by Dessa
The sound was pleasant enough, vaguely musical. But the constant halting made it strange—like a day spa with buffering problems. Penijean pulled up a menu on-screen where I could select the musical scale of the notes. My dad, who used to play the lute for a living, says that a lot of the piano lines I write are mixolydian, so I picked that one. (I don’t have the music theory to know what he’s talking about—I just stick to mostly white keys because they’re bigger.)
Conceptually, I could hang with this idea of unconscious learning. Pavlov’s dogs didn’t study bell and dinner. Their brains learned to associate the two, no matter what their minds were up to. But how could my brain be expected to change in such carefully defined regions, with only a MIDI chime to guide it? It seemed like a lot of information to convey with such a limited medium—like a game of charades in which you’re asked to pantomime the whole Bill of Rights.
The cat ninjas, during their training, had at least gotten warm milk. That made sense as a clear reward. But, I wondered, what if my brain doesn’t really like chimes? Penijean said we’re naturally pattern seekers—the intermittent sound would be enough to call my brain’s attention to its own behavior. Still, little pieces of a cut-up Snickers bar seemed like they would have been the safer bet.
I watched my brain slowly spin on-screen, at roughly the speed of a gyro machine. When I blinked, the front of my cortex went red for a moment: the electrical signal generated by my blinking muscles got picked up by the electrodes on my forehead. Penijean told me not to worry; the software knew to factor out the motor signal. In her regular practice, she said, patients diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or autism might try to pull off the electrodes. One had bitten her forearm, an experience she described as “an excellent reminder” to attend to the nonverbal communication of her patients. A little blinking was nothing, she assured me. But I’d already accepted red as enemy. I asked Leslie to turn off the ceiling fan to reduce the air circulating past my open eyes.
With a few keystrokes, Penijean could isolate the parts of my brain we were training on the on-screen display. “Anything you’d like to see?”
“The anterior cingulate, please.”
Until that point, I’d mostly studied brain anatomy in cross-section. Structures that I’d recognized by their smooth arcing lines revealed themselves as knobby, severe rams’ horns in three dimensions. It was like turning away from the wall to see the source of a hand shadow and discovering all knuckles and tucked fingers that had seemed so elegant in silhouette.
If they didn’t wear me out, we could do two sessions a day, Penijean said. I nodded thoughtfully, knowing that I would not be reporting any fatigue, no matter how the sessions felt. She also said I could pick another sound if I wanted to, and after trying out a few, I decided on a pizzicato harp-like thing.
Time behaved unusually during neurofeedback training. Minutes that should have dragged passed without my noticing them coming or going. Oh, we’re done already? When the wires came off it felt a little like stepping out of a dark theater into the daylight, where everyone was walking fast and already partway through their conversations.
We worked steadily for the next few days. My dad and Leslie walked past, talking on the phone and attending to their weekday duties while I sat in the high-backed chair, with a mane full of wires, unblinking and blissed-out on brain harps. A deliveryman peered in through the glass front door and then went away without knocking. I stopped washing my hair between sessions. I just put it in a ponytail at mealtimes, conductive paste and all.
* * *
—
Penijean and I completed half of our trainings, then took a break. She had presentations to deliver in Cleveland and Vegas; I had songs to write back in New York. We made plans to return to my dad’s in a month for the final rounds of sessions.
In my musical life, I was busy preparing for a big show with an orchestra. The harp parts of the musical score, I discovered, became difficult to listen to properly—the tinkling sounded too much like neurofeedback signal. I wondered how it had been for the dogs, how much ringing it took before the bell was just a bell again.
A few weeks later, I returned to Florida to finish up with Penijean. I discovered that my dad had taken up cosmology in the brief bit of time I’d been away. He had books out from the library and was already into the hard stuff: subatomic particle colliders, space-time, redshift, the whole shebang. This part of my father, the rogue scholar, is one of my favorites. Since I was a kid—no, since he was a kid, he’s been dragged around by his curiosities. First it was airplanes, then World War II, then sailing (a phase during which I suspected he harbored plans to circumnavigate the earth in a used boat). The morning before Penijean joined us, he lectured me on quarks, finishing with a quote from Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
When Penijean came, we fell into a fast routine. On my urging, she dispensed with any former delicacy and scrubbed at my head roughly to get a better electrical connection. When the sessions were over, I’d microwave a mug of water for her electrodes. She’d gather the wires in her fist, the coin ends all gummed up with conductive paste, then swish them in the mug like a teabag and pull them out clean. We talked about her life while we prepped and cleaned, prepped and cleaned again. She’d broken her nose in a bar fight. She still rode motorcycles, even though she’d had a bad crash. She wanted to get a tattoo of her own EEG signal. She had a complicated romantic history.
When we finished our final session, I walked outside barefoot to see Penijean off. Our dynamic had been shaped by incongruent forces: we’d essentially just had an extended sleepover at my father’s house—for science. We’d discussed some of the most intimate details of my love life—in Latinate technical terms. I waved from the driveway as she pulled away. Leslie and my dad waved too. Unusual intimacies bloom in unusual circumstances—being trapped in an elevator with someone for an extended period might feel the same way: it’s gotta be strange when the handyman arrives with a crowbar, lets in the daylight, and restores normalcy.
Back inside, I fixed myself lunch. My dad’s known that I’d struggled with X for a long time. It had still, of course, been a little weird to sit in the middle of his living room while a neurofeedback practitioner sleeping in the guest bed tried to fix my personal life with a mixolydian MIDI harp.
The science made it easier to talk about. While I watched the microwave carousel spin, melting cheese on a tortilla, he asked, “What do you think about the project?”
“I think it’s probably too soon to tell, but I’m processing it.”
“Really? Still thinking about it, huh?” He said he’d known right away—within two minutes of picking me up from the airport—that I was different after even just the first rounds.
That came as a surprise. My dad, historically, has been a serious skeptic. When I learned he had doubts about the physiological basis of my allergies, I’d daydreamed about how to present him with scientific proof: I’d buy one real gold stud earring and one nickel stud. He’d assign each one to either my right or left ear and I’d put them in with my eyes closed. Then I’d cover them with Band-Aids so that I didn’t know which was which. Three days later, vindicated by a rash, I’d be able to victoriously demonstrate in an elegant single-blind study and a blaze of righteous indignation that I AM ALLERGIC TO NICKEL (and also cats and dust and pollen).
But on this neurofeedback stuff, I was the one taking the more cautious position. I wanted to get into Cheryl’s fMRI scanner again, to see if the work with Penijean had diminished my brain’s response to X.
Leslie wanted to know: Did I feel different?
I’d been intentionally avoiding asking myself that question. It might be like opening the oven door—I’d let the heat out and ruin the soufflé. Or maybe the change would be incremental and I wouldn’t notice it if I checked all the time. I’d kept my thoughts as far away from X as possible;
I wasn’t sure exactly how they’d behave when I took down the fencing.
Also, maybe I was afraid it hadn’t worked. Also, maybe I was afraid that it had.
I hedged, reiterated my eagerness to see Cheryl’s next set of images. I knew my answers dissatisfied both Leslie and my dad, but neither pressed. I felt like one of those bureaucrats who spend all day turning down FOIA requests with the same can-neither-confirm-nor-deny canned response.
The microwave ding was just a little shriller than a neurofeedback chime. I removed my tortilla. I have no real understanding of how microwaves work, I thought. Besides some vagaries about fat molecules, I didn’t really understand how cheese worked for that matter—making it or melting it. Daily tools, basic sustenance, our own brains—just barely less than total mysteries.
Einstein, according to my dad, was known to end a particularly complex lecture with “If you’ve understood me, then I haven’t made myself clear.”
* * *
—
Lying on my back, waiting for Cheryl to begin the final scan, the screen displayed a live feed of the pandas at the Atlanta zoo. Two cubs moved about a cement enclosure, the whole scene framed by the eyeholes of my Batman mask. We’d already filled out the consent forms, tested the squeeze ball, and were only waiting for the machine to make its final calibrations. Pandas seem like pitiable idiots to me. Without help from a zookeeper, half the time they can’t figure out mating. What sort of creature can’t pair properly without the intervention of a specialist?
Before climbing onto the gurney, I’d stopped Cheryl to tell her that I’d forgotten to change bras—I was wearing one with a metal underwire.
She waved me off. “It’s alright with me. Just a little extra lift on the way in.”
She was right. As the gurney slowly slid into the small tunnel of the 7T magnet, my bra was pulled toward the ceiling, and for a moment, my nineteen-year-old figure was restored to me.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
Cheryl had queued up the same protocol as last time—photos of X would flash, interspersed with photos of the control. In between images, I’d be instructed to count back by seven, like an Etch A Sketch shaking herself blank again.
White text appeared on-screen, Noise coming.
This time, I tried to parse the component sounds in the cacophony. There was a modem dial-up. Then an Epson inkjet printer, producing a book-length work of only hyphens. Then a slow, steady gonging, at maybe sixty beats per minute. It was like a copy center inside a Buddhist monastery.
I made eye contact with X. At least it felt that way when his photo flashed. He must have been looking straight into someone else’s lens.
* * *
—
In the interest of thoroughness, I took the Passionate Love Scale survey again. But I didn’t have to tabulate my scores to know that something had changed. Looking at the photos had felt different—a lot different. Not so much pain, not so much panic. My familiar, bittersweet response to X had been slightly but significantly reformulated to lean away from the bitter and into the sweet. I hadn’t felt the same adrenal surge, no rising tears. We’d used the same set of photos as we did in the first session, but looking at X, I’d felt farther away, at a remove where kindness came more easily.
Cheryl wrote. She told me my brain generated some of the strongest signals of anyone she’d ever scanned. She said that working with my data, it was always easy to differentiate the signal from the noise. Everybody’s brain is probably unusual by one measure or another, but that note flattered me—I liked the idea of being a loud thinker. Maybe I also liked the idea that my response to X was demonstrably powerful—I wasn’t overdelicate for struggling with it, I’d been grappling with a Goliath.
She and Phil would need some time to analyze the results, to see exactly what changed between my first scan and my second. Then she said she’d be able to display the data in all sorts of ways: we could view the activity in my brain in cross-section, moving from ear to ear, slice by slice. Or she could make a little 3-D video of my brain spinning around, all the active parts lit up. Or she could even take the surface of my brain and lay it flat like a map—she called that view “the brain-skin rug.” But even before crunching all her numbers, Cheryl said that she could see that “Dude A’s dominance of your brain is essentially gone in the second scanning session. . . . I believe this is the desired effect?”
At that moment if someone had asked me to describe my attitude toward X with a list of elemental feelings—love, fear, attraction, anger—I’d have ticked through the same set of feelings that I’d had for years. But sometime in the last couple of months, the ranking of those feelings had been re-sequenced. Bitterness was lower. Amity higher. And this re-sequencing was not a small thing; in fact, it was the most important thing. In the same way that if I told you I was going to anesthetize you and I was also going to take out your wisdom teeth, it would really matter in which order I did those things.
Yes. It was exactly the desired effect.
* * *
—
I knew it was possible that discussing my heartbreak with so many scientists—in an effort to persuade them to loan me the keys to their fMRI scanner for the weekend—had served as a bit of forced talk therapy.
It was also possible that I was in the throes of a short-term placebo effect.
Or maybe this little experiment had actually worked.
Before, I’d lived inside my love, like an enormous hamster ball. I maneuvered through the world inside it and saw my surroundings through it. Now it was a manageable love that I could hold in my hand and spin to examine: a squeeze ball. The love wasn’t gone, but there was a new and overriding sense of benevolence. I was excited to tell X about it—maybe even see if he wanted to try a session with Penijean too.
Back at the fMRI lab, Andrea and Cheryl 3-D printed a miniature model of my anterior cingulate. Looking at that little bit of blue plastic in my palm felt like an enormous philosophical privilege. I was one of the few people who had held her love in her hand. And it wasn’t a neat valentine heart, it was a mangled pair of ram’s horns buried deep inside my skull.
On a hunch, I did a little research on snake oil. Turns out that when harvested from cold-water snakes, snake oil is rich in fatty acids that might actually reduce arthritis pain and inflammation—exactly as the first peddlers promised.
I continued my work on the orchestra show. Harps began to sound like harps again. To thank Penijean, I bought her a plane ticket to come to the show—she even agreed to join me onstage. To thank Cheryl, I bought her a queen’s share of halva. To thank my third collaborator, I texted a mixologist friend, What would have been the most popular drink in Paris in 1967?
The French cocktail scene was nonexistent at that time, he replied, but he suggested a liqueur I’d never heard of: génépi. I visited five liquor stores before I found a bottle.
It was green, like absinthe, shelved with other strange herbal elixirs. Standing at my kitchen sink, I poured two shots, doubles. Tchin-tchin. I lifted both glasses, clinked them together, drank mine, and poured hers down the drain.
The End of the Night
—
After a show is over, we go to the merch table. We sign records, T-shirts, sometimes skin. We pose for pictures and the flashes layer on top of one another, so that when I close my eyes there is a bouquet of them fading back into the blackness.
We work the merch line together, tossing Sharpies overhead, listening to the personal stories of soft-spoken fans, and drinking whiskey with the loud ones. Eventually, a security guard will come by to tell the showgoers that it’s time to leave. Some will linger anyway and the guard will have to unholster a sterner tone. Bartenders cruise around one another, closing tabs. The venue empties and the doors get locked and the houselights come up and the truth of the room is revealed: sticky floors and frayed carpet and an echo that h
ad been absorbed by the presence of all the soft bodies.
Our equipment and our plastic bins of merchandise must be loaded back into the van with a precise geometric strategy, or else they will not fit. We call this Van Tetris and only some of us are good at it.
One member of the touring party will settle with the club: review the contract, count the money, and sign the receipts. Someone else will bag up whatever food’s worth scavenging backstage. One of us will do a dummy-check: the last scan of the greenroom for any forgotten phone chargers, headphones, cast-off show shirts, or dopp kits. Greenrooms are more similar than the clubs themselves: they are all covered in the same line drawings of dicks, cigarette burns, and stickers from the bands who’ve played before. Even after this final check is complete, I am the member of our outfit most likely to have left something behind.
Our lives change in the weeks and months between shows. We get married or have children or rent a New York apartment to start a new life, but the shows always unfold this way: load-in, sound check, chips and hummus, stage lights, signing, load-out—because that’s the only way a show can go.
Since my last big tour with Doomtree, I have dyed my hair blonde, developed a taste for halva, gone on dates, renewed my lease on the Upper East Side, and recorded a new solo album. The walls of my apartment are covered with campaign plans for this new record: I am booking two hometown shows, one in Minneapolis and another in New York. For the first time, I will tour Asia. Then I will get back in the van for another round of Tinker Bell. I have had many conversations with X and some of them have hurt, but our interactions are becoming increasingly casual: brief updates on our separate lives. He tours, I tour, and our routings loop through the same clubs, like figure skaters leaving crossing cursive on the ice. I see his face on the posters on the walls and I am sure that he sees mine. And the best part of each of us hopes the other sells the motherfucker out.
