CHAPTER 24

SURPRISED AND THRILLED BY PAUL’S DICTATION ON THAT summer day, we continued the following afternoon. I welcomed hearing from his “voices” again, those ghostly speakers haunting the mansions of his mind. Dictation had made me once again feel like the old Paul was peering out from within, clear as a porch light through timberland, in a way he somehow couldn’t manage in conversation. We weren’t calling the project a memoir yet. Neither of us, because who knew if or what the coming efforts might bring. At the moment they were only sighting shots, trial balloons of thought, any of those metaphors humans use to convey hope, tentativeness, and not foreseeing the what-will-be. As Paul and I both knew, the main thing was to keep him tailoring language.

Again he opened his mental book of voices and spoke haltingly, sometimes cryptically, for nearly an hour. This time he wasn’t quite as fluent, and he battled more to find words, which came slowly, but he pressed on anyway and together we created his second journal entry.

“The second d-day in the Rehab Unit, I h-heard. heard. this v-voice,” he said tentatively. “And it was not the v-voice of the flimflam, but the v-voice of pellucid flim . . . no, not flim . . . pellucid, articulate . . . reason . . . droning. droning the absence any s-s-sound, and. and . . . I knew. at once. that I was g-g-going to be anchors, axels, all right. even then, in s-spite of the ersatz, no, evil-seeming th-things that . . . happened . . . to me.”

He paused, yawned his mouth wide open without uttering a sound, and seemed to compel the next words to come out: “I mean that . . . though I hadn’t tried to speak yet . . . and the whole whirwhir-world was sink bottle some kind of abstract fanfare. waiting. to be led. on or off. I w-would be all right because my language . . . even if even if even it led to. ee-mean, emen, immensely private universe . . . or . . . or . . . full panoply of speech.”

His language? I guessed he meant that at least he could form cohesive thoughts internally, in his private universe, even if he couldn’t convey them with the “full panoply of speech.”

“So, that side of him . . . remains,” he reasoned, surveying himself in the role of doctor-inquisitor.

Then again he abruptly changed point of view. “I can t-t-urn it on whenever I want speak. It’s. very. eerie. You might say almost like having second language f-forced upon one, one the lackadaisical, partly formal voice of BBC announcer, other . . .”

He paused only an elongated breath’s worth, but I wondered if his brain was going to change gears and narrate events again. It didn’t. Instead it alluded to the Shakespearean characters of his youth.

“. . . oth-other the rapscallion Calibanesque la-language, or substitute Falstaff . . . No need say which one I prefer.”

I smiled at the exotic twosomes, rapscallion Calibanesque, which I took to mean “mischievous ranting,” and substitute Falstaff, meaning “imitative fool,” and he smiled back, catching that his brain had dished up something amusing.

He pressed on. “Three voices really. One, ff-faint intellectual voice of speaker.. who. until I broke to this clutch of fortune . . . didn’t know whether he exited. existed or not. . . . somersault executing virtuoso . . . of my hours daily, if I’m lousy, no l-l-lucky ... of joyous harmony. Second the extinct radio voice of Snagge. Third . . . rough country incoherent you already know too well. for his for his crude nonsense. and almost defiant . . .”

The sentence fell off a cliff. I watched him trying to crystallize the right word in his mind.

“I’m stunned,” he suddenly said from yet another remove. “I’ve proven . . . that I have two three voices.”

So, the voices remained. Inside his head, Paul still seemed to harbor a trio of speakers from different parts of his life: the formal BBC broadcaster John Snagge, whom he had heard on the radio during his childhood and Oxford days; the tongue-tied aphasic, who frustrated and shamed him by speaking gibberish; and the language-loving scribe with American turns of phrase. All worked to support him like durable friends, or maybe like the strongest sides of his personality. The Snagge voice, he would tell me much later, “spoke into my inner ear, Lord knows why, and sometimes handed me the right word.” I found it fascinating, if a bit confusing, and although the speakers seemed different, he clearly wasn’t experiencing multiple personalities. No, the diction was continuous and, if anything, a bit flat in tone, spilling very little emotion. While dictating, he seemed to focus deep within his head, where all the action lay and the invisible people took turns doing his internal monologue, or really, his internal trialogue. What he uttered came from that three-man theater, and could be spoken of by yet a fourth voice.

It brought to mind a book I’d read ages before, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. There was a time eons ago, Jaynes suggests, when we all heard voices inside our head, not as chat from a familiar brain, we thought, but from otherworldly beings telling us what to do. Jaynes speculates that in the days before people had modern minds capable of self-reflection, our instincts spoke to us with commands on how to survive. We believed the internal voices to be from gods because they seemed wise, stayed invisible, and yet invaded the interior mind. “At one time, human nature was split in two,” he controversially suggests, “an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was Consciously aware.”

We forget that in ancient texts, hearing voices was commonplace—especially divine voices. Not only did the Greek and Roman gods speak to people, even their statues spoke. All of the monotheistic religions were founded by people who swore their god spoke to them, issuing bans, rules, and proclamations (and, of course, Joan of Arc’s famous call to battle). Genesis proclaims: “In the beginning was the word,” the word of a god who knew every dialect and engaged worshippers personally, moodily, sometimes in the give-and-take of conversation. Today we’d most likely deem mad anyone who said he heard God speaking to him from a burning bush. In a courtroom, a defense lawyer bidding for an insanity plea need only prove that his client hears voices, and that’s enough to sway the jury. So, claiming to hear three voices in his head, Paul might well raise eyebrows.

Jaynes’s theory argues that these vividly distinct voices arose in the right hemisphere, in the convolutions that are counterparts to the left hemisphere’s language centers. After all the damage Paul had suffered to the left, in precisely those regions, could it be that his mind was compensating by unleashing the usually stifled voices in his right? To keep a continuous sense of self alive, perhaps? After all, someone had to call the shots, tell him what to do, even if his longstanding, carefully whittled “self” was temporarily fractured into several voices, not many compared to the mob reported by some folk.

“I had been splintered into a million beings and objects,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in an essay on sounds. “Today I am one; tomorrow I shall splinter again. . . . But I knew that all were notes of one and the same harmony.”

“The head we inhabit is a haunted house,” philosopher William Gass once wryly observed, full of “the words which one burns like beacons against the darkness.” At heart lies “this secret, obsessive, often silly, nearly continuous voice . . . the silent murmur of us, our glad, our scrappy, rude, grand, small talk to ourselves, the unheard hum of our humanity.”

Talk we must, we haven’t any choice. As babies we babble, and we keep right on babbling as grown-ups, too—but silently, to ourselves. The words in the haunted houses of our minds never stop, even inside the head of someone with aphasia. Not speaking to someone you barely know is considered a slight, and if you know them well it’s a blind arrow of anger or cruelty. Not talking to someone is regarded as passive violence, which is why we call it “cutting someone” or “cutting someone dead.” We remember who we are, what we did, how we felt in words, even if most of the time we-don’t-know-who is saying we-don’t-know-what to we-don’t-know-whom. We talk to ourselves all day, even while eating or making love, and at night we talk to ourselves in our sleep. We talk to cooperate and exchange ideas with others—it’s how our species survived—but also to commune with that compound ghost, our so-called “self,” and know how we feel, consider what we’re doing, analyze whether someone may be a killer, a rival, a mate.

Some unlucky stroke patients are haunted, not with alien voices but with alien limbs, a rare neurological condition when a hand seems to have a will of its own, reaching out and grabbing things (or, most embarrassingly, body parts) unbidden, and needing to be wrestled down by the other hand. Sometimes called the “Dr. Strangelove syndrome” (after the Peter Sellers character in the movie of the same name, whose arm would suddenly shoot up in Heil Hitler! salutes), it makes the limb seem foreign to its owner, so beyond conscious control that patients usually give it a name, or refer to it as “It.” “It” may even try to strangle its owner. The cause remains a mystery, but seems to stem from multiple lesions in the brain that, in effect, separate it from itself in too many places, more than it can overlook and still feel whole. It made sense to me that lesser lesions in Paul’s brain might do something similar, not with limbs but with the speechifiers inside, the homely ghosts we talk to when we talk to our “selves.”

“THREE DAYS OUT of seven, I can zoom,” Paul stage-whispered the next day, “the others no,” by which he meant speak, converse. His verbal ability also seemed affected by how much he’d slept, and even by the whims of weather and the time of day. True for all of us, as our brain cycles and rests. The best time of day for brainwork changes with age. A child’s internal clock naturally summons it to sleep at around 8 or 9 p.m. Teens tend to grow sleepy later, at around 11 p.m.; need nine hours of sleep, even if they rarely get it; and are notoriously hard to wake up. College students often report feeling brightest at night, and the elderly say they’re sharpest in the morning. Negative ions—molecules naturally produced at cascading waterfalls, beaches loud with heavy surf, or after a spring thunderstorm crackling with lightning—create more oxygen in the brain, which makes us feel exhilarated and more alert.

It made sense that his “dictating” ability might vary from day to day, just as his speaking did. Also that it would provide invaluable speech therapy, if he continued to prod his brain to craft language until it wore itself out. And he’d be focused on what had always made him happiest: being immersed in a writing project, something creative and constructive which he was motivated to continue. I know now, as I sensed then, that it’s essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention—through endless repetitions, alas.

Right after breakfast, Paul felt most fluent, and that’s when he usually met me on the couch with a short list of notes on a small scrap of paper. Sometimes he sat down and studied his carefully prepared scribblings, unable to decipher his own craggy handwriting no matter how hard he tried. Other times even I could read the list, which might include a one-word cue such as “Morpurgo,” and sure enough, at some point during the hour, he would slip out a phrase like the “pitter-patter of Dr. Morpurgo’s feet.”

The dictation was exhausting for both of us. For the hour or so I needed to concentrate hard on deciphering errant, often-wrong words, using my own language skills to do overtime, climb cliffs of possible meaning, looking for any toehold. After years of writing poetry, odd combos of words didn’t faze me, and I knew Paul’s habits of word and mind, so I could catch his dictated curve balls, but it became clear to me that I couldn’t be his secretary. It would sap all my writing energy, change our relationship, erase my creative self, bruise my own voice, reduce me to excavating when I needed to be freewheeling. And so I gently suggested that Liz be recruited to help transcribe his outpourings, and fortunately she agreed.

Day after day, Paul continued dictating, sometimes with mountain-moving effort, and others sailing along at a good clip, freeing an account of what he’d gone through, what the inner world of aphasia felt and looked like. It was Paul’s chosen regimen, a struggle that helped him to organize his mind, which also impressed upon us all just how wounded his brain had been. Composing his narrative—and relating it to someone while doing so—was the best speech therapy anyone could have prescribed. For an hour of animated slogging every day, he stubbornly forced his brain to recruit cells, build new connections, find the right sounds to go with words, and piece together whole sentences. Painstakingly reviewing the text with him the next day helped Paul clarify his thoughts and gave him the opportunity to repair some of aphasia’s fingerprints in the prose. In those moments he transcended his brain injury, and was able to repossess himself, narrate and reorder his life. At times, what he said sounded nonsensical, but Liz and I were both punctilious about recording him exactly, whether he made sense or not.

We already knew that when someone has aphasia, working out a seemingly simple, yet new, practice can be incredibly frustrating. Dictation was no exception. From the kitchen one day, I overheard Paul and Liz working through a typical roadblock.

Paul requested a “new paragraph.”

Liz presented him with the newly typed paragraph.

Disappointed, he insisted, “No, new paragraph.”

She stated emphatically, “It is a new paragraph.”

He said, “No, new paragraph.”

And round and round they went, both baffled and frustrated, until finally Liz figured out that Paul really meant “new chapter.”

He made other irregular substitutions as well. “Period” for comma. “Full-stop” (British) for period. “Period” for question mark. The flags of punctuation are all symbols, and they defied him. For some bizarre reason known only to his gray matter, he didn’t make mistakes with the semicolon.

To add to the general confusion, Paul was now the king of malaprops and a geyser of neologisms, at times substituting the wrong word or mispronouncing to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, trying to catch the word “cloud,” and pronouncing only the word “loud.” “Skeleton” became “skellington.” “Mold” came out as “mole.” He said “pillar” when he really meant “pillow.” He could only convey the idea of an umbrella if he referred to it as a “pagoda.” A simple word like “hurt” mutated into the more dire “hearse.” For “obsess” he’d say “abscess,” as if obsessing were a sort of boil in the brain. On the other hand, we were often surprised when we tried to puzzle out what we thought were nonsense words we’d faithfully written down phonetically—pallaisse, corybantic, halma, fatidic—only to discover they were real if obscure words, outside our vocabularies.

What emerged in time was an aphasic’s journal yanked out of the brain attic, an account of stumbling around in his scary new mental landscape, searching for hidden light switches and keys to locked rooms, while dodging cobwebs of numbers, moth-eaten garlands of logic, dusty shoeboxes full of old photographs, newsreel memories, and, scattered everywhere, disintegrating sacks of word-shells collected over a lifetime—lightning whelks, owl limpets, heart cockles, alphabet cones, fighting conchs, pearly jingles, tiger cowries, saw-toothed pens, frilled dogwinkles, banded turbans, noble volutes, and thousands more—all knuckled together in quiet inclines that were threatening to spill. The book he christened The Shadow Factory, a unique chronicle of his first aphasic months, and he published it with Lumen Books, the avant-garde press in Santa Fe, known for its books on architecture and design, fiction and poetry, especially in translation.