CHAPTER 30

AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE, A FEW SUMMERS AFTER THE stroke, we opened the pool for the season, and Paul slid into its blue eye with a shiver of delight. Flailing some and looking a little anxious, he swam a tentative breaststroke across the shallow end.

“You’re swimming! You’re swimming!” I yelled from the patio, feeling a sudden surge of excitement. He paused long enough to grin and call back an exultant “I am, aren’t I!”

Then he suddenly turned toward the deep end and pushed off from the shallow bottom, swimming in awkward but nonetheless continuous strokes for his first lap of the season. Pausing at the far end, he gasped a bit, caught his breath, then, face beaming as if he’d astonished himself, set off on the return lap with verve.

Over the past few years, he had learned how to cope a little more with the lack of coordination, vision, and balance problems he had suffered during the stroke. Depending on where a stroke hits, one’s sense of the body’s scale and edges can change dramatically, the skin feel porous instead of elastic, a leg grow heavier, a wrist dangle looser. Suddenly one can have so many toes. But his brain was reorganizing and learning to compensate. He still had irritating trouble with things that required many steps, but he’d relearned how to hold a felt pen and write reliably in longhand, wield a knife and fork, button his shirt, steer a zipper, brush his teeth, and dozens of other commonplace but sublime small acts of complexity the brain teaches itself and then secretly remembers. All the stuff we take for granted, unless they’re taken away from us by injury.

“A bowl of raspberry and rum space dust,” I teased, on a typical morning, as I presented his usual breakfast of Egg Beaters and Smart Bacon. Then I shared with him a short article from The Guardian online. It reported that astronomers had identified a swirl of amino acids in Sagittarius B2 (a giant dust cloud in the Milky Way)—and that if we had a bowl of that space dust to sample, it would taste of raspberry and rum.

“What do you make of that?”

“I need something to write with!” Paul picked up the pen, which he habitually kept next to his place at the table, almost as another type of cutlery.

“You’re holding a pen,” I replied, taken aback.

“No, I need something to write with!”

“You have a pen in your hand,” I said slowly, with growing puzzlement.

“To write with!”

I took hold of his hand with the pen. “Here’s a pen. You have one. Do you need a different pen?”

“Nooo—the other thing,” he sighed, getting more flustered.

“The other thing . . . a tablet to write on?”

“Yesss!” he crooned in relief. Yet another never-ordinary conversation to start the day.

“Thank you for an absolutely lascivious breakfast,” he pronounced with conviction, while chasing a last patch of soy bacon around his plate.

Since it was noon, my lunchtime, I joined him with a bowl of Moroccan Vegetable and Chickpea Stew.

“Lascivious, eh? I’d be happy to share my lunch with you.”

“No way, too burly,” he declined with a grimace. “Has that . . . that . . . double-barreled entity sent their . . . hmm . . . their . . . spondulicks?”

Words crowded my mind. Stumped, I finally asked: “What’s a spondulicks?”

“Money.”

“Really? Truly? Spondulicks?” In my mind’s eye, I pictured a spastic duck.

“Yes,” he said emphatically.

“Okay.”. . . double-barreled . . . and sent ... double-barreled . . . and sent . . . Do you possibly mean: Has the Johnson and Wales School sent me my check?”

“Yes!” He nodded firmly.

“Spondulicks?”

“Spondulicks. It’s British.”

Surely he was pulling my leg. I breezed into the library to look it up in an etymological dictionary, where I found this entry:

1856, Amer.Eng. slang, “money, cash,” of unknown origin, said to be from Gk. spondylikos, from spondylos, a seashell used as currency (the Gk. word means lit. “vertebra”). Used by Mark Twain and O.Henry and adopted into British English, where it survives despite having died in Amer.Eng.

“You’re right!” I said, returning to my seat. “I think you meant to say check.”

“Check. Check. Check,” he repeated, pressing the word into his doughy memory.

In his early-morning fog, brain cells warming up, a simple word like check could slither away. But spondulicks would do, and while he repeated check in his mind, I repeated spondulicks in mine. The important thing was to find a shared vocabulary.

“What’s the price of an airmail stamp?” he asked Liz.

“Ninety-eight cents,” she advised. “But it’s probably easiest if you use one of the dollar stamps.”

“Thanks for invading my darkness,” Paul replied chivalrously.

“How about the screed . . . ?” He moved his hand through the air as if he were writing in invisible ink. Since he had trouble finding the word paper or essay, Liz had become well acquainted with screed, the Middle English word Paul often used for any form of writing.

“The manuscript I typed for you?”

“Yes,” he said. “What’s the total mileage?”

“A little more than . . . eight . . . hundred . . . words.” She slowed down at the numbers to give him time to manage the sum. “Just the right length. That’s what Transfuge asked you for.”

“Good.”

“Oh, by the way, don’t forget you have an appointment with Dr. Blemkin this afternoon.”

Wanting to know if his eye doctor accepted check or credit card, Paul queried: “What does Dr. Blemkin traffic in?”

Her eyebrows arched like silk worms. Then she replied: “You’ll need to take your credit card with you.”

It was a typical exchange. We didn’t interrupt Paul when he was trying to speak, which usually required his full attention. In his strain to communicate, he knew just what he meant, but was not aware he was substituting an odd word or expression. The three of us sometimes laughed about the word chimeras of the day, with Paul cackling over them as much as we did. It delighted the part of his personality that had always appreciated gaudiness, especially in language.

“What does Dr. Blemkin traffic in?!” Liz repeated with an amused smile later that afternoon, as she massaged Icy Hot into his crooked fingers.

Paul giggled. “Did I say that?”

“You did.”

“Opium?” He thought a moment. “Nepenthes?”

“Nepenthe?” I said. “Where did that come from?”

Laughing, he shrugged. “Floated up.” To the surface of his mind, he meant, from the lily-pad-covered word-pond beneath.

“Okay, okay, what is it?” Liz asked. Few could feign exasperation with such aplomb.

“Soporific,” Paul explained.

I could tell Liz was paging through her mental pharmacopeia under the letter N. She wouldn’t find it there, it was too esoteric an allusion from his school days, when he had had to translate books of the Odyssey.

“Ancient Greek,” I added. “Some Egyptian herb they took to forget their grief.” How odd, I thought. He even remembers that the original word had an s at the end, which English translators dropped by mistake because they confused it for a plural suffix. At some point in our decades together, he must have spoken to me about it, but I couldn’t remember where or when.

Paul laughed, shook his head, grinned proudly. “I never know what I’m going to say!”

“But you can say what you mean most of the time. That’s huge. I’m really proud of you.”

“I am, too,” Liz chimed in as she stretched his cramped finger until it almost straightened for a moment, and he flashed her the tortured grimace of some Inuit masks.

Wrong words still veered through his speech like errant comets. Deciphering his sentences was still taxing for me. Not as taxing as it was for him to utter, of course—it might take Paul five minutes of false starts to work a sentence free.

“The movie starts at two. No. Two. No. Two, three, four. Four,” he’d declare with relief at finally finding the right word. Even then he might choose a word by default because he couldn’t lasso the ideal one.

Once he was truly awake, he was fresher. But that’s when he tended to be writing in his study, or working with Liz on revisions. I spent more hours with him in the late afternoons and evenings, when he was sundowning. By mistake, he sometimes referred to that period, quaintly, as his “five o’clock shadow.” By now I knew that when he was fatigued, asking him open-ended questions (“Which movie would you like to watch?”) didn’t work well. Instead I used short phrases and offered him choices in pairs (“Would you rather watch A Perfect Murder or A Gathering Storm?

The thriller or the Churchill movie?” “Shrimp for dinner or Tasty Bite?”). Then, by using the words I’d already primed his mind with, he could simply model his reply on mine: “Tasty Bite. The Churchill movie.”

Some of his days seemed cut loose from past and future. Out of the blue he couldn’t remember something that happened yesterday, or he’d forget a routine (taking vitamins) that had been part of each day for months. To him it was unbelievable, rumor, not conscious, not real, yet another figment he must take on faith.

“We spoke about it last week,” I reminded him when he complained he didn’t know about the doctor’s appointment that day.

“Last week is mythic to me!” he snapped in gruff exasperation.

Whenever he poured milk into a mug, half of it still spilled over the front edge. The first hundred or so times, I tried centering his hand over the cup, showing him where to pour. But he never did improve his aim (though he did improve at mopping up). People don’t just calculate sums. While pouring milk, we gauge how far a stream of milk is from the edge of a cup, and while walking we compute how high a foot must lift to glide safely over a curb. For depth perception, the brain relies on visual clues plus the ability to recalibrate distances if the situation or landscape changes. Paul’s brain had lost the knack of counting, and he also had trouble judging distances. Maybe that contributed to his spilling when he poured, and how easily he tripped over steps and curbs.

But few things continued to plague Paul more than remembering how things were done. Over and over, he relearned how to dial the phone, open a pull-tab carton of milk, unlatch a pillbox, push the microwave’s one-minute button the correct number of times, and a hundred other feats. Check-writing proved hopeless. He’d write the wrong name, the wrong amount, the wrong date, all on the wrong lines—there seemed an infinite number of mistakes he could make with a single check. Sometimes it took an hour to get one check right. But he kept trying. If he didn’t do something regularly he forgot how. It was as if he needed to reinstall lost habits, which are really mental shortcuts. The brain would grind to a halt if it had to think every time its owner tied a shoelace or wielded a fork. So, to keep household life flowing smoothly, we established simple routines and stuck to them. Doing the same things at roughly the same time each day seemed to leave Paul more energy to devote to relearning speech and the arts of once-familiar tasks.

Most afternoons we’d convene for a midday break. “Wombat Teatime!” Liz would holler to me in my study, and I’d pack up work for the day and wander down the hallway to join them, in the style of a British afternoon tête-à-tête, my mind often trailing thought-clouds from faraway atolls. As the three of us caught up on our day’s doings, our planet seemed to grow smaller and non sequiturs flew. A typical teatime conversation: I emerged full of news of Nyepi, the Balinese national day of silence and introversion. We decided I should learn to touch-type when I retired—Liz and Paul agreed I’d never have the patience to do it now, plus they got such a kick out of watching me type like a mad, two-fingered organist. Liz vented about her husband. Paul announced he had been writing an essay about “George Foreman and cows.” Liz popped an eyebrow in surprise. I’d do my best to horrify Liz and Paul with favorite awful puns, such as: “What geometric shape most resembles a lost parrot?” Answer, of course: a Polly-gone.

A bonus from Paul’s stroke was how much time Liz, Paul, and I had spent together—“more than I’ve spent with my husband!” she once laughed. Time, that sweet luxury, and the close tie it inspires, usually happens in college, when days move slowly around similar events. College roommates or housemates tend to stay friends for years. I’ve sometimes heard professional women complain about how hard it is to make lasting friends, how there isn’t always enough time for closeness to flourish. So one wonderful side effect of Paul’s stroke was what cherished friends Liz and I had become.

As different as we are, she’s a word-slinger who is sharp as a fang, we’re both bookish, both excited by nature, both curious little ferrets who identify with Autolycus, in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a self-described “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Not least, we’ve been thrown together during periods of sorrow and joy. We appear in many of each other’s memories. We’ve survived scary episodes in Paul’s life. And it’s been a godsend for me as a wordsmith. Even though I couldn’t communicate well with Paul, especially during his first years post-stroke, Liz and I could talk normally—sometimes just for the sake of talking, as humans do—and that kept me from feeling silenced by his aphasia.

Our days flowed around well-charted, often traveled courses, and yet, the underlying sense of falling out of time, out of the trajectory of one’s life, not by choice, but by subtraction, was frequent and disquieting. Then I grieved for him, for the lost and previous Paul. He grieved for that man, too. Both our griefs were mainly private, internal, unuttered. Return was impossible, and there was only one direction open; and so we kept our compass pointed forward.

Physically, Paul grew stronger, thanks to lots of swimming. He divined time by listening to the planes pass overhead. Prop-jet. four o’clock. Using planes as sound clocks, he seemed infallibly to know exactly when five o’clock came around and it was time to go inside. He was continuing to improve his speech, writing, and walking, and to compensate for his faulty vision. But the slow progress had a tinge of black shadow. I could still feel the hot breath of what-could-go-wrong. Falling still posed a threat, as did pneumonia. Swallowing pills and liquids continued to make mischief with his airways. But, as usual, concerns were tempered by moments of levity. Every day seemed to include the unusual juxtapositions of fun and worry, laughter and fear, hilarity and danger.

Toward the end of that summer, as Paul continued to roast himself in the sun on the patio, sprawled in his favorite chair before and after his swim, he grew browner and browner, and we started calling him the names of coffee beans.

“Good morning, Sulawesi,” I’d greet him.

“Hullo, Java Blawan,” Liz would teasingly chime in with another favorite dark roast.

One day I noticed something odd about Paul’s robustly brewing tan. His chest, underarms, and pubic hair had begun, ever so faintly, to blush green. Then, one hot afternoon as he climbed out of the pool after a skinny-dip, his body hair glowed the green of ghostly ectoplasm. He looked like an aurora borealis surging up from the blue, though he hadn’t seemed to notice.

Mystified, I yelped in mock horror: “It’s the Green Hulk!”

“Where?” he cried, looking around, a bit confused.

“On you, you’re bright green!” What on earth is that? I wondered, and Is it unhealthy? Where have I seen that green before?

Paul inspected his hairy green arms, legs, and groin—the last especially picturesque—and let out an uneasy chuckle.

“Giant sloths! You look just like the three-toed sloths with green fur I saw in the Amazon. The ones that move so slowly whole tribes of algae and bacteria take up residence in their fur!”

“The same tree-huggers that shimmy down their stanchion to vote?” Paul asked.

Stanchion = tree. Vote = cast a ballot = defecate. I got it.

“Yes, fertilizing their tree once a week. Creative exchange of goods and services, don’t you think?”

Paul surveyed his arms and legs as if they didn’t belong to him. I could tell he was picturing the possible colonization of his body by miniature green monsters.

“Little green men!” I warbled in my scariest voice, and laughed.

“Aaagggh!” Paul opened his mouth while waggling his fingers in pretend fright. But when he tried to towel the green off and discovered that it wouldn’t budge, he started to look genuinely concerned.

“I think it’s probably the chlorine, not anything like algae,” I reassured him. “You move too much for algae. Blondes have to be careful their hair doesn’t turn green in the pool. Maybe your gray hair is reacting the same way? I mean, you usually dry off in the sun instead of rinsing off. I’ve got some shampoo for chlorinated pools; let’s try that.”

And so we did, both scrubbing until he lost all of the green tufts.

“Mildred would have liked it,” Paul said with a grin, referring to his Irish mother. “A big lad of shamrock green!”

For several days afterward, Paul kept inspecting his pelt and looking a little disappointed when he didn’t find any more green. He liked briefly joining a race of reptiles and amphibians, he’d enjoyed the body pageantry. As a child, he’d always been fascinated by gargoyles, masks, totem poles, grotesques, war paint; then, as a young man, by the freak imagery of the Surrealists, and the prose high jinks of such writers as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Mercifully, word pageantry kept returning to the household through the unlikeliest of routes. When he said funny things without meaning to, we all laughed—not at him but with him, at aphasia’s comic side. Paul was growing comfortable enough in his own altered skin to laugh at himself, too, rather than just feel frustrated. This was good, I knew, not just any path out of the silent undergrowth, but a more comfortable one.

Working hard at my desk one afternoon, without thinking, I balanced my coffee mug on a foot-high stack of papers. Paul walked in, eyeing the mug with a look of concern—it was dangerously close to the computer and piles of my notes and books.

“Do you feel attached to that mug?” he asked. I smiled to myself, knowing he really meant: “Is it safe there?”

He seemed greatly concerned about my safety. Whenever I traveled, he always admonished me to mind my head on the low-ceilinged commuter planes, and take care to lock my hotel room door.

Just that morning he’d remarked: “Guard against precipitous motion,” by which he meant: “Don’t fall out of bed.”

After which, Paul addressed me with the day’s piropo: “Satrap of the Endless Sky . . .”

“Ni-i-ice,” I said, crinkling my nose in appreciation.

“They’re talking about terminating the stars,” he proceeded to tell me excitedly.

“Wow. That’s quite a trick!” Terminating the stars, holy smokes, that’s a lot of celestial violence, I thought. I pictured a lonely cold black sky. My mind set to work on his puzzle. Maybe stars = going to the stars?

“Do you possibly mean . . . ending the space program, stopping funds to NASA?”

“Yes!” he said, throwing up his hands, with a look that blared: What a stupid decision they’re making! After years of amateur astronomy, roaming the galaxies in his imagination, scrutinizing closeup photographs of the planets, and savoring Hubble telescope images of deep space, he felt personally offended.

“Never mind,” Paul said, quieting. “Is it sunny today?” Then, complaining about the long spell of cold rainy weather, he muttered: “April made me go insane.” He yawned, and added by way of clarification: “A disheveled April is a really hard thing to sleep through.” Then he chuckled, suddenly charmed by the silliness he’d uttered.

Despite his newfound pleasure in his own funny turns of phrase, it wasn’t all skylarking. Some exchanges, so typical of aphasia, still frustrated him no end, like the time he casually said:

“Boy, do I have a story for you!”

“You have a story to tell me? What?” I asked.

“No, nothing,” he said, dismissing it.

“You’ve decided not to tell me?”

After much confusion, he finally was able to explain that “Boy, do I have a story for you” had simply leapt out of his mouth against his will, even though it was actually the opposite of what he had meant: “I have nothing new to say.”

Another aphasic icon continued to foil and frustrate us, too. Attempting to harpoon the right words, his mind would still occasionally produce nonsense, despite clearly wishing to say something important.

“Why don’t you smitch the graffelklug on wentstodge?” he garbled one day while he was having breakfast.

“What did you say?” I asked in the even tone I aimed for on such occasions, trying not to make him feel self-conscious.

“Why don’t you smitch the graffelklug on wentstodge?” he repeated in an irate whisper, clearly knowing what he meant to say.

“Take it slowly and have one more go.”

After another aborted reply, he finally gave up and grew pensive. Then, with remarkable fluency and sadness, he reflected on his rubble of incoherent sounds.

“It’s just the soft catechism of a great machine falling apart.”