Skull Session (12 page)

"One can learn a great deal about a person by observing his bookshelves," Vivien said, startling him. She had appeared at his side without his hearing her approach. "As one can by observing what a visitor takes from the shelf. Apparently you share my interest in neurology." She had put on a brown coat trimmed with mink and had applied lipstick to her mouth, a bright, unflattering crimson.

"It comes with the turf," he said, tapping his head. "With having Tourette's. What prompts your interest?"

"Right now I'm looking into how your brain works when you get old. Quite fascinating. I've started taking 'smart pills' every day, guaranteed to improve your cognition and completely legal. Here in San Francisco, there are even smart-drug cafes where you can order a malted milk with L-pyroglutamic acid and phosphatidyl choline and 2dimethylaminoethanol, and so on. Lovely brain-nurturing chemicals."

"If you can remember the names, they must be working pretty well."

Vivien smiled slightly. "I'm probably not the best judge. Perhaps you can tell me. Now, we had better go." Paul instinctively offered his elbow, and she gripped his arm firmly above the biceps as they left the suite. "But Paulie—you won't start shouting obscenities at the restaurant, or anything of that sort, will you?" It was a gentle teasing, a flirtation.

"I'll try to restrain myself," he said.

13

H
E WAS SURPRISED when she suggested they walk back to the Royale from Chinatown.

"You must understand," she explained, "this is the San Francisco I love most. Mysterious, timeless. We could be in old Shanghai. I don't often have a willing companion for evening walks, and I intend to take full advantage of your presence." She gripped his arm, steered him to the right, into the labyrinthine streets on the edge of Chinatown.

A fog had rolled in, occluding the city. The smell of the ocean mingled with the exotic stink of restaurants and groceries: butchered meat, dried fish, strange herbs, incense. Through the windows of darkened storefronts, Paul saw plucked corpses of geese hung in rows by their long necks, doomed carp hovering in their packed aquariums, bins of contorted roots and bulbs and dried squid. A few other pedestrians, faceless in the fog, walked hurriedly past them.

They had lingered over an excellent dinner of central China's regional cuisine, drinking plum wine and conversing on a wide range of topics—everything but what had brought him to San Francisco. The walls of their small private room were decorated with panels of intricately carved wood, lacquered a deep red, depicting scenes at the court of some Chinese emperor. Sitting opposite Vivien, Paul felt that the setting perfectly framed her: There was an imperial quality to her, with her dramatic red lips, the cynical arch of her eyebrows.

"Now, where were we?" Vivien said. She walked easily, still gripping his arm. "Oh yes. It was your turn to explain
your
interest in neurology. Per our agreement to be entirely reciprocal."

"As I said, it comes with the territory. When I was a kid, Ben taught me about the brain so I could understand my own neurological problems. Now I try to stay current on Tourette's syndrome research—there's been a lot of progress. Also, I thought I should understand how brain functions develop during childhood, if I wanted to understand the learning process. For teaching."

"And it has nothing whatever to do with your son, Mark, and his behavioral problems."

He didn't try to hide his irritation. "I guess Kay has kept you pretty well informed."

"You are so wary of me, Paulie! Have you heard such terrible tales about me? I'd think you'd be glad to compare notes with another amateur scholar of the brain."

"Mark has been variously diagnosed as autistic, epileptic, and about half a dozen other things. Since the medical community couldn't agree on what his problem was or how to help him, I thought I'd give it a try.

I've done a lot of reading, but I don't consider myself a scholar so much as, basically, a parent."

They turned again, onto a darker residential street where the streetlights cut cones of light in the fog. In a dark doorway, what he'd thought to be a shadow stirred as they passed, revealing itself as a homeless man, swaddled in blankets. Paul felt tension begin to twitch in the muscles of his shoulders.

"Is there any similarity between Mark's condition and what you once had? Before the Tourette's?"

At first he was hesitant to go into details with Vivien, but then decided the hell with it. It was a relief to unburden himself. Vivien nodded encouragingly as he talked.

Yes, he explained, there were similarities between Mark's symptoms and the symptoms he himself had shown as a child. Dealing with Mark's condition, Paul had learned only a little from the failed programs the child psychologists and neurologists had prescribed, and mainly by negative example. He'd gotten more from his own reading, and still more from remembering his own childhood experience. Though his first symptoms had been later eclipsed by Tourette's and had never returned, he remembered distinctly the same micropsia Mark com plained about, and the strange, remote, frightened mood that seemed to accompany it.

"Remind me what micropsia is," Vivien interjected.

It almost always had come on near bedtime, when Paul would be reading or playing with toys, getting drowsy. He remembered being fascinated by the slippery play of light on the shiny paint on one of his toy soldiers. Suddenly it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope: His own feet looked tiny, tapering with the distance, the soldier nearly imperceptible in his faraway hand. A fascinating change of perspective, making him feel like a giant of geological proportions. But also frightening. He'd shake his head violently in an effort to clear his sight, which never worked.

Thirty years later, he watched Mark suddenly start shaking his head as he played with some small toy and realized his son was experiencing the same thing. If Mark got up to walk then, he'd topple uncertainly, as if having difficulty balancing on those tiny, distant feet: a feeling Paul remembered well.

Since micropsia was one symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, he and Janet had taken Mark for EEGs and CAT scans, but nothing definitive had ever shown up—no unusual spikes on the EEG, no sign of dark, mysterious structural abnormalities on the CAT scan. Definitely a mixed relief for parents wanting a name and a cure for whatever it was that tormented their child.

But the micropsia was only a signal, the beginning of what might be hours or days of altered behavior, when Mark would be sullen, uncooperative, unpredictable. Withdrawal, long periods of immobility with some toy forgotten in his slack hand. Reversion to infantile behaviors: nagging whines or imperious shrieks, throwing things, arching and flailing. They couldn't send him to school when he was in one of these periods, and though he was an exceptionally bright child, his academic progress suffered. As did his social development.

Some seizure activity occurs deep in the brain, the neurologists told them, and wouldn't necessarily show up on an EEG. On the assumption that Mark had some undetectable activity, they'd given him antiepi-leptic clonazepam, but it had little effect on the symptoms. And neither Mark nor Paul could endure the side effects of drowsiness, torpidity, disorientation. After the fifth drug had done no better, Paul had insisted that they try alternative therapies.

The key, Paul felt, would have to be conscious acts on Mark's part. He needed to sense in himself the beginning of the slide, and resist. Once in the state, he needed to let his parents or teachers know, and find ways to get out of it. Talking did nothing to help; what seemed to work best were activities that reached Mark through other senses: massage, structured play with brightly colored blocks, interactive drawing, and large-muscle kinetic activity like dancing together or walks outdoors—anything that countered the tendency to focus on little things and the effect of anxiety and isolation. Mark's taking an intentional role in governing his own mental state was not only his best hope in combating the seizures; it was essential to his sense of self, a way to assert that he had some control over his life.

Vivien listened intently, and in a doorway light she stopped him to look sharply into his eyes. "Do you know the most fascinating aspect of what you've told me? That your response has been so like Ben's, when he was wrestling with your various conditions. The role of conscious, intentional behaviors. Self-observation and self-discipline. That marvelous faith in
reason.
That marvelous arrogance again."

"I suppose so," Paul admitted.

"You say that rather grudgingly."

"It's just that I'm not always and exclusively
grateful
for some of the long-term effects of Ben's training. I hate the thought that I'm visiting the same sins on my own son."

Vivien's eyes glinted. A greedy light. He regretted letting her see this much of his feelings toward Ben. The knowledge was something she'd salt away, hoard. To what end? He smoothed his mustache and eyebrows with a flick of his free hand. "Do you remember all of his treatments?" Vivien turned and began to walk again. Muffled in the fog, the sounds of the city were faint, just their footsteps and the occasional hoot of foghorns from ships on the bay. Behind them, another pedestrian had appeared on the otherwise empty street.

"For the Tourette's. Not for the earlier stuff."

"I ask because, your resentment notwithstanding, I recall he felt he'd found some very effective ways to help you when the medical community could do nothing. He wrote to me about it in great detail. It is too long ago for me to recall the specifics, but perhaps among my letters—" She let the thought hang. Even in the darkness, he could see her lips draw down. "That is, if any of them are recoverable."

At the thought of a cure for Mark, Paul's hopes leapt. He coughed, trying to conceal the desperate interest she'd certainly perceive in his voice or his face. He'd be sorting through the letters soon enough. And, with or without her approval, be looking at them very closely.

Several blocks ahead, Paul was relieved to see a brighter cross street, mist-blurred, and the occasional passing car. He knew San Francisco fairly well, knew they were heading generally in the right direction. But in the fog, after the wine, he felt disoriented, not sure where they were. He glanced back to see the bulky shadow of the person behind them, closer now. A sudden tic caused his hand to rise and ring an invisible bell.

"You do realize," Vivien went on, "that in your prognosis for Mark you have set up a rather classical equation? The hidden, unconscious, 'animal' processes of mind on one hand, the conscious, intentional 'human' self on the other. All sorts of lovely resonances!"

"I hadn't seen it in such exalted terms. I'm just trying to give my son a chance for a normal life."

"In any case, I think you are wise to take the prognostications of the medical experts with a grain of salt," Vivien said. "There is a great deal we don't know about ourselves." She laughed humorlessly, a dry cackle.

They made it to the cross street, and as they turned Paul glanced down the street they'd just come from. Their fellow traveler had vanished.

Again Vivien steered him, turning toward a bench. "Do you mind if we sit, Paulie? I'm afraid I'm not used to so much exercise."

Paul sat next to her. A few cars passed, occupants invisible. The fatigue of the long day began to catch up with him.

"I understand you are no longer with Mark's mother," Vivien was saying.

"Janet and I separated three years ago and finalized our divorce two years ago. I'm living with a wonderful woman named Lia McLean."

"Mmm. My, how lightly your generation seems to take such things.

Tell me: How does Mark get along with your—what is the term nowadays?—significant other?"

"There've been a few minor adjustment problems, but she and Mark generally do just fine together."

"And you feel that Lia is a better match for you than Janet?"

Her voice had become brittle, full of veiled accusation—issues of marriage were obviously something to avoid with Vivien. He wondered if her own divorce had anything to do with her attitudes. And their conversation had begun to resemble an interrogation again. Still, he found himself liking her for her outspoken curiosity, which seemed to invite the same in return. "Frankly, yes," he said. "But now I think it's your turn, since we're being reciprocal. Royce—tell me about him."

"I am not in communication with him."

"Your choice or his?"

"I'm not sure it was anyone's choice. Royce found me a difficult mother, I found him a difficult son. Perhaps it is because we're similar people."

"How so?"

Vivien tilted her head and gazed at him. "Similar outlooks on life, perhaps. Or similar disappointments with ourselves—and therefore with each other."

"I'm not sure I understand."

"For many years, when Royce was a boy, I was a victim of what I call Rimbaud's disease. A term your father coined, actually. After Rimbaud, the French Symbolist poet. Are you familiar with him?"

"I've read his
Illuminations.
I don't think I understand it that well."

"He was brilliant, a prodigy. By the time he was seventeen, he was acknowledged as a genius who had changed the world of poetry forever.

Then, when he was twenty, he gave it up. Stopped writing. Became rather a rough fellow, ended up running guns in Africa. Died at thirty-seven." "So what's Rimbaud's disease?"

Vivien brought her voice low, as if confiding a treasured secret. "It's what killed him. Not physically—he had cancer. I mean
metaphysically.
At his deathbed, his sister called in a priest. Rimbaud was in anguish, and the priest sat by the bedside, prepared to administer extreme unction. Do you know what Rimbaud's last words were?"

"No. Sorry."

"'Show me something.'
Do you see?
He'd exhausted the world!
It had nothing left for him. He'd given up poetry, a life of literary celebrity, and had gone on an increasingly desperate, violent quest for novelty and sensation—but could not find it anywhere. 'Show me something.' The most terrible death of all!"

For a moment Paul could see it in her face, just below the mask of pride and command: desolation, emptiness. A disappointment on the deepest level:
Life has no meaning. Nothing is real enough. There is no
purpose.

"But you aren't dead," he said.

"No. I have escaped. At least so far. I have certain pleasures to sustain myself with. In any event, I'm afraid dear Royce caught some of that dread disease from me. It's no wonder that he needs to keep his distance, or that he harbors less than fond feelings for his mother."