‘Like thirty-three’s not your age?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered.
‘Gerry,’ he said warmly, ‘there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
I realized I was breathing too hard. I pulled myself together. I said, ‘I don’t like remembering saying things in somebody else’s voice.’
‘Look,’ he told me. ‘This head-shrinking business, as you called it a while back, isn’t what most people think. When I go with you into the world of your mind—or when you go yourself, for that matter—what we find isn’t so very different from the so-called real world. It seems so at first, because the patient comes out with all sorts of fantasies and irrationalities and weird experiences. But everyone lives in that kind of world. When one of the ancients coined the phrase „truth is stranger than fiction”, he was talking about that.
‘Everywhere we go, everything we do, we’re surrounded by symbols, by things so familiar we don’t ever look at them or don’t see them if we do look. If anyone ever could report to you exactly what he saw and thought while walking ten feet down the street, you’d get the most twisted, clouded, partial picture you ever ran across. And nobody ever looks at what’s around him with any kind of attention until he gets into a place like this. The fact that he’s looking at past events doesn’t matter; what counts is that he’s seeing clearer than he ever could before, just because, for once, he’s trying.
‘Now—about this „thirty-three” business. I don’t think a man could get a nastier shock than to find he has someone else’s memories. The ego is too important to let slide that way. But consider: all your thinking is done in code and you have the key to only about a tenth of it. So you run into a stretch of code which is abhorrent to you. Can’t you see that the only way you’ll find the key to it is to stop avoiding it?’
‘You mean I’d started to remember with… with somebody else’s mind?’
‘It looked like that to you for a while, which means something. Let’s try to find out what.’
‘All right.’ I felt sick. I felt tired. And I suddenly realized that being sick and being tired was a way of trying to get out of it.