"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

JOKE ABOUT IT all you want losing a day's recollection is no laughing matter. Something similar presumably had happened to Dugan.
"Scattered reports are beginning to come in," Andy told me on the phone from Atlanta the next morning, "but it's hard to track at this point. People are home sick, sleeping off a flu they might not even realize they forgot a couple of hours when they were awake."
"Unless something important to that person happened in that time," I said.
"That's right," Andy said.
"Which has happened to me, now, twice," I said.
Andy sighed. "I hear you. But we can't rush this. Look, let's say there's nothing really going on here "
"I think there is."
"Okay, let's say I agree with you," Andy said. "But what if we're wrong what if there really is no memory loss and we ask a randomly selected sample of physicians around the country to ask patients they've treated if they've suffered a memory loss? You know how that works we're bound to get a few patients saying yes, just because of the halo effect."
"A percentage of subjects are always inclined to say whatever they perceive their questioner as wanting them to answer, if the questioner is considered an authority. Yes, I know that."
"So that's one problem," Andy said.
"Well, your survey should focus on patients who've been treated for this damn cough, anyway." I cleared my throat. It didn't help. "I bet you'll find that a lot more of them report memory gaps than whatever statistic usually results from the halo effect."
"That's what we're going to do," Andy said. "But until we're also able to get responses from a control group if we can find a part of the country that was less wracked by the cough we're not going to know much. That's another problem."
I frowned. Then cleared my throat again.
"We'll get to the bottom of this," Andy said. "But it's going to take a while. In the meantime, let me know about any other clear-cut cases of memory loss that you "
My other phone line rang. I asked Andy to hold on.
It was Ed Monti. "Sorry to spring this on you last minute," he said. "But I was wondering if you had time to come down to the ADA's office right now for a meeting. It's about the Riverside case."

I WORK FOR the police department, not the medical examiner, so technically Ed Monti couldn't direct me to do anything. But I'd found over the years that it behooved me to be on the ME's good side.
I was in Elaine Rubin's small office in thirty minutes. She was assistant DA for the Riverside murder case. Ed was there, as were Claudia Gonzales the foot cop who had been first on the crime scene and Ron Greave, her partner. No one was smiling.
"Thanks for rushing down here, Phil," Elaine said. She was in her mid-thirties, short-cropped black hair, business suit, and a severe, angular face that Jack Dugan once described as a tomahawk. No nonsense, all business.
"Sure," I said, and tried to break the tension with a friendly air. I took the one empty chair.
"We're interviewing everyone who's had anything to do with the Riverside case, Phil. Could you tell us everything you know about it?" Elaine asked.
"Well, it's not really any more than I knew when I was called in on it "
"That's okay. Please tell us what you know anyway. If it's okay with you, we'll record this," Elaine said.
I caught Claudia's eye for a second. She avoided my gaze. Greave was staring ahead, impassively. I looked at Ed. He nodded encouragement.
I shrugged. "No problem." I told her what I knew about Jillian Murphy, the victim. She was a Columbia University graduate student, going for her Ph.D. in English literature. She had been found naked, strangled to death, in the thread of park on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, by a couple walking their dogs early in the morning. No sign of rape or foul play. There were rumors, so far unconfirmed, that she had had an intense relationship with a woman, also a graduate student at Columbia, about a year ago. The sexuality implied in her being stripped naked, combined with the lack of rape, and her rumored relationship, had led some people in the Department to speculate that maybe this was a murder arising out of a lesbian lovers' quarrel. "I'm sorry I haven't been able to do more on this," I concluded, "but I've been getting increasingly concerned about something else that "
"That's okay." Elaine waved off my explanation. "No need to apologize. What you just told us is extremely helpful."
"There's been some inconsistency in the police reports about this case," Ed offered. "And we're just trying to get all accounts down on tape, so Elaine can build her case so she can have a case when an arrest is made "
"I'm not being inconsistent," Claudia spoke up, agitated, aggravated. "I just don't remember!"
She suddenly had my complete attention.
"Officer Gonzales has no recollection now of first seeing the body," Elaine explained. "The couple who discovered the body went shouting for help, running with their dogs from Riverside Drive to Broadway. Gonzales was on her way to work, heard the commotion, and went with the couple to investigate. She arrived on the scene alone, without her partner. Her initial report gives very specific details on the state and position of the body these could be crucial in our case "
"I'm a good cop!" Claudia insisted.
Elaine looked at her.
"How the hell could I just forget a whole morning like that? I don't get it," Claudia said.
Her partner Greave reached from his seat and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "With the stress of this job, it's not surprising," he said.
I opened my mouth to give a better explanation, but succumbed to a spasm of hacking coughs.


TWO

I dragged myself two evenings later to a lecture at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, a few blocks west of bustling Columbus Circle and Central Park. I was tired, coughing, on the edge of a fever. But the weather was kind, and this was a lecture I didn't want to miss.
Professor Robert McNair was a cognitive anthropologist. He studied the importance of thinking in the evolution of our species. His lecture tonight was on the significance of memory in human culture.
I looked around the audience about a hundred students and maybe a dozen faculty. I saw no sign of Claudia. Perhaps she had forgotten that she had told me about this lecture, just this afternoon? Not likely. Claudia, Jenna, Dugan, and the handful of others I had learned had lost a piece of their memories had no trouble remembering from then on, once they had recovered. Still...
McNair took the stage. He was an impressive-looking man, in his late forties or early fifties, of mixed African-American and European ancestry. Appropriately, he spoke without notes. He had no paper to read. "I used to go through the pretense of carrying a batch of blank sheets up the podium," McNair began, "so the audience would feel I had prepared for the lecture. I hope you'll feel I prepared for this lecture even though it comes to you entirely from my mouth and my brain."
The audience chuckled. I sat in an aisle seat always a good bet if you had a cough that might require a rapid exit. To my left was a priest, who looked to be in his early thirties. I didn't take this as a portent that I might die of the cough. Fordham was the leading Jesuit university in the United States.
"Memory makes the difference between humans and other organisms," McNair said. His voice was smooth and deep, like oatmeal. "As far as we know, we can look further into our past than any other species and therefore further into our future. Most of our lives take place not in the immediate present, but the immediate past and the immediate future we define ourselves based on where we've been and where we expect to be going...."
I felt a cough coming on, and struggled to suppress it. I mostly won it came out as a stifled thunderclap in my throat. I reached for my bottle of water, and guzzled.
"...If memory makes us human, recorded memory makes us civilized," McNair continued. "The burning of the ancient library at Alexandria which reputedly had a copy of every book ever written at that time was a greater blow to human civilization than the sacking of Rome. Fortunately, later regimes in the Church and in Islam did what they could to preserve some of the ancient information...."
Some in the audience were taking notes. I wondered what it would feel like to lose your memory of an evening like this, then come upon notes you had taken of this lecture. What would it feel like to read, in your own hand, notes you had no recollection of writing? Surely if people were suffering bouts of memory loss around the country, at least a few might have been taking notes in the affected time period? Then again, some of the people in this audience were taking notes on their laptops. Coming upon a file you had no recollection of writing would likely not be quite as disconcerting it could be explained as some kind of glitch in a download, with an incorrect date-stamp, or whatever....