“But, like I say, Mr. Ah-cquillo,” he said, “we only know about one percent of what actually happens in the brain, or why. There are more possible connections in der than there are molecules in the universe. Too much to know. We can see patterns, but almost anyt’ing is possible with the traumatic brain injury. Especially multiple injuries over time. But we do the best we can.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I can’t give any more discount information. They’re waiting upstairs for the attending to finish his snack.”
“Sure, of course.”
He’d been looking hard at me while we talked. Even with his abiding grin, it wasn’t a particularly happy look. But now his face hardened even more.
“One more t’ing. You don’t always see a damaged prefrontal right away. The symptoms sneak up on you.”
“Why’s that?”
“‘Cause, like I say, that’s where you keep your personality, the trickiest part of the brain function. The effects can be subtle, almost invisible, even to the patient himself. It’s a clinical consequence, but sometimes you need a good head shrink to spot the signs. And den, trust me, you might not want to be meeting up with these people.”
“You don’t?”
“Most common indication is a change in social behavior. Empathy, judgment, awareness of risk, rejection of authority and a whole collection of personality disorders the head shrinks call pseudopsychopathic, though it don’ seem so pseudo to me. Anyway, that’s what I didn’t tell the boss of that cop friend of yours and this other guy lookin’ like he’s straight from IBM when they come to see me, just like you, asking for free information, which I tell them to go find somewhere else. And that’s who’s got those MRIs of yours. I tell dem, don’t go flashing subpoenas at me. Take it down the hall to the people who care about all that.”
With that he stood up to leave. I almost sprained my neck looking up at him. He reached over the table again and took all of my shoulder along with a fair amount of the rest of me in his huge paw.
“Jus’ do me a favor and stop by my nurses’ station. Give dem some of your blood and make an appointment to come back and we take some more snapshots. I write the order.”
“I think you’re the one doing me the favor.”
“It doesn’t have to be a big bookcase,” he said. “And no tropical hardwoods. Remind me too much of home.”
And then he left me in the hospital canteen, alone again with my mental powers, however suspect and capricious. I’d spent most of my life devoted to logic and reason. Whatever the value of intuition in solving engineering problems, everything was ultimately based on trust of hard fact. Quantifiable, testable, empirically sound truth.
But old Kant would tell you, reality is only as sure as the mind perceiving it. I wished I could get him to take Markham’s seat across from me in the hospital canteen so I could put it to him straight:
Can a man be outsmarted by his own brain?
PART THREE
FOURTEEN
ABOUT A MONTH after I’d modified Tony Vaneer’s Vermont ski hideaway, I woke up on the floor of a sweltering room in Bridgeport, Connecticut. For most of that month I’d been drinking Jack Daniels on the rocks, when rocks were available, or straight up in a plastic cup when they weren’t. I’m not sure if I got through a whole bottle each day. I’d buy the stuff by the case and by the end of the day any form of arithmetic was way beyond the possible. Recollection was also a challenge—degraded further by waking up in a lot of different places, few involving a bed.
This time it was a floor, a solid hardwood floor painted dark red, which is how I interpreted my first waking sight. As I gained an addled, blurry form of consciousness, I went to sit up. That’s when I noticed the broken ribs, which felt like a sharp knife being slipped into my lungs. A startled little squawk came out of my mouth, and I fell back on the floor.
The room wasn’t entirely fixed in place. It tilted and turned with nauseating bumps and jolts. I forced my mind to calm down and took slow, deep breaths, testing the limits.
I felt around for wounds or blood, locating the center of the pain, but nothing else. The blood was all on the floor; it wasn’t paint. Some of it was mine, I concluded from the stinging clot on my lip and the reddish brown spray down the front of my shirt. The rest belonged to the dead man propped up against the wall directly across the room from where I lay. Everything between the bottom of his sternum and above his belt was rust-colored spongy looking slop. A river of blood had traveled down his left side and fanned out across the floor.
I sat up against the wall, imitating the other man’s position. There wasn’t much else in the room. An overstuffed sofa decorated with swatches of half-completed needlepoint, a couple of rolling office chairs, an upended coffee table and a floor covered in cans, bottles, titty magazines and buckets of take-out chicken, the bones strewn everywhere—some afloat in the sea of blood—plus a rusty old Frigidaire and a gigantic TV balanced precariously on a pair of milk cartons. Two windows, one door. No pictures on the walls, no written explanation of how I got there or why my blood was mingling with a dead man’s.
I gathered myself together for about a half hour before trying to stand. By then it was almost easy. I leaned against the wall and felt for my wallet. It was still there, stocked with cash. I opened and shut my hands, breaking open scabs across the knuckles, getting the circulation flowing and loosening the jammed-up joints.
I’d been in a half dozen full-out fistfights in various bars, clubs and street corners that month, that I remembered. But I couldn’t recall where I got the fat lip. It was too fresh. Must have come along with the ribs.
On the other side of the door was another room. Nobody was there, dead or alive. I went from there into the kitchen where I washed out the gash with dish soap. I took a Salem out of a crushed pack on the drainboard and lit it with the gas stove. The menthol fumes went great with the hangover and the coppery taste of my busted lip. I caught sight of myself in a mirror. Along with the split lip I had a black and purple bruise over my right eye. My beard was about a week old, grayer than my hair. I was grateful that my eyes were too bleary to see much else.
I found my silk baseball jacket hanging behind the front door. It had been a dusty taupe color when Abby had given it to me. Now it was hard to tell. I zipped it up over the filthy shirt and went down two flights of stairs and out to the sidewalk in search of a drink. I recognized the neighborhood. Crossing the street to get a better perspective on the apartment building, more of my memory trickled back in.
I’d gone to the building with my friend Antoine Bick and his cousin Walter, the guys I’d hired to help me gut Abby’s house. It actually took us the whole day and most of the night to get the stuff into a pair of semis, including extras like hardwood floors, ceramic tile and the custom kitchen she’d just finished installing. Abby was still in Europe with Tony Vaneer, so we had the leeway to execute a thorough and professional job. Whatever the team didn’t want for themselves we took down to New Jersey and dumped in a landfill.
Antoine was gracious enough to let me stick around after that, or thought it too much trouble to tell me to get lost. I’d been hanging with him and Walter and two or three other associates, whose social life entailed a zesty mixture of sugary alcohol, exasperated but hopelessly charmed young women, illegal drugs and gang warfare. They mostly let me settle my own disputes, usually the result of being a middle-aged white guy in traditional Levi’s, button-down dress shirt and silk jacket, smoking filtered Camels in clubs and apartments that hadn’t seen a white face since the death of Martin Luther King had brought out the riot squad.
Things leveled out after they started calling me CB, which I later learned was short for Charles Bronson, growing out of my original moniker, Death Wish.
“Don’t go dissin’ the old ghost, dog,” Antoine would tell the occasional challenger. “He got a mental situation. And hits like a motherfucker.”
As I got my bearings, I knew where to go from there. I started to walk down the street, but then yielded to the perverse urge to jog. My ribs lit up with every stride, but I could still get enough air in my lungs to allow a slow but steady pace, which is how I usually ran anyway.
