Maud Casey - The Man Who Walked Away

“There’s been an incident with the monkey,” the high forehead in front of the Doctor is saying to the aristocratic nose next to him. “It got loose,” the high forehead says with evident delight. “Crashed through the door and bounded around, climbed on top of peoples’ heads. The doctor finally pulled a banana out of his coat and that was the end of it.”

The Doctor’s not sure he believes it, but there’s a certain pleasure in imagining the stout oak door banging open and the monkey, shrieking, bursting free, taunting the hairy bear, the hairy bear taking a swipe at the monkey, the monkey going faster and faster, just out of reach, the hairy bear stumbling and falling facedown into the sawdust.

“This is what happens when wild animals are turned into pets,” sniffs the aristocratic nose.

“This circus could use a monkey,” the high forehead says. “It’s gotten a bit dull.”

The Doctor realizes now he too has been missing the thump thump of the monkey. It would be better than the zzzzzz of the eels that lingers still. He tries to focus on what is about to unfold — a demonstration of the great doctor’s new treatment that isn’t new at all. It is in fact quite ancient. Not even its resurrection is new. The Doctor tracked down an article that gave the lie to the great doctor’s reinvention of it. A Danish entertainer had finessed that trick on a tour through Central Europe. Clench your jaw muscles , the Danish entertainer instructed volunteers he plucked from the audience and quickly put into a trance. He asked politely. Please —and they did. Here’s a delicious apple , he said, and offered them a potato from which each took a big bite. Every last one of them cooed over its crisp sweetness. You will go rigid and stiff. You will lie down between two chairs, your feet on one chair, your head on the other, your body a stiff board suspended in between. And they did and they did and they had. An outraged doctor in Breslau wrote an article declaring the entertainer a fraud ( Sir, you are not who you appear to be ); in response, the entertainer invited all of the local doctors to come see for themselves. The entertainer called them to the stage one by one. The outraged doctor who had written the article was the first to fall under the spell. Clench your jaw. He clenched. Eat this apple . He ate and cooed. “Delicious,” he said. Lie stiff as a board between two chairs and, having always been the sort of student who excelled in his studies, he became even stiffer than a board.

Near the end of the Danish entertainer’s Central European tour someone in the audience raised his hand and asked, What really happened that evening you hypnotized the doctors ? Before the entertainer had a chance to answer, another audience member, a doctor, reportedly raised his hand. “What does it matter if we do not understand the exact mechanism of the phenomenon?” he asked.

Not much is required: one chair, one lamp, and a peaceful effect. An amulet, a letter, a telegram. These were said to be the best devices. The most effective method is the use of two fingers to make circles on the top of the patient’s head.

The Doctor has heard rumors, of course, of doctors using the treatment for their own entertainment — putting a man in a trance and asking him to drink a glass of ink and telling him it is beer; inducing a man into sleep, a man whose beard has been carefully cultivated for many years, and then giving him a pair of scissors in the midst of his dreaming and instructing him to cut it off. .

Aaaah , says the audience. And there he is, with his Napoleonic profile and his spectacular nose, walking slowly into the center of the amphitheater like a bullfighter. The Doctor wishes for a bull as the great doctor gestures to the platter.

“In the past,” the great doctor says in that voice that falls like a fantastic cloak over them all, “I have performed with you an anatomical-pathological study of the encephalon. .”

And the Doctor realizes that the something on the platter is not lunch after all. It is a brain.

“. . notice the attractive exterior. .”

The monkey, punished? Was this the brain of his beloved pet?

“. . the white matter, the flattened portion of the crura. . the gray layers of the island of Reil. .”

The Doctor’s mind skips like a stone over logic into the frigid depths of panic. It is much worse than he had thought. It is not the monkey’s brain at all. He wiggles his knee into the back of the high forehead in front of him. “Where is the girl?” he whispers.

Shhh , the forehead says. Shhh, says the audience. Zzzzzz. The Doctor finds himself wishing Monsieur Eager were here. He would know, or he would claim to know, what has happened to the girl. What has the great doctor done with the rest of her? Chopped her into pieces? The tall, skinny photographer lurking in the corner, adjusting his tripod, preparing his plates for the first photograph — he must know something. There is something about the man’s thin face that makes him seem as though he knows useful things, or maybe it is just his displeasure at the entrance of the great doctor that catches the Doctor’s attention.

The great doctor hoists the platter onto his shoulder and carries it around the room.

“. . I wish to isolate the Great Neurosis as a purely nosological object,” the great doctor is saying, returning the platter to the table. “The etiological theory is clear. A pathophysiological alteration in the nervous system. But this alteration is of an unknown nature, in an unknown location.” He gestures to the brain. “A physiological phenomena, beginning in an elusive lesion.”

“Where is the girl?” the Doctor whispers.

“Quiet!” the high forehead hisses.

“The lesion itself?” the great doctor says. “Invisible.”

Invisible, and yet they were meant to believe it was there. Where is the girl? What has happened to her?

“Today, we will witness a treatment that is not blind to the invisible lesion. It sees it. It speaks to it.”

Aaaah, says the audience, and the hairy bear appears from the wings with the girl. The Doctor’s mind skips back, an obedient stone, from panic to logic, and it is only then he realizes he has been on the verge of tears. It is not the girl’s brain on the platter. He needs more sleep; he will go to bed early, he will sleep on the train. But as the hairy bear coaxes the girl gently down into the wooden chair, as he pulls the straitjacket slung across his shoulder and lays it across the table next to the platter, the Doctor waits for whatever comes next. At least she is here; at least she is not in pieces. The silence in the amphitheater is thick; an enormous held breath. The pressure of the silence builds, rumbling through the benches, through the Doctor, connecting him and his low forehead, his close-together eyes, his lumpy nose, to the men all around him: something is about to happen. They all perch on the edge of the benches: Make it happen . Had the Danish entertainer called the Doctor to the stage right now, he thinks, he would have eaten the potato and tasted its secret apple sweetness.

The girl does not look at the brain on the platter on the table, though it is close enough that she could reach out from the chair where she sits and touch it; instead, she opens her mouth. She puts her hand to her wide-open mouth; it looks as though she is pulling something from deep in her throat.

The girl eyes whatever imaginary thing she has pulled from the depths of herself with scorn. “I don’t have the time,” she says.

Flash goes the camera from the photographer’s corner, where his rail-thin legs stick out of the bottom of the camera’s tent: an image of the girl and whatever it is she’s dangling from her fingertips is illuminated, etched eternally onto a plate.