The Portuguese Neurologist Visits Me In My Sleep

The Portuguese Neurologist Visits Me In My Sleep // Sloan Drechsel

The scrawny towns of the South are flanked on each side by even scrawnier driveways lined up on the main drag. When I get out beyond those, though, I understand the human impulse to create something out of nothing. I see these defenseless grasslands, this gaping countryside, and I think, shouldn’t there be something to prowl this? (A live scarecrow, or at the very least some four-legged beast). Should there not be a reason for some tools to go missing from a shed every so often, or for the night terrors of little children nearby every few years? The signs from decrepit churches and shops fallen into disrepair seem to raise their eyebrows at me: saying, is it enough to be here or must we also be policed?

I have a few conspiracies about my own existence. I think that it rains every other Tuesday in this state like clockwork. I think when I was small my mother worried aloud too much. I think if any urban legend is real it’s gotta be Mothman. I think that maybe Coca-Cola is poisoning us slowly, but like, on purpose. (Still nailing down the details of this one). I think the lead singer of one of my favorite bands is totally a serial killer. I think that sometimes, doctors visit me in my sleep and lobotomize me.

The first lobotomy performed in the United States took place in 1936. The idea, introduced by a Portuguese neurologist named António Eras Moniz, was that chronically sad or otherwise problematic people had “closed” or “fixed” circuits in their brains, and the solution to help these sufferers was to sever these connections.

The voice of the neurologist is pleasant. I guess this would mean that I profess to believe in ghosts, but does the presence of the inventor ever leave his invention? A string master retains his occupation even if, out from underneath him, the puppet begins to walk of its own accord.

It is softer than most men’s voices I am used to hearing. He tells me about the third time the bastard policemen arrested him, back when he was serving as the Dean of the Medical School at the University of Lisbon. He had stopped police from settling a student protest. His first two arrests saw him jailed for protesting.

Sometimes I feel like weeping with him. I looked on his Wikipedia page once and found out that the secondary school he attended in the early 1920s had burned to the ground in a forest fire just over two years ago. I have no comprehension of what it is like to exist long after the relics of your life decay. He talks a lot about the beauty of his homeland. I look up photos of his parish on Google Images. I agree. (It is beautiful. It looks like a wonderful small Portuguese town that I would like to move to with a lover and do nothing but read books all day).

The neurologist talks to me while his team saws open my head. This is not the technique that was used in the real world, but it is what the ghosts use. More Halloween potential, I guess. The procedure is painless. I know that they saw off just the top so that a circular mass of skin and its connected hair hits the ground. But by that point I am always back asleep.

I barely remember it in the morning. By that hour I am always more preoccupied by the lack. (Of feeling, of familiarity). Why do the tears take so long to come? Why do my arms seem longer, or are my hands just farther from my eyes or are my eyes just farther back into my skull? And suddenly they are closer again and I doubt that I even knew what I was talking about.

What about my ears? Why do they only hear such fowl things? I can see the mouths of others moving, saying even compliments and celebratory news, and I think: what on earth are they saying? Any food I suggest to my stomach sounds like it will all taste white. (So I do not eat, until I am hungry enough to be tempted by sugar). (Sugar).

The most unbearable thing about this procedure is how the body feels afterward. I’ve communicated this issue to the neurologist. It mopes, it is heavy, it is sleepy constantly. Its mouth cannot help itself- either it will go on confessing its life’s theses or its eulogy draft, or it will stay so still that one wonders if my mouth is just, like a sticker, beginning to lose its ability to hold itself to my face.

I tell the neurologist that I think the only positive about this is the neck. The neck feels better. It is easier to look around and squint. I tell the neurologist that I would not like to have this done again, that it hurts me. I tell the neurologist that I would perhaps give anything for a drug instead, a small pill to swallow neatly. I tell the neurologist that I don’t appreciate his team barging in periodically, snipping at my brain while I dream. The neurologist tells me that, unfortunately, treatment will continue until I show an improvement in symptoms.

The amount they come to see me depends on the month. Sometimes they do not come at all. Sometimes they come so frequently that I am reduced to wondering if I have not lied to you, my reader. Earlier I stated that I have no comprehension of what it is like to exist long after the relics of your life decay. I am at times forced to wonder if this is not correct, if the neurologist and I are not at times more similar than I would like.