The Forgetting Time(16)
“Return?”
“After he’s been in therapy for a while. We’ll be in touch before the summer session and reevaluate the situation then. All right?”
“All right,” Janie murmured, and stumbled to the door before the woman could say anything else she couldn’t bear to hear.
Outside, she sat heavily on a bench among the tiny boots and coats. No call to child services, then; she’d averted that disaster. Her mind went black with relief. And at the far corner of the blackness, flickering like a spark that had gone astray and was beginning to smolder, the anxiety (which had been there all along): what was wrong with Noah?
Six
“APHASIA IN MAURICE RAVEL,” BULLETIN OF THE LOS ANGELES NEUROLOGICAL SOCIETY
At fifty-eight, Ravel was struck with aphasia, which quelled any further artistic output. Most strikingly, he was able to think musically but unable to express his ideas in either writing or performance. Hemispheric lateralization for verbal (linguistic) and musical thinking offers an explanation for the dissociation of Ravel’s ability to conceive and to create …
“Jerr!”
Anderson slid his uneaten plate of food over the article he’d been trying to read and glanced up. The man in front of him, a portly fellow with a goatee floating like an island in the center of his chin, was holding his tray aloft and looking down at him inquiringly. It couldn’t possibly have been worse.
He had known the medical school cafeteria was probably a bad idea, but he had thought that the collegial buzz of activity, the long walk to the familiar building, might do him some good. Now he nodded at the man and bit into an apple. It felt cold and mealy in his mouth.
“You’re here!” the man said. “I was telling Helstrick just the other day I was sure you’d moved to Mumbai, or Colombo.” He waved a manicured hand. “Or some such.”
“Nope. Still here.” Anderson looked up at his colleague and broke into a sweat. He’d known this man for decades but couldn’t remember his name.
The man had been a rising star when they were both medical residents, the two of them friends and competitors, talked about in the same breath. They had been in the same institution now for the last twenty years and still both seemed startled at the different directions fate and their interests had taken them. Now the other man was chairman of his department at the medical school and Anderson was … Anderson was …
Anderson was forcing himself to move over, letting this nameless man take up the space next to him. He marveled at how much compressed energy some bodies had. The steam from his food tickled Anderson’s nose. He thought maybe he’d throw up. That would put an end to the meal in a hurry.
“So, where’ve you been hiding, then? Haven’t seen you in months! Did you hear the latest?”
Anderson picked his response carefully. “I doubt it.”
“There’s talk that Minkowitz is in the running for a—you, know. The N word.”
“The N word?” Anderson stared.
He whispered. “Nobel. Just talk, you know, but—” He shrugged.
“Ah.”
“His recent studies have really been groundbreaking. They actually change our current understanding of the brain. We’re all very proud.”
“Ah,” Anderson said again. The man looked at him sideways, and he could tell exactly what he was thinking: you could have been a part of this, you could have done something, if you hadn’t swerved so inexplicably. You could have changed lives.
They all thought this, Anderson realized. They always had, but he had been too busy to feel the weight of it. He looked around him now at all his colleagues chatting and chewing, clanking their silverware. Doctors, mostly; cautious, oblivious people. He could sense their aura of smug certainty even in the way they plunged their forks into their baked ziti. He had known some of them for decades and had always thought of this as his community: these strangers whose names he had forgotten, who wanted nothing to do with him.
“So how’s the soul business? Discover any new ones lately? Or is it old ones?” The nameless man chuckled to himself. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to call you. Corinne swears our attic is haunted, I told her she should look you up. ‘Jerry’ll get to the bottom of it for you,’ I said. ’Course, it’s probably the squirrels.” He winked. A man pleased with himself in every particular. In his surety that his work was valuable and that Anderson’s was not.
At another moment in time, Anderson would have nodded, his eyes elsewhere, would have let the other man’s mockery fall on the shell of civility he’d had to create around himself. His usual response was to pretend not to hear the humor behind the inquiries, to answer back with an utterly serious discussion of his work, as if his data could possibly interest them, as if he could still change their minds. “Well, actually, I had an interesting case recently in Sri Lanka,” he might have said, and talked until he saw their mockery drain out into boredom.
Now, though, he looked right into this familiar, nameless man’s small, shiny eyes, and words fell into his head, and he said them: “Fuck you.” The most eloquently expressive and pithy sentence he had said in some time.
The man narrowed his eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it. He spooned some soup into his mouth, red splotches rising on his neck and his cheeks. He wiped his lips on his napkin. For a few moments, he said nothing at all. Then: