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By Root 1395 0

But Phyllida’s visit had changed that. Leonard now understood where Madeleine’s peculiarities came from: why she said “rum” for “room”; why she liked Worcestershire sauce; why she believed that sleeping with the windows open, even on freezing nights, was healthy. The Bankheads weren’t open-window types. They preferred the windows closed and the shades drawn. Madeleine was pro-sunlight and anti-dust; she was for spring cleaning, for beating rugs over porch railings, for keeping your house or apartment as free of cobwebs and grime as you kept your mind free of indecision or gloomy rumination. The confident way Madeleine drove (she often insisted that athletes made better drivers) bespoke a simple faith in herself that Leonard, for all his intelligence and originality of mind, didn’t have. You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope. Leonard wasn’t giving up on it. Not yet.

Leaning forward, he opened the glove compartment and searched through the tapes, taking out a Joan Armatrading cassette. He put it in.

“This in no way signals approval on my part,” he said.

“I love this tape!” Madeleine said, predictably, endearingly. “Turn it up!”

The late-autumn trees were bare as they came into Boston. Along the Charles, joggers were wearing sweatpants and hoodies, exhaling vapor.

Leonard was forty-five minutes early for his appointment. Instead of going inside the hospital, he walked into a nearby park. The park was in about the same shape he was. The bench he sat on looked as though beavers had gnawed on it. Ten yards away, a statue of a Minuteman, spray-painted with graffiti, rose from the weedy grass. With their flint-lock rifles, the Minutemen had fought for liberty and won. If they’d been on lithium, though, they wouldn’t have been Minutemen. They would have been Fifteen-minutemen, or Half-hour-men. They would have been slow to get their rifles loaded and arrive on the battlefield, and by then the British would have won.

At eleven o’clock, Leonard had gone into the hospital to make his case to Perlmann.

“O.K., you stopped taking your lithium on purpose. But the question is, why did you do that?”

“Because I was sick of it. I was sick of how it made me feel.”

“Which was how?”

“Dumb. Slow. Half-alive.”

“Depressed?”

“Yes,” Leonard allowed.

Perlmann paused to smile. He put a hand on top of his bald head as though to contain a brilliant insight. “You felt horrible before you stopped taking your lithium. And that’s the dose you want me to put you back on.”

“Dr. Perlmann, I’ve been on this new higher dose for five months now. And I’ve been suffering side effects way worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. What I’m saying is that I feel like I’m being slowly poisoned.”

“And I’m saying, as your psychiatrist, that if that were the case we would see evidence of it in your blood work. Nothing that you’ve described about your side effects sounds out of the ordinary. I would have liked to see them lessening more than they have, but sometimes it takes longer. For your size and weight, eighteen hundred milligrams is not that high. Now, I’m willing to consider lowering your dose at some point. I’m open to it. But the reality is that you’re a relatively new patient of mine. I have to evaluate your case in light of that.”

“So by coming to see you I put myself in the back of the line again.”

“Wrong metaphor. There isn’t a line.”

“Just a closed door then. Just Joseph K. trying to get into the castle.”

“Leonard, I’m not a literary critic. I’m a psychiatrist. I’ll leave the comparisons to you.”

By the time Leonard rode the elevator down to the hospital lobby he felt exhausted from arguing and pleading. Despite the danger of encountering sick children and getting even more depressed, he ducked into the cafeteria for a coffee and a bear claw. He bought a newspaper and read it cover to