The Partially-Remembering Abductee

Marisol is the second-shift MRI technologist at a community hospital north of Denver. The shift runs 1400 to 2230, four days a week, with a fifth day every other week for on-call. She runs Suite A — the 3-tesla. She has run it for eleven years.

She is good at her job. She runs the standard brain protocol three minutes faster than the published timing. She remembers, without checking, which of the in-network neurologists wants T2 FLAIR before diffusion and which wants it after. She has caught two acoustic neuromas the radiologist had to be specifically pointed to in the read. When a claustrophobic patient panics in the bore she can usually keep them in the scan by talking to them through the headphones in a register the orientation video does not teach.

The register she uses with claustrophobic patients is a register she did not choose to develop. She noticed it the first time around 2014. A contractor in his fifties had begun to thrash in the bore at the eight-minute mark of a lumbar series. She had keyed the mic and said something that was not in the patient comfort script. She had said: the sound is a procedure. The procedure is on a schedule. The schedule will complete. The man had stopped thrashing. She had finished the scan. She had not, at the time, thought about where the sentences came from. She had a list of patients waiting and she went on to the next one.

This is the story of one week in May of her thirty-eighth year. The week is otherwise unremarkable.

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On Monday at 1612 she is positioning a forty-one-year-old woman for a routine pituitary protocol. The woman has a prolactin level that the endocrinologist would like a picture for. The woman is lying on the table with the coil cradle around her head and her hands folded on her abdomen and she is asking, in the bright voice patients use to delay the moment the table moves, whether anyone has ever fallen asleep in the scanner.

Marisol says that they have. She is checking the IV line for the contrast injection that will happen at minute eleven. She says, most people don’t, but it isn’t unusual. The noise is rhythmic. If you’ve had enough of a workday it can put you under.

The woman laughs. The woman says, I had a dream once where the noise was a person talking.

Marisol’s hand pauses on the IV line. She does not look at it pause. She finishes the line check and she taps the cradle twice with her knuckle, which is the signal for I am leaving the room now, the scan begins in about ninety seconds, and she walks to the console.

She knows, walking to the console, the following thing. She knows that the noise was not a person talking. She knows that the noise the woman is remembering as a person talking is the secondary acoustic signature of the unit’s pulse during the pineal recalibration step, which on the model the apparatus uses runs at a frame rate that interferes with the subject’s auditory cortex in a way that produces a phonemic illusion. She knows this. She has not been told it. She does not know what the unit is. She knows the frame rate. The frame rate is 14.7 Hz.

She sits down at the console. She runs the localizer. She acquires the sagittal T1. She injects the contrast at minute eleven. She acquires the post-contrast coronals. The pituitary is unremarkable. She files the study. She walks the woman to the changing room. She tells the woman to drink a lot of water tonight, for the contrast.

She does not, between the moment at the IV line and the end of her shift at 2230, think about the frame rate. She thinks about whether to pick up tortillas on the way home. She picks up tortillas.

She has been a partially-remembering abductee since 1994. She does not know this. The phrase is not one she has ever encountered. The fragments she carries are not, to her, fragments; they are a thin sheet of facts she possesses without having learned, the way some people know the capital of every country. She has assumed, without ever framing the assumption, that everyone has a sheet like this. She has never compared sheets with anyone.

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On Tuesday her ex-husband Daniel calls her at 1118, before her shift. They are on good terms in the specific way of people who married at twenty-three and divorced at twenty-eight and remained the only person each of them knows who remembers their twenties. He is calling because his mother has had a fall and he wants to know whether a hip MRI is the next step or whether the X-ray will be enough. She walks him through it. She tells him to ask for the X-ray first and that if the orthopedist wants further imaging it will be CT and not MRI for a hip after a fall, because the question is bone and not soft tissue.

He thanks her. He says, I keep forgetting you actually know things.

She says, I keep forgetting I do too.

They both laugh. She is, while laughing, looking at a small photograph stuck to the refrigerator that is of the two of them and his sister at a campground in southern Utah in the summer of 2003. In the photograph she is wearing a green tank top and her hair is in two braids. They are standing in front of a wooden sign that says BLANDING. She remembers the trip. She remembers the campground. She remembers the smell of the firepit and the conversation his sister had with the ranger about whether their permit covered the side canyon. She remembers all of it.

She does not remember the eighty-three minutes between 0214 and 0337 on the second night of the trip, during which she lay on her side in a tent next to Daniel, who was asleep, her cheek against the floor of the tent and her eyes open and her body unable to move, while a sequence of operations was performed on her substrate that included the geometric placement of a maintenance implant via the right nostril, the calibration of the interface port at the center of her brain, and the laying down of a memory overlay intended to bind the eighty-three minutes to the image of an owl on a fencepost outside the tent. The overlay took. There is no owl in her memory of the trip. There is, very occasionally, a sense she has when she walks past a particular fencepost at a particular angle that she has forgotten something important; the sense has no content. The photograph is the photograph. Daniel is laughing. His sister is making a face.

Daniel says, on the phone, do you remember the campground in Blanding? She says yes. He says, do you remember Megan made the ranger explain the permit twice? She says yes. He says, anyway, thanks for the bone-versus-soft-tissue thing, and they hang up.

She gets ready for work. On the way to her car she stops, with her hand on the door, because she has remembered something she did not have a moment ago. She has remembered that the calibration on the second night of the Blanding trip was the fourth in her current series and that the next one is scheduled for the autumn of the year she is now in.

She gets in the car. She drives to work. By the time she is parking she has forgotten this, the way you forget a thing you thought of in the shower. It does not return that day. It will return.

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Tuesday evening, between patients, she is in the reading room doing the protocols for tomorrow morning’s add-ons. Dr. Reyes is at the workstation behind her reading out the day’s MSK studies into the dictation mic. Reyes is one of the radiologists she has worked with longest. He is a careful reader and a quiet man and the closest thing to a friend she has at the hospital.

He pauses the dictation. He says, Marisol.

She turns.

He is looking at her with the specific attention of a doctor noticing something he has not been asked to notice. He says, have you had a recent ENT workup?

She says no.

He says, your right nostril is — and then he stops, because he is a careful man, and he says, there is a faint asymmetry at the upper margin. Probably nothing. If it bothers you, get it looked at.

She says, thanks. I’ll mention it at my physical.

He goes back to the dictation. She turns back to the protocols. She is breathing in the slow way she uses with the claustrophobic patients. She is breathing this way because she has, on hearing the word asymmetry, understood that the four-millimeter implant in her right ethmoid sinus has been seated at a slight angle since 2003, that the angle has been on the technician’s correction list for the upcoming service window, and that the radiologist behind her, who has been her colleague for nine years, has just been the first human being besides the technicians to observe it.

She finishes the protocols. She goes home. She does not, at her physical six weeks later, mention the asymmetry. She forgets to.

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Wednesday she scans seventeen patients. The seventeen include a non-contrast head for a stroke rule-out at 1947. The patient is sixty-eight, right-sided weakness, his wife in the corner of the prep area with her purse on her lap. Marisol gets him on the table in nine minutes. The acquisition takes six. The diffusion sequence shows a small acute infarct in the left corona radiata. She flags it. The neurologist on call calls her from the parking deck before she has finished moving the patient off the table.

She does this work. She does it well. She does not think, while she is doing it, about the fact that during the diffusion sequence she had a clear sense — not a thought, a sense, the way you sense the temperature of a room — that the patient’s substrate had been serviced twice, that the second service had not gone cleanly, and that the small infarct on the left was located within two millimeters of an interface artifact that the maintenance crew had not been able to fully clear in 1997. The sense is not actionable. She does nothing with it. She files the study. The patient is taken upstairs.

This is the kind of fragment she carries the most of. Not visions. Not encounters. Just facts, arriving without sources, in a register she has come to recognize as the register the facts come in. She has, over the years, developed a way of receiving them that allows her to keep working. She lets the fact arrive. She does not look at it directly. She continues with the task. The fact remains in the room for some interval and then it is gone. She has, on a small number of occasions, written one down — on the back of a receipt, on the inside cover of a paperback — and the act of writing it down has caused it to dissolve before the sentence completed. She has stopped writing them down.

She thinks of the facts, on the rare occasions she thinks about them at all, as a kind of intuition some people in her field develop. She has read that the best diagnosticians often just know before they can say why. She has filed her own experience under that. The filing has held for a long time.

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On Friday she drives to Grand Junction for a long weekend at her sister’s. The drive is six hours via I-70. Around hour four, near Green River, she pulls off for gas. The gas station is at the southern edge of a long featureless basin she has driven through many times.

Walking from the pump to the cashier, she feels the air change. Not a temperature change. A change in the quality of how things look — the white of the awning is the same white it always is, and also less itself than usual, the way the color in a photocopy of a photograph is less itself than in the original. The cashier’s face is the cashier’s face and is also a slightly low-resolution version of the cashier’s face. She pays for the gas. The cashier says have a good one. The have a good one is the cashier’s have a good one and is also a recording of have a good one played back through a slightly under-specified codec.

She gets back in the car. By the time she is on I-70 the air is the regular air again. She is, at this moment, passing within thirty miles of a site at which the apparatus’s render budget is locally overdrawn, for reasons related to the working population that lives below it; in such locations the apparatus does not expend the cycles required to render subject perception at full fidelity, on the calculation that the substrate driving through will not have the equipment to notice. Most do not. Marisol noticed and did not notice. She tells her sister, that night, that the drive was uneventful.

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She has, since 2019, been seeing a therapist named Pat Marrero. Pat is patient and kind and is not the kind of therapist who would push her toward an explanation she did not want. They meet every other Wednesday morning before her shift. She has, in five years, mentioned the fragments to Pat twice. The first time, Pat asked her about her sleep. The second time, Pat asked her whether she had considered an EEG. She had not. She did not pursue it. She has not raised the fragments since.

The Sunday she gets home from her sister’s she has the appointment with Pat that follows the long weekend. She does not mention the gas station near Green River. She mentions instead that she had a strange moment at work the previous Tuesday in which a patient described the scanner noise as a person talking, and that for a second she had felt she knew something about it she could not have known.

Pat says, what did you feel you knew?

She says, the frame rate. She does not say 14.7 Hz. She has, in the days since Tuesday, lost the number. She has retained the shape of having known it.

Pat says, what does it mean to you that the feeling came up?

She thinks about it. She says, it means I’m tired. I think I’m working too much.

Pat says, you have said you are working too much for a long time.

She says, I know.

Pat says, what would change if you took the on-call rotation off the schedule for the fall?

She says, I’d lose the differential. I’d be fine.

They agree she will think about it.

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That night, she does not think about the on-call rotation. She thinks, in the slow way thoughts arrive in the half-hour before sleep, about the small photograph on the refrigerator. She thinks about the wooden sign that says BLANDING. She thinks about the fencepost outside the tent, which is not in her memory and which she is, somehow, thinking about anyway. She thinks about the position of her cheek on the floor of the tent.

She gets up. She goes to the kitchen. She takes the photograph off the refrigerator. She looks at it under the kitchen light. There is no fencepost in the photograph. There is no tent. There is the wooden sign and there are the three of them, and behind them there is the green of the campground and a wedge of the ranger’s station and a corner of someone else’s RV. There is no owl. There has never been an owl. She returns the photograph to the refrigerator under the magnet that has been holding it since 2009.

She thinks, standing at the refrigerator, about the autumn. She thinks about a date in October that has been sitting in her calendar for the past several months under the entry PTO — long weekend (?), which she put there one afternoon at work and which she does not remember the reasoning for. She has been treating it as a tentative plan to drive somewhere. She has not made the plan. She has not removed the entry.

She thinks: I should book something for that weekend. I should go somewhere. It would be good to have something on the calendar.

She thinks: maybe Blanding again. It’s nice in October.

She goes to bed. She sleeps eight hours, which is unusual for her, and she dreams of nothing she remembers. The next morning she is at the console at Suite A by 1359. There is a full slate. She works through it. The autumn is on the calendar. The implant is at its angle. The next service window is, by the apparatus’s schedule, already addressed.