Free Lying by Lauren Slater Page A

Wednesday. He recommended that I rest for the few days before, so I got to miss school on Monday and Tuesday, great. I lay in my shade-darkenedroom, my mother running errands, my father at work, the house so quiet I could hear the ticking of branches, the gurgle of the fridge. I sat in front of the mirror and combed my hair. I had never noticed before what beautiful hair I had. It was a chestnut brown; it bounced and glistened. It was the precise color of my eyes, I matched.
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    And then Wednesday. I was dressed in a white johnny, with blue scrub slippers over my bare feet. The OR was frosty, the steel table cool beneath my body. Dr. Neu and two other doctors came in. Dr. Neu said, “It’s such a simple procedure, Lauren. We’re not even going to put you to sleep. We’re just going to give you some Novocain in your scalp, so it won’t hurt when we cut.”
    I was not afraid. They had described to me how the doctors would make a small slit in my scalp, and then touch the surface of my brain with an electrical stimulator. It would not hurt; it would not take long, but I might feel a few funny things every once in a while.
    “Okay,” Dr. Neu said, standing above me. I felt him sawing at my skull, Jesus, and then the suck of something lifted, like the lid from an airtight cookie jar. “We’re close now. Soon you might feel something funny.”
    He had the electrical stimulator in his hand. I saw it. It looked like this:

    And then I held my breath. I felt myself go very still, the fear. Now, now I was afraid. They had promised me it would not hurt; they had told me the brain, which is the seat of all feeling, has no nerves in it. How could that be? The brain seemed to me to be as tender as the tongue, each bump a bud with which to taste the world. I heard a small zap. “Okay,” Dr. Neu said. And all my fear went away. I saw yellow, puffs and puffs of it, a yellow so pure, so true, it seemed extracted from the center of the sun.
    “I see colors,” I said.
    “Yes,” said Dr. Neu. “That’s because we’re stimulating your visual cortex.”
    I watched the yellow. After a while it moved into my mouth, and I tasted lemons and soil. I smacked my tongue. “Are you having taste sensations?” Dr. Neu asked.
    “Yes,” I said. The word
yes
had a taste too; it was like speaking through a strawberry sucker.
    “Pleasurable tastes, I hope,” Dr. Neu said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “And now?” he said.
    “Voices,” I said. “I hear voices. I hear a woman calling me,” and she was calling me, this woman, standing by a brick house in a long forgotten place. “Lauren, Lauren, Lauren,” and when I turned I saw her with her hands cupped round her cry and all the grass was moving.
    “And now?” Dr. Neu said. I had caught on to what he was doing. He was moving the probe from place to place on my bare brain, and each time he moved it, a new color, a newtaste, probing all the pieces of me back so fast it was salmon swimming upstream, a surge beneath glassy water, and then there was that woman again—who was she?—walking down a flagstone path, and it filled me with a feeling like I wanted to cry; I did cry. “She’s crying,” I heard someone say, and I heard Dr. Neu say, “If only Freud could witness this, the material id.” And that was when it happened. The material id, he said, and right after that a pure sensation went through me, a sensation that flickered up and down the length of my spine like a spark travels the tail of dynamite, getting closer, getting closer, it was good, it was touch, it was true: “You’re tickling my back,” I said to Dr. Neu, and even when he said, “No, I’m not, I’m in the somatosensory cortex,” I didn’t believe him. I believed he was touching me, and that he might learn to love me after a while.
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    He was not touching me, he never was, but that was the year when what was and what could be—the real and the reflected, the true and the