Confused, Kate nodded, then shook her head. “Not really. Just that it has to do with how some children process visual stimuli, which makes it difficult for them to learn to read.”
He nodded. “That’s what we used to think. Turns out the problem is in how those kids hear, how the brain processes language, not how they see.” She wondered why he was telling her this. And why now.
“The medial geniculate nucleus—the area of the brain that receives incoming signals from the ear and sends them to the auditory cortex—has fewer neurons that process fast sounds, mostly stop consonants, in dyslexics than the brains of normal readers. Since they never hear these sounds, dyslexic children can’t construct the mental dictionaries that enable us to recognize a sound the next time we hear it—to make sense of it. Are you with me?”
“Yes, but I don’t have any trouble reading, Max, really.”
“I know that. And I’m probably doing this badly, but—what you do have is sort of a twin to dyslexia. It’s called central auditory processing disorder, a hearing problem that has nothing to do with the ears. It’s in how the brain processes complex auditory signals.”
He waited for Kate to say something, but a kind of mental white noise had wiped out everything but the sensation that she’d been hit from behind—by something she never expected and hadn’t seen coming.
Then it began to sink in. Something was wrong with her brain. She kept her eyes on her hands. Didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think.
“I suspect you fell between the slats, timewise,” Max continued. “Until ten years ago there was a lot of debate about whether CAPD even existed. Then a team of audiologists at Baylor, here in Houston, confirmed that it did, using topographical brain mapping.”
She still couldn’t look at him. Face him. “How long have you known?” she asked.
“I suspected from what you said New Year’s Eve about the trouble you ran into after you started going to a bigger, noisier school. Then the other day, while we had you in the scanner—” He reached out to touch her arm and Kate pulled back, dropping her hands into her lap.
“Why didn’t you say anything then?” she asked, keeping her eyes cast down.
“I thought about it. But I didn’t want you to think that’s all I do—that everything’s just another diagnosis with me. That I’m detached, impersonal. Didn’t want to ruin what I felt happening between us, the sense of closeness. I’ve never felt that with anyone else.” He dropped his voice. “The way we can be with each other is important to me, what I think we can have together. That’s why I’m telling you now, even if my timing is off. I didn’t know if last night was ever going to happen, let alone when. So there’s never going to be any better time.”
Kate finally looked at him, searching for any sign that he wasn’t being straight with her—for the slightest hint of a smile or disingenuousness—and was surprised to find his face naked, without the beard. Another trick of her psyche.
“Then tell me everything you know about this—this brain disorder,” she replied. “I’ll yell uncle when I’ve had enough.”
He nodded. “Each sensory system has specialized neurons that are activated by sounds, sights, and other stimuli, and these receptors create a sort of map or spatial diagram of how this information is processed. Except in the auditory cortex, which contains cells that appear to be unlike any others in the nervous system.” His eyes never left her face. “These cells are able to detect sounds anywhere in space around us by emitting signals in a temporal code, not spatial. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, like whether the signals are passed on to other brain circuits to help us understand or whether they’re secondary sites, artifacts of another process. But it looks pretty certain that these temporal codes are used by other sensory systems to tie several spatial maps together. Anyway, that’s where I think CAPD originates, some flaw in the temporal coding process that makes you unable to handle a lot of signals at the same time.”
He paused again but Kate waited for him to go on. “I can dig out the latest stuff in the literature so you can read about the research for yourself. That’s really what you’ve been doing for a long time, Katie—converting everything you can to visual stimuli, taking in more of the world around you through your eyes than your ears. The happy result is your unusual ability to construct mental images. Vision is a linking together of subsystems—what is in the temporal lobe, where is in the parietal lobe—combined with associated memories. When we see an apple we not only know it’s red and round but that it has seeds inside and how it tastes. Every visual area that sends information upstream also receives information back along those same neural pathways. In most people, input from the eye is much stronger than signals coming the other way, from the imagination. Not with you. I wish you could’ve seen Ben’s face when I asked you to think of two animals and then draw them.”
“I was thinking more about what you were seeing on that monitor than what I was doing,” Kate told him. “I don’t even remember what I drew.”
“Wait here,” he said, jumped up, and left the kitchen. She sat staring out the window, wondering where Sam was. Then Max was back, handing her a pencil drawing of a lion and gazelle playing some kind of board game.
As she stared at the hastily sketched “cartoon,” other animals began to appear on either side of the lion and gazelle, the lines fainter and slightly out of focus—reminding Kate of the halo effect Tom McCowan talked about.
“It looks vaguely familiar,” she admitted, “but I don’t remember doing it.” She looked up. “Does that mean I’ve got more than one disconnect in my brain?”
He shook his head. “We try to put subjects into a resting state before a test by eliminating outside stimuli, but the brain isn’t just reactive. It’s constantly generating stuff. At night, with almost no sensory input, it’s free to do whatever it wants. During the day the senses limit the types of images you can generate, but it’s still going on. Daydreaming. A mixture of fact and fantasy. Problem is, sometimes our mental maps get so elaborate that we get lost in them. Happens to everybody.”
This time when he reached out to smooth her hair back from her face, Kate accepted the gesture for what it was, a sign of caring not only about what happened to her but how she felt about herself.
“Is there any way to fix this … disorder?” she asked.
“Stay out of crowds, all the things you already figured out to do.”
“Medical school?”
“If that’s what you want. You probably ought to stay away from emergency medicine, but anything else?” He shrugged. “Is that what you want?”
“I don’t think so. No. I was just asking. Where’s Sam?”
“Asleep on the couch in my study. Watching us play tennis wears him out.”
“I’ve had enough, haven’t you? I think I’ll go shower.”
Max nodded and watched her go. She knew he wanted more from her, but she didn’t have more to give. She needed to be alone. To think. To get a second opinion from her inner voice.
She stood letting the spray pummel her back, but the hot water only seemed to intensify the conflicting emotions pelting her brain. Anger mixed with relief. Resentment with gratitude. Relief at finally knowing why some perfectly intelligible voices would suddenly turn into gibberish. Grateful that she no longer needed to fear the day when the gibberish wouldn’t go away. Angry with herself for letting her guard down.
She turned to let the water mix with the tears running down her cheeks until she couldn’t tell which was which. Max was stimulating yet easy to be around, even when they didn’t see something the same way. Because he’s not judgmental. Just because he takes a different approach than you do doesn’t mean you’re wrong—not to Max. What drives him is curiosity, not control. The need to question. To ask why. Not only with his patients but Tashat. So why not you?
With Max she felt connected instead of “different”—a thought that triggered a recollection of Max telling her about his grandmother. But she was
n’t the same person she used to be, either, maybe because of Sam. She thought of the day they hiked across the top of the mesa, her carrying a backpack with water and their lunch, Sam breaking trail for her through the virgin snow. She had talked it over with him, telling him everything, and decided that, no matter what, she wasn’t going to abandon Tashat. Now, thinking about it, she knew someone else had been with them that day—that it was Max’s unwavering faith in her that was helping her to believe in herself, despite all the Dave Brovermans, past and present. That her inner voice, the one the ancient Egyptians called the ka, was beginning to speak with assurance instead of the self-doubt she had lived with so long.
Now Max had given her another priceless gift—self-knowledge—releasing her from the clutches of the vulture that had been sitting on her shoulder for years, watching her stumble, waiting for the fall that would bring her so low he could peck out her golden eyes. And she had turned her back on him. Again.
She turned off the water, towel-dried her hair and then her body. With water still trickling down her back, she pulled on a pair of panties and was hunting for her bra when she heard a door close downstairs. She grabbed her robe, slipped her arms into the sleeves, and grabbed the folder from the table by the window as she went. She flew down the stairs—had to catch him before he left—pivoted around the bottom post and ran for the kitchen.
He was sitting right where she’d left him, staring out the window, until he heard her and turned.
“I thought I heard the door,” she stammered.
“Sam wanted out.” He turned back to the window. “He catches on so fast to everything else, why can’t he learn to return the tennis balls to that bucket?” It sounded to her like a halfhearted attempt to say something to cover an awkward moment.
Kate began to worry that what she held in her hand wouldn’t be enough, that she had waited too late. But that was a chance she had to take because she didn’t have anything else—only the drawings she had been doing of him from that very first day, in the museum. A story she would never be able to put into words.
“Sam is too intelligent to find chasing balls inside a fence any challenge,” she said as she went to him. “He just indulged you a few times because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She laid the bulging folder on the table in front of him.
Max glanced up, then at the folder. As he opened it and saw himself as she had—a middle-aged hippie with a beard and one eyebrow raised—he smiled but shook his head. Then he discovered the hastily sketched cartoon beneath it—a man in a mouse-colored suit with a long tail trailing behind him, timidly knocking on one side of a door, emerging from the other side as a roaring lion. That one brought a laugh, and he began turning the sheets like the pages of a book, anxious now to see the next one, and the next, as it dawned on him that they were all depictions of him—seen through Kate’s eyes. The look of consternation when he realized she had pulled his leg about Sam. Standing on her front porch in the dark, eyes and mouth cold as the blanket of snow behind him. Stepping out of his car at the gas station in Houston, angry yet overjoyed to see her.
When he came to the last one, a pen-and-ink drawing of his hands, he looked up with a question in his eyes. Kate wasn’t sure what he was asking—why just his hands, or why any of them.” ‘Let me count the ways,’” she whispered, hoping he would understand what she meant.
When his eyes came alive with a smile that told her everything she needed to know, Kate bent and wrapped her arms around his neck. Then, after a minute, Max pulled her down on his lap and wrapped his arms around her.
He began spending more time at his office, but nothing like the twelve to fourteen hours he’d been putting in before Kate came to Houston. He didn’t have to, he told her, and now he didn’t want to.
One afternoon he came home early to give her a tennis lesson before it got dark, followed by his special mesquitegrilled chicken. That was what Kate really looked forward to, eating at home and discussing the day over a glass of wine while they worked on the meal together.
She spent another morning at the hospital to observe the postoperative knees of Mike Tinsley’s patients and picked up a copy of the chapters he’d completed so far. After that she worked on illustrations in the morning, then spent a couple of hours in the afternoon reading, making notes about what needed illustrating, and sketched any ideas that came to her.
She also fell into the habit of waking just as it was beginning to get light and would lie in bed letting her imagination float ideas and images to the surface of her mind. One was pure serendipity, like the watercolor wash born of an accident during surgery, when Mike nicked a blood vessel with his bone drill, flooding the entire field with a quick rush of blood. More often than not, though, she found herself trying to construct a series of events to account for Tashat’s premature end. And then, inspired by the transparencies she’d done for Tinsley, she began painting Tashat as she saw her in those early-morning half dreams.
The following Saturday Max insisted that she come to his study for a different kind of lesson. He’d clipped the printout of the superimposed skulls of Tashat and Nefertiti to the viewbox mounted on the wall behind his desk, and she assumed he was working on something to do with that. Instead, he turned the monitor of his PC so they both could see it and brought up a picture with text, an axial “slice” across the human chest cavity. Kate skimmed the first few lines of text.
“Because of the obliquity, only a portion of each rib is seen in each axial cut. One can see the articulation of the rib with—”
“This software package is called Radiologic Anatomy,” Max explained. “Mostly it’s used as a teaching tool, but it’s fairly encyclopedic so I like to keep it around as a reference. I thought you might want to get familiar with how to use it. What you do is click on any part of the body to get a CT image like this one. Or a regular radiogram. Or a dissection slide. The arrows and other icons at the bottom of the screen let you move it left or right, or zero in on a particular part and blow it up.”
He moved the mouse, clicked on the head of da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man with his arms outstretched inside a circle, and the image disappeared, then was replaced by an axial view of the skull and brain. Next he demonstrated how to move in and out, then called up a dissection slide of a matching area of the brain.
“Here, you try it,” he said, turning the mouse over to her. She did, and was hooked. It wasn’t until he called her to lunch that she realized she’d been sitting there for two whole hours.
“You should’ve booted me out sooner,” she mumbled by way of apology for taking over his study.
Max just grinned. “I’ve got some other stuff you might want to look at now that you’ve got the feel of things. I think Jose has an orthopedic tutorial, but I’ll ask around at the office and see what else is available. If you want.”
“I want. But only if someone else won’t be needing it for a couple of days.”
By the end of the following week she was almost finished with Tashat. Hurrying in case Max should come home early, she fitted the last two transparencies into the small glass panes. Afterward she paced the kitchen, watching the alcove as the light changed with the moving sun, trying to decide if she needed to change anything.
When she heard Max’s car in the driveway she was overcome by a sense of déjà vu, and realized she was playing the same scene she’d set up the day she had her hair cut. This time she stood out of his line of view as he came in the back door.
“Jesus!” he whispered under his breath. “For a minute I thought she was alive.”
Kate had fitted the plastic sheets over the small glass squares, turning the multipaned alcove window into a life-size viewbox lit by natural light. Now, with the sun almost directly behind her, Tashat appeared to be walking toward them.
“It’s in her physical attitude, too, not just her eyes,” he mused. “Something she has to keep the lid on. So much energy, so much … life.”
“I saw a dress like that i
n the Petrie Museum in London,” Kate explained, “from a much earlier period. Cleo would be all over me for taking historical liberties, but I thought it suited her.” Tiny stitched pleats ran across the yoke of the white-linen sheath and down the long, tight sleeves. Otherwise, it was perfectly plain and fell straight to her ankles.
Kate had painted Tashat’s hair gathered into a knotted filet with sky-blue beads at each intersection of the twisted linen string. Other than that her only adornment was a garland of red berries mixed with waxy green leaves—that and the drawstring bag swinging from one shoulder.
“The berries are a nice touch,” Max commented as he pulled Kate in front of him, wrapped his arms around her from behind and put his cheek against her temple. “D’you suppose she carried medicines in that bag?”
“It’s big enough to hold lots of things, even a scribe’s palette.”
“Think about it, Kate. She had to be a member of the aristocracy or she wouldn’t have been mummified and painted with anything like the skill we saw on that cartonnage. So what could have been going on back then to get an Egyptian of her class in trouble?”
Kate could feel the tension in his arms and knew he was either excited or upset about something. She also knew he would tell her in his own good time.
“If she didn’t die during the reign of Tut, Ay, or Horemheb—the three pharaohs who are missing from the list on her coffin—then she must have lived either just before or just after them. Before would be under Akhenaten, a period of social and economic upheaval. If she lived after ward, well, none of the three pharaohs who followed Akhenaten left any heirs. That could mean a power struggle, probably between the priests and the army.”
“If Tashat’s father was a priest, she would have been aligned with them. Maybe she came out on the losing side.”
“Or her father did,” Kate suggested. “Say he got crosswise of Horemheb and didn’t survive her. Given their habit of wiping a person from history by banning his name or destroying his body, sometimes both, that inscription may not give his real name. Nebamen means favorite of Amen, which must have been as common as Smith back then.”
The Eye of Horus Page 33