The Wonder Garden (7 page)

“It looked claustrophobic.”

“It was! I had a terrible itch on my nose and there was nothing I could do!”

“I can imagine, sweetheart. It sounds terrible.” But not as terrible as brain surgery, he thinks.

They are relieved when the doctor reports that Carol's brain has no anatomical malformation they can find. The seizure could have been an anomaly, possibly even an allergic reaction to something. That sounds likely, the family agrees. They'd been in Hawaii, after all, eating unusual foods and breathing unusual air.

Back home, Harold watches his wife flip through fabric swatches. She's returned to her work, reupholstering everything in the house. A diamond twinkles from the lobe of her ear, that weird, primitive organ. Harold thinks of what brain surgery might entail, whether a piece of skull would need to be removed like a door, whether the brain matter itself could stand to be touched by an instrument, or if it is done in some other way—maybe with lasers.

He spends an hour after dinner thumbing through
Scientific American
. As he sits, he tries to discern the workings of his own brain. The transmitters, he imagines, fire more slowly while he listens to the calming jungle tones, and faster when he looks at the magazine. His brain feels powerfully charged, marvelously elastic. He imagines how it might look on an MRI screen, color-coded.

But this is nothing, this armchair science. There are men who spend their whole lives studying the human brain. Others study outer space. How about that? There are men who do nothing but study the human brain—or the universe—each day, who are excited by pictures that are meaningless to the rest of the world. Harold feels a gnawing envy. The magazine pictures of the brain and of the cosmos are beautiful and not dissimilar—abstract smudges of color against the same fluid black background. Brains and galaxies, these places where everyone lives, where everyone floats in an enormous black egg. Every surgeon and astrophysicist and Wall Street banker alive.

His own house, deep within the egg, features leafy drapes, decorative wreaths, patterns around the rims of dishes, everything made to chase fear away.

Several weeks later, Carol has another episode. It happens while she is out walking on Pelican Point's narrow finger of land, past its string of hermetic mansions. It is a stroke of luck that the driver of a passing car happens to find her on the side of the road, jolting in a patch of pachysandra.

Dr. Warren prescribes medication for her seizures—for her
epilepsy
—and Harold's family gets used to the word. Over the following year the seizures seem to come at random intervals, often preceded by a vivid memory or sensory experience.

Harold leaves
Scientific American
behind. He buys neuroscience books and learns all he can about the brain's structure and functions. He is beginning to see the connection, now, between the recurring paella taste and the rigid grasping motions that follow. And now he knows that the brain has no sensory nerves of its own. It is, in fact, dead to the touch.

The more he learns about the brain's curled geography, its mystifying functions, the more he needs to know. He wants to see the organ up close. He even considers buying a brain in a jar—an authentic cross section for sale on the Internet—but knows his wife would not be happy about it. In any case, a preserved specimen is no substitute for the real, living thing.

There are so many questions. Harold tells himself that it is his responsibility to answer them, to gain uncommon insight into the nature of his wife's trouble. But, he knows, this is not just about Carol. The truth is that he wants total access, total knowledge. So when Dr. Warren orders a PET-CT scan, Harold requests the doctor's presence. They stand together in the technician's booth. Harold watches his wife slide into the scanner's mouth and waits for her brain to appear. It swims onto the screen, this time in vibrant colors like a flamboyant fish, and the doctor's face glows aquamarine.

The technician picks up his headset.

Harold coughs. “Dr. Warren, before we start, may I speak to you privately?”

The technician puts the headset down, as if offended, and the doctor looks at Harold. They step into the corner of the room, and Harold whispers, “May I ask you an unusual question?” He straightens his posture, tries to picture an admiring board of directors sitting before him. “Would it be possible for a patient to touch his own brain?” He is dismayed to feel his face heat.

The doctor levels a blank gaze, then smiles slightly.

“Perhaps, yes. I mean, it's hypothetically possible. There could be local anesthesia on the skull area and nowhere else. In fact, it's sometimes preferable that a patient remains conscious during an open-brain test. So, yes, it's technically feasible that a patient could touch the surface of his own brain.”

Harold nods. “I'm sure it would be a very strange feeling.”

The doctor pauses. “Yes, I'm sure,” he says, stepping back toward the monitors.

Harold is quiet, focusing on a yellow cloud in the back of Carol's brain. The occipital lobe, he knows.

It isn't difficult to convince Dr. Warren to speak to him privately. All men are vain, in one way or another, Harold knows, and this request would appeal directly to his ego and professional sense of duty.

“I've been thinking of making a donation toward your work,” Harold says. “A substantial one.”

“That's terrific news.” The doctor smiles genuinely as the men walk together down the hall.

“Yes, well, it hasn't happened yet,” says Harold as they enter the doctor's office. He sits down without being asked. “The thing is, I think of philanthropy as an investment. And, as a businessman, I like to know what, exactly, I'm investing in.”

“Understandable,” the doctor replies after a moment's hesitation, taking the seat behind the desk. “I'd be happy to put you in touch with our development office.”

“No.” Harold leans forward. “You see, I'm particularly interested in neurosurgery, as you might gather. I'd like to learn more of the specifics about what
you
do here, what sort of advances make your own work stand out.”

“I see.”

“I don't want some dry, deadly report. I don't want to read a bunch of medical lingo.” Harold looks the doctor in the eye. “I want you to give me the real juice, man-to-man.”

Dr. Warren shifts back in his chair. “I'd be happy to help you however I can,” he says tentatively.

“Well then, let's schedule a time to talk.”

“Schedule a time? Oh. Well, I'm afraid that won't be easy. I'm usually booked solid.”

Harold stands. “Let me know when you have time to spare. I'll buy you a drink and pick your brain, so to speak. Maybe give you a few tips of my own, if you like. Business insight.” Harold taps his forehead with a forefinger.

The doctor tilts his head and smiles up at Harold, looking for that moment like a teenager in a beam of praise.

The doctor chooses the bar, a generic Irish pub that Harold has never noticed, just off the main street near the hospital. There are television sets showing the same frantic basketball game. In the dim light, the doctor's features are softer, more human. He is a handsome man with a pair of strong eyebrows and a turned-up curl at one corner of the lips, as if he is harboring illicit thoughts.

The first half hour is useless, a banter of commonplaces. Like a bad date. But Harold is patient. It is impolite to rush things.

Finally, after his second Scotch, they get into it. “What was your first surgery like?” Harold asks, and the next hour swarms with tales of the doctor's first year in the operating room, its triumphs and missteps and ultimate mysteries. So many mysteries remain, the doctor says, shaking his head.

“That's it,” says Harold quietly. “That's exactly what this is about.”

They meet again two weeks later, at the same bar. The doctor's love of his work is evident, as is his satisfaction in being so queried. Harold reciprocates with his own insights, where appropriate, into the market, amused by the doctor's intent stare. It is a beautiful joining of minds, Harold thinks, a fruit-bearing tree.

They meet every other week for the rest of that year. Finally, on a bitter December evening, Harold tells Dr. Warren that he is ready to make his donation.

Two hundred grand is more than reasonable for the fulfillment of his purpose. The doctor's only condition is that the payment be in cash. Harold nods in understanding, fired by such backroom collusion.

Harold is exhilarated with himself, with this, his greatest investment of all. After just three whiskeys, the doctor has agreed to grant him access to the operating room, where he will be able to observe a neurosurgical procedure.

The next several days are limned with anticipation. Christmas passes in a blur. Harold feels a physical rush each time he thinks of his secret, each time he considers the prospect of encountering a stranger's brain—another person's memories and experiences contained in one unit, exposed.

Harold returns to the hospital on the agreed-upon day in January, without Carol. Like a boy, he nearly jogs from the car to the front entrance, past the stocky hospital shrubs, through the enchanted automatic doors. He nods to the nurses and winks at the pretty ones. They walk obliviously past him in their tropical uniforms, South Pacific blue. He, in his gray suit, is invisible. Visitors have disturbingly free rein here. It is almost insolent, this lack of concern on the part of the staff, who are all but chained to their little clipboards. Harold takes the wrong route to the neurosurgery wing, but finally finds the way to Dr. Warren's door. He knocks. He imagines that when he emerges from this office in just a few minutes, he'll be wearing the tropical uniform, too.

Dr. Warren takes him in and closes the door. Harold still thinks the doctor, his friend, seems suspiciously young with his wavy Roman hair and unlined brow. He motions briefly to the visitor's chair.

“I'm sorry to tell you this, but I won't be able to help you today.” The doctor speaks strongly, not meeting Harold's eye, as if afraid of faltering. “I just can't be held responsible for a breach of security.”

Harold sits quietly as the doctor goes on. A sudden flashback to his Hippocratic oath, perhaps. Or, simply, sobriety. The money is attractive, the doctor admits, but he can't hazard going to jail.

“Dr. Warren, we had an agreement.”

“I'm sorry, Harold, but I've thought about it, and it's just too risky.”

“But it wouldn't be you at fault, it would be me,” Harold reminds him.

The doctor smiles sadly. “I'm the one who'd be fired.”

“But our story is solid.”

The surgeon shakes his head. Harold increases his offer. Dr. Warren flinches, but still refuses.

By the spring, Carol still hasn't responded to medications. Further tests continue to show what appears to be a normal organ.

Harold is now sixty years old. Not truly old, but well past the block of time known as “youth” in the life span of a human being. There is no longer any way he can pinpoint what each year has meant to him specifically. There have been too many of them, one leaking into the other.

He sits on the wing chair, near the picture window. His wife sits on the couch nearby, on the phone with another wife. Harold listens to her as she listens to her friend's voice on the receiver, nodding and responding in the tuneful, sympathetic monosyllables unique to women on telephones. The women are starting to succumb to illnesses, to accidents, a creeping string of minor disorders that will ultimately take them under. There is a look on his wife's face lately, as if she knows something that he is failing to grasp. A searching, disbelieving look. Her eyes, like her hair, have begun to show sage flecks of silver, and her face is more angular. She will never be one of those women who spreads out in her own flesh. She is already contracting, minimizing, as if making herself more efficient for the next, most difficult stretch ahead.

They've had a good life. Compatible from the start, a smooth coast. Like a pair of cross-country skis, Harold imagines, never straying far from each other's sight, but keeping separate enough, with plenty of room to maneuver and come together again. It had never occurred to him that her course might veer, that he would ever find her out of reach.

At their next appointment, Dr. Warren finds a tumor in her brain. Harold and his wife sit together as he shows them the results of the MRI with a double dose of contrast. Looking back on the prior imaging now, he explains, the tumor was just barely visible.

“So you missed it the first time,” Harold says.

“Sometimes that happens,” Dr. Warren clips. “Only in retrospect do we see the clues. It would have been impossible to identify the abnormality without this additional test.”

“A year later.”

The doctor does not respond or meet Harold's eyes.

“Well, we've found it now,” Harold says calmly.

The doctor's shoulders hunch slightly as he speaks. The tumor is not necessarily bad news, he explains. It has clear borders and is most likely benign, but is not far from the hippocampus, which explains her strange memory relapses. The condition causes abnormal electrical bursts in the temporal lobe, the seat of sensory organization. This can create unpleasant sensations, like the perception of invisible presences. Some people with the condition become delusional, believing themselves to have contact with supernatural entities. Moses was likely a sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy, as was Joan of Arc.

Carol flashes Harold a look of terror.

“Well, it will be all right, now. Won't it?” Harold asks.

“Surgery would be the best option,” Dr. Warren says gently. “The success rate is remarkably high.”

Carol's face turns pale and pinched, as if she would sink into her turtleneck sweater. They drive home in silence.