“Please help me,” Mike Webster said.
Fitzsimmons tried. He was the closest ally Webster had during the crazy years of his decline. It took him a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania, Kansas City, Wisconsin, West Virginia. Hundreds of pages of medical files. He could find just two references to head injuries, which he thought strange, considering Mike’s mental condition. He sent Webster to new doctors for new evaluations. Four separate medical evaluations confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.
So in 1998 Fitzsimmons filed a disability claim with the NFL’s Bert Bell / Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. Guys would file claims for lasting effects of knee injuries, back problems, and other physical conditions they believed resulted from their playing days. The six-member pension board making the decisions—three player representatives and three team owner representatives—was notoriously stingy in approving claims, and it had virtually no experience in dealing with players coming forward to say they suffered mental problems as a result of playing football. Football might cause bad knees, shoulders, or backs, but football did not cause brain damage. That was a given. There was no proof that football did anything to anybody’s mind.
Fitzsimmons went after that notion. He argued that Webster’s case was a work-related injury, pure and simple. A guy spends fifteen years bashing himself in the head repeatedly with more than sixty g’s of force for a living, and then goes insane—well, his workplace owes him something.
Fitzsimmons won the case. It was the first time the NFL had ever made the finding of football-related brain injury. But it was not retroactive. Webster would qualify for payments only as of 1998, the year the claim was filed. There would be nothing dating back to his retirement in 1991. The difference amounted to more than a million dollars, and Fitzsimmons argued in an appeal that Webster was owed it.
Here was a man who Tasered himself, peed in his oven, used Super Glue on his teeth. “Four doctors,” Fitzsimmons argued—“all with the same diagnosis, some dating back years!”
The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor.
“Bring it on,” Fitzsimmons said.
The doctor the NFL hired for the job examined Web-ster and concurred with the other four: Closed-head injury. Football-related. And Fitzsimmons gathered affidavits from people across the nation like TV anchors who had tried to employ Webster only to discover that he was demented. The NFL pension board voted unanimously for limited disability payments anyway.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Fitzsimmons said. He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered.
In 2005, the judge would ultimately reverse the decision of the NFL pension board to deny Webster back payments—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.
And yet still the NFL fought. They appealed that verdict in a higher court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably twenty-five thousand violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster wasn’t crazy long enough to qualify for what the courts had said he was owed.
Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mama. He took to sleeping in the parking lot outside Fitzsimmons’s office, waiting for him to show up for work. He would write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. “Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We’ve got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through.” And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.
And now he was dead.
Fitzsimmons held the phone and took a giant gulp of air as he listened to Bennet, the stranger with the thick accent who was calling from the Allegheny County coroner’s office, four days after Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster’s brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client’s death deeply; in his increasingly rare lucid moments, Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry that had used him, had crippled both his body and his mind, and then had thrown him away like a rotten piece of meat.
And now he was dead.
“Yeah,” Fitzsimmons said that night to Bennet on the phone. “You should go ahead and study that brain.”
CHAPTER 7
DISCOVERY
Mike Webster’s brain sat for two weeks in a white plastic bucket of formaldehyde at the morgue, and when it was firm enough, Bennet pulled it out and put it on the cutting board. He took a scalpel to the frontal lobe, sliced it off, then cut a section from it about the width of a stick of gum. He did the same to the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. He packed the four slices into plastic cassettes, put them in his briefcase, and took them up to the lab at the University of Pittsburgh, where he had just finished his neuropathology training and knew the technicians and their particular expertise.
Jonette Werley was the grandmother of the place. She was a round woman with a blond bob and a magnanimous way, and when she saw Bennet she stood up and reached out her arms. “Look at you!” she said. Bennet flashed a smile and tilted his head as if inviting further admiration. “We miss you around here, Bennet. It’s so boring!”
Say what you would about Bennet, but his idiosyncratic ways could perk a place up—especially an academic department with a lot of ambitious research scientists in sloppy attire yakking about the size of research grants or complaining about the backbiting ways of rival colleagues. Bennet wasn’t like them, wasn’t in that racket. He cared nothing about academic rank; he was the quirky guy from the morgue who had come to Pitt and studied brains to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. He was a guy from Cyril Wecht’s world—the polar opposite of an academic research laboratory. Forensic pathology, at least the Wecht brand, was about showmanship and conviction and razzle-dazzle and Bennet had unapologetically embraced it. Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is! That kind of stuff had no place in a research facility. People like Jonette found Bennet’s theatricality refreshing.
Bennet opened his briefcase and handed Jonette the four cassettes. He said nothing about whose brain it was; a man’s brain was holy. It wasn’t unusual for Jonette to process tissue for the morgue or other outside contractors. Certain labs across the country specialized in the work, and Jonette had been at it for decades.
“You just want the routine panel?” Jonette asked.
“If you please,” Bennet said, indicating which antibodies he wanted her to use in the processing.
She was to shave each block of Mike Webster’s brain into microscopic slivers, then mount the slivers onto glass slides and stain them with the antibodies. The stains bring any unusual patterns of cells into view. A neuropathologist could choose between some thirty stains, and Bennet ordered the selection he had come to use routinely when he examined brains for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Lou Gehrig’s. He didn’t expect to find any of those diseases specifically in Mike Webster’s brain, but maybe something with a link?
He knew it was a long shot. He was acting on a guess, like a kid on some sort of treasure hunt. He decided he would be glad enough if no one ever asked him about it. He told Jonette to submit the bill for the tissue processing to him personally, not to the coroner’s office; he didn’t want any of the techs at the morgue involved in the paperwork, didn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder or making fun of him for his indulgence. It would cost a few thousand dollars for just the first batch of slides, and after that there was no telling. He didn’t mind paying for it. For the first time in his life he was making real money—a bachelor earning close to six figures in
a city where the cost of living was among the lowest in the country. He was giving large sums to St. Benedict’s, and sending money home to his parents in Nigeria. He helped Uche and Ikem and the others buy a generator for the compound, a giant, thunderous orange machine that could provide a reliable source of power; Oba’s ailing health now required round-the-clock air-conditioning. It felt good to pay for that. It was a way of showing his father that he was a man now.
“I’ll need a few weeks for these, okay?” Jonette said.
“Thank you,” Bennet said.
Mike Webster’s brain was not, at least not at that point, an urgent mission, or even a calling. It was a curiosity and a whisper. It was him talking to Webster on the slab that Saturday morning and him hearing Webster ask for help explaining what had happened to his brain—which, when you held that kind of transaction up to scrutiny, sounded like poppycock and maybe even its own kind of dementia. It wasn’t something you could say out loud in America, wasn’t something you could say to Wecht, or the academics at Pitt, or even to a religious man like Father Carmen. If he had been home in Nigeria, sipping brandy with his brothers or eating kola nuts with his sisters, he could have discussed that sort of thing long into the night; the Igbo tradition left room for spirits in all forms. He imagined his father with his high hat, and he pictured Chizoba wearing one, and he heard Ikem praying, and he imagined Winny holding her head back, weeping and rejoicing.
Nigeria was emotion, fire and prayer and hunches, and America was reason, ambition, and wealth. He bounced between those two spheres, not quite in one but not quite in the other. And maybe it was the necessity of having to hang there, in the uncertainty of transition, pulling forward and getting pushed backward, that enabled him to see what others had not yet seen.
When the slides came back from Jonette in late October, Bennet put them on a shelf in his office at the morgue and for weeks he didn’t bother to look at them. He was not on a timetable. No one was asking for results. This kind of brain research was a personal curiosity. It was like a novel he had started writing; he would get back to it when he had time.
—
“Wait, you bought Prema a dress?” Father Carmen said.
“It’s yellow,” Bennet said. “It has a fashion designer label on it and it is very elegant.”
“A dress?”
“She was very surprised when she opened the box,” Bennet said. They were in the kitchen convent and the nuns had left them a pile of gingerbread cookies to share.
“I don’t know that women like something so…personal,” Father Carmen said. “She might have interpreted it as your saying she’s not stylish or something.”
“She’s not!” Bennet said. “She is very drab in her appearance!”
“Hoo boy, Bennet.” Father Carmen hardly had authority when it came to dating tips, but still. “You should be careful not to insult her.” He sat back in his chair, looked away, folded his arms. The maple tree outside the window had exploded into orange, red, and gold, and the autumn dew made it droop.
Bennet had been spending a lot of time with Prema, a nurse from Kenya who had come to the United States to advance her studies and had joined the parish shortly after Bennet did. Yinka had introduced them at a party. Prema had been sitting with a small group of newcomers and she was not flashy or fancy. She had a long face, long hair, a smooth neck; she was like a zinnia plant with neither bloom nor bud; with a little nourishment she would flower, Bennet thought, that first time he saw her.
Bennet had walked up to her and he tried to be booming and powerful like Theodore and his father. An Omalu manly man! He talked at her, told her about his car, as he was holding his shoulders up to make himself look muscular.
“You must be Nigerian,” she said, eyeing him up and down. She said she did not like Nigerian men. She said Nigerian men were arrogant. She turned her back on him.
“I think she may have been tired,” Bennet explained to Father Carmen when he recounted the incident.
“Uh-huh.”
“It was the end of the day.”
“Right.”
“I was wondering if you knew her?”
Father Carmen did. He told Bennet that Prema was new to America, had been here only a few months, and he suggested that Bennet try again with her, offer to help her with her transition to Pittsburgh. So that’s what Bennet did. He reintroduced himself to her after church one day, a few weeks later, handing her a roll of twenties.
“What is this?” she said.
“Father Carmen said you need help?”
She winced.
This was going nowhere. He was rusty with women, so rusty. Eventually he offered to give Prema a lift to the grocery store, then drove her around to do errands, took her to the laundromat, helped her fold. She liked that. The frequency of the favors increased. Bennet did not take Prema on dates and he did not consider himself to be dating her; he was helping, that was all. He felt comfortable doing things for her, not with her.
“I was thinking of taking her to a hairdresser,” Bennet told Father Carmen that day in the convent kitchen. He’d been “helping” Prema for a few months by now and it was turning into a kind of chase. Gifts and favors, surprises by her door. The dress and hair ideas were just the latest. “She does not take care of her hair like she should.”
“Bennet, I don’t think—” Father Carmen said. “My recommendation is that you stay away from fashion altogether.”
“Her hair will be so beautiful for church on Sunday,” Bennet said. “You will see.”
“Okay, well, God bless you, Bennet.” Father Carmen grabbed a cookie, popped it in his mouth.
“The hair is too much?” Bennet said.
“Bennet, you’re fine.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I’m sure she’s very grateful.”
“I found out she sends money to her mother in Kenya,” Bennet said. “That melts my heart! That makes me want to help more.”
Bennet continued to bombard Prema with this thing he called help. He told her he wanted to start paying her rent, her tuition, how about some spending money? Prema laughed. Who was this odd man bursting with generosity? It seemed that the guy with the cackle-laugh who sang so loudly in church wanted a project, and she was it. She found it amusing, and, in time, adorable.
As for Bennet, he did not experience the giving as generous. He just wanted to be near her. He saw in her the fire of Uche, the compassion of Winny, the softness of his mom. He saw in her a will of iron he knew so well. Going to nursing school all day, working the cleaning crew at a bank at night, then all day at school the next day, sending money home to her mom. The two of them against the world, that’s how Bennet saw it. He was working his butt off and so was she. The two of them not like everyone else. Everyone else their age out having fun, enjoying life, but the two of them working so hard, working to catch up with the Americans.
Prema became Bennet’s companion on that fabled journey. And if they were falling in love, Bennet was not yet ready to see it.
—
One day, nearly a month after he put the processed slides of Mike Webster’s brain on his office shelf, Bennet decided to look at them. Truthfully, at that point it was arbitrary. He had at least a dozen research projects in development. He had brain samples from people suffering diseases such as West Nile virus, and from suicide victims. He would take the slides home and look at them under the microscope on his dining room table, scan, imagine, and think. People don’t tend to associate scientists with a muse, but Bennet trusted that sort of relationship implicitly. The mind should be allowed to wander! It was the same as with his drawer and the bottle caps, his books in school, the files in the Kimbell case. The mind, he long ago discovered, was a private playground, a place for random conversations and games, always welcoming and never proscriptive. It was something that could clamp irrationally onto something unknowable like depression. It was a mystery as vast and elusive as God.
He brought the slides
of Mike Webster’s brain home to his condominium, where he could study them in the darkness before dawn without having to explain. He sat at his dining room table where there was a reading lamp and a microscope and a white plastic box that opened at the top and when you looked inside you saw rows of glass slides all lined up, clear with hues of pink and tan. Paper-thin slices of Mike Webster’s brain.
He loaded the first slide and leaned over the microscope and adjusted the light and moved the lens into focus. He didn’t see anything but clean tissue, and so he put in a second slide and then a third. He sat back, tapped his fingers on the plastic box a few times, and he heard the clock in the kitchen tick loudly.
He reviewed the photos he had taken of Mike Webster’s body and he went back to the death certificate, unwinding the story and restarting from the beginning as he knew it, and as Wecht had taught him to do. Rebuild the story, block by block, and don’t add the next until the pieces fit snugly. The hospital report said Webster had died at Allegheny General Hospital from an acute myocardial infarction. He suffered from “depression secondary to post-concussion syndrome,” suggesting the syndrome was a contributory factor to his death, thus making it accidental. Every accidental manner of death falls under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. So that was the only reason Mike Webster’s body ended up on the table for autopsy in the first place.
Bennet thought about the term “post-concussion syndrome” and he took a deep breath and he remembered one of the reasons he hated being a doctor. People always wanting a name for something, doctors inventing names, as if naming had anything to do with healing, let alone science. You couldn’t come up with a more vague term than “post-concussion syndrome.” Basically it meant someone suffering concussion symptoms such as headaches or dizziness for longer than concussion symptoms usually lasted. And how long was that? Who knew? Who decided? Where was the science? What, anyway, was a “concussion”?
People have been grappling with that one for centuries. Hippocrates mentioned commotio cerebri in his medical writings from ancient Greece. He described the loss of speech, hearing, and sight that could result from “commotion of the brain,” a vigorous shake or blow to the head. After that you have to move all the way up to the tenth century to find further documentation. The Persian physician Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi is thought to be the first to make the distinction between the dramatic kind of brain injury—bruising and swelling and bleeding—that outright killed a person, and this other more subtle thing: an injury to the head that could make you dizzy, could even knock you unconscious, but from which you recovered. Razi was the first to use the term “cerebral concussion,” and his definition of the condition—“a transient loss of function with no physical damage”—advanced incrementally over hundreds of years.
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