The Beautiful Miscellaneous

by Dominic Smith

  “Nathan, can you hear me?” the doctor asked.

  “Something about the car,” my father said, short of breath.

  Pop Nelson let go of the wheel as his body lifted off the seat. I was looking straight at him. His arms swung out wide, then went behind his back. The truck hit us at an angle, severing the rear of the pickup. I watched him take flight, his arms drawn behind him like a felon in handcuffs. The glass windshield didn’t shatter so much as explode into a million splinters of light. This was the last image before I died, the last memory of that old life: a blinding radiance before it jump-cuts to black.

  fifteen

  In the end they gave me tranquilizers to get me back to Wisconsin. I woke up in the children’s hospital with three other boys sleeping in my room. St. Michael’s was twenty miles from my house and my parents had gone home to bed. It was the middle of the night. I heard sick children breathing in the small hours, the sound of bodies on the mend, air sifting through the ceiling vents. Out in the corridor there were flickering lights and the faint sound of a television. In the last few weeks I’d spent hours in front of The Price Is Right, CHiPs, and The Love Boat. After so many years without television in our house, I was mesmerized by anything. I could get lost not only in the words, but in the grain of the screen, the neon pixels. Even though my father hated television (“Random photons swimming in a vacuum tube…”), he allowed me to watch all I wanted in the hospital. The sick and the resurrected were apparently entitled to all the mind-numbing programming they could handle.

  I stood in the corridor, my legs stiff from sedation. I was in pajamas again; somebody had changed me while I’d been on Valium. The children’s hospital was cheerier than the Michigan hospital. There were framed prints of alpine lakes, misty coastlines, and northern cabins dusted in snow. Instead of white, everything was painted sky blue. The nurse stations had Mickey Mouse night-lights. The smells were less intense: lemon instead of ammonia, lavender soap instead of surgical issue.

  I walked past a nurse station where a young woman dozed at her desk. The TV lounge was a narrow alcove off the main corridor. Two rows of vinyl chairs faced a color television on a stand. I sat down and pulled my legs beneath me. On-screen, a man stood in front of the state of Wisconsin, pointing at it with his index finger. A mass of cloud swarmed east across the screen, red arrows flashing. Gusty winds are likely all of tomorrow morning…afternoon showers, keep the umbrella in the trunk… The word gusty was white and dull, like a ball of wax. I watched the weatherman’s lips move as he spoke, thought I could detect the slightest delay between his mouth moving and the sound.

  As the days passed, I soon realized that the nurse at the nearest station fell asleep every night. Lights went out at ten and I waited an hour before stealing down the corridor. Some nights I watched the news and weather, others it was an old Western or sitcom—whatever happened to be on. The theme music from Jeopardy! was a parade of cyan discs; Alex on Family Ties spoke in platinum waves; Bill Cosby’s voice projected a series of royal-blue spheres. The colored shapes and sounds blended together as I flipped channels. Documentaries intercut with infomercials and cowboy adventures, detective shows juxtaposed with cooking classes and gangster movies. Like particle physics and jazz, channel surfing warped time. In the stop-frame dash from one channel to the next, one show bled into another. The voices of small-time racketeers in fedoras smeared across trivia contests; they were trying to swindle cash prizes and Bermuda island cruises. TV was the dream of a coma patient—disjointed, surreal, animated in a kind of chemical way. It wasn’t hard to believe that the sensory assault was coming from an old man on a gurney somewhere, anesthetized and drip-fed, the seep of his mind spilling across the screen.

  During daylight, I underwent various tests and read a lot of Time magazine. I noticed now that reading, like remembering and hearing, was also different. Words and individual letters had a distinct form; they had lives of their own: burn resembled an upright man with a mustache; spare was flat and rectangular, a gray floating window; safe was something substantial, a stone house. Every word was married to a mental image. I had to keep my attention on the string of words, instead of each one, so I could decode the barrage and take in meaning. Sometimes I wondered if I was hallucinating. I had a recurring fear that before long I would find myself talking to a colored blob hovering above my bed.

  I SPENT SEVERAL WEEKS IN the children’s hospital and consequently missed the beginning of my senior year of high school. My mother came each lunchtime with pies and strudels and stayed for the afternoon. My father came by after lectures. The day after my high school went back, he arrived carrying the senior math book he’d obtained from my teacher.

  “I thought you might want this,” he said, setting it gingerly on the bedside table. “The kids and your math teacher send their wishes.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I probably won’t open it until after I get out of here.”

  “No rush,” my mother said.

  My father said, “Mathematics is no different than the piano. You practice until the structure becomes invisible.”

  “Maybe if you want to be a concert pianist or a mathematician, that’s true,” my mother said.

  My father shrugged and turned to me. “Have you applied to your colleges yet for next year?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Earlier in the summer I had been looking into a half dozen schools, from Dartmouth and MIT to the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  My mother said, “Samuel, he’s been in a coma.”

  “I know that, Cynthia. I’m aware.”

  Not long after, my father brought one of his old slide rules and left it beside my bed, as if, magically, I would pick it up and topple an engineering problem. It reminded me of the way my mother had left her violin in the parlor all those years before, hoping for music. The thought of almost losing me had done something to my father. It resurrected a languishing hope that my mind was just like his.

  My mother took me for walks, partly to keep my father from lecturing me on the benefits of knowing thermodynamics before college. The leaves had turned early—sorrell and gold, strewn across the browning lawn of the hospital. There was a fountain and a sundial at the end of a wheelchair path. There was a river lined with limestone boulders behind the main building. She wore Indian paisley scarves and woolen mittens months before winter came. My mother has always felt the cold; her fingers and joints ache when the weather turns. One day, as we walked, she held my hand—something she hadn’t done since before I was ten.

  “Nathan, I’ve noticed your father’s moods. He’s plotting something. The slide rule is not a good sign. Ignore it.”

  “It’s his way of dealing with this,” I said.

  “Your father doesn’t deal with things. That’s the whole point. He lives in a universe made for one.”

  Something about this comment stayed with me. That night in bed I saw my father everywhere on television. He was the outsider—the sackcloth recluse; the pious mendicant; the Confucian kung fu master; the bunkered anarchist; the hillbilly mountain prophet sermonizing from an Appalachian cave; the gold prospecting seer of an old Western; the blind penitent out in the desert; the Crusoe castaway on a lost island, waiting for a ship to pass. In all these personas he walked alone, haltingly, like a man in leg irons. He had a face shaped by solitude—his dead stare and wary mouth, the unlined forehead of a loner. I knew exactly what my mother meant. On some level, my father didn’t believe that other people existed.

  LATE NIGHTS WITH THE TELEVISION continued. The doctors and nurses knew I left my room after lights out, but they didn’t seem to mind. I began reciting dialogue to other patients. The three boys in my room—Woody, brain damaged from a horse accident; Andrew, a football neck injury; and Mitch, who had cerebral palsy and was recovering from surgery on his legs—listened as I spoke from the side of my mouth, imitating gangsters, or talked with the brio of a game-show host. I saw their words flash before me, sometimes with taste and smell. He was a guy
on the lam. He was about to meet with a headache, you understand me? They would pretend to change channels and I would instantly dissolve into another genre. The deputy is the man to watch. Watch his hands, I tell you… Click. The barometer is steady. Temperatures are falling. If it feels uncomfortable, you’re not imagining things. Click. Fry without oil. Steam is your friend. Click. What is Tegulcigulpa? I continued for hours, the other boys urging me on. I captured the accents and tone of delivery. Words swept across my mind no different than clouds spiraling across America on the Weather Channel.

  One night, at the end of fall, they discovered my new talent. Dr. Cleaves, a chain-smoking intern, had watched television with me a few times before. By now I was known as the midnight man. We sat in the vinyl chairs, our feet resting on a coffee table piled with Christian youth magazines. A late-night movie came on—The Body Snatcher, with Boris Karloff. Dr. Cleaves went to change the channel, but I held on to the remote control.

  “I watched this yesterday,” I said. “They must be replaying it.”

  “Do you want to watch something else?” he asked.

  “No, leave it for a minute.”

  He left the TV on that channel and I leaned in.

  I was surprised by how much I remembered as the titles dissolved onto a picture of Edinburgh Castle. I felt I was watching something I’d created in my own head—the bony white horse coming down the lonely street; the young medical student sitting in the abandoned graveyard. Just as Dr. Cleaves was about to change the channel, I began reciting the dialogue, saying each line a moment before the actors. I had their accents and timing down perfectly. I spoke the dialogue between Mrs. McBride and Donald Fettes as they stood by the grave of her newly departed son, a small terrier standing guard.

  He’ll not leave the grave—not since Wednesday last when we buried the lad.

  Dr. Cleaves took his feet off the magazines. Sometimes I spoke at exactly the same time as the actors—Mary Gordon and Russell Wade. My voice lilted like hers, contained traces of a working-class Scottish upbringing. His voice, as I mimicked it, was less broad, more earnest: a poor boy making a go of it in the city, becoming a doctor.

  “What are you doing?” Jason asked.

  I could hear his voice, faintly, and smell the nicotine on his fingertips. He got up from the couch and disappeared for several minutes. When he returned, the sleepy nurse was with him. They sat down beside me, alternately looking at me and the television.

  I’m studying under Dr. MacFarlane—that is, I’ve been studying until today…

  We continued like this for close to an hour. My dialogue echoed theirs, sometimes overlapped. I stared at the screen, transfixed by the filtered light, the gloomy examination rooms where Dr. MacFarlane probed his patients, the gleaming marble tables in the anatomy room. If someone had asked me what the movie was about, I don’t know that I could have given an answer. It was like staring too closely at a smudge on a pane of glass, oblivious to the view on the other side. A few other nurses and another intern stood by the wall, watching. Nobody spoke. By the time someone realized it was one in the morning the movie was half over.

  It’s because you were afraid to face it—and you’re still afraid…

  Dr. Cleaves switched off the television, but I continued to recite.

  No, I’m not afraid. Tell! Shout it from the housetops…

  “Nathan, it’s time to go to bed.”

  I stared at the blank screen. I could hear the TV’s diodes cooling. I clearly saw the Scottish pub where MacFarlane and Gray were having their drunken argument about experiments on the dead. Dr. Cleaves touched my arm and helped me to my feet. The other nurses and the doctor went back to their stations. We walked slowly down the corridor to my room, where the other boys were fast asleep. Their shoes and slippers were placed neatly beside their beds. I got under the sheets and put my hands behind my head.

  “Get some rest,” Dr. Cleaves said.

  He sat there a moment longer, made sure that I was going to fall asleep.

  “At the end of the movie you know what happens?” I said.

  “No.”

  “The white horse and carriage go over a cliff,” I said.

  “It’s just a movie.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Get some sleep,” he said, walking out into the corridor.

  I closed my eyes. The white horse whinnied as the carriage fell toward the sea.

  sixteen

  After my TV recital I underwent a battery of memory tests. A neuropsychologist, Dr. Lansky, was brought in from a nearby hospital—a man with a graying goatee and a bald head. He gave me things to memorize: pages from the phone book, restaurant menus, baseball scores. Each time, I recited the information exactly; it didn’t matter whether the words came to me through reading or by hearing. He double-checked my X-rays and CAT scans and confirmed that there was no visible change to the brain from the accident. Yet I could now remember thirty pages of a phone book, with names, numbers, and addresses. Initially, I needed somebody to guide me to the information—the first line of a movie, the first name on the phone-book page—then the cascade of images took over.

  One day, Dr. Lansky had a cold and as he recited a table of numbers to me, his voice cracked and thickened. Previously, I had been able to recite a series of random numbers, nonsense syllables or meaningful words in any order, forward and backward, so long as I had a few seconds in between each word during the initial memorization. It was simply a matter of laying each word or sound image on a pathway—the street where our house stood—and naming them as I walked along the street in my mind. I laid objects and people on doorsteps, on rooftops, and in swimming pools. Numbers were the easiest to remember because they were all people with a definite gender: 1 a stoic, tall man; 4 a waif of a woman with her arm in a sling; 9 a skinny man with a large head…. For some reason on this occasion, Lansky’s voice was changing the images, sending splotches across my number-people’s faces. I couldn’t remember past the first three numbers in the series.

  “Having an off day?” he asked.

  “Your voice,” I said. “Normally it’s silver and smooth. Today it’s scuffed and brown. It’s getting in the way of the words.”

  He looked at me, jutted his bottom lip slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t see the numbers because of your voice.”

  He rushed a note onto a piece of paper and told me I was free to go watch television.

  My father insisted on seeing all the results of the tests and looked at them as if they contained the same kind of data as his electron collision readouts. He devised memory drills of his own, showing up with Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. There was something about it he didn’t trust. He watched my eyes scan the dictionary words and definitions. After several pages he took the book and placed it beside my bed.

  “Tell me what you remember,” he said.

  “All of it?”

  “Say them,” he said, his eyes slightly closed.

  I started with aardvark, calling it a burrowing insectivorous mammal, then aardwolf, a hyena-like mammal, making my way to acclimate—to accustom or become accustomed to new surroundings or circumstances. He touched his face delicately and stared at the dictionary. He looked up at me.

  “Where are you getting this from?” he asked.

  “The words remember themselves. They follow me around.”

  “You’ve changed the frequency of your brain. It’s like you’re eavesdropping on the unified field.” He looked out the window. “This is an anomaly, Nathan. Anomalies only occur when something’s brewing.”

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  “We test this. We ask the right questions.” He puckered his mouth, tasting the possibilities.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Yes. All right, then. Let’s ask the questions,” he said.

  During my next visit with Dr. Lansky, he gave me a series of tests involving sound tones. He produced certain pitch frequencies usin
g something resembling a tuning fork with thin, red wires attached to a readout device. After each tone, he asked me what I experienced. They all produced different images in my mind: bronzed circles, silver strips, glistened steel, earth-colored ribbons with tongue-like edges. Many of the images also had tastes and smells. For example, one sound came as a contrail of neon pink that made my tongue taste watermelon. He repeated these tests over the next week, and every time the same variables produced the same sensory experiences.

  My parents and Whit watched me undergo these tests, half scared, half proud. When Dr. Lansky called us into a conference room, my father was prepared for anything. He had a notebook in his lap. I sat between him and my mother.

  “How’s the gray matter holding up?” he asked the doctor.

  My mother shot him a look. I fidgeted with my hands.

  “This is a remarkable thing,” Dr. Lansky said. He sucked on a cough drop. I could smell eucalyptus filling the room.

  “What do we have here?” my father asked, drawing a margin of black ink down a fresh notebook page.

  Lansky said, “It seems that Nathan has developed synesthesia.”

  “I’m not familiar,” my father said.

  “It’s a condition in which the boundaries between the senses become fuzzy. We sometimes call it cross-modal association. The most common form is colored hearing, when sounds elicit specific visual effects. But Nathan has a mixture of joined sensations. For example, when he hears or sees the word bell he sees a series of undulating purple lines, but he also tastes something bitter on his tongue. Some words also give him a feeling of a certain texture, like sand or cement, let’s say. Sometimes there are smells, too. It’s the exact same sensation for the same word or sound every time.”