Part of what made the migraines so terrible was his belief that he had caused them. You’re going to give yourself a migraine, he often heard, often warned himself. If the cause of the headaches was stress, then every intense thought, wrong desire, real or imagined conflict, would return to him in the form of pain. The pressures of passing himself off as a real man, of staying true to type—the constant weight lifting, the verbal combat—would eventually reduce him to a child again, calling out for his mother from his bed. The migraines were his periodic full-bodied involuntary confessions that he was soft, a poser. And while he’d never had more than one in a six-week period, he thought he felt one coming on a hundred times a day: whenever he looked away from a light source to find his vision mottled, whenever part of his body fell asleep or felt slightly numb from an awkward posture, on the very rare occasions when he stuttered or grew briefly confused in his speech—terror arose within him. Each false alarm, because it caused anxiety, brought him closer to the real thing.
Erwood was a pioneer in biofeedback—especially in teaching people to warm their hands as a way of bringing automatic bodily processes under conscious control. The aim was to quiet fight-or-flight responses, increase blood flow to the extremities, and alleviate headaches caused by the buildup of vascular tension. Adam’s parents had rightly assumed he would be more open to seeing Erwood for migraines than to seeing a psychotherapist to discuss his emotional life. Since Erwood worked unconventional hours, he could consult with him at the Foundation on Sunday afternoons.
The office resembled his father’s except there was no desk; there were two chairs that faced one another for conversation and then meditation pillows and mats in a corner. A copper singing bowl and a little mallet. On the walls were a few framed pictures of what he assumed were famous Eastern healers—men, mainly, in white and red and saffron robes. The first session consisted of Erwood soliciting a detailed description of the migraine symptoms, their onset, explaining how and why biofeedback worked, then hooking up a little temperature sensor to his hands, asking him to shut his eyes and visualize what the doctor slowly described. First he was to be aware of his breath, breathing deeply in, slowly out. Note the rise and fall of the abdomen and chest. Then he was to imagine a warmth spreading from the tips of his toes slowly up and throughout his body, before focusing on his hands. Although it felt like half an hour, they spent less than ten minutes on this initial session, Erwood showing him, after he’d told Adam to open his eyes, how he’d raised his temperature slightly. Erwood asked that he commit to ten minutes of practice a day for the first week, gave him the sensor, then wondered: Would you like to see the wall?
In the clock tower basement, Adam walked tentatively into the room Erwood had unlocked for him and sat cross-legged on the large glass cube, as he assumed he was supposed to; Erwood left, shutting the door. Adam looked up to consider the wall while his eyes attempted to adjust to what he at first experienced as total dark. He thought he smelled a faint coppery scent, but that must have been his imagination or his sweat. The color of the center of the wall soon became faintly visible to him. He could hear Erwood making noise behind the wall; why hadn’t he switched on the lights? Some ambient light was present in the room, maybe filtering in below the door, and now he could more clearly differentiate a nebula of red and orange and brown from the surrounding blackness. Although his eyes were open in a dark room, he felt like they were shut while he was looking at a light source, as if light were penetrating his eyelids, taking on the color of the blood it passed through. Involuntarily, he attempted to open his already open eyes.
“How are you doing over there?” he heard Erwood ask from behind the wall, either through it or via a microphone, and he heard himself respond, “Fine”; his voice sounded bored, but he was not bored: he was looking into the secret power source of the Foundation dimly glowing in the clock tower basement, the thing behind or beyond all the talk, the unnameable energy that had drawn his parents and so many others from the coasts, helped gather Klaus and the old guard of analysts from their exile. He was looking at the gold ground of a medieval painting, then he was inside the painting looking out into a museum at night. He repositioned himself on the glass block, noticed how hot he felt, and almost demanded that Erwood turn on the light, if there was a light, but then he thought that it would sound like he was scared, which he was, if just a little. Because he’d picked that plant with special powers in the backyard of Bright Circle Montessori, because he’d hit his head, stopping time, because he brought the depersonalizing headaches upon himself. He was all ages at once as he sat in the dark before the wall, or he was flickering between them, moving through every house on the lake.
Now Erwood wasn’t making any sound. It was too quiet; they had soundproofed the room so effectively that it approached the anechoic. He heard water moving through the clock tower pipes and the hum of electricity in the wires, but this was blood moving through his head, the hiss of idling auditory nerves. He imagined Erwood dead, slumped over some kind of control panel on the other side of the wall, which was a million miles away—he was adrift in outer space now, launched into orbit against his will; Erwood had been ground control. He shut his eyes to stifle panic and the wall was still there, phosphenes cycling across it; involuntarily, he tried to close them again. And now to fill the void came rage and language. Rage at whatever trick Erwood was playing on him, whatever test he was administering, leaving him here for minutes that were hours; he imagined kneeing the gentle doctor in the face, his nose shattering, the coppery smell of blood. I warned you, motherfucker; I said step off. I said affirmative plan will trigger widespread particles of anger resulting in the declaration of martial law of migraine which does permanent damage to democratic institutions leads to collapse of NATO of the sound good rules that would enable thousands to live together in Rolling Hills Nursing Home with Darren and Dole. Were his eyes open and/or shut? He wanted to deface the perfectly smooth copper surface, draw his keys across the metal like the car door of an enemy from Topeka West, make whatever minimal mark could inaugurate an alphabet.
Erwood opened the door; light flooded in, scattering his thoughts, if that’s what they were. What do you think? Erwood asked. Cool, he said, indifference in his voice. Erwood approached him and, to Adam’s surprise and discomfort, put a hand on the back of his neck, which was wet with perspiration, then moved both hands down his trapezius muscles to his shoulders, which were sore from his most recent workout at Popeye’s Gym on Twenty-First. You’re carrying a tremendous amount of tension, Erwood said. Here, and here. Why don’t you try talking, since you’re such a great talker, to those muscles? Ask them—with a lot of kindness, with a lot of humility—to relax.
There was an iron bench across from the clock tower, where he waited for his dad to pick him up. The clock said it was almost five. It was unusually warm for November, but the shortness of the days signaled the approach of winter. The red leaves of the nearby maples and the yellow leaves of the ash seemed to glow in the early dusk as if they were producing their own light. He wanted a cigarette. A siren passed in the distance; in its wake he heard the downward-sloping whistle of a cardinal somewhere in the trees. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be hospitalized here, to live on the campus, although hospitalizations were increasingly rare, since now insurance almost never paid. Then he imagined a huge debate tournament on the Foundation grounds, all of the competitors patients, most of them psychotic, some of them shaking and drooling from medication, involuntarily sticking out their tongues, smacking their lips. He imagined them withdrawing evidence from their plastic tubs, but instead of texts they produced random objects: an umbrella, a horseshoe, a pack of baseball cards, strange implements. The judges, the shrinks, Jonathan and Jane Gordon among them, would have to figure out what arguments had been made, which had been dropped. Resolved: A few red sparks, a network of faint lines.