By the spring, Carol still hasn’t responded to medications. Further tests continue to show what appears to be a normal organ.
Harold is now sixty years old. Not truly old, but well past the block of time known as “youth” in the life span of a human being. There is no longer any way he can pinpoint what each year has meant to him specifically. There have been too many of them, one leaking into the other.
He sits on the wing chair, near the picture window. His wife sits on the couch nearby, on the phone with another wife. Harold listens to her as she listens to her friend’s voice on the receiver, nodding and responding in the tuneful, sympathetic monosyllables unique to women on telephones. The women are starting to succumb to illnesses, to accidents, a creeping string of minor disorders that will ultimately take them under. There is a look on his wife’s face lately, as if she knows something that he is failing to grasp. A searching, disbelieving look. Her eyes, like her hair, have begun to show sage flecks of silver, and her face is more angular. She will never be one of those women who spreads out in her own flesh. She is already contracting, minimizing, as if making herself more efficient for the next, most difficult stretch ahead.
They’ve had a good life. Compatible from the start, a smooth coast. Like a pair of cross-country skis, Harold imagines, never straying far from each other’s sight, but keeping separate enough, with plenty of room to maneuver and come together again. It had never occurred to him that her course might veer, that he would ever find her out of reach.
At their next appointment, Dr. Warren finds a tumor in her brain. Harold and his wife sit together as he shows them the results of the MRI with a double dose of contrast. Looking back on the prior imaging now, he explains, the tumor was just barely visible.
“So you missed it the first time,” Harold says.
“Sometimes that happens,” Dr. Warren clips. “Only in retrospect do we see the clues. It would have been impossible to identify the abnormality without this additional test.”
“A year later.”
The doctor does not respond or meet Harold’s eyes.
“Well, we’ve found it now,” Harold says calmly.
The doctor’s shoulders hunch slightly as he speaks. The tumor is not necessarily bad news, he explains. It has clear borders and is most likely benign, but is not far from the hippocampus, which explains her strange memory relapses. The condition causes abnormal electrical bursts in the temporal lobe, the seat of sensory organization. This can create unpleasant sensations, like the perception of invisible presences. Some people with the condition become delusional, believing themselves to have contact with supernatural entities. Moses was likely a sufferer of temporal lobe epilepsy, as was Joan of Arc.
Carol flashes Harold a look of terror.
“Well, it will be all right, now. Won’t it?” Harold asks.
“Surgery would be the best option,” Dr. Warren says gently. “The success rate is remarkably high.”
Carol’s face turns pale and pinched, as if she would sink into her turtleneck sweater. They drive home in silence.
When Harold approaches Dr. Warren with his new idea, the surgeon responds with a blunt mix of disbelief and admiration. They sit together at O’Reilly’s, at their usual table. Their meetings have become a favorite ritual of Harold’s, and he suspects they are a highlight for the doctor, too. He has continued to meet Harold after their failed scheme, as if nothing untoward has happened. Now, the doctor shakes his head.
“I thought brain surgeons were known for being mavericks,” Harold says.
It’s true. He’s heard that they are addicted to adrenaline: juggling patients’ lives in their hands, screwing nurses in the locker room. Of course there must be quiet, steady neurosurgeons, too—men like himself, with stable marriages and rain forest sound tracks at home. Even after their hours of conversation, he still isn’t entirely sure which type of surgeon Dr. Warren is.
“Who’s going to complain about it?” Harold presses. “I’m the only one who would complain. I’m the only one who would sue.”
Harold actually flashes a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills for effect. The surgeon looks gravely at it.
“And I’m the one who won’t sue over a certain botched diagnosis.”
Dr. Warren is silent. Harold tucks the cash away in his jacket pocket and pats the bulge that it makes.