24

George sat on the edge of the examining table with his legs dangling off the side. He wore a hospital gown, tied in the back, and his feet looked odd sticking out from beneath it, like they were someone else’s feet, someone bluer, older, thinner. He could see all the weird little veins in them. How can I not even recognize my own feet? He thought. The world is changing, and I don’t like it.

“My feet look weird,” he said.

“It’s the light in here,” said Sam Beth. She was standing next to him, leaning back against the examining table, her little hips and shoulders shifting back and forth occasionally like she was dancing. She was listening to something on her phone through earphones, and thumbing through messages, too.

“I thought you weren’t listening to me,” said George.

“I can hear you,” she said, without lifting her eyes from the phone. Her ponytails waved back and forth.

“How old are you, Sam Beth?” said George.

“Twenty-four,” she said.

On his other side, the goddess of the race sat fidgeting. She wore a tracksuit with the hoodie pulled up. Inside the hood, her pale, silvery face was tense, and she was biting her lip. George patted her on the leg. He could smell her eucalyptus gum.

“It’s alright,” he said. She snapped her head around to look at George, and the piercing eyes met his.

“Yeah, are you alright?” asked Sam Beth.

“I’m alright,” said George. He put his other hand on Sam Beth’s shoulder, reassuring them both. “I’ve just got to get some better drugs.”

They were all three waiting for the doctor to come back. She had given George a cursory examination, moving a finger in front of George’s face, asking him to walk heel to toe across the room, in a straight line on the tile floor. She’d checked reflexes and examined George’s pupils at length. During this time the goddess of the race had done standing jumps, where she’d touch her knees to her elbows by leaping into the air and bouncing them off each other in midleap. When the doctor left, she sat back down next to George and seemed to want to huddle against him.

George’s phone rang. His pants were across the room, but Sam Beth went over to them and fished his phone out of the pocket.

“It’s her,” she said, looking at the screen.

George snatched it out of her hand. “Irene?” he said into the phone.

“It’s me,” said Irene. “George, listen.”

“Hi! How are you?”

“George, listen,” she repeated.

“Listening,” he said. He couldn’t help but feel his face stretch into a grin. He wanted to squeeze Sam Beth around the shoulders until she popped. He wanted to cheer the goddess of the race to victory, pumping his fist in the air. He was so happy that Irene had called him on the phone.

“I know this is going to sound odd, but you need to take this seriously, George. What I’m about to say.”

“I absolutely will,” he said.

“I can tell that you’re not, though,” said Irene.

George laughed. “Of course I am,” he said. “If it’s something you want to say to me, then it’s serious to me.”

George was ready for her to talk. He was ready to hear that she was sorry, that she never should have left him, that she’d been impulsive. He knew that these answers were coming. He just wanted her to say them and get it over with. He needed to hear her say she was coming back, and he could say that all was forgiven. “We never have to see my mother and father again,” he had prepared himself to say. “We can pretend we fell out of trees or arrived in a spaceship or grew from the swamp. Nobody has any mothers where we come from. We don’t even believe in mothers.”

“You need to go to the doctor,” said Irene.

“OK,” said George. “Is that the thing you wanted to tell me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s it. I think—this is going to sound really weird, but bear with me—I think there is something wrong with your head.”

George said nothing. He pulled the hospital gown lower over his knee.

“Can you hear me?” Irene said.

“Yes,” said George. “I just thought, I thought that you were going to say something else.”

“What else?”

“I thought that you were going to say—”

He felt embarrassed, in front of Sam Beth, in front of the goddess. They both knew so much about it already. It was shameful, what was happening to him. It was embarrassing.

“Did you think I was going to say that we were getting back together?” Irene wanted to know. Her shrill voice cut into him. He had been thinking it was a beautiful voice, so clear and direct. But now it just sounded awful.

“No,” said George. “Well, yes.”

“We can’t, George. You know that. We can’t even think about that.”

George said nothing again. He had no response. His head was throbbing. The goddess of the race put her hand on his back and rubbed back and forth over his spine, her blunt fingers with their short pale nails scratching gently over his skin.

“So, what then?” he finally said.

“Go to the doctor,” she said. “Get your head looked at. It’s important. I can’t explain why. But it’s important. I think there might be something badly wrong with you.”

George gave a little wry laugh. “OK. OK, I’ll go to the doctor.”

“Don’t blow this off,” said Irene. “Don’t snort painkiller up your nose and wait another day. Please. For your mother, if not for me. For Sam Beth.”

“OK, Irene. I said OK,” said George. He cut her off before she asked if Sam Beth was with him. She was with him. She had asked to come with him. She was tapping away on the screen of her phone, sending messages, maybe finding strength in quotations found online.

“OK,” said Irene. “Promise me, though.”

“I promise,” said George. “I promise.”

“Good-bye George,” said Irene. “I won’t call you again, and I’m sorry for this. But I had to tell you. You don’t have to check back with me. I know you are mad. But just go.”

The phone chimed and George knew she had disconnected. He knew she did not think he was aware that something was wrong with his head. She did not know he was present in the dream she’d had, that he was there, dreaming with her, sucked out of some addled version of a can’t-get-ready-for-work dream and into her bleak nightmare. And all he had thought, while he was listening to her talk about the missing parts of his head, was how beautiful she was, even in the blurring back-and-forth of dreaming, she was so beautiful, and even with a bloody mess falling out of his skull, he was just happy to be in her arms.

*   *   *

When the doctor came back in she had a frown on her face. Sam Beth whipped her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and said, “What.”

George felt a cold fear sink into his chest as if a snowball had landed on his sternum, dissolved, and flowed inside.

“George, we’re going to do some tests. I’m going to be honest with you now. Because of the severity of the headaches you are experiencing and some of your other symptoms, we are a bit concerned. Please don’t worry yet, but let me do what I can to get a clear picture of what’s going on so we can get you on the road to feeling better, Ok? I want you to be patient with us today as we are going to try some different things, and know that it is worthwhile, finding out as much information as we can.”

“What tests?” said Sam Beth.

“Well, we’ll start with an MRI. The nurse will be in shortly to give you an injection, some contrast dye that will go right here, into a vein in your arm.”

“He just wants medicine for his headaches,” said Sam Beth.

The doctor smiled at her, crinkling up the skin around her eyes until they almost disappeared.

“Of course, that will come later,” said the doctor. Then she reached out and put her hand on George’s knee and patted it firmly. “I’ll be back,” she added.

Sam Beth took her phone back out but just held it idly in her hand. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said. “Contrast dye.”

“Maybe I’ll be radioactive,” said George. “You can put me in the detector and say, there he is.”

*   *   *

The nurse helped him to lie down on the curved table that would feed him into the MRI. The room was bright white, dominated by a huge beige machine with a round opening in it and a table sticking out of the opening, which he could lie down on. When he was in place on the table, he could see the machine above his head, its tube waiting for him.

“We’re just going to stabilize you,” the nurse said. George’s head was pounding with pain, and he acutely felt her fingers touching him around his skull, brushing his hair aside, and aligning him on the table, then applying a brace to his head that made it impossible for him to move his neck or rotate his head. His hand went up to scratch his eyebrow and knocked into a piece of this head cage, making the nurse chuckle.

“Itch?” she said.

“No, I’m fine,” said George.

Inside the tube, he tried not to think about Irene. He concentrated instead on the clicks and whirs the machine was making around him, on keeping his eyes closed, on inflating his lungs and deflating them rhythmically, on the feeling of the cage on his head, and then the clicks and whirs again. But it was hard not to remember being with her, inside the space where the proton collider would go. The burning urgency of her hands on him, every touch of her mouth like a little singe, of her voice telling him things, never shutting up, just egging him on and on until he was maddened by it, and lost track of himself, and lost the headache, and the visitations of the gods, and just surrounded himself in her, and found her there for him, very simple, very close.

In the imaging machine with its grumbles and whines and its lights moving strangely across his face, he wondered where Irene could be and how if you folded the United States on a central line of symmetry between San Francisco and him, then you would fold it in Kansas, and Louisiana, Nebraska, and when the angle of the line was just perfect, then he would be reflected onto her, and she onto him, perfectly asymmetrical, a transformative equation where the left does not equal the right but is the right. Where the night doesn’t mirror the day but is the night, and the day is the day, and they’re both the same thing.

“Irene,” he would say. “I didn’t get the idea of the Gateway of God from my own brain.”

“Oh, OK,” she would say. “Where did you get it?”

“I was visited by a god, and the god told me about it.”

She would wait.

“Then other gods visited me, and they further confirmed and explicated the idea. It all came from them.”

Then she would say, “But that’s crazy.”

And it was crazy. George was very, very afraid that it was very, very crazy.

“I know,” he would say. “I know it’s crazy. And I’m afraid that because it’s crazy that I’m crazy.”

“You are. You’re totally nuts if you think gods visited you and explained physics concepts to you.”

“That’s just it.”

“But don’t worry. We can fix it.” Irene would want to fix it. She was a doer. She was a fixer.

“That’s just it. I don’t want it fixed. I’m actually more afraid that if I’m crazy, I might someday have to stop being crazy.”

George halted his imagination in the middle of this hypothetical conversation, before Irene would say something insulting like “Don’t be stupid. Of course if you had the choice to be crazy or not, you’d choose not.” Or she might say, “Don’t worry, being crazy is great.” But probably not.

He wanted to say that losing his faith was terrifying to him. That if he did not have the gods, and he did not have Irene, then he would have nothing. If he thought very hard, in the middle of the MRI machine, with his brain elevated beyond itself by the whirs and clicks and whines and lights of the imaging mechanism that was mapping his brain, he could almost believe that she would say, “Babe, if you lose your faith, you can use mine. Mine is better. I believe in machines, remember? They’ll never call you crazy for believing in that.”

Would she ever say that? Would he ever be brave enough to tell her all about it?

*   *   *

“You have a tumor,” said the doctor. “I’m sorry to say. In your brain.”

George had his street clothes on again and was sitting in one of the regular chairs in the examination room. The doctor had sent Sam Beth out of the room, after determining that she was not his sister or his wife.

“A brain tumor?” said George. He could not hear the doctor properly because the goddess of the race was standing behind the doctor, putting her silver hands over the doctor’s wide mouth, and occluding her speech as much as she possibly could. She gritted her teeth with the effort. She squinched her eyes together. The doctor was mumbling.

“A brain tumor,” she said again. “George, are you having difficulty hearing me?”

“No,” George lied. “I’m just tired.”

“I need to ask you some questions,” said the doctor. “I’m afraid your situation is quite serious and we must act quickly. There is a severe amount of pressure from this tumor encroaching on several very important areas of your brain. I’d like to show you a picture.”

The doctor wheeled her chair over to a flat-screen computer monitor and, with a few clicks of the mouse, opened a file so that George could see it.

“Your tumor,” said the doctor, “is here.” She pointed to an area in George’s brain that George believed to be near the front.

“It is shaped like a barbell,” the doctor pointed with her finger to show the two sides of the tumor. “Part is here in the frontal lobe, and then part is over here in the temporal lobe, both on the left side of your brain. Do you see?”

“I do,” said George. George thought, People with brain tumors have hallucinations. That’s what they have. They have hallucinations. They don’t have visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. They have hallucinations of visitations from gods who explain physics concepts. A much different thing.

“So, to our questions. I know you have had headaches for quite some time now. And they were diagnosed as migraines, and you’ve been taking narcotics to control the pain. But do you ever see things that aren’t there? Smell anything odd that doesn’t make sense to you? Hear things?”

George looked up at the goddess of the race, who was standing behind the doctor still but was now gesturing eagerly, waving her arms in front of her as if to say no, stop, don’t. George looked at her and felt as if he was being torn apart by inches on the inside. He didn’t want to lose her, didn’t want to lose the goddess of love, and the coy sex goddess, and even the god of wealth, and the god of war, the mermaid, the goat, the mistier ones like Quetzalcoatl and Osiris, the firm ones like Philanthropy and Revenge. These familiar figures, present in his life for such a long time.

“If you take out the tumor, all that will stop?” he asked the doctor.

“All what?” said the doctor. “All what?”