Jane followed the Mercedes in her car. She pulled up to the curb and stepped out. She hurried through the snow.
He was lying on a cleared bed of granite. He sat up at her touch with a mortal start, as if she had jolted him out of another dimension. His eyes darted wildly in the holes of his ski mask. His unsheltered sleep had put him again at the mercy of an unknown world. He felt the approach of some violent reckoning.
“There was a man on the bridge,” he said.
“What man?”
“He knew who I was.”
His attention was drawn away by the slamming of a car door. He watched a man in a long charcoal wool coat approach them slowly through the crusted snow. Even from so far a distance he could make out those familiar Picasso features — the skewed nose, the plump lips, one eye bigger than the other.
“What is he doing here?”
She was also watching the man come forward. “I called him.”
“I said no doctors.”
“I know,” she said.
“He can’t help me, Jane.”
“How do you know that?”
“None of them can help me.”
“Hello, Tim,” said Dr. Bagdasarian.
They sat in the doctor’s warm Mercedes as halos of glowing halogen began to shine from the lampposts across the cemetery. Tim disliked Bagdasarian the least of all his doctors. He had been the recipient of many funny looks over the years, but Dr. Bagdasarian’s was due to the fact that he was born that way, not because he questioned Tim’s sanity or doubted the severity of his suffering. One look at Bagdasarian and the assumption was that God had deprived him of all beauty and vanity so that he could better dedicate himself to the puzzle of men’s afflictions. The doctor was learned and eloquent with his singsong accent and carried the aura of a polymath.
Yet Tim was not pleased to see him. Before he got sick, he was under the illusion that he needed only to seek help from the medical community, and then all that American ingenuity, all that researched enlightenment, would bring about his inalienable right to good health. At the very least, he thought, there would be one person, one expert in the field, to give him some degree of understanding, solace and action. But by now he had abandoned his search for the One Guy. The One Guy was dead, the One Guy was God, the One Guy was an invention in the night when he was bottomed out and desperate to believe in something. He was sick of searching for the One Guy and sick of having his hopes dashed. He would not let himself believe in the One Guy anymore.
And anyway, who the fuck needed the One Guy? He was still alive, wasn’t he? He could beat this thing on his own, couldn’t he? Fuck the One Guy. Fuck the One Guy’s answers and the One Guy’s hope.
Bagdasarian spoke over their heads for twenty minutes about advances in brain imaging technology. He discussed radioisotopes and motion degradation and atomic magnetometers. Considerable progress had been made, he said, since Tim’s last extended medical examination. In fact there were some very cutting-edge developments that allowed a clean image of the brain to be taken in situ.
“In other words,” the doctor said excitedly, “in other words, we no longer require complete immobility, you see. We can capture what’s happening in your brain when you’re walking, at the very moment it’s changing. In neurological circles, this is extremely significant. No one dreamed we could be where we are at this moment for another fifty, sixty years. I know some who said we would never get there. But it’s true. We no longer need to lay you out on a slab and push you inside a tunnel to get a very good idea of what’s going on inside your head.”
To his dismay, as he listened to the doctor, he couldn’t prevent a little bit of renewed hope from belly-flipping inside him.
“What does that do for me?” he asked.
“What does it do?”
“Where does it get me? Does it get me a diagnosis? Does it get me a cure?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “no, not a cure, certainly. It is only a tool, but a more refined tool than we’ve ever—”
“Not interested.”
“Not interested?” said Jane.
She hung between the two men in the backseat. Tim pivoted to look at her.
“Why would I do that to myself, Janey?”
“Do what?”
“Allow myself to hope again, when it’s really only another opportunity to be disappointed?”
“How do you know you’ll be disappointed when you haven’t tried it?”
“You just heard the man. It’s not a cure, and it’s not a diagnosis.”
“But,” said Bagdasarian, “it still might be of some comfort to you, Tim.”
He turned back to the doctor in the dim light.
“I know how you’ve struggled to validate your condition,” said the doctor. “I know you’ve fallen into depression because no empirical evidence has emerged to exonerate you — I use your word, which I have remembered many years — to exonerate you from the charge of being mentally ill. You hate it when people say this is something all in your head. You place great importance on having your condition regarded as a legitimate physical malfunction, something that members of the medical establishment like myself must take seriously. That is the very prerequisite of a real disease — that it’s taken seriously. We have a few new tools to do that now — possibly, possibly. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to prove to the world that your unique condition is as you insist it is, a matter of organic disease, and not something — a compulsion, or a psychosis — for which you, for personal reasons — and perfectly naturally so, Tim, perfectly naturally — feel you must be ashamed of? Wouldn’t that be, in its humble way, some measure of progress?”
Bagdasarian was good. Tim could feel himself getting sucked in again. “What would I have to do?”
The device Bagdasarian had in mind would be a prototype made to order. As such it would not come cheaply. Because his was a disease of one, they did not have at their disposal prefab medical supplies. Tim told him not to worry about money, they could afford it. In that case, the doctor resumed, he would approach one of the two private biomedical firms he knew capable of engineering the kind of thing he had in mind, an ambulatory helmet of sorts. It would take snapshots, so to speak — some before he walked, some during his walk, and some after. From that they would be able to reconstruct a full picture of what was happening inside his brain during a typical episode.
“I’d have to wear this device before walking?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “To get the before-and-after story, you’d need to wear it day and night.”
The doctor had spoken eloquently and empathetically of Tim’s despair. Why should it be so important to him to prove that he was suffering from a legitimate medical disorder and not a mental illness? He didn’t know, except to say that it was. It meant all the difference in the world somehow not to be lumped in with the lunatics and the fabricators. He wanted to prove it to Jane, who needed no proof, and to Becka, who looked at him suspiciously, and to the medical establishment, who made a cottage industry out of dismissal, and to people at the firm who might doubt him with a lawyer’s inborn skepticism. Most of all, he wanted to prove it to himself.
But the doctor had stopped speaking, and Tim recalled the many tests he’d already endured, the hard exam beds and cold paper gowns, and the thousand times that hope had belly-flipped inside him before. And he thought about Troyer, Barr. There was already a backpack over his shoulder when he walked the halls. What would they make of him on the day he showed up wearing a made-to-order brain helmet?
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.
“You’ll have to think about it?”
He turned back to Jane. “What if he doesn’t succeed?” he asked. “I get my hopes up again and nothing comes of it. What then?”