Will & I (7 page)

The ride across downtown was my first exposure to the world outside the hospital since my stroke. I was truly outside only for the seconds it took to transfer my gurney into the ambulance, but I remember the sudden feeling of the sun on my face, and I remember the change in pressure of the summer air. It should have been an uplifting moment, but for me an uneasy hopelessness shrouded the whole event. There was a sense of something eternal about it. Something about being exposed to the enormity of the outside shocked me from the microscopic focus I'd maintained in the hospital—back in leg-and-thumb world—and into the actual situation I faced. I was fucking paralyzed. The ambulance felt like a hearse.

My therapists—as well as a woman dressed in street clothes, who I assumed was an administrator—met me in my new room when I was rolled in. They were lined up at the foot of the bed like a group of waiters about to sing “Happy Birthday.” I don't remember anything about this initial meeting, except that the woman I'd assumed was an administrator turned out to be a speech pathologist. My father had contacted her after I didn't die. She wasn't one of the regular staff.

Before my new movements had kicked in, my father had already arranged for me to be equipped with a talking computer, the kind Stephen Hawking uses. It was to have an eye sensor I could communicate with. But now that I could use my right thumb, the sensor was no longer necessary. A clicker would be used instead.

The speech pathologist came back the next day with a briefcase. She held up a poster-sized piece of audibly wobbling plastic. It contained four rows of bold black letters and two rows of numbers and other symbols. She said that until my computer arrived this would have to do.

“Let's give it a try,” she said, pulling up a chair to sit the chart on. “You up for it, dear?”

Since I'd only been able to answer yes and no, my mental condition remained somewhat of a mystery to everyone except me, and Will. I blinked yes over and over. Not that I know Morse code, but at the hospital they'd given me a simple system to work with: one blink yes, two blinks no.

Now I had the alphabet at my command. It had never seemed so ancient and sacred. I actually felt grateful toward it, as a system, for allowing me to get thoughts out of my head. At last I could demonstrate my mental alertness.

The speech pathologist held up a pointer to the poster, and explained that I could guide the tip of it around with my blinks. She would watch me. As long as I didn't blink, she would drag the pointer down and across the letters. When I blinked, she'd stop.

“Spell out anything you want,” she said. “This is to let your mom and dad see how this works.”

I paused. It was strange to think about what my first word would be. Babies don't get to do it, don't have to do it. For some reason, I thought of an experience I'd had when I was eighteen, on the camping-and-hiking trip where I'd first met Eleanor. We were about to climb six thousand feet over a distance of ten miles. None of us had yet become used to the sixty-plus-pound packs we were carrying. Dread and skepticism showed on everyone's face. Right before we set out, a girl from Connecticut had said, “You know what Nietzsche said, ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.'” I'd heard the saying before without knowing where it came from.

The woman scanned down the lines with her finger until I blinked, then she moved across the line until I blinked again. She would call out each letter to confirm it.

“N?” Blink.

“I?” Blink.

“E?” Blink.

“T?” Blink.

“Z??” Blink.

“S???” Blink.

She stopped and looked up at my parents. “Very good,” she said with patently false enthusiasm. “So you all see how this is supposed to work?” I don't know what she really thought. That I was just randomly selecting letters?

My mother jumped in. “Nee-chee?”

I blinked, as proud of her as I knew she was of herself.

As I spelled out the quote, which began to seem longer than I'd remembered at about the fourth word, they started guessing each word before I finished, which sped things up, but also diminished the effect somewhat. After I finished, everyone just stood there. I realized I hadn't thought it through. I burst into tears, not so much because I was sad but because it would put a stop to the awkward silence I'd created. But I could see on people's faces that the quote had impacted them, and I knew they'd be telling others what I'd said. For some reason this made me cry even harder.

When things began to settle down, the pathologist spoke up. “The computer works this same way, except independently. There's a cursor that moves down the lines, then across the letters. There's also a feature that lets you enter up to ten different phrases it will repeat by a single click. So be thinking of things you'll be repeating. We can load them on when the computer gets here.”

Still smiling, she looked at her watch. Then she walked over and picked up her briefcase from the windowsill. “I'm supposed to be at Health South in five minutes,” she said to my parents. “I'll come back in five to seven days when the computer comes in. Until then, you have my number if you need me.”

She tapped my foot on the way out. “Remember this,” she said quietly.

 

11

Candy was a tall dark-brown woman who'd worked for one of my previous doctor's patients. The doctor gave my parents her name. She appeared on the scene sometime in those first weeks at rehab. I don't remember much about her first day, except that when she approached the bed and looked down at me, she asked, “What's going on?” as if I could answer. I figured she was another in a line of temporary sitters I'd watched pass, and that may have been the case had I not told my parents I didn't dislike her.

Candy wasn't a licensed nurse, but she knew more than a lot of the RNs I've dealt with. You could tell she'd been at it for a while. She was a generation older than me and had been a sitter since before she was eighteen. She was open to trying new things and new ways of doing things, but she also treated everything and everyone with familiarity, as if nothing was that new or that big a deal. Her face was always poised for laughter, with a kind of expectant grin, as if she were waiting for a punch line. On her second day she came in to music playing. I'd been given the first Jerry Garcia and David Grisman CD for my birthday a few months before, and had spelled out for my mother my desire to listen to it. “The Thrill Is Gone” echoed down the hall. Candy came in and said, “Hey, man, did you know that's a B. B. King song?”

I blinked twice.

“When I used to stay up in Alaska, we listened to that stuff all night sometimes.”

Just hearing
Alaska
—where I'd met Eleanor—made images of her and my time there flood into my head, of hiking over fields of boulders that looked like they'd been arranged by giants, and having to call out “Hey, bear!” as we rounded bends on the caribou trails, of walking out into bright sunlight at midnight and inhaling crisp air. The whole memory seemed the perfect opposite of my circumstances.

Candy nodded, as if she could tell that her mentioning of the place had affected me. “Yeah, Anchorage,” she said. “Your mom showed me your pictures.”

She was quiet. The music played.

“Your boys there ain't bad,” she said. “Not like B.B., though.”

“I'm free, baby,” she sang, “free from your spell.” I rolled my eyes in amusement.

“I'm sure I've got that record somewhere at home if you want me to bring it next time I come.”

Two days later she was back again.

“Hey, man, I finally found it in my attic,” Candy said, strolling into my hospital room—as if nothing else had occupied her thoughts while she'd been away—holding up the record. She set her purse down and came over to my bed to show me. The weathered sleeve had a royal blue background with a picture of B. B. King in a white suit. He was sitting on a wooden stool and laughing, guitar in his lap. Candy turned the record over to let me see the song titles. She mumbled the words as she read along.

“There we go,” she said. She pointed to “The Thrill Is Gone,” like she'd been briefly worried that she might have been mistaken. “And that first song, ‘Caldonia,' is where my car's name comes from … That's what we call her.”

She was smiling. There wasn't really anything we could do with the record—she knew my portable stereo didn't have a turntable to play it on. But that passing moment, of connecting the two versions of the song, had given us both pleasure. In that moment we became more than an invalid and his paid keeper. There was something refreshing—I'm almost tempted to say unique—about Candy's attitude. She embraced what I was going through in the spirit of a game, one she had a stake in. There wasn't any pressure over whether I would improve, because not to do so was out of the question. She was patient but insistent. If she'd seen me do an exercise once, she never let me fail to do it the next time.

My therapy then consisted of trying to lift my leg off the mattress, stick my tongue out to my teeth, wiggle my toes, and so on. Candy watched what the therapists did, then she and I would continue the exercises after they'd left. Like her, I didn't think about what I was doing in terms of possibility or impossibility, just as a stepping stone. My greatest motivator was the fear of staying the way I was. That was not going to happen. As before, in the previous hospital, my attention would become fixated on tracking the most infinitesimal differences in my range of motion. I was aware of the slightest angle change. Weeks went by in the tunnel of these micromovements.

Usually, when we weren't doing the exercises, I could keep my spirits up, or at least level, in part because I was developing an ability to slip outside myself. Something had changed, right after the stroke. My brain had done what they say brains do: it had evolved.

Still, I would also burst into tears for no apparent reason. Whenever this happened while I was in therapy with another patient, one of the therapists would quickly wheel me off to be by myself until I was done. I didn't know why I was crying. It was like an ungrounded storm passing over.

I would also erupt into strange-sounding laughter at anything, regardless of consequences—assorted memories, easily flustered therapists, the dumpy white nurse who Candy said wanted to be from the hood, calling her “girlfriend” and snapping as she spoke ghetto slang. I would laugh at things that weren't even funny. The therapists would reprimand me like I was a little kid, shaking a finger in my face while telling me, “You just don't do that.” But I did. I couldn't help it. I still have a hard time telling a story I think is the least bit funny without cracking up.

And humor has always been the means by which Will and I communicate, otherwise our closeness would be too intense to allow expression. I think lots of identical twins feel that. Some achieve the same ends by becoming silent, which Will did whenever I wanted him to talk about what was going on.

Still, he rarely lets an opportunity to fuck with me pass. After I'd been in the facility a week or so, my computer had arrived, and Candy entered the presets into it, phrases I was using over and over and didn't want to have to spell out every time, things like “I'm thirsty.” Because my tracheotomy tube repeatedly got clogged with mucus, making it hard to get the little air I received, one of the automatic phrases she'd entered was “My tube needs cleaning.” One morning I was trying to tell this to the doctor making his rounds, when my computer in a robotic voice announced instead, “What are you looking at, dickhead?” My face got hot, but the doctor started laughing even before Candy did.

 

12

My mother walked into my room one early morning holding a cup of coffee with lipstick smudges around the rim and a croissant wrapped in parchment paper, as if this were merely another day to be gotten through. Something about her determined obliviousness instantly put me on guard. The night sitter was leaning back in the recliner my father had bought for Candy. She sat up and started putting away her knitting. My mother stopped at the foot of the bed and tried to contain her proud smile.

“Guess who I talked to last night?” She looked at the night sitter and winked. “She wants to come see you this Friday, too. I said I knew you couldn't wait.”

My heart sank. How could she have done this?

“It's Elin-ah,” she said, and looked at me with a now uncertain smile. “That's okay, isn't it?”

I didn't respond.

“I have to get the house cleaned before they get here. It's literally a pigsty right now.”

I was too distraught at the time to wonder who “they” were, so I didn't spell out the question. It quickly became the only thing I could think about, however. Was it Eleanor and her boyfriend? And if so, was it the same boyfriend she'd had before, the one we'd cheated on? I assumed so. That had been only a few months ago.

When later that day I found out my intuition was right, a queasiness set in that rolled around in my gut, gathering intensity as the weekend approached. Eleanor's boyfriend had a relative that was getting married in Atlanta, and “they” had decided to come to Birmingham first. I knew she hadn't told him about us, about our having messed around. Was bringing him here some weird attempt to expunge her guilt? She'd forgotten about him then, so she would put him in my face now, and show him in the process that she and I were just friends. I was thinking all these thoughts and at the same time yearning to see her. Still, he wasn't actually going to come down to the hospital with her, was he?

When Friday arrived, I couldn't concentrate on my therapy all that morning. Since hearing about her visit, the same hopelessness that had accompanied my ambulance ride had edged all my activity. The fairly funny physical therapist who always wore a lab coat even said something after a while. He asked if I had to be somewhere else. Because, he said, he could hurry it up if I did. When I didn't squint in laughter along with him, he became serious and asked if I felt okay. I typed out the gist of the situation. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Let me see you raise your hip twenty more times and we'll call it a day.”