THREE DAYS AFTER HE WOKE UP, Jack was moved to a rehab floor referred to as the SNIF unit—shorthand for “skilled nursing facility.”
Here Marcy and a therapist wrapped his legs in Ace bandages to prevent his blood from pooling and laid him on a tilt table in preparation for sitting him up. Something about “orthostatic hypotension” and his “autonomic nervous system” adjusting to being upright again. He heard the words but didn’t bother to process the explanations.
They also monitored his blood pressure and heart rate, raising him to a slant of sixty-five degrees, moving him ten degrees at a time for five-minute increments. It took an hour to do this and he felt lightheaded. “If you don’t use it, you forget how to use it,” the therapist explained. “Being upright increases the vascular resistance on your autonomic nervous system. We don’t want your blood pressure to drop suddenly.”
Jack nodded. Whatever, he just knew that it felt good to be up, since some part of his mind sensed how long he had been on his back.
So much time had passed, yet he felt the heft of elusive memory just beneath the membrane of awareness—memory that manifested itself in incoherent flashes.
As they had since he woke up, the nurses and staff kept him chatting so that his voice grew stronger and the words came more easily. But it was like starting over, having to relearn how to do things that previously were all but involuntary activities.
In spite of the constant and aggressive physical therapy he had undergone while comatose, he had lost seventy-five percent of his muscle strength. But with the aggressive physical rehab program laid out for him, the therapist said that chances were good that he would be able to walk again in a month, probably with the assistance of a cane.
Since Jack had been fed through a gastric tube for so long, they were afraid that if he ate solids right away he might inhale some and end up in the hospital again. So he had been put on thickened liquids for two days, after
which he graduated to mashed foods. It was like being a baby again, he said to Marcy.
In the afternoon of his third day awake, Marcy and the therapist sat Jack in a wheelchair and brought him to an office to meet the neurologist, a tall thin woman with a sharp bird face and reddish brown hair pulled back in a bun. She introduced herself as Dr. Vivian Heller. “Welcome back. How are you feeling?”
Jack’s left foot ached, his vision was still slightly blurry, and a beetle was crawling through his brain. “Fine.”
“I know how difficult this is, so confusing and all, but you’re going to go on the record books for coma recoveries.”
“Lucky me.”
“Well, you are lucky, since only a small percentage of long-term coma patients ever wake up, and so alert. It’s wonderful.”
He nodded.
Then she opened her folder. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to check your neurological recovery—memory and such. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. I’m going to ask you some questions and you answer them as best you can. Do you know what state we’re in?”
“Massachusetts.”
“What country?”
“United States.”
“Good. And who is the president of the United States?”
“George W. Bush.”
“Who was the previous president?”
“Bill Clinton.”
“Very good. And where were you born?”
“Worcester, Massachusetts.”
“What’s the capital of England?”
“Fish.”
“Fish?”
He closed his eyes. “I smell fish … . Fishy air.”
“You mean the sea.” The doctor tested the air. The window was open and a breeze could be felt. “I don’t smell it, although we’re only a few miles inland. So you think you smell the ocean.”
“More like in my head.” He closed his eyes again. “And something else … like a swimming pool … chlorine.”
The doctor made some notes. “The police report says you were on Homer’s Island. Do you recall what you were doing when you got caught in the jellyfish? Why you were out there?”
“Summer cottage my family used to rent.”
“When you were young.”
“Mmmm.” The beetle in his brain split in two and began to nibble twin paths into the gray matter.
“I see. But you were out there alone, I understand.”
“Anniversary of …”
The doctor waited. “Of?”
“My mother’s death. She got lost in the storm a long time ago.”
“I see. If you don’t mind me asking, how long ago? How old were you when she got lost?”
“Two.”
“Two? But didn’t you say your parents used to rent the place every summer when you were a kid?”
“My father died in a plane crash shortly after I was born. After my mother died, I was brought up by my aunt and uncle.” He wasn’t sure if the doctor was asking for real information or just trying to jump-start his memory.
“And what were their names?”
“Nancy and Kirk.”
“And what were your parents’ names?”
“Rose and Leo.”
“What kind of work did your father do?”
“He worked in a foundry.”
“Did your mother work?”
“Yes, she was a biochemist.”
Heller’s eyebrow shot up. “Really. How interesting, and for a woman back then.”
What she was really wondering, he thought, was how a scientist could end up with a foundry worker. “It was an arranged marriage—what immigrants did back then.”
“I must say that your long-term memory retrieval seems excellent. What I’d like to do next is test your visual memory. If you get tired or confused or want to stop, please say so.”
“Okay.” The beetles had doubled and redoubled again and were humming behind his eyes in packs.
She pulled out a small stack of eight-by-ten cards and laid them facedown
on the tray table. “What we’ll do first is I’ll show you a series of cartoons one at a time. You’ll look at each one for five seconds, then I’ll cover it and ask you questions about what you saw. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” She turned over the first and held it up—a colorful drawing of a house with children out front, toys on the lawn, a cat under a bush, birds on the roof. After five seconds, she turned the card facedown. “How many children are playing in the yard?”
“Two.”
“How many birds are sitting on the house?”
“Five.”
“Oh which side of the house, left or right, is the chimney?”
“Right.”
“What color is the house?”
“Blue.”
“How many windows are on the front of the house?”
“Five.”
“What number is the house?”
“Three seventy-nine.”
“How many bushes are in front of the house?”
“Two.”
“True or false: There is a hydrant in front of the house.”
“False.”
The doctor continued reading all ten questions, and when she finished recording Jack’s answers she peered over her glasses at Jack. “Very good. You got them all right. Now let’s try the next one.”
The next drawing was more intricate with details—a pasture scene with cows, horses, and sheep in a field, with a farmhouse and barn in the background. The doctor held up the card and then laid it down and asked ten more questions. And Jack responded. When he was finished, Dr. Heller said, “You’re doing a great job, Jack.” She opened another folder. “Okay, this time I’m going to show you a series of letters for five seconds, then I want you to repeat them from memory.”
Jack nodded. The beetle-humming in his head intensified, as if someone had cranked up the volume. She held up the first card for five seconds then dropped it.
“GU.”
And in the time allotted, he did the same with each sequence that followed.
“RXW”
“XIURZ.”
“APXOZNT”
“QMENRBTJH.”
“EIDYTAWXIZBJM.”
When he finished the last sequence, something flitted across the Easter Island blankness of Dr. Heller’s face.
“How did we do?” Jack asked.
The doctor looked up at Jack with a queer expression and shook her head to say she would hold off on commentary. “Okay, this time I’m going to hold up cards with a series of words for five seconds and I’d like you to try to recall as many of the words from the list, and the order is not important. Only as many words as you can recall.”
The first card was short: CANDY, CHOCOLATE, CAKE, TASTE, SWEET.
After five seconds, Jack repeated the words.
The next sequence followed: NAP, SLUMBER, PILLOW, DROWSY, REST, WAKE, DOZE, BED.
And the next: DOG, FUR, BARK, FLUFFY, TAIL, LICK, JUMP, PAWS, LEASH.
And the next: BEACH, SAND, OCEAN, CRAB, WAVES, SHELLS, SUN, SALT, BOAT, FISH.
Jack answered, but the humming in his head was making his teeth ache.
KNIFE, CUT, POINT, HAMMER, STEEL.
The doctor stopped. “Jack, are you all right?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe we can finish later.”
Dissociated images were swimming in his head like litter in a muddy whirlpool. And the buzz had produced a material pressure. “Sorry,” he whispered.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Are you feeling faint or dizzy? Or disoriented?”
He rocked his head slightly. “Tired.”
“Fine. We can continue tomorrow, but you should know that you did amazingly well, Jack. The average adult letter span is seven, with a deviation of plus or minus two. You did a span recall of eleven. I don’t know what to say, but your short-term recall is off the charts.”
The beetles had bored their way out of the sac inside his forehead and
were making their way toward the rear of his brainpan. He wanted the doctor to leave. He wanted to be left alone. He wanted to close his eyes and fall into a long, deep sleep.
“I’ll let you rest,” Dr. Heller said. She got up and began to pack her papers into her briefcase. “If you don’t mind, I have one more thing I’d like to ask you. No, it’s not a test.”
Jack looked up at her through pulsing slits. “Sure, but how about some Tylenol when I’m done?”
“We can do that right now,” she said, and produced a two-pack from her smock pocket and placed them in his mouth and held up a cup of water. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the ethnicity of Koryan?”
“Armenian.”
Another test question. He was certain that during the course of his convalescence the staff would be tossing him offhand little bio queries to be certain his hard drive hadn’t crashed.
“Do you speak it?”
“No.”
“Did you ever?”
His aunt and uncle had spoken only English with him, even though on occasion they conversed with each ether in Armenian. “No.”
“Well, would you recognize it if you heard it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” The only place he had heard it spoken was in grocery stores in Watertown, the Little Armenia of the East Coast.
She gave him a strange look, then she pulled out of her briefcase a small tape recorder. “I’d like you to hear this,” she said, and she moved it close to his head and flicked it on.
There was electronic hush like the open line of a telephone, some indistinct background noise, the muffle of people talking softly in the background, the distant sound of a jet plane. The sound of breathing. The soft beeps from the monitors. Then a voice that for a split instant registered in the warm core of his soul.
“Ahmahn seerem anoosheeg.”
A high, feathery, fluttery voice—a woman’s, as if speaking to him through a distant fan.
The next moment Jack felt a jolt of recognition. It was his own voice.
The tape continued as he looked helplessly at Dr. Heller, whose face seemed to dislodge itself from her white smock and dissolve in the soupy sensations in his brain. The margins of his vision became dark as everything began to fracture and sparkle—like viewing the room through a shattered windshield.
Suddenly the beetles hit a trip wire, setting off a wild gyroscope that set Jack into a spin as if his wheelchair had turned into the Tilt-a-Whirl at Canobie Lake Park, whipping him around into a centrifugal blur, sounds muffling and breaking up … his name … someone calling his name … a female voice, the doctor … Dr. Heller, but he couldn’t locate her.
“Room three nineteen … having a seizure … Diazepam and Dilantin … hurry …”
He felt his body shake as if he were being prodded with an electric rod, cold, wincing ripples shooting across his brainpan.