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 feeling it during the past year we'd been together.

Of course I'd asked Dr. Wagram, first. We had a long talk about marriage and its risks—particularly as they might apply to someone in my rather unusual position and circumstances. He hadn't been too encouraging.

But I didn't need encouragement at the time. I needed Roxie. And for a while she took the place of any continuing therapy. It wasn't for many months that I went back to Dr. Wagram's clinic.

When I went, Roxie wasn't involved. In fact, she didn't even know. She had met Wagram, of course, once or twice during the early months of our marriage. I'd told her a bit about my past—or lack of one, rather—and of what Wagram had done for me. She hadn't pried or probed, merely accepted my story as she accepted me. And as I accepted her. For my own part, I never spoke to her of her earlier years. Even though she could remember them, I sensed that there was much unhappiness in that area, and I avoided it; just as I avoided my own earliest memories of lying under that car and screaming my mind away into the echoing night.

The trouble was, I couldn't avoid such recurrent recall completely, not even in Roxie's arms. And so the time came when I went back to Wagram—and even to the womb.

I did a little reading about amnesia, and what I learned bothered me. "There must be something I'm afraid to face, something pretty awful," I told him. "Surely by this time I should have a gradual return of memory. Partial recollection ought to be triggered in, at least. Couldn't you try some more word-association techniques? And what about hypnoanalysis, narcohypnosis, or—"

Wagram waved my suggestions aside. He was never a violent man, always a quiet one, but his mere casualness carried weight.

"Ive not found it necessary to discuss my other work here at the clinic, Steve," he told me. "The work which supports all of my research, all of my independent investigations, my staff. You met Dr. Bittner, of course, and Dr. Corelli. But did you know that I have four more internists on the payroll, and three full-time nurses? Do you realize that at no time are there less than a dozen patients here, plus the others that I see regularly by appointment? 26