There must be symbols in the birds’ heads, something that says again. They trace one single, continuous, repeating loop of plains, mountains, tundra, mountains, plains, desert, plains. On no clear signal, these flocks ascend a slow spiral, great twisting columns of lifting thermals that, with one glance at its parents, the new bird learns to ride.
Once, long ago, as the cranes massed for their autumn departure, they passed above an Aleut girl standing alone in a meadow. The birds flew down on her, beat their wings together, and lifted the girl upward in a great turning cloud, hiding her, trumpeting to drown out her calls. The girl rose on that twisting shaft of air and disappeared into the southward flock. So cranes still circle and call when they leave each autumn, reliving that capture of the humans’ daughter.
Long afterward, Weber could still pinpoint the moment when Capgras entered his life. Inked into his planner: Friday, May 31, 2002, 1:00 p.m., Cavanaugh, Union Square Cafe. The first copies of The Country of Surprise had just come off the press, and Weber’s editor wanted him in the city to celebrate. His third book: publication was hardly a novelty anymore. The two-hour train ride in from Stony Brook, by this point in Gerald Weber’s career, was more duty than thrill. But Bob Cavanaugh was eager to meet. Pumped, the young editor had said. Publishers Weekly had called the book “a wild tour of the human brain by a sage writing at the height of his powers.” Wild tour would play harshly in neurological circles, circles that hadn’t forgiven the success of Weber’s previous books. And something about the height of his powers depressed him. Nowhere but down, from there.
Weber dragged himself into Manhattan, walking from Penn Station down to Union Square briskly enough to get some aerobic benefit. The shadows were all wrong: still disorienting, more than eight months on. A patch of sky where there should be none. Weber hadn’t been in since early spring, when witnessing the unnerving light show—two massive banks of spotlights pointing into the air, like something out of his book’s chapter on phantom limbs. The images flared up in him again, the ones that had slowly extinguished over three-quarters of a year. That one, unthinkable morning was real; everything since had been a narcoleptic lie. He walked south through the unbearably normal streets, thinking he might get by just fine without ever seeing this city again.
Bob Cavanaugh greeted him at the restaurant with a bear hug, which Weber abided. His editor was trying not to snicker. “I told you not to dress up.”
Weber spread his arms. “This isn’t dressed up.”
“You can’t help yourself, can you? We really should do a coffee-table book full of sepia photos of you. The natty neuroscientist. The Beau Brummell of brain research.”
“I’m not that bad. Am I really that bad?”
“Not ‘bad,’ sir. Just delightfully…archaic.”
Lunch was Cavanaugh at his most charming. He ran down the latest buzz books and described how well Surprise was faring with the European agents. “Your biggest, by far, Gerald. I’m sure of that.”
“No need to set any records, Bob.”
They talked more high-speed industry gossip. Over an entirely gratuitous cappuccino, Cavanaugh at last said, “Okay, enough pleasantries. Let’s see your hole card, man.”
Thirty-three years had passed since Weber’s last hand of blackjack. Junior year of college, Columbus, teaching Sylvie the game. She’d wanted to play for sex favors. Nice game; no losers. But insufficient strategic depth to hold their interest for long.
“I’m not holding anything too surprising, Bob. I want to write about memory.”
Cavanaugh perked up. “Alzheimer’s? That kind of thing? Aging population. Declining abilities. Very hot topic.”
“No, not about forgetting. I want to write about remembering.”
“Interesting. Fantastic, in fact. Fifty-two Weeks to a Better—no, wait. Who’s got that kind of time? How about Ten Days to—”
“A lay overview of current research. What goes on in the hippocampus.”
“Ah! I see. Are the little dollar signs over my irises fading?”
“You’re a good sport, Robert.”
“I’m a shitty sport. But a terrific editor.” As he picked up the check, Cavanaugh asked, “Can you at least include a chapter on pharmaceutical enhancement?”
Back in Penn Station, as Weber stood under the departure board, waiting for the train out to Stony Brook, a man in a battered blue ski vest and grease-smeared corduroys waved at him in happy recognition. He might have been a former interview subject; Weber no longer recognized them all. More likely, this was one of many readers who didn’t realize that publicity photos and television were one-way media. They saw Weber’s receding snow line, the blue glint behind his wire-rims, the soft, avuncular half-dome and flowing gray beard—a cross between Charles Darwin and Santa Claus—and greeted him as if he were their harmless grandfather.
The ruined man drew up, smoothing his greasy vest, bobbing and chattering. Weber was too intrigued by the facial tics to move away. The words came in a babbling stream. “Hi, hey there. Great to run into you again. You remember our little venture out west—just the three of us? That illuminating expedition? Listen, can you do me something? No, no cash today, thanks. I’m flush. Just tell Angela, everything that happened out there is copasetic. It’s all okay, whoever she wants to be. Everyone’s okay, just who they are. You know that. Am I right? Tell me: Am I right?”
“You are most certainly right,” Weber said. Some form of Korsakoff’s. Confabulation: inventing stories to patch over the missing bits. Malnutrition from extended alcohol abuse; the fabric of reality rewoven by a vitamin-B deficiency. Weber spent the two-hour train ride back to Stony Brook scribbling notes about humans probably being the only creatures who can have memories of things that never happened.
Only: he had no idea where the notes were headed. He was suffering from something, perhaps the sadness of professional consummation. For a long time, longer than he had deserved, he’d known exactly what he wanted to write next. Now, everything seemed to be already written.
Back home, Sylvie hadn’t yet returned from Wayfinders. He sat down to the e-mail in that mix of buzz and dread that came from opening the inbox after too long. The last person north of the Yucatán to go online, he was now suffocating to death under instant communication. He flinched at the message count. He’d spend the rest of the evening just digging out. And yet, some ten-year-old in him still thrilled at diving into the day’s mail sack, as if it might yet hold a prize from a contest he’d forgotten having entered.
Several e-mails promised to resize any of Weber’s body parts to the scale of his choosing. Others offered offshore drugs to address every imaginable deficit. Mood changers and confidence boosters. Valium, Xanax, Zyban, Cialis. Lowest cost anywhere in the world. Also, his share of vast fortunes offered by exiled government officials of turbulent nations, apparently old friends. Interleaved among these were two conference invitations and another reading-tour request. A correspondent Weber had stopped replying to months before sent another objection to the treatment of religious feelings and the temporal lobe in The Three-Pound Infinity. And of course, the usual help-me petitions, which he referred to the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center.
That’s where he almost consigned the note from Nebraska, after the opening line. Dear Dr. Gerald Weber, my brother has recently survived a horrible automobile accident. Weber was finished with horrible accidents. He’d explored enough broken histories for a lifetime. With what time he had left, he wanted to return to an account of the brain in full flower.
But the next line kept him from hitting the Forward button. Since starting to talk again, my brother has refused to recognize me. He knows he has a sister. He knows all about her. He says she looks just like me. But I’m not her.
Accident-induced Capgras. Unbelievably rare, and immensely resonant. A species he’d never seen. But he was finished with that kind of ethnography.
He read the whole brief note twice through. He printed it out, reading it again on the
page. He set it aside and worked on his new outline. Making little headway, he scanned the day’s headlines. Agitated, he rose and went to the kitchen, where he spooned several hundred illicit milk-fat calories straight from the pint container of organic ice cream. He returned to his study and fought time in a preoccupied cloud until Sylvie came home.
True Capgras resulting from closed-head trauma: the odds against it were unimaginable. A case so definitive challenged any psychological account of the condition and undermined basic assumptions about cognition and recognition. To selectively reject one’s next of kin, in the face of all evidence…He read the letter again, swept up by his old addiction. Another chance to see, up close, through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was.
Sylvie got back late. She fell through the front door, her mock sigh of relief unable to disguise the kick she’d gotten from her long day’s work. “Yo, Man—I’m home!” she chanted from the foyer. “No place like it. Where’d I put that husband?”
He was in the kitchen, pacing, the printed letter clutched behind his back. They kissed, subtler than in their blackjack days, a third of a century ago. More historical.
“The pair bond,” Sylvie decreed. She buried her nose in his sternum. “Name a more ingenious invention.”
“Clock radio?” Weber suggested.
She pushed him away and slapped his chest. “Bad husband.”
“How’s the new clubhouse holding up?” he asked.
“Still a dream. We should have moved offices years ago.”
They compared days. She was still racing from hers. Wayfinders was thriving, finding ways for a variety of clients even Sylvie hadn’t anticipated when she started the social services referral outfit, three years before. After years of drifting through unsatisfactory employment, she had at last come home to a vocation she’d never suspected. Careful to violate no professional confidences, she sketched out the gist of her most interesting cases while they prepared a squash risotto together. By the time they sat down to eat, Weber could recall exactly none of her stories.
They ate side by side, on barstools at the raised kitchen counter where they’d taken their meals together in nearly unbroken pleasure for the last ten years, since their lone daughter had left for college. He told her about lunch in the city with Cavanaugh. He described the Korsakoff’s sufferer in Penn Station. He waited until they were washing dishes to mention the e-mail. Stupid, really. They’d been together so long that any attempt to fake a casual tone only blurted the thing out, louder than intended.
She suspected at once. “I thought you were moving on to the memory book. That you wanted to graduate from…” She seemed dismayed, or perhaps he was projecting.
He held up his dish-towel hand, before she could repeat all his recent arguments. “Syl, you’re right. I really shouldn’t spend any more…”
She squinted at him and tested a grin. “Not fair, Man. This isn’t about my being right.”
“No. No, that’s true. You’re absolutely…I mean…” She laughed and shook her head. He draped the towel around his neck, a prizefighter between rounds. “It’s about what I’ve been wrestling with for the last several months. What I should be doing next.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like you’re backsliding on a crack cocaine habit or anything.”
She would know; she’d worked in a Brooklyn rehab center for almost a decade before bailing out to save herself and start Wayfinders. She shot him a look of skeptical trust, and he felt as he had, through all their years of changing climates: the undeserving beneficiary of her social-worker understanding.
“So what’s the crisis? It’s not like anyone’s holding you to public promises. If this is something that interests you, where’s the guilt?” She leaned toward him and picked a stray fleck of risotto out of his beard. “It’s just you and me, Man.” She grinned. “The general public don’t have to know that you don’t know your own mind!”
He groaned and pulled the folded-up e-mail out of the pocket of his still-creased trousers. He flicked the offending document with the nails of his right hand. He offered her the printout, as if the sheet exonerated him. “Accidental Capgras. Can you imagine?”
She just smiled. “So when will you see him? When’s he coming out?”
“Well, that’s the thing. He’s a bit banged up. And a bit hard up, too, I gather.”
“They want you to go there? I’m not saying…I’m just a little surprised.”
“Well, I do have to spend down the travel account. And for studying something like this, seeing him in situ is actually best. But maybe you’re right.”
She growled, exasperated. “Husband! We’ve been over this!”
“Seriously. I don’t know. Half a continent, for a volunteer consultation? I’d be without a lab. And traveling has become such a hassle. You practically have to strip before boarding the plane.”
“Hey! Doesn’t Tour Director take care of those things?”
He winced and nodded. Tour Director: all that was left of their combined religious upbringings. “Of course. I just think my field-examining days might be over. I need to reconstitute myself, Syl. I just want to stay home, write a harmless little science-journalism book. Keep the lab running, maybe sail a little. The whole domestic tranquility thing.”
“What you call your fifty-five-year-old’s exit strategy?”
“Spend some quality time with the wife…”
“The wife’s been neglecting you recently, I’m afraid. So stay home, already!” Her eyes taunted his. “Aha! I thought as much.”
He wagged his head, bemused by himself. She reached up and polished his bald spot, her ancient good-luck ritual. “You know?” he said. “I really thought I’d acquired a certain degree of self-mastery, at this point in my life.”
“‘Much of the work of the brain consists of hiding its work from us,’” she quoted.
“Nice. Has a ring to it. Where’s it from?”
“It’ll come back to you.”
“People.” He rubbed his temples.
“Quite the species,” Sylvia agreed. “Can’t live with them, can’t vivisect ’em. So what is it about this particular people that has you hooked again?” Her job, to talk him into what he’d already decided.
“A man who recognizes his sister, but does not credit the recognition. Apparently otherwise reasonable and cognitively unimpaired.”
She whistled low, even after a lifetime of hearing his tales. “Sounds like something for Sigmund.”
“It does have that ring. But at the same time, the clear result of injury. That’s what makes it so fantastic. It’s the kind of neither-both case that could help arbitrate between two very different paradigms of mind.”
“This is something you would like to see before you die?”
“Ah! Can we put that a little less terminally? The patient’s sister is aware of my work. She’s not sure that his doctors have fully grasped the case.”
“They do have neurologists in Nebraska, don’t they?”
“If they’ve come across Capgras at all outside their medical texts, it’ll have been as a feature of schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s.” He took the dish towel from around his neck and dried their two wineglasses. “The sister is asking for my help.” Sylvie studied him: Those are the ones you swore to stay away from. “Anyway, misidentification syndromes might reveal a lot about memory.”
“How do you mean?” He’d always loved that phrase of hers.
“In Capgras, the person believes their loved ones have been swapped with lifelike robots, doubles, or aliens. They properly identify everyone else. The loved one’s face elicits memory, but no feeling. Lack of emotional ratification overrides the rational assembly of memory. Or put it this way: reason invents elaborately unreasonable explanations to explain a deficit in emotion. Logic depends upon feeling.”
She chuckled. “This just in: male scientists confirm the bleeding obvious. So, sweetie. Take a trip. See the wor
ld. Nothing’s stopping you.”
“You wouldn’t mind if I went out? Just for a couple of days?”
“You know how much I’m scrambling myself right now. It would give me a chance to clear my own backlog. In fact, I think I’d better skip our video date for tonight. There’s a child HIV assessment I need to work up for tomorrow.”
“You wouldn’t think less of me if I…backslide?”
She looked up from the empty sink, startled. “Oh, my poor little Man. Backslide? This is your calling. It’s what you do.”
They kissed again. Amazing that the gesture still communicated so much, after three decades. He held back a lock of her mocha hair and grazed her forehead. Her hair was thinner than it had been in college, when they’d met. How searchingly beautiful she’d been. But lovelier to him now, at peace with herself at last. Lovelier, because graying.
She looked up at him, curious. Open.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now, if I can just survive the damn airport security…”
“You leave that to Tour Director. That’s what he does best.”
He called them all by fictional names. When the details of a life threatened anyone’s privacy, he substituted others. Sometimes he created a single case history from a composite of several people he’d studied. That much was standard professional practice, for everyone’s protection.
He described a woman once, well-known in the literature. In The Three-Pound Infinity, he called her “Sarah M.” Bilateral extrastriate damage to the middle temporal area left her suffering from akinetopsia, a rare, near-complete motion blindness. Sarah’s world had fallen under a perpetual strobe light. She couldn’t see things move. Life appeared to her as a series of still photographs, connected only by ghostly motion trails.
She washed and dressed and ate in time lapse. A turn of her head launched a series of clunking carousel slides. She couldn’t pour coffee; the liquid hung from the pot spout in icicles, and from one stopped moment to the next the table would fill with frozen coffee lakes. Her pet cat terrified her, blinking out and rematerializing elsewhere. The television stabbed at her eyes. A bird in flight made bullet holes in the windowpane of sky.
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