“You told him about the boat and the—?!”
Mario laughed. “Even as a vision the experience was a bit too intense to share with another person. Even with a doctor. No, I did some editing for the doctor’s sake. In the official version it was my dog I thought I’d killed.”
“You replaced me with the a dog?” Ryan found this equally insulting and endearing. He snorted with laughter before his dignity made him shake his head.
“Yes, I did. It was meant as a compliment. I’m not one of those people who mistake dogs for babies, but this dog of mine is quite something.”
“Wow. I guess I should feel honoured, eh?” Ryan chuckled. He wasn’t much of a dog person himself. “Did you go to a shrink or a real doctor?”
“Ha ha! I went to a real doctor. A medical doctor. A neurologist. He dabbles in psychology, but he’s not a real shrink.”
“A real doctor, but not a real shrink. I gotta say, Mario, this is kind of bass-ackwards.” Ryan was truly amused for the first time during this strange meeting. He was beginning to believe Mario really meant him no harm. “So, you re-wrote your hallucination? The one you never had?”
“I did. In my version I took Roxy to Tulum with me. We went fishing on a boat far from shore, she bit me by accident while snatching a piece of bait from my hand—without permission—and I was so furious that I pushed her overboard, knowing she’d get exhausted long before she reached the shore. I was hoping she’d run out of strength, I told him. In reality she was in Seattle with my sister while I travelled. She was safe and sound and happy to greet me when I got back. I knew very well it was a vision, and I told the doctor so. But, so vivid! It frightened me badly to discover such rage in myself, and over such a trifle, toward an animal I loved.”
“If you were going to edit the hallucination, why did you keep the violent part? Why not something, you know, harmless and silly?”
“Good question. I guess I needed to be truthful without being too truthful. I needed to confess to the anger I was capable of feeling. It was a medical fact I thought was relevant, and I needed to get it across to the doctor. Because I thought it might have some connection to my headaches. You denied what happened that night, but what you couldn’t deny was the anger I felt when I knew you’d caused my father’s death. I’m not a passionate person, I don’t get or stay angry easily. By the time we were out in that boat I had to keep reminding myself I hated you. I needed to stay angry at you to go through with what I’d planned. That’s why I tried to get you to take it back—because I knew that you wouldn’t, that you’d start bickering about it. I needed that to get me angry at you again.”
Ryan ignored the unflattering reminder. “And what did the shrink tell you?”
“Ah! Here comes the good part. He told me, ‘Be thankful to your dog: she saved you. You were angry at her, but it’s her you chose to help you.’ ‘How do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘I didn’t choose anything, I had a vision that wasn’t real.’ ‘But the vision meant something,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t random. You chose your dog because you trust her to be your messenger. Something in you needed help, and you sent her for help. You made her the central character in your vision.’ ‘That makes zero sense,’ I told him. ‘In my vision I left her to die!’ ‘But you trust her enough to know she won’t die. On some level you knew it wasn’t real, and that you weren’t capable of doing what you imagined you did. That’s why you could afford to hallucinate about it.’ You see, the doctor’s an idealist who loves dogs—he has a picture of his two dogs on his desk—and who insisted that I was a good person, that I couldn’t possibly have murder in me. I didn’t argue with him.”
“Did you think that maybe Iwould swim to shore?”
“No. I didn’t want you to, and I had no reason to think you would. It didn’t even enter my mind. Hell, it didn’t enter my mind that another boat might be close enough to hear you scream and save you! I’m glad you rocked the boat, that made me feel better: at least you put up that much of a fight. And I did expect you to scream. Why didn’t you?” It was funny how Mario sounded like a stern parent questioning his child over a spot of disobedience.
“I don’t remember why. I was too stunned, I guess. Too surprised to scream.” Ryan found it difficult to talk about himself after listening to Mario’s story.
“And you did swim to shore,” Mario said with admiration. “You learned to swim there and then!”
“I guess I did.” Ryan grimaced and shrugged. “You can have the credit for that, if you want it.”
“I don’t want it, it’s not mine. I want to know how you learned to swim. I’ve never met anyone who’s done that under, how shall I say, similar circumstances.”
“‘Under similar circumstances’,” Ryan repeated. He looked up at Mario and exploded with laughter ending in a snort. It really was the funniest thing in the world although he could never say why. Mario caught his mirth and chuckled too, but with caution and restraint.
“Yea. Well.” Ryan had composed himself. “The hardest thing wasn’t learning to swim. It was lying on the water and doing nothing. Moving nothing. Just lying on my back long enough to believe I wouldn’t drown. Those were the longest moments of my life, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I swear I’ve got some sort of ADD shit going on even though I’ve never been diagnosed. It’s hard for me to focus on one thing and to keep my mind still. Every waking second my mind wanders this way and that, and my body follows and keeps looking for something new to do. It was downright scary, having to keep myself still and focusing on nothing but that. Collapsing the universe into this one little atom of lying still, and keeping it from re-expanding!”
A small bright flame had lit up inside Ryan’s chest as he recalled that night and the victory over himself. His eyes had a fervent and feverish sparkle, he was breathing fast. This meeting was not just about Mario; he was not the only one who deserved congratulation!
“That’s how I learned to swim, Mario: by learning not to swim. Learning not to do anything. After that, everything else was easy because I knew I could always go back to that safe place, lying on the water and not moving. Then I started moving while I lay on my back. I did what you’d call the backward stroke with my arms, except it was in slow motion, and when that worked and I didn’t drown, I started moving my legs the way I’d seen people do. Every now and then I had to roll over to look at the light to make sure I was moving in the right direction. You know what was the biggest letdown?”
“Letdown?” The word had taken Mario by surprise.
“It was realizing that the reason I was still afloat wasn’t because of any heroic efforts. It was because the water was so salty. That was all! It was a blow to my pride, but it made me relax even more.”
“Don’t downplay what you did.” Mario was looking at him with admiration and mild disbelief. The disbelief was aimed at himself, at his forgetting and ignoring what a serious opponent Ryan could be for all his weaknesses and whining and childish obstinacy. He felt a pang of sadness at losing Ryan as a friend before he’d become one, a rare friend who, like himself, took the blows aimed at him and turned them into victories.
Ryan’s desire to speak had run its short course. He’d said all he wanted to say, and he was vindicated. Now it was Mario’s turn again. Mario who’d refused to fall into the trap of madness Ryan had set for him and who’d triumphed over the big C itself.
“Enough about me,” Ryan said with a goodhearted smile. “I’m still waiting to hear how you got your diagnosis.”
“I got my diagnosis because as a shrink, my doctor couldn’t tell his own ass from his elbow. He diagnosed me with a beast named peduncular hallucinosis.”
“Sounds impressive. And nerdy.”
“Yes! Except that it was wrong. I presented to him not only for a hallucination but also for acting on it. This doesn’t jive with peduncular hallucinosis at all. I’ve researched this fucker through and through, at this point I know as much about it as any doctor. It makes people see things, us
ually a parade of gibberish floating past their eyes, but it doesn’t make them imagine they’redoing things, let alone such violent things as murder, and so carefully planned. He should’ve known that.”
“But aren’t you glad he didn’t?”
“Hell yes. But that’s what scares me: that my life was saved through a mistake that a better practitioner of psychiatry would have never made. If he’d seen through my bullshit I might be on my way to pushing up the daisies. He would’ve realized I was a pathological bullshitter, ordered a CT scan to cover his ass, and found nothing on it. But he took my homemade story seriously.”
“I think you’re too harsh on him. Maybe he should’ve known you were lying about what you saw, but he couldn’t possibly know you were lying abouthaving the hallucination. Fundamental truth: people don’t make themselves out to be crazier than they are. If you said you saw things, it’s because you saw things. So it’s a bit unfair to blame him for not seeing through your bullshit, don’t you agree? He’s only a shrink, not a mindreader.”
Mario liked this. “Ha ha! You keep calling him a shrink but he’s a real doctor, and a good one. He made the right diagnosis—which was the wrong diagnosis, but he was right to make it—and that’s all that matters. Because when they did the CT scan, he took a very close look at the area where this peduncular hallucinosis lives. In a part of the brain called the peduncle, as you might have guessed. Sounds vaguely obscene, but far be it from me to complain. In that peduncle he found a shadow, just a suggestion of a shadow. So small that nobody would’ve found it if they hadn’t thought to look in that particular spot. He showed the scan to two other doctors and they agreed it could be something. A tumour. Could be. There was no way to know for sure without cutting into my brain. I said, Do it. So they had me sign a stack of papers and they cut into my brain and they found it just where it was supposed to be. It really was a tumour. Once it was cut out and sent to the pathologist, it got a name of its own: glioma. That’s what I had. That was my one and only true diagnosis. The operation was a success, which was a miracle in itself because gliomas aren’t easy to remove. But they got it all. They got it all!” Mario slapped his shaved head.
Ryan asked, “Do you realize how many people would say no to the suggestion of cutting into their brain to find out if there really is a tumour? Do you realize how many people simply would rather not know, or would choose the possibility of cancer over the perceived violence and violation of having their head cut open? I’ve never understood this kind of reasoning, but it’s too prevalent to ignore.”
“Yes, I do realize. Still, I can’t claim any credit for courage. The way I see it, having my head cut open for a good reason, and in the twenty-first century, is not all that big of a deal. No bigger than learning to swim a mile from shore.”
Something occurred to Ryan. “Once he found the cancer, he didn’t think to go back and question his initial diagnosis?”
“Why would he go back and question it?”
“Because good doctors often do. When something about an earlier diagnosis feels not quite right, they go back and rethink it. Many of the doctors I work with used to be in clinical practice, and many still are. They tell me things they might not tell each other, but they need to tell someone.”
“Maybe he did realize later that it couldn’t have been this peduncular thingamajig. But he had no reason to tell me that. Why would he? The misdiagnosis was gone together with the cancer. And cancer trumps everything. Finding and removing the cancer was such a triumph of medical goodness over entropy. So why would he want to second-guess the diagnosis that led to it? That would be almost ungrateful.”
Ryan found himself agreeing. “Yep. The best doctors are only human. When a diagnosis is this successful and popular with everyone, why mess with it?”
“So,” Mario concluded. “They found my cancer by chance. Kind of stumbled on it because of a misdiagnosis. It’s great, but it’s also very scary.”
“I think you exaggerate the element of chance. The doctor’s mistake had a lot to do with the happy outcome. But so did your decision. You deciding to describe your so-called vision to him had just as much to do with it.”
“No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating the element of chance. If anything, I still can’t appreciate its full power. How life brought us together, how you told me your story and what that led to. At the very time when a threat to my life needed to be discovered and removed! And the idea of the so-called vision I owe entirely to you. That’s why I feel you saved my life.”
“Well, if you want to go that far back, my breaking up with Sam is what saved your life. We were supposed to go to Baja together. Instead, I ended up in Cancun. And you know the rest.”
They looked at the distant mountains of Vancouver Island in silent agreement about the power of chance.
A wave of perverse curiosity swept over Ryan. “Mario, did I really convince you? That morning after the—boat, did I really convince you that you’d imagined it all?”
Mario pondered. “Yes and no. Part of me was stunned and disarmed by the gall of your, er, performance. That part of me didn’t question anything. Your version of reality was set aside as an option, something that wouldn’t spoil and could just sit there until I might need it. That was the amazing thing: I accepted your version with a feeling of Whatever. Just like when you’re hounded by a pushy salesman and you agree to take a brochure of whatever he’s selling, something you know is too extravagant and impossible. But you agrees to take it anyway, just in case your tastes and circumstances change in some improbable future.”
Ryan wondered how many times Mario had rehearsed this little speech in his mind, because he must have. He loved making speeches, and he apparently loved preparing them.
Mario rolled on. “But the other part of me knew right away that you had to be bluffing. There was one mistake you made in your otherwise brilliant performance.” He paused to let Ryan wonder.
“What was that?”
“You sprang it on me too soon. Two more days, even one more day, and the impressions of the senses would’ve started to fade. Memories would’ve started to replace them, and the stuff of memories gets shuffled around in storage. There are things that happened to me not even that long ago that feel as if I’d dreamed them, and sometimes I wonder if I had! I have no proof that they really happened. So, if you’d ambushed me at that coffee table not on the very next morning but even one day later, I might’ve been ready to agree that we’d never gone out on that boat.”
Ryan accepted his defeat in dignified silence.
But Mario hadn’t finished. “And. And, you never gave me time to regret what I’d done. A person can’t know if they’re capable of murder until they give it a tryand it’s had time to sink in. For one night and one morning I lived with the knowledge that I’d committed murder, and it felt—right. It felt like I’d done right by my father and by my own orphaned self. If someone had offered to turn back time so I could let you live, I wouldn’t have taken the offer. It was very scary to realize that I was quite okay with committing murder, actually proud of this new person I’d discovered in myself. And then I walked into you sitting at that table as if nothing had happened, and you assured me that nothing had. You took away my entire newborn self. But what if you’d waited just one more day? I may have been shocked and horrified by what I’d done. I may have longed to take it back, and then your timing would’ve been perfect. Maybe. We’ll never know. My doctor, you, myself—we all want to believe I don’t have murder in me. But the truth is, we’ll never know now.”
Mario looked at Ryan with sadness and reproach of one forever denied a primal certainty about himself. And for an instant Ryan felt responsible for depriving Mario of this essential certainty. But in the next instant, driven by the same orgasmic urge that makes us look at frightening things when we really shouldn’t, he asked, “Before you found out about the cancer, did you mean to kill me again?”
Mario looked at the table. “Yes. I did. I had no
idea how or when—part of me wanted to weasel out of the task, to procrastinate—but the intent was there. It was like you’d already forgiven me for what I meant to do, because you’d already denied that it had happened.”
“I denied it, yes. But forgiven you?” Ryan pulled a rueful and crooked smile. “No, I hadn’t forgiven you. But—here’s the interesting part—for my plan to succeed, I was relying on you tofeel forgiven. I was hoping you’d choose that over sanity.”
“Then you’re an idealist. Because I decided that I didn’t have to choose. I decided I could have both.”
“Well, it was a gamble on my part.”
“One hell of a gamble,” Mario agreed. “You almost won too, but in the end I beat you at your game, so I can see why you wouldn’t want to forgive me even now.”
“I’m not sure I believe you’ve forgiven me either, Mario.”
“I’m not sure of it myself. But here’s why that doesn’t matter. You need to know that after today you won’t see me again, and that you’ve nothing to fear from me. I don’t want revenge any more, but it’s not because I’ve become a nice person toward you. It’s because cancer has changed everything, trumped everything. Even if I wanted revenge and tried to come after you, the gift of a second chance at life might be rescinded. I might be punished for my greed. I’m superstitious enough to believe that. The fear of having that gift taken away will always be stronger than any desire to get back at you.”
Ryan nodded as he pondered this. Before he could say anything, the sonar ping of his cellphone announced the arrival of a message. He’d chosen this sound because of its crystalline innocence and simultaneous potential for frightful power: it was the sound of a submarine’s curiosity. He saw that this message was from Sam. (Ryan didn’t believe in setting a distinct sound for each of the people who called or messaged him. When a friend pointed this out to him, he thought about it and said it was because he was conversing with the machine in his hand, not with the actual person on the other end.)
Killer of a Mind Page 11
