It's a little girl's room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and window sills, shoulder to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hair brushes and bottles of nail polish. Pin-ups from Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league gymnastics medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled 'I Promise…' exhorting Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who she'd been, who she was supposed to become.
I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread-they've been re-sewn, maybe more than once.
Therese's father sets down the pitifully small bag that contains everything I've taken from the hospital: toiletries, a couple of changes of clothes, and five of Dr. S's books. 'I guess old Boo Bear was waiting for you,' he says.
'Boo W. Bear.'
'Yes, Boo W!' It pleases him that I know this. As if it proves anything. 'You know, your mother dusted this room every week. She never doubted that you'd come back.'
I have never been here, and she is not coming back, but already I'm tired of correcting pronouns. 'Well, that was nice,' I say.
'She's had a tough time of it. She knew people were talking, probably holding her responsible-both of us, really. And she was worried about them saying things about you. She couldn't stand them thinking that you were a wild girl.'
'Them?'
He blinks. 'The Church.'
Ah. The Church. The term carried so many feelings and connotations for Therese that months ago I stopped trying to sort them out. The Church was the red-brick building of the Davenport Church of Christ, shafts of dusty light through rows of tall, glazed windows shaped like gravestones. The Church was God and the Holy Ghost (but not Jesus-he was personal, separate somehow). Mostly, though, it was the congregation, dozens and dozens of people who'd known her since before she was born. They loved her, they watched out for her, and they evaluated her every step. It was like having a hundred overprotective parents.
I almost laugh. 'The Church thinks Therese was wild?'
He scowls, but whether because I've insulted the Church or because I keep referring to his daughter by name, I'm not sure. 'Of course not. It's just that you caused a lot of worry.' His voice has assumed a sober tone that's probably never failed to unnerve his daughter. 'You know, the Church prayed for you every week.'
'They did?' I do know Therese well enough to be sure this would have mortified her. She was a pray-er, not a pray-ee.
Therese's father watches my face for the bloom of shame, maybe a few tears. From contrition it should have been one small step to confession. It's hard for me to take any of this seriously.
I sit down on the bed and sink deep into the mattress. This is not going to work. The double bed takes up most of the room, with only a few feet of open space around it. Where am I going to meditate?
'Well,' Therese's father says. His voice has softened. Maybe he thinks he's won. 'You probably want to get changed,' he says.
He goes to the door but doesn't leave. I stand by the window, but I can feel him there, waiting. Finally the oddness of this makes me turn around.
He's staring at the floor, a hand behind his neck. Therese might have been able to intuit his mood, but it's beyond me.
'We want to help you, Therese. But there's so many things we just don't understand. Who gave you the drugs, why you went off with that boy, why you would-' His hand moves, a stifled gesture that could be anger, or just frustration. 'It's just… hard.'
'I know,' I say. 'Me too.'
He shuts the door when he leaves, and I push the panda to the floor and flop onto my back in relief. Poor Mr. Klass. He just wants to know if his daughter fell from grace, or was pushed.
When I want to freak myself out, 'I' think about 'me' thinking about having an 'I.' The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.
Dr. S says that nobody knows what the mind is, or how the brain generates it, and nobody really knows about consciousness. We talked almost every day while I was in the hospital, and after he saw that I was interested in this stuff-how could I not be?-he gave me books and we'd talk about brains and how they cook up thoughts and make decisions.
'How do I explain this?' he always starts. And then he tries out the metaphors he's working on for his book. My favorite is the Parliament, the Page, and the Queen.
'The brain isn't one thing, of course,' he told me. 'It's millions of firing cells, and those resolve into hundreds of active sites, and so it is with the mind. There are dozens of nodes in the mind, each one trying to out-shout the others. For any decision, the mind erupts with noise, and that triggers… how do I explain this… Have you ever seen the British Parliament on C-SPAN?' Of course I had: in a hospital, TV is a constant companion. 'These members of the mind's parliament, they're all shouting in chemicals and electrical charges, until enough of the voices are shouting in unison. Ding! That's a 'thought,' a 'decision.' The Parliament immediately sends a signal to the body to act on the decision, and at the same time it tells the Page to take the news-'
'Wait, who's the Page?'
He waves his hand. 'That's not important right now.' i Weeks later, in a different discussion, Dr. S will explain that the Page isn't one thing, but a cascade of neural events in the temporal area of the limbic system that meshes the neural map of the new thought with the existing neural map-but by then I know that 'neural map' is just another metaphor for another deeply complex thing or process, and that I'll never get to the bottom of this. Dr. S said not to worry about it, that nobody gets to the bottom of it.) 'The Page takes the news of the decision to the Queen.'
'All right then, who's the Queen? Consciousness?'
'Exactly right! The self itself.'
He beamed at me, his attentive student. Talking about this stuff gets Dr. S going like nothing else, but he's oblivious to the way I let the neck of my scrubs fall open when I stretch out on the couch. If only I could have tucked the two hemispheres of my brain into a lace bra.
'The Page,' he said, 'delivers its message to Her Majesty, telling her what the Parliament has decided. The Queen doesn't need to know about all the other arguments that went all the other possibilities that were thrown out. She simply needs to know what to announce to her subjects. The Queen tells the parts of the body to act on the decision.'
'Wait, I thought the Parliament had already sent out the signal. You said before that you can see the brain warming up before the self even knows about it.'
'That's the joke. The Queen announces the decision, and she thinks that her subjects are obeying her commands, but in reality, they have already been told what to do. They're already reaching for their glasses of water.'
I pad down to the kitchen in bare feet, wearing Therese's sweatpants and a T-shirt. The shirt is a little tight; Therese, champion dieter and Olympic-level purger, was a bit smaller than me.
Alice is at the table, already dressed, a book open in front of her. 'Well, you slept in this morning,' she says brightly. Her face is made up, her hair sprayed into place. The coffee cup next to the book is empty. She's been waiting for hours.
I look around for a clock, and find one over the door. It's only nine. At the hospital I slept in later than that all the time. 'I'm starved,' I say. There's a refrigerator, a stove, and dozens of cabinets.
I've never made my own breakfast. Or any lunch or dinner, for that matter. For my entire life, my meals have been served on cafeteria trays. 'Do you have scrambled eggs?'
She blinks. 'Eggs? You don't-' She abruptly stands. 'Sure. Sit down, Therese, and I'll make you some.'
'Just call me 'Terry,' okay?'
Alice stops, thinks about saying something-I can almost hear the clank of cogs and ratchets-until she abruptly strides to the cabinet, crouches, and pulls out a non-stick pan.
