From Dr. Ehirllimbal's private journal—

July 22, 1954: My mother used to press leaves. I would find them in my father's heavy medical journals. This may be the true source of my fascination—unrealized, unspoken, these many years. How many years did I spend poring over those diagrams, those texts, trying to understand the knowledge held within? How many years did I delicately brush those flattened shapes aside? I was always careful to leave the leaves where I found them—I had learned by then the volcanic nature of my mother's anger—and I did not know if the locations of the leaves were specific or random.

Random, of course. I can be honest with that assessment now. My father knew of her dementia, though it did not yet have a name. He knew the manner in which her brain malfunctioned. He never spoke of it to me. Not after she died. Not after I went to school, and learned the specifics of her condition—learned its name and how it could have been treated. We never spoke of it.

I wonder if there were still leaves in the books when he sold them. Did he remember they were there, and couldn't bear to page through all those texts in order to empty them of the dried leaves?

I remember the anatomy book. One of the first editions. A massive book, almost too much for a boy of eight to handle. I would drag it off its low shelf and crouch down next to it, turning the pages with the utmost care. My mother hid pansies and daffodils among the diagrams of the skeletal structure. She dotted the technical discussions of the musculature with peonies and asters. The organs were hidden beneath red and yellow layers of rose petals, while the dissection of the brain was wreathed with chains of honeysuckle.

I suppose the odds were even as to whether I would grow up to be a painter or a mortician, surrounded as I was by all that floral decay. I didn't have my father's aptitude with physiology—much to his eternal disappointment—and it was inevitable that I would seek something very counter to his own profession. The natural destination of all children fleeing their upbringing.

And yet, as I write these lines while waiting out a rainstorm here in the Amazon jungle, I wonder how far have I really fled from the physician and the madwoman?