‘I would like to apologise personally for the invasion of your privacy. My only excuse is that I am required to work within certain parameters; these things are to an extent out of my hands…’
There followed some discussion of our contracts, the fact that his holding out on us constituted a breach on the part of the School, and an echo of the conversation I’d shared with Dr J during negotiations:
‘Most certainly yes, you can leave.’
‘What if we don’t want to leave?’
‘Then you stay.’
Rachel raised the issue of our status: students, patients, prisoners, guinea-pigs; or all or none of the above? Legal non-entity?
I listened, observed, taking the opportunity to mentally segue my narrative: They wake in a room that is not a real room. They are not real walls. They are not real people, but ideas in the mind of a madman…
The Doctor was patient with our questions and careful in his answers. The best he could do now was to ensure we were in possession of the right information. That was the next stage: the reports. He had taken the liberty of preparing reports for Alex and Rachel covering their time at the school to date and collating my weekly reports into a single document. He handed them to each of us and we started to flick through our bar graphs and brain scans. As the mood of the room internalised, we worked our way slowly through the pages—the process behind it forgotten and forgiven, the information like an opiate to be feasted on, devoured. Here it was, page after page, week after week: the blood flow in our brains, the working of our minds.
Alex pointed to the dates. The Doctor confirmed they could link activity data to a particular day and suggested we try an example using Helen’s stories.
‘So here, number twelve: the sea-god lesson. The next column is the number of the image in that lesson, with the length of time spent on the image and the area of dominant brain activity. For this example, Alex, it tells us you spent limited time on that first image, Proteus—a great deal more time on the second image.’
He flicked pages to check a label on that one: Boy with Growth. ‘This was your area of dominant brain activity, in the cerebral cortex,’ he said as he drew an outline around the area. ‘Right here at the junction of the three lobes. This area of bright orange shading shows an extremely active neural network; this is empathy. At this sort of level, it would indicate an ability to mirror pain.’
Up until this point the Doctor’s tone was perfectly clinical; he could as well have been talking to Alex about his digestive tract as the neural pathways that formed his psychic and emotional framework. But at the mention of the ability to mirror pain, Alex flinched, and the Doctor saw it. He paused and pulled his seat closer so that their knees were touching. It was a gesture of intimacy such as I had never seen in any of my sessions. When he spoke again, it was softer, murmurous, like a cone had formed around the two of them and he was speaking a dialect only Alex could understand. ‘You remember, we talked about this—the risks; it is enough without theirs too. A gift, a curse…’
Alex nodded, squinting under the spotlight. The Doctor patted his hand and turned back to me and Rachel. We had found our corresponding pages. The Doctor looked over to mine and pointed out that there was no shading. ‘The area failed to become active.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘In your case, we might want to fortify that response. To the extent that it is possible.’
Rachel let out a guffaw. ‘We might want to make you a nicer person.’ (I’d been having a rough few days. After an email from Mary I’d started to slide, punched the fridge, pushed over a whiteboard and banged Rachel’s door again. She summed it up: ‘You’ve gone to shit.’ She’d been slow to accept my apology.)
Things got weirdly personal here. The Doctor seemed to consider Rachel’s comment for a moment before flicking back and forward in my report to find where this particular network spiked. The only one that was even a little bit orange was the agar plate. It seemed I had more empathy with a plate of swarming bacteria.
There was another point of comparison between me and Alex in lesson nine, image one—Prince Sado, the terrible son who starved to death in the rice chest. Alex had an unsurprising level of empathy, ‘whereas Daniel experienced an elevated level of limbic activity—that is, pleasure. Perhaps a sense he got what was coming?’
I nodded. The end result: no question. It was justice. The Doctor raised a hand in Rachel’s direction as though to fend her off. ‘There are reasons we empathise with different things. Our experiences, our circumstances…they can combine to make it hard for us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
‘And if we’d like to round it out—you, Rachel, for the most part in this whole part of the “boy with growth” lesson, show zero activity—with a theta burst here…It appears you were on some kind of shamanic journey.’ Her face was blank. ‘Or in a state of deep sleep,’ he said with a rare, broad smile. ‘One of the two.’
We ended on the high note, so to speak, of the music session. ‘Wait for it,’ the Doctor said, getting us each onto the same page: lesson seventeen, the Beach Boys, ‘Good Vibrations’. Our colours were consistent across the board—not just the three of us, but everyone—Tod and the sisters and the back-row boys. That was a big deal for the Doctor. He was marvelling at the images like our brains had produced a multi-part harmony of their own.
‘Look at the synchronisation here; it isn’t just auditory processing—it’s movement, attention, memory, all of it. The music fortifies the connections.’ He pointed to the penultimate row of head shots. ‘By the second refrain it is right across both hemispheres.’ He smiled and put a hand on my arm. ‘This is the jackpot. This is what it means to commune with your brain.’
After Dr J left, we decided to conduct a covert search for images of real brains, the gross stuff, Alex said: brain porn.
We found brains of all sorts, jellied and bloody like a foetus, or dried up and jaundiced (a cauliflower). We stuck mainly with the bloody ones, zooming in to get a close up on the capillaries, the folds and ridges of the tissue. There was a cool image showing the layers of brain pulled back in strips across the top of the head, ear to ear—the scalp, bone, dura, brain tissue—but our favourite (even Rachel only pretended to gag) was a picture of a head sawed in half to reveal the full monty, shiny and gelatinous. Tufts of long fair hair were still attached on either side of the scalp, and captured in the picture at the edge of the image was a hand in a bloody rubber glove. There followed a series of images of the slicing up of the brain—one captioned (seriously): ‘The amygdala—that is your fear and anger.’
It is not very big, your fear and anger, tucked up there in your temporal lobe.
There was no end of interesting material here, an entire internet subculture, countless Pinterest pages, and why not? It was compelling stuff. Scrolling and clicking, from gruesome images to fun facts. Our top seven:
1. If you brush your teeth with the wrong hand you will increase your self-control (we agreed to try it but were unclear on how to measure results).
2. The brain has more fat than any other organ in the body (one for Tod).
3. Seven hours after his death someone stole Einstein’s brain.
4. The cerebral cortex is 4 mm thick. The human brain contains 86 billion neurons which travel at 220 mph and charge 25 watts of power (okay, so that was my like not theirs; they had to force me off the ‘interesting measurements’ page).
5. The subconscious mind controls 95 per cent of our brain (I don’t know how they know that).
6. You have 70,000 thoughts a day (ditto).
7. Lack of sleep leads to lack of growth.
None of us grew that night. Sleepless, we ended up in the courtyard where our brief conversation moved from a reprise of What the fuck is this place? through to bravado around Who cares, all good, into weighty silence as we pondered our individual and starkly contrasting neural activity. My sense was that we were each waiting to see if the others rubbished the whole th
ing, but nobody did. As the conversation trickled off and I took one last look at the stars, I decided to lead myself through the task of communing with my brain:
• Close your eyes.
• Picture the pre-autopsy brain inside my own skull.
• Now excavate, layer by layer, through the cerebral cortex into the deep limbic system, all the way to the brain stem.
I learned quickly that what the brain does when you try to focus it in on itself is deflect to other parts of the body. It arcs up. Out of nowhere there is pressure in nasal passages, a ringing in the ears, a gaseous gut reaction, then other shit comes in and eventually you just want to go to sleep, leaving the brain safely out of reach: job done. In short, the brain doesn’t want you getting too close. I’m not talking about mantras and meditation; I’m talking about going in, feeling your way around. The pink clump, just a few centimetres in, so close yet so far away.
To reach my brain as I lay in the courtyard that night, I had to get tough and do what the bloody rubber glove had done: saw through my scalp and split my cranium in two, open it right up. It was a messy business and I didn’t think it was what the Doctor had in mind when he talked about communing, but it was my way and it was getting me steadily further in. I ventured into new territory, going where no boy had gone, a journey into the centre of the brain, over the ridges and folds. I discover the deadly molecule and blast it into oblivion and save all our innocent lives, then I arrive in the midbrain. This is the jackpot, the default network of humankind; it is lit up, a bright and rolling tunnel. I will reset it and be cured. We will all be cured. We are, each of us, miracles. I look down, not through a human eye. What sits in the cranium is a life source, an interstellar power…
‘Daniel, buddy.’
I opened my eyes. Alex and Rachel: one on either side. There is that time between night and day when the sun has risen and you can still see the stars in the sky. When you have everything.
I had a dream when I was five that next to the bins on the street I stumbled across a big Santa sack of good things—Chokito bars and ninja figures and fluoro soccer balls. Then I woke up, empty-handed. I hated myself all week long for not reaching out and holding on to that bag, convinced it could have travelled with me between worlds. I remembered that dream as events unfolded at the School over the next little while.
The shift in approach reflected in the revision of the curriculum and the introduction of a full disclosure policy was also the basis for contract renegotiation. My take was that the benefits all went one way: ours, but the Doctor was adamant that there were risks involved and in accepting them, we were doing our bit. He was right. I was in effect signing up to do something I’d sworn I’d never do: group therapy.
But that was not immediately apparent. For the next session, we met in the courtyard. There was a jug and glasses on the bench and a pair of mynah birds that flew away on our arrival. (The currawongs were coming less; the trees were bare and the ground had been swept.) The Doctor wore a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses and sat on the table casting his eyes around the upper level of the building, the framed glass and concrete.
‘It is good, isn’t it?’ he said, and launched into a spiel about balance and symmetry, the recurrence of elements and the texture of the concrete and timber.
‘The pears, they are the centre point. During the course of the day as the sunlight moves across the space, the elements orbiting around them—the pots and the glass and the corridor and classrooms, and any time at all, the building frames the sky.’
There was more: the formwork above the glass—each section with the plugged holes, the different numbers (18 sections, 92 holes). That was important, that there was a gradation between the lower and upper level, that the form evolved. The variation in height and dimension.
It was hard to agree with him when he said it was important for us to understand all this, but what worried me was not the randomness of what he said (by now par for the course), but the fact that there was something nostalgic in his tone, like he was speaking of a golden time, past tense. At the end of it Greg appeared in the corridor alongside a stocky woman with a honey-coloured ponytail, who was dressed in a man’s suit. They walked around a few times, not speaking. We asked Dr J who she was and he said ‘occupational health and safety’. When he left he seemed to time it to cross the corridor when they were on the other side.
Next time Greg took my measurements (another 1.3 cm), she popped up again. She didn’t introduce herself, just looked at my numbers with a frown of concentration.
As I said, the group thing crept up on us.
It was raining so we went instead to Dr J’s office. He patted his knees and launched into lecture mode. Recapping on the levels of activity in the various areas of the brain, he talked about how we were made up of different parts, different sub-personalities—and how each is a necessary part of a structure, how each plays a role in our self-preservation. Even the parts we don’t like, he said, but he didn’t want to start with them. To start, he wanted us to identify a part of us we liked well enough, or at least were okay with. Something we wouldn’t want to change.
After a while Rachel said, ‘Like what?’
‘Okay, so for instance: Alex, the part of Alex that likes to dance.’
A silence.
‘Okay, I’ll start,’ said Alex. ‘The part of me that likes to dance. Your turn, Daniel.’
I mumbled something with the word fucker in it.
‘It’s hard,’ Rachel said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Dr J conceded. ‘We tend not to like ourselves. You were a good runner at school, how about that?’
She shrugged. ‘I won races.’
‘Okay, good. Sprints or distance?’
‘Distance.’
‘What makes you a good distance runner?’
‘My legs?’
‘Yes, what else?’
‘I dunno. I wanted to win.’
‘You are determined, and you go the distance. So there it is—the part of Rachel she doesn’t want to change: the runner.’
And so we kept going with parts for a bit. I said I was pretty happy with my entrepreneurial side, and we all conceded our maths brains could stay. Rachel liked that she kept things tidy. That was about the sum of it. Rachel kept coming back to his idea we wouldn’t be better off without the bad parts. That didn’t make sense to her.
‘There are no bad parts,’ the Doctor said.
She said that was just bullshit.
‘Each part is to be valued and understood. It is important that you understand that.’
She was getting impatient: ‘So Daniel gets a gold star for banging down someone’s door.’
His answer to that was there are parts that need to be promoted, and parts that need to be managed.
‘Well, he better start managing it ’cause I’ve dealt with enough shitty people I can tell you and there is some bad shit going on with this boy and I am saying here and now that’s fine if you want it that way but you leave me out of it. You leave me the fuck alone.’
It was difficult for me to process my thoughts at this time. I loved and hated what was happening. The fact she cared enough to string the sentences together was a minor triumph, but the fact we were in group—the group thing; like I said, it crept up.
The Doctor ran with it: ‘Okay so let’s stick with your example, Rachel…if that’s okay.’
I don’t know whose permission he was requesting. I never gave it. Droplets of sweat ran down the side of my body as he asked me why I banged on her door and I said I didn’t know. He asked me if it was because I wanted Rachel to open the door and I said not really. Did I want to give her a message? I didn’t know. It felt like he was picking at sores. It didn’t feel possible for me to remain through another of his questions so I got up and walked out.
I went into the courtyard and waited in the rain. I thought someone would follow me out, but they didn’t. I sat there alone, then went to my room and looked for faces in the shadows on
the ceiling and wondered what they were talking about now.
Some time after dinner that night I saw the envelope slipped under my door. Another email from Mary.
Dan no need to worry about me Ive got everything in place. They had a pest man do the whole building except for the ones he refused to step a foot in cant blame him poor bugger. Nina says he was one of them muslims but a nice fellow in spite of it. Nina walked me to the shops and I cooked us the sausage casserole and we sat on the walkway and ate it in bowls and watched the shenanigans. Nothing you haven’t seen before
I didn’t mind opening it and I didn’t mind thinking back. The flats without the tenants, before they came.
Before: Mary walks me to school and goes to work at the pie shop or the place they made jars and after school I go to Nina’s and eat fairy roll and when Mary comes to get me she opens the door to our place and calls out ‘we’re here’ like there is someone to tell and sometimes she brings leftover pies and we eat them sitting on the carpet while we watch movies or pick our favourite contestants on reality TV and when we finish we stretch out and I use a part of her as a pillow.
I didn’t mind. The timing felt somehow deliberate. Like it was paving the way.
In our next solo session, Dr J took it up where we left off.
I didn’t sit. I paced around, stopped at the photo on the wall and matched trees with their reflections, some blurred in rippled water. He asked me how I thought it went the other day.
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought it went very well.’
I laughed. ‘Low expectations.’
‘I didn’t have any.’
‘Well there you go.’
‘Can we take it up again?’
‘Take what up?’
‘What we were talking about when you left.’
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