The Two Doctors Górski Read online

  But then Annae had fallen silent. It seemed that things weren’t that simple after all. And then this article had surfaced, heavily quoting her former supervisor, Jonathon Bayer. Annae had been raised too high and too quickly. She had only had one idea, and that an incomplete one. “To be honest,” Bayer had said, “I think that it was partly because she was a woman, and everyone wanted a woman to come along to save advanced magic from being such a boys’ club. That doesn’t mean that the right woman couldn’t excel in this field, or rather that many women could not. But everyone wanted Annae to be another Meril Meyerfeld—they wanted to see gravity reversed—and that’s not her. The only reason I don’t call her a fraud is that I sincerely think she believes that she’s a genius.”

  Torquil had looked at her Facebook, to see if it seemed like a fraud’s Facebook. Bayer was all over it. He was youngish, good-looking, with a square face and an expansive look. In one photo he had his arm slung around her shoulders. She was wearing a white shirtdress, very crisp, and dragged to greater crispness by the tightness of his grip on her shoulder. When you scrolled past him, all that was left was the kind of Facebook page that’s staccato and mostly full of other people’s happy-birthdays, photos of Annae at parties with women she didn’t appear to know well. He’d scrolled to the very bottom, to the formation of Annae’s account. But there was nothing there except a note that she had been born.

  “What do you think?”

  All of this had gone by in a moment, a microdot of thought. He felt his face convulse, compress. She looked mildly horrified, as if she had seen everything he’d thought, everything he was thinking now, every nasty misogynistic intrusive thought about the way the girls in the photos had looked like dead sunflowers, the way they would gangle and stretch. Their raw skin under the flash. All the ways he’d believed Bayer’s words, because Torquil, a known fraud, believed in frauds.

  “I think you’re hard done by,” he said to her quietly. “And I think you should watch out for Marec, anyway. No doubt you’ve been warned that he’s unkind, and obviously he is that, but it’s worse. He will either try to stop you from ever leaving this place, or destroy your career entirely.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” she told him, flinging the words suddenly into his face. “Don’t you know? Marec is the only one who’d take me. Leave me alone. Don’t pretend you don’t know everything.”

  “Know everything? I don’t know anything. I’m—I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  * * *

  Annae sat on the bus, her face in her hands, locked in dread and humiliation, wondering what she was doing here. It would have been so easy to leave academia, to leave magic. She had thought that she could bear anything, after leaving Jonathon and losing her position; she had thought herself numb, finished, after the tenth or twentieth long email, I see now that I was wrong to think you were anything more than a spoiled child, after he had complained of her personality and her appearance until she felt like a muddy blur, something pummeled and unrecognizable; after she had finally tried to ask the department to keep him away from her, only to find herself asked to leave campus herself. But she had found that she could not bear losing her life’s work.

  She tried to feel the bus seat beneath her, the ridged floor under her feet. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, to establish herself. But it was like trying to stay awake when the alarm rang but the sleeping pill hadn’t worn off. You were always pulled back under, back in, to the black heat just outside of your consciousness, to the place where Jonathon waited to lash another strip of her away.

  * * *

  At home, she should have cooked dinner, but she couldn’t face the gas stove. She lay on the couch instead and gathered a shaggy cushion to her chest, reaching behind her to unzip the top inch of her skirt. She longed for the wafting escape from herself, which ever since Jonathon she had wanted more than scholarship or food. Her old mainstays, the favorite minds she’d read just to get away, were back in America and hopelessly out of her range: the man who worked at the bakery, the vet she’d watched with her cats. Minds like soothing YouTube videos, ASMR.

  She liked reading because it made the world feel like a book written in unlimited third-person perspective, her favorite since the fantasy novels of her childhood, whose chapters traded names and narrators with the avidity of little girls swapping dolls or Pokémon. To the skilled reader, the world was just one narrator after another. Sometimes she wondered if anyone was reading her, and imagined herself saying, in some way, take it, you’re welcome to it, it’s little enough use to me.

  She let herself drift back to Torquil. He was stressful to be with, but he was the only person here whose mind she knew.

  * * *

  Torquil went home, made himself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the long lab bench he used as a desk. It was of sweet reclaimed wood, covered in a long row of plants turned toward the window or toward the door or toward different parts of him. The plants soothed him, and he felt the relaxation in his heart and muscles and lungs, as if each trumpeting flower and unfurling leaf was sending out a ray of heat. People terrified Torquil; plants gave him rest.

  He was watching the video of Annae again. She seemed so bright and shivering, thrilled to be here, to be sharing what she’d made. He struggled to reconcile her with the woman he’d met today, who had seemed, in important ways, dead—dried and still, all the water pressed out of her. She was talking about bringing more girls into magic. Then there was a mention of Jonathon Bayer, with a ping of excitement in her voice like a text coming in. This woman was in love with this man, and in love with her work; she wanted to be a mentor the way some happily partnered people want to have children, because they hope it will make their happy thoughts concrete.

  It seemed to him that American magicians had to be very driven. They only taught simple magic in school over there, not much beyond transmogrification of plants. He had seen videos of giggling twelfth graders turning a palm leaf into an air plant, but it was the kind of air plant that looks a lot like a palm leaf. Torquil had had an English education, and so he knew magic, knew it like he knew the bones running up his trouser legs. He knew it with a quiet tranquility that half rhymed with his name, troubled though he felt about everything else in life. Leaping the gulf between that American school-magic and the real stuff was like leaping the gulf between calculus and the kind of swooning math that they made Oscar-bait movies about.

  Christ Jesus—he needed to eat. Cooking was hard for Torquil, because he had some very strong feelings about plants. He spent hours with them every day, teasing them at a cellular level, flicking at their DNA. When it came time to chop them with a crude, granular knife (for like all magicians, Torquil looked at the world in extreme close-up)—when it came time to sizzle and sear them in a pan, and watch them curl away, he got depressed and had to go to bed after dinner. Meat was even worse.

  Someone had once asked him why he cooked his veg, why he didn’t just eat salad. Torquil had had to think about that a little, and then had said, “It’s because it’s a painless kill. A kind of euthanasia for them. The knife and the heat. At least I don’t have to bite them to death.”

  “But they’re already dead, Torquil.”

  “I know that.”

  * * *

  Annae found herself still on the couch, staring groggily at the dark. She sat up with a groan of pain, a muscle in her neck spasming, and then went to the kitchen to shovel something into her numb mouth, crackers and cheese and some grapes, all of it good. They said British food was bad, but to her it tasted like Tolkien food, the laws that protected its quality stiffer and higher than American laws, so that everything was salty and sweet and rich, a still life in a bite. Vanitas. When she was done, she went straight to the bedroom, released herself from the crumpled heat of her sweater and skirt and from the scratchy tension of her bra, and paused, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  Her apartment was in a new building, and it could have been anywhere: America, even, with its glassy coolness, its cheap wall-to-wall. The window was covered with a sheet of cardboard, for although she had bought a dry chenille bedspread and a white bed of a Styrofoam stiffness, and a set of plastic drawers for her things, she had forgotten curtains. She liked the anonymity—it was as if nobody lived here—but wished it could have been pushed further, that she had been a person who needed no sofa, no bed, no body. The person who had plunged into the delicately scented bloom of Jonathon’s sheets, who had loved the feeling of his hundred-dollar pillow across the back of her skull, had gone away, and she didn’t know where.

  She looked down at her thigh and, with a slight twitch of her fingers across the dry skin, she made one of her blotches. Tiny bumps like eczema, and then a larger papule that grew under the pad of her thumb. When she did this, she felt the nodes of her brain, clear and flowing. Annae had cut herself as a teenager, in just this part of the thigh. She still had the scars, as long and thin and untidy as uncombed hairs. Halfway through her relationship with Jonathon, she had found the irresistible urge coming up again, for by then he had begun to critique all that she did, crossing her out with a firm hand as if she were an undergraduate making the same grammar mistakes again and again on a paper. This time, she had discovered the blotches, the blemishes, which she thought were better, for no one could see them; she lacked the skill to make them permanent, being a specialist after all in the brain. It was harm reduction, really. They faded when she stopped paying attention to them, and by morning they were gone. In the meantime, they soothed her. The irritation under the surface never quite broke through and bled, but that was all right. It was worth it for the absolute privacy.

  She could make a light patch on the corner of her mouth, just above the chin. A pink hot patch on her cheek. Eczema on h
er elbows; a big dark rash on her stomach. When she was too tired to go on, she went to bed under the chenille and watched squares of light sail past in the dark, the lights of cars or hallucinations. Annae always hallucinated after doing magic, even if only a little; it was what happened when you pulled the brain out of alignment.

  She had told herself for some time that her mind-reading was a matter of self-protection, and then that it was for science. Lately, she had been working on telling herself that it was for revenge, although on whom she could not say, for it harmed no one who had harmed her. But really, she knew she did it because it offered a comfort that nothing else could provide, not alcohol and not shopping—which in any case were instruments for fitting in with other people, and not the sources of any private pleasure.

  The comfort of mind-reading was not the comfort of Jonathon’s sheets, the comfort of money and stability. Other people’s minds were grimy, worn out, clogged with decay. But when she was inside someone else’s mind, she didn’t feel the world biting into her. She didn’t feel like a fraud. She felt nothing at all, except what they were feeling; she could see her face reacting to them sometimes, but the emotions behind it were as inscrutable as those of a stranger. And she loved knowing she was illegible to people, loved the safety it offered. She saw herself clean and tidy, well dressed, her hair straightened, nothing torn or shrunken or translucent that ought not to be, an attentive listener with perfectly opaque eyes.

  She had told a soon - to - be - ex - therapist about this once, back in San Cipriano, pretending the actual mind-reading was only skilled empathy and attention, because actual mind-reading was wildly unethical. The therapist had said gently, “It sounds as if you can’t get into your own head, Annae, and that’s what should concern us.” Annae had said, “Don’t tell me what should concern me. Don’t tell me how to think.”

  She lay awake for hours before she could sleep. Well, it had been barely after dinnertime when she lay down; that was to be expected. She tried to read some research on her phone, Otono’s new work on adjusting the perception of risk and reward in the rhesus macaque. It was an incredibly exciting paper that only made her feel anxious, because it was the sort of thing she should be doing, but Otono had rejected her along with everyone else except Marec.

  Finally she closed her eyes and decided to look into Marec himself. Surely he would be such a challenge to read that he would exhaust her into insensibility. She couldn’t take Torquil’s clench of anxiety anymore, and somehow she suspected that Marec was never anxious.

  She was afraid of what he might have thought of her, but Annae loved ripping off Band-Aids, popping pimples, breaking scabs. It was impossible to resist the urge to know someone who might think ill of her. She closed her eyes, looked for the pattern of his mind, found it.

  * * *

  Marec loved to come home late. The silence of the lanes through which he pedaled, the faint hint of wildlife in the grass, the scatter of light on dense English lawns, made the world seem a more focused creation than it was. He braked his bicycle as he pulled up to the cottage, pausing for a moment to admire it: the quiet hulk of the building, the thatch fitting like a close warm hood. He had built the place himself decades ago. It was a relief to return home to something he had made, something that was entirely his, whose very plaster bore the imprint and showed the span of his hands. From here you could not see the town at all, only the tower of the cathedral, and that had been dug out of the wet earth of the hills nine hundred years ago; the color of it fit the land. He let go of his spattered bicycle and went inside, glancing at the fireplace to light a fire.

  He cracked his long back. The fireplace warmed the whole room: close walls in marshmallow white, the trestle table that had so awed and horrified Torquil Gibson, who had said it was like looking at slabs of meat fitted together. Why had he ever invited Gibson here? High-strung, silly, a keen nibbler at ideas. And he smoked, although he said he did not. Not so sympathetic to plants then, was he?

  His fingers traced the raised veins of the wood, varnished raw from the tree. He felt the dead life in them, under the dirt, under the gloss. Even now there was something, cells and pulp. No, he was not to think about Gibson now. And Annae Hofstader tired him out too. Had they been unable to commit to “Anne” or “Anna”? Just like Jennifer, exactly like. Tiny girls, too soft to break.

  He should have kept the students from the house from the start, not just Gibson. He needed one place where he was entirely private, where he was entirely himself, free of others’ voices. The flesh of this place was his flesh. The students didn’t see it, always commented in polite surprise on the clash of his home and his name—as if a man with a Polish father must be genetically immune to the charms of English vernacular architecture. Well, his mother was English as dirt, and he claimed as much of a right to that dirt and its products as anyone.

  Yes, Marec thought. Live among your ideas; live among your memories. Live in a house that’s the product of your body, and don’t let anyone into it. If he’d known that before Ariel happened, Marec would never have lost him. Never let any precious thing go.

  He took his cell phone from his jacket pocket and tossed it on the table as if he were tossing it at Gibson, hoping to see him fumble it in his long hands, drop it to the ground. It lit up with messages and emails, and he opened a bag of bread, scowling down at the red numbers. How did he have five new emails since leaving the office? Would these people never stop digging at him, as if mining his skin and muscles for bits of precious material? With toast on the fork over the fire, he thumbed the button that would let him read them.

  From: Jonathon Bayer

  To: Marec Górski

  Dear Dr. Gorski,

  Jonathon Bayer here, of the University of California, San Cipriano. I’m writing to you on a matter of some urgency, and I hope you’ll forgive me for taking so long to do so. I did not know that the student in question was working with you until today.

  First of all, please let me say that I am a great admirer of your work. Although I am anything but an elementalist myself—I am in medical magic, a nerve specialist—I have followed all that you do for many years, from The Eternal Flame on through your more recent, and spectacular, work on realigning jet streams. I hope you don’t think me a flatterer when I say it’s possibly the most significant body of work to come from a living magician.

  The reason I write is because, as I said, I’ve become aware that Annae Hofstader has come to your department to complete her PhD. As you probably know, Annae began her work here at San Cipriano, where I was her PhD supervisor. I was surprised to learn that Annae will be completing her degree. I found her to be a consistently unreliable student, emotionally unstable, manipulative, and unable to take criticism. There is a more sensitive matter, as well: Annae and I were in a romantic relationship for the several years that she was in the program. I trust that you will be discreet about this knowledge, especially to Annae herself, and I realize that in many ways it reflects very poorly on me. I should have had the judgment not to succumb to a student’s romantic attentions. You know how they become obsessed with us—well, we preside over their whole world; how could they not? But ethically, I know I should never have said yes. The truth is that Annae can be very charming when it suits her, and of course she is a beautiful woman as well. When it comes to such charms—poured liberally over one’s head by someone who presents herself as a kind of anointing shrine maiden of science—I am as weak as any other man who has spent his life in the laboratory and the library.