The Diagnosis

Businessman Bill Chalmers descends into a nightmare as he pursues a diagnosis for the strange illness--involving a bizarre memory loss and a strange numbness that gradually affects his entire body--that has affected him. By the author of Einstein's Dreams. 50,000 first printing.

ON THE SUBWAY
People must have been in a great hurry, for no one noticed anything wrong with Bill Chalmers as he dashed from his automobile one fine summer morning. Earnest and dressed in a blue cotton suit, he was immediately swept up by the mass of commuters also galloping from their cars toward the elevators and down to the trains of the Alewife Station, a cavernous structure of concrete and crisscrossed steel struts, one end of the Red Line through Boston. At the ground floor, Chalmers presented his pass and rushed through the turnstile. He was halfway down the stairs to the platform when he heard the taut string of electronic beeps and the doors began sliding on train Number One. A woman groaned. Another commuter, a tall nervous man with squeaky shoes, lunged ahead and ran alongside the train, shouting and slapping his magazine against the red paneled doors. But the train was already in motion, its steel wheels scraping and squealing so fiercely that several people had to turn up their head sets. The tall man swiveled and shot Chalmers an accusing stare, as if his lack of sufficient speed through the turnstile had caused a half-dozen people to miss their trains. What a jerk, Chalmers thought to himself and looked down at his watch. It was 8:22. Twenty-three minutes to his stop, a nine-minute walk to his building, two minutes on the elevator, and he'd be sitting at his desk by 9:00. Assuming the train on Track Two arrived and departed within four minutes, as it should. With some satisfaction he reminded himself that, unlike the ridiculously agitated man with the magazine, he had calculated his morning commute so that he could miss the first train and still arrive at the office on time. Abruptly, he began worrying that the train on Track Two might be late. Never had that happened when he'd missed train Number One, but it was certainly a possibility. Stroking his mustache, he continued down the stairs and looked again at his watch. He mustn't waste the four minutes. However, he slowed his descent to drop fifty cents into the cup of a homeless woman sprawled on the edge of the stairs. She looked disturbingly like his old piano teacher. "Thank you, kind sir," she said. "Please don't thank me," he answered, embarrassed. "I thank everyone who is more fortunate than me," she called to him as he hurried down to the platform. Waves of people flowed around him, jostling and crushing from all sides, shoving each other to gain an advantage for the next arriving train. Gulped down in seconds were muffins and rolls, hard-boiled eggs, bananas, coffee, and crackers. Some commuters tried to unfold newspapers in the cramped space but gave up and contented themselves with staring at the digital sign on the kiosk, where bits of news and the correct time scrolled by in bright glowing dots. The dozens of upturned faces were waxy and yellow beneath the underground fluorescent bulbs.

Even in that pale yellow light, if any of those waiting had looked carefully into Chalmers's eyes, they might have observed a faint petrifaction, a solidification, some sign that all was not well. But they did not, occupied with their own busy schedules and the marching dots on the sign. Chalmers himself felt perfectly fit, aside from the normal stresses and aches of a man just past forty, arguably overweight but by no means fat. He glanced at his watch, 8:23, and forged a path to the kiosk. Above his head, the digital sign flickered and hummed and something clattered repeatedly against the high concrete ceiling and the air sagged with the burnt smell of hot brake fluid. Several radios blared, jumbling their throbbing bass notes in competing rhythms. Huddled against the kiosk as if battling a strong wind, a woman in a smart linen suit was delivering instructions into a cellular telephone. Chalmers couldn't help noticing that her phone was a new model, considerably smaller and sleeker than his. He took out his own phone from his briefcase. As he began dialing, he found that he was still shaken by the poor woman on the stairs. Her misery had cast a gloom over him, which he tried to forget by pushing the tiny buttons as fast as he could. First, he called Jenkins, to make sure that the proper documents would be ready for his 9:15 meeting. All was in order. He hung up and stood on his toes, peering down the dark tunnel of Track Two. Over the track, hundreds of glowing red neon tubes dangled down from the ceiling, one of them broken and blinking like a Christmas tree light. His telephone rang. Two men reached inside their briefcases, thinking it theirs. "Mr. Chalmers, this is Robert again. You didn't tell me if you wanted the Lehman file for the meeting." "No. Thank you, Robert." "Just checking to make sure everything is in order, Mr. Chalmers. We're set for TEM at ten-thirty." That Jenkins was an excellent young man, Chalmers said to himself. He would remember to compliment him when he arrived at the office. People didn't compliment each other nearly enough. Everyone was too quick to criticize. Chalmers looked at his watch and dialed his voicemail. As the connection was being relayed through space or wherever--who knew exactly where cellular transmissions were at any one instant?--he twisted his neck and gazed up at the digital sign: "8:24 . . . Introducing a new feature of Providential Services: Providential Online . . . Get stock quotations on your pager, minute by minute . . . Think of Providential Online as 'Work wherever, whenever'™ . . . PO@Provins.com . . . 8:24." Chalmers fumbled with a pencil and hurriedly copied down the e-mail address before it fled from the screen while a feminine voice crooned from his telephone receiver, "The Plymouth voicemail system will be disabled for twelve hours, beginning at midnight on June 26, while Telecom performs an upgrade of the system. At Telecom, progress is our business. You have three messages." Which must have arrived in the previous twenty minutes, since Chalmers last checked his voicemail. A dog barked. What were dogs doing down here? he wondered. People should be more considerate. Last week he had come within inches of stepping in dog poop. He retrieved his first message. "Jasper Olswanger calling. I need to talk--hold it a moment, please. . . . Sorry, that was call waiting. I need to talk to you as soon as possible. You've got my number." Someone was shouting Chalmers's name over the roiling of voices and music and dogs. He removed his ear from the receiver and went up on his toes. Twenty feet away he spotted the shouter, now waving and grinning. "Yes," Chalmers answered, trying to make out the man's head in the ocean of pale, fluorescent faces. Gradually he recognized the sunken eyes of Tim Cotter, his neighbor across the street. He didn't know Cotter very well. Cotter worked in a small bank somewhere downtown and came home late every night to the loud reprisals of his wife. Chalmers waved back good-naturedly and started to retrieve his second message. Someone elbowed him, shoving the phone into the side of his head. The neighbor continued waving and shouting "Bill, Bill," with a definite note of urgency, as if there was something he needed to tell him that moment. "What?" Chalmers shouted back, still standing on his toes. His neighbor didn't seem to hear him, then removed one of his earphones and yelled, "What did you say?" "I thought you wanted to tell me something," Chalmers shouted back, realizing at once that he had used far too many words under the circumstances. "Lower your voice," yelled a cheeky college boy standing next to him. "You're destroying my eardrums." The student made a face and slapped his hands over his ears. Chalmers glanced at his watch. He had only two minutes or less to retrieve his messages. With a sigh, he began working his way through the concrete thick crowd toward his neighbor. Cotter shouted something else, which Chalmers didn't hear, and refastened his headphones. Now Chalmers could see that his neighbor was sitting on some kind of fancy foldable chair, like a beach chair or a country lawn chair. He made a mental note that he should get one for himself. "Guess what I'm doing," said Cotter, keeping one of the earphones pressed against his ear so that he could listen and talk at the same time. His fingers tapped on his briefcase. "I don't know. What are you doing?" "I'm reading," said Cotter, grinning broadly. He paused, to let the announcement sink in. "Books on Tape. The Bridges of Madison County." Chalmers made a thumbs-up sign. For the first time, he realized how much he disliked Cotter. In a hundred little ways, Cotter always tried to make him feel like a slacker. Cotter was just envious of anyone seriously engaged in their profession. It was Cotter who was the slacker. The dog was barking again and Chalmers began coughing, having inhaled an invisible cloud of the burnt brake-fluid air. In addition, the morning's usual indigestion had just slammed into his stomach. "Nice to talk to you," said Cotter. "I haven't seen you since Phil's thing." He put his second earphone back on. At that instant, with a high shriek of metal on metal, the train on Track Two arrived. Chalmers looked at his watch, 8:26, and surged forward with the torrent. By the time he had squeezed through the doors and been shoved to a spot in the middle of the car, the seats were long gone. The upright commuters, pressed hard against each other, clutched their coffee cups and muffins close to their bodies and searched in vain for handrails to grasp. Chalmers began brooding over his unretrieved messages. Maybe one of his appointments had been rescheduled. He could have an important call from New York. Those people got to their desks early. As he was considering the various possibilities and their dark implications, with the knowledge that he would be incommunicado for the next several minutes, an extremely loud alarm bell rang, then the series of electronic beeps, the doors slid together, and the train jolted into motion.

It was between Harvard and Central that Chalmers forgot where he was going. This realization did not arrive suddenly but seemed to trickle up slowly into his consciousness, like a trapped bubble of air rising from the bottom of a deep pond. At first, he was calm. He was most likely suffering from a momentary lapse of memory, as when he'd forgotten Morla's name at the last New Year's party.

He took a long breath and maneuvered himself between bodies to the front of the car, where he could read the list of stops on the wall. They were all familiar, but he could not remember which one was his. He pronounced the name of each stop softly, so as not to draw attention to himself, and ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair. When the train screeched to a halt at Central Square, he peered out the window and studied the token booth and the passageways and the stairs. Commuters hurried forcefully in every direction. Could this be where I get off? he asked himself, trying to jog his memory. He couldn't decide. The doors slid shut and the train was in motion again. He looked at his watch. It was 8:39. If he didn't straighten himself out soon he'd be late. But he was not late yet. No, he was not late yet. If he could just remember his stop before he reached it, no time would be lost. With that logical deduction, he seemed to relax slightly and gazed out the window into the black tunnel flying by. He remembered that he was due at his office at 9:00, that he had appointments at 9:15, 10:30, and noon. Then, with alarm, he became aware that he couldn't recollect precisely where he had to be at 9:00, or who he was meeting. The meetings, the meetings. He strained to remember. They were probably important. In fact, it was quite possible that his meetings were critical, that a great deal hung in the balance. His grip tightened on the overhead rail. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He had worked in his office a long time, he was certain of that, and he had always met his responsibilities with efficiency and speed. In a sickening premonition, he imagined the vice president smiling sympathetically at him and then quietly transferring away his better accounts. A sweat broke out on his cheeks and the palms of his hands.

So distraught was Chalmers by this time that he didn't think to open his briefcase, which contained, among other items, his appointment book and dozens of letters and office memoranda bearing the name of his company and its address. Instead, he looked anxiously into the faces of the two men standing on each side of him. One sported a faint smile, as if amused by the crush of humanity around him, and was dictating something into a tiny recorder. The other had lightly closed his eyes, possibly engaged in one of those new business visualization techniques. The two seemed so confident and self-assured in their plans for the day. He could not bring himself to ask them for help. Maybe he could locate his neighbor. Standing on his toes again, he looked in both directions without success. Then he noticed that a man in a green plaid suit, occupying one of the scarce seats on the car, was gazing intently at him through the thicket of torsos and arms. As soon as the seated man saw that his gaze was returned, he quickly went back to typing on a computer in his lap. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps he was a professional colleague, or possibly an employee. His computer screen was tilted at such a wide angle that Chalmers could see some kind of spreadsheet, with a colored graph shimmering at the top. After a few seconds of purposeful typing, the man looked up again, apparently to verify that Chalmers still saw him profitably at work, then returned with a smirk to his computer. Looking about, Chalmers noticed that other people, even those standing, were reading reports, making memos, checking off columns of figures and lists. Everyone was busy at work. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and began thinking of something to write on it. Immediately, the man in the green plaid suit craned his neck nearly out of his collar to see what Chalmers was doing. This unwelcome surveillance made Chalmers even more upset and moist.
Avoiding eye contact with the green-suited man but feeling his gaze, Chalmers once more pushed to the front of the car to ponder the list of stops. This time he pronounced the name of each stop out loud. "Do you have a problem?" said a huge woman with blue frizzy hair and two silver rings in her nose. She looked him up and down, her chin remaining hidden in the rolls of fat around her neck, then offered him some of her blueberry muffin. The train pulled into another station. People raced off, people raced on. There were still twice as many commuters as seats. Without recognition Chalmers gaped at the fluorescent terrain. Men and women fled toward the exits at both ends of the station. Between the tracks hung long silver chimes, and an enamel map of some kind covered the wall. He was beginning to feel nauseous. Could this be my stop? he said to himself, again trying to shake loose his memory. A sign on the wall said "MIT." MIT? Could he possibly work at MIT? He examined his clothes and tried to recite some school math formulas to himself.

It now occurred to him to look in his briefcase. "My briefcase," he shrieked when he realized that it was not in his hand. At his exclamation, people rotated their heads to stare at him. When he succeeded in groping his way back to the middle of the car, his briefcase was gone. And with it, all identification, since he routinely carried his wallet in his briefcase on the advice of his chiropractor. For the last several years, he had been told that his tight muscles and little pains were caused by his wallet pressing against certain cartilages and nerves. "Has anyone seen a leather briefcase?" he shouted without thinking. The train lurched forward and he grabbed fo...