I confessed all this like a tire hemorrhaging air pressure. In one big, satisfying rush, I told her things I’d never told anyone, things I was barely conscious of myself, and as I spoke, Dr. White hardly moved. But she was attentive. The way she held her mouth slightly ajar, I got the feeling of overwhelming empathy, as if she could experience my fear through some sort of cosmic osmosis. She had a motherly way about her, gentle and caring, though I noticed no pictures of family, only her paintings of people that did not resemble people, just a mash of human characteristics, an eye here, an eyebrow there, a foot turned to an impossible angle.
“Recently,” I continued. “I’ve been confusing them with my actual memories. It takes a while for me to register if a memory occurred or if it was one of these hallucinations. I’m never entirely sure, though.”
Dr. White nodded knowingly, like this was nothing to be alarmed at. “I would like for you to do something for me.” She reached into a drawer in her desk and pulled out a stack of paper and a pencil. “Draw a picture of your family. Don’t worry about your artistic prowess. This isn’t a contest. But I do ask you not to draw stick figures and that you draw the entire body, not just a portion.”
I wondered who I should include, what she meant by “family.” My immediate family? My wife? My unborn son? Father? Cousins? Grandparents? She filled in the time I spent thumping the eraser against the paper with small talk. She asked me about the University of Oklahoma, if I missed it there—she had visited once on a speaking tour and thought Norman was a lovely town. I loved the way she said “lovely,” like how hot caramel slides down melting ice cream. She asked if I was married, and I answered in the affirmative, and she told me about her three husbands, all dead now, one murdered, another heart attack, and the third in a car accident, strange she didn’t have pictures, but no children, though. How about you, she asked, and I told her about Sara and I expecting, and she congratulated me, again warmly, with the utmost sincerity.
“Let me see your picture,” she said.
I’d drawn a picture of my family, not even recollecting that I’d made a decision on who to draw or even putting pencil to paper. There were three of us, Sara, me, and the baby. We weren’t holding him. He was on the ground, swaddled and off to the side. Sara and I looked forward, but had no faces.
“Have you ever driven someplace,” Dr. White said, “perhaps someplace that you’re used to going to, home maybe, or work, and minutes will go by on your commute, but you have no memory of actually driving. You’ll all of a sudden find yourself in front of your house or your office, but you don’t remember if you had to stop at a red light or if you saw the mailman delivering letters or if you had to swerve around a familiar neighbor taking an early morning walk? Your mind was elsewhere. You were thinking of your day ahead, meetings you had scheduled, problems that needed to be addressed, something you had said to your wife before you left that morning, rushing to get that last drop of coffee in before you walked out the door.”
“I suppose,” I said. “I’m sure that happens.”
“Would you say that you were unconscious then?”
“Well, no. I couldn’t have been unconscious.”
“Or you would’ve driven off the road, right?”
“Sure. Yeah. I guess.”
“But no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t remember it.”
“So you’re saying that maybe I don’t lose touch with reality during these hallucinations?”
“Maybe,” she said. She took my picture from me, stared at it for a good long while, nodded, and then put it down on her desk. “Have you heard of heterophenomenology, Mr. Zahn?”
“Heterophenomenology?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t.”
“It’s a scientific, objective approach to the human consciousness. As a heterophenomenologist, I do not take any opinion other than what you tell me is fact, as you perceive it. If you tell me something happened, then it happened. Though, I don’t try to understand what is causing you to believe what you say. You could have experienced it, yes. But you could also be controlled by a computer program, say, that spits out a stream of thousands of digits of binary code. Or you could be a zombie, dead inside, yet somehow speaking, or maybe controlled by Descartes’s demons, a poltergeist masking as a soul.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am, Mr. Zahn.”
She crossed her legs. Varicose veins crisscrossed her ankles, and her skin was so pale I thought I could see the blood flow through her capillaries. The stream appeared to float in blobs much like a lava lamp would, and I blinked several times thinking that I was about to black out again and slip into one of my hallucinations or maybe her slow, raspy voice was somehow hypnotizing me.
“So you think I’m a zombie?”
“I didn’t say that. My point is that I can’t make a judgment about your condition as something wrong or unhealthy or as an illness.”
“I see.”
“What do you think is causing your condition?”
“Stress probably. Sleep deprivation. Maybe genetics. A brain tumor.”
“All possibilities, I suppose.” She grabbed another piece of paper. “I would like for you to draw another picture for me. Your home.”
This time she didn’t feel the need for chitchat, instead letting me focus on my drawing. I drew a street view of our apartment complex, and once complete, she took it from me and dropped it atop her desk without taking the time to look at it.
“I’d like to run an experiment,” she said. “Would you be okay with that?”
“What kind of experiment?”
“A simple cognitive exercise.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“A light experiment. Color. I want you to tell me what you see.”
“Sure.”
She readied a projector and aimed it at a white, bare wall. She dimmed the lights and clicked on the machine. A humming noise followed by a clicking filled the silence.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Yes.”
A red circle illuminated against the wall. At first it was static, but then it moved rapidly to the right and as it did it turned into a green color.
“What did you see?”
I told her.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“At first it was red, but then it moved fluidly to the right and somewhere in the middle it turned green?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. Again her smile was warm, and it made me feel comfortable. My muscles relaxed, and I could feel the apprehension draining from my body, the knots in my shoulders and neck dissolving. She had a powerful quality about her, like her presence could be used as an anesthesia.
“What if I told you that is not what actually occurred?” she said. “The tape is one red circle followed by a green circle three inches to the right. Two distinct pictures separated by 500 milliseconds.”
“I would believe you.”
“But you saw the circle move between a space where there actually wasn’t a circle.”
“Yes.”
“Does it not startle you that your consciousness somehow filled in a circle where there was no circle, it not only traversing time and space but also the color spectrum when in fact it didn’t?”
“I would say it’s fascinating.”
“This phenomenon is well-documented. It’s one of the reasons why films seem fluid. The color-phi.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s what the phenomenon is called.” She paused a moment as if allowing me to digest what she’d just revealed. “Do you not see the implications of such a phenomenon?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“It means that our consciousness is fundamentally flawed,” she said. “Two scenarios are possible. In one, there is a Stalinesque rewriting of our consciousness. We perceive the one green light and then a distinct red light shifted to the right; however, a master editor revises this co
nscious experience with what you have just reported to me, the one circle moving fluidly and changing color, with the first conscious experience completely erased from your memory. Or,” she lifted her finger in the air as if making a very important point, “an Orwellian editor is somehow editing the information that streams in from your eyeballs before it can reach the master control center in the brain where consciousness occurs.”
What she said made sense, and I could tell by the way she melted into her chair, a pleased smile spread across her elfish face, that she could see the idea register in me. I was intrigued. The implications of such revisionism could, in some sense anyway, unravel the mystery of my hallucinations. My consciousness could be being rewritten by my very brain, some sort of Stalinesque mechanism being activated for some reason, perhaps in a defensive posture, repressing harmful memories and replacing them with lurid trappings of my subconscious.
“How do we stop this revision from occurring?” I asked.
“You can’t,” she said. “It’s an intrinsic part of human consciousness that has evolved over millions of years.”
She reached back into her desk and pulled out a rectangular cardboard pack. It was purple, with large, flowing script. Systique, it said. 150 mg. A larger name was printed underneath, a long string of consonants practically illegible to me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A sample of a medication I would like you to try.”
“These will help?”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘help.’”
“Will they slow down these revisions?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I want to propose something,” she said. She opened the pack. Inside were seven bubbles filled with rectangular pink pills. “Something that is a bit, well, experimental. As a scientist I would think you might be a little more open to the suggestion than some of my other patients.”
There seemed to be two voices competing for my attention inside my head. One was telling me to beware, while the other completely trusted Dr. White. She picked lint off her black pants as she spoke, her warm and peering eyes still locked on me, unblinking, but her fingers picked away, like a chimpanzee looking for lice in the coat of his brother. Her gaze made me trust her. Her eyes were deep and brown and rich, like freshly brewed coffee, and just as comforting. But her ability to perform such detailed tasks at the same time while not devoting her full attention unnerved me, like she might have ulterior intentions just below the surface, ones that she didn’t even know that she was constructing, but still they were there, implacable and unavoidable.
“What does it do?” I asked, pointing at the pills.
“They will accelerate what you call your hallucinations. Make them more intense.”
“Why would you want to do that? I came here for help.”
“I believe this will help. Think about it, Mr. Zahn. Your subconscious is revising your memories for a reason. We could take a traditional treatment course, numb your senses, disable some of the chemical secretions in the brain, slow down the electrical circuitry so that you don’t feel a thing. That would stop these revisionist histories replacing your own, but at what cost? You wouldn’t be able to function. You wouldn’t be able to finish your dissertation. You wouldn’t be the same husband to your wife or the same father to your son. You wouldn’t be yourself. This way we might sooner discover why your mind is behaving in this manner, and either correct the error that is occurring or—”
“Or?”
“Exploit it.”
“This is crazy.”
“What you’re experiencing might very well be an evolutionary step in cognizance.”
“Or I could be suffering from severe problems.”
“All I am asking is that you think about it.”
She stood and glanced at her watch. Our time was up. She hadn’t stood since I’d arrived. She was even shorter than I’d anticipated, only coming up to about my armpits.
“You have a good day, Mr. Zahn.”
As she showed me to the door, she pushed the packet of pills into my hand.
Marcus felt dirty. He wanted to take a shower and scrub the first two layers of skin off. He wanted to burn his clothes. He wanted to sandpaper his bones. He wanted to do anything he could to get Dianne’s smell off of him, whatever that took, if it meant scraping it off with a paring knife, burning it with a blowtorch, even tearing it off with his fingernails, but, most of all, he wanted to grab Coulter and hug him and make sure that Natalie hadn’t already found out and taken his son away from him.
Not that it excused his infidelity, but he and Natalie hadn’t touched each other intimately for some time now—six, eight, nine months maybe. And when they had, it’d seemed so cold. Their lovemaking was a chore like washing the dishes or trimming the hedges. Natalie wouldn’t look at him, instead opting to lie on her side while he scooted in behind her. She didn’t move. She clasped her hands underneath her chin and didn’t blink as if she was daydreaming. Was she trying to picture herself someplace else? With another man? Was she scanning the grocery list by memory or checking off the bills that were due? Should that bother him? After fifteen years of marriage? Was that justification enough to cheat on his wife? He knew it wasn’t. But that hadn’t stopped him.
The thing that bothered him most, though, more than the infidelity itself, was that he knew he would not fire Dianne, and he would, if the opportunity arose, do it again and again and again. He would go out of his way to initiate it, in fact. He would, now that he had touched her, that soft flesh, the way her sweat tasted strangely of grapefruit, buy sleazy motel rooms at hourly rates, meet her at her apartment, risk a sexual tryst at work, in the editing room post broadcast. He’d try to tell himself not to, remind himself of all that he could lose. His son. How would he be able to live if he couldn’t see his son every day? But he was weak. The first opportunity that presented itself, he would fall deeply into Dianne.
His house appeared quiet, which was good. Natalie and Coulter must be asleep. The storm he was chasing had left the metro hours ago. Usually Natalie didn’t watch the news and simply waited for Marcus to call. “Take cover,” he’d say. “It’s bearing down on you right now.” Coulter would probably be asleep in his parents’ bed, cuddled up next to his mother. Despite being highly intelligent for his age, he still harbored an irrational fear of thunder and lightning. Marcus could see in his face that he still believed monsters lived in his closet and came out on Halloween and stormy nights to eat children. Natalie would have a file open on her lap, a brief she needed to finish in the morning or notes for an opening statement or a piece of evidence. She brought work into bed every night now. She claimed she was simply busy and overworked and trying to get that promotion. Marcus didn’t quite believe her, though. Her ambition was part of it, sure, but he couldn’t help but feel that she intentionally filled every moment of her waking life so she wouldn’t have to face him anymore.
He was right; Coulter was asleep in his parents’ bed, curled around a body pillow that was almost as big as he was. He had his thumb stuck in his mouth. Damn near twelve and still sucking his thumb. It was a habit he and Natalie had been trying to get Coulter to break, but he wouldn’t stop. They just didn’t understand it. Their doctor had said it was a comforting reaction to external, unpleasant stimuli, but they had no idea what could be causing it. He and Natalie never fought, not where they screamed and cried and threw things anyway, and never where Coulter could hear them. He never complained of being bullied at school, although Marcus had the suspicion that he might be. He didn’t come home with bruises or in tears from names he’d been called. But he was such a gangly kid, prone to get lost in a book rather than playing video games or talking on the phone with a friend. He was the type of kid Marcus would have bullied when he was in school.
But where was Natalie? Her side of the bed seemed untouched. Worried, Marcus walked downstairs. The throw blanket she kept in the living room was neatly folded atop the arm
of the couch. The television was mute, the remote control stored neatly away in a glass container on the coffee table. The kitchen was empty—she wasn’t making a late night sandwich or enjoying a glass of wine before going off to bed. Nothing seemed to be out of place. The office was quiet, the computer monitor dark. It was like she’d disappeared, left her child sleeping unattended.
That wasn’t like her.
There, on the foyer table, was a ring, reflecting the scant light filtering in through the window. Had that been there this morning when he’d left for work? Natalie had left before he had, and she wasn’t one to just leave jewelry lying around. It was her wedding band. In fifteen years of marriage, he’d never known her to take it off. She had even worn it while scuba diving last year on their trip to the Cayman Islands when the instructor had warned the pressure would make her finger feel as though it were being clamped to the bone. He picked it up and twirled it between his fingers. The metal felt cool.
Marcus was scared. She hadn’t answered when he called earlier. The phone went straight to voicemail.
That’s when Marcus heard a low rumbling, like a car engine. Confused, he walked slowly to the garage where he found Natalie, killing herself by carbon monoxide poisoning. He could hardly breathe. The fumes filled his lungs, and he couldn’t find any traces of oxygen. He pushed the button to open the door and rushed to his wife’s side. There was a pulse; she was still alive, thank God. He grabbed her underneath her arms and dragged her out onto the driveway where she wheezed for air. She didn’t wake right away, though, her eyelids fluttering, her breaths escaping in short wheezy gasps, and Marcus let her lay. He didn’t call an ambulance or a doctor or ask the neighbors for help; instead, he waited until she woke up on her own. When she came to, he didn’t say a word, just went back into the house and shut the door behind him.
An Elegant Theory Page 10
