I think to myself that I could never have chosen this house that talks to me with every step I take through it. I would not have arranged these photographs in such perfect order along the bookshelves. I would not have minded the stains left behind on countertops from perspiring glasses or the dribble of wine. I am not allowed to drink anymore. My medications won’t allow it—the antiseizure “cocktail” (isn’t that funny?) that my doctors have come up with does not mix well with alcohol. Once we fine-tune the cocktail, they tell me, I’ll start to get my energy back. I’ll be less loopy and sluggish. The things they warn me I’ll never get back: my driver’s license, my hand-eye coordination, and most of my memories from the age of seventeen to thirty-four. We call this memory loss my black hole. We try to laugh about it, all of us—the doctors, Charlie, Rachel, and me. But at the same time, we are skeptical and hopeful. Perhaps there is a way back to those memories, after all, we think. Charlie, for one, is insistent about it.
I have a bald spot. I fell down in the kitchen a few days ago and I hit my head on the tiles and split open my scalp. Charlie was beside himself. “Dear God, Claire. What have you done? Hold this; press it here. Get in the car.” He drove with his jaw clenched, sweat collecting at his temples. I wish it had been Rachel who took me to the doctor. She has remained strikingly calm and dependable over these past weeks. But she let me go alone with Charlie after draping a shawl over my shoulders and kissing my cheek.
In the car, I reassured my husband. “I’m fine, Charlie. Really. It doesn’t even hurt that much.” It actually felt good to be out of the house. I opened the window to feel the speed of Charlie’s driving. It is terrible of me, but I enjoyed his sense of panic. Sometimes I strive to get a reaction out of him. He is calm in a much different way from Rachel, as if he is perpetually gritting his teeth to keep some secret words from getting out.
“Do you feel faint?” Charlie rolled all the windows down. My hair twisted in the wind, wrapped itself around my neck. I was writing everything down in the dark of the car in fumbling lines, with one hand still pressed to my head.
“Must you write in that thing right now? All the time?” Charlie stared at the road in front of us.
“You started it, Charlie. You can’t be angry with me now.” I took the dish towel from my head. It was saturated.
Charlie looked at me. “Good God,” he said. “Please stop writing. If you forget anything, I’ll help fill in the details later.”
I put the journal away to calm him, but I wouldn’t ask for his details later. It didn’t work that way.
The doctor gave me five stitches and some ibuprofen, consulted with the neurologist, and discussed my antiseizure “cocktail.” Up the phenobarbital. Reduce the prednisone. Let’s not go back to the Dilantin. I have it all written down in my meds log, but Charlie is the one who fills my daily pills container. The nurse shaved off a patch of my hair so that the doctor could put the stitches in.
The next day, I asked Charlie to take me to his barber so I could get my whole head buzzed. It would feel better that way, I said. More symmetrical. I thought it would look good, but Charlie clearly was trying hard not to be appalled. “But your hair, Claire,” he said. “It’s always been so lovely.”
When we got to the barber’s, I met Charlie’s troubled gaze in the mirror. “It’ll grow back, Charlie. Don’t look so glum. It’s only hair, after all.”
Even the barber looked uncertain. “Don’t mind him,” I told the barber. “It’s my head. He’ll get used to it.” The barber shrugged his shoulders and offered Charlie a quick apology.
And so my hair was all shaved off, and there was my face, staring back at me. What can I say? I looked a bit strange. My ears seemed enormous and my mouth was so very small. The scar on my neck seemed even more pronounced. I touched the soft fuzz of my neck and smiled. “Now we get to watch it grow back!” I was trying to make all three of us feel better. The barber looked guilty; Charlie looked anguished. But I felt worlds lighter.
The feeling of lightness was short lived, though. I always feel even more restless and burdened when I return from my visits with Dr. Stuart. His questions race around my mind. Who is the president? What do you remember about your job? Did you like being a journalist? What was the weather like in Pondicherry? What was the name of your first dog? When did you first feel guilty about hurting someone else’s feelings? What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? I feel like I am answering a questionnaire or maybe taking some kind of psychological torture test that will somehow dictate the rest of my life. What if my favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry and not coffee as I answered? What if making Stevie Norris cry on a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village wasn’t something that I did that made me feel guilty? I get impatient with the questions and I fear I am a terrible patient. During my last visit, I think I even shouted at my poor doctor. “So, what you’re telling me is that I may never drive again?”
He shrugged his shoulders. Like a lot of people lately, he sometimes looks a little bit frightened of me.
“What does that mean?” I exaggerated his shrugging. “You’ve got to keep me hopeful, Dr. Stuart,” I said, trying to smile, to calm both of us. “Go ahead and lie to me if you have to. I need to believe that I’ll be able to drive again, get on a plane again to another time zone, go swimming in the ocean.”
The doctor nodded and looked at my chart. “The important thing is that you’re making progress, Claire. Try to be patient. The other things will come when your body is ready for them.”
He is trying to be helpful and kind; I know this. But I am not good at being patient. I am angry (“This is normal, Claire”) and frightened (“Who wouldn’t be, Claire?) and growing increasingly resentful about his notes and my mysterious chart and the directions he murmurs to Charlie when they huddle in the corner as I politely sip water in the waiting room. (“Don’t blame Charlie. He’s only following the doctor’s orders.”)
I keep notes of our conversations so I don’t forget them. Before Charlie comes to pick me up, I scribble them down so that I don’t forget what the doctor has forbidden me to do or, on rare occasions, reluctantly allowed me to start trying. Like drinking a little bit of caffeine now and then. A sip or two of wine is fine, but just a sip. A longer walk if Charlie or someone else is there to keep me company. I take notes like a good student, and I nod to show how eager I am to take on more. “Baby steps,” I echo, sounding a lot like a baby, in fact.
Here are some of the facts associated with my misfiring mind: Japanese encephalitis is transmitted to people through a bite by an infected mosquito. This mosquito had probably nibbled on a pig or a bird wading in still water before snacking on me. I was probably bitten while on assignment in Tamil Nadu, perhaps alongside a rice paddy or along the irrigation canals that had almost, but not completely, run dry. The minuscule remains of the flood catchment area, the focus of my article, were also most likely the source of my virus. From 1973 to 2010, there were only fifty-eight reported cases of the virus among travelers living outside Asia. Many of those travelers died; others were lucky to have immune systems that fought off the virus. I am part of the 30 percent of survivors who suffer lasting damage to their nervous system. I am both lucky and terribly unlucky. I have survived, but I am forever altered.
My doctors inform me matter-of-factly that it makes perfect sense that I have my black hole. They talk about my brain as if it were a mesmerizing discovery, an uncharted, unpredictable planet. The virus and all those subsequent seizures damaged my temporal lobes. They tell me that these lobes are responsible for forming new memories (“a process called consolidation”). This area of the brain also stores memories, hence the soupy nothingness that has replaced where my twenties should be. The doctors reassure me that all my symptoms make sense! Some days, the doctors tell me, I won’t remember their names. They won’t be offended, they say with a laugh. Some days, I won’t remember my honeymoon no matter how hard I try, they say. But you must try. Every brain is different in how it respon
ds and how it copes. Charlie nods along with them. When I come home to Rachel, she fills my sensory world with memories to help me remember my honeymoon and many other things. Research has told her that smells and sounds can trigger recollection, so she prepares meals from the days we all lived together; she tracks down old CDs—the Breeders and Mazzy Star and Luna—that echo the shows we went to at the Paradise; she spreads out photo albums for us to sort through together.
I can tell you, even with this black hole of mine, that I know I have always been a messy person. I like a little clutter and dust on the edges of things. I have always had the tendency to misplace a single shoe from its pair. I leave dishes in the sink and keep the radio on even if I’m watching TV. I am committed to my mess and that is why I can say with complete confidence that I don’t belong here. This place doesn’t feel like home. Charlie doesn’t feel like home either. I think he is determined to make me feel like a stranger here.
Charlie told me that I was delusional in the hospital. He explained this to me after he returned from work last Friday. He said that for several days I accused him of trying to kill me, of imprisoning me in a jail that was only made to look like a hospital. I accused him of hiring actors to play the roles of doctors and nurses and slowly poison me. The real doctors couldn’t figure out what was causing these paranoid notions—whether they were muddled aftereffects of my seizures, or some kind of drug fever from an allergic reaction to one of my medications, or ICU psychosis, a not-uncommon phenomenon among patients who linger in the ICU too long. “It’s meant to be a transient place,” Charlie said by way of clarification as he continued to describe my unruliness. I hate when he talks to me like I’m a child.
I snapped back at him, “I know, Charlie. People either die there quickly or recover enough to be transferred to a main floor.” I imagine myself in that windowless room, a breathing tube coming out of my neck, and restraints on my arms. Charlie thinks I’m lucky that I don’t remember any of this. Perhaps he is right. And yet he insists on filling my head with his memories. What I find amazing is how I can feel so much guilt and humiliation without my own memories to attach these reactions to. Charlie is a very good storyteller.
I cannot tell you much about last week or the week before, but the doctors insist that my short-term memory will improve with time, as they keep tinkering with the balance of my medications. I can tell you that it is autumn in Vermont—I can see the season outside these windows, the leaves just past their radiant brightness.
I cannot tell you about unpacking my bags or if I asked where all my things are, because frankly I am not certain what things I have or what things I should be searching for. But I do remember Charlie pouring us some tea on our first evening back here and adding a few drips of honey and milk and then taking mine away before I could protest, murmuring, “I forgot you prefer yours with lemon.” I really couldn’t say if he is right. But I did end up drinking my tea with lemon and enjoying it.
I know that my parents are dead. I can describe the house I grew up in, nestled into the Berkshires. I can tell you the name of my second-grade teacher—Mrs. Pierce—and I can tell you the name of our class bully—Freddy Maloney—who had shockingly red eyelashes and eyebrows. I can tell you how I got the scar in the very center of my forehead, but I was too young when it happened to remember the fall itself, which sent my head into a stone stair.
But I cannot tell you about my last work assignment or the half-finished story on my computer that Charlie presented me with today. “It’s quite a good story, Claire,” he said as he pulled a chair up to an old desk in the study. “I think it’d be good for you to read it and see what you’d been up to before this accident.” Charlie talks about my fevers and seizures and still-to-be-determined diagnosis as if I had been injured in a car accident. He is having trouble accepting that the tiniest mosquito bite could overturn our lives. I am a mystery to my doctors and to Charlie and Rachel, a puzzle to be worked out. You have always been so lively, so healthy, so strong, Charlie tells me. It just doesn’t make any sense. Here is one thing we can agree on.
I am a clumsy typist, but amid the typos, my article describes a hunger strike in the province of Karnataka in southern India over rights to a waterway. After reading this, I can tell you that one senior official from the BJP believes that water will become a life-and-death issue for the people of Tamil Nadu, and wars may be fought over the Cauvery River. I can describe the photographs that accompany my incomplete story—the rich, green paddies and farms of Kerala, which, downriver, become the arid, yellowed landscape of Tamil Nadu. In one photo, a young boy, shoeless, leans up against a hoe and squints into my lens. I listen for my own voice in this distant story and I seek my own internal eye, which snapped these images and has them tucked away somewhere in my misfiring brain. But there is nothing here that I can confidently claim as my own, nothing apart from a vague sense of familiarity, no different than coming up against any famous image—the Dorothea Lange photograph of the migrant mother, for instance, or the naked child running down the streets of Vietnam, or Avedon’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe. None of these would seem more personally my own than the next.
Today is Monday, and Charlie went to the newspaper offices, and Rachel joined him in town to catch up on her own work, and even though I wasn’t supposed to I took a walk on my own. I rummaged through a bin of old clothes—for some reason, everything of mine is boxed away in various closets—and created a mismatched outfit of wool and corduroy. It looked cold outside, sunny but breezy, so I put on Charlie’s too-big hat with its flaps over my ears and his too-big gloves and smacked my hands together to encourage myself. I thought about leaving behind a trail of some kind—marbles or stones—but I wanted to prove to myself that I could still get from here to there on my own. No one seems to trust me these days; the least I can do is to try to trust myself. I put Charlie’s digital camera in my pocket.
Charlie’s house—our house—is nestled in the woods. Aside from the farm across the road, we are surrounded by oaks and maples, and today the colors were almost shocking. It is the second week of October and the sluggish afternoon light slanted through the trees, leaving half the landscape in shadow and the other half brilliant with foliage. I took a picture of our house in the angling light, the spindly shadows of trees hugging the roof. It was still warm when I left, but I knew it wouldn’t be for long, and when I got to the dirt road, I chose left, the direction I thought would lead me toward town.
What I imagined, or perhaps remembered, was that the road went on like this, dusty and pebbly and rutted, for a mile or so, and then it would meet a bridge where it would become paved and drift down, down, down, always shifting left, until it met another road, and then a covered bridge, and then some semblance of a village center. As I walked, I pieced this town together in my memory. An antique shop that was almost always closed that had once been a mill of some kind. A little white house with green shutters that claimed to be the post office. A full-service gas station with a little café inside that always smelled of fried eggs and bacon. I walked, and with each step I kept enlarging this town in my mind. I kicked at the dirt under my feet and snapped an image of the poof of dust that hid my hiking boot. And then I shot an image of my footprint in the dried-out road.
I walked up to the neighbor’s fence and took a picture of their sullen-looking horse, a gray-white wreck of an animal, who was standing, inexplicably, in an empty water basin. I took a picture of an orange leaf swimming in a puddle. I rested the camera on the fence and set the timer and stood in front of it with the road and the forest behind me, and I grinned, stupidly, at nothing.
I must have gotten a little farther down the road and as far as the bridge before . . . before what? A seizure? A fall? I don’t know. There are a few more pictures on the computer screen as I scroll through them this evening. I am holding an ice bag against the bump on the back of my head. Charlie is downstairs, watching the NewsHour. He isn’t talking to me right now.
I never mad
e it into town, so I don’t know if I was right to turn left or if the antique store was open or if it exists at all outside my imagined memory. There was a neighbor, an older woman named Mrs. Culver, who nearly ran me over—her words—on her way home. I was lying in the middle of the road, staring up at nothing—her words again—and nearly scared her to death. She sat me up and slowly helped me into her car. She must have known who I was, where I lived, because she deposited me here, on this couch, and called Charlie. Charlie has repeated this story to me more than once tonight, because I can’t quite keep it straight in my head. But he has gotten exasperated now, and he is angry that I tried to take a walk on my own, and I feel sorry that I’ve made him so worried. It took a lot of arguing before he agreed not to take me back to the hospital.
I believe Mrs. Culver, and I believe Charlie, of course, but I keep seeing myself in town, sitting at the gas station café, drinking a strawberry milkshake. I can see myself taking a picture of the milkshake, but it is not here on the computer in front of me. Charlie uploaded the photos and sat me here about an hour ago before he went downstairs. He did all of this without speaking. He is frightened and angry and has left me with my pictures. The neighbor’s horse is staring at me from the screen. His gaze is full of accusation too.
Charlie
Claire is obviously restless and I can’t blame her. Her body, even if her mind doesn’t remember, is used to movement. She is always tapping her feet or shredding scraps of paper with impatient fingers or biting her nails, getting up and then sitting back down again, seemingly forgetting the task that set her in motion in the first place. She can’t read a book—she tells me that she loses track of characters, plots, names. So I give her the newspaper, and she complains that all the current conflicts, leaders, villains, heroes, even some of the places, are unfamiliar to her. It took me fifteen minutes the other night to fill her in on the conflict in Syria. These games of catch-up are quite shocking to me, these gaps in her memory. She’s the one who used to lecture me on my current-event laziness. Your curiosity doesn’t extend beyond the Champlain Valley, she used to say to me accusingly as she listed the junior senators from South Dakota and Virginia as quickly as she named the candidates in the race for Bangladesh’s most recent elections.
Remind Me Again What Happened Page 3
