I
I shot my first dog when I was twenty-four. I shot the other dogs—for the forestry department, on an island off the coast of Maryland—when I was also twenty-four. My only contact with the world was a man named Dave. He told me stories on a radio. Once, I didn’t turn it on for a whole day. When I did, it played serial music.
Dr. Boxer must’ve seen some value in this experience, as my application referenced it extensively. It was she, and not Avagyan, who sent the acceptance letter I kept folded by eighths in the pocket of my parka. Whenever I found myself on the banks of a blue-green river, a wad of foreign bills in my pocket, I’d unfold the letter and read the words. I’d try to understand why I was chosen.
§
Whatever Boxer had seen in me, it hadn’t been enough to prevent the incident with the green firecrackers. That Dr. Avagyan prescribed amphetamines in the aftermath didn’t help my performance. The patients noticed the difference immediately. They began asking questions about the firecrackers in general, as if firecrackers had anything to do with occupational fatigue, which is what the little blue slip in my hand read, in Avagyan’s perfect script, when I handed it to the pharmacist down the hall on the first of every month.
The inpatient ward was wedged into the same wing with the Fette lab for pain management and the lab with the cerebral organoids, though no one at either lab—nor anyone at the institute, for that matter—seemed to have any idea what went on outside the narrow confines of their specialty. I could go weeks without seeing anyone I recognized in the halls—with the exception of a single nobody. She worked in cerebral organoids and once spilt Keurig on me in the elevator. My patients were convinced something else had happened. They rubbed their hands all over my wet pants. One of them even bent down to smell the pasteboard scent of the liquid, pressing his nose into the cotton. None of them were convinced, not even the milder ones.
After I scrubbed the stain out, Avagyan invited me to have a Keurig of my own with him in the lounge. The organoids came up. He told me he looked in there sometimes. That he had the key, and that he sat in the long room and communicated the system. He said they looked like grains of rice. They were brains.
§
When I first came to Judith Boxer’s lab, I was told I’d be treating patients with the illness. I was told I’d meet Judith Boxer. Her experimental methods were said to cure some in weeks, while others fell into swift decline, only to improve years later. I’d said in my application that I wanted to continue my research on the linguistic dimension of the illness, analyzing the transcripts of my therapy sessions for patterns, and integrating those patterns into the system. I admitted I didn’t know what I was looking for, as the illness called into question our most basic assumptions about what it meant to be ill.
The pioneer days looked exactly as one might’ve expected. Naive and grasping at straws, Boxer and Avagyan reversed every condition they could think of. After months of failure, Boxer had a vision of a green cathedral in the Dakotas. This experience transformed her methods, so that nothing proceeded logically. I’d long suspected this was because the system wasn’t a field of study per se, like musicology or chemistry, but AN ORIENTATION TO EXPERIENCE. As a result, nothing was comprehensive. Nothing was final. While Avagyan thought the shock of unusual treatment was itself therapeutic, I was still more conservative than he was in this regard. We have to be human beings for some small fraction of our lives.
When I brought my doubts to Avagyan—about the patients, about Boxer, who I’d never seen, only heard of—he gripped my upper arm with his soft hand and took me through the inpatient wing. Sinatra played on the speaker. Don’t be fooled, he said, his soft hand gripping my upper arm in what must’ve been an abbreviated, Armenian style. Some of them, he said, like Albert, appear perfectly normal. They pass all the batteries, function well, suffer from normal amounts of anxiety, depression. But, he said, drawing me closer, these are really sick people. The other day Ronaldo asked me how my day was, said Avagyan, distractedly, as if trying to focus on something that had until then appeared only in the background.
§
He brought me back to the observation room, where he made us two of the larger cups of Keurig. He called them “long ones.” Drinking his “long one,” he asked me how I liked to cut my apples.
American-style, I told him. Laying one down on a surface, I said, and cutting.
So you don’t cut them in the hand, he asked, Aunt-Maria-style?
I mumbled it was too advanced a style for me, and shuffled after him, into the gymnasium, where folding chairs had been organized into three blocks of twenty. A projector screen billowed menacingly at the far end of the room. It was movie night at the institute, and the committee had gotten their hands on a copy of the newest Top Gun. Maggie stood by the projector with a Tupperware of adaptors as the rest of us, doctors and patients, filed in.
A number of thoughts passed through the crowd as the lights dimmed and the jet fuel burned, some of them mine. At one point, Ernesto got up and started dancing in front of the screen. He was pretending to be one of the airplanes. The projected images of the F-18s flew back and forth across his body, in a scene made not for literature, but the cinema. And then squares of green light drifted across his face.
§
I saw Anya, one of my patients, in line at the cafeteria the next day. The cafeteria, like so much at the institute, was out of a 1970s East German housing block. Tortured cement. Frosted, green blocks of glass that let in light without allowing those within to look out.
I asked Anya what she’d thought of Top Gun. She couldn’t get over the guy on the soundtrack, she said, who no one knew, who just stood there, not saying anything, making as little sound as possible, the totally nondescript guy. She explained that this guy, who she said she could hear in the soundtrack, had been a menace to the crew, and they’d recorded the sound of him standing there and put that on the soundtrack. I asked where he appeared in the credits. She replied that it’d been like Afghanistan all over again. I loved Anya and always appreciated her contributions to the lively discussions that were typical of the cafeteria.
Making my way back to the lab, I got off on the wrong floor. Someone on the third floor must’ve lost heart and taken the stairs after having pressed the button to call the elevator. This was typical behavior at the institute, whose elevators were always shooting up and down tremendously, as if the engineers had lost sight of the fact that they were meant to transport people, not to demonstrate the precision of their design. When I finally made it to the ninth floor, I thought I heard a faint music emanating from the brain labs, although it could’ve also been the Sinatra that played on repeat at Boxer’s.
§
She was bringing the system to parts of the world that’d never heard of the illness. Stories of her travels were legendary. She’d take a backpack, with only a single change of clothes, and set out without a coherent plan. Avagyan said she was rich and that it wasn’t impressive. I liked to sit in her office, especially late at night, when there were fewer people to catch me in the act.
One particular night, I walked in, and chose to leave the overhead off, relying instead on the simple light that came in from the hall. I pulled the swivel chair back from the desk. The plush, maroon lower-back support had, no doubt, absorbed years of the woman’s sweat, though I’d never dared smell it. The monitors were always on. I rested my fingers on the brass keys of the ‘Lando’ novelty keyboard I’d once seen advertised on the train, careful not to press too hard and register a keystroke.
I let my eyes wander. The office was full of pictures. Boxer in Congress. With Clinton. Old pictures of her and Avagyan in the early days. Boxer with her Taiwanese kitchen staff. Boxer taking a self-portrait, in the early 1990s, with a disposable camera she’d pointed at a mirror in a dark hotel room, the cheap flash illuminating particles of dust and a single, clear-winged insect hanging in the dampness between Boxer and the image of Boxer, between the image of itself and the reflection of that image.
II
It was in the second year of my postdoc that I won a grant from NIMH to bring the system to “A lowland rainforest.” The call had been just in time. I was headed for a nervous breakdown, Avagyan assured me, between the incident, and my increasing amphetamine use. A good rest in the southern hemisphere, he said. That’s what I needed.
And so, sitting by a blue-green river in the northeast of Peru, I contemplated the dogs. I was waiting for the boat to Yarina, in front of a place that served my favorite meal: armored catfish with small, yellow peppers.
I’d bought cocaine from the owner the day before. It’d been terrible, and I told him so. He told me to smoke it. I rolled a joint with the pulverized crack I’d been snorting off the back of my toilet and put it on the table, next to the fish. Smoke it, he told me. My hand didn’t shake when, after one puff, I stamped it in the dirt, when the man, a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, held a Nokia phone to my ear and asked me what they were saying. Before I could answer, the river master called my name. The boat was leaving.
The jungle flew by while I took puffs of the joint with crack in it. I wrote In the Flames of Being in the Fiat of the Waves. I felt pretty good. For the first time, I cut a Granny Smith apple into quarters, Aunt-Maria-style. There were clouds. And with the clouds, came a massive rain.
I got off the boat hours later in a town that, like the river beside it, was either green or blue, but never both at the same time. I passed a soccer field where overnight two saplings had sprouted and entered the town’s one hostel. The manager told me the place got one hour of electricity. I stripped and sat, naked, smoking a wet cigarette on my bed. The lights went out.
§
The manager of the hostel reminded me of the man at the entrance to the institute, who sat—either on the terrace, or on the busted up couch in the kitchen—and did nothing to occupy himself, except when he: 1) turned on the fluorescent bulb in the alcove where the cross with the blue drape and Jesus mural lived, or 2) opened the tired, green door to let us in.
I’d walk past this man and wave to him with a sheaf of stories in my hand every Wednesday. Avagyan made fun of me for my literary pursuits. He called me a Squealer, a put-down, whose meaning, in this context, I didn’t understand. I knew my stories were an important part of the treatment. Literature is contingent on the ability to bring something from one part of one’s life into another part of that life, to make use of, and recombine those parts, so passing the aestheticized relations of individual functions through a social factor.
I talked to Avagyan about this idea quite often, and about my stories. I’d find him in the observation room, chopping up amphetamines with the seven-inch knife. He’d give me one of his looks, but in a way that made me feel the cathedral I knew formed the walls of the institute rise in place.
§
After I dried off and put on a fresh change of clothes, I met up with an Australian I’d met on the boat. His name was Philip. We found the driver of the boat, Ernesto, gave him a wad of cash, and asked him to take us to a barn by the river where, through the wheezing and the howling of the synthesizers and the slick green light, all powered by the generator blasting away next to the band, we made out a few lean, sloping figures.
Ernesto came back from the bar with a case of Fanta and a single cup. We filled and passed it with the bottle, flicking our suds into the dirt. I wrote Night Gored Us with its Big Ideas on the back of the piece of cardboard the bar guy used to keep track of the bottles of Fanta we bought. I told them about how the dogs had nowhere to hide. I’d stand outside the one copse of trees on the island and unload my .22. I could’ve killed them all in a single day, I said, but I didn’t, because it was important to stop when I felt like it, even though I had only enough kerosene to cremate the first dog. The department had no idea the problem was so bad. Philip asked what I’d done with the rest of them. I piled them at the far end of the island, I said, next to the copse, putting the new ones on top of the half-burnt, first one, because I hadn’t been able to get the fire hot enough.
Ernesto leaned over and said—indicating with his hand—you have to get the fire so hot. He told me the girl at the back of the barn, the one dancing, was fourteen. There were dogs outside.
§
Beneath the seventy-three categories of green light that showed the place had a number of surfaces, Ernesto and I—arm-in-arm—wheeled round and round, while the old women, the cousins and the aunts, the drunks and the fishermen, sat on a little bench jutting from the wall, their collective posture the frieze carved into the seventy-three green cathedrals I’d been trying to keep separate this whole time, when they had—of course—been one and the same cathedral all along.
The dogs were everywhere, crawling under my legs and between my feet. Standard dogs and lean dogs and dogs of a blue so dark it had no color. Dogs with good hands and strong, solid feet, and dogs that cared a great deal for serial music.
But what do I know about serial music? I asked Ernesto. Sometimes the dogs would come to my part of the island looking for food, and I’d find them curled up, all of them, in my tent. How could I not have called them by their names, when the lights went out and I could’ve seen anything—a few rusty flecks in the iris, a longing to be among others of my kind?
§
After the barn scene, they had to carry me home in a golf cart. I could barely lift my eyes to the ceiling the next morning, let alone begin to formulate the montage of being on night boats that would get me to my destination. NIMH needed me in Iquitos by the 14th to explain the thing about the dogs, and I still hadn’t made it to Yurimaguas.
I hired a car.
While I dozed, the driver whistled gently through his teeth, guiding us at blinding speed through mile after mile of clearcut forest with a single finger on the wheel. Pink cows with gray, drooping ears followed our RAV4 with suffering eyes. Officials from the forestry agency, holding very big shotguns, stopped us at a checkpoint and searched the car, while a man in his fifties, with a potbelly, and wearing a fluorescent orange shirt, stepped out of the Jeep behind us. Two small blue and green parrots were perched on his shoulder. His back was caked in bird shit and there were holes in the shoulders of the shirt where the small, black claws had punctured flesh. Small quantities of thick blood would spurt through the holes and mix with the shit. The department guys waved us through. I got onto the night boat in Yurimaguas at 2AM. It pulled up to the low-slung dock at Iquitos eight hours later.
After learning Dr. Lopez wouldn’t leave São Paolo for another week and even then wouldn’t be able to meet for another ten days, I stayed put in my darkened hotel room and edited my stories, waiting for the NIMH to bust down my door with a fire axe and drag me, babbling, back to my career. I thought of Anya. Poor Anya. I turned to the mirror in my room and, holding up my disposable camera, snapped a picture.
III
The lab closed not long after I got back. First the NIMH money dried up, and then the Kennedy money. Had our patients improved? This was the question I asked myself time and again as my gaze traced arabesques on the fifteen-thousand-dollar oriental rug in my office.
Like any system, ours could be thought of as a function of the relationships among its factors, with each factor defined in relation to a totality of functions. But the factors in our system—like the dogs, the green firecrackers, the green cathedral—didn’t seem to bear any relation to one another. Or if they did, they were in need of a greater number of kinds of relations to be legible, as if the society in which those words would find their use were itself in need of a system, though one whose terms, had they been articulated, would’ve directly contradicted ours. This problem was at the heart of Boxer and Avagyan’s efforts. They once wrote how the system stood in AN ALLEGORICAL RELATION TO LIFE. It was precisely this kind of mysticism that’d led me to the institute to pursue my research in the first place. And yet, I thought, looking at the piles of spent Keurig pods and Amazon packages scattered across the office, I’d accomplished nothing. Hundreds of transcripts had piled up, and I’d yet to look at a single one.
I decided to make something of myself. I looked for patterns in the transcripts. “The dogs,” “the green firecrackers,” “the green cathedral” appeared on nearly every page. So did the words: “of,” “and,” and “the.” At night—after the patients were put to sleep, and even the old man switched off the light in the alcove where the Jesus statue lived—I stayed behind in my office and kept working, the only decoration a fold-up map of the Arctic Circle from the National Geographic the last postdoc had left.
During those long nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I said the names on the map like a rosary. I walked the halls, flicking a paper football down the tile floor with my boot, or I stared at the miniature brains in the lab next to ours through the small window in the door. Boxer was nowhere to be found. Avagyan told me she was somewhere in Central Asia, teaching the system to at-risk Tajik youth. But I knew she was somewhere in the institute with a pillow and would smother me if she got the chance.
§
It was on one of these late-night excursions that I ran into Anya. She’d had trouble sleeping and had used the seven-inch knife to get out of the locked inpatient ward. I brought her to the lounge and put on the newest Top Gun. With the movie in the background, she told me stories about her time in Afghanistan, when she’d been posted in a fortified position at the mouth of a U-shaped valley in Helmand province. She cracked me up.
Once she fell asleep, curled in a chair, I made myself a “long one,” pressing my hands into the sides of the machine as hard as I could to dampen the squeal, and then I put the film on again and again and I got to work. I realized that if the illness were itself a pattern within language, one predating the system’s, whatever I wrote would be fundamentally legitimate. I took events from the lives of my patients and slotted them next to the lines from my stories.
I brought these new stories into the Big Group with everyone on the unit, the patients, orderlies, the old man at the door, Avagyan, the externs—all seventy-three of us—and had them tell me what did and didn’t work. I took sections from the transcripts of the Big Group and fed those back into the stories. In this way, a voice arose. It spoke in aggregate to the incident with the green firecrackers better than any of us could. Though it wasn’t that of a person in the traditional sense, Avagyan assured me that it didn’t matter. Desperation was the only requirement of a good story.
I modeled the way our miniaturized version of the system engaged the larger, more open-ended one, demonstrating the existence of not one entity, but two. I wrote up my findings, calling Boxer’s: The Big System, and mine: The Small.
The work had already sparked a flurry of activity. On one of my nightly walks past Boxer’s empty office, I watched the Toshiba monitors sputter with activity. Green and blue lines of code sailed at a speed exceeding the capacity of the Dell’s CPU. Boxer was working. And now that she had VPN access and was using Microsoft Remote Desktop, the work wouldn’t stop.
§
When the last day arrived, I removed the four pins that held the map of the arctic to the wall, folding it by eighths and placing it in my slim valise. I picked up my disposable camera and felt some give in the magazine, scraping the circular feed disk to the right until I heard the next frame click into place. I looked at the black number against the white background in its clear, plastic counter: 26.
I’d already said goodbye to Anya, but I made a last tour of the inpatient ward to see what Avagyan was up to. New York-Presbyterian had accepted my application, and I’d be fine. But I worried about him.
I found him in his office, about to unhook the custom Keurig from the wall. Sinatra played over the speaker. I told Avagyan it’d been real, and gave him a natural, mediated grip to the upper arm. He gestured to what would’ve been the patient’s chair as he leaned back in his. We sat across from each other, me and Avagyan, drinking our “long ones.”
IV
I found myself thinking about the dogs again, years later, at a dine-in cinema, in the Russian city of Archangel. I was eating a tilapia burger. Images from the newest Top Gun flashed before me.
I decided, after the first bite, that the filet was under-salted, though breaded expertly, and wondered if the filets had been breaded in the theater’s kitchens, or if they’d arrived from the factory like that, already breaded. Taking a second bite, I concluded the filet couldn’t possibly have been breaded by hand in the theater’s kitchens. It must’ve come straight from the distributor frozen, already breaded, and even sealed in its own plastic pouch. If it’d been hand-breaded on site, they surely wouldn’t have let us hear the end of it, I mused, leafing through the menu in the sickly light projected from under the table and onto my lap. They would’ve written: панированный вручную beside the name of the tilapia burger.
Unsettled by another disappointment, I left the theater. Blue and green phosphenes lit the edges of my vision. As I crossed the empty lobby, I thought of the beautiful children of the food distribution magnates, of the bangles and the quality tattoo-work on their arms, and of how few of them there were. How many breaded filets were required to produce so few of those truly beautiful children? I wondered. How many polyps would there have to be per beautiful child? How many would bloom in the colons of those subjected to the machinations of the food distribution conglomerates so the children of the food distribution magnates could appear in the films shown in the city of Archangel?
The heavy, frosted door to the outside stood before me. I felt immediately worse thinking about all of this, putting on my thin, silk mitten-liners, my thick, textured mittens, my boots, vest and jacket, and then my parka, my scarf, and my big bear’s fur hat. Bracing myself for the cold, I leaned against the door. I wanted to kill myself. I thought of the fourteen-year-old girl in that town in Peru whose name I couldn’t remember and went over the statistics in my head—about child psychiatrists being at a higher risk of suicide than normal ones—and this really did make me feel better.
§
The arctic wind hit me like a Hadouken. Blue and green buildings of indeterminate function stood against the arctic night. Lights in the windows of the buildings made a rudimentary alphabet, forming the words: “of,” “and,” and “the.” After some time, I came to the wooden shacks that dot the banks of the White Sea. I sat down in a playground, on a slide made to look like a dolphin, and took a swig of vodka from a small, plastic bottle.
I didn’t think so much about the green firecrackers anymore. They were a placeholder, a stand-in for a system that, once internalized, could never be wished away. I thought, instead, of the miniature brains in the lab next to ours, about how their system must’ve formed its own cathedral in the basement of that emotion we’d studied like idiots on the ninth floor. But what did I know about the brains? I thought, draining the last of the bottle. I was bringing the system to parts of the world that’d never heard of the illness. All I had was a backpack and a change of clothes.
I hired a cab driver from Dagestan and his wife the next morning. They are: “The Russian attaché and his wife.” After a tour of the Yamal peninsula and the town of Salekhard, I found a Nenets man to drag me in a sled behind his snowmobile. When I got too cold to write, I flashed pictures of the dark landscape with a disposable camera. Sometimes, the sled would get rocked so hard the flash would go off on its own. Sometimes, a woman from the forestry department would loom out from behind a tree, with an old Mosin-Nagant rifle, and wave me on.