Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

Sometimes this apartment feels so crowded with loved ones, strangers, imagined people. They don’t accuse me or call me to account, but I am unable to part with them. In the beginning, I had feared the worst, that Hiroji had taken his own life. But I tell myself that if this had been a suicide, he would have left a note, he would have left something behind. Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large, and we so empty, that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them. I remember floating, a child on the sea, alone in the Gulf of Thailand. My brother is gone, but I am looking up at the white sky and I believe, somehow, that I can call him back. If only I am brave enough, or true enough. Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear. At Hiroji’s desk, I work quickly. My son’s voice is lodged in my head, but I have lost the ability to keep him safe. I know that no matter what I say, what I make, the things I have done can’t be forgiven. My own hands seem to mock me, they tell me the further I go to escape, the greater the distance I must travel back. You should never have left the reservoir, you should have stayed in the caves. Look around, we ended up back in the same place, didn’t we? The buildings across the street fall dark, yet the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.

Sunday, February 19

[fragment]

Elie was fifty-eight years old when she began to lose language. She told Hiroji that the first occurrence was in St. Michael’s Church in Montreal, when the words of the Lord’s Prayer, words she had known almost from the time she had learned to speak, failed to materialize on her lips. For a brief moment, while the congregation around her prayed, the whole notion of language diminished inside her mind. Instead, the priest’s green robes struck her as infinitely complicated, the winter coats of the faithful shifted like a collage, a pointillist work, a Seurat: precision, definition, and a rending, rending beauty. The Lord’s Prayer touched her in the same bodily way that the wind might, it was the sensation of sound but not meaning. She felt elevated and alone, near to God and yet cast out.

And then the moment passed. She came back and so did the words. A mild hallucination, Elie thought. Champagne in the brain .

She went home and did what she always did. She closed the glass doors of her studio, unlatched the windows, lifted them high, and she painted. It was winter so she wore her coat over two shirts and fleece sweatpants, thick socks, Chinese slippers on her feet, and a woollen hat on her head. A decade ago she had been a biomechanical engineer, researching motor control, lecturing at McGill University, but at the age of forty-six, she had abandoned that life. Now, experience unfolded in a different pitch and tone, it was more fluid, more transitory, it enclosed her like the battering sea under broken light. When she closed her eyes she saw how the corners of improbable things touched — a bird and a person and a pencil rolling off a child’s table — entwined, and became the same substance. Even her loved ones seemed different, more contained and solid, like compositions, iterations in her head. Painting was everything. She painted until she couldn’t feel her arms anymore, ten, twelve hours at a time, every single day, and even then it wasn’t enough. She told her husband, Gregor, that it was as if she had arrived at high noon, the hour when all forces converge. Gregor, a chef, grew used to falling asleep to the rhythms of Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, Elie’s preferred accompaniments. Her husband grew accustomed to the smell of oil paint on her skin, the way she gestured with her hands in place of words, the way she gazed out with a new-found passion and righteousness. “I can see,” he heard her calling to him one day. “Look what I can see.”

“I thought,” Elie told Hiroji, when he had been treating her for many years, “that my entire past was fantasy. Only my present was real.”

The champagne in the brain began reoccurring, blotting out people’s names, song lyrics, street names, book titles. She felt sometimes as if the words themselves had vanished, in her thoughts, her speech, and even her handwriting. There was a stopper in her throat and a black hole in her mind. In her paintings, she turned music into images, the musical phrases playing out like words, the words breaking into geometric shapes, her paintings grasping all the broken, brilliant fragments. When she worked, there were no more barriers between herself and reality, the image could say everything that she could not. Increasingly, she could not speak much. But she could live with losing language, if that was the price. This seemed, back then, a small price.

She was painting when she noticed the tremors in her right arm.

The first time she had met Hiroji, he had asked her if she found speaking effortful. The word had seemed to her like the priest’s green robe that day in St. Michael’s Church, an image blocking out all other ideas. Yes, how effortful it was. “I’m decaying,” she told Hiroji, surprising even herself. “What do you mean?” he asked her.

“I can’t … with the …” She put her hands together, straining to find the words. “There’s too much.”

Hiroji sent her for diagnostic testing. Those MRI films are conclusive. The first thing that strikes the viewer is the white line, the fragile outline of the skull, surprisingly thin. And then, within the skull, the grey matter folded around the hub of white matter. What has happened is that her left brain, the dominant side (she is right-handed), has atrophied — it is wasting away in the same manner that a flower left too long in the vase withers. Throughout Elie’s left brain this disintegration is happening. Language is only the first thing that she will lose. It may come to pass that, one day soon, she will not be able to move the entire right side of her body.

The images show something else too. While one side of her has begun to atrophy, the other side is burgeoning. Elie’s right brain has been creating grey matter — neurons — and all that extra tissue is collecting in the back of her brain, in the places where visual images are processed.

“It’s a kind of asymmetry,” Hiroji had told her, “a kind of imbalance in your mind, between words and pictures.”

“So what is it, all this, that I’m making? Where is it coming from?” She waved her hands at the bare walls, as if to pull her own paintings into the room, to trail them behind her like an army.

“It comes from the inner world,” Hiroji said, “but isn’t that where all painting comes from?”

“My diseased inner world,” she said. “I’m at war. I’m dwindling, aren’t I?” She picked up the mri scans from his desk. “Do you paint, Doctor?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever thought about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He paused for a moment. “My mother painted. She was a Buddhist, and she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things.”

“The ephemeral,” she said doubtfully. “Like dancing?”

He laughed. “Yes, like dancing.”

Hiroji kept Elie under what is known as surveillance mr imaging. Scan after scan, year by year, the films show the imbalance widening. Three years after her diagnosis, Elie’s paintings, too, began to change. Where once she had delighted in turning music into complex mathematical and abstract paintings, intense with colour and the representation of rhythm, now she painted precise cityscapes, detailed, almost photographic. “I see differently,” she told him. “It comes to me less holy than before.” He wanted her to go further, to explain this holiness, but she just shook her head and poured the tea, her right hand trembling.