CHAPTER TWELVE

Dr. Breen’s office was completely bare. Little steel hooks glittered on the walls where paintings had been removed, and aside from the examination table, with its required length of white butcher paper, and a small side desk, the doctor’s office was empty, the workplace of a person getting ready to flee the country. “Doctor will be right in,” said a nurse, one of those human dumplings who really should read up on cholesterol.

I was never going to put a patient through anything like this.

Dr. Breen herself was wearing something knit and slinky, a dress with a drop waist, mauve and very unusual, from what I could see of it through her unbuttoned lab coat. She gave me one bright look, up and down, taking me in the way men sometimes do, and then went back to the folders in her hands, leaning on her desk. She straightened her back, continuing to read.

“I’m sorry to be so late,” she said at last.

I heard myself say that I didn’t mind. Maybe one tiny part of my mind hadn’t wanted Dr. Breen to show up, and didn’t want to ever climb the tower again. I asked what color she was going to paint the walls.

“Whatever color the architecture committee picks,” she said, looking through my folder. “What do you think—nerve white? Bone marrow pink?”

I gave a little pro forma laugh.

She pried a paper clip free, nodding as she read. “How have you been feeling?” not looking up.

“Great.”

This got her attention. “You haven’t experienced—”

“Double vision, no.”

I answered no to nausea, dizziness, and told her promptly that my appetite was fine.

“And the event-specific amnesia.”

“I’ve been remembering it in sections.” I had prepared this statement, having anticipated the question, and it came out a little wooden.

“Have you?” Friendly, but not friendly.

I had to offer her something, something true. I had to give her some hint how I felt. “I have dreams.”

Her gaze slipped off mine for an instant, as though dreams were not her field of expertise. “What of?”

“The dive,” I said. I couldn’t keep from sounding a little exasperated—why else would I mention this? “The accident.”

She gave me the little wrinkle of a smile I had noticed before, as though “accident” were a euphemism.

“I didn’t get the right altitude,” I said. “And then, because of that, I didn’t have the leverage when I tucked in. Of course, I could have hit my toes. A guy in San Diego broke a metatarsal a few months ago, dinging the tower with his foot. I could have missed and gotten away with it. But I didn’t.”

“You can’t remember it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s all right that you can’t recall the actual dive, step by step.”

“That’s what I mean—I know it’s all right.”

“Tell me about the dream,” she said.

“What made you choose neurology?” I asked. One way to cross-examine an expert witness successfully is to mix up your questions, keep the witness just a little off guard.

She looked at me with her polite smile. Her makeup was good.

“You could have picked—radiology,” I said, imagining her scurrying into the control booth, protecting her reproductive future from the electromagnetic waves.

“Radiologists are the most boring people in the world,” she said, slipping out of her doctor voice for a second, as though visualizing radiologists at parties, next to her in meetings, excited about their new high-speed Kodak film.

I wanted to be an ophthalmologist. I wanted to cure blindness, and I wasn’t afraid to imagine my touch searching the vitreous humor, the central fluid of the eyeball, for a steel splinter or a shard of glass.

I had sometimes given into fantasies of my waiting room, with broad, comfortable chairs, easy for the sight impaired to find, with simple, beautiful abstract paintings, greens and blues, on the walls. I had fantasies I was a little embarrassed by, tall, soft-voiced male nurses telling frightened but increasingly hopeful patients, “Dr. Chamberlain will see you now.” But I had studied the university catalogs carefully, Duke, Harvard, Stanford. Dad had always said cost was no object.

I told Dr. Breen about my dreams, putting some feeling into it.

“These nightmares trouble you,” she suggested, gently.

I hesitated. “A little.”

“I never remember my dreams. I’m going through a divorce, and I would like to have access to whatever my unconscious might have to offer in the way of dream commentary. But—”

This happens to me—people look at me, make a judgment about my character, and tell me about themselves. “That’s too bad,” I said. “About not dreaming.”

“I’ve always envied people who had howling nightmares. Wonderful story dreams. Rich inner lives.”

“You’re right to envy us. It’s wonderful.”

She laughed, looking a little like my sister Georgia.

“I’m signing a release,” she said, briskly hurrying back to her doctor diction. “This form—”

She said form with a trace of exasperation, another scrap of paperwork to clutter her life. She let a piece of stationery flutter in her hand, extended in my direction, Lloyd-Fairhill Academy in dignified Medieval-looking script at the top.

“I’m clearing you,” she said.