“Of what?”
“Me?”
“No,” I say. “I know you can’t help it.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Really? Spiders.”
“Which ones?”
“All varieties, all sizes, from any country or time period. And stucco.”
“Eructate!” he says and slaps his forehead. “I couldn’t remember. Animals are afraid all the time, but they don’t know what it is. The only difference between my brain and a dog’s is that I think there’s something I can do about it. You’re nice.”
“Thank you.”
“When I’m on my Seroquel I’m as dull as a Mountie. Can I sleep with you?”
“You hoo what?”
“I have low oxytocin levels. It’s good for both of us and anyway, you say you’re not afraid of me. I’m asexual. Shiva touched my lingam.”
I weigh my options and arrive at a decision based on the behaviour of early humans. Because of the caves we once slept in for warmth and safety, I let him into my bed. I’m better off than the cave-women of the paleolithic, anyway, who had nothing but Neanderthals to keep them warm. I open the blankets and he slides in. His thin stubbled legs make scritch-scratch noises on the sheets. I shudder at the feeling of his beard painting my shoulder as he pulls me down into the bed and folds one leg over me.
“Turn off the light,” he says.
I can just reach the switch. His breath comes in rattles, smelling of red Jell-O and tooth rot. He sounds like an old tom with a broken purrbox. “Can you try to calm down? Just try to breathe—not in this direction, though. When’s the last time you brushed your teeth?”
“Have you been to Nepal?” he whispers.
“No.”
“If you don’t get better soon, you’ll want to go. I want to go. I can’t concentrate very well and that’s what they recommend: go to Nepal. Cullen is going to give me my no-mind.”
“Cullen from the? You’ve seen him?”
“I’ve seen him. If you do no-mind, you can get out of yourself. Be in the ultimate present. Jean?”
“Yes?”
“Would you try no-mind if you could?”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. It sounds like a medication. “Are you…on it right now?”
“Can’t get any. Still in beta because it broils your liver. But,” he says, clamping his leg more tightly around me, “I think it’s the way to go. You scrub out time and then you can see everything.”
“Sounds like something I’m not ready for. Maybe not you, either.”
“One day everyone’s gonna be on it. It’ll be in the water. Tasteless, odourless. Coming to a major city near you.” He inhales slow and deep. The staves of his ribs spread open along my side, a threadbare bellows. “It’s just matter of time,” he says into my ear.
IT SURPRISES ME how easy it is to don the clothing of a normal person and go to work. And how good it is: simple, splendid work. You get up and connect the day to come to the day that was. Whose file was open on my desk? When is my first appointment? Bathe. Kiss the husband, kiss the kids. Coffee on the way, coffee when you get there. Soon after, someone brings you coffee. Meetings, lunch. Discussions, leave-taking. Eat as a family. Argue, play, fuck, sleep. In bed, you think: what is it again I have to do in the morning?
I am on the path of routine and it is glorious. But the machinery that gives it its texture of lived life is a watchworks. I’m aware of the mainspring keeping the tension.
“It will take a long time before that feeling of being in danger passes,” Morbier says. “That’s its nature. To make you doubt. But in the meantime, you carry on! With some enthusiasm, even!”
My first days at the bank, I felt eyes on my back every time I turned it. We—Dr. Morbier, Ian, and myself—decided I should backburner any ambitions I had of getting back to teaching and focus on a job with simpler parameters. (When I finally checked the emails from the university—emails Morbier suggested I had filed in a psychological spam folder—they revealed an increasingly hysterical one-way correspondence from the splenetic man who had hired me and was dealing with students asking for refunds.) Morbier suggested a part-time job somewhere brightly lit, where my tasks would quickly become routine. I thought a bank would do it. I put my resumé out, and in a couple of weeks, I landed an interview at the Royal Bank at College and Bathurst. The manager called me back as I was walking out of the interview and told me I could start the following week.
I didn’t mention my health issues and answered the question about the long gap in employment by telling him about my bookstore. At least it was half-true, in the sense that on some level, it had happened to me. Morbier couldn’t explain why my memories of the hallucinations were so strong. “They should fade, like dreams, shouldn’t they?” I’d asked him. “Why can I still feel my wooden cash desk under my fingertips when it never existed in the first place?” He didn’t know; he couldn’t explain it. My syndrome was too rare, few people studied it, and subtle differences in wiring and chemistry in patients produced wildly differing effects. There was no baseline.
“And where was I? When I was ‘at’ the bookstore? Was I standing out on the sidewalk? Was I just wandering around?”
“You were in a fugue state, wherever you were. I bet you spent almost all your time on that wall in Bellevue Square.”
No one at the bank should have known about my problems, but it felt like everyone did. It wrong-footed me from the beginning. I went out of sync. I banged my knee on a doorframe and said holy fuck too loud. I developed a strange, nervous body odour. I got locked in the safety deposit on my second day. I earned the nickname Boom-Boom, which I hated, but I smiled and tried to play along.
The hardest part of getting to know new colleagues is figuring out which ones you can talk to. People keep their pasts to themselves at the bank. The ones who don’t might trigger me out of the blue, like Meaghan, who confided that her brother had a psychotic break in Peru after drinking an herbal tea. “He’s still not himself,” she told me, “after fifteen years.” Karl with a K tells Carl with a C that his sister’s kid has to be on mental health tablets and his opinion is that some people are born broken and society shouldn’t have to pay their medical bills.
I figure it out after a while, and that leaves me with a small group of people I can confide in, people who are not on automatic pilot. Some of them have also been places they’d rather not talk about, and a kind look from one of them can put the day right.
At home, Ian and Reid have worked out a new routine to an old joke. “You know, Reid,” Ian says, “it’s not entirely uncommon that people lose their minds once in a while. For three long years, I thought I was a chicken.”
“How come you didn’t get help any sooner?” Reid asks him.
“My father owned a pillow factory and we needed the feathers.”
“Thank you, Wayne and Shuster,” I say, “but I haven’t lost my mind. I had a microangioma and some bad electrics. But look at me: I’m a new woman.”
—
By the time the Christmas jingles are poisoning the air, I’m no longer thinking that much about what happened in the summertime. It’s last season’s flu. But it’s hard to accept that what I experienced didn’t happen. The fade never comes on: what I saw and did occupies a part of my memory where the experience remains stubbornly intact. I can bring to mind in the smallest detail the things she wore, the feeling of sticky sidewalk beneath my feet, her voice, my thoughts. I can smell the carpet in the bookstore.
—
I continue to see Dr. Morbier, but in his own practice, which is in his house, ironically on Denison Avenue, below the park. I take Dundas, walking if the weather is good, but always on the south side. I only cross when I’m at Denison. I can see a snowy wedge of Bellevue Square at the top of the street, but I have cause to look away quickly as I come to Morbier’s. I haven’t been back and it’s going to be some time before I can step into that space once again. I use a side door and a bell
rings. I have already come to associate the sound of this bell with a feeling of sanctuary.
I’ve done plenty of my own reading by now and I offer Morbier the observation that memory is not located where my seizures occurred. I love watching a doctor’s face when you start quoting what you’ve found on the internet. “The brain is not divided into sections like a side of beef,” he says. “And your whole brain is active all the time. Not just ten per cent.”
“That’s bullshit?”
“Total.”
He wants to continue seeing me because there are only three cases in the literature of autoscopy at a distance, which Morbier calls asymmetrical autoscopy. Now that I’m cured, he wants my assistance in exploring the psychological side of the phenomenon. While my memory of it is still fresh, he wants to see if the contents of an autoscopic response—to physical injury, to electrical issues in the brain or seizures, to trauma states—reveal anything about the construct we call selfhood. His theory is that our experience of “first person” might be encoded in that cleft, between the temporal and parietal lobes.
“Why imagine seeing yourself,” he asks, “when that part of the brain in particular has been damaged? Why not see unicorns or tiny people running up the walls? It’s very specific.” Sometimes I wish Morbier smoked a pipe. “I believe if you went in here”—pointing to his own head—“with a hot wire and poked around, you could lose your entire personality and still carry on with all manner of activities and functions. You might even have a job and be married and have kids. But you’d be unaware of yourself because you’d have no self to be aware of. Do you follow?”
“It sounds like autism.”
“Yes.” The tip of his pen does a paradiddle on his pad. “Maybe autism and autoscopy are along the same spectrum. Interesting.” Much writing. “Can you imagine, in real life, a person without a person in it? Such as you interacted with while you were ill?”
“But Ingrid had a personality.”
“I mean in a more…meta sense. She was manifest only to you. Therefore Ingrid had no person. Do you think she was self-aware?”
“It felt like she was. She felt, to me, like anyone else, like there was something going on behind her eyes. She even had a scent.”
“Of what?”
It comes instantly to mind. “The inside of a chest freezer.”
Sometimes I follow the motion of the top of his pen and try to winkle out what he’s putting on the pad, but everything looks like the letter O to me. “It was quite an opportunity you had,” he says. “Meeting yourself. I wonder, if I could bring Ingrid into this room, what would you want to ask her?” He sees the look on my face. “Don’t worry! I can’t produce her.”
“I would ask her what she remembers about her mother and compare it to my own memories.”
“Like which memories?”
“I can’t think of any in particular right now. I’m not sure how much I remember happening and how much of it is memories of seeing pictures or hearing stories. It took so long to live through and now I can barely remember it. Maybe Ingrid remembers more than I do.”
“Is she your personal backup disk?”
“I don’t know what she is. Apart from her inoperable brain tumour, she seems to have her act together. It’s weird that everyone in this story has something wrong with their head.”
“Who’s everyone in this story?”
“Me, Ingrid. Paula. Katerina.”
“I know what’s wrong with you and Ingrid, but what’s wrong with Katerina?”
“She has a hole in her head?”
“Right. I forgot about her.”
“How can you forget?”
“Jean, Katerina doesn’t exist. You met her in the bookstore, right? She walked in one afternoon and told you—”
“Oh,” I grunt, like I’ve been struck. “Katerina…but whose pupusas did I eat? Who was my friend?” A panicky feeling begins to fill me. “I can’t tell what happened and what didn’t. Will this go away?”
“It’s a lot to digest. It’s going to take time to tease the strands apart. Tell me about Paula. What’s wrong with Paula’s head?”
“I told you. She has an inoperable tumour. Almost exactly where you say my seizures originated. They don’t know what it’s going to do next. I’m afraid she’s going blind. I’m afraid the tumour is going to affect the part where she speaks from. That’s all we have right now. Her hands shake too much to type.”
“She sounds trapped.”
“Yes. She won’t let me visit her. But we Skype at least once a week.”
“So you’ve Skyped her this week.”
“Not this week.”
“So a couple of times a month?”
“Right.”
“She must be pretty concerned about what happened to you.”
“I’m sure she is.”
He leaves a silence. “So you haven’t spoken with her lately.”
“I have. We talked about the boys. She knows what I’m going through. I told her about seeing Ingrid in the park.”
“But that was months ago,” he says. “That was May or June. It’s December now. Did she ring you in hospital?”
“She doesn’t ring. She likes to see my face. I must have talked to her a couple of times before I had my operation, but I don’t remember everything from before.”
“You’ve really been through a lot, Jean.”
“Why are you so interested in Paula?”
“I’m interested in what you say to her. If she’s your sister, you must share a lot with her.”
“What do you mean, if she’s my sister?”
“I just mean I wasn’t aware of her until you mentioned her, and I’m not clear on what kind of closeness you share. Like, was she there for you after you lost the baby?”
How does he know that? “That was a long time ago.”
“It sounds like you’ve been there a lot for Paula. Why hasn’t she been in touch since your surgery?”
I’VE BECOME A BRAIN MAVEN! As I have these thoughts of myself, the thoughts are also tiny impulses and electrical charges and neurotransmitters squirting over the wet machinery of my brain. My thoughts, which are I things I “have,” undergo translation from one set of symbols to another, the way ones and zeroes turn into colour pictures on a screen.
And I realize, going in to visit Jimmy the day before Christmas, that I have lost all my fear of—even my dislike of—mental illness. Not in myself, where I may not detect it, but in others. My prejudice is gone.
Jimmy says: “This afternoon, stock values flashed a warning.” He spoons rice pudding out of a Ziploc bag. Cary, the triple-nicotine-patched erotomaniac, had an hour pass and came back with a litre tub of Kozy Shack, but there was nothing to share it in because all the bowls were being washed. “And,” Jimmy continues, “Chinese sounds like English spoken backwards.” He offers me some of his pudding; I decline.
“Where are you going to go if they let you out of here over Christmas? It’s fifteen below.”
“They won’t let me out. I serve at his satanic majesty’s pleasure. But I might go to my sister’s place after the new year.”
“You have a sister?”
“Nada.”
“No siblings at all?”
“No. I have a sister. Her name is Nada. Tell me who names their kid Nothing?”
“Your parents must have felt differently after having you. James is a noble name.”
“James is the usurper. The understudy. Can we turn that goddamn thing off?” The television overhead in the common room is tuned to a yule log. Someone turns it off. The only two adolescents left over Christmas are sitting in the window hutch with their bags of Kozy Shack, huddled up against each other. They’ve snipped the corners off their bags and are sucking the pudding out, as if from plastic teats.
“Is your mum still alive?” I ask Jimmy.
“She’s sick.”
“With what?”
“Whore disease.”
“Hore—?”
“She hoovers pills and fucks strangers for fun. She was run down one night stumbling out the highway exit, glue dripping from her nose, and it took five months in hospital to rebuild her vagina.” He slaps the tabletop hard and I almost leave my shoes. Flecks of wet rice fly. “It was just fine to begin with, but now it runs like clockwork!” Through the windows, Spadina Avenue stretches in a string of flashing colours south to Queen. I feel his hand feebly squeezing my forearm. “Santa, can you help me?”
I run down to the station to get the orderlies. Christmas is hard. It makes people think of family.
ALTHOUGH I HAVE to pass the site of “Bookshop” once on the way to Morbier’s and once on the way back, I am no longer afraid to. He’s suggested that I don’t go into the pet store that occupies its space in “this” reality. I have no desire to look at goddamned puppies. Part of my treatment is a cycle of “exposure and response prevention,” and apparently just being able to walk on Dundas, across the road from the pet shop, is progress. I have to reclaim streets and then neighbourhoods one at a time. We both agree that I’ll leave Bellevue Square for sometime in 2017. But I am becoming impatient. “I feel the need to go there,” I tell him on our last session before the new year.
“Why? What’s there?”
“I know people. I want to see how they’re doing.” Technically, I want to confirm that they exist. “You know that some of the people I met in the park I’ve seen on the ward.”
“I’m not surprised. The park is close to the institute. Who have you seen there?”
“A guy named Jimmy.”
“Are you friends?”
“Yes. I’ve been visiting him.” He starts writing. “It’s surprising how much of a, you know, what you’d call a real person is there, under his symptoms.”
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