Chapter 2: Road Trip

Off to visit his 55 year old big sister in Palm Springs years after the fact.

“Are you sure this is such a good ideal Lucy?” Paul asked Lucy once again as they were driving to Palm Springs down interstate 10/20 to confront Shella and Dorothy. Goggle map and route planing said it would take them 27 hours to get there.

“No I’m not so sure it’s a good ideal Prof ... Paul, but I think it needs to be done to prove to you what Shella McGaret, and your loving sister Dorothy, did to you back then. It may not have been your sister’s fault at all, she may not have had any control over any of this. As we’ve sort of agreed your sister was probably a sub, under the control of her top, or dominate Shella McGaret. She might even be completely innocent, Hell I don’t know. For all we do know she may be in that relationship entirely against her will actually. You may be responsible...” Paul angrily broke in at that.

“Now wait a minute young lady, are you blaming me for all this? Are you saying that Shella McGaret took advantage of my own sister against her will Lucy. That I may have left my sister under Shella’s abusive control all these years. Left her in a ... a ... an abusive relationship ... aginst her will with no more of a way out than I had? That I might be at fault?” Paul almost raved at Lucy.

<Yes, Professor that is exactly what Lucy and me are telling you. Why haven’t you ever questioned the relationship your sister was in. Why are you so fine with it now that you know about it. Maybe at 15 you really didn’t have that much experience, sexual experience anyway, but latter ... I mean my God man your a full fledged psychology professor now. Haven’t you ever even questioned why you’ve never asked your sister about any of this, even thought she taunts you with that Christmas card every year?” Raymond paused and waited for Paul’s answer.

“But I remember so clearly when I made the decision at 15 that incest was wrong. That it was my sister’s life, her choice. That I wouldn’t ever interfere in her personal relationships again. I also realized that the use of hypnosis like that was wrong, and I would never have anything to do with hypnosis again. I remember making all those decisions so clearly Raymond. It was the least I could do after screwing up trying to hypnotize my own older sister and take advantage of her like that.” Paul said out loud as he drove at a steady locked in 65 MPH down the busy federal interstate highway.

<Was it Paul? Was it your decision? I’m beginning to wonder myself Paul?> Raymond questioned the mad and confused Paul.

“Yes, I’m wondering now too Professor. Was it really your decision? Who were the McGaret’s?” Lucy asked the open air in the car.

<Tell Lucy we need to stop in Las Vegas to do a little more research on the McGaret’s. We need to pick up some supplies we might need latter anyway.> Raymond told Paul.

“Raymond says we need to stop in Las Vegas to do some research on the Internet, and pick up some supplies Lucy.” Paul conveyed the message to Lucy.

“I totally agree with Raymond that we need to totally reevaluate our facts here. They are not adding up right at all. At a guess I would say it is much more likely that you was hypnotized and programed to believe this Professor...” Paul broke in on Lucy.

“I’ve never been hypnotized Lucy.” Paul stated flatly before she could finish her sentence.

“Every instinct I have tells me otherwise Prof ... Paul. We’ll know soon enough after we get to Vegas and check into the suite I’ve booked for us at the MGM Grand. Ray I really really need you to check his memory. Something just doesn’t add up here.” Lucy said as she put down her cell phone.

<Tell Lucy I’m working on it Paul.> Raymond responded.

“Raymond’s working on it Lucy.” Paul told her.

Hours latter after a half dozen pit stops along the way to relieve themselves, get something to eat, and gas up the car, they were on the strip in Vegas. Soon they were checked into their reserved suite in the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino and soon asleep in their different beds in the one large room they had chosen. The morning’s wake up call got them up early and after showering and dressing they had breakfast. Then Lucy and the Professor were on the Internet researching the McGaret family.

The only problem they found right off was there had never been a McGaret family in Fairhope, Alabama. No Shella McGaret went to any Fairhope school. No Shella McGaret was listed at UCLA. When they dug deeper they did find pictures of Shella in all the year books, but hers and her family’s names had all been meticulously removed from all the digital records online. When they checked the tax records for the house the McGaret family had lived in they found that the J. J. Jones that was listed as paying the property taxes had no past either, just another ghost to chase.

On a wild hunch Raymond had Paul do a wide Internet search of any published psychology or psychiatry journals articles by a McGaret. It seemed that there were several hundred McGaret out there in the different fields of research. Narrowing the search even further he connected the search with hypnosis. That still got a few hundred hits. Then he added Mesmerism and mind control to the search engine, and bingo that got a hit on a number of articles published in the major psychiatry and psychology journals. The articles were about the use of hypnosis and Mesmerism in the treatment of PTSD, in veterans suffering from sever war time shell shock.

The authors of the articles were a husband and wife team of medical psychiatry and clinical psychology doing research at State U at about the same time as Paul and Dorothy were in high school with Shella McGaret. The husband was named Henry and the wife Harriet. Neither Paul, Lucy, or Raymond was surprised to find their names missing from anything but those hard copy journal articles.

Pulling the articles from the Internet and reading them they soon discovered that Henry, the husband, was the medical doctor Psychiatrist, and the wife, Harriet, was the clinical Psychologist of the team. Together they had supposedly created ... invented a “gun like device” that could instantly Mesmerize any subject, and yes they insisted it was Mesmerism not hypnotism. According to the articles it showed great promise in treating PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder cases,

There was great debate and skepticism for awhile, within the various professional communities, about whether it was actually Mesmerism, or hypnotism. Still others called it an outright fraud, or scam run by the McGaret’s to make money. Whatever, under the harsh criticism of their peers, the McGaret’s had suddenly withdrawn completely from the fight taking their “hypnosis raygun” with them. This left the ones accusing them of outright fraud and a scam on top. There was no further mention of Henry and Harriet in any other journal articles after that, they had simply vanished being call scoundrels by their peers.

“I think we’re seeing now how the McGaret’s put their ... their ... their “hypnosis raygun” to use after that, ha, ha.” Lucy laughed.

“Mesmerism raygun if you believe the McGaret’s.” Paul corrected Lucy.

“And I think we’ll wind up the same way as those poor deluded fools if we just walk up and confront Shella McGaret at their home in Palm Springs. I mean think about it, if I didn’t get that Christmas card every year from Palm Springs, “To My Looser Little Brother”, we wouldn’t even know where to find them. Evidently this gun ... device ... Hell we don’t even know what it looks like, but we do know it’s very effective.” Paul voiced his new concerns.

“You need to have Lucy hypnotize you where I can tell Lucy what I’ve found out about your memory Paul.” Raymond told Paul.

“Raymond says you need to hypnotize me where he can talk to you Lucy. I’m not fighting it any more. Heck he might have figured out what did happen to me back then.” Paul told Lucy.

“Sleep Paul sleep.” Lucy uttered his trigger and he was under this time.

“OK Ray what have you found out that you couldn’t just relay through Paul?” She questioned Ray.

“Can’t I just be happy to talk to my former hypnotized sex slave Lucy. Talk to her alone.” Ray asked.

“No Ray I don’t like doing this to him now.” She told her former Master.

“Ah, ha, you are developing feelings for him.” Raymond laughed.

“You already knew about my Daddy complex Ray so get on with it.” Lucy told Raymond impatiently.

“Ok. Human memory is a lot like the memory schemes used in computers. There’s only so much memory to go around and we naturally start overwriting old memories that we aren’t using anymore to recover new memory space to use. So there’s new memory, RAM, avaible, but it’s still got data on it as I say. But Paul has whole sections of old ... what should be old memory anyway ... that is absolutely blank. Nada, nothing on it at all Lucy.” Raymond started explaining what he had found in Paul’s mind.

“And this is bad?” Lucy questioned.

“The reason hypnosis fails a lot of times is when we have the subject rewrite a past memory, some would say overwrite it, and have the conscious mind remember that new memory as the original, the real original memory is still in there just floating around. That original memory can still be randomly called up and remembered at any time. After all it is RAM, random access memory. When that old memory is called up and remembered it puts into question the new memory we implanted. This leads to doubt, which causes stress, and things start sliding downhill from there.”

“To give you an example Lucy. A kid has a bicycle accident and he wakes up in a field of sweet smelling lilies when he’s very young. He moves on and more or less forgets the accident, but years latter he has a teacher that wears a perfume, or even uses a soap, that smells like those lilies. He winds up having blind panic attacks every time she gets near him. They send him to the Psychiatrist and they hypnotize and regress him and find out about the bicycle accident and the field of lilies when he was young. The hypnotist, I still don’t believe in Mesmerism, substitutes a good memory of smelling lilies for the bad one. Tells him that every time he smells lilies from now on he’ll just remember the good time. Everything is fine until a year latter he’s sitting on a park bench smelling lilies and hears the squeal of car brakes, and the crunch of car fenders and remembers that original accident and field again and can’t put it out of his mind. This time it’s worse than ever. All because that old memory is still in there.”

“But in Paul’s case there’s no old memory there, not even a piece of a contradictory memory in there, there’s no memory there at all to be brought out to prove he’s ever been hypnotized. Therefore there is no conflict, his memory is seamless Lucy. Even with ECT, heavy duty Electroconvulsive Therapy, ECT is a procedure done under a general anesthesia today. It uses small electrical currents passed directly through the brain to intentionally trigger brief seizures and obliterate long term memory strings in the brain. Even with ECT it only scrambles the original memory and the old saying; “nature abhors a vacuum”, well the human brain “abhors a scrambled memory string”, and tries to unscramble it, put it back together in some meaningful way. Which means it’s awful damn hard to fully get rid of old memories, but the McGaret’s evidently figured out a way to do just that Lucy.”

“If my guess is right the McGaret’s managed to figured out a device that removed ... erases the whole memory string. Just plucks it right out of your sweet little old head and erased it. They could quite literally reprogram anyone to believe anything. There would never be the conflicting older memory to worry about popping up and disturbing your newly implanted memories.” Raymond laughed.