I will call myself Susan although it doesn't really matter as I don't come into this story much. I am a nurse or I was. This is the story of an amazing child. Amazing in the sense of “Strange Tales” and the “Amazing Spider-man.” For those of you who read such things, she was a level three or maybe even a level four mutant. No one ever found out because Stan Lee wasn't writing yet and the people who knew her or knew about her were frightened witless by the things she did and they do not know half of what I know.
She might have been a shape shifter, but I don't think so. This is her story as she told it to me and as I witnessed it for ten years. When she turned eleven I told her this same story because she no longer remembered it. She has proven extremely hard to kill.
She claimed to be a girl even though her genitalia matched those of a boy spot on. The Baluga pygmy children, who taught her to swim, always remembered her as a girl. Their grandchildren can still tell you stories about the Bad Magic Girl.
Those children, transported to Johnston Atoll with their parents who contracted to fill in the lagoon with stones and dredged sand, said she taught them to use a special language. That they all used it to keep secrets from the army men and their own parents. She warned them if they were discovered talking about her secrets in English or in their own language, they would all be sent away to a deep hole surrounded by a high wall. They said she told them how the birds nesting on the coral fed the barnacles and the moss with their dropping. She said this guano had the same taste as the bags the sailors used to make the big ship's gun fire and this bird dropping magic made the heavy shells fly. She knew a lot of magic.
She said all fish were different, even the ones that looked the same, the birds, too. She said they had faces, sizes and colors all much the same but just a bit different so we could tell them all apart if we looked carefully. The children were all different with different faces. Some were brown and had hard feet from walking for years and years. She was pink and her feet were not yet hard because she was only two and had not walked so long.
She said the lagoon waters were changing as the stone and sand filled in the coral walls. The stones from the ships came from far away. She watched as they stained the water like tea leaves in hot water. The water that came on the ships for them to drink came out of them all yellow and it was making the lagoon water plants grow too fast. The plants were using up the air in the water. The fish were looking for a way out of the lagoon because they could not breathe. She said the dredging sand had filled up the way out so the fish would swim into the pools in the coral. If they gathered the weak fish each day they would have more food than they could eat.
She told them that boys and girls were different, not because of the pee things between their legs, but because a boy could see more red colors and girls could see more blue. She said girls could smell more smells but boys could locate the source of a sound more quickly than girls. She told them that all the people would leave the island soon when the lagoon filled and then a big magic would come to turn the stones, the coral and the birds into hard sharp glass. She did not know how this magic worked, but the army men talked about it in whispers when they thought she was napping. She also told them that a vegetable called the artichoke could make anyone see horrible things. They must never look in the buildings on the north side of the island. Screaming men who ate the artichoke were kept there.
Her mother was afraid and wanted to leave the atoll. She told the girl's father that no one knew how the chemicals being brought to the island would change when the Glass Magic came. It would be too dangerous to stay there or on the smaller sand islands nearby. The artichoke magic needed to move soon.
Some of the pygmy children showed their parents the fish and told how the island would turn to glass. The parents told the army men that the two year old girl was making very bad magic. Her mother said she was bad for telling anyone such stories. For two months, no one talked about the glass magic when she was nearby. Papers were burned, soldier taken from the building and sent away on boats. No one spoke of the Artichoke project. The children were forbidden to talk with her in the new language. No one waved when she walked by and no one played with her any more. Only the sailors from the ships bringing stones and fresh water nodded their heads to her from high up on their boats.
So she walked on the coral alone and remembered the fish that came into the pools to die. She remembered the fish she carried across the coral to release in the sea. She remembered the boats and the faces and the shapes of the men upon them. She remembered the wind and the shape of the waves. She learned how the wind tugged at the water and how the water tugged at the coral. She remembered and talked with her friend that no one else could see. They talked about the fish, the birds, the clouds and the changing blue and gray of the sky and water. They wondered why the birds sitting on eggs rolled the eggs with their beaks. They knew that some kinds of birds sat on eggs for twenty-two days and some for twenty-eight days before the chicks fought their way from the shells. They wondered why? She remembered and she waited for the army men coming to take her away to the big hole inside the big wall.
When the workers filled the lagoon and laid down long rows of metal plates for a runway, the children left on boats with their parents and she and her parents left on a plane the pilot called a “gooney bird.” The Navy left men on the island to pour concrete for a stronger runway.
In three hours, the gooney bird came down on another island that had many people and many planes. She walked with her mother while her father in his brown uniform with many stripes on the shoulders and even more down its sleeve walked away from them. He turned to look back at her and waved just a little with his hand at his waist as the wings on his pocket flap flashed in the sun. She knew he had other uniforms with wings or crowns on the shoulders and no stripes on the sleeves, but today he wore the striped uniform.
The Bad Magic Girl, who was not a girl, waited with her mother in an office with wooden chairs. They waited until a WAC, a woman in uniform, brought a folder filled with papers and said they were going on to California, to Travis SAC/MATS. She told the child's mother not to speak with the crew on the plane. The bad magic boy would be meeting with doctors for several days. The mother should read and follow the orders in the file. She should give the folder to the OSI interrogators when they met her at Travis AFB.
Bad Magic Girl told the woman, “I am not a boy. I do not see like a boy. I do not smell like a boy.”
The woman said, “If you run around fast and play in the dirt, you will smell like a boy.”
Bad Magic Girl laughed at her joke. Her mother did not even smile.
She slept in her mother's arms as her mother sat on the bench/bed of a B-29. They walked away from the plane after climbing down from its ladder. A black car took them through gates and around corners to a concrete block building. Inside, I took the child's hand and led her away from her mother.
Bad Magic Girl was interrogated by four doctors wanting to know how she had learned about the glass magic. She told them she remembered all the words the army men had spoken and all the orders and messages that had been read aloud when she was around. The doctors asked her many questions about the conversations her parents had had. They asked if they had told her how the glass magic worked. When she told them no many times they seemed relieved.
But when one of the doctors called her a good boy, she told him he was wrong. She was a girl. The doctors, especially the one who insisted she be a boy, put on their worried faces again.
They asked her about the pygmy children, about speaking with them in their secret language. She told them about helping to make up the language and how they could then talk together without repeating the army men's secret words. The doctors asked many questions about this made up language. She told them that children always made up new words for things. She said she just made up words for doing things and new silly ways for saying it was done long ago, or a little while ago and for it being done right now. The children's language only had one word to mean a doing that would happen in the future. She just added the English word “next.”
The interrogators were very interested in her memory, marveling at how long she could remember. She thought she could always remember words. She could remember the things she saw for days, but if she looked back at a scene closely she could remember it for always. She could remember tastes for always and smells for a long time. She did not remember how things felt so well. She liked to touch things repeatedly because the feel was always a little bit new.
The doctors argued about her memory while she listened. One argued that her memory was impossible. After she told them she could always remember words, they left the room to discuss her. They said some things that puzzled her before they stopped speaking in front of her. She asked me later about these things when I took her to her room. They had mentioned a trauma that could make her think she was a girl. They were concerned that pre-homosexualism was manifesting in a two year old. They discussed how the child could be isolated so the secrets already overheard would not be shared with uncleared persons. They had been amazed at her ability to describe the emotions on the faces of pictures they showed her. They said she had a long-duration, eidetic memory, which none of them had seen before. She wanted to know what a trauma was, the meaning of the words pre-homosexualism, uncleared, and eidetic. She asked if reading emotions was very wrong?
Her dinner was uneventful although she really, really, really liked potatoes au gratin. The night nurse put her to bed.
After a breakfast of oatmeal and milk and the announcement that “au gratins” were her new favorite food, we walked to the examination office. Along the way she told me that the doctors were frightened and she needed to see her mother soon. Her mother could help her and show her how to not frighten them.
I asked if she was frightened by the doctors and she told me, “Not yet,” as if she expected it soon. Two years later she would tell me about Artichoke Magic and why she always worried about being hurt by doctors.
The doctors spent the day showing her pictures of planes, paintings and photographs of cluttered rooms. They asked her to describe all that she had seen after a short pause and after reading a long story to her. Her recall was phenomenal and she impressed them further by repeating the story for them word for word.
I spoke with her at lunch and again at dinner. She moved me with her politeness, begging my pardon for her errors in using napkins and forks. She told me she had not been exposed to these before. In the morning I brought her to breakfast and told her that her mother would come to take her home today. She said she liked me and the night nurse, but she liked her mom best. I explained that 'he' would be coming back for a visit with us in a few months. We would love 'him' to visit again.
I have referred to this child as a girl while describing her first visit. She always spoke of herself this way and corrected me if I said he or him. The preliminary reports of a security leak on Johnston Atoll had been confusing for us because all the statements from the workers and their children referred to a girl child as the source of the “glass magic” stories, and I wasn't sure whether the two year old was male or female before he appeared. During the ten years I worked as this child's nurse and as liaison between her and her caregivers, she never referred to herself as a boy. When she was leaving that day, I began addressing her as a male because the doctors felt her mislabeling of her gender might be a sign of a serious disorder. I later learned better.
I turned the child over to an Air Force MP who took her down the gray hallway to her mother.
Her mom stood up from the row of wooden chairs along the north reception area wall. She did not stand quickly as her swelling abdomen made her balance unsteady. She seemed happy to see her child but worried by the MP's presence. She knelt on one knee to hug her bad magic, secret keeping girl. Holding hands they walked with the guard to another all black car.
Bad Magic lived in a new pink house and she had a new room with a new bed. Her bed was raised from the floor and there was a shadowed place under it. Her mom said she could put her shoes under the bed at night. She said there would not be any other children to play with in this neighborhood. The doctors did not want the Bad Magic Girl to make up any new languages.
Her mother said she would have to wear clothes now. She could not run naked. Her clothes would always be boy clothes because the doctors said she could not ever be a girl. Being a girl was bad and if she was bad she would cause trouble for her mother and father. If she caused trouble men would come to take her mother away. So she should wear the boy clothes and never go outside naked. People did not like naked children in this country.
The child asked her mom, “What country is this?”
Her mother said, “You must never say you are a girl anymore.” Mom said, “I will call you a boy. I will treat you like a boy. The doctors think I told you to be a girl. They think I am bad because I loved you too much and I let you say you are a girl.” She did not answer the child's question.
“Your father will come to this new home in a few days. Doctors and policemen are talking to him just like the doctors spoke with you. He will call you a boy. If you tell anyone that you are a girl he will have to spank you, hurt you. The doctors think you may be a very bad person.”
Homosexuals were not accepted in 1950 US society and psychiatric groups were being asked to evaluate the risk homosexuals presented to the security of the country. The FBI under the leadership of that closeted and self-hating homosexual, J. Edgar Hoover, were already adding homosexual organizations to the Justice Department's Un-American Activities List. In just two years President Eisenhower would issue an Executive Order declaring homosexuals to be a 'known risk' to national security because they 'might' become subject to blackmail by foreign operatives. The lists and the orders actually created the threat they were designed to contain.
“Your father will be here with us very often” her mother said. “They say you will become very bad if he stays away. But they say we should not ask him about his work and you must never talk to him about secrets. You should always be a good secret-keeping boy.”
The child thought it would be hard being a bad magic girl and a keeps good secrets boy. She felt like a girl. She saw and heard like a girl. When her father spoke about the world he described it as a man sees and hears it. She could tell she saw and heard the birds, cars, clouds and trees in a different way. She walked with him, played with him, chased a ball and threw it with him. All the while she did not feel like a boy. She did not become one.
She did not forget to act like a boy, but she often rebelled, saying “I am a good keeping-secrets girl. I am not a boy!” He would spank her and send her to her new bed to think about it. Still she would rebel again and again. She learned not to cry when he spanked her. Only girls cry, so he would spank her again for crying. Instead, she learned to cry inside her heart.
She started playing a new alone game with her invisible friend. They would watch television. There was a television in the new pink block house. She would envision herself dressed like the girls and women on the television. Her friend would tell her that she looked nice or not nice in the outfits. She would then thank her friend for the compliments or her suggestions for better designs.
Together, they discovered that the symbols coming out of the soap suds during commercials repressed the words spoken by the announcers. Pow, bam and zap represented words. Product names had symbols. They saw similar symbols in the books her mother read to them. He perfect sound memory and her near perfect visual memory let her begin reading in less than two months. They discussed in silence how the parts of some symbols appeared in other symbols and soon learned the sounds of the alphabet and how these letter symbols made visible spoken words.
She kept her television game a secret, so she would not get spanked. She kept her reading secret so no one would discover here invisible friend. She became a very good secrets keeping girl. Not a boy, still a girl.
Not being outside much was not so bad really. She had television, her invisible friend and papers with words. She would look at a newspaper, a book page, the papers on her father's desk, the notes her mother wrote to herself, and she would remember all the word shapes. Later, she would silently read all the words to her friend and they would discover the context and meaning of new words. They would invent stories to explain the meaning of what she had seen. It was a great game.
In December, I was sent to bring the child back to the hospital. I found her mother in the beginnings of labor and took her with us to the admitting room. Her mother said she would bring a new baby home soon and the boy could meet his new brother or sister when he came home. I held the girl's hand and an armed MP walked us through several doors and down a long hall to see the doctors.
Only two doctors were waiting for the child this time, along with a psychiatrist. The man introduced himself as a psychiatrist, but the other doctors called him “doctor,” so the girl deduced that a psychiatrist was another kind of doctor, even though he did not wear a white coat.
I have decided not to name the doctors, nurses, teachers and officers that appear in this account. We were often cruel or intolerant, but each of us believed we were working to help this gifted but severely troubled child. The Bad Magic Girl was something we had never seen before. We had no idea how to deal with her; we had no understanding of just how dangerous she really was.
Each of the doctors told her that she was not to keep secrets from them. I had also been instructed to reinforce this message whenever I was alone with her. She was to tell them her secrets and all the secrets she had learned so they could see what a fine secret keeping boy he had become. She told me at lunch that telling the secrets would not make her a good secret keeping boy, but a bad secret keeping girl. She had reasons for keeping her own secrets from us.
She understood that she must not tell us about the television game or her invisible friend. They would be angry because she was not being a good boy, but she would not tell them about reading. They would ask how she had learned to read. They would take the television, her mother and all reading materials away from her. She would only tell them some of the stories she had imagined to explain the things she read with her friend. And that was more than enough to frighten these protectors of classified information. Years later she told me.
As she answered their questions, she read the notes they made while she answered. She was both intrigued and worried by their concern that her mother and father must still be telling her secrets. One of the doctors noted her understanding of politics and the government's concern about communist infiltrations. He wondered if her mother or father had warned her not to be forthcoming. He asked about Joe McCarthy and the Rosenbergs, who were being tried for espionage. She told them how she learned things from the news on television and how she thought about new stories to explain the news. She had decided that giving up television access would give her the best chance of misleading them. She was learning to lie by omission, leaving out the important details as she answered.
He put into his notes the idea that someone must be coaching the child, surely much too young to care about such things, possibly a neighbor? Could her imagination be useful?
At lunch, she told me the doctors were being mean and were trying to make her be bad as they asked her to tell secrets. She said she would not tell them all her secrets. When I passed this revelation to them, they were very concerned. They said they would not let the boy know that I had told them. I should remain in his confidence and encourage him to tell his secrets to me.
In the afternoon, the psychiatrist brought out boxes of blocks and asked her to play with him. The blocks had multicolored sides, mostly red and white, some solid and some with bi-colored diagonals. He wanted her to use the blocks to make the pictures he would show to her. He read to her the instructions from a spiral bound test binder.
She read the same instructions upside down and noted the images she would be expected to duplicate. She saw the tester's instructions to time her efforts and to score these times on a chart marked to score five to fifteen year olds. She saw how he was to arrange the blocks before each puzzle. As he read the instructions to her she was solving each test in her mind. As he arranged the blocks, she already knew how she could flip and move the blocks to make each image.
When he showed her the image to duplicate and started his watch, she raced her hands to solve the riddle. She only lost seconds if her hands slipped in excitement. Every puzzle took her less than a minute to solve and while he recorded the results, she was learning to use number symbols. Even as she learned numbers and the meaning of the numbers on his stopwatch, she took less time to solve the puzzles than the psychiatrist took to set them up.
After he wrote the times in his book and checked them against the chart, he asked her to please wait while he spoke with the other doctors outside the door. He came back in with the other doctors and with one more.
The new doctor took the watch and the psychiatrist read the instructions for another set of puzzle blocks. She solved the first puzzle while he set it up and this time memorized the patterns of colors on each block. There were only sixteen blocks in a set and only four color patterns, each repeated four times on the blocks. When the psychiatrist showed her the image, she duplicated it. Then she overturned the blocks and rearranged them to make the same image again, both in less than a minute.
The doctors were so startled they began talking about what she had done before they realized what they were doing. They then quickly left the room.
The psychiatrist and the new doctor, a man from the Office of Scientific Investigations who was never introduced to the child, let her play more games with the blocks. After they were done she asked if she could play her own game with the block sets. They let her have the six boxes. She emptied the boxes and began forming the images she remembered in order, one image on top of another until the first six images were done. Then she took these apart and reformed the next six images, not using the original colors but making the images with a different colored block set.
The new doctor stared as the psychiatrist wrote in this note, “The boy's spacial intelligence is uncharitable.”
I was summoned to take her for a snack of milk and cookies. She liked the little bottle of milk and said it must be a baby bottle.
The psychiatrist and the nameless doctor took turns playing word games with her for the remainder of the afternoon. They never referred to her as a she and called her a good boy repeatedly. She was careful not to correct them. Their notes expressed wonder at her associations and her vocabulary, but concern that her associations showed a consistent feminine inclination.
When I took her to dinner, she asked why I had told the doctors about keeping secrets. This startled me, because I could not imagine how she had learned this. I told her that I was her friend but I was also the doctors' friend. I was not supposed to keep secrets from her or them. Bad Magic Girl said she needed to keep secrets from me, but still wanted to be my friend. Could she tell me some secrets that would just be our secrets? I gravely nodded a yes and then asked her how she knew I had told the doctors about her keeping secrets from them. She said they had said so when they were so excited in the afternoon. She told me two years later that this was only part of the truth. She only told me then that the nameless man was very bad. She would not tell me why.
The night nurse came to take her away and told her that she was now a big brother. Her mother had given birth to another boy. In a few days, the big brother would meet his new little brother.
I came for her in the morning and told her I liked the loose blue hospital pajamas she was wearing. I also told her she would be returning to her mother soon. She told me that I must never tell her that her clothes looked good. The doctors were angry already that she was too feminine for their tastes. I said the doctors were trying to find reasons to consider her an asset rather than a liability. They wanted her to be well. I complemented her on her understanding of my words and asked her to be as honest as she could be in speaking with the doctors. They were trying to protect the whole country from dangers and she should not worry them by keeping secrets.
That day the psychiatrist asked her to tell him how people knew if they were boys or girls. She told him about how boys and girls had different ways of seeing, hearing and even tasting the world. She said boys and girls saw different facial features as being the most important to them. Boys saw the shape, turn and movement of the mouth. Girls watched the curve of the brows, the blink of eyelids and the changes in the size of the pupils. Boys reacted faster to changes in sound intensity and to changes in sound location. Girls reacted best to changes in tone and harmonies. Boys varied the volume of their voices when speaking. Girls varied their pitch and made music when they spoke. She said this was because each valued a different way of hearing. She spent most of the morning telling him about the boy and girl differences she knew already. These differences were how one discovered gender.
The psychiatrist kept refuting her claims, pointing to the slit or staff between a child's legs as being more important. She argued back that almost no time was spent going to pee. People do not pee in the nighttime, but she could see and hear even in her dreams. Peeing, standing or squatting, was not as important as tasting and smelling things. But if a pee thing was the most important part, she would cut hers off to keep seeing, hearing and tasting like a girl.
This made the psychiatrist very sad so she told him stories to make him happy again. She made him laugh by telling him how birds could tell the boys from the girls by dancing. Some birds puffed their throats and bounced, some turned round and round or hopped back and forth. Boy birds were good dancers. Girl birds were good at seeing the colors and watching the movements of the dance. She said girl birds and boy people were alike, both liked to watch color and movement. She said girl people and boy birds were alike. They liked to put on colors and move smoothly with repetitions.
She told me during lunch that she had upset the psychiatrist. She asked if I knew how to help him.
The doctors let her play with toys in the afternoon while they watched her and did not talk often. They spent most of their time making notes in their little books.
When I took her to dinner she said the psychiatrist seemed very worried about the bad magic boy. He was worried that the bad magic boy would always feel like a girl. There might be no way to for Bad Magic to become a good person. I said maybe he was just upset because she did not think her penis was important. Maybe she could think about being more like her father.
The night nurse helped her to bed and said his mother missed her and that she might go home to see her and her baby brother tomorrow. She laid out his cleaned boy clothing to wear in the morning. She washed, dressed and combed the child, wished him goodbye and gave him back into my charge for breakfast. She told him to be very good and to love his new brother.
As I brought her to the testing room, the doctors were already meeting with her parents. They told her mother and father that this child presented a very large problem for them. They said, “He remembers every word and is able to connect the smallest hints and clues to form larger, surprisingly accurate pictures.”
They reminded her father that her mother was being relieved of her top secret security clearance. The father must no longer share classified information with her, especially anywhere their child could overhear them.
Bad Magic Girl felt like a bug being ripped and swallowed by a bird when the psychiatrist stated the child had strongly fixated on being a girl for no apparent reason. He said this fixation had manifested with delusional sights and sounds. The parents must make sure he has no access to feminine toy or clothing. Any use of towels, sheets or even rags to fashion skirts or shawls was to be stopped and punished immediately. He warned her father that if these signs of girlishness were allowed to continue, the father's own classified access could be revoked. She had tried to teach the psychiatrist and he had pretended to listen to her explanations. She felt betrayed
The doctors stressed how important it was for the parents to always address the child as a boy. They could not say, “You are a good boy” or “You are a bad boy” too often. They must stress his gender as often as they could. This child has the potential to become a great asset to the nation, but he is already a terrible threat. If the child sassed them or argued in support of her own femininity, they must let the doctors know so even stronger reparation methods could be considered.
The doctors instructed the parents to let him hold his new infant brother for only short periods of time. They must not allow him to make any mothering gestures or noises as he held the infant. He should never be allowed to change his brother's diapers or to cleanse him in anyway. The parents should try to encourage emotional separation between these children, because their oldest son had already shown an ability to enlist the aid of even older children to support his delusions.
The parents expressed their consent and papers were signed by both of them affirming their understanding of the doctors orders.
I was asked to lead them all to the entrance where two MPs waited to guide them to the same black car that had brought the Bad Magic Girl and her mother to us, three months earlier. She said, “Good-by, Nurse Susan. I will come to see you again.” Her father said, “Not if you learn to be good.”
At the pink house, the Bad Magic Girl argued against the affirmations of her masculinity. Her father was forced to spank her repeatedly and the relationship between them grew very estranged. She was not allowed to watch television. She was not allowed outside.
Before her new brother was a month old, she was brought back to the hospital. She told the psychiatrist this story which he included in her case file.
“My baby brother Ronald, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes, smiled at my mother as she changed his diaper. She wipes his smelly, dirty bottom and scrubs the black, tar mess from his little scrotum with a corner of the diaper. He kicks his heal against the closed diaper pins on the floor. She tells him that he is her perfect baby boy.
I watch and tell her, 'I'm your perfect girl, Mom.'
'No,' she answers, 'You're my boy, too.'
My Dad suddenly come up out of his chair, the light brown, sort of leather one that he sits in always. He grips my hand tightly and tells her that we are going fishing now.
She looks up sad and worried, but says nothing. She nods slowly and goes on cleaning her perfect boy.
The car is green, the seats the same brown as my father's chair. The grass outside of my window is high, higher than the car. The tops are like dust mops barely moving as we come to them, but swaying quickly as we pass. The sun is bright. I squint my eyes to see the road ahead. I stand and then I sit looking. There is a fishing pole leaning back over the bench seat between my father and I. A sinker with a number on it swings each time he moves his hands on the wheel. It is held to the line by a pin, a big pin almost like the ones that fasten my brother's diapers. The line is clear where it knots to the pin but it is green on the winder spool.
As I wonder why, the car turns onto gravel and soon stops. Dad opens the door, takes hold of the pole and pulls it outside. The sinker swings and makes a tiny star on the triangle window. He takes my left hand tightly in his large right and pulls me over the seat and out of his door. The grass is high on both sides of the gravel road.
We walk side by side on a path for twenty-four steps through the tall grass to a short grassy bank right above tea-colored water. The water has only a hint of wiggle to it. Dad lets go of my hand and puts his hand on my back. Then he catches my collar behind my neck and shoves me into the water.
My feet kick against the grass and dirt, my hands flail in the water. It is not warm or cold. The bottom looks like a field of green streamers. I turn my head from side to side. I do not breathe. The colors slowly change from green to gold and then to chocolate as I kick slower and slower against the bank. I cannot breathe water. I stop kicking, I am so very tired; he lets go of my shirt with a push.
I can see the sky through the water as I turn over. I can see his dark brown hair and thin face against the sky and grass. He is holding the pole in his left hand as he kneels on the bank. Everything turns the color of his pale brown chair. Then I see nothing.”
The admissions record I saw shows that her father and another Air Force Officer brought her to the Sacramento Mercy Hospital emergency room after they had pulled her almost lifeless from the Montezuma Slough. Her father had asked that she be transferred to our care as soon as possible. Her case file documents a consultation request from the psychiatrist to the doctor from the OSI. Together, they stated the child's story is the result of an oxygen deprivation induced hallucination. She remained with us for one day and was then released to her mother. I was not present during this visit. This was all I knew about the child until she was returned to my care in the winter of 1953. She told me this story in 1957.
“When I awoke in the public hospital, I knew I was not safe. I knew someone had ordered my death. Someone had decided that I remembered too much and that I could puzzle out still more. I knew my father had not decided to kill me. He was following orders.
When the Mercy Hospital nursing students told me that I had been rescued by my father and an Air Force officer who had been fishing for striped bass, I knew only half of that story was true. My father had been interrupted and then pretended to be my co-rescuer.”
She understood her mother's nod as a nod of assent to her drowning. Every story she imagined to explain away that nod felt wrong as she told them to her invisible friend. She imagined her mother might have been threatened by the OSI or by other people she had learned about on the atoll. But her mother and father were too important. She knew that her father and mother had both been part of the Artichoke Magic. Her mother had been the briefing expert and her father had been in charge of developing new techniques. Her hopeful imaginings did not fit the facts. Her mom had given a yes to her execution. Mother and father were both following orders.
All she could think of to save herself from another attempt was telling the truth. She was much too young to run away. If many people knew the secrets there might be no reason to kill her. She could not be a secret keeper and live. Her father's actions had proven that.
She told the nurses and the student nurses that her daddy had tried to drown her. He had not saved her. He was telling a lie. She told as many people as she could in that hospital. She told the Air Force officer who came in to see how she was doing. She tried to tell them why her father tried to kill her. No one seemed to believe her as she told about Artichoke and Glass Magics. The nurses said she was overwrought and told her to rest.
After her father insisted on having her transferred to Travis AFB for care, she told the night nurse there and the psychiatrist how her father tried to kill her. Still she was released to her mother.
On the day of her release, her mother finished packing all their belongings. Her father had already flown on to Washington DC to meet with leaders in the CIA. In the morning the mom and her two children were on a transport plane going to Offut AFB outside Omaha, Nebraska. Bad Magic Girl was afraid, really afraid. She did not know anyone here and her mother would not protect her.
She tried to understand the reasons behind her elimination and the reason for this hurried move. She knew someone had decided she was an intolerable threat to Artichoke. She knew that many people understood Glass Magic. She had heard the announcers telling about the atomic bomb on television. Two people were already in jail for letting the Russians know how to make these bombs. The Army/Air Force had already dropped two of these bombs on an island called Japan. Atom bombs coming to Johnston Atoll was not a big secret. Artichoke Magic was a very big, very important secret.
Only three people at Travis AFB had known that she knew about Artichoke Magic: Her mother, her father and the unnamed OSI doctor. She had seen other men from the island at the base, but none of these had talked with her.
Her mother had been the briefings officer. She boiled down the experimental results from the many tests on Army and Navy volunteers. She knew the details of these investigations. She knew which isolations methods, truth serums, hallucinogenics and chemical poisons had been used. She reviewed and compared the effectiveness of the techniques. She had determined which ones were most productive, pulling out the truth and avoiding the misfortune of fantasy and defensive falsehoods. Verification and concise reportage of the results, these were her orders and goals.
Her father did historical research and expanded upon it. He was an inventor, a Thomas Edison of torture and interrogation. He could look at the wet sheets used to make 16th and 17th century madmen more compliant and then visualize how complete sensory deprivation could improve brainwashing. He could review the uses of pliers and clamps on human joints and then propose use of a simple non-destructive electric current to achieve better and more lasting effects. He liked interrogations and behavioral modifications that changed the mind but left the human body intact. He has been ordered to find undetectable means to control our state enemies. He designed and supervised the testing of methods on Johnston Atoll.
The doctor with no name had come to Johnston Atoll. He had come once aboard a submarine and once in a seaplane marked with Navy insignia. Bad Magic Girl did not forget faces or body actions. She remembered him. The doctor had met with her parents, but she had never heard this one speak with them. He had visited on the north end of the island both times. He did not wear service uniforms.
Only these three knew that Bad Magic Girl could have learned the secrets of Artichoke. Now that they and other doctors knew how well she could remember and piece together puzzles, these three must have alerted others within the small group of experts developing America's intelligence protocols. That group ordered the child's elimination.
When an uncleared individual accidentally interfered in that elimination, a new option had to be considered. The child was telling the Artichoke secrets to nurses, student nurses and others. Even though the nurses had dismissed her story, they could become a security menace if they remained together and compared notes.
Well-funded benefactors quickly approached the Catholic Archdiocese. If the present class of nursing students could be dispersed and the teaching program discontinued at Mercy Hospital, a much needed Pediatric Care Hospital would be completely built and immediately equipped on the present training office site. The benefactors would pay for the whole project.
The Travis night nurse received orders of transfer to Hickam AFB in Hawaii. The psychiatrist was honorably separated from the Air Force two months early, and Bad Magic was isolated in the psychiatric care area of the Offut AFB hospital.
I cannot verify the treatments given to the child there. In 1963 all of that hospital's military , detached and dependent personnel treatment records were destroyed during a convenient St. Louis depository fire. She gave me this brief history when I spent two days with her in 1957. There was no reference of her admittance to that hospital in the records given to me when I saw her again in December, 1953. I honestly did not believe the story she told me then and would not search for hidden records until much later.
At Offut, the new Artichoke HQ, her mother sent the child under guard to the project director. He chastised the child for not being a secret-keeper. She was then stripped naked, lightly wrapped in gauze, wrapped in porous plastic film and fitted with a breathing mask. The gauze between her fingers and over her skin limited her sense of touch. The plastic limited her mobility and the mask her senses of smell and taste. She was laid in a long white box filled with body warm water. A tube was attached to her mask and a lid fitted over the box to seal her into the dark.
She knew from conversations overheard between her parents on the atoll that this was a sensory deprivation chamber. Her parents had used these to change the behavior of military volunteers. Two days in this box made subjects highly suggestible and subject to hostile control. Her mother said, “Deprivation breaks a man's sense of reality.”
Three days in the box split the subject's ego, creating an “alter.” The alter could be given suggestions that controlled behavior. The alter could also be given trigger phrases that would activate these behaviors and the alter could be told to disappear back into the ego until called out by a trigger. Some subjects developed more than one alter.
Five days in the box had shattered the minds of at least five army volunteers. They emerged in a sustained hallucinatory state, speaking and reacting to individuals and images that no one else could see or hear. When she left the atoll these five were still incarcerated at the north end of the island. They had remained trapped in their waking dreams for four months already.
Her mother said human beings deprived of sensory data built their own worlds from poorly recorded memories. The longer sensation was withheld the more elaborate these worlds became. It seems the rational mind cannot find its way back from a complex imaginary world.
Bad Magic Girl did not know how long she would be kept in the box. She was being treated to keep her quiet; that she knew. After two days her controllers could demand her silence. After three days they could reinforce their demands with a compulsion to commit suicide if she told. After five days it would not matter who spoke to her, she would live in her own world. No one would believe her.
She was sealed into the box, but she was not alone. She was inside with her invisible friend. She had already created her own alter on the atoll.
They talked about her memories and worked out ways they could use them to mislead the doctors. They determined that the doctors would not let them out of the box for at least three days. Her controllers needed the assurance of both a post-hypnotic control and a suicide backup.
They recalled the sights and sounds from just before they had been sealed in the box. She focused on her short term memory and made her recollections permanent. She set this eidetic capture as a safe return and reload point if she should go insane. She recalled her feelings, the sights and sounds, the smell of the air and the taste of her own fear. He imprinted the feel of the gauze being wrapped and the movement of her muscles. She even set to full recall the precise beat of her heart and her breathing.
Having established a point of likely safe return to sanity, they began discussing possible responses that could convince the doctors that the deprivation had been a success. If they were in the box for two days, she would answer all the questions they put to her honestly, even if they searched for information she had hidden from them. The doctors would then believe any suggestions or commands they presented would be effective.
If they were locked in the box for three days, her invisible friend would take the lead, pretending to be an induced alter personality. She would respond to the doctors' commands while Bad Magic Girl evaluated and remained untouched.
If five days passed, they would emerge talking only to each other, completely ignoring the doctors. They would continue doing this for a week or more while letting themselves be heard referring to sounds from her mother's womb. They would let slip the idea that the box was quite like awaiting birth in the womb. Then they would suddenly, return to normal. The doctors should assume that deprivation was not as devastating for young children, who had not moved far along from birth.
Somehow the friends would have to arrange a glance at the desk calendar on the desk in the preparation room. They thought it likely that Bad Magic Girl would be taken there for unwrapping.
If more appointments had been recorded and marked off as completed there, they would know how long they had been in the box. The time difference would determine their responses.
They talked with each other not about making new worlds but about the possible status of the CIA organization, about its parts and about its goals. They spent their time becoming the danger that this group was trying to eliminate.
They determined that I must have passed on everything that Bad Magic Girl had told me. They knew I was kind and caring, but ascertained that my first loyalty was to the CIA. They had not told me about being able to read and they hoped I had not worked out the existence of the invisible friend. These two secrets should be intact. Still, they would be looking for signs that either secret was known.
When they had planned ahead and reached reasonable conclusions concerning the CIA and my part in the organization, they started listening to their memory of the pygmy children teaching her to swim. Hopefully it could be recalled in close to real elapsed time, so they had some idea of how long they were sealed.
More than three days later, maybe more than four, they did not know for sure, Bad Magic Girl was lifted from the box. The lights were not as bright as when she had been sealed away. Yet bright enough to make her squint. She was unmasked and carried to the preparation room in green-clad arms. She was numb. Wiped, unwrapped and wiped again she was placed on a counter and cleaned a third time.
Bad Magic could not see the desk calendar, so the two friends decided to talk only with each other. She stood weakly in place, not moving unless physically moved by the caretakers. She could not be sure if these were doctors or nurses or technicians. She was supported and helped to take steps. She stopped immediately if they removed their hands. She tried to be as much like a clay doll as she could.
She talked to her friend about carrying sick fish across the coral. As they led her past the front of the desk, she saw they had kept her five days in the box. One caretaker's watch let her know it had been nine hours longer then five days. When the caretakers sat her down on the floor she talked with her friend about the warm dark and beating sounds until she fell asleep.
She now knew for certain that the CIA had ordered her drowning. She did not see or even hear mention of her parents. While she talked to her hallucinations no one seemed surprised by her madness. For twelve days, she ate when spoon fed, swallowed when she was told, always talking to nobody there. She was being toileted as directed when she suddenly recovered. She looked around with curiosity and not a trace of her former hallucinations. The casual notes of her mumblings made by the nurses and aides and totally ignored by the doctors suddenly interested them.
This confirmed several theories she developed inside the box. No one had been surprised by her hallucinations; They had expected her to remain lost to the world. Her parents must have approved the use of five day deprivation. They and the CIA would happily institutionalize and eventually let her pass away there from benign neglect. They would put her in the hole with the high wall. The secrets she held were more important to them than her life.
She knew that the CIA was the cover for the OSI, the Office of Scientific Investigation. There was a power struggle going on within the CIA. The OSI had allied itself with others, who recruited and supported revolutionaries all over the world. These individuals believed only verifiable intelligence had any value. Guesses and maybes were useless. The OSI and its allies were a very small group, she had seen the same faces several times in different uniforms and clothing.
The OSI members had once been military, some still were. They had security clearances. Some had a “Q” clearance. The Q clearance was higher than a Top Secret clearance. This security code letter had come from pre-WWII biblical scholars who had postulated a lost “Q” document from which gospel writers had taken their historical information. The Q document then was a secret hidden even from the elite of Christianity. The group liked using code names for its operations. They had used “Bluebird” for a program that could bring false security and happiness to an enemy. Then they changed one part of that project's codename to “Artichoke.” Artichoke was to make an art of choking information from reluctant enemy sources. They adored secrets and believed secrets gave them power to control others. The ones she had met were addicted to power. She knew from the discussions these men had with her mother on the island that the military thought any weapon that could be used against an enemy was a good weapon.
Her father had taken that art as his highest calling. Any technique that could break a mind, cause confusion, suggestibility or give control over the actions of the enemy was a good technique. Her mother had found that some techniques gave interrogators the ability to split personalties, implant irresistible hypnotic suggestions and then induce complete amnesia. She had passed her finding along and many CIA members had come to the island to see her. They were starting a new project to be called “Mind Culture.” It would focus on making super spies, so deep under cover they did not even know they were spies.
The CIA was not staffed by idiots. They had learned enough from her parents, the island children, and the interrogating doctors to fear Bad Magic child knew way too much.
The CIA was also fighting for control of the whole intelligence package in the USA. The entire foreign intelligence program had been scrapped after the defeat of Japan ended the war. J. Edger Hoover, Director of the FBI, had convinced President Truman that a strong intelligence group inside the country could be a grave threat to democracy. But the FBI completely failed to reveal any indication of Stalin's aid to China or Korea. The organization had no knowledge of atomic secrets being leaked around the world until the USSR exploded its own atom bomb.
President Truman began discussions with the Secretaries of War and State and the Joint Chiefs of the Armed Forces about organizing a central intelligence office to controlled by these men. Director Hoover leaked these discussions to the press. Using the pressure of blackmail against owners and editors, he built media opposition to such an organization.
Truman dropped discussion and asked the Secretary of War to organize and secretly fund a group of previously vetted military officers, who had been seconded to European spy organizations during the war. German mind doctors chosen to work with them were released from incarceration by the military and brought to the US without the knowledge of the State Department or the FBI. These men would seem to be an augment to German scientists that had been recruited earlier to develop the hydrogen bomb and our missile delivery systems. This Central Intelligence Group would later become public and be renamed the CIA.
The CIA spent time trying to subvert FBI agents. They needed to find ways to limit Hoover's blackmail of Senators, Congressmen and media leaders, and then control them themselves. They called this project “Mockingbird” because a mockingbird imitated the calls of other birds. Bad Magic child had determined that this effort was more important to OSI officers than any other secret project. She hoped to use this knowledge now to save her life.
As the properly cleared doctors came to question her, she tried to conceal her recollection of having been in the box. She made no mention of any time she had spent away from Johnston Atoll. She tried to convince them that she had complete amnesia for the time period. She mimicked the actions of people who had been two days in deprivation. She wanted them to believe she had no memory of ever revealing her puzzle solving ability to us. She also wanted us to believe she had no knowledge of any plan to kill or isolate her.
She continued letting them think her hallucinations had been built from only superficial recollections of birth and her year spent upon the island. She knew they would take advantage of her 'amnesia' to implant strong suggestions to keep silence. She hoped one of them would think of having her solve puzzles for them. She was not disappointed.
She was asked how she would solve the problem of FBI control of the media. They did not mention the FBI but she knew their target. They told her that both the media and the congress were investigating communist organizations. One group of people seemed to get most of the media credit. How could this be stopped?
She said, give that group even more credit. Send them more secrets to share with the public. Feed them many fabricated links between real communist organizations and other groups. They should publicly encourage the investigations and send agents from “secret, high levels of the government” to leak information some true but mostly false to their rival. They should push for the discovery of connections no matter how nebulous, always praising their rival. Then they should just stop, letting the media, the condemned and injured prove that most of the revelations were false and damaging.
When the doctors 'suggested' she completely forget their questions and her solution, she did so with joy. Here was her hope! She was sure we would see the possibilities of expanding her idea.
The OSI would take her idea, analyze it and approve its use with additions. She had given them the key to making Mockingbird work. They would use many of the methods they had developed within Artichoke to gain control over selected FBI agents. These agents would pass lies directly into FBI investigations without even being aware of their perfidy. Others would be bent to accept questionable data unquestioningly. A few could be used as internal spies with access to all the blackmail activities used by the FBI. They would share these secrets with the OSI when properly triggered. They would not even know they had done so. The OSI loved Artichoke and would jump at the chance to use it in support of Mockingbird. Unknowing FBI moles would give them all the dirt collected by Hoover.
As the FBI lost public credibility, the CIA would gain it. When they had the power of blackmail, they could shove the FBI aside and become the supreme intelligence organization inside and outside of the USA.
The CIA should then use its growing control over the content and flavor of newspaper and television news coverage to push for higher and higher military spending. Senators and Congressmen should be rewarded by the press for raising the National Defense Budget. They should be awarded bases and forts in their states by the military leadership.
Stressing the dangers of the Soviets armed with nuclear weapons, the CIA could move the whole peace time economy to a permanent wartime footing. The group could trade with the military for a hidden percentage of that effort to finance covert operations and investigations everywhere in the world. They should involve congress by accepting a limited oversight of the CIA. Give Senators and Representatives high, but definitely not the highest security clearance, so they could become partners in some operations bordering on the illegal. Their need to feel important coupled with having knowledge not available to average citizens would make them into strong CIA supporters.
The CIA should use Artichoke controlled agents to build ties between the military, supporting government leaders and industrial contractors. Secrets should become an important coinage within this coalition.
The number of Q cleared individuals was quite small, There were less then thirty of us in 1951 and never more than fifty at any time. She was giving us the means to hold power no matter how the people voted in the future. We could become the puppet masters of the world.
She hoped the CIA would keep her alive as a “go to” puzzle solver, a controlled agent of their own, believing she did not even know she was an agent. They did not need to kill her now. Her memory, if it ever returned, could always be erased later with electroshock or hypnosis. She just might be an amazing asset, a weapon that worked to overcome any problems as we developed and expanded her simple plan.
To save her own life, she had suggested the CIA become exactly what J. Edgar feared, a grave threat to democracy. We took her suggestion, believed in our own control over her, and made plans to seize real power. She had given us a justification for doing what we already wanted to do. We decided to keep her hidden away and safe.
We swallowed her bait, not even suspecting the hook she had hidden in it. She was corrupting us with power and criminality. We would destroy our nation and then ourselves.
Her mother's security clearance was renewed and she was given a new assignment.
- Keep Bad Magic Girl away from any secret information.
- Periodically renew the implanted commands against remembering and sharing secrets.
- Move the child away from any military establishment. She should set up housekeeping away from any large media centers.
- Be a loving mother, as supportive as possible of the child's interests and development. If family connections could be used, use them to establish a complete cover.
While her father moved on to Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Argentina to teach interrogation techniques to government security police, her mother took Bad Magic Girl to Fargo, North Dakota. She had cousins in nearby Minnesota and many in-laws in Fargo. She renewed contact with both. She told them that her enlistment had ended because of the children, but her husband would stay in the Air Force. She might be called on sometimes to be a temporary secretary because she knew so much about supply records.
Fargo seemed to meet all her needs. Her in-laws, three families with multiple older children could be called on to babysit her sons, especially if she needed to make a face to face report concerning the child asset. She could no longer be a primary briefings officer, but she could be a backup and a training expert for any new agents called to Q clearance level. She still had the best overall knowledge of Bluebird and the Artichoke test data. She could receive the latest problem, present it to the child for a solution and then give the trigger words to make her forget everything, including her conclusions. As a stay at home mother, she would always be on hand to reinforce the amnesia commands if Bad Magic Girl started remembering.
But Bad Magic Girl had never forgotten. She had misled us when we thought she had become our agent due to sensory deprivation. She soon became aware of the whole range of her mother's responsibilities. No one knew she could already read. Artichoke documents were still being delivered to her mother. Bad Magic Girl read them. She would remember the questions put to her by her mother and she would remember her responses. Her mother would ask her test questions to determine how strongly the amnesia was still working each week. The gradually changing questions and the regular changing of the trigger words used to induce “her amnesia” gave her all kinds of information about changing CIA plans and plots.
After each questioning session her mother would faithfully repeat the trigger words, verbally reinforce the amnesia commands and give new commands not to remember that session. New commands were added telling her to stop breathing if any memory should start to reappear. Bad Magic Girl remembered the sessions, the commands and used these to sharpen her improving acting skills.
She was becoming an accomplished actress and even more dangerous to us, a skilled manipulator. Our original decision to kill her had been the right one. By the time she turned four, she was determined to bring down the United States government by herself. Before she turned five her plan was in place and running. She wanted so much to survive.
Bad Magic Girl used her mother's question sessions to keep up with the concerns of the CIA. OSI had become the powerhouse of the CIA because of her plan to discredit the FBI. Her mother was reporting complete control over the child as well as the refined plans Bad Magic was feeding her. Both of the covert groups in the CIA, the OSI and the black operations group agents supporting allied governments against communist infiltrations, thought of this child as a savant strategist the equal of all the chess master covert operations planners in the USSR. She was our sharpest secret weapon and she had turned in our hands, cutting us so smoothly we never noticed the wound.
In his science fiction series recounting the history of the Foundation, Issac Asimov tells us how mathematician Hari Seldon developed psycho-history to predict the actions of large groups of people. His math only worked for large groups, while a hidden group of robots worked behind the scenes to refine his predictions. Bad Magic now met her robots.
In Fargo, Bad Magic Girl found her first level two and level three mutants. These were her robots and something even better. She was often given into the care of her father's sister's daughters,
Marilyn 14, Yvonne 12, and Janis 10. Yvonne could hear thoughts when she set herself to really listen. Janis could sense illness and was learning to touch sick people to make them better.
Neither girl knew how they could do what they did, but their talents were getting stronger. Yvonne had been able to hide her talent as a special sensitivity to people's emotions. At five when she had first heard the loving caring thoughts of her mother and the worried thoughts of her sister, Marilyn who was going to school in yard sale hand-me-downs, she did not know they had not spoken aloud. They did not know it either.
As her widowed mother began to worry that she might be too sensitive Yvonne learned to disguise her thought reading. She learned to let everyone think that they had spoken with her or out loud to themselves.
Yvonne barely remembered her father, who died just before Janis was born. When Janis turned five she became sickly. Yvonne worried. Yvonne concentrated and was surprised to find Janis feeling the sickness of the children in the duplex next door. She was being weakened by their influenza. Yvonne had to help her little sister and she told her how she could hear thoughts. She had been hearing Janis' thoughts and the thoughts of the kids next door. She told Janis that her sick feelings came from those children. Janis could somehow feel the sick in someone else.
Janis stopped being ill and instead became curious. Before going to first grade Janis had learned to feel illness even before other knew they were sick. She could feel sickness in muscles, bones and teeth and often in the minds of her uncles, aunts, sisters and cousins. When she began school, Yvonne could head talk with her across the whole building.
Yvonne did not have to concentrate to hear thoughts, now. Instead, she had to concentrate to hear one person in a noisy crowd of thoughts. When she did not concentrate the crowded thoughts blended together like hard rain falling on a roof.
The two girls had discovered that some thoughts made people sick. Thoughts could make bodies sick. Yvonne had not found any bad thoughts, but thoughts were like flowers, grass and trees. Flower thoughts were pretty because they were scattered about, but grass and tree thoughts could spread too much or grow too tall. They crowded out other thoughts and that's when the body started being sick.
Aunt Lois said worrying too much gave someone an ulcer. Lois was a nurse, but Janis could feel moldy bugs inside the ulcers. She knew the bugs made the ulcers, not worry. Yvonne could hear fear thoughts crowding inside some people. Janis could feel the tiniest blood vessels breaking inside them. Seeping blood fed other bugs inside these people and the bugs poisoned their bodies.
Janis was learning how to touch a frightened person. Her hands could make them less afraid. The vessels stopped breaking and the flat cloud things in their blood started eating the poison bugs. Yvonne was hoping she could someday stop fear thoughts, selfish thoughts and even sharing thoughts from spreading and growing too big.
Three year old Bad Magic Girl came to their house for babysitting by Marilyn. Yvonne heard the child's fear thoughts screaming. Bad Magic Girl's thoughts were loud and almost all fear thoughts. Janis could feel the child's body ripping itself apart. Bad Magic smiled and played with Marilyn while her mother and their mother talked together. Yvonne did not have to concentrate to hear that girl 's fear filled, “Be nice, don't let them know. Watch out! Why did she do that? What do they want me to do?” And flavoring all her thoughts, “When will they hurt me?”
Janis walked over and touched the stranger. Bad Magic Girl felt a coolness running under her own skin and through her muscles. She felt lifted as if she were rising on a wave in the warm Pacific. She stopped thinking and simply stared curiously. All of her mind focused on her cousin's touch. Marilyn, Yvonne, and Janis were unfocused. Only Janis' hand and wrist laying on her own arm jumped into focus with no moving at all.
Touch was the one sense that did not copy perfectly in Bad Magic's brain. Bad Magic Girl had never been touched like this. This was new, not even like any touch she had felt before this moment. The amazing child was completely overwhelmed, awestruck, cooled to speechlessness inside and out.
The instant of that touch seemed eternal, timeless but extending to the end of all time. Janis had never felt calm flowing from her hand and fingers so fast and strong.
Yvonne heard Bad Magic Girl's screaming stop. She heard the thoughts of both girls pause for an instant. Then Janis said, “Oh,” joyfully.
Bad Magic Girl did not speak. She thought “So good!” as Janis took her hand from her cousin's arm.
Marilyn did not notice a change in Bad Magic Girl. She and the child both kept smiling. Marilyn said, “Janis this is your cousin, Donald. I am babysitting him.”
Yvonne interrupted, “She is not a boy, why is she dressed like a boy?”
Marilyn corrected her in that proper big sister tone, “His name is Donald. He is a boy. That's his mother over there. I am babysitting him.” She went on in near baby talk, “This is your cousin, Yvonne. Janis and Yvonne are my sisters.”
Bad Magic Girl looked at Janis and said, “Hello, Janis.”
Thoughts flooded inside Bad Magic Girl, so many Yvonne could not understand them all. Bad Magic was thinking like a crowd of people, she was her own rainstorm beating on the roof. Wondering what had happened, Yvonne took Janis by the hand and they walked up the stairs to their room.
Marilyn played with the child, hide and seek, I Spy and a coloring book. The Aunt Esther and the child's mother left. They returned in one hour and seven minutes.
While her mother spoke with Marilyn, Bad Magic Girl climbed to her cousins' room and asked, “Yvonne, How did you know I am a girl?”
Yvonne's eyes widened. She looked at her sister and back at Bad Magic. She did not answer.
Then her aunt took the child away.
Bad Magic Girl rode in the taxi reflecting. She was not frightened, her muscles that had been so tight were loose. He mouth did not taste like licked iron. Janis had changed her, and she did not understand how. She could still feel the changes. The changes felt good. She was more alert.
When she focused on her cousin's hand, nothing had been in it. There was nothing on it. It was just a young lady's hand. Something had come from that hand, something unseen but felt. She had felt the flow, the coolness. Her muscles remembered.
She recalled that coolness. When the wind moved invisibly it could bring warmth or coolness. This had been invisible, but its coolness had been a part of the thing, not the result of its passing. The sunlight shone on her face warmly, the light had warmth in itself. She had never known anything that was cool, not cold, in itself.
How had the coolness taken away her fear? Her muscles were loose, not readied to run. She was focused as she sat here beside her mother, her guardian, her keeper and handler. Why wasn't she jumping inside her own skin? Had the coolness relaxed her muscle, so the fear could release? No, the coolness relaxed the fear first, then the muscles found rest.
Did Janis have a drug? A better drug than the CIA knew? There was no fuzziness. There had been no loss of focus, no loss of time. Janis had not thrown her off balance and then implanted hypnotic suggestions.
Bad Magic Girl had been teaching herself self hypnosis and knew the feelings. She had all those sessions with her mother to guide her. She knew the clear focus of hypnosis and the dreaminess of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Janis had not hypnotized her, had not drugged her. What had she done? How?
She knew that Janis was powerful. She was not like anyone Bad Magic had ever me. New and different, but Bad Magic Girl was not afraid of her. But the child was not trusting, maybe she had never been trusting. She was curious and hoped her mother would let them meet again.
She thought about cousin, Yvonne. Yvonne had only seen her for a moment. She had not spoken to Yvonne. She had been in her best actress mode, because that house had been a new place that frightened her. She did not know what went on there. Paying attention to her mother, her aunt and her cousin, Marilyn, she had been stepping, moving, angling her hands and head in her full boy emulation. Marilyn had been convinced, her mother had not changed in anyway. Bad Magic Girl had not fallen out of character.
Marilyn introduced Bad Magic as a boy, but Yvonne had immediately disagreed. Her tone of voice fairly shouted, “This is a girl, not a boy!”
When Bad Magic Girl went into the sisters' room, Yvonne's look toward Janis told her that they had been talking about her. Had they been discussing her for an hour? What did they know? How did Yvonne know about her true gender? Why had Yvonne been so sure!?!
As she walked into her mother's house and as her mother went to retrieve her infant brother from the elderly lady there, Bad Magic Girl pondered perplexed. She did not have enough information. She needed more. Thinking more clearly than she had since being drown, without the fear that had been in her, she decided to take a great risk.
She moved her body rhythmically and slowly during her next session with her mother. Because her mother was distracted by her own purposes, she did not notice until Bad Magic Girl had captured most of her attention. Bad Magic Girl suddenly tilted her head aside as if she had fallen asleep and her mother copied her. The girl induced hypnosis and in this first session suggested reintroduction commands and amnesia concerning this induction. During the next session she spoke her suggested triggers and deepened her mother's hypnotic trance. By the end of their third session Bad Magic Girl had given her mother three trigger words to induce deeper states of trance. These were “Castor, Pollux and Balmer.”
When she told me the words years later, she laughed and called them her own CIA code. She explained it then. Pollux first because it is the brightest star in the constellation Gemini. Any reference to the stars in astronomy or astrology would have put Castor first. She did not want her mother accidentally triggered. Then the name Castor because she sought information about two sisters, who might not be twins, but were certainly mysterious. Babylonians call the two stars, Death and Pestilence. The Chinese claimed the stars were parts of two different star sign animals. The last word was the name of the mathematician, Balmer, who used the spectral lines of the star Pollux to unravel the energy states of the hydrogen atom.
All of this information had been in the Glass Magic documents from Johnston Atoll. If the CIA ever discovered the trigger words used on her mother, they might be able to discover the source of Bad Magic Girl's knowledge about them. It was a big risk, but she did not think the best of us were very smart. We proved her right.
Inducing a trance in the first session, Bad Magic knew she could find out everything her mother knew about the cousins. She did not ask during this session however. She only stressed amnesia of the session . She knew that hypnosis could be resisted at this level. She knew suggestions were not perfect and she could not split her mother's personality to make her commands irresistible. She had neither the time nor the equipment.
After the third session and after planting all three code words for triggers of deeper and deeper trance states, Bad Magic Girl began her inquiry. Even then she kept her questions general. How did mom know this family? What were they like? Why did she want to use them as babysitters?
Her mother did not know that anyone in that family was special. The widowed mother deeded money to support her daughters. The girls were the right age to babysit. Marilyn could watch the baby while the other girls watched the Bad Magic Girl.
Bad Magic decided to strengthen her mother's acceptance of the family as babysitters. She also suggested her mother never notice any lapses in Bad Magic Girl's behavior. From now on the sessions meant to augment her mother's control over her, would be sessions increasing the girl's control over her. Sessions to give Bad Magic information.
So spending hours in the afternoons at her aunt's house would become a regular thing. Bad Magic Girl laughed about taking CIA moneys from her mother to support her covert cousins.
One month after her first visit, Bad Magic was her cousins again. Her aunt Esther was not home but all three cousins were. Marilyn took charge of her infant brother. Yvonne and Janis took Bad Magic to their room. Janis held her hand and the three year old felt the cool again easing her mind and body. It felt so good. This time her thoughts tried to analyze the feeling, isolate, and identify how this feeling worked. The coolness seemed to be going to a hole where her head met her neck. She could not follow the flow beyond that spot. She had never felt anything like this.
She knew from her gentle interrogation of her own mother that Yvonne had never been told about Bad Magic's feeling like a girl. Bad Magic Girl's mother did not know that her nieces were talented in any way. Maybe they could be trusted like the island children.
Bad Magic Girl asked Yvonne, “Can you tell me what she is doing?” Bad Magic thought Yvonne might also be a puzzle solver.
Yvonne said, “She sends herself to fill the holes in people.”
“How do you know?” Bad Magic asked.
Yvonne said, “I can her her thinking.”
Janis said, “She really can! She hears you, too.”
“How?” asked the Bad Magic Girl.
And Yvonne answered, “We do not know.”
For two years the children discussed their talents. Bad Magic did not tell me all that she learned from them and I have no idea how the brains of these girls had been rewired. Bad Magic finally convinced me that I should not intervene in their lives. If the great puzzle solver had not been able to solve the riddle of their special talents, no one in the CIA that I belonged to would treat these girls kindly. We could only be expected to harm them.
She presented her story to me.
Janis had discovered the near root causes of many human behaviors with her sense. Yvonne had listened to the thoughts of people and she confirmed what Janis had felt. When Janis gained the ability to transfer a part of herself, they had another confirmation that a hole of some sort existed at the base of many human brains. These people would try very hard to fill that hole with special ways of thinking that seemed to brush the edges of the hole.
Bad Magic Girl listened to them and began reasoning from their data and their descriptions of peoples' thoughts. She added information that she had gleaned from two Encyclopedias, journals and books she scanned at the public library. The girls took her there often to flip pages. Yvonne was able to check out some books that interested Bad Magic, although the librarians restricted even the older girl's access to the adult section. The ladies would have been shocked to discover just how thoroughly Yvonne already understood the 'darker side' of the adult world.
Bad Magic developed a theory. Infants came into the world by no means complete. Their bodies would grow fifteen to twenty times more massive, if properly fed and exercised. But their brains would only triple in size because they were born with oversized heads. The growth of the body was fairly even across all parts. The growth of the brain was not. Several areas expanded and matured at vastly differing rates. Because the brain tissues grow at different rates and at different times, Bad Magic Girl figured there must be separate causes and triggers for growth in individual areas. Brain growth was not simply a matter of nutrition. She thought the hole must be an area of the brain that had failed to grow, because its growth trigger had not been pulled. As the touch of Janis' hand felt so wonderful, she thought the hole in her own brain must have appeared because she had never been touched in the right way.
She told the sisters, she though their talents were similar. Both could sense the thoughts and emotions of others. Yvonne's mind focused on hearing and Janis' on the feel. She never questioned the talents of either girl. Just accepted them. They in turn never questioned her ability to build whole pictures and symphonies from a brief glance or a softly caught sound as they flashed by in a car.
She proposed an experiment involving all their talents. Janice would feel at a distance for persons who had holes in their brains. Yvonne would listen to their thoughts, identifying the dominant thinking patterns. They would chose some people to work with. Bad Magic Girl would induce a short trance and the suggestion to forget. Janice would touch them, transferring some of herself. Yvonne would then listen to see how the pattern might change.
They hoped to find beneficial thinking patterns. Bad Magic Girl was excited by the idea that they could so directly study how early developmental deficiencies influenced thinking patterns.
In the first months of babysitting, Yvonne noticed Bad Magic Girl's constant fear decreasing. A calmness took it place. Bad Magic had been filled with distrust and fear. That dominate thinking pattern was changing. Janis noticed that the hole in Bad Magic's head and neck was slowing closing. Bad Magic Girl thought Janis' healing touch promoted growth in the hypothalamic region of her brain. Her brain was growing there and her thought patterns were more balanced.
Bad Magic Girl liked being less fearful, but she did not know if this calming was beneficial for her health and survival. Over the next year, the girls observed and discussed their findings. They learned startling things.
The dominate thought patterns of persons with holes in their lower brains fell into only four patterns. There was a guilt pattern that let an individual assume large amounts of blame. This pattern let fingers of guilt pick at the edges of the hole as a bored child picked at the edges of a scab. The fear and anger pattern which was more like poking into the hole with a stick. A hunting and killing pattern which threw up temporary barriers of dead bodies around the hole. And finally a building/making pattern which felt like filling the hole with sand or stones.
Every thought had a place in the mind and no thought seemed bad or good in itself. Grouped together though thoughts did benefit or harm to one's body. The guilt pattern had an action like a spreading poison ivy rash. The fear and anger pattern made the whole body jumpy. Then the body started to fall apart from a lack of rest. The killing pattern seemed to retard hypothalamus growth even more. The body and the mind seemed only half awake. The kill thinkers needed bigger and more violent kills to stay awake. The building pattern fixed on having too much, burying the mind and body under collected, built or kept things.
All of these obsessive patterns drove people away from the ones with hole in their brains. These antisocial patterns precluded the receiving a healing, caring touch. Bad Magic Girl thought they were terminally destructive.
All of the people touched by Janis and observed by the girls changed their obsessive thinking patterns. Their thinking became more balanced and less circular in nature. If Janis touched them more than once over weeks the hole in their heads began to close. Bad Magic Girl was convinced Janis had a healing touch, but she could not identify any measurable substance transfer.
The girls tested different combinations of touching, Janis/Yvonne, Janis/Bad Magic, Yvonne/Bad Magic and all of them together touching a chosen person. Janis combinations always calmed and often showed brain growth. Yvonne's' touch worked better than Bad Magic's, but touch repeatedly given by any of the girls produced some calming.
Bad Magic Girl thought the hypnosis that let them touch these people may have led to that calmness, so they arranged some interactions with and without touch. For these they used the older girl's classmates as subjects. They were not selecting for holes or pattern thinking. Hypnosis produced short term calm, but touch produced even more.
The girls agreed that simple holding, physical caring, comforting touch may be the best therapy for obsessive thought disorders. Simple caring touch!
As Bad Magic Girl grew more calm and less harried by her repeating fears, she began looking beyond her own immediate survival to the survival of caring people. She learned that the care of Yvonne and Janis gave her balance and healing. She knew they were caring because all three of her cousins had been held and cared for by their mother, her own Aunt Esther. Caring is healing and nurturing. Caring is passed around by caring individuals gathered into caring families and communities. Caring is self-perpetuating.
All the obsessive thinking patterns, born out of not being touched, drove away the caring community that could heal. She had been right in thinking greed, pride, and the lust for power would destroy the CIA and the government. She had been wrong to encourage secrets, blackmail and hidden control for she had condemned millions of caring people in the world.
Bad Magic Girl's will to live, her limited knowledge, her pride in her superior reasoning had hardened the course of the world in an anti-caring direction. She would study war no more.
While the girls learned that a caring touch, a hug, a pat could heal a wounded mind, the two cousins continued to heal the Bad Magic Girl. Yvonne could hear how strongly the child affirmed her girl nature. Janis could feel the girlishness of Bad Magic's senses. That part of Bad Magic was not wounded or sick and they did not try to heal it.
The assertions, that Bad Magic Girl remembered perfectly, made by the psychiatrist condemning her feminine perceptions were sick. The punishments she had received for being a girl and saying so were also sick. The still ongoing rejection of Bad Magic Girl by both of her parents was very sick.
The girls gathered girl clothing that fit Bad Magic and let her wear these whenever they were without 'adult' supervision. They always spoke to her as girls addressing another girl.
As Bad Magic Girl lost her fear and anger, they talked about sharing and caring. They learned by experimental observation that a caring touch could heal. They knew sharing a healing touch with a wounded person felt good, and it helped that person heal. They learned that the more times they touched in a caring manner the more caring they themselves became. Caring sharing grew as they used it.
Bad Magic realized that the secrets she had encouraged the CIA to use and to keep were an extremely bad form of non-sharing, a denial of caring. Secrets keeping would destroy the CIA just as she planned. Now she was learning why. The growing distrust splintered a caring society. Secrets made sharing impossible. They denied caring. The lack of caring touches made more holes in more brains. This led to obsessive behavior and then to more holes in more and more children. Bad Magic had doomed the world.
As she realized the extent of the wrong she had set in motion, Bad Magic was also healing. She did not exchange her fear and anger for guilt. She could acknowledge her fault and work to find a way to save the world. Pretty ambitious goal for a single almost five year old girl.
In November of 1953, Bad Magic Girl's father came to Fargo from a training mission in Argentina. Bad Magic said:
“It is a bright cold day. The snow blows in fluffy waves down the road. The windows are laced in fine white frost. The curtains are a pale rose lace. The wallpaper is white with blue, yellow and brown flowers.
I play school with my cousins, both girls older than I. Von is fourteen and Jannie is twelve. Jannie loves school for real. I sit at a small desk, wearing a short-skirted one piece jumper in a light creme with a soft yellow rose imprint.
Von is the teacher. She wears a white blouse and a dark blue skirt. Mary Janes hold her feet over warm white socks. Jannie is the oldest student assigned to help me read. She wears red and green so I think it must be close to Christmas. She has brown Buster Browns on her feet.
A dark haired, scowling man, my father, comes up the stairs. It is not his house. He has been away in a war for a long time. He stands in the open doorway, turning red above his brown uniform. I watch him, wondering who he is now.
He yells my name and calls me a “sissy girl.”
She was brought back to Travis AFB, to the hospital where I tended and helped rehabilitate the survivors of CIA testing. Most were volunteers but some had been picked at random from grade schools and colleges. We were testing the use of hallucinatory drugs at that time.
Her jaw was broken and she was missing three teeth. Both the ulna and the radius of her left arm were broken. Her right shoulder had been dislocated and that humerus had a green stick fracture. The sternum had separated from several ribs and her right thorax severely bruised, as were the right side of her head and neck. A blow to her left temporal region had given her a hairline fracture and a massive impact to the right side of her skull had left a serious concussion. She had been sedated for fifty-four hours.
Although her mother had reported no signs of resistance to her hypnotic suggestions nor any signs of feminine behavior over the course of two years, her father had found her dressed as a girl and playing school with two older female cousins.
Questioning of the girls by police officers after the ambulance took her away revealed she had been dressing as a girl with their help for more than a year. She had convinced them that she was a girl. The cousins had been assured that Bad Magic Girl would recover from her father inflicted injuries. He would receive mental health care for his battle fatigue breakdown. The FBI had claimed jurisdiction from the police. The incident file sanitized and closed.
Hypnotic interrogation of Bad Magic's mother let us know the child had learned to use hypnosis on her mother. Her mother was able to recover the memory of being placed in a trance and asked to forget that session. Bad Magic Girl had given her a racial slur, “Pollock” as a trigger word.
The presence of an implanted trigger word convinced us that the child had more than one hypnotic session with her mother. We suspected many sessions, but had not been able to verify these. When psychiatrists at Offut AFB tried repeating the trigger word, the child's mother had gone into a deeper trance state. She was not responsive to questions in that state.
I was to win the child's confidence while tending to her injuries. As she recovered psychiatrists and interrogators would be using drugs to ferret out the truths Bad Magic Girl was hiding from us. I must be very careful that the child never saw any written notes or materials. Her cousins had taught her to read while they babysat her.
Medically the child did not need much care. Her fractures had been reduced and immobilized with casts. Her concussion appeared to be healing. The sedatives were discontinued. Feeding her through her wired jaw gave me the best opportunity to gain her trust. Bad Magic Girl told me this story.
She had become aware of her mother's questioning sessions about three months after their move to Fargo, ND. She noticed time missing from her days. She could recall all that she had seen and heard except for some times spent with mother. Her memory remained perfect apart from those times. She found by review that her memory lapses occurred on a regular basis, almost always at the same time of the week and always with her mother present.
Because she did not trust her mother, although she did not know why, she began asking her little brother about these times when he learned to speak. He told her Mama would tell her things and then ask her to make up stories about them. Then Mama would tell Bad Magic Girl to forget.
Bad Magic Girl had indeed forgotten, but the missing times worried her. She began searching for clues. As Yvonne and Janis, her cousins, read stories to her and showed her the children's books, Bad Magic learned to read. She soon asked them to help her read more books than they had in their house. They took her to her soon to be favorite place, the public library.
They let her roam through the stacks and flip through magazines as they studied and talked with their friends. They checked out books for her. She never took any books home with her. She told them she did not want her mother to know she could read.
I thought this was an unusual thing for a child to hide. Most children, I believed would be proudly showing off their new skill. But Bad Magic Girl told me she had a reason. She could remember all the pages she saw. She could flip those pages in her memory. She convinced me of her skill by telling me all the words that appeared on the first, second and third pages of our nursing procedures, reciting them perfectly. This was another aspect of the perfect recall we already knew she possessed.
She said, she had learned about hypnosis from a magazine article about Dr. Milton Erickson. She had then read everything in the library about hypnotism. She recognized her own after session feelings as matching the descriptions of post-hypnotic suggestion feelings.
She hypnotized her mother and asked her about what happened during their weekly sessions, then she told her mother to forget. She left a word trigger after her mother told her about the suicide penalty for remembering these sessions. She told her mother not to give this suggestion any more and to ignore any feminine behaviors in he child. She repeated the word and reinforced the forgetting every few weeks.
Frightened by the suicide command, Bad Magic let herself be repeatedly hypnotized. She did not try to recall the problems her mother gave nor her own responses. The sessions made her mother happy, so Bad Magic did not change their format or her participation in them. She did however read some of her mother's notes about these sessions. She wanted to make sure her mother was not suggesting suicide any more. She still remembered the notes she had read.
Because she had learned that her memory gaps had been commanded during hypnosis, she began trying to recall what had happened before she came to Fargo. She said she remembered a little about being on a Pacific Ocean Island and something about being alone in a wet box.
She played me well. She gave us enough to account for all the things we already knew without revealing that she had never forgotten, never developed multiple weakened personalities, and had never been under our control.
We decided to make several changes in the handling of this valuable asset.
Because sensory deprivation had not had the profound force we had envisioned, we would not repeat this treatment. (I did not know that she had been left in the isolation coffin for more than five days.) Because she did not trust her mother, we would not use maternal affections to motivate the child. Because her father had hurt her so badly, we thought fear might be an excellent motivator. Because drugs were at the top of our present investigations, she should become one of our experimental subjects. But we must always remember, the child is useful. Her problem solving must not be impaired; she must not be destroyed.
Psychiatrists now openly in the employ of the CIA were called on to develop a plan to motivate and exploit the child. I passed on everything I was learning from the girl.
They felt the child's ongoing gender dysphoria could be the key to controlling her. We should remind her and her parents that girlishness and feminine feelings were very serious signs of mental illness and maladjustment. All of the upcoming chemical experiments should be explained as attempts to control or eliminate these behaviors. Any failures or the need to try additional procedures should be attributed to the non-responsive nature of her pathology.
Her father, who was developing a fondness for inflicting pain, should be strongly encouraged to hurt the child. Her fear of him could become her primary motivator toward cooperation. She could come to see the psychiatrist and I as her protectors. We intended to use a method she had given us to control her. We would back both her and her father, using each against the other.
That was our plan. She had another!
She had learned of another way to induce a hypnotic trance. She had practiced it for almost two years. She did not mention falling asleep nor did she issue forceful commands. She told stories and during the telling repeated pulsed pauses. To these she added small nods and the lifting of a finger in time with the telling pauses. She slightly stressed the words of her suggestions inside her story. She induced an unnoticed trance, even in people who knew the usual induction methods. She caught me, just as she caught her mother.
She chose not to use me as she had used her mother. She touched my hands and arms as I fed her. She suggested I seek healing touch everywhere I could find it. She gave me no strong commands to resist. Still, I became a fan of massage and I started looking for a caring relationship with someone. She began healing the hole in my head. She would study war no more.
She was aware of her mother's and father's positions in the CIA. She understood that her father's discovery of her in drag, our uncovering of her hypnotic control over her mother, and her father's overly violent reaction before witnesses, revealed both of them as unstable and unreliable. They were not fit to hold the Q clearance. They would be shunted aside. She had foreseen their eventual reduction in the organization. She had not planned their rapid and traumatic demotions.
Her mother was dedicated to project quality and not focused on gaining power. She was a builder thinker. The CIA rewards perfidy and not performance. Her father was also a builder, he invented new techniques. She believed he had realized that he was being pushed from the inner circle. He was trying to become a kill thinker. He was beginning to enjoy causing pain. But he learned too late.
She was perfectly aware of my involvement with CIA testing. She could continue her access to CIA plans through me. She was working to correct her planned destruction of the country. She needed unimpeded access. She had to keep us interested in her.
She needed more information. She could not ask Yvonne for direct knowledge of peoples' thoughts. She would heal me, but she would not control me. I must become her willing partner without coercion. Even though she could not be sure of my future actions, she would begin healing and stay patiently ready.
She had been analyzing Bonhoeffer's book, The Cost of Discipleship, when her father swung her against the wall and threw her down the stairs. She was not convinced by any of his arguments against cheap grace, but she was intrigued by his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. She questioned all aspects of keeping secrets, but had not determined if complete honesty and openness could be achieved. Did open sharing have a chance when the government was violently power hungry? The book said no.
She would follow a path of limited resistance to our control over her. She hoped to thwart us and to stay just outside our expectations. Keep us intrigued, keep us puzzled.
One morning while we talked, she asked me to tell her about Jesus. Who was he? What did he do?
I told her the little I remembered from my days in Sunday school. She asked if she could see the book his story was in. The next day I brought her a Bible. She flipped each page from beginning to end. Then she told me that the first part was a very boring story about bad people doing bad things to other people. They had a bad god who helped them be bad. There were four gospels that told the story about Jesus with another god, and then a bunch of letters speculating about who he had been. At the very end a man suffering from an aneurysm had recorded his vision. She thanked me and said no more about Jesus or the Bible.
We started using drugs on Bad Magic Girl after giving her system four days to purge the remaining traces of sedative. She was restrained in her bed while I started IV drips in her hands. I used those veins because of her casts. The interrogators, three men, added a heroin based sedative to one IV and then after ten minutes added adrenaline to the other. After two more minutes they began rapidly asking her questions.
She told them essentially the same story she had given me. She lied, but she never told me how she could resist this chemical cocktail. I cannot tell you, now.
The questioning went on for two hours until the IVs emptied. I injected her with morphine and allowed her to sleep. The interrogators were confident that the child was telling the truth.
After waiting two more days for her system to clear, we began hallucinogen tests on her. We wanted to know if these could disturb her phenomenal memory. We already knew most subjects experienced no logic dysfunctions on psychedelics.
She told me much later that she had confused the testers by placing herself into a trance and memorizing her heart and respiration rates. She recalled all the details of the testing room, down to the number of flies dead on a window sill. Her invisible friend reminded her of these starting details while Bad Magic noticed all the changes happening to her perceptions.
Comparing her present sensations and her perfect memory, she knew exactly which drugs changed her and how. From the questions the testers asked, she gleaned their expectation of the drugs effects. Watching and noting the changes in their body language she knew when and how her responses gratified or exasperated them.
She began playing peek-a-boo with us. The super child playing with the ordinary adults, striving to entertain us, she let us see our expected drug responses. Then she would hide, faking an unexpected reaction. As we tried to make sense of these she returned to the expected. Over and over, she covered her self and then let us see her peeping from behind her hand. We could not stop playing. She befuddled us. All of our drugs produced wild and strange results.
She trapped our curiosity and excited our imaginations with false data. How did her mind and body work? Was she completely unique?
I reminded the psychiatrists that she could read, and could memorize a label in an instant. So they gave her dosages in unmarked syringes, in alternate tablets, tinted with food coloring. She would repeat her first test responses until we were almost sure we knew how a drug worked in her. Then she would suddenly start responding differently. We had no idea she could resist almost all our pharmaceuticals, or confuse our knowledge of her reactions to the rest.
As we gave the child on-the-job training in the use and identification of our pharmacological inventory, she was working to heal me. She would touch me on the arm and put her hand on mine as we sat to talk. She asked me to bring her books of any kind, and thanked me for my choices.
We had already restricted her access to newspapers and magazines. We did not think it safe to let her even glimpse our charts, peer reviews of psychological tests or scientific journals. I brought her novels. They should be safe.
We used the trigger words used by her mother to induce a trance state and then quickly changed her trigger words. It seemed appropriate to change the words frequently because we were afraid of the child. She was so unusual. We could not be sure she would not learn the new words if they were repeated for very long.
She seemed to enter hypnosis easily. We could induce numbness, heightened attention and muscle rigidity. She solved our problems and apparently forgot the details upon command. But no instruction commanding her to respond as a male, answering to masculine pronouns or even her given name, were ever followed. She had decided to stubbornly resist attempts to correct her perceived gender.
In the middle of hypnotic sessions and in the midst of drugged interrogations, and they were many, we would order her to act as a boy. She would respond with this line, “I am a girl. I will survive.” This response repeated exactly with identical inflection each time under many different drugs led us to search for a buried post-hypnotic command. We did not know who might have implanted such a command. But one must be there, strong and deeply hidden.
Her parents were our first suspects of course. If there had been any inclination to let them in on our interrogations, our suspicions ended them. We ignored requests for information from the Black Operations teams. Her father had too many contacts with them. We terminated her mother's custody rights by court order, citing her inability to protect this delusional child from injury. Her mother did not contest our decision.
Bad Magic Girl still played with us. She strengthened our distrust of each other within the CIA. She hoped to make us so paranoid that we would not be able to consolidate our power. This was her first temporary attempt at undoing the plan she had set in motion.
We had unlimited access to the child for a year. We tested psilocybin, mescaline, DNT and LSD on her. Jimsonweed tea and light doses of PCP were given to simulate dream states. Ketamin, laughing gas and PCP in higher dosages let us judge her reactions to the dissociation of mind and body. Even though most subjects reported similar visions and responses to these drug, Bad Magic did not. She was sometimes very resistant to opiates and sometimes almost unconscious under them. Stimulants produced strong but very erratic behaviors.
We concluded this phase of our study with the notation: “His reaction to any tested psychoactive chemical has been wildly erratic. We do not recommend the use of chemicals in controlling this subject.”
At the end of these tests, our Pareto loci power was threatened by California's truancy laws. Consulting psychiatrists recommended moving the child to Patrick AFB in Florida, where he could be tested in other ways for another year. Patrick AFB had restricted entry and no self-contained medical unit. The base commander was told that the child was mentally ill.
Several local doctors in the surrounding counties were given records describing Bad Magic as a boy, intelligent but delusional; retarded and socially withdrawn; intelligent with catatonic schizophrenia, and of normal intellect with dissociative episodes. We believed these scattered records would let us consult the “right doctor” as needed.
Bad Magic Girl would be tested with more conventional control methods, including rape, abandonment, induced terror and prolonged pain. Unused housing on base would be reassigned so her father could proceed without interference from base personnel.
Father and child moved in. She was given two rabbits as pets and shown how to care for them. Her father was her sole caregiver and in complete charge of her feeding, bathing and all of her out of doors movements. After two weeks her father killed her rabbits while the child watched. A psychiatrist who believed the child delusional recorded her description of the event.
“The blackberries ripen. Some are ready for tasting. Red, turning to black a few are already tart-sweet. I wear red shorts and a blue and white striped t-shirt, flag like.
I search through the leaves and lift the thorns, reaching very carefully for the few, picking them gently and biting them slowly. There is a green shiny worm, with sucker feet and white hairy spots, walking along a looping, yellow-green, squared, thorny stem. His feet lift and fall almost like ocean waves. He has a golden spike grown out of his rear end, a barely curving spike. It looks sharp.
Grasshoppers, some small yellow and other large green, make tea brown, black or green spit as they chew on the glossy green leaves, They hop and drop away from me into the dark as I spread the thorns apart. Some fly behind me over the high board fence. The fence is redwood, just starting to stain gray from a wonderful red-brown. The boards stand tall and straight, nailed without spaces to two inch by four inch horizontal rails. Three rails are inset between pairs of upright posts set into concrete footings. The fence keeps out the alligator that dad says lives outside this yard.
I see our white garage through the spread leaves, standing up across thirty-six steps of grass. I counted once. Our yellow house touches it on the left and the board fence turns corners to touch it on the right. There is a gate in the second corner fastened with a black metal latch and hinged with black metal strap hinges. Outside the gate is a sidewalk that crosses a culvert channeling the ditch where the alligator swims. I cannot see the sidewalk but I know it is there.
My father comes around the corner of the house. He sees me picking blackberries. He sees my rabbit with its pink eyes nibbling the grass along the fence where it grows greenest under the lowest rail. Without pause he walks to the rabbit and lifts it up in his hands. Then he turns, looking to see if I see. He smiles and takes my rabbit's head in his left hand as he lets its body drop from his right forearm.
Pinky kicks her big grass-stained feet. She doesn't like being held this way. I watch, not moving.
He sees me watching. He takes her neck in his right hand and twists her head with his left. She stops kicking. She stops moving, her legs just hanging down. He throws her over the fence still looking at me.
I stand still for a long time, urine running down my legs. I get angry and then calm. I look away, then I reach out to pet the big worm.
He stops smiling, turns and walks away.”
As her father drove her to see the doctor, he told her she could say whatever she wanted because no one ever believed children like her. The doctor prescribed a sedative after hearing her account and told her father, who had remained in the room with them, to bring her back if the child had other stories.
On the way back to the base, Bad Magic's father said he could do whatever he wanted to her and no one would ever help her. She could tell anyone and no one would believe her.
For the next four days, he anally raped the child. After each assault he would sit down in the room acting as if nothing had happened. Day and night he came to her, sometimes just to be in the same room, other times to rape her. He built her fear and disrupted her sleep. He worked to destroy any sense of security.
On the morning of the fifth day, her father took her on a motorcycle to the southern base gate. After they had passed through he put a black hood over her head and rode a twisting route into the manatee inhabited waterways and swamps. He removed the hood and pushed Bad Magic from the bike.
“Sitting flat on the ground, I watch the motorcycle speed away across and then along a dirt path. My father turns east.
I have fallen off, maybe. I do not know, but I have been left behind. My feelings are conflicted. I am alone and worried that I am very far from people. I am alone and yet happily relieved because I am alone.
I stand up, brushing the damp whatever from my corduroy pants. There is a shed at the end of the wet meadow, pine and cypress trees all around. I start walking toward the shed with misting eyes.”
He “found” the child five days later. She had rolled in mud to protect herself from insect bites. She had bent down thin bamboo stalks and chewed the tips. She was not happy to see him. He raped the child again and then left her in their house alone. He would set out food, give her books to read and wake her each time she slept for more than one hour. He did not assault her for a week.
He took the child back to the doctor and told her to tell the doctor what had been happening. She told and the doctor dismissed her story. Her father took the child back to the base and told her to point out any airman with an MP armband. The child chose one and her father stopped his car by him.
Her father in dress blues with the seven pointed leaves of a Major on his shoulder tabs, put on his service cap and stepped from the car. After the exchange of salutes, he asked the Sargent if he had any orders concerning this child.
The Sargent replied, “Yes, Sir.”
“What are those orders, Sargent?” her father asked.
“If he is found anywhere but in your house and not in your immediate custody, he is to be returned to you immediately. Sir.”
“Thank you, Sargent,” her father said. The Sargent saluted and her father took off his hat and sat in the driver's seat. As he set his hat on the seat between them, he asked Bad Magic, “Do you want to choose another airman?”
“No,” said the child.
Her father slapped her hard as they drove to the house. He raped her and then beat her inside the entryway. As she lay crying and trying not to cry, he told her she would be hurt every time she called herself a girl. If he called her a girl, a bitch or a cunt and she did not correct him, he would hurt her. Did she understand?
He listened as the child said yes and then asked, “Are you a girl.”
She said, “I am a girl. I will survive.”
He beat her with a web service belt and shut her in the coat closet. Two weeks of such abuse still pulled the “I am a girl. I will survive” response from her. We decided to try another type of pain. This is a memory we were not able to wipe from her mind.
“I have been lying on the hardwood floor for a long time. My head is turned to the left and my cheek is numb. All of me is almost numb and I am feeling better for it. My chest trembles with each in and out breath, but I feel better.
I have stopped crying, though I have cried. The floor is wet. My breathing is ragged. My eyes burn with the feeling left behind after tears. I can see my hand with the blood on it and under it. I can see the nail that stabs through it and pins me to the floor. I can see the white tendon behind the nail and slick in the wound.
I remember being told to feel my body, to feel the pain. I am to learn that this is my real body. I am to learn that this is a real boy's body. I did not know the man who told me this. My father held my hand still when this man put the nail between my pointer and index fingers, halfway between the web and my wrist bones. He held me down with his knee on my back when the man hammered the nail into my hand and into the floor. He held me harder when they put a nail in my other hand because I jerked and jerked to get away.
They are behind me somewhere talking softly now. I cannot move my feet, they are pinned to the floor. My knees press the floor. My thighs and my knees are growing more numb. I have no clothes. I do not hurt so much now.
I think about getting free. A fish can pull a hook out of its mouth. I know I have to get free. Nails can kill. I have seen a catfish die with a nail through its head, spiked to a board. My father used pliers to strip off its skin.
I move my left hand just a little bit and it is still numb. I think I can pull my hand off of the nail. I bend my fingers and there is no pain. It feels like pins poking me, not like a big nail.
I am ready. I pull my arm up and towards me hard. My hand slides up the nail until the head stops it. I start twisting my wrist. The nail head digs into the back of my hand. I pull and twist harder. There is still no pain. The nail is tight to the floor, but my hand is moving up. I am pulling the nail head through my hand.
The men behind me shout and I see a brown shoe stepping toward my arm.”
Her memory abruptly ends. She has only twelve memories, spotty and unconnected, still visually and aurally perfect, from her time in our care. I am thankful that only twenty hours of perfect recall remained when she left us. I can not imagine the torment of having all she went through recorded in that mind.
Crucifixion did not change her. Even though she would have to be enrolled in school, we brought her back to California. New behavioral modification techniques were being developed and tested at Berkley. These methods ignored the content of a patient's mind, ignored the patient's history and directed all the therapist's effort to changing just the patient's behavior.
We reunited the family and placed them in a rental property in the town of Vacaville. We assigned the father as a Chief Master Sargent working in the Military Air Transport wing at Travis AFB. Once again the mother would try to establish a personal relationship with the child. Her husband was to be verbally abusive toward both the mother and the child. We hoped this would bond the mother and child as supportive allies and abuse survivors, especially when the mother defended the child.
Bad Magic Girl was six now. She must enroll in school this year. She had remained responsive to hypnosis, we believed, cooperating with us in problem solving. Except for the problem of obeying our commands to change her gender presentation she seemed a useful tool. We could use that presentation now to win the support of the educational staff for the behavior modification techniques we would try next.
Her father's report of the abuse sessions while in Florida convinced the psychiatrists that Bad Magic Girl's “I am a girl. I will survive” had to be an implanted response. Not being able to discover its source troubled us greatly. They hoped changing her behavior might weaken its force and let us dig out its author.
Bad Magic was enrolled in the third grade at Ulatis Elementary School in Vacaville, California. The semi-rural community provided supportive businesses to serve the men working in the orchards and the women primarily employed at the canning plant. The oder of stewing tomatoes, garlic and onion permeated every nook and cranny of the place.
She lived with her parents and her little brother on the far western edge of town. One house beyond their home orchards began. A railroad spur ran east to west three fourths of a mile away to the south.
The school administration had been told that the child although highly imaginative had little contact with reality. She had been schooled so far in institutional settings. He had been affirming a strong desire to be a girl for the past year and the psychiatrists at the University of California, Berkley, would be treating his condition.
Teachers were encouraged to mainstream the child, but to let him study at his own pace. His intelligence was high, but he was easily frustrated. They would be surprised at the child's memory. Spelling, geography and history tests would only be penmanship practice for him. They should monitor his friendships, limiting his interactions with girls in the class and on the playground. Team sports could only benefit the child.
From time to time, teachers would receive special requests from our psychiatric team. They were trying a number of methods to save the child from a life of depraved homosexuality. School cooperation could make all the difference.
Bad Magic Girl seemed to flourish in Vacaville. She made many friends among the children and became best friends with two boys, Gary and Kenneth. Gary was gifted athletically and Kenneth was perhaps the best academic mind to ever attend that school. Music brought the three of them together. She introduced them to the music of Elvis Presley and other rockers. She asked Gary to help her get better at sports and to help Kenneth. She asked Kenneth to help Gary with spelling and geography.
Together they would walk past her house and into the orchards. They climbed trees, ate green fruit and got sick together. Bad Magic pointed out to both of them the diversity of nature even in a cultivated orchard. They made bows and arrows and became good target shooters. They took the tubes and circuit boards out of radios and televisions discarded in a ditch near the railroad tracks. They used these to build sound shooting guns and cannons.
She fit in well with children, always touching but never offending them. Except for her insistence on being a girl she seemed normal.
I continued to see her each week at Travis. The psychiatrists met with her there. She still touched me often as we spoke together about her week. She asked me how my life was going. I could tell her that I was feeling calmer and not so focused on my work. I spent time off-base shopping in Sacramento and attending church again. I told her it was her fault for asking me about Jesus.
Behavioral modifications did not weaken her implanted “I am a girl” response. We were aware of all her activities and knew that no one had had the opportunity to reinforce it. We finally concluded the child was not a foreign controlled Monarch type agent.
I began having reservations about some of the programs directed by the CIA. They seemed excessively damaging. The knowledge gained had little value. We were giving orphans narcotics, injecting live viruses into unsuspecting black airman, pretending to treat patients with social diseases so we could map the untreated spreading of the infection. I watched men die after being intentionally exposed to high powered X-rays, gamma radiation and aimed radio waves.
Radioactive dusts were released on the west coast and monitored as they flowed on the winds east. We found from a statistical model given to us by Bad Magic under hypnosis that living at high elevations multiplies the rate of ALS and other degenerative nerve diseases. We new certain pesticides killed both birds and people as they passed through the food chain. We even found that the anti-miscarriage drug DES given to mothers made many of the born boy children feel like girls. We kept it all secret. Secrecy was our power, but the secrecy was making me increasingly uncomfortable.
The behavioral modification techniques were not effective when used on Bad Magic Girl. After two years we discontinued them. She has only one memory of that time now.
“I am seven years old. I am the smallest child in this fourth grade room and I stand next to the teacher's desk facing the whole class. All the children are older than I.
I know that Gary and Kenneth are my friends. They have their heads down and look up at me through their eyebrows. The rest of the class looks at me and over to Mrs. Perwin, the teacher. They think I am weird.
I need to urinate urgently. That's why I am standing here.
Mrs. P wants me to ask to go to the boys' lavatory. Everyone else used the facilities after recess. She stopped me as I stood in the girls' line and told me to go to our classroom.
After we were all seated and reading the pages of our government lesson, I raised my hand and asked to use the restroom. She asked which restroom I wanted to use.
I said, “The girls room, please.”
“No, you may not use the girls' lavatory, Donald. Come here and stand until you can ask to use the correct toilet.”
So I am standing here . I may not move until I ask to use the boys' room. I will not ask. I will hold my pee all day.
I see the clock at the back of the room. It second hand hops around the circle. It is 12:18 and five seconds when I start to pee inside my slacks. The stain spreads down the front of my pants and urine falls right over my left sock to spread across the floor. I see the kids look up and then down. First one and then a second one in the front row begin to laugh. Mrs. P looks over at me and everyone else looks up, first at her and then at me. The warm water is cooling when she smiles and laughs. All the children laugh with her, even my friends.
I stand watching. I see the clock, their faces, everything hopping about. My heart is beating hard enough to jump out of my chest. My knees are shaky. I am angry, ashamed and then angry again.
Mrs. P tells me that I ought to be ashamed of myself. Only a little boy would embarrass himself by not using the restroom. Only a spoiled child would disrupt her class in this terrible way.
I try not to listen to her. I am trying to shut out all sounds. I do not want to hear the laughter or the sound of the clock. She says I should go to the toilet and clean myself up. But I do not really hear her. I do not move. I stand in my pee, shaking.
The kids are laughing. She hushes them. She tells Gary to go get the vice-principal.
I want to run, to hide, to jump on her and to hit her. I want her to stop talking to me. I want all these things at the same time. I cannot move. I don't know where to move. I want to cry, but I will not cry. I know crying will get me into more trouble. If I cry she will scorn me more and the kids will laugh some more. My lips tremble and so do my knees. I stand still and I do not cry.
She is doing what she has been told to do. I know it. My mother told her that the doctors said everyone must work together to discourage my acting like a girl. Mother told her while I sat in the same room with the teacher, the principal and the school counselor.
The vice-principal comes in and Gary swiftly hurries around him to sit down. Mrs. P says I have refused to use the boys' restroom and that I have embarrassed her and disrupted her class.
He takes my hand and leads me out the door. We walk to the boys' lavatory, but I pull back when he starts to lead me inside. He kneels down in front of me, putting our eyes at the same level.”
We knew that Bad Magic Girl had been exposed to DES, diethylstilbestrol, in utero. An army/air force doctor had prescribed it when her mother miscarried at five weeks. The drug had been used continually while Bad Magic was being carried to term. Other boys were being brought to pediatricians across the country now. They were telling their parents that they also were girls. A number of our secrets came into play when we discovered this.
One of the largest companies making and distributing DES also made our LSD and refined our other psychotropic drugs. One of our clandestinely funded psychiatric doctors had published the theory that raising a child strictly as a boy or a girl had more impact on their gender identity than their birth sex. Our statistical analysis methods must be kept secret.
We worked through the media to increase public acceptance of Dr. Money's theory. We did not release our DES findings, fearing the resulting lawsuits would destroy an important research partner. Although behavioral modification had not worked on Bad Magic Girl, it showed promise when applied to others. We would continue funding modification research.
Because we now had a model that explained Bad Magic's gender dysphoria, if not the repeated “I am a girl. I will survive” assertion, as being set in the womb. We could give up the search for an unknown enemy agent. The child's memory was of no importance. Only her problem solving ability benefited us. We began using electro-convulsive shock on her. She experienced fifty-four multi-shock sessions, before undergoing several treatments with much higher power levels.
If the child could remember any of this she would be a walking encyclopedia of 1950's psychiatric methodologies recorded from the patient's point of view. She retained only two memories, however. She had this one good memory
“Standing on the banks of a wide river, I see the washed and sorted gravels. Sand banks behind and to my left tell of the time the river flowed higher and sorted with a finer comb. A path goes north beside me The bulrushes are green with spring, and even the cattail heads are green as sausages. They are topped with pale green, almost but not yet, yellow spikes. The river flows rippling in heaped windrows, bundles passing. The sun flashes on the ripples as a light breeze blows east. The river too is green with khaki streaks far out by a tree lying buried in the mud. The air smells of mud and fishy things not long dead.
I fish with a six foot white pole in my hands. I sit on the gravel, then stand again. My eyes watch the water and my finger feel the tension of the line as it strums softly in the current. No thought in my head, only a seeing, hearing, smelling, touching as the wind plays with the world and me. I am.
The open faced reel clicks once, the line tightens, then three more clicks. I look to the rod, seeing the red and blue wrapping that secure the silver ferrules. I see the black tip glued to the end of the pole, and see that tip spring forward, release and tip again. The clicks become many and the line runs over my left forefinger.
Right thumb on the reel, I stop the turning and pull back on the pole. I watch its tip bend way down against my upward pull. With a jerk the line runs, clicking like a flying grasshopper. A big fish has taken the chunk of sardine and is hooked good now. It swims away, fast.
I shift my hand to the reel handle, pulling back on the pole again. Line still strips from the reel. I let the tip fall and reel as I do, then I pull back again. Again and again, I lift and drop the tip of the pole, always reeling, but I can not keep up with the line dragging off the reel. I shout for help. Yelling. “Big fish. Big fish!”
My father and my brothers are upstream somewhere. I lift, drop and wind the reel handle, over and over. Then the line stopped stripping away. I gain some line back each time I lift and drop. It is like pulling a very heavy wagon. This fish is very big. I lift, drop and wind. I back away from the water and fall onto the gravel. I do not drop the pole. I get up again, without using my hands because they are too busy. I shout, “Big fish, big fish!”
I pull and wind as my father comes walking into the corner of my vision, smoking a cigarette. I pull again and a great silver fish head with wide jaws erupts from the water. The hook with the slice of sardine driven up the leader is speared into the corner of that silver mouth. The head shakes and half of the fish rises behind it out of the water. The fish is big. It is larger than I. As she drops into the water, heading downstream , the line twangs and pops, going suddenly slack.
My father runs to me. His cigarette is gone, He says, “I thought you were snagged.”
And this one:
“I stand in a dark garage in the dark of night. Light comes through a side window, through four panes of glass set into the garage door. I hold a pink blouse in my hand. It came from the top of a two by three by one and a half foot cardboard box. The box contains left overs from today's yard sale. I run my hands over the material, feeling the stitching. I can see the small pearl-like buttons by the street lamp reflecting off of the shiny concrete.
I know being here, holding this blouse can get me into trouble, but I am in trouble already. I hold the blouse seeking assurance that I am still me.
Tomorrow, I will be at the clinic again. I'll wake up drooling and wide-eyed in terror. I will do both at the same time. I will see two of everything. Nurses will tell me that I will be alright. They will stroke my head. They will bring me a glass of water. Tomorrow. they will wipe up my spill, wipe up my drool. Some of me will leave tomorrow. My bones may break again. Tomorrow is electroshock day.
Because I am a girl: because no one believes me; because I hold this blouse in my hand; because I hide girl's clothing to wear; because I look like a boy; because I embarrass my parents, because I disappoint the doctors; because I scare scary people, I will become less of a person tomorrow. I am afraid tonight standing here in the dark.. I am afraid remembering from yesterdays what tomorrow will be like. I am afraid remembering.
I feel the material, rayon with a pearl luster tiny buttons resting in little hooped backs, sewn by hand onto this machine-sewn blouse. I am sad, so sad. I am alone and feeling lonely. I stand feeling with my hands, feeling my emotions: feeling fear, sadness, loneliness and loss.”
Bad Magic Girl was right, we made her much less for a long time.
She helped us discover why electro-convulsive shock miraculously reduced depression in some patients. After a session she would describe her feelings of near euphoria. These would decline during the school week at a steady and predictable rate. She could run through her memory and tell me exactly which bits and pieces of her memory were now missing. She described the holes appearing in her thinking process.
When we asked her to analyze what was occurring in her mind with each shock, she told us. We destroyed thousands of her brain cells with each treatment. The dead cells released serotonin and endorphins that temporarily elevated her mood and improved clarity of reason. Euphoria declined as the body neutralized and stripped away the dead cells and the remaining debris.
The psychiatrists loved this child because of her articulate descriptions of each step of the process. They were able to track from her accounts the destructive and cumulative force of each shock series. Unfortunately, they were cooking their golden goose.
She came to us each Saturday morning to receive four to eight jolts of electricity through her temples. The nursing staff, myself included, led her staggering from the procedure table to the couch in the debriefing room. Along the way she stopped to vomit and then squat down unable to continue. We sponged her face clean, helped her to stand, and finally walked her to the couch. Each week, I asked her about her experience as the other nurses departed.
She was still unique. Most patients leave the electroshock room disoriented and unable to remember the session. Bad Magic Girl remembered vividly. Most patients report feeling nausea and seeing double, so did Bad Magic. Most patients were not verbal for an hour or two after therapy. Bad Magic remained verbal throughout. Most patients felt much better in a few hours with a feeling of euphoria lasting two weeks or more. Bad Magic Girl felt the high and understood the price being paid for the experience. She mourned the dying of her brain. Her euphoria never lasted a whole week.
Each Saturday she would arrive trembling, knowing exactly what would happen. Not knowing only which of her memories, which reasoning paths would die that morning. Still after each series, she touched me and after four months started hugging me as I tape recorded every work she spoke.
One morning after her therapeutic series, I turned off the tape recorder because she made me so sad I did not want my shaken voice on tape.
She said in a determined voice, “They will destroy me. You kill me or help me. Please decide.”
I turned the machine lever back on and she continued answering my last question as if there had been no pause. All week I wondered what she had meant and why she had spoken to me unrecorded.
In 1956, tape recorders were large and not easy to conceal. Still, I arranged for a second recorder to be running after next Saturday's treatment. The tape wheel turned quietly on the shelf to the left and across the room from her couch. As the other nurses left the room, I turned on the first tape machine and began questioning her. After a bit I turned off the first machine and asked what she had meant last week. She looked at me shaking her head no and then nodding at the second tape machine. She did not speak.
When I turned on the first recorder, she answered all my new questions about her experience this session. I knew she had issued me and only me an invitation to honesty. I do not know if I had healed enough to become more caring, or if I was motivated to hold a secret that no one else shared. I would talk to Bad Magic Girl alone and unmonitored.
As we wobbled into the debriefing room the next Saturday I said to Bad Magic Girl while the other nurses were present, “I will see you next week.” I turned on the recorder as they left the room and questioned her as usual.
Bad Magic was not being escorted under guard any more. She was free to play baseball, walk through the orchards with her friends, and ride her bike to and from school. I made arrangements for a midweek half hour session with one of her attending psychiatrists at Berkley. He could ask how she felt in between shock treatments, and I could have an hour alone with her each way on the bus.
That Wednesday I signed her out of her class and as we walked out of the school door Bad Magic Girl asked, “Have you decided?”
I told her I did not understand what she meant, but I was willing to listen to her.
She said that she knew about the CIA, that her memories had not been erased in the isolation box or forgotten because of drugged or hypnotic commands. Every bit of the data we had given her and all of her solutions were still in her memory. She floored me as she recited them.
She told me that something had happened to make all the CIA doctors less afraid of her. She did not know what that something might be, but it had changed their attitude toward her. They had decided to kill her slowly, a piece at a time and I was their helper. She hoped I cared enough for her now to kill her quickly. She finished her message as we walked down the hall to the doctor's offices.
I waited in the hall until he came to the door with her. I thanked him and took the child's hand.
We walked silently to a bus stop and remained silent until we caught the bus going back to Vacaville.
Bad Magic Girl had tears in her voice, “Have you decided?”
I could not answer her. Instead, I told her that we were not afraid of her because we had discovered that a drug given to her mother made her feel like a girl. We know you are not someone's secret weapon. I told her about DES and how our knowing cleared away her mystery but still left us afraid of her mind.
She said, “You should be afraid. I have destroyed you.”
Then she told me how all of her 'solutions' were designed to tear apart the whole country. I would like to fix it she said but you will kill me too soon. The doctors are breaking me apart already. I am sorry. No one brings me the right problems now.
“Will you decide? ...Will you kill me or help me?” she asked.
“How can I help you?”
“I have a better plan. I cannot use the CIA. I broke it and gave it a cancer. It is sick! I cannot fix it. I need to find special people and you can help me, maybe.”
I told her I could not decide yet. I would think about it. I picked up my car at the bus station and drove her home.
On Saturday, she came and spoke one unrecorded word as we wiped the vomit from her mouth, “Decide.”
I pondered hard. She was asking me to abandon a course I had believed in. I am proud of my country. We came to help humanity in the Second World War. We were still helping to rebuild Europe and Japan. We were working to prevent a communist takeover.
She said the CIA was sick and she had made it so bad it would destroy my country. I could see that some of the things we did were bad. Some of our actions were even criminal. But our intentions were good, and I believed in our purpose.
Maybe she wanted me to kill her so she could not make matters worse. If she was not around to irritate our illness with her 'solutions' we could heal.
What kind of people could I find to help her? I did not know anyone with the power to stop the CIA. I would not be an agent for an enemy nation. I did not decide. I did not report her to my people. She was right. We were killing her slowly. The irritant would be out of our way soon enough.
“Two weeks,” I said with the recorder off.
She came for electroshock the next two Saturdays, speaking only in answer to my questions. I took her from school the following Monday and again we rode buses. Again we talked. Again she put her trust in me.
“There are people who can touch other people,” she said. “They can heal with their touch. Many of them are nurses, some are doctors.”
They become nurses and doctors because they enjoy healing. They enjoy using and sharing their power. These are the people I should find. She would tell them about how holes grew in peoples' brains and how the holes let people think in obsessive ways that hurt everyone. They could start touching the sick people, the ones most people did not touch at all.
She told me I had a hole in my brain, a hole that she had been healing. She told me about her cousins and about her experiments together with them. She asked me if I had been feeling less frazzled and more balanced.
I had to tell her I had been feeling better.
She said she was not a touch healer, but every touch could heal a little. Even hers. All the times she had been with me after her time in Fargo, she had been touching me, healing me. She wasn't doing it to obligate me. She only did it to share and to maybe one day teach me to share.
She told me Jesus had a strong healing touch. He told everyone all the time to put aside secrets and to practice sharing instead. He said love each other, just like I loved you. He spent his whole ministry touching and healing.
She said that she thought I might be a healer. She told me I had not been touched enough when I was small and parts of my brain had not grown. They were growing now and would grow completely when I started touching with care and concern.
She said she was worried that the CIA would burn away her knowledge of touch and healing. She worried that they would keep her as an unloving, uncaring problem solver. She worried about being a monster. She even said, I was thinking of her as a monster right then.
After her session at Berkley, we rode home again. I told her we were going to change the type of shock she received soon. Some of the psychiatrists had been working with voltages thirty and forty time higher than hers. They sessions filled the patients with terror and made them very compliant to the therapists' suggestions. We wanted her to tell us why this method worked.
If the voltage wiped away large chunks of her memory that would be to our advantage. If it destroyed her puzzle solving ability that would be even better. It would eliminate her as a threat. I told her not to touch me anymore.
She did not speak until I dropped her at her house. Then she said softly, “Decide, please.”
I did not decide. God took the decision out of my hands.
That Saturday she had her usual therapy, but the following Saturday she experienced a single shock forty time the usual voltage. Now, she was disoriented. We could not talk with her for more then four hours, the she told us we had sent her to hell.
She had been in darkness, very cold, no sounds, no light, no body, no touch and all alone. No hope and no way out, no place at all. Somewhere, some evil waited. She could not remember joy, only remembered pain. She had been there lost for a thousand years-- more for there was no time. There was nothing and not even an expectation of any ending. Eternally alone.
She came back terrified for the non-place was real more real than the couch, more real than all of us. She experienced no euphoria after this session. She was afraid!!
She could not go home until Monday. She lacked the coordination, she saw double. She trembled even in her sleep. Her breathing was repeatedly interrupted by gulps and long breathless pauses until Sunday night.
She missed the next Saturday session. She was in a hospital Wednesday.
She did not go to school Tuesday. She walked there Wednesday morning. She dragged a ladder from the custodial closet, set it up against the schools rear wall and climbed to the top. She climbed the roof to a decorative half cupola two and half stories above ground. Singing a verse of “Jesus Loves Me,” while the kindergarten class watched she dove head first toward the ground.
Her hands remained pressed against her hips as her head drove three inches into the grass. An ambulance took her to a Sacramento hospital, very stiff in the neck but otherwise undamaged. She felt too sore to move.
When I saw her there she told me Jesus did not love her, He did not want her in heaven. She made me cry. One Saturday later I helped wheel her curled body from the electroshock therapy room.
We had shocked her with the high voltage again. She lay in bed with her hands curled over her head for two days. She appeared catatonic, pliable and unresponsive. When she did begin moving she did not speak. She told us nothing about her experience. The session was a total failure.
The next Saturday we invited un-vetted nurses and technicians in training to witness an electro-convulsive session with a depressed child as the patient. The psychiatrists had decided to terminate Bad Magic Girl. We had told her father and gotten his permission. He felt entitled to a cured child or a dead one. There would be no problems from that direction. An electrical accident and unfortunate short circuit would kill her.
The whimpering child, who thought we were going to terrorize her again, was brought by wheelchair into the room. We lifted her onto the table and strapped her wrists and ankles. I fitted the headband to her head after putting conductive jell on her temples. I attached the alligator clamps from the machine to the metal studs that pierced the band to touch her head. I casually fitted a grounding cuff to her right ankle. I had been appointed her executioner. Without a decision I would kill her. I would end the threat of her. I would end her pain.
I turned to the metal cabinet pushed back against the wall at the head of the table. I adjusted the setting while explaining what I was doing to the assembled technicians. I told the doctor that the capacitors were charged and ready.
He reached past me and pushed the contact button himself. This was a kindness I had not expected.
The child's body stiffened, his eyes opened and his breathing paused in the usual manner. But his eyes stayed open, his body assumed a more pronounced arch and he did not resume breathing. For six minutes we stood still. We watched in shock. Then the doctor pushed the cabinet away from the wall and pulled the non-sparking plug. It was over.
His body slumped, his eyes half closed and he lay unbreathing on the bed. We all knew he had died. Our chosen witnesses had seen an accident while the doctor an I performed and execution. He put his stethoscope on the boy's chest and pronounced.
Some stayed and other filed away as I removed the alligator clips and unbuckled the headband. As I touched the child's wrist to remove that first restraint, Bad Magic Girl breathed. Nurses and technicians saw it. The doctor listened again and ordered us to take the child to ER.
Had I witnessed a miracle? Had I been redeemed? Did Jesus love this kid after all? I made a decision, I killed a monster, I would help the child.
