Petit Mal

Dr. Margaux Levesque's consulting room at the Pitie-Salpetriere was deliberately bare — no diplomas on the walls, no family photographs on the desk, nothing that might distract from the central transaction of neurology, which is the attempt to understand another person's interior landscape using only the crude instruments of language and observation. She had learned early in her career that the brain resists being known the way a river resists being mapped: you can chart its course, but you cannot capture its current.

Thomas Beaumont arrived twenty minutes early for his first appointment, which told Margaux everything and nothing. He was thirty-four, a translator of German literature, and he had been experiencing absence seizures — petit mal, the old terminology that she privately preferred for its poetic accuracy — since the age of nineteen. He described them with the precision of a man accustomed to finding exact equivalents for imprecise things: a brief departure, he said, as though he were a train leaving a station without announcing its destination. Three to ten seconds of absence, during which the world continued without him and he continued without the world.

She ordered an EEG and watched the tracings scroll across the screen like a seismograph recording an earthquake visible only to the instruments. His brain produced spike-and-wave discharges of textbook clarity —three-per-second bursts that lit up the temporal lobes like a city seen from an aircraft at night. Beautiful, she thought, and immediately chastised herself, because beauty is not a clinical category, and the patterns she found aesthetically compelling were, for the man sitting in her examination chair with electrodes glued to his scalp, a form of involuntary exile from his own consciousness.