Pandemonium

"Dr. Ram."

He didn’t hear me. I followed him down the hall toward the elevators, persisting even as he shed members of his entourage by ones and twos. One of his shoes was untied, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Dr. Ram, if you have just a second—”

He glanced at me, then was immediately distracted by a scruffybearded man at his elbow. Dr. Ram grunted at something he said, and then the elevator opened and the people around them shuffled forward, and Dr. Ram and the bearded man went with them. Dr. Ram looked up, and waved me inside. I put out a hand to stop the door from closing, and wedged inside.

“Thanks! I enjoyed your talk. I was—”

But the bearded man was still talking, something about calcium channel blockers. We went up.

At the eighteenth floor Dr. Ram stepped out, and the bearded man was still talking as the doors started to slide shut. I abruptly jumped forward, and Dr. Ram’s eyes widened. The doors closed behind me. Dr. Ram didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t want me to know where his room was. I opened my mouth, shut it. I fought the urge to say, “I am not a stalker.”

“Are you a student of Dr. Slaney’s?” he said.

“What?”

He nodded at my badge. “Dr. Slaney. Or perhaps Dr. Morgan?”

His accent was pure California, vowels stretched a bit longer than a Midwesterner’s.

“I want to show you something,” I said. I unzipped the tote bag, flipped through the other pages I’d picked up, and withdrew the fMRI printouts. I held them out to him. “I’d like you to look at these.”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t have time. I have to meet someone . . .”

I stood there, holding them out to him. Finally he took them. He looked at the first one, shuffled it to the back, looked at the next one.

“Where did these come from?” he said intently. He studied the first scan again.

“Me.”

He looked up, his expression guarded.

“I’ve been following your work,” I said. “What you noticed about activity in the temporal lobe—you see it there?”

“I see something.” He flipped a page, tilted his head. “But even if I take these scans as valid—which I would not—they could mean almost anything. You could have been experiencing fond memories of your birthday, or simply contemplating a new haircut.” He handed the pages back to me, but his voice was kinder. “I know these scans might be alarming to the layman, but heightened activity in the temporal lobe by no means suggests that you were possessed while getting your MRI.”

My cheeks flushed in embarrassment. “I’m not—” I breathed in. “I don’t know how to put this. I’m possessed now. I can feel . . . I can sense this presence inside me. I know that it just feels this way, that it’s just a subjective sensation that could be a symptom of the disorder, but—” I smiled tightly. “It’s just that I feel like I’ve trapped this thing in there.”

I had to give him credit; he didn’t immediately dismiss me. What I was saying was impossible—no one that I’d ever heard of walked around saying that they’re possessed.

But he thought for a moment, and then said, “What would you have me do about this?”

“I was thinking. If your theory is correct—” I almost ran into a Jurassic-size potted plant, and stepped around it. “If this section of the brain is responsible for possession, then if we disable that section—”

“Disable? How?”

I looked at him. He lifted his hand. “No. No.” He turned and started down the hallway, the laces of one shoe whipping along the floor. I hurried after him.

“At least consider it, Doctor. There are similar operations being done for tumor victims.”

“You don’t have a tumor! I can’t just cut into your brain based on a theory. It’s not even a theory, it’s a hypothesis, and an unproven one at that. Maybe, years from now, there will be some surgical option—”

“So you have thought about it.”