A Stitch of Time

by Lauren Marks

  What is it? Elle asked me. This Sir Spatula?

  I linked my hands together and I lunged at her, as if my fingers were spider legs.

  This is a tarantula!

  Gleefully dodging my tickles, Elle rolled down to the grass, where she found my pen and journal.

  I have another idea! Elle said. Do you think we can write a story together?

  Sure thing. I grabbed the pen from her. You first, kiddo.

  This is a story that is not about my brain, she began. It is about Elle’s brain.

  I stopped transcribing. What did Elle know about the aneurysm? What had she been told? At her age, it couldn’t have been much. But she might have overheard some phone conversations, detected whispered concerns, picked up some key words. Elle was thinking about brains, but she had cast herself as the main character in that story, instead of me.

  Keep going, I told her. You tell me what happens and I’ll just write it down.

  Elle invented a fable about a girl named Elle. This girl had an impressive brain until the day it fell off her body. She grew a new brain, and this one (my cousin emphasized) was humungous. But it failed her too. The Elle from the story continued to grow, and lose, these disposable brains. I loved the twists in Elle’s storytelling. Only after the girl actually died and became a ghost did she acquire her Happily Ever After.

  When we finished, Elle snatched the journal from me, and looked at our combined effort. She flashed me a grin, displaying both the gaps in her mouth and her teeth in progress. Then she darted off, eager to share her story.

  •  •  •

  Elle and her family spent less than a week in Los Angeles before the fires were contained and they were given the all clear to return home. After seeing everyone off at the base of the driveway, Gram asked me to come inside her cottage and sit with her as she finished her coffee.

  A year of close calls, she said, rapping her arthritic fingers on her round wooden table. Wouldn’t you say?

  I told her I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

  My grandmother listed a few things. There was the San Diego fire, which had spared our family’s lives and home. There was my cousin Spencer, whose major motorbike accident a month before my own injury had crushed parts of his spine, but to everyone’s relief, he had not been left paralyzed.

  And, of course, there is your aneurysm, my grandma said. Wouldn’t you consider your own medical emergency a “close call”?

  Oh, I said. Yeah, I guess.

  Interesting, my grandmother said. You remember when I worked in the hospital, don’t you?

  I nodded. As a child, I used to visit her at work. She was the most senior nurse on the ward, and almost everyone answered to her.

  Well, I did a lot of things in that place, even though it was in a somewhat isolated corner of Northeast Montana, she said. I managed patients with all sorts of injuries, delivered babies, and personally helped set up the Glasgow medical airlift and doctors’ exchange. I was real proud of that. But in those five decades, I was never able to save anyone who had an aneurysm rupture.

  Oh no? I asked. Why not?

  Sometimes I wonder if you really understand what happened to you, Lauren. A rupture is often a death sentence, and treatment has everything to do with location. Though I saw about a dozen cases like yours, everyone from our little hospital died in transport to somewhere else.

  Gram took another sip of her black coffee.

  You’ve got a very serious thing up there in your noggin, she said. The sort of thing only a specialist can treat, and only a few places in the world can do that well. After an aneurysm’s rupture, everything needs to be aligned perfectly for a patient’s survival. I thank God you had all the resources you needed to be able to get through this and I count my blessings every day.

  My grandmother had always been a church-going woman, and though I had been interested in religion, and even studied it academically for years, I didn’t practice formally before or after the rupture. I was relieved that Gram hadn’t assumed that my near-death experience had been a religious one. There had never been tunnels of light or out-of-body experiences. Once the hemorrhage began, I had no clear memories until after the surgery was finished, and I certainly hadn’t woken up from this procedure thinking I should be a better Catholic.

  But there had been the Quiet. I had been exposed to this incredible sense of order, and it had been so pervasive, so all-encompassing, I felt its traces in me could never really disappear. I was immensely grateful for this experience, which had altered the attention I paid to the world. In fact, grateful was too small a word.

  Don’t you ever forget how lucky you are, my grandmother said. Because you happened to be at the right place, at the right time.

  And on this point, my grandmother and I were in complete agreement.

  3

  One crisp fall morning, I joined my parents on their walk before work. I did this fairly often, but it was getting harder and harder to get up this early because my dark bedroom didn’t take in much light at all. Before I had left for college years ago, I had given the space a moody teenager paint job, a blue that was almost black.

  I think it might be time for a change, I said to my mother.

  Finally, my mom said. Been counting the days till you’d outgrow that gloom. She pointed out the pumpkins on neighbors’ porches and changing leaves on the trees around us. Would you consider something autumnal? she asked.

  A vivid image came to mind. Right before Edinburgh, I had been in Paris. I had been awed by the way light struck the weathered facades there. At dawn and dusk, the French walls glowed like embers.

  What about red? I said. Wouldn’t it be great to have a red room?

  Mom had been leading the brisk pace of the walk, but her sneakers squeaked on the curb as she halted abruptly.

  You can’t be serious, she said. Lauren, are you really suggesting we should just go from midnight blue to blood red?

  No, I corrected her. Parisian red.

  •  •  •

  Why do I remember Paris in the way I do? When I think of Paris I always think of it with Edinburgh—a bound pair, like chicken and rice or balloons and birthday parties. And in the months since the rupture, Paris had been just as important a place as Edinburgh. It was a touchstone, and unlike other things in my life, something I remembered somewhat clearly.

  I had arrived in France a week before I was due to meet BJ and Laura in Scotland. Of course I remember Paris, because this was my first trip to the city, and it had broken up my otherwise predictable New York routine. But much more than that, I think I remember Paris because of the girl I had been there—this was the version of myself that everyone seemed to remember. Unfractured. Before the fall. That was someone of whom I was trying to get glimpses of. In France, I had stayed with my friend and former professor Michael Krass, whom I had known for years. He was like an uncle to me. The cool kind of uncle with whom you can speak freely, who spoils you a bit, and gives you more freedom than you have at home. He was a successful costume designer in Manhattan and had rented a great apartment for the summer in the middle of Paris—two floors, with a whole guest suite to itself on the lower level. In certain contexts, it might have been considered inappropriate for a male professor to offer a room to his female student, but his invitation couldn’t have been any more platonic. In our long friendship, his exclusive preference for male partners had never been a secret.

  Just come to France, he said. The only reason to rent an apartment in Paris is to have visitors. And you can stay for a whole month before you head out to Edinburgh, if you want to. . . .

  Though my financial constraints were substantial, I was not going to say no to the offer. I could stay for a week, at least. Krass’s apartment was situated on the appealing Isle St. Louis, only two blocks away from the short footbridge that led to Notre Dame. Krass showed me the trick of unlocking his bright violet door, and he handed me my own set of keys.

  To come and go as you please,
he said. And if you want to bring back an overnight guest, I’ll be the soul of discretion. He winked, and led me up to the roof deck.

  From the private terrace, four flights above the street, we could look down and watch the bustle below, the air saturated with the honey and butter wafting up from the bakery on the ground floor. In front of us was the magnificent cathedral, its buttresses resembling a tremendous rib cage. We looked up to the transit of clouds, and for a few moments, near dawn and dusk, every cream-colored building glowed this singular shade of red.

  Living in a space that could always capture the light show of sunrise and sunset was ideal. And if I was going to be in California for a while, that was the kind of thing I wanted to re-create in my bedroom.

  4

  Per Dr. Russin’s recommendation, my mother finally got me an appointment at USC, with Dr. George Teitelbaum, director of interventional neuroradiology. As I sat in the waiting room, I filled out the requisite paperwork with my mother’s help. On top, she noted the date: October 30, 2007.

  There weren’t many introductions, and once I met Dr. Teitelbaum, he commenced with my exam. He asked me to touch my nose with my finger, first with my eyes open, then with my eyes closed. Next he wanted me to balance on one leg. Could I feel it when he stroked my arm? What about there? He gave me the name of three items in the room (pen, clock, coat), and five minutes later asked if I remembered them by name.

  I completed the tasks as instructed, but without much enthusiasm. I assumed this would be the first and only time Dr. Teitelbaum and I would ever meet. This was just procedure. The plan was for Dr. Teitelbaum to write up a report of our meeting and send it along to Dr. Russin’s office. I didn’t know at the time that my doctors sent reports back and forth to each other, and it would be a while before I realized that patients could request such documents for themselves.

  When I eventually saw Dr. Teitelbaum’s report, it was hard for me to read, partially because of my aphasia, but also because of the pervasive medical terminology. I would review this report time and again, over a period of several years. And as my knowledge base grew, it was like reading a new document every time.

  “Thank you for allowing me to consult on your patient, Lauren Marks, a very pleasant 27-year-old female that on August 24, 2007, suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage due to a large left middle cerebral trifurcation that was treated in Edinborough (sic), Scotland . . . satisfactorily occluded with the use of bare platinum and HydroCoils.”

  Very pleasant. It was a compliment, so I probably noticed that early in my first read. Satisfactorily was good—I knew that immediately. But occluded sounded bad. The term meant blocked. However, this block was the dam that kept blood from refilling the aneurysm, so occluded was positive, in this case. And platinum and HydroCoils made me sound bionic. People who stole copper from street lamps would plunder my skull if they only knew.

  Buried mid-paragraph on the second page, there were a couple of sentences that included a word I had never heard before: recanalization. Did it have something to do with canals? Assuming it was just another complicated term that dealt with some minute detail about my case, I only glanced at this passage.

  “I would recommend that she undergo a follow-up angiogram at 6 months’ time,” Dr. Teitelbaum advised. He reported that he had gone through my tests from Scotland and noted that the “aneurysm appeared to be well treated by coil embolization.”

  “However,” he continued, “I would estimate that the chance of recanalization of such a large aneurysm is fifteen to twenty percent.”

  The odds appeared to be very much in my favor here, but this was something I really should have looked up sooner.

  5

  Don’t burn your bridges. A stitch in time saves nine. Today’s lesson was on idioms, and Alicia wanted me to translate the phrases, to explain what they meant and why people used them. It shouldn’t have been too difficult since I had heard and used them throughout my life. But the sayings didn’t stick in my head the same way anymore, didn’t click against my teeth the way they should have. The table we were working at was filled with colorful puzzles, games, and dry erase boards. We sat in plastic chairs, low to the ground.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that I had retained only a vague aptitude for these sorts of phrases. I usually knew what people meant when they used them, but mainly from evaluating a person’s tone or body language. I couldn’t produce them on my own, couldn’t repeat them back if I was asked to. It wasn’t that my aphasia made me too literal—I understood that language could be figurative—but why these words? Why in this order? Idioms tended to be loaded with images, which would put my brain into overdrive; it was hard to keep my attention focused on Alicia when flying off the handle conjured up soup pots sprouting pigeon wings.

  I feel like a million bucks, Alicia said to me. What do you think that means, Lauren?

  It means I am . . . happy, I said. It means that bucks, which is money, is like happiness.

  Basically, yeah, she said. It’s an analogy. We’re going to work on analogies more next week, she added as she flipped through her pile of worksheets, ready to tackle another subject.

  Wait, I said. Go back.

  I wanted Alicia to explain. It sounded to me that the phrase suggested that money had feelings, and we should feel the same way money does. Or maybe money was something you should feel on your skin. Or maybe you could buy a lot of things with a million bucks, and those things would make you feel happy. But none of these options resonated with me. A million of anything was far too much. It was like watching a cell divide and multiply in front of me, the mutation occurring more quickly than I could track.

  I knotted my fingers inside the pockets of my dress, grinding my teeth. I pressed Alicia on this: Why would we want to feel like a million bucks?

  Don’t think I follow, Lauren, she said. Can you explain your issue?

  The idiom itself was the issue. It seemed to be about greed. And for a culture to understand these words implicitly, it meant that this truth had been widely assimilated.

  Facing the music was equally complex. It meant to be held accountable for something, but in my mind, the words were too animated. When I closed my eyes, I’d see a jazz funeral marching down a street in New Orleans, musicians surrounding an open casket with their blaring brass sounding into a cold, unhearing ear. The man in the box was facing his music.

  If this exercise is upsetting you, Alicia said, we don’t have to keep doing it.

  Before the rupture my face was easy to read, but it was even more so after it. I couldn’t disguise my distress, but Alicia had overestimated the gravity of the situation. I didn’t want to stop working on idioms. In fact, I wanted more of them. I was starting to crave their challenge. An idiom was a parable. It was like a covenant between the words and those who received the words. With them, I was observing how words could twist and plunge, reference and implicate, echo and haunt. I grasped ideas faster than I would have if I had been a child because of the isolated pockets of preserved knowledge and experience present from before the rupture. But any deftness I might have had coexisted with many other rudimentary linguistic difficulties. Odd as it might sound, aphasia gave me an opportunity to re-encounter the enthusiasm for language I had felt when growing up. After the stroke, I was manifesting a host of disfluent symptoms that often made me dependent on those around me. But when I approached words now, it was with reverence again, an easy sense of awe. Recommitting myself to the contract of language was thrilling, but it also made me a tourist in my native tongue.

  •  •  •

  Justine and I were in the private office where she conducted my sessions. As always, she was eager to hear about my ideas regarding the next steps in my therapy.

  I want to try to do an essay or something, I said. Not just fiddle in my journals.

  You don’t think you are able to start something like that yourself? Justine asked.

  Not really, I admitted. When I was a PhD student, I wrote
essays as easily as I made oatmeal. Now I don’t even know how to start one.

  What do you think is stopping you? she asked.

  I tried to explain that in the past, ideas fell into place naturally on the page. A thought in one sentence would effortlessly develop into the next sentence as a gentle stream of consciousness. But now, it took so long to write a full sentence that by the time I finished it I had forgotten whatever other ideas I might have had. The traffic jam became a desert highway.

  Justine made a radical suggestion: give up the way I used to write. When a topic came up now, I should jot down all the words that it would call to mind. Names of people, places, things. I shouldn’t try to put it into a structure immediately. Who cared if I wrote a bad sentence? Putting the ideas down was the most important part, and making the piece sound good could come later. The approach was feasible, and I was overjoyed she had come up with it. The next week, she brought in a writing assignment for me on the subject of “perseverance.”

  You don’t have to finish this quickly, she said. We can take as long as we want.

  The prompt page had quotations from Nelson Mandela, Ghandi, and Helen Keller. For inspiration, she explained. Some people who’ve triumphed in the face of adversity.

  I glanced at the page, but there was something about the idea that troubled me.

  What about . . . ummm . . . Obben . . . you know. Scientist. New Mexico . . . I showed her with my hands. BOOM.

  Oppenheimer? she asked.

  Yeah, I said. That’s it.

  Umm. She paused. You want to make J. Robert Oppenheimer the subject of your perseverance essay?

  No, no, that is not what I meant. I slowly explained to Justine that on the way into therapy that day, a radio segment had been discussing the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Like all the other figures on Justine’s prompt, Oppenheimer had done something the world had never seen before, in a time of great adversity. She was careful not to interrupt me as I tried to cobble my reasoning together.