I decided to visit the University of Siena, which was right near the Piazza del Campo—Sienese call it Il Campo for short—to see whether I could find more of what Ben had been working on. Nathaniel had recommended that I speak with a local archivist, Emilio Fabbri. It was too early when I got there, the doors locked and windows dark, but I could pass time in the Campo, along with half the population of the city.
The day was heating up by the time I reached the big piazza, so I stopped at a small shop to buy a bottle of fizzy lemonade. I drank it while sitting on a bench, watching the lines between the paving stones converge and bend in the heat. I counted the piazza’s nine sections—for the Council of Nine, i Noveschi—who ruled Siena during its medieval heyday. As I sat, my mind went still. The sounds around me intensified; high individual voices rang out against a background of lower rumbles. I felt the ground vibrating as children ran past me chasing pigeons, and I inhaled the pungent smell of garlic wafting from a trattoria that faced the piazza. And into that moment of pure receptive blankness came a sudden wave of profound, absolute panic. It passed quickly and left my heart pounding. Seconds later, the terror hit me again. I stood up, and the lemonade bottle slipped through my hand and shattered on the pavement. That’s when I saw the young girl a few feet away from me, alone in the crowd and white with fear. She looked up into my face, her dark eyes huge and brimming with tears.
“Dov’ è Mamma,” she wailed, throwing her head back. “Mamma, Mamma . . .”
In that moment I knew that it was not my own fear I felt, but hers. I grabbed the girl’s hand and looked desperately around the expanse of the Campo. At the other side of the piazza, under the awning of a souvenir shop where I’d bought postcards on my first day in Siena, stood a woman I’d never seen before. She had dark hair pulled back from a pale face, and her red dress was bright against the stone of the buildings behind her. The moment I saw this woman who should have been a stranger, all I wanted to do was run as hard as I could into her arms. And so we ran together hand in hand, the girl and I, both fueled by the same desire and knowledge, stumbling up the slope of the shell-shaped piazza, until we were looking into Mamma’s stricken face—me from above and her daughter from below. Mamma thanked me in a wild outpouring of Italian and tears and enveloped her daughter in a tight embrace. I stood frozen, watching them. She was back with her family, but no one could help me find mine. I didn’t have the energy left for the visit I’d planned to the university. I left the girl and her mother by the postcard rack and walked slowly home.
Back at the house, I sat at the kitchen table. I tried to re-create that blank feeling I’d had right before I’d found the lost girl, before her fear had taken root in my head. I’d had it before—in surgery. As soon as I’m scrubbed and gloved, my mind goes quiet and something else takes over. Looking back on all those surgical hours, I realized that when I operate, I am listening, and reacting to what I hear. And what I hear is the patient’s body telling me how things are going, because it knows I’m paying attention. I can feel the blood moving, hear the air entering and leaving the lungs, see the winding thick gray gyri of the brain being pushed aside by an invading tumor. I know where it is safe to cut, and I know when things go wrong.
When I’d written to Ben about the OR being intense, he’d made a joke about it. But I hadn’t been joking. At first, my extra sense had been a background hum, such a natural and useful extension of my work that I’d barely noticed it. That moment in the OR with Linney three years before, when I’d noticed a problem before the monitors did, was the first time my abilities had crossed the line. The ventricular tachycardia episode had been worse—my emotional response to a patient’s condition had overwhelmed me enough to interrupt my ability to work. And things kept happening, things I no longer told Linney. I was afraid to tell Ben, who might worry too much from too far away. While I was operating, I’d know a hidden blood vessel was leaking because I could feel it in my own head. I’d wake up sweating at 3:00 a.m. to realize a postop patient had a brewing infection before the nurses called with reports of fever. And now, after that moment in the piazza, that tendency had broken into the rest of my life, outside the confines of the operating room. How far could this empathy go? And would it take me with it?
I can’t help thinking that having been a twin, even so briefly, might have something to do with it. Maybe I feel what others are feeling because I’ve got an open edge where she used to be, and instead of having her at my side, buffering and shoring me up against the outside world, I absorb everything. Or maybe she is my window into other, because I knew, once, deeply, before I knew what it meant to know, how it is to be identical to someone else.
* * *
Ben witnessed the first time it happened, though neither of us realized what it was at the time. QUIET ZONE the sign read at the edge of the steep path leading up to the Cloisters, marking the entrance. Every Sunday Ben and I walked to the transplanted medieval abbey in Fort Tryon Park from our apartment in Washington Heights, on paths that opened to a view of the Hudson River through the trees. We entered through a doorway in the stone walls and up a steep dark winding staircase, then emerged into the sudden sun of the magical twelfth-century cloister garden, centered around a quiet fountain etched with lichen.
While we walked through the museum, Ben told me stories of knights, feudal lords, and the Annunciation—but the unicorn tapestries were always my favorite. This is probably true of all kids who visit the Cloisters—the hunt for a mythical creature beats paintings of a bunch of old dead saints any day. I’d sit in the gallery, staring at the intricate patterns of flowers woven into the background of the tapestries, imagining myself as the maiden who invited the unicorn to dip its horn in a woodland stream. When I was twelve, my brother decided I was old enough to hear the real story behind the tapestries, and I sat on a wooden bench at the side of the gallery listening in the high-ceilinged room.
Ben told me the story while I looked at the series of tapestries that told the story of the hunt for the unicorn: the hunters brandishing their weapons, the dogs sniffing out their quarry, the maiden who’d lured the unicorn to lay his head in her virginal lap. And near the end of the cycle, when I saw the unicorn’s limp body draped over the hunter’s horse, his white coat stained with new blood, I felt suddenly dizzy, and the sounds around me muffled. I smelled the sharp scent of horses, felt the bristling of a wiry mane under my hand, and heard the barking of hunting dogs. I saw dense forest undergrowth coming up to meet my face, then suddenly I was lying on the cold stone floor of the gallery, blinking up at Benjamin.