4. IS THERE A COMMONALITY between these two cases? Have I been away so long and lived so strangely that everyone else seems strange? No, there’s something wrong with these women. And with Frank Macon. Two cases are too few even to suggest a syndrome, but I am struck by certain likenesses … In each there has occurred a sloughing away of the old terrors, worries, rages, a shedding of guilt like last year’s snakeskin, and in its place is a mild fond vacancy, a species of unfocused animal good spirits. Then are they, my patients, not better rather than worse? The answer is unclear. They’re not on medication. They are not hurting, they are not worrying the same old bone, but there is something missing, not merely the old terrors, but a sense in each of her—her what? her self? The main objective clue so far is language. Neither needs a context to talk or answer. They utter short two-word sentences. They remind me of the chimp Lana, who would happily answer any question any time with a sign or two to get her banana. Both women will answer a question like Where is Chicago? agreeably and instantly and by consulting, so to speak, their own built-in computer readouts. You wouldn’t. You’d want to know why I wanted to know. You’d want to relate the question to your—self.

I’m sitting on the porch again, not sailing airplanes but musing and keeping one eye on my watch—I have to meet Max and Bob, my “parole officers,” at two—when suddenly I get a flash. Well, not quite a flash, but a notion. Could it be that—

Could it be that there has occurred in both Mickey and Donna some odd suppression of cortical function?

I am thinking of my sole contribution to medical science, a paper I wrote some years ago after an explosion in the physics lab at Tulane on the effect of a heavy-sodium fallout on the inhibitory function of the cerebral cortex on sexual behavior, which earned me a write-up in Time and some small local fame. I did in fact make a contribution toward the development of the present-day CORTscan, a scanning device for measuring localized cerebral functions. But there’s no reason to suspect a heavy-sodium factor in these cases. There’s been no explosion. It is true that the nuclear facility at Grand Mer has a sodium reactor, but there’s been no accident—or even an “occurrence,” as they call it.

But accident or not, are there not signs of a suppression of cortical function in Mickey and Donna? I’m thinking particularly of the posterior speech center, Wernicke’s area, Brodmann 39 and 40, in the left brain of right-handed people. It is not only the major speech center but, according to neurologists, the locus of self-consciousness, the “I,” the utterer, the “self”—whatever one chooses to call that peculiar trait of humans by which they utter sentences and which makes them curious about how they look in a mirror—when a chimp will look behind the mirror for another chimp.

Yes, I’ve been away, and yes, I’ve not been so well myself. But there’s an advantage in absence and return. One notices changes which other people don’t. Tommy has grown six inches, hadn’t you noticed? Betty looks ill. Mickey and Donna? Maybe they, my patients, are not crazy, but something’s going on here. What I need is objective evidence, more cases …

But first I must convince Max and Bob that I am not crazy myself, or at least no crazier than most doctors.