Concussion

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  “No.”

  Look, the guy used me, okay? Bennet looks at the jury, tries to say with his eyes all that he needs to say. But I agreed to be used! He gave me so much more than money.

  “Sir, let’s switch gears for a moment here,” the attorney says, approaching with a slow saunter, like he’s pondering, like he’s just thinking this up right now. This is for dramatic effect; Bennet knows that. The closer he gets, the more Bennet can tell the doily thing is not fake hair, it’s just the way he combs it. Such an easy fix.

  “Had you ever indicated that you were scared as a result of the FBI investigation?” he asks.

  “I wouldn’t say that I was scared,” Bennet says.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Afraid?” Bennet says. On this point he needs to ponder. He leans forward, sits on his hands, can’t wiggle his damn toes. “If you would pardon me,” he says, leaning into the microphone. “The most frequent thing Jesus said, do not be afraid. I’m never afraid. What is it to fear?”

  The people on the jury exchange nervous glances. How did Jesus get in on this?

  Wecht allows a smile, and so does one of the guys from the morgue, in the galley. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be around Bennet, until you’re around Bennet again. The Jesus crack, that is so…Bennet.

  The attorney goes back to his table, looks at his notes.

  “In terms of your immigration status, sir, am I correct that when you entered the country, a part of the permit to enter the country was after you completed your medical education you were to return to Nigeria for at least two years to practice medicine?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Immigration and your permit status in the United States was an issue from the day you joined there, correct?”

  “If you say it was an issue, that makes it look like a bad thing.”

  “Nobody is making anything sound bad, sir. From the moment you came to the coroner’s office did that man, Dr. Wecht, do everything he could to help you with your immigration status?”

  Bennet looks at Wecht. “Oh, definitely! When everyone looked away, he helped me. And that is why I hold him in the highest regard. I’ve said it before, what I am today, Dr. Wecht made me. He supported me. He gave me the opportunity. He gave me a place to stand to express myself. He made me what I am today.”

  Bennet pauses. Waits for Wecht to look at him, acknowledge him. Or Sigrid? Hey, guys?

  Nothing.

  Bennet leans closer still into the microphone. “And I love him, if I could say that,” he says.

  Love?

  Love. Jesus. The words hang in the courtroom like wayward party balloons. Bennet knows that. Americans are not always comfortable with these words in public. But Bennet is just going to be Bennet, and to hell with everyone and everything else. He is almost forty years old. Bennet can only be Bennet! He puts his feet flat, firmly on the ground, collects himself, straightens his back.

  “Dr. Wecht was my adopted American father,” he announces loudly to the court. It feels good to say. Just being honest and frank like that. It feels like a lot of pressure letting go.

  “Are you under subpoena to be here, sir?” the defense attorney asks.

  “Yes, sir. I had no choice.”

  “You didn’t want to be deported—”

  “Nigeria is corrupt. It’s like the Mafia. I had to run.”

  So, yeah, the FBI had threatened to send him back, and he caved. Wecht would have to understand. It wasn’t as if he had anything earth-shattering to offer the prosecution. He could use his testimony to slip in positive words for Wecht. And Wecht would understand.

  “When all this is done with,” Bennet says, looking straight at Wecht, “we will reestablish our friendship.”

  Wecht looks up. For the first time in two days he looks at Bennet. He shakes his head.

  It feels like a shot. It feels like his hero just shot him through the heart. Are you not listening? Bennet Omalu is telling the world that Cyril Wecht is a good man, that he loves him like a father, that he is grateful to him, that he wishes everything could go back to the way it was when he was his loyal sidekick, Junior Wecht.

  Again Wecht shakes his head. No. A dismissal. I’m done with you, you piece of shit. Wecht is not a forgiving man, and when it comes to betrayal, no, he is not going to forgive.

  Bennet turns to the judge. “Can I ask Your Honor, please, I was hoping we could finish today so I can go back home to California.”

  Please, Your Honor.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen,” the judge says.

  “I have been here since Sunday,” Bennet whispers, deflated.

  “I couldn’t hear you?”

  “I have been here since Sunday. I left my house at three A.M. on Sunday morning.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come here Sunday, sir,” the defense attorney says. “May we have Government Exhibit 365, Page 797?”

  The clerk hands over the pages.

  Just let me go.

  “Are you going to be featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this week?” the defense attorney asks.

  “Oh, I’m surprised—” Bennet answers. “I don’t know, really.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I discovered a disease. Has there been media attention on the disease discovered? Yes.”

  “You have been involved in a lot of publicity for that discovery of yours, correct?”

  Publicity? Canada? Am I supposed to do something in Canada? What does this have to do with anything? Can someone please object? Relevance?

  “I have not been involved in the publicity, but my discovery has attracted so much publicity,” Bennet says. “When I discovered this disease, it was by accident. I never knew in my wildest imagination that it would attract the publicity it has attracted and the publicity it has generated.”

  “And just so the jury knows what we’re talking about,” the attorney says, “you claim that you discovered, while you were working at the Allegheny County coroner’s office on Mike Webster’s case, a phenomenon called CTE, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you have been all over the national airwaves in America on that phenomenon this past year?”

  “It went internationally, not just this past year—”

  “And publicity is good for your name and reputation, isn’t it?”

  “No, I truly, if you ask me, really, I don’t like it. I wish—I really wish I never touched Mike Webster’s brain. Why? Because it has generated so much—with publicity comes the effects of human behavior, jealousy, envy, rancor, meanness, which actually I do not need, truly.”

  He does not need the bullshit, this real-world bullshit. People claiming credit. People running to the press. People stealing credit. Right now he just wants to go home to his garage in Lodi. The garage has floodlights, and big doors to open for fresh air. And a wall of brown cupboards for storing stuff. He wakes up, reads his Bible, says his rosary, goes out and cranks some Pendergrass or Bob Marley, and he examines brains. Before he leaves for the office he makes Prema eggs. Mashes carrots for Ashly. It’s wonderful. He’s been trying to come to peace with it, trying to convince himself that getting kicked into obscurity is wonderful, and mostly it is, of course it is, there is plenty to like about obscurity. It’s the kicked part that he’s still struggling with.

  He wanted to stay in Pittsburgh. He wanted to be the new Dr. Wecht. He wanted to move into the big, beautiful house in Moon Township he was building, live happily ever after there with Prema and the baby. His dream house—they never even got a chance to move into it. Never once slept in it. The builders finished it the week they moved to California. The same week. That beautiful house, two white columns, brown brick, giant windows. Flatscreen TVs. Imported tile. Marble. Granite. Every single decision his and hers. The real estate agent said wait until the market goes up to sell it. He said fine, I’ll wait. He doesn’t want to sell it, and Prema can’t bear the thought of selling it.
So they still own it. It sits there vacant, like: There’s the life we were supposed to have. There it is. He drove by this morning before he came to the courthouse. He stopped there, got out of the car, felt the bitter air on his cheeks. He marched up to the front stoop like he owned the place. I own this place. He kicked snow off the stoop with his shiny new shoe. He sat there, blew steam. He considered calling Prema. Calling her to say, “Hey, honey, I stopped by the house.” But there was no way he would do that to her.

  “Now, sir,” the attorney is saying. “Have you referred to yourself as a brain chaser?”

  Huh?

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “I’m sorry. No.”

  “Dr. Omalu, do you recognize Exhibit 369, what that might be from?”

  He looks at it. Some announcement or something from SLI. Where did this come from? What does this have to do with anything?

  “I resigned. This is outdated. I resigned. It has nothing to do with— I resigned.”

  “Did you draft a portion of the description?”

  “No. Chris Nowinski did. N-O-W-I-N-S-K-I.” Motherfucking cocksucking ass-kissing bastard! Now, if we are going to talk about Chris Nowinski, Bennet’s head is going to explode. Is that what everyone wants to see here in this courtroom today? Is that why we are here? “I was not in support of so many things that he did—”

  “So you are no longer affiliated?”

  “No.”

  —

  Deliberations in the Wecht trial drag on for ten days and end in a hung jury in April 2008. “Call and cancel your luncheon appointments,” Wecht says to the press hovering outside the courthouse; he’s beaming, full of life again after two years living like a raisin. “All that I built up, and all that my wife and I saved, is gone, and I am very much in debt,” he says, and then he turns to Sigrid, huddled next to him in tweed. “I shall continue unfettered in the next, what, honey? Twenty years?”

  He doesn’t speak to Bennet, doesn’t answer his plea for forgiveness even though Bennet’s testimony was anything but damaging. Bennet confirmed dates of autopsies, receipts, payments, and other records that had hardly been questionable. On balance, he probably helped the defense more than the FBI, providing a portrait of his boss that was of a loving and generous man. It would take seven years for Wecht to finally speak to Bennet again.

  —

  A few months after the Wecht trial, in his garage in Lodi, Bennet finds CTE in another fallen football player. Tom McHale, a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. A steep postretirement decline ended with his taking a lethal dose of oxycodone and cocaine. He was forty-five.

  Still partnered with Bailes and Fitzsimmons, Bennet reports his findings to the group, now named the Brain Injury Research Institute, BIRI, headquartered at West Virginia University. “Tom McHale is positive,” Bennet tells them. They tell McHale’s family. This time, Bennet doesn’t want to wait to release the news. He doesn’t want to risk the rigmarole of NFL doctors demanding retractions or trying to humiliate him. He’s prepared to go public with it.

  “Please don’t,” the family says. They’re still reeling, trying to understand.

  Bennet is in his own way reeling, trying to understand. In a blink the whole CTE landscape has changed. Ego has erupted. Now there are competing scientists and arguments about turf and press releases and media training and money and ulterior motives.

  If you make a discovery, you’re supposed to tell people, because the discovery is important. But then what? Are you supposed to hold on to it, run around asking for glory? No, you are not. So what happens if someone else runs off with it, claims it as his own? Are you supposed to argue, try to get it back? Does anyone really care?

  No. The important thing is the discovery, and what it can do for the world, and how it can help people. Not you. You were just the messenger. You were God’s tool. Or, you were Mike Webster’s voice. Hey, you did the right thing, now let it go.

  But still.

  Nowinski has started a new version of SLI. He’s teamed up with the Boston University School of Medicine, and he’s still working with Dr. Cantu, and they’ve added a newcomer to the scene: Dr. Ann McKee, a BU neuropathologist who has been studying Alzheimer’s disease her whole career. CTE in football players comes as no surprise to her, although like others in the field she had never gone looking for it. She agrees to examine the brains that Nowinski says he will be able to bring to her. They create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy and start a brain bank. One of the brains Nowinski gets her is half of Tom McHale’s.

  Half to Bennet, half to Nowinski, that’s what the McHale family decided. Bennet asked first, then Nowinski came. Two competing groups asking for a brain. How does a family even understand something like that?

  The whole CTE landscape has changed.

  —

  Meanwhile, the NFL ups its damage control operation. In October 2008, the league makes what seems like one final attempt to discredit Bennet’s work. The request comes via Maroon to Bailes. He says that the NFL would like to send an independent researcher to West Virginia to look at Bennet’s slides and make his own judgment of the validity of Bennet’s so-called “discovery.” The league is still not willing to talk about Bennet’s work as anything more than a weird fluke of some sort, an exaggeration, wishful thinking on the part of an uppity young scientist trying to make a name for himself. They want to put the issue to rest, once and for all.

  “They want to send out a guy to look at your slides,” Bailes tells Bennet, who has had new sets of slides made up from the brains in his coat closet.

  “Forget it,” Bennet says.

  “No, don’t forget it,” Bailes says. “You don’t want to be the guy who doesn’t share his research.”

  “Julian, I’ve shared.”

  “Just come out and show the guy, Bennet.”

  Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, a thirty-year veteran of Alzheimer’s disease research, is said to be the consummate pro. He will take no money from the NFL, not even parking reimbursement; he will just look at Bennet’s slides and form his own opinion. Davies is more than a little doubtful; he will go on to speak of his skepticism countless times in the media. He has examined thousands of brains, and he’s never seen anything close to the degree of tau accumulation that Bennet has described in his papers. Bennet, he thinks, is well-intentioned but naive. Bennet’s claims are just too far-fetched; he must be mistaken about what he’s looking at. Davies has to be reminded that Bennet is a real scientist, a neuropathologist, not just some guy at a morgue doing autopsies and playing with a microscope.

  Davies, Bennet thinks, is an old white guy with silver hair who commands so much respect on the strength of being an old white guy with silver hair.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Bennet says, in the microscopy room down the hall from Bailes’s office at the West Virginia University Hospital.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Davies says.

  “Please, gentlemen,” Bailes says, “please sit down.”

  “Sit down, Joe,” Bailes says to Maroon. No one knows what to do with Maroon. He discounts Bennet’s work, then accepts it, then discounts it again. It seems he’s on his own private mission.

  The microscope has multiple eyepieces so several people can look at the same time. Davies takes one, Maroon another, and Bailes another.

  Bennet sits on the sidelines, tapping his foot. He did not get new shoes for this event. He is wearing loafers, the shoes of a man who refuses to care.

  “Whoa,” Davies says, focusing on the slide.

  “I told you,” Maroon says.

  “Wow,” Davies says. “What the hell is this?”

  “I told you,” Bailes says.

  It goes on like this for two days, slide after slide, the NFL’s independent expert saying “Wow.” Davies is transformed into a believer. It gets to the point where the only doubt Davies has is the staining of the slides themselves. (Jonette
! Oh my gosh, you do not second-guess Jonette!) Perhaps the technicians were not using state-of-the-art equipment, Davies says. He asks Omalu if he could take some of the stuff home. Tissue samples, pieces of brain to take back to his lab in New York, where he could make new slides with his own equipment, his own technicians, his own stains.

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Bennet says. “You take some pieces home, talk to your guys, see what you think.”

  So in his lab in New York, Davies runs his tests, and when he looks in the microscope, he is stunned all over again. The tau pathology is even worse—even more pronounced—than what he’d seen in West Virginia.

  He doesn’t believe his own eyes. He has his techs make new slides.

  When he looks in the microscope he sees the massive collection of tau tangles again.

  “Come look at this!” he says, calling in his team of researchers. “What the hell am I looking at? This will blow your socks off! And it’s not just in one case. I have three separate cases here. Bucketloads of tau pathology, and the one guy wasn’t even forty years old.”

  It is far more severe than anything any of them had ever seen in the most advanced Alzheimer’s cases—and in completely different regions of the brain.

  So Davies fires off a letter to Bailes and Maroon, confirming what they all witnessed in West Virginia. He tells them that he believes Bennet, that Bennet was right all along. He tells them he had been skeptical but now he’s a believer.

  He writes a report for the NFL, detailing his findings, saying yes, Bennet was right. He speculates about the role of steroids, and of specific genetic markers, and other possible contributing factors worth pursuing, but the bottom line is that Bennet Omalu is right.

  He writes to Bennet: “I remain convinced that you have discovered something, a new phenomenon….This discovery could prove of great importance to the field of neurodegenerative disease research….This is amazing stuff: you really have opened a major can of worms!”

  The NFL never releases Davies’s report, never makes it public.

  Instead, the league commissions a new study, tries a whole different approach. They send a team of researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research off to do a survey of retired players. More than a thousand retired players. The researchers are to ask the players about health issues, whether they have heart disease, cholesterol problems, cancer, and they are to ask them if they have ever been diagnosed with “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.”