Later on, back at his own office he finds himself drifting as he looks over the angiogram of a patient. With a synaptic level map, the precision of his work would become unprecedented. Suddenly the angiogram looks ridiculous, a magnifying glass compared to an electron microscope. Ridiculous! He turns to his office window, his glassy, glossy search light eyes staring out into the new world. And somewhere in the back of his own brain, in the back of his mind too, he feels a part of him rotting and seizing up because of that lack of precision.

“Dr. Coburn?”

Back still turned, “Yes.”

“The Dreyfuses are here, along with doctors Flynn and Schanacter.”

“Show them all in.” He watches their reflections in the glass, the city growing pale as the sun moves behind a small cloud on the West Side. Chairs are moving, people speak. He moves over to the light box on one wall of his office as someone introduces him and he swaps out the angiograms there. Turning to everyone in the room, the saccades of his eyes’ arcs fix on the blue eyes of a pale blonde frightened woman. Besides her sits her stern but equally frightened (Coburn knows) husband. He doesn’t look at the neurologist or the resident. No need.

“I have total confidence that we can remove this tumor almost in full.”

The woman reels a bit, having been expecting hello.

“You don’t get a lot of good news in this line of work, but I can tell you that where your tumor is located makes this an ideal surgery—really the best odds that you can get.” He stares like a trap.

“You think?” Mrs. Dreyfus manages to stammer out after a moment.

“I do. It is at the top of the basil ganglia region, inside a fold. This would not be a difficult operation, well—as far as brain surgery goes.” A joke. But no hint of it on his face; nor any intended audience. Idiot simpletons. Like Death’s straight man.

“Well, I don’t know—I had so many questions—what about if we just leave it?”

Coburn looks to the woman’s hands, shaking now, even resting on the arms of her chair. He looks to the back of his own hands and admires their steadiness. “Marylin!” he hollers lightly at his hand. Everyone else in the room seems shocked, but almost instantly, a secretary pokes her head in the door. “I want you to get Mrs..!”

“Dreyfus.”

“Dreyfus, yes, of course. I want you to get Mrs. Dreyfus a hot cup of green tea.”

“Oh that’s all right—” Mrs. Dreyfus begins.

Coburn takes one step toward her. “I insist. It will help to calm your nerves. And right now, you need them.” With a look he dispatches the secretary. Turning back to the angiogram for a moment, he says, thoughtfully, “If we leave the tumor it will eventually kill you.” Staring at the image of the ghostly yellow walnut that is Mrs. Dreyfus’s brain, Coburn reasons that Mr. Dreyfus will now feel the need to weigh in and he waits for it. Often people felt that he, Dr. Jacob Coburn, doubted their intelligence. He did not. No one more than he understood the stunning intricacies of even the most mentally challenged individual, the most damaged brain. The true beauty of it. No, it was their insolence he found so hard to tolerate.

“What about other methods?” Mr. Dreyfus asks. “Isn’t cutting into her skull jumping the gun here? What about chemotherapy?”

Coburn rubs the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger for just a moment. “If by jumping the gun you mean avoiding months and months of very painful therapy and debilitating sickness, then certainly you are correct that I’m jumping the gun.”

Two quick steps and he is squatting next to Sandra Dreyfus, his hand on her hand. “Mrs. Dreyfus, the tumor is here.” He points to his own thin, salt and pepper locks, ahead of and above his left ear. “We will make a very precise hole in the skull—the skull not her skull—relieves some of the pressure, making it clinical, he knows. “We will drain some fluid, remove the cancerous tissue, put the bone back. We could have it done by,” he looks to the resident, who, used to the Show, is already looking at dates in a small notebook.

Mr. Dreyfus, “Now wait just—“

“End of the month.”

Coburn, “There. The end of the month. Problem gone.”

“It’s all just so fast.” But he can see he already has her.

The secretary comes in with the tea. Mrs. Dreyfus smiles, still very nervous.

“Mrs. Dreyfus,” still squatting by her side, “you are facing permanent, imminent damage. You do not have to.”

Mr. Dreyfus is still half-cocked in his chair almost ready to storm out of the room it would seem. Mrs. Dreyfus, sensing this, puts her hand on his and pats it without looking at him. She is still staring into Jacob Coburn’s rock-solid blue eyes. They radiate a cold confidence and icy reason. She could put her life in his hands. She knows it in that moment. Some Bayesian calculation deep in her brain, summed up and divided all of the looks she had ever received in her life, looks of lying, suspicion, guilt, cheating. Here now, in front of her, was the gaze of Truth. His calm was infectious. “Yes. Yes, you’re right.”

Coburn smiles, slightly, for the first time.

“Yes, let’s do it as soon as possible.”

Jacob takes her hand and squeezes. “Good. Okay.”

Mr. Dreyfus relents impotently but with one last just-because protest, “Sandra, I really think that—” but she quiets him with a serene glance. Coburn’s look is imprinted on her now and she shows it to her husband with the same effect. Everything was going to be just fine. Looking to the resident and the neurologist, “Harry, Sam, if you all can take care of things here, there are several matters I have to attend to before evening rounds.” Never finish the meeting. Always let them know you are the busiest neurosurgeon in New York City.

Harry and Sam just look at each other as Coburn leaves and exchange exasperated smiles. He might as well have taken a bow as he left. They’d seen him walk this tightrope of consultation so many times it was like a show. Mrs. Dreyfus looks almost enchanted by the idea of surgery, her eyes lit up with the glow of a light at the end of some tunnel and the passion of Jacob Coburn.

Read the whole thread: The Memory Thief

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