In Allston, the Psychologist said he was training my brain waves. During our sessions, the Spanish music played on his laptop. He told me a man named Plácido Domingo was singing. He told me that he always wanted to live in Spain, where people sat under umbrellas in beautiful stone plazas and all the buildings were ancient and you could sleep through the middle of the day. When the music stopped, he asked me if I liked it and I nodded. He told me I could start it again with my mind, if I concentrated hard enough.
I was sitting on his bed. The white electrodes were stuck to my scalp. I thought as hard as I could about Plácido Domingo, who I had never heard of before. I tried to picture what he would look like and saw a man with a heavy black beard. Nothing happened.
“It’s okay,” the Psychologist said. “This is just practice.”
Practice for what? I did not think to ask.
At the end of one session, he turned the computer around to face me. An image of my brain quivered on the screen. It was round and dense as a planet, the color a liquid green that kept shifting into yellows and blues.
“Imagine something happy,” he said.
I thought of the rope swing in Ms. Neuman’s backyard, the sensation of being airborne, and watched blue wash into the center of my brain. Plácido Domingo’s voice returned.
“Now imagine something scary.”
I thought of the white electrodes lying flat as leeches on my skull and his drawer full of eyeglasses. A watery red line swam around the front of my brain and the singing vanished.
“The trick,” the Psychologist told me, “is to train your brain to think about the happy thing while the scary thing is going on.”
*
He never explained himself to me, not in the way Dr. Bek explained himself to me, and maybe I should thank God or whatever for that.
*
During an Internet Session, I look up Plácido Domingo. I find the following: Plácido Domingo was born in Madrid. Onstage, he’s played over one hundred and fifty roles. In the eighties, in Mexico, he pulled earthquake survivors from collapsed buildings. In this earthquake, he lost his aunt and his uncle and his nephew and more. There is a statue of him in Mexico City. I find a photo of the statue, a bronze figure standing with his arms raised. He has met the pope.
*
In the Hospital, I keep playing along with the examinations and the Community Meetings and the meditations. I try to be a good model of health, so good that my model might become contagious. Also: Louis cannot know what I know, because if he does then what I know will become real.
One night I show Louis the hole. We’re naked and wrapped in our sheets. We keep the lights off. We sit in front of the hole, the sheets pooling white around us. A dull light rises from the opening. Louis leans over it and closes his eyes and I wonder what he is thinking or if the buzzing has walked inside his brain and taken away his ability to think at all.
“Do you hear that noise?” I ask.
He nods, eyes still closed. “It sounds like a machine.”
“Sometimes I hear it through the walls.” The sheets slide down my shoulder, and I am relieved at the sight of smooth healthy skin. “Sometimes I imagine I can say things and the twins will hear me.”
He starts counting the knots of my spine. I feel the light pressure of his fingers moving up my back, toward the sensitive spot at the base of my neck.
We stay by the hole. We take turns sticking our hands into the opening and breathing the strange air. We feel the vibrations on our skin. After we slide the tarp back into place, Louis scoops me up like a bride and carries me to our room. In the morning, when a nurse comes for us with chilly alcohol wipes and cuffs and needles, the edges of our sheets are stained black with dirt.
20.
Louis gets his morning exam. I’m sitting on my bed and staring at the dates the nurses have forgotten to mark on the bird calendar, counting up our blank days like they are something that can be repaid. When I look over at Louis, he is doing the Romberg, only he’s doing it differently than before. His back is to me and I can see his shoulders tipping to the right, a statue about to topple over.
N5 says to try again and I watch his body sway like he’s being pushed by a wind.
She takes out her little flashlight and starts checking his skin. She looks under his sleeves and along his throat and down his back and inside his mouth. She’s checking one of his legs when the light stops. She doesn’t move to the next phase of the exam. She leans closer to Louis and all I can hear is her breathing.
He sits down on his bed and rounds his back, the bumps of his spine pressing against his green scrubs.
“There’s an abnormality,” she says.
She turns off the flashlight and packs her kit. She tells us to stay in our room and we nod dumbly. We don’t need to ask where she’s going. We know she’s getting Dr. Bek.
When I hear the click of the door closing and look at Louis on his bed, hunched under the lights, his hands squeezing the edges of the mattress, I feel something inside me pop—a sharp sudden break, like a wishbone snapping. Microburst after microburst after microburst.
Louis keeps sitting on the bed. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t turn to look at me. I go to him. I kneel at his feet and push up the leg of his scrub and there it is: a blister the size of a quarter on his shin, rough and silver in the center, ringed with pink. For a while, we sit wrapped in heavy silence.
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“Louis,” he says.
I roll down the scrub. His feet are bare. I stroke the knobs of bone on his ankles.
“What’s my name?”
“Joy.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Six months.”
“How long have you been alive?”
“Three decades or thirty years. However you want to say it.”
Three decades or thirty years or not nearly long enough.
“What do you want more than anything?”
“To be alone with you.”
I kiss his knee. He puts his hand on the back of my head.
“You’re going to be fine,” I say.
*