Table of Contents
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2010
to R .K .
prologue
The first night, obviously. Victor says it was love at first sight, but I was too tired that night to fall in love. It was after one of my little happenings. I remember I was exhausted, I wasnt out to impress anybody. Then he came up with a drink and I thought, Well, hes tall. The kind of guy who took himself seriously, straight out of Brooks Brothers, with pens in his breast pocket. Not at all my typical fan. But I could tell he wanted to kiss me. I made him want to kiss me. That was the whole idea.
New York, August 1971. I was renting a studio on West Eighth Street, back when it was dingy. Men found it avant-garde, the exposed pipes, the working bathtub in the kitchen. Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place to listen to some Chicago blues records and drink whiskey sours (I only drank whiskey sours that year). I probably lit some incense and talked a big game. There was a point, I remember, when we discussed our favorite books. We had three in commonthat seemed important. But he didnt come on to me. I started to worry Id read him wrong. Then he asked me, after one of those prolonged quiet moments (I never liked quiet moments), So, whats your secret?
He had this earnest, really lovely look on his face. His seriousness didnt waver.
Deep down, whats the one secret you dont share with people?
You first, I said.
After a second, he said, I killed a friend of mine.
Not what I expected.
Recently?
No, when I was a kid. He sort of laughed. He wasnt self-conscious, but it was a big deal. When I was twelve. Im not sure.
Whether you killed him?
He killed himself. But I could have stopped him.
Well, I scrambled to think of something. I hit my mother one time. I punched her in the mouth. After a beat, Victor said, You might have something there, and then both of us started laughing, just crazy laughter, and that was that.
Normally I gave away my love in dribs and drabs, but not this time. As though Id stumbled into a cause; perhaps not right for anybody else, but all mine.
Saras handwriting covered both sides of the index card. Shed scribbled down to the last empty space. I put the card back where Id found it on her desk, tucked into a book with dozens more.
She might have written it just after our counseling appointment, sitting in her car while I pulled out of the parking lot.
Weeks before California.
Some theories said the most accurate memory was one thats never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely.
But I hadnt brought this one up in thirty years. And Sara recalled that first evening perfectly: the movie, the music, the whiskey sours.
What we said. How it felt.
But I didnt remember that wed gone to a movie.
I barely remembered that evening at all.
one
The ghosts of our research labs were old, clipped cartoons. Scientists treated them like Dead Sea Scrolls, as though natures mysteries were best explained by Far Side captions. Comic strips were the relics of investigative progress. Scientists more esteemed than myself were probably above such things (if ranked, I would have made varsity within the Alzheimers disease community, though not as a marquee player), but from Chicago to Cambridge, New York to Bar Harbor, Id always carted along my favorites, particularly one that showed two scientists at a lab bench, one of them examining a fuming test tube, saying to the other, Whats the opposite of Eureka?
The best summary Id seen of a researchers daily life.
My lab consisted of a half-dozen rooms on Maines Mount Desert Island at the Soborg Institute, a satellite campus for the states university system. My offices eastern wall faced a faculty parking lot and featured three large windows, each of them blacked out by papers I was in the middle of editing (the better to see them with). The floor was a no-fly zone of archival boxes, FedEx envelopes, and stacks of journals. Sara used to say I worked in academia because OSHA would have banned my tidying habits from the private sector, but whatever I needed, I could find in twenty seconds.
Sherlock Holmes once said, A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. Perhaps my mind, like his, meandered. Other scientists were known for their impressive recall, but I preferred to rely on my judgment.
Science in school was horrible, though, a boot camp of memorization drills, except with one teacher, Mrs. Gill. Her hero was Charles Darwin, the garden explorer. She taught us about species evolution by lugging in her own butterfly crates. Our task, she said, was to assemble the world, to develop wondering points of view, even in the grass around a baseball diamond. I remembered a moment from that year when I was standing at the end of my parents driveway while my friend Russell shot by on his bicycle, no hands, and Id had an idea that seemed to make the trees shimmer: Was how I thought about things, the way things happened in my mind, the same as how Russell thought about things? If so, how could he ride no-hands when I was too scared? If not, then why not, and which one of us was the odd one out? What did it sound like inside his head? Was everyones consciousness different? Were all of us equally full of thoughts, or some more than others?
I probably would have ended up reading Kierkegaard if thered been a philosophy club, but instead there was Mrs. Gills biology class, dissecting cow brains. And if my career since hadnt been Keplerian in magnitude, didnt rival Mendels or Cricks, at least it reflected a life spent pursuing what had interested me for as long as I could remember.
Our labs subject was Alzheimers disease. Specifically, we were trying to develop neuroprotective strategies for sufferers, aiming to help their neurons fight back against or even prevent the disease. Unfortunately, our success was measurable among peers, not the public. Alzheimers disease was still an excruciating illness for millions. It lacked a cure, and the popular spin on our genes as so many on and off switches didnt help. Which one is the Alzheimers gene? Which one causes cancer? Even for experts, understanding gene expression was a shadows game, a spelunking mission where thousands of caverns were still dark. We simply didnt know much about genetics, and the ways both scientists and civilians behaved with uncertain information had led to straw men popping up. This misconception that humans were so many toggles was to my mind the new phrenology, and scientists themselves were responsible for bad marketing and spreading rumors, attempting to explain our mysteries with little data.
We certainly couldnt map memory function to a switchboard. Riddles abounded. I couldnt recall what Id eaten for dinner the previous Sunday, but all the pretty girls from high school remained vividly in storage. Their figures, their hair color, their venomous voices.
