The Shoe on the Roof

  Thomas and Amy had followed this same pattern: their first semi-date had ended with them tumbling into each other’s eyes, into each other’s arms, and, soon after, into bed. True, Thomas held a distinct advantage over Amy: he had a full psychological profile and detailed brain scan of the object of his affection, whereas Amy didn’t even know his real name. But his advantage didn’t last.

  As their clothes fell away, he’d asked her his question, had purred it into her ear: “How do you want it?”

  To which Amy had pulled back. “How do I want what?”

  Um . . . This had thrown him off his game. “You know, it.”

  “It?”

  “Do you want it hard and fast?” he asked. “Or soft or strong?”

  She laughed (snorted, really). “What, is that your technique?” she said. “Column A or Column B? Let me guess, no matter what I ask for, you’re going to tease me.” Then: “I don’t like to be teased. You lie back. I’ll take care of this.” And before Thomas could stammer some sort of reply, she was already on top of him and he was inside of her and she was moving her hips, first in a rocking-horse fashion, then in grinding circles, then in slow figure eights—an infinity sign unrolling like a lariat—pushing deeper with every turn until the inevitable happened. Thomas gasped, bucked several times. “Shhh,” she whispered.

  Next time at bat, Thomas resisted the narrative, fought to regain the upper hand. He wrestled his way on top of her, only to have her flip him back over, part tango, part bullfight, until, weakened, panting, and with willpower sorely depleted, he allowed her to again climb astride. Amy leaned in, her hair falling over his face, and as she reached down to guide him in, she asked, half mocking, half serious, “How do you want it?”

  Later, as she dismounted, chest sheened in sweat, she’d said, “Don’t feel bad.” (He didn’t.) “It’s always that way.” (What way?) “I’ve always had trouble coming.”

  This was a devastating aside, and one that Thomas took as both a personal affront and a challenge. (A nifty trick, throwing down the gauntlet like that.) Thomas never worked harder than after Amy’s admission. He tried all sorts of new positions, many of them cribbed from the Kama Sutra, some quite fanciful, others downright ridiculous, suitable more for balloon animals than the sexual arts. He researched new rhythms, flirted with tickling, tried more kissing, then less kissing, tried spanking, kneading, butterfly flutters, inner thigh pressure points, but it always ended the same—with Amy rolling him onto his back. Amy the cowgirl. Amy in charge. (He began to suspect it was all a hoax and that, counterintuitively, she was faking not having an orgasm to make him work harder. Several times over the days that followed, he would feel her contract around him like a fist flexing, only to be told, “Close, but no cigar.”) He eventually did solve the Rubik’s Cube of Amy’s orgasms, more as a matter of sheer persistence than magical technique, but he never did manage to solve the Rubik’s Cube of her sadness. It was always there. There was something profoundly sad about her, this girl who had been so desperate to find God.

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “Not much to tell. Mom died when I was young. Dad works at Mattress Warehouse. My brother, Sebastian, is studying to be a priest.”

  “A priest? Wow. That’s like meeting someone who makes fine whalebone corsets. Is there even a market for that anymore? Priests, I mean. I assume there is some niche fetish group keeping the whalebone corset business alive.”

  Memory is the hotel curtain that never completely closes. Memory always lets in just enough light to fill the room and ruin your sleep.

  “So your brother wants to be a priest. Was he strict as a kid?”

  “No. He was lovely. When Mom died, he watched out for me. He always watched out for me.”

  “Y’know, I still haven’t met any of your family. We should get together, maybe have a—”

  “Can we change the subject? Please.”

  Heart attacks hurt, but there are no pain receptors inside the brain. Memories cause mental anguish, but nothing physical. Thomas reminded himself of this daily, but it didn’t seem to help. Every relationship he’d ever been in, no matter how fleeting, had always ended on his terms, some gently, some in tears, but always on his terms. Not so with Amy. Was it simply pride? Only that? This was, after all, Thomas’s first true heartbreak, and those are always the most devastating, the most intoxicating, the most compelling. (Everything we do is inevitably measured from that first heartbreak, the way epochs are marked. Before the Common Era and After.) So, too, would his life be forever divided into Before Amy and After. Every relationship that followed would be measured against her and would be found lacking. He knew that already. Some might be sweeter, most would be happier, but none would be Amy. He would look for her in the eyes that followed, would search for her reflection. Science requires standard units of measurement, whether metric or imperial, grams or ounces. For Thomas, life would now be measured in units of Amy.

  She haunted not only his thoughts, but his senses, especially smell. It’s the oldest of our senses, older than we are, older than mammals, older than primates. It existed in the earliest tadpole, is older than sight, older than taste, older even than touch. Our other senses are routed through the cerebrum, but our sense of smell bypasses the gatekeeper, feeds directly into our reptilian brain stem, into the deepest evolutionary layers of who we are. It is the sense most closely connected to memory. This is why a fragrance, a smell, a fleeting aroma, can flood the mind with associations. For Thomas, the minty smell of Crest toothpaste would hurl him back in time, would conjure up images of Amy, would bring him to his knees. At one point, he tried smearing tiger balm under his nose, but it didn’t help.

  Heartbreak is an ice cube caught in the throat. A tourniquet around the chest. You try to swallow, but you can’t. You try to breathe, but aren’t able to. People have died swallowing ice cubes the wrong way.

  Heartbreak is a fractured bone, poorly set. A bad dream you wake into. A drug withdrawal. A waking case of the DTs. Thomas roamed the corridors of recollection on punitive missions, search and destroy—or was it search and restore? It was hard to tell at times.

  Memories are like mythical monsters; you have to kill them three times before they stay down. And even then . . . The past collars us whether we acknowledge it or not; the only difference is the length of the leash. No matter how unfettered we feel, if we run far enough we will feel that leash tighten, yank us back. Thomas had once watched a dog in a park, tethered to a tree, turning in slowly constricting circles until it had to be rescued and unwound. At which point it started winding itself in anew. Heartbreak is a dog in a park on a tree.

  The possibility that Amy would now only ever exist in the past tense: this is what he couldn’t face, that any time he spent with her would be in retrospect, in the chemical traces that memories leave in the neural pathways of our brain. Her brother, then, was a lifeline, thinly drawn, toward a future with Amy.

  Why did he love her so painfully, so completely, so inadequately? (The intensity of one’s affections, after all, has little to do with the object of one’s affection. Fixations are self-generated, like compound interest or the voices in your head.) A “splintered self” theory might say that he was searching for a missing fragment of his own psyche, that he saw something in her that he was lacking and was longing for. A certain sadness?

  At some level Thomas still perceived himself, however imperfectly formed, as a healer. She hates me and I don’t know why. How to heal one’s self? Ah, but the premise was wrong. Amy didn’t hate him. No. It was much worse than that. Ever since the Incident of the Feigned Pregnancy Test, after the initial anger subsided, Amy had been left with only a profound feeling of indifference toward Thomas. This was worse than hate: hate, after all, is predicated on passion. But indifference? One might manage to transform hate into love—certainly love was easily enough turned the other way—but indifference? That was a task of the first order, as close to impossible as any algorithm would allow. Whi
ch is to say, Thomas’s quest—to cure her brother and win her back—was doomed from the start. As all heroic endeavours are.

  Here was the hard kernel under the tooth: it was not that she had stopped loving him, but that she had, perhaps, never started. She never loved him, not in the way that he had loved her: painfully, completely, inadequately. She had loved that he loved her, that much was true, but Amy had always known that Thomas was only ever a way station en route to someone else, that One True Love waiting for her beyond words.

  Should we tell him? Would it matter?

  In the last few nights, Thomas had worked his way out from under the worst of his despair. He felt buoyant, upbeat, optimistic even. His heart had been broken, true. But he’d changed his brand of toothpaste and, even better, Thomas had a plan. And with a plan, anything is possible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “DO I KNOW YOU?!” This was the greeting Eli had shouted, spittle flying, when Sebastian arrived at Thomas’s apartment.

  “Don’t mind him,” Thomas said. “Come in.”

  The other Jesus—the magician—was on the far side of Thomas’s spacious living room, once again peering through Thomas’s microscope.

  “Leave that alone,” Thomas said. “It’s expensive. And leave Sully alone as well.” He could tell that someone had moved his pet skeleton. The Saint Patrick’s Day hat was gone, and Sully was now facing the window, as though someone had been dancing with him, had spiralled him around loosely a few times, then left him there. Probably Eli.

  “Just put your bags here, by the door,” Thomas said, as Sebastian followed him in.

  Someone had been snooping in Thomas’s mail as well; the bills and flyers were spread across the kitchen counter. He spotted another postcard, written in the same boxy capital letters as before, like a culprit trying to hide their handwriting in a ransom note: REMEMBER ME? And below that, underlined forcibly: THINK. Thomas threw it into the recycling along with the flyers.

  “Gentlemen, gather round. And leave that microscope alone! It’s not a toy.”

  The three men crowded around the marble-topped counter. “There are two floors,” Thomas explained. “This is the main floor. There’s a balcony on the second—Eli, you can smoke there if you need to—but otherwise, I would like the three of you to stay down here. We’ll put Eli on the couch, Sebastian in the guest room—that’s at the end of the hall—and we’ll put”—he still didn’t know the magician’s name—“you in the pantry. It sounds cramped, but it’s not. It’s more of a walk-in storage unit, almost as big as the guest room. If any of you aren’t happy with your sleeping arrangements, let me know. We can move them around. I have an extra futon and some blankets as well.”

  “I admire your domicile,” said Eli, nodding his approval. “Very chic. Ikea?”

  “No, not Ikea.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “My bedroom? It’s upstairs.” With a lock on the door in case any of you crazy fuckers tries to kill me in my sleep.

  “Not where. What on? D’ya sleep on a plank or a cot? Cardboard?”

  “A mattress. A regular mattress.”

  “King-sized?”

  “Queen.”

  “Well, it’ll have to do. I’ll take it.”

  “What? No.”

  “You said—”

  “I meant amongst yourselves. If you aren’t happy with the sleeping arrangements, you can sort things out amongst yourselves.”

  “Let’s put it to a vote.”

  “I am not getting voted out of my bed, okay?” He could feel a migraine coming on. “I’m going upstairs.”

  “Hypocrite,” Eli said, under his breath.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE SCHOOL’S NEURAL-IMAGING LAB was located deep in the catacombs, across from the biometrics department. Bernie was at home, but on call. He was always on call.

  Half awake and fumbling for his glasses, he answered his phone without checking the number. Someone this late? He didn’t need to check. It could only be Thomas. Bernie breathed onto his lenses, tried to clean them on his undershirt, to no avail. “Did Cerletti sign off on this?”

  He could hear the grin in Thomas’s voice. “He hasn’t not signed off on it.”

  Unlike the lab’s older PET machines with their IV units of the sort they’d tested Amy on, the school’s MRIs required two passcards and a key.

  “There’s a log as well,” Bernie pointed out. “Every time one of the MRIs is fired up, there’s a record. Cerletti will know.”

  “Yeah, but how often do they check the log? Never. So who’s going to know?” Bernie’s many part-time jobs at the university included on-call night supervisor at the neural imaging department. If someone booked an MRI or a SPECT scan after hours, Bernie signed them in. “And if anyone does notice,” Thomas said, “who are they going to report it to? You.”

  “I don’t know. This seems . . .”

  “Listen. Cerletti approved this project. He doesn’t know the exact details, but he gave his blessings.”

  “For therapy. Not for brain scans.”

  “Look. I’ve got three guys who think they’re Jesus. Their problems are either physiological or cognitive. If I’m going to begin therapy, I first have to eliminate the possibility of any physical causes: brain damage, lesions, fossilized tumours, depleted forebrain activity—the usual fault lines that might cause a brain to misfire.”

  Bernie was beginning to waver. “It’s late. The buses aren’t running.”

  “One step ahead of you, buddy. I’ve already sent a cab to pick you up. It’s on its way.”

  He knew Bernie would give in, just as he knew Bernie would be alone on a Saturday night. Thomas piled his three Christs into his Prius and set off to meet Bernie at the imaging lab. As they glided down empty lanes, past parking garages and shuttered storefronts, he explained the basics of brain scans to them—emphasizing that it was a way of illuminating their inner powers.

  “Sounds diversionary,” said Eli. “I’m in!”

  He used the word like a compliment. Good things were diversionary, bad things trepidary. “What kind of wattage are they drawing?” he asked.

  “Not really sure,” Thomas said, as he made the turn from Massachusetts Avenue onto Everett. A nondescript red building slipped into view.

  “I used to work in the railyards, at the switch house, monitoring the relays,” Eli said. “Back in the day.”

  “I thought you were a carpenter,” Thomas joked. “Back in the day.”

  But Eli missed the humour. “I worked electrical at the railyards, was never in carpentry. I did the wiring. Fuse boxes and such.”

  “He means your father,” said the magician, leaning up from the backseat. “It’s an allusion.”

  “Illusion?” Eli was more confused than ever. “My father was a farmhand. Don’t know where you’re getting your information.”

  He knows, thought Thomas. At some level, he knows. When his guard is down, he is fully aware of who he is and where he came from. It seemed to Thomas that there were layers of reality involved, and that Eli’s competing identities were not as segregated as they seemed, but seeped into each other. If so, how does one go about disentangling the two?

  Eli had calmed down a great deal since that first day. He was still prone to fits of declamatory rage, but when Thomas read through Eli’s medical records from San Hendrin, it became clear that for all his bile and bluster, the only person Eli ever really hurt was himself. The magician seemed to have a soothing effect on him, which was surprising considering they were both occupying the same psychological space, both claiming the same name.

  Mr. Wasser has shown marked improvement in temperament. This is what Thomas wrote in his journal. He then added: You would almost think that being cuffed and left alone in a room was bad for one’s mental health. But, realizing that he needed to adopt a more scientific tone—these journals were, after all, being written for posterity—Thomas crossed out those comments and wrote instead: Test subject E.
Wasser has experienced negative therapeutic results in regard to his restraints. These restraints, therefore, have been removed.

  Eli was still an intimidating figure with a booming Old Testament demeanour. When Bernie met them at the side door of the Neurobiology Imaging Lab, Eli roared, “I know you!”

  “Don’t worry,” Thomas said. “He does that to everyone.”

  “I know you!” Eli repeated, eyes frenzied.

  Bernie was shaken by Eli’s accusation and remained rattled even as the MRI hummed to life, even as the test subjects were laid out, one by one, on the cold comfort of a medical slab, even as the halo headrests were swivelled into place, even as the machine rotated, layering their brains in colour-coded imagery.

  “Remain perfectly still,” Thomas advised. “It’s going to get loud. Lots of clanging and banging, but don’t move. No pens in your pockets or plates in your heads, right? Great.” Then, to Bernie: “Let’s set the crosshairs on the lateral ventricles. Should get good fluid density there.”

  When Eli balked at following Sebastian into the MRI, Bernie explained, “There’s nothing to worry about. The scan tracks oxygenated blood flow to specific regions. It uses magnetic resonance. We’re basically reading echoes.”

  “Echoes?” asked Eli as he lay down.

  “In the form of radio waves. Creates a three-dimensional image.” Bernie leaned across, adjusted the settings. “Allows us to see inside a living brain.”

  “Blasphemy!” Eli shouted as his head was being strapped down. “We’re not bats, you know!”