“Eliot Wrote” was published online at Lightspeed. It is a story about the powerlessness of a fiercely intelligent fifteen-year-old kid who has lost his mother and is now losing his hospitalized father, whom he loves and needs, and who uses revisions of his high-school writing assignment on metaphor to explore his feelings. It is a story that interrogates ageism.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantel. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.
Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor”?
He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.
Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.
Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.
Ononeida, named for an Indian tribe that had once occupied Marthorn City, was accustomed to religious visions, and Carl Tremling was a mathematician, a group known for being eccentric. Ordinarily the hospital would not have admitted him at all. But Dr. Tremling had reacted to the toaster pastry with some violence, flinging furniture out of the apartment window and sobbing that there was dice being played with the universe after all, and that the center would not hold. A flung end-table, imitation Queen Anne, had hit the mailman, who was not seriously injured but was considerably perturbed. Carl Tremling was deemed a danger to others and possibly himself.
A brain scan had failed to find temporal lobe epilepsy, the usual cause of religious visions. Dr. Tremling had continued to sob and to fling whatever furniture the orderlies were not quick enough to defend. Also, the psychiatrist on intake duty, who had recognized both the Einstein and Yeats quotes, was puzzled over the choice of Zeus as the toaster-pastry image. The usual thing was either Christ or the Virgin Mary.
The commitment papers had been signed by Dr. Tremling’s sister, a sweet, dim, easily frightened woman who had never been comfortable with her brilliant brother but who was fond of Eliot. She was leaving the hospital as her nephew arrived.
“Eliot! Are you alone?”
“Yes, Aunt Sue.” In Susan Tremling Fisher’s mind, Eliot was perpetually nine instead of sixteen, and should not be riding buses alone. “How is he?”
“The same.” She sighed. “Only they want to—he wants to—Eliot, are you eating enough? You look thinner.”
“I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t stay in that apartment alone. Anything could happen! Please come and stay with Uncle Ned and me, you know we’d love to have you and I hate to think of you alone in that big apartment without—”
If Eliot didn’t stop her, she would start her Poor Motherless Lamb speech. “What does Dad want to do?”
“What?”
“You said ‘They want to—he wants to’—so what do the doctors want to do?”
She sighed again. “I wish I had your memory, Eliot. You get it from poor Carl. That doctor with the mustache, he wants to try some new procedure on Carl.”
“What new procedure?”
“I can’t recall the name …” She fumbled in her purse as if the name might be among the tissues and supermarket coupons.
“Was it Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?”
“Yes! The very words! Your memory, Eliot, I swear, your mother would have been so proud of—”
Eliot grabbed her arm. “Are you going to let them operate? Are you?”
“Why, Eliot! You’re hurting me!”
He let go. “I’m sorry. But—you are going to let them operate, aren’t you?”
Aunt Sue looked at him. She had small eyes of no particular color, and a little mouth that was pursing and unpursing in distress. But she was a Tremling. Into those small eyes came stubbornness, an unthinking but resolute stubbornness and yet somehow murky, like a muddy pool over bedrock. She said gently, “I couldn’t do that.”
“Aunt Sue—”
“Carl will come to himself eventually, Eliot. He’s had spells before, you know—why, just consider that time he shut himself up in my spare room for six days and wouldn’t even come out to eat! I had to bring him meals on a tray!”
“He was working on his big breakthrough on the topography of knots!”
“Not only would he not eat, he wouldn’t even wash. I had to air that room out for two days afterward, and in February. But Carl came out of that spell and he’ll come out of this one, too. You just wait and see.”
“It’s not the same! Don’t you understand, his whole mental construct has been turned upside down!”
“That’s exactly what he said when he came out of my spare room with those knot numbers,” she said triumphantly. “Knots! But even as a boy Carl took fits, why I remember when he was just eight years old and he found out that somebody named Girdle proved there were things you couldn’t prove, why that doesn’t even make common sense to—”
“Aunt Sue! You have to sign the papers allowing this operation!”
“No. I won’t. Eliot, you listen to me. I went online last night and read about this Memory Obligation Whatever. It’s new and it’s dangerous because the doctors don’t really know what they’re doing yet. In one case, after the operation a woman didn’t even remember who she was, or recognize her own children, or anything! In another case, a man could no longer read and—get this!—he couldn’t relearn how to do it, either! Something had just gone missing in his brain as a result of the operation. Imagine Carl unable to read! We can’t risk—”
Eliot was no longer listening. He’d known Aunt Sue all his life; she wasn’t going to budge. He barreled down the hall and rattled the door to the ward, which was of course locked. An orderly wielding a mop peered at him through the reinforced glass and pantomimed pressing the call button.
“Yes?” said the disembodied voice of a nurse. Eliot recognized it.
“Mary, I want to see Dr. Tallman!”
“Oh, Eliot, I’m glad you came just now, your father is quiet and—”
“I don’t want to see my father! I want to see Dr. Tallman!”
“He’s not here, dear. I’ll just buzz you in.”
Mary came out of the nurse’s station to meet him. Middle-aged, kind, motherly, she radiated the kind of brisk competence that Eliot admired, and had seen so little of in his own disordered household. Or at least he would have admired it if it weren’t for the motherliness. She saw him not as the intellectual he knew himself to be, but rather as the skinny, short, floppy-haired kid he seemed to be. He was smarter than Mary, smarter than Aunt Sue, smarter than most of the world, so why the hell couldn’t the world notice that?