In the Court of the Yellow King (18 page)

When he checked out, he asked Griffin about the insurance situation. They spent a few minutes going over it.

“Today,” Constance said at their next appointment, “I’d like to talk about homeopathy.”

“It’s interesting,” Chet said. “Of all the therapies I’ve tried, and most of them were the ‘talking cure,’ this is the first time I feel like I’ve done the minority of the talking.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Kind of a relief,” he admitted. “But—excuse me, please, don’t take any offense—it does make me skeptical.”

“I’m not offended.” Constance had a pretty smile. “Look, this
isn’t
like other therapies. They’re a process to help you construct mental and emotional tools for living your life. Like... like a seamstress who won’t make clothing, but who talks you through every step of measuring yourself and threading the needle and putting it together?”

“Um... ”

“Sorry about my metaphors,” she said. “Let me conclude this one. I don’t want you to have a bespoke suit of psychological techniques. I want to hand you a set of one-size-fits-all pants to, um, go over the naked memories that are troubling you.”

“So you’re a specialist.”

“A very narrow specialist, which is why I don’t have an M.D. or a Psy.D.”

“Which is why the insurance company is having a conniption,” Chet said.

She grimaced a little. “Sorry about that.”

“Look, it’s fine, if this works I’ll happily pay it out of pocket. Though, again... that’s a reason for some... concern? I guess?”

“Memory is plastic,” she said. “Every time you remember an
event
, you edit it and consolidate it. Often, several similar scenarios are melded together.”

“See, that’s the part that I can’t...”

“How many times did your dad do it?” she asked.

He moved back into the sofa as if slapped.

“Too many,” he said at last.

“You do not remember an exact number.”

“Well, it’s... you can’t...”

“You recall several archetypal encounters, and those are probably the result of multiple events being compacted together. Anything you remember with particular clarity, I’m guessing had some extraneous element involved.”

He was quiet for some time.

“The scent of gingerbread,” she said quietly. “The Christmas episode. That one stands out. Doesn’t it? You said.”

He nodded.

“Because that time was a little different, it didn’t get combined with the times that were all the same.”

He said nothing, just stared, blank.

“I’m not trying to belittle your suffering,” she said, leaning in and putting a hand on his knee. “I’m not trying to tell you it wasn’t every bit as awful as you think.
But you did change them
. The memories
did
get loose from the actual events. Can you agree to that?” She bit her lip.

“I guess I have to,” he whispered.

“It is hard to admit that we not only don’t know something, but that we can’t,” she said, reaching out to take one of his hands in both of hers. “But this means that you can alter how you respond to those memories.
You can change it
. You can take control of your past.”

He nodded.

“Do you believe me?” she persisted.

He nodded again. Satisfied, she sat back and let him withdraw his hand.

“So,” he croaked. “Homeopathy? It’s some kind of... New Age thing, right?” Chet asked.

“Actual homeopathy is, yes. Sure. The theory says that if an ounce of the chemical irritant from poison ivy causes an itching rash in a healthy person, a hundredth of an ounce of it would heal a sick person’s rash. Or, something that makes you nauseous when you take it healthy would—if carefully diluted down to a fraction of its initial intensity—settle your stomach if you were already throwing up.”

“Okay, how is that even
supposed
to work?”

She shrugged. “I’m not claiming it works for snakebites, although exposure to small doses of venom can let people build up immunities. Really, if you think about it, the process of getting vaccinated with a small sample of dead disease cells sounds very similar to homeopathy. But I’m not trying to sell you on it for the body, but for the mind.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Think of psychoactive chemicals. If you give lithium salts to a healthy person, the bad effects are going to outweigh the positive ones. Give the same dosage to someone suffering mania, and it can be, can be very helpful.”

“All right,” Chet said slowly. “It’s like... like that stuff Adderall? Or am I thinking about Ritalin? The stuff that makes normal... normal people hyper, but makes hyper kids more normal?”

“That’s quite an oversimplification,” she said, “But that does speak to the fundamental theory at play here. A stomach, say, that’s functioning just fine might be thrown out of balance if you add too much of an acid to it. But if it has insufficient acid, adding some might restore it. Something that has an effect is a better starting place than something that has no observed effect.”

“I thought you didn’t prescribe medications,” Chet said.

“I don’t. Have you ever heard of
The King in Yellow
?”

“We think our memories are like pictures,” Connie said. “When we think of our first kiss, it’s usually an image, even though we probably had our eyes closed. We see ourselves from outside, very often.”

“So that’s another example of how we change our memories?” Chet asked. “I was in ‘first-person view’ when I got married, but I imagine it in third-person because that’s how I see the wedding video and pictures?”

“It’s partly due to those reinforcers, and partly due to our tendency of make narratives, with meaning, out of events, which are merely observed. But memory isn’t really like a picture, because pictures don’t change. We
want
it to be fixed and steady, but it’s not.”

“If I wanted my memories to be unchangeable, I wouldn’t be here,” Chet said.

“Very true.” Constance stood, produced a key from her pocket, and unlocked a gray metal box on her desk. Inside was a small Tyvek envelope, which she set aside. Under it was an old book, in rather poor condition.

“
The King in Yellow
,” Chet said, staring at it.

“Memory is more like clay,” Connie said, sitting with the book in her lap. “Think of an unfired statue, in a dark room. To find out what it’s like, you have to feel it. But because it’s still soft, each touch makes tiny changes. That’s memory. Every time you call something up, the fingers of your mind leave streaks or imprints on it.”

“So you think things weren’t really as bad as I remember them?”

“In many ways it
does not matter
objectively what ‘really’ happened. The flexibility of the mind—the plasticity of recall—lets you choose a better reaction.”

“Tell me again about the book,” he said, lips dry.

“No one’s sure why
The King in Yellow
produces drastic effects on consciousness. It seems to operate almost like a hallucinogenic drug.”

“Yeah there’s... there are some scary stories about it, on the Internet.”

She waved her hands. “Oh, the
Internet
. They must be true, right?”

“Well, nothing is, is it? If our memories are all plastic?”

“Something that changes isn’t necessarily
false
,” she said sharply.

“It’s just, people talk about it like it’s a drug. Or a religion. That everything changes in the, what’s the phrase, ‘in the shadow of the King.’ People say they get their wishes coming true, or that people with masks chase them out of paintings. Crazy stuff.”

“Let’s assume this literature has the ability to alter memories,” she said. “If you didn’t know that’s what it did, what would that feel like? It’s not unusual for confabulated memories to be weirdly dramatic, even horrifying. If you accidentally reworked your mind so that you remembered a nightmare of a past, wouldn’t normalcy seem like a granted wish?”

“Once again, we come to the idea that my memories are false... ,” Chet said.

“I don’t care if they are! Real, fake, something in between, if they’re hurting you I want to make that stop.”

“So the guy who said everyone around him had a mask on over their real faces and was trying to rebuild his house to convince him he was still on Earth and hadn’t been kidnapped to some weird lake somewhere?”

She shrugged. “First off, the Internet is full of freaks and weirdos.”

“I’ll give you that one,” Chet said.

“Even if he wasn’t just hoaxing you, are you going to hold up a guy who remembers nonsensical assaults as proof that
The King in Yellow
does
not
alter perception and recall?”

Chet opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “No, but he might indicate that it’s a bad idea.”

“They’re just words, Chet.”

“So’s
Mein Kampf
.”

“There’s a difference between mnemonic effects and political incitement,” she said, folding her arms and giving him a stern look. “I do know what I’m doing. I’m taking every possible precaution to limit the alterations to only malignant memories.”

“How does that work?”

“
The King in Yellow
and some associated materials seem to powerfully disconnect the mind’s ability to keep its memories structured. If you go with the statue metaphor, it takes the clay from being mostly-dry to a... muddier state. Changes become much easier. There was a man named Castaigne, did you come across his name in your research? He was treated for what was probably frontal lobe damage before being accidentally exposed to the book.”

“Did it homeopathically fix him?”

The therapist shrugged. “No way to know. Without it making his personality more labile, he might have just been one of those spaced out, nodding, lost-mind cases, like someone with late stage dementia.”

“What happened instead of that?”

“He fell in with another fellow, a Mr. Wilde. While Wilde isn’t
known
to have read the play, he was reputedly in possession of, um, ancillary material that had similar effects.”

“Wait, you mean the ‘Yellow Sign’?”

Her eyes flicked to the envelope on her desk.

“Yes, among other things.”

“That’s supposed to be the really fast version, right? You see it once and it gets in your head?”

“It does seem to work much more directly on some people, possibly because it doesn’t have to go through the linguistic centers of the brain,” Constance said.

“Yeah, one guy said that once you see it, you start seeing it over and over again, everywhere.”

“A more rational explanation is that, given its impact on the brain, one begins to
hallucinate
seeing it everywhere, like when you see faces in clouds. Or that one falsely remembers sightings, when in fact one was only experiencing an emotion associated with it. But that’s really not relevant, Chet! You,” she said, “Are not getting anywhere near the Yellow Sign.”

“Okay.” He sat back. “These symbols and ideas are really that powerful?”

“They seem to have affected Castaigne and Wilde, not to mention the reports about Bundry and Hollis in the 1970s and the New Bristol episode in 1986.”

“What were those?”

“Oh, Bundry and Hollis tried to put on a performance of
The King in Yellow
at their college but wound up leaving school and kind of disappearing for two years. There was a big media buzz over them vanishing without telling anyone, but they were eventually found in Florida living as ‘Camilla’ and ‘Cassilda,’ their characters from the play.” She shifted her eyes away from him. “Wilde styled himself a ‘repairer of reputations.’ That’s a phrase that’s
fascinating
to consider...‘re-pair’ suggesting to take things that have been disconnected and join them once more, very reminiscent of the word ‘re-member’. Memory language is full of the idea of return... when we ‘re-call’ we summon ideas together, or ‘re-collect.’ And then we have ‘reputation,’ descended from the Latin ‘
putare,
’ to know. A reputation is that which is known again. To repair a reputation is to shuffle the connections, knead the clay, and connect old things in a different way.”