Read I Saw a Man for Free Online Page A

truth being told was almost fanatical, whatever the outcome of a story’s exposure. Where Michael would carefully weigh his content for repercussion or hurt, Caroline had always been fearless with consequence.
    “Why wouldn’t you be?” she’d once challenged him. “Anything that happens is only what should have happened anyway, if it was known in the first place. And what’s the alternative?” she’d asked him, warming to her theme. “The untold story,” she’d said, pointing at him like an accuser. “It’s like landfill. We can bury it all we like, but in time it’ll catch up with us.”

    Her passion was infectious and Caroline’s commitment to her craft had been one of the traits Michael had most admired about her when they’d first met. But he also knew it wasn’t without self-interest. For him the life of his subject was another country, one he discovered first in person, and then again on the page. Once back at his desk his stories travelled further than he had, went where he’d been unable to go, leaving Michael behind as a silent still point, a governing hand from afar. But for Caroline the stories of others were her fuel. She travelled for them and through them. Their birthing into the light was her nutrition, their telling what kept her moving.
    “We can be still here.” This is what she’d said to him when they’d first viewed Coed y Bryn and the estate agent had left them alone to talk. Michael had wanted to believe her, and as they’d bedded in over that spring, he’d continued to do so. But sometimes, when they walked to the top of the hill behind the cottage, or when he found her looking out of its windows on the landing, he’d catch a flicker in her expression, as if it wasn’t freedom she saw in those hills, fields, and woods, but constriction.
    On that first night they’d met at the Frontline, Caroline’s manner had reminded Michael of a birdcage, her small body alive with wings brushing against her wire. On moving to Coed y Bryn he’d sensed those birds begin to settle, their wings fold, their alert heads become calm. But they were still there, inside her. Their lightness, their potential for flight. And this is what Michael saw in those moments on the hill, or on the landing, when something surfaced, briefly, beneath her features. The wingtip of one of those birds woken within her, its plumage flashing in her eye, its feathers brushing under her brow.
―

    Within days of unpacking, Michael had begun work on his next book. Like BrotherHoods, The Man Who Broke the Mirror was to be a work of nonfiction, but novelistic in style and tone. Its subject was Oliver Blackwood, a brilliant but volatile neurosurgeon who in recent years had controversially, and often on the back of the work of others, “crossed the floor” to stray into matters of neuroscience. Although trained in the biological workings of the material brain, for the last decade Oliver had been making waves, and trouble, with his writings and lectures on abstract matters of the mind. Not that Oliver himself saw such a clear distinction between the two. “The material,” he’d told Michael early on in his research. “It’s all we’ve got, all we are. Anything else—memory, emotion,” he’d tapped his finger roughly against Michael’s head. “It’s all created, for real or as illusion, by this, the spongy stuff inside our skulls.”
    At the time Michael met him, Oliver, with the determination of a Victorian explorer, had become fixated upon locating the neurological source of empathy. It was an emotion, he believed, born in “mirror” neurons, single cells in the human brain through which the actions and feelings of others are mirrored and therefore felt. “I’m telling you,” he’d once told Michael before taking the stage for a panel discussion, “mirror neurons. They’re the future. You watch, they’ll do for neuroscience what DNA did for biology. Think about it, it’s the source of everything.