“Please,” said Bernie. “Don’t move.”
Eli eventually complied, eyes closed, whispering repetitively, “The time will come, the time will come.”
Bernie had to ask. “What time?”
“When we will envy the dead. We, the wounded, the damaged, the unrepairable. Our time will come.”
It was a phrase that would stay with Thomas over the next three weeks: We, the wounded, the damaged, the unrepairable.
“Please,” said Bernie. “Try to relax.”
“Don’t you need a license to operate one of these?” the magician asked when it was his turn.
“What’s to know?” said Thomas as he helped Eli off the table. “You enter the information, press a button, machine does the rest. The hard part is reading the results. Fortunately, we have one of the best in the biz with us tonight. Bernie here is an old hand at this.”
Bernie had indeed assisted on hundreds of experimental scans, had watched the professors tease meaning out of the topography of the mind. He was something of a protégé.
Each scan took less than twenty minutes, but the prep time between stretched the procedure well into the night. When it was done, Thomas and his three test subjects sat in a dimly lit room, under the buzz of fluorescent tubes, while Bernie correlated the results, uploading each one into separate files. Eli was soon stretched out over three chairs, snoring, a chest-rattling catarrhal sound more alley cat than lion. Sebastian, pale and weak, rocked back and forth, eyes closed, mumbling catechisms to himself. The magician sat waiting patiently with a bemused look on his face, like someone who knows how a trick is done.
It was the confessional hour of night, somewhere between darkness and dawn (although, in the windowless rooms of the catacombs, it would always be night). While they waited for Bernie to wrap things up, the magician moved his seat next to Thomas’s.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
Thomas blinked. “With the brain scans?”
“With everything. With us.”
“Honestly? I think you’re broken. I think you’re broken and I want to help. Not only you, but Eli as well, and Sebastian. Especially Sebastian. Three people. Same name, same claims, same identity. Something is seriously wrong here, and the problem is either in the way your brains are wired or in the way you think. It’s either physiological or it’s cognitive. That’s the question.”
“Not spiritual?”
“Spiritual?” said Thomas. “Listen. If I were to scan your brain while you were praying, I could pinpoint the neurochemical pathways your prayer follows. I can draw you a map to God. I can hook you up to an EEG, chart your brain waves, or run a CAT scan. And if I were to inject radioactive tracers into the bloodstream of, say, a Tibetan monk while he’s chanting or Franciscan nuns while they’re reciting the rosaries, and run a SPECT scan, I can show you the human soul lit up like a Christmas tree.”
“You’ve seen it, then? The human soul.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Here, then, was the Soliloquy of Thomas the Lesser, patron saint of the empirical, advocate of the neurochemical gospel, champion of the synapse (that microscopic gap between neurons, that thin rill where the arc light of mind occurs):
“Searching for magic?” Thomas asked. “You don’t need to look far. You certainly don’t need to turn to the stars or the heavens. The human brain weighs three pounds. It’s the size of a small cantaloupe, uses less power than a refrigerator light, and yet a cubic millimetre of it contains more than a million synapses. Where we once mapped unknown continents, we are now mapping the human mind. Things we once thought of as abstract entities have been pinpointed with uncanny accuracy. Joy, memory, fear, regret—these are nestled in real places, in specific clusters of cells. The greatest explorations of our age are inside our own heads. Who cares what a lot of dead stars and cold planets provide? The mind is far more complex. A gelatinous organic computer, throbbing with life, with electricity, there are as many neurons in the human brain as there are stars in the Milky Way. If you’re going to look for God, start there.” He tapped his temple. “This loose coil of wet rope contains everything humankind is capable of: cathedrals and symphonies, gas chambers and slave ships, Monet and Mozart. There’s more than enough wonder inside us. We don’t need to insert an imaginary being into the equation; the math works quite well without it.”
And therein ended the soliloquy. Thomas came out of it as if from a dream. Somewhere, he could hear choral music and the sound of voices singing. Where was this music coming from, down here in the catacombs?
“You want to meet God?” Thomas said. “I can send an electrical current through your left temporal lobe and you will meet God. The devil, too.”
“The devil?”
“He dwells in the lower reaches, next to our childhood fears and primal anxieties.”
“And joy? What of joy?”
“Simple. Joy lives in the medial forebrain. Euphoria as well. I can pinpoint altruism in the basal ganglia, empathy in the midbrain. I can show you where a sense of pessimism is rooted, where optimism is bred, where our intuitions and ‘hunches’ are generated. I can even bore a tiny hole in your skull, insert a syringe, and suction out your identity along with your hippocampus. I can erase your autobiography.”
“Really? You can contain us in a syringe?”
“Who are we, if not our memories? Erase that and you erase the self. And what is memory anyway? Just protein synthesis and synapse connectivity. And the act of forgetting? The art of letting go? I can isolate that in a petri dish as well, in a single squirt of calcineurin enzyme.”
“You want to reduce us to a series of chemical reactions.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Want to know why you can’t stick to that diet, get yourself to the gym, why you keep making the wrong choices in life? Blame your anterior cingulate cortex, that’s where impulse control is handled—or mishandled. Got a bad feeling about something? I can pin that down as well. Bite your nails, afraid of dogs? Our compulsive habits are tangled up in the clotted seaweed of the basal ganglia. Phobias are lodged in the almond-shaped amygdala. Emotional trauma is seared into the somatosensory cortex. Everything we do can be localized and quantified, all of it. Looking forward to something? Anticipation is just the cells in the brain’s reward centre preemptively secreting dopamine.”
“And doubt?”
“Doubt, denial? Those are in the lower neural substrates of our prefrontal cortex. The seat of consciousness? That’s your thalamus sorting through incoming information, making sense of the senses.”
“And what of guilt?”
“That’s the central nervous system firing distress signals back and forth within the amygdala. Creates a clammy sensation on the skin, the feeling of trying to recoil inward from ourselves. The physical manifestation of a guilty conscience. And feelings of remorse? Those are just memories that have begun to ferment. Remorse lives in the brain’s insula.”
“Trying to explain human emotions and ideas by referring to their molecular foundations is like trying to explain a cathedral by holding up a brick.”
“Listen. Rational thought dwells in our frontal lobes, emotions live in the limbic system. The two are braided together. Fear, bliss, worry, dread: these all have specific neural correlates. Imagination lives in the hippocampus. Feelings of social obligation—what you might call a conscience—are situated in the orbitofrontal cortex, just above our eye sockets, nestled in our frontal lobes.”
“And love?” asked the magician.
Thomas hesitated. “Well, that’s a little different. Love is what we would classify as a ‘polygenic phenomenon.’ It’s diffuse. It spreads throughout the brain, hard to locate in any one area.”
“Love, hope, and charity. These three abide, but the greatest of these is love.” The magician was quoting Saint Paul.
Thomas was unimpressed. “Paul was an epileptic who suffered from hysterically induced blindness. As for love, it depends on wh
at type of love you’re talking about. The love of a parent for a child? Of a couple married for many years? Are we talking companionship? Or raw passion? Hormonal love? Intellectual love? The love of a good meal?”
The magician smiled. “It sounds like a modern version of phrenology, of reading the bumps on people’s heads.”
“I suppose it is, in a way, but this time it’s scientific.”
“Phrenologists were scientific, too.”
“Yes,” said Thomas, “but now we know better.” Then, looking around: “Do you hear that? The music. Is there a radio playing somewhere?”
But the magician didn’t hear anything, and before Thomas could wander off to investigate, Bernie had reappeared, looking tired but triumphant.
“All clear,” he said. “The verdict is in.”
Eli woke with a start, momentarily disoriented. Sebastian opened his eyes as well, and the magician leaned forward, intently focused.
“I’ll have to go over it again more closely,” Bernie said, “but everything looks normal. Near as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with your brains.”
The three Christs seemed relieved. Thomas felt elated. It’s cognitive, then.
We know people can be talked into madness—brainwashed by cults, hectored by abusive spouses into emotional collapse, raised in toxic communities, breastfed on poisoned ideologies—so why can’t we undo it the same way? Why can’t we talk ourselves out of madness?
This is what Thomas would set out to prove, this was the single insight he would kindle and fan, the church door to which he would nail his thesis: We can talk our way out of madness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
IDENTITY THERAPY: SESSION ONE. The following is a transcript of a session conducted by THOMAS ALEXANDER ROSANOFF (recorded on digital audio, supplemented with notes) with the following test subjects: ELI WASSER, SEBASTIAN LAMIELL & JOHN DOE (aka THE MAGICIAN).
Subjects are seated in a semicircle at the residence of T. Rosanoff On the table in front of them are the following items: a portable blood collection unit; a Bible; a revised SDM:III manual; notepads and paper; and the medical files of Eli Wasser and Sebastian Lamiell, as provided by the San Hendrin mental facility.
THOMAS: Good afternoon, gentlemen. I would like to start by introducing myself. I mean, we’ve already met, but—anyway. My name is Thomas. I’m a doctoral candidate at the Hawthorne Institute of Brain Sciences. It’s affiliated with Harvard Medical. I study experimental neurology, with a specific interest in developing restorative treatments based primarily on physiological diagnoses.
Subjects: no response.
THOMAS: Brains. I study brains. The biological foundations of behaviour, beliefs. What can go wrong, and how to fix it. That sort of thing.
ELI: Like with rats?
THOMAS: Not with rats, no.
ELI: With mice?
THOMAS: No, not with mice, either. I mean, I did work with mice as an undergrad, but that was a long time ago and my research now is primarily—
ELI: With rats?
THOMAS: No, not with rats. For want of a better word, I study the human psyche.
THE MAGICIAN: (cutting in) The psyche?
THOMAS: Yes.
THE MAGICIAN: Not the soul?
THOMAS: Same thing. Now, before we get started, there are a few items we need to—
THE MAGICIAN: (softly, almost to himself) Thomas . . .Thomas . . . Do you have a last name, Thomas?
THOMAS: We will need to run regular blood tests, make sure everyone stays healthy. There are some standard psychological profiles I need to compile, questionnaires I’d like you to fill out, a Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MPI, plus a thematic apperception test and so on. To get a baseline, nothing too complex. Mainly, I want us to talk. I want to find out more about you, who you are, what you believe. And (turning to the magician) to answer your question, my family name—it’s Rosanoff.
THE MAGICIAN: Rosanoff?
THOMAS: That’s right. Now then, before we—
THE MAGICIAN: Rosanoff? Like the Boy in the Box?
THOMAS: Yes. Well. The reason I brought the three of you here today—
THE MAGICIAN: I heard you went mad. I heard you killed yourself.
ELI: Is that true? You killed yourself?
THOMAS: Okay. First off, there was no box. I was there, I should know. And secondly, do I look like I killed myself?
They lean in, consider Thomas carefully.
THOMAS: It’s a rhetorical question, for chrissake. Of course I didn’t kill myself!
THE MAGICIAN: So you are Tommy? The boy in that . . . experiment?
THOMAS: My eternal albatross, yes.
THE MAGICIAN: Strange childhood.
THOMAS: No, actually. It was perfectly normal, boring even. It was like any other childhood, except for the mirrors.
THE MAGICIAN: The mirrors?
THOMAS: One-way mirrors, in every room. Not as invasive as it sounds. A little weird, granted, but not invasive. (laughs) I was always turning on a light and surprising myself.
THE MAGICIAN: Mirrors?
THOMAS: Mirrors and music. They would play different types of music while I was doing different tasks. My childhood had a soundtrack. Does that answer your question? Now, why don’t we go around the table and you can each tell us a little bit about yourself. Sebastian?
Sebastian: eyes down, no reply.
THOMAS: Sebastian? We can’t move on until you say something.
SEBASTIAN: (whispering) Not Sebastian . . . I am Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth.
THOMAS: I see. (turning to Eli) And you?
ELI: I am the Son of God! Lord of the Dance! King of the Jews! Christ the Redeemer! Lion of Judea, returned from Heaven! Born anew! . . . But you can call me Jesus.
THOMAS: Okaaaay. (turning to the magician) And . . . ?
THE MAGICIAN: What he said.
THOMAS: Well, now. You see, I’m confused. It’s like—“Would the real Messiah please stand up?”
All three stand.
THOMAS: Kidding! I was kidding—listen. (Thomas opens the New Testament to a bookmarked page) Matthew 7:15. “Beware false prophets. They come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are as hungry and ravenous as wolves.”
He turns the Bible, slides it across to the others so they can read it for themselves.
THOMAS: “Beware false prophets.” All three of you claim to be Jesus. But there can only be one Messiah, one Christ. So, either one of you is right or all of you are wrong.
THE MAGICIAN: You’re the man with the microscope. What do you think?
THOMAS: What do I think? I don’t think any of you are Jesus. I think it’s a story you tell yourselves to help you cope with the pain and disappointments of life. And I think, at some level, you know this.
Eli slams his fists against the tabletop.
ELI: Blasphemy! (looking upward) Father in Heaven, smite him down! Smite him down now!
Long pause.
ELI: (arms crossed, sullen) He’s busy. (Eli thrusts an accusatory finger at Thomas.) But it’s coming!
The magician passes the Bible back to Thomas, open to a new page.
THE MAGICIAN: John 10:20.
THOMAS: (reading) “Of Jesus, many said of him: He has madness within. Why should we listen to him?”
THE MAGICIAN: And here as well (he flips through the pages) in Mark. See? His own family thought he was mad.
THOMAS: His. You said his family. Not yours.
THE MAGICIAN: The royal “we.” His own family wanted him committed. Even they thought Jesus was mentally ill. Was he a prophet or a madman? His own family couldn’t tell, even with all the miracles he was performing—healing the sick, turning water into wine—they still weren’t sure.
ELI: Smoke break?
THOMAS: No. You can smoke later—but only on the balcony. (turning his attention back to the magician) Not to question your sources, but as I understand it, the Gospel of Mark is also the origin of snake handlers and talking in tongues. So ther
e you go.
THE MAGICIAN: You didn’t answer my question. How are we to tell a prophet from a madman?
THOMAS: Well, I hate to break this to you, but the Church of England decided this matter back in 1604, a little doctrine known as “the cessation of miracles.” Haven’t you heard? The age of the prophets is over. Any mystics or miracle workers you encounter now are either charlatans or deluded. So, to answer your question, any prophet today is, by definition, false. (turning his attention to Sebastian) Now. Mr. Lamiell . . .
ELI: Smoke break?
THOMAS: No. Moving on . . .
Thomas opens Sebastian’s file.
THOMAS: Sebastian Henri Lamiell. Age twenty-eight. Admitted to the San Hendrin psychiatric facility. Affective schizophrenia disorder. Akinesia tendencies. Auditory hallucinations. Intrusive thoughts. Suicidal tendencies. An undue preoccupation with spiritual matters. Obsessive-compulsive religious behaviours. Currently taking antipsychotic medication. Is this correct?
Sebastian: no response. He stares down at the tabletop. His facial muscles twitch. His tongue darts out between his lips.
THOMAS: (closing the file) Sebastian, let me come clean. I know your sister. And what you’re doing is killing her. It’s breaking her heart. . . .
Sebastian: no reaction Thomas waits, but there is no response. He turns to Eli’s file instead.
THOMAS: Mr. Wasser, according to the police report, you were picked up in Boston Common dancing. Naked.
ELI: Not dancing.
THOMAS: It says dancing.
ELI: Not dancing.
THOMAS: But it says dancing. Right here. Look. “Eli Wasser. Age fifty-seven. Indecent exposure, public nuisance, resisting arrest. Suspect was seen dancing in the nude.” You were dancing, Eli, without any clothes on.
ELI: Not dancing. Whirling.
THOMAS: Whirling?
ELI: Like David. At the temple.
THOMAS: Okay. So, why were you . . . whirling, in the park, naked?
ELI: (leans in, whispers) Angels. I was calling them down from on high to take me to a better place. They were coming to rescue me. But the others—they conspired against me.
THOMAS: The others? Who?