Head Wounds (19 page)

——

I lay frozen in the cold rain. I could see a grass hut just a few yards away. It was crowded with people huddled under the dubious shelter. I wanted to join them, but all I could move was my eyes, which I had to blink frequently to keep them from filling with water. I wanted to shift positions to take pressure off my sore shoulder, but I couldn’t. A vast weariness clung to my limbs, drawing me down to the earth, my jaw slack and my tongue lolling, an uncontrollable wad in my mouth.

The gang under the hut stood looking impassively at the rain. I knew they’d be no help to me. But the harder I tried to move, the less possible it seemed to be. It was like this for so long I almost started getting used to it when Eddie suddenly trotted into the area between me and the hut. His tail was wagging, slowly, the way it does when he wants to say hello, usually out of the blue, just for the hell of it. He looked over at me and barked, something he rarely did. I liked that about him, that he dispensed his barks sparingly, strategically.

I wanted to say to him what I usually said, something like, “Yeah, yeah, easy for you to say,” or “Frame that argument a little more clearly and maybe we’ll have something to debate.” But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t move my mouth or activate my vocal chords.

So, naturally, he kept barking. More and more insistently. I started worrying about the neighbors. I didn’t know them, except for Amanda, and I didn’t much care what they thought of me, but I always thought a barking dog was sort of rude.

“Knock it off, will ya?” I demanded, in my mind.

But he kept barking, and waving his long feathered tail.

“Sam, Holy Christ,” said Amanda.

Then the rain abruptly stopped. Eddie was still barking.

“Eddie, shut the hell up,” said Amanda, which he did, more or less.

The hut evaporated before my eyes, and the cedar walls of the shower enclosure emerged. That and Amanda’s wet hair, which fell from her forehead and smelled like tropical flowers, covering her face as she felt around my body.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

She had a flashlight. When I opened my eyes she pointed it away from my face. She kept asking me urgent questions, but she didn’t know I couldn’t speak. Or move. On the other hand, maybe I could.

“Uh,” I said.

“Uh?”

“Fell.”

“You fell?”

Now I had Eddie’s wet nose poking around my face, his warm, prickly fur scraping over my wet body.

“Eddie!” Amanda yelled. “Get the hell out of here. He’s all right.”

“I am?”

I picked my left hand up off the floor and wiggled my fingers. I located my right hand and used it to push myself up so I was sitting with my back against the wall of the shower enclosure.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I looked at my legs sticking out in front of me. In the cold dark it was hard to see my toes, but I knew they were wiggling. I drew my knees up to my chest and flexed my leg muscles. Everything operational.

“Fucking hell, I’m cold. I got to dry off.”

“I’m calling an ambulance.”

“No you’re not. You’re going to help me stand up. Then you’re going to hand me that towel.”

“What happened? Talk to me.”

“I am. I’m talking to you now. I’m telling you to help me stand up.”

I gripped her arm and together we stood. The floor of the shower enclosure had been reattached to the earth. I snatched the towel off the hook and wrapped it around me.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“Let me drive you to the hospital,” said Amanda.

“You want to help me?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Follow me into the cottage. If I pass out along the way, leave me where I fall.”

“Okay. Sure.”

My equilibrium seemed as good as it ought to be after a few tumblers of Absolut and pomegranate cosmopolitans. My head was clear—no more little clicks—but I thought I heard a distant ring. Before we reached the side porch I gently shook off her grasp and walked on my own. The ground held and my heart stayed calm in my chest.

Eddie had stayed welded to my side. When I reached the side porch I squatted down and scratched his ears, letting him look me over.

“I’m okay, man. Everything’s okay.”

“You have to let me get you to the hospital,” said Amanda, almost knocking me down as she shoved her way into the kitchen.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

“That’s not up to you.”

When I stood up the world tipped a little, but then righted itself. The ringing in my ears was gone. My mouth was dry
and my hands and feet tingled, but otherwise, no major upheavals. I walked into the house.

“It has to be up to me, beautiful,” I said to her. She and Eddie followed me into the bedroom where I dug out some clean clothes. After slipping on my jeans I sat on the bed and took stock again. All faculties seemed nearly intact. Acuities an open question.

“You’re afraid to go,” she said.

“I am.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.”

“I’m afraid of hospitals. People die in those places.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“Just had a little vertigo. Slipped and hit my head.”

“You should have seen your face when I found you. It was awful.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I said.

“Eddie was going berserk. It didn’t sound normal. I knew something was wrong.”

“Worried about getting his dinner.”

I went into the kitchen and poured another drink. Amanda scowled at me, but didn’t say anything. The three of us went out to the screened-in porch where I sat at the pine table. Eddie and Amanda secured the floor. As I settled down, I noticed tiny pinpricks were sticking at my fingertips where I held the chilled glass. I worked on regulating my breathing and slowing my pulse rate. Amanda worked on her scowl.

“What happened to all the edibles?” I asked.

“You actually want to eat?”

“And drink and be merry.”

I let her talk me into staying put while she went to get the food. I was glad to be alone on my porch for a little while. I took off one of the storm windows so I could look through
the screen at the water and hear the sounds of the birds and bay waves. The air was cool but calm, and the porch would stay warm enough as long as I stoked the woodstove.

My hand had a slight tremor when I took a drink. I switched the glass to my left hand, which was steadier. An unwanted recollection of the punchy old guys who hung around the gym in New Rochelle forced its way into my mind. Their lumpy faces and hands swollen into balloons, the flesh pink and smooth, stretched taut with edema. Hands that shook so badly they couldn’t hold a full cup of coffee. Their heads bobbing uncontrollably, involuntarily agreeing with everything you said.

You’d think the owners of the gym would shoo them away, afraid the ravages of the trade would deter young fighters. But every gym had the same old guys. A standard feature of the ambiance. Nobody saw them as a cautionary tale, the blindness of youth and commerce being what it is.

The next time I took a drink my right hand was steady. Along with my resolve. As of that moment I was alive and as fully functional as I had a right to expect. Until that status changed, I wasn’t living in anticipation of the moment it would. Thoughts like that are dangerous. Inhibiting. Make you think you might actually have something to lose.

“Fear and anger make you stupid,” I told Amanda when she showed up with a wicker basket full of comestibles.

“Some manage it with a light and cheerful heart,” she said.

She had the good sense and generosity to keep our dinner conversation superficial. I bored her with tales of my days as a troubleshooter for the hydrocarbon-processing business. Drinking coffee under a tent with guys in white robes after spending the afternoon scaling a cracking tower that soared above the desert sand. The sweetness and gentility of the
maintenance teams, desperate for knowledge and thrilled by my company’s technological prowess.

I taught them what I could, though I doubt those young engineers, or the people back at our office in White Plains, ever understood what the enterprise truly meant to me—the ideal undertaking for a brain never safe on its own, undistracted and free to wander, malevolent, into dark and lethal domains. Places where things could happen that were incomprehensible, unexplainable in the cold light of day, even to myself.

——

Southampton Hospital was only a few city blocks from the high school. It was also made of red brick, the Village standard. Unlike the school buildings it was tucked inside an established neighborhood of Victorians and early shingle-style homes, mature Norway maples and copper beech festooned with building permits, or notices of an upcoming hearing before the architectural review board. Likewise, the streets were lined with pickups and vans, and the syncopated rhythm of construction filled the air. Fresh framing lumber and reddish brown cedar shakes strained against zoning setbacks and height restrictions, casting shadows over the occasional bungalow or modest two-story colonial, bearing uneasy witness to the neighborhood’s original intent.

I found the guy I was looking for in the hospital canteen. This was easily done, since the canteen was so small and Markham Fairchild was so big. He was working on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich from one of the vending machines, nodding his head to a compelling beat coming through a pair of white earphones. I imagined something
along the lines of Bob Marley, a stupid stereotyping of Markham’s Jamaican origins, since it turned out to be Dwight Yoakam.

“I like all those country guitars,” he said, peeling off the earphones. “And the lyrics. Little stories.”

I sat down across from him with a cup of astringent vending machine coffee.

“If they have to plug it in to play, Doc, I’m not interested,” I told him.

He wiped his hand with a napkin and reached across the table. I saw mine disappear briefly into his handshake.

“You bleeding out from somewhere or just come to call?” he asked.

“No blood, no buddies in the ER.”

“Capital.”

“I’m just looking for some free information.”

“That’s fine for you, Mr. Ah-cquillo, but I pay a lot of money to Georgetown University for the information up here,” he said, tapping his temple.

Markham’s specialty was trauma care, often fielding patients fresh out of the OR. I’d first met him while regaining consciousness. The hallucinatory sensation that I’d been transported to a land of brilliant and affable giants had never quite left me.

“I’m a carpenter,” I said. “What’ll you take in trade?”

“I could use a new house. Somet’ing with a little elbow room for a change.”

“Big order.”

“Big doctor.”

“I’ve only got a couple questions. How about a bookcase?” He took a bite of his sandwich and nodded.

“A deal,” he said, letting me off a lot easier than Rosaline Arnold.

“You remember the first time I was in here, after getting beaned by Buddy Florin?”

“Didn’t know the name of the perpetrator, but I remember the hole in your head.”

“They stuck me for about an hour in a tube that made a noise like a four-cylinder engine with a couple of burned valves.”

“That’s the MRI. How dey examine your brain, or whatever you got left in der.”

“That’s my question. Do you remember what it said?”

“I had an attending in those days. He told me what it said. Now I’m an attending, so I got to look again to see if he was right.”

“But you remember what he said.”

Markham’s mouth stretched into a smile wide enough to catch a sparrow.

“That’s one of the t’ings you learn at Georgetown. How to remember everyt’ing. How technical you want it?”

“Just looking for headlines.”

He looked at me the same way he did back when my scalp was full of stitches.

“Funny you ask about this now.”

“Just curious.”

He paused, scrutinizing me. Then his face relaxed, as if an internal debate had been resolved.

“Okay, if you really want to know, you’re a classic right prefrontal cortex.”

He reached across the table, and without having to lean forward, tapped the middle of my forehead.

“Lot of action there, according to the MRI. Lots of bangs and bruises.”

I felt my heart cinch up inside my chest. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about frontal lobes.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“You know, the most complicated t’ing in the universe, that we know about, is that three pounds of pinky gray cauliflower inside your skull. That goes for everybody, even the dumbest Homo sapien on the planet.”

“Or the smartest chimp.”

He shook his head.

“Not quite. His brain is wired up different from the one you’ve been using for a battering ram. Especially in the prefrontal cortex. That’s where you get to be human and he don’.”

“So it’s too complicated to know.”

He shrugged.

“They researching these t’ings all de time. Got lots of ways of chasin’ down traumatic brain injury. I can show you the diagnostic guide. Bigger than the phone book.” He tapped his head again with his index finger. “Though I got most of it up here. No damage.”

“Okay, what about vertigo?”

“Sure. See that more with the cerebellum, but sure.”

“Same as memory loss?”

“That’s your frontal lobes, for sure. And big time over in the temporal. Different neighborhood, but I remember you had some flare-ups there, too.”

“Flare-ups?”

“On the MRI. Very colorful t’ings.”

“Amnesia?”

“That’s a nice myth for Hollywood to make movies about. You can destroy the short term. Strokes and Alzheimer’s do that. Not usually the long term. Though you can have a gap that doesn’t come back. That’s pretty common with the head trauma. Or lots of blood loss. Like your blond friend the cop. He got plenty of each in a big fight and don’t remember anyt’ing.”

“Do you see progression over time?”

“Sure. Come in for another MRI, throw in some other tests, we know for certain what sort of trouble we looking at. I’ll know better den because I have my hands on the wheel. Much better than lookin’ at other people’s tests.”