by Liam Durcan
“I don’t know,” he answered, as she turned back from the lobby. Celia looked at him and he thought she could tell he was lying, but he realized he was imagining this. That was the way it used to be. Now she just looked away. But it didn’t disappoint him. He wanted to sit. Just five minutes more, then he would tell her. He had earned this much.
FIVE
Reverberations. A limited form of seismic activity, enough to make a chandelier sway. It was dark now and he felt dizzy as they crossed an intersection, the empty space like a hole he needed to avoid. Once they got to a sidewalk, something about the comfort of parallel lines cordoning him in, perhaps, he felt steadier. Celia and Nina and Paul were to his left and it required a surprising amount of concentration to stay at the same pace. The discomfort seemed an adequate karmic repayment for having misled them, having kept them waiting at the police station. He had settled on a smaller lie to redeem the larger deception, finally telling them that while they’d been in the washroom, he’d caught a glimpse of someone leaving the building who (and he’d pointed to his head as he said this, implying the cloud of his concussion and the need for understanding), in retrospect, might have looked like Roberto.
He staggered along, a zombie walking toward daybreak. He almost put out his hands to steady himself. Each footstep hurt, tugging at a part of him he couldn’t immediately identify. Celia turned around to find him with one hand to his forehead.
“Are you okay to be walking?”
He answered back with a grimace and a minimalist nod.
“Maybe we should go to the hospital.”
“I’d rather not,” he said, but he was thinking the same thing. He wanted to ask Celia if Roberto had hit him only once. Maybe he’d banged his head on the concrete of the plaza. As he recalled the tribunal doctor advising him to get medical attention, a textbook chapter of head trauma opened to him: worst-case scenarios of depressed skull fractures and subdural clots collecting, molasses thick, swollen brain squeezing out of the skull’s tight cap like cookie dough. You were fine for six hours, until the pressure mounted and you died in your sleep. Or if you were lucky, you’d get a shaved head and a burr hole, followed by months of windmill-watching while you rehabbed somewhere in the Dutch countryside. And as he thought this, he felt Gage shadowing him, stumbling along in tandem disrepair.
The four of them carried on along the streets of Den Haag and thoughts of Gage faded. He was not Gage. He would be okay. Patrick touched his head as if to assure himself that the skull was still there, and it was, the scalp feeling parboiled and tender. The burden of conversation–generic chat about the rain or the hotels they were staying in–was shared equally, each of the adults taking their turn, the interval of silence widening as topics were used up.
“So how’s Boston?” Nina asked, old enough, he thought, to recognize conversational pauses for the terror they brought.
“Boston’s great.”
“We read about your research,” Nina said, smirking, “the pornography research.”
Celia turned to her sister, and Patrick could feel an exchange between the two women, the pulse of energy thrown off by what he assumed was a castigating glance.
“Yeah, that got a lot of press,” he said. Patrick had mastered a response to the sniggering questions about his research. Sheepish acknowledgement was the standard tone he adopted in hopes of ending the discussion. It often failed. But here it worked. Perhaps Nina felt she owed him this courtesy.
“We heard you started your own business.”
“That’s right.”
“But you still do research?”
“Well, yes. It’s just a change of location.”
“Who are you doing the research for?”
“Companies.”
“Like who?” Nina asked, and Patrick couldn’t help but notice the familiar tone of questioning, the cheerful, never-ending inquisitiveness. Perhaps Elyse Brenman wasn’t just an aggravation, but a type of personality that Nina had also grown into. An army of Elyses, with follow-up questions. He was certain Nina was playing dumb. He’d heard from Elyse that Nina had finished a business degree and was running Le Dépanneur Mondial. If so, then Nina had got her business education in the shadow of the Globomart phenomenon, studying–with admiration and dread, the dual sentiments evoked by any leviathan–the tactics used to dominate retail. She knew exactly who he worked for. He felt he had a licence, a reason, to be vague.
“I work with a lot of different companies.”
After a few more minutes of sparring, Nina let it go. He was surprised he didn’t have to explain the technical details of his research to them, but he reasoned they already knew about that too.
“Do you ever see patients?” Celia asked. This sounded like an honest question and it caught Patrick off guard.
“No. But even back when I was with the university, I wasn’t actively practising.”
“Don’t you miss being a doctor?”
“I’m still a doctor.”
“I meant as more than a title.”
Jesus, he thought, someone should be ringing a goddamn bell for the end of the round. They walked on in silence and Patrick tried to hide his growing annoyance with the Garcías, but he could feel his mood curdling with every step. He understood what Celia was getting at. She was letting him know what she thought of him, the insinuation he wasn’t a “real doctor” and, in that way, could never know what her father had gone through. He didn’t see patients–so what? Because he didn’t write prescriptions he should suspend judgment?
At one point during his medical training, Patrick had finally acknowledged he was not the type of doctor who could deal with someone like Gage, the rages, the endless explanations to his increasingly horrified family. The hollow pep talks to a man no longer able to listen to anyone. He didn’t miss any part of clinical neurology, a part of his life he’d happily confined to four years of residency, a specialty that a friend once described as the study of brain catastrophes, paid upfront or mortgaged out.
In truth, he was a doctor but not really a doctor. At one time Patrick thought that he would be quite a good doctor and he supposed he could have been–he had pictured the type so clearly: competent, up on the latest developments and willing to tweak the reigning controversy with a prescient insight, a good teacher, not a prick, carrying it all off with some sort of humility that passed for grace. But it just didn’t happen, or rather, it happened differently. It wasn’t as though he’d planned a career in research. A year into his neurology residency in Boston, he’d become involved in research that used a new imaging technique, which came to revolutionize brain research. At first, he didn’t know the technique was cutting edge–everything was new to him and the technique simply had an appealing logic. Then everything seemed to fall into place. It turned out Patrick had all the qualities that lend themselves to a successful career in scientific research. He was dogged. He was able to work long hours. He had enough imagination to formulate the next, necessary question and yet not so much imagination as to be distracted by the unnecessary questions. The first paper he ever co-authored was published in a leading journal and while his supervisor, a slightly paranoid Ph.D. named Ed Phipps, was ecstatic, it was viewed by all to be something akin to a minor lottery win. But then six papers followed in the next two years, each publication causing a departmental buzz, together constituting a run of success that drew a congratulatory letter from the then-chairman. Phipps’s ecstasy evolved into bafflement–he’d never had a post-doc publish like this–and then into collegial wariness, as it became clear that with each paper the work was becoming as much Patrick’s as his own. From student to protegé to equal with a suddenness that bruised egos; at that point Patrick was introduced to how contused his supervisor had become: he was asked to leave the laboratory. After finishing his residency (barely scraping through the board exams), he was told in no uncertain terms by Phipps that he should “go away” for further training. So he had gone to Caltech for eighteen months before coming b
ack to take over his supervisor’s job when Phipps didn’t get tenure. For a year or two, Patrick would see his old boss at meetings in places like Toulouse or Aberdeen, always able to sense Phipps’s stare like a rifle’s laser-sighting device from across a half-empty convention hall. But that’s life.
And so it happened that even though he was trained and certified as a neurologist, he had never really practised. His first university appointment was in the department of psychology, not in the faculty of medicine. This was a mutual acknowledgement that his value was as a researcher and that he wasn’t going to put on a white coat and start ministering to people. He had a medical licence but this was to keep his credentials up for the purpose of writing grants, the way some people kept an unused driver’s licence in their wallet for photo ID.
In his research, Patrick used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the minute differences in blood flow between different parts of the brain that occurred when subjects did certain mental or physical tasks. This change in blood flow made the affected part of the brain appear to “light up” and areas of the brain could be “mapped” accordingly. Initially the tasks examined in this way were relatively simple: look at the blinking light, move your index finger, and so on. Then language became big, everyone had studies examining word generation, syntax, and grammar structures. After that, working more and more with neuropsychologists, he became involved in research on generation of language and this led to projects studying more complicated responses, such as arousal, and specifically arousal to certain complex stimuli. This was, as the press (and many in his department) dubbed it, his “blue period” when he “single-handedly gave scientific credance (sic) to the depravity that pornography encompasses” (that little gem came in a threatening letter he found taped to the mailbox of his apartment and addressed to Patrick Lazerenko–Smut Doctor). It was, of course, less titillating than that: he had subjects–usually university students who participated without complaint or a hint of embarrassment–watch selected “vignettes” while being scanned, showing how their right occipital, cingulate, and then frontal lobes lit up in a sequential pattern that was the brain equivalent of arousal.
His new chairman, a recruit from another university visibly harried by the demands of fundraising and budget cuts, invited Patrick into his office for lunch and a discussion. Patrick remembered the view from the office as he sat down, the expensive slice of green quadrangle rationed out to the upper-floor offices. A secretary brought two salads, and as he speared a small forest of broccoli–“Good source of folate,” his luncheon partner said–the chairman admitted to Patrick that he found having a non-psychologist in the department to be an “invigorating” experience. The chairman said this in a way that implied he was not the sort of man who enjoyed such invigoration. The former chair, then deep into his last term, had made a controversial decision to hire Patrick, and he had championed the young researcher almost as a rebuke to the grumblers in the department who questioned his authority. Now, regime change had come, and the mood for many in the department had deteriorated into one of frank paranoia. The new chairman tried to dispel this atmosphere with a series of private lunchtime talks with his faculty. And as they ate, the new chairman explained how he wanted the best for Patrick and, in that vein, wouldn’t it be more efficient for all involved if they thought about having his appointment–and salary support and office space requirements–transferred to another department? This was followed several days later by a “personal note” from the chairman, something to the effect that no decisions had been made but that he should try to “keep his work in the news.” In this spirit he accepted an invitation to a televised round-table discussion of pornography where he was one of a number of pundits. He spent the program like a reluctant punchline, trying to hide between a baby-faced Internet pornographer with a Russian accent and a very troubled-looking priest. After a while, Patrick grew frustrated with the sniggering and began to refuse interviews. That didn’t please the chairman.
All this coincided with a drop-off in his publications, due to what Patrick would call a “re-orienting” of his research. The grants dipped too, which set off an alarm in the chairman’s office. And then Marc-André called. He had seen Patrick on television, knew something about the brain imaging work he was doing, and was interested in, as he put it, applications for the work. Patrick was leery, but agreed to meet for lunch.
It was a coincidence, that’s how Patrick thought of it later. He was never one to believe in coordinated door openings and closures but there was Marc-André, talking about neuroeconomics, the newly coined study of the processes behind economic and consumer decisions, without knowing that Patrick had already written a proposal to study what parts of the brain were activated in states where decisions were made with competing goals. “We’re organisms driving toward not just some thing, but many things, constantly evaluating multiple variables and shuffling our desires,” Patrick remembered saying to the growing grin of Marc-André as he explained the research. Patrick told him he wanted to know how that happened and what part of the brain was responsible for that shuffling. The biological basis for all the utilitarian choices that needed to be made. Marc-André finished Patrick’s sentence by saying he couldn’t think of a big player in the world of business that wasn’t asking the same question. And willing to pay handsomely for an answer.
So Patrick had the option of continuing to do research in his university–waiting for his turn on the machine to do the necessary functional MRI studies, dealing with the infighting in a department where his career was on a death watch, scrambling for grants and hanging on–or, as Marc-André said after the food arrived, he could establish his own company and control everything. Marc-André gave Patrick what he now knew was a standard business-school presentation: a neo-Marxist analysis delivered over lunch in an expensive Thai restaurant. And during this particular Marxist-Thai fusion meal, Marc-André reminded Patrick that he did not own the means of production, that he would be a worker forever crouched in the great field of science. To remain in that state required Patrick to accept a false consciousness. Patrick didn’t know Marc-André at this time, so he was very impressed.
It didn’t turn out to be that simple. In resigning his position at the university and founding Neuronaut, Patrick discovered that he’d traded the collared tensions of an academic department for the open warfare of a lawsuit, where, in the university’s deposition, he was portrayed as little more than a not-yet-tenured thief. The judge saw it differently.
Now, he was rich.
It turned out that Patrick had set his sail at high, high tide. Neuronaut went public with an initial offering whose success stunned even the MBAs. He had become a salesman, explaining the technique in terms that anyone with ambition and a chequebook could understand. He spent a disorienting season in countless meetings, luring Jeremy Bancroft away from another biotech start-up to act as Neuronaut’s first CEO, poaching psychometricians from various psychology departments, and trying to set up the first free-standing functional brain-imaging centre in the United States, all accompanied by the beep, beep, beeping of the Brinks truck backing up to the door. And it wasn’t like he’d been doing poorly before; it’s just that what he made as a junior faculty member at a prestigious university was less than what now periodically fell out of the crevices of his sofa. He was rich enough that he was uncertain of his worth at any one time. For Patrick, wealth was best understood in terms of degrees of freedom. He was free to pay his team of intellectual property lawyers. He was free to have his own laboratory. He was free to go.
Personally, it had been necessary to retool. Becoming suddenly wealthy in America was a consciousness-raising experience, perhaps inferior only to becoming famous or publicly battling cancer, and Patrick recognized the responsibilities that went along with this newfound status. He stepped away from rental life in Brookline with the speed of an evacuee, and anyone who wanted the furniture remnants of that life was welcome to it. He took his
computer and his books and some clothes and, like switching sectors in post-World War II Berlin, he migrated over to a new life. He purchased a condo in Kendall Square, appreciating the irony of living in a brand spanking new building constructed to look like a period terra cotta-clad warehouse converted into condos.
“Is this Chicago style?” guests would ask as they admired the prominent overhang through one of the two smaller double-hung sash Chicago-style windows.
“You have a good eye,” he would reply, handing them a glass of Pinot Noir that ached, ached.
He thought that he liked his apartment. The Chicago style was very popular. Minimalist, modern, American. Ornament subordinated to an overall structural theme. Yes, he was drawn to this terra cotta cliffside, its fraudulent history, its height.
A lifestyle change followed his new address. He wanted simplicity, he told himself as he cycled to work on a bike that cost more than his first year at the provincially subsidized medical school he had attended. He owned a black Saab 9-5–the regimental sedan of the technocrati–that slept in the caverns of a garage under the condo, but he didn’t drive it. Simplicity. He had space now, beautiful space. He took off his shoes so as not to hear footsteps like mortar rounds sounding off the cherry-wood floors in the main room. The ceilings were high and the windows big enough, and the only outside disturbance to his peace was the occasional rimshot of birds meeting their terminal reflections.
The apartment was empty for the longest time until Heather convinced him to have it decorated, convinced him to let her “prepare” the rooms. Now his furniture was sculpture, his rugs tapestries, and his kitchen an anteroom to the larger cathedral of asceticism. He would have liked it to stay museum-bare, gallery-bare. When guests nodded admiringly at the furniture, he could still tell them of his misgiving about certain pieces, his curatorial restlessness. They appreciated it.
