The next time I took a drink my right hand was steady. Along with my resolve. As of that moment I was alive and as fully functional as I had a right to expect. Until that status changed, I wasn’t living in anticipation of the moment it would. Thoughts like that are dangerous. Inhibiting. Make you think you might actually have something to lose.
“Fear and anger make you stupid,” I told Amanda when she showed up with a wicker basket full of comestibles.
“Some manage it with a light and cheerful heart,” she said.
She had the good sense and generosity to keep our dinner conversation superficial. I bored her with tales of my days as a troubleshooter for the hydrocarbon-processing business. Drinking coffee under a tent with guys in white robes after spending the afternoon scaling a cracking tower that soared above the desert sand. The sweetness and gentility of the maintenance teams, desperate for knowledge and thrilled by my company’s technological prowess.
I taught them what I could, though I doubt those young engineers, or the people back at our office in White Plains, ever understood what the enterprise truly meant to me—the ideal undertaking for a brain never safe on its own, undistracted and free to wander, malevolent, into dark and lethal domains. Places where things could happen that were incomprehensible, unexplainable in the cold light of day, even to myself.
——
Southampton Hospital was only a few city blocks from the high school. It was also made of red brick, the Village standard. Unlike the school buildings it was tucked inside an established neighborhood of Victorians and early shingle-style homes, mature Norway maples and copper beech festooned with building permits, or notices of an upcoming hearing before the architectural review board. Likewise, the streets were lined with pickups and vans, and the syncopated rhythm of construction filled the air. Fresh framing lumber and reddish brown cedar shakes strained against zoning setbacks and height restrictions, casting shadows over the occasional bungalow or modest two-story colonial, bearing uneasy witness to the neighborhood’s original intent.
I found the guy I was looking for in the hospital canteen. This was easily done, since the canteen was so small and Markham Fairchild was so big. He was working on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich from one of the vending machines, nodding his head to a compelling beat coming through a pair of white earphones. I imagined something along the lines of Bob Marley, a stupid stereotyping of Markham’s Jamaican origins, since it turned out to be Dwight Yoakam.
“I like all those country guitars,” he said, peeling off the earphones. “And the lyrics. Little stories.”
I sat down across from him with a cup of astringent vending machine coffee.
“If they have to plug it in to play, Doc, I’m not interested,” I told him.
He wiped his hand with a napkin and reached across the table. I saw mine disappear briefly into his handshake.
“You bleeding out from somewhere or just come to call?” he asked.
“No blood, no buddies in the ER.”
“Capital.”
“I’m just looking for some free information.”
“That’s fine for you, Mr. Ah-cquillo, but I pay a lot of money to Georgetown University for the information up here,” he said, tapping his temple.
Markham’s specialty was trauma care, often fielding patients fresh out of the OR. I’d first met him while regaining consciousness. The hallucinatory sensation that I’d been transported to a land of brilliant and affable giants had never quite left me.
“I’m a carpenter,” I said. “What’ll you take in trade?”
“I could use a new house. Somet’ing with a little elbow room for a change.”
“Big order.”
“Big doctor.”
“I’ve only got a couple questions. How about a bookcase?” He took a bite of his sandwich and nodded.
“A deal,” he said, letting me off a lot easier than Rosaline Arnold.
“You remember the first time I was in here, after getting beaned by Buddy Florin?”
“Didn’t know the name of the perpetrator, but I remember the hole in your head.”
“They stuck me for about an hour in a tube that made a noise like a four-cylinder engine with a couple of burned valves.”
“That’s the MRI. How dey examine your brain, or whatever you got left in der.”
“That’s my question. Do you remember what it said?”
“I had an attending in those days. He told me what it said. Now I’m an attending, so I got to look again to see if he was right.”
“But you remember what he said.”
Markham’s mouth stretched into a smile wide enough to catch a sparrow.
“That’s one of the t’ings you learn at Georgetown. How to remember everyt’ing. How technical you want it?”
“Just looking for headlines.”
He looked at me the same way he did back when my scalp was full of stitches.
“Funny you ask about this now.”
“Just curious.”
He paused, scrutinizing me. Then his face relaxed, as if an internal debate had been resolved.
“Okay, if you really want to know, you’re a classic right prefrontal cortex.”
He reached across the table, and without having to lean forward, tapped the middle of my forehead.
“Lot of action there, according to the MRI. Lots of bangs and bruises.”
I felt my heart cinch up inside my chest. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about frontal lobes.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“You know, the most complicated t’ing in the universe, that we know about, is that three pounds of pinky gray cauliflower inside your skull. That goes for everybody, even the dumbest Homo sapien on the planet.”
“Or the smartest chimp.”
He shook his head.
“Not quite. His brain is wired up different from the one you’ve been using for a battering ram. Especially in the prefrontal cortex. That’s where you get to be human and he don’.”
“So it’s too complicated to know.”
He shrugged.
“They researching these t’ings all de time. Got lots of ways of chasin’ down traumatic brain injury. I can show you the diagnostic guide. Bigger than the phone book.” He tapped his head again with his index finger. “Though I got most of it up here. No damage.”
“Okay, what about vertigo?”
“Sure. See that more with the cerebellum, but sure.”
“Same as memory loss?”
“That’s your frontal lobes, for sure. And big time over in the temporal. Different neighborhood, but I remember you had some flare-ups there, too.”
“Flare-ups?”
“On the MRI. Very colorful t’ings.”
“Amnesia?”
“That’s a nice myth for Hollywood to make movies about. You can destroy the short term. Strokes and Alzheimer’s do that. Not usually the long term. Though you can have a gap that doesn’t come back. That’s pretty common with the head trauma. Or lots of blood loss. Like your blond friend the cop. He got plenty of each in a big fight and don’t remember anyt’ing.”
“Do you see progression over time?”
“Sure. Come in for another MRI, throw in some other tests, we know for certain what sort of trouble we looking at. I’ll know better den because I have my hands on the wheel. Much better than lookin’ at other people’s tests.”
He sat back in his chair and rested his hands on the tops of his thighs, elbows akimbo.
