mysterium
BY MID-DECEMBER, JUST a few months after the brain injury, we’re packing to travel to Atlanta to be with our families for the holidays. There’s a new baby, Richard’s brother’s first child, who will be a welcome distraction. Even though Richard’s short-term disability is running out and we haven’t won approval for long-term disability, our home in Seattle has sold. We’re excited to have some cash that can sustain us during his recovery.
The week we leave Laguna Beach, Dylan puts on “The Christmas Song” and Richard joins in on the chorus. The first notes sung since the surgery. It’s a shock to hear the low rumble of his beautiful voice. Richard walks toward his daughter, both of them singing with Nat King Cole, and they hold each other, singing and laughing. After hearing him speak just a few sentences, we’re amazed to listen to effortless expression.
This is the first time most of our family has seen us since his surgery. We stay in Richard’s brother’s large family home on a hill overlooking a golf course. My husband backs himself against the bar in the living room as everyone walks in, sixteen of them, the sisters and the “outlaws,” as we call our partners, their children, my long-divorced parents, our children, Richard’s brother and wife and baby, and Mimoo—my grandmother—who bonded with Richard long ago over the early loss of their mothers. They grab him by the shoulders and hug him, and after greeting everyone, Richard stands straight, staring, the bewildered face of overwhelm. Mimoo finds a place near Richard, where she can hold his huge hand in her frail one, and she looks away, shaking her head in disbelief, tucking her lower lip to stop herself from crying.
Everyone is thrilled to see him alive and unsure about how to relate to him. In the past, Richard has been the vocal one, rallying people for games and adventure, keeping a steady beat of music going, singing and dancing along. This Christmas, he stays quiet, reading and resting. He tries going out to a hockey game and a movie theater, to see how he will do. He sleeps long hours after each of the outings. Our extended family makes delicious meals, and we talk with the children about their lives.
A week later, when we return to our apartment, Richard will leave only for therapy and the walk I insist he take each morning. But something unusual is beginning to happen on our strolls along the sand. Just as he has begun to sing, now full memorizations spring from his mouth. First up: the entire soliloquy from Hamlet, otherwise known as the “What a Piece of Work Is a Man” monologue.
Then, on the drive home from one of Dylan’s vocal performances, out pops the announcer from the Adventures of Superman television series: “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands; and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way!”
“Where did that come from?” Dylan asks.
“Some memory he had since he was a child. You used to do it for the kids,” I say to him. “Remember?”
“No,” he says.
And, inside me, the crush of arbitrary forgetting. Life is available only in the present moment, say the gurus. But they remember what happened yesterday.
The “you” in Richard has disappeared, and in its wake a mind appears in random flashes of gestures, words, expressions. There’s so much silence that being with him is like being with the spaces between things, between words, between sounds. I’m unmoored by his apparent nothingness. He’s a living embrace of impermanence, in dude form. But I don’t want this bodyspace called husband, absent of ideas and longings and history. I want him to be as he was. I want to have what was once mine, even though I know he really didn’t belong to me. But this man does not stay. He goes and goes and goes. Whatever has done this to us cares nothing for what I want.
In January his company calls to see if he’d like to attend a yearly conference, the same conference where Richard has received outstanding performance awards in previous years. It’s all the way across the country, in Washington, DC. I’m not sure how to describe what he might find when he sees his colleagues again. Should I tell my husband that his co-workers might be appalled by what they see in his lost-boy expression? Should I make Richard aware that he risks frightening his colleagues with his childlike behavior?
“You’re too fragile,” I argue. We walk up the hill behind our apartment. He opens the chain-link gate that leads onto the Laguna Hills path. I watch his body move awkwardly, his shorts belted so they won’t fall down. He’s still thirty pounds below his presurgery weight.
Richard’s mouth moves into a straight line. He’s determined to reconnect with the fulfilling career that makes him feel capable.
“I want to go alone,” he says.
“Without anyone?” I kick the dry dirt with my feet. The cars drive alongside the old creek bed below, an empty gorge once full of river life. So many cars that roads are being widened. In this canyon, rock ledges and concrete culverts have been constructed, coastal sagebrush planted, to veer flash floods to the ocean. The Tongva tribe used to fish for abalone in these creeks. Now the land is managed wilderness. I’m caught between two internal forces—one that wants to keep him safe from those who can injure him with a frozen image of decline, and one that wants him to reconcile with the truth of his predicament.
“I can travel alone,” he says.
“You’ve only been inside a grocery store by yourself,” I say. He has no clue about the support that holds his life together. Richard has no formed sense of himself, or of his relationship with the corporate culture he once found so amenable to his skills.
“I have to go,” he says. He is squinting into the ever-present California sun when he says this, and his face looks like a little boy’s: innocent, resolute.
I realize that I can’t really tell Richard what others might think because I can’t actually know their minds. At the same time that I want to control his story, I also want to stop defining who he can be.
“I’ll need to coach you on how to do everything—take the flight, take the train, introduce yourself, remember manners. Okay?” I say.
“Yes,” he says, and he turns around and walks the trails without caring that there might be rattlesnakes upon the rocks.
Later that afternoon I call the woman who has been his business manager and confidante, and ask her to watch over him. “He doesn’t know people anymore,” I tell her, and she reassures me that his former colleagues will reintroduce themselves. I place a label with my contact information in every coat and jacket. I drill him on various “what-if” scenarios: what if he gets lost, what if he gets sick, what if he decides to come home early. While he’s preparing to go, he continues to read his textbooks and sleep a lot.
He leaves three weeks later. He makes it to the hotel.
“How was the flight?” I ask him later that night, when we check in.
“I can’t remember,” he says.
“The train? Did that go okay?”
Silence.
“Are you raising your shoulders? Because I can’t hear you,” I say.
“Everyone says I look great,” he says.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Tired,” he says.
Three days later, when Richard returns, he sleeps, hard.
“Well, that happened,” I say, when I take him his morning juice.
“I slept through most of the three days,” he says.
“Meetings are boring,” I say.
“I went to the Holocaust Museum,” he says.
“Really? How was that?” I ask, trying not to choke on my coffee at the thought of choosing so intense an experience straight out of cancer surgery.
“I saw my friend Damien.”
“Who used to work for you in Memphis? How is he?”
“Good. He was kind to me,” Richard says.
“Then what?”
“I went back to the room and slept until I got on the plane.”
“Oh,” I say, like it’s no big deal. But he’s crying already. I lean in and kiss the gentle man on his wide forehead. Something about his incorruptibility is instructing me. He’s precious in his purity. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my surroundings without complication.
Though I spent fifteen years in management for museums and science centers, I left that work to consult and write part-time. Before Richard’s brain injury, I thought that the move to California would allow me time to write every day, creative work that I wanted to do from the time I was a girl, work that I never allowed myself in my effort to be responsible. I haven’t always been forthcoming about my own dreams. I was afraid to declare them, afraid I would fail, afraid I would give up.
While in California, I work with my writing mentor, who lets me into her retreats for free in exchange for preparing the meals. I’m grateful for this community, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to continue writing when Richard cannot work. It feels like a compulsion, less a choice than a survival skill. I reason that if we live simply on Richard’s disability, then I can help Richard with his recovery, and write a novel and some screenplays. I also do a few consulting gigs to pay for Dylan’s college auditions and for travel to see Joshua.
Dylan’s vocal studies at the Orange County School of the Arts have kept her engaged throughout her senior year, but in the time I’ve had to focus on Richard’s recovery, our daughter has become more independent and resilient. By the New Year, I’m planning a five-city audition tour for Dylan, who wants to find the best university to study vocal music, and locating companions who will stay home with Richard while we travel. Our plan calls for her to visit two schools on her own, and for me to join her for the more demanding auditions. In February, Dylan flies to Cincinnati, and I join her a week later in Rochester, Philadelphia, and Bloomington, Indiana.
On the East Coast, the clouds open and pour forth snowflakes. Dylan’s throat closes. We find a café, and I ask for ginger tea. We take off our mittens and hold hands while we watch the barista grate thin slices of fresh gingerroot, place them in a gauze pouch. I try not to talk about her upcoming performance, since it makes her nervous. Instead, we talk about our impressions of each campus so far, and the student guides, and what it might be like to settle in this geography. After the tour and a successful audition, we find our hotel and go out for burgers and tell jokes. For the first time in months, she has the full attention of her mum, and we play like when she was a little girl, staying up late telling each other silly stories, and joking about family memories, and making fun of the kinds of structures and judgment that stifle personal creativity. We say what frightens us—that Richard will remain emotionally as a child, that we won’t be able to reach him, that we will grow angry or, worse, bored with him. We talk about how we will stay connected, even when we don’t know what remains of our family.
Upon returning, we’re able to know in the lift of an eyebrow what’s required of the other. She lost some of her carefree youth through her father’s cancer, but having to study and practice in the middle of this upheaval made her self-reliant. She knows that she’ll soon be leaving this chaos and entering her own life. I want this for her, and I’m fearful of the silence on the other side of her departure.
The groceries in the trunk melt in the scorching midday as I drive across the parking lot near our apartment. It’s late March, and the afternoon air stifles inside the metal car, quite unlike the subdued, dreary Northwest we left behind. When my phone rings, I see an area code matching Richard’s company. I’m driving too fast because Richard is worried every time I leave the house. I pick up the call anyway. The CEO says my name. He’s on speakerphone with the head of human resources. After the small talk, they ask the question, the one I’ve been dreading, just as I hit a speed bump. I pull over and take a deep breath. I imagine there’s a room full of people listening for the answer, so I’m trying not to sound like an asshole.
“I don’t know when he’ll be back to work,” I say.
They prod. “Three months? Six months?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think it’s going to take to get him back to work?” they ask.
It’s as if they’re speaking in code, some code I haven’t ever bothered to learn. I pull at the sundress sticking to my legs and think of the way people expect rational responses to an event so mysterious it hasn’t yet found a name. I want Richard’s company not to lose hope in him, but I don’t even know what has happened to his mind. He can’t remember his past. He passes out when he tries to stand. He’s read the same book every day for the last four months. I don’t say what I’d like to because I’m afraid the company will think he’s too far gone to ever work for them again. The possibility would crush Richard’s motivation; he’s getting out of bed because he needs to return to his job.
“Going to take a lot of hard work!” I say, trying for cheery.
They’re not impressed. They want to know what our plans are.
“Honestly, I don’t know whether he’s coming back,” I finally say, as I break out in a sweat. This is the most truth I’ve told all year.
“What is it going to take to know?” they ask.
I’m on a roll now. Might as well give it to them.
“Could be a few months of therapy, could be a sabbatical to the Himalayas in Tibet. I have no idea what we’ll do next.”
Silence. The kind of silence like that time I stood up in the restaurant after too much to drink and fell face first on the floor.
I cannot find the words. Just like my husband.
Richard has already resigned his position. There isn’t anything we can do to make life easier for the corporation. I’m thankful for their support, for the way they flew our child out to see her father, for their help in preapproving and financing the surgery. I’ve said all of these things. Now, I want them to sit in the discomfort I feel every day.
If only the doctor had told us the hospital caused the brain injury, if only the medical insurance hadn’t delayed us in getting the diagnosis, if only I’d screamed louder when the blood wasn’t available. You can kill yourself on the poisonous “if-onlys.” But there isn’t some magic time machine that will transport me to the past to change the outcome. Life now seems to eradicate the past. Richard and I are corpus, bound by scars of the dermis, scars below the surface too. I’ve loved him and I’ve hated him, and I’m no longer sure if any of it was because of who he really is.
Still, the persona loves the narrative of change. This is the story I want to give to the corporation—he woke up and he’s getting better!—but that story is already unraveling. I want to say, We’re eating and sleeping and walking. What more do you want?
Instead I say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
By April, seven months after the brain injury, when we finally have approval from the insurance company, we make an appointment to see a neuropsychologist. We wait another month to get in to see Dr. L, who meets with us in his modest Lake Forest office, on a spring day that’s California ever-bright. Certified in psychology and clinical neuropsychology, Dr. L specializes in rehab medicine and leads international symposiums on brain injury. With polite charm, kind eyes, and the mild-mannered repose that comes from his black belt in karate, Dr. L instantly makes us feel like we’re not insane. It’s as if we have been spit out of the rapids of the cancer hospital and the sporadic aftercare and into a gentle river.
His waiting room is filled with vivid watercolors.
“Dreamy paintings,” I say.
“Former patients. Most with brain injuries,” he says.
“Really?”
“Lots of people with TBI have latent artistic abilities,” he says, like it’s no big deal.
His bookshelves are lined with clinical works and those by popular writers: Antonio Damasio and Eric Kandel and Michael Gazzaniga and Daniel Schacter. Names I will grow to trust as I learn about the enshrined experiences of memory. Tucked on a top shelf is Dr. L’s frame drum, just like the ones Richard and I made to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. Dr. L speaks matter-of-factly and reassuringly about the process Richard will undergo so he can be evaluated: three days of tests and then an interview and a meeting to discuss his care plan.
“Richard can barely stay awake for a few hours at a time,” I say.
Dr. L assures us: “The testing will be four hours each day. Lots of breaks. At the end of these sessions, we’ll have a clear understanding of Richard’s neurocognitive and neurobehavioral functioning, including his strengths and weaknesses.”
“Do you think he’s had a brain injury?” I ask.
“The MRI taken in November appears normal, but a functional MRI was not taken. We can see increased signals, or ‘motor tracks,’ that can result in higher-level thinking problems, more apparent on the left than on the right. The tests will indicate where his cognitive difficulties are, and what the treatment plan needs to be.”
These three days of tests are to include a sensory-perceptual examination, a tactile form-recognition test (matching geometric shapes to a board cutout), a finger-tapping test (quickly tapping dominant and nondominant hands), an aphasia examination (using written and spoken language to name pictures and perform simple math), a Rey Complex Figure Test (reproducing a line drawing by copying and by memory), a Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (recalling a twelve-item semantically categorized list), a Wechsler Memory Scale (testing spatial, symbolic, visual, logical, and auditory cognition, including working and delayed), a Brief Visuospatial Memory Test (storing and recalling visual memory and the spatial relationship of objects), and a Neurobehavioral Functioning Inventory (identifying problems with daily living), as well as tests to examine visual discrimination, judgment of line orientation, and executive functions.
I hear the names of the exams rattled off. What we want is the plan. Dr. L tells us we’ll do the tests right away, but it will take a couple of weeks to pull together the results. Another round of waiting.
We take out the list we made when we first discovered that Richard had cancer, the list that always brings us back to ourselves, the list that has, since he died and came back, become The List: Ten Things We Want to Do Before We Die. There it is, at number five. Get to the Grand Canyon.
That week, I haul our camping gear out of storage, load the tent, sleeping bags, food, and water into the car, map the South Rim entry from southern California, reserve the campsite, make and freeze several meals we can eat at the canyon, pack oatmeal and brown sugar and ground coffee beans and Earl Grey tea into animal-proof boxes. We drive eight hours east, around the edge of the Mojave Desert, and into Arizona, our mouths becoming dry with the rising midday temperatures.
In the first week in May, the canyon holds midday heat, with evening temperatures near freezing. We are comfortable with these extremes, having learned to camp in the Canadian Rockies. We locate our site near Douglas fir, alligator juniper, desert bricklebush. We pitch our tent under the big tree. We sit at the picnic table and look at a map. We walk down the road until we arrive at the edge of the canyon.
One million arid acres stretch out in the afternoon sun. The mile-high crust, layers of umber, russet, charcoal, goldenrod, burnt sienna, and ochre, exposes two billion years of geologic history. We stand awe-smacked. We’re the newest things on earth. Everything at the rim—all of the particles that big-banged themselves through the universe to be alive in just these forms—has been set in motion. Our lives are the vestiges of these events, events that seem to happen ceaselessly. As tired and grief-stricken as I am, there’s still a part of me that knows that Richard’s loss of memory, the death of his identity, his coming back as a new man, it all has its place in the order of things, or perhaps the chaos of things—just like these ancient, awesome rock formations.
But now, even though I have been stunned into a state of wonder by the Grand Canyon, I am also lonely. I don’t know if I have a marriage, or if I will be alone with my thoughts for the rest of our lives.
Like the boy that he is, Richard gets too close to the drop-off at the South Rim, and I drag him back. The terror of nearly losing him can be scratched like the tender skin of the scar that winds up his middle. With him, I’m a young mother, all frightful imagining and smothering care.
We walk back to the campsite and make cups of tea on the camp stove. Richard climbs into his sleeping bag and naps while I write in my journal. Hours later, when he wakes, it’s still light, and we watch a raven swoop onto our table, open a foil tea packet with her beak, pick out the bag, and break into the tea leaves. We smirk as we observe her open a matchbox and fling the matches to the ground.
“Now you’re just showing off,” I say to the bird.
Playing, laughing, even the organization of daily chores feels easy with this new Richard. On the road there’s little tension inside him because there’s nothing to do. He’s simply living in current time, not fretting over the past or freaking out about the nonexistent future.
I watch him build a fire, the first one since the brain injury. Once he gets his hands on objects, he remembers. The paper crumples, the kindling is stacked near the bottom over a layer of tinder, bark, and dry needles. He organizes the logs by size so they can be fed to the fire in the correct order, small to large. After he arranges the classic log cabin shape, four walls around a central teepee, he digs in the waterproof bag for matches. When he takes them out he pauses, looks at the matches for a long time. Not seconds. A long minute. His hand seems disconnected from his brain. I open my mouth to ask if he wants help, and then I stop myself. I watch his fingers grasp the match and look at the wooden sticks, as if he can’t recall what to do next. But he knows what to do, he simply can’t decide to take the action. Suspension. Concentration. I watch his fingers take a few grazing stabs against the rough edge of the matchbox. Pause. Graze. Pause. Graze. And then he strikes a singular sffft; phosphorus and sulfur ignite. His fingers dance to hold the tiny timber of the match. He balances the flame and he lowers it to the tinder. He bites his lip. Releases the match. Watches the little flicker turn to heat. He purses his lips and blows air into the fire. The kindling catches. He kneels and feeds the logs, one by one, until the fire is hot and thick with gold light. He turns his flushed face toward me.
“What was that?” I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders. The big Whatever. He doesn’t know.
“The match thing is quirky,” I say. “Very Oliver Sacks.”
“Yes,” he says. “Strange.”
This is just one of the curiosities of my husband’s life now.
Later, in the tent, I listen to Richard’s bearlike body snore, and I watch the curve of the stars fall into the scrape of rock, and I feel my body slowly rotating with the earth. I am one object of billions here.