The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

  “Dr. Frankenstein?” I said, not out of smart-assery, but because it was as close as I could get to his name. Okay, a little smart-assery. Dr. Brainguy. His new name.

  “Lily!” Mom said.

  Dr. Brainguy laughed.

  “Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard that. You must have read the book, Lily. Most kids think Frankenstein is the name of the monster, not the doctor who created him. Tell me, what was your favorite part of the novel?”

  Easy question. I’d thought about this so much, but no one, besides Mrs. Rogers-Peña, had ever asked me. I liked Dr. Brainguy. He was actual human material.

  “My favorite part is when the monster is watching the old blind man and his family, helping them, and then he kills a deer for them. And then when he finally comes out of hiding, they run from him. And he realizes that no matter what he does, he’ll never be accepted for who he is.”

  Dr. Brainguy held two fingers to his lips and inhaled. I could swear he was sucking on an imaginary cigarette. He lowered his fingers and exhaled. And he looked at me like he could actually see me, not as some conduct-disordered kid off her meds, but a real thinking person.

  “Pretty metaphorical, that,” he said.

  Mom frowned. I don’t think this is what she expected. It wasn’t what I expected either.

  “I don’t know much about this surgery. Could you tell us about it?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, of course. Well, it is an experimental surgery, so you do have to understand that there are certain risks. Basically people who have ADHD have regions of the brain that remain chronically understimulated, regions that pertain to impulse control and self-regulation. So what we do is we electrically stimulate the part . . . urgle . . . cingulate cortex . . . normalized in . . . screluar drug therapy. While this is a new surgery, we use a device. . . . plababble responsive simulator . . . on the market . . . used for seizure disorder . . . so what we find with ADHD . . . slibits autonomic changes . . . expectation of an imminent challenge . . . determined attitude to overcome it. Stop me if you have questions.”

  I tried to follow what Dr. Brainguy was saying, I really did. If someone is going to peel your head open like an orange and plant electrodes there, you should do your best to listen. But I couldn’t follow. I noticed there was a piece of wood on his desk with three small wooden dowels protruding from it. On one of the dowels was a set of five brass disks, stacked largest to smallest.

  “Is the surgery reversible?” Mom asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Brainguy responded. “But as with all surgery, there are—”

  “What is that thing?” I asked, pointing to the game with the brass disks.

  Mom sighed deeply.

  “It’s a game called Towers of Hanoi.” Dr. Brainguy pushed it across the desk toward me. “You have to move all the disks from the first tower to the last, but you can’t move more than one disk at a time, and you can only put smaller disks on larger disks. Do you understand the rules?”

  I looked up.

  “One disk at a time. No larger disks on smaller disks,” I said.

  I moved the smallest disk to the next pole and then the second smallest disk to the farther pole and then put the small disk on top of that one.

  “So because this surgery is experimental, we really look for candidates who have exhausted all other options.” Dr. Brainguy said. “Can you give me an outline of the drug therapies you’ve tried?”

  My mother launched into a litany of all the drugs I’d ever been on, but I lost the thread of the conversation. There had been so many drugs.

  “First there was the . . . she wasn’t sleeping . . . then . . . took that one for two years,” Mom said. “And it had side effects, but she didn’t mind it.”

  “Yes I did,” I said without looking up. “I was too young and stupid to know I could complain. I thought I had to take it.”

  “You always have to take drugs. Lily. It’s just a given,” Mom said. “I’m sorry that you have this condition, but really, we can’t do anything about that, can we?”

  “Well, except pry my brain open like a can of soup and stick a couple of electrodes in there. Maybe bolts in my neck?”

  “Lily!”

  I glanced away from the game and up at Mom. Her face was turning red. I realized that this whole visit probably sucked for her almost as much as for me. I wondered aimlessly how much the whole thing would cost.

  “And the most recent drug?” Dr. Brainguy said softly. “What are . . . your dosage . . . side effects . . . you feeling about . . .”

  I prepared to move a larger disk off, but both poles had smaller disks, so I had to backtrack.

  “Lily,” Mom said. “The doctor asked you a question.”

  I looked away from the Towers of Hanoi. Dr. Brainguy smiled.

  “What about the drug you’re on now? Do you always take it?”

  Something about Dr. Brainguy’s expression made me think he already knew the answer to this question.

  “No.” I laughed.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for the first four or five months I was on the drug, things were okay, but then everything started to flatten out. After a while, I started to think, what’s the point of any of this? Nothing tasted good; nothing made me happy; I didn’t like reading or listening to music. The drug made me good at things I hated, and made me hate the things I liked, and I just thought—kill me now.”

  I pointed my finger at my temple and pulled an imaginary trigger before it came to me that this is the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t do in front of a doctor. Or your mother.

  “So how would you do it, if you killed yourself?” Dr. Brainguy asked.

  “I used to have all my medicine in a jar under my bed—” I blurted it out before I could stop myself. I’d never really admitted to myself that I’d been saving my medicine for this purpose. I’d miss a day, and then I’d put the pill in the pickle jar, and sometimes I’d pull out the jar and hold the pile of pills in the palm of my hand. And it would give me a calm feeling to know that if things got too bad at school, unendurably bad, I could pull the ripcord. Handful of pills, swigs from the bottle of vodka Dad had left in my closet, and it would all be over.

  “How do you feel now?” Dr. Brainguy asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “I stopped taking my drugs, and after a couple of weeks, the feeling went away.”

  “I didn’t know,” Mom said. It was a voice I’d never heard before. Regretful. I’d been telling her for months how much I hated the drugs. I’d thought she’d understood.

  “Suicidal ideation is a common side effect of this drug,” Dr. Brainguy said softly. “Treating ADHD with antidepressants is not without sprigs, but the important thing is that Lily is . . .”

  Dr. Brainguy continued to say soothing things to Mom. I returned to the game. I’d managed to move most of the disks over to the end dowel using an ever-increasing number of steps, but about five steps from the end, I realized that I was going to end up with all the disks on the middle dowel, not the end one.

  “Shit!” I said.

  Dr. Brainguy laughed.

  “You figured it out?”

  “Do I have to retrace my steps, or can I start over?”

  “Start over. Do you realize where you went wrong?”

  I thought about it.

  “It’s a recursive pattern, like a fractal. The first move determines everything.”

  Dr. Brainguy smiled.

  “You know about fractals,” he said.

  “My boyfriend is a math and robotics genius,” I said. Boyfriend. My new favorite word.

  “I imagine you have high theoretical mathematical ability yourself. You’re probably hampered by low computational speed. These are the things we will want to test before we even consider the surgical option.”

  I finished the Tower of Hanoi while Mom and Dr. Brainguy talked about the hospital stay and insurance and testing and MRIs and how his research grant would cover most of the expense, which was nice. When he
said that, I felt Mom relax.

  And then I finished the puzzle.

  “Ms. Michaels, would you mind if I talked to Lily alone for a minute?”

  Mom stood reluctantly. I think she was worried that I would say all sorts of random Lily things to Dr. Brainguy and discourage him from doing the surgery.

  He waited, puffing on an imaginary cigarette, until he heard the door to the waiting room open and close again.

  “So, Lily, what do you think about all this?” he said finally.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking around at his diplomas, the bookcase behind him. “Does it really matter what I think?”

  Dr. Brainguy knit his eyebrows and picked up the Towers of Hanoi.

  “Do you know why I have this on my desk?” he said.

  I shook my head, suddenly very interested.

  “It’s an informal test of sorts. I needed to see if you were capable of hyperfocus. Do you know what hyperfocus is?”

  Hyperfocus. The ADHD superpower. The ability to work obsessively and without regard to the passage of time on something important, like searching a text for quotes to send my boyfriend. Impossible to use for unimportant tasks like paperwork or organization.

  “Yeah, I do. So is that what you are going to zap out of my brain?”

  Dr. Brainguy laughed.

  “Hopefully not. That’s the good part. So are you afraid of losing something if we do this surgery?”

  I closed my eyes because I couldn’t think. There was something I needed to grab hold of, some essential part of me I didn’t want to lose no matter what. Something the drugs took away.

  “Okay, so you know, I have a lot of ideas, and when I’m on the drugs, they just kind of . . . disappear. Do you know what I mean? I get better at absorbing information because there’s less going on inside my head, but when there is less going on inside my head . . . I mean, it’s kind of like being . . . partially dead. I get that that’s really dramatic, but I don’t want part of my brain to die.”

  Dr. Brainguy smiled, but not in a condescending way.

  “Okay, part of that is a side effect of some drugs, pure and simple. But you will change.” He set the Towers of Hanoi back down on his desk. “This proves that you have high mathematical ability, so let me see if I can explain this like a math problem.”

  “Suppose you have thirty really original ideas in a week. And of those ideas, maybe five are really good, and perhaps one is superlative. And maybe it takes three weeks to develop that one really good idea, but in the meantime, two other really fantastic ideas have come along. What do you do? So you wanted to be a marine biologist because you had an idea worth exploring, but next week you change your major, and you’re pulled in another direction entirely because you don’t have the focus to pursue any one idea to its conclusion.”

  I couldn’t help thinking about my father abandoning a brilliant, half-finished doctoral thesis about Hildegard von Bingen to go goat farming, which bored the shit out of him, and probably the other fifteen things he hadn’t told me about. New family.

  “You’re talking about my dad,” I said.

  “ADHD runs in families,” he said. “But you know that. There is this theory that asynchronicity leads to ideaphoria. It’s an adaptive response to a deficit.

  “So, if you do have this surgery, you may generate fewer ideas, but let’s think about that. Let’s say instead of thirty original ideas a week, you had ten. That would mean you had a really amazing important idea every third week. In the meantime, you’ll be improving your self-regulation and impulse control, so when you have that really important big idea, you could run with it. You could go to college and have the focus to finish your course work. It’s possible that with your test scores, you could qualify for early college enrollment.”

  Go to college? Right now? I hadn’t allowed myself to think about college: reading novels with people who actually liked novels, long discussions about music and art and architecture and feminism and . . .

  “How will I know which crazy ideas are really great and which crazy ideas are just crazy?” I asked.

  Dr. Brainguy laughed. For a doctor, he did that a lot.

  “If I could figure that one out, I’d be a billionaire,” he said. “So, do you want to pursue this? Your mom isn’t here. If you tell me no, that will be the end of it. She won’t even know. I’ll tell her you weren’t a good candidate for the program. It’s your brain, Lily. You have to make the decision.”

  College. I could go to college. I could take robotics or be a marine biologist, and if Dr. Brainguy was right, I would still feel things. Pleasure. Love.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He called my mother back into the room. We talked some more and signed about a hundred papers. Mom and I went to a sushi bar for lunch and splurged. She drank sake, even though she had to go back to work. I think she was happy that I’d decided to have the procedure. And nervous. So was I.

   Chapter 26

  Mom went to school with me the next day. I had several appointments scheduled with Dr. Brainguy next week. I was going to miss a lot of school, and Mom wanted to let the office know the reason. Of course, I was more than happy to have a ready excuse to be out of school.

  Mrs. Treviño led us into Vice Principal Krenwelge’s office. Vice Principal Krenwelge had one of those curled, short haircuts that look like a wig from 1964. She was encased in a square-shouldered navy blue blazer and shiny, red button earrings.

  “Ms. Michaels,” she said, extending a hand. “Pleasure to see you again. And Lily.”

  We sat in two ancient green armchairs identical to the ones in the waiting area. Her desk held a picture of two toddler grandchildren so blond they were practically translucent.

  “Thank you for making time for us,” Mom said.

  Mom had on her lucky jacket, a tan safari kind of thing that nipped in sweetly at the waist, over a white linen blouse. For once, she looked well rested, ready for a day of hunting antelope or taking on difficult meetings.

  “What can I do for you?” Dr. Krenwelge asked.

  “Well, as you know, Lily was absent yesterday. I’m afraid Lily has a number of medical tests coming up. She’s probably going to miss a lot of school.”

  “Is there a problem?” Dr. Krenwelge asked quietly, her face clouded in genuine concern. I was kind of touched. It was always a shock to realize that people in the office actually cared about students. Aside from Mrs. Treviño, who oozes sympathetic concern from every pore.

  “Lily is going in for brain surgery,” Mom said solemnly. “It’s a minor surgery, but—”

  “Of course, anything we can do to make things easier on you both.” Dr. Krenwelge looked for a moment like she might start weeping, and I felt bad. She probably thought I had a tumor or something. “We’ll make arrangements for homework and makeup tests. Whatever you need.”

  We all observed a moment of silence in anticipated memory of my soon-to-be-surgically-altered brain. For a second, I wondered if I actually did have a tumor.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Mom said. “Lily failed geography the last six-week period because she made a zero on her Populations in Peril project. Her project and paper are in the hall. I think Lily did a wonderful job, but she didn’t quite follow the directions. The thing is, it states very clearly on her 504 accommodations for dyslexia that she needs oral instructions. I don’t think Mr. Neuwirth gave her oral instructions.”

  “Her 504 accommodations? I don’t have any accommodations on record.”

  “They should be on record,” Mom said, her voice rising. “We had an exit meeting when Lily left middle school.”

  “Excuse me for a moment.”

  Vice Principal Krenwelge turned toward her laptop and typed furiously. She picked up the phone—an ugly beige landline phone the size of a shoebox, punched in a number, and spoke to someone. I didn’t actually pay attention to what she was saying, but she seemed annoyed. I had on a short skirt and my thighs were sticking to the strange green chair. I
needed to move, but the phone call dragged on. Dr. Krenwelge shook her head and sighed loudly.

  “Mrs. Michaels-Ryan—”

  “Just Michaels,” Mom said.

  “Of course. The district changed software last year, and we’ve had a few glitches. Lily’s middle school swears they sent her 504 over, but we never received anything. They are going to email Lily’s exit exam. I’m sorry for the mixup.”

  “Really? A mixup?” Mom said in a tone of voice that made me actually feel a little sorry for Dr. Krenwelge. I’ve been on the receiving end of that tone before. Not fun.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Mr. Neuwirth,” Dr. Krenwelge said in a voice that suggested she and Coach Neuwirth would sit down over tea and scones, and agree with all civility and due speed that a grave injustice had been done to my person.

  Everyone—Rosalind, Mom, Mrs. Rogers-Peña, even Humberto the Star Trek therapist—had suggested that I invoke my 504 accommodations at regular intervals. But I had no idea that the phrase “504 accommodations” was a magical spell I could cast that would cause unicorns and rainbows to issue forth from the sky. No idea at all.

  I still didn’t want to talk about it with my teachers. I mean, who does? But it could come in handy if I really got into trouble.

  “There’s also chemistry,” Mom said. “Lily failed chemistry because—”

  “Please don’t worry. I’ll be talking to all of her teachers. We’ll need to set up a 504 meeting next week. Is it possible for you to come in before school?” Dr. Krenwelge rose from her desk.

  “Yes.” Mom stood.

  Dr. Krenwelge reached for the door.

  “I’ll be in touch. So nice finally meeting you, Ms. Michaels. And, Lily, a pleasure. I . . .” Dr. Krenwelge stammered, and her voice caught in her throat. “I wish you the best of luck with your procedure. Please keep me informed.”

  Mom and I walked together out of the office. She stopped at my Populations in Peril project. Most people had already picked up their projects, but I’d forgotten mine. My project was looking much worse for the wear. All but two of the bloated corpses were gone, and someone had pulled out one of the stilts, sending my hut sliding into the fake water and mud. If anything, the repeated vandalism of my project only added to the pathos of the scene.