Free The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora Page A

bad news, she might have to undergo brain surgery. No one has told him this, but he’s sure it is true. Bad news always means surgery.
    â€œIt didn’t hurt, did it?”
    â€œNot at all, but the noises were unpleasant.”
    Harold tries not to grin.
    â€œYou mean the bangs and taps and whirs?”
    â€œYes, how did you know?”
    â€œI talked to the doctor about it. I wanted to know what you were experiencing.”
    â€œThat was sweet of you, honey. But really, it wasn’t that bad. I’m just glad to be out of that tube.”
    â€œIt looked claustrophobic.”
    â€œIt was! I had a terrible itch on my nose and there was nothing I could do!”
    â€œI can imagine, sweetheart. It sounds terrible.” But not as terrible as brain surgery, he thinks.
    They are relieved when the doctor reports that Carol’s brain has no anatomical malformation they can find. The seizure could have been an anomaly, possibly even an allergic reaction to something. That sounds likely, the family agrees. They’d been in Hawaii, after all, eating unusual foods and breathing unusual air.
    Back home, Harold watches his wife flip through fabric swatches. She’s returned to her work, reupholstering everything in the house. A diamond twinkles from the lobe of her ear, that weird, primitive organ. Harold thinks of what brain surgery might entail, whether a piece of skull would need to be removed like a door, whether the brain matter itself could stand to be touched by an instrument, or if it is done in some other way—maybe with lasers.
    He spends an hour after dinner thumbing through Scientific American . As he sits, he tries to discern the workings of his own brain. The transmitters, he imagines, fire more slowly while he listens to the calming jungle tones, and faster when he looks at the magazine. His brain feels powerfully charged, marvelously elastic. He imagines how it might look on an MRI screen, color-coded.
    But this is nothing, this armchair science. There are men who spend their whole lives studying the human brain. Others study outer space. How about that? There are men who do nothing but study the human brain—or the universe—each day, who are excited by pictures that are meaningless to the rest of the world. Harold feels a gnawing envy. The magazine pictures of the brain and of the cosmos are beautiful and not dissimilar—abstract smudges of color against the same fluid black background. Brains and galaxies, these places where everyone lives, where everyone floats in an enormous black egg. Every surgeon and astrophysicist and Wall Street banker alive.
    His own house, deep within the egg, features leafy drapes, decorative wreaths, patterns around the rims of dishes, everything made to chase fear away.
    Several weeks later, Carol has another episode. It happens while she is out walking on Pelican Point’s narrow finger of land, past its string of hermetic mansions. It is a stroke of luck that the driver of a passing car happens to find her on the side of the road, jolting in a patch of pachysandra.
    Dr. Warren prescribes medication for her seizures—for her epilepsy —and Harold’s family gets used to the word. Over the following year the seizures seem to come at random intervals, often preceded by a vivid memory or sensory experience.
    Harold leaves Scientific American behind. He buys neuroscience books and learns all he can about the brain’s structure and functions. He is beginning to see the connection, now, between the recurring paella taste and the rigid grasping motions that follow. And now he knows that the brain has no sensory nerves of its own. It is, in fact, dead to the touch.
    The more he learns about the brain’s curled geography, its mystifying functions, the more he needs to know. He wants to see the organ up close. He even considers buying a brain in a jar—an authentic cross section for sale on the Internet—but knows his