Squinting into eyes and ears through a scope, begrudgingly loaned to her by a sour-faced hospitalist, she asked about the book. It’s from my school days, Abigail Willard said. I’m relearning.
Dissociative amnesia. A major case of memory loss, due to the axonal head injury and the psychic trauma from the fall, erasing so much of that year her boyfriend died.
And now, since her collapse last November, the brain bleed and coma that followed—the late effect of that original injury, an effect which started gradually then became acute—amnesia returned. But of course, a key piece of her brain was excised in emergency surgery. Thus much of 2015 had been wiped away. Clean.
The ever-changing brain can be a merciful master of forgetfulness and deceit.
The examining room interview yielded the woman’s only remaining fragments of that year: mostly happy ones centering on her children. A school concert of love songs. Her son befriending a stray cat. A holiday feast made and served at home.
Obviously, her journal entries record other occurrences, much more momentous, more shocking, more triste. But, in support of the rehabilitation process, Chief Detective Leverett has suggested that she is not ready to read those journals. Maybe once my investigations are finished, he said. When she is stronger.
Did the husband know about the journals? If so, he would know that this police detective, Leverett, and his wife had . . .
And who was Leverett to make such decisions, and how had he accessed those journal files? She supposed police detectives had their ways. Especially a chief of police detectives.
Best to focus on the neurology.
Yes, dissociative amnesia, certainly it was part of the overall picture. But she was certain: Mrs. Willard’s brain contained more complicated mysteries. They were to be found in that miniscule area of darkness. The part removed. The void.
She had four more days in New York to develop and present final conclusions. Tonight, she would dine with the California physicist, Dr. Shuttlesworth. A slight man with russet-brown skin and a rather prickly demeanor, and some very outré theories of his own. It should be an interesting night out.
She headed out from her hotel for a dusk run in Central Park, thinking of the woman, a devoted wife and mother and also, as her journals made clear, a furnace of ambition. Still burning, she suspected—look how Ms. Willard was determined to teach herself again, wielding that book of colors. Running through dark trees up a long sloping drive, certain synchronicities seemed increasingly clear. She wondered if the two of them—Abigail Willard and herself—weren’t being twinned somehow, paired by some unseen hand. She is here in New York City trying to tease out the meaning of this woman’s story, but who—what omniscience—was mapping her own?
PERSONAL WORK LOG: Garrett L. Shuttlesworth, December 5, 2016
* * *
Everything is happening all at once, I reminded them at today’s meeting. The stack of photos, the layers of time. The math supports the theory, ever since Einstein.
But I know you two aren’t big on math, I said.
My undergrad degree is in algebra and number theory, said Dr. Kazemy.
I stand corrected, I said. She smiled, with what seemed to me admirable good nature.
Anyhow, I said, let me read you this entry from her shrink’s records.
(And, by the way, via what unorthodox means did her shrink’s records get into these files? I asked. Jameson glowered, in a way that made it clear I should drop that line of inquiry.)
Then I read aloud to them Dr. Merle Unzicker’s final notation on young Abigail, dated November 30, 1991.
SESSION NOTES
* * *
Treatment terminated due to a grievous accident.
I will see her again in 24 years. She mentioned this a few times, over the last several weeks.
I found it amusing, this pronouncement. Like something she got from a sidewalk psychic or a Chinese fortune cookie.
Now, I find it less amusing. This strange statement.
I have failed with A. This case will haunt me.
ABBY, DECEMBER 5, 2016
After all of today’s medical business was finally done, I headed to the new studio.
Still getting used to it.
Just color studies. I started with reds. Terra rossa, carmine, Venetian. Square after square. The colors vibrate.
Dennis is in his place next door. The new soundproofing is doing its job. My space is large, quiet, clean, with daylight filtering in from the north, through two rows of high windows.
I paint here mostly early mornings and a few evenings, if I’m not too tired after work. Soon, I will scale up from part- to full-time at the new job. The pace at that office is breakneck, but designing for a global news outfit has turned out to be exciting. Dennis says we could do okay on what he’s earning through sales, but I now understand that I need and truly value the satisfactions and steadiness and centering realities of a paycheck job. Plus my medical costs. Self-employed artists get screwed on health care, no matter how many big metal sculptures they sell.
When we returned to the house, Ben and Gianna had fixed dinner for us. Everyone takes such good care of me these days. Pete is in the dorm, but he calls almost every evening, to check in on me, he says. And Wowza the cat winds himself around my legs. He took a liking to me during the first months of my recuperation, when I snoozed most of the day and wandered a bit at night, like a cat.
I understand that I have lost something. I know this to be true. I wake up feeling absence. An ache I can’t pinpoint or name. A void. With a faint gravitational pull, as if my inner light, which I hope to shine on the world, is instead looping backward and in. But, this feeling dissipates, usually, as I go about my routines. And as Dennis always says, the best thing for me now, the only way, is forward.
PERSONAL WORK LOG: Garrett L. Shuttlesworth, December 6, 2016
* * *
Last night, Dr. Kazemy and I met over astronomically priced rib eyes and Côtes du Rhône at a Midtown steakhouse. (Who set Humboldt State’s per diem rate for research travel? They’ve clearly never set foot in New York City.) It started as a bit of a thorny debate, but it may result in a workable theory.
(She is formidable. Intense.)
“I’ve spent months staring at this space in the brain,” she said. “Trauma-induced injury, damage from the fall. This damaged tissue resulted in amnesia, but as it changed with age and time, it also altered function near the amygdala. An abnormality in that area can cause hallucinations, for example.”
“If it’s just hallucinations,” I said, “how do you explain the physical evidence?”
“The portrait in the application file, the paint chip in the matchbox. The location tracking on the phone.” She sighed. “I’m not sure.”
“All that,” I said, “plus the house going down in flames. In my thinking, the party known as A torched the place. It represented a future she didn’t want.”
Dr. Kazemy scoffed. “Leverett thinks it was triggered by one of the sons, the miscreants, candles in bedroom, playing with chemicals.”
“But in the journals, it was the girl who said, ‘Burn it down.’”
“I’ve sometimes wondered if Abigail set the fire herself,” she said. “One will see aggression, destructive impulses, when an abnormality impinges upon certain tissues. Look, the woman took a sledgehammer to the Bank of America.”
(She chewed furiously. She is a petite person, this doctor, but I couldn’t help noticing that she was wolfing down a gigantic piece of meat. I enjoyed observing an impassioned professional. Physicists can be so wooden.)
“Dr. Kazemy.” I lifted my wine, sipped deeply. The tannins fortified me. “Will you indulge me, look up from your microscope and think macro, for a moment?”
She put down her fork and knife and nodded at me, solemn.
“I’ve played with some formulas and run the simulations hundreds of times this past year,” I said. “It seems to me that there’s something paradigm-shifting here. Quant
um physics forces us to grapple with ideas our brains aren’t able to process easily, but that doesn’t mean these theories aren’t viable.”
“It is very outlandish, what you’ve been saying in that conference room,” she said, frowning. She poured herself a second glass of wine. “She can see through layers of time?”
“It would explain some of the inexplicable elements of this story.”
She swirled her wine, then sipped deeply. She stared at me for a long moment, in a way that made me a bit nervous. “There were things that troubled me,” she finally said. “That didn’t seem hallucinatory in nature, that seemed not logical but nevertheless true to life. I will admit.”
At last—a bit of give. As my quantum prof at Berkeley said, we have to slow down from time to time and let the rest of the human race catch up.
“So you were a math major,” I said, draining my glass, helping myself to more.
She nodded. “At the Sorbonne.”
“Well, does the Sorbonne offer English lit classes, by chance?”
“I studied a lot of Shakespeare,” she said, looking a bit baffled. “Why?”
“I took a lot of poetry classes.”
She stabbed her last bit of meat and, chewing it, said, “Go on, then. Recite.”
I swigged again from my goblet, looked down into that ruby pond, where I could see bits of myself refracted. I gathered it from my memory. “Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present.”
Dr. Kazemy stared at me for a long moment. “Oh,” she said. The table’s candle reflected in her wide brown eyes, a rather distracting effect. She put her fork and knife down and waved for the check.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, DECEMBER 7, 2016
Garrett Shuttlesworth had already arrived. In front of him sat a cardboard tray holding two coffees. She took her now-customary spot at the end of the ridiculously long table. “Thought we could both use this,” he said, grinning and handing her a cup.
They had been texting all night.
When the chief detective walked in, she said, “We are ready to deliver our final conclusions.”
Leverett looked from her to Garrett. “Together? OK then. Go ahead.” He lowered himself into his spot between them, straightened his tie. He looked especially dyspeptic, she thought.
And then she began to speak.
Diffuse and mysterious. This is how neurology describes the aftereffects of axonal head wounds. They jostle the white matter of the brain. Such insults can wreak havoc on the impacted cells, rattle the connections between neurons, and alter functioning and perception in ways that are tricky to predict and difficult to treat.
Abigail Willard’s head wound, incurred in her 1991 fall and then slowly healed in the months thereafter, is what planted the seed for her bizarre year of 2015. It is not uncommon for sufferers of head injuries early in life to develop brain-structure abnormalities in later years. A car crash at eighteen puts one at increased risk of aneurysm, hemorrhage, or a brain tumor in middle or old age.
So it is reasonable to conclude that the abnormality, or anomaly, from 1991, changing and shifting over time as all parts of the body do, began to dramatically alter her behaviors—and her perceptions—in 2015.
Since the area was removed following her brain bleed, the incidents have stopped. They will not recur.
But the girl she saw in 2015 did not live just in her mind.
The physicist nodded here, smiling broadly. Tristane felt encouraged.
Dr. Shuttlesworth has told us that although we experience time as unidimensional—as a unidirectional sequence of events—physicists have known this to be an illusion since Einstein.
And so working together, we have come to our conclusion. As T. S. Eliot wrote in his “Four Quartets,” “Time the destroyer is time the preserver.”
She exchanged a glance with him. He seemed trying not to beam.
The destructive injury, changing over time, nanometer by nanometer, created an opening. Through it, Abigail Willard saw life as it truly is. Moments preserved, always and forever, because those moments happen, always and forever.
A girl preserved, always and forever, because that girl lives, always and forever.
Mrs. Willard’s brain anomaly, growing and morphing as her brain aged, cracked open a portal that allowed her to see what others cannot see.
What the rest of us can perceive only through a veil of shifting half-truths and guesses.
Even amid her anguish and confusion, she could see it with paradigm-shifting clarity.
The essential self. The timeless self.
ABBY, DECEMBER 10, 2016
Pete finished his finals and caught a late train home for the holiday break. So good to see him walking out of the station with his big bag over his shoulder, tossing us a slight wave, his dark hair falling across his dark eyes.
I miss him a lot, when he’s off at school. I wonder if the transition has been a bit harder for me than for other moms from his class. One of them, Dennis said her name was Katharine Erdmann, had come by with a veggie lasagna, right after my release from the hospital last spring, and she said she couldn’t wait for her daughter to get out of the house. “She’s going to UCLA,” she said, “and I asked her, wait, aren’t there any good schools in Australia?” She laughed. And then she said, “I heard Pete is going upstate somewhere.”
“Yes, I heard that too,” I said. She’d looked at me very strangely. But I had been elsewhere when the applications went out, and, just a few days home, I was barely back to myself. The whole thing seemed more than I could manage, him going away. It added to the sense I had that I’d incurred some losses. I just couldn’t quite say what the losses were.
But Pete was gone, and then he came back, and tonight, we sat up talking after dinner, he and I. The election, it had been clamoring all around me, but I have been focused on recovering.
“Inauguration Day,” Pete said. “The Brigade. We’re going to march on Washington.”
My heart revved. “Yes,” I said.
“You can’t,” called Dennis from the kitchen, where he was wrist-deep in dishes. “You’ll be in Vienna.”
Right. Viennarte. We’d been invited to speak on a panel about Mariah. Our romantic and political entanglements had been juicy fodder for the art-world gossips: “A tragic mess usually raises one’s profile,” said Jillian Broder when she’d dropped by the studio a few weeks ago. She demanded that we both show work in her Viennarte booth. “You were a star last time, dear heart, I demand you come for another round,” she said to Dennis. Then she turned to me. “And Abigail. You continue to be the most astute colorist I know—in fact, this post-catastrophe work has a startling, unexpected, passionate freshness.” She put her hand on my cheek. “My beauty. Never, never, no way, was I ever going to allow Matthew Legge-Lewis to poach my once and future discovery.”
So, come January, we would be in Vienna.
And my darling Pete would take to the streets. But for now we sat together. I held his strong, warm hand in both of mine.
I wished I could be in two places at once. But no.
“I guess you’ll have to march for both of us,” I said.
December 15, 2016
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected], [email protected]
To each of you, first, a word of thanks, for your expert analysis and your discretion up to this point.
I understand that you both see this case as “paradigm shifting.” Ultimately, that’s all above my pay grade. Not every question has been answered to my satisfaction, but there comes a time to move on.
Please destroy all files and records having to do with the Abigail Willard matter. And, with all due respect, don’t cross me on that.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, DECEMBER 23, 2016
Laurin has barely spoken to her since she returned. He has been as frosty as the merciless Quebec wi
nd. Preparing his morning espresso, Buccardi whispers there is some kind of death watch—Laurin’s assistant, young Molly Jiang, had filed a major harassment complaint. “The man didn’t see the writing on the wall,” he said. “But the dinosaur hunt has begun, and he has a target painted right on his derriere.” Then he turned to her, stirring sugar into the tiny cup. “So, you say you won’t seek publication on your findings from this New York case after all. I think that’s a shame.” But then he lowered his voice again. “No matter, Tristane. New staff appointments will be posted January 1, and let’s just say your name has been bandied all about.”
“January 1! I’ll be on holiday,” she said.
“Oh? Winter hiking, I suppose? Or skiing this time?”
“No. I’m going somewhere green. California.”
“Ah!” Buccardi sighed. “I do love California.”
January 1, 2017
* * *
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Garrett, I always try to clean up a bit around New Year’s. As part of that, I was getting ready to delete this email account. Consider it over and done. Forget about it.
But shit. G, I can’t.
It’s like you said. She’s always here. All the time.
And it’s not that I loved her. I suppose I did have feelings for her.
That’s not what’s bugging me. It’s something else. Something I didn’t tell you and Kazemy. For obvious reasons.
I’m the chief of detectives, and the breadwinner. I’ll put one foot in front of the other, what else can I do. I don’t get to understand this whole thing. I don’t get to know what it means. I just feel empty. I don’t know what any of it means. I only know it’s shaken me so hard, I don’t know if I will find solid ground again.
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