Stroke

by Ricky Monahan Brown

  At least it made for a shorter work day. Beth made it home to get ready to visit her stroke bloke, having arranged a lift from one of our Boland’s darts team buddies, Matt. Fortunately, they had enough gas to make it to the hospital. Unfortunately, New York City was the world’s biggest stroke patient.

  It’s generally known that, if you have a stroke on one side of your brain, the opposite side of your body will be the weak side. I had never seen it said, though, that if the stroke patient draws a line directly down the centre of himself, the delineation between the two sides is quite exact. One of the most worrying moments of my convalescence was waking up one morning, rubbing my eyes, and feeling the numbness in my left eye and eye socket. It felt like my stroke would surely have some effect on my vision. What else could be affected? I scanned the rest of my body, doing an inventory. My two nostrils felt quite different, and would do for some months. Not noticeably, most of the time, but certainly if I had a good dig around. That was even though they’re right in the centre of my head, and right next to each other.

  I continued down. The two sides of my rib cage felt different, that was obvious. However, the difference was even perceptible when I touched the edges of my breastbone with the fingers of my good hand. Further down, I was amazed to discover that, slightly but perceptibly, even my two testicles felt different.

  An iconic photograph covering New York Magazine in Sandy’s aftermath painted Manhattan in a similar light. Or, at least, parts of the city were in light. The view, from the south-west of the southern tip of the island, showed the Williamsburg Bridge, over which Beth and I had gleefully ridden on the Malaguti weeks earlier, lit on the Brooklyn side, but with the lights abruptly dying halfway across the East River. A sharp diagonal line, running from 39th Street on the East Side to 26th Street on the West Side, separated those with power to the north from those in darkness below. Battery Park City, to the south of the island, but just north of the Financial District, was illuminated. To the north of Battery Park City, coated in Teflon, blazing like a beacon of Freedom – or, as the political blog Roadkill Refugee tweeted at the time, ‘a giant middle finger to the rest of New York’ – stood the Goldman Sachs Tower.

  When Matt and Beth had finished navigating the empty streets, unlit by street lamps or traffic lights, and reached HJD, they found that, like Goldman, it was running on its backup generator, at least to the extent of vital services. The lights in the corridors were on. Life support systems and monitors provided the only radiance in the wards.

  Room 920 was in Cimmerian shade. Notwithstanding his fear of the dark, Alfonso slept. In light of the anxiety the storm had generated, and the absence of any distracting activities, I had also suspended my consciousness. The scene on the ninth floor was even more eerie and ominous than usual, and my visitors stayed just long enough to pick up my latest batch of pee-soaked clothes.

  Outside, New Yorkers had just about had enough of this storm bullshit, and regardless of any Armageddon, were beginning to get on with their lives again. Together with the imperatives of global capitalism in its Babylonian capital requiring that everybody get back to work and then, perhaps, figure out some way to get home, this meant that the trip home to Brooklyn took two hours.

  Then something poetic happened.

  5

  For Whom the Bell Tolls

  On Thursday, 1st November, power was restored to Lower Manhattan. That afternoon, the lights went back on at HJD and, with pleasing symmetry, the lights went back on in my head.

  Up to this point, my visitors had been worried about whether there was any Ricky left. The lights weren’t on and there was nobody home. Or if there was, he was rattling around in there like Miss Havisham.

  The life-threatening danger appeared to have passed, but the sack of muscle, fat, bones, nerves and blood lying in one of Room 920’s beds displayed none of the distinguishing characteristics of the human being formerly known as Ricky. My studiedly mussed hair, the symbol of the well-to-do Brit around New York, had been shaved in the style of an inmate of Bedlam. I had lost 35lb in the aftermath of my stroke, even though Beth was regularly bringing me cream puffs the size of Sonny Liston’s fist, our love packed into tasty symbols of intensity and pleasure. I responded to basic stimuli, but my lawyerly garrulousness had largely evaporated. Although there had been an amusing ridiculousness to my uninhibited verbal flailings, the intellectual underpinnings of a properly absurd sense of humour had been extinguished.

  Core functions, like an automatic politeness, continued, but I spent much of my time sitting in bed staring at a bunch of flowers, or my shit-covered hands, or whatever other object had recently been magicked into existence. Without a functioning memory, nothing had any context. No day had any relation to any other day. No event had any connection to any other event. Life was simply a procession of serially managed occurrences. Any advances in rehabilitation were meaningless beyond the encouraging words of my therapists, because I had no idea how things had gone the previous day. I was broken today, just as I had been broken yesterday, and would be broken again tomorrow. I was a goldfish. Except goldfish have memory spans that can extend to five months.

  Beth would come in after work and ask if my friend Jonathan had visited that afternoon. I would reply, no, I hadn’t seen him, even though he had been in just an hour or two earlier. With no ability to form a narrative to shape the events of my life, I bobbed loosely in a sea of unconnected faces and events. I was always happy and grateful to receive visitors, but unable to gauge who these people were, and what their visits meant.

  In almost two months, Jonathan was the only work colleague to visit me in hospital. The other men and women for whom I had generated millions of dollars of fees, who had called themselves my friends, whom I had considered friends, never once appeared. Sure, the firm had let me go, but where was the humanity?

  One of these colleagues had been shot in a botched mugging in the early nineties. His heart had stopped on the operating table. Twice. On each anniversary of his shooting, he had held a deathday party. For a few years, anyway. Then he no longer had time. The three thousand billable hours a year he logged required over eight hours of billable work a day, every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. That was just billable time. Add an hour of billing and collection. Half an hour for each of breakfast, lunch and dinner. A couple of hours of drafting, negotiation, review and research written off each day, to keep the client happy. Another couple of hours reading the legal journals and periodicals relevant to one’s field. An hour of continuing legal education, preparing presentations or training associates, depending on the day. Two more hours wining and dining, or otherwise sucking up to clients. The government recommends half an hour of moderate exercise daily, and seven to eight hours of sleep. That’s twenty-five hours, so clearly urination, defecation and fornication are out of the question – never mind visiting the sick. He didn’t have the time to be alive.

  Thinking of him made me ask myself: if I was ever able to recover, would I ever be able to return to the only thing I had ever been trained to do? And would I want to? That life didn’t seem like much of a recovery, or much of a reason for a party.

  I have wondered if the absence of visits from my colleagues was related to a lawyerly conservatism, particularly given the proximity of my collapse to my layoff. I was never a litigator, always a transactional lawyer. Nevertheless, for anyone immersed in a world of adversarial positions and risk aversion, the perils of a visit to a former employee who had, until recently, worked these sorts of hours would have been clear. Particularly if any sympathy was expressed by the visiting party. I’m sorry you’re totally fucked, is a little too close to, I’m sorry we’ve totally fucked you, even if I never saw it that way.

  Although I never saw it that way with respect to my situation, there does seem to be something wrong with the world of corporate finance. Ten and a half months after my brain exploded, a twenty-one-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London worked three ni
ghts in a row. Early each morning, he would pop home for a quick shower while his taxi waited outside, before returning to the office. This ritual was so commonplace in London’s financial houses that it had a name: the Magic Roundabout. In the environment in which I had worked, three nights in a row wouldn’t provoke much in the way of comment. Moritz Erhardt, the intern, was eventually found dead on the floor of the shower cubicle of his temporary accommodation. A subsequent inquest found that he had died of an epileptic seizure, and that while fatigue could have been a trigger, that couldn’t be said for sure. I think about Moritz Erhardt a lot.

  Working in a grotesque monument to urban brutalism in Midtown, I didn’t have the luxury of a magic roundabout. My office had a window, at least, but it was still a grim little space, unleavened by my attempts to provide personal colour. When I first moved into the office, the firm arranged to have their picture hanger come by and hang my two reproductions of Edinburgh scenes. I would see them as I entered my office each morning (assuming I left the night before), but never took a second to look at the view along Princes Street towards the Scott Monument, or the convivial but conscientious constable directing traffic at the bottom of the Mound. A print from the Philadelphia Museum of Art dominated the wall facing my desk. An early seventeenth century Japanese scroll by Hon’ami Kōetsu, it sparsely, almost abstractly, depicted an impression of a silver river running under a sky washed in gold. In the foreground, a poem card bisected the horizon. I meant for Kōetsu’s piece to inspire a mindful contemplation amidst the crowding in of conference calls, drafting and review. Ten years on, even before my stroke, I couldn’t remember a line of the poem.

  The lines of the calligraphy fell from the sky, dissolving into the river below, a shakiness in the penmanship showing that the piece was completed after Kōetsu began to suffer from slight palsy.

  A mountain temple

  Evening and the sunset bell,

  Whose every voicing

  Vibrates with a message sad to hear:

  ‘Today too is over, dusk has come.’

  I love the image I’ve painted in my mind of Kōetsu sitting in the valley as the mist rolls down from the hilltops, his brush trembling as he continues his project of presenting the verses of the Wakan roeishü. The days are slipping by, but the artist must let the river carry them away.

  In my office a few blocks north of the simple, functional lines of Lever House on 53rd Street, dusk would fall, but the day would never end. Each parcel of twenty-four hours merged seamlessly into the last, and the petty pace crept from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. Tomorrow never came. The lawyers would be the people the bankers would call to keep the candle burning when they had called it a night. I would emulate the example of my bosses, and, if they were working at 5a.m., or their couches were covered with the work of the day when my drafting was completed at 6.30a.m., I’d find the tiny area of my little office floor that wasn’t covered with discarded drafts from the prior year, or three years, or ten years, and lie down on the grotty carpet, inaccessible to the cleaner’s vacuum, for an hour’s sleep.

  The firm my ex-wife had worked for when we moved to Manhattan boasted a gym, shower facilities and accounts with the best restaurants in town, not because their associates deserved to be treated like royalty, but for the same reason that the dry cleaner’s and the doughnut shop had found the basement of the building of Beth’s employer a profitable location: it was best if the more junior members of the team didn’t have to go home to wash their clothes or eat a proper meal.

  When I reached the Hospital for Joint Diseases, my visitors were mostly from outwith that world. An ex-girlfriend, Jenny, got a message to me to ask if she could visit. Our affair had mostly been conducted in her apartment, in a dark crevice off Manhattan’s side streets. Another hard-working young attorney, she nevertheless couldn’t afford a place near to her office that would allow in more light, or for that matter, had much in the way of walls or doors – it was basically a bedsit described in more aspirational terms. Just thirty short blocks from where Lever House cast a damning shadow over my place of work on Park Avenue, we drank wine in a flat that embodied the way that ideals of modernism had been perverted in cities around the world.

  Lever House is a thin, floating and visually light vertical glass slab evocative of the alien beauty of Kubrick’s monoliths in 2001, but built in the International Style advocated by Mies van der Rohe. As such, it evokes a design process in which rational thought is employed to achieve spiritual goals. The city-dwelling pedestrian passes an open plaza featuring a garden and pedestrian walkways. The tenant has use of a building designed to reduce operating and maintenance costs, and keep out the grime of the city.

  Where I worked, on the other hand, was a building so ugly and unsuited to purpose that it would soon be demolished because it no longer met the requirements of a modern office building. Its windows were separated by unsightly white brick, and its only characterising feature was a slavish adherence to the old city zoning laws requiring setbacks from the street as the building clambered into the sky.

  Jenny and I had been joined by our unhappiness over the courses our respective lives had taken. As I had emerged into the lighter climes, I had withdrawn from her in a fashion that I had hoped was kind, but on reflection was neglectful. I subsequently discovered that, some time after our affair ended, she had suffered a nasty injury requiring hospitalisation. Given my conduct and her penchant for melodrama, I did not anticipate her visit with relish, but merely hoped that it might be an opportunity for healing.

  Lying in bed with little to occupy my mind now that Sandy had passed, I considered what made a good hospital visit. In its essence, visiting an inpatient is a selfless deed. A distaste for hospitals, and their imagined stench of cleaning supplies, sickness and death, is enough to discourage many people from visits, unless they are infrequent and required by guilt. At the same time, it seemed to me that the last thing the broken, confused inhabitants of the neurological ward needed were visits in which the visitor exuded a backslapping self-congratulation. Why, I wondered, would people who had written you off now want to co-opt your drama into their story?

  I was contemplating all this when Jenny arrived in the ward and took a seat.

  ‘Hi. How are you doing?’ She laughed. ‘Stupid question, right?’

  ‘Not really. I’m feeling . . .’ I stopped, and actually tried to answer the question. ‘I’m feeling pretty positive, I think. Pretty upbeat. It’s better than working in a law office, right?’

  I think that we were both relieved at how easily we had managed to pick up a conversation.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s a pretty extreme way to take some time off.’ She smiled again. ‘It’s funny. For some reason I had been thinking about you and the time we spent together before I heard what had happened. It’s a shame things got complicated at the end. We kind of stopped communication on a negative note, didn’t we?’

  We did. We had drifted apart, and the last time we had caught up, I had fallen in love with Beth.

  ‘It was good to hear from you,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry about the way things ended. I suppose a lot of that time was pretty dark for me. I’m sorry if my issues led to me being careless. I mean, I know they did.’

  I filled her in on the rough outline of what had been going on with me, and she told me that not a lot had changed with her, but she was doing OK. We passed a pleasant hour, and I was glad of the company. When she got up to leave, we didn’t make any plans to meet. To her immense credit, Jenny’s visit was a thoughtful and enjoyable one that left me feeling much better at its end than I had at the beginning. She was solicitous, open and comfortable, and I was happy to find her in a better place.

  In fact, if the aim of a hospital visit is to leave the convalescent party in an improved state, then I have to say that the vast majority of my visitors were exemplary. They were patient and, as befits an appealingly intellectually curious group, interested in my condition, while no
t dwelling too heavily on the hazards on the road ahead.

  There was a great deal of concern shown for my primary caregiver, too. Many friends asked Beth if there was anything they could do to help. A kind thought, and one that is helpful in providing the warming knowledge that one’s friends care. When the caregiver is frazzled by daily pre-work visits, though, as well as the coordinating of a trip through a storm-ravaged city to drudge in an unsympathetic workplace before returning to the hospital in the evening to pick up piss-soaked clothes for laundering that night, it’s a question that’s too open-ended to easily answer.

  It turns out the most helpful thing to do was make a specific offer of help to the caregiver. The most supportive questions were ones like:

  ‘I’m coming round for a visit. Can I bring you something to eat?’ or ‘I’m going to pick up some groceries. Can I take you along? Or get you some essentials?’ Or one that sticks in my mind even though I didn’t hear it: ‘Are there any TV shows or movies you’ve been wanting to watch? I could bring you some box sets.’

  Maybe it’s the monotony, or the blank walls, but there’s something about a long hospital stay that intensifies the reaction to any art that’s available. My first hospital stay I can remember with any clarity was at the age of twelve, for appendicitis. I probably struggled on with stomach discomfort longer than I should have, because I had a schoolboy ticket to see Scotland play France at rugby on the Saturday of that week. By the time I was checked into Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital, my appendix was fit to burst, and my parents were told that just another couple of hours could have been fatal. Just like in every other appendicitis story. I will say this, though: the pain was even more intense than the endless, savagely beaten pain of my stroke.