CHAPTER 27

“HI, WOMBAT,” I GREETED PAUL AS HE STUMBLED OUT OF the bedroom’s cave of dreams, looking like he’d been waylaid by gremlins. His hair stood to attention, his flannel boxer shorts were on backwards, he wobbled as he walked. And yet he wore the expression that humans do upon waking, that of a swollen-eyed infant, which, by design, we find cute.

“You have me all to yourself today,” I announced—as I always did on Saturdays, Sundays, and the many weeks when Liz was away.

He put his right hand over his heart, curled pinkie and all, as if a national anthem had begun playing, and added the day’s new pet name: “My Little Bucket of Hair.”

I laughed so hard I had to stop pouring a cup of milk. “Ooh, I love that one!”

“My Little Bucket of Hair,” Paul said again in a singsong, this time grinning to the right and left, acknowledging the applause of imaginary bystanders.

Then, with a “What’s new, wombat?” sung off-key to the 1965 tune “What’s New, Pussycat?” he sat down to breakfast.

Well, this morning I had fun news to share with my fellow wombatophile.

“I’ve discovered that the Pre-Raphaelite painters were obsessed with wombats! Did you know there’s a British tradition of wombat-snogging?”

“Wombat-snogging? Tell more.” He was hooked.

Paul had once been an expert on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: the mid-nineteenth-century band of young British artists who had jolted the drab art world of their day with jewel-toned paintings full of moody women who somehow managed to be simultaneously erotic and ethereal. When the Pre-Raphaelite ringleader, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was commissioned to paint the walls and ceiling of the Oxford Union, he gathered his motley crew of friends, and they gaily painted elaborate murals filled with heroic and supernatural scenes of Arthurian legends, complete with forests, castles, velvet-clad damsels, and dashing knights.

“You know about Rossetti painting knights on the ceiling of the Oxford Union, right?”

“And on the roundabouts,” Paul added.

Roundabouts? Oh, walls. “Yes, on the walls, too. Everywhere except the windows, which were whitewashed for protection. But the whitewash made such a tempting clean surface that they sketched dozens of frolicking and cavorting wombats on the windows!”

Paul’s gray-blue eyes opened so wide I could see their rims of agate.

“Apparently Rossetti had persuaded his clique that wombats were just dishy, the most beautiful of all God’s creatures, and he threw picnics full of frolick and badinage near the “Wombat’s Lair” at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo. One of his sketches even showed a wombat dashing past Egyptian pyramids! Fantastic!”

“Can I see them?”

“No, I’m afraid somebody washed the windows. But there are sketches at the British Museum. Shall we fly to London and hold hands in front of Rossetti’s wombat drawings?” I asked impishly. If only his health were better and he could travel, what a lark that would be.

“Don’t think so,” he said. “Good idea . . . maybe . . .” He twirled round the index finger on his right hand, struggling to find the word for something. “. . . box?”

“Mailbox?”

“No, not mailbox, the other thing . . .” He continued the high-spirited word-hunt. “. . . Light dancing mailbox.”

Light dancing mailbox. . . . light dancing . . . and a mailbox . . . “Computer?”

“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Swivel?” Whirling his forefinger in the air, as if stirring up mischief.

Months before, I had shown him an Italian museum website where viewers could virtual-tour, strolling through the museum, from gilt to rococo. Did he actually remember that?

“Do you mean the museum tour . . . ?”

“Yes!” he said with relief, adding, “Of course.”

In school, Paul had studied the great revolutions of the past—Agricultural, Industrial, Transportation—and how they’d edited and revised being human, from our gene pool to our ability to survive in climates and landscapes deadly to our ancestors. But that hadn’t prepared him for being swept up in the next great one. It was both his privilege and bad fortune to be alive in the throes of the Information Age, too slick, fast, and silicon for his old-fashioned brain. This was a revolution he didn’t fathom, didn’t like, didn’t use much, and yet nonetheless profited from—which made it all the more daunting before his stroke. After his stroke, it confused him utterly, and Liz or I served as go-between. I soon found the British Museum site, and although we couldn’t “stroll through” the halls, together we browsed.

Discovering Rossetti’s wombat was fun, but it also reconnected us through an activity not related to illness, the arc of learning something new together, a lively way to bridge minds. More and more now, we began to delve into subjects we could share, which satisfied both my curiosity and Paul’s. The history of aphasia produced a cabinet of wonders not for the squeamish. In the second century AD, the Greek physician Galen would have diagnosed Paul’s aphasia as a blockage of black bile gumming up a cranial sac believed to store his animal spirits. To our horror, in the sixteenth century, doctors would have applied leeches to his tongue. Paul relished the recipe in Théophile Bonet’s seventeenth-century Guide to the Practical Physician, which advised a “most secret and certain remedy for apoplexy [stroke]”:

Take a lion’s dung, powdered, two parts, pour spirit of wine till it be covered three fingers’ breath, let them stand in a vial stopped three days. Strain it and keep it for use. Then take a crow, not quite pinfeathered, and a young turtle, burn them apart in an oven, powder them, pour on the above-said spirit of wine, let them stand in infusion for three days. Then take berries of a linden tree, an ounce and a half. Let them be steeped in the aforesaid spirit, then add as much of the best wine and six ounces of sugar candy, boil them in a pot till the sugar be melted. Put it up. Let the patient take a spoonful of it in wine, often in a day, for a whole month.

To Paul’s delight, an apparently plausible medical reason for his aphasia in the late eighteenth century would have been keeping a mistress. Presumably because the worry, or the unusual sexual excitement, raised some men’s blood pressure? Doctors didn’t specify why, only that mistresses could lead to stroke. We chuckled together when we discovered that in the nineteenth century, phrenologists concluded that verbal memory was located behind the eye sockets, because brilliant wordsmiths displayed big bags under their bulging, frog-like eyes.

Thank goodness for medicine’s steady advances. At least Paul didn’t have to endure tongue leeches or linden berries stewed in lion’s dung and baby crow. I’d already told him about the clinical trials with vampire-bat saliva, and those in which the brain is stimulated by coiled magnets. Maybe treatments hadn’t changed that much after all.

“No bat saliva?” Paul casually asked Liz as she offered him a mug of milk.

“Bat saliva?” She cocked an eyebrow. Her pixie-cut hair was a new shade of red—dark chestnut with a touch of persimmon—and her shoulders were newly tanned from a canoe trip.

Deadpan, he said: “Because I’m off Tasty Bite.”

“R-i-ght,” she drawled skeptically. “You better not be—Tasty Bite was having a sale, and you have seventy-eight boxes stacked up in the pantry!”

Her eyes lingered a moment on the unopened asparagus can next to Paul on the kitchen table. It was wearing a wristwatch. A self-winding one, which seemed all the more implausible. I smiled. Though it looked like a doubly amputated aluminum arm, I knew it was just Paul’s solution for a tight Twist-O-Flex watchband.