Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

With chilly courtesy he told Peters that he would see him again after a week. Peters had a week to consider what Walford had explained. But Walford knew that nothing would change the man’s mind.

  The excision of any part of the limbic system was a delicate and uncertain process. The hippocampus still preoccupied and amazed him. It received a meteor shower of sensory information every second, processed the information, arranged it in sequence, coloured it from a vast palette of emotions, then filed it away in the cortex for the demands of instant memory. To resect the hippocampus or amygdala was, in its way, to reorder nature.

  Yes, you might cut out God with a knife.

  One night, while Kate’s arm was draped round him in sleep, he had measured her marriage finger with a piece of string. The engagement ring he secretly bought held a single diamond – small but very pure and finely cut – set in platinum. Its discreet brilliance, he thought, was right for her, and from time to time he fondled its hard shape, wrapped in tissue in his anorak pocket, and awaited his place and moment. But nowhere on the cliffside path was perfect: here a bay was occupied by others, there the view disappointed, here the wind had started up again. So he marched behind her in frustration, his heartbeat a little faster than the walk exacted, while she went blithely ahead, interpreting his quietness as preoccupation with the past week. She could not know at what moment he found himself thinking: when I ask, might she refuse? The question had barely occurred to him before (yet it was she who sometimes accused him of arrogance). She wasn’t one of the nurses whose wide eyes gazed at him from their surgical masks; and for marriage, she once said, her exemplars were hardly promising. Her father was often absent, her mother alcoholic. To him, whose home had been stable, hers was a source of grim wonder, and she herself a little miraculous.

  Around them the chalk grasslands flowed gently seaward, while below, the waves boiled in and out of shoreline caves, and flocks of guillemots shrilled from the cliffs. Here and there a dry-stone wall meandered down to their path, overgrown by brambles.

  She began playfully to probe him. His abstractedness was not usually silent, but would surface in speculations (as far as she could follow them) on whatever brains he had been resecting that week. But today, if he momentarily emptied his mind of her, it was occupied not by neural science but by two oddly troubling patients. The woman, Claudia Greene, he said, had been opaque to him at first, her interview gaping with things unspoken, but her neuropsychiatric report stressed her lucidity. Then there was the fanatical Peters, for whom the concept of informed consent was futile: a man too engulfed by his condition to be informed by anything but a hallucinatory God.

  For a while the two lovers carried these strangers with them along the coastal path, she teasing him that his self-trained detachment had faltered before two complex human beings. Had he fallen in love – she bantered – with Claudia Greene?

  Yes, he was in love, he answered, enjoying the adolescent words. He was in love with Kate. As for Peters, what would be left of him if God was gone, he did not know. Ahead of them the long white wall of cliffs curled to the lighthouse headland three miles away, and the sea had calmed to a grey plain under a watery sun. He walked beside her now. A windless peace descended. Once he found her quietly laughing at the beauty of the country: her laughter not a release of tension, but a curious, sweet tinkle of inner exultation, like the involuntary gurgle of a baby. He loved her for it.

  But soon afterwards, she said: ‘Poor Mr Peters. Can the temporal lobes really be responsible for God?’

  ‘In his case, they may be.’ He touched her cheek.

  ‘So who knows?’ she laughed. ‘The brain may simply be our means of apprehending God.’

  He said: ‘In which case I’ll be destroying someone’s salvation.’

  ‘Oh, so you are God. I was wondering where . . .’

  He cuffed her gently. He might have asked her then and there to marry him, but they had argued before about his view of patients as neural specimens – as though detachment had turned him heartless – while he sometimes tried to distance her from her children’s sickness, which often racked her dreams.

  The death of the past had grown only slowly to trouble him. It was memory in the present – the capacity for efficient day-to-day recall – that surgery could most crucially destroy. For the sake of patients’ survival, mental acuity might be irreversibly dimmed, careers broken, relationships wrecked. As for retrograde memory, the unique history buried in the individual brain, its loss was less easily assessed. In the altered mind of the post-operative patient, the past could slip away unnoticed. Whole stories remained buried alive, inaccessible in the labyrinth of the cortex.

  For her second and last consultation, Claudia Greene arrived alone. She was dressed as sombrely as before, and in the harsh light of his consulting room the tension in her face, with its fragile bones and ghostly web of lines, deepened her look of premature age. She sat opposite him, on her seat’s edge, her small, gaunt body held very upright, and her hands fidgeting over a tight-rolled umbrella. She asked in her faintly ironic way precisely what parts of herself he planned to remove, then turned at last to her dread of lost memory. How much of her past would be gone? What periods of her life were most threatened? Did memories vanish wholesale, or leave themselves behind in fragments?

  His answers, he knew, would be insufficient. Neuroscience was young and imprecise, he admitted. Each human brain was different. The brain was best imagined not as a cluster of discrete regions, but as a traffic network of information. When one road became impassable, another might open. What was it, in particular, that she feared?

  She went silent. He wondered how long this would last. Then she said: ‘There is a period of my life, four years ago, that I don’t want to lose.’ She turned her oddly brilliant eyes on him. ‘It was a love affair.’

  He had not expected this. Her pared appearance had deceived him – but after all, she was little older than him – and her aura of propriety. He found himself nodding at her, frowning. ‘I understand.’ But he was not sure he did.

  She was looking at him now with bizarrely mixed pride and shame. ‘The memories are very strong. I can’t imagine myself without them. I don’t know who I would be. It must sound feeble – it sounds feeble to me – to feel your identity so wrapped up in somebody else’s, and years ago now. And the man is dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Walford was wondering why no other patient had confronted him with such apprehensions: fear for the continuity of the self. Had others imagined memory to be so intrinsic that its loss did not occur to them? Or perhaps, given the depletion of so many patients, they had not thought at all.

  The woman said: ‘Will all this disappear, Mr Walford, as if it had never happened?’

  For a moment he wondered why she did not want this: to be returned to the illusion of fidelity to her marriage. But she went on: ‘I want to know what happens here.’ She touched her head, then added in a voice beginning to tremble: ‘If you can, preserve it.’

  He realised that she had already read and understood something of her condition. He said: ‘As you know, the tumour is in the brain’s left hemisphere. But the hemispheres are not discrete. They learn from one another.’

  ‘Where do memories reside, then?’

  ‘They are processed by an organ in the limbic system – that’s a region deep inside the brain – called the hippocampus. It assigns some memories for long-term storage in the cortex – the upper, rational brain, if you like – while the more trivial memories drop from our consciousness.’ She was watching him with a fierce, sad stare. ‘It was recently thought that after some years the long-term memories remained solely in the upper brain. But now we are not so sure. For all we know, the whole limbic system is awash with memories. That’s why your question is hard to answer, Mrs Greene.’

  But he had always resisted false consolation, and he added clearly, deliberately: ‘What I would expect you to lose is part of your so-called “autonoetic consciousness”, the ability to t
ravel back into the past and recall it in detail. This may affect time over all periods of your life. It may be that only a simple memory trace will be left of some events, just a sense of familiarity . . .’

  As often before, he knew that he had been harsh. He added that he expected her semantic memory – the ability to read, speak – to be spared, as well as any procedural skills: ex-patients went on riding bicycles and dancing.

  But her gaze had dropped from his and he knew she was not listening. She said tightly: ‘Perhaps it’s better to go on enduring seizures.’

  ‘That way your memory will deteriorate anyway, worse than anything surgery can do. You’ve been unusually free of damage so far, but it cannot last.’

  She said: ‘I have not forgotten a single hour of those years yet.’ The words, even in her clipped, metallic voice, sounded oddly girlish. ‘Nothing of him at all. I still speak to him, listen to him. Even the epileptic fits are filled with him.’ She was suddenly blushing; he concluded that her seizures were accompanied by orgasm.

  Guessing, he said: ‘That is quite frequent for women in epileptic spasm.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Patients rarely speak of it, of course, but the statistics are there.’ She was silent again. ‘As I explained in our first interview, Mrs Greene, this is a very delicate operation, which will remove as little as possible of the outer brain, the cortex. This is the best we can do to preserve language, and memory.’

  She stood up and went over to the window. She was still carrying her umbrella. All her life, he imagined, she had kept this self-control, like a pure flame, and now it was passing from her. He could sense her fear. But at last she said, still staring through the pane: ‘I’ve decided to have this operation.’

  ‘I think you’ve made the right choice.’

  ‘But there’s something I need from you.’ She reached into her handbag and laid on his desk a slim packet of letters. He saw by their stamps that they came from Spain. ‘How long after the operation will you see me?’

  ‘I see patients within half an hour, in intensive care, then twice daily in hospital.’

  She said almost vehemently: ‘I want you to show me these letters as soon as the operation is over. I want to remember at once. You say my semantic memory will survive. These will make me remember. Will you do this, Mr Walford?’

  ‘Does your husband know?’

  ‘My husband knows nothing. He is too busy with himself.’

  But Walford felt his irritation rising, anger at this imposition, and impatience with her subterfuge. No one had ever asked him such a thing. He could not know what memories – fractured or dimmed or whole – would reassemble around her. Even now, after so many seizures, her past might be corrupt. Memories were not static. With every re-remembering, their neural structure changed, so the most dwelt-upon past might be the most impure. Even an imagined event, if vivid enough, could leave its print on the brain as permanently as a truth. He said: ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

  But Claudia had leant across his desk and placed a photo on the sheaf of letters. Her voice was breaking. ‘Perhaps I won’t remember anything. But before you operate, I want to know I’ve done all I can. If the letters don’t mean anything, perhaps the photo will.’ Her face was close to his now, its eyes filled and shining. He glanced down at the photo and saw a small, sallow man, with a dark beard. The margin was inscribed simply ‘Joaquim’. Beside him, her hand in his, was a woman he did not recognise at once, young for her years then, and lit by wonderful eyes. He did not know if the shock he felt was one of admiration or pity. She followed his gaze and turned the photo over, as if it were still secret.

  ‘He was Spanish. He was a Roman Catholic . . . but I’ve always found God a little ridiculous.’ The metal of her laugh softened. She was recalling something affectionate. ‘We met in Salamanca, at a conference, and then in England. Those boarding houses . . . years of subterfuge . . .’ Her voice found its coolness again. ‘You will do it, won’t you?’

  This is maudlin self-indulgence, he thought. He kept the irritation from his voice, but said: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Some days were long and unpredictably demanding, and intensified in him the concentrated energy that he relished. After his ward rounds next morning, during five hours in the operating theatre, he resected a construction worker’s high-grade glioma, clearing the residual tissue under an MRI scanner. His half-hour break was spent consulting with the oncologist. In the afternoon, with the senior registrar away sick, he operated on a fifty-year-old solicitor, excising a tumour pressing on the inner ear. In intensive care the man responded satisfactorily to his voice.

  By early evening he was interviewing the parents of a sixteen-year-old girl with subdural haematoma, and anticipating a final consultation with Roy Peters. Peters was more subdued than before. He gave a distracted wave from the doorway as he entered, as if Walford was far away, and sat down gingerly. His eyes had a cloudless fixity. During the past five days he had suffered two seizures. Once his brother had found him unconscious in the hallway of their shared flat. His arm was bandaged to the elbow. He had decided to quit his part-time job as a packager, he said, in order to write. He was writing about the purifying power of everyday phenomena. He had knelt in prayer each afternoon for over an hour, and Jesus had come to him in the sunlight. Jesus was the Word, and Peters would write it. Jesus had explained to him the order of things, and that there was nothing to fear. He had even told him the purpose of his seizures, and where his daughter had gone.

  ‘You have a daughter?’

  ‘She passed away.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ There had been no mention of this child in Peters’s clinical reports, nor in interview with his relatives. And he had never been married.

  ‘She is with God now,’ Peters said. ‘She is His angel.’ So how could Peters be sad? There were times, he said, when he felt a profound detachment from the material world, as if everything inside him were at last resting, and the edges of himself bleeding into the infinite beneficence of God. ‘And when I kneel by the window I can see across the rooftops and the satellite dishes, and there is the church spire with its cross. Then I fix my eyes on it and I can feel Him coming, and after a bit I close my eyes in the sunlight, and He speaks. At night the cross is lit up, a kind of reflected light, and God is still there. You said that God is in the brain, Dr Walford, but it is the Devil who is in the brain, in the dark, indoors, and God is in the light, asking to come in . . . Isn’t this very beautiful?’

  It was now that Walford felt an unaccustomed misgiving. He would operate, of course, there was nothing else to be done. Peters’s lesion was sub-acute, and spreading. But he wondered how much the post-operative Peters would lose of his divine comfort. In his dimmed world, would nothing any longer be explained? And would his angel daughter be a corpse? Then quickly these questions curbed themselves. He wondered if this daughter might not be a fantasy. But when he looked at the patient now, at his hare’s eyes staring and his gawky perch on the chair – Peters seemed about to leave at any moment – Walford felt a stab of something like pity.

  Now Peters was saying: ‘After the op, the Devil won’t pull me down again?’

  ‘No, I hope not.’

  A minute later Peters jumped up to go, elated by Walford’s agreement to operate, and seized both his hands, and blessed him, and walked backwards to the doorway, waving.

  Walford felt suddenly very tired. He remained in his chair for a long two minutes, staring at the doorway as if Peters had absconded with his energy, bequeathing only his little hand wave and his childish convictions. Walford thumbed half-heartedly through a dossier of referrals and a radiologist’s report, then prepared to go home. Peters was a little mad, of course, and might remain so. There was no knowing if the operation would blur his faith or unravel it altogether.

  Some brain studies claimed that repeated contemplation of a concept could render it as real as any sense perception. A function of the thalamus, Walford
thought. So Peters’s invocations could enforce belief as intensely, say, as the candlelit prayers of a seminarist addressing God. The brain created its own idols. It did not always separate fact from fantasy. It had evolved to promote its owner’s survival. And Peters needed his God.

  The sea has gone dead now, and the air still. They walk hand in hand. In front of them the coast curls in a level wall of cliffs under green hills, and the waves make only a light froth below. The richer limestone seams lie here, and abandoned excavations gape in serried caves high along the shoreline. Once the path descends into the canyon of a derelict quarry, where they emerge on to a natural terrace above the sea. The slope of a ramp remains, and a concrete slipway where timber derricks once swung the stone on to barges fifty feet below.

  He feels the sun on his face and the warmth of the encircling rock. As Kate explores the ruined quarry, he sits apart and watches her with a tinge of apprehension, nursing his delayed proposal, consciously loving her. She is sometimes still mysterious to him. Perhaps she will always be. He can never quite predict her: what will upset her, what she will love or laugh at. She has taken off her anorak and cap in the sun, and her fair hair drifts back from her forehead. After so many years, so many other loves, harsh indecisions, he thinks with wonder: this is the woman I want to marry. He leans on the empty ramp while she wanders through workrooms where a few brick piers still stand, their iron beams rusted and broken. The quarrymen have been gone for a century. The square mouths of their excavated caves yawn beside her. She vanishes inside one, and he follows her.

  Its chasm extends deep into the rock face. Huge, misshapen columns of living stone uphold the ceilings. Kate calls out to him: ‘There are bats. Little ones.’ Now his eyes accommodate to the dark. He stands beside her under a ceiling blackened and shifting with pipistrelles. A stench of urine rises. Around them the rock walls are split laterally in regular seams, as if the stone foreshadowed its own cutting. Their footfalls scrunch in the silence. They wonder aloud at the cavernous vastness of these works, at how many stoneworkers died of silicosis and TB, how many churches and city squares were created from its emptiness.