couldn't let me leave, just couldn't do that. No, no, no."
She'd grown more and more agitated as she spoke, stabbing the fire with her stick, talking more to her knees than to Teddy. "You really were a doctor?" Teddy said.
"Oh, yes. I was a doctor." She looked up from her knees and her stick. "I still am, actually. But, yes, I was on staff here. I began to ask about large shipments of Sodium Amytal and opium-based hallucinogens. I began to wonder - aloud unfortunately - about surgical procedures that seemed highly experimental, to put it mildly."
"What are they up to here?" Teddy said.
She gave him a grin that was both pursed and lopsided. "You have no idea?"
"I know they're flouting the Nuremberg Code."
"Flouting it? They've obliterated it."
"I know they're performing radical treatments."
"Radical, yes. Treatments, no. There is no treating going on here, Marshal. You know where the funding for this hospital comes from?" Teddy nodded. "HUAC."
"Not to mention slush funds," she said. "Money flows into here.
Now ask yourself, how does pain enter the body?" 4,
"Depends upon where you're hurt."
"No." She shook her head emphatically. "It has nothing to do with the flesh. The brain sends neural transmitters down through the nervous system. The brain controls pain," she said. "It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything."
"Okay..."
Her eyes shone in the firelight. "What if you could control it?"
"The brain?"
She nodded. "Re-create a man so that he doesn't need sleep, doesn't feel pain. Or love. Or sympathy. A man who can't be interrogated because his memory banks are wiped clean." She stoked the fire and looked up at him. "They're creating ghosts here, Marshal. Ghosts to go out into the world and do ghostly work."
"But that kind of ability, that kind of knowledge is - " "Years off," she agreed. "Oh, yes. This is a decades-long process, Marshal. Where they've begun is much the same place the Soviets have - brainwashing. Deprivation experiments. Much like the Nazis experimented on Jews to see the effect of hot and cold extremes and apply those results to help the soldiers of the Reich. But, don't you see, Marshal? A half century from now, people in the know will look back and say this" - she struck the dirt floor with her index finger - "this is where it all began. The Nazis used Jews. The Soviets used prisoners in their own gulags. Here, in America, we tested patients on Shutter Island."
Teddy said nothing. No words occurred to him.
She looked back at the fire. "They can't let you leave. You know that, don't you?"
"I'm a federal marshal," Teddy said. "How are they going to stop me ?"
That elicited a gleeful grin and a clap of her hands. "I was an esteemed psychiatrist from a respected family. I once thought that would be enough. I hate to inform you of this, but it wasn't. Let me ask you - any past traumas ;n your me.
"Who doesn't have those?"
"Ah, yes. But we're not taking about generalities, other people. We're talking about particulars. You. Do you have psychological weaknesses that they could exploit? Is there an event or events in your past that could be considered predicating factors to your losing your sanity? So that when they commit you here, and they will, your friends and colleagues will say, 'Of course. He cracked. Finally. And who wouldn't? It was the war that did it to him. And losing his mother - or what have you - like that.' Hmm?"
Teddy said, "That could be said about anyone."
"Well, that's the point. Don't you see? Yes, it could be said about anyone, but they're going to say it about you. How's your head?" "My head?"
She chewed on her lower lip and nodded several times. "The block atop your neck, yes. How is it? Any funny dreams lately?" "Sure."
"Headaches?"
"I'm prone to migraines."
"Jesus. You're not."
"I am."
"Have you taken pill since you've come here, even aspirin?"
"Feeling just a bit off, maybe? Not a hundred percent yourself?
Oh, it's no big deal, you say, you just feel a little punkish. Maybe your
brain isn't making connections quite as fast as normal. But you haven't been sleeping well, you say. A strange bed, a strange place, a ston.
You say these things to yourself. Yes?"
Teddy nodded.
"And you've eaten in the cafeteria, I assume. Drank the coffee they've given you. Tell me, at least, that you've been smoking