* * *
■ ■ ■
“Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,” the doctors told them, and so she began to live in that brain, thinking herself along its routes, thinking what it meant that the baby would never know the news. The picture of it approached total abstraction, almost became beautiful. “The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to each other,” the doctors said. Ten words, maybe. Maybe she’ll know who you are. Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud; everyone in the room seized with a secret wish to see their own, which they believed would be recognizable by the subtle shadows of things in it. Oh look, eight years of medical school. Oh look, an old episode of Frasier.
* * *
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The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish-shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be made of 14 percent classical music, the kind you were supposed to listen to while you were studying. As she spoke, she stopped every few sentences to apologize. “Not your fault,” her sister kept saying, flicking solid silver away from her cheek, as whatever it was that had made the neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her education and began to pour toward them as a direct current. She streamed in her fixed socket like a star. Said, “I am so sorry.”
* * *
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If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long, they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses. Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state. Tidepools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.
* * *
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The words shared reality stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, which all shrank from the same cold. Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem, for didn’t we all have the same one?
* * *
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What is a human being? What is a human being? What is a human being? she asked herself, on the day the gorilla who understood she was a person died. But that was the thing. Let one gorilla be a person, and then a whole flood comes crashing through the word, until the childhood home is swept away right down to the bars on the windows.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Back in Ohio and heterosexual again,” she sighed. This happened every time she returned home, as soon as she saw the Quaker Steak and Lube, as soon as the first Tom Petty song came on the radio and began working at the zipper of her jeans, as soon as her speed on the highway produced a friction approaching fire.
* * *
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As a teenager, she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings, but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project. Why were the trees here so brown, so stunted? Why did the billboards announce LOOSE, HOT SLOTS? Why did her mother collect Precious Moments, why did the birds seem to say BUR-GER KING, BUR-GER KING, and why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident-and-injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease?
* * *
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If she had stayed, she might have gotten addicted to pills too, she realized. Something about the way the lunch-bag-colored leaves wadded in the gutters in autumn, something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives. Something about her memory of the multiplication table, with its fat devouring zero at the very corner and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue.
* * *
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Instead, she had disappeared into the internet. She had not realized what a close call she had had till recently, for now in the portal, men were coming up through the manholes to confess how near they had come to being radicalized, how they too had wandered the sewers of communal thought for days at a time, dry-mouthed and damp under the arms. How they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny, just long enough to grow that all-discerning third eye.
* * *
■ ■ ■
All along the roadside were signs reading KIDNEY FOR MELISSA. KIDNEY FOR RANDY. KIDNEY FOR JEANINE, with desperate phone numbers written underneath with magic marker. “Mom, what are those signs?” she finally asked.