Aesthetics could not survive the waiting room. A bit of aesthetics on his part had led, however indirectly, step by step, to a burst vessel in Jimmy's brain. I looked at the woman again; yes, infinitely more Holbein miniature than contemporary Long Island mother. I was inspecting her in the Met, with Franklin at my side. It was suddenly enough to have had a look at her real face — pinched eyes, mole, spinsterly, approving mouth — to set her in a time she matched. Empathy came on me from nowhere, and I wished her daughter every chance that medical technology, God, and a good anesthetician could give her.
Years later, when they at last let me into his room, Jimmy was sitting in bed as if nothing had happened. I wondered, What on earth is he doing here? There's nothing wrong with him. In that first moment, he seemed the same person he had ever been. Unmistakable, vintage Uncle Jimmy. Then I saw just how wrong things were. His face had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad foundation. His mouth sagged down to the left, an eighty-year-old's mouth, unable to produce anything more than a few raw vowels. His lips drooped a deep, secretive smile all over his face, the smile of a man who had seen something remarkable. His eyes bore a matte glaze, not his. Jimmy's eyes were gone.
I thought there would be others there — friends, day shift, his mother. But I was alone, except for Jimmy and the patient behind the draw curtain. My calm collapsed beneath me like a pier gently washed out to sea. My eyes grew acid. I dug my fingernails into my upper arms, trying to reverse the process that had overtaken him, reverse everything.
He must have recognized me in some sense, because as I stepped to the bed, he rippled his ruined facial muscles. He looked roughly in my direction and erupted in a horrible, unformed call like the open modulation of an underwater whale. "Hello, Jimmy." My tone was no closer to natural. He made the awful blast again. This time it seemed to possess syllables. The sound was edgeless, blurred, terrible. I had to force myself not to run from the room and deny I ever knew him. I put my hand on his gown, and my touch made the word come out of him again. "Jimmy," I said, as brightly as I could without bursting. "Try it a little softer." I put my head close to him, my ear almost onto his mouth. The less air he had to push, the less muscle he needed to control, the more chance I had of making him out.
The sound came out again, softer but no more distinct. Jimmy fought to unmangle it. His whole body shook, a weight lifter at the instant when he must either jerk the bar overhead or be crushed under the plates. I thought I heard him, in shadow, pronounce "cohabit." The word he had teased me with for weeks when Todd and 1 moved in together. 1 must have projected it. I began to think he wasn't saying anything at all, just releasing animal bursts from a cortex now helpless to hold them in.
"Once more, Jimmy. Don't try so hard." But the noise was worse, vanishing. I looked at him, shook my head. "I'm sorry. 1 can't. I can't make it out." My own words were themselves smudged out, my voice lost in a choke, my head rocking. 1 could only stop myself by putting my face down onto him, where 1 kept it. 1 felt something brush my hair. His arm, its muscles contracted into a permanent claw, was trying to move, to put its weight over me in comfort. I lifted it — he could not do it alone — and put it around my neck, where it had been trying to go.
I hunted down a resident to ask about Jimmy's chances. Like most, I had so mastered necessity that when chance was at last the subject, I was lost. The physician was too professional to say what might be hoped. Hope was a function of structural impairment. But the implication was clear: Jimmy was setting out for an unknown place. Sitting in bed in the double-occupancy room, close up, flush against a place closed to every petition except disaster.
I went straight to the — warehouse. Todd wanted word immediately, over the intercom, but 1 waited until 1 went up. At the top of the freight elevator, I froze, afraid to go in. Jimmy was there. The office floor was still warm where he had fallen, a delicate, blue, broken vessel stroked out across the tiles. He was there, working late, ready to scold me for unofficial use of combinations, to tease me boyishly about cohabiting with men. It was all as I had left it, every night I ever spent in this forsaken place. But the old arrangement, the Second Shift Club, had changed color, reddened upon contact with air.
I gave my faithful transcript. I told them about his face, his mouth, his eyes, his clawed hand. I told them about the sound he had made, syllables beyond guessing. I told about the doctor's hedge. Dr. Ressler listened for physiological signs, Todd for any scrap that might spell forgiveness. Would it have happened without his mistake? Unanswerable, but we gave the rest of the night over to it. I couldn't think of sleep, and so sat up the remaining hours with them. In the morning I went directly to the branch, as I had before after long nights in circumstances that would never arise again.
I spent the day combing our modest collection, reading everything I could find on brain damage. I learned that a third of a million Americans suffer cerebral vascular accidents each year. I learned that the word derived from the stroke of God's hand. I learned that Jimmy's injury would unfold in its own way, a way research could not fix.
I found a text on the subject, reasonably up-to-date, although the pace of the field consigned all texts to the pyre every two years. The chapter on stroke recovery was a rationalist's nightmare: people who could see a sofa, walk around it, and give its name, but couldn't say how the thing was used. People who had no trouble explicating "Jack kissed Jill" but who were hopelessly gutted by "Jill was kissed by Jack." People whose right hemispheres didn't know what their lefts were doing. People in every other way intact, day after day unable to recognize their own spouses' faces.
Some accounts went beyond science fiction. I read of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad man who had a three-foot rod blasted through his head. He lived for twelve years, intelligence unimpaired, capable of speech, memory, and reason, but with no emotional control. I read of a woman whose one hand tried to strangle her unless fought off by her other. I read of people who could not recall anything from before their accident or who could not learn anything after. I read of a concert pianist who could play the most complex concerti from memory yet who could not point to middle C.
There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia, loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing, and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything a person possessed could be taken away. I read of people who could grasp numerals but not numbers, who could define the word "pig" but couldn't recognize one, who could write complex ideas but couldn't make out what they'd written. There were patterns too bizarre to warrant names: the sixty-seven-year-old stricken into thirteen years of fastidious silence only to be awakened at age eighty by a train whistle's sixth-chord that launched him into a popular tune from the year of his wedding, a half century before. Minds reduced to a vacant stare worked their way back into replicas of their former state. Massive paralytics rose up and walked, showing no trace other than a shuffle or droop of one eyelid. Others, only grazed by God's swipe, lived for years masking incapacities they themselves failed to suspect. I grabbed at every slight ray of optimism. Children's brains could rewire, recover from blows that would wipe out mature adults. Jimmy's gentleness might indicate a saving persistence of child's wiring. Recovery was above normal in left-handed people, and higher still in lefties who had been forced into the right-hander's world. I'd seen Jimmy type, lift, carry, write, and wave hundreds of times, but I could not for life remember with which hand.
I was so high-strung that I even found, hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits from a well-placed lesion. Violent personalities woke from apoplexy as loving as a newborn. Pasteur's massive stroke altered his work for the better. Dostoyevsky's visionary power followed from lifelong epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing except that no one could predict injury's outcome. No one knew much about the brain at all, let alone Jimmy's. The hierarchy had too many subsystems for the loss of any piece to be understood. My only question — would it still be Jimmy inside the destroyed case? — dissolved in qualified statistics. By evening I found myself guiltily hoping for the kinder, comprehensive solution.