by John Crowley
“Executive function is largely about response to novelty,” he said. Harry found he enjoyed listening to Dr. Macilhenny talk, calmly and with a pleasant uninsistent certainty, about things Harry had not realized it was possible to know. “Most of what we do all day is practiced, automatic. But novel situations require decision-making strategies. We have to be able to both initiate appropriate strategies, and inhibit inappropriate ones.” The Stroop test was about that, Harry learned: seeing if you could inhibit your first response, which was to read the word, and choose a novel one, name the color. Harry had failed that one, though Dr. Macilhenny laughed gently when Harry said it that way. Attention meant selectivity, choosing among inputs, what was important, what was distraction, yet being open to new unexpected information. Harry’s attention was compromised.
“So now I know,” Harry said. He almost laughed; it was hardly a surprise. He almost thought he perceived an answering smile on the doctor’s face. “Is that it?”
“Well,” said Dr. Macilhenny. “I don’t want to overstate this, but there are rehabilitative programs. Cognitive retraining for people who have limitations in this area.”
Harry said nothing.
“The brain’s an amazing thing,” Dr. Macilhenny said. “Do you remember when they used to say that after you leave adolescence the brain ceases to grow? Well, not so. It’s plastic. It continues to make new connections. You can actually see them with magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans and PET scans, people with damaged brains developing new pathways and circuits.”
“The more specific CAT scan,” Harry joked, “the more general PET scan.”
“If you’d like to try to work on some of these things,” Dr. Macilhenny said, “there’s a program being used now successfully called CRT, Cognitive Rehabilitation Training.”
“I thought you said I was undamaged.”
“Well, that’s the interesting part. It might work for anyone with a similar problem.”
“One thing I’ve noticed,” Harry said, not having known he was about to. “I have a very hard time with directions. I mean left and right, north and west.”
“Uh-huh,” said Dr. Macilhenny patiently.
“I can’t find my way back to a place I’ve come from.”
“Until it’s been practiced.”
“Well, yes.”
Dr. Macilhenny nodded.
“My sister’s the same way,” Harry said. “She always said, though, that we could probably do it fine really, as good as other people; we just weren’t paying attention.”
Dr. Macilhenny nodded again, and went on nodding and smiling very slightly, as though Harry had proved something that Dr. Macilhenny had already known about him, and all others like him; and Harry felt a flush of something between hope and fear.
On her day off Hope took Harry and Muriel to look at a new condo building in the town next down the valley.
“It’s not like I want you out,” she said. She’d said it more than once, and Harry believed her; she was, he thought, glad enough of his company, and he was helping with Muriel, which surely made things easier for her; but she would eventually want to date, wanted to already probably, and he’d have to be far away for that to be easy. Mainly though he thought it was the strain of decisiveness she inherited from Mila, a restless dissatisfaction that no firm move was being made or even worked toward, that led her to propose things, make suggestions it was hard to turn down. And why would he want to turn them down?
It was a nineteenth-century mill building where something plain and useful had once been made, kitchen knives or horn buttons or brushes, Hope couldn’t remember, all those had once been produced around here. It was right near the middle of the pleasant gentrified and prosperous downtown, and was quite small. Hope put her car in the newly striped parking lot and showed the place to Harry with a gesture that seemed to him faintly disparaging, though he thought this was just Hope’s way; she never liked to invest in things too soon, so as not to be disappointed. The brick walls of the place had been cleaned somehow and restored to what must have been their original warm rose pink. Nice.
It went on being nice. Harry liked the matte-black metal of the new door-frames and window-frames, which he touched as they passed. He liked the honey-colored wide planking of the halls, ancient and “distressed” as the antique dealers said by labor and use in another time. Muriel watched her feet in their multicolored sneakers fall on it, absorbed. Harry wondered if she was now placing in those unexpungable files this exact color, to be reminded of it—and of this unimportant, this unremarkable and unrecoverable moment in her life, with all its ramifying proprioception, its gestalt—by some new car’s or jet’s or time-machine’s brilliant hue in time to come.
“Here,” said Hope, and pushed open the door of the Sample One-Bedroom, enough like all the others that a choice could be made or at least embarked on through study of it. It was nice too. Muriel went to run the water and flush the toilet (she had come to enjoy strange bathrooms, and could go nowhere new that offered one without visiting it), and Harry and Hope examined the features and ran their hands over the Formica and the stainless steel.
“Nice,” said Hope.
Harry was entranced. Not a thing here had a history, even though it was placed within this shell of history. It was so clean: he had never lived in a new house or apartment, only old ones where decades of private grime had to be overlooked and dynasties of mice secretly resided. He could smell glue and sealant, as though the job had just been finished this morning. “I’d need everything,” he said.
“Ikea,” said Hope. “One day. Buy everything, have it delivered. See the built-in desk? You could work.”
He could work. He could have new Ikea furniture in blond beech or pine. He could have a narrow bed with new bed-sheets in clear colors, covers of virgin fleece made from who knew what. An armchair, one that looked fifty years old (like his velvet one that had burned) but was new, the nap of its plush crisp and tall; or dark cool leather. Books, but no more than dozen or two, all as yet unread.
“I wouldn’t need all that much,” he said softly.
“No,” said Hope.
“One cup,” Muriel said at his side. “One plate. One fork and one knife. One glass and one spoon.”
“Two,” Harry said. “Two of those things.” He smiled down at her, and she shrugged elaborately, lifting shoulders and turning her hands palm up by her cheeks, smiling too to say Whatever.
Harry turned and looked out his windows. Every day he could go down to town, to the pasticceria they had passed, and have coffee and biscotti, and buy a loaf for his dinner. Every week he could go to early Mass at that church, as he had for a while in one bad year, he didn’t know why he’d stopped. Every month he could sit at that desk and pay his bills: only three or four. And afterwards sit to read, or nothing. There would be nothing else required.
“What do you think?” Hope asked. “Any thoughts?
Harry had long used to think that he wouldn’t live much past his sixtieth year. It was a statistical thing more than a sense of fate: his father, both his grandfathers, and a grandmother had died at sixty, or sixty-two, or fifty-nine. Now it appeared that the statistical approach wasn’t any longer valid, and modern accounting suggested that Harry was more likely to be looking at seventy-five or eighty. Mila always told him he had to prepare for this, mentally or spiritually, but he never knew what such preparations would entail; it was like the way she said Be careful when he embarked on some journey in bad weather or tricky business negotiation: he would, indeed he would, but what command did it actually give? His to know.
Well, maybe this was it. Check out at sixty-three and at the same time still remain. It seemed almost like bliss, like a pleasant and undemanding afterlife. “It’s great,” he said.
“I think they’re great,” Hope said.
“I think they’re great,” said Muriel, with exact
ly Hope’s permanent shadow of dissatisfaction or doubt.
“They won’t last long,” Hope said. “These are going to get snapped up.”
“Oh, I believe it,” said Harry.
“They’ll get snapped up,” said Muriel.
“Should I snap one up?” Harry asked her
“Snap one up, Grampa!” she commanded. “You snap one up!” And she snapped the fingers of both her hands at him fiercely, like a flamenco dancer, though no sound came forth.
Harry drove to Dr. Macilhenny’s office in the city for the tenth session of his Pay Attention! program. Two sorts of day seemed to be occurring at once in the broad valley he passed through, a warm and damp one and a colder, clearer one, each with its own array of cloud and wind and light, you passed out of one and on into the other and yet could see the first lying still ahead the way you went. On the highway south, Harry’s old station wagon was passed by a great bulging SUV in an intense shade of blue-green, teal or peacock—Harry wasn’t sure what name applied to it—and as it hovered in his side-view mirror and then went heaving past him Harry experienced a momentary memory trace. That’s what he called the experience, a memory trace, though whether that was an accurate term or not he didn’t know: it was an instant sensation that somewhere in his far past, in childhood, in infancy maybe even, something of that color had filled his consciousness for a long or a short time. He could feel, taste, know, re-experience intensely the bit of past time, yet couldn’t say what it had been, what had been colored like that or what or when it was that he was reminded of.
There it is, Harry thought, damn there it is again. For this peculiar temps retrouvée thing had once been rare, so rare he could hardly have identified it as a kind of thing at all, and now it was suddenly common. It was now most often started by the vivid colors of new cars. He felt it go on, this sensation, as the SUV pulled away, at the same rate as the sensation faded.
What, Harry asked his brain, what, what is it, what did I see once or have or hold?
Gone.
Reds most often caused the sensation, scarlets and crimsons from tomato to fire-engine to blood, but also metallic golds and bronzes and one or another shade of the sudden startling yellow that sports cars and trucks now sometimes came in, so saturated as to be unreal, more shining and deep even than the shining circle within a newly opened can of paint. None did it consistently, but when his brain was in receptive mode (or whatever it was) they produced around Harry’s head and in Harry’s heart and in the world an aura like the aura that’s said to precede an epileptic seizure, yet each one different, because each was drawn from the life of his body in his real past. And yet he couldn’t reach that past, or it couldn’t reach him. Like the dreams he lost, but rather than slipping from consciousness they struggled to arise into it, or didn’t struggle but only smiled blandly and faded as Harry strove and failed to draw them up.
“It’s like those experiments thirty years ago,” he told Dr. Macilhenny. “The ones where they showed that no memories are ever lost, and you could excite a single neuron, or was it an axon, with a fine probe, and the patient, the subject, would suddenly have a vivid memory of her long-dead dog. Or smell her childhood house.”
“I remember the stories.”
“Isn’t that right? Memories are all stored forever somewhere in the brain, if only you could access them?”
“Well. We don’t use that model any longer.”
“Oh no? There were those experiments.”
“They turned out to be non-repeatable.”
“Oh.” Harry realized he hadn’t taken his jacket off, and that the room was warm. “Too bad. I always hoped I could volunteer.”
Dr. Macilhenny broke out the practice materials, and he and Harry sat opposite one another and began to work. Harry had already decided that the weird and pointless tasks he was made to do here were ineffectual, amateurish, like quack nostrums of some other medical era. That he got better at them seemed to matter not at all. But he did as he was asked, and at the end of every session went over with the doctor when he should come back again. He had nothing better to do.
That day he drove back from the city along the valley roads to the town where his daughter lived. At a wide sweeping turning of the highway, between the mass of a mountain on the left and the drop down to the river on the right, Harry felt himself understand for the first time that the landmarks he was noting—that junkyard, that stand of pines, that playground—and the stretches of road between them, were the same as the ones he saw going the other way, only in reverse order and seen from the other side. Of course it was something he knew, but just then he knew he knew it. The experience of going and the experience of coming back had been unrelated, somehow, but now the two ways, the way there and the way back, merged smoothly and wholly together in his mind, his poor mind, into one way. He felt it happen, and wondered if it was an experience only someone like him would ever note; if anyone not like him, like him or his dead sister, would even understand it if he spoke of it.
A mild winter rolled on. There seemed to be no particular programmed end to the Cognitive Rehab Program, and Harry found that he didn’t want it to end. There were no tests to tell him that his Executive Function was improving outside the office where he sorted cards and recited lists of words backwards with greater and greater accuracy. Dr. Macilhenny said that children with ADD could be shown to have been measurably helped by their Pay Attention! work. But—Harry wondered—what if your shortfall or limit or however it was to be described had gone on all your life unattended to?
“Well.” Dr. Macilhenny had been about to begin Harry’s workout, but instead folded his hands carefully before him. “That’s what we’re trying to learn.”
There is always this oddness with doctors, Harry thought, that they are something more than intimates, and yet less than friends; no matter how desperately you need what they can give, the giving of it is, for them, a job.
“So you don’t really know.”
“This is a very new area, Harry,” said Dr. Macilhenny. He leaned forward on the table that separated him from Harry and regarded him with a look of tender interest, almost compassion. “But suppose you’re a person who’s limited dispositionally in his ability to make decisions—just the necessary small decisions that others make more easily and quickly every day, the little yeses and little nos that we have to say, in response to many situations and challenges. It seems reasonable to think that without intervention such a person might never develop strong decision-making capabilities.”
“Little yeses,” Harry said. “Little nos.”
“And such a person might, yes, actually come to have difficulty making big life decisions, necessary ones, as well as the littler ones. He would have learned over a lifetime to depend on the cuing of others. Overseers.”
“Overseers?”
“Parents, perhaps. Or anyone who took an interest, wanted to help, or had a reason to put some pressure on him. Teachers. Not that he’d like it, necessarily. Just because you have this difficulty with decision-making doesn’t mean you can easily recognize it. You might refuse the overseer. Go your own damn way. Become habitually oppositional. We see this.”
For years Harry had heard the voice of his father in his head, assessing his, Harry’s, choices, suggesting other and better ones, a guide Harry never followed, or opposed even when he did follow. He used to marvel at its persistence, despite absence, beyond death; the man only ceased talking when Harry married Mila. “And,” Harry said, “I guess, you could be passively oppositional too. You could learn that. You could learn that from life.”
“Yes, sure.”
“So that instead of doing the opposite of what these overseer people wanted, you could just do nothing.”
“Yes.”
“A strategy.”
“Well yes. Not maybe a good one.”
Harry knew it was so. He was sure tha
t he could tell the doctor with absolute certainty that it was so, because it was what had happened to him. He had grown up with a deficit that no one could see or know about, not a funny quirk of personality or an eccentricity he could alter if he wanted to, but something in the shape or functioning of his physical forebrain where his deepest self took place. He could only function completely at the behest or command of others, and he would forever depend on them and resist them, actively or not, and when one died or passed from the scene he would adopt another, or if none appeared he would build one in his brain out of the ones he had before depended on. It wasn’t because he was stupid or incompetent or lazy or unwilling to do the work. It was what he had been given, and all his life it had only got worse, because he hadn’t known, and neither had anybody else, how to work to make it better.
Little yeses, little nos. Which way do you want to turn, Harry? Do you want to go to college, join the Army, get a job? Do you want to sign up for this? What color should this be, Harry? Do you need one of these, or one of these? If they raise your rent, should you move or pay? How do you feel about it, Harry, do you want to go to bed, have a child, buy a house? A terrible pity came over him for that child, that boy and man.
Mila, he thought. Oh I am so sorry.
On a January day Harry was Dr. Macilhenny’s last patient. Harry wrote a check for the amount he owed, the part that the insurance wouldn’t cover. “The paypal,” he said. “The copal. Capo. Copay.” Dr. Macilhenny tidied his office, put away the games Harry had played with as though he kept a day-care center, and when Harry put on his coat to go, Dr. Macilhenny put on his, and they left the office together. When they got to the street level they found that the temperature had fallen, and the slight rain that had been coming down most of the day had turned to ice. Even as they stood at the door of the building assessing this, they saw a passing car brake too suddenly, slide balletically left then right and narrowly miss sideswiping a line of parked cars glistening with frozen rain. Far down the straight avenue in the other direction they could see the behemoth of a sand-truck, already on its rounds. Harry proposed a novel strategy: next door was a bar. Best to wait a while till the situation had been dealt with. Somewhat to Harry’s surprise, and after a long moment’s consideration—thought moving from forebrain to remoter parts where perhaps feelings and fears were stored—Dr. Macilhenny agreed.
