The Eden Clinic
Detective Reinbrect entered the interrogation room, file in hand, then sat down across from Maggie who remained handcuffed, sitting at the opposite side of a small table.
Maggie stared intently at the Detective's file. She asked, "Does that tell you who I really am?"
Reinbrect put the file aside, folded his hands and stared into the woman's eyes for a long moment. "My supervisors told me quite a story about you, Maggie," Reinbrect finally said. "It is Maggie, right?"
"That's the name 'they' put inside my head. I have no idea who I really am," Maggie responded.
"Tell me about that," Reinbrect invited.
"You already know everything, just read my statement," Maggie said. She was exhausted. For two days now she'd been in police custody, ever since they found her unconscious near a freeway.
Reinbrect said, "You tell me your story; I tell you what my file says about who you really are. Deal?"
Maggie closed her eyes and responded, "Deal."
"Start at the beginning and tell me what you remember," Reinbrect advised.
Maggie laughed at this and said, "I'll tell you what I remember but I can't tell you if it's true."
Detective Reinbrect waited patiently.
Maggie began at the beginning....
~
"It started at the local hospital. I wandered into Emergency and collapsed. They believed I'd been living on the streets for quite some time based upon my poor health and appearance. I was told later that I fell into a coma. That was when they transferred me to the Eden Clinic. That was where I received my recovery treatment after I came out of the coma three days later. Dr. Stevens was right there when I woke; like a hawk hovering over it's kill.
They had the whole thing planned before I even regained consciousness. When I woke, I was lying in a hospital bed. I couldn't remember a damn thing; nothing at all. I couldn't remember how I got there, or even my own name.
Dr. Stevens told me that all attempts at discovering my identity had come up fruitless. I had no form of identification on my person. My fingerprints and photo turned up nothing in everyone's data banks. To society, I was a ghost and didn't exist.
Dr. Stevens said I had a serious concussion; that someone must have struck me on the back of the head. He believed that this triggered my extreme amnesia, but told me not to worry for my memory would return in time.
The Eden Clinic specialized in extreme disorders, such as amnesia cases like mine. There were several other patients, like myself, but they kept us separated as much as possible. Dr. Stephens said it was for our own good and that association with other patients caused too much confusion.
My recovery went very slow at first. I was subjected to various therapy techniques, including hypnosis. At first, there was nothing. But one day I remembered my name. Then over time, other memories returned: My name was Maggie and I was not married. I enjoyed playing tennis and cooking.
As time went on, more images returned. They were like pieces of a puzzle that made no sense by themselves. It was extremely frustrating but with the help of the staff at Eden Clinic, the pieces started coming together.
A couple weeks turned into a month, and I wanted to get out of there. What I'd learned from the memory fragments was that I was involved in some sort of dispute with my family. It had something to do with my wealthy father molesting me at a young age. At some point, I told everyone about it. This threatened my father's reputation and my family turned against me. That was how I ended up on the streets eventually. In all these memories, I still didn't know my last name or where I was from. It was a difficult process putting the pieces back together.
Dr. Stevens said I was making tremendous progress but I was growing impatient. All these memories felt so foreign to me and I couldn't attach anything real to any of them. They were like watching home movies in my head of someone else's life. Nothing felt tangible or made me feel anything.
That was when I thought getting outside the clinic walls would trigger something.
Dr. Stevens strongly advised against it, but never said I couldn't leave. It was always like that. I was never physically forced to stay there, but they had a way of keeping you put without restraints. You see, they did something to me. I'm not sure what exactly, but they put something in my mind. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.
I remember one afternoon in particular. I was out on the hospital grounds, taking my daily walk through the gardens that gave the clinic it's name. The hospital was big and set back in the country, somewhere isolated and private. The gardens were bordered by woods, but I could hear a freeway in the distance. My first thought was to cut through the woods and get out for a while. Every time I tried, something horrible fell over me. I don't know why, but I became dreadfully afraid of something in those woods. It was completely irrational, but the longer I thought about walking through them, the more afraid I became. It got so bad once, I ran back to my room, convinced something out there was coming to get me. That's how they kept us there. They didn't need walls or gates for they had their mental prisons firmly established deep in our minds. I wish I'd known that more clearly then, but I understand now."
~
At this point, Detective Reinbrect asked someone to bring Maggie some water and something to eat. She was grateful for the pause.
Reinbrect looked deeply troubled.
More than ever, Maggie desperately wanted to know what was in that file.
Reinbrect went fishing, "Tell me about the little girl. She seems to be the vital link in all that went wrong in your recovery."
Maggie immediately became uncomfortable. She drifted off to a very lonely place and continued her story....
~
"I started to suspect something was "off" about these memories of my life. They just seemed out of sync in my head and I couldn't relate with them. It was a clever bit of fiction, for sure, but none of it felt right. I began to play along with my "recovery" because they all wanted it. That much I could easily tell. Dr. Stevens was especially concerned about my reactions toward my returning memory. So I put on my best poker face and convinced them all that I was feeling better as each new memory surfaced.
It was the memory of the little girl that woke me one night and shattered their little house of cards. I even knew her name. It was Mary. She was the only memory I trusted and it felt real. I guarded this new revelation and kept it from the staff. Something told me they wouldn't like it that I remembered her and that this would upset them terribly. Call it intuition, I don't care, I just knew to keep her to myself. I continued to dream about Mary, and I held on to this one truth while in my head the false memories continued to torment me with their lies.
One day, I had a breakthrough that exposed the mountain of deception for what it was. I discovered that Mary was my daughter!
~
Detective Reinbrect seemed extremely uncomfortable now. He said, "So that was when you decided to make a run for it. How did you get through the woods?"
Maggie smiled and said, "It was Mary that helped me. When those scary thoughts of something in the woods screamed at me to run back to my room, I simply ignored those foreign thoughts and focused on my daughter's lovely face. I was almost to the other side of the woods before I heard those hideous sirens going off from the clinic. They were on to me. Which meant, if they caught me now, they would find out about my girl, and take that memory from me."
Reinbrect look ed puzzled.
Maggie continued, "You see, I don't know how they did it, but they must have implanted those memories in my mind, like rebooting a computer and rewriting a new program to replace the old one. I think they caused my memory loss so they could turn me into someone else. Don't you see? They thought they erased it all. But they didn't. I remembered my little girl!"
At this point, Reinbrect opened the file and tossed it on the table. He said, "Fair is fair. Now you can know the truth about who you are. But I warn you, you're not going to like it."
Now Maggie was puzzled. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Detective Reinbrect got up and started for the door. Before leaving, he turned and said, "I have one more question for you though. How come you never asked why we put you in handcuffs? Doesn't that concern you at all?"
Maggie looked at the handcuffs as if noticing them for the first time. She didn't know why, but she felt oddly comfortable in them. It was as if she'd worn them before and this was not the first time she'd visited an interrogation room. Maggie found it strange that she wasn't surprised by their extra security measures.
"Go ahead," Reinbrect said, "read the file. You have a right to know what you did. I'm sorry you have to find out this way. I feel sorry for what happened to you, Claire."
"Claire? Is that my real name?" She asked.
"Yes, Claire. We know all about you," Reinbrect said. He paused a moment more, then said, "I'll go ahead and tell you this much because you won't find it in that file. The Eden Clinic is not a clinic. It's a prison."
"What?" Claire was shocked.
"That's right," Reinbrect said. "Only the worst of the worst get sent there; inmates on death row, like yourself. What you don't remember is that you were given the choice to volunteer for a new rehabilitation program; highly experimental and very top secret. You volunteered to avoid death by lethal injection but you were never supposed to remember anything from your old life, especially your daughter. That's the only way the new memories could work. The old life had to be completely wiped out. It's very unfortunate for you that it didn't work. I'll leave you alone now. Again, I'm sorry."
Claire reached for the file and began to read.
As Reinbrect closed the door behind him, he heard Claire scream.
"Will the fabricated file be convincing?" Dr. Steven's asked, coming down the hall. He'd been watching the interrogation via the hidden camera that was placed in the interrogation room.
"Yes sir, very convincing," Reinbrect said. "By the time she's done, she'll be begging us to give her new memories. We'll just have to be more thorough next time."
"Indeed," Dr. Stevens agreed. "We'll have to see if these back up memory implants hold. Will she believe this second set of memories to be her own? I wonder." As an afterthought, Stevens added, "She must never be allowed to know her daughter is alive. It's unfortunate we haven't found her yet. Whatever we seem to do, we can't seem to remove the daughter. It's troubling."
"The memories will hold," Reinbrect said. "By the time she leaves that room, Claire will remember killing her entire family, including her daughter. She will remember everything we placed there. The guilt of murdering her own child should make removing the real memory of her much easier this time."
"Let's hope so," Dr. Stevens said. "When they brought her in, we were assured that she had no remaining kin still alive. The daughter was never on any of the records."
"Claire kept the pregnancy quiet. That's why we didn't know," Reinbrect said.
"Well, we know now don't we," Steven's finished. "We'll start the process again in a few days; give the guilt time to linger. Then, we wipe her mind properly and leave no traces this time. Lord knows if she ever got out and remembered everything. We'd be ruined. All it will take is for her to remember Mary again, and all the memories will come back. No one must find out what we've done here, and for how long. All those missing children reports will start to point back at us. Work harder at wiping out the daughter this time. Remember, no traces."
"I understand Dr. Stevens," Reinbrect said. "No traces."
They reached the end of the hallway and together stepped outside into the gardens.