Valley of Fire. Steven Manners
psychiatry convention alternates from east to west each year. Admittedly, it’s difficult to keep track. Such a terrible sameness to these affairs: a week of lectures, workshops, poster presentations, oral sessions. Meetings with the professor. Brown-bag luncheons. In the evenings: a few fireside sessions, dinner meetings, and the usual assortment of drug company symposia followed by an excursion to the trendiest restaurant in town. Damn dull at times. Hughes tries to muster a sort of nostalgia, but it doesn’t take: each city only stirs up recollections of other cities in other years.
Do you remember… the Baltimore oysters that sent a panel of experts to hospital? The symposium — where was it, out west at any rate — where the speaker wandered off, simply disappeared, I heard he went mad, poor chap. Each year not a fresh start but just an overlay of the previous one. What Munin would call a palimpsest if he were in another mood.
“You’re right,” Hughes concedes. “It was Atlanta. I remember it was miserably humid.”
When the waitress arrives with their coffee, Munin is staring out at the Strip: tourists with cameras, gamblers with plastic cups mostly half filled with coins, car jockeys and casino workers before their shifts. An endless parade of back-and-forth. Everyone in America is in a constant state of migration. They quit jobs, swap spouses, get on the interstate. Everyone looking for a second chance, and Vegas is there to give it to them. The signs as you drive into town are your guide: get a free spin at the wheel of fortune, reverse your vasectomy, double your paycheck.
The waitress takes Hughes’s order: fried eggs, sausages, toast, as close as he’ll get to an English breakfast in this country. Munin is looking at two crows or ravens on the windowsill when he catches the waitress’s reflection in the glass. She’s making a stab at patience; lost souls that ended up here were always staring outside. The desert’s a blank slate, a promised land of life without credits or debits. Of course, it’s mostly debits around here, the way it is everywhere.
“What about you? Can I get you anything? Something to eat?”
Munin notes the waitress’s hands: pitted nails, white sheen of fingertips. Her teeth are bad, and she self-consciously holds the notepad in front of her mouth when she speaks. “No, I’m fine.”
He scans the room, an old habit from his days working the ER. Addictions, of course, at least a half-dozen withdrawal disorders; signs of self-mutilating behaviour; social anxiety in the rear booth; a woman in hiking sandals reading apartment want ads, curling her toes in a way that suggests a neurological disorder. He spots three men at a nearby booth. They nod at Munin. They look familiar — an advisory panel, a paper they’ve co-authored? — but he can’t recall their names. How many times has he been here, in a place like this? How many coffee shops, hotel bars, airport lounges, hospital cafeterias? He feels tired, and it’s only early afternoon. It’s evening at home, that other place. He nods in the direction of the men and lets his gaze drift back to the window.
“See anyone you know out there?” Hughes asks.
Munin taps the glass, and the birds fly off. “Everyone wears sunglasses. Even indoors.”
“I had a patient who wore sunglasses during every session,” Hughes says. “Rainy days, evenings, didn’t seem to matter. These horrible mirrored specs. I thought it was very revealing.”
“They were prescription. He broke his other pair.”
“Did I tell you that story before?”
“I can’t remember. Probably.”
“Still, it made for a queer dynamic. I spent the whole time staring at myself while he talked endlessly. Finally, I couldn’t bear it and stared at his earlobe. He became quite self-conscious about it, I’m afraid. We spent a couple of sessions talking about his ears, although they were normal enough.”
“You told me about him. You called him the Amphora Man.”
“I suppose he was a bit jug-headed, poor man. But that’s off the point.” Hughes pauses as the waitress arrives with his meal.
“Looking deep into a person’s eyes is old-fashioned. Mirror of the soul and all that. Only infants look at the eyes.”
“What do we look at?”
“Hair.”
Munin laughs, but Hughes is quite serious. He’s read it somewhere. Adults study a person’s facial features but remember only the rough outlines — ears, beards, hair. To character and personality we are blind.
“It was in one of the medical journals — I can’t remember which one,” Hughes says. “Of course, it might have been The National Enquirer. People only retain bits and pieces. They never remember the source of the information.”
“Something else you read?”
“I expect so.”
Hughes eats quickly and precisely, a bit of egg, a bit of sausage. Toast cut into thin strips — what Hughes’s mum still calls soldiers — and dipped neatly in the runny yolk. Pushes his plate aside when he’s done and sighs. Breakfast not quite up to snuff: no kippers, runny eggs, fried bread, the whole lot swimming in grease. Would kill for a nice cup of tea, but the miserable tin pots they use spill more than they pour. “Simply hopeless — all the marvellous technology in this country and they can’t make a decent teapot. It’s enough to rot your socks.” Settles for more coffee, a little testy even with his third refill, a caffeine withdrawal symptom that an addiction expert might be expected to self-diagnose. “We’ll have to try that English-theme casino. I expect they know how to make a proper meal.”
“It’s a replica of King Arthur’s court, Merrie Olde England and all that,” says Munin. “You’re more Greenwich Mean.”
“Well, a half-display of wit. You’re on the mend. Now what were you saying about Bascule? He was researching antidepressants at the time.” A smug smile; Hughes is going to show off a little. “Enantiomers, if I recall. Mirror-image molecules.”
Munin has forgotten the substance of Professor B.’s lecture. But he remembers it was at one of those boutique hotels near the university, a dozen residents in a small, airless room, stink of burnt coffee from urns sizzling on Sterno. The professor’s performance was off that day, his review of the slides interrupted by long pauses. His thoughts seemed to be straying to far-off places; his voice sounded as if he were unsure how to return. There was a question period afterward but few questions. The old man’s vagueness was a bit of an embarrassment, and the room cleared out quickly. In those student years there was always the feeling you were missing something important somewhere else.
Munin stayed even though he was late for rounds. Hotel waiters came in to clear the room. The session chairman, an associate professor jockeying for tenure, tried to wrap things up with a question: “What is your research interest at the moment, Doctor?”
A clatter of dishes by the hospitality staff just then, so Munin almost missed the answer.
“Love,” Munin reminds Hughes.
“The old bastard.”
As psychiatrists, they waited for these moments, brief flashes of uncensored thought. Almost hypnagogic in their half-asleep awareness, defences down but the mind still needing to dislodge a word, unburden itself of something long buried.
“Bascule studied it for years — love,” he tells Hughes. “He said he’d had made a thorough analysis. What was it? What purpose did it serve? Why do we have that capacity? Does it serve some function? Or is it only an epiphenomenon?”
“The fieldwork,” Hughes can’t resist saying, “must have been exhausting.”
“He said that other states — anxiety, depression, violence — were fairly well described. Neural circuits, neurotransmitters, that whole business. Why not study love?”
“Why not indeed?”
“He had isolated six aspects. Six elements that were necessary for love.”