The Stranger

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson

The police officer saw her wandering down the street. The look in her face triggered his cop switch and made the officer watch her. She looked lost, and amazed. But unlike most of the drug addled beggars and homeless, this girl was wearing a nice suit and was clean. Something didn’t look right to the cop.

As she passed, the cop stopped her, “Excuse me Miss, what’s your name?”

The woman looked at him as if he was speaking Swahili.

“Your name?” he tried again.

The same look.

“Do you have any ID? Passport?” Maybe she was a tourist. Passport was a universal word. The woman just stared. Now the cop was a little angry but also curious. Just what the hell was this all about? Maybe she was deaf and dumb. The cop held his arms above her head and pointed at her to do the same. That finally communicated. The stranger held her arms up. The cop began patting her down. The stranger simply stared in wonder. Quickly, the cop realized the woman had no ID, nothing on her person. She didn’t even have some change to jingle in her purse, or a purse to hold the change. The cop waved her arms down. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

The stranger simply stared uncomprehending.

The cop pulled out his walkie talkie and called for a car in support. After a minute, the stranger turned and started to walk away. The cop grabbed her and pulled her back. She pulled hers arm free and started off the way she was going. The cop grabbed her again. That’s when the car pulled up; they saw the beat cop struggling with the woman and the two cops in the car jumped out to help. The three cops wrestled the woman into handcuffs and into the back of the car.

“Do we take her to the station for resisting arrest?”

“Shit, I don’t know. I don’t think she even hears us. We’ll get some civil rights suit slapped on us. I say take her to General and let the docs figure it out.” The two young cops nodded at his sage advice. They hopped into the front of their car and delivered the strange woman to County General. The admitting nurse asked what was wrong and the cops gave her a quick rundown. “Restraint?” she asked.

The older cop shrugged. “She’s in cuffs right now. Up to you and how fast you can run her down.”

The nurse called for psych techs to bring down a straight jacket. It took two techs and both cops to get the woman out of the cuffs and into the jacket. Once, when they had her down, trying to get the jacket tied, the nurse ‘slipped’ and gave her an injection. In seconds she was relaxed. The techs threw her on a gurney and headed off to the psych ward.

Dr. O’Hara, head of the County Psychiatric ward, looked through the one way glass at the woman. She struggled in the jacket, trying to get loose. Strange, thought the doctor, that she made no intelligible sounds. No words or anything like words. Yet she looked like she belonged in a human civilization. Her suit had been bought at Macys according to the tags. Underwear was from JC Penny. She looked American. Why didn’t she understand anything anyone said? She wasn’t deaf because her head turned at sounds.

The door opened and the woman looked at it. A nurse brought in a tray of food and set it up. The stranger knelt and bent over trying to eat, her face stuffed in the food. The nurse pulled her back and waved her off. It was obvious the woman had emotions; they were plain to read on her face. The nurse untied her hands and undid the jacket. As soon as hers hands were free she grabbed the bread and started eating like she was starving. She picked up a pat of butter and chewed it, spitting it out. The nurse picked it up, unwrapped it, and spread it on the bread with a plastic knife and handed the bread to her. She watched the nurse and bit into the bread, smiling as she did.

Dr. O’Hara could see the woman watching and learning even as he watched. The nurse pointed at the food and said, “Food.”

“Fud,” she repeated.

“FOOD,” the nurse said again.

“Food,” she copied her.

The nurse nodded smiling.

“Food, food, food,” the girl said smiling.

O’Hara turned away from the window. “She appears to have mental cognitive skills but no knowledge. That makes no sense. Schedule her for an EEG, please.” He left.

The next day Dr. O’Hara was looking at the EEG with several of his interns. “What do you make of it,” he asked them.

Several shrugged their shoulders. One said, “It looks like there is nothing happening in the hippocampus. The girl would have no memory.”

Dr. O’Hara looked up at the intern. “That might explain her behavior. It’s almost like she is a complete Naïf. You might be right, but what would cause the hippocampus to disappear and how do we restore it?”

The interns all looked thoughtful, “Hormones cause it to grow and recede.”

“Estrogen causes it to recede,” one volunteered.

But that level of estrogen would leave other effects,” O’Hara said.

“Unless you could target the hormones on the hippocampus,” one said.

“How?”

“That’s the million dollar question.”

O’Hara looked in on his patient. One nurse had taken her under her wing. She pointed and talked, “Ceiling, floor, wall, wall, wall, wall.”

The girl copied her, “Ceiling, floor, wall, wall, wall, wall.”

“Foot, shin, ankle, thigh, Leg.”

“Foot, shin, ankle, thigh… leg?” she seemed to realize that she had given two names for the same part.

She went back making sure she limited the area, “Foot, ankle, shin, thigh, leg.”

She was happy, “Foot, ankle, shin, thigh, leg.”

O’Hara smiled, ‘Damn, the girl was bright, no denying that. The nurse would have her speaking English in no time.’

They redid the EEG and this time there were waves from the hippocampus. A CAT scan showed the hippocampus to be normal. But it was as if all of her memories had been erased. Now she was building up memories again. Where had they gone?

They had moved her from the padded room into a ward. Now she was ‘talking’ with all of the patients and learning even faster. O’Hara now tried to have a conversation, but she hadn’t learned enough higher level words to make sense of his questions. They were both frustrated. But he did learn that the woman knew nothing before suddenly waking up one day in downtown San Francisco, which she didn’t know was a city, and nothing before that. Certainly some head traumas could cause loss of memory, but not like this where she couldn’t even remember language. And there was no physical evidence of trauma. They had sent off her prints to the FBI but they didn’t match any missing persons description.

O’Hara kept returning to look at those two EEGs and he became surer that somehow, this woman’s memories had been erased. He didn’t know how, but they had.

The First Lady had called her main operative in. “Is she gone?”

“Yes, we dropped her in San Francisco. She has no memories at all.”

She said, “That’s no good. I thought I told you to get rid of her completely.”

The man shook his head. “That’s something out of the old USSR. We don’t do things that way. We erased her memories completely. There is no way to trace her back to us.”

Now angry, she hissed, “You stupid asshole. What about fingerprints?”

“We aren’t stupid. Of course we removed her from the FBI fingerprint files. We even got her old school records and destroyed them. Her state birth certificate, gone. She never existed according to any official record. Damn it, she was only fourteen.”

The First lady put her head in her hands. “God damn him. Why can’t he keep his fucking pants zipped?”

The operative shook his head in agreement while really thinking to himself, ‘If I was married to you, I’d be fucking every young thing myself.’

“The President can’t be linked to screwing a fourteen-year-old.” She said recovering her poise.

“Shit, Elvis got away with it,” he said smiling.

She stared at him. “He was a hillbilly rock star, not the President.”

He said nothing but thought, ‘Yeah, and he’s a hillbilly President.’ He answered, “She’s well and truly gone and there is no way to trace her back to us. She was from a little hick town and her parents are both drug addled welfare cheats. I doubt they even know she’s gone. They probably think she went off with some guy and are happy to be free of the responsibility.”

“How sure are you this will work?” she asked.

“This isn’t the first time. When we grabbed those Al Qaeda creeps, not all of them wound up at Guantanamo Bay. Five of them were brought here. We washed all five with the estrogen targeting and it cleaned out their memories completely, something about the hippocampus. Then we indoctrinated each of them that they were American Patriots through and through. That was the base memories they had. Everything else goes on top of that. You can’t change those first memories. It’s kind of like baby fixing its mother in their brain. We can erase them by erasing the whole thing, but you can’t change them. Then we taught them agent skills, Arabic language and some basic facts about who they were before, but not that they were that person. We told them that they had volunteered for surgery to make them look Arabic and sent them back to Afghanistan, telling them that they were taking over another person’s identity. Every one of them has been a perfect double agent and none has remembered a thing from before. It’s foolproof.”

“What about her?” she asked.

“We hacked the County’s medical computer and I’m getting daily reports. The Head Doc is smart. He figured out she’s been memory wiped but he thinks it is head trauma. He doesn’t think it’s possible to target estrogen like we did to clean out the hippocampus. They filed a missing person request and checked the FBI finger print files and came up empty. We’re safe.”

“Good,” she said, relaxing a little. “Damn slut,” she said.

He laughed inside, ‘Funny how he finds so many sluts.’

The girl was progressing in her language skills. She could hold conversations and was obviously bright. Dr. O’Hara kept wondering how she could have just appeared on the face of the earth, almost like a new Eve. Of course, he knew she wasn’t Eve since it had been seen in her complete physical that they did the first week that she wasn’t a virgin. But she knew nothing of sex, another memory gone.

He had consulted friends all over the U.S. and nobody had ever seen a case like this one. The interns had started calling her Eve; it was better than Jane Doe. But Mike O’Hara had an ace up his sleeve. He had been trained in Memory Regression techniques. He knew the pitfalls; the therapist could easily, and even unknowingly, lead the patient into believing made up memories. But he had been trained to use a standard patter which prevented leading questions and conclusions. And he had found a way not to have to hypnotize the patient, which prevented hypnotic suggestion. Why regression? Because regression could recall even past lives. If true, and it it seemed to work, then the memories accessed during regression weren’t in the brain, they were in the mind, a non-corporeal entity that traveled with the spirit, not the body. Even if the brain had been wiped, the memories in the mind might still be intact. Dr. O'Hara had a healthy skepticism about all this, so unscientific as it was. But he had seen it work and he had nothing to lose.

Now that Eve had enough words, Tim O’Hara had decided to try regression. He welcomed her into his office, “Welcome Eve. Please, sit down.” He put her in a comfortable chair. The shades were down, making the office dim. There were no distracting noises or sights. “I want to try something to maybe help you remember. Are you willing to try?”

“Yes, I’ll try,” she said.

“Okay, please close your eyes and relax. Do you remember the day you came here?”

“Yes.”

“Go to that day.” Pause. “What do you see?” he asked.

“The nurse, she must be a nurse, she is trying to put a coat on me. I’m scared and I fight. Then I got tired and I woke up in the first room.”

"Thank you, Eve. Now go earlier that day. Where are you?” he asked.

She paused, closed her eyes and seemed to be watching something. “I don’t know. I didn’t have any words. I was walking along and this man was making noises. I didn’t know what he was doing. I went to walk away and he grabbed me, scared me. I tried to get away but he had me and then more men came and they brought me here.”

“Thank you. Now where were you before that, earlier that day?” he asked.

“A car. Two men in suits. They were wearing the dark glasses so I couldn’t see them. Suddenly, one of them pulled me from the car and left me on the road, no the sidewalk. Then he got back in the car and the car left. I was so confused. I cried a little, then I started walking.”

“Before that?” the doctor asked.

She turned her head like she was trying to see something very faint. “It’s all like dark clouds, boiling up and covering everything.”

“Go through the clouds,” he said.

“A room. I’m tied to a table. There’s something like a ray gun… It’s pointed at my head. There are doctors standing around. They put some drug in my arm. Then I can feel it in my head. My head is getting hotter. The ray gun is burning my head, Oh God; it is burning up my brain. I can feel it. I scream. They give me another shot and I pass out.” Her eyes shot open, “Dr. O’Hara, were they burning out my brain?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. What do you think?” he asked.

“I think they were making me crazy,” she said.

Mike O’Hara knew what he thought and it scared him. He thought she had been made to forget and the method had been estrogen washing the hippocampus. By whom, and why? That was what scared him. No legitimate medical facility would do something like this. Who did that leave? Terrorists? The Government? Was there really a difference when they wanted something badly enough? He looked at his patient and saw she was upset by what she had remembered. He called a halt for the day and sent her back to the ward.

Tim sat down at his computer and started typing up the session. Then when he was done, he sat back. Was he being paranoid? But who had done it, wiped the girl’s memory so completely? He remembered that the US Government made every computer company in the US give a key to the Government so they could unlock every crypto code used. Every crypto code written had a special key inside that the US government could unlock. Why? Maybe he was being paranoid, but maybe he wasn’t either. He took out a USB device and saved the session on it, and put it on his key chain.

The next morning Mike made sure to see Eve. She had recovered from the previous day. “Would you be willing to try to see the past?”

She nodded, “I want to know what happened,” she said.

“Good, after lunch we’ll try again.”

Eve smiled but he could see the strain behind the smile.

Tim started the session as before. But he tried to go before the operation to spare the girl. “Eve, can you move to before the operation, before they wiped away your memory?”

She closed her eyes. She squirmed in the chair, then said, “It’s all black, boiling clouds and fog. Wait, something…”

“Go to that,” he directed. “What do you see?”

“Men, men in suits. It’s my house, a trailer. I’m home alone and suddenly these men break in, I scream, they grab me and put something over my face. I start choking, then I fall asleep. That’s all,” she said.

“Good, you are doing good. Do you see anything earlier?” he asked.

“I think so… School,” she said.

“Good, go to that incident,” he said. “What happened?”

“It was an assembly. The Principal was there and the school board president and each of the class presidents. I was the freshman class president. It’s the President,” she said breathlessly. Her eyes flew open, “I’m not Eve. My name is Tricia, Tricia MacDougall.

Mike nodded, “That’s good. We should be able to track that down. Now Tricia, which President?” Mike asked.

“Him, the real one. The US President.”

“Okay,” Mike soothed her even though he was surprised and now worried. “Go on,” he encouraged her.

“The school band is playing that song, the one for the President and he came in, everyone is shouting and he’s waving. He stopped and started shaking hands, as he shakes my hand he leans over and tells me, ‘You’re very pretty,’ and he winks,” she said.

“What happened then?” Mike asked.

“He gave a speech and we all clapped like crazy. I mean no President has ever been to our town before. There are cameras and reporters all over, it’s a zoo. Then he left,” she said.

Mike said, “And?”

“I went to class. The day just flew by. After school that day, I went out and there was this guy, all in a suit and dark glasses. He was holding a photo and he called to me. It was my picture. How did he get a picture of me so fast? So he says, ‘The President would like to talk to you. Do you have anywhere you have to be?’ I live with my parents but they aren’t home much, so I didn’t have anywhere I had to be. The guy leads me to a car with the glass all dark and we get in the back. They take me to a hotel, but around back. He sneaks me in a door and the guys sneak me up the elevator. Nobody was in the hall. They take me to a room and open the door. He’s inside and he’s wearing a robe. He says ‘Hello dear. I was right, you are pretty.’ He comes over and he’s telling me about helping out the country and stress and all sorts of crap. Then he grabs me and kisses me. I was like, ‘This is the President.’ I froze. I think he took that as an okay ’cuz he started pulling off my dress. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I seen him on TV so much and here he is pulling off my dress, the son of a bitch. That fast, he’s got my dress off and my bra and he’s reaching for my panties. Then I was standing there naked. I tried to cover myself as he tossed off the robe and he was naked. I tried to scream but just couldn’t. ‘He’s the President,’ I kept thinking like this couldn’t be happening.

He pushed my shoulders so I went down on my knees. He stuck his thing in my face and said ‘Suck it sweetheart. Get it hard for the US,’ or some shit like that. Finally he stuck it in my mouth. It was disgusting but I swear I didn’t know what to do, so I did it, sucked on it and it got big. He pulled me up on the bed got between my legs and used his legs to push my legs apart. He rubbed his thing over me and pushed hard as he lays down on me, trapping me. Oh God, it hurt. That’s when I screamed. He put his hand over my mouth as he started bucking into me. I was getting all dizzy and I couldn’t believe this was happening. I just kept thinking, ‘He’s the President,’ like it couldn’t be true. He was pumping into me. It hurt and he had his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe well. Finally, he took his hand and I was gasping for breath and he moaned and I felt all wet down there.

He stopped and rolled away. I lay there at first and couldn't believe this had just happened. I rolled away crying. He jumps out of bed and says, ‘You need to get dressed.’ He just raped me and he’s saying ‘Get dressed.’ He puts on his robe and two guys come in. I was so embarrassed; I rolled onto the floor so they couldn’t see me and got into my clothes while I was lying on the floor. One guy grabs my arm and pulls me back into the hall. They drove me home and let me out. As I got out, the guy in the back who hasn’t said a word to me says, ‘Miss, it would be best for you and your family if you never mentioned this to anyone.’ I just wanted to forget it. I went in and took a bath and cleaned myself. I must have washed myself twenty times.” She opened her eyes and looked up at Mike, “Did that really happen?”

“I don’t know. Do you think it’s real?” he asked.

She looked away and Tim saw tears in her eyes. She nodded.

“You’ve answered your own question,” he said. Eve broke down in tears. Tim let her cry herself out. He had a nurse take her back to the ward and prescribed a sleeping pill. He took the tapes of the sessions and called the Chronicle asking for a reporter he had met before.

They met at his house. Mike played the tapes for the reporter. The man asked, “Do you think she is telling the truth?”

“Well, there is a lot of controversy about memory and recalling them under hypnotism. That’s why I don’t use it. It’s hard to make up details like this while awake. I think we were getting real memories. Where they are and what, I don’t know,” he said.

The reporter said, “Are you keeping the tapes secure?”

“I have a locked cabinet in my office,” Mike answered.

“Good. I have to do a little research. You really think this happened?” he asked the Doctor.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “And you should be able to find out if a Tricia disappeared after the President visited her school.”

The reporter nodded, “Thanks.”

When he got back to his office his first call was to a former reporter friend who now worked for the press secretary. After all, the reporter was a patriot. And the country couldn’t afford a change of administration right now. It was best for the country, not to have them back in power he kept telling himself.

Eve Doe, AKA Tricia MacDougall, was reported missing from the hospital the next day. Tim O’Hara hadn’t told anyone other than the reporter about the session and the tapes were never found. She was in an unlocked ward so it was assumed that she just walked out. But her disappearance was lost in the mystery of Doctor O’Hara. He missed his rounds that morning. They searched his office and nothing appeared touched. They got in a locksmith to open his locked files and found them untouched. It looked like all of his papers were there, but there were no tapes and since no one knew of the tapes, it aroused no suspicion.

His apartment was untouched, but they found several well worn books on how to disappear and assume a new identity and his closet had been partially emptied. No one who knew him could really believe that he would just disappear but the police thought otherwise. He was reported as a missing person but there was no investigation. They assumed that he would turn up in North Dakota or somewhere one day.

The operative sat down, “It’s taken care of,” he said tiredly.

“Are you sure this time?” she asked.

He nodded, “You shouldn’t ask.”

She nodded knowing the only reason he wouldn’t tell her is if it was illegal, really illegal. “Good, the little slut.”

The agent said, “You think he’s the first President to do something illegal? Christ every president does. Well, maybe not Jimmy Crater, but he was a total failure as President. Maybe to be a good president you have to be willing to do whatever it takes.” The supervisor looked at the new kid who protested, “It wasn’t the President who ordered it.”

The Supervisor shrugged, “Remember Ollie North? Think about whether or not you can leave the job on the job, because to be a good agent you have to have no memory of what you see or hear on the job, ever. There’s a reason they call us the Secret Service. Go home and think if you have what it takes to work here.”

Yes, I know this wasn't erotic. That's why I marked it not erotic. Is it possible? According to the article I read, yes. Likely? You have to answer that for yourself. I answer all feedback. Please make sure your address is correct and you are set up to accept email from me:

Or you can e-mail me directly

The next story is Taming Brenda

Return to Somethings Different homepage