For an EEG test, let the cap be fitted snugly over your head. The cap is covered with small metal probes, each attached to a wire. Try to believe they will not electrocute you. Sit very still as a green gel is injected into each probe. Smile politely when you are told this machine will channel the music of your brain waves, the amplitudes and frequencies. The EEG technician fancies himself a poet. He says, now let’s listen to the song of yourself. But first, maintain a resting state for eight minutes. To rest, in this context, means sit up straight. Stare fixedly at the image of a small purple cross. Wait for the voice to give you permission to stop, for the real test to begin.
Before an fMRI, remove all jewelry. Any metal in an fMRI could superheat and burn your skin. If you have a metal implant in your body, the machine’s magnetic field could yank it out of place, tear a swath of destruction through muscle and tendon and flesh. You don’t know if you have any metal inside you. Trust the doctors who claim you do not. Remove all clothing. Gown up. Lie down. Let the technician place a plastic shell over your head and face, a joystick in your hand. This is how you will communicate, while keeping perfectly still. Whatever you do, keep perfectly still. Let padded headphones be fitted over your ears. Lie still as the table slides you into a coffinlike tube. Try to listen to the commands playing through your headphones. Focus on the mirror, suspended over your eyes, angled toward a screen. See what they want you to see. Faces you don’t know, with expressions you try to recognize. Press one button for happy, one button for sad. Don’t move. Don’t scratch. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t panic. Don’t imagine what will happen if they leave you here.
Before a PET scan, fast for six hours. Raise arm, allow cannula to be inserted. Watch radioactive dye flow from syringe to cannula, from cannula to your veins. Wait for your organs and tissue to absorb radioactive material. Take off your clothes, again. Your gown is still too thin. Lie down. Behind glass, your scientists watch your brain at work. Wonder what they see, and if they can see what you think of them.
LIZZIE
Their first one-on-one update meeting had barely begun and Strauss was already bored. No one who knew Lizzie would have called her a good observer of social cues, but this diagnosis didn’t demand much acuity. Strauss was making a dumb show of distraction, his pencil playing a jazz riff against the rim of his glasses, his eyes volleying between Lizzie’s face and a sunlit view of the Meadowlark woods. As Lizzie relayed the results of Wendy’s latest brain scans, she caught him checking his watch three times.
“I can come back,” she said on the third, wishing she’d sounded less apologetic and more aggrieved. “Or just leave you with the notes?”
“I’m hungry.” Strauss stood. “You hungry?”
“Uh, sure?”
“Should I take that interrogatory tone as the lack of conviction characteristic to your generation, or a more idiosyncratic inability to gauge your own physical desires?”
“You can take it as my uncertainty that my hunger is relevant, given the foodlike stuff they serve in the cafeteria?”
“Who said anything about the cafeteria?”
* * *
Yes, she was riffing. Yes, her central uncertainty had stemmed from the suspicion she was being dismissed. Yes, everything she said to him came with a terminal question mark, because everything she said was, at base, a variant of the same question. Am I, Lizzie Epstein, dutiful novitiate in this cathedral to pure science, judged meritorious by you, its god? Am I boring you? Am I impressing you? Am I revealing the deep truth of self and its unworthiness, am I destroying my future with this sentence, or this next one, am I proving that I am special? Am I special? Am I sufficient? Am I pleasing you? How can I please you more? And yes, she knew that as a student, a scientist, a woman, she was not supposed to care, and to whatever degree she did care, it was supposed to be for pragmatic purposes, the necessity to impress power. It was not supposed to be because she had fallen prey to the myth of the Great Man of Science, or because seeing Strauss close up had only inflated the myth it should have punctured, or because—his respect seeming an improbable goal—she longed for his approval. Supposed to aside: there it was. Lizzie was an inept observer of others but prided herself on a supreme ability to gauge her own desires, and she admitted, if only to herself, she desired this.
But it was also true that the cafeteria, state of the art or not, was disgusting, and far too reminiscent of cafeterias past. Junior high, summer camp, retirement home, hospital, all fetid with the same stink—stale refrigerator, soggy french fries. Often, the other fellows ate with the postdocs and junior researchers who staffed their project labs, which left Lizzie scanning the room for safe harbor, some empty corner of a table where she could pick at limp salad and sip weak coffee with a modicum of dignity before fleeing. She’d mastered this skill in eighth grade, the speed eating, the gaze performatively intent on absorbing reading material, but had never hoped to hone it into adulthood. The days the other fellows ate together were worse. Mariana spewed thinly veiled commentary on Lizzie’s lack of a solo project; Dmitri dripped jealousy about her proximity to Strauss; Clay simply hit on her, but lazily, as if he couldn’t resist the opportunity for practice but wanted to ensure she knew it was nothing else. Worse than this were the evident ways they peacocked for each other, pretending at modesty regarding their own work and innocent intellectual curiosity about one another’s, all of them probing for weakness, jockeying for superiority, driven by the Darwinian will to eliminate and survive that had earned them their slot to begin with—and it was clear not one of them considered Lizzie a worthy threat. Why would they? Her project was nearly a joke, and it was only nearly hers. She chose not to care. But she’d taken to eating a granola bar and a bag of potato chips alone in her closet-sized cubicle and calling it a day.
Strauss led Lizzie to the Meadowlark’s “hall of memory,” his shrine to the institute’s earlier incarnation. It was as unsettling as Wendy’s description had led her to believe. Framed photos of asylum inmates marched down both walls—nineteenth-century patients outfitted as farmhands, twentieth-century women in ice baths and induced comas, all interspersed with oil portraits of the Meadowlark’s medical directors. The hall dead-ended in an exhibition of what Strauss presumably saw as his spiritual forebears: long-dead Europeans framed over glass display cases harboring the tools of their trade. Strauss had collected ice picks and straitjackets and electroshock probes, a century and a half of failed miracles. A display in the center paid tribute to the lobotomy technique, which, according to the plaque, had been debuted at the Meadowlark before spreading across the state. Strauss settled onto a long wooden bench near the ice picks. She sat beside him, trying to be casual about leaving an appropriate distance between her thigh and his.
“So? What do you think of my little tribute to historical memory? I’m told most of the staff finds it unsettling. I hope it doesn’t put you off your lunch.” He’d ordered Chinese food from a dive down the street, cold Szechuan noodles and chicken lo mein for them to share. She preferred pork, but he assured her the chicken was not to be missed.
“It’s interesting.” She felt like she needed to seize the moment, convince him he was right to treat her like a hypothetical equal. Groping for something anodyne but not moronic to say, she feigned interest in the nearest painting, a medieval orgy of lunatics in a boat.