Garcia's Heart

by Liam Durcan

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “And he is a cardiologist–”

  “Was a cardiologist.”

  “Yes, yes. He was a cardiologist, Dr. Lazerenko, please remember that. Perhaps he has insights into his own condition that his friends or his family don’t have. Turn your head.” There was a pause and Bolodis pointed to his own ear when he saw the puzzled look on Patrick’s face. “I have to look inside.” The exam was painful and made Patrick want to yawn. “You do research,” Bolodis said as he examined the other side, as though he had discovered this fact looking into Patrick’s ear.

  “Yes.”

  “I read about it. After you left I did a literature search on you. I read about your research.” Always a non sequitur. He never knew whether to say “Thanks” or “Sorry” when what he usually meant was “I don’t care.” “It was very interesting,” Bolodis said earnestly. “I like to think about these questions too.” A broader version of the smile appeared, which was then revised into something cloudier: “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your research. I read that it hopes to explain certain behaviours.”

  Patrick shook his head. “I’m here for personal reasons. Besides, I don’t do that kind of research any more.”

  “I mean, I can see it, you know. The brain determines our mental states, how we feel, and brain function is subject to physical laws; it’s determined.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, where is his free will? How can he be guilty? How can anybody be guilty?” Patrick was glad Bolodis added the last part, it made it easier not to have to answer him. Bolodis paused, then said, “I’ve met a fair number of unusual people at the tribunal. You can’t help but think. You get a lot of time to think.”

  “Do you see Hernan regularly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every day?”

  “Most days. Yes. Every day.”

  “He talks to you, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he does. I’m his doctor.”

  “No, he talks to you. Not just about his medical condition.”

  “Confidentiality, Dr. Lazerenko. A physician should respect that.”

  “I think he’s unwell.”

  “I can’t discuss this.”

  “Why does Hernan think I’m here? Is it because of the research? Because that’s not what I do.”

  “What do you do, Dr. Lazerenko?”

  Patrick sighed. “I study how people make certain decisions with their money. Period. I look at situations and variables in order to help make marketing decisions. Who told you I was a researcher in the first place? Did I tell you that when I was here before?”

  Bolodis shook his head: “No. Celia told me.” He put the file down on the desk, and as his arm extended, Patrick saw the creases of the elbow of his linen suit open up.

  “He should know how he’s affecting his family by not talking.”

  “I’m sure he’s aware,” Bolodis said flatly, and jettisoned the latex gloves into the container next to the examining table.

  Bolodis smiled but Patrick understood it was anything but a smile; it was a default mechanism, professionally applied but still a Soviet-bloc–grade obfuscational device. He would prefer open disdain. He had grown used to disdain–in the world of business it had become one of the indicators that he was doing his job well. The smile was like a handshake held too long, a breach of decorum, more flagrant for it being used among people who had some sort of shared experience. But he and Bolodis were not the same. To Bolodis he was a lapsed colleague, a theoretical thinker, a mercenary, a pain in the ass on a Friday afternoon. But he shouldn’t be so harsh, he thought, a smile could mean so many things: tolerance, beneficence, sympathy–samplers of goodwill, sentiments lasting long enough to get him out of the office.

  “I think you’re fit to go, Dr. Lazerenko.”

  THIRTEEN

  The village has been captured by enemy soldiers with orders to kill all civilians. A group of townspeople have sought refuge in the hayloft of an abandoned barn. They can hear the soldiers outside; the soldiers are coming toward the barn. At that moment, a woman’s infant daughter begins to cry. She covers the child’s mouth to block the sound. If she removes her hand from the child’s mouth, the soldiers will be alerted and will kill the woman, her child, and all the townspeople. To save herself and the others, she must kill her child.

  The story was a thought experiment, and it preoccupied Patrick as he walked the deserted streets of Den Haag. The crying baby dilemma was meant to highlight the conflict between group welfare and personal moral conviction. The emotional response, the abhorrence associated with the thought of killing one’s child was forced to compete with the abstract understanding that the child would die under either circumstance and that many lives could be saved by committing this act.

  It was a terrible thing to contemplate. Something visceral occurred, Patrick had felt it. He’d watched as the faces of his undergrad students furrowed, as though for the first time, while considering this dilemma. They’d answer slowly, toeing their way along the process as though they heard ice creaking.

  What is the right thing to do? How do we decide what is right? Philosophers had the question to themselves for centuries. Utilitarianism versus deontology. John Stuart Mill against Kant in the ultimate cage match. And after three centuries without a resolution from the philosophers, neuro-scientists had begun eyeing the dilemma–specifically, what part of the brain was activated in a decision-making process and if relatively greater activity in certain parts of the brain reflected a more utilitarian response.

  Even though Neuronaut didn’t study these sorts of problems, Patrick had thought of this dilemma a lot in the last two years. He had watched from the corporate sidelines as the research of his former colleagues progressed without him. At one time, he had wanted to do the experiments himself, to define a neural basis of conflict in moral judgments, to understand how they are resolved. He wanted to know what happened in the brains of the Nazi doctors to allow them to continue with their day. He wanted to know what sort of brain activity, what deft imbalance between competing regions made it possible for Hernan García to participate in the torture and killings of civilians, in the death of José-Maria Fernandez, a boy he’d taught. A boy he’d known.

  Of course, Patrick didn’t do this experiment. He was busy getting a prospectus together and figuring what parts of Globomart’s new promotional campaign were maximally activating temporal lobe structures. But the study, which used functional magnetic resonance scans to study the brains of subjects as they considered the “crying baby dilemma” was done, and done well, and showed that parts of the brain–the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex–were activated during the moral angst that came with these dilemmas, and when the decision was made to pursue the utilitarian route, to smother the child, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was even more strongly activated.

  He didn’t want to think about Hernan practising that pragmatism, killing for a larger cause. It was once a solace for Patrick to think that Hernan made the decision to trade the lives of those held at Battalion 316 for those of his family. And even then, he hoped Hernan had felt anguish, hoped for a moment of moral hesitation when the reflexes of everyday life were stripped away and one’s actions had to be considered. But even if he was coerced, Hernan had come to the conclusion that someone’s death made sense. It was easier to think about the brain malfunctioning, and that is how he needed to think of Hernan now, that his dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was activated at a crucial moment, resolving the conflict. In some ways it absolved him. It made the smothering of a child easier to contemplate. Evil was unfathomable, but Patrick knew how to measure blood flow.

  This was Den Haag at dusk. This was the sea.

  He had come to the very edge of Holland, in Scheveningen, the place that Birgita had told him about. He thought it would be a bus journey away but it was really nothing more th
an the northeast corner of Den Haag. Scheveningen was a beach town, infamous and deserted and so close to Den Haag that he’d walked there without particularly intending to. In the early evening light it was beautiful, even more abandoned than the city just to the south. In the guidebook he bought at one of the few open stores, he learned that Scheveningen, other than being the North Sea version of Daytona Beach (with everything, positive and negative, that that entailed), held a special place in the psyche of the Dutch as the proper pronunciation of its name–Skay-veninguh–was so difficult to German speakers that it was used as a shibboleth, a test by the Dutch to identify enemy spies during the war.

  “Skay-veninguh,” he said, loudly and ineptly enough for any bystander to cast a suspicious glance, but he was alone. Ahead there was a boardwalk that led to a pavilion on a pier, all of it stilted above a sea the colour of slate. He was an invading army of one. The city was his.

  Patrick turned a corner and walked down another street and this confirmed the emptiness, an almost pathological emptiness. It was the sort of abandonment that reminded him of evacuation from some impending civil catastrophe. He expected to look through windows to see pots bubbling on stoves or doors swinging on their hinges. Maybe a flood was coming, the rising waters even now overwhelming the vaunted system of dykes and canals, leaving scant hours until they were all waist-deep in North Sea. Maybe the evacuation orders had been issued in Dutch, and the foreigners, stumbling through Skay-veninguh in every sense, had been left behind to fend for themselves. “Skay-veninguh,” he repeated to himself, lacking even the conviction of a proper spy. He had been found out, consigned to a Dutch rooftop in the coming flood, wind-whipped and waving for rescue.

  He told himself that if he had been alone on an empty beach the solitude would have been tolerable, even pleasant, but wandering the streets of a ghost town filled him with dread. He wasn’t used to seeing everything closed, everything was 24/7 back home, and he understood in that very North American way that only the sight of a functioning retail establishment was going to reassure him now. He grew so desperate that he almost retraced his steps to the shop where he had bought his guidebook. It took him another ten minutes to find a restaurant that didn’t look boarded up on one of the side streets off the Strandweg. He was further relieved to find the door unlocked, and he ventured inside, coming face to face with two restaurant workers who regarded him with a look of astonishment and shock, as though he’d emerged from the foam after having swum over from Norway.

  They were apologetic for only having sandwiches, but it was fine, Patrick told them. The meal in the dining room, with its huge diorama window fronting the coast, calmed him down. By the time they brought Patrick a cup of coffee and the bill, Scheveningen had again become just another off-season beach town, one of a fraternity of forlorn places. The sky deepened and then the sky was black. No stars, but the lights of the coast extended to the right and left and that was enough for him.

  It was cooler by the time he left, and he could smell the sea now. The pier disappeared except for a small skeleton of lights that outlined where the pavilion would be. He could go back to the Metropole, but he thought about his cell phone and laptop and whatever concierge was on duty, all waiting for him. No, right now the empty streets of Scheveningen were what he needed. Shop windows full of beach gear, bicycle rental places boarded up; even though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, nightfall had normalized the streets for him and he was able to imagine it was three in the morning. As he passed the shop windows, he could see the flesh over his cheek sagging now like low-lying Dutch evening clouds, a right eye still swollen to the point that it looked like he was winking. Patrick stopped and peered into a darkened shop window. He opened his mouth, and the skin over the swollen cheek stretched. His eye opened slightly. Past the reflection he saw that the shop was a gallery, with paintings stacked on the floor against the back wall. Two paintings still hung in the window–seascapes, with more compositional skill than typically seen in tourist-grade oils–asserting a more-than-seaside-town-gallery aspiration for the establishment. It was natural that he thought of Celia at moments like this. Art from the sidewalk, inadvertent, brought back memories of a moment like this on a different street fifteen years earlier. It was how he had found his way back into the Garcías’ lives.

  It was 1991. He had barely seen any of the Garcías and hadn’t talked to Celia at all in the four years since he’d quit Le Dépanneur Mondial. After a year dodging Celia at the store and at school, he had been relieved to escape to the anonymity of a different CEGEP. He had friends and girlfriends and a life and Celia García was demoted to just another person he knew from his old neighbourhood. He was accepted into medical school after CEGEP (something routinely done in Quebec, if only for the extreme social experimentation of graduating twenty-three-year-old doctors) and became immersed in books, treading water with the other overachievers. In late September of his first year, walking through the downtown early on a Friday evening after a day of gorging himself on another thousand facts of biochemistry, he stopped on the sidewalk and turned his head sharply to the right. He still thought about that response; the flare, perhaps reaching the occipital lobes, tripping through substations in the temporal lobes, retrieving a visual memory, comparing, triggering other associations. Not a decision to turn, but a response to something only partially understood and then the decision created later. He stopped. He was stopped. Through the window he saw something familiar among other paintings at a student exhibition. Patrick saw himself, emerging from a field of corn. He went into the gallery.

  The exhibition space, a building belonging to the other English university in the city, was already full. Half the crowd–obviously family–was dressed up for the event and milled nervously, never straying far from the work of various offspring, while the other half, younger, whom he assumed to be the artists themselves or friends of the artists, were dressed less formally but with more eccentric precision. He was the rarity, the walk-in business, likely the only one. He strolled through the aisles of art, making his way to the wall that had been visible from the window.

  He looked at the painting again and had to remind himself that he hadn’t given it back, that this was a copy of the one that hung in his bedroom. Artist: Celia García. It was exactly like his. It was him in the painting, titled Unknown boy in cornfield #2. It was him pushing back those stalks.

  She had four other paintings there. Stunning paintings. Patrick saw a rendering of the inside of the Garcías’ house, distorted and yet still recognizable, a point of view that he could imagine only as coming from inside the aquarium that sat in her parents’ living room. Another showed her parents, American Gothic-style, standing in front of Le Dépanneur Mondial. Hernan and Marta, gaunt and stoic, clutching a mop and carafe of coffee respectively. There was a portrait of a man about Patrick’s age in which she captured something intimate, a knowing smirk, that made Patrick feel the stab of a butter knife somewhere in his ego. Of course, there was Unknown boy in a cornfield #2, which was unsettling and impressive in its own right. Patrick’s favourite was one whose point of view could have been his for the summer he worked at Le Dépanneur Mondial, impressionistic banks of colour on either side of a produce aisle.

  “My professor doesn’t like that one,” Celia said, having crept up on him. She whispered: “She doesn’t like any of them really, they’re all devoid of a personal style, all ‘imitative.’”

  Patrick stared straight ahead at the painting, into a churning sea of yellow that he thought must be mangoes. “That’s why they’re being exhibited, I suppose. Setting an example.”

  “No, seriously. She hasn’t said so, but I get the feeling she wants me to discover my inner La-tee-na. You know–folksier style, crucifixes and skeletons, the new Frida Kahlo. That’s how I’ll get to be a great Canadian painter.”

  He turned toward her. She had her arms crossed–all the students identifiable as artists stood with their arms crossed, as though sentries against the marauding
philistines. But she smiled at him. She was taller than when he had last seen her, and she wore her hair pulled back and gathered into a thick cord that hung down her back.

  He didn’t know what he was supposed to say to someone he hadn’t seen for three years. A summary of what he’d done in the intervening time maybe. He had imagined just this sort of situation, hoping whatever he had accomplished would impress her, surprise her. In these fantasies she was always the same, the Celia he’d known from the store, from that day they’d walked home together. But he was surrounded by evidence that she had changed too. Art was no longer a hobby for her. She had become an artist, and it intimidated as much as it impressed him. As much as he tried to think of himself as different, as an older or more accomplished version of himself, it was still just a version. And she knew the other versions.

  “Hi,” he said, holding out his right hand, “I’m Patrick Lazerenko.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she replied.

  He had arrived late. Hernan and Marta had come and gone earlier, and he had missed Roberto by a scant five minutes. The gallery emptied but he loitered, pretending to develop a taste for the work of the nearby exhibitors. Finally, he asked Celia if she wanted to go out for something to eat. Patrick didn’t notice much about the meal–all his neurons were committing themselves to various Celia-related details. She laughed differently, the nasal snort was gone, and instead she pursed her lips. She was more comfortable in English now, pausing less as she spoke and, unless she wanted to make a point, the Spanish words had disappeared from her conversation. She spoke about art and her ambitions, sounding confident but not arrogant, a neat trick for someone in university. At one point, Celia mentioned a guy’s name and the soup turned sour, but Patrick managed to carry on with some measure of composure. She wanted to know about medical school, and he told her it was, up to that point, a morass of facts that he had difficulty imagining would have any application. “We’re learning about the brain,” he remembered saying to her, then regretting it as the words made him sound like a grade school child eager to impress with his knowledge of the alphabet.