Authors: Joshua V. Scher
I wandered homeward, clip-clopping along the sidewalk, watching my shadow circle round me to avoid the street lamps. I must have had a lot more of Toby’s bourbons than I’d realized, because the next thing I knew I woke up sitting on a bench in Union Square. A patch of drool had blossomed on the collar of my peacoat. My breath condensed into plumes of sighs. Fall was coming. My phone BEEPED/VIBRATED in my pocket. That must have been what woke me.
It was a text from Toby.
If a diesel dyke ever asks if ur into backdoor action, the answer is always NO.
BEEP/VIBRATE:
I think she jammed a coatrack up my arse.
I grinned so big it hurt my ears, watched the clouds of my breath evaporate, stood up, and glanced at the frenetic digital clock that glowed eight stories above the southeast corner of the park.
It was 4:52.
It was the 30th.
It was my mother’s birthday.
Like I said, it took a while for it all to coalesce in my head. I left long messages for her while riding the Acela down to DC. Called her again from the cab. And shouted her name as I unlocked the front door to my childhood home. I spent the entire weekend in the empty house. I waited, I watched TV, I snooped through my mother’s bedroom, closets, drawers. Everything was there. No missing underwear or suspiciously absent luggage. However, it also wasn’t like there was a cigarette in the ashtray still quietly trailing a ribbon of smoke into the air over a glass of milk, still wet with condensation. Just a rotten, desiccated orange on her desk and a busted water pipe in the basement weeping from an early frost. Like she just went out one day and never came home. That’s how I explained it to the police. Except her car was still in the garage.
The folks at Anomaly were nice enough about the whole thing when I told them I wouldn’t be in for a few days. I called Toby. He offered to come down, but I didn’t see the point. The FBI and I were already going through the house and her office looking for clues. The Bureau got involved due to my mom’s position with the government—with DARPA—the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency.
It had been a while since I’d stepped foot in her office. It looked the same, pretty much, just felt like everything had been shifted three inches to the left. At the time I wrote it off to memory echo. Mom’s term. She came up with it to explain how memories tended to persist, but distort a little. Fade, but not uniformly, in patches. Like how in an echo certain syllables still get punched clearly, while the other parts muddle into gibberish due to the destructive interference.
That’s what I thought it was. Back then.
Before all this.
Still, it was all there. Her desk in the corner, her bookshelves filled with
The Drama of the Gifted Child, I & Thou
,
In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent
; the DSM-IV-TR—her ergonomic lounge chair in which she did the majority of her work: listening to patients, taking notes, and of course her trademark Psynar
®
-ing; the abstract wooden sculptures that looked like 3-D Rorschach tests (even though she always denied it); and the oriental rug, bordered by not one, but two leather couches. These weren’t the prototypical Freud-mind-fuck leather couches. You know the kind, the armless, dimpled-cushioned, psychoanalytic sofas with the raised back. She had way too strong a sense of irony for that. No, these were just your typical Design Within Reach leather couches. Still, these artifacts were exactly the type of thing semioticians get off on. What better symbol to signify therapy than a leather couch? I guess a Polaroid of Freud sucking on a thick, long phallus of a cigar would trump it, but in a pinch: leather couch.
She wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill, tell-me-about-your-childhood kind of therapist. My mother was a Pneumagrapher . . . or more colloquially put, a mind-mapper. The authorities would bring her in, after some aberrant occurrence, to reverse engineer the psychological state of the perpetrator. This was less criminal profiling and more demonic possession. She wasn’t just called in for any old crime, though. They only used her when it was open-ended, when something needed to be shaken loose.
Once she was summoned after Alan Teleos, the serial kidnapper, was killed during his attempted arrest.
She found the secret lair where two of his intended victims were slowly starving to death. Another time she was brought in after that student went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University. The ATF asked her to ascertain if he was an individual who had a psychological break or rather was the by-product of a confluence of insidious memes that could be diverted and dispersed through government regulation. And on three separate occasions, I can attest to my mother taking sudden vacations to undisclosed destinations within twenty-four hours of three different terrorist attacks. I can only posit that she was needed to determine whether these were multitiered attacks with still-pending targets or something along those lines.
My mother would inhabit the scene of the crime; she would delve into the landscape of her subject’s life. She’d read his books, taste his food, study his life, take volumes of notes, and then sit in her ergonomic chair, collating iterations of what was and what ifs and Psynar
®
her way into his skin. Psy(chological) na(vigation) r(anging). In navigating her subjects, my mother tracked the footprints of their animas, listening for memory echoes and following them right inside the hollow. You see, objects, things . . . they muffle acoustic reflections. Only empty places can house echoes of lasting clarity. So she went spelunking around the caverns of their minds, sat inside their empty dwellings, and sent out waves of empathy that bounced back. She let iteration after iteration wash over her until she could “see” it. See how they felt.
Once her talent was recognized, she was ushered into the upper levels of anonymity through a variety of “classified” government agencies. While her Psynar
®
was what originally attracted the attention of these shadow walkers,
her success was due to another trademarked innovation, her PsychoNarrative
®
.
With Psynar
®
she could map out the subconscious of her subjects and sound the depths of their psyches. However, it was only useful to her. But the PsychoNarrative
®
: that puppy took her data and interpolated the shit out of it, transforming it from a visceral, singular immersion into a transportive, engrossing, almost seductive window of access to others. It provided the higher-ups with insights they could assimilate, integrate, and implement. Simply put, she used the good old-fashioned time-travel and mind-reading technology of a good book and wrote a story (cleverly disguised as a report) they couldn’t put down.
Based on my mother’s doctoral work, PsychoNarration taps into ancient neurological roots tied to crucial parts of our social cognition dealing with both the telling of tales and the enjoyment of them. She discovered all this by studying the have-nots, by poking and prodding those with dysnarrativia, which is basically a state of narrative impairment due to brain damage. These poor souls can’t separate between narrativity and personhood. Essentially, in losing the ability to construct narrative, they lose themselves. Am I me or the character of me? I can relate.
Anyway, the habit of engaging the world around us through narrative is hardwired into our central nervous system. It’s why storytelling is one of the few human traits universal across cultures and throughout history. Folktales even predate the written word. What do you think those Neanderthals were doing painting bison and deer on their cave walls in Lascaux? They were telling one of the three basic stories and tapping into our common, underlying biology. As Jeremy Tsu summarizes the theory of Patrick
Colm Hogan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, “As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes . . . The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed ‘sacrificial’ by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.” We’re programmed to respond to them as our very survival depends on it. Hence, the power of PsychoNarratives
®
.
Psychologists like Mom call this immersion in stories “narrative transport.” It’s crucial for social interaction and communal living. It’s how we learn empathy. It’s why lines like
my bedroom ceiling fan is spreading rumors about me
strike a chord in us. We make stories out of everything.
My mother hammered her quill into a psychic scalpel and lobotomized the shit out of an inner monologue. What propaganda was to cinema, PsychoNarrative
®
is to storytelling. Her reports were beyond influential, they were the tablets from on high. Which is why they were locked away, thrown into the oubliette of CLASSIFIED. And most likely why she hid this last report.
When I uncovered the documents you now have, there was no DCPD, no FBI, no NSA, no acronyms of any sort. I didn’t find it for some time, not until I stared at the key she left for me. And when I say key, I don’t mean figuratively, but an actual, physical key. Like I said, she had a healthy respect for irony.
It had been over nine months since her birthday weekend. Toby and I were sucking down martinis at Olive (we had progressed to two-syllable joints). I was bitching about my recent rent hike, when Toby just sort of blurted out, “What about your mom’s house?”
I didn’t get it at first. Telling him that while a town house in northwest DC was styling, it would make the commute to SoHo a tad long.
“No, I mean like you could subsidize yourself by renting out your mom’s house. Not like there’s a mortgage on it or anything. With the money you get you could probably even move out and get yourself a sweet loft.”
I blinked at my glass of gin.
I wasn’t upset, just more shocked. Stunned that I hadn’t thought about it. It had been nine months, and somehow I had carried my mother’s disappearance to term. Her, the house, hope—I had kept it all in some sort of abeyance. It’s not like I was in denial or anything, I was on the phone with the FBI every other week. But it was her house. I mean, yeah it was our house, but it was my mom’s house. I guess it was denial. But I deserved a little denial in my life. I didn’t have her anymore, no Mom to cuddle and comfort me. But I had the house that still reeked of the scent of childhood. The house that she might open the front door to any day now.
Toby ordered another round for us, and offered to drive me down.
So there I was, sitting on the edge of my bed, in my old room that hadn’t changed since I left for college. On my walls hung prints of paintings by Magritte, Escher, Dalí, Kandinsky; a poster of Einstein; and a Norwegian Moose Crossing sign. (I was nerd-chic before it was hip.)
Bookshelves were stocked with everything from
The Yearling
to Tolkien to
Hamlet
to Kesey. Soccer trophies and annual sports-team photos stood guard over my bureau, and stacks of comic books cluttered my closet.
Toby was downstairs, mothballing my mom’s study. I was in my room, staring at a poster of
Dalí from the Back Painting a Person at the Window from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Panes Provisionally
. In the left foreground is the back of Dalí. He sits at his easel, paintbrush in hand, and leans to the right of it to look at his subject, the back side of a woman in a blue-striped house dress and a ribbon necklace, leaning on a windowsill. She stares out at a seascape. Opened inward, a six-paned window stands guard behind her. Reflected in the glass, divided up by the coordinate plane of windowpanes, is the woman and the face of Dalí leaning to the right of his easel. In the window’s reflection you can see the ribbon draped around the woman’s neck twists like a Möbius strip, and a key-shaped pendant dangles from it.
This painting had always been a favorite of mine. The stillness of the craft, the facing one’s self, and the secrets within the reflection. More than just themes, in this portrait Dalí simultaneously creates and compresses depth. It seemed both intimate and infinite. A little unnerving unless you just went with it, otherwise it’d just do-si-do with your middle ear. Even the key, which seemed locked in the distant reflection, at the same time bulged with proximity. The effect was hypnotic.
Something was off, though. I stumbled out of a middle-distance stare, wobbled back into two-dimensional analysis, and forced myself to focus. The key still really came out at me.
I stood up and approached the print. The image of the key was not an image at all; it was an actual key.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
, my ass. It had been glued onto the painting. I tried to delicately pry it off, but after a few tentative snaps with my fingernail, I just ripped it off with a piece of the woman in tow.
So there I was, staring down at this key that, to my discombobulated mind, had somehow been magically transported from one world to another. It looked like an old key, worn, stained with some old paint, a piece of poster stuck to it. What the hell had it been doing there, like the Purloined Letter? More importantly, what did it open? I know you’ve already jumped ahead of me at this point, but you have to remember, at the time I wasn’t in the most incisive of mental states. And then I turned it over, and it all snapped into focus.
On the back of the key, underneath the piece of poster, were more blotches of paint. I knew those blotches, like a suicide girl knows her tats. It was the key to my father’s old art studio.
It was exactly like he left it. Preserved like a shrine. Canvases leaned against the walls, tubes of paint scattered asunder on his drafting table, easel, and an almost finished painting. It was a portrait of my mother when she was younger. The brushstrokes seemed blatantly impressionistic as if each blot was made up of a tiny picture. And in fact, they were. As I moved close to the canvas, the portrait of my mother dissolved into a collage of a thousand little portraits of me.