Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain Read Free

grew beneath his floorboards and the mold on the bread left out for the pigs in the street. He could hear the sigh of his bedclothes, the whisper of the words in his notebooks, the echo of clanging saucers and spoons he’d put away hours before. When he ran his fingers through his hair, he could almost feel his brain, as if the organ were raw and exposed. He touched his scalp, gently rubbed. Since arriving in the colony, he hadexperienced four stupors, all of which descended upon him at home. Only time stood between him and another public bout of illness, or worse, another incident.
    â€œMother,” he said, but she was now sleeping, her head tucked close to her chest, her fingers splayed over bent knees. She was sitting, back pressed to the wall. Her shadow, hunched and dark, could belong to a demon, and on the full moon, Olaf thought it might.
    â€œMother,” he said again. He wanted her to open her eyes and say that she would recover. He prayed — the words running fast through his head — that sense and sanity would return to carry away his troubles. But his mother only smiled, her lips an empty arc. “I must attend to my patients,” he said, and if she heard, she did not respond.
    H IS FEET HEAVY as he strolled along Smits Vly to visit Farmer Janssen’s cow, Olaf worried that he had not taken enough rest before departing for his rounds. The dirt road was soft after the late-summer thundershowers. The air smelled of sheep dung and ripening apples. He paused to rifle through his medicine bag, pulling out a dented tin of tobacco. A teaspoon or two between his cheek and jaw would do the trick — raise his spirits, dispel his dread. Beside the road, a wolf, recently shot and left to decompose as a warning to his kin, caught his eye. If he succeeded insaving the cow, he could always take the wolf head back to the hospital for the evening’s studies.
    The cow, however, did not survive. She was dead upon his arrival.
    â€œNothing we can do for her now,” Janssen said, accepting Olaf’s sympathetic hand.
    â€œShe has some meat on her,” Olaf noted and, proffering his usual excuse, that his mother made a fine stew from the brains of the cow, offered to buy the head. He could leave it on the street in front of his next patient’s home — no one would steal it — and then take it to the hospital, where he could saw it apart.
    â€œYou shall have it,” Janssen said, removing his ax from the stable wall.
    O LAF AND THE COW head arrived at the hospital just before nine, when the inns and taverns closed their doors, and the denizens of New Amsterdam abandoned their empty glasses and cards and backgammon games to return home to bed or a nightcap of West Indian rum. Had he arrived at the iron-braced door any later, he would have had to wait for the streets to clear before he stepped into the hospital. But as long as he entered before the mandated closing time, he could confidently assume he’d passed unobserved.
    Inside, he set the head on the plank floor and felt fora candle and tinderbox. Even in the moonlight that crept through the shuttered hospital windows, Olaf could discern that Dr. Johannes le Sueur had left the space in disarray, abandoning pints of urine on the central table and leaving a broken glass and its pungent contents spilled on the floor. Why could his colleague not attend to his own debris? As he lit the candle and then the gas lamp and set to work with the broom, anger and dismay coursed through his muscles.
    He had to rest for a moment, breathe deeply and exhale before he could take up his saw. He bit his tongue so pain would keep him focused. He should leave the work for tomorrow morning, early, when he felt rested; he should return home, to his mother, who must be hungry. But the thought of his mother, her hands still tied, her wide eyes gazing into his, forced his hand. She was failing.
    Bone crumbled beneath his saw as the pale mass of