The Wonder Garden

by Lauren Acampora

  Harold is exhilarated with himself, with this, his greatest investment of all. After just three whiskeys, the doctor has agreed to grant him access to the operating room, where he will be able to observe a neurosurgical procedure.

  The next several days are limned with anticipation. Christmas passes in a blur. Harold feels a physical rush each time he thinks of his secret, each time he considers the prospect of encountering a stranger’s brain—another person’s memories and experiences contained in one unit, exposed.

  Harold returns to the hospital on the agreed-upon day in January, without Carol. Like a boy, he nearly jogs from the car to the front entrance, past the stocky hospital shrubs, through the enchanted automatic doors. He nods to the nurses and winks at the pretty ones. They walk obliviously past him in their tropical uniforms, South Pacific blue. He, in his gray suit, is invisible. Visitors have disturbingly free rein here. It is almost insolent, this lack of concern on the part of the staff, who are all but chained to their little clipboards. Harold takes the wrong route to the neurosurgery wing, but finally finds the way to Dr. Warren’s door. He knocks. He imagines that when he emerges from this office in just a few minutes, he’ll be wearing the tropical uniform, too.

  Dr. Warren takes him in and closes the door. Harold still thinks the doctor, his friend, seems suspiciously young with his wavy Roman hair and unlined brow. He motions briefly to the visitor’s chair.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I won’t be able to help you today.” The doctor speaks strongly, not meeting Harold’s eye, as if afraid of faltering. “I just can’t be held responsible for a breach of security.”

  Harold sits quietly as the doctor goes on. A sudden flashback to his Hippocratic oath, perhaps. Or, simply, sobriety. The money is attractive, the doctor admits, but he can’t hazard going to jail.

  “Dr. Warren, we had an agreement.”

  “I’m sorry, Harold, but I’ve thought about it, and it’s just too risky.”

  “But it wouldn’t be you at fault, it would be me,” Harold reminds him.

  The doctor smiles sadly. “I’m the one who’d be fired.”

  “But our story is solid.”

  The surgeon shakes his head. Harold increases his offer. Dr. Warren flinches, but still refuses.

  By the spring, Carol still hasn’t responded to medications. Further tests continue to show what appears to be a normal organ.

  Harold is now sixty years old. Not truly old, but well past the block of time known as “youth” in the life span of a human being. There is no longer any way he can pinpoint what each year has meant to him specifically. There have been too many of them, one leaking into the other.

  He sits on the wing chair, near the picture window. His wife sits on the couch nearby, on the phone with another wife. Harold listens to her as she listens to her friend’s voice on the receiver, nodding and responding in the tuneful, sympathetic monosyllables unique to women on telephones. The women are starting to succumb to illnesses, to accidents, a creeping string of minor disorders that will ultimately take them under. There is a look on his wife’s face lately, as if she knows something that he is failing to grasp. A searching, disbelieving look. Her eyes, like her hair, have begun to show sage flecks of silver, and her face is more angular. She will never be one of those women who spreads out in her own flesh. She is already contracting, minimizing, as if making herself more efficient for the next, most difficult stretch ahead.

  They’ve had a good life. Compatible from the start, a smooth coast. Like a pair of cross-country skis, Harold imagines, never straying far from each other’s sight, but keeping separate enough, with plenty of room to maneuver and come together again. It had never occurred to him that her course might veer, that he would ever find her out of reach.

  At their next appointment, Dr. Warren finds a tumor in her brain. Harold and his wife sit together as he shows them the results of the MRI with a double dose of contrast. Looking back on the prior imaging now, he explains, the tumor was just barely visible.

  “So you missed it the first time,” Harold says.

  “Sometimes that happens,” Dr. Warren clips. “Only in retrospect do we see the clues. It would have been impossible to identify the abnormality without this additional test.”

  “A year later.”

  The doctor does not respond or meet Harold’s eyes.

  “Well, we’ve found it now,” Harold says calmly.

  The doctor’s shoulders hunch slightly as he speaks. The tumor is not necessarily bad news, he explains. It has clear borders and is most likely benign, but is not far from the hippocampus, which explains her strange memory relapses. The condition causes abnormal electrical bursts in the temporal lobe, the seat of sensory organization. This can create unpleasant sensations, like the perception of invisible presences. Some people with the condition become delusional, believing themselves to have contact with supernatural entities. Moses was likely a sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy, as was Joan of Arc.

  Carol flashes Harold a look of terror.

  “Well, it will be all right, now. Won’t it?” Harold asks.

  “Surgery would be the best option,” Dr. Warren says gently. “The success rate is remarkably high.”

  Carol’s face turns pale and pinched, as if she would sink into her turtleneck sweater. They drive home in silence.

  When Harold approaches Dr. Warren with his new idea, the surgeon responds with a blunt mix of disbelief and admiration. They sit together at O’Reilly’s, at their usual table. Their meetings have become a favorite ritual of Harold’s, and he suspects they are a highlight for the doctor, too. He has continued to meet Harold after their failed scheme, as if nothing untoward has happened. Now, the doctor shakes his head.

  “I thought brain surgeons were known for being mavericks,” Harold says.

  It’s true. He’s heard that they are addicted to adrenaline: juggling patients’ lives in their hands, screwing nurses in the locker room. Of course there must be quiet, steady neurosurgeons, too—men like himself, with stable marriages and rain forest sound tracks at home. Even after their hours of conversation, he still isn’t entirely sure which type of surgeon Dr. Warren is.

  “Who’s going to complain about it?” Harold presses. “I’m the only one who would complain. I’m the only one who would sue.”

  Harold actually flashes a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills for effect. The surgeon looks gravely at it.

  “And I’m the one who won’t sue over a certain botched diagnosis.”

  Dr. Warren is silent. Harold tucks the cash away in his jacket pocket and pats the bulge that it makes.

  The girls come home, and the night before the operation, the Christensens gather for dinner at a high-end Spanish restaurant. This is Carol’s idea. She’s been wanting to try the place for years, she says, but no occasion has ever seemed special enough. It’s as if she expects this dinner to be her last. She orders paella and a pitcher of sangria for the table, but there is a weight in her eyes, as if she can’t bear to look at her family. Even the girls are subdued as they take turns filling their glasses.

  “Listen, kids. Carol,” Harold speaks with conviction. “I’m just as nervous about this as you are. But you have to look at the facts here. Modern science is more precise than you realize. Operations like this happen hundreds of times a day, all over the world.”

  His daughters nod and force smiles. Carol looks down at her plate.

  “It’s more dangerous to cross a busy street than to have surgery nowadays. And these surgeons are experts, remember. They wouldn’t operate if they weren’t very, very confident of their success. Their own careers are on the line, after all. Think of all the lawsuits. They wouldn’t do it unless they were sure.”

  The more Harold speaks, the more certain he feels about the truth of these words. He looks at his younger daughter, only nineteen. She is on her second
glass of sangria, but nobody stops her. Tonight is beyond such trivialities as underage drinking. Harold watches her chew a wine-soaked orange rind and feels a rising apprehension. She is too young to be motherless.

  Later that night, as he watches his wife cleanse her face with a tissue and cream, the apprehension returns. He feels it as a push inside his chest. His wife drops a used tissue into the trash, draws a new one out of its box, and pats her face in the mirror. For a moment, he questions his plan.

  As Carol lies in bed beside him in her yellow nightgown, Harold tries to sort the problem out logically. He is not a man accustomed to second-guessing himself. He lies still and tries to shepherd his thoughts into a rational row. They will all make perfect sense together, he is sure, even if they are disjointed and unruly now.

  He remembers dissecting a cow’s heart in school. He feels keenly again the thrill of encountering on the outside those secrets that belonged on the inside. He hadn’t been brought up with religion, but he felt he was touching a machine manufactured by God. He stood at the front of the class and explained what he knew about ventricles and valves and the unknown motor that made the pump run. A girl wrinkled her face as he put a finger in the aortic artery. Harold squeezed the heart. He stood holding the heart, memorizing the cool smooth feel of it, until the teacher asked him to give it back and sit down.

  His wife rustles in the bed. She wants to talk, he can tell.

  “What is it, honey?”

  Carol is quiet for a moment.

  “I’m afraid,” she says softly into Harold’s arm.

  “Oh, you know there’s nothing to be afraid of, sweetheart. It’s a safe operation.”

  “It’s brain surgery. What if I die, or end up brain damaged?”

  “Yes, it’s brain surgery. But they do it all the time. You won’t die, and you won’t be brain damaged, I promise. You’ll be much better when it’s over.”

  “I think I’d rather have the fits.”

  Carol’s face is still pressed against his arm. He looks down at the top of her head, the waves of meandering hair that he’s looked down upon for years. Just a single prod to the correct fold of her motor cortex, he knows, could cause her knee to bend or fingers to curl. The thought brings a sense of almost excruciating intimacy.

  “Trust me, honey. You’ll be fine.”

  She whimpers slightly and pushes her face harder against him. He wraps her in his arms and squeezes. He will never know anyone so fully, that much is certain. He keeps her tightly in his arms until her breathing slows and she sleeps. He relaxes his hold then and takes a long look at her, the slackened mouth and crinkled eyelids. He lies beside her, feeling his worries wash out in a pool of tenderness.

  He can still feel the dinner stir in his stomach, the rice and wine and spices breaking down to a pool of sharp juice. The echo of garlic rises into his mouth as he silently belches. It is the taste of Spain, of their courtship in its early days. All at once he remembers Seville, remembers the restaurant, the dancer. Carol had cried that night, he remembers. She had sat at the table with trembling lips. It was a white frilled top that she wore, that she’d bought at an outdoor market that day. He remembers how it had made her look like a young girl, like a peasant’s daughter. The trip had been perfect until then. Carol’s face had colored in the sun despite her straw hats. Her skin had been smooth and youthful, and she’d been eager to disrobe in the hotel, with the shades drawn or apart. She had been his then, unquestioningly, and exalted to be far from home.

  Why he’d chosen that moment, he’ll never know. He understands now that every man keeps a detail or two in a neutral place inside his own brain, and the wise ones never enter that particular cabinet. To speak at that moment must have been a decision brought on by a young man’s misguided idea of honor, or an obscure brand of perversity.

  “Her name was Jacqueline,” he said.

  Carol did not respond. There was a happy buzz in the restaurant, the whirl of the dancer, the aching, adamant guitars propelling everything forward.

  The rest of the evening unraveled. He told her the details—she questioning and he answering calmly. He apologized with what was, he thought, inviolable sincerity. The tears came, predictably, and spoiled her face. They finished their meal, or left it, and concluded the rest of the trip in a kind of muffled, vacuumed atmosphere, as if a giant bowl in the sky had descended upon them. In the days after the trip, he wanted to take the words back. He lay beside her in bed and stroked her hair. It had been nothing, he told her, which was true; it had been only a kink in his sanity. They would go back to being the same. She nodded and smiled blandly and said she believed him.

  Before leaving for the hospital, Carol puts on makeup. Harold waits, feeling a slight burn of impatience as she spreads foundation over her face, brushes her cheeks with powder, and applies bronze eye shadow. The color she dabs onto her lips is a shade of red more suited to a Hollywood premiere than the operating table. She even puts hot rollers in her hair, the way she used to do when they were first married.

  Harold goes out to the living room to wait on an upholstered chair. When Carol emerges from the bedroom, she looks younger, almost pretty. She smiles shyly, and he notices that she is wearing the necklace he gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary, diamonds in the shape of a heart.

  “I don’t think they’ll let you wear that, honey,” Harold says, coming close. “They’ll probably take it from you.”

  “Well, it’s not going to get in the way of my brain, is it?”

  “No, but I’m sure it’s hospital policy. You don’t usually see patients wearing diamonds with their hospital gowns, do you?”

  She is silent, but keeps the necklace on. She is still wearing it when he hugs her in the hospital corridor and they lead her away to the neurosurgery wing.

  Harold feels a twinge as he watches her go. It is natural to be worried, he reasons, and ultimately maybe a positive thing. The concern on his face might help him blend in with the other husbands in the waiting room. He imagines that he looks generic, forgettable enough. Just another gray-haired gentleman.

  He sits patiently for several long minutes before Dr. Warren appears and signals to him from the corridor. With a friendly nod to his neighbors, he rises and follows.

  He doesn’t know how the doctor has managed to circumvent security protocol, but with a swipe of an identification card, they are in the surgical suite. Dr. Warren leads him through the fastidious stages of “scrubbing in,” and Harold is frustrated by the exaggerated and time-consuming insistence on sterility. At the scrub sink, Dr. Warren uses his elbows to pump the soap. They are to spend no fewer than ten minutes, each, washing. Harold watches the clock above the sink and feels like a schoolboy again, his eyes fixed on a motionless minute hand. When they are finished, the doctor uses his elbow to turn off the tap. In the sterile prep room, he prepares the surgical gown and mask for Harold and directs him in putting them on. Donning surgical gloves requires a further set of calisthenics. Harold must not touch any unsterile object—even his own face—the doctor warns him, or he will have to rescrub, regown, reglove.

  Harold realizes too late that he will not be able to consult the decidedly unsterile piece of paper he’s brought with him—a map of the brain’s specialized areas: vision, memory, emotion, motion. He isn’t entirely sure exactly where Carol’s tumor is located. It had been hard to tell from the MRI scan.

  Dr. Warren and Harold enter the operating room together. The rest of the surgery team is already there, waiting. The doctor introduces Harold as Dr. Kaminski, a visiting neurosurgeon from Poland, here to observe the procedure. His English, Dr. Warren explains to the team, is extremely limited.

  Harold concentrates on keeping his face muscles loose, relaxed. Skeptical eyes gaze back at him.

  “Poland?” a nurse asks.

  There is a faint murmur amid the surgery staff.

  �
�All right, everyone, let’s go,” Dr. Warren interjects, moving toward the operating table. Harold follows.

  All at once, he sees what must be his wife’s body in the room, hidden beneath a blue canopy like a pup tent. It reminds Harold of war, of the makeshift shelters used by medics in battle zones, or what he’s seen of them in movies.

  The doctor motions to Harold, who joins the others at the tent. He is aware of an ambient sound of machines. A nurse operates a console like something from a recording studio. A monitor graphs an undulating line: his wife’s heartbeat. Across the tent, a row of nurses stand, their faces uniformly serious. Harold focuses on one nurse whose brow comprises thin utilitarian lines above searing blue eyes. When she suddenly raises those eyes to his, he winks reflexively, then feels a buzz of shame.

  He cannot see any part of his wife’s body. Still, it feels dangerously devious to be here, so close beside her. His instinct tells him to hide. But Harold reminds himself that she is anesthetized. Entirely unaware of his presence.

  Dr. Warren moves a sheet to one side, and Harold finds himself staring down all at once at a small patch of bare brain. He looks away involuntarily. What have they done with the piece of missing skull? Is the hair still stuck to it? There are so many questions, but he can’t keep them together. His heart quickens. Looking up, he takes stock of the surgery room and feels disoriented, as if awaking in an airplane thirty thousand feet above land.

  Harold looks back down. He concentrates on maintaining an air of calm, confident superiority; an air he’s mastered over the years. Nonetheless, he feels increasingly conscious of eyes upon him. He stares at the brain. The window itself is disappointingly tiny, revealing just a glimpse of a pale reflective substance. Over this surface runs a faint, spidery red road map. Blood vessels, Harold assumes. Exposed within its drab skull, the brain strikes him as a delicate animal whose stone shelter has been removed. A snail in an overturned shell. It is amazing to think that every human thought and action arises from this weird matter. There is something divine about the sight of it, and Harold thinks he can detect a hush beneath the low bustle in the operating room, as if in religious observance.