that the brain itself doesn’t feel pain. But if there isn’t any anesthesia the skin of the scalp certainly feels enough of it to provide all the pain a person really needs. My scalp did that, and didn’t stop feeling it. The helmet was lined with a plentiful supply of those agile and untiring needles, and now, one batch after another, they were busily inserting themselves right through my skull into the unresisting meat of my brain.

If what they were doing was looking for buried memories, they found them, so many of them that I couldn’t keep track. I didn’t just see or hear things, either. I felt them—I mean
really
felt them—at one moment shuddering with cold, then sweating, then the muscles of my thighs burning with the lactic acid of overexertion and my bladder almost bursting with an urgent need to relieve itself. And pain. Serious pain, like the sudden, violated hurt revisited for me from one sultry summer New York day when I’d been going into the city to hustle a few illegal dollars. Now it was back, as agonizing as it had been on that long-ago day when I’d fallen off the car I’d been hanging onto, and took off thirty square centimeters of skin on the concrete floor of the tunnel.

Then there were the quick flashes, coming and fading, so fast that it was only later that I could remember what they were associated with. There were bellyaches and headaches, and there were overwhelming sexual sensations: massive erections and massive ejaculations. None of them were imaginary. Each one was a kind of snapshot of some one real thing that had actually happened—yes, had truly happened, and had happened with Gerda. Those were the ones where she was with me in all the places we had been together. Sometimes she was naked and sprawled sleeping across that dingy cot in my dingy room, sometimes chewing happily on a high-priced meal at one of those high-priced clubs and casinos that she loved so well. Or in the dress of an ancient Pompeiian matron at a triclinum dinner. Or beside me on the seat of a three-wheeler, perhaps on the way to the Caserta palace or the Amalfi shore.

But mostly she was naked, and the smell of her was there, and the touch of her skin and her always talented fingers and tongue. I guessed—no, actually I was quite sure—that these were not accidental, that really those deeply penetrating people were deliberately driving their machine through the parts of my past life that involved Gerda. Put the memories all together, and they were a sort of taped record of every last thing she and I had ever done together, from that first moment when I’d met her outside the refectory at the Giubileo to the hour when she kissed me good-bye and left to join her grandmother at her place on Lake Garda.

You’d think I would have been paralyzed with embarrassment, lying there and knowing that these medical investigators and Security hangerson were all watching these same private, not to say outright pornographic, sexual experiments Gerda and I had performed. Well, I was somewhat, when I thought of it. But it tells you something about the way I was feeling, about all the different ways I was feeling at once, about my dearest transsexual love, that the most hurtful feeling I had was the agonizing, overriding miserable sense of loss.

Oh, I did wish all those strangers weren’t there, all right. But if they hadn’t been there, if I weren’t having the most painful and private parts of me exposed, I wouldn’t be having this one, final and machine-generated repeat of my Gerda time. And I could try to reassure myself that all these unwanted onlookers must have seen this same sort of thing so many times already that it meant nothing to them.

I never quite succeeded in persuading myself of that.

I did know, of course, that all this was not happening in real time. In real time all of these things had taken much of a real summer, so I would’ve been stuck in that machine for weeks, at least. But even in the hyped-up tempo of the machine it took a long time—not to say forever—before the kaleidoscope turned itself off and I heard someone say, “Anything useful?”

There was a silence, and then a new voice—no, a familiar one, the voice of Professor-Colonel Mazzini now in the room—sounding fretful. “Not what we need,” he said, and then, to me, “Sorry, Bradley. I didn’t want this done to you unless it was our absolute last resort, but I wasn’t here.”

Someone helped me to sit partway up, and I had a partial look at his blurry face. He didn’t look the way he had the last time I’d seen him, though. He didn’t look at all befuddled or ditsy, and what he was wearing was some kind of surgical smock.

He was looking regretful, too, and certainly sounding that way, so I tried my luck. “So can you get this thing off me?” I asked, reaching, but failing because my hands still did not want to do what my brain was ordering, no doubt because of that pestilential helmet.