Second Sight (21 page)
Authors: George D. Shuman
“Sherry?”
“I’m listening.”
“It doesn’t look like you are.”
“I was just thinking about the trooper.”
Brigham nodded.
“I could have saved her a month ago.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I think Kelly was disappointed with me.”
“Sherry, for God’s sake. How can anyone be disappointed with anyone for not reading someone else’s mind? You know, you really are caving in. You’ve got the bar so damned high no one could get over it. Act human, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not caving in.”
“It’s no goddamned different. I don’t like it when you start to feel sorry for yourself.”
“Well, I’m still sorry.” She huffed, rearranging herself on the chair. “Tell me how it goes with your own gamma ray test next week. Maybe you’re just better adjusted than I am.”
He saw she was near tears.
“I’m sorry,” Sherry said, putting up a hand. “Really, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Brigham’s hand moved to his jacket pocket and he had the oddest of urges just then. To remove the pack of Marlboros and light one, except that he’d quit smoking forty years ago.
Sherry knew Brigham had his own trials and tribulations. She knew he’d lost a wife and that cancer wasn’t new to him.
“Forgive?”
Brigham nodded.
“Please, tell me what you’ve got.”
Brigham looked out the window. He wasn’t thinking about Monahan or the Korean War anymore. “Ever smoke?”
“Smoke?” Sherry repeated.
“Cigarettes. You ever try one?”
She shook her head. “No. Why do you ask?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He sighed and then he opened the folder on his lap. “They called it Bluebird in the beginning,” he said solemnly. “The CIA’s attempts at using drugs, isolation, and hypnotherapy to effect mind control. They also tried electroconvulsive therapy at a lab in Canada, which produced drug-induced comas. Patients were made to listen to recorded loops of tapes for weeks, even months, at a time. The longest one that was documented went on for a quarter of a year.”
“Oh my God,” Sherry said.
“There was also a study of probing brain centers using segments of hypodermic needles that were quickly pounded into the head with a hammer, so at any time—even years later if they shaved the head—doctors could find the needle openings and thread fine fiber leads, like fishing line, through the hypodermic needle and probe different depths of the cranium.”
“Ugh.” Sherry shook her head. “To find what?”
“To stimulate hunger, thirst, arousal, euphoria—we were
learning where the emotions came from and how to excite them on demand. This was back in the 1940s. Later the project was renamed MK-ULTRA, around the time young Monahan was in upstate New York. There was now officially a race for a weapon to control the human mind. MK-ULTRA was under the command of the deputy director of the CIA. There were thirty universities participating in the projects and untold doctors and scientists in secret labs around the country. They were dosing patients with LSD and sodium pentothal, among other things. Dosing without their knowledge, I might add, but this was to avoid symmetrized reactions. In fact, one of the most famous scientists attached to MK-ULTRA was a doctor by the name of Olsen, who took a leap from a New York high-rise hotel in 1953. His fellow scientists later admitted he’d had a psychotic episode following high doses of LSD, but there is evidence that he was increasingly unhappy about the direction MK-ULTRA was taking.”
“He may have been murdered?”
Brigham shrugged. “It was suggested often enough, but who was around at the time to investigate? The CIA?”
“So all these people were duped into using potentially lethal drugs?”
“I wouldn’t say duped. There were a host of willing volunteers around as well. The Unabomber, Kaczynski”—Brigham pointed at her—“participated in MK-ULTRA experiments at Harvard. Kesey, who wrote
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
volunteered at Stanford. The list goes on.”
“What does this have to do with radio waves?”
“The process,” Brigham said. “The more we learned about Soviet advances on their LIDA Machine, the more our own program morphed from psychotic drugs to radio-wave frequencies.” Brigham pressed his palms together. “There was a device created by a Yale physiologist, named Delgado, that could control the implants in the brain with radio waves. He called it the stimoceiver.”
“And it worked? Really worked?” Sherry asked.
“He stood in a ring with a bull in 1947 and stopped it dead in its tracks when it charged. He claimed his device interrupted the bull’s aggressive tendencies.”
Sherry was silent for a moment. “Which must have seemed like a miracle at the time.”
Brigham shrugged. “There were skeptics. They thought the bull was turning away to avert the frequency of the radio waves, but I still think the experiment would shock some people today.”
“The problem was that a human who had received the implants would know what was happening to them,” Sherry said. “Which negates its use as a weapon.”
“Exactly,” Brigham said. “Which led to the next step in MKULTRA’s research. The apparatus described in your journal. How to control the brain by beaming microwave bursts at it.”
“Voices?”
“Images, voices, sure, but maybe more. Possibly the volunteers were shown videos meant to desensitize them to violence. Then they were given an idea, a suggestion. A subliminal message.”
“Like suicide.”
“It would be the extreme of the extreme emotions to resist. Men might be convinced to commit murder for a cause, but how much harder would it be to surmount our own natural instinct for survival? How much would it take to make a man kill himself?”
“This machine worked too?” Sherry asked.
“The Russians had some success, though we can’t say how much. ELF waves emit extremely low ionizing radiation and very low heat. These machines were virtually undetectable.”
“Invisible to counterintelligence technology,” Sherry said.
He nodded. “It wasn’t just intelligence signals that the machines delivered. ELF waves in themselves were capable of crum
bling brick walls or vibrating the internal organs of a human body so violently as to alter their location. They could disrupt brain patterns and prevent organisms from functioning altogether. They were literally lethal.”
“Grotesque.” Sherry made a face. “This is what happened to Thomas Monahan? Brain damage? Possible suggestion of suicide?”
“I think so,” Brigham said. “His writings mention a metal box. Fabric mesh could mean speakers, and you’ve seen the white dial and numbers he described. It had to be radio waves they were using on him. He talks about the sunburns they were experiencing, which sounds very much like exposure to microwaves.”
Brigham shifted in his seat. “Sherry, I’ve said this before, but this journal could cause quite a stir for the people involved.”
“The government?” Sherry said.
“The government, the scientists, the doctors, the patients’ families.”
“Maybe that’s good.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know,” Sherry said. “I know. I’ll be careful.”
“You want to finish these last couple entries?”
Sherry nodded.
“You want me to fix you anything to drink?”
She shook her head.
Brigham opened the green journal.
November 20th, 1950
There are two new members in R-lab now. Radio heads we have begun to call one another. They were talking about food and one of them was telling me about his parents’ farm back in Oklahoma. They raise a small herd of buffalo and he was saying how tame they all were.
I drew some sketches of the room we all sit in to do our
tests. The room is very narrow and has a long wooden table in it. At one end of the table there’s this machine. It is very sophisticated technology we are told. It sends out radio waves that the enemy can’t hear and that we can and that’s what makes it valuable as a weapon. Our job is to try to understand what the radio waves mean. In other words, they want us to listen for any sounds and mark on a sheet of paper what we hear and when. Sometimes you can tell when a signal is coming because there is a gauge on the front of the machine with a needle that registers between zero and thirty. But the gauge isn’t always reliable because once when it wasn’t moving I heard voices talking to me and not like voices over a radio or outside the room, but right there in my head. I was the only one who could hear them. I think that maybe the needle is there to fool us. Cool, huh?
There is also a movie projector and it shows film reels from the war in the Philippines and Japan and Korea and it plays over and over until you know everything that is going to happen before it does. There is no need to tell you much more than how horrible war is and I guess they just want to impress that upon us as much as possible. Even though we are all getting out of the army in a month or so.
There is a glass window near the door. You can’t hear through it as the walls are so thick. The doctors watch us through the glass while we’re working to make certain that everything is okay. The one who is in charge is a lot younger than the others. We know his name but no one here is allowed to repeat it or write it down because the enemy might be using their own type of radio equipment on us. I can tell you, he wears a white hat and smokes a pipe like General MacArthur. I heard one of the military policemen telling another he’s a brilliant scientist and we’re lucky to have him on our side. I guess that’s almost as good as saying his name, not that anyone will be reading this.
November 21st, 1950
We’ve started a new exercise in the radio room. Now, instead of recording the signals we hear, we are supposed to resist them. We were told we could use anything as a diversion to think about, old memories, our serial numbers, we could pick out objects in the room to focus on until we train ourselves to overcome the voices. It’s a bizarre exercise because one of the voices is about a revolver lying on the table in front of us. The voices tell us to pick it up, but we’re really supposed to leave it on the table. Very strange, but they obviously know what they’re doing.
November 22nd, 1950
They’ve started increasing the supplement shots now that we’re in our last month. I think I might have had a reaction to the shot because I passed out when I was in the can this morning. Next thing I remember someone was banging on the door and instead of opening it I tried to think whoever it was away. I know this makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t been here, but it did to me and the next thing I remember is the captain’s voice ordering me to get up off the floor.
They strapped me to a gurney and left me in the R-lab most of the evening. I saw the replacement guy whose family owned the buffalo farm. He was on a gurney as well and they were getting ready to move him somewhere. They said he tried to get out and that one of the guard dogs attacked him. His bottom lip was missing. All the skin around his nose was chewed away. I’ve never heard the dogs barking, but I guess they’re up there to keep spies out.
They wanted me back in R-lab right away. They said I was very important and that they were getting ready to give me my final discharge tests so I could get out of here.
Can’t…on, can’t…on, I couldn’t remember the numbers anymore. Can’t…on, can’t…on, it’s all getting to be too much, too hard to hang on another day. I’m trying to remember all of you, to keep your faces in my mind. Sometimes I think of Shep. You know when I get old and die I’d like to be with Shep under the cherry tree in Grandpa’s field. People don’t do that much anymore, bury their kin at their homes, but if you could ask Grandpa how’d he feel about it, that’s as nice a place as any I could think to be. I used to sit there and talk to Shep. I’d like to do that again. I’d like to tell her about all the things I saw and did and I know she’d understand in her own way in the end. When I was a kid and did something wrong she always licked my face and I know she didn’t mind.
N
OVEMBER
23
RD
, 1950
T
HANKSGIVING
D
AY
I can only imagine you sitting around the fire this morning having breakfast. I know Mom is in the kitchen with the turkey and Grandpa is reading the newspaper. Most everyone is gone around here. All the brass went home for the holiday. All the guards but one and he’s been drinking whiskey heavy most of the morning. One of the docs wants to run tests and I’m supposed to be in the lab in ten minutes. I don’t know how well I’ll do today. I didn’t sleep last night. I tried to remember the numbers and names, but they’re all gone. I can’t think of anything but the gun anymore. I guess this is what happened to Tim before he left. I don’t want to talk to anyone anymore. I don’t want to hear anything else. I don’t want to think. I don’t wa…
The rest of the pages were blank.
It was a busy night at Grant’s Tavern, perhaps more than the usual number of locals were there, and the weather was improving daily, so tourists were out stretching their legs after a long, dismal New York winter.
The bartender was pouring beer and talking a new waitress through the beverage menu. Every table on the floor was occupied and those left standing congregated around a half-wall wooden ledge that separated the bar from the restaurant waitstaff station.
Troy sat at the end of the bar. He’d arrived in town in the late afternoon and ordered a vodka, rocks. It would have been preferable to locate the address and wait in his car, but in a town the size of Stockton you were more visible trying to hide than acting like everyone else.
“Business?” the bartender had asked.
“Family business,” he said with an appropriate degree of gravity.
Troy knew that all kinds of people came to the hospital. Most wouldn’t be expected to talk about themselves.
“Heard about that plane crash in Moscow?”
Troy shook his head.
“Ran off the runway and a fuel tank ruptured. Looked like Armageddon, but everyone got out. You don’t see that too often.”
“Nope.” Troy looked at his watch.
The bartender walked down the bar to take an order and Troy used the time to escape, leaving an appropriate tip. Not too much, not too little.
Carla Corcoran was sitting in a rocker in her living room. Her house was one of the larger ones, six doors down from Grant’s Tavern, on the corner of an intersection. The décor was predictable early American, but done with style. She was as meticulous as her first husband had been. Everything was perfectly arranged, from the flowers on the table to the pencils on her antique desk.
The windows were open this evening. It was the first chance to air out the house, and the warm spring breeze smelled fresh and wonderful. Colter was at the clubhouse, as usual. He was a good man, but absent more than not. He wasn’t the kind of man who could sit still. He could have retired on a government pension, but the club kept him busy, and he liked the attention everyone gave him. He certainly wasn’t a Jack McCullough, Carla thought; the two men couldn’t have been more different. She wondered if it was like that with all divorced couples. Were they constantly comparing past mates?
She’d hate to admit it to anyone, but Jack would always remain the love of her life. She missed the real companionship he gave her. She could never resolve that he would take his own life. If something were so wrong that he couldn’t live with it anymore, he would have told her. They were just like that.
She’d thought about him more and more since Betsy had introduced her to Sherry Moore. Not that she’d forgotten him,
not by a long shot, but now that she’d dug out that old journal in the attic and gone through the photo albums, he was on her mind much more.
She had all his things, all still locked in her desk. Colter might have been surprised to know that, but then Colter would never have cared enough to look. Colter’s world was outside the house. Carla’s was inside.
She picked up a book and read two pages before she marked it and laid it down. She went to the kitchen and turned the gas on beneath the teakettle, took a paring knife, and brought an orange into the living room. She looked at the television and decided against it. She peeled the orange neatly, studying the parking lot outside Grant’s Tavern. People looked happy carrying their packages and there was laughter in the air. When Jack was alive he’d sometimes take her there for a drink, but that was an exception to the rule. Mostly they sat at home and read and Jack would clean his guns while they talked, and she would make jars of jam from the berries he brought her. It was a simple life, but simple was good.
The curtain fluttered in the breeze. She felt weepy just then and wiped a tear from her eye. The kettle began to whistle in the kitchen and she laid down the orange and went to make a cup of tea. When she returned to her rocker she sat and reached for the knife and a drop of blood splattered on the orange in front of her.
Carla wiped her nose with the side of her hand and was surprised to see blood on it. How odd, she thought, reaching for the tissues on an end table. She dabbed at her nose, then she stood and went to her desk.
She looked confused for a moment, but then she took an old key from her pocket and opened the rolltop. It was dark now, she’d noticed, the last light of day having slipped behind Mount Tamathy.
She took out a piece of paper and a pen. The words came easy, fluently, as if they had long been bottled inside. “Colter and
all my dear, dear friends, you could never know the pain I have lived with these last fifty-eight years….”
When she was finished she folded the letter neatly, creased it with a thumbnail, and stood it tent-style upon the top of her desk. She took Jack’s big .38 caliber revolver from the bottom-righthand drawer and the box of ammunition next to it, old green cardboard flaking away across the desktop as she opened the box to reveal tarnished brass shells. She removed a few and dropped them into the chambers.
There was a slight smile on her face as she put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.