Free Lying by Lauren Slater

became not a thing I had but a thing through which I could escape. It was a secret door in the back of a Victorian closet, and when I went through it I entered something soundless and secluded, a place of pure float. Through the thin walls I might hear the other world, the difficult world where maybe women were cold, where there was chalk trotting across a blackboard, Latin verbs declined down to their raw nubs, the titter of growing girls; I was free from that. I was safe. I saw hot-air balloons and lovely ladies fed me salted limes, and in this place, my place, I stayed small forever.
    •  •  •
    His name was Dr. Neu, pronounced like
oy
, and he looked like a Yiddisher too, a little frumpy and old-fashioned, with thick eyebrows and a curly beard. As soon as I saw him I wanted to touch his beard, because it was curly, but also because it was red, like a living fox, tipped here and there with white.
    He was my new doctor at Beth Israel, my brilliant neurologist who had published many articles, one of which I will include later in this book. Everyone, epileptic or not,should read the work of Dr. Neu, because he understands the philosophy of neurology, how the cellular phenomenon called consciousness is so much more than a blip of energy; it’s a blue light, a flame we can feel but cannot find; it’s mystery and love.
    I loved Dr. Neu, almost right away. I went to see him because my case got so severe, and also because I wasn’t a child anymore. So I said good-bye to my pediatrician, Dr. Patterson, and hello to Dr. Neu. I went up to the sixth floor at Beth Israel and waited in his waiting room. He called me in and looked me over. He said, “So, I hear you are quite a case,” and then he smiled.
    I smiled back. “I suppose I am,” I said, trying to sound weary and elegant.
    “Sit,” he said, patting the table.
    I considered hopping up on the table, but that seemed very unladylike. I smoothed my skirt. I was afraid if I jumped up, he might see my underwear. I smoothed my skirt again and then he said, “Oh, may I offer you some assistance?” and he brought over a stool, and he held my hand as I stepped up on it, like I was a queen coming into a carriage.
    “Thank you so much,” I said. The sound of my voice, even though it was not my own, pleased me. It was crisp and a bit British. Dr. Neu smiled.
    “My pleasure,” he said.
    •  •  •
    Like I said, he was not a normal neurologist. He was a brilliant man, and brilliance is never normal. His office was allstainless steel, white drapery, the sheen of surgical tools. In one corner he had a plaster human head with removable parts. I held in my hands the thalamus, the cerebellum, the substantia nigra. “Intelligence,” Dr. Neu said, “is not the sum of its parts. It’s even more.”
    I didn’t know what he meant, but it moved me. I could almost cry listening to him. What did I need with anyone else? I had him, and Nell Fiore, the sickroom and my sickness, and as time went by it all started to seem like enough.
    Dr. Neu, of course, had a different agenda. His mission was to cure me, and in order to do that he needed to find out where in my brain the seizures started. He called my parents and me in for a conference. “We need to know where,” he said. “And in order to find the locale, we will do some exploratory surgery.”
    “Why do you need to know where?” my mother said. “Does where matter? It’s not a question of where,” she said. “It’s a question of is. We know the epilepsy is. You don’t have to cut open her head to prove that.”
    “At this point,” said Dr. Neu, “I am not talking about cutting open her whole head. Only a small piece. It’s a harmless procedure.”
    “Will she have a visible scar?” my mother asked.
    “Beneath the hairline,” Dr. Neu said, and that disappointed me a little. Of course I wanted something shiny and pink and tremendously obvious, like a love tattoo.
    He did the exploratory surgery on a