by Lauren Marks
5
Close to three weeks after I had failed to read the book by my bedside, I wandered into the visitors’ room at the end of the hall, and resting on the round wooden table was another book. Aside from the strained moments of conversation with other people, which would exacerbate my language loss, I didn’t think about it much. I am not sure if I missed reading exactly, I’m not even sure I was capable of that nostalgia or wistfulness, but something about books still drew me in. Even if I couldn’t read them, touching them still provided a type of satisfaction. I could enjoy their weight, savor the smell of ink and mildew, and welcome the rough flip of the pages running across my numb right hand.
With my uneven grasp, I picked up the book before me. It was a hardback, and on its cover was an illustration of a man, a cluster of clouds, and a flock of birds. The background was off-white, and the birds were multicolored. The man himself was in silhouette. He stood as if he had just taken a large step forward, with one straight leg in front of the other. He had a telescope to his eye, and he was looking into the distance. I started to thumb through the pages, but as I did so, they assembled into an unexpected kind of order. They shifted and squirmed, and then these patterns suddenly looked a lot like . . . something. These letters looked like words.
But was I actually reading this? Was that even possible? Should I tell someone?
My fingers swept over the bubble of raised ink on the cover, where the book gave me a more formal announcement, calling itself Cloud of Sparrows.
It was hard for me to understand what was happening in that moment. Reading, as I had come to experience it recently, always involved Anne. She would point to letters and I would sound them out to her. But I couldn’t corral them by myself. With the first book I encountered, which may or may not have been written by Agatha Christie, I’d never know if I had actually been able to read the name of the author, or if I had just recognized aspects of the book as an object—impressions that could have been carried over from my life before. But this new book was different. I had never read it or even seen it until that very moment. I was experiencing everything about it for the very first time.
Cloud. Of. Sparrows. All of these words made sense to me. I knew what a cloud was—I could see them out of my window. I knew a sparrow was an animal and I could call up that image in my mind’s eye. Still, I felt I couldn’t trust this initial impression. When I actually opened the book, the words inside were too tightly packed, like a net of just-caught fish. So I tried to pluck out individual words at a time. I thought I identified the word Japan. Japan. I knew Japan. I had been to Japan. This story might have something to do with Japan. I clutched the book to my breast, pressing it against my quickening heartbeat. I was caught up in a new stream of desire. Now that I had been given a glimpse of what it was like to read, I was overjoyed by the possibility. I just wasn’t sure if I was reading yet.
When Anne arrived for our next session, she launched into the day’s instruction as usual. I startled her when I reached out and clutched her tiny wrist.
This is important, I tried to say, gesturing to the book. I think I can read this.
But saying this aloud felt too bold. Risky somehow. What if Anne proved me wrong?
Anne seemed to understand what I was saying and grabbed a nearby magazine.
Why don’t you try to read these sentences? she asked. Take your time.
She came to my side of the bed, silently reading the piece herself, and making notes. It was very slowgoing, but when I said I was done, she gave me her piece of paper and asked her questions aloud, too.
Was this paragraph about A) Europe, B) China, C) Antarctica, or D) the Caribbean?
I pointed and tried to say Caribbean.
She nodded and continued. Does the author invite the readers to travel by A) plane, B) boat, C) train, or D) on foot?
I circled boat and tried to say it, though I probably stumbled on the diphthong.
Good, Anne said. That’s very good.
Though this breakthrough was significant to me, it wasn’t particularly life changing, not immediately. My world was still mainly Quiet. And being able to read this little bit of text didn’t change my focus on everything. I didn’t become hyper-aware of all the written words around me, on signs or in lists. It was still difficult to decipher a lot. I didn’t even try to read any more of Cloud of Sparrows. Still, it sparked something in me. I immediately identified this as the day I learned to read.
Anne, however, knew we still had a long way to go. Her most pressing objective was to establish my baseline communication. To her, I was in the middle of a complex language re-immersion. She probably wouldn’t make blunt distinctions like “the days I couldn’t read” and “the day I could.” Moments of spontaneous recovery like this tend to happen in the first days, or weeks, after an onset of aphasia. The neural mechanisms in this kind of recovery are not well understood, and they manifest dramatically differently from person to person. Some linguistic abilities simply return, other things need to be entirely relearned, and certain capacities can never be fully accessed again.
My reading was important, yes, but much more important was my ability to articulate my needs to others. Speaking, reading, and writing all reinforced each other. Anne told me that when one aspect of language failed, I should just try another approach. When you can’t speak, write, she said.
And that was what I started to do. My parents picked up on this quickly and soon bought me my first journal.
• • •
Though I can identify “The Day I Learned to Read Again,” I can’t pinpoint the day I learned to write. It feels like a more nuanced distinction. Anne had given me an alphabet sheet, and I could write words that she had me copy like a four-year-old with a piece of tracing paper. With some cajoling, I did that early, probably in the first week, but my initial journal was a strange primer. It wasn’t like the A is for Apple, O is for Octopus workbooks I filled in as a kindergartener. It’s chock-full of very specific items that represent a very particular life. I could congratulate myself on having pretty good spelling and steady-enough handwriting at the time, but these are somewhat different cognitive processes.
In a few weeks this confetti of fractured words would give way to fractured sentences, too. There was so much I couldn’t remember, but having the paper in front of me helped.
When I consider the journals now, I have to read, remember, and imagine.
I imagine. I remember. I translate.
• • •
My earliest journal entries continue to intrigue me. In the beginning, they were blunt instruments, pure and simple; my handwriting is often crammed against other people’s pens, as we built off one another’s attempts to communicate. It’s often a dramatically condensed dialogue, where I am mainly being instructed by those around me, usually my mother or Anne. On one page, I can clearly see my own script attempting to write down the days of the week. I begin with Friday, have a major confusion at Wednesday—which I mark as “MW” and then scratch out—and I don’t include a weekend at all. My mother’s handwriting appears on top of mine where she inserts Saturday and Sunday in the appropriate slots.
Though some of the words I wrote down were direct responses to other people’s questions, I wonder about the point at which my writing became self-generated. Even a pretty crude call and response on these pages was precious in its own right because I could rarely see or hear the words in my own head. An unwritten word was an unthought. Writing them down changed everything—alchemy itself. On a given day, I was the maker of the words bag, cab, bear, chorus, narwhal, Nevada, Nintendo, bridge, cowboy, and spruce. In the excitement of creation, it almost felt as if I summoned the words into their very being. It was as if they would never have existed in the world without my pen.
In my journals, a discovered word was a sacrament—a thing I could write. And if I could write the thing, I could read it. If I could read the thing, I could often say it. The process indicated that the
re was much more to explore, a rapturous language life that could be sought and, more importantly, found. When I pass over the pages now, I linger on sections containing mainly my own writing. There are exceptions, like when someone tries to phonetically correct my pronunciation, reminding me that some written words with a c in them can make a sh sound when spoken aloud, like the word special. But what about all of these other words? Why had my mind singled them out as important back then? I feel like an archeologist walking through ruins that are littered with the odd artifacts of an ancient city.
These are the first things I wanted to write? This is what I was thinking about when I woke up?
Words like Sainte Chapelle and catacombs appeared because I had been in Paris right before I came to Scotland. My friend Michael Krass was subletting an apartment there. But why would I write the word jeweller before the word head ? Why the word tumor instead of the word aneurysm? And how could this possibly be a relevant moment to recall the Empress Catherine the Great and her rumored sexual proclivities in Prussia in the early 1700s (cathrene prussia horse-donk)?
I realize that the earliest words were mainly nouns—things I could visualize. Research shows that language acquisition happens similarly in a child’s brain: developing minds have vocabularies that are densely populated by words for solid objects. Specifically, children seem to have a preference for things with a defined shape. Only after that, children move on to abstract concepts for intangible things, like honor or trust, and start to adopt words for their emotions. An interesting anomaly in my case is that I wrote the word amor, Spanish for love, early on. I am not sure if I even knew what the word meant as I wrote it. I had spoken nearly fluent Spanish before the rupture, but post-stroke it was worse than my English.
Regardless of why I had written these exact words down, the thing clearest to me here is that I wasn’t a child, and I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was a twenty-seven-year-old who had accumulated life experiences and was trying to remember, and communicate, these impressions.
I didn’t use my limited writing skills to address my current emotional state, though—terms like happy or sad—or perhaps the most applicable word at the time: confused—never appear on these pages. That might seem especially odd to a casual observer. But when there is a neural-bleed, all the mechanisms of the organism are burdened. Every moment of existence requires new effort. Life itself is effortful. There is air to breathe, food to eat, and the basic needs of the body to fulfill. It’s likely that expending energy on the emotional circuits was just a lower priority on my body’s checklist. My brain had a lot to process already.
6
BJ and Laura had extended their trips to stay with me in the hospital for a while longer, but they had both reluctantly booked their tickets back to New York City by mid-September. They had obligations they could no longer ignore. BJ had his courses at Columbia University; Laura was in a new show and had already missed a few rehearsals.
A day before Laura left, she joined my mom in my hospital room, lowered the guardrail on my inclined bed, and flopped down beside me.
Lauren, I want you to know that I got in contact with Jonah, she said. I tried to reach him a lot earlier, but didn’t tell you because I hadn’t heard back from him. Apparently he was camping up in Alaska and didn’t see any of my e-mails until now because he was completely off the grid. Which is just so . . . Jonah. Anyway, he’s returned to civilization, and he really wants to be involved in what is going on here.
Jonah. How could I not have thought of him before? We had been dating for years. And Alaska. Of course. It was his summer camping trip with his old Seattle friends.
My mother crossed her arms firmly.
Jonah wants to come to the hospital, Lauren.
My mind grappled with the concept. There was a location that was not here, a time that was not now, and they could potentially collapse into each other. My parents and friends had been constants in my hospital world, like the window and the rocking chair, but they left at the end of every day. And as much as I enjoyed everyone’s presence around me, I didn’t exactly miss them when they were gone because I always had the companionship of the Quiet. But this was the very first time it occurred to me that someone might arrive from somewhere else. An unexpected addition.
Do you really want him here? my mother asked, her lips pursed. Of course, it’s your decision to make.
I looked to her and tried to read her face like I would read Anne’s during speech therapy. Was she wearing the very good or not exactly expression? Since the rupture, I had gone from naturally being able to intuit someone else’s feelings to struggling to pick up on basic emotional tells. This interpersonal navigation is what psychologists call Theory of Mind (ToM). It is an ability that becomes manifest in most people around four or five years old, and in short, it’s a person’s ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking.
The easiest way to check for Theory of Mind is by conducting a false-belief test. To do this, you need to set up a condition that defies an expectation, like putting pencils inside a tube that usually holds candy. You ask a child: What do you think is inside here? The child, recognizing the tube, will usually answer: candy. Then, you let the pencils spill out. When you return them to the tube and ask the child again what they think is inside the tube, they will tell you: pencils. They’ve learned their lesson. But when you ask the child what someone not in the room might think is in this container, they still say pencils. It’s too hard to imagine any worldview other than their own.
Many developmental psychologists say that the changes in a child’s brain when they acquire Theory of Mind are directly correlated with their language skills. It’s a controversial idea, but acquiring ToM skills happens around the age of major linguistic milestones, such as creating complex sentence structures to express hypothetical situations or make a counterfactual statement. It creates a thought versus reality paradigm, like If I hadn’t seen inside this tube, I would have assumed different contents, but since I have been let in on the secret . . . and so on.
A subordinate clause can completely change the way you see the world. And in the hospital, my language skills did resemble those of a child. I lacked a lot of vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, internally and externally. I didn’t possess the powers of complicated inferences. It’s nearly impossible to know how much my language skills actually resembled that of a child developing language for the first time, or even if language is as imperative to ToM reasoning as some researchers suggest. But it would have explained a few things in my case. Maybe without a certain amount of language, some thoughts are unthinkable.
My mother was still looking at me, waiting for my response about Jonah.
Well, Lauren? she asked. Do you want him to come here? Yes or no?
No? I asked her.
The people in the room nodded their approval. No seemed to be the correct response.
• • •
The first time I ever met Jonah was at a party in a Russian restaurant on Brighton Beach, five years before the rupture. He was introduced to me as a classmate of Laura’s, and we hardly spoke that night, so I didn’t think much about our meeting or about him.
Until I got a phone call from him a few days later.
In the apartment I shared with Laura and BJ, we kept a communal phone in the kitchen. My roommates had recently encountered a discarded box overflowing with 1970s Playboy magazines on our street corner, and when we discovered a seven-page spread, a pornographic rendering of the old Mother Goose rhyme about the days of the week, we found it so delightful we festooned our breakfast nook with it. I remember being completely surrounded by these scantily clad bunnies the night Jonah called. When I heard who it was, I shouted for Laura to pick up the line.
Actually, I was calling for you, Jonah said. Confused, I briefly locked eyes with “Monday’s Child”—who was full of face and then some. What was this all about?
Jonah explained that his birthday was coming up, and he wanted
to know if I might be free to swing by his party. At first, I was a little perplexed by the personal invitation. I wasn’t sure I could pick Jonah’s face out of a crowd. But I was also intrigued, so I said I might stop by.
He called again the next day, though. He said he had decided to cancel the party.
Too much hassle, he said. But let’s keep the date. We can meet at Sake Bar Decibel on St. Mark’s. Do you know it?
I did. But this was a lot of newfound pressure. What kind of guy makes a first date on his birthday? I agreed to meet him, but then immediately plied Laura for more information to decide if I should back out or not. She said Jonah was the most brilliant guy in any of her classes, from scene study to physics, but “moody” didn’t begin to cover his emotional swings.
Don’t get me wrong; he’s always been pretty nice to me, she said. But he is opinionated, often judgmental, and I’m glad I’ve stayed on his good side. He can be pretty intimidating.
The profile was somewhat off-putting, though I was intrigued enough not to cancel. Right before the date, I took two shots of Wild Turkey to steel me for whatever the night might have in store.
The staircase of Decibel was a repurposed fire escape, an entrance that looked more like an exit. I descended the clanging iron steps and looked around. I didn’t see Jonah anywhere. So, I ordered a bottle of sake, sat in the corner, and waited.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Thirty minutes in, the cute lady bartender gave me a sympathetic look and a second carafe of sake for free. By the forty-minute mark, I had nearly finished that bottle, too.
