"A surfboard weighs about 10 lbs. It doesn't sound like much, but I suppose it depends who you ask. Women in Annex 12 of this building who have recently wrestled with exuberant newborns of this weight might, indeed, share my perspective. It's still three times as much as the adult human brain. I no longer have a surf board. It was sliced in half and found in two pieces on the beach--while my head met with a similar, if narrowly less conclusive, fate. To use the trusty medical idiom, I am 'very, very lucky.' Indeed, I have never felt luckier. I can't eat, I can't move and I can't imagine my first morning without the pain."
###
Guy preferred the beach without the glare and noise of summer. The ocean was more appealing under a paler sun and the low angles of early November light. He leaned back to admire the comings and goings of the bay. A foolish Labrador was bounding about in the foam and running amok like a carwash brush, rolling and shaking and ruining everyone's winter coats. Fearlessly a toddler joined in the chase, his head in a higher gear than his feet as he fell face first into the sand. Tears, indignity, and a mouth full of grit, until, just seconds later, the child was distracted by a wayward tennis ball, his crying ceased in an instant, and cheerfully he ran on. Guy picked up his long board and swam out.
'Guy. It's me. Julia.'
'Julliard.'
'You know who I am, don't you? You do recognize me?'
Julia had flown in from New York armed with a few of Guy's favorite CDs and personal effects and had gone directly to the hospital. The first 48 hours were grave, with the memory loss at its most distressing. She had rushed to her husband's side only to have him half open his two black eyes and take her for some archived Freshman classmate. She wondered for a moment if this was simply his habitual, weary sarcasm at play, but they'd just administered his painkillers and Guy fell asleep before she had a chance to ask him. She did notice that he'd been awake and had had the presence of mind to put his watch back on. She set her own to West Coast time and waited for him to wake up. It really bothered her that his watch still worked but his mind apparently didn't. It wasn't like it was a Rolex or anything. He'd bought it on the street, for God's sake.
Guy was underwater. Gray, particulate water. An impossible pressure bore upon his head and there was nowhere to go. His wetsuit clung to him like a heavy layer of useless, dead skin. He struggled. He was about to die clothed in rubber when he wanted to die in style, in a tuxedo, in the back seat of a limo. But now even that thought caused him panic. Tuxedos, too, were uncomfortable. Wherever they were worn, you were nervous or short of breath, and his head was now inexplicably filled with those prickly rites of passage. Piano recitals, funerals, Prom night, his wedding day. And now this. He panicked, and struggled, and couldn't breathe. Tight suit, tight collar, tight chest, everything tight and black.
###
The stalwart hospital administrator peered out her window towards room 1412. Guy Mann. Head trauma. Patient BLQ-1220. Why did he stare at her data entry desk when he could be watching TV? She pounded onward. 85 words a minute and no commercial breaks.
'Basilar skull fracture. Enter. Tab, tab. Contusions to both frontal and occipital areas. Retrograde amnesia. Possible damage to the medial temporal region and other areas of the cerebral cortex. No evident damage to cerebellum or basal ganglia. Skill memory unimpaired. Double space. Able to retain post-trauma events. No present signs of anterograde amnesia or aphasia, although patient very impulsive with short attention span. Go to field 13. Recommend continue medication at present dose. Therapy. Test possible damage to hippocampus, post trauma memory and ability to form new long term memories. Enter.'
###
The hospital common room was quiet that day. Last week's card players had since been discharged and there was a political hearing on television. Guy was reminded of his kindergarten classroom. What was it about hospital attire that made everybody look like children? He sat down next to the graying man who dwelled behind a tattered supermarket tabloid.
'Stoned! Jaded Jagger arrested in drunken L.A. bar brawl. Jerry flies to secret Bermuda love nest. Inside: Ryan's shame. From Love Story to Love Handles. Photo exclusive.'
'It's all so deflating.'
The ailing tabloid reader looked up for a moment, acknowledging the lurid headline, and continued to ingest Ryan O'Neal's 30 lb weight gain.
'I meant about not being able to remember,' Guy continued.
'Quite,' said the reader, 'I still have library books from the early 70s knocking around somewhere.'
'Any news in there about my accident?'
The man squinted. 'Do I know you?'
'I don't know. Do you know him?' Guy gestured towards the paper's celebrity poster boy for debauchery.
'Everybody knows him.'
'Does he know you?' Guy asked.
'No.'
Guy continued to stare as the man attempted to return to his "reading". After a few seconds of Ryan's grainy telescopic gut, the man lost interest and began seriously to scrutinize Guy for star quality.
'Really. Should I know you?' he ventured.
'Everybody else seems to.'
Guy stood up suddenly, and turning to go, he collided with another patient, almost spilling the man's coffee.
'Whoa, steady there, guy,' said the man.
'See,' thought Guy.
The coffee drinker sat down, reached round behind the newspaper and lit the reader's cigarette. The man inhaled, very deliberately put down the newspaper, exhaled, and looked at Guy. 'What're you IN here for?'
###
"My temperature is running high and I am experiencing hallucinations. I can vividly recall a number of these semi-logical encounters, but since I am bedridden and cannot move, such burlesque little interchanges can only have been waking dreams, imaginary conversations with the other patients. It's indicative of my confusion that, up until this time, I have assumed that everybody being wheeled around this particular corner of the hospital is, as I am, under treatment for memory loss. Keith Baxter, the supposed tabloid reader, it turns out, is in for bypass surgery. Joe Ciccarone has liver problems. When I later meet Keith in the hallway I ask him about the Ryan O'Neal story and he seems confused. There is no common room in our wing and Keith, I notice, is now reading Timebends, the autobiography of Arthur Miller."
###
"My second week brings with it more clarity, as my medication is gradually reduced, but the sharper my perception the more acute my confusion. I am able go to the bathroom by myself and take a proper bath. For a horrifying moment I catch a glimpse in the mirror and think there is someone else in the tub with me. I don't recognize myself without hair. It strikes me that the most appreciable thing coming between me and the man I was two weeks ago is my hair. Perhaps it is the missing link in all this and I'll remember everything when it grows back.
"Doctor Nelson has given me this diary to write in, both to exercise my learned skills and to monitor my ability to retain events since the accident. So far I have no problem recounting long term memories of my life or even day to day recollections since I have been here. It is only the period leading up to my accident that is conspicuously absent from my head. The medical word, in layman's terms, is that different types of memory are housed in different parts of the brain, that we do not fully understand the neural basis of memory and that cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy. Vague on vague. So, in the same vein, on days when I'd rather read magazines than write in this book, I simply tell the doctor, generically, that I forgot, which he falls for hook, line and sinker."
###
Guy was asleep with a piece of string tied round his index finger. On top of the swelling, the lacerations and the bloating from the medication, Guy now wanted to cut off his circulation, too, thought Julia. She untied the knot, and, in so doing, woke him up.
'I brought you a card,' she whispered.
He opened it. 'IT'S A POOR SORT OF MEMORY THAT ONLY WORKS BACKWARDS...I can read!' said Guy.
'It's the Queen. From Alice In Wonderland. Guy?'
'Thanks. Through The Looking Glass, actually.'
'Do you like the CDs?'
'I didn't think much of this one.' Guy frowned with concern at the bargain bin, orange-sticker-plastered disc of "25 Zither Instrumentals".
'Oh. Right. I threw that one in there as a ruse. Wanted to see if your mind was still working at all. How's the food?'
Guy looked down at his leftover vegetables. *I can't seem to stomach the co...co...co...coral?'
'Cauliflower.'
'It reminds me of the inside of my head. I can't taste it anyway. Nerve damage.'
'Probably just as well.'
'Why?'
' Forget it,' said Julia, '...Oh. Sorry.'
###
"With nothing to do but sit and ruminate, I have had altogether too much time to put my life into perspective. My life in perspective--a picture by M. C. Escher. It all seems so arbitrary and senseless. If I went to college on a music scholarship, why am I not a concert pianist. Loss of interest? Crisis of confidence? Broken metacarpal? There, you see. I can remember the most tedious of junior biology terms: sternum, clavicle, femur, patella...that 'noyer' is French for drown. But why do I live in New York with Julia when I'd clearly rather stand alone on a piece of wood in the middle of the Pacific ocean in a rubber suit? I wish I hadn't. Julia will say no more than I had gone away surfing on a solo vacation to 'clear my head'. I guess I got more than I bargained for on that score. On the other hand I have apparently just wasted a thousand dollars on a New York to California airfare and accommodations, since I can recall next to nothing of the first, probably highly pleasurable, seven days of my investment.
"Julia, in a well intended attempt at layman's cognitive therapy, has brought with her pictures of me at various stages in my life, just to be sure I know who I am. Rainy Appalachian vacation, in drag as Princess Diana at mid 80s Halloween party, me and Ken Bailey in criminally tasteless bell bottoms on his Dad's farm in 1972, a few shots from my days as bass player for my thrash metal band, GASH. I appreciate her efforts but it hardly seems fair and certainly precludes the clean slate option: To put a positive spin on all this, I'd have liked at least to have used my amnesia as a platform for a fresh start, a new leaf, a whole other chapter. But with only limited memory loss and the continual dredging up of my pastiche existence, I've been robbed of even this opportunity.
"Endlessly I acknowledge the photographs, while Julia narrates to me a Reader's Digest version of my life. I find this lacks warmth and wonder why she is testing me. It seems motiveless, and that being so, my concern that she is testing me becomes motiveless, too. When everything checks out, she moves on to the contents of my backpack, found on the beach along with my body. I remember the bag itself, but only some of the contents. Still, the film from my camera can be developed, with high hopes pinned on a consequent magical, Disney-style reversal of my condition."
###
Julia was feeling the strain of caring for a convalescent. Since he was hit over the head, Guy was full of himself, and despite his pain saw himself as some sort of arch genius. She found this rather annoying, since he didn't quite seem to know the difference between critical thinking and constant complaining. Sardonic, sardonic. Some days she considered tampering with his medication but didn't know whether to halve or double it. Maybe she should take some of it herself. She couldn't help thinking he had embraced this amnesia thing all too readily--it was his perfect excuse to turn inward and turn way and dispense with any form of accountability.
"Julia is disturbed by my indifference. She leaves disappointed every visit, unable to comprehend that I can remember how to read and write, that I am left-handed, that I like rock and roll and rhythm and blues, and can't stomach cauliflower or zither tunes...but seem unable wholeheartedly to recall or express appropriate feelings for her. And each time she leaves, I'm left with the sense that she is keeping something from me and, likewise, that I have forgotten to tell her something. Alone, I dwell loftily upon the nature of association and how it is that we retain some pieces of information and discard others, and basically construct a world according to our own parochial interests. Julia says that I have become self absorbed and that the world doesn't revolve around me. But that's just my point. It DOES from where I'm standing."
###
One morning, Julia ventured to ask Doctor Nelson if Guy would be able to play the piano again, upon which the doctor launched into an unfathomable neurological thesis which he seemed to have spent the last twenty-three years compiling for the Nobel Prize committee.
'Guy's injury appears to be limited to the medial temporal region and possibly other areas of the cortex where the memory engrams are actually stored,' he began, swaying autistically back and forth in his chair. 'This would account for the more extensive form of retrograde amnesia he's manifesting--his inability to fully recall events and circumstances up to a couple of months before his injury. He's not showing any signs of anterograde or post-trauma memory loss which means the hippocampus is probably undamaged.' He paused, anticipating a question that wasn't asked. 'The Greek word for seahorse,' the doctor gleefully elaborated, 'The structure deep in the brain's center which processes events that will later be stored as long term memories. If the pathway to it is damaged, new memories are destroyed. Again, I don't see any evidence of this here, but I'm keeping a close eye. Even if a blow to the head does not directly injure the hippocampus, any catastrophic accident is a powerful producer of the body's glucocorticoids which are released as a result of both physical and mental stress,' he continued, physically and mentally stressing, before releasing a triumphant out-breath. 'The brain's own protective response to head trauma could cause harm to the hippocampus because of its vulnerability to the rush of glucocorticoids released at the time of crisis. Nonetheless,' he said, conceding reluctantly to an anti-climactic prognosis, 'I'm cautiously optimistic that this hasn't occurred.'
Music for $400, please. 'Now, the part of the brain responsible for skill memory such as Guy's piano playing would be the cerebellum. Guy has no damage to this or the subcortial areas or basal ganglia, nor to the frontal lobes, which are all involved in skill memory. So, yes, he should be able to play. Certainly, some of his confusion and behavioral changes are simply the result of his medicine. But we'll monitor his progress very, very closely. As the medical axiom goes, "touch the brain, never the same."'
Julia's face, and indeed her mind, abruptly went blank. She had glazed over at the first mention of the medial temporal region, pale and drowning in her own sea of glucocorticoids and waiting for the next tide.
###
One afternoon Guy went through the snidely headed 'Don't Forget' section of his address book, randomly calling telephone numbers he didn't recognize in search of people who might care to know about the accident.
'Welcome to Moviefone. Brought to you by Volvo. Critics are calling "Letters from India" the most unforgettable movie of the year...'
'Really,' thought Guy, 'I wonder if I've seen it...'
He dialed another number.
'You have reached the pooblic lie-prarie system you must have a touch tone phone to use these system please enter your lie-prarie card number and press the pound sigh-in.'
'What kind of a geek am I?'' thought Guy. 'Are all of my friends robots?'
But there was something. The third number was a San Francisco number, which, like the others, Guy did not recognize. It rang four times and was picked up by a woman's answering machine.
'Hi, this is Celeste. I'm sorry I missed your call. Please leave a message and I will call you back.'
Guy dialed it one more time, listened and hung up. He closed his address book for a moment, then opened it again. He tried once more to find the number, but re-rang the library by mistake. His heart slipped into syncopations for a moment. Did he have any books to return the library? Would he have to pawn his wedding ring to cover the fines? He turned towards his bedside table. There was only the copy of Newsweek with its feature story 'Memory: How it Works.' How did it work? Obviously not by tying a piece of string around your index finger as the cover picture implied. Of course, if he had actually read the article instead of just looking at the pictures.... Perhaps he should start his 20,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the sky. Maybe tomorrow. Instead he selected a CD. The Zombies. Much more appropriate, he thought, staring at his own image in the reflective metallic disc. 'Sometimes,' sang The Zombies a cappella, 'I feel a little lonely.'
###
"By the second week, things are much clearer, although this is mostly thanks to the recovery of my glasses from my backpack. At least now I can watch TV. I come across a news broadcast featuring a woman who has left the iron on at home and lost all her belongings in the ensuing fire. There she is (all pink and green--if only I could reach the color adjustment button) weeping in front of the charred remains of all tangible evidence of her 42 years on earth. 42 years and nothing to show for it. Might as well not have lived them. 'It's a nightmare. I've lost everything,' says Eleanor Dailey (42) outside the ashes of her Fremont home early Wednesday morning, 'All I have left are the memories.' Perversely I envy her. I would gladly accept a lasting understanding of the recent past in exchange for my bag of meaningless souvenirs.
"It is Sunday and the paper, too, is available. I start on the Style section but it makes me ill. Celebrity this, celebrity that, the world's a big party and you're not invited. I turn instead to the best sellers list, which, with indefensible snobbery, I read as a barometer of the nation's collective intellect. Immediately I notice a pattern:
#3 Summer Vacation by Vanessa Koch, Ph.D. Using childhood memories to recover your inner youth.
#4 One Eighty. Harness your future by unleashing your past. Dr James Ormand's practical manual to moving on.
#7 Short Term/Long Term. 10 steps to a better memory by T. Daniel Rayner The Third.
#10 Three Sixty. Turn your life around with new age guide to self transformation, by Dr. James Ormand, best selling author of One Eighty. Numbers 3 and 7, how to remember, 4 and 10, how to forget, (with 2 and 8 being contentious accounts of a soul-searching trip to the Antarctic gone awry). Everyone's looking for a way to feel better. Self help. People used to help each other. I take three Tri-Vicadol and go to sleep."
###
Sleeping on drugs was, as usual, an untroubled, halcyon experience. Guy swooned beneath the impeccable hospital linen. He quickly found himself outside lying on the grass. There was a brown haired woman sitting on a blue rug. She looked up from her book and smiled.
Her house was dark but warm. She had inherited it from her Grandmother, and the place was now an anachronistic still life, conceived in the 1890s, completed in the 1990s. Plants, books, paintings, rugs, curtains, antiques...car keys, phone bill, stereo, laptop, cereal.
Guy liked to show off. He could construct half a dozen convincing soliloquies about the spiritual significance of music in his life, its richness as a language and indispensable cultural role as a means of expression. This was, after all, how he had sailed through school. Yet, as he set himself down on this particular antique piano stool, he wondered sheepishly if he really just used music to get attention. The G was slightly flat, and the F sharp silent. It was a terrible piano. But it didn't matter. It was still beautiful. He must remember the melody and...
###
A corner of the newspaper covering Guy's sleeping head was transparent with drool. The words 'hsaB ytirbeleC' were imprinted on his chin. Ink-stained and bruised he sweated and snored until dinner.
###
Guy was feeling better. He was sitting up and doodling on the back of a Family Circle magazine, drawing over and over again an odd hieroglyphic. An S- like symbol that looked variously like a primitive seahorse, or a question mark, or, indeed, like the hippocampal area of his brain, as Doctor Nelson noted as he approached Guy that morning. The doctor was not impressed. Guy seemed to be spending far more time on perfecting this curious piece of graffiti than writing the self-evaluation journal entries he had assigned to him. When questioned, the patient would claim he had forgotten, which Doctor Nelson didn't believe for a minute. Still, Guy was responding fairly well to the tests of his associative retrieval skills and the doctor was confident he'd lead a relatively unimpaired life following gradual recovery.
' Seven,' began Doctor Nelson.
'Um....Seven...um...days of the week, lucky seven, seven dwarfs, seven Samurai...seven...seven seals? Seven veils!'
'Twenty-four.'
'24 hours, 24 months in the year. No...two dozen.' Guy lost his thread for a moment.
'Do you remember the day you were born?' continued the doctor.
'Well, I imagine it was too long ago.'
Wiseacre. 'The date, not the event.'
'10/10/58.'
'Good. Fifty-two.'
'52 weeks in the year. 52 cards in the deck. Studio 52? Area 52! Studio 51. Um...51 clarinets. Um...51...'
'Fifty-two. The number is fifty-two.'
###
The next time Julia came to visit, Guy seemed withdrawn and more interested in his quest to remember how to draw a question mark. Impatiently she snatched the magazine bearing what appeared to be thirty-nine scribbled attempts at completing one interrogative punctuation mark and drew one for him. Guy had little time for her, so she dropped off the photos from the camera in his backpack and left.
###
"After a series of simple party games, Doctor Nelson seems hopeful that I'll leave here a useful citizen. I'm not sure if I ever was one in the first place, so perhaps this would be a positive side effect of the medication. Meanwhile there's a gorgeous piece of music playing in my head. I must have composed it shortly before my injury, and now it seems lodged there in my conscience, broadcasting itself relentlessly in a tuneful sort of time warp. I ought to be able to get it down on paper when I can remember how to draw a treble clef."
Guy took out the photos. The envelope was still sealed. He noticed that Julia had neither bothered with an extra set of prints, nor, indeed, sprung for Kodak premium processing. The rug looked more purple than blue and the woman looking up from her book was partially obscured by a ray of light. He should have stood with the sun behind him.
###
Professionally speaking, Doctor Nelson found Guy Mann's case to be one of his most engaging since joining St. Thomas's three years ago. He would miss their daily Doctor-Patient repartee. For, aside from the patient's very evident cranial damage, Doctor Nelson was wise to a certain game-playing afoot. Not that Guy was in any way deliberately attempting to mislead him. But he clearly thought much and said little. Although it was not officially required of him, the doctor himself had kept some informal personal notes on the case. They were, true to cliche, written in haste in an Arabic-meets-Sanskrit cipher script that only he and one hospital administrative assistant could read. (A skill so singularly valuable it had warranted her 12% pay raise last year).
The assistant cracked her knuckles. She glanced out of the window as a middle aged female roller coaster disaster victim was wheeled into room 1412. Maybe this one would watch the television instead of watching her and the daily battle she waged with carpal tunnel syndrome.
'File open. A.N./G.M. 12-05 Tab, Tab, Enter.
BLQ1220. Guy Mann discharged from St. Thomas's hospital on December 4, 1998, 31 days after accident. Slowly recovering from his amnesia, but still prone to momentary confusion and lapses into depression. G.M. maintains all motor skills, learned behavior, social conditioning and habits. Event memory of incidents close to instance of his accident remains characteristically tenuous. Evidence of some organic damage from severity of impact to the skull. Possibly some degree of psychological basis for inability to remember, as exhibiting certain signs of selective recovery of recent past. Condition may be overcome through hypnosis or therapy, contingent on patient's compliance. Origin of amnesia stems from organic disturbance resulting from injury, compounded by symptoms of emotional trauma. Patient referred to Dr. Lynne Stam in New York for weekly out-patient treatments. Escape.'
###
That was it. Having discovered that there were three pieces missing from the hospital's 20,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the sky, Guy was ready to go home. For the last time, he turned off the television and met with his reflection in the dead screen. Not bad. He would keep his hair short.
###
An interesting function of all this was that Guy seemed to have forgotten most of the mutual dissatisfaction that had prompted his trip in the first place. And, as Julia now tried to convince herself, he had always been too confused and too vulnerable and in too much pain for her to broach the subject. Not while he was nauseous, not with the doctor there, not when he was making such progress. She had even entertained the possibility that they would grow close again, reconciled through the proximity and compassion that comes with catastrophic infirmity. Undeniably, she had been exhausted by affection and surrender as she watched him sleep, swollen and unguarded and beaten up. But Julia was nothing if not rational. She knew this wouldn't be a fresh start. Merely a false start. She would give it time and talk to him when they got home. Suddenly Julia was not ready to go home. There in the hospital, life had been cautiously administered and controlled and held at arm's length and measured objectively. No wonder the world was teeming with hypochondriacs. Home was a messy, messy place to be. Home was where the heart was, God forbid. She tried to remember whether or not, in the haste of her departure, she had left remains of breakfast spread out all over the kitchen table--two coffee mugs, two bowls...two wine glasses from the night before--in which case this would be the first thing Guy saw when they walked through the door. Perhaps she had left the iron on and the house would be gone. When they got home, she must remember to put all the ashtrays out again and hope that he had forgotten that she was supposed to have quit smoking.
Black white black white black white black white, C D E F G A B C. Guy began to play. You never forget a good melody. That was the problem. Music was always a hybrid--in part, however small a part, a strain of something you had already heard. (Off he went, to his own wry disgust. He had written a paper on this in his Junior year). He listened to his tune. It sounded much richer with a working F sharp. Unforgivably romantic. Definitely a new age Chopin knock off. But it didn't matter. It was still beautiful.
Julia sat in an armchair, finishing her cigarette and opening the stacks of Get Well cards that had arrived in their absence. Love and warm thoughts, is there anything we can do, hang in there, come home soon, George, Tommy, The Gang at The Pig and Whistle, Anna and James.
Julia didn't notice that the large yellow envelope was postmarked from San Francisco. A Monet. Tasteful. She was far sighted anyway, so it worked well.
"Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad." Christina Rossetti (1830-1894).
###
'Dear Guy,
You must have decided not to stay. I wonder why you disappeared so suddenly. I never had a chance to say goodbye. By the way, you forgot your music.
Love, Celeste'
###
Julia picked up the dog-eared pieces of hand-written sheet music that had fallen to the floor with the envelope. Crossing the room, she placed the music on the piano in front of him. As Guy played the concluding strains of his composition, Julia gathered up the ashtrays, tossed them on top of the torn pastel envelopes in the garbage can and took out the trash.
