I had lied to Gideon when he asked what was written on the wall. I did know.
It wasn’t a random string of letters and numbers. It was chemical formulas for drugs: anisomycin, U0126, propanolol, D-cycloserine, and neuropeptide Y. I had written about them in an earlier paper, when I was trying to find links between elephant memory and cognition. These were compounds that—if given quickly after a trauma—interacted with the amygdala to keep a memory from being coded as painful or upsetting. Using rats, scientists had successfully been able to eliminate the stress and fear caused by certain memories.
You can imagine the implications for that—and recently, some medical professionals had. Controversies had sprung up around hospitals that wanted to administer drugs like this to rape victims. Beyond the practical issue of whether or not the blocked memory actually would stay blocked forever, there was a moral issue: Could a traumatized victim actually give permission to be given the drug, if by definition she was traumatized and unable to think clearly?
What had Thomas been doing with my paper, and how did it tie in to plans to raise money for the sanctuary? But then, maybe it didn’t. If Thomas truly had snapped, he might see relevance in the clues of a crossword puzzle; he might see meaning in the weatherman’s forecast. He would be constructing a reality full of causal links that were, to the rest of us, unrelated.
It had been a long time, but the conclusion of my paper was that there was a reason the brain had evolved in a way that allowed a memory to be red-flagged. If memories protected us from future dangerous situations, was it in our best interests to chemically forget them?
Would I ever unsee that room, looped with the graffiti of chemical formulas? No, not even after Gideon had painted it white again. And maybe that was for the best, because it reminded me that the man I thought I had fallen in love with was not the one who came into the kitchen this morning, whistling.
I had plans. I wanted to get Thomas help. But no sooner had he left for the observation deck than Nevvie showed up with Grace. “I need your help moving Hester,” Nevvie said, and I remembered that I’d promised her we could try to put the two African elephants together today.
I could have postponed it, but then Nevvie would have asked why. And I didn’t feel like talking about last night.
Grace held out her arms for Jenna, and I thought about our conversation yesterday. “Did Gideon—” I began.
“He finished,” she said, and that was all I needed to know.
I followed Nevvie out to the African enclosures, peeking at the upstairs level of the barn, with its sheet of plastic and the overpowering smell of fresh paint. Was Thomas in there, even now? Was he angry, to find his handiwork destroyed? Devastated? Indifferent?
Did he suspect me of doing it?
“Where are you today?” Nevvie asked. “I asked you a question.”
“Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Do you want to take down the fence or drive her forward?”
“I’ll get the gate,” I said.
We had built a hot-wire fence to separate Hester from Maura when we realized Maura was pregnant. To tell the truth, if either elephant had wanted to get to the other side, she could have easily torn it down. But these two had not been together long enough to bond before they were separated. They were acquaintances, not friends. They had no great affection for each other yet. Which is why I didn’t think Nevvie’s idea was going to work.
In Tswana, there is a saying: Go o ra motho, ga go lelwe. Where there is support, there is no grief. You see this in the wild, when elephants mourn the death of a herd member. After a while, a few elephants will peel off to go to a watering hole. Others will investigate the brush for sustenance. It comes down to one or two elephants left behind—usually the daughters or young sons of the fallen elephant—who are reluctant to resume their daily lives. But the herd always comes back for them. It may be en masse, it may be just an emissary or two. They vocalize with “let’s go” rumbles and angle their bodies to encourage the mourning elephants to join them. Eventually, they all do. But Hester was not Maura’s cousin or sister. She was just another elephant. Maura had no incentive to listen to her, no more than I might have followed a complete stranger who walked up to me and suggested we go to lunch.
While Nevvie drove off in the ATV in search of Hester, I disconnected the fence controller and unwound the wire, creating an open gate. I waited until I heard the engine revving and spotted the elephant following Nevvie placidly. She was a sucker for watermelon, and there was a whole one on the ATV for her that would be placed closer to Maura.
I hopped on the vehicle as we drove to the site of the calf’s grave, where Maura still stood, her shoulders sloped and her trunk dragging on the ground. Nevvie cut the engine, and I hopped off, setting the food for Hester a distance away from Maura. We had brought a treat for Maura, too, but unlike Hester, she did not touch hers.
Hester speared the watermelon on her tusk and let the juice drip into her mouth. Then she curled her trunk around the melon, plucked it from the ivory skewer, and crushed it between her jaws.
Maura didn’t acknowledge her presence, but I could see her spine stiffen at the sound made by Hester’s crunching. “Nevvie,” I said quietly, climbing onto the ATV again. “Turn on the engine.”
Lightning fast, Maura pivoted and thundered toward Hester, her head shaking and her ears flapping. Dirt chuffed, a cloud of intimidation. Hester squealed and threw back her trunk, just as willing to stand her ground.
“Go,” I said, and Nevvie angled the ATV so that Hester was headed off before she could get close to Maura. Maura didn’t even turn toward us as we shepherded Hester away, to the other side of the hot-wire fence. She faced the raw, dark grave of the calf, which stretched like a yawn across the earth.
Sweating, my heart still pounding from the confrontation, I let Nevvie lead Hester deeper into the African enclosure while I reaffixed the wire joints, crimped them closed, and reattached the battery clamps. Nevvie drove up again a few minutes later, as I was finishing.
“Well,” I said. “I told you so.”
I took advantage of the fact that Grace was still watching Jenna and stopped off at the African barn to talk to Thomas. Climbing the spiral staircase, I heard no sound from inside the space. It made me wonder if Thomas had found the whitewashed walls and if that had been enough to snap him back to equilibrium. But when I reached the door, the knob turned in my hand and I stepped into the room to find one wall entirely covered with the same symbols I’d seen last night, and another wall half finished. Thomas stood on a chair, writing so furiously I thought the plaster might burst into flame. I felt as if my skeleton had turned to stone. “Thomas,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”
He glanced over his shoulder, so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t even heard me come in. He didn’t seem embarrassed, or surprised. Just disappointed. “It was going to be a surprise,” he said. “I was doing it for you.”
“Doing what?”
He stepped off the chair. “It’s called molecular consolidation theory. It’s been proven that memories stay in an elastic state before they are chemically encoded by the brain. Disturb that process, and you can alter the way the memory is recalled. To date, the only scientific successes have occurred when the inhibitors are given immediately after the trauma. But let’s say the trauma’s already past. What if we could regress the mind back to that moment, and give the drug. Would the trauma be forgotten?”
I stared at him, completely lost. “That’s not possible.”
“It is if you can go back in time.”
“What?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not building a TARDIS, a time machine,” Thomas said. “That would be insane.”
“Insane,” I repeated, the word breaking on the jetty of a sob.
“It’s not literal bending of the fourth dimension. But you can alter perception for an individual, so that time is effectively reversed. You take them back to the stress, through an altered consciousness, and have them reexperience the emotional trauma long enough for the drug to do its job. And here’s the part that’s a surprise for you. Maura, she’s going to be the subject.”
At the sound of the elephant’s name, my gaze snapped to his. “You aren’t touching Maura.”
“Not even if I can fix her? If I can make her forget her calf’s death?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Thomas—”
“But what if it did? What if there were implications for humans? Imagine the work that could be done with veterans who suffer from PTSD. Imagine if the sanctuary cemented its name as a critical research facility. We could get seed money from the Center for Neural Science at NYU. And if they agree to partner with me, the media attention could bring in investors to offset the loss of revenue the calf had been projected to bring in. I could win a Nobel.”
I swallowed. “What makes you think you can regress a mind?”
“I was told I could.”
“By whom?”
He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper with the letterhead of the sanctuary at the top. Written on it was a phone number I recognized. I had called it last week, when my credit card was declined at Gordon’s.
Welcome to Citibank MasterCard.
Beneath the customer service hotline number was a list of anagrams for the words Account Balance:
Cabal cannot cue; banal ceca count, accentual bacon, cabala once cunt, canal beacon cut, cab unclean coat, lacuna ant bocce, nebula coca cant, a cab nuance clot, a cab cannot clue, a cable can count, a conceal can but, cabal can’t cue on, anal acne cub cot, ban ocean lac cut, cabal act once nu, actual can be con.
The last words were circled so deeply that the paper had begun to disintegrate. “You see? It’s in code. Actual can be con.” Thomas’s eyes burned into mine as if he were explaining the meaning of life. “What you see is not what you believe.”
I stepped toward him, until we were standing only inches apart. “Thomas,” I whispered, holding my palm up to his cheek. “Baby. You’re sick.”
He grasped my hand, a lifeline. Until then I hadn’t realized how hard I was trembling. “Damn right I’m sick,” he muttered, squeezing so hard that I twisted in pain. “I’m sick of you doubting me.” He leaned so close that I could see the ring of orange around his pupils, and the pulse in his temple. “I am doing this for you,” he said, biting off each word, spitting them in my face.
“I’m doing this for you, too,” I cried, and I ran out of the airless room and down the spiral stairs.
Dartmouth College was sixty-five miles south. They had a state-of the-art hospital there. And it happened to have the closest inpatient psychiatric facility to Boone. I don’t know what made the psychiatrist agree to see me, considering I did not have an appointment and there was a waiting room full of people with equally pressing issues. All I could think, as I clutched Jenna against me and sat across from Dr. Thibodeau, was that the receptionist must have taken one look at me and thought I was feeding her a line. Husband, my ass, she probably thought, staring at my wrinkled uniform, my unwashed hair, my crying baby. She’s the one who’s in crisis.
I had spent a half hour telling the doctor what I knew of Thomas’s history, and what I had seen last night. “I think the pressure’s broken him,” I said. Out loud, the words swelled like garish balloons. They took up all the space in the room.
“It’s possible that what you’re describing are symptoms of mania,” the doctor said. “It’s part of bipolar illness—which we used to call manic-depressive disorder.” He smiled at me. “Being bipolar is like being forced to take LSD. It means your sensations and emotions and creativity are at their peak, but also that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. You know what they say—if a manic does something bizarre and it turns out to be right, he’s brilliant. If it turns out to be wrong, he’s crazy.” Dr. Thibodeau smiled at Jenna, who was gumming one of his paperweights. “The good news is, if that’s what’s actually going on with your husband, it’s treatable. The medications we put people on to control these mood swings bring them back to center. When Thomas realizes that he’s living not a reality but just a manic episode, he’s going to swing in the other direction and get very depressed, because he isn’t the man he thought he was.”
That makes two of us, I thought.
“Has your husband harmed you?”
I thought of the moment he grabbed my hand, how I heard the crunch of bones and cried out. “No,” I said. I had betrayed Thomas enough; I would not do this, too.
“Do you think he might?”
I stared down at Jenna. “I don’t know.”
“He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. If it is bipolar disorder, he may need time in the hospital to be stabilized.”
Hopeful, I glanced at the doctor. “So you can bring him here?”
“No,” Dr. Thibodeau said. “Institutionalizing someone is a stripping of personal rights; we can’t take him by force unless he’s hurt you.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
The doctor met my gaze. “You’re going to have to convince him to come in voluntarily.”
He gave me his card and told me to call him when I felt Thomas was ready to become an inpatient. During the drive back to Boone, I thought about what I could possibly say to convince Thomas to go to the hospital in Lebanon. I could tell him Jenna was sick, but then why wouldn’t we go to her pediatrician one town over? Even if I said I’d found him a donor or a neuroscientist interested in his experiment, it would only get him in the door. The minute we checked in at the psychiatric reception desk, he’d know what I was actually doing.
I came to the conclusion that the only way to get Thomas to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric ward was to make him see, simply and honestly, that this was best for him. That I still loved him. That we were in this together.
Fortified, I drove into the sanctuary, parked at the cottage, and carried a sleepy Jenna inside. I settled her on the couch and then went back to close the door I’d left ajar.
When Thomas grabbed me from behind, I screamed. “You scared me,” I said, turning in his arms, trying to read his expression.
“I thought you left me. I thought you took Jenna, and that you weren’t coming back.”
I ran my hand through his hair. “No,” I swore. “I would never.”
When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself. When he kissed me, I believed that Thomas was going to be fine. I believed that maybe I would never have to call Dr. Thibodeau, that this was the beginning of Thomas’s sway to center. I told myself that I could believe all of this, no matter how unfounded or unlikely, without realizing how much that made me like Thomas.
There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you. If it teaches you something you need to learn.
For a few months, it seemed as if life at the sanctuary was settling back to normal. Maura took extended walks away from her calf’s grave before returning to settle down there each night. Thomas began to work in his home office again, instead of constructing the observation deck. We left it locked and boarded up, like a ghost village. A grant he’d written for funding months ago came in unexpectedly, giving us a little breathing room for supplies and salaries.
I began to compare my notes about Maura and her grief to those about the other elephant mothers I’d seen lose calves. I spent hours walking with Jenna, at a toddler’s pace; I pointed to wildflowers by color, to teach her new words. Thomas and I argued about whether it was safe for her, in the enclosures. I loved those arguments, for their simplicity. Their sanity.
One lazy afternoon, when Grace was sitting for Jenna in the stagnant heat, I was doing a trunk wash in the Asian barn with Dionne. We trained the elephants in this behavior, so that we could test for TB: We’d fill a syringe with saline, flush it into a nostril, and get the elephant to lift her trunk as high as possible. Then we’d hold a gallonsize Ziploc bag over the trunk as she lowered it and the fluid drained out. The sample was collected in a container and sent off to the lab. Some elephants hated the process; Dionne was one of the easier ones. So perhaps my guard was down, and that’s why I didn’t notice Thomas suddenly striding into the barn. He grabbed me by the neck, dragging me away from the elephant so that she couldn’t reach us through the metal bars.
“Who’s Thibodeau?” Thomas yelled, smacking my head against the steel so hard that my vision blurred.
I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Thi … bo … deau,” Thomas repeated. “You must know. His card was in your wallet.” His hand was a vise around my throat. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I clawed at his fingers, at his wrists. He pressed a small white rectangle close to my face. “Ring a bell?”
I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision. Still, somehow, I was able to make out the logo for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital. The psychiatrist I’d seen, the one who had given me his card. “You want to lock me away,” Thomas accused. “You’re trying to steal my research. You’ve probably already called NYU to take credit, but the joke’s on you, Alice, because you don’t have the code to dial in to the colloquium’s private conference line, and not knowing that flags you as an impostor—”
Dionne was bellowing, crashing against the reinforced bars of the barn. I tried to explain; I tried to speak. Thomas slammed me harder against the steel, and my eyes rolled upward.
Suddenly there was air, and light, and I was falling to the cement floor, gasping as my chest filled with fire. I rolled to my side to see Gideon punching Thomas so hard that his head arced backward and blood bloomed from his nose and mouth.
I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the barn. I did not get very far before my legs gave out beneath me, but to my surprise I didn’t fall. I wound up caught in Gideon’s arms. He stared at my throat, touched a finger to the red necklace made by Thomas’s hands. He was so gentle, like silk over a scar, that something inside me snapped.
I shoved at him. “I didn’t ask for your help!”
He let go of me, surprised. I staggered away from him, avoiding the spot where I knew Grace had taken Jenna swimming, and made my way to the cottage. I went right to Thomas’s office, where he had been spending his time keeping the books and updating the files of the individual elephants. On his desk was a ledger we used to record all our income and expenses. I sat down and flipped through the first few pages, marking the deliveries of hay and the payments for veterinary care, the lab bills and the produce contract. Then I skipped to the end.
C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.
I put my head down on the desk and cried.