At first Diane thought she would go alone to get the results—she has never before gone to a doctor’s appointment accompanied by anyone, not as an adult—but when she imagines driving across the river, no doubt in heavy traffic, and parking in the dank hospital garage, then finding her way to the right building and the right elevator and the right corridor, everything institutionally drab and anonymous, all the doctors and nurses and technicians striding past her imperiously, pressed for time, blank-faced or stamped with patronizing smiles, trained to read people as always evincing some pathology, then arriving at her doctor’s waiting room where she would wait surrounded by people who would look perfectly ordinary, but whose brains would all be carrying invisible damage—tumors, or dementia, or some neurological condition that was about to impair their functioning and make them invalids and maybe usher in their premature demise—well, she couldn’t face it, the thought overwhelmed her, and she asked Joe, very quietly, if he would accompany her.
Of course he said yes. Dear Joe. He recast himself for service, came down from Maine, and put on the coat of command. He took the driver’s seat—she usually drives—and drove her along Memorial Drive in the early afternoon. They crossed over the Longfellow Bridge, and the traffic was not bad, and the river was a ribbon of sunlit gems and full of boat traffic, and things might be right with the world if you looked at them in a certain way. They were both quietly ruminative. In this attenuated moment of transit she told him about the Mexican man and his son, and Joe listened and nodded, and she was glad he felt no call to comment.
Dr. Sadaranghani is an elegant and lively woman who has retained the lilting, lightly English-inflected accent of her native India though she earned her medical degree here and has been practicing in Boston for fifteen years. Diane chose her not primarily because she was on several of the “top doctors” lists, though that was important, but because she took Diane’s request for a test seriously and did not make her feel the least bit ashamed.
The waiting room, which serves two other neurologists as well as Dr. S, is full, and Diane is surprised to see that the other patients are mostly middle-aged, or downright young. There’s a man of indeterminate middle-age with a turban, a fifty-something black couple clutching one another, an elderly white woman accompanied by her prim middle-aged daughter, a boy of not more than four or five with his parents, and a teenaged girl with her mother. Viewed from the outside everyone appears disease-free.
The turbaned man moves to allow Diane and Joe to sit side by side. They nod their thanks and seat themselves, and Joe takes her hand and, though the gesture embarrasses Diane, she doesn’t withdraw. He squeezes and she squeezes back. He scans the room, trying to be subtle, and she knows that when they emerge from here he will have made up a story about each grouping, their family circumstances, the problems that have brought them to this waiting room. He will have named and nicknamed them all, and assigned them ages and professions and obsessions. Some of what he’ll come up with will seem right to her, some of it will seem fantastical. It’s simply the way his brain works, he maintains, or how he has trained it to work. You mold your brain around science, he tells her, and this is my way.
If a single room can exude joy, Dr. S’s office is that room. It is a tarantella of color with a Persian carpet in shades of deep red and indigo, plump carmine arm chairs with saffron accent pillows, and adorning the walls are children’s drawings in the neon primary colors of PET scans. Also on the walls are various framed photographs of Dr. S’s two children and her doctor husband. Diane has never seen a physician’s office with such a joyous personal stamp and, though she has been here once before, it still takes her by surprise.
Dr. S wears her name badge on a stylish, pale blue linen suit. Her white coat hangs on a hook on the door. Preoccupied as she was on the first visit, Diane missed how stunning this woman is, a slim forty-something woman with the glossy hair and burnished satin skin of a teenager, and perfectly symmetrical features, a perfection that isn’t precious and static, but active and playful. She shakes their hands and expresses delight at meeting Joe and they sit in the arm chairs, a slim monitor on the table to one side.
“Well, Dr. Fenwick,” says Dr. S, “I won’t keep you in suspense. Your brain is perfectly fine. There is no evidence of pathology at all.” She pauses and smiles almost teasingly. Perhaps it is rare for her to deliver good news.
Diane hears the words, but is slow to absorb them.
Joe pats her arm. “I told you! Didn’t I tell you?”
Dr. S laughs. “We all worry. It’s normal to worry sometimes, especially in times of stress. I consented to test you because it seemed to me you were more worried than most.”
“Oh, she was,” Joe says. “For no reason at all. Her brain is ten times as good as most people’s. Certainly better than mine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Diane says. “Your brain is top notch.” She holds her breath, a recent tendency. There’s something more coming, a “but” hovering behind what’s been said that will change the story. “But that’s not all?”
“Your frontal lobe is larger than most, as is your inferior parietal region. That’s certainly no cause for worry—in fact it has been associated with a higher level of intelligence.”
Joe is raining laughter. He can’t seem to stop. “See, I told you!” Yes, he has been more worried than he let on.
“But what about the things I’ve been forgetting? What about the feeling that my brain is leaking knowledge at a terrible rate?”
“We all forget things. Even younger people, like the medical students I teach, have lapses in memory. Think of how often computers freeze up. You’re fine, really, Dr. Fenwick. Would you like to see your brain scans?”
Diane nods, not sure at all. She is unable to receive this good news that flies in the face of her recent experience. It does not feel like the whole story. It isn’t the whole story really, because she has not been honest. She is here for information about her own brain, yes, but she is also here about Bronwyn’s brain too—and there is certainly no way Dr. S can weigh in on Bronwyn’s brain without having seen it. And something else too—she is here to investigate something even beyond Bronwyn’s brain, something about the human brain in general. What she really wants to know is perhaps unanswerable: What is the possible reach of the human brain? What are its limits?
Dr. S has turned on her computer and the monitor has come alive with bright blobs of primary color. Diane tries to recognize something of herself in those color blocks, tries to recall what she was thinking as she lay like a corpse in the circling scanner.
Dr. S uses the laser pointer. “You see these areas here—this is where there is high activity, rapid glucose metabolism. You see how healthy it all looks? It is very much alive, very active.”
Diane squints, trying to see what Dr. S sees, trying to make sense of the colors and match them with particular thoughts she was having that day.
“What made you become interested in the brain?” Joe asks, ever curious, thinking perhaps about a character for his next book.
“Oh my,” she says. “It’s always a wonder to me that everyone doesn’t want to explore the brain. It’s capable of so much. And yet we’re just beginning to understand it. You’re a writer, are you not? I imagine you have always been interested in stories and language.”
“Oh, yes. Since I was very young.”
“This is true for me also. I have been curious about the brain since I was a small child back in India. I had a friend who was a spelling champion. He knew how to spell so many words, words from many languages even, words whose meaning he did not know. I wanted, even back then, to see how his brain was working from the inside.”
Diane floats, hearing them at some remove, thinking of Bronwyn, wishing she could get Bronwyn to come here and have her brain examined. What would Dr. S see?
“And you, Dr. Fenwick, I imagine you, too, have always been focused on natural phenomena?”
Diane stares at the colorful simulacrum of her brain and smiles weakly. She is not like Joe and Dr. S. She has worn and shed many skins since she was a child.