Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  I used to be an eight hours a night man or I was useless. I need only five and half now and they serve me better than my sleep ever did before. In my waking hours I feel more awake than I ever have.

  I couldn’t read, my brain wasn’t letting me yet. But I could focus on the little things and block out the distracting thoughts. In short, I could listen like a motherfucker. Pardon my French. Lack of inhibitive reflex plus mild aphasia there: ‘impaired ability to speak the appropriate word for the scenario, or the one your brain is searching for.’ In other words, I send for a good formal noun, in this case ‘genius’, but by the time it comes down the chute some joker has switched it for ‘motherfucker.’ Apologies again.

  I longed for things passionately, like I never had before.

  I wanted to run.

  I wanted to watch movies and fully understand them.

  I wanted to climb remote exotic mountains.

  I wanted mystery and love and mysterious love.

  I wanted to be able to drive.

  ‘For the moment, it’s best if you don’t drive. Order from on high. Probably an insurance thing, something like that.’

  I know he’s lying but I appreciate his tact. He has an upright stance. He has initiative. Gumption. I like him. I give him a thumbs-up.

  A crease in his face tells me he’s not sure whether this gesture is an ironic manoeuvre. Little does he know I don’t have anywhere near the outward mental processing speed required for irony yet.

  He moves on and says some more things with his mouth. I take my cheat pad out of my pocket and write. You see, I can still write, as the part of my brain that turns thoughts into symbols works fine, but curiously the bit that interprets those symbols back into words? Different matter. Pun intended.

  So I know I won’t be able to read this back but the act of writing it down helps me commit it to memory. I observe. The others peer at me but I block them out with ease, with my genius focus. I write:

  Upright stance. Gumption. Fair and balding. Wire frame circular glasses. Highly Caucasian.

  On the upper left of his jacket, where his breast would be, are some symbols. A word I think. It starts with an L.

  L. E. Then one I can’t make out, then an I, and it ends with another E. The process takes a while and my straining to establish the word at this point has become a spectacle, which everyone is pretending manfully not to notice.

  LE_I_E. Lee? Can I call him Lee? Leon. Lean? Levine? Levine! I’ve heard that somewhere before. Ah. Of course. Levine. So that’s Levine. I remember him. I think he’s recently been promoted.

  Levine. Or Upright-Gumption-Bald-Glasses-White-Face. As I will call him. In my mind.

  I turn and see another man to my right, close to my head. He holds out his hand, luckily, because that means he might whisper his name. I may have seen him before, it’s quite possible. I’ll probably remember him. Because, you see, it’s not the remembering exactly I struggle with. No, it’s not that, it’s another thing.

  ‘Hey. I’m Emre Bartu. Good to meet you,’ he says with a wink.

  Yes. He’ll do. I keep out my cheat sheet and start to write.

  Bouncy. Kind. Black hair. Deep voice. Brown face.

  I realise I haven’t said anything back to him. As is certainly customary. I think I just locked eyes with him and started writing.

  Multi-tasking is hard so I have to stop for a second to mutter something pleasant-sounding to him.

  ‘I’m Tom Mondrian. Can you stay still please? I’m looking at your head.’

  He smiles and does so. He nods, his eyes flicker to the side, which indicates he’s a bit confused by all this. Then he holds his pose like he’s having his school photo taken.

  A thought hits me from nowhere that someone once said he was Turkish. I don’t know where I got that from but my mind has offered it to me as useful information so it’s best to follow it up.

  ‘You’re a Turkey,’ I say.

  ‘What mate?’ he says.

  ‘Sorry. I mean. You’re a Turkey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry. Shit. I mean. You’re a Turkey. Ahhh,’ I shout, frustrated. Damn aphasia.

  The room looks up for a second and I hold up my hand to apologise. They go back to talking about their beat, what they have to do that day, that kind of thing.

  ‘Sorry. You’re a Turkey. Shit! You’re… Turkish?’ I bend my voice at the last minute, it had taken so long to splutter it into the world I’d forgotten that it was supposed to be a question.

  ‘Yes, mate. That’s right.’ We nod. Agreeing with each other.

  I’m pleased with this. I run the words over in my head.

  This word pattern forms what is called a Feature by Feature Recognition Strategy. I slip the note back in my pocket.

  *

  The physio came to me every day but I had to go and see Dr Ryans twice a week. The journey itself was a good test and I’m sure he was aware of that. We went through a series of facial recognition exercises as that was his biggest area of interest. It was discovered I had prosopagnosia – an inability to recognise faces. Which is a particularly cruel word if you also have trouble reading.

  We talked through strategies and the face cheat sheet was certainly the best. By far the most disquieting side effect of my accident is the inability to recognise my own face. Typically, Ryans also had a few methods to deal with this frightening daily occurrence – the part where I wake and scream because I don’t know who the man in my mirror is.

  ‘It’s suggested that success can be achieved by making your own image as distinct and memorable as possible. Prosopagnosiacs often choose to grow characteristic facial hair. But what works best, in fact, is when this is coupled with headwear, perhaps a bandanna or…’ He pauses, catching me mulling this over.

  ‘No offence, Jeff, but as well as having all my brain disorders I’d rather not dress like Hulk Hogan.’

  Amazing that despite not being able to pick out my parents faces from a line up in Dr Ryans’ tests, I can picture Hulk Hogan clear as day. But then, he does have that characteristic beard and bandanna combo we prosopagnosiacs seem to really respond to.

  ‘Get a cat,’ he says as I leave.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’d advise you to get a cat. For a few reasons.’

  ‘I don’t like cats.’

  ‘It will like you. But you won’t come to rely on it. Soft companionship. That’s reason one. Understood?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘You really hate them?’

  ‘I’m indifferent to them.’

  ‘Oh, that’s different. That’s fine. Here’s reason two: It’ll anchor you, by which I mean you’ll judge time better by its presence, it will remind you how you’re progressing in relation to it and therefore will stop you getting depressed.’

  ‘I don’t feel depressed.’

  ‘Well, you could well get depressed. Reason three: The stroking is nice. You’ll just fucking like it. Trust me. Get a cat!’

  I sometimes think the sudden outbursts of swearing are in my imagination, but I think he’s just like that. He’s come direct from the wayward 1960s. His hair is kind of shaggy, his formal jacket sits awkwardly on his shoulders above his loose fitting slacks, like he was dressed by his mother this morning, but even the jacket itself is finding its place on his torso pretty inappropriate and is mounting a slow escape.

  I’ve often seen him hurriedly extinguishing something in a drawer as I enter the room, his desk gently smoking as our conversation begins. His pupils a little dilated and the room smelling leaf green.

  ‘Okay. I’ll get a cat,’ I say.

  ‘And you can have it as what people call an emotional support animal. There are perks of this. For example, if you go on a fucking plane you can take it with you and have it on your lap. You’re allowed almost anything if it’s for emotional support. Big dogs for instance. One chap even got a small horse on a long haul.’

  ‘What? In the cabin?’

  ‘Yes. A
tiny one, but it was still a horse. Listen, trust me, in my line of work I’ve seen far fucking stranger things than that.’

  I leave. I get a cat. Now I have a cat.

  *

  Draw a line between the middle of your forehead and the top of your left ear. Make a mark directly in the middle of that line. Then make another mark one centimetre above it. That’s where the bullet went in.

  Right there.

  6

  ‘Dee. Dah dah girl dee dah, dah dah, my head…’

  ‘So… Stevens and Anderson are to follow up with the girl’s family. Bartu and Mondrian, you’re giving a talk at the school.’

  ‘What? I want to follow up the missing girl,’ I exclaim.

  A hush. ‘I want’ isn’t a word combination that often gets an outing in the debrief room.

  It’s been a big deal, me coming back so early. They wanted it for me. And for my part, I needed it; I couldn’t stay at home any longer.

  Brains need other brains to develop. If I’m kept out in the cold, in exile, mine will start to recede before it’s even rehabilitated. People go mad when left in rooms with nothing but their own thoughts to haunt them. Inmates in solitary confinement, deprived of sensory stimulation, have been known to forge their own deluded realities, even see things that aren’t there and hear voices. Try not speaking to anyone for a full day when home alone on sick leave, and you’ll feel the chill the icy hand of madness leaves on your shoulder.

  That’s a microcosm of where I am. That’s the narrow end of it, a fleeting taste of the mouthful.

  But they need to know I can be trusted. They’ve shown a lot of faith in a man still trying to get a grip on the newly coloured world spread out in front of him, because in truth, I’m not sure whether I can be trusted or not. Sure, I’ll give it a crack, but I’m certainly not making any promises.

  ‘Me and Bartu will check up on the missing girl. Sounds interesting. Anderson and Stevens, you do the talk at the school. That okay?’ I blurt out.

  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

  ‘Err… sorry, Tom. That’s not really part of your remit. You get to do… other things. Community work, which in some ways… is the most… important work of all.’

  My face seems to tell Levine everything he needs to know about the validity of that statement.

  ‘Look, a couple of months on the straight and narrow and they want to bust you up a bit. Get you on the force maybe. Fast track. You’ve been told this, right?’ Levine says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s so much… good feeling around you, Tom. Good press. Good public err… you know. You’re well thought of, Tom. You. And your story. It’s… uplifting. So, you know…’

  I’m not sure I do. I mean, I think he’s telling me to behave or I won’t get what I want. It’s been a long time since someone’s had to tell me to behave. I used to stay out of trouble, stay in the corners, under the radar. Not anymore it seems.

  ‘So the school for you today please, Tom. The school,’ Levine says.

  ‘Yep. Course. Yep, yep,’ I say, folding my arms and smiling at the rest of the team. Faces and faces staring back at me. Stubbly ones. Pink ones. Pale ones. Happy ones. Sad ones. I’ve no chance of keeping them all in my head. So I just smile.

  We get up to go. I think about the missing girl. It interests me.

  *

  Emre is somewhere between twenty and thirty. I can’t do any better than that for you, perception is difficult.

  But his physical energy, his spirit, if you can imagine such a thing, is by turns fifteen and forty-five.

  He’s springy but with a coolness that belies his youth. He could have a high IQ. Or perhaps it’s a centred temperament that’s learnt. Maybe it’s a religion thing, but I don’t know what religion he is so it’s difficult for me to comment on that, but he’s definitely smarter than he looks. I decide to tell him that as we walk toward the school.

  ‘Hey, I think you’re definitely smarter than you look.’

  ‘Thanks. You’re pretty blunt. Do you know that?’ he says, observationally, no side to it at all.

  ‘Yes, I know that. Thanks,’ I say, politely.

  ‘Is that you? Or your brain?’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘Were you like this before the accident?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No. But I’m interested.’

  ‘What was the question again?’

  ‘Were you like this before the accident?’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘Well… ? Were you?’

  ‘Do you know what, Emre Bartu? I have absolutely no idea.’

  I don’t like it when people call it an accident. We don’t know if it was an accident. Not yet anyway.

  I prefer The Incident. Or The Happening. Or The Bullet.

  I listen to our footsteps and think about people. People like to think their personality is separate from their brain, as if their personality is in the mind.

  The mind, that thing that is the actual self, is presumably located somewhere above the skull, floating free of the brain’s complicated mush of blood, cells, flesh, neuroglia and wires. This ‘mind’ is unbound, simpler, and yet capable of far more complexity than the biology and flaws that pervade within the strait-jacket restraints of the human brain.

  The brain holds people back: from finding the perfect words over dinner that will make our friends revere us as debonair and articulate. If only the brain could take some lessons from the mind, that reliable thing that is uniquely us and always right. The centre of our genius that no one understands.

  All that is utter cocking fantasy, of course. But we can easily fall back into the idiotic grasp of these thoughts if not careful. If we don’t remind ourselves that we have nothing else to think with, but this miraculous lump that contains who we are completely and is all our best idiosyncratic parts.

  When patients wake from strokes, and sometimes during them, they often describe not being able to distinguish themselves from the world that surrounds them.

  Their arm is the wall.

  Their head, a computer.

  Their genitals are the trees and landscape outside the window.

  This is reportedly often a euphoric feeling rather than a scary one. It appears to me that this is getting closer to a truthful condition than the general way of thinking. Not misled by the structures we have learnt to see, that define us as the protagonists and everything else as the scenery, these patients accept their place in the world in those moments, on a par with everyone and everything, comfortable with the fact that they are no more than their anatomy.

  ‘Normals’ think of themselves as beautiful hand-crafted originals that always know best, who will prevail even as their bodies fail them. They think their brain contains only facile learnt sequences that make it easier to put your trousers on or cut a cucumber. If only they knew better.

  One day I’ll fill Bartu in on all this. But for the moment I keep this enlightenment as an advantage over them all. Everyone is on a need to know basis, and I’m the only one who really needs to know.

  My inner thoughts work so much faster than my mouth. I can think it all exactly as I want it. But it doesn’t come out quite that way yet. I speak in imperatives, everything slow, but with exclamation marks. I can virtually see them hang in the air after every sentence.

  ‘This is the school here, right? Really doing this are we?’ I say.

  These words pierce the silence we’ve been in for a good five minutes. Bartu would probably have preferred this trip to be filled with witty repartee, rather than the dead air of one man thinking and the other waiting. He’ll have to forgive me. I don’t do patter easily yet. I don’t do off the cuff. Sometimes I forget to get out of my head.

  A car with blacked out windows passes and my eyes follow it away.

  He considers my question. Luckily, I’m pretty comfortable with silence as it’s the condition in which I’ve lived the majority of my life up until this point
. Even pre-bullet.

  ‘Look, don’t worry. You don’t have to speak, if it’s uncomfortable or difficult. To the kids I mean,’ he says in an almost whisper.

  ‘It’s not uncomfortable. It’s just boring.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll do the talking.’

  ‘We’re not teachers. We’re officers of the law.’

  ‘We’re not really officers of the law.’

  ‘We’re community support officers of the law.’

  ‘We’re part of the uniformed civilian support staff.’

  ‘Same diff.’

  He laughs. A genuine one, I think, not for show. People are sometimes afraid to laugh at me, or with me, but not Emre Bartu.

  We look at the school, it’s a tidy set of red bricks with a pair of pointy roofs. It also contains a playing field full of my past sporting failures and the scene of many rejections and one good kiss.

  Her name, Sarah, flashes into my head and I pat my brain on the basal ganglia for the remembrance. Without the ability to show me Sarah’s face, it merely reminds me that she was pretty, freckled and mysterious, and that I hung around to wear her down. And that sometimes people told stories of the strange things she did. But I can’t recall any of them.

  Old sights, sounds and smells allow you to go down neural pathways you don’t frequently use. The resultant sudden rush of seemingly lost memories is what causes strong emotions in such places.

  I observe this feeling and let it pass through me. None of my teachers will be here, the turnover is pretty fast. Things change swiftly in cities. They change double swift around here. This is a foreign land.

  I won’t announce that I am alumni. I’m not sure they’d care anyway. Some bloke whose biggest claim to fame is getting shot in the skull. I’ll wait till I’ve done something more auspicious with my broken head before I bring it back here and try to hold it high around the corridors.

  He brings out ‘the bag’. I’ve had to handle ‘the bag’ once before, in a training session, but today he has ‘the bag’.

  ‘I’m going to do the talking. You be a presence,’ he says.

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Good. Any questions? Anything you need?’