feet from the entrance to the main building to a frontage road, and the highway is just beyond that. There are some trees here and there, and some landscaping shrubs that should be looked through, but it’s mostly open space and easily surveyed.
I ask Sam what he knows about Abby Wagner.
“She came here when the nuns were still in charge. Near the end of their time. She was a teenager I think. Her brain got messed up in an accident. That’s all I know. She looks regular, but she ain’t regular. She’s got problems.”
Don’t we all. But he’s right about her looking Normal. I recall the hand on the knee the first time I saw her and thank the Big Bang that it didn’t get me in trouble.
Sam and I don’t find anything. Neither does anyone else. I fill out our report in two sentences and hand it to Sam who hands it in. We are told to go back to our Normal Routine. We will be updated As More Information Becomes Available. Since my work is done for the day, I head for my car. As I open the door, I see the Stuart Wagners pulling up in front of the main entrance, with two police cars not far behind. I’m glad not to be an executive director of anything.
five
My brain and I are glad to be going to what I euphemistically call home. Home is where the snacks are. Where your finger automatically goes to all the right buttons on the remote control. Where the ratty easy chair is more desirable than any throne. Where you scratch any place that itches. And the common denominator to all this is familiarity. Not health, not wholeness, not peace—just the familiar. The devil you know and all that.
Funny how “broken” feels right when you’re used to it. We talk about comfortable shoes being “broken in,” which actually is just an intermediate step toward “worn out.” I think it’s the same with lives. We make a thousand little choices that collectively give our lives a certain shape. For some of us, too many of those thousand choices are little cracks in how things ought to be. (The “broken” in “broken in,” perhaps.) They’re small distortions that add up to a misshapen life, like how gaining a pound a month will eventually give you a belly the size of the Hindenburg. (“Oh, the humanity!”) Just as you get used to each new pound as it finds its place on your globe of a gut, so you strike up a friendship with each new distortion in your increasingly defective but familiar life.
When I say my brain wants to go home, I also mean it misses its old broken self. It’s not comfortable, not “at home,” with my recently improved mental state. It’s not that my brain wants the voices back; they were nasty to live with and hopefully gone for good. It’s just that pathology can be a kind of friend, an old buddy, a soft pair of slippers.
Not that I’m now a poster boy for mental health. I got yanked back from the precipice, but I can still see the pit edge from here, not all that far away. I’m like an alcoholic who’s been dry for some months, maybe even a year or two. I’m 100% cured right up until the moment I’m 100% relapsed. I’m just one little stimulus away from a free-fall response. My brain knows it, and some of its lobes are nostalgic.
But why do I say “my brain and I” instead of just sticking with “I”? I mean, who’s the “I” asking “Who am I?”—the dusty old question, beloved of writers and thinkers and commuters staring out windows. Am I my brain or am I my mind? Or my consciousness? Is consciousness the same as mind? Are both mind and consciousness wholly produced by brain? Is my foot part of my “I” or is this “I” of mine just a mind jockey riding this old nag called the body? And how do you get something as seemingly immaterial as consciousness out of something as unconscious as pure matter? And if you say consciousness is material, then explain to me how a molecule can store a memory of Zillah’s perfume. Pretty soon you’ll be blowing smoke. Pile up enough quarks and you get a tiny closet for a memory to live in? How charming. How unconvincing. The gap between micro and macro is as wide as the cosmos.
And don’t even talk to me about soul. That’s an eye-rolling word among Those Who Know. In the same forgotten parking lot for mothballed ideas as astrology, bloodletting, and slavery. The soul—titter, titter—how quaint. Next thing you know you’ll be believing in resurrections.
(I once believed in resurrections. I found the idea very encouraging. When Judy and I lost track of our mom and dad, I was ravenous for resurrection—or at least for afterlife. If not resurrection, at least reunion. But like most of the hopes of childhood, it faded. I haven’t found a way back to believing it since. Not that I don’t see the attraction.)
Anyway, I’m okay with ditching soul. Having one didn’t do me much good all those years, so let’s deal the deck with no soul card in it and see how the game turns out. But I would certainly appreciate an “I” card, and it seems like it’s next to go. If “I” am just my brain, and my brain is just neurons firing in strict obedience to their underlying chemistry, and that chemistry is nothing but configurations of molecules, and molecules are just the combination of atoms that started flying with the Primordial Pop (and so on into the dark), then how can Zee blame me for wanting to watch football instead of talking to her about her cousin Irene? I mean, who or what is left to blame—or to feel guilt—whether I turn on the TV or I cut off someone’s head? (“It wasn’t me, Your Honor; it was the Big Bang.”)
So do I freely choose to turn on the TV or am I required to do so by the inexorable logic of the distribution of matter when time began? What is freedom, anyway, in a Big-Bang-is-the-only-Bang universe?
But then some Seriously Scientific People, much to the consternation of Other Seriously Scientific People, allow that there is something besides the brain. Let’s call it mind. The mind is bigger than the brain even if you wouldn’t have mind without the brain. Pain talks to the brain, they say, whereas suffering dialogues with the mind.
I mean, how do I explain feeling terrible when my dog Blue died when I was kid? Why should the brain care? What in the Great Explosion inscribed suffering into the passing of a mutt? And what adaptive value does it have? Maybe something about reinforcing social ties that increase survival rates, I suppose. But how circular is that? Seems more adaptive to immediately forget a dead loved one and start looking for someone else with whom to pass on your genes. Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be all about? (Or are the All-Confident socio-biologists not talking to the All-Confident physicists?)
I suffer, therefore I am. Is that the mind’s mantra? (A lot of whiner writers apparently think so.) Brains don’t suffer. Brains register the stimulus we label “pain,” but they don’t give a damn about it. They don’t even care about their own continued existence. All those molecules will just reconstitute themselves as something else, something not bothered by questions of brain and mind and soul. Something loamy, perhaps, or tree-like. They will just float out into space with the ejecta from the next asteroid that punches the earth in the nose. No hurry, no worry.
Then again, maybe suffering is evidence for the existence of God. Not pain—that requires only neurons. But suffering seems to imply values and oughts—because it lives in the gap between how things are and how they ought to be. And values and oughts create a possible space for God. Something that transcends. (I hear the materialists screaming.) Genuine values, that is. Real oughts, real shoulds and shouldn’ts. Not just pragmatism (“things will operate more efficiently if”), not just power (“we will punish you if”), not just arbitrariness (“the big end of the egg is good, and the small end of the egg is evil”). No, I want real right and real wrong and real should and shouldn’t or I won’t play this game anymore.
And my brain says, “So quit playing. Who cares? You’re boring me.”
And I am boring. I know it. I bore myself. But these are the kinds of ruts my brain-mind-consciousness is heir to. These are the worn tracks that feel most familiar to
