Patient H.M. (4 page)

Protect it when possible, keep it clean, don't muck about inside.

That was the status quo for thousands of years.

Until suddenly it wasn't.

I
n the lab at MIT, Henry was explaining, again, the many moves his family had made when he was a child. Even the scientists found his odyssey confusing. Dr. William Marslen-Wilson, a British psychologist who was interviewing him, worked hard to follow Henry's story.

“I see,” Marslen-Wilson said at one point. “Right. It's all becoming clearer now. A lot of schools, a lot of houses, difficult to sort out.”

“And from there,” Henry continued, “we moved from Franklin Avenue out to South Coventry, Connecticut. And I had to take a school bus, which stopped—I was the last one to get on it in the morning—and take me home, take me from South Coventry to Willimantic, and I think it was exactly five miles, right from our house to Willimantic.”

“And you were in…what sort of school were you in?”

“That was in a high school. Windham High.”

“Windham?”

“Windham High School.”

“Do you remember how to spell Windham?”

“Well, it's W-I-N-D-H-A-M.”

“And what grade were you in there?”

“Second year of high…and well, half of the third year.”

“Why only half of the third year?”

“Because we moved from South Coventry back to Hartford, and I quit school.”

“Yes.”

“And it was then…well, then after that we moved from light-housekeeping rooms that we had….”

“Lighthouse-keeping?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, I don't really understand about this lighthouse-keeping. You mean your parents were working in a lighthouse?”

Henry's parents had not worked in a lighthouse. His father was an electrician, his mother a housekeeper. They didn't make much money. Their savings, small to begin with, had been hammered down to almost nothing in the stock market crash of 1929. A light-housekeeping room was mid-twentieth-century American shorthand for a partly furnished tenement apartment. When Henry was a teenager, his family put their furniture into storage and lived in a string of light-housekeeping rooms in and around Hartford.

To supplement the family income, Henry took on part-time jobs. He worked as an usher in a movie theater, a stock boy in the shoe department of the G. Fox & Co. department store, and a scrap-metal salvager at a junkyard. After dropping out of high school, he started learning a trade, training as a motor winder at Ace Electric Motors. The job involved taking small electric motors apart, eyeballing their individual parts for problems or defects, and then rewinding the copper wires that coiled tightly around each motor's magnetic core. It was a good job, one with a future, but eventually he had to give it up. By that time, his epilepsy had become much more severe. He had his first grand mal seizure on his fifteenth birthday. He remembered driving with his father. He didn't remember if he was in the front or the backseat, but he thought that it was probably the backseat, because when he began convulsing and fell forward his father didn't notice at first and just kept driving. Then he had another seizure, in which he fell down someone's front steps and awoke on a sidewalk. He began having them more and more often. Afterward he would typically remember what he'd been doing immediately prior to seizing up, but the seizures themselves were inaccessible, a blank spot in his mind. When they struck, they sent him to oblivion, exactly like that bicycle in Colt Park had done. Motor winding required delicacy and precision, and even when Henry wasn't having a full-blown grand mal, the petit mals were enough to compromise his work, causing him to strip too much insulation from wires or to leave out some essential part of the motor when he put it back together.

He eventually went back to high school, enrolling at East Hartford High and struggling his way through to a diploma. By the time of his graduation, his seizures were so frequent that the decision was made to keep him from collecting the diploma onstage. In the laboratory, he explained to Dr. Marslen-Wilson about what might have happened otherwise.

“Well, in a way that was more protection of themselves,” he said, “so if I was to have an attack or something like that, I wouldn't fall or something and disturb the others that were there, that were graduating, and the people in the audience.” He explained that even a petit mal would have been enough to cause a disruption. “You black out. You could be walking to get your diploma or something, and you walk right by the person that was handing out the diploma instead of stopping and getting the diploma and
then
walking off.”

“That would have been a bit difficult,” Marslen-Wilson said.

“Yes, it would,” Henry said.

After high school, Henry got the last job he remembers, working on the assembly line at the Underwood Typewriter factory. Again, his illness became an issue. He was in the middle of the line, helping put together the frame of the typewriter before another worker attached the keys. This required less skill than motor winding, but still, sometimes the parts of the typewriter might be laid out in front of him, ready for assembly, and he would suddenly go absent, frozen, eyes open but looking at nothing, and the line would back up behind him until he came to.

I recently found a moldering cardboard box in my mother's basement. Inside was a stack of letters wrapped in twine. The letters had all been sent by either my grandfather or his older brother, Gurdon, to their mother in the late 1920s. Most were in their original envelopes, and on a few of these envelopes my great-grandmother had scrawled little notes to herself. Sometimes the notes were just hints about the contents—“About graduation”; “My birthday”—but sometimes they were more like mini-reviews: “To be kept always in my lifetime, this letter of Gurdon's”; “About our beloved home, Treetop”; or “A beautiful letter to be kept from Gurdon.”

Usually, she would only add those extra heartfelt little notes to Gurdon's letters. And reading the letters themselves, it was easy to see why. Gurdon was so effusive in his love for his mother that it was almost creepy. Here's a typical passage, written when he was several years into seminary school and already sounding like the minister he would become:

I have never felt before what I feel at this moment—the union of our hearts and souls in a way that has broken all the barriers of distance and brought me into a sudden new understanding of what love between two persons really can be and how it lifts them into the realm of the eternal beyond the mile posts and clock ticks of our little earth. You must be thinking of me, Mother darling, and praying for me this morning—you have given me just as I have been writing this letter something more than I ever before had—a feeling of how we cannot ever be separated that I will always count one of my sacred experiences.

The letters from my grandfather were different. They, too, were loving—both sons clearly adored their mother—but my grandfather's letters tended to be maudlin, full of apologies.

“My mother darling,” he wrote toward the end of his senior year at Yale University, “I have just written father about 42 pages, but seem to be just as discouraged, so will continue with you. After reviewing all of your last letters and his, the world has become darker and darker, letter by letter. I am sorry about everything I have done, for I don't mean to be so selfish and mean. I have been awfully wrought about money matters, and am trying to work it out all right.” He laid out the various ways he was trying to supplement his “allowance,” ranging from tutoring to selling jewelry he had imported from China. “I am working my head off with this jewelry in an effort to be self-supporting,” he wrote, then added a clause that said a lot about the privileges of his upbringing, “and am giving the Rolls back to Pen without using it, as you wished.” Toward the end of the letter, he unleashed a fusillade of self-pity and self-recrimination. “I am more sorry than I can say that I disappoint you both with my carefree-ness and thoughtless selfishness. I have worried too much to be exactly carefree. I love you so much and think of you so much and your goodness to me and in you—as I grow older—that I feel very miserable when I hurt you so—please forgive me.”

The painful insecurity on display in this letter was present in several others from that same year as well. In one he sent to his mother on her thirty-ninth birthday, he wrote, “I want all of my friends to see what a mother I have—then they will realize that even if I am not going to be a success in life, it was not my mother's fault.”

It was hard to know what to make of this. People I'd spoken with over the years had applied a lot of adjectives to my grandfather—brilliant, arrogant, dashing, reckless—but insecure wasn't one of them. The man berating himself in these letters didn't match the image I had of Dr. William Beecher Scoville. But maybe that was the point. The person writing these letters was still just Bill Scoville, a rich kid from Philadelphia, struggling through college, trying to decide what to do with his life. He was smart and ambitious, and possessed certain talents—he was, for example, good with his hands, loved tinkering with cars, taking them apart and putting them back together to understand their inner workings—but he didn't yet know what he wanted to do with these skills.

Deeper in the same box the letters had been hiding in there was a brown-jacketed photo album with yellowing pages, and in the album was a photograph of my grandfather. He was probably two or three, wearing one of those frocks that toddler boys wore in the early 1900s, reaching a tiny hand up toward the mouth of a live rattlesnake that had wrapped itself around the staff of his father's arm. (His father was an eccentric polymath—a lawyer, a writer of children's adventure books, and an amateur naturalist—and used to keep a variety of venomous serpents as pets until his wife forced him to stop.) Seeing that photo, I got a cheap little jolt, since the obvious symbolism of it—the snake and the staff—seemed to portend my grandfather's eventual choice of career.

Within a year of writing those letters to his mother, he had moved back to Philadelphia, enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, and thrown himself into his studies.

Sometime around 1969, in the middle of taking some tests, Henry stopped and looked up at his examiners.

“Right now,” he said, “I'm wondering, have I done or said something amiss? You see, at this moment, everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? That's what worries me. It's like waking from a dream.”

Henry often described his inner state that way: a constant feeling of having just emerged from a dream. There's a psychological term used to describe that feeling: hypnopompia. It derives from the Greek
hypnos
(sleep) and
pompe
(sending away), and it's a common sensation, experienced as our minds dispel our dreams and snap us back to reality. In Henry's case this feeling never went away.

As it happens, Henry's dreams, like so many other aspects of his life, were also a subject of intense scientific inquiry. He once spent several nights in a sleep laboratory at MIT, hooked up to sensors. Whenever he entered REM sleep, a researcher would shake him until his eyes opened and then ask him what he'd been dreaming about. In the end, the researchers never published their dream studies, in part because nobody could decide whether Henry was actually dreaming at all, in the normal sense, or whether he was even capable of dreaming, since many scientists consider dreams to be patchworks constructed out of recent memories. But some of the transcripts survived. In them, he usually just talked about the same sorts of things he liked to talk about when he was awake—boyhood recollections of a road trip to Florida with his parents, of shooting targets in his backyard, of fishing with his dad. Occasionally, he would talk about what he claimed were old childhood ambitions.

“Henry, Henry, Henry?”

“Oh!”

“Were you dreaming?”

“Yeah.”

“What were you dreaming about?”

“I was having an argument with myself….”

“About what?”

“What I could have been…I dreamed of Pennsylvania. I dreamed of being a doctor. A brain surgeon. And it was all quick. Flashlike, being successful. And living down that way…tall straight trees.”

It's doubtful that Henry ever shared my grandfather's aspirations. Instead he probably just imagined himself into his shoes. Even from the depths of his perpetual hypnopompic murk, some part of Henry saw things clearly enough to know that the nearsighted child of an electrician and a housekeeper would have had trouble pursuing that particular goal. A decade after the dream study, fully awake, Henry explained to another scientist that he had eventually decided against becoming a neurosurgeon due to his poor eyesight.

“Because I know, in brain surgery”—maybe Henry gestured with one of his hands as though he were holding a scalpel—“that wearing glasses, these little…”

Maybe he made a slight twitch with his hand then, pantomiming the scalpel going a little too far, cutting a little too deeply.

“That person is gone,” Henry said of his imaginary patient.

O
n September 21, 1930, just before dawn, a twenty-four-year-old man from Pennsylvania named Norman J. Terry snuck past the watchmen for the still-under-construction George Washington Bridge, then climbed to the top of the enormous steel tower on the Manhattan side, bypassing the elevator for the stairs. Once at the summit, six hundred feet above the Hudson River, he edged out onto one of the four steel cables that hung between the tower and its twin in New Jersey. The distance between the two towers was precisely 3,600 feet, but the cables were far longer than that; they hung down in gentle parabolic arcs, creating the bottom halves of enormous bowls that, if extended into complete circles, could have swallowed the Empire State Building whole. Each cable contained 26,474 pencil-thin strands of steel, forged at a factory near Trenton and woven together into one mammoth braid three feet in diameter. If you unspooled the individual wires in all the cables, you would have a length of metal rope long enough to circle Earth four times or reach halfway to the moon, depending on your taste in superlatives.

As Terry crept down the cable, holding on to the two guide ropes at waist height for balance, the intricacies of the braid beneath his feet would have been invisible to him. Workmen had slathered the whole thing with a thick, hard layer of zinc paste to protect it from the elements. But still: The sheer mass of the cable must have been obvious, sufficient to hold up a quarter of what was then the world's largest bridge. A foot-long slice of the cable weighed nearly two tons. And not only was it massive, it was supple. The bridge had been designed to give. If a gust had stormed down the Hudson from upstate New York at that moment, Terry would have had the unpleasant sensation of standing atop the world's thickest braid of steel as it swung gently toward the sea.

Hundreds of feet below, a handful of people in two small speedboats peered up toward the cable. Terry and his manager had contracted with the New York
Daily News
to allow exclusive newspaper coverage of the event now unfolding. They'd also contracted with an independent motion picture company, so there were both still cameras and movie cameras on the boats. A couple of the young man's friends were out on the water as well, though they were only there to watch. At first nobody could see much of anything. They craned their necks, gazing upward, dwarfed by the monumental tower with its ten million pounds of exposed girders rising like God's own Erector set from the murky river. Then eventually a small gray dot presented itself as a silhouette against the morning sky, inching slowly down the cable.

When he reached the center point between the two towers, the convex of the bowl, Terry stopped. The bridge was designed to sag in the middle, and engineers believed it would come within approximately 196 feet of the surface of the water under a full load of cars. On this morning, however, more than a year before opening day, with no traffic at all, the center of the bridge was as high as it ever would be, at least 207 feet above the river. Terry looked down at the water below. The cameras in the boats were snapping and whirring, but he couldn't hear them. He removed his street clothes and stood there for a few moments in nothing but a swimsuit.

And then he dove.

Norman J. Terry was a daring man and had already performed all sorts of remarkable feats during his short life. He had learned how to jump between the wings of biplanes and had once tightroped between the Carbide & Carbon and Mather skyscrapers in Chicago, more than five hundred feet above the pavement. Just a few months before this particular morning, he'd hung from the undercarriage of an airplane, waited till it swooped ten feet above the ground, then let go, landing safely.

His dive, at first, was perfect. He swanned forward, stretched his arms above his head, pressed his legs together, and began a smooth downward arc toward the water. Soon he was approaching the river straight and true, at an accelerating rate of speed. The
Daily News
photographers fired off as many shots as they could and hoped the negatives wouldn't turn out too blurry. One hundred feet he'd fallen, 125, 150, 175.

Even today, eighty years later, the world record for the highest high dive is 177 feet. Terry passed through that mark and kept going, faster and faster: 180 feet, 190 feet. And then, according to the witnesses in the boats, something happened. His body, rigid, determined, confident, suddenly lost its composure. In midair, still fifteen feet or so above the water, he crumpled. Instead of staying straight, he bent in the middle and toppled forward, the beginning of a somersault.

What was going through his mind in that moment? What caused that loss of poise? Had he suddenly realized that he had gone too far? That his ambitions had finally oustripped his abilities?

He made it halfway through the somersault before landing on his back. The impact of the Hudson River against his skull knocked him unconscious in an instant, but worse was the impact against his spinal column, which ruptured his vertebrae and severed his spinal cord and prevented his unconsciously toiling brain stem from delivering all its usual life-sustaining imperatives, chief among them: Breathe.

By the time Norman J. Terry's friends had dragged him out of the water and delivered him to the hospital, he was already dead.

Strangely, considering its outcome, Terry's daring inspired copycat climbers. A few weeks afterward,
The New York Times
reported that a group of teenagers, hearing of the feat, had dared each other to climb to the top of the bridge and that two of them had done it. They were arrested on the way down. Surely there were others who managed to climb and descend undetected, but I only know of one for sure. As it happens, he was, like Norman J. Terry, another twenty-four-year-old man from Pennsylvania.

My grandfather was in his second year of medical school when he made the climb. There were no cameras, no police, no friends. He hadn't told anyone of his plans, and it's unclear whether those plans gestated for long before he acted on them. Perhaps he was just in the area, saw the opportunity, and seized it, hoisting himself onto one of the cables and beginning to climb. The climb would have been easy at first, almost parallel to the ground. And then the angle would have grown dramatically steeper. As the cable flared upward away from the island and the bridge extended out over the river, I imagine him climbing faster and faster, using both his legs and his arms to power himself up toward the tower's peak. It was nighttime, and the river below would have been a dark morass. I imagine he kept his mind on the climb, on placing each foot in front of the other, on gripping the guidelines hard enough to keep him steady but not so hard that his hands would cramp, on his breathing and his balance.

Eventually he reached the top of the cable and stepped off onto the flat roof of the tower. There were construction crates and bits of steel and coils of wire. Whenever the wind blew, he would have felt the tower sway beneath his feet. He had planned to climb up and then down right away, but now, up on that precipice, in the darkness alone, he couldn't bear to move. He sat down instead, placed his back up against something solid, and shivered in the cold.

One of the things our brains do, constantly, unconsciously, whether we like it or not, is make connections. They make connections in the literal sense, in that our neurons are promiscuous, always reaching out with their yearning axons to bond with other neurons. They also make connections in the figurative sense, in the way we're all familiar with, provoking endless little leaps of time travel during our daily lives. A few molecules of a certain burnt coffee bean adhere to the sensory neurons that project to your olfactory bulbs and build an instant and fleeting bridge to the last moment you smelled the same thing, in another town, city, year. A woman walking past you on a busy street talking on the phone suddenly laughs at something she hears, and her laugh—bracing and unself-conscious—conjures up an ex you've avoided thinking about for months.

When I think about my grandfather up on that tower, my mind yanks me back to a parallel night of my own. My memory of that night starts with me creeping along a narrow path through a lane of crypts, toward a breach in a high stone wall that I knew would give me access to the Giza Plateau, that otherwise well-guarded expanse of natural desert and man-made mountains on the outskirts of Cairo. Once I was out of the cemetery and onto the sand, however, there was nowhere to hide. About a quarter mile separated me from the Great Pyramid, and I started walking as fast as I could, passing tents that belonged to the families who rented scraggly horses and ludicrously pom-pommed camels to tourists in the daytime. A small clump of barking dogs materialized out of somewhere and started running toward me.
“Emshee!”
I shouted, using one of the too few Arabic words I'd learned during the year I'd so far spent in Egypt. “Go away!” They kept their distance and slunk off as soon as I got to the top of the plateau.

There are six pyramids in the Giza Necropolis, but only the three biggest ones are referred to as “great” and only the biggest of those three is known as the Great Pyramid. And it is. It's great in the way no photograph can prepare you for. Over the course of a life, you accumulate internal templates of what is and what can be. You know what a building is. You know what they look like, roughly, and you know their range, in size and spectacle. Then you see the Great Pyramid and your idea of what a building can be explodes in an instant.

Which isn't to say that we haven't done our best to diminish it. The diminishment began after the Mohammedan invasion of Egypt, in the seventh century, when its smooth white limestone carapace was stripped away for use in mosque building, leaving its flanks rough and terraced. Much of its subsequent uglification was at least well intentioned. Modern Egyptians no longer willfully destroyed their country's wonders; they just smothered them with unnecessary adornment. (See again: those dismal, pom-pommed camels.) In the case of the Great Pyramid, for example, a shabby museum squatted right at its base, twelve years old and already decrepit. Looking at the museum, and at the masterpiece that reared up behind it, I had a hard time not feeling that humanity's grasp of architecture and workmanship had declined steeply in the past four and a half thousand years.

And then there was the light show. Every evening, at eight
P.M.
, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities mounted a psychedelic spectacle on the Giza Plateau. A few hundred foreigners sat in a hemicycle of seats in an outdoor amphitheater below the Sphinx. Then, for forty-five minutes, the tourists would be presented with a ridiculous display of Pink Floydian lasers and strobe lights projected against the side of the Great Pyramid, while an Attenborough clone intoned factoids and dry-ice smoke billowed out from somewhere.

But that night I was thankful for the garishness. I'd timed my visit for the beginning of that evening's show, and when it kicked in and I saw the colored lights and lasers begin to splash up against the southern end of the Great Pyramid, I ran across the remaining distance separating me from the western side. I had counted on the light show to distract and partially blind the guards who patrolled the plateau, and as soon as I reached the pyramid I hoisted myself onto the first block and began to climb. Each block was four or five feet high, and each ledge was between two and three feet wide. I climbed quickly, keeping my eyes up as much as I could. The pyramid itself filled most of my field of view, but at its edges the sky pulsed with migraine colors.

Within ten minutes I reached the final tier, just below the apex, 455 feet above the sand. Before it lost its limestone sheath, the Great Pyramid had ended in a point, one that was itself a miniature pyramid, rumored to have been made of solid gold. But now it ended in a square, flat summit, about fifteen by fifteen feet. In the center of the summit was one last bit of unnecessary ugly: a large metal tripod, bolted into the rock, aiming skyward, meant to remind people viewing the pyramid from below that, yes, it had once been pointy. I pulled myself up onto the summit, staying low so the light show's audience wouldn't see me. Then I lay back on the stone and looked up at the throbbing sky.

I'd been in Egypt for a little more than a year, and that evening was a sort of self-conscious commemoration, a moment to reminisce about where I'd been and to think about where I might be going. I was twenty-four years old, and my résumé was a joke. I'd graduated from college with a degree in U.S. history, mainly because the other degrees I considered—English, economics, sociology—seemed more theory than facts, and my brain tank was ridiculously low on the latter. Since college, I'd had a few different jobs. I'd hauled furniture for Cheap Date Moving in Watertown, Massachusetts, bussed Walter Cronkite's table at the Docksider restaurant in northeastern Maine, and for the past six months taught English to Egyptian oil rig workers at the Cairo offices of a Kuwaiti-owned, American-named company called the Santa Fe International Corporation. I'd moved to Egypt on a whim, inspired by Lawrence Durrell's
Alexandria Quartet,
an intricately interwoven series of novels that told a single story from four different perspectives. One of the quartet's protagonists was an English teacher who had all sorts of romantic adventures in Egypt, and I figured maybe I could do the same. Beyond that, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Prior to my move, when people asked, I'd fallen into the habit of saying that I thought I might apprentice myself to a furniture maker, even though I had zero interest in carpentry and even less skill.

But a few months before the pyramid climb, I'd started doing something that felt different from my previous jobs. I'd started writing. The Egyptian roustabouts I was supposed to be teaching during their vacation days had mounted a campaign of passive resistance, refusing to show up for class, which left me drawing a paycheck in an empty conference room overlooking the Nile. I had lots of free time and used it to draft long letters home. Eventually I decided to repurpose one of my letters to my grandmother—it was about a day I found a dead body while rowing on the Nile—and submitted it to a thrice-weekly newspaper called
The Middle East Times.
Then, armed with my single clip, I decided that my next target would be the
New Yorker
of Cairo's English-language publications, a glossy monthly called
Egypt Today.
I walked into the magazine's offices, asked to speak with an editor, and somehow walked out with an assignment: a feature about the statues in Cairo's public squares.