Drawing a Blank

I am freaking out. How can I explain this? I’m in a full-blown It's a Wonderful Life scenario here but in reverse. I’m not seeing what the world would look like if I had never been born—I’m seeing the world where I was born—but the joke’s on me.

You know, like when a guy walks up to you and addresses you by name and you’ve got no idea who he is. Now, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right. Say, Who are you again? and you’ve offended the guy. Greet him like an old buddy and he’s going to expect you to comment on your shared past. I mean, clearly, you’ve met him before. And he remembers that meeting. He knows who you are. But you don’t know him from Adam.

Now let’s take that lovely little conundrum and grow that to the size of a galaxy, and maybe you’ll begin to get an idea of what I’m dealing with here. For me, it’s everyone. And everything. My mind has completely drawn a blank.

Taking inventory. I’m in the Student Center. This is the College of New Jersey. It doesn’t look familiar, but there’s a sign by the bookstore that gives away the setting. There’s an “Introduction to Psychology” textbook in my hands. A flat screen with a list of rooms for Final Exams is on the brick wall by the bookstore. So, it is exam season. I have a psychology class. And it’s freezing outside. I’m wearing a full-length pea coat, a black one, with those big buttons, lapels, and an extended collar. Indicating it is December. I’m a man, in my early twenties, judging by the reflection staring back at me from the window of the bookstore. And I’m well put together if I do say so myself.

“Harry, did you bone up on Professor Panarella’s legendary hypotheticals,” a voice behind me says. So, judging by this, I’m Harry. Whoever the hell that is.

Turning, I see a prim bleary-eyed blonde, with blue eyes, bangs, and a sorority sweatshirt, clutching a large metal coffee travel tumbler to her chest. The sweater has the name “Penny” written on it in block letters, so I’m guessing she’s Penny.

“I’m kind of at a loss, to be honest,” I say.

“Shit, Harry. Again? I know you are kind of a prodigy, but this is Panarella we’re talking about. He’s got a reputation for failing students who are unprepared. You can’t just wing this one.”

Well, this is confidence inspiring.

Where do ideas come from? Where do memories reside? Where does your mind go when it wanders? Where would one go to track it down again? These are not matters of metaphysical concern. These are life and death issues. I mean, I’m royally screwed here.

Penny provides me with a clue. “I mean out of everyone, I’d think you’d be ready for the exam.”

“And why is that, Penny?” I ask, really wanting to know.

“Because you are his Research Assistant, silly,” she says with a giggle. Now, I’m wondering what kind of relationship I have with this girl. She’s giggling. Twirling her hair. Giving me a familiar look. There might be something going on between us. I’ll come back to that. There are more immediate concerns.

“Oh, what research would that be,” I say with a playful affect as if hunting for praise.

“Oh, you know, work-a-day stuff. Expanding on the theories of William James, the very Father of Psychology. Taking up the baton and puzzling out the mysteries of perception. Just, real-world proof of the tenuous link between conscious awareness and behavior. The research study the two of you published—providing empirical evidence that conscious awareness or attention is absent nearly half the time, giving sway to automatic processing—and attention only comes into the picture when sleepwalking through common behaviors becomes too challenging.”

Wow. This girl has got it bad. She has, like, a dossier of my accomplishments. “Huh?” I say, for lack of a more appropriate grunt to express the tangled ball of emotions that her little speech has brought to the surface. But she has me thinking, by her math, I’m literally the most consciously aware person on the planet since automatic processing isn’t going to do shit for you if you don’t even know who you are.

I attempt to draw her out with aplomb, asking, “Which study was that, again?”

“The driving study. Where you guys put sensors on people’s heads while driving. And determined that their attention was completely absent—gone—their minds wandering—only being called back when something unexpected happened on the road that required their full attention.”

“So, you’re saying that attention is a spectrum—that our minds are here and there—wandering off in space—then returning only when needed?” I ask.

“Well, that was your thesis,” she said, chewing on a Bic pen. “You feeling okay, Harry?” She asks.

“Not remotely,” I say. “Can we sit down?”

“Sure, hunny. We’ve got a few hours before the exam.”

And Penny leads me into the Rathskeller, where I immediately order a beer.

“Budweiser?” Big Mike asks. I call him that because it is on the nametag, not because I remember.

“Sure,” I say, assuming he knows what I drink.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to drink right now? You’ve got an exam,” Penny says.

“Under normal circumstances, I’d say no. But I need something. I don’t feel well,” I say.

“You look pale,” she says. “Your lips are blue Harry.” I hear an echo, Your lips are blue Harry, blue Harry, blue Harry. I see her bright blue yes floating away from me, her head inflating like a balloon.

And this is when shit starts to get weird.

The blood pounds in my ears.  Breathe. My vision recedes, leaving me peering out at her through occluded fish-eye lenses. The acidic cringe of bile rises in my throat. Just breathe. A cold sweat drenches my forehead. Deep breaths, now, Harry. My shoulders writhe with spasms and the back of my head burns like it is resting on a literal furnace, the shimmer of the sensation running along the temples to the front of my head. And somewhere inside I know that I can’t stop it. I have to let this play out. It is that feeling when something bad is happening, where you try to go somewhere else, distance yourself from it, float away—but you can’t stop it.

And then the fun begins. The rushing dizziness like the feeling of sucking down helium. The womp-womp-womp of the electricity sputtering out. The weakness of my arms, dangling like weightless feathers by my sides. Somehow, I know that this is a conditioned physiological response. I know that everything is okay. But I don’t believe it for a second.

I dive into a pool of cold water. Tendrils of icy cold envelope my raw skin, as if the clothes have been cut off of me, leaving me naked, every nerve singing. The rush of movement, though still perched on the stool. The loss of place and time. Remember to breathe.

Feels like hands are firmly pressing down on my neck, choking out my life’s breath. I gasp for air, only catching crumbs of a breath. From the corner of my eye, something materializes out of the wooden flooring of the Rathskeller. It is in the shadows. The shadows of the stools. They lengthen and enlarge, running away toward the walls, and then snap back and pulse into three dimensions, and rise from the floor like cloaked assassins. Their voices a droning electric hum, accented by mirthful screeches. Three of them converge on me—slowly shuddering forth from the dust and din of the bar, shadows trailing behind their morbid forms like capes—malintentioned intruders from the realm of demons. Only I can see them. They are coming only for me. They are coming. They are coming quickly. Almost upon me.

I stumble backward, tipping over the stool. Straddle my feet to break my fall, and crash to my backside. A violent flurry of sobs and whaling. My hands flail in front of me to keep them away as I kick my feet, one at a time, kicking myself back to the wall. I tuck in my knees and grip them in a desperate hug, screaming in terror as I wait for them to get me. Which they do. It all goes black.

“Harry. Harry. Harry,” someone says.

Slap. Owww. Slap. Whoah.

I shake my eyes open. It’s a man. Slapping me in the face. He’s got a stubbly beard growing in. A round face with a protruding muzzle like a bear. I’d say he’s either Italian or Polish.

“It’s me, Professor Panarella. Are you back with us?” he asks.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

“About fifteen minutes,” he says.

And I see Penny standing behind him, arms crossed, tapping a foot, looking very worried about me.

“Professor. There’s a problem. I—”

“—Can’t remember anything?”

“Exactly. How’d you know?”

“Penny told me. But it makes perfect sense.”

“What? Why is that?”

“Just lay back. Don’t move. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.” Hospital. Hosp-it-al. Hahh-spit-allllll. The world womps and pulses and my eyes close.

And then I am back. Sitting up in the hospital bed. Panarella is there. Penny is there, asleep in a chair, with her legs up on a table. The white curtain is drawn back. The hospital bed is perched up so that I am looking forward in a seated position.

Panarella approaches me with a syringe and injects it into my arm. I put up my other hand to protest, but I am so drained of energy, I just go with it.

“This is what you get for playing God, Harry,” he says. “Who do you think you are, goddamn Jonas Salk?” Panarella asks.

“Wait. Are you saying that I did this to myself,” I ask.

“Relevance, impartiality, welfare, and consent. Ethical cannons of the research scientist. Remember those?” he asks.

“Oddly, I think I do,” I say. “But I haven’t the faintest idea why.”

“Do no harm. Ever heard of that? Least of all to yourself. My God, Harry, what the fuck have you done this time?”

“I was kind of hoping you would tell me.”

“Jesus, Harry. We were testing the serum on hamsters. We were nowhere near ready for human trials.”

“Serum?”

“Uppfattning serum, Harry. A bridge to oblivion. The zombie anesthetic. A drug to separate awareness from perception. It was a breakthrough. But who knows what goes on in the mind of a hamster? It barely has a sense of self. Its whole life is almost entirely automatic processing.”

“Whoah, doc. Slow down. Help me out with this. Give me one of your famous hypotheticals, like Penny was telling me about.”

“Okay. Okay. How do I explain this? You. What you call ‘you’ is really a composite. A relationship. A master-servant relationship. Like a dog and its master. The dog is your awareness. And what you call ‘you,’ your perception, your selfhood, your experience of being you is like the master. The thinking awareness, the automatic processing, is like the dog.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you, Professor.”

“I’m not talking to ‘you,’ right now. You are gone. All that is left is your awareness. The dog waiting at the door for its master to return. That’s why ‘you’ can’t remember anything. Because ‘you’ aren’t here. We don’t know where ‘you’ have gone or how to get ‘you’ back.”

“Then where am I?” I ask.

“I have no fucking idea, Harry! We’ve only just started these experiments. But you decided to use yourself as a human guinea pig.”

“Sounds serious, doc,” I said.

“’You’ as we understand it is really a community of ‘yous.’ There’s your bodily self, your perspectival self, your volitional self, your narrative self, and your social self. Each a mix of awareness and perception, each a compound of master and servant. And your unified self has been pulled apart into pure awareness—unless we can get ‘you’ back.”

“Tell me about the driving experiment.”

“The driving study was an experiment where we studied the brains of people experiencing the feeling one gets that they don’t remember the drive home. We proved it was real, Harry. They don’t remember the drive home because they weren’t there. It is the functional equivalent of sleepwalking. Proceeding entirely through automatic processing. Like a computer carrying out a program.”

“So it's possible that jarring a person out of automatic processing is the trigger that brings their perception—the master—the ‘you’—back into the game.”

“I don’t know, Harry,” Panarella said sitting back in the chair next to Penny, rousing her. Penny yawned and wiped her eyes.

Penny smiled at me and said, “You’re back.” She rushed over and gave me a wet kiss on the lips, saying, “You had us worried, babe.”

And then an idea struck.

“Professor, is there a treadmill in this place?”

A few minutes later, the neurologist hooked up electrodes to my head. I stepped up on the platform of the treadmill.

“Are you ready, Professor,” I asked.

“This is insane,” he said.

“Well, can’t hurt to give it a shot. Now remember, I’m going to go on running at a steady pace. I’m going to listen to some music. And I’ll be blindfolded. We’re going to keep it going like that for ten minutes or so. Then, without any warning, stop the treadmill. I’ll have to deal with the sudden shift in velocity. I’ll be pulled out of automatic processing. I’ll have to come home.”

And the treadmill starts whirring. My sneakers are connecting to the mat of the treadmill, clicking along. A somnambulant, reflexive cadence. A steady drumming. The music in the headphones is at 150 bpm. I breathe rhythmically. I focus on my stride. The autonomous swinging of my arms. The automatic recoil of my hamstrings. The feeling of flying laterally.

My mind wanders. Will I like my life with Penny? Will I be happy with the results of my research position with Panarella? Do I like myself? Why did I take the Uppfattning serum? Was it a mistake? Was it on purpose? Was there some reason I wanted to free my consciousness from my present awareness? Had I discovered something about existence that terrified me?

I heard a sound like breaking car tires. The skidding of rubber on rubber. I felt the traction of the treadmill jolt me forward. My hands reached out. The blindfold was pulled off. My eyes scanned, reaching for the handholds. And in a woosh, I came back to myself. Or was it?

It was me. The master had come to the door.

Only the dog wasn’t wagging his tail and looking up and licking his face. The dog was barking. Ferociously. As if an intruder had entered the home.

Penny said, “Is it you, babe?”

Professor Panarella looked up hopefully, “Harry, are you back?”

I looked at these strangers, I looked down at my young body, and I looked at my vitals on the screen of the monitor.

How long had I been in a coma? Where was that useless body being kept in this hospital, I thought. And who was Harry?

All I knew, is I was free. Free at last.

Harry can’t come to the phone right now, I thought with a chuckle.

“What’s so funny,” Penny says.

“Oh, nothing,” I say, “You wouldn’t understand.”