A Stitch of Time

by Lauren Marks

  I should get going, I said.

  Then Jonah sat straight up in bed. Why don’t you want to stay in New York? he asked. Why won’t you let me take care of you?

  Oh, Jo. I placed my purse on the floor and sat next to him. I slowly guided his fingers on my uneven scalp, where the screws could still be felt jutting from the skin.

  You shouldn’t have to take care of me, honey. This is not about another person. Parent. Boyfriend. Whatever. I have got a lot to sort out, and the issue really is time. If I want to keep getting better, I think I need a lot more time.

  Jonah let his head prop against mine, and we listened to each other’s long inhales and exhales. I looked at the gift Jonah had given me for my birthday on the desk. It was a ridged and ornate conch. He had said he wanted me always to be able to have the ocean at my ears. We both knew there were no ghostly waves inside, and the rushing sound in that “seashell resonance” could be replicated with or without a shell because the echo was produced by the person listening for it. But that didn’t make the sound any less beautiful, or the gesture less moving.

  When you first arrived, I wanted to convince you how well we could live together, Jonah said. Like a trial run. And didn’t we do well?

  Better than well, but I still have to go.

  I know. Jonah sighed. It doesn’t take a genius to realize you’re not ready for this yet. And now I’m afraid I’m ruining your final days by talking about you leaving.

  You haven’t ruined anything, Jo. We’re both just trying to figure this out.

  Jonah pulled his head away from mine to look at me. Lauren, he said, I just want to let you know that I’m not going anywhere.

  This statement confused me at first. Going anywhere. Was he traveling soon? Where in the world would Jonah be going? Then, I realized he was speaking figuratively. He wasn’t talking about travel, but fidelity. He was saying we could stay together even while we were apart.

  Indirectness seemed important to this moment with Jonah, so, although it no longer came naturally to me, I tried to speak to him in this kind of code, too. I said something about not taking “sides” in this game. But I think my message came out garbled even as I was saying it. I wasn’t about to pursue another relationship, and I wasn’t encouraging him to do so either. However, I didn’t know how long we’d be apart. Whatever transpired in our lives away from each other, even if it included other people, I wanted him to know we could still be on the same team.

  I wake up in New York, like I do in LA, with soun. But ist is much harder to remember my dreams here. Jonahs body beside me, I wake with a list call citibank. Call landlord.

  I am surprised when he brings up the issue of my leaving. I shad thought about it, but didn’t want to ruin the last days I’m here—he felt the same. “Before you came, I was ready to have you move in with me but now I think I see now that you need alone. He is disappointed. I didn’t expect and prepare much, but instead sure happy finding that we do live somewhat well together.

  But what again about leaving. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, endearingly and cryptic. I say “I will not get another side against you,” which decoded said “If you find someone or somewhere else, I will not become your enemy. I can’t wait for him to wait indefinitely with no known resolutions.

  Ever since I was a preteen, New York City was the only place I ever wanted to live. In fact, my mom says this desire began earlier, and she suggests that this interest goes all the way back to my fanatical viewership of Sesame Street. But the place required so much focus now, and when my attention drifted (as it often did), crossing a street or in the middle of a conversation, my language would drop out, and I would lose sense of what I was doing and even why I was doing it. The city’s pitch and yaw was far too demanding for me. I would have to rehearse conversations before I had them—with the clerk at the bank, the subway attendant, the acquaintance at a party. And though I had planned to return to my grad school to discuss the conditions of my medical leave, I hadn’t dared step foot inside. I didn’t even call. It would have been impossible to resume the workload of the doctoral program that I was still officially enrolled in. That class I was supposed to be teaching would have to go on without me.

  I packed up my stuff in Greenpoint and Jonah helped me sell off all of my furniture on Craigslist. Though I thought about putting the boxes in storage nearby, I didn’t know how long I would be keeping them there, so it ended up cheaper to ship them back to California.

  My friend Emily offered to help out on the day of the parcel pickup. She had done her level best to look after the apartment when I was away, but it got a lot more challenging when she moved to New Jersey to manage an art gallery. When she met up with me in Greenpoint, it was the hottest day of that summer, made even more stifling since the window air-conditioning units had all been sold. And by the time the UPS guy arrived at my door, he was dripping from his greying buzz cut, sweating through his brown jumpsuit. He started cursing when he saw my tower of packages—16 boxes, weighing 561 pounds. Thirteen of them were filled entirely with books.

  The guy started to rail about the “desk jobs” back at the office who hadn’t prepared him for this kind of cargo, and, though we had informed him that we would be taking things downstairs as well, he said two little girls in flouncy dresses were going to be as helpful to him as a chainsaw in a prostate exam. Every new parcel he lifted brought a new string of curses that might be mistaken for Tourette’s syndrome, if the language wasn’t so consciously controlled. And some of the phrases were brand-new ones for me. Shitdick. Cockjockey. Assbag. The guy wasn’t threatening us. He was exclusively addressing himself to the items he was carrying. Emily and I were bearing this burden too, but for every box we shared, he carried alone. And it was hard not to find his inventive stream of expletives funny.

  At the very end of the job, the final box slipped from the man’s sweaty hands, falling down half a flight of stairs, and this one he actually kicked the rest of the way to the door. All I could do was laugh. I hadn’t noticed the absence of this stuff for most of that year, so why get attached now? Books could take a heavy bruising.

  When the man arrived at his van, he hit his absolute limit when he found a parking ticket stuck to his windshield. He began kicking the wheels repeatedly. After all this nut-breaking work? he shouted. You filthy (kick) rat-infested (kick) cunt-dumpster! (kick kick kick)

  Although every fragile thing I had placed in those boxes was now broken past repair, I felt a sort of kinship with the UPS man. This city had been an obstacle course for me as well. I approached his open door and asked him if he needed anything. Could I run upstairs and get him an ice-cold bottle of water?

  Whatever lady, he said, waving me off and climbing into his bucket seat. You just do me a favor. Next time you lezzies need some help, call FedEx!

  As he was pulling away, Emily and I laughed until we wheezed.

  Well, that’s an elegant New York swan song if I ever heard one, she said. You never know when this city is leaning in for a kiss, or about to give you the finger. Try to tell me you won’t miss this.

  16

  Returning to Los Angeles, I was in a reflective mood. Being around old friends had brought out different parts of my personality, different parts of my language. I could see my thought patterns shift accordingly. I wondered then: If language changes thought, what kind of thoughts are impossible without our full, natural language?

  This is the kind of research that Harvard professor Elizabeth Spelke has spent a good portion of her professional life doing. Working in developmental studies, Spelke designed a groundbreaking experiment that dealt with the strengths and weaknesses of language, partially borrowing from a model that began in animal tests, asking how rats behaved in a room in regard to their spatial reasoning and their perception of color.

  The rats were deposited in a rectangular room that was all white—white ceiling, white walls, white floor. A bit of food was deposited behind a flap of fabric, and then the rat was t
urned around and released to find the morsels. The rats weren’t searching completely blindly, though. They had a sense of geometric arrangement (they could differentiate between a long wall and a short wall), so they arrived at the target area 50 percent of the time.

  Spelke conducted a follow-up experiment, but this time with both human and animal subjects, and added a new element too: a blue wall. Although the rats could perceive direction and color, the blue wall made no difference in their search. The rats and the young children who Spelke included in her study were both largely unaffected by the color change. But, the young participants remained unable to integrate the two separate sets of information (navigation and color) at the same time. They still were finding their target by a large amount of chance.

  That is, until the children turned a certain age.

  Adults proved to be beyond proficient in the task, and around the age of six, children also become adept at it. They become able to take in the environmental changes and adjust their behavior accordingly. This is when the blue wall starts to matter.

  Why could the adults excel, but young children and rats could not?

  Spelke and her colleagues (Hermer-Vazquez and Katsnelson) gave a somewhat revolutionary answer. They suggested that language itself might be the missing link. And when I first heard about this study, that suggestion both confused and thrilled me. I had long proposed to Jonah that language was capable of being a unique process of creation, so I needed to know more about their hypothesis.

  The team proposed that children were acquiring a certain linguistic aptitude at around age six, in which the concepts of direction (left versus right) and color (blue versus white) could be analyzed together. Spelke suggested that language served as a bridge between these disparate abilities, which were completely self-contained without it, but could suddenly engage with one another when language was inserted into the dynamic. And if that hypothesis was true, language didn’t just change the behavior, language itself made those new thoughts possible.

  Charles Fernyhough also explores this sort of idea in A Thousand Days of Wonder, which chronicles his daughter’s first three years of life. When Fernyhough’s daughter begins to acquire aspects of language, he seeks to understand what the implications of this new type of communication could be. The question of linguistic relativity comes up a lot. He asks, “Was she finding words for thoughts that had already been there . . . was language translating thought, or creating it?”

  This very question lit a fire in me. It is the same one I had asked about myself throughout my language redevelopment. Long after Spelke conducted these experiments and Fernyhough published A Thousand Days of Wonder, they were invited to be interviewed together on NPR’s Radiolab.

  The interviewers asked Fernyhough, “What is thought without language?”

  “I don’t think it’s very much at all,” responded Fernyhough. He stood by his belief that young children “don’t think,” at least not in the way he imagines thought. He explained, “If you reflect on your experience, if you think about what is going on in your head as you’re just walking to work or sitting on a subway train. Much of what is going on in your head at that point is verbal. I want to suggest that the central thread of all of that is actually language, it’s a stream of inner speech. That’s what most of us think of as thinking.”

  Spelke disagreed slightly, saying that Fernyhough might be “exaggerating the role of language here.” She called language a “fundamentally . . . combinatorial system.” She continued, “Everybody has always talked about how language is this incredible tool for communication that allows us to exchange information with other people,” but she added that, “Language also seems to me to serve a mechanism of communication between systems within a single mind.”

  It’s an enthralling proposition and appealed to me on several fronts. In Scotland, when my internal and external language had both become disconnected, my abilities for sophisticated recollection and future planning had suffered, too. And people like Boroditsky, Spelke, and Fernyhough all proposed that language itself could be a source of all kinds of cognitive changes. There is a possibility language may have influenced my Theory of Mind as well. There are many psychologists who insist that it plays a key role in regular childhood development, though there isn’t nearly as much research related to language and ToM reasoning after a brain injury. Every time I came across a bit of research like this, I was trying to contextualize myself inside of it. And when it came to Theory of Mind, I had arrived in Scotland a socially adept creature, interpersonally intuitive, but as soon as I acquired a language disorder, I suddenly became unable to understand other people’s basic intentions or predict their likely responses. What if language was the common denominator when it came to all of my disorientation?

  Most of my skill sets and knowledge base were mainly left intact after the rupture. But these capacities weren’t interacting with each other in the easy way they used to, remaining self-contained, isolated. If they were fully formed pearls, they didn’t string together to make an entire necklace. And that is why thinking about language in the way Spelke suggests—as a system that facilitates all kinds of other combinations—is so attractive to me. Because if that was true, someone who has lost neurological fluency is bound to feel emotionally disjointed, too.

  In my case, I observed that as more vocabulary returned to me, as my grammar and syntax improved, as I became able to use the subjunctive forms in my sentence structures, I was able to navigate through my memories a little more easily. This was also when I started to re-engage in my abilities to understand or anticipate another person’s worldview. However, these were just personal impressions, and I am not really in a position to say what is causation or correlation here.

  While my language was still very much on the mend, I would seek out any information from people who shared the same condition, even if only on the page. But these accounts were surprisingly difficult to track down. I was never in a language support group, and since the disorder breaks down the basics of linguistic communication, it should go without saying that first-person accounts written by people with aphasia tend to be rare. This was why I paid such close attention to Jacques Lordat.

  Lordat had been a well-respected professor of physiology in France in the early 1800s, with a focus on medicine and surgery. Though he experienced his aphasia more than two hundred years ago, his self-reporting is still considered a major touchstone in the literature about the disorder. Oliver Sacks wrote about him, as did Iain McGilchrist. I was thrilled when I first heard about him, and poured over his account, ready to find something in his case that would resemble my own.

  But as I delved in further, I was quickly surprised to see that his descriptions of his experience were noticeably different from my own. He writes:

  “Within twenty-four hours all but a few words eluded my grasp. Those that did remain proved to be nearly useless for I could no longer recall the way in which they had to be coordinated for the communication of ideas . . . Inwardly, I felt the same as ever. This mental isolation which I mention, my sadness, my impediment and the appearance of stupidity which it gave rise to, led many to believe that my intellectual faculties were weakened . . . My memory for facts, principles, dogmas, abstract ideas, was the same as when I enjoyed good health.”

  Though Lordat articulates his loss impressively, I found his recollection agitating. I had always sensed that my language, and lack of language, had hugely affected my actual thought patterns. When I saw Lordat write that “inwardly” he felt “the same as ever,” I couldn’t make sense of that at all. “External” and “internal” speech were inextricably linked for me, and I assumed this was the same with anyone else with aphasia. We all intimately knew the Quiet, didn’t we? So I tried to reconcile Lordat’s version of this condition with my own, trying to hammer our experiences into the same shape. Was he right, or was I right? Because our positions seemed mutually exclusive.

  Later, though, and much more slowly than I would
have wished, I realized that things weren’t so straightforward. Lordat made it clear that aphasia was not a thinking problem, but a problem transmitting thought. It was an impressive stance to take at the time, and that viewpoint has left a very positive legacy for those with the disorder.

  But I thought, and still think, that aphasia can sometimes be a bit of both those things: a cognitive issue and a transmission issue. However, concomitant conditions may strongly come into play here, too. After all, no one can acquire aphasia without a brain injury, and who is to say if another aspect of their injury is producing their symptoms? Also, whether or not people with aphasia have access to their “inner voice” might create a huge variety in the way people experience the condition. It would be a very grave mistake to think that someone who acquired aphasia was no longer knowledgeable or capable. People with aphasia remain chess champions, problem-solvers, financial whizzes, and high-level managers at nonprofit organizations. They can continue to be devoted spouses, parents, and children. They can remain kind or funny. The many manifestations of aphasia can be as unique and various as the people experiencing it.

  I mention this because my social group would eventually include many people with aphasia, of all ages and nationalities, including a young woman who had also lost her language at twenty-seven, as a result of an ischemic stroke. Like me, she had gotten most of her language back, which gave me a rare opportunity to have a very fluent dialogue about the issues I had been thinking about for years. And one afternoon, as we sat down over a glass of wine facing the River Thames, I asked about her inner monologue going mute. She had no idea what I was talking about. This had never happened to her. She told me that she had the same knowledge and sense of identity she always had. Like Lordat, she knew what she wanted to say, and the main struggle was that she couldn’t express that knowledge.