The Eye of Horus (34 page)

Afterward I kept her in the curve of my arm, loath to let her leave me even then. As our bodies cooled I reached to pull a blanket over us, and saw that already she slept. But I lay awake for a long time, looking up at the stars that made night seem almost as bright as day, trying to separate dream from reality. My thoughts went back in time to what my days had been like before she came into my life. I realized then that she had given my very existence not only direction but purpose, and that without her this world would be as colorless as the desert around us.

When next I opened my eyes, the stars were bright in the dark sky as before, making me wonder if I had dreamed that someone painted my chest with a brush made of downy feathers. But I was awake now and still felt it sweep back and forth across one nipple and then the other until they formed hard knots. A moment later the feathery brush took a new path, over my rib cage and down across my abdomen. I felt at the same time a tightening in my gut and swelling surge in my loins—as if my body responded to someone else’s command. What dark fantasy was this, I wondered, that tortures me even as I sleep? I put a hand down and encountered a mass of soft curls.

“Aset?” I whispered, for I could not be sure she was awake enough to know what she was doing.

“Sshhh, be still,” she whispered without interrupting her exploration of my body, leaving nothing untouched by her hair, nimble fingers, and soft moist lips. Each time I lifted a
hand to touch or caress her, she stilled it with one of her own, refusing me even the tiniest distraction from the sensual feast she prepared, until I could do nothing but give myself into her tender keeping.

Her head moved down, blazing a trail of anticipation with her lips and darting tongue, a weapon that turned languidly gentle as it reached my turgid penis. In a haze of anticipation, an unimaginable ecstasy shook my entire body as her mouth closed around me. Then, just as the pleasure flooding my loins threatened to erupt, she pulled away, leaving me suspended between this world and the next, unable to go either forward or back. In the next instant she swung a leg over mine, to kneel astride my thighs and raise herself slowly, teasing and torturing me with her pouting nether lips until, finally, her wet sheath took in my entire length. For one interminable moment she held perfectly still. Then, watching my face in the moonlight, she began sliding up and down. Near the end I thrust up as she came down, my hands grasping her hips to pull her hard against me, so she would know the instant I spilled into her. When I was done she fell forward to lay her cheek over my heart and listen to its frantic pace.

“That was so you will never again think of me as a child, Tenre … or as my father’s daughter. From this night forward you and I embark on a different voyage.”

Now she lies just behind me, lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking of the felucca riding at anchor. The moon is bright enough in the cold dry air to cast a patina over the landscape all around me, from the murmuring ribbon of water to the grassy bank where Pagosh and our oarsmen spread their pallets for the night. In the distance I can make out the roofs of the slumbering town, mud-brick hovels all hugging the earth while only the temple of Isis reaches high into the sky. A moment ago a big white ram came down to the water to drink, yet I cannot help wondering if unbridled pleasure causes me to confuse dream with reality. I even wonder if I have passed through the reeds without knowing it, for every
thing is changed, not only the world around me but within me. I am a man fully grown, yet I see with the eyes of a babe and imagine all the adventures yet to be dared. Only one thing remains constant and real—love, the gift of the goddess.

Max was pouring syrup on a cut-up pancake when she came down the next morning, while Sam sat clicking his nails on the floor in anticipation. As soon as Max set the plate on the floor she made a beeline straight for him, not caring how she looked without any makeup, hair curling wildly after a hurried towel-drying. He caught her in his arms, then held her close.

“No regrets?” he asked.

“Only that the night was so short.” The touch of his hand had quieted all the little doubts that set in the instant she opened her eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be at your office pretty soon?” It was already after nine.

“Not today.” He seemed reluctant to let her go. “Ready for some pancakes? Weather forecast says a wet front’s on the way. I thought we might get in a few games of tennis while we can. Unless you’d rather do something else.”

Whatever he wanted to do was fine with her so long as they could be together. After last night it felt as if another Max had taken the place of the one she had eaten breakfast with yesterday. They were going to have to learn to talk to each other all over, in a new way.

By the time they finished the first set Kate was really worried. Max’s mind definitely wasn’t on tennis or on her. She didn’t think he’d thrown the set to her on purpose, either. Which made her wonder if he was having second thoughts
about asking her to stay. As they headed into the house to get a drink he never looked at her, or held the door or anything. Maybe he was worried about one of his patients. If so, she wished he would say so, not leave her wondering.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, so abruptly she felt a jolt of premonition. He motioned her toward the kitchen table and waited for her to sit down, then took the chair beside her facing the windowed alcove that looked out to the backyard. “Do you know what dyslexia is—what happens in the brain to cause dyslexia, I mean?”

Confused, Kate nodded, then shook her head. “Not really. Just that it has to do with how some children process visual stimuli, which makes it difficult for them to learn to read.”

He nodded. “That’s what we used to think. Turns out the problem is in how those kids hear, how the brain processes language, not how they see.” She wondered why he was telling her this. And why now.

“The medial geniculate nucleus—the area of the brain that receives incoming signals from the ear and sends them to the auditory cortex—has fewer neurons that process fast sounds, mostly stop consonants, in dyslexics than the brains of normal readers. Since they never hear these sounds, dyslexic children can’t construct the mental dictionaries that enable us to recognize a sound the next time we hear it—to make sense of it. Are you with me?”

“Yes, but I don’t have any trouble reading, Max, really.”

“I know that. And I’m probably doing this badly, but—what you
do
have is sort of a twin to dyslexia. It’s called central auditory processing disorder, a hearing problem that has nothing to do with the ears. It’s in how the brain processes complex auditory signals.”

He waited for Kate to say something, but a kind of mental white noise had wiped out everything but the sensation that she’d been hit from behind—by something she never expected and hadn’t seen coming.

Then it began to sink in. Something was wrong with her
brain. She kept her eyes on her hands. Didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think.

“I suspect you fell between the slats, timewise,” Max continued. “Until ten years ago there was a lot of debate about whether CAPD even existed. Then a team of audiologists at Baylor, here in Houston, confirmed that it did, using topographical brain mapping.”

She still couldn’t look at him. Face him. “How long have you known?” she asked.

“I suspected from what you said New Year’s Eve about the trouble you ran into after you started going to a bigger, noisier school. Then the other day, while we had you in the scanner—” He reached out to touch her arm and Kate pulled back, dropping her hands into her lap.

“Why didn’t you say anything then?” she asked, keeping her eyes cast down.

“I thought about it. But I didn’t want you to think that’s all I do—that everything’s just another diagnosis with me. That I’m detached, impersonal. Didn’t want to ruin what I felt happening between us, the sense of closeness. I’ve never felt that with anyone else.” He dropped his voice. “The way we can be with each other is important to me, what I think we can have together. That’s why I’m telling you now, even if my timing is off. I didn’t know if last night was ever going to happen, let alone when. So there’s never going to be any better time.”

Kate finally looked at him, searching for any sign that he wasn’t being straight with her—for the slightest hint of a smile or disingenuousness—and was surprised to find his face naked, without the beard. Another trick of her psyche.

“Then tell me everything you know about this—this brain disorder,” she replied. “I’ll yell uncle when I’ve had enough.”

He nodded. “Each sensory system has specialized neurons that are activated by sounds, sights, and other stimuli, and these receptors create a sort of map or spatial diagram
of how this information is processed. Except in the auditory cortex, which contains cells that appear to be unlike any others in the nervous system.” His eyes never left her face. “These cells are able to detect sounds anywhere in space around us by emitting signals in a temporal code, not spatial. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, like whether the signals are passed on to other brain circuits to help us understand or whether they’re secondary sites, artifacts of another process. But it looks pretty certain that these temporal codes are used by other sensory systems to tie several spatial maps together. Anyway, that’s where I think CAPD originates, some flaw in the temporal coding process that makes you unable to handle a lot of signals at the same time.”

He paused again but Kate waited for him to go on. “I can dig out the latest stuff in the literature so you can read about the research for yourself. That’s really what you’ve been doing for a long time, Katie—converting everything you can to visual stimuli, taking in more of the world around you through your eyes than your ears. The happy result is your unusual ability to construct mental images. Vision is a linking together of subsystems—
what
is in the temporal lobe,
where
is in the parietal lobe—combined with associated memories. When we see an apple we not only know it’s red and round but that it has seeds inside and how it tastes. Every visual area that sends information upstream also receives information back along those same neural pathways. In most people, input from the eye is much stronger than signals coming the other way, from the imagination. Not with you. I wish you could’ve seen Ben’s face when I asked you to think of two animals and then draw them.”

“I was thinking more about what
you
were seeing on that monitor than what I was doing,” Kate told him. “I don’t even remember what I drew.”

“Wait here,” he said, jumped up, and left the kitchen. She
sat staring out the window, wondering where Sam was. Then Max was back, handing her a pencil drawing of a lion and gazelle playing some kind of board game.

As she stared at the hastily sketched “cartoon,” other animals began to appear on either side of the lion and gazelle, the lines fainter and slightly out of focus—reminding Kate of the halo effect Tom McCowan talked about.

“It looks vaguely familiar,” she admitted, “but I don’t remember doing it.” She looked up. “Does that mean I’ve got more than one disconnect in my brain?”

He shook his head. “We try to put subjects into a resting state before a test by eliminating outside stimuli, but the brain isn’t just reactive. It’s constantly generating stuff. At night, with almost no sensory input, it’s free to do whatever it wants. During the day the senses limit the types of images you can generate, but it’s still going on. Daydreaming. A mixture of fact and fantasy. Problem is, sometimes our mental maps get so elaborate that we get lost in them. Happens to everybody.”

This time when he reached out to smooth her hair back from her face, Kate accepted the gesture for what it was, a sign of caring not only about what happened to her but how she felt about herself.

“Is there any way to fix this … disorder?” she asked.

“Stay out of crowds, all the things you already figured out to do.”

“Medical school?”

“If that’s what you want. You probably ought to stay away from emergency medicine, but anything else?” He shrugged.
“Is
that what you want?”

“I don’t think so. No. I was just asking. Where’s Sam?”

“Asleep on the couch in my study. Watching us play tennis wears him out.”

“I’ve had enough, haven’t you? I think I’ll go shower.”

Max nodded and watched her go. She knew he wanted more from her, but she didn’t have more to give. She needed to be alone. To think. To get a second opinion from her inner voice.

She stood letting the spray pummel her back, but the hot water only seemed to intensify the conflicting emotions pelting her brain. Anger mixed with relief. Resentment with gratitude. Relief at finally knowing why some perfectly intelligible voices would suddenly turn into gibberish. Grateful that she no longer needed to fear the day when the gibberish wouldn’t go away. Angry with herself for letting her guard down.

She turned to let the water mix with the tears running down her cheeks until she couldn’t tell which was which. Max was stimulating yet easy to be around, even when they didn’t see something the same way.
Because he’s not judgmental. Just because he takes a different approach than you do doesn’t mean you’re wrong—not to Max. What drives him is curiosity, not control. The need to question. To ask why. Not only with his patients but Tashat. So why not you?

With Max she felt connected instead of “different”—a thought that triggered a recollection of Max telling her about his grandmother. But she wasn’t the same person she used to be, either, maybe because of Sam. She thought of the day they hiked across the top of the mesa, her carrying a backpack with water and their lunch, Sam breaking trail for her
through the virgin snow. She had talked it over with him, telling him everything, and decided that, no matter what, she wasn’t going to abandon Tashat. Now, thinking about it, she knew someone else had been with them that day—that it was Max’s unwavering faith in her that was helping her to believe in herself, despite all the Dave Brovermans, past and present. That her inner voice, the one the ancient Egyptians called the
ka,
was beginning to speak with assurance instead of the self-doubt she had lived with so long.

Now Max had given her another priceless gift—self-knowledge—releasing her from the clutches of the vulture that had been sitting on her shoulder for years, watching her stumble, waiting for the fall that would bring her so low he could peck out her golden eyes. And she had turned her back on him. Again.

She turned off the water, towel-dried her hair and then her body. With water still trickling down her back, she pulled on a pair of panties and was hunting for her bra when she heard a door close downstairs. She grabbed her robe, slipped her arms into the sleeves, and grabbed the folder from the table by the window as she went. She flew down the stairs—had to catch him before he left—pivoted around the bottom post and ran for the kitchen.

He was sitting right where she’d left him, staring out the window, until he heard her and turned.

“I thought I heard the door,” she stammered.

“Sam wanted out.” He turned back to the window. “He catches on so fast to everything else, why can’t he learn to return the tennis balls to that bucket?” It sounded to her like a halfhearted attempt to say something to cover an awkward moment.

Kate began to worry that what she held in her hand wouldn’t be enough, that she had waited too late. But that was a chance she had to take because she didn’t have anything else—only the drawings she had been doing of him from that very first day, in the museum. A story she would never be able to put into words.

“Sam is too intelligent to find chasing balls inside a fence any challenge,” she said as she went to him. “He just indulged you a few times because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She laid the bulging folder on the table in front of him.

Max glanced up, then at the folder. As he opened it and saw himself as she had—a middle-aged hippie with a beard and one eyebrow raised—he smiled but shook his head. Then he discovered the hastily sketched cartoon beneath it—a man in a mouse-colored suit with a long tail trailing behind him, timidly knocking on one side of a door, emerging from the other side as a roaring lion. That one brought a laugh, and he began turning the sheets like the pages of a book, anxious now to see the next one, and the next, as it dawned on him that they were all depictions of him—seen through Kate’s eyes. The look of consternation when he realized she had pulled his leg about Sam. Standing on her front porch in the dark, eyes and mouth cold as the blanket of snow behind him. Stepping out of his car at the gas station in Houston, angry yet overjoyed to see her.