The Wonder Garden

by Lauren Acampora

  And being in the presence of these men, complacent upon their moneyed peaks, makes him uneasy. Indeed, he is most admired by his colleagues for the phenomenon of his success out of dingy beginnings. His life story, having leaked somehow to the hospital staff, has become legend: his father’s sudden brain hemorrhage when Michael was twelve; his widowed mother cleaning houses, going on food stamps. The consensus is that Michael was activated by poverty’s humiliation to rise above his station. Given the nature of his father’s death, it seemed logical—and admirable—that he would pursue medicine, and neurosurgery in particular.

  Now, he stands upon a square of flagstone on Pelican Point and watches in horror as his host retreats into the mass of guests, leaving him alone with the art insurgent. There is a long, vacant moment during which it occurs to Michael that it must be his duty as the lower-ranked male to carry the conversational burden.

  “What’s your line of work?” he finally ventures.

  “Banking,” Bill Gregory says, his focus snapping back. Despite the relaxed stance and soft-jowled face, despite the pink shirt and navy blazer—that uniform of the ages—there is something hawklike about him.

  Michael mirrors his stance, one hand in a pocket, the other holding a tumbler of Scotch. “Rough time lately?”

  “It’s a memorable moment, that’s for sure.” Twinkling smile. Of course no one of Gregory’s rank would feel a pinch of any kind. They are the ones delivering pinches.

  Michael considers, for a brief moment, whether to ask this man’s advice about gold bars. Most likely he has his own cache. Anyone with insight into the current financial debacle would know how to hedge—and gold, after all, is the hedge of all hedges, the only sure thing. When the crunch comes, no one will want to see a dollar bill. Anyone with a stock certificate or government bond will get a laugh in the face. If anyone would know this, it’s Bill Gregory.

  “Hell, I hate talking shop,” Gregory says. “But now Harold tells me you’re quite a prodigy with the scalpel. I heard you saved a girl’s life? Some new type of surgery?”

  “A hemispherectomy. Not new, but unusual. The disconnection of an entire hemisphere of the brain.”

  Bill Gregory nods. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what I heard. She was almost gone, she was seeing angels, and you brought her back.”

  This is what everyone has heard. It has become less about the procedure, less about Michael’s life-saving work, than about his patient’s glimpse of the afterlife on his operating table. There was a national magazine feature about it, which mentioned Michael’s name only in passing. There was no praise for the heroism of modern medicine, or of the surgeon who yanked the little girl back from the brink and secured a semi-normal life for her. Rather, the article went into raptures about the existence of God, as proven definitively by the words of a child.

  The girl gave everyone what they wanted. She hovered near the OR ceiling, traveled to the waiting room and observed her anxious parents. She floated to a night sky and passed the planets of the solar system—Saturn was a floating ball of milk ringed with ribbons, she said—and beyond. Then the light and tunnel. She entered this light, of course, and felt the usual sense of warmth, perfect peace. She met the relatives she’d never known in life, all of whom fluttered with wings. The long-dead grandmother turned her around and sent her back to her body.

  It would have seemed petty to contradict all this, to offer the probable scientific explanations: The malfunctioning of the girl’s remaining parietal cortex would have created a feeling of union with the universe and the sensation of flying. Adrenaline from a distressed brain would have dilated the pupils, causing the appearance of bright light. The diminishing supply of oxygen would have been to blame for the closing of the girl’s peripheral vision field and her trip down the quintessential tunnel.

  “The surgery was a success, yes,” Michael tells Bill Gregory. “She’ll need plenty of therapy to regain the use of the left side of her body, but will otherwise be like any other child.”

  Gregory puts a hand out, pumps Michael’s. “Well. It’s an honor.” He smiles. A trim blonde appears at his side. “Excuse me, my wife.” Gregory winks, claiming her. As they retreat, Michael allows his imagination to swoop into their bedroom, then back out, to what he presumes are Gregory’s extracurricular pursuits.

  Michael stands in place, training his gaze over the heads of party guests. Between the pool house and Tudor mansion a swatch of the Long Island Sound is visible. From here, it is a fragment, an ornamental splash of color. Still, its presence agitates him in some primal way. Just the suggestion of sea, the undertone of its faraway thunder.

  There is one woman who keeps looking over. Bottle blond, in a dress with a complicated green-and-navy print. Despite the wrap design that creates a deep plunge at the chest, Michael distinctly dislikes the dress. Its pattern, he realizes, is like a crude illustration of the sea. The woman’s chest is so smoothly rounded beneath the fabric that there must be some sort of padding in her bra, or beneath the skin. The over-bleached hair lies flat against the sides of her head like paper. Still, he returns her glances. The woman disengages herself from her conversation and approaches.

  “You’re the brain surgeon, am I right?”

  “I’m Michael Warren, yes.”

  She touches his arm. “The Christensens have told me about you. And I read the story of the little girl you saved.”

  Her hand remains on his arm, the fingers impressing themselves through his shirtsleeve. She holds his gaze, and he feels the usual stirrings. Despite the unappealing sleekness of hair, the toned upper arms, the terrible dress; despite the lurking presence of the husband in blocky eyeglasses—or maybe because of it—he does not look away. He feels the woman’s fingers against the flesh of his arm like a reassurance: the old passages will always remain open to him.

  She talks in an undulating voice about the little girl and her audience with angels. “So amazing, don’t you think?”

  Michael finds himself pulling his arm away in punishment, bringing the Scotch glass to his lips. He has nothing to say about the attractions of heaven.

  He had pushed for the surgery. It was a long-thwarted ambition of his to perform a hemispherectomy. Most patients opted to travel to Johns Hopkins, but he was determined to persuade someone to stay at St. Joseph’s. At age eight, the girl was somewhat old for a surgery best suited for infants whose brains have not yet calcified into task centers. But Rasmussen’s encephalitis was causing debilitating seizures, and the parents did not want to travel. The girl resembled his youngest daughter, with the same shade of maple wood hair. During the surgery, with the patient’s head concealed by blue sterile drape, he kept lapsing into the thought that it was Hannah’s cerebrum beneath his knife.

  It was after the frontal and parietal lobes had been disconnected and he was cutting the corpus callosum that intraventricular hemorrhaging began. The team’s first attempts to cauterize were insufficient. They went into silent focus. For just a fleeting moment, Michael slipped. He allowed himself to think of the child, of the little memories tucked into the folds of her brain tissue, and his fingers went stiff. Standing over the open skull, he imagined having to tell the family. If he lost her, he would have to be the one to tell them. He had lost only one patient before, but there had been no relatives to inform. Meeting the grave eyes of the attending surgeon at his side, he felt a crater open inside him.

  The hemorrhaging finally, magically, ceased, and the girl’s heartbeat returned to normal. After they fastidiously replaced the section of bone and sutured the skin of the scalp, Michael left the OR without a word. The attending surgeon called after him, but he kept walking, exiting through the radiology wing to avoid the family in the waiting room.

  It was after eight in the evening. He raced his BMW over the roads that led to his own family. He felt a vertiginous impatience to see them, to wrap them in an iron embrace that would never we
aken. When he got home, he would pull them close and talk to them. He would say and do what a husband, a father, might say and do. Coming through the door and standing in the entryway, he could hear the voices of his wife and children, the younger ones getting ready for bed. He stood for a long time in the foyer, listening. At last, Rosalie came down the stairs and glanced at him. He stood, mesmerized. Her gaze lingered for a moment, as if reading something, then slid away.

  Now, standing with the blond woman, the same unmoored sensation returns. The name she gave him has faded out. Something unbeautiful. Gertrude, or Greta. For the past few minutes she has been relating the story of a dream she had as a young girl.

  “They were angels, I’m sure of it. They came to my bed and talked to me. They explained the difference between right and wrong.” She cocks her head to the side. “I really believe they gave me my first lesson in morality.” She has the faraway look of a woman traveling on three margaritas.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  Her gaze spirals back. She moves a piece of hair behind her ear, exposing a cluster of icy gems. “Gretchen Von Mauren.”

  “It’s been nice talking with you, Gretchen. Will you excuse me?”

  Despite the gravitational pull to remain in any woman’s orbit, Michael steps away. He is careful not to make eye contact with anyone as he drifts to the periphery of the crowd. But, as if supernaturally attuned to the defection of any of her guests, Carol Christensen appears at his side.

  “Lovely party, Carol,” Michael offers, producing a smile. “And you look wonderful.”

  She grins like a teenager. “I’m feeling wonderful.” Stepping closer, she lowers her tone. “You know, I never mentioned it to you, but I did have some bad headaches right after the surgery. And some very dark moods.”

  “No, you didn’t mention that.”

  “I’m afraid I might even have been clinically depressed for a while.” Carol blinks. “But thankfully that’s all gone now. I’m better than ever.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  Carol pauses, gives Michael a long look. “I feel a little bashful telling you this, but I ended up finding a holistic healer. Well, I guess he’d call himself an indigenous healer.” She quickly puts a hand to Michael’s sleeve. “Honestly, I never thought I’d go in for the New Age stuff. That’s not the kind of person I am. But I have to say, I’m so glad I kept an open mind.”

  Michael feels he has no choice but to prod further. “So, what kind of healing was this exactly?”

  She smiles and draws closer. “He did something called a soul retrieval, which sounds very spacey, I know, but afterward I felt like a completely new person. It seemed like everything was brighter around me. Even my complexion has improved. People have noticed!”

  Michael looks sternly at her. “You should have called me about the headaches.”

  “That’s what Harold said.” Carol tilts her head. “But, anyway, they’re gone now. The healer said that sometimes, with some conditions, there’s a point where Western medicine can’t really help anymore, and you have to address the root cause of the problem. He said that the surgery may have been an effective solution for the epilepsy on a superficial level. But he perceived some deep-seated spiritual issues, too. I’m sure that must sound implausible to you, but whatever he did, it worked for me.” Carol touches Michael’s sleeve again, as if in apology, then scans the crowd. “I invited him tonight, actually. I’d love to introduce you, but it seems he’s not here yet.”

  “That’s all right,” Michael says, raising his Scotch glass and disengaging Carol’s touch. He has cut open more than one shamanic skull in his career, short-circuited more than one carnival in the temporal lobe. He can predict just the kinds of interictal spikes that would appear on an EEG if Carol’s healer were monitored during one of his so-called retrievals. Michael considers the irony here, of one epileptic healing another.

  “His name is Apocatequil, in case you meet him. Hard to forget that! It means ‘god of lightning’ in the Incan language. He’s really a very interesting person.”

  At this, Carol summons a nearby crescent of guests to her, and, as they begin to congeal into a ring, Michael lifts his chin as if suddenly remembering something. With a quick backward step, he melts out of the circle toward the edge of the pool. He stands, feeling the cut of Carol’s insult. There is an acidic taste in his mouth as he watches the flux of revelers.

  He spots Rosalie, mingling happily. She always looks good in her diligent way, but in a social setting like this a kind of nimbus surrounds her. He watches her for a few moments in wonderment. He is aware of her quiet power, the daily feat she performs of parenting his children, of navigating the politics of schools and township, what she refers to as the community. He becomes aware of her partnership as a boom to which he clings. She alone has made it possible for him to join gatherings like this, gatherings that to him court all manner of attack—crazed gunmen, terrorist sieges, biological pandemics—and send his imagination reeling.

  He knows that this feedback loop is its own biological pandemic, likely caused by deficient serotonin in his amygdala. He has learned not to fight the fear, but to welcome it as an inborn advantage, compelling him to prepare where others might procrastinate. Still, once the panic begins, it takes all his will to push it away. He is seized by the myriad ways he could be killed at any moment. Car accident—blunt trauma to the brain, impalement by the steering wheel column, snapped rib through the heart. Electrical fire—third-degree burns, asphyxiation from smoke inhalation. Brain aneurysm—subarachnoid hemorrhage, intense headache, collapse. Nuclear blast—immediate dismemberment or slow, painful death from radiation poisoning. Just the sound of fireworks out of season makes him jump. The apocalyptic moment is skulking closer all the time. There is a script of actions that he is prepared to take when it finally appears like an ornate rising dragon, breathtakingly hideous. It is almost a feeling of welcome, of feverish anticipation for the beginning of something. He has charted the variables so studiously that there would be a certain disappointment if they did not occur.

  Standing beside the pool, he pictures the sky lit up, bleached like a photo negative. The atmosphere would flare white-hot, sending radioactive particles raining down within seconds. Standing there, he does the calculations. It would take several minutes to locate their car in the assemblage on the front lawn. He and Rosalie would have to split up to find it. Being the first into their vehicle would be crucial if they were to avoid the inevitable jam of guests bottling the Christensens’ elegant driveway. If they succeeded, they could be back on Whistle Hill Road in twenty minutes, more or less, allowing for detours onto back roads. If those roads were also clogged, they would proceed on foot via wooded shortcuts. Once home, it would take another five minutes or so to get the kids into the dugout under the tool shed. Not fast enough, but better than it could be. And although the underground bunker itself is not yet finished, it would be serviceable—large enough for sardine-tight sleeping pads—and more than what most others would have. When Rosalie sees what he has done for them, how thoroughly he has seen to their safety, she will be dumbstruck.

  He has, over the course of a year, reinforced the tool shed walls with concrete blocks. The supplies are hidden behind a false wall: a waste bucket, bins of clothing, a pyramid of water jugs, three months’ worth of shelf-stable food, and first aid kits with iodine tablets. He is always adding, little by little, to the survival kit: an assortment of pocket knives, fire starters, flares. The gold—about fifty Good Delivery bars with serial numbers, twenty-seven pounds each—is buried a hundred feet away in a spot marked by a loose triangle of rocks.

  And he has done even more with the money from Harold Christensen, who had wanted to attend his own wife’s surgery. After months of persuasion, Michael had finally accepted his donation, then put it toward an arsenal to keep roving mobs at bay: a .38 pistol for each of his boys,
plus his own Ruger; a .22 rifle, a Remington 700 with Leupold scope; and his newest acquisition, a set of four AR15s, one for each male in the family. He has rubbed the weapons with rust-preventing grease and secreted them in a cache tube made of industrial piping, itself buried in a cavity adjacent to the dugout. With the rest of the cash, he has bulked up his ammunition supply. There is no such thing as too much personal ammo, or too much wampum for barter.

  It might take another year of digging, removing buckets of dirt after dark, before the bunker is up to standard. He will need to go down far enough for earth arching to protect against radiation. He will need to install some sort of ventilation and, crucially, create a second exit. Even with two exits, however, there is always the possibility of the shelter collapsing, of being buried alive—a scenario that has already bored its way into his imaginative repertoire.

  He breathes deeply. The rise and fall of conversation and laughter, like ocean waves, insist on normalcy, the stubborn continuation of the world as it is.

  With an effort, Michael steps back toward the party. As he joins the swarm, a woman brushes past him, a new brunette like a draft of cool air—loose hair, scant makeup—a natural beauty. Tight at her side is a ponytailed freak in some kind of pajama set. This man gives Michael a direct, penetrating look. The jealousy is unsurprising, given the disparity of the pair: the man has a narrow, miserly face, his hair pulled too tight in its choke hold. A cracked leather cord girdles his neck and disappears down the front of his tunic. This can only be Carol’s medicine man.