by Gary Braver
“Who was the previous president?”
“Bill Clinton.”
“Very good. And where were you born?”
“Worcester, Massachusetts.”
“What’s the capital of England?”
“Fish.”
“Fish?”
He closed his eyes. “I smell fish … . Fishy air.”
“You mean the sea.” The doctor tested the air. The window was open and a breeze could be felt. “I don’t smell it, although we’re only a few miles inland. So you think you smell the ocean.”
“More like in my head.” He closed his eyes again. “And something else … like a swimming pool … chlorine.”
The doctor made some notes. “The police report says you were on Homer’s Island. Do you recall what you were doing when you got caught in the jellyfish? Why you were out there?”
“Summer cottage my family used to rent.”
“When you were young.”
“Mmmm.” The beetle in his brain split in two and began to nibble twin paths into the gray matter.
“I see. But you were out there alone, I understand.”
“Anniversary of …”
The doctor waited. “Of?”
“My mother’s death. She got lost in the storm a long time ago.”
“I see. If you don’t mind me asking, how long ago? How old were you when she got lost?”
“Two.”
“Two? But didn’t you say your parents used to rent the place every summer when you were a kid?”
“My father died in a plane crash shortly after I was born. After my mother died, I was brought up by my aunt and uncle.” He wasn’t sure if the doctor was asking for real information or just trying to jump-start his memory.
“And what were their names?”
“Nancy and Kirk.”
“And what were your parents’ names?”
“Rose and Leo.”
“What kind of work did your father do?”
“He worked in a foundry.”
“Did your mother work?”
“Yes, she was a biochemist.”
Heller’s eyebrow shot up. “Really. How interesting, and for a woman back then.”
What she was really wondering, he thought, was how a scientist could end up with a foundry worker. “It was an arranged marriage—what immigrants did back then.”
“I must say that your long-term memory retrieval seems excellent. What I’d like to do next is test your visual memory. If you get tired or confused or want to stop, please say so.”
“Okay.” The beetles had doubled and redoubled again and were humming behind his eyes in packs.
She pulled out a small stack of eight-by-ten cards and laid them facedown on the tray table. “What we’ll do first is I’ll show you a series of cartoons one at a time. You’ll look at each one for five seconds, then I’ll cover it and ask you questions about what you saw. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” She turned over the first and held it up—a colorful drawing of a house with children out front, toys on the lawn, a cat under a bush, birds on the roof. After five seconds, she turned the card facedown. “How many children are playing in the yard?”
“Two.”
“How many birds are sitting on the house?”
“Five.”
“Oh which side of the house, left or right, is the chimney?”
“Right.”
“What color is the house?”
“Blue.”
“How many windows are on the front of the house?”
“Five.”
“What number is the house?”
“Three seventy-nine.”
“How many bushes are in front of the house?”
“Two.”
“True or false: There is a hydrant in front of the house.”
“False.”
The doctor continued reading all ten questions, and when she finished recording Jack’s answers she peered over her glasses at Jack. “Very good. You got them all right. Now let’s try the next one.”
The next drawing was more intricate with details—a pasture scene with cows, horses, and sheep in a field, with a farmhouse and barn in the background. The doctor held up the card and then laid it down and asked ten more questions. And Jack responded. When he was finished, Dr. Heller said, “You’re doing a great job, Jack.” She opened another folder. “Okay, this time I’m going to show you a series of letters for five seconds, then I want you to repeat them from memory.”
Jack nodded. The beetle-humming in his head intensified, as if someone had cranked up the volume. She held up the first card for five seconds then dropped it.
“GU.”
And in the time allotted, he did the same with each sequence that followed.
“RXW”
“XIURZ.”
“APXOZNT”
“QMENRBTJH.”
“EIDYTAWXIZBJM.”
When he finished the last sequence, something flitted across the Easter Island blankness of Dr. Heller’s face.
“How did we do?” Jack asked.
The doctor looked up at Jack with a queer expression and shook her head to say she would hold off on commentary. “Okay, this time I’m going to hold up cards with a series of words for five seconds and I’d like you to try to recall as many of the words from the list, and the order is not important. Only as many words as you can recall.”
The first card was short: CANDY, CHOCOLATE, CAKE, TASTE, SWEET.
After five seconds, Jack repeated the words.
The next sequence followed: NAP, SLUMBER, PILLOW, DROWSY, REST, WAKE, DOZE, BED.
And the next: DOG, FUR, BARK, FLUFFY, TAIL, LICK, JUMP, PAWS, LEASH.
And the next: BEACH, SAND, OCEAN, CRAB, WAVES, SHELLS, SUN, SALT, BOAT, FISH.
Jack answered, but the humming in his head was making his teeth ache.
KNIFE, CUT, POINT, HAMMER, STEEL.
The doctor stopped. “Jack, are you all right?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe we can finish later.”
Dissociated images were swimming in his head like litter in a muddy whirlpool. And the buzz had produced a material pressure. “Sorry,” he whispered.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Are you feeling faint or dizzy? Or disoriented?”
He rocked his head slightly. “Tired.”
“Fine. We can continue tomorrow, but you should know that you did amazingly well, Jack. The average adult letter span is seven, with a deviation of plus or minus two. You did a span recall of eleven. I don’t know what to say, but your short-term recall is off the charts.”
The beetles had bored their way out of the sac inside his forehead and were making their way toward the rear of his brainpan. He wanted the doctor to leave. He wanted to be left alone. He wanted to close his eyes and fall into a long, deep sleep.
“I’ll let you rest,” Dr. Heller said. She got up and began to pack her papers into her briefcase. “If you don’t mind, I have one more thing I’d like to ask you. No, it’s not a test.”
Jack looked up at her through pulsing slits. “Sure, but how about some Tylenol when I’m done?”
“We can do that right now,” she said, and produced a two-pack from her smock pocket and placed them in his mouth and held up a cup of water. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the ethnicity of Koryan?”
“Armenian.”
Another test question. He was certain that during the course of his convalescence the staff would be tossing him offhand little bio queries to be certain his hard drive hadn’t crashed.
“Do you speak it?”
“No.”
“Did you ever?”
His aunt and uncle had spoken only English with him, even though on occasion they conversed with each ether in Armenian. “No.”
“Well, would you recognize it if you heard it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” The only place he had heard it spoken was in grocery stores in Watertown, the Little
Armenia of the East Coast.
She gave him a strange look, then she pulled out of her briefcase a small tape recorder. “I’d like you to hear this,” she said, and she moved it close to his head and flicked it on.
There was electronic hush like the open line of a telephone, some indistinct background noise, the muffle of people talking softly in the background, the distant sound of a jet plane. The sound of breathing. The soft beeps from the monitors. Then a voice that for a split instant registered in the warm core of his soul. “Ahmahn seerem anoosheeg.” A high, feathery, fluttery voice—a woman’s, as if speaking to him through a distant fan.
The next moment Jack felt a jolt of recognition. It was his own voice.
The tape continued as he looked helplessly at Dr. Heller, whose face seemed to dislodge itself from her white smock and dissolve in the soupy sensations in his brain. The margins of his vision became dark as everything began to fracture and sparkle—like viewing the room through a shattered windshield.
Suddenly the beetles hit a trip wire, setting off a wild gyroscope that set Jack into a spin as if his wheelchair had turned into the Tilt-a-Whirl at Canobie Lake Park, whipping him around into a centrifugal blur, sounds muffling and breaking up … his name … someone calling his name … a female voice, the doctor … Dr. Heller, but he couldn’t locate her.
“Room three nineteen … having a seizure … Diazepam and Dilantin … hurry …”
He felt his body shake as if he were being prodded with an electric rod, cold, wincing ripples shooting across his brainpan.
“Get him flat before he hurts himself.”
Lifted. He was being lifted.
And from someplace outside of his body, someplace above the ceiling, he watched them lay him on the slick sheets, the tendons of his legs stretching painfully flat on the bed like a long, bent child. He heard himself making gasping sounds. His eyes snapped open, and for a second he froze, his eyes huge and gaping at Marcy in nameless horror. Then his body spasmed and a scream rose out of his chest.
“Jack. Calm down. Everything’s okay. Just relax.”
He heard himself whimpering as awareness closed in on itself and warm hands cupped his little fist, rubbing open the tight ball of sad, small fingers.
Ah mahn seedem.
And the moment before the world pulled itself into a pinpoint and blew itself out, Jack felt a small flutter in his throat.
“Maideek.”
44
“HE HAD ANOTHER FLASHBACK.”
René had arrived at Broadview a little before noon when Nick met her in the lobby. As he led her to the locked unit, he explained how it had happened during a visit Louis had with his wife and daughter. “They were having a nice time when Louis began flipping out about the Red Tent and Fuzzy somebody. I guess it was pretty bad, especially for the wife.”
“What did the nurses do?”
“Gave him a shot of Diazepam.”
They almost never had to resort to needle sedatives in the homes.
“Except for the bad one,” Nick continued, “his daughter says she prefers the hallucinations to his fading away. A few flashback seizures she could live with.”
“What about Mrs. Martinetti?”
“I suppose she’ll have to adjust. It’s better than losing him completely.”
“Except he’s resisting taking the other meds that have helped reduce the number and intensity of flashbacks.”
They arrived at the locked unit, where Nick tapped them in.
“What bothers me,” René said, “is what happens if Louis gets stuck in a flashback and can’t come out, or doesn’t want to.”
Nick nodded grimly. “That would be a problem. But that’s not why I called you. Have you seen the recent patient census?”
“No.”
Nick walked her to a small sitting room down the hall from the Activities Center. “It’s another thing the president didn’t see the other day.” He opened the door.
There were three residents sitting in wheelchairs before a television set playing on low volume. Two of them René knew—women in their eighties who were in advanced stages of dementia. The third woman René did not at first recognize. She moved closer, and for a protracted moment fixed herself on the woman’s face. Then recognition hit René like a fist.
Clara Devine.
Over the six months at McLean’s Hospital her body had atrophied to the point where she was bound to a wheelchair. She did not look up when René and Nick entered, as did the other women. Instead, she stared blankly at the television, her eyes clotted with fog.
“They brought her back two days ago,” Nick explained. “McLean’s decided that she was no longer a danger to others or herself.”
That was evident, for Clara looked like a pathetic effigy of the once-feisty woman who had eavesdropped on the nursing staff and tapped her way out of the unit. “My God,” René whispered.
“Of course, she was taken off Memorine right after the murder. Then about two months later the plaque had begun to return.”
The aide held a cup of water with a straw to Clara’s lips, talking softly to her. But Clara didn’t respond. She was clearly incapable of speech and the ability to feed herself. Her skin hung on her frame like a too-loose seat cover. From her appearance, she didn’t appear to have much time to go before she was bedridden. Then it would be a matter of weeks before she’d forget how to eat or before her heart or kidneys failed or her lungs filled with fluid.
“Her sister had asked that the staff not take any extraordinary measures.”
Clara’s reversal was kept quiet. But there would be no legal repercussions since in the fine print of the consent forms was a clause exonerating the clinical team, researchers, home and pharmaceutical company, et al., from the possible return of the disease. Clara Devine was the only patient to have been withdrawn, and given the extreme circumstances, her sister and legal guardian had raised no complaint. And since she had been removed from Memorine, her existence was simply a brief countdown to her death.
They left the room, and Nick walked René to the door. “They did an MRI on her before they sent her back,” Nick said. “The plaque’s all back. She’s a mess.”
“Oh, no!”
“That’s the bitch of it: Once a subject is on the stuff we can’t withdraw them or the dementia returns.”
“Which means that if the flashbacks become problematic, taking them off Memorine isn’t an option.”
“Not without renewed deterioration.”
“But nearly everything we use to combat the seizures only dulls them.”
“The lesser of two evils. But I do have some good news,” Nick said. “Jack Koryan woke up.”
JACK KORYAN.
When René left, Nick sat alone in his office and from his window watched René cross the parking lot. She looked so lovely as she made her way. A beautiful and bright young woman. He could still hear her gasp of delight at the news, tears of joy filling her eyes.
His eyes fell to a copy of the report of Dr. Heller’s interview with Jack Koryan. He fingered open some of the pages that held Jack’s answers to standard questions that determined his basic cognitive functionality: Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Name the president of the United States. What state is this? What is your mother’s maiden name?
It was that last one that fixed his attention.
What is your mother’s maiden name?
And from the opaque, still water well of past time, it rose up like a phosphorescent bubble expanding all the way until it broke the surface with a blink.
What were the chances—maybe one in a million?
Or maybe not.
He watched René pull out of the lot. In a couple of days she would visit Jack Koryan, driven by all the best sentiments—photographic positives of what would drive him.
45
“I REMEMBER YOU,” JACK SAID. “Weren’t we once husband and wife?”
Beth nodded. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said with a c
hoke. “I waited and waited, but you didn’t wake up and …”
“Nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t know.” He patted her hand. “I’m just glad you didn’t have them pull the plug.” He could hear the false brightness in his voice.
“They said they didn’t think you’d ever recover.”
“Forget it. I would have done the same thing.” That wasn’t true, but what the hell difference did it make? He remembered their marriage was headed for the shoals anyway. The coma had spared him all the anguish.
Beth wiped her eyes with a wad of tissues.
“You’re still the best-looking woman I’ve seen in six months.”
“Very funny,” she said, half laughing and half crying.
Jack stroked her hair lightly, and his mind flooded with memories. Although he had been told of all the time that had passed, it still seemed like just the other day he had last seen Beth, and overnight she had got divorced and remarried.
But Beth looked older: Her face was fuller than he recalled. She still looked good, dressed handsomely in smart gray slacks and black blazer, a pearl necklace lighting up her neck. He recalled none of the outfit and tried to repress the thought of her posing for her new husband as she would with him in the dressing rooms of Saks or Potpourri or their bedroom. The diamond on her finger was the size of a small olive. But on her other hand she wore an emerald ring he had given her for Valentine’s Day, 1998—presented over dinner at Aujourd’hui at the Four Seasons Hotel. In an arrangement with the maitre d’ it was delivered as her dessert under a silver dome. He remembered speculating on his reaction had the man swapped the ring for a wedge of cheesecake.
Five days ago Nurse Marcy Falco had telephoned Beth in Texas with the good news. She arrived last night. For the reunion Falco and the therapist sat Jack in a wheelchair with a new pair of New Balance running shoes.
“How are the feet?”
“Okay, but they’re going back to school.”
Jack had been scheduled for intensive physical therapy, which he welcomed, since he couldn’t believe how weak he was. According to Marcy, he weighed 127 pounds—a loss of a quarter of his body weight. Yet, just last week he had bench-pressed ten reps of 175 pounds at the gym with Vince. Just last week—six months ago.
