One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir (3 page)

Once, in a writing seminar, when a student kept defending an abysmally written story with a self-flattery that finally strained the class’s goodwill, Paul lost his cool and declared sharply: “Listen, I’d rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!”

For thirty years, he had taught graduate fiction writing, and also contemporary European and Latin American literature at Penn State. He was infamous for making his students’ brains hurt from the strain of learning how to juggle complex ideas. One day I passed a student of his in the hallway holding his head under the gush of a drinking fountain, trying to cool his mind after grappling with some of Samuel Beckett’s hilariously thorny fiction in Paul’s class.

In addition to being a collegiate and county cricket player in his youth, and an RAF officer who lectured on giving good lectures, he garnered several degrees, including a coveted First from Oxford, one of only four given in literature that year. I don’t know how Oxford may have changed since those post–World War II days, but at the time there were only two ways to earn a First—the rough equivalent of an A+ and a guarantee of a sterling job—by breathtaking feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle. A working-class boy on a scholarship to Oxford, he managed to do both. The dazzle came easy because Paul had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons.

CHAPTER 3

T
HE TESTS REVEALED THAT PAUL HAD A MASSIVE STROKE
, one tailored to his own private hell. In the cruelest of ironies for a man whose life revolved around words, with one of the largest working English vocabularies on earth, he had suffered immense damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Though not visible in the CAT scan’s chiaroscuro world, other vital language areas had also wilted, leaving a labyrinth of fragile liaisons hushed.
Global aphasia
, it’s called. Paul’s aphasia was indeed global, round as his head, a grief encompassing our whole world. I’d never heard the expression before, and didn’t want to think about the full cartography of loss. Yet I had no choice because someone had to make decisions about his care—informed, clear-headed decisions.

Where was the tutelary angel who should descend at such times and restore the everydayness of things? I felt acutely unqualified. I hadn’t volunteered for this job, and never would have, given how much was at stake. I didn’t want to be responsible for my loved one’s life. Sitting in his hospital room while he was enduring more tests floors below, I could picture him in my mind’s eye, glowing red with warmth as he was wheeled through the chilly haunts of the hospital, could track his travels as if I were a pit viper sensing his heat through tunnels underground. I felt very much alone, scalded by my own ineptitude, and thought:
Forget angels. Where are all the grown-ups when one really needs one?

I knew his plight wasn’t unique. Browsing the pamphlets I’d picked up in the waiting room, I discovered that stroke is the number one cause of long-term adult disability in the United States. Paul was now among the 5 to 6 million American stroke survivors, and of those he’d joined the ranks of over 1 million Americans living with aphasia—a void of language, a frustrating perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory loss, a mute torturer of words, a jumbler of lives. Aphasia doesn’t just cripple one’s use of words, but the use of any symbols, including the obvious ones: numbers, arrows, semaphore, sign language, Morse code. But also the lightning bolt that spells electrical danger, the three triangles that warn of radiation, the intersecting arcs that announce a biohazard, the cross that locates a hospital on a map, even the paper-doll man and woman on restroom doors.

In 1861, French neurosurgeon Paul Broca inspected the brain of a dead patient, known as
Tan
, who’d suffered from an unusual complaint. Although he understood language, he could neither speak nor write. All he could say was the one syllable—
Tan
. Broca discovered a large lesion in the lower left front of Tan’s brain, and when he autopsied the brains of other patients in similar straits and found matching wounds, he declared the peanut-sized area the home of language. That was the first patch of the brain pegged to a specific function, and it still bears Broca’s name. Ten years later, German neurologist Carl Wernicke realized that patients with a lesion in the left rear of the brain often spoke incoherently, and he flagged this second area as key to comprehending language.

For the longest time, people believed that the neural pathways of language curved along a Silk Road, journeying from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s, and when Paul had his stroke, that’s what all the textbooks taught and I accepted. But recent strides in brain imaging now suggest that word signals spread widely, detour through mazy souks in the temporal lobe, and strike Wernicke’s and Broca’s almost in parallel. It seems those two classic word-mills don’t so much specialize as conspire to fabricate language, and other artisans contribute to the neural weave.

When we hear a noise, the brain analyzes the incoming stimuli, asking itself:
Is that weird yammering human? Is it a syllable, a real word, just nonsense sounds?
If it resembles speech, the brain conjures up the memory of how certain words sound, associates them with meaning, and furnishes instructions on how to use the muscles of the tongue, throat, lips, and mouth to dispatch a reply.

In so-called
convergence zones
, cargo from the senses combines with emotions, resemblances, a tangle of memories, and other mental spices. As neural traders hobnob (wiring and firing together), they grow stronger ties in the process, establishing a quick route for future trade. The brain relies on such guilds of neurons firing in synchrony, but they don’t have to be neighbors. They don’t even have to share the same hemisphere. Still, they forge vast assemblies of cells. One such convergence zone in the parietal lobe, gravely damaged during Paul’s stroke, is associated with drawing meaning and emotion from language, with providing music’s rhythmic enchantment, numbers’ clout, writing’s constellations, telling left from right, directing thoughts outward to the bright spangled world, and deflecting thoughts inward to judge a feeling or hatch a plan. Adding to the carnage, adjacent cells that spur movement can be injured, too. It’s the equivalent of knocking out a state’s electrical grids. After that comes a cascade of silently detonating disabilities.

My mind raced. In an instant, Paul had moved to a land of foreigners, whose language he didn’t speak and who couldn’t understand him. He’d become the unspoken, the unspeakable. In our most talkative of worlds, where lovers coo and confide, friends and family chatter, employers dictate, stores pitch, and all the ready forms of entertainment for the sedentary or sick (TV, books, doctor’s office magazines, newspaper, movies) babble language. Suddenly he could not comment, share thoughts, voice feelings, describe hurts or desires, ask for help.

Over the next day, Paul slept a lot, thank heavens, and, in a stupor, I dragged home to shower and nap, and also cancel upcoming book tour events. I needed to let the venues know so that, with any luck, people might see the last-minute “canceled because of family illness” postings. But I still felt guilty imagining them arriving at events only to find a cryptic sign awaiting them. I emailed editors who expected work to be turned in, and canceled all assignments. My project lay in a narrow bed across the lake.

ON DAY TWO
, I swooped up the highway edging Lake Cayuga, a cavernous lake too murky for scuba diving, with a rumored underground passage connecting it to Lake Seneca, and a legend of long-necked monsters. Small white sails battled chop on the steel-blue water. I’d admired the lake thousands of times, and glimpsed it while driving thousands more. It always looked different, depending on its mood, and mine. As I drove, it stabbed at the corner of one eye, shining dimly, not glacial at all, but like some impure metal, with slaggy brown inlets, and at times a glaring surface tense as aluminum. Every landmark I passed held spring-loaded memories.

The hospital is located on a hill overlooking the lake, and just past the Finger Lakes Massage School, Paleontological Research Institute, and Museum of the Earth, which houses over 2 million species of fossils. Paul used to chuckle about the road being an avenue not of pines but of spines, traveling from spiny trilobites to spinal taps, and enjoyed the jazzy rhythm of the fossil syllables: “Cenozoic benthic foraminifera.” Whenever we drove past it, he’d pronounce “mollusk” very slowly and roundly, just for the mouth-feel.

Near the hospital intersection, a roadwork sign warned:
BE PREPARED TO STOP AT ANY MOMENT
. I felt my jaw dropping. It sounded like a warning, and also a reminder, as if I needed one, that most likely I wouldn’t be hearing Paul say “Cenozoic benthic foraminifera” anytime soon. Or playfully rounding out “mollusk,” either. Would we ever laugh together again? Glancing down to find myself grinding one fist on the steering wheel, I wondered,
How long have I been doing that
? but kept right on doing it. Parking, then a space walk into the hospital.

When at last I braced myself and entered Paul’s room, I crossed the threshhold into a world that was unfamiliar, with an unfamiliar man lying in it. Although he looked like Paul, he wore a distorted scowl, and seemed to unhinge his whole body in a vain attempt to speak, reeling upright, flexing his shoulders at odd angles and flailing his arms against the bed. Then he switched to just a facial tantrum—cheeks, eyelashes, jowls, and nose writhing as he desperately fought to communicate
something
. His mouth slouched to the right, his lip curled, and for a moment all I could see was a glint of drool at the corner of his mouth, a thin shiny trail like the rune left by a slug.

“Hi, honey,” I said, trying to rally a small smile from somewhere in the coal-pits of my belly.

He stared at me, his eyes declaring:
What on earth are you driving at?

Then he fidgeted about in a vain attempt to muster all the aggregate parts of his being, but only finding a blurred view of what had once moved in unison, he spluttered: “Mem.” When I didn’t respond, bringing down his clenched fist on the bed railing, he repeated it in loud italics:
“MEM, MEM, MEM!”

“Easy now, easy, quiet down, it’s okay,” I said in what I hoped was a calming tone, the same one I’d used as a coed to quiet headstrong riding-school horses when I was afraid one might gallop into a tree. But his flare up shook me so much that I had trouble steadying my voice.

Paul would tell me later that he felt different than before, newly embedded in himself, as if trapped in statuary. His room seemed to be full of Hopi dancers and dazzling as Mardi Gras. Almost festive. He felt his teeth blink. Something pagan was going on, with a mad ring to it, like a disturbed vibraphone. People were speaking a foreign language. Maybe Senegalese or Quechua. And they didn’t seem aware of the pandemonium light show and cacophony he was enduring.

When I tried to wrap an arm around him, he threw it off.

“How are you?” I persisted.

He struggled to respond, then he spat a little sound—
whgggggggg
—as if he were blowing at a candle, followed by a sibilant parade of s’s. On he wrestled, and the more words eluded him, the more frustrated he became, until his temper boiled, his face flushed, his jaw opened and closed in silent damnation, and his eyes darted around the room. At last, he glared at me with pupils tiny and hard as BBs. Suddenly he clenched his fists and thrashed his arms as he shouted: “MEM-MEM-MEM-MEM-MEM!”

I flinched, and seeing that he’d scared me, he quieted down.

“I wish I could understand you,” I said, more to myself than to Paul.

When I reached for his trembling hand, he yanked it away. Thus far, his tantrum hadn’t invaded his legs and feet, which seemed somehow immune to all the turmoil. How strange—his temper stalked only his face and torso, while his lower body stayed calm, free from his rage. I’d once heard that Inuit dancers, to conserve their body heat, danced while seated on fur rugs, using only their upper bodies. Was his brain playing favorites and saving energy in a similar way?

It was an exhausting one-way conversation. I repeated: “How are you?” Not meaning anything by the question except
I’m here, I’m sharing your suffering, I wish I could help you.

Paul looked at me with controlled exasperation. All that came back from him was a yawning croak twice, a silent cough three times, and “MEM” barked seven times, and finally murmured almost inaudibly, like the last word from a dying man, as if this syllable alone formed the basis of some life to come. He later told me that he already hated that willful word that sprang loose and clogged his mouth, over and over, no matter what he longed to say. In his mind’s eye, he saw the syllable compulsively scurrying, like a rat in pursuit of a sandwich.
If only the right word would present itself,
his eyes said,
I could still be saved.

“Mem, mem, mem,” I repeated quietly.

“Mem, mem, mem,” he echoed back with a desolation that broke my heart.

Paul fell silent. But the rest of our new habitat was noisy. Remote voices sounded like cats scratching on wood, or monastic prayers, and grew louder as they approached our room, striking a distinct sentence or two as they passed—
“Wouldn’t you think?”“I dunno”
—before dwindling to sound scraps once more, recognizable only as the distant lilt of human pipes. Low-heeled shoes shuffled past on the linoleum floors. Anonymous skirts and jackets swished like the breath sounds of small whales. Unseen trays and trolleys clanked and clattered through the hallway. Inside the room, the
wild tone
—that barely-audible background stir we perceive as
silence
—included purring machines, syncopated pings, the wind
shushing
behind buttoned-up windows, and faintly humming walls.