This man loading vegetables onto the back of a truck is Jerry Morgan. Jerry's 43, lift weights, bit of an athlete...oh, and he's recently divorced. He doesn't talk about the legal side of the split much - he's not that kind of guy. Jerry's an optimist. What you might catch him talking about is sports. Baseball is his favorite, and the Mets have been his team since he was five years old. He's probably mouthing off about their prospects right now. He does it as a management mechanism, something to be sure of. The only other guy on Jerry's port at the distribution depot - Mike, who we can't see right now, he's behind those crates - is used to this by now. Apart from sports, well. Come four o'clock on a Friday, Jerry will talk solidly about women and the weekend until clocking off at five thirty.
What Mike and Jerry's other workmates at the depot don't know is that Jerry hasn't been out for a beer since the day his wife asked for a divorce, and he hasn't looked at another woman since the day he told his wife he was having an affair, and that was eighteen months ago. I'm telling you. The guy's lonely.
That's Mike there with the forklift, shifting the bigger crates while Jerry does the fragile stuff like peaches and tomatoes.
Look, ah. Jerry's stopped. See the little shake of his head? I hate it when he smacks his own head like that. He's got some big old hands, I'm telling you. He keeps saying a good smack should do the trick. Dolt.
Jerry's getting worse, you see. He seems slow, stupid even, but he isn't. I've chatted with him a lot, he's a bright man. I wouldn't say intelligent, that's a word which is bandied around too much these days, but he's not dumb. He's just..well, it's hard to explain.
Let's take a walk.
He used to work in an office, about two years ago, I think. It was just after he lost that job that he came to see me for the first time. He's kept coming as well. I don't know why, I'm not a specialist. I'm just a regular doctor, I have my practice, I have my patients. Jerry came in one morning and for the first ten minutes I thought he was a complete nutjob. Totally off the chart. What did he say when he first came in? Oh, yeah, something like, "Oh, hi, there, hey." Nothing spectacular. I thought he was just a nervous guy, you know? Then he tried to explain his problem, but he kept stopping, kept tripping over his words.
Then when he finally got it out, all in a rush, it dawned on me that everything he had done since he walked into my office was weird. Not the actions of a nervous guy, but a regular guy who was just freaking the fuck out every few minutes. And the way he said hi that first time? Well, I think I must have looked a lot like that at med school, saying hi to people who I kinda remembered from parties. He thought he knew me. I hadn't seen him before in my life, I was sure of that, I have a great memory for faces...ha, yeah, except from parties...and I didn't know that man from Adam. So maybe I started to believe him.
Do you know what deja vu is? Yes well, literally it means 'already seen'. French. What happens is that while your brain is happily processing all the sense data that's coming in from the body, something short circuits. It's related to epilepsy, frontal-lobe epilepsy...I'll try not to get too much into the details. Anyway, what happens is that instead of experiencing something as it happens, sometimes it comes through in stereo - the brain sends it through the regular channels, and again through the bit of the brain that deals with memory, so it feels like you're doing something you remember from before. Everything matches up - every tiny little detail. It's not like remembering the last time you had the chicken at a restaurant - the thing that's the memory is exactly the same as everything you're seeing. The salt's in the same place, the waiter said the same things, your date said the same things and hell, that would freak me out, I can tell you. That's what Jerry's got, only it doesn't happen every so often. Jerry has it all the time.
All the time.
That's why he lost his job. He was sitting in a meeting, and it got really bad. It was an important thing, clients, suppliers, that sort of stuff, and Jerry lost it. He knew something was wrong, all right, but he got slow, really. slow. Kept having to talk himself through everything two or three times, and his company didn't want that. Said it was bad company image, yadda yadda yaddda, and they got rid of him.
You smoke, huh? You shouldn't. That shit'll kill you. It's your life, whatever.
Jerry, uh. I never would have put him down as the cheating sort, you know? When he told me he was getting divorced I was shocked. I asked him how it happened. That was when he started living with the deja vu thing the whole time. All the time, everything he did felt familiar, like it was already, had already been done. Man. I couldn't take that.
Oh, anyway, so he says, "Well Doc, I was going out of the city a lot, job interviews, and I was standing in the station and this woman stopped in front of me and I looked at her and I recognised the coat and her boots and the hat...hell, the angle of her hat was familiar, like I'd seen it sit on her head like that a hundred times, and her nose, chin, the lot, I was SURE, doc, really sure, I swear, so I went up to her and said, "Excuse me, but do I know you from somewhere?" and it all sort of took off from there."
