Stroke

by Ricky Monahan Brown

  Sonoko arrived to interrupt my reverie. Thirty minutes had passed, and she asked how I was getting on. I was getting frustrated. I had opted for the cheapest room, and I had moved our flights along every day from Wednesday to Friday, and I was still coming in two times over budget. I would not be defeated, though. For the next thirty minutes, I scoured increasingly flea-bitten accommodations to no avail. When Sonoko deposited me back in Room 920 for a debriefing, I was able to look at the strokey scrawl of my notes and declare triumph.

  ‘We’re going to take the non-stop Continental flight to Edinburgh, and stay at my father’s house!’

  ‘You can’t do that. That’s cheating,’ Sonoko told me.

  ‘But I thought you wanted flexible thinking!’

  I was incensed, but the unspoken rules were not to be bent. I would be allowed another attempt the next day.

  For the rest of the day, I contemplated my task. This vacation hadn’t even occurred to me that morning, but now it was something to look forward to, a goal. I could almost touch it. When my travelling companion arrived for her evening visit, I described my flight of fancy and its tragic end in a sea of despond.

  ‘Did you try Canada?’ Beth asked.

  Oh! Canada! I should have thought of that. I once knew a wife and husband team of architects whose first major project was the interior of a boutique hotel in old Montreal. I excitedly turned to my smartphone. The hotel was easy to locate. The couple had exquisite taste, of course. Even their names sounded like they had been selected from a book of tastefully designed appellations. Their full names conjured up a few simple lines of skinny sophistication in monochrome, unfussy cladding and modern, lightweight frames. I imagined being able to sink back into my bed, swaddled by a soft and ethereal interior within the solid reassurance of a muscular Beaux Arts exterior. Or that’s how the hotel’s beds were described.

  When I’d fantasised about visiting their early opus in another life, the architects had told me that the sushi in the immediate neighbourhood was to die for. They had lived on it for months. I would live on sashimi, Beth on California rolls. This would sustain us through days and nights of lovemaking in or around the king-sized bed. When we were sated, we would throw open the windows to a balmy, breathy breeze and enjoy our champagne cocktails looking over the roofs of Old Montreal. Or the Downtown skyline. Whichever.

  When the luxury of the immaculately laundered sheets became oppressive, and the solidity of the stone, raw metal and firmly yielding bed grounded us too soundly, we would drink cheap, chilled lager with hip unknown bands in a commune in the artier part of town. This was going to be a doddle! Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?

  The next day, Sonoko came back to the ward, and deposited me at the desk in the computer lab. I cracked my knuckles. Canada. I was legendary pianist Glenn Gould; Canadian, stroke-afflicted. About to create a work of art. My fingers danced across the keyboard, and with perfect synaesthesia I could taste the music in the wide stripes of chocolate, burgundy and saffron that composed the canopy of that firm bed. Then all too soon, the colours discordantly turned to ash in my mouth, and I was William Bennett, the crumpled oboist stricken on the floor of the Davis Symphony Hall. I had flown too close to the sun. I remembered entire working days at the height of my powers, contorted by the cumulative pressure of minuscule adjustments to flight schedules while looking for an affordable holiday. The room once again mutated into my old office. There was no way to get this done for $1,000. I didn’t have enough time. There was never enough time.

  A week later, Sonoko set me another task to train me for re-entry to the world of the living. It was the birthday of one of the physical therapists. My job, in consultation with Sonoko, was to take the number of attendees, figure out how many pizzas and bottles of soda would be required to sate them, pick out a range of toppings and flavours – allowing for dietary restrictions – call the pizzeria, and place the order, establishing the cost and time of delivery.

  Despite flashbacks to my trials ordering pizzas for James Brown some seventeen years earlier in Texas, I was able to complete this task successfully. I was happy to note that there was enough veggie pizza to cover my inevitable invitation and release from the constraints of hospital food. Which turned out to be not so inevitable. Steph, the therapist who took my physical therapy the next day, said that the party went well. She admired my ordering prowess, and was just as surprised as I that this did not garner an invite.

  Yet it wasn’t this disregard that put me on edge around Sonoko, nor her occasionally brusque manner. On the contrary, I enjoyed her company. Not only did I admire her firm hand among the infirm, it was refreshing to be around someone who was comfortable treating me with the carelessness of adulthood. It was a change from being asked, ‘Do you need to pee-pee?’ As I railed against the injustices of the holiday planning task I had been set, she asked, in a casual fashion, ‘Are you the kind of person who doesn’t take criticism well?’

  Therein lay the root of my unease. The comfort that I was slowly beginning to construct from my diminishment was the shedding of my protective dragonhide, my Mister Hyde. Yet in my rampaging, stroke patient id, Sonoko discerned the old Ricky, and tweaked him, and he didn’t like it. It was he who discomfited me. I could keep him locked up in the private room where my council desk sat. Keep him hidden in the recesses of my mind, behind the door covered in red baize. Still, he would pace behind the dusty, barred windows, and mutter until his once proud voice was broken and harsh in my head. Then one day, I would think that I had need of him, and he would emerge to take away everything that I now held dear.

  I couldn’t allow it. My new self would have to inhabit every room, cupboard, wardrobe and door. There would be no room for that man I now found hard to describe; the one who strode upright and did not carry his strokey left arm awkwardly by his side. The man who must have been deformed somewhere, like Henry Jekyll, although I couldn’t specify the exact point where or when.

  As if this foggy Victorian conflict wasn’t enough to postpone my sleep that night, voices of a quite tangible nature floated along the ninth-floor corridor. I couldn’t tell if they came from a mob of rambunctious visitors or a bored horde of night nurses. With some difficulty, I rolled over in bed again, and fled – as I had on the night of my stroke – to the Highlands.

  In a bothy in Glen Coe, an axe erupted through a red baize door, and the world of the new Ricky erupted through. There was no pea soup fog, not even a light sea haar. It was a perfect morning. The aroma of ground coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice and porridge leavened by vanilla clung to the air, competing with the chatter of stories read from newspapers bought in the village.

  The wide living room was clear of chemical apparatus, crates and packing straw of the barred cabinet room. Free even from the detritus of a cosy night in front of a movie with well-buttered popcorn and generously poured whisky. The occupants of ‘The Bothy’ (a bothy in name only – it was well-appointed with subtle plaids and heavy tweeds) were long gone. Though not so long that the voices of their children couldn’t be heard rolling down a valley that looked the same as it did three hundred years ago.

  Or almost the same. If one made one’s way along the base of the glen and headed up the correct hill, the wide, flat stone capping each cairn had been scraped with an ‘R’, a ‘B’, a heart and an arrow. Rural graffiti. Looking a little higher, a couple strolled by the summit, admiring the scene. Funny to think that in a few months the peak – the whole glen, in fact – would be covered in snow, and the beauty of the view would be best described as ‘bleak’ or ‘savage’.

  The man stood behind the woman, his arms wrapped around her waist. Ten years ago, her belly had been a little beach ball, swollen expectantly. He remembered this, and briefly thought of the love they had made, as they each explored her newly alien body. Now, she pinched in and curved the same way as when he was amazed by her body, as they fucked desperately in Brooklyn.

  Zooming in, the love blazed from his eyes. He
was still so excited to tell her about it, just like when his heart was trying to leap out of his throat that night by the jukebox at Boland’s. So he moved his head a little away from hers, and bellowed into the valley:

  I LOVE BETH MONAHAN!

  It was clear what I had to do. The odd, subjective disturbance caused in me by Sonoko’s presence was not down to anything in her. On the contrary, I was discomfited because she had no investment in my feelings or opinions, and could hold up a cheval glass, an unflinching mirror, to my unsettled gaze. I could see now that New York was my Edinburgh as much as Victorian London was Henry Jekyll’s. Like Jekyll, my fondness for – the expectation that I should crave – the respect of the great and good, had led me to conceal my pleasures and carry myself in the manner expected of any upwardly mobile corporate lawyer. Just like Jekyll, when I took stock of my progress and position in the world, I found that I had been living a sort of double life – not through any malice, but a desire to fit in to the world I had inhabited. Then, for a mere thirty-three months in Beth’s company, I had felt younger, lighter, happier in body, and less constrained by the bonds of obligation.

  It was not that my new self was in any way base or dangerous. My former, be-suited, Midtown self may have recused himself from taking any part in the financing of an arms manufacturer, but he was still a minuscule cog in the machine that had brought the world economy to its knees. The bearded, tattooed two-and-a-half-year-old who had embarked on the process of blundering out of that life when he met Beth Monahan was a harm to no one. Not even himself, night-time stumbles aside.

  I thought he deserved a chance to make something of himself. That wasn’t going to happen in New York, however, where too many people would expect more of the same, where every shadow would conceal a silent disapproval of my betrayal of the kid in that dark, stony basement of the Old College.

  ‘Beth and I will make a new start in Scotland,’ I thought to myself. I could already see the heather-clad moors in my mind’s eye.

  But I still had no idea how to get there.

  11

  Physical Therapy

  Stroke brings out the best in us. Stroke brings out the worst in us.

  A fellow survivor once told me he lives in fear of his own fathomless fury.

  ‘I had been doing my grocery shopping. I was really frustrated. There was music playing in the store. It was hard to concentrate, and make out what people were saying. I was trying to lift a package of soda bottles off the shelf, and it kept catching on the package underneath. This guy behind me – he wanted soda too – got impatient. He said to me, “Why don’t you use both hands?!” I shook my useless right side at him, and then stormed out without finishing my shopping. Outside, I started to cross the road. I was using my stick.’

  He put the walking stick on the table for emphasis. It was wrapped in different coloured tapes, the least festive candy cane you can imagine.

  ‘Do you know why it’s red and white?’ he continued. ‘It’s so people can see I have trouble with my vision and hearing. Then this other guy, he just zooms up, before slamming on his brakes at the last second. I was furious. I waved my stick and slammed it down on the hood of his car. Then he got out. He was very big, and very angry. But look at me. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t flee.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I think he took pity on me.’

  In the face of too much pity and sympathy – ‘Oh god, it must be terrible!’ – some stroke survivors become obsessed with empathy.

  Joyce Hoffman, a stroke blogger of my acquaintance, described her experience: ‘Only a couple of people in my life empathised with me. Fellow stroke survivors can automatically empathise because they know the absolute hell that I’ve been through. Other people seem to find it a lot more difficult.’

  Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, gave a talk about empathy a couple of years before my brain exploded. She noted that, while empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection. She made the point that, when things are at their worst, sometimes making a connection is more important than trying to come up with what feels like the right response.

  Stroke was the great democratiser. The great leveller. It imposed empathetic imagination.

  At the beginning of November, I was standing at the door of the gym at HJD, where those of us who could make it out of bed would do our physical therapy. The wall beside the door, as well as the wall at the far end of the room, was lined with the mats where each individual’s therapy session would start. Our therapists called them ‘mats’, but they were so different to the mats you see in a proper, gym-type gym, that this would just drive home our otherness.

  The mats were a quiet blue, of course. Almost everything in HJD was blue. I was drowning in blue. Blue tones are associated with feelings of relaxation – the city of Glasgow once put up blue street lighting, and it was said to reduce crime. In Nara, Japan, prefectural police set up blue streetlights and they reported that crime fell. In Yokohama, a railway company installed blue lights at the ends of their platforms to try to reduce suicide.

  In the gym, the blue, waterproofed cloth material of each mat covered a padded platform, about five feet by seven, within a metal frame. The platforms appeared to hover about eighteen inches off the ground, each supported by an inconspicuous galvanised metal framework that was mostly hidden by the platform. The car crash outlines of the patients’ bodies were arranged on these platforms as their therapists manipulated atrophied limbs as a warm up.

  Unusual as the mats were, it was the patients who brought my scattered attention into focus. I looked over by the parallel bars and thought they must be for aiding the first, faltering crack at walking – I didn’t think I could manage the dismount if they required something more ambitious. Next to the apparatus, there was an elderly husband helping his wife through rehab, and learning techniques to help her after discharge. Watching them, I thought it was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen.

  Otherwise, the scene was a shocking parade of tattooed-up under-forties with hipster haircuts and glasses. I had told Beth, who had written a dating and relationships advice column for her business school newspaper, that there was an article in directing New York’s young, single men and women to the stroke wards. The gym was full of skinny, funny, well-accessorised young men with cool tattoos and, more lucratively, older, more fragile men, too. Remembering the 35lb I had lost, I could understand why they were skinny. I got why they were funny. Over the next year, we would meet a host of supporters and carers who would describe how the thing that got them through the darkness of stroke was their loved one’s hilariousness. I subsequently discovered that a bleed in the frontal lobe has been found to reduce inhibitions, so survivors often have no filter and say the most outrageous things.

  It took me a long time to come up with a theory on the prevalence of the skin ink. I had two tattoos at the time, too. One was the black heart on my right shoulder. It was a perfect replica (but 25 per cent bigger – to scale) of the one on Beth’s left shoulder. It was my first tat, at the age of thirty-five. Beth’s too, at thirty. About the right age for that sort of thing, I think. Beth would proudly show off her newly adorned skin and receive glowing compliments. Then I’d unveil mine to a chorus of clicking and tutting, as the realisation of the reality of the matching tattoo sank in with the observers.

  On the left shoulder, a complicated latticework of circles and lines representing Doctor Who’s Time Lord Seal decorated my skin. This was a birthday present from Beth. It was meant to represent the infinite possibilities of life. All of the potential adventures in time and space. It was also a reminder that there’s strength to be found in the least expected places, even when things are at their bleakest.

  I remember sitting at home as a wee boy, watching Doctor Who with my mum and dad. I remember being scared by a man who pulled off his human face to reveal a pesto-coloured mess of tendrils. Laughing at the antics of Tom Baker a
nd his patrician yet anarchic portrayal of the ancient man who valued the child within, I’d scoot onto my father’s armchair and enjoy being scared by robots and cyborgs and aliens. Practicing for real fear and death, untouchable on a Saturday evening.

  Now, my story incorporated a companion who knew what I needed, even before I did. Someone to travel with me who made me better. Just like the companions who travelled with my fictional hero.

  When the tattoo was finished, Beth asked the inker if he was happy with it.

  He told us he was. ‘Other tattoo artists will really appreciate this,’ he said. ‘Circles and fine lines are difficult. It’s cruel to have your tattooist work on this first thing on a Saturday morning.’

  It was 2p.m.

  I finally concluded that the gym was awash with the patients’ ink because tattoos are – still, just about – a signifier of recklessness, rebellion and abandon. Haemorrhagic strokes remain popular among the relatively young despite intensive efforts to reduce the prevalence of risk factors such as smoking, hypertension and alcohol abuse. Medical professionals speculate that this may be due to a lack of impact of risk factor reduction measures among younger people and reckless rebels who wear their sleeves on their arms.

  It wasn’t only the patients in the gym who were young. The physical therapists were young, too. Just like all of my therapists. Just as my father knew he was getting old when all the policemen started looking young, all my therapists were some undefined age that was best described as ‘younger than me’. As I stood at the threshold of the gym, a strobe light of insight flickered into life. Maybe I would never stand inside a cube of sweating whitewashed walls again, my hands to the ceiling, my eyes to the light, happily being jostled by fellow revellers. Maybe I wouldn’t ever dance again.