Me and My Animal Habits

There will be no graduation! There will be no trumpets blowing!

Goofy pretense, my one true friend!

Around ten a neurologist walked in, said hello. His head was large and sunken at the temples, but the skin of his face was youthful and smooth. A grey corona of hair moved in a current, back and forth, but slowly, like the branches of a willow. Smile. The air in the room was moving, a fan was on. It was meant to lower her body temperature, encourage restfulness and limit her brain activity. Brain activity sapped energy from more important matters, and made problems where none were needed.

This was what the neurologist told me. He was very kind, very soft-spoken, and competent in a way that put me at ease. This quiet confidence is wonderful, although it can seem like arrogance, depending on your question. This is another cliché, this idea of cool, dispassionate skills. Most of the doctors have it. I would think they live in it, like a coat or something. Something to look nice in when a woman is asking about her husband, if his shitting his bed is a good sign.

What are you supposed to do, incidentally, in that case?

The neurosurgeons share an unnervingly young look, like they preserved themselves in studies that last ten years, locked over Thayer Street…

The morning resident is in his seventh year. My aunt calls him—in her beautiful, slow Southern accent—‘My son.’ He is thirty-four years old, and has never made more than thirty-five thousand dollars. He attended medical school at Trinity College, in Dublin.

I remember the medical school. We had a common entrance, and shared ashtrays in the building courtyard, which was really an alleyway for an administration building, if I remember correctly.

It surprised me that they smoked.

Earlier in the week, a stroke victim with emphysema occupied the other bed. I’ve never heard anything like it. I smoked heavily for a while, myself, in Ireland, up to two
packs a day. I’ll never smoke again, two nights hearing him breathe like a ship sinking.

He was moved to a step-down unit on Monday.

The next was a man who, while shaving in an upstairs bathroom, had blown a secret little aneurysm, hiding in his head. His wife found him. Their daughter spends most of the morning crying, pulled up on a windowsill in the consultation room.

The next was a man fresh from surgery, holding over in the Neural ICU, for observation. And here again we have this awful, strange disjunction. All night long—as I watched seven languages I can’t read crawl up through the numbers on the monitor—he was shitting his bed. But why should a man, of any age, appear more dignified at the lip of death than, say, while taking a shit? What difference does it make? To whom?

And this is my issue, tonight: A brain can either be right, or wrong. At this time, we are neither. Why not wait to respond to something that is, rather than chasing your own morbidity through the cracks in the tiles? Making it, in the first place, something, and then following it—crying over its hands—in every instance deeper into an annihilating sentimentality that, in the end, will only comfort itself?

G.F., our primary neurosurgeon, is a perfect example of the alternative. Listening to his calm, hobbyist voice, you could never tell he was describing tears in my sister’s memory.

They’re bringing her downstairs for an MRI. Gotta go.

2/10/05
1:06AM