The Shoe on the Roof

  “Think of it as culling the herd,” said Bernie. He was talking about the mice. “If we can’t do something as simple as this, how can we ever hope to become doctors?”

  “I don’t think mice travel in herds,” said Thomas.

  “Flocks?”

  “That would be pigeons.”

  “Packs?”

  “That would be rats.” Thomas thought for a moment. “We have a murder of crows, a bevy of swans. Why not ‘a field of mice’?”

  “Not to be confused with field mice,” said Bernie.

  This was in their undergraduate days, the first time they’d ever worked together, back when Thomas was still seeing Wendy. The experiment was an attempt to locate empathy in the brain. “We’ll be studying the effects of mirror neurons,” their supervisor explained. “We want to know if stress is contagious. Is trauma transmittable? We know about the effects of second-hand smoke. We’re looking for the effects of second-hand stress.”

  Bernie and Thomas would separate litters of mice into pairs. They would then “stress” one mouse and leave the other alone. Stressing a mouse could be done through mild electrical shocks to the feet (0.05 milliamps every thirty seconds for two seconds, say) or by taking them “swimming” (that is, putting them in a vat to tread water for five minutes). The stressed mouse would then be united with its “buddy” (an actual term, that) to see if the traumatic effects in one mouse would register in the other, either physically or in terms of behaviour.

  And how would you evaluate behaviour? By reviewing thirty-minute videos of the mice after they were reunited. With 140 pairs, that came to seventy hours of mice videos, all of which had to be reviewed in real time—one couldn’t fast-forward in case one missed some crucially important mouse action. Seventy hours of mice videos, and you had to pay close attention as well, clicking keyboard codes for each behaviour as it came up: sniff, walk, climb, fight, sleep. Oh, the glamorous life of an undergrad!

  “We’ll be looking for structural changes in the hypothalamus as well,” their supervisor explained. “We want to find out if being around a stressed mouse will affect the brain structures of the nonstressed buddy.”

  It was a way of looking at the ripple effect of trauma on others, on the siblings and friends of abused children, for example.

  And how would they check the hypothalamus?

  “First, you’ll need to give them an anesthetic, to put them to sleep. You then insert a needle between the ribs, into the left ventricle. You’ll draw out the blood and then rinse their system with saline. After that you’ll inject PFA.”

  “PFA?”

  “Paraformaldehyde. If you try to scoop out a brain without preserving it beforehand, it will fall apart like oatmeal.”

  “Scoop it out?”

  “Exactly. You need to harvest the brains. What you’ll do is cut through the skin on the top of the head and then peel it back with tweezers to expose the skull—mouse skulls are thin, so be careful. You remove the brains and incubate them overnight in sucrose. The next day, you’ll freeze them in liquid nitrogen and then take thin slices, 30 microns thick. We have brain atlases for you to consult.” He referred to heavy books, opened like Gutenberg Bibles. “They show every layer of brain possible, so when you reach the cross-section of the hypothalamus, save those slices. You’ll need to lay those on the slides and stain them, to look for structural changes. We’ll be keeping an eye out for landmarks, white matter tracks, ventricles and so on, as we slice.”

  “Surely we don’t slice the brains by hand?” said Thomas. “I’m not good with scalpels.”

  “We have a precision slicer, a cryostat. It’s like something you’d use in a deli. Except instead of salami, you’ll be, y’know, slicing mouse brains. The good news is, you’ll be working with designer mice.”

  “Designer?”

  “Genetically modified. They’re called ‘tomato mice,’ because their brains have been specially bred to appear bright red under a laser microscope. Makes analysis a lot easier. Patent pending.”

  Thomas felt queasy and they hadn’t even started yet.

  It was hard to know which was worse—the hours watching mouse surveillance videos, clicking on a keyboard and feeling like the world’s saddest voyeur, or harvesting the final product. It was trickier than it looked, killing something. Thomas often punched his needle clean through the heart and ended up spurting blood onto his gloves.

  “I really hope God isn’t a mouse,” he said, after the fifth or sixth botched execution.

  He eventually got the hang of it, and it became easier and easier as time went on, though no less monotonous.

  “Do you find it ironic,” Bernie asked, “that an experiment on the origins of empathy involves the wholesale slaughter of helpless mice?”

  “A mouse apocalypse,” said Thomas.

  “For the greater good,” said Bernie.

  “Culling the herd,” Thomas repeated.

  “Exactly. We’ll be fine, so long as we don’t get too attached to any of them.” He picked up the next allotted mouse, held it in his palms. “I named this little guy Squiggles!”

  Bernie was joking, of course, but Thomas blanched nonetheless.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing, it’s just— Squiggles was the name of my hamster.”

  “Oh shit, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Really.”

  “These brains have to incubate for twenty-four hours anyway,” said Bernie. “So, let’s go get a drink.”

  And that was how Thomas and Bernie became friends.

  Later, having dispatched the last of the mice, and having lined up the relevant slices onto the lab’s high-precision confocal microscopes, and having peered at the lunar landscape of the enlarged brain tissues, rendered in stark relief on the microscope’s monitors, having prodded and poked, and teased out the secrets of their micron-thin samples, and having tentatively concluded that empathy may indeed affect the physical structures of the brain, Bernie and Thomas now sat at their lab counter happily eating Japanese noodles out of soggy-cornered takeout boxes. The gruesome nature of their completed task hadn’t dimmed their appetites.

  Thomas dug into his yakisoba, slopping it partly into his mouth, partly down his chin. “You suck at chopsticks,” said Bernie.

  “I suck at a lot of things.”

  This surprised Bernie. His impression of Thomas was of someone who skimmed lightly across the surface of the world, as though gravity didn’t apply to him.

  “If you can’t handle chopsticks,” said Bernie, “how are you going to handle a scalpel?”

  Thomas opened a can of beer to a satisfying fizzzz. “As long as I don’t have to finesse takeout noodles with a scalpel, I’m good.”

  Something else Bernie said pulled at Thomas’s memory, like a child tugging on a sleeve: “I had lunch with Professor Cerletti today. He wanted to bask in my gratitude.”

  Bernie was on a bursary for academically accomplished students who might not have the financial wherewithal to attend Harvard unaided. Which is to say, Bernie had a scholarship. (Thomas, meanwhile, had his name—or rather, his father’s name.) Professor Cerletti had championed Bernie’s enrollment from the start, something he liked to remind Bernie of regularly. Hence the lunches and royal audiences.

  “Know what Cerletti ordered?” asked Bernie.

  “Fresh blood?”

  “Brains. Seriously! Calf brains on a plate. It was like watching someone stuff steak tartare into their face, with his mouth all gummy, lips wet. And the whole time he’s eating, he’s asking me what I thought my role was in the laboratory of the human mind. That’s what he said, ‘the laboratory of the human mind.’ ”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “The pursuit of truth! or some such nonsense. And then he wipes his mouth with a napkin and says, ‘No. We deal in refuse, Bernie. Not truth. Our job is to sift through the wet leaves and mulch of evolution. And as we root about in the cellars of the psyche, is it any w
onder we might find . . . unpleasant things?’ ”

  “Middens,” said Thomas. “That’s what they call ancient latrines. The archaeologists who work on them specialize in fossilized shit. Except, of course, it’s no longer shit. It’s now an artifact, an historic inheritance, a relic, a treasure trove of knowledge. Diet, grains, ancient migrations, medical conditions, even life span. It’s all there. If we are archaeologists of the mind, that’s where we ply our trade as well.”

  Bernie raised a toast. “Here’s to us! The miners of mulch, excavators of fossilized feces. I am so glad I gave up my job as a movie star for this! Question: If you discovered that Saint Francis of Assisi—you know the guy, the one draped with loving creatures, with bluebirds perched on his shoulders, fawns eating from his palm—if you found out that he secretly hated animals, that he flicked the bluebirds from his shoulder whenever he had the chance and dropkicked furry woodland creatures when no one was looking, would it matter?”

  “Would what matter?”

  “Proposition: Who we are in private is different than who we are in public. Agreed or disagreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “So, which is more real: the private us or the public us?”

  “Public.”

  This tripped Bernie up. Everyone always said private.

  “A person isn’t a person except in relation to someone else,” said Thomas. “The real test isn’t, How do we act when no one is around? It’s, How do we act when we know we’re being watched? That’s the real test of socialization. Hell, our entire society depends on it.” He pointed the chopsticks in Bernie’s direction. “We are not our raging ids.”

  Bernie could feel the pain from here. The Boy in the Box. Still there, after all these years. And as the night wound down and their thoughts turned inward, Bernie raised another toast: “To our ineluctable march into insignificance, to that last step into nothingness.”

  “Hear! Hear!” said Thomas (drunkenly).

  “Y’ever think,” said Bernie (philosophically), “that life is merely a series of smaller and smaller capitulations, practice runs for that final surrender at the end?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Know what I think?” said Bernie. “I think every obituary ever written should simply read: That was it?”

  “You really know how to lighten the mood.”

  Bernie raised yet another toast, sloshing his beer in salute. “The greatest of tragedies can exist right beside us and we might never know!”

  “What’s that from?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s something Cerletti said. He’s an odd duck, that one.”

  “My dad knew him from way back when. I ever tell you that? They were graduate students together. Were fairly close at one point, I think. Y’know, Cerletti asked me the exact same question. Wanted to know what I was hoping to find, poking around in the brain.” It was at a dinner with the dean. She was holding forth on her favorite subject: herself. (She found herself endlessly fascinating. If only others shared that fascination!) And as Thomas’s father was topping up the sherry, Cerletti had leaned across and asked Thomas the same question he’d posed to Bernie, apropos of nothing. “What are you looking for?”

  “What did you tell him?” Bernie asked.

  “I said, ‘I want to map out the final continent, I want to unlock the secrets of the last great mystery, I want to pin down God once and for all.’ ”

  “Really?”

  Thomas grinned. “Not quite. I said, ‘The pursuit of truth!’ Or some such nonsense.”

  They raised a toast to God.

  “For a nonexistent being, he’s certainly caused a lot of trouble,” said Bernie.

  “Amen to that,” said Thomas.

  And now, lying awake in the guest room of Kingsley Hall, unable to sleep and thinking of mice and hamsters, long forgotten, Thomas recalled a woman he’d caught sight of the other day. He was crossing the street and when she saw him, she looked away, instantly embarrassed. One of his soccer moms, no doubt, yet he was damned if he could remember her or her name. (It had taken him almost a week to remember Bernie’s first name after they’d met, and months more to learn his last name. Donovan? Flanagan?) Thomas had self-diagnosed this as a mild form of prosopagnosia, “face blindness,” a glitch in the fusiform facial recognition area of his brain, the one that assigns identities to names and facial features. But Wendy had said it had nothing to do with his brain. “You just don’t care. You can’t be bothered to remember people.” A cruel assessment, perhaps, but not entirely untrue.

  And now the postcards were piling up in his apartment: REMEMBER ME. REMEMBER ME. And a voice from long away and far ago was asking: “We’ll still be friends, right?”

  Thomas stared at the ceiling. He stared at the ceiling until the music faded and the memories disappeared like faces into a fog.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  DR. ROSANOFF WAS ABOUT to open the door when he stopped, stepped back, and looked at his son with a warm smile. “You’ve never been in here before, have you?”

  Thomas shook his head, felt his mouth go dry. He knew the room existed, but had never known exactly where.

  They were standing at the far end of his father’s capacious study. Tall windows. An expansive view of the river, misted in the distance. Oak trees and the rooftops of lesser manors. The cobblestones of Beacon Hill. A cityscape rendered in diminishing gradations of grey. Traffic, sorting itself out on the esplanade below, the red brake lights wet in the early evening, flowing into lanes like corpuscles in a vein. And out on the river, sculling boats: thin elongated teardrops, sliding soundlessly under Longfellow Bridge, leaving concentric circles and slowly spreading lines of water in their wake. Going forward, looking backward. The art of rowing.

  Dr. Rosanoff’s desk was a swath of polished mahogany, the blotter as big as a billboard. A decorative globe, an inkwell, bookshelves with standard-issue leather-bound volumes, glass-framed doctoral pomp and sundry academic honours: the accoutrements of a learned man.

  Thomas had only ever been in his father’s study a handful of times and, even then, he was usually too wonderstruck to have noticed the doorway at the far end. If he had noticed, he would have assumed that it led to an antechamber of some sort, perhaps to a restroom or a storage closet.

  The room behind that door had indeed been an antechamber of sorts, used by the various lords of Kingsley Hall over the years as a cloakroom, a smoking parlour (poorly ventilated), a walk-in wine cellar (albeit one located on the third floor), even as a janitorial storage space by one of the less refined owners who’d disdained the airs of the nouveau riche. Under Dr. Rosanoff’s directives, the room had been repurposed for more scientific pursuits.

  “After you.”

  It was a dim space, crowded with shapes: squares and looming obelisks hiding under draped cloths. Cords snaked across the floor. A fluorescent light flickered on in the sickly green of shifting spectrums.

  Dr. Rosanoff pulled one of the shrouds away, revealing a row of rounded TV monitors and a flat-topped reel-to-reel tape deck. He pulled aside another drop cloth in a slow-motion conjuring that revealed toggles and switchboards, with an intercom and a built-in microphone, all in the same shade of putty-grey plastic. Cutting-edge technology in its day, now a museum of the near past. Thomas’s father flicked a switch and the unit hummed to life. Murky images swam onto the TV screens.

  “I had it tested a few years ago. Psychology Today was doing a feature story, a look back at the great experiments of the twentieth century.” He flicked another switch, and another. “It should all be up and running.”

  The TV monitors peered into the various rooms in the house, black-and-white images of Sebastian sitting on a piano bench, rocking back and forth, of Eli pacing like a captive bear in the library room, of the magician standing perfectly still in the middle of Thomas’s childhood bedroom, staring directly into the camera.

  “The main observations were via the one-way mirrors. Graduate students, psychology classes. B
ut we also recorded the more important bits, for posterity.”

  Dr. Rosanoff rolled his chair up to a bank of TV monitors. On one screen, Thomas could see the two orderlies standing guard in the central hallway. He could see the large kitchen where the housekeeper and her staff were preparing a meal. The stairwells and the corridors. The sunroom and dining hall. He could see himself as well, reflected in the curve of the TV screens.

  “Y’ever play with yourself, Tommy?”

  It was his grandfather’s voice, still resonant after all these years.

  Thomas, walking along the garden hedges. His grandfather, more stooped than ever, “Y’know. You ever diddle your willy?”

  Thomas had balked, immediately embarrassed. “What? No!” This was a lie. An emphatic lie, but a lie nonetheless. (And a lie is no less a lie for being emphatic.)

  “Well, if you do, make sure it’s under your covers with the lights out, okay? And not in front of a mirror. Never in front of a mirror.”

  Why on earth would anyone do that in front of a mirror? And why on earth would Grandpa say such a thing? (Thomas now understood exactly why.)

  Another voice, closer at hand, nearer in time.

  His father had asked him a question, and it pulled Thomas back to the present. Dr. Rosanoff repeated his query, tapping a finger on Sebastian’s TV monitor. “He’s on Risperidone. Correct?”

  “He is, yes.”

  “Blood pressure?”

  “A little low.”

  Dr. Rosanoff leaned closer, watched as Sebastian rocked back and forth on the piano bench. “There! Did you see that?” Thomas’s father moved a toggle, zoomed in with a series of jerking lurches. The image of Sebastian’s face filled the frame, grew so large it began to break up. “See? There it is. Again.”

  Thomas moved closer, not sure what he was looking for. On the screen, Sebastian’s mouth twitched, and then—so quickly, Thomas almost missed it—his tongue darted out. Once. Twice.