Stroke

by Ricky Monahan Brown

  In fact, I hadn’t just deliberately flunked the exam. Still, my answer was what Elizabeth would call an ‘epic fail’, and explained the look of utter befuddlement on the examiner’s face when I delivered my answer with an air of complete confidence and conviction.

  I had remembered the words apple, ball and penny, as rug, clock and flower for a reasonable reason. They were the objects that I’d been asked to remember at the Ambulatory Care Center that morning.

  It seemed my time in New York and with the medical teams at the Rusk Institute and Methodist Hospital was coming to an end. Still, they hadn’t been able to establish what it was that made me so susceptible to my haemorrhagic stroke.

  After a very pleasant Friday lunch on a pretty, early summer’s day at a local Italian restaurant with Matt From The Darts Team, Beth and I sauntered over to our home from home at Methodist Hospital so I could get fitted up for an ambulatory EEG that would measure voltage fluctuations within the neurons of my brain as I went about my business over the weekend. It was always a strange sort of pleasure to return to Methodist, because everyone was very nice, and I had little memory of my original stay. I could build a sense of that narrative that the members of the aneurysm awareness group and the Grumpy Bert workshop were trying to build. We walked along the quiet, residential side of the hospital, and Beth was able to point out my old window and mention that view from the step-down unit that was pretty, and wasted on me.

  As always, I was struck by the look of the lobby when we arrived. As the novelty had worn off, I had found that it wasn’t so much that I liked the lobby, but that I liked that the person who’d designed it seemed to have had a blast. After all this time, explorations of infinity and architecture be damned, Beth was a whizz at finding her way around Methodist, so we promptly rolled into the epilepsy unit for my appointment. We were invited into a treatment room by a technician, Isabella, and the process of my latest cyber-conversion began with a head measurement.

  As Isabella reeled off various numbers (60 . . . 60 . . . 36 . . .) while carefully measuring from the bridge of my nose to the ridge at the back of the top of my skull, from ear to ear, and so on, I made one of the cracks I always made about the size of my huge, Scottish head. Like the wee kid with the massive heid from So I Married an Axe Murderer.

  ‘I’m an inverse Weeble. When I fall down, I can’t get up.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she demurred, and I briefly conjured fantasies of the numbers describing some kind of perfectly proportioned Vitruvian skull that would leave men and women all over the borough swooning. Beth was chuckling in the corner though, and I realised that Isabella simply meant that I was, somehow, the right size and shape for the EEG wires. God knows how, given that the folks at the Motorcycle Safety School set me up with an XXL helmet when we were learning how to ride that little pink scooter.

  The process continued, with what felt like various guide marks being scribbled on my head, and the application of the adhesive and the sensors. At this point, there was some discussion regarding the opening of the window. The adhesive was stinky, like nail polish remover, but as a child of 1980s Scotland, I was all for advocating that the window be closed tight and any cracks stuffed with towels. To no avail.

  Eventually, twenty wires leading from my head were sticking into the little receiver box that I would be carrying around night and day until Monday. I was told to close my eyes while I was subjected to bright flashing lights, to check that the receiver was registering whatever fluctuations resulted. I don’t know the exact degree to which the EEG reflects what is going on in the brain, but at this point, mine was screaming, ‘Make some fahking noise!’ and imagining an Orbital gig somewhere in a field off of the M25.

  When we were done, I was carrying the receiver in a jaunty wee purpose-made shoulder bag and the sensors were covered by a woolly beanie that I hoped marked me out on that summery weekend as a Brooklyn hipster rather than a neurology patient. The bandage that covered the sensors and collected the wires into a bundle poked out of the bottom of the hat and ran down my back like the Predator’s tendrils. Like the Drop Foot System at the HJD, all this gear plugged into my interest in sci-fi body horror. We were told not to let the apparatus get wet. As well as that, I wasn’t allowed to chew gum through the duration of the test. Apparently if I did this, that’s all the EEG would capture for the duration of that activity.

  Thereafter, it was a fairly normal weekend. Rain was forecast, so we lounged around at home in this strange interlude, watching telly and footering around with preparations to leave the country.

  As we reached the end of the experiment, I had to say that the set-up was quite literally nipping ma heid. Not to forget that adhesive! On day one, I had noticed a nasty pain behind my right ear that turned out to be a broken little blister that the adhesive had caused. So I was glad that I hadn’t huffed too much of the stuff.

  When we returned after the weekend was over, I was hoping that the attending technician would be able to tell me what I thought about the fact that I had spent a substantial portion of the weekend watching all six hours of a miniseries about the Hatfield and McCoy families feuding on the Kentucky-West Virginia border in the late nineteenth century. Maybe because of a pig. It wasn’t entirely clear, but I felt pretty sure that my blurriness wasn’t solely attributable to my stroke. If the moral was that all this feuding and killing was pointless, then what did that say about watching all this feuding and killing?

  In the end, the return trip to Methodist was pretty frustrating. For starters, I was beginning to find that my visits to Methodist generally seemed to leave me feeling a bit gimpier, I guessed that this was something to do with somehow returning to the inpatient mindset. It didn’t help that this was a grey, dreich day. In fact, on this particular Monday morning, the rain was lashing down. As I angled my crappy street vendor brolly against the wind and positioned the receiver box with the twenty wires sticking out of it under my jacket, I felt like one of those kids who takes an egg home from school with orders not to break it for a couple of days.

  Things continued downhill from there. I was in possession of coffee vouchers to be cashed in at Methodist that had been bequeathed to us by Matt From The Darts Team. Amazingly, although I had come to understand that Methodist’s cafeteria usually closed between 8a.m. and 11.30a.m., from 11.30a.m. to 5.45p.m., and again from 6p.m. to 7.59a.m., it was open just before my appointment was scheduled. Like a good stroke patient, I happily strolled in and set about finding myself a decaffeinated beverage. It turned out that there was no decaf in the hospital with an Institute for Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery! I decided to take my life in my hands and redeemed my voucher regardless.

  By the time I found the epilepsy unit again, I’d had quite enough irritation for one day. Then I was called in to begin the removal process. Well. Have you ever visited the dentist for a teeth cleaning, and had the hygienist put their foot up on the arm of the chair so they can really get some leverage on the scaler?

  The technician indicated that I should close my eyes, because she was about to apply the ‘water solution’. I’m clear on what water is, but as I understand it, a solution is a homogeneous mixture of two or more substances. We didn’t get into a discussion about what the other one or more substances that were going to melt my eyeballs might have been.

  Apart from a visit to the dental hygienist, the other wonderful experience I was reminded of was having some cheap barber in the New Town of Edinburgh cut my hair as a kid. And by cut my hair, I mean grab onto tufts of hair with his blunt scissors and pull them out. Now, just as then, it didn’t seem judicious to tell my tormentor what a shitty job she was doing, so I followed the old approach of jerking in pain and taking sharp intakes of breath.

  This didn’t really work, and I ended up with a hole in my head. Needless to say, I needed another hole in my head like I needed a . . . Well, you get the idea.

  Why this happened, I’m not exactly sure. It may be that I’ve got a very mild case of my late
mother’s allergy to non-precious metals. Maybe it was a reaction to the adhesive. Or, most likely, it was a reaction to having an electrode amateurishly torn off my forehead.

  Oh, and the Hatfields and the McCoys? Well, I can tell you that when the families were on Family Feud in 1979, they competed for cash prizes and a live pig that was kept on stage during the games. It’s complicated, but the McCoys kind of won.

  The results of the EEG didn’t reveal anything of interest.

  Beth and I handed in our notice to end our lease of the flat on 15th Street. We sold or gave away anything that was too big to ship to Edinburgh. We arranged to ship the possessions that we hadn’t disposed of. We gave little one-eyed Cyclops to Ex-Flatmate Mat and his wife Jenni, because she got on with their cat Noah and because she had the softest fur and because she fulfilled the contract whereby you gave her food and water and shelter and in return she loved you and because she was the best cat.

  I met with Elizabeth’s mother to discuss how best we could maintain my relationship with my daughter: by my keeping up regular contact, making it clear that our move was in no way a reflection on how I felt about her but something that had arisen from circumstance, and talking with her directly about all this as openly and honestly as a grown-up could. I met with Elizabeth herself the next day, and a local coffee shop served as neutral ground. Our relationship had been faltering as I remained a boring, stroke-y daddy.

  It didn’t go great. I ran through the talking points I had discussed with Linda, and tried to keep Ilana Grunwald’s injunction to remember that Elizabeth, although a smart kid, was still only ten years old, and I was a man in his late thirties. When I delivered the news of Beth’s and my forthcoming move, Elizabeth wobbled for a second and excused herself to go to the women’s toilet. I thought it would be best to give her space, and considered my coffee cup and waited.

  And waited.

  Some more time passed, and a text came in from Linda. Elizabeth had texted her from the toilets to ask her to come by from around the corner and take her home. It was all too much to deal with.

  I knew how she felt. Being a grown-up sucked. Nevertheless, Beth and I kept putting one foot in front of the other, because that’s what grown-ups do.

  We found out that it would cost as much to take those feline jerks Seamus and Geronimo to Scotland as it would cost to send over all of our possessions, and we had them chipped and certified for travel by the US Department of Agriculture and arranged to take them anyway. They probably hadn’t even noticed my absence while I had been an inpatient at Methodist and HJD. They had been present throughout Beth’s distress, though, and we would have missed them.

  We applied for a visitor’s visa for Beth to come to the UK so that we could be together while we waited for her partner visa to be processed, and so everything would be totally above board. We moved out of the apartment on 15th Street and moved in with Jen, Paul and Jill while we crossed as many ‘t’s and dotted as many ‘i’s as we could. When we were moving out of our flat, the cable company tried to screw us out of our deposit on our shitty cable box, of course, because that’s what the cable company does. The building’s superintendent told us that a number of items we had left in the flat for safekeeping on the day we were moving out had been put out on the sidewalk. We didn’t see them there, but when we told the super we were going to call the police for some help with that, our possessions were miraculously found.

  As we took our last walks around Brooklyn, near Jen and Paul’s place, that Red Hook summer felt hotter and more humid than previous summers in the city, and that summer smell of hot trash smelled hotter and trashier. New York was in my blood forever, but I wasn’t the New Yorker who would pick up an egg salad sandwich off a Queens subway platform any more. We loved New York, but for now, we were tired and it was bringing us down. Our hearts had already moved as we bought our tickets to fly to Edinburgh. We had a last night out with our old buddies from Harry Boland’s, and then we started off on a new adventure.

  Two hundred million years ago, I had read, Scotland had been a desert. Then I had left forever. Right enough, as we flew above the banks of the Forth, my old home was no more. Friends and family had moved on, Mum and Hugh were gone, and even though I recognised my old dad, he was a different man now. On the edge of this new old world, I held Beth’s hand, and I was scared. Over sixteen years, I had traversed the old new world, and by the time I was through, my friends and family were an entirely new group of people. I had changed, too – my sandstone heart broken, yet held together now by succulent American oak. As I surveyed this new land, I had strength. Beth had brought me back from Buckie, and, my Charon, she had sailed me safely across the Styx so I returned from the underworld alive even though I had no coin for her, and owed her everything.

  Scotland as I had known it was gone, but this new country was going to be our adventure together.

  18

  Valhalla

  The connection at Heathrow had been tight, and we took a taxi into Edinburgh without the cats. At my father’s house, I got off the phone with the airline representative and relayed the story to Beth.

  ‘She says that they missed their connection. Which makes sense – have you ever seen a cat trying to read a departure board in an airport? They’re rubbish!’

  ‘Right? And pulling rolling luggage with no thumbs?’

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, they can’t get them on another flight today, so they’re going to keep them in London over the weekend. The animal handling centre in Edinburgh is closed until Monday. But she tells me that the centre at Heathrow is really good. They’ll have loads of room to move around, much more than in Edinburgh, and they have lots of handlers to look after them.’

  We reassured ourselves that Seamus and Geronimo would be fine and that it hadn’t been selfish to haul them across the world with us, by picturing them making the most of a free weekend in London, checking out the changing of the guard and taking selfies by the London Eye. They arrived in Edinburgh after the weekend was through, and this latest version of our little family began to make itself at home.

  We borrowed a book of Edinburgh city walks from the local library, to help Beth learn the city, and me help re-learn its rhythms and routes. With Beth in tow, I found myself taking unexpected, meandering detours that unveiled new views, as well as more obvious, expository routes.

  Our timing had been good. During our February trip the previous year, twilight had begun to fall before 5p.m. and many of Edinburgh’s landmarks had kept restricted hours. We’d been concerned about the weather that the Scots complain about like a persistent drizzle, but during our last days in New York, the increasing heat and humidity had begun to take its annual toll while reminding us of the symmetrical yearly trudge through snowbound sidewalks before stepping confidently off a curb into filthy, black, freezing slush up to the knees.

  To my amazement and in contrast to my memory, Edinburgh, on the same latitude as Minsk, turned out to be temperate. Shortly after our arrival, my father’s newspaper screamed the headline SCOTS SIZZLE IN 86°F HEATWAVE! We were tickled by the incongruous use of Fahrenheit in a British newspaper to increase the sense of sensation, the red font that the paper had used to pick out the impossibly high number, and the fact that year’s highest temperature in New York City had scraped 38°C, or 100°F.

  We joined a running group that jogged gently through Princes Street Gardens on Saturday mornings. One Saturday, as we passed the Ross Fountain in the shadow of the Castle, the leader of the group commented on another spell of unusual weather.

  Beth’s response seemed to me to sum up the capital’s climate. ‘Yeah, what the hell is this? It’s raining, but it’s not raining!’

  As the days waxed and waned, we took advantage of this interval in our lives. One day, we took out our book of walks and decided to follow a route that would lead us to Calton Hill.

  Walking east along Princes Street, the gothic rocket ship of the Scott Monument didn’t look as tall as it had back in the
day. It did have a heft that I didn’t remember, though. From there, Scotland’s National Monument on top of the hill looked like it should have been all the way down in Leith. Like its spiritual successor, the tram, it only got as far as the East End. Our route took us through the Old Calton Burial Ground, which Abraham Lincoln benevolently surveyed from a plinth. His monument marked the graves of a small number of Scots who had died in the Civil War, all on the Union side.

  Uncertain of the details of the journey after a long absence, I repeatedly took my phone out of my pocket to check our progress. Edinburgh had always claimed to be on seven hills, like Rome. Arthur’s Seat, Blackford Hill, Braid Hills, Castle Rock, Corstorphine Hill, Craiglockhart Hill and the one we were on now. Or maybe it was the seven in the old rhyme:

  Abbey, Calton, Castle grand,

  Southward see St Leonards stand,

  St Johns and Sciennes as two are given,

  And Multrees makes seven.

  Or maybe the map in my pocket was right, and Edinburgh was really built on countless hills and under innumerable bridges, a labyrinthine rat run. Whatever, now the Nelson Monument loomed above, so I took a chance on my gut. ‘This feels right. This way!’

  Because going with my gut had always worked before.

  We headed up a narrow, stone, tree-lined set of stairs signposted as Jacob’s Ladder.

  Re-emerging into the light, we oriented ourselves again. Horatio’s telescope still stood on its end to the north reaching to 561 feet above sea level, but a little closer now. Peering deep into Edinburgh’s heart. We crossed Calton Road and set off up another flight of stone steps to the summit. Halfway up, a monk in grey robes and Reeboks stopped us with an expectant smile. He passed me a little plastic amulet bearing an exhortation to WORK SMOOTHLY for LIFETIME PEACE, and opened a small flip book to a picture of his temple. Then he passed me another little booklet and a pen, indicating that I could fill in my name, home country, a message of peace and a pledge. I fished in the pocket of my jeans for a pound coin, and the monk thanked me with another smile.