Across the room, my wife seemed even smaller inside the scanner. They gave her Vigilance. I wouldn’t even have called vigilance an emotion, let alone one of the eight core ones. But vigilance was to Alyssa what chant was to medieval nuns, so it didn’t surprise me when, three minutes into her stint with it, Currier leaned in to the monitor. “Hoo. She’s intense.”
“You have no idea.”
But maybe he did. We watched the activity swirl through Aly’s brain like an animated finger painting. Maybe she was reliving the same night that I had. Yet scores of other nights could have served her as nicely. I watched the screen, learning something. Aly sang all of life’s basic tunes in full voice, but vigilance was her national anthem. Her whole life was variations on one theme: whatever work your hands can do, do now, for there is no work for you in that place where you are going.
The patterns danced through Aly’s brain. A tech told her to breathe deeply and relax. Relax? she called from inside the tube. I’m just warming up!
Then they gave her Ecstasy. “Wait,” I told Currier. “I get Grief and she gets Ecstasy?”
The man grinned. His charm was undeniable. “I’ll have a look at the random number generator.”
Vigilance and Ecstasy lie right next to each other on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Vigilance shades off into Anticipation and Interest, toward the wheel’s rim. Ecstasy dials back into Joy and Serenity. In the wedge between Joy and Anticipation is Optimism. Day after day of hopeless triage used to knock Aly on her ass. I remember her weeping over clandestine video from an Iowa feedlot. She once damned humanity to hell while throwing a UN report about habitat destruction across the room. But my wife’s cells pumped out optimism. Her soul aligned toward Ecstasy like iron filings mimic a magnetic field.
I watched Aly’s brain-print of bliss on a screen in a booth alongside a man I was sure desired her. Currier stared at her unfolding pattern. “She’s perfect!” I had no idea what he was looking at, but even I could see how different this flood was from her patterns a few minutes before.
I knew my wife as well as I’ve ever known anyone. But I had no clue what memories Aly used to generate this command performance. Was I somewhere in the mix? Was her son the center of her joy? Or did other things prompt her innermost bliss? I wanted so badly to know the source of the spreading colors that it filled me with a ninth primary emotion nowhere on Plutchik’s wheel.
Currier studied her diencephalon on the monitor. He was part of a long, impressive exploration that would last for as long as society believed in science. But even if his kind did succeed at last in opening the locked room of another person’s head, we’d still never know what it felt like to inhabit that place. Wherever we went, the view would always be from here.
The two techs helped Aly from the fMRI tube. She blushed with pleasure the way she did the day the nurses put her newborn in her hands. She joined us in the booth, a little wobbly. Currier whistled. “You sure know how to drive that thing.”
My wife came and put her hands around my neck, as if my body alone might keep her small craft afloat in a large sea. We made it home still clutching at each other and paid off the babysitter. We fed our boy and tried to distract him with his favorite Star Wars Legos. Robin knew something was up and chose that moment to turn clingy. I reasoned with him.
“Your mother and I have a few things to take care of. You play quietly, and we’ll go see the sailboats, later.”
This worked long enough for Aly and me to barricade ourselves in the bedroom. She had me half undressed before I could whisper my first fierce words. “What were you thinking of, back there? I need to know!”
She ignored every sound from me but my pulse. Her ear was up to my chest and her hands everywhere below. Oh, my poor little guy. You looked like you were about to cry, in that nasty machine!
Then she towered above me, upright, alert, and huge. Lifting off, she cried out a little, like some nocturnal thing. I reached up to shush her, and the thrill doubled. It took only seconds for the knock on the door. Is everybody okay in there?
My wife, vigilant ecstatic, took all her will to keep from laughing. So okay, honey! Everybody’s so okay.
-
ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER, I walked across campus to Currier’s building. It was a good long hike, but I didn’t send a heads-up. I didn’t want a paper trail. Martin seemed perplexed to see me. The closest emotion on Plutchik’s wheel was probably Apprehension.
“Theo. Huh. How’ve you been?” He sounded almost like he wanted to know. That came from years of studying human emotions. “I felt miserable about missing Alyssa’s service.”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. Two years ago; ancient history. “Honestly? I couldn’t tell you who was there and who wasn’t. I don’t remember much of it at all.”
“How can I help you?”
“I need to ask something confidential.”
He nodded and took me down the hall and out of the building. We sat in a cafeteria in the School of Medicine, each with a hot beverage that neither of us wanted.
“This is a bit embarrassing. I know you’re not a clinician, but I have nowhere else to go. Robin’s in trouble. His grade school is threatening me with the Department of Human Services if I don’t dope him up.”
He took an instant to place Robin. “Has he been diagnosed with something?”
“So far the votes are two Asperger’s, one probable OCD, and one possible ADHD.”
He smiled, bitter and sympathetic. “This is why I dropped out of clinical psych.”
“Half the third-graders in this country could be squeezed into one of those categories.”
“That’s the problem.” He looked around the cafeteria, scanning for colleagues who might overhear us. “What do they want to put him on?”
“I’m not sure his principal cares, so long as Big Pharma gets their cut.”
“Most of the common meds are pretty normalized, you know.”
“He’s nine years old.” I caught myself and calmed down. “His brain is still developing.”
Martin raised his hands. “That’s young, for psychoactive drugs. I wouldn’t want to experiment on my nine-year-old.”
He was a clever man. I could see why my wife liked him. He waited me out. At last I confessed, “He threw a thermos at a friend’s face.”
“Huh. I broke my friend’s nose once. But he deserved it.”
“Would Ritalin have helped?”
“My father’s treatment of choice was the belt. And it turned me into the exemplary adult you see before you.”
I laughed and felt better. Quite a trick on his part. “How do any of us make it to adulthood?”
My wife’s friend squinted into the past, trying to remember her son. “How bad would you say his anger gets?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“He did peg that boy.”
“That wasn’t entirely his fault.” Nothing was ever entirely anyone’s fault. His hands got confused.
“Are you afraid he might hurt someone? Has he ever come after you?”
“No. Never. Of course not.”
He knew I was lying. “I’m not a doctor. And even doctors can’t give you a reliable opinion without a formal consult. You know that.”
“No doctor can diagnose my son better than I can. I just want some treatment short of drugs that will calm him down and get his principal off my back.”