Devil's Plaything

We rush to the stairwell.

Remarkably, we make it down the stairs and out a side door without capture.

Breathless, we get to our car and drive from the lot, just as a cadre of security guards enters the building.

* * *

Ten minutes later, we’re parked in the lot of a chain grocery store, hidden among many cars, sandwiched between a minivan and a roadster. If any of the Biogen guards suspected us and our departing Toyota, they either didn’t act or move quickly enough.

I look at Grandma. Her hands are folded in front of her and she’s looking at me.

“I’m angry with you, Nathaniel.”

“With me?”

“You don’t visit me as often as you should. I’m sorry to speak like this, but we were very good friends when I was younger, when we were both younger, and I don’t think we see each other that often. I know you’re very busy, but it would be nice if we could spend some time together.”

“Grandma, do you remember what just happened? At the office? Do you remember the fight?”

“A man was going to hit your head. You have to protect them from getting inside your head.”

“A fight. You saved us. You were amazing. You were tough, and strong, and instinctual. Holy shit. I was saved by my eighty-five-year-old grandmother.”

“My hand hurts.”

I reach for it. Her fragile skin is unbroken. I prod gently at the bones beneath her fingertips and she winces only slightly. No fractures; maybe ultimately a bruise.

“Unbelievable,” I say. “Grandma, do you remember The Karate Kid?”

“What?”

“You’re the Karate Curmudgeon.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a joke,” I say. “I…”

I pause mid-sentence. I’m struck by something Grandma uttered a few moments earlier. She said: “You have to protect them from getting inside your head.” She didn’t say: “You have to protect your head.” That would be the phrase.

“They’ve gotten inside your head,” I say.

“If you’d visit me more, we’d be making more sense to one another. We’d be speaking the same language.”

“Grandma, I’ll try to do better.”

But even at that moment, I’m not totally invested in the conversation. I’m lost in an idea about what’s going on, my first sense of the nature of the bizarre conspiracy we’ve stumbled into, and how Grandma might be involved.

Chapter 30

It’s an idea that seems utterly remarkable, almost totally absurd.

“It has something to do with Biogen — and something called Advanced Development and Memory 1.0. ADAM,” I say. “That sounds like software to me, a program of some kind. What does it have to do with you?”

“Nathaniel.” She wants to say something, but I can’t pause my train of thought to indulge her.

“They were observing you at the fake dentist’s office,” I say. I don’t want to say aloud what I really mean: They were experimenting with you, Grandma. In the radiology clinic below the dental offices, they were scanning your brain, using the MRI to look at images of it. They were studying your hippocampus. Why?

“Grandma, I’m just going to say it.”

“What?”

“They were fiddling with your memory.”

“I can’t remember things the way I used to.”

“Adrianna Pederson was in the middle of it, and she reached out to me. She knows what’s going on. Now she’s missing.”

“I feel like I’m watching Jeopardy,” Grandma says, and laughs. She feels like she’s made a joke.

“I know someone who can help me figure out whether I’m onto something — or losing my mind too.”

I pull my phone from a pocket.

“Grandma, have you heard of Henry Gustav Molaison?”

I dial. Grandma doesn’t answer my trivia question.

“He was the most famous amnesiac.”

He died near the end of 2008 after making a lifelong scientific contribution, all unbeknownst to him.

When he was in his twenties, in the 1950s, he underwent experimental surgery to stop terrible seizures. The surgery destroyed his hippocampi and, inadvertently, his short-term memory. He couldn’t remember a person he’d met minutes earlier.

He was famously nice, willing to participate in endless observation, which he did as a kind of petri-dish-in- residence at MIT. He was lucid, thoughtful, and able to communicate his experiences with researchers, even though he couldn’t register new memories. His brain was a veritable blank slate on which to study the science of memory.

I learned about him in medical school — no med student ever forgets H. M. (how he was known until his death) — and then read his obituary. Researchers learned from H. M. that there are two different kinds of memory: a mental one and a physical one. Intellectually, H. M. could retain no new information. But physically, he could learn tasks. For instance, he learned to draw, and his skills grew over time, suggesting his memory for physical tasks remained intact.

This is partly what prompts me to call Grandma’s neurologist. H. M. showed that such memory bifurcation is possible. But what doesn’t make sense is how markedly Grandma’s physical and intellectual experiences are diverging.

“You not only remember karate. You’re adroit and able,” I say to Grandma as Pete’s cell phone rings.

“Okay.”

Pete finally answers. “Hello.”

“Dr. Laramer. Pete. It’s Nat Idle.”

“Is everything okay with your grandmother?”

“No. I mean, her decline has been so precipitous.”

“Where are you, Nat?”

“Listen. It’s not normal.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Is there evidence in the literature of highly accelerated cases of dementia, unusually rapid deterioration? Memory loss at hyper-speed.”

“As I told you, trauma can exacerbate memory loss.”

“No. Not something so… organic,” I say, emphatically. “I’m thinking about drugs, or, I don’t know, maybe some kind of technology that hastens decay of the hippocampus.”

“Whoa. Stop.”

“What?”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like the people who come into my office caring for a loved one who has dementia. This is a difficult time.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nat.”

“Sorry, Pete. Something is not right.”

He sighs. “May I posit a theory?”