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—?”
“She called me Rose.”
Dr. Star snapped off the blue light.
“You were happy, Rose, weren’t you?”
“I still am,” she said, in her despair.
CHAPTER 25
“Dr. Star,” she said, “you have to fix this.”
“Mm?”
“I can’t—I don’t know—”
“Rose. Take a deep breath.”
She did, but it felt like no air entered her lungs. “So what happens now? Do we just reverse the procedure?” I’ll simply go back into the glass coffin, she thought.
“There’s no reversing it. I am sorry.”
She thought she hadn’t heard Dr. Star correctly. “You’re sorry . . . about what?”
“Reversal isn’t possible, Rose. It’s not as though we removed pieces of you like books out of a library, and we can just put them back on the shelves. We fundamentally altered your physiological responses to your memories.”
No reversal . . . fundamentally altered . . . What had been done to her? What was she going to do with the feelings Rose wasn’t even supposed to have, now or ever again? “Dr. Star . . . what’s me and what’s ME?”
“I don’t follow—”
“Okay. . . . Okay. We can’t reverse it.” She breathed more giant gulps of air, as Dr. Star had instructed her to do. Why wasn’t the air getting to where it was supposed to go? “Just do it again,” she said finally. “Put on the red light—let’s pick new things from the salad bar. . . .”
“Rose, it’s not so simple.”
“You have to!” she cried out. And then, more softly: “Please, I need the red light.” Oh God. The blue light had turned her into a crazy person. A couple of years ago, walking on Belle Heights Drive, a woman heading toward her was yelling nonstop, cursing up a storm. But when she passed Clara, she looked right at her and said sweetly, “Have a nice day, darlin’.”
“There is an option available, upon request.” Dr. Star was scrutinizing something on her computer.
“What is it? What?”
“A refresher. It’s not a ‘fix,’ but it might help. We can reinforce the idea that you never had Memory Enhancement.”