One thing stolen, p.11
One Thing Stolen, page 11
The OCD germaphobe takes the subway every afternoon to a part-time job in the station mall on Market.
And always last, in the stories, she tells, some guy named Amir sees it through.
“Amir,” she says. Cracking a borrowed chestnut.
There’s a girl who waits for us every day—five or six years old, always the same red sweater on. Sophia Loren lips. A pair of beat-up cowboy boots. She lives in a house on the hill across from Belvedere. She must sit in the window waiting for us, because as soon as we’re close, she’s there. Pops out of the front door with a gappy smile on her face. Our own welcoming committee, and good Lord, given the way things are, we can use a welcome in triplicate.
“Buongiorno,” she says.
“Buongiorno.”
Popping back out of sight and closing the door like some Ambassador of the Hills. I crack a chestnut.
We get three hours in most days. Intensives, we call them. We do the life work, the focus work, until the third hour winds down, or until doing more will hurt more than stopping where we are. Almost every day we do it—leave the apartment, cross the river, make the climb to Katherine’s house, settle in for the intensives with Nadia. Two weeks ago, two days in a row, there was too much storm and we couldn’t go, and those two days were the saddest days of all, holed up in the apartment on Verrazzano, listening to the piano playing upstairs like a dirge. Nothing we could do. No hills. No intensives. No nouns. No Nadia. My best friend in the world. My community garden assist.
We had ourselves a plan.
At night I keep up. I’ve switched over to the MOOCs for now. Massive Open Online Courses—a bunch of videos and message boards and crowdsourced e-buddies; ask a good-enough question and it climbs the board and the prof slaps you back with an answer—live. I’m not saying that this beats shoulder-to-shoulder in the classroom, but it’s where I’m at right now, how I remain “academically greedy” (my parents’ favorite term). I stayed local with my MOOCs—signed up for the Penn-proffed, Quaker love and whatnot:
Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society
(Professor Karl Ulrich)
Pay Attention!! ADHD Through the Lifespan
(Professor Anthony Rostain)
Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
(Professor Al Filreis)
Basic Behavioral Neurology
(Professor Roy Hamilton)
I’m greediest of all for number 4.
Jack, when he’s not cooking, not reporting back on his spices, keeps up his work on the opus magnum: Brunelleschi Rising. Almost Independent Study 201. Studying the old books, Binging the net, going out and asking questions of old-timers in Italian, then coming back to the flat and plumping the room with his repertoire of new-to-his-own-self facts. “Did you know,” he will say, about the Santa Maria del Fiore and its famous biggest-in-the-world arched cap, “that no one thought it’d be possible to build a Duomo like that?”
“Knew it, Jack.”
“That years and years and years went by before anybody tried?”
“I read the Lonely Planet.”
“Did you know that there are seventy million pounds of marble, brick, and stone up there, all of it supporting itself?”
“Now I do.”
“They built it on air.”
“You mean on top of the air.”
“Called it a nest of delights. Called Brunelleschi crazy until they called him a genius instead.”
“Way of the world, I guess.”
“Had it bad until he had it good. It happens. Right? It happens. Anything can.”
“Happens.”
Brunelleschi Rising. Jack’s thesis in a nutshell. His new proof of hope.
We sit when Jack goes on. It takes a moment before the dirge dies down. The bells in the bell towers chime. The ivy leaves chase each other’s tails, run through the silver stop signs of the Vitale thumbtacks. And then it will be dinnertime, and we’ll sit there close, at the Vitales’ table, and spew signifying metaphors.
(A phrase I picked up in the Poetry MOOC.)
Little-known fact (courtesy of Jack): There’s a subterranean river running through the soils of Florence, deep beneath the Duomo. A whole river down there that nobody sees, running on and on, and every day, tourists climb the tourist steps and think they are safe, high above.
(Nobody’s safe.)
Little-known fact (courtesy of the prof): After the floodwaters of 1966 were gone, there were half a million tons of mud in the streets of Florence, and guess how many citizens? Precisely. Easy math. One ton of mud to every person in Florence. And the mud got good and gone.
(Hope can be found.)
Little-known fact (courtesy of at-risks): In some cities in the United States as many as 60 percent of high school students ultimately drop out. If you start looking for the signs when the students are sixth-grade-young you can help them beat the rap. Early intervention. That’s the key.
(It’s right there, end of story: Early intervention is the key.)
Little-known fact (courtesy of Perdita—Perdita with the cable-knit tights and the green feather earrings and the spice tricks, the spice facts, the jars of this and that): The history of spice is the history of the world, and where there is history, there is future.
(We believe.)
Little-known fact (courtesy of me): The hundred billion nerve cells in the three pounds of folded brain are not fixed. They are plastic; they remap. Voilà. Dr. Roy Hamilton, MOOC Number 4, calls the brain a masterpiece. He says, looking straight and directly at me through the screen, that the brain—my brain, yours, anybody’s—harbors “a near-infinite capacity for connectivity.” He says “beautiful” and “complicated,” and in terms of the future for people in some kind of brain trouble, we’re only staring at the tip of the berg.
(Nothing is fixed, and nothing is certain.)
Dinner at the Vitales’ is metaphors time. It’s when we hope out loud.
C
Dr. Katherine Goldrath is a Dr. Roy Hamilton fan. Sometimes, at her house on the hill, she watches the MOOC videos on my iPad, and sometimes she talks back, disagrees, reaffirms, proposes, what if?, until I say, “Not like he can hear you, Katherine.” She’ll flip her long white hair to the opposite shoulder, press her fingers to the skin beneath her eyes, get up, cross the room, power up her own computer, and tap out an e-mail directly to Dr. Roy because she’s in the brain business and can. “Professional discourse,” she’ll say, about their relationship. Leaves it at that.
She offers lemon squeezed into seltzer water. She offers cookies from a red tin, ginger tea. She keeps a window open, even with the rain, and when the intensives are done and all the cards put away and it’s quiet in the front room across from Belvedere, she leans back and tells us about the news inside her magazines, or stories from before, when she was still a practicing head doctor. The paralyzed man learning to walk. The lady born with half a brain in full alert and thriving. The congresswoman shot close-range in the head by a demented man who talked and walked again.
Also: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, who, young, couldn’t tell time, couldn’t compute relationships, couldn’t get the irony knack, couldn’t even figure out, when she touched a stove with her left hand, where the pain was coming from. Barbara Arrowsmith-Young had so many problems that her own mother said she’d be dead real soon.
Almost, but not. Even when she tried to take her own life, she failed at that, too, until at last she found a way to change herself. To teach her brain to overcome its broken parts. She taught her brain clocks. She taught her brain maps. She taught her brain irony and style. She taught her brain philosophy. She forced her brain to do new things until it reshaped itself—built itself new neuronal networks to bypass the ones that didn’t work.
I picture train tracks. I picture tree roots. I picture tree branches tangling in the sky. I picture Barbara Arrowsmith-Young and her brain-training, an Olympian of the mind. I hear Katherine finishing her news in the house on the hill: Knowledge, she’s saying. Optimism. Parallels and metaphors. We fight our war like that.
I look past her, past the kitchen, through the open door toward the white, white room with the glass shelves. I look past her and see Nadia’s hair tumbling off the bed, falling away from itself.
It hardly ever snows in Florence, but man, does it rain. We walk away from Belvedere when it’s already dark—me and Mrs. C. The little girl in the red sweater and cowboy boots watches us through the front-room window of her brown-yellow house.
She cheers us on.
I could have been her. Once. I wish I could show her the angel that Nadia found in the shop called Curiosities. How it dangles from strings. How it dances in the breeze. How it says hello, hello. How it has wings.
D
I sleep in the top bunk, in the Barbie pinks. The piano songs fall. Paganini, Caprice No. 24, sometimes. Sometimes Christmas carols and sometimes old rock and roll, give us a little Carly Simon. Please. There’s dog yip up there and some mean stiletto heels. When I take a deep, long breath, I do an intake of sticky glue. When I dream, I hear the chip-chip sound of scissors.
From the very start, in the morning hours, I’ve returned the things Nadia stole. It’s like detective work, archaeological, its own kind of intensive—matching the things laid across the floor to the places they might have come from. One of those kaleidoscopes that splits the color world to fractions. A couple of satin pillows with tasseled ends. A dozen scarves. Rosaries and garlic chains, felted buttons, leather twists. One rubber glove the color of a baby’s duckie. A box made out of leather, pretty papers, stamps. And glitter. And ropey chains. And a piece of broken glass.
Faded flowers.
Nadia could have owned her own shop, the way she was going, and I don’t always win the match-to-match. But if I were taking a class called the Shops of Florence, I’d be so ace they’d have to give out a triple-A-plus. Taddei made the leather box in his shop across from what they claim is Dante’s house. Alice on Via Faenza had the bright pots of glitter. All the books Nadia stole from Paperback Exchange, the best little bookshop in Florence. The best scarf of the lot was lifted from L’Elefante Verde, and on the day I went in bearing my she-didn’t-mean-to-steal-it gift, Loriana Bergantini, the owner of the shop, did a little courtesy bow and called me honorable.
Nadia’s honorable too, I wanted to say. Nadia’s just not Nadia. Right now. Nadia, mostly, is fighting.
In Le Telerie Toscane, they were grateful. In the shop along the Ponte Vecchio, they called me the dubious American. In Del Moro they took me on a tour of all the hats—the merino wool, the straw, the leather—and showed me where the chartreuse silk had been stolen from. Keep it, they said. Keep it. We understand. That was the hardest return of all, and for that return, I took Jack’s friend Perdita, whose style is totally rad.
I have my system worked out—easier to harder. I am up to the fourth tier, the match-to-matches I hadn’t scored on yet. Scarves that could have been sold by any one of the ten dozen street vendors. Flowers sucked dry of their colors. Lily souvenirs that might have been snatched out of any unsuspecting tourist’s purse. An old-style Timex, ticking like a bomb, that I hadn’t hooked up with one of the two million antique shops or (perhaps) a grandfather’s pocket. A gold chain, screwdriver-thick, practically padlocked together at its ends, its pendant broken. I found the chain one day when Perdita was near. She saw it in my hands. She gasped.
“My chain,” she said. “My chain. It’s here.” And then she looked for Jack.
I’ve arranged Nadia’s nests on the twins’ bottom bunk like a private museum. Nadia’s nests, her beautiful, bold nests—her Goodnight Moon, her sunflower soufflé, her tornado weaves and her potholder looms, her stolen jewels, the perfect mattress spring, the dried husks of flowers that are so dried now I don’t even know what they were. It’s as if the birds themselves had taught Nadia their secrets—the hoisting and weaving, the cementing and sculpting, the majesty magic of mud and spider silk, the pillowing down. I would have gone blind making those nests—even just one. I would have lost my fingers inside the tangles and silks, given up, gotten out, but not Nadia. Nadia persisted. She persevered. She compulsed. That’s one of the words Dr. Hamilton uses when he talks about cases like hers, and one of the words that I hold in my head when I stand at the window of this borrowed room and look out. The waiters, the girls, the faded stucco, that glass room where a man works behind a taped-up window. Sometimes he looks up and I wave, but he never waves back. He turns out the light. He checks the seams on the tape in his window.
There are four dozen MoMA-worthy nests in the bottom bunk in the twins’ room in the Vitale flat. There are four dozen nests, and they are gorgeous, each one, and maybe that’s what hurts most of all, in all this.
Nadia. Our artiste. But the art is a disease. Nadia’s mind is a fog.
She thinks in full sentences, Katherine explained, when I asked her, when I said I could not understand. But she cannot find the words on her tongue. A catastrophe in expressive language. Complicated by obsessions, memory lapses, delusions.
What kinds of delusions?
She can’t tell us. Right now.
E
The prof blames himself. Says he should have seen it, should have known, should not have brought his family here. What is an obsession? he asks. What is a disease? What is a choice, and what is an affliction? He has a PhD. He’s a historian. He is an Ivy League man. All this time in Florence, searching for the place where chaos began—the flood. All this time, and it was right there, climbing the steep hills beside him.
Mrs. C. says, “Shhhh, let’s be strong.” Mrs. C. says, “One day at a time. The science is progressing. Look at how well she is doing. Look at all we can do for her now. Listen to Katherine.”
“She’s in the best hands.”
“She is young.“
Mrs. C. is there every day, in the house where Katherine lives and Nadia has been staying since the middle part of October, when she could no longer return to the nests she loves and the nests that torment her. Obsessive thoughts. Disinhibited behaviors. Delusions. Loss of expressive talk. I keep trying to get the words right. To see past the labels. To understand the stories they tell me, to understand this man—Dr. Bruce Miller at the University of California, San Francisco, whom Katherine says is the best they have. A neuroscientist-philosopher with answers. A doctor who listened when Katherine called.
“Bring her here,” Dr. Miller said.
Over and over, in our walks up the hill, Mrs. C. tells me what Dr. Miller said. During the quiet hours in the apartment. During the mornings when we stop at a church and sit in the quiet together. During the evenings when Jack cooks, when Perdita helps him, Mrs. C. talks. She tells the story of Dr. Miller and the diagnosis.
In San Francisco, they tunneled Nadia into the MRI. They asked her to wear the EEG hat. They named fifteen things—milk, paper clips, cell phone—and wrote down which Nadia remembered and how long her remembering took. They showed her pictures of animals and asked what they were. They gave her denotation tests, connotation tests, quizlets on pejoratives, sarcasm, satire, parody, irony. They asked her to draw a clock, draw a flower, copy a picture built out of lines and spokes.
Then they asked her to reproduce her own nests, to explain what she could about the birds. Why the birds, Nadia? What about the finch?
They did all these things, according to Mrs. C., and then they told a story about a man named Maurice Ravel—French, an impressionist, a hooligan, a small man in meticulous clothes, a composer. Most people know Ravel for his composition called Boléro—two melodies arranged on top of a repeating snare drum rhythm. Two melodies only, repeated again and again, played first by flute, then by clarinet, then by bassoon, until finally every instrument in the entire orchestra is in on the game—the same two melodies, the same on-and-on drums. Perseverative. Systematic. Rigid. Compulsed.
“Why are you telling me this?” Mrs. C. said. “Why all this talk about a composer?”
“Because Nadia may be like him in some ways,” Dr. Miller said. “She may have the condition Ravel may have had.”
“Which is?”
“Frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia.”
“But Nadia’s young.”
“Yes.”
“You said dementia.”
“I did.”
“Dementia is Alzheimer’s. It’s old people.”
“Not always, Mrs. Cara. Not in some very rare cases, it isn’t.”
Dr. Miller had a model of the human brain on his desk—a plastic version of mental cauliflower. He showed Mrs. C. the front left, the language center. He showed her the right, a node in the back, the visual and spatial processing department. “The scans,” he said, “are suggesting that, in Nadia’s brain, the language center is shrinking. They’re suggesting, too, that the part of the brain that generates art is growing, gaining weight, thriving. One thing lost and another thing gained. A brain rearranging itself.
“The plastic brain,” he said.
“Art as the mind’s great disinhibition,” he said.
“The erupted artiste,” Mrs. C. said. The erupted artiste. Our Nadia.
There are others out there, with what Nadia might have—that’s what the doctor said. A couple hundred sudden painters, sudden landscape designers, sudden musicians—these ordinary people who, little by little, become less of themselves and more of something lovely-strange, their words and inhibitions going away as their artwork flowers. There are experiments being done with some kind of machine that changes the magnetic field inside the brain and temporarily creates brain states just like Nadia’s. The volunteer subjects become insta-artists for an hour. Their one thing lost, their other thing gained.
But for them, the lucky ones, it’s temporary.
The Caras spent a week in San Francisco. They spent a week, and then they returned. To Katherine, on the hill. To the Mud Angel and the blessed.
