January 20, 2017

Inauguration Day – Early evening

On the drive from the barn up to my house in the hills, Maria follows me in her dinged-up silver Volvo, an urban warrior, with its telltale signs of knocking metal against metal for hard to find parking spots in D.C.  Her reflection in my rearview mirror has my near constant attention.  In it she appears miniaturized and horizontal and in realtime like on TV, the venue where she’d first captivated me.

While still in the parking lot at the stable, I’d scanned myself on the off chance an ’on call’ doctor might need me for an emergency.  Bruised a bit on the inside and sticky on the out,  I wasn’t so far gone from whiskey and smelling like sex in a barn that a hot shower, followed by two coffees with sugar and an egg salad sandwich, couldn’t straighten me out.

But I’d need an hour.

And I’d rather not, says the thrumming coming from between my legs that wants nothing at all to do with doctoring tonight.

Maria had been right earlier during our horseback ride.  No one in her Washington power circles would ever know me.  I had arrived only six months ago from Stanford Medical Center, where I’d been happy until the afternoon I’d slapped Jeanne across her face.

The longtime someone I’d thought surely would be my wife.

Wearing the red streak blooming across her cheek, Jeanne had sent daggers through her eyes at me, which I’d taken to mean – she’d expected an apology for slapping her for cheating.

That bit of my personal history I am hyper-secretive about, but Jeanne had followed the myth of greener pastures – taking off for her lover’s vineyard in Napa – and I’d been headhunted from coast to coast.

Taking a research position, as far away from her as possible,  I’d quietly slipped out of state with my horse and tack and no assault charges, and the needle had dropped on a different tune in Virginia, when the clown candidate, Donald Trump, had won his primary and I’d become obsessed with proving him insane.

I turn into my driveway and soon, Maria and I are trotting up the steps together with her overnight bag.

”I get the feeling there’s money to be made in brain surgery,” she says, following me into my spacious new home.

Inauguration Day

January 20, 2017

Inauguration Day

Northern Virginia –

Nightingale’s best friend, a silver dappled Morgan named Dev, belongs to a big-hearted East Indian woman, also a doctor, who thankfully shortened her traditional Hindu name to simply, Pat.  Her whole family, she had told me on the phone earlier in the week, was concerned for their safety. ”Being brown in America these days is frightening, Bette.  My son came home from school last week beaten and his backpack in pieces.  Some fool thought he was carrying a bomb!  Please take Dev out for a ride. I’m not leaving home on Inauguration Day.”

Other horse owners must’ve made similar decisions, because the barn is atypically empty for a Saturday.  Normally, horse owners arrive by eight and by nine the air is filled with clouds of dust from brushing.  Farriers are usually here trimming hooves and fitting horses for new shoes. Saddles and tack are being soaped and oiled, or buckled onto mounts ready to stretch their legs, but not today.

It’s eerily quiet at this end of the barn, where I saddle the horses and hum as an antidote for my own Inauguration Day blues.  I try but fail at remembering more than two verses of any song.  If I’m honest, there’s a dull aching at the base of neck and an anxiousness that is humping me like a feral dog.

All of this, very strange for me. Life and its attendant attractions going haywire doesn’t usually make me nervous.  Pissed off too quickly?  Yes. Those damn agents who wasted my time the other day absolutely irritated me, however; as a surgeon, I’m trained to keep a steady calm under pressure. But I’m no help to myself today.  I should go home and draw a hot bath and commence drinking  immediately, but Maria’s on her way.

Soon.  It should be soon.

Leaning back against the warmth of Nightingale’s flanks, I wonder how I would conduct a research study into the disruption of the psycho-neural patterning of Trump supporters. His rallies had enraged people, unleashing a public vulgarity in them that no person in their right mind would participate in yet, too many had costumed themselves as Hillary Haters and had screamed for her blood.

Was their mass indoctrination temporary?  Were they possessed only while in a crowd? Have significant numbers of Trump voters turned down their fever pitched outrage dials and reverted back to an uneasy state of dissatisfaction?  For months the poll number of undecided voters had hovered around 20%…until the Russian cyber attacks began.

Dateline:  January 15, 2017

Five Days Until Inauguration Day

Chapter Two – Missing Hours

This has become become a meditation exercise.

I’m staring at a doorknob.  Staring deeply at a doorknob.  I’m entering a spiral, going deeper into the spiral, following my breath…to escape my anger that’s been simmering for hours.

This doorknob has real meaning for me.  It is the doorknob on a closed door that I want to throw open.  Turning that knob would lead me to freedom and drop the curtain on this bad piece of  theater –starring the intercept team in dark suits — and this exasperating interlude would end.

I don’t consider myself a naive person.  So, how did this happen?

Days ago, I’d whispered into a comatose combat veteran’s ear that Donald Trump was crazy and I had some answers for the right people who wanted to get serious about this bullshit.  Did I expect anyone to show up?

No.  Never.

But they had shown up and I had taken them seriously.

During the drive over to the house with the doorknob I’d worked out a clear meeting agenda in my head.  Using the Socratic Method applied to the subject of brain science, I’d created a step by step process for people unfamiliar with neurology to follow. I had believed I was in possession of the golden keys to this meeting.

Standing before them in the main room of what I can only guess would be called a Safe House – a place for stashing people of interest until the heat has died down – I had delivered the following opening statement, but not in one of my power suits, not in one of my pristine lab coats, but in my riding attire of knee high boots and jodhpurs.  The team had nabbed me at my office after I’d returned from the barn.

During my presentation the agents had sat on a sofa and chairs and were dressed in nearly identical dark business suits.  Before beginning my statement, I’d decided not to mention how the swarm identity they were exhibiting would likely lead them straight to Groupthink whenever considering a case together.  Their cognitive problems would have to come later.  We had national security issues to tackle first, and so, I had begun.

Chapter One – Doctor Porter

Dateline: January 12, 2017

Eight Days until Inauguration Day –

At this time of the morning the drive from my home in Virginia to my suite of labs and offices near Langley is never congested.  The turn off for the massive CIA headquarters is miles before my own exit off the small highway that winds its way past horse farms and turn-of-the-century Victorian homes surrounded by ancient oak trees and pastoral orchards.  I crack the car window open a few inches and inhale the woodsy scents of the fields still frosty in early January.  The chilly breeze lifts the dark curls off my left shoulder and before I reach for the radio – to hear the first news of the day – I stop myself and curl my fingers tighter around the steering wheel instead.

The news I fear has been irrevocably changed by the election of Donald Trump, and in defense of my sanity I just cannot listen to another one of Trump’s tweets read aloud.  On my drive to work I used to enjoy morning radio programs, but they’ve devolved into an implausible search for coherent message and meaning inside the circus tent of Trumpworld.  Where political commentators mimic shamans, who look for mystical signs in the entrails of dead baboons, and American journalists search for policy in Donald Trump’s Twitter account.  It’s been an astonishing twelve months to live through and once again, it’s January.

Nevertheless, as infuriating as it has been, each day I give our national dilemma some thought and I have my own impossibly complicated work to pay attention to.  How to remedy the unimaginable brain damage of my patients?  That’s what waiting for me at my office.  Do I try a complicated system of electrical micro-pulses I’ve designed for the combat vet lying in a vegetative state?  How do I treat the woman whose car crash has left her unable to speak or move her legs?  These are but two, on my long list of responsibilities, and that’s before I even delve into the neuroscience research technology I’ve committed to R & D.

My Audi speeds by the icy brown leaves of winter, so stuck and frozen together on the roadside they barely stir an inch as I drive past.  So, I ask my silent radio, ”Who has the more impossible task?  You as political pundits trying to divine the truth in a tweet, or me as a brain surgeon!?”