“Yes, dear. Whatever you say. How ’bout them Rangers?”
“I could be teaching in Arizona. Or guest-lecturing in California, just down the street from Jess. Better yet, we could both be retired. Living in some ramshackle farmhouse in Umbria.”
She knew her job. “Or we could both be completely dead. Then we’d have everything handled and out of the way already.” She rinsed their breakfast bowls, for the ten thousand nine hundredth time in their shared life. “Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes.”
He watched her walk into the bedroom to dress. What did she look like to strangers? Still slim for her age, hips and waist still echoing the past, her body still waving the advertisement of vigor, long after it had any right. She’d become almost unendurably dear to him in recent weeks, the result of his Nebraskan near-derailment.
The night he’d returned, he told her why he’d rushed home. Say everything: their marriage contract from the beginning, and to salvage anything real with this realest of women, he could not hide now. He’d always believed in Blake’s “Poison Tree”: bury a fantasy if you want to nurture it. Kill it by exposure to the open air.
The dank Long Island air did not kill his fantasy. Rather, describing his awful discovery to his wife the night of his homecoming killed something else. Lying in bed alongside her, he laid it out. He felt some sick frisson of collapse, just gearing up to speak. “Sylvie? I need to tell you something.”
“Uh-oh. Real first name. Big trouble.” She grinned, turned on her side, head on an elbowed arm. “Let me guess. You’ve fallen in love.”
He squeezed shut his eyes, and she sucked air. “I wouldn’t say…,” he started. “It seems I may have gone back to Kearney, at least in part, for another look at a woman around whom, without any awareness, I’ve fabricated an entire hypothetical life.”
She lay there, the grin still poised, as if he’d just said, So this neuroscientist walks into a bar…“Syntax getting all fancy, Ger.”
“Please. This is ruining me.”
Her grin stiffened. She rolled onto her belly, regarding him as if he’d just confessed a love for donning women’s underthings. Second by second, she grew more professional. Sylvie Weber, Wayfinder. Supportive; always, horribly supportive. “Did you sleep with her?”
“It isn’t that. I don’t think I even touched her.”
“Ah. Then I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?”
He deserved the slap, even wanted it. But he shrank and said nothing.
“I know you, Man. The Weber Nobility. I know that idealist’s mind of yours.”
“This is not something…I want. That’s why I came back so fast.”
She lashed out. “Fleeing?” Then soft again, ashamed. “You didn’t know, when we talked about your making another trip out there?”
“I…still don’t know. This is not…” He meant to say lust, but that seemed evasive. As shifty as something Famous Gerald might write. More desperate scramble to make a continuous story out of chaos. “In retrospect, perhaps some part of me was looking forward to another look.”
“You weren’t aware of being attracted to her, on your first visit?”
He thought before answering. When he spoke, it was from up near their bedroom ceiling. “I’m not sure that what I felt yesterday is best called attraction.”
She drew her hands in and shaded her eyes. “How serious is this?”
How serious could it be? Three days versus thirty years. A total cipher versus a woman he knew like breathing. “I don’t want it to mean anything at all.”
Underneath her cupped hands, Sylvie cried. Her crying, so rare over the years, had always puzzled him. Detached, almost abstract. Too civil to count as real weeping. Maybe calm grief was genuine maturity, the thing that mental health demanded. But only now did Weber realize how much her vague dispassion in distress had always bothered him. The crisis that their bedrock certainty always mocked—all their binding kindnesses and silly games, Man and Woman—the estrangement they’d never understood in others was now theirs. And she was crying, without sound. “Then why the hell are you telling me this?”
“Because I can’t let it mean anything.”
She pressed her temples. “You aren’t just throwing this in my face? My punishment for…?” For what? For finding herself, finding steady fulfillment in mid-life, while his abandoned him. Something animal flared in her face, ready to hurt back. And he felt how cruelly he loved her.
He tried to say. “I’m giving you…I’m trying…”
Then she was up and out of her crouch, game again, too quickly. She sat up and exhaled, as if she’d just been exercising. She patted the bed with a palm. “Okay. So tell me what you like about this babe.” Improvement project. Life’s next step to self-mastery.
“How can I…like anything about her? I don’t know anything about her.”
“Unknown commodity. Mystery? Lock and key thing? How old is she?”
He wanted to stop talking for good. But talking was his penance. “Pushing fifty,” he said, lying by a decade. A pointless lie—forty hardly qualified as a younger woman—after the harder truth. Barbara was younger. But youth was irrelevant.
“She remind you of someone?”
And it came to him. “Yes.” That aura of having evaded life. One step outside and above it. The same angelic pretense as the author of those three books. And yet, that private frenzy, just beneath the surface of her flawless act. “Yes. I seem to be linked to her. She reminds me of me.”
He might as well have slapped Sylvie. “I don’t understand.”
The two of us. He pressed his palms into his eye sockets until his lids splashed green and red. “There’s something to her that connects. That I need to understand.”
“You’re saying it’s not physical? That it’s more…?”
And then, what he’d tried to tell Karin Schluter, a thing he could not entirely bring himself to believe: “Everything’s physical.” Chemical, electrical. Synapses. Fire or not.
She fell back on the bed, next to him. “Come on,” she grinned, grappling the sheets for safety. “What does this floozy have that I don’t?”
He covered his bald spot with both hands. “Nothing. Except for being a totally unreadable story.”
“I see.” Between brave and bitter. Either one would kill him. “No real chance of competing with that, is there?”
At last he roused himself and encircled her, drew her shaking head into his chest. “Competition’s over. No contest. You have…all my knowledge. All my history.”
“But not all your mystery.”
“I don’t need mystery,” he claimed. Mystery and love could not survive each other. “I just need to get a hold of myself.”
“Gerald. Gerald. Is this the best midlife crisis you can manage?” Her spine collapsed and she burst into tears. She let him hold her. After some time, she surfaced, wiping her damp, red face. “Do I have to buy complicated underwear from the Internet, or something?”
They broke out in choked laughs, scalded with compassion.
The encounter shook them, worse than Weber imagined. Sylvie was still heartbreakingly herself, and he kicked himself for his idiocy every time she smiled gamely at him. After thirty years, she should have taken the news with wry fatigue, realized that he was hers by default, buried under the fossil record of experience. Should have patted him on the head and said, Dream on, my little man; the world is still your proving ground. Should have known he was going nowhere, except in symbols.
But a life of neuroscience had proved that symbols were real. No place else to live. They passed each other in the den and embraced. They touched each other’s forearms in the laundry room. They sat alongside each other on their stools at meals as they had always done, both of them brightened by danger, trading casual theories about UN weapons inspectors or harbor seal sightings in the Sound. Sylvie’s face was clear and bright, but far away, like a color-enhanced nebula beamed back from the Hubble. She refused to as
k how he was, the only question that mattered to her. It bruised his chest to look at her. All that unbearable care would crush him.
A few years back, Giacomo Rizzolati’s group in Parma had been testing motor-control neurons in a macaque’s premotor cortex. Every time the monkey moved its arm, the neurons fired. One day, between measurements, the monkey’s arm-muscle neurons began firing like crazy, even though the monkey was perfectly still. More testing produced the mind-boggling conclusion: the motor neurons fired when one of the lab experimenters moved his arm. Neurons used to move a limb fired away simply because the monkey saw another creature moving, and moved its own imaginary arm in symbol-space sympathy.
A part of the brain that did physical things was being cannibalized for making imaginary representations. Science had at last laid bare the neurological basis of empathy: brain maps, mapping other mapping brains. One human wit quickly labeled the find the monkey-see monkey-do neurons, and all others followed suit. Imaging and EEG soon revealed that humans, too, were crawling with mirror neurons. Images of moving muscles made symbolic muscles move, and muscles in symbol moved muscle tissue.
Researchers rushed to flesh out the staggering find. The mirror-neuron system extended beyond the surveillance and performance of movement. It grew tendrils, snaking into all sorts of higher cognitive processes. It played roles in speech and learning, facial decoding, threat analysis, the understanding of intention, the perception of and response to emotions, social intelligence, and theory of mind.
Weber watched his wife moving about the house, going about her days. But his own mirror neurons failed to fire. Mark Schluter had gradually dismantled his most basic sense of acquaintance, and nothing would ever seem familiar or linked again.
Jess came home for three days at Christmas. She brought the mate. Sheena. Shawna. Jess noticed nothing wrong. In fact, her parents’ closeness—the lovebirds in winter—became the running joke between Jess and her cultural studies scholar. “I warned you: disgusting displays of hetero-bourgeois devotion like you witness only in the bowels of Red America.” The three women soon condensed into a trio, running out to vineyard tastings on the North Fork or over to Fire Island for frigid beachcombing, leaving him to solitary “testosterone musings.” When the girls left, Sylvie settled into a post-holiday empty-nest funk. Only long hours of social-service referral at Wayfinders seemed to help.
He fantasized about treating his own holiday descent with piracetam, a nootropic with no known toxicity or addictive properties. For years, he’d read amazing claims about the drug’s ability to enhance cognition by stimulating the flow of signals between the hemispheres. Several researchers he knew took it with small dosages of choline, a synergistic combination said to produce greater increases in memory and creativity than either drug taken alone. But he was too cowardly to experiment with a mind already so altered.
The Country of Surprise showed up on no end-of-year lists except the ones for dubious achievement. Its rapid disappearance almost relieved Weber—no lasting evidence. Sylvie ministered to him with studied indifference, which only made him sad. They were sitting in front of a fire on Sunday evening after New Year’s when he made some crack about Famous Gerald forgetting to come down the chimney this year. She laughed. “You know what? To hell with Famous Gerald. I could kiss Famous Gerald goodbye right now and never miss him. A postcard once a year from Club Med Maldives would do.”
“That strikes me as unnecessarily cruel,” he said.
“Cruel?” She smacked the brick mantel with real force. Her hands stabbed out at the pent-up weeks when she’d said nothing. “Jesus, Man. Can you tell me when this is going to be over?”
Her eyes burned, and he saw the size of her fear. Of course: having to sit by and watch his private deterioration, unsure where or whether it would ever end. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve not been…”
She took a series of deep breaths, willing herself down. She came to the couch where he sat and pressed her hand into his chest. “What are you doing to yourself? What’s this about? Reputation? Public judgment is nothing but shared schizophrenia.”
He shook his head, pressed two fingers into his neck. “No. Not reputation. You’re right: reputation is…beside the point.”
“What then, Gerald? What is the point?”
No one saw his own symptoms. No one knew who others knew him to be.
Sylvie twisted his shirt, wincing at his silence. “Listen to me. I would gladly trade every recognition you have ever managed to have my husband back and working for himself again.”
But her husband, stripped of recognitions, was no one Sylvie would recognize. He was a breath from telling her what he now felt certain of: the basic immorality of his books. Two words that would have finished them faster than any infidelity, imagined or real.
Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes. All she wanted, finally, was for him to master his own life again, as he had for decades, ever since they’d met as Columbus undergrads. Her Man. The man who threw himself into every activity, not because of where it might lead, but for the innate strangeness of raw engagement. The man who had taught her that any life one came across was infinitely nuanced and irreproducible. Go teach. Go learn. How much more flavor do you want? How much bigger could you hope to make yourself?
As he toyed with his grapefruit, something struck the window of the breakfast nook with a sickening thump. He knew before he turned around. When he did turn, he saw the bird struggling away, broken: a large male cardinal who, for the last two weeks, had been attacking his reflection in the nook window, thinking himself an intruder on his own territory.
He stood in front of the quarter-bowl of students, fiddling with his wireless mic and fighting that sense of deceit that hit him before every lecture now. The students were the same as any year: upper-middle white kids from Ronkonkoma and Comack, trying on every identity from Prison Yard Tattoo to LaCoste alligator. But their manner had changed this semester, turned sardonic. They had passed around the public indictments of him by e-mail and instant messenger. They still wrote down every word he said, but more now to catch him out, to root out charlatanism, their pens angled in challenge. They wanted science, not stories. Weber could no longer tell the difference.
He tested the mic and focused the projector. He looked up into the Greek theater filled with college seniors. Feral facial hair was making a comeback. And the piercings, of course, the heavy hardware: he would never adjust to that. The grandchildren of Levittown, with rods through their eyebrows and noses. As a plump tattooed girl in the fourth row made her last legal cell call before the bell—Hey, I’m in my neuro lecture—he watched her tongue stud glisten in the sheen of saliva, a surprising little freshwater pearl.
Looking into this bowl of world-weary twenty-one-year-olds, he couldn’t help assigning them case histories. Since his last curtailed visit to see Mark Schluter, the world had broken out in Dickens and Dostoyevsky. The feverish anarchist, Bhloitov, stretched out sideways on a bank of three chairs in the back row. The high-strung stickler, Miss Nurfraddle, in the aisle seat two rows from the podium, fussed over her perfectly aligned texts. From the center of the auditorium, a slim man with slick black hair, Slavic or Greek, glared at Weber when the lecture failed to begin at the stroke of the hour. What was there in life worth such anger?
Every soul in this room would look upon itself in time with amused disgust. I never dressed like that. Never scribbled notes so earnestly. I couldn’t have thought such things. Who was that pathetic creature? The self was a mob, a drifting, improvised posse. That was the subject of today’s lecture, all the lectures he had given, since meeting his ruined Nebraska meatpacker. No self without self-delusion.
Two seats down from the slick-haired Greek sat the woman in this semester’s class that he avoided looking at. They came and went every year, growing eternally younger. They were not all beautiful. But each played at being older than her age, eyebrows raised a nanometer too high. This one, eight rows up, right i
n his fovea, in a clinging peach turtleneck, smiled at him, her round face flushed, eager for anything he might say.
The sister, Karin, had said something, the first time they met for lunch. An accusation. I can’t believe it. You do it, too. I just thought that someone with your accomplishments… He thought he hadn’t known what she was talking about. But he had. And he did—did do it, too.
He cast a last look at his notes: organized ignorance. Next to the brain, all human knowledge was like a lemon drop next to the sun. “Today I want to tell you the stories of two very different people.” His disembodied voice came out of speakers high up on the walls, full of amplified authority. The last fragments of nattering conversation fell away. The word stories drew a suppressed snicker. Bhloitov stared at Weber’s first slide, a coronal cross section, with open skepticism. Miss Nurfraddle pleaded with a digital voice recorder. The turtlenecked woman gazed at Weber with pliant curiosity. The others betrayed no emotion beyond mild boredom.
“The first is the account of H.M., the most famous patient in the literature of neurology. One summer day half a century ago, just across the Sound from here, an ignorant and overzealous surgeon, trying to cure H.M.’s worsening epilepsy, inserted a narrow silver pipette into H.M.’s hippocampus—this gray-pink area right here—and sucked it out, along with most of his parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, and entorhinal and perirhinal cortexes—here, here, and here. The young man, roughly your age, was awake through the entire procedure.”
So, suddenly, was this entire room.
“Those of you with functioning hippocampi who attended last week’s lecture will not be surprised to learn that, along with all the tissue evacuated through the pipette, came H.M.’s ability to form new memories…”
Weber heard his florid showmanship, and it made him ill. But he’d told the story so many times over the years, in lectures as well as in his own neurological novelistic books, that he could tell it no other way. He clicked through the slides, recounting the outcome by heart:H.M. returning halfway to the land of the living, his personality intact, but unable to tag new experience.