On the other hand, if Ruben did get involved…
Evie in the dressing room, leaning so close her knees brushed his knees. The two of them thrown back together, speaking softly as they used to, contemplating possibilities.
Ruben saw himself reflected in the window glass and saw that he was smiling. His body relaxing into the pleasure of that possibility.
Then he screamed—sat upright and lurched around, screaming. Reflected beside him in the window, sitting in his other chair, was a man in a tank top and flip-flops, with long tangled hair bleached by the sun, smiling the serene smile of a maniac. The face of this man was injured, cut and bleeding profusely, but still he was smiling—
“Hey, man,” said the stranger, who was not a stranger, whom Ruben had known for all his life, “long time no see,” and Ruben flung himself toward him, his muscles tense for the kill, and slammed into the empty chair, which wobbled and crashed.
Ruben lay in silence, panting and bruised, his arms tangled with the chair’s cheap metal legs, thinking helplessly, again—
…again again again…
May 7, 2009
1.
“Consciousness is not a ‘mystery.’ We need to be careful about the words we use, and what they mean. There is no ‘mystery of consciousness.’”
The slight and disheveled woman at the front of the lecture hall looked down at her notecards and paused, as if she had found, written on one of the cards, the word [pause].
“The word carries mystery, an association with the supernatural, with the spiritualist, or even with the religious or theistic. As we turn from specific pathologies of the brain and toward questions of its unified functioning, it is imperative that you eliminate the word mystery from your vocabulary.”
The woman squinted at her cards and then looked up at her audience.
Was it over? Shenk shifted hopefully in his seat.
She flipped to the next card. No. Not over.
“Especially pernicious, and especially to be avoided,” the lecturer continued, “are certain simple solutions one hears suggested, regarding this quote-unquote mystery. Such as what is called the ‘theater of consciousness,’ or ‘Cartesian theater.’”
The woman carefully pressed a single button on her laptop, and the PowerPoint projected behind her advanced to its next slide, showing a cartoon: a man in his kitchen, looking at an apple, while—inside the man’s head—a tiny version of the same man sat in an armchair, gazing at an apple projected on a television screen. The cartoon was satisfying and clear: everything we look at, it suggested, is projected inside our minds, on a kind of screen.
The lecturer glared at the cartoon, her mouth a twist of dissatisfaction.
“This is wrong,” she said to it, and then again, to her audience. “Wrong. There is no little person inside of your head, synthesizing external stimuli.”
She clicked to the next slide and continued. Her voice was flat and uninflected, her speech spiked with academic jargon that was making little impression on the bored undergrads who sat in clumps and clusters, spaced out through the raked tiers of the half-filled auditorium.
But the real question was, how would it go over with the pair of middle-aged Jews who sat in the very last row, a set-off pair within the larger group, like the two codgers in the Muppet Show balcony.
“So?” said Ira Liptack to Jay Shenk. “What do you think?”
“Well, she sure is something,” murmured Shenk. “She’s something all right.”
Liptack winced. He knew a Shenkian dodge when he heard one. A lapsed cardiologist who had been Shenk’s medical-expert scout since dinosaur times, Lippy was on the hunt for an expert in rare brain conditions, someone who could provide the definitive analysis of the Keener boy.
Shenk knew that if he was going to fix blame for Wesley’s condition on the hospital, he had to explain it, and he hadn’t yet found a doctor who could do that—and not for lack of trying. Dozens of them, neurologists and psychologists and virologists and specialists of all stripes, by now had made the pilgrimage to Valley Village Methodist to watch the boy walk his endless circles. Some on Shenk’s invitation; some on the hospital’s; some on the steam of their own curiosity. They came from other parts of LA; they came from the rest of California; they came from all over the world.
Beth Keener would stand beside each new doctor, down in the basement room where Wesley was now kept, biting her nails, trembling with hope, and Shenk would stand beside her, shifting from foot to foot, her nervousness his as well. She wanted the child healed; he wanted someone who could make a convincing case that he had been the victim of malpractice. The doctors came and stared into Wesley’s empty eyes, writing in their pads, murmuring dictation. They took notes, they took blood, they took Shenk’s number, but they never called. No one was prepared to make a diagnosis, to stake their reputation on announcing definitively what the hell was going on with this kid.
But if Lippy thought this lady, clicking her way through her little PowerPoint here, was gonna be the golden ticket on this thing, then Lippy—bless his heart—had lost his frikkin’ mind.
First of all, this professor—wait, no, not a professor, a lecturer—this Theresa Pileggi, she looked to be maybe seventeen years old. Which obviously she could not be, not if she was professing to a couple hundred undergrads on the mysteries of the brain—sorry, can’t say mystery—at UC Riverside. But in black flats and a limp ponytail and a beige pantsuit a half size too big, she looked like a high school junior up there, giving a poster-board presentation about climate change.
More to the point, she couldn’t hold the room. This fact Shenk could confirm with a quick glance down the rows of seats—those of Pileggi’s students who weren’t nodding off were engaged on their laptops, playing video games, chatting in text bubbles, tooling idly through auction sites. If Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation went to trial—again, worst-case scenario, God forbid Shenk couldn’t settle this puppy—he’d need an expert who could ensorcell twelve honorable citizens. In big cases like this, jurors tend to pay too much heed to the Thomas Angelo Catanzaros of the world, with their white coats and wise faces. Who are we, mere mortals, to play Monday morning quarterback to this noble doctor, this healer of men?
What was needed as corrective, then, was a plaintiff’s witness smart and charismatic enough to present a credible counternarrative to the medical history, but also to rewrite the myth of the case. This is not a tale of a heroic doctor, striving mightily but unable to turn the tide of fate, but of a tragically afflicted family, laid low in the aftermath. A family deserving not only of empathy but of recompense, a financial reward that will never replace their loss, but should still be pretty darn big.
So what you needed, if for whatever reason you couldn’t settle, was to find precisely the right expert.
But this lady? This lady was not that.
“Which brings us to the central question,” said Pileggi, her voice stuck in its monotonic drone. “Once we have ejected this homunculus from the seat of consciousness, what, if anything, is in its place? Which is to say: is there such a thing as a person?”
She waited, but none of these undergrads hazarded a guess.
As far as Shenk was concerned, the answer was yes, there was such a thing as a person, and furthermore this person had to pee and then get back on the road for his ninety-minute drive back to West LA.
“All right, Lippy?” he whispered. “Shall we?”
“Yup,” said Liptack. “Sorry about this one.”
“Excuse me? Gentlemen?”
Theresa Pileggi had found them back there. She was squinting, shading her eyes with her non–index card hand, peering to see them from all the way in the front.
“Oh, sorry.” Shenk waved to the teacher and then, merrily, to the rows of students who had craned their necks around, mildly roused from their stupor by the random interruption. “Sorry, ma’am. We’re going.”
“Doctor,” Pileggi corrected flatly. “Not ma’am.�
�� She kept her gaze locked on him. “And I might have guessed, Mr. Shenk, that having come all this way you would at least wait until we can speak directly.”
“Oh. I, uh—” He looked at Ira, who had not told Shenk that Pileggi knew they were coming. Ira looked at his thumbs. “Listen. I hear ya.”
“We break in twenty minutes,” continued the professor, her tone forceful. “Let’s talk then. In the hallway outside.”
Shenk gave her a thumbs-up, feeling on his neck the heat of some ancient residual high school capacity for public embarrassment. Pileggi clicked to her next slide, a brain like a pink and wrinkled planet against a field of dark, as her students returned to their respective internets and Liptack pursed his face to keep from laughing.
“Listen, no hurt feelings and all, and I thank you for your time, but it’s not going to be a good fit,” Shenk told Dr. Pileggi when he and Liptack met her as commanded outside in the hallway at the break. “For what I need.”
“I understood you needed an expert witness.”
“Well. First of all, hopefully not. Hopefully, we’re going to settle it. No witnesses required. Secondly, uh—frankly…”
Shenk didn’t want to offend. He had to admire her moxie, he really did. And her voice in conversation was not nearly so monotone. She had, in fact, a certain fire in her, a certain firmness, out here in the hallway that was entirely absent at the lectern.
Still, though: No chance. In no universe would he be putting this assistant or adjunct or whatever she was in front of a jury, this frizzy-haired young woman with the nubby pantsuit and the ill-matching flats, with a comically large messenger bag hanging from her shoulder like a sack of fruit.
He wanted to say it without hurting her feelings, but then she said it herself.
“You think I am too young, and that I look younger.”
“Yes. Well, that is part of it. That is all part of it.”
“I understand your concerns, Mr. Shenk, and I would only counter them by saying that I know what is wrong with that child.”
Shenk tilted his head. “You do?”
“Yes, Mr. Shenk.”
“You’ve never seen him, though.”
“No. But I’ve examined the materials I was provided by your associate.”
Neither of them looked at Lippy, who was leaning against the wall, under the NEUROSCIENCE DEPARTMENT billboard with its VOLUNTEERS NEEDED fliers and yellowing Far Side cartoons, waiting for them to wrap up.
“And from that you have diagnosed him.”
“Yes.”
“Very impressive.”
She nodded. Of course she was impressive. It went without saying. She was persistent. She was smart. Her self-confidence was a marvel.
“Enlighten me on something,” said Shenk, smiling softly. “What is a lecturer? Exactly? Not quite the same as a professor, is it?”
“No.”
“So, like, an assistant professor?”
“Not quite.”
“Right. And—just so I’m clear—as far as the actual practice of medicine goes…”
Pileggi clicked sharply, like an insect. “I’m not an MD, no. But I don’t need to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“For your case. For this.”
“The thing is,” Shenk said, “and I don’t want to be an asshole, pardon my French, but for my cases it’s actually important.”
“Not this one,” she said immediately, and he said, “Yes, this one,” and then he felt like a little kid, doing are-not-am-too on the schoolyard.
“You were going to tell me how, in this kind of case, you require the testimony of a practicing doctor, to point out the medical errors that were made in the course of treatment.” She straightened abruptly, swiveled toward him. “In this particular case, however, what you need is someone to testify not on the mechanics of the brain, but on its chemistry and neurophysiology.”
Pileggi pronounced each of these terms with clinical overarticulation. And because she was so young, or young-looking, there was something charming about her precision. It was like she was a child, condescending to explain something complicated to her parents.
Shenk tried to figure out how old Dr. Pileggi actually was. Maybe she was thirty, but a young-looking thirty, an uncoordinated and girlish thirty. Hair uncombed, pale face blotchy in spots with acne. Eyes wide set and staring.
“I know what is wrong with this child, and how it happened. I can explain that to a jury. I would, of course, need to examine the patient in person in order to do so properly.”
Aha, thought Shenk, and said, “There it is.”
“There’s what?”
“Your angle. No offense. But there’s your angle.”
Pileggi pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, making her small face even smaller, like it was condensing into a suspicious point.
“You wanna get a peek at the weird workings of this kid’s noggin, maybe write him up in a medical journal. Elephant Man kinda thing.”
Shenk kept his tone pretty light, making sure she knew he was just joshing and all, but Pileggi did not smile.
“I did not become a neurologist in order to satisfy petty curiosity, Mr. Shenk, and my ego does not require it.”
“So why, then?” said Shenk. “Why so eager for the gig, if not for the—you know. The weirdness. Why dragoon me and keep me waiting out here while you finished thrilling the masses with today’s lecture?”
“Money.”
Shenk’s eyebrows shot up. Liptack looked over from the wall, and the two shared a frank, amused glance. This, now, thought Shenk, this I like.
“Expert witness work, I have been led to understand, is highly remunerative. I am, as I said, an absolute expert in my field. The fact of my being a young woman, or a lecturer rather than a full professor, should not disqualify me from participating in this work and being rewarded for it. Obviously, yes, I am drawn to the complexities of this young man’s condition, and I would welcome the opportunity to examine him firsthand. But the two motives are not exclusive, Mr. Shenk. For me, they are entwined.”
Shenk almost laughed out loud. This confession of mixed motivations, this reframing of contradiction as nuance, even as multiplicity of spirit, was a line he gave to clients or prospective clients all the time. Including, most recently, to the Keeners themselves.
I want to make a living, and I want to help your son.
Both.
“All right,” said Shenk, with a quick glance at his Rolex. “So what is it?”
“What is what?”
“You said you know what he’s got. So? What’s the diagnosis?”
If Shenk thought he was going to take Pileggi off-balance with the abruptness of his transition, his certainty was misplaced.
“Hire me,” she said flatly. “Write me a check. And I’ll be happy to explain.”
Shenk smiled. He told her he would think about it. He and Liptack started out, and then he turned back.
“So you’re the one, huh?” he said.
“Excuse me?” said Theresa Pileggi.
“You’re the one who can heal him.”
“I said I had diagnosed him, Mr. Shenk. I didn’t say I could heal him.” Pileggi frowned minutely. “He cannot be healed.”
2.
The Shenks, father and son, lived in a three-bedroom one-story house in Mar Vista, on Tabor Street, off Palms, a four-lane connector running west from Shenk & Partners all the way over into Venice.
The house on Tabor had been discovered by Marilyn, appointed by Marilyn, decorated by Marilyn, and left largely as she left it, lo these many years since her death. In the years of his widowerhood Shenk had done nothing with the place, not so much as moved a chair from over there to over here. Not necessarily out of nostalgia, Ruben knew, but more because he was just as busy now as he was when Ruben was little, when Marilyn was alive, when their days were Shenk at work and Marilyn schlepping her infant son from the appliance store to the furniture store to the wallpaper display room, makin
g all the small decisions, making it perfect.
And though there were pictures of his late mother everywhere—notably the famous snapshot of her at an LAX baggage carousel, beaming at the camera while infant Ruben gawks wide-eyed at his new native land, reaching out his hand toward his mother’s tiny Starbucks espresso cup—it was in the spaces of the house that Ruben found her every day, in the spaces and the colors: his mom in the bathroom tiles and his mom in the springtime green of the drapes. He’d gotten such a short time with Marilyn Shenk, but he carried his memories of her like we all do of our mothers from our childhood: snatches of feeling, elusive and overwhelming, frustratingly small and impossibly large.
Right now, waiting for his father to come home, Ruben was playing with one of Marilyn’s many tchotchkes, a little handcrafted turtle, too precious to be a toy, too chintzy to be of real worth. The turtle’s cartilaginous back was formed of two symmetrical ceramic planes, each individual hexagonal panel studded with a green-hued semicircle of glass. The little mouth opened and closed with a tiny lever seated just behind the head, and that’s what Ruben was doing now, opening and closing the turtle’s tiny mouth, toying with it as he had been toying with it through various anxieties for as long as he could remember.
He ran his thumb over the satisfyingly textured dome of the turtle and made it talk while rehearsing the conversation with his father, now imminent, which he had been dreading since he got today’s mail and read the letter that he had folded and jammed into his pocket, and which was still there, one sharp corner jabbing his thigh.
The letter would emerge from his pocket soon and be unfolded. As soon as Shenk came through the door, if Ruben had the courage. But it would be OK. His father would understand.
“Of course he will,” said Ruben to Ruben. “It’ll be OK.”
He looked to the turtle, and the turtle looked back, incapable of offering a consoling word or look, eyeless and speechless.
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