The Memory Book

by Howard Engel

  On the question of visitors I was insatiable. Professional visitors as well as personal ones—I couldn’t get enough of them. When company was in short supply, I became greedy for more. I became a company junkie; I wanted a line of visitors at the door. But it seemed to me that my neighbour, Jerry, saw more visitors than I did.

  Then it hit me that I might be under police protection. What if the Dumpster Gang came back to finish the job. Could anybody walk in to see me? Would the nurses opposite the elevator give anybody my room number? My “wife” didn’t seem to have had much trouble.

  One day, I followed one of the nurses into the elevator and pushed the button for the main floor. Not a word was said. No one lifted a hand to bar my way. I felt proud of myself as I stood in my dressing gown facing the unrestricted front door.

  * * *

  “Are you busy?” It was Anna Abraham, my sometime girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since I don’t remember when.

  “Anna! God, I’m glad to see you! How did you find me?” Anna took a breath, as though I’d just asked an impossible question. “Oh, I know all about your secret life. I watch at keyholes, tap phones, read tea leaves, interpret bumps and warts. For weeks I’ve been studying your face in repose.”

  “I know that,” I said. “How did you first hear?”

  “There was a piece in the paper. The Beacon. Besides, I have my spies. You’re not the only one who can dig up the facts. Remember, I’m a trained researcher as well as a professor. How are you feeling?”

  “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I’m not that easy to dump, Benny. I stick like burrs to your pant leg.”

  “I missed you.” It was true. It seemed like a thousand years since I’d gazed at the wonderful structure of her cheekbones. And yet I retained the shadow of a memory of an earlier visit. Had she been here, or was it only in my dreams?

  “You told me so last week when I was here.”

  “You were here to see me? My head’s a bit thick, Anna. Humour me.” Sometime the bread you cast upon the waters washes back with the first wave; she gave me a big kiss.

  “I’ve been in and out a few times. You just don’t remember, that’s all. It’s not your fault. Besides, I sometimes catch you having a nap. I like watching you sleep. It’s very restful. Did I say that before? Sorry. I’ve been missing your peculiar bachelor ways: rolled socks in the bread box, trousers under the mattress.” Her voice was brittle, like glass.

  “If you give me a minute, I’ll put my pants on and we can go for a walk,” I said. She grinned as I rolled free of my hospital corners. While I was busy finding my trousers and getting into them, a thought crossed my mind: was Anna holding something back? The clue was in her bright banter. Something more than bedside manner. It reminded me of my conversations with my brother Sam and Staff-Sergeant Sykes. Something was off balance and it wasn’t just me.

  In ten minutes, we were sitting in the café in the hospital. I had my Memory Book beside me; I felt secure. Anna was at the counter buying coffee and talking to a tall stranger with a summer hat in his hands. I held our table against all comers. And there were a few. I was beginning to wonder at my growing passivity; why wasn’t I collecting the drinks and paying the shot?

  Anna put a tray on the table. “Fellow up there wanted to know if I wished to make ten thousand dollars,” she said.

  “Sounds like a good scam. Did you take him up on it?”

  “No. I told him I was more interested in spiritual values. I got him involved in a long religious discussion. That stopped him.” She unloaded the coffee and two oatmeal cookies. After getting rid of the tray, she sat down across from me and leaned forward. “Now,” she said. “Tell me what’s new.”

  As briefly as I could, I brought her up to date on the treatment I was having to get over the trauma. I told her about my newly imposed regimen. I was now being shunted around the hospital to classes in three kinds of therapy. In physical therapy I had to walk on an irregular ramp to test my balance, climb up and down a flight of stairs, and spend twenty minutes riding a stationary bicycle. Occupational therapy tested me with games to see how deep my brain damage went.

  “The third class is in reading,” I explained. “Here the teacher, a Miss … Sorry, her name escapes me. Anyway, she tries to re-educate my poor bruised brain to recognize the letters of the alphabet again and the words they could be organized to form. I’m slow at this; the letters keep changing shape on me, r’s becoming p’s without warning and j’s turning into h’s.” I could find no sense in this. If the d’s suddenly became b’s, or the p’s, q’s, I could see the dyslexic logic of my degeneration. Maybe I was foolish to look for method in my confusion. My disorganized head treated all letters equally; my affliction was at least democratic.

  I also told Anna how anxious I was to get back on the street again. I even included what I could remember of the more upbeat of the comments that had been made by doctors and nurses in passing. When I had finished, she sat back hard in her chair.

  “Wow! Poor bunny, you really have been raked over the broken glass, haven’t you? Everything but wild dogs chasing you over frozen ice floes.”

  “Hell, no! I’m just a member of the walking wounded. My floor is full of people who can’t walk or talk or put a spoon in their mouth. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m so fit they may be getting rid of me before too long.”

  “But your reading? Your memory?”

  “Neither will be cured by bedrest here on the fifth floor. There are people here who can’t even pull the bell cord to call a nurse if they need one.”

  “Whoever attacked you can claim ‘by way of mitigation’ that he could have hit you harder.”

  “We have to catch him first. Do you know the university residence at the corner of Wessex and Spadina?”

  “The building with the crazy O dangling over traffic? Sure.”

  “Could you nose around the Dumpster and see if the perpetrator left his name and address anywhere?”

  “Benny! Two things: you’re forgetting how long ago this attack on you occurred, and I’m a lecturer in English literature, not Susanna of the Mounties. I wouldn’t even know what to look for.”

  “You’re right. I keep forgetting you’re not Batgirl. Besides, aren’t there students waiting for you to show up at Secord?”

  “No, not during the summer, Benny. Instead, I’m teaching summer school here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Coming here to visit you doesn’t take me out of my way at all. In fact, it helps me pass the time. It keeps me out of libraries and such low places. Let me think about your idea overnight.”

  “Forget it, Anna. It was a dumb idea. Even I have them sometimes.”

  “Do you really think I might find something?”

  “It’s just part of the drill. It’s unlikely there’s anything to find, but you can’t check it off the list of things to do if you haven’t looked.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Anna. It’s just that I’m going stir-crazy in here. I need to be up and doing already. The longer I stay in bed, the weaker I get.”

  Anna took my hand across the table. “Damn your wheedling ways, Benny. I should be armed against them at this late date in our relationship. I’ll go around there and have a closer look. I’ll see what I can find. And if I run into what Flora McAlpine ran into, I’ll take my lumps.”

  “Who’s Flora McAlpine? The cops asked me about her.”

  “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Tell me what? The name rings a very distant bell.”

  “Flora McAlpine was a professor at the university. She was lying in the Dumpster with you. They found the two of you together. The only difference was that you were still alive and Professor McAlpine was dead.”

  TEN

  Anna and I walked across the hospital lobby. It was busy, crowded with people frustrated in one way or another. They couldn’t find where a patient was located, or they couldn’t find a proper gift for some newborn. Vaguely I
admired the volunteers who tried to treat each request, however confused, with cool clarity and simplicity.

  We walked outside and found a wooden bench facing a children’s playground. The toys inside the enclosure— tricycles, wagons, and kiddy-cars—were mostly broken, mangled by use or neglect.

  “Tell me about it,” I said at last.

  “There’s not much to tell. Didn’t your police friends …?”

  “Not a word. Just her name as they went out the door. They must have been testing me. I don’t know.”

  “Flora McAlpine was a teacher at one of the colleges. Properly, she was Doctor Flora McAlpine. She was forty-five, unmarried, and by all accounts a good teacher. She lived in Clarendon House. She also had a head injury, same as you, but hers was fatal. I don’t know any more than that, Benny. I’m sorry.”

  By the time Anna delivered me back to my room, I was completely exhausted. I was less than my usual affable self when I pecked her on the cheek and waved her away. The ping of the elevator bell sounded with finality as she vanished. My shirt was wet through across the shoulders and down my back.

  I must have broken some speed record when I pulled the bedcovers around me and surrendered myself to forty winks that lasted through the whole of the late afternoon. I slept through both speech and occupational therapy, waking only when the occupational therapist came to see if I was still breathing.

  “I’ve been out for a walk,” I explained. “My first, as far as I remember. Sorry I missed those classes. Can I make them up in some way?” The young woman, whose name I still managed to forget, instructed me in hospital policy, and I returned to sleep for another half hour. It seemed to me that most of my day was pieced together from naps and rests and sleeps and lie-downs of varying seriousness. I guess there was healing going on somewhere in my head and I needed more sleep than normal. When I finally woke up, it was close to dinnertime. The whole day, like so many that had gone before it, had fled like retreating guerrillas before a massed attack of infantry with armoured support.

  Dinnertime found me with the gourmets at the table farthest from the television set. The Czech who’d been a United Nations representative was there too, and he turned out to have an interest in crime fiction. I’d read a bit myself, and so I encouraged him in his attempts to move the conversation away from the best place in the Dordogne to find a truly outstanding cassoulet. My new friend shut the others up saying that nobody in the Dordogne has any business looking for a cassoulet in the first place. He’d be better off looking for a superior hot dog. We all laughed, but one of the gourmet crowd was mildly injured by the remark.

  I became anxious after dinner. When I had eliminated all the other possible sources, I was troubled by the knowledge that Anna might be poking around that university residence on her own. I was anxious both for her personal safety and for the scraps of information she might have come across. Anna had helped me out in the past, but usually I was with her or the situation was less sinister.

  Under the surface of my concern for Anna’s fair hide was a large ration of guilt about the way our close relationship had stalled. There had been no way to turn my job into a nine-to-five operation, and I had missed more dates and appointments. To stay alive a relationship has to grow and expand, or it dies of neglect. One night, looking in a drawer for a stamp, I found a clutch of theatre tickets that she had bought for the two of us. In each case I failed to show up. And through it all, she pretended to shrug off my habitual delinquency. Anna was a remarkable woman.

  I wondered whether I could slip away from the hospital long enough to make sure she was safe. By day, she would be fully visible to all; by night, her flashlight might attract the U of T campus police. Or she might surprise the guy who hit me.

  I stopped myself. This was my bum head talking. Anna was in no danger; my encounter with the Dumpster was weeks—no, months—ago. Why couldn’t I hold on to that fact? Why did my ideas now have big holes in them?

  None of this helped to relax me. Thank God, my Czech friend from the dinner table came by and asked me whether I would like to play chess. As luck would have it, I did play. The odd thing was that he seemed to know that already. I wondered whether my brain injury would give me an advantage over my partner, who had suffered a crippling stroke. The next few hours passed by quickly as I demonstrated to my friend just how badly I played the game. And as for my earlier worries about Anna, they vanished for a time as the fate of my beleaguered queen had to be dealt with.

  After my new friend left, the worries returned. The outing with Anna got me thinking about life outside. Did the hospital have a course on reintegrating former patients into their neglected lives? Or was the Memory Book all I could hope for? How would I learn to pay my bills with my trick memory? How could I remember the names of my clients? I pictured one sitting across from me, telling me her problems, while my problem was trying to remember the name she gave me. I could install a blackboard on the wall facing me. Here I could enter the names of my clients. The client wouldn’t see it, and it would help bolster my assurance. The idea made me feel better, and I began to invent other ways to make life away from University Avenue supportable.

  My new life was going to depend on such strategies: the Memory Book, pocket notebooks, and diaries. I was at last going to have to get organized, as my teacher Miss MacDoughal kept warning me back in grade four. It was going to be a peculiar life, I had to admit: part of my old memory worked—I could still remember about the Battle of Hastings and when Julius Caesar crossed his Rubicon—but I could no longer remember the names of my many first cousins. While I was trying to list all sixteen of them, I had the haunting feeling that I had done this before. I didn’t so much mind the duplication of the work as I did the feeling that I was looking over my own shoulder to see what was going on. I could remember Anna and her father, but I had lost his first name. And in order to remember his last name, I had to go back to Anna’s, which, of course, was the same. I kept surprising myself with my own ingenuity; for instance, I was trying to recall the name Grant for some reason. I spent ten minutes going through the alphabet searching for the name. I succeeded only when I remembered that I’d once worked for a Saul Granofsky, whose daughters had changed their name to Grant. My memory was full of such filigrees of twisted silken strands. My new memory required me to build a latticework of aids to criss-cross my experience and expectation.

  ELEVEN

  There were days and days of tests. Some were simply physical, like the blood pressure monitor I wore around my arm for twenty-four hours. Every so often it would begin to squeeze my arm like a persistent python, then release me after a minute: a silent companion who followed me everywhere. I was able to take more pride in the tests of my mental functions. They were more involving. I was childishly delighted in my correct answers, but the seeds of depression were planted with every incorrect response.

  “That was excellent, Mr. Cooperman. You got them all.”

  “I wish I could read faster.”

  “That’ll come. With practice and time.” The therapist that day was a woman in her late twenties. She had a pleasant manner; I didn’t feel as though I were being made to jump through hoops. She never spoke about me to another therapist while I was standing there listening. When the therapist left, I’d continue the conversation with my nurse.

  “Should I be doing something about my reading?”

  “You’re going to speech therapy twice a week.”

  “I know, but isn’t there something more I could be doing?”

  “Have you tried reading a book?”

  “It takes me all day to get through The Globe and Mail. A book could hang me up until the Second Coming.”

  “Get along with you! You’re doing very well here. But I thought you were Jewish, Mr. Cooperman.”

  “I was. I mean, I am; but when it comes to measuring the time it will take me to recover my old reading speed, the phrase seemed appropriate. What could be longer than an unbeliever’s idea of the Second C
oming?”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “Do you think I’ll ever be able to read again?”

  “I’ve seen all sorts of progress on this floor, Mr. Cooperman.”

  “Call me Benny.”

  “And you’ve forgotten my name again.”

  “I forget it all the time. I know it rhymes with something, but I can’t hold on to it. It’s not just you; I can’t remember anybody’s name. I was never great at names, but this is ridiculous!”

  “My name is Carol McKay and it rhymes with ‘day.’” She repeated the name and the mantra that went with it. For me at least it was a mnemonic trick with a flat tire. I repeated it with her. I planted it in my heart of hearts and there, a moment after she left the room, it vanished. I felt stupid, as though I’d just listened to an hour-long lecture and come away without a thought in my head and no words to explain what it had been all about. It wasn’t that I forgot who she was or that I forgot what she said to me. It was just the name itself.

  There was a ringing in my ears. I tried to shake it away, but it persisted.

  “Hello?” Jerry, my roommate, waited for a moment while the caller identified himself. I could follow it all. I just hadn’t noticed before that I had a phone next to me. Then I remembered my wrangle with the unhelpful telephone operator.

  Jerry handed me the receiver, then wheeled himself back to his side of the room.

  “Hello? Benny?” It was Anna. “Are you okay? Benny?”

  “I’ve got a phone beside my bed, Anna!”

  “I know. I’ve seen it. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. What have you got for me?” I had not forgotten my earlier worries about Anna’s safety. I should have asked whether she was still in good health. It would have shown me to be a good and caring friend and sometime lover. But I was more interested in what she had to tell me just then. The bang on the head had rendered me no more considerate than I used to be. I still cut to the chase.