Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/22

 FBI and they put out the usual bulletins and inquiries and tried to match fingerprints—without results.

No family claimed me, no friends stepped forward, no wife or children rushed to identify me. Nor was there any clue as to what I'd been doing holing up in a Venice motel with about seven thousand dollars in cash—or what I'd intended to do with the four thousand I had left when I took off in the general direction of Las Vegas.

I couldn't remember.

My mind couldn't remember and my body couldn't remember. Thirty years had been wiped out.

At first there was even the painful and embarrassing matter of re-learning the simple physiological habit-patterns governing ingestion and elimination. And, after the casts were removed, the business of learning to walk again. I was like a child; more accurately, like a newborn infant.

And that, I suppose, is why Dr. Wagram put me in the womb.

I knew where Wagram picked up his neuropsychiatric techniques, but never did discover where he'd acquired his theories. And even after I'd regained a certain measure of comprehension, a certain vocabulary which extended my frame of reference, I was unable to obtain satisfaction in the matter.

"There's no point in explaining," Wagram told me. The short, plump, balding little man regarded me with enigmatic eyes. "Poor Reich tried to explain about the orgone, and they laughed at him. Moreno's psychodrama techniques haven't won general acceptance. Even Jung has had trouble with his theories about the use of the mandala. The innovator, the unorthodox practitioner, had best be silent and let his work speak for itself, in terms of results.

"I will say only this. Out of trauma comes fugue, out of fugue comes the retreat to the womb. Many psychotherapists attempt to block this retreat. As the record attests, few succeed. So I have chosen another course. The patient seeks the safety and comfort of the womb? Very well, I will give it to him. I have built a womb, where he is safe and secure, where he can find rest and reassurance. When the time comes that life stirs anew within him, when he desires to be born again, he and I together will weave 22