Didion buys a copy of Clinical Neuroanatomy to understand about Quintana’s health, and one story in Appendix A stands out to her, a mysterious narrative called the “gilded-boy story.” A little boy plays the part of an angel in the coronation of one of the popes about 300 years ago. The boy gets poisoned from the gold foil which covered him from head to toe. Everything possible is tried to recover the boy, but he dies a few hours later. To test the memory and comprehension of a patient, the patient is asked to retell the story after waking up from coma.
The vortex effect is a phenomenon that reminds Didion that grief is a short-term state of mental illness as she reminisces her past life with John and Quintana. To fully acknowledge John’s
