Patient H.M.

by Luke Dittrich

  As Terry crept down the cable, holding on to the two guide ropes at waist height for balance, the intricacies of the braid beneath his feet would have been invisible to him. Workmen had slathered the whole thing with a thick, hard layer of zinc paste to protect it from the elements. But still: The sheer mass of the cable must have been obvious, sufficient to hold up a quarter of what was then the world’s largest bridge. A foot-long slice of the cable weighed nearly two tons. And not only was it massive, it was supple. The bridge had been designed to give. If a gust had stormed down the Hudson from upstate New York at that moment, Terry would have had the unpleasant sensation of standing atop the world’s thickest braid of steel as it swung gently toward the sea.

  Hundreds of feet below, a handful of people in two small speedboats peered up toward the cable. Terry and his manager had contracted with the New York Daily News to allow exclusive newspaper coverage of the event now unfolding. They’d also contracted with an independent motion picture company, so there were both still cameras and movie cameras on the boats. A couple of the young man’s friends were out on the water as well, though they were only there to watch. At first nobody could see much of anything. They craned their necks, gazing upward, dwarfed by the monumental tower with its ten million pounds of exposed girders rising like God’s own Erector set from the murky river. Then eventually a small gray dot presented itself as a silhouette against the morning sky, inching slowly down the cable.

  When he reached the center point between the two towers, the convex of the bowl, Terry stopped. The bridge was designed to sag in the middle, and engineers believed it would come within approximately 196 feet of the surface of the water under a full load of cars. On this morning, however, more than a year before opening day, with no traffic at all, the center of the bridge was as high as it ever would be, at least 207 feet above the river. Terry looked down at the water below. The cameras in the boats were snapping and whirring, but he couldn’t hear them. He removed his street clothes and stood there for a few moments in nothing but a swimsuit.

  And then he dove.

  Norman J. Terry was a daring man and had already performed all sorts of remarkable feats during his short life. He had learned how to jump between the wings of biplanes and had once tightroped between the Carbide & Carbon and Mather skyscrapers in Chicago, more than five hundred feet above the pavement. Just a few months before this particular morning, he’d hung from the undercarriage of an airplane, waited till it swooped ten feet above the ground, then let go, landing safely.

  His dive, at first, was perfect. He swanned forward, stretched his arms above his head, pressed his legs together, and began a smooth downward arc toward the water. Soon he was approaching the river straight and true, at an accelerating rate of speed. The Daily News photographers fired off as many shots as they could and hoped the negatives wouldn’t turn out too blurry. One hundred feet he’d fallen, 125, 150, 175.

  Even today, eighty years later, the world record for the highest high dive is 177 feet. Terry passed through that mark and kept going, faster and faster: 180 feet, 190 feet. And then, according to the witnesses in the boats, something happened. His body, rigid, determined, confident, suddenly lost its composure. In midair, still fifteen feet or so above the water, he crumpled. Instead of staying straight, he bent in the middle and toppled forward, the beginning of a somersault.

  What was going through his mind in that moment? What caused that loss of poise? Had he suddenly realized that he had gone too far? That his ambitions had finally oustripped his abilities?

  He made it halfway through the somersault before landing on his back. The impact of the Hudson River against his skull knocked him unconscious in an instant, but worse was the impact against his spinal column, which ruptured his vertebrae and severed his spinal cord and prevented his unconsciously toiling brain stem from delivering all its usual life-sustaining imperatives, chief among them: Breathe.

  By the time Norman J. Terry’s friends had dragged him out of the water and delivered him to the hospital, he was already dead.

  —

  Strangely, considering its outcome, Terry’s daring inspired copycat climbers. A few weeks afterward, The New York Times reported that a group of teenagers, hearing of the feat, had dared each other to climb to the top of the bridge and that two of them had done it. They were arrested on the way down. Surely there were others who managed to climb and descend undetected, but I only know of one for sure. As it happens, he was, like Norman J. Terry, another twenty-four-year-old man from Pennsylvania.

  My grandfather was in his second year of medical school when he made the climb. There were no cameras, no police, no friends. He hadn’t told anyone of his plans, and it’s unclear whether those plans gestated for long before he acted on them. Perhaps he was just in the area, saw the opportunity, and seized it, hoisting himself onto one of the cables and beginning to climb. The climb would have been easy at first, almost parallel to the ground. And then the angle would have grown dramatically steeper. As the cable flared upward away from the island and the bridge extended out over the river, I imagine him climbing faster and faster, using both his legs and his arms to power himself up toward the tower’s peak. It was nighttime, and the river below would have been a dark morass. I imagine he kept his mind on the climb, on placing each foot in front of the other, on gripping the guidelines hard enough to keep him steady but not so hard that his hands would cramp, on his breathing and his balance.

  Eventually he reached the top of the cable and stepped off onto the flat roof of the tower. There were construction crates and bits of steel and coils of wire. Whenever the wind blew, he would have felt the tower sway beneath his feet. He had planned to climb up and then down right away, but now, up on that precipice, in the darkness alone, he couldn’t bear to move. He sat down instead, placed his back up against something solid, and shivered in the cold.

  —

  One of the things our brains do, constantly, unconsciously, whether we like it or not, is make connections. They make connections in the literal sense, in that our neurons are promiscuous, always reaching out with their yearning axons to bond with other neurons. They also make connections in the figurative sense, in the way we’re all familiar with, provoking endless little leaps of time travel during our daily lives. A few molecules of a certain burnt coffee bean adhere to the sensory neurons that project to your olfactory bulbs and build an instant and fleeting bridge to the last moment you smelled the same thing, in another town, city, year. A woman walking past you on a busy street talking on the phone suddenly laughs at something she hears, and her laugh—bracing and unself-conscious—conjures up an ex you’ve avoided thinking about for months.

  When I think about my grandfather up on that tower, my mind yanks me back to a parallel night of my own. My memory of that night starts with me creeping along a narrow path through a lane of crypts, toward a breach in a high stone wall that I knew would give me access to the Giza Plateau, that otherwise well-guarded expanse of natural desert and man-made mountains on the outskirts of Cairo. Once I was out of the cemetery and onto the sand, however, there was nowhere to hide. About a quarter mile separated me from the Great Pyramid, and I started walking as fast as I could, passing tents that belonged to the families who rented scraggly horses and ludicrously pom-pommed camels to tourists in the daytime. A small clump of barking dogs materialized out of somewhere and started running toward me. “Emshee!” I shouted, using one of the too few Arabic words I’d learned during the year I’d so far spent in Egypt. “Go away!” They kept their distance and slunk off as soon as I got to the top of the plateau.

  There are six pyramids in the Giza Necropolis, but only the three biggest ones are referred to as “great” and only the biggest of those three is known as the Great Pyramid. And it is. It’s great in the way no photograph can prepare you for. Over the course of a life, you accumulate internal templates of what is and what can be. You know what a building is. You know what they look like, roughly, and
you know their range, in size and spectacle. Then you see the Great Pyramid and your idea of what a building can be explodes in an instant.

  Which isn’t to say that we haven’t done our best to diminish it. The diminishment began after the Mohammedan invasion of Egypt, in the seventh century, when its smooth white limestone carapace was stripped away for use in mosque building, leaving its flanks rough and terraced. Much of its subsequent uglification was at least well intentioned. Modern Egyptians no longer willfully destroyed their country’s wonders; they just smothered them with unnecessary adornment. (See again: those dismal, pom-pommed camels.) In the case of the Great Pyramid, for example, a shabby museum squatted right at its base, twelve years old and already decrepit. Looking at the museum, and at the masterpiece that reared up behind it, I had a hard time not feeling that humanity’s grasp of architecture and workmanship had declined steeply in the past four and a half thousand years.

  And then there was the light show. Every evening, at eight P.M., the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities mounted a psychedelic spectacle on the Giza Plateau. A few hundred foreigners sat in a hemicycle of seats in an outdoor amphitheater below the Sphinx. Then, for forty-five minutes, the tourists would be presented with a ridiculous display of Pink Floydian lasers and strobe lights projected against the side of the Great Pyramid, while an Attenborough clone intoned factoids and dry-ice smoke billowed out from somewhere.

  But that night I was thankful for the garishness. I’d timed my visit for the beginning of that evening’s show, and when it kicked in and I saw the colored lights and lasers begin to splash up against the southern end of the Great Pyramid, I ran across the remaining distance separating me from the western side. I had counted on the light show to distract and partially blind the guards who patrolled the plateau, and as soon as I reached the pyramid I hoisted myself onto the first block and began to climb. Each block was four or five feet high, and each ledge was between two and three feet wide. I climbed quickly, keeping my eyes up as much as I could. The pyramid itself filled most of my field of view, but at its edges the sky pulsed with migraine colors.

  Within ten minutes I reached the final tier, just below the apex, 455 feet above the sand. Before it lost its limestone sheath, the Great Pyramid had ended in a point, one that was itself a miniature pyramid, rumored to have been made of solid gold. But now it ended in a square, flat summit, about fifteen by fifteen feet. In the center of the summit was one last bit of unnecessary ugly: a large metal tripod, bolted into the rock, aiming skyward, meant to remind people viewing the pyramid from below that, yes, it had once been pointy. I pulled myself up onto the summit, staying low so the light show’s audience wouldn’t see me. Then I lay back on the stone and looked up at the throbbing sky.

  I’d been in Egypt for a little more than a year, and that evening was a sort of self-conscious commemoration, a moment to reminisce about where I’d been and to think about where I might be going. I was twenty-four years old, and my résumé was a joke. I’d graduated from college with a degree in U.S. history, mainly because the other degrees I considered—English, economics, sociology—seemed more theory than facts, and my brain tank was ridiculously low on the latter. Since college, I’d had a few different jobs. I’d hauled furniture for Cheap Date Moving in Watertown, Massachusetts, bussed Walter Cronkite’s table at the Docksider restaurant in northeastern Maine, and for the past six months taught English to Egyptian oil rig workers at the Cairo offices of a Kuwaiti-owned, American-named company called the Santa Fe International Corporation. I’d moved to Egypt on a whim, inspired by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, an intricately interwoven series of novels that told a single story from four different perspectives. One of the quartet’s protagonists was an English teacher who had all sorts of romantic adventures in Egypt, and I figured maybe I could do the same. Beyond that, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Prior to my move, when people asked, I’d fallen into the habit of saying that I thought I might apprentice myself to a furniture maker, even though I had zero interest in carpentry and even less skill.

  But a few months before the pyramid climb, I’d started doing something that felt different from my previous jobs. I’d started writing. The Egyptian roustabouts I was supposed to be teaching during their vacation days had mounted a campaign of passive resistance, refusing to show up for class, which left me drawing a paycheck in an empty conference room overlooking the Nile. I had lots of free time and used it to draft long letters home. Eventually I decided to repurpose one of my letters to my grandmother—it was about a day I found a dead body while rowing on the Nile—and submitted it to a thrice-weekly newspaper called The Middle East Times. Then, armed with my single clip, I decided that my next target would be the New Yorker of Cairo’s English-language publications, a glossy monthly called Egypt Today. I walked into the magazine’s offices, asked to speak with an editor, and somehow walked out with an assignment: a feature about the statues in Cairo’s public squares.

  In retrospect, that sounds like an incredibly boring story idea, and later the editor told me she’d given the same assignment to dozens of other people, that it was a sort of hazing ritual. But I did my best with it. I roamed the city, notebook in hand, soaking up as much information as I could on a topic I’d previously known absolutely nothing about. I ended up filling the feature with mini-profiles—a man whose job it was to clean the statues, another who slept on the street near a monument to a famous Egyptian poet, a Spanish diplomat who oversaw the installation of the bust of José Martí near his embassy—and, to my surprise, the magazine accepted the story. Not only that, they were short-staffed, so they offered me a full-time job as a writer. My contract with the oil company was almost over, and I’d been planning to return to the States. I’d been thinking of going back to the moving company, working myself up from grunt to driver. The offer from Egypt Today had made those plans moot.

  I decided to stay in Egypt, to take the job. For the first time in my life, I felt confident about my future, and that confidence, that sense of heading in the right direction, cried out for some sort of dramatic commemoration. So there I was, up on that pyramid, under that laser-beamed sky, riding that unfamiliar surge of optimism. Eventually the lasers blinked off, and the darkness descended. The tourists left their seats, and I stood and looked out over the smog-choked lights of Cairo. A light wind carried a fine grit of desert sand and the faint sound of car horns. The pockmarked Sphinx, 455 feet below, seemed as small as a kitten, and the stars above were nowhere to be seen. The Great Pyramid had been there for 4,600 years, and on that night, for a few hours, it was mine alone under my feet.

  —

  My grandfather sat shivering on the top of the George Washington Bridge. Later he would speak about the climb many times to many people. He would speak about the cold, the height, the fear, and the long night spent waiting for dawn, hiding in a packing crate. But he never, that I’m aware of, spoke about why he’d decided to climb in the first place.

  I think I know.

  He was twenty-four years old and in the process of burying his old self, the one who’d worried about always being a failure. He was halfway through medical school and discovering gifts he’d never known he had. He was learning how to make sick people better, and he was learning that this was something he could not only do but do well. He was newly confident that he was on the right path, and this feeling, this revelation, cried out for commemoration.

  Of course this leap I’m making might be bullshit, but I’ll defend it. There is only one way we tell stories about other people, and it’s the only way we’ve ever told stories about other people. We find the connections between us and them, and then we use those connections as a bridge. Sometimes the connections are solid, buttressed by primary sources and interviews and every other sort of documentation you can imagine. Sometimes they’re tenuous. Sometimes they’re as ephemeral as two young men, divided by two generations, climbing two monuments for what the younger man believes must have
been the same reasons.

  My grandfather waited on top of the bridge until dawn. Maybe he slept at some point. I doubt it. I imagine him sitting there watching the lights of the city below until they were eclipsed by the light of the brightening sky. Eventually he stood and walked back to the cable and stepped out onto it. Like the man who’d jumped months before, my grandfather couldn’t see the thousands of tiny filaments that united to form this one massive rope of steel beneath his feet. He didn’t need to see them. He just needed them to sustain and hold him while his body coursed with adrenaline and endorphins and the sun began to warm him. Inside his skull, new neuronal connections were made, fresh impressions conveyed across yearning axons destined to imprint themselves as a memory trace that would reside there, inside him, until his last day.

  One more thing: The length of all those thin strands that made up the thick cables of the George Washington Bridge—108,000 miles—not only could circle Earth four times or stretch halfway to the moon but also happened to match, almost exactly, the combined length of all the axons in the average adult human brain. Of course, they are very different, axons and steel. In the bridge, the wires came together in lockstep formation, pooling their strength in accordance with some civil engineer’s formulas. In the brain, as my grandfather would have already learned during his first two years of medical school, axons came together and fell apart in infinite patterns that changed from microsecond to microsecond, conveying and creating everything we know and feel, believe and remember. He would have learned that there was no formula to describe what axons did, that they were the wiring of the brain, and that this wiring was embedded within small circuits, and those small circuits were embedded within larger ones, and the brain as a whole was made up of entire constellations of interlocking circuits. He would have studied these things and learned that a working human brain was so dauntingly complex that most of what we knew about it came from studying brains that didn’t work, brains whose infinite circuitry had been disrupted and whose basic functions had been stifled or altered in a variety of interesting ways.