Possession by Charley Burlock
The summer after eighth grade in 2012, I began working at a mental hospital at the very top of a very tall hill in San Francisco. I had gotten the job—the internship—because my mother was, at the time, a patient of a doctor who practiced there. Being a good doctor, or specifically, being a good psychiatrist, requires a curious and rare balance of empathy and detachment, a balance this doctor did not possess.
Case in point: when your patient—in the grips of a particularly psychotic bout of mania—mentions that her daughter has no plans for the summer and an interest in psychology, it is in no one’s best interest to offer that daughter a position down the hall that you made up on the spot.
Now, from a safe distance, I say that I was terrified. In the moment, I was vengeful.
An emerging biological technique known as optogenetics sparked my psychiatric ambitions. I learned about this online while my mother was gone, which she was often between my seventh and tenth grade: a brief, self-contained, and still inexplicable period when her brain revolted against her. “Bipolar” is the closest word we have for what went wrong and the one that has dogged her since, a handful of years overriding a lifetime of general sanity. She was gone to hospitals, of course, but also to her own self-appointed missions. Mania doesn’t change a person as much as we pretend it does. It merely arms the individual with the belief that they can actually achieve everything they set their mind to, and worse, that they should.
The dreams that my mother’s amplified mind revealed were strange, tender, and ambitious. She embarked on a mission to change every street sign in the city to a font that (she presumed) would be more legible for dyslexics like herself, and me. She wanted to write poems and did. She had always wanted me to eat more—I was a skinny kid with a precocious interest in carbs and thigh gaps—but now she felt empowered to make me, leaving urgent notes in my lunch box and presenting me with afterschool PSA videos featuring dead girls with articulated ribs. She embarked on numerous missions to bring various politicians to power, good men and real people, who spoke to her and her alone through street signs, jewelry, and television static.
For the first time in her own eyes, my mother was a very important woman. Prior to her mania, she had only been very important to me. Now, from a safe distance, I say that I was terrified. In the moment, I was vengeful.
One night, after coming home to find half my closet missing and my mother nowhere to be found—the former a casualty of one of her spirited cleaning purges, the latter anyone’s guess—I sat with wet hair in the dull glow of the family computer. I typed: bipolar cure into the Google search bar. I typed: bipolar cure, experimental. I typed: electroshock therapy. My fingers hovered over the bruised keys until, finally, I asked the internet for what I really wanted. I typed: mind control— the cursor beat once, twice — scientific.
From Ed Boyden, an optogeneticist from MIT with a treasure-trove of well-animated YouTube videos, I learned that optogenetics involves harvesting genes from single-celled green algae and inserting them into mammalian neurons—usually in mice, which are small, cheap, and easy to abuse. All mammals’ brains run on electricity; this algae’s gene produces proteins that produce electricity in response to light. Scientists with transition lens glasses and TED Talks have figured out how to infect neurons with genetic codes that are not their own. These men have even figured out how to selectively deliver the light-converting gene to specific types of neurons responsible for specific types of thought patterns, behaviors, diseases, and desires. Shining blue light on brain cells infected with this green algae will release an electrical signal, mirroring a natural neural firing. With the flash of a laser and the flip of a switch, the mind bends to electrical submission.
On YouTube, I watched mesmerized as mice, with tendrils of flashing fiberoptic cables growing out of furry skulls, went abruptly violent and hungry. Under the pulsing glow, the “free moving mammals” would suddenly attack other mice, attack inanimate objects, try to kill what is not alive and eat what is not food. They would forget fears they learned through pain. They would, if uninterrupted, eat themselves to death.
But when the blue-lit helmet extinguished, the mouse would drop the gnawed bottle cap or scurry away from the bowl of protein pellets and become a mouse again: sniffing and prodding according to the currents of its own genetics.
The miracle of optogenetics, the potential it offered for mothers like mine, was precise control. My internet neuroscientists spoke of the human brain as a possession, rather than the basis, of the self. I loved them for it. In their eyes, we are not victim to the whims and maladies of a rogue piece of gray meat— we are proprietors of a skull-bound computer, one that can be programmed to best suit our interests.
I watched Ed Boyden pace back and forth in his YouTube box, speaking with genuine pathos about the billions of people suffering from brain disorders: schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression, addiction. While medication has offered some relief to those who tend to their damaged neural property, it merely alleviates the symptoms, leaving the defective hardware untouched. Electrical stimulation—implants and shock treatments—is the psychiatric equivalent to trying to type with oven mitts, slamming whole brain regions to get at a single misbehaving species of neuron, a single key. With optogenetics, we are finally learning how to hunt-and-peck. Control, control, control, Boyden promised, reciting the word with all the intimacy and faith of catechism.
I heard the garage door groan and my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. She flipped on the hallway light. I shut down the desktop.
My work at the hospital did not involve implanting fiberoptic cables into mouse skulls and illuminating mutated neurons to determine how those neurons impacted behavior. It involved sitting in a windowless, nine-by-nine-foot room that used to be padded and watching Mean Girls to determine how long it took to watch Mean Girls. The doctor wanted to use the film for an outpatient educational program on post-traumatic growth and wished to know how long it would take the patient-students to watch.
“Couldn’t you just look up the run time?” I asked.
“The runtime doesn’t account for how long the movie takes to watch.” Like if you need to use the bathroom or get a glass of water or if you can’t get your TV to switch to HDMI mode or the sound isn’t working or Lindsey Lohan is talking in Mandarin or something.
So I watched the film on the ancient hospital computer with my iPhone timer running and, when it came out even with the official runtime, added fifteen minutes and sent my findings to the doctor who thanked me profusely and told me to poke around Google and read about psychological studies that I found interesting. The position was unpaid.
By my second week, the doctor began populating the intern “office” with an unsteady stream of underoccupied youths and semi-youths. There was Paul, a recent high school graduate with scampering eyes and vampiric skin. There was Max, a shy teen from the suburbs, and deeper into the summer, Natasha, a thirty-something recovering addict who was beautiful in a fully-realized-woman way that both thrilled and repulsed me.
Then there was Taylor. Taylor who always had wet hair. Taylor who had not been newly hired, but merely relocated to the unpadded room from some other fluorescent gutter of the institution, who had lurked around the hospital for years before my arrival making coffee and copies, not an official intern but a ghost of bureaucratic limbo: a family friend of the doctor, I assumed, or another child of a patient— perhaps a patient himself—for whom hospital staff scrounged up odd jobs and made allowances.
Taylor who had the square jaw and concave cheeks of a mountain lion but none of the bulk: sharp bones under a lanky frame—hungry. Taylor with his dirty blonde hair and an Adam’s apple that let you know when he swallowed. Taylor, who had grown up alongside the teenaged sons of other rich expats in Japan, spinning exhales of marijuana into tornados on their black granite countertops and posting the videos on YouTube. Taylor, who would show us the videos. Taylor who called himself twenty-five but who might have been older, the type of stalled man who was forever outraged at time for continuing to cleave him further from the golden boy he no longer was but still privately idolized. Taylor, whose body spray filled the nine-by-nine-foot room, its astringent imitation of pine tangling in the crowded air with the smell of his mother’s expensive laundry detergent, the smell of his sweat and shampoo—a smell I can still conjure now, older than he was then. Taylor, who would teach me, at fourteen, what it meant to own a body.
We took lunch in the hospital food court on Parnassus. While my motley, rotating, cohort of unpaid interns ate Italian BMTs I gorged myself on optogenetic factoids, with an orange opaque Jamba Juice straw in my mouth, sucking the same sip of Mango-a-Go-Go up and down, unswallowing, until lunch was over and my smoothie was a melted sludge of saliva and sugar.
I had starved myself, casually and intermittently, throughout my childhood, but a few weeks before starting work at the mental hospital—with high school waxing, my prepubescent metabolism waning, and my body rapidly growing—I made the decision to cultivate my hunger into a proper disorder. I stood, naked in June, before my parents’ full-length mirror and ran a diagnostic assessment. I wanted to be popular my freshman year, which meant that I had to be beautiful which meant I had to be, in some way, exceptional. I had brown hair that my mother called chestnut, adored, and forbade me from dyeing the buttery blonde of Wiley Wadsworth, who sat at the back of the school bus, each day, on a different eighth-grade boy’s lap. According to a Seventeen magazine quiz, my body type was “carrot.” Though I spent evenings feverishly humping the air under the tutelage of Kardashian-assed blogilates instructors, dousing my chest in stimulating tea tree oil, and feasting on Luna Bars (rumored to contain enough soy-based estrogen to turn me into a tweenaged Jessica Rabbit), I was making no marked progress towards “peanut.” Surgery was not an option as my body was not yet legally mine. Thinness was the only path to physical extremity within my jurisdiction. I wanted to make myself small enough that strangers would look at the space between my thighs with fear and desire. I wanted to make myself small enough to be seen.
Online, there were plenty of guides: The ABC (Anorexia BootCamp) diet provided a fifty-day calendar and daily calorie limit, ranging from zero to eight hundred. The Celery Diet was a diet of only celery. The Rainbow Diet assigned colors to days of the week. You were to only eat foods that shared a color with the day: peeled apples for lunch on Monday (white), a banana for breakfast on Tuesday (yellow), a quartered orange on Thursday (self-explanatory), a half cup of strawberries and a bell pepper for dinner on Friday (red) and a weekend of green beans and blueberries. Wednesdays were fast days. You could, in theory, eat any food as long as it matched the assigned color of the day.
I remember how Taylor told me the first day we met that I looked ‘legal.’
Between cracks in my iPhone screen and over the food court din of nurse clogs and iced beverages, I learned that the scientists were not content with their blue-lit algae-infused, electrically-operated mouse brains. They wanted a whole spectrum of influence. And they had found it— in the soda lakes of Egypt and Kenya, in the brackish ponds that gnaw at the rind of San Francisco’s Bay, in the human digestive system: various species of Archaea, salt hungry, single-celled, and responsive to new colors. While blue light could turn on neurons, these Archaean genes, sliced and fed into foreign brains, could, under strobes of green and yellow, turn neurons off. The scientists were thrilled. I was thrilled with them. We no longer had to guess at the function of vast swaths of the mind by waiting for strokes or impalements. We could silence individual neurons ourselves. With these targeted, systemic deprivations, the brain became suddenly visible, suddenly captive.
I remember how Taylor told me the first day we met that I looked “legal,” though I can’t imagine he used that word until later, until we were friends.
And we were friends. Shortly after the doctor shuffled him into the intern office and instructed him to shake hands with me and the other interns, Taylor had an idea. The doctor had left, and the four of us veteran interns had relaxed back into our numb scrolling of Psychology Today. But Taylor, who had brought his own Macbook, pounded a metronome with the spacebar, bored. When this elicited no response, he snapped his laptop shut, clambered up from the ground (there weren’t enough chairs for all of us at once) and began unpinning the detritus from the office corkboard: a three-year-old pizza receipt with the subtotal circled thrice in red, glossy brochures on self-harm and bulimia, a handwritten note defining the emergency loudspeaker codes (code gray for patient “elopement,” code yellow for bomb threat and so on), expired coupons. He told us to fill the board with caricature drawings of each other, doling out cheap pens and printer paper.
Natasha drew Paul as a block head balanced on a penguin suit, while I drew her in the porny style of Bratz dolls, with feline eyes and puffed lips. And Taylor drew me: his eyes washing over my form, crook by crook. Every so often, he would glance up from his paper and meet my gaze before flashing back down to his work, grinning privately as he rubbed with the pink nub of his eraser— disappearing a body I hadn’t had the chance, yet, to see.
The rest of us had already tacked each other to the board and embarked on a collective BuzzFeed personality quiz when Taylor finally dropped his pencil to the desk. I looked up at the sound of wood on plastic.
“Let me see!”
“No,” he told me grinning, “this one’s for me.”
He folded the drawing carefully, smaller than it needed to be, and slid it into his pants pocket.
Midway through the summer, the blur of alien energy that had taken up residence in my mother’s familiar body suddenly went still. While manic, she had seemed to feel the whole world belonged to her, was her responsibility. I would wake up to find the contents of my school bag rearranged according to her organizational preference, every inch of the attic scrubbed at predawn, my bathroom papered with dozens of copies of newly printed “house rules” and duct tape. She confided in strangers. She confided secrets that were not her own. She was borderless. She owned the house. Then, the house owned her. My mother’s room became a tomb, door closed, shades drawn.
Taylor wasn’t the first adult to notice my disordered eating, but he was the first person whose noticing I coveted.
A hideous relief washed over me, knowing that she was still and contained—that my life was once again mine. I no longer bothered to rub mayo over a clean plate, rumple a new paper towel, and leave evidence of a meal uneaten in her kitchen sink. I did not trouble myself with cooking up stories of crispy Japanese crepes purchased and consumed on my way back from the bus stop, quesadillas wet with fat and devoured in the early evening with friends she had never heard of, friends, I told her, I had made at work. In my mother’s chemical absence, I indulged in unmediated starvation. And I texted Taylor.
To Taylor, I was dangerous; he told me so. It was dangerous how old I looked, how cute I was, how thin I was getting. It was a good thing I didn’t know how to flirt, otherwise, I would be too dangerous. Actually, he might have said, “too powerful,” but to me, danger was power and power was control and I was starving for it.
Taylor wasn’t the first adult to notice my disordered eating, but he was the first person whose noticing I coveted. Prior to meeting him, I had understood my systematized hunger as an ugly, necessary route towards beauty. Reflected in his pupils, the route itself became beautiful. My skipped lunches captured his attention, made him call me pretty and plead. I would wake up and fall asleep to my phone buzzing with concern—promise me you’ll eat dinner 2nite?—his attention turning himself into a savior and me into something worth saving. His eyes, caught on my clavicle, were huge, anxious, and aroused.
I began to see the outline of lessons that I came to learn later, through age and repetition: that deprivation could be its own type of extraordinary. That self-destruction could turn a girl into a spectacle. That some men will always want a spectacle more than a woman.
I knew he was dangerous too. When he texted me: come over on weekends, I texted: no. I texted: u could be a cereal killer lol. I met him in public.
After blue, yellow, and green, my neuroscientists made a fresh discovery: red. A single artificial gene, a Frankenstein’s monster made from bits of over one hundred different species of algae, can force mice to submit to crimson light. Red has the longest wavelength on the visible spectrum; it can penetrate skin, fat, bone, and blood better than any other color. So well, in fact, that it can pass through an intact skull, free of fiberoptic cables. Researchers at Columbia filled a tube with a mutated mouse and a red glow, turning off and on its neurons with external LEDs. They proved that they could arouse the brain and amplify behaviors from the outside.
On weekends, I spent hours in these internet rabbit holes with my phone on my lap, willing an incoming text for which my answer was always, automatically yes: u free?
Getting ready to see Taylor, to be seen by Taylor, took hours. I preened before the mirror, shaved my legs even when I planned to wear jeans, avoided water for fear of bloating. In some ways, I was constantly getting ready for him. I conjured his camo-green eyes as I jogged through the Presidio each evening, my vision going staticky at the edges with dizziness and exertion. I imagined his mouth around the words, “you’ve lost more weight” as I sucked on an ice cube for breakfast. I imagined him waiting four years for me, us getting married on my eighteenth birthday, me wearing white and meaning it.
We hung out mostly on playgrounds. He smoked and told me he would kill me if I ever started, that I would gain back whatever weight they might help me lose but I would never gain back my healthy lungs or my mind, unpossessed by craving.
Once, as we sat on a moored swing set, my toe digging a whirlpool into the woodchips, he told me plainly and without preamble that he knew I was insecure about my boobs. I don’t know how he knew this. I knew I had never mentioned them to him or anyone else. But he told me not to worry, “you’ll be grateful for them when you’re older and everyone else is saggy.”
I turned crimson, I’m sure, but I also swelled with an ambivalent awe. How had he penetrated so deep into the pink folds of my brain without my permission? How had he seen so much of my body through my clothes?
My mother abandoned her missions, but she did not abandon me. Though she rarely had the energy to feed herself, she kept our fridge stocked with pudding cups and Newman’s Own lemonade—treats that I begged for in childhood and would toss, expired and unopened when she was out of sight, resting off a grocery store visit that left her trembling with anxiety and depleted for days. As my body shrank, her terror grew—compounded, no doubt, by her own powerlessness and my frightful will. She missed birthday parties and funerals of people she loved, but kept monthly appointments for me to be weighed at my pediatrician and pursued expert referrals. If she had been a different mother, I might have put up a fight, but she had so little fight left to give that it didn’t seem worth it.
In late July, my mother picked me up from Eleanor James’ slumber birthday party and drove me to the mental hospital on the very top of a very tall hill. We entered through a door I didn’t enter through for work, a whole separate building. Still, I was scared I might see the doctor. Still, I hoped Taylor would see me.
A peppy nurse made me step on the scale backward—“we’re taking blind weight today”—and answer a series of questions with gloating lies. No, I had never stuck my fingers down my throat, counted my calories, felt out of control when I ate. What’s a laxative? Why would I want to make myself poop? My mother cradled her forehead. I was having fun.
“I know I’m thin,” I explained, eyes widened in faux confusion, “but I’m growing fast. I’m sure my body will catch up soon.”
“Do you think you’re beautiful?”
The question felt irrelevant, subjective, Hallmark-ian, and cruel. I looked at my mother for help. She was looking at the Styrofoam paneled ceiling, unseeing, her neck slack as a shot swan. She was sick and looked it: gray-skinned and mournfully thin.
“No,” I told the nurse, “I do not think I am beautiful. But that is not the same thing as thinking I am fat.”
I had meant it as a slap, directed, generally, at my mirror of a mother—insulting her appearance and undermining her perception of my disorder in one stroke. It cut my own ears with an unnoticed shard of truth. The nurse checked my answer as a box, but I couldn’t see which one.
After Ed Boyden finished his TED Talk, “A Light Switch for Neurons,” a taller, older man rose from the audience to the spotlight. He had the same Caucasian-colored microphone floating on a wire before his face, so I assume he was an official part of the production. “Some of this stuff is a little dense,” he told the crowd he had just separated himself from. The crowd laughed.
The man heard Ed Boyden explain that we could now control the brain in two colors, blue for on, yellow for off. (The presentation took place in 2011; we hadn’t yet made it to red). This makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code, is that correct? That is correct, Boyden nodded. Blue light is a one, yellow light is more or less a zero.
“And in theory, that means that everything a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches—you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros.” Sure. We are hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes drive which behaviors, thoughts, and feelings and use that to understand more about the brain.
“Does that mean that someday you could download memories and maybe upload them?” Well, that’s something we’re starting to work on very hard. We’re in the process of tiling the brain with recording elements so we can record the information and compute what the brain needs, augmenting its information processing.
The man thanked the scientist. The crowd cheered again. The lights dimmed. In the dark of the auditorium, neurons crackled, yet unpossessed.
Every time I watch this video, I am struck by the articles: the brain, not our brain. Augmenting its information, not ourselves. Every time, I think of a snake eating its tail and what’s left, behind and full, after the meal is complete.
A week before I started high school, Taylor and I took a walk. I wore a waffle-knit Hollister t-shirt—so thin, tight, and gray you could see the rattle of my sternum with each inhale. We met at Alta Plaza Park, in the belly of a play structure. Taylor asked if I had told any of my friends about him. I told him no. He nodded and called me smart. It felt different than when he called me beautiful, but it also felt the same.
We walked down the hill of Pacific Avenue, past the mansions, towards the Bay. He brought me to an ice cream shop and watched me molest my cuticles bloody as we waited in line.
He asked me, please. He told me to do it for him.
I recognized something that I would come to know in the boys that followed, although I did not yet recognize that there would be boys to follow him. I recognized that giving people who wanted you things that they wanted and you didn’t gave you a strange, precise, and incomplete control. I ordered the dessert.
I ordered a medium. I did not order a sorbet. I got something with uncooked pastries and fudge swirled in it. I asked for additional chocolate chips and one spoon. He came after me, ordering nothing and paying. We left together, under the trilling customer bell and into the fog. We walked until we could not walk any further, until land gave way to sea and we sat, our legs dangling off the wharf, his hand on my back. I stirred my ice cream to soup and wondered what my spine felt like from the outside. I stirred more.
Soon, his hand had crept under the back of my shirt—skin against skin but still low enough to be safe. Soon, my hands were sticky and brown. I’m not totally sure how I made such a mess. I felt like a child, a loose toddler at a birthday party. I felt fat, dumb, insane, and innocent in a way that was a long way from sexy. Taylor noticed immediately and peeled off his sweater.
“Here, you can wipe them on this,” he held out the white cashmere. I had never worn cashmere, but I knew the word. I had never seen anything that looked so soft.
“I’m not going to wipe chocolate on your sweater,” I giggled. He did not giggle. He insisted.
“Don’t be stubborn. Wipe your hands.” I tried to imagine what it would feel like to reach into those downy folds, still warm from his body, and pull the fabric over each of my ice-creamed fingers until I was clean, and it was ruined.
“No,” I said, firmer. He laughed and grabbed my wrist. I jolted to my feet and pulled myself free of his grasp. He looked up at me, standing taller than him for the first time. His smile froze, then melted.
I walked alone back up the wharf and down onto the shore, balancing on rows of algae-mossed rocks struck through with miscellaneous poles of rusted steel. They reminded me of unbrushed teeth under braces, a mouth in ruins. I reached the water and submerged my fists. The bay was shocking, but I kept my hands under until all the chocolate had lapped out to sea. Then I returned to Taylor.
He had lit a cigarette and did not turn to face me when I sat back beside him. Finally, he told me he was cold, he was going home, I should come with him. For a few blocks, I did, trailing him back up the mammoth hill we had just descended. But I stopped before I went too far. I told him that I had forgotten an appointment. I walked back the way I had come. Watching the sea expand, I became aware of how chilled I was and weak I felt; walking was work for me then. When I was sure I was out of Taylor’ sight, I called my mom. She answered. She drove me home.
*Note: Names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.
