sorry.”
“No, you don’t have to be. I should tell you. Bill—he wants to get serious.”
Bill was Sara’s old boyfriend. A young attorney who lived in San Francisco’s Mission District and did a lot of pro bono work for the Hispanic population there. They’d dated for several years and been on the verge of marriage before I stumbled along. My sense of it—she half wanted him, and half didn’t. Her relationship with me was a fling, a way of escaping the decision. Flirting with the unknown. Underneath it all, she knew this as well as I.
“Not tonight,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, and hung up the phone.
An instant later it started to ring. I heard her voice on the answering machine. I was tempted to pick it up but it was the kind of thing, you’re damned either way. In the end, I resisted. I gathered up my work and went home to see my wife.
When I got home Elizabeth had not arrived yet. I did not think much of it. She often dragged in late—distracted by a student or a colleague—and I figured she would be along soon. In the meantime, I went to my bookshelf and pulled out my copy of Kleindst. I plunged into my work with a renewed energy. Whether I did so as a means of escape—as a way of forgetting Sara—or in earnest pursuit of a greater end, I can’t tell you. It may be that both things were true at the same time. Regardless, it had been a while since I’d read Kleindst, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with his ideas:
Situational memory loss is an acute form of amnesia, a blackout of memory that has its roots in early abuse, and typically reoccurs after an incident in which the suppressed abuse has exploded into rage. After such incidents, the afflicted patient will not remember his own rage, or the attendant violence, until much later, >if at all.
I thought about Dillard’s story. The locked door, the intruder, the gamma hydroxybutrate in Angela’s blood. I thought, too, about my moment with Sara, at her apartment.
If the memory does return, it is often fragmented, and marked by severe disassociation, in which the core identity of the afflicted individual separates from his or her actions—and as a result he sees the perpetrator of the crime not as himself but as a shadowy other In such situations, the individual will go to great lengths to preserve this false view of events.
It unnerved me, this analysis. I understood the tack Haney Wagoner wanted to take. Rather than fight the physical evidence, he meant to build his defense on the notion that the greater truth lay shrouded in his client’s psyche, in a netherworld of abuse where memory had been destroyed and everything Dillard had told the police was not a conscious lie but a delusion, a metaphor for his unconscious state.
Would the jury believe this? More importantly, would they see it as reason for acquittal? I didn’t know the answer, but I’d seen odder things happen in the courtroom.
A word of caution. This syndrome should not be confused with the feigned memory loss common among the criminal populations, and practiced with great flair by psychopaths and other malingerers.
I went on reading. About genuine amnesiacs and certified fakes. Case histories and interpretations. Rulings and counter rulings. Every once in a while I glanced at the clock. Nine thirty and Elizabeth still had not returned.
I thought about the case.
There was supposed to have been some kind of coordination between myself and Paulie and the other experts. A meeting of the minds, so to speak. So far it hadn’t happened. It was Haney’s job to bring us together, but he kept canceling, putting things off.
It was midnight before Elizabeth returned. She wore a peach-colored suit, well-tailored but simple, with buttons going up the skirt. And the necklace her father had given her.
“Where have you been?”
“At the conference. Didn’t I tell you?”
I knew about the conference, as I have said. They held it every year. A psychiatric convention based on the
“No, you don’t have to be. I should tell you. Bill—he wants to get serious.”
Bill was Sara’s old boyfriend. A young attorney who lived in San Francisco’s Mission District and did a lot of pro bono work for the Hispanic population there. They’d dated for several years and been on the verge of marriage before I stumbled along. My sense of it—she half wanted him, and half didn’t. Her relationship with me was a fling, a way of escaping the decision. Flirting with the unknown. Underneath it all, she knew this as well as I.
“Not tonight,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, and hung up the phone.
An instant later it started to ring. I heard her voice on the answering machine. I was tempted to pick it up but it was the kind of thing, you’re damned either way. In the end, I resisted. I gathered up my work and went home to see my wife.
When I got home Elizabeth had not arrived yet. I did not think much of it. She often dragged in late—distracted by a student or a colleague—and I figured she would be along soon. In the meantime, I went to my bookshelf and pulled out my copy of Kleindst. I plunged into my work with a renewed energy. Whether I did so as a means of escape—as a way of forgetting Sara—or in earnest pursuit of a greater end, I can’t tell you. It may be that both things were true at the same time. Regardless, it had been a while since I’d read Kleindst, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with his ideas:
Situational memory loss is an acute form of amnesia, a blackout of memory that has its roots in early abuse, and typically reoccurs after an incident in which the suppressed abuse has exploded into rage. After such incidents, the afflicted patient will not remember his own rage, or the attendant violence, until much later, >if at all.
I thought about Dillard’s story. The locked door, the intruder, the gamma hydroxybutrate in Angela’s blood. I thought, too, about my moment with Sara, at her apartment.
If the memory does return, it is often fragmented, and marked by severe disassociation, in which the core identity of the afflicted individual separates from his or her actions—and as a result he sees the perpetrator of the crime not as himself but as a shadowy other In such situations, the individual will go to great lengths to preserve this false view of events.
It unnerved me, this analysis. I understood the tack Haney Wagoner wanted to take. Rather than fight the physical evidence, he meant to build his defense on the notion that the greater truth lay shrouded in his client’s psyche, in a netherworld of abuse where memory had been destroyed and everything Dillard had told the police was not a conscious lie but a delusion, a metaphor for his unconscious state.
Would the jury believe this? More importantly, would they see it as reason for acquittal? I didn’t know the answer, but I’d seen odder things happen in the courtroom.
A word of caution. This syndrome should not be confused with the feigned memory loss common among the criminal populations, and practiced with great flair by psychopaths and other malingerers.
I went on reading. About genuine amnesiacs and certified fakes. Case histories and interpretations. Rulings and counter rulings. Every once in a while I glanced at the clock. Nine thirty and Elizabeth still had not returned.
I thought about the case.
There was supposed to have been some kind of coordination between myself and Paulie and the other experts. A meeting of the minds, so to speak. So far it hadn’t happened. It was Haney’s job to bring us together, but he kept canceling, putting things off.
It was midnight before Elizabeth returned. She wore a peach-colored suit, well-tailored but simple, with buttons going up the skirt. And the necklace her father had given her.
“Where have you been?”
“At the conference. Didn’t I tell you?”
I knew about the conference, as I have said. They held it every year. A psychiatric convention based on the
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