I poked again, and again, the next morning, the next evening, breakfast and supper, but one day she said, “I seem to have written down that you’re worried about what I’m going to do with Perfection, now you’ve stolen it for me. Are you worried?”
“No,” I lied, face flushing hugely, pulse suddenly fast and high in my skull. “Not at all.”
She nodded, and made a note in her notebook, and I didn’t ask again.
Terror. Horror. Maybe…
… ecstasy?
Is this what it feels like to be remembered?
Is this — this moment in which Byron challenges me on a thing I have said or done, a thing she can, in her own kind of way, remember me doing — is this what consequence feels like?
I race a trolley car up a hill, and for a moment think I might actually win.
Then Byron said, “I’ve been thinking about your condition. I’ve had a few ideas.”
And all things changed.
A private clinic in a private hospital — were there any other kinds in America, I wondered? Private medicine brought bad coffee, a receptionist who greeted you with a cry of “Hey hi there!” and a waiting time of ten minutes.
The doctor, thin grey hair combed over a spotted scalp, incredibly long fingers curling to manicured, glossy nails, leather shoes and a bright blue stethoscope slung about his neck, greeted us like we were old friends come to visit, and ushered us into the room.
Byron did the talking. fMRI, bloods, spinal fluids, DNA, thyroid function, eye exam — the extent of tests she wanted performed on me was long and, in several cases, painful.
“This is how you’ll be remembered,” she explained, as they helped me onto the rolling platform of the MRI machine. “We’ll find out how you work.”
Inside the machine, they played soothing music through oversized headphones. I closed my eyes against the tightness of the walls, remembered a cupboard in Istanbul as the fire started, the cold of the waters in Hong Kong when I jumped. Despite myself, my breath came faster, and I squeezed my eyes tighter and counted the muscles in each of the toes on my foot, capillaries in my fingers, clicks in the machine, the thunk-thunk-thunk of magnets moving. I counted flickering, dancing points behind my eyelids and, when the motion of lights in the darkness became too jumbled and difficult to track, I counted my breath again, and found that it was steady, and I was calm.
The doctor, when they pulled me from the tube, was briefly — but only briefly — surprised to see me. He had remembered putting a patient inside, for of course he’d just spent the last forty minutes examining my brain — but in that time my face had blurred, and he managed just about to bite back on a surprised “Oh, you’re British?” when I spoke.
On her list, Byron crossed off the word “fMRI”.
Spinal fluid.
Knees to chest.
Tighter.
Chin down.
Spine curved, distended, a good word, distended; expanded, dilated — the French protuberant from the Latin protuberare, to swell, bulge out
the needle hurts like crap when it goes in
the pain is my body
just a body thing
they leave it in for a while, letting the spinal fluid drip, drip, drip out from between the vertebrae into a little plastic cup.
Byron watches, and I watch back, and her face shows nothing at all.
In the evening, Byron went to more meetings for her other work, her real work, Perfection, always Perfection.
“Are you going to follow me?” she asked. “I have it in my notes that you like to follow me.”
“Not tonight,” I replied, curling up on the hotel bed.
She nodded, without conviction, and left me alone.
A walk around Fort Mason as the sun went down. Here it was almost possible to imagine that you were in a European city: low rise-apartment blocks painted pale pastels, cyclists weaving between the cars, ginkgo trees ready to drop their foul-smelling fruit, chestnut trees heavy with prickly seeds, children dodging the cracks in the pavement. A woman was raising money for an animal shelter.
“Every year we receive over two thousand animals from the bay area alone!” she exclaimed, shaking her tin under my nose. “That’s dogs that have been beaten by their owners, cats thrown out of a moving car, pets that have been tortured and starved and left for dead; traumatised, vulnerable animals whose only sin was to trust people. We do what we can for them, but there are some that are just so badly hurt, psychologically as well as physically, that they have to be put down. But this year, with your donation, we can get the euthanasia rate down to just 1 per cent. That’s thousands of beautiful, loyal, loving creatures given a second chance, a second home!”
“Why do people treat their pets badly?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Honey, I’ve asked myself that for years, and every time I think I come close to an answer, I realise it’s just another sad story for a sad individual. Truth is, I can never understand what’d make a person hurt a thing that loves it, that just wants to be cared for, and I hope I never do understand it neither. You wanna meet Sally?”
Sally, a brown dog with scars fading across her ribs, backside and neck, stared up from behind her mistress’s legs with huge, wet eyes, and, at the offering of my hand, came forward to nuzzle and press her skinny body against mine.
“Her owner was a lawyer down in Forest Hill. That man can argue the balls off a city judge but when he got home, he just raged out against Sally. She had pee problems, you see, and a guy like that I guess he didn’t realise that you can’t argue a dog into obeying, you gotta use love, you gotta be patient, you gotta help her understand for herself. One day he just went at her with a kitchen knife, left her bleeding fifteen blocks away, but she found her way home, and the city found her dying in his front yard. We ain’t supposed to get too attached to the animals that come into the shelter, but Sally — I couldn’t say no.”
Sally stared up at me, tail beating out an expectant rhythm on the ground, and I wondered if animals remembered me in a way humans did not, if perhaps their brains were wired differently. Should I tell Byron? Would she then cut open a dog’s brain, as well as mine, to see how it ticked?
I gave the woman twenty bucks and squatted for a while on the path while Sally put her paws in my hands, and licked my fingers, and wondered if I could stay there for ever, and couldn’t, and kept on walking.
EEG. Inject radioactive materials, watch them flow through my body. I pissed blue for a week.
A doctor spluttered, “Oh, goodness, I hadn’t… Well, no of course I had, so sorry, my mind must have wandered…”
A nurse said: “You’re new here, aren’t you?!”
A professor of neurochemistry exclaimed, “No, I was alone, then you came into the room, there wasn’t anyone here, I would have remembered…”
A student of cognitive science mused, “We don’t have a model. We don’t just not have a model, we don’t even have a box to try and put the model in, we don’t know where to begin with this sorta thing…”
A patient sitting two chairs down from me as I waited in the hall sighed, “I was on twelve thousand points yesterday but today it’s down to eleven thousand and I don’t know why. Do you think I lose points for radiotherapy?”
Byron declared, “We’re making progress, I promise you, I know it doesn’t feel that way, but Filipa’s research, the treatments, your brain, we’ll find out how she did it, we’ll find out how to make you memorable…”
She was repeating herself, of course. Everyone always repeats themselves, when I’m around.
A night in… some place. The Mission, probably. Tacos. I was tired, a little drunk, the streetlight burning, chilli on my lips, a pleasant pain, a pain that reminded me of the blood running through my body, count my pulse, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum…