by Chris Knopf
“I’m a carpenter,” I said. “What’ll you take in trade?”
“I could use a new house. Somet’ing with a little elbow room for a change.”
“Big order.”
“Big doctor.”
“I’ve only got a couple questions. How about a bookcase?” He took a bite of his sandwich and nodded.
“A deal,” he said, letting me off a lot easier than Rosaline Arnold.
“You remember the first time I was in here, after getting beaned by Buddy Florin?”
“Didn’t know the name of the perpetrator, but I remember the hole in your head.”
“They stuck me for about an hour in a tube that made a noise like a four-cylinder engine with a couple of burned valves.”
“That’s the MRI. How dey examine your brain, or whatever you got left in der.”
“That’s my question. Do you remember what it said?”
“I had an attending in those days. He told me what it said. Now I’m an attending, so I got to look again to see if he was right.”
“But you remember what he said.”
Markham’s mouth stretched into a smile wide enough to catch a sparrow.
“That’s one of the t’ings you learn at Georgetown. How to remember everyt’ing. How technical you want it?”
“Just looking for headlines.”
He looked at me the same way he did back when my scalp was full of stitches.
“Funny you ask about this now.”
“Just curious.”
He paused, scrutinizing me. Then his face relaxed, as if an internal debate had been resolved.
“Okay, if you really want to know, you’re a classic right prefrontal cortex.”
He reached across the table, and without having to lean forward, tapped the middle of my forehead.
“Lot of action there, according to the MRI. Lots of bangs and bruises.”
I felt my heart cinch up inside my chest. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about frontal lobes.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“You know, the most complicated t’ing in the universe, that we know about, is that three pounds of pinky gray cauliflower inside your skull. That goes for everybody, even the dumbest Homo sapien on the planet.”
“Or the smartest chimp.”
He shook his head.
“Not quite. His brain is wired up different from the one you’ve been using for a battering ram. Especially in the prefrontal cortex. That’s where you get to be human and he don’.”
“So it’s too complicated to know.”
He shrugged.
“They researching these t’ings all de time. Got lots of ways of chasin’ down traumatic brain injury. I can show you the diagnostic guide. Bigger than the phone book.” He tapped his head again with his index finger. “Though I got most of it up here. No damage.”
“Okay, what about vertigo?”
“Sure. See that more with the cerebellum, but sure.”
“Same as memory loss?”
“That’s your frontal lobes, for sure. And big time over in the temporal. Different neighborhood, but I remember you had some flare-ups there, too.”
“Flare-ups?”
“On the MRI. Very colorful t’ings.”
“Amnesia?”
“That’s a nice myth for Hollywood to make movies about. You can destroy the short term. Strokes and Alzheimer’s do that. Not usually the long term. Though you can have a gap that doesn’t come back. That’s pretty common with the head trauma. Or lots of blood loss. Like your blond friend the cop. He got plenty of each in a big fight and don’t remember anyt’ing.”
“Do you see progression over time?”
“Sure. Come in for another MRI, throw in some other tests, we know for certain what sort of trouble we looking at. I’ll know better den because I have my hands on the wheel. Much better than lookin’ at other people’s tests.”
He sat back in his chair and rested his hands on the tops of his thighs, elbows akimbo.
“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.
People on the sidewalk moved cautiously out of the way. They didn’t know what I was about, but assumed it couldn’t be anything good.
There was a breakfast joint on a corner a few blocks away that served heart-choking mounds of colorful local cuisine and fat doughy hard rolls with bottomless cups of charred coffee. Antoine loved the place because it was owned by his late mother’s best friend, a woman named Éclair, the appropriateness of which nobody had the courage to point out when she was within earshot.
“Hey, CB,” yelled Walter, seeing me come in, “you ain’t dead.”
Antoine looked genuinely glad about it. The others were perplexed.
“Éclair, get this man a coffee,” said Antoine. “Can’t live without the shit. If you please, ma’am,” he added when she shot him a baleful look over the Formica counter.
I sat in the booth, squeezing a wiry little speedball named Franklin Leghorn into the corner, and lit a Camel.
“You might’ve checked my pulse,” I said to Antoine.
“Sorry, man. The way Darrin was goin’ at you with the butt of that gun, I figured you for white meat tartar.”
“Who’s Darrin?” I gripped my midsection as a jolt of pain streaked across my ribs. “What happened back there?”
“You’re messin’ with me.”
“No. I can’t remember. Not quite,” I said, after thanking Éclair for the chewable coffee, which she’d learned to give me as a double in a tall Styrofoam cup.
“Fuck, man,” said Antoine. “Darrin got aberrant with this evil little shotgun. I don’t know what set him off.”
“You fed him enough crack to get all’a Bridgeport high, then tole him his bitch been fuckin’ some Chinaman sellin’ fruit outta the back of his Expedition,” said Walter.
“I did? That was inauspicious.”
“CB save our ass,” said Walter to Antoine.
Antoine looked embarrassed.
“I sincerely thought you was dead,” he said to me. “Darrin come out with this sawed-off, lookin’ like he’s plannin’ to ventilate the room. Then you’re in his face, screamin’ shit, grabbin’ at the barrel of that gun. We’s all tryin’ to find cover in Darrin’s fucked-up little crib, while you and my boy’re beatin’ on each other like psycho versus psycho. Old Darrin was givin’ me the look of hate when he wasn’t workin’ on shootin’ your ass. You really don’t remember this shit?”
In truth, some of it was coming back. I’d actually had most of the outline when I woke up, but I thought it was a dream. Or some execrable phantasm courtesy of all the bourbon I’d been drinking.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I think I remember. I shouldn’t be drinking so much. Degrades the mental acuity.”
Everybody smiled at that.
“If that’s the case, CB, your acuity be turnin’ into some sorry shit,” said Franklin, earnestly.
“So who shot Darrin?” I asked the table. The smiles disappeared and everybody but Antoine started looking around the room.
“Not entirely certain about that, CB,” he said. “With all the screamin’ and commotion, you tryin’ to get the gun from Darrin and him beatin’ on you and swingin’ around that ugly little barrel, it just went off.”
“Went off?”
Walter sighed a loud sigh.
“Here’s the way it went down,” he said, waiting quietly to get full command of the floor. “Darrin come bustin’ in yellin’ he gonna smoke Antoine, throwin’ in some derogatory nonsense we don’t have to dwell on here.”
“That’s right,” said Antoine.
“That’s when CB does the kamikaze thing with the screamin’ and grabbin’ at the sawed-off. The point is, Darrin can’t get the muzzle pointin’ where he wants to, so he’s smackin’ CB with the barrel like this,” he demonstrated a vigorous tw
o-handed thrust that caused Jared, the guy next to him, to lean out of the way.
“Damn, Walter, not so realistic.”
“And then jammin’ the butt of the gun in CB’s guts like this,” said Walter, pantomiming the action.
“He’d’a shot you dead if it weren’t for us jumpin’ on the barrel of that gun,” said Franklin to me. “Darrin had some kind of supernatural strength in him, that’s for certain.”
Walter shot a withering look at Franklin, who raised his hands, then did the zipper-my-mouth move across his lips. Walter sighed again and pressed on.
“Like the man said, we all jump in on things, but then Darrin got clear of everybody for a moment, and had that piece leveled at my chest, which I personally assumed was the moment of truth for yours truly, but for some reason he decide to use that golden opportunity to jam the butt end one more time straight into CB’s face, which I agree with Antoine should’ve been the curtain call for your ass. CB goes flyin’, and Franklin here, wriggly little fucker that he is, gets back in Darrin’s face before he can swing the sawed-off back into the game.”
“See, Antoine. I tole you that,” said Franklin. “You gotta start believin’ me when I tell you shit.”
Antoine looked conciliatory.
“Sorry, man. You’re right about that,” said Antoine.
“So, basically,” said Walter to me, “you was out cold when that gun went off. So cold we figure you was dead or about to be. I’m not sure why you ain’t dead, like you oughta be, but that’s a question for modern science, which ain’t at our immediate disposal.”
“We shot the motherfucker, is what he’s sayin’,” said Jared.
“Shot him with his own piece,” Franklin added.
“And was gonna say it was you that done it, since you was dead anyway and past the point of arguing,” said Walter. “And before you get all indignant about it, you gotta admit, it was a natural decision.”
“Or tell the truth. Simple self-defense,” I said.
They all looked at me piteously.
“We all gonna pretend that’s sheer naivety on your part,” said Antoine.