aside my confused emotions, I consider the cause of her mind’s disappearance. Drugs? Certainly the psychiatrists have confused her brain chemistry enough for the mind to lose its mooring and drift away. But what is a mind? Is it an ethereal entity, a spirit or a soul, superimposed over the biology of the brain? One might think that my ability to fragment gives me an answer to these timeless questions. Ironically, it is not so. I know that the mind is more than the sum of neurons, but whether normal human minds can exist outside of the brain, I do not know. I only know my own nature. I need a body to exist, even though I can flow from body to body.
Since there is no mind to detect my interference and thus be terrified, I manipulate her memories. Her procedural memories seem intact. She still knows how to walk, how to sit, how to feed herself. Her general memory also seems intact. She knows where New York is and how a car works. Now for the most important and intimate form of memory, episodic.
I visualize a white pill in our mind and the memories come forth, activated by this trigger. She is five years old and staring down at her purple vitamin that is shaped like a dinosaur. Like most memories, the edges of the stage of her mind are fuzzy. The pill and her feelings are the core of the memory.
Every morning her Mom made her take one. “It is good for you.” But she hates the bitter taste. When her mother’s back is turned, she grabs the pill and goes to the bathroom to flush it down with her pee. She feels triumphant and guilty. She hates feeling guilty.
Another image comes. This time a paper cup full of pills and capsules of many colors. Total despair rebounds back and forth in her mind. A white-sleeved arm offers her a glass of water. Laboriously, she begins to take the pills one by one, following each with a sip of water. The doctors say that it will make her feel better but she has no hope of that. She has gone beyond depression or paranoia. Both of those emotional complexes require energy to sustain. She had no energy to offer.
I draw back from her brain chemistry, allowing the memory to fade. Still, I can taste the utter lack of the will to live. Rarely is a person so beaten down as this.
But while I have found her despair, the answer to her missing mind proves elusive. It will take days of sifting her memories to find the answer. I am curious and willing to devote the time. One must always continue to learn. Of course, in the end, I might find that her memories do not hold enough clues to arrive at an answer.
Diving back into her mind, I prepare to focus on her hand and the memories that it triggers....
* * * *
While my fragmental trolls through Joanna’s mind, I sit in my chair, gazing out the window at the trees and remembering Gary. A different time, seventy years ago, a different host. I was not James Barash then, but a nurse. Locked within me are all the memories of all the people that I have been and everything that I have experienced. Normally, I avoid those memories and live in the present. My life as a healer has involved so much misery and included so much failure that I try to learn from my mistakes and put them behind. But some memories are pleasant, and this is one of them.
Gary had the misfortune to grow up in a family that savaged its members. A sensitive child, he weathered these buffetings with considerable courage. After escaping, he fell in love. He put his trust in a woman and when he was betrayed he retreated into insanity. By the time that I examined him, all hope was gone. Never again would he be able to view people with anything less than total distrust and paranoia. A man gifted with extraordinary empathy was lost.
One day I took Gary on a walk through the grounds, which were mostly dirt and weeds since the hospital had just been built. We were located far enough away from the city to put the insane out of sight and concern. A thin, wiry man, Gary stopped and bent over a wild violet that was struggling to survive among the wild grasses. I reached out and touched him to find out what he was feeling. He was already pulling the grass up and casting it aside to give the violet the necessary space to flourish. My unique nature was not required to understand the situation.
Over the next couple of months, Gary transferred the empathy he had once had for his fellow humans to an empathy with the fruit of the earth. I arranged for him to tend a garden. So boundless was his energy that he rapidly outgrew the garden and soon was landscaping the entire grounds. From dawn to dusk he moved soil, planted seeds, pulled weeds, and cut grass. The director of the hospital was quite thrilled to have such a talent who would not strain our state allocation of funds.
Gary even began to communicate with others, yet only when he needed something for the grounds. He also found satisfaction when the staff and patients walked among his flower beds and across his grass. When Anthony had a tantrum and destroyed one of the flower beds, Gary handled himself with grace. To him, Anthony was a natural force, like rain or snow, to be suffered through and the resulting damage repaired.
The memory calms and comforts me. Gary was a success. Looking at my wristwatch, I find that it is time to go. It is Thursday and I have an appointment in the city. I turn around to look at Joanna, hoping to see a spark of life in her eyes, hoping that my fragmental had found the key to unlock her vitality. As usual, I am disappointed. She still stares at the floor vacantly.
Most therapy takes considerable time, many days or even years, yet I always yearn for the quick fix. Such speed would allow me to help even more people. I am just one, with so much misery to fight.
I touch Joanna and the fragmental passes through our skin, rejoining me. Instantly I know all that it has learned. I feel a sense of dismay and exhilaration. My current body is still strong, only forty-three, but it is always wise to have an alternative waiting in case of an accident.
Fragmentals is a word that I use to refer to the other parts of me, though perhaps that is not the right word. They are more like copies. Each fragmental contains all that makes me unique, memories and personality. Like a flock of birds, I split apart and come back together. The joining is sweet, like long-lost siblings reuniting. With the fragmental reabsorbed, we are one again and the memories of the fragmental are integrated into the whole.
On my way out to my car I talk briefly to Mrs. Foster. “There is some hope.” I despise the need for deception. There is no hope for Joanna Prall, but someday she might come alive when I animate her, so I need to lay the groundwork for such a dramatic turnaround.
CHAPTER TWO
Over the centuries I knew the Slavs, peasants who toiled in the fields under the heel of their latest conqueror. Whether Hun, Mongol, or Teutonic Knight, they persevered as a people, even if many individuals perished. As with so many peasant folk, unschooled in written lore, they thrived on the spoken story. Their singing and dancing touched me whenever I passed through their homelands. I had visited the Czech, the Pole, and the Jew in the Pale and their urban ghettos. Finally they found an escape from stagnation and misery.
When the Eastern Europeans emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, they crowded into the industrial centers of the north. It had been a century since I had last visited the New World, and my wanderlust urged me to follow this massive emigration. The Europeans had clustered together with others of the same language and religion and recreated the old ways of life in their ethnic neighborhoods. The singing and dancing continued. Every day they trudged, men, women, and children, to service the smoking behemoths and textile mills. And like their Europe neighborhoods, the sharp points of church spires soon defined their American skyline.
After a while my restlessness had abated and I found myself in Cleveland, which had been booming from the invention of automobiles. For a time I used my talents among these ambitious dispossessed peoples, calming fears and healing their heartaches. I took hope from the promise of their new situation.
I was away when Cleveland begin to rust. In 1969, the Cuyahoga river caught fire when an oil
