Private Heather’s exposed brain glistens oxblood and rose in the dim light.
“It’s a pudding, basically,” explains Stanley.
“I would have said ‘cathedral’,” McDonald retorts mildly. “I suppose it depends on the man.” He glances at Stanley, that ineradicable teasing glint in his eye.
And how much he has endured,Stanley thinks to himself. After all, there had been a time that he, too, might have likened man’s brain to a cathedral. Actually, he would have reserved that particular metaphor for the body, for it was more apt: the ribcage curved over heart and lung like the kerfed ribs of St. Paul’s vaulting up over the nave. A lavish miracle of engineering, man and cathedral alike; the one’s form echoing the other. The brain, he might’ve likened more to a clock. No less intricate, far less ostentatious of a metaphor. Or a lightning storm. A nebula of tree roots. Not a pudding, at any rate—but now, that’s what he sees, and that’s how he calls it.
Anyway, he grudgingly likes McDonald. He comports himself with a mirthful equanimity more befitting a cook or a seaman than a doctor, and Stanley’s own effort to model a mien more befitting go largely disregarded by both him and Goodsir (who is such a soft, scuttling thing he hardly warrants notice). But McDonald: there’s something of steel in the man, a kind of grit; perhaps the ability to face up to the horror of the brain exposed and scry in it a holiness—and to speak of it with gladness. There was a time they might have been fast friends.
He casts a sidewise glance at Goodsir, who is busy with flame and sealing wax. He’d asked to stay and watch McDonald cauterize the edges, asserted his will in that cringing way of his: how timid he is, yet he seems always in the way, somehow. His mere presence grates. Now, the eyes having been sealed—at Stanley’s request, Goodsir notes—and the cauters heated, Goodsir takes a moment to inspect the brain closely. It is the first living brain he’s seen, the skull shorn away with unnervingly surgical precision, and it is enough in itself. What he means is, man’s engine needs no metaphor to claim divinity: it is out of this labyrinth of pink hillocks and blood vessels as finely-forked and intricate as lightning that the whole of human history is sprung. Yet removed from the context of its vast scope of accomplishment, one might think of it as so much meat. Both men are correct, but neither grasps the full complexity of it.
Nor does Goodsir, in terms he could explain. But for a moment its full complexity is unfurled before him—like Bernini’s St. Theresa, this vision of the brain’s thousand manifestations, transfigurations, iterations pours down around him like shafts of gold: a cathedral, a pudding, a geode hatched open. A chorale of light, of impulse, of blueprints and ecstasies. The holy symmetry of the lobes, their earthen ugliness; by the will of the great animator a thousand cathedrals erected and puddings confected—metaphor is inconsequential in the blinding light of this revelation. Metaphor is language: this transcends.
But it only lasts a moment. He is used to it by now, these—what else can he call them but visions? It is like his mind’s eye is momentarily deluged with a sight not his own, and his intellect (which he recognizes with conditioned humility is not insubstantial) is left to sort it out. When he was a child he tried to share it with others, he discovered that he not only lacked the language but that others did not experience the same. “A capital imagination”, his mother had beamed to a friend once. “Unnatural,” the woman had retorted darkly. He was eight then and never spoke of it again. Not even when it took the form of instructive presentiment. At ten, idly plucking blackberries on a country ramble, he fancied he could taste—for all of him was given to these visions, brain and ear, touch and tongue—within each black-shining drupelet smaller ones, an infinitude of — what might he call them? The matter of all things parsed into smaller, invisible things. And the next week he learned of cells, discovering their name only after tasting them.
He raises his eyes and glances from Dr. Stanley to Dr. McDonald to Stanley again. And again he sees the darkness around Stanley’s head, a scrambled etch-work of lines, like a child’s drawing of cloud. He drops his gaze. This he is accustomed to as well: the crown And he feels the room warm incrementally as Stanley leaves it. McDonald crosses behind him in the small space, grazing his hand along the small of Goodsir’s back as he does so. This he does often, and it is such a natural gesture for a man of such bonhomie that Goodsir has only recently begun sensing something more in so many seemingly incidental touches: a brush of fingertips as they exchange an instrument, the older man’s gaze lingering—kindly, but lingering nevertheless—a few seconds longer than necessary.
Perhaps he is imagining it. He hopes he is. Not just because he dreads disappointing McDonald with his eventual rebuff, but because he senses—again, it is nothing he can explain, nor does he see it the way he sees the naked brain before him, the low wooden beams of the sick bay, the anatomical drawings pinned to the wall—a weak, fluttering light, like the beat of moth wings, emanating from Stanley’s heart when McDonald is near. In close proximity, it flickers nearly steadily; it gutters and fades as McDonald moves away. Goodsir knows what it is, though he’s never experienced it firsthand: longing, affection. When shared between two lovers, it buoys him—an aimless sunniness, like on the morning of one’s birthday. But suppressed, as with Stanley’s feeling for McDonald (not even, Goodsir guesses, acknowledged by the sour-tempered veteran to himself) it is an agitation; one’s hands shake and all things, even breath, taste of ash and iron.
——
To be continued? Eventually? Posting to galvanize me into working more on it.