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I call Morrin’s extension and tell him that, if he’s looking for me, I’m in Hiroji’s office, doing the dreaded deed. He says he’ll bring up some boxes. When Morrin arrives, he, too, lingers for a moment. The three of us have spent many hours in here, discussing, arguing, idling. The office u
“Janie,” he says. “Sorry to make you do this.”
“You were right. It’s time.”
He nods. Weeks earlier, he had tried to draw me out on this subject, but I had rebuffed him. Now, he takes a pen from Hiroji’s desk and taps it soundlessly against his fingers. He says that I should call downstairs if I need anything.
“A second brain?” I say.
He laughs. “Hmm. No, but there’s a new dissecting scope. Come and see it when you’re done.” Still holding the pen, he leaves.
When all the files have been removed, I shut the cabinet and sit down in Hiroji’s chair. The morning light, tipped in gold, has laid its gaze across the desk, illuminating a stapler, a box of paperclips, and a thumb-sized bronze Buddha in a seated posture, both hands extended in the gesture of protection. Hiroji has an object coveted by all the other neurologists: a phrenological map of the brain, drawn onto a porcelain head. During the Victorian era, the brain was believed to have forty-eight mental faculties, and each of these had a specific location that could be felt via bumps on the skull. Destructiveness, for instance, curves like a horseshoe behind the ear. Immortality floats at the crown of the head, far above vagrancy and animality, low qualities that swell the neck. Blandness is neighbour to agreeableness. My own head has a bump above my left temple. Hiroji had studied the map.
“Mirthfulness,” he had said, gri
We had both laughed. He used to rest his glasses on the head’s porcelain nose, so much more upright, he said, more Roman, than his own.
I open the drawers. This trespass shames me, and yet I continue, ru
I close the address book and put it back in the drawer. I carry the boxes downstairs, one by one. On the last trip, sweating, I return to the desk. I take out the address book and place it, carefully, into the box.
Evening arrives quickly. In the foyer where the brc branches off to the hospital and the university, I sit, unable to face the freezing cold. This foyer is an intersection, a place where patients, neurologists, researchers, families, and students meet and part. I have been a researcher at the brc for twelve years. Many floors below, in my electrophysiology lab, I have listened, hour after hour, to the firing of single neurons. In my work, I harvest cells, gather data, measure electricity while, in the upper floors, lives open and change: a patient with a brain tumour begins to lose her vision, a girl ceases to recognize faces, including her own, a man stares, disgruntled, at his left leg, refusing to believe that it belongs to his body. So many selves are born and re-born here, lost and imagined anew.
Now, a woman in a hospital gown has been brought to a halt, overwhelmed by the patterned lines on the floor. A nurse comes and prods her forward. My friend Bo
As they move across the foyer, I retrieve the yellow book from my coat pocket. All afternoon, the name Nuong has been clamouring in my thoughts. I calculate the time difference once more. In Cambodia, tomorrow morning has arrived. I take out my phone and dial the international number. On the sixth ring, a woman answers.
I ask to speak to Ly Nuong.
When she doesn’t respond, I ask a second time, switching to Khmer, though the words no longer come easily to me. She laughs, relieved, and says, No, Nuong isn’t here, he’s already left for work. She has a Phnom Penh accent, the same as my parents.
“Who is this?” she asks.
My English name feels awkward so instead I say, “I’m calling from Canada.”
“Canada, yes. I will tell him.”
I thank the woman and hang up. The phone feels heavy in my hand. I pick it up again and dial Meng’s number. Though it rings for a long time, nobody answers.
The first time it happened, it was January. I had been anxious and overworked, and then, that day, I couldn’t find my wallet, and then my keys. In the confusion, I forgot to pick Kiri up from daycare. By the time the aggravated staff reached me, my son had been waiting in the deserted rooms for more than two hours.
I ran all the way. At the daycare, I thanked the staff and apologized as best as I was able, then I took Kiri’s hand and we made our way through the snow, stumbling together on the patches of ice. The sky was charcoal and the cold ambushed us. My son had lost his scarf. He asked me where I had been and when I didn’t answer, he started to cry, he pulled on my hand but my body was light and my hand felt far away.
At home, I made di