L.A. in L.A. Read online

  L.A. in L.A.

  Barry B. Longyear

  Just how far does the “observer effect” go?

  L.A. in L.A.

  by Barry B. Longyear

  Lyle Bennet tried to hide his facial expression from Dr. Raeder by looking down at his notes. He needed a moment to think. Lyle had always envisioned himself as a future psychological explorer blazing new paths in the treatment of mental disorders. He had found himself, however, contemplating a master’s thesis comparing the performances of two breeds of lab rats running a slight modification of the Hauser Maze. After hearing a description of the project, his thesis advisor had suggested he look for something else. That’s what Lyle had thought even before the suggestion had been made, and that was what he was doing that morning in Dr. Raeder’s office. But Raeder had to be kidding.

  Lyle looked up from his notes, stifled a giggle, and leveled his gaze at his thesis advisor. “Let me get this straight, Dr. Raeder. You’re telling me wolfmen are real? Silver bullets, full moons, bad hair days, and all that?”

  Janos Raeder returned the gaze and didn’t change expression as he tapped the tip of a freshly sharpened pencil against his desk blotter. Abruptly he tossed down the pencil, leaned forward in his chair, and clasped his hands in front of him, his wrists on the edge of his desk. “No, that is not what I said. What I said was that you should check out a meeting of that new twelve step program.” He glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk. “Let’s see. This is the thirty-first, right? Friday?”

  “That’s right.”

  Dr. Raeder moved a finger down the list. “Here it is. There’s an L.A. meeting tonight on Alameda. I think you should at least go and check it out.”

  Lyle’s eyebrows went up. “L.A.? Lycanthropics Anonymous? Werewolves, right?”

  “Look, Lyle, you were the one who came to me for suggestions regarding a new thesis topic.”

  “Yeah, but werewolves? Give me a break.”

  Dr. Raeder slowly shook his head. “I don’t know, Lyle. Perhaps I made a mistake. This is the kind of subject that, properly handled, could make your career take off from a standing start. Your mind seems a little too shut down, though, to take on a subject as radical and controversial as this.”

  Lyle held up his hands. “OK, look, I’m coming at this cold, Dr. Raeder. This is all new to me, as long as you ignore a bunch of bad Lon Chaney, Jr. movies that rotted out my mind years ago.” He lowered his hands to his lap and tried to hold his face expressionless. “Why not let me hear the whole thing and then I’ll decide ”

  His advisor took a pained breath then continued. “First, Lyle, forget all about Lon Chaney, Jr., silver bullets, full moon freakouts, and Hollywood horrors. Lycanthropy is a very real, quite painful, condition. I’m not only referring to the well-known psychotic belief in being an animal. The variation of lycanthropy to which I refer also manifests itself in physical symptoms, such as measurable increases in body and facial hair, dentition, bone mass, musculature, and alterations in saliva and blood chemistry. Are you familiar with Kuchilan’s recent paper on hysteria?”

  Lyle nodded. “Yes. Fanatics tapping into forces on the quantum level, miracle cures, religious freaks who go into a frenzy and begin squirting blood from their palms. But this—”

  “This is the same sort of thing, Lyle,” interrupted his advisor. Dr. Raeder held up a finger, nodded, and said, “Hold on. There’s something I want you to see.”

  He got up from his desk, went to an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner of his cluttered office, and opened the middle drawer. “It’s in here somewhere… here.” He pulled out a thick accordion file that had obviously seen a lot of wear. Almost reverently the doctor placed the file on his desk, opened it, and began thumbing through the contents. “Yes.” He pulled out a dog-eared eight-by-ten glossy print and handed it across the desk to Lyle. “Look at that.”

  Lyle took the print and frowned as he examined it. It was a print of six different stages in the transformation of a man, in his early twenties, into something very much resembling a latter-day Hollywood wolfman. In all six stages the man was clad in sixtyish hippie garb: headband, peasant shirt, patched flares, and sandals. In each stage there was a definite increase in body and facial hair, an elongation of the upper and lower mandibles into a shape resembling a muzzle, an incredible enlargement of the canine teeth, and a tongue that would be the envy of any Doberman. The increase in upper body mass had been sufficient to split open the baggy shirt’s seams. On the final frame the enlarged hairy toes sticking out of the sandals each carried what looked to be a two-inch-long claw. Similar armaments graced the fingertips. Time and date signatures appeared on each of the frames. The date on all of the frames was 4 May 1967. The elapsed time indicated that the subject had made the trans formation from young adult to drooling beast in just under three minutes. Lyle raised an eyebrow and handed back the print. “Jack Nicholson did it better in Wolf.”

  Ignoring the comment, Raeder took the glossy and tapped it with his finger. “The subject’s name was Roger Westlake. He was a psych student at Pepperdine working on his master’s. This series of shots was taken under faculty supervised laboratory conditions just before he was committed to Pescadero.”

  “Was Roger Westlake?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You used the past tense, Doctor.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Raeder nodded, his expression quite wooden. “He was reported dead in October of ’sixty-nine. The story was that he attacked some other patients and, in the process of subduing him, he was accidentally killed.” Raeder held out a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. The headline read: “Three killed, eleven mauled at Pescadero.”

  Janos Raeder dropped the clipping back into the file. “Westlake’s body was cremated before anyone could get a look at it. The two patients and the guard who were killed, however, looked as through they had been savaged by timber wolves.” He looked up at nothing in particular. “They were all cremated, as well.” He faced Lyle. “It might be very interesting to find out what happened to all of the patients who survived. The belief among most lycanthropics is that a virus in the saliva is what transmits the disease.” Dr. Raeder tapped the glossy and said, “In any event, this is one of the most well documented modern cases of lycanthropic hysteria that exists.”

  Lyle gestured at the photo with his hand. “Look at that increase in body mass, doctor. All that has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? What’d he do, snack on an ox while they took the snapshots?”

  Dr. Raeder looked up from the file and fixed Lyle with his eyes. “Here is a theory for you to consider: the quantum field is a Universe-wide matrix of energy and information. We are all parts of this matrix and you cannot alter any part of it without altering every other part in some manner. Changing or reinforcing a thought pattern is just such an alteration. The upshot of this is that if you believe strongly enough, your body will use every power available to it within the field to fulfill that belief. Energy convertible into mass can be drawn from the field. Are you familiar with the works of Deepak Chopra?”

  “No.”

  “In just one of his works, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, he shows how one’s intentions can affect the quantum field such that an individual can increase or even reverse aging. Imagine the physiological changes—”

  “Is this the guy who was on Oprah Winfrey’ some time back? I’m supposed to take pop science seriously?”

  “No. As a scientist, Lyle, I expect you to investigate first, and only then form your conclusions.”

  “Sorry”

  Janos Raeder brushed away the apology and the question with a wave of his hand. “It doesn’t matter. Look, Lyle, there are the miracle cures from terminal diseases you mentioned, and the stigmata, what you calle
d those freaks squirting blood from their palms. Think about the very real cases of stigmata we have on record. These cases are similar to lycanthropy in that they involve actual hysterical alteration of fluids and tissues simply on the basis of a very intense belief.” He tapped the print once more. “And this. It is a very real, very painful, and quite debilitating condition. It can’t be cured, as far as we know, but it can be arrested, much like compulsive gambling or alcoholism.”

  Lyle clasped his hands over his belly and slumped down in his chair. “I’m familiar with the cases. In fact, I’m pretty familiar with all of the literature on hysteria, and I’ve never run across anything like werewolves.”

  Dr. Raeder pursed his lips, placed the glossy on top of his desk and dropped into his chair. “I’ll tell you why, Lyle. It’s for the same reason you’re dragging your anchor right now Just as no one would take alcoholism and addiction seriously as diseases back in the thirties, lycanthropic hysteria has been passed off as a moral problem, or hoax, for almost eighty years. That’s why this study, almost thirty years old, wasn’t taken seriously. It was never published and lit tle new work has been done in the field. There is simply no grant money available for research in this field. But just as those who wanted to recover from alcoholism back in the thirties put together their own therapy program in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, thereby pioneering the treatments for a host of compulsive disorders, those who want to recover from lycanthropy are doing the same. I think the field is ready for a courageous new look at this problem.” He shrugged and held out his hands. “If you want a new thesis topic, it’s the best suggestion I’ve got in the shop. It will be new work and much more impressive than another herd of tired rats running through yet another maze.”

  Lyle twiddled his thumbs for a moment, then leaned forward and held out a hand. “Could I look at that photo once more?”

  Dr. Raeder allowed himself a slight smile. “By the way, Lyle, if you decide to go to the meeting, don’t make a point out of your being free of this condition. Also, don’t take any notes or bring a recorder. They are adamant about their anonymity, and for very good reasons. Finally, don’t call them wolfmen or werewolves. Call them lycanthropics. They are quite touchy about that.”

  “What time is the meeting?”

  “Eleven-thirty at night.”

  “That late?”

  Janos Raeder’s eyebrows went up. “You’re kidding. Midnight is the toughest time for lycanthropics. If nothing else, Lyle, this experience will be an excellent opportunity to raise your consciousness regarding the plight of a much neglected minority.”

  There was plenty of time before the meeting, and, after an uninspired taco at the student center, Lyle put in a few hours at the university library. First he tackled the subject of stigmatization with examples beginning with Francis of Assisi in 1224 to Louise Lateau in 1868. The latter was a peasant girl whose case was investigated by Professor Lefebvre of Louvain. The girl’s “Christ wounds” began on April 24th, 1868 and bled regularly every Friday thereafter. The ability of the human organism to alter its tissues radically through intense belief was well established. What was not so well established was a degree of alteration sufficient to turn a human into a completely different species.

  Search as he might, his pursuit of a work on quantum physics for dummies was fruitless. The only works available were either dripping with equations or too general to discuss the application in which he was interested. Reluctantly he resorted to pulling Chopra’s Ageless Body; Timeless Mind from the shelf and paged through it. The thesis seemed to be that every cell of an individual’s body is constantly listening to what that individual is telling it. If you tell yourself “I’m too old for that kind of stuff,” the cells listen and you become “too old for that kind of stuff.” By the same token, if you decide to become more youthful, the cells listen and can actually reverse the aging process. Chopra wrote:

  “You can control the informational content of the quantum field. Although there is a certain amount of fixed information in the atoms of food, air, and water that make up each cell, the power to transform that information is subject to free will.”

  Lyle leaned back and scratched his head as he recalled the photograph Dr. Raeder had shown him. As scientists looked on, Roger Westlake supposedly just stood there, turned into a werewolf, and almost doubled his body mass in the process. All of that bone and tissue had to come from somewhere. By changing the informational content of the quantum field, would it be possible to convert that energy directly into mass? Several primitive cultures had shape-shifter traditions: men and women who turn themselves into snakes, eagles, bears, even wolves. Lyle leaned over the keyboard and began to tackle the subject of lycanthropy.

  The computer subject search was not sympathetic to the term “lycanthropy.” The prompt insisted that if Lyle wanted to pursue the topic, “werewolves” was the term to use. The pickings seemed slim. Douglas’s The Beast Within, was filed under “Animals, mythical.” An 1865 work, Baring-Gould’s The Book of Werewolves, revealed its thesis in its subtitle: An account of a terrible superstition. Then Lyle’s eye was caught by another title: A Lycanthropy Reader: werewolves in western culture. Published in obscurity in 1986 by the Syracuse University Press, the work was described as “Medical cases, diagnoses, descriptions; trial records, historical accounts, sightings; philosophical and theological approaches to metamorphosis; critical essays on lycanthropy—” He looked up at the availability code and the Reader was out.

  His eyes next turned to a 1937 work published in Paris by psychiatrist Jean Riendeau, English translation by Paul Norgren: The Hidden Face of Jeorg Brandt: a case study of a lycanthropic. The work was described as a three-year study of an unemployed Swiss laborer whose metamorphosis from man to werewolf was witnessed no less than nine times by Riendeau, four such times under confinement in laboratory conditions with corroborating witnesses. The volume was available.

  It was a thin book, the embossed printing on its cover faded and gray, the pages inside edged with yellow Lyle scanned the table of contents, skipped the background material, and turned to the first of the laboratory controlled observations of Jeorg Brandt’s changing. Riendeau wrote:

  “Jeorg was caged at his own request. The metamorphosis began shortly after midnight with Jeorg coming ‘alive’ from his usual deep depression, his increased animation followed first by the change of his eye color from blue to reddish black. His chest, normally at 120cm, showed 151cm on the tape before Jeorg swatted Dr. Bresette away from the bars where my colleague was taking the measurement. I saw the front of Bresette’s laboratory coat slashed to ribbons and turned back to see that Jeorg’s claws were already half-formed, his muzzle filled with horrendous teeth…”

  Here it was again: energy consuming transformation, incredible increase in body mass, with no apparent source. Or, as Riendeau put it, “He seemed to draw upon the thin air for material,” although when the change was complete, Jeorg Brandt wolfed down 24kg of raw beef before he exhausted himself trying to get out of his cage and fell asleep. Later, as himself, Jeorg was horrified after reading the reports and seeing the photographs. It was after the fourth of these laboratory episodes that Riendeau’s subject committed suicide, unfortunately in full human form.

  In the translator’s introduction, Paul Norgren described how the publication of The Hidden Face had destroyed Riendeau’s reputation as well as the reputations of the four colleagues who had participated in the study. Lyle checked his watch and realized that he had just enough time to make it to the meeting. He frowned as he realized that on some strange level he was just a little bit frightened.

  “My name is Ted and Ah’m a gr-r-rateful recoverin’ lycanthropic.”

  “Hi, Ted!” answered the twenty or so men and women seated in the conference room on the ground floor of an otherwise locked up office building. As Lyle examined the faces seated in the circle, he was uneasy. Everyone in there looked just like regular humans. Minority representation, old, young
, male, female, neckties and tie-dyes. What made him uneasy was that everyone in the room, with the sole exception of himself, believed him or herself to be a werewolf.

  The one called Ted cleared his throat, which sounded a bit like a growl to Lyle, then he smiled and said, “Welcome all tew the Hair of the Dog Group of Lycanthropics Anonymous.” Ted spoke with just a touch of Scottish brogue. “We’ll all open the meetin’ with a moment of silence followed by the Serenity Prayer.”

  During the moment of silence Lyle swore that the young lady sitting to his right was panting while a young man sitting on the opposite side of the circle was scratching behind his ear, although only with a finger. Lyle started having an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud. His defenses began crumbling when he heard someone to his far left sniffing. He didn’t look. Lyle believed that if he caught a glimpse of one of them sniffing the butt of another, he would lose it altogether. Just thinking about the possible flea problem made tears come to his eyes, and he covered his face hoping that at the worst he might look like he was crying.

  While they recited the Serenity Prayer (God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference), Lyle felt a friendly hand (paw?) petting the back of his head. He thought he would pop an artery and he decided that he would have to leave the meeting. Before he could go into action, however, the man chairing the meeting began speaking again.

  “This is a special anniversary meetin’ tonight. Allyson is celebratin’ one whole year without turnin’.” Loud applause followed Ted’s remarks accompanied by some whistling and some rather distinct howling. The woman to Lyle’s right seemed to have increased her panting. Lyle noted that her tongue wasn’t hanging out. He wondered if her real problem was asthma.

  “Allyson will be our speaker for the first part of the meetin’,” Ted announced, “then after the break we’ll have our sharin’ session. Before we get started, are there any newcomers to the group?”