Amnesia

by G. H. Ephron

  Staring thoughtfully, she smiled. “Now I see a bird. A bird flying.”

  I turned to the next card. Syl glanced at me anxiously. “I’m doing all right, aren’t I?”

  “Absolutely. It’s like I said, there are no right and wrong answers.” That’s what psychologists always say, and strictly speaking, it’s true. But responses can be very revealing, almost like looking at someone’s emotional insides not quite head-on but through a periscope. Of course, there are plenty of folks who say Rorschach cards are a crock, and I guess some patients have seen them so many times their responses are tainted. But I find them illuminating in a way that other tests aren’t.

  This time, it took her less than a minute to come up with a response. “It’s two people. Two women. They’re dancing.”

  “What makes it look like women dancing?” I asked.

  “Because of the breasts,” she said. “They’re touching … here … and dancing.”

  Then she turned the card upside down. “It looks a little different this way. This is an arm,” she said, pointing to one section of the blot, “and here’s a leg.” She pointed to another section. “This looks like something you chop with.”

  Sure enough, in the upper corner she had isolated an image that resembled a meat cleaver.

  The next words came in a rush. “This is the chopping block. This is the leg on the right and the ax over here. They’re going to hack the leg into pieces.”

  Syl was flushed and breathing faster. She looked at me and I nodded for her to continue. She gave the picture a quarter-turn to the right and sighed, suddenly relaxed. “Now it looks like a butterfly. A paper butterfly. But one of its wings is missing.” She took a deep breath as her face and neck grew paler, revealing hot pink streaks running down her neck and chest.

  I waited for her to continue. Instead, she said, “Do you mind if I take a break? I need to go to the little girls’ room.” The last card had struck a nerve.

  When she returned, she rolled the wheelchair into the room slowly. She pulled herself into position. It seemed to take an effort for her to lift her arms and set them on the table. “How much more?” she asked. She looked as if someone had turned off the light behind her face.

  “Hang in there. Just two more and we’re done.” I flipped the next card.

  She stared for a few seconds. She stifled a yawn and started, “It looks like a big bear. You know, with a lot of muscle on his arms and legs. This part up here could be the head. He has a large penis.” She pointed to a massive dark smudge between what could have been huge hairy legs.

  As she rotated the card, there was a tap at the door and in came Nurse Lovely, preceded by a rattling cart of medications. Angry, I got up and stood in her way.

  “You must have missed the sign on the door,” I sputtered.

  She looked at the door. “What sign?”

  “We’re testing.”

  “Ms. Jackson needs to take her medication.” As she talked, I marveled at how she could speak so clearly without unclenching her teeth. A few choice words sprang to mind but I kept them to myself.

  She poured Syl a cup of water and handed her a small plastic cup of pills. As Syl took each one, I stared at the rows of medication neatly lined up on the tray.

  “Do you always use those cups for pills?” I asked.

  “I guess they’re not as nice as the silver cups you use over at the Pearce, but we get by.”

  I looked at her impassively. “What I meant was, you don’t ever use white pleated cups to deliver pills, do you?”

  She held up a white pleated cup from the stack on her tray like a teacher showing an exceptionally stupid child. Pointing, she announced, “Drinking cup.” Then she held up one of the white plastic cups. “Medications cup. No, we don’t ever use these,” she said, toasting me with the little pleated cup, “for pills.”

  In my mind’s eye, I juggled competing images — the pleated paper cup of pills Syl had found in her bathroom, the white plastic cups on Nurse Lovely’s medications tray. I felt like Syl with multiple videotapes jockeying for position in my brain.

  Lovely watched until the last pill went down. “Good girl. The emergency call button is just over there in case you need anything,” she said, before clattering out of the room.

  After Lovely left, I held out the final card. “This is it. End of test.”

  Syl stifled a yawn and reached for the card in slow motion. She turned it upside down. Then right side up. “This is pretty,” she said, probably responding to the different colors. Then she traced her finger down the middle. “My mother used to tell me that if I was naughty, an evil spirit would take me away and leave behind a changeling.”

  “A changeling?”

  “Yeah. Like a little dead baby. Only not dead. Just empty, you know, without a soul. Doesn’t this look like one?”

  Syl was pointing to a narrow, wormlike shape at the center of the card.

  She turned the card upside down. “Now it’s upside down. Only it hasn’t got any hands or feet. And it’s so small.” She flipped it again. “There are wings growing where the hands and feet should be.”

  “What makes it look like a changeling?” I asked.

  “She’s so small. And transparent.” Then, in her small, breathy voice she added, “She’s a tiny, tiny little person trying to fly.”

  19

  AFTER SYLVIA Jackson returned to her room, I remained alone in the conference room writing up my notes. I put her figure drawings side by side and considered the contrast. The wellformed male figure, the attention to detail, spoke to her interest in men and their power over her. The void of the female figure, no more than an outline sandwiched between head and feet, echoed her own feeling of emptiness and loss. These same themes rippled through her responses to the Rorschach cards.

  It had been painful to watch her struggle. I was glad the testing was over. It wasn’t my goal to be Syl’s tormentor, but that’s what I’d become. She reminded me of my father, when he still had enough of his mind intact to realize that he was losing it. I remembered one time I was in New York for a conference. I was going to my parents’ apartment for lunch and then catching the shuttle back to Boston. I called that morning to ask if there was anything I could bring. My mother said they were all set. Dad was going to walk to the market to get coffee and milk. He liked the exercise.

  When I arrived, their apartment door was ajar and I could hear my mother inside, talking on the phone. An open apartment door in Brooklyn is about as common as a hippopotamus on the subway. I knew something was wrong. My mother’s voice was high and shrill. “But he’s been gone for two hours. The market is only fifteen minutes from here!” When she saw me, she hung up in disgust. “Your father hasn’t come back and the police are useless,” she said, her voice tight.

  I sprinted to the store where my mother thought he’d gone. I found him there, wandering down an aisle carrying a box of Brillo and a package of chicken cutlets. He didn’t know where he was and he didn’t know how he’d gotten there.

  During the walk home, he brooded silently. At the first street corner, he hesitated, anxious, starting and stopping, like a kid trying to dart into a rapidly turning jump rope. I took his arm and he let me lead him across.

  “I didn’t want to worry you” was my mother’s explanation for why she hadn’t told me Dad was having problems. This came on top of a series of lesser incidents — forgetting phone numbers, burning pots on the stove, repeating things — that marked the boundary between benign everyday forgetfulness and a more pathological situation. He was still taking in information, still cataloguing every time he screwed up, comparing his screw-ups to how he used to function. He was becoming increasingly anxious and depressed, afraid he was losing his mind. And in fact, he was.

  I remember his relief when I told him that I thought he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. At least it was an illness, something organic with a name other than crazy. And I remember my own distress. Here was a disease about which I
knew everything there was to know. I’d written papers, given talks. And I knew there was nothing I could do to make it go away.

  It turned out that our tenant gave notice a few months later. I called my mother and asked if they would consider moving into the apartment.

  The mercy of Alzheimer’s is that as a patient becomes more demented, the awareness of the dementia disappears. The opposite would probably turn out to be the case for Sylvia Jackson. As she continued to heal, she’d become more, not less, aware of her deficits.

  By the time I’d packed up the test materials and headed to my car, it was after six. I took the elevator down and walked along the nearly deserted hallway, through the lobby, and out to the temporary bridge to the parking garage. Outside, it was gray and raining. A stream of water clattered from a disconnected downspout onto the corrugated sheet metal that did little to protect people crossing the wooden walkway.

  I was relieved to get inside the glass vestibule of the garage where I pushed the elevator button and waited. Following a series of muffled creaks and groans, the elevator doors opened. The ride up three floors was slow and the elevator seemed to sway back and forth in the shaft. Its doors slid open to reveal a shadowy landing. I got out and squinted into the gloom. When the elevator doors shut, it became darker still.

  Fortunately, I’d managed to find a spot just opposite the elevator. My footsteps echoed across the pavement. Although the level I’d parked on was half-empty, a Jeep and a Dodge Caravan hemmed me in on either side.

  I slid sideways between my car and the Jeep, relieved to discover that, close as my neighbor was, he’d managed to get out of his car without damaging the recently painted green of my car door. I wedged my way inside. I turned the key in the ignition and the engine immediately caught. I exhaled and sat back. The warm smell of leather was comforting. I turned on my headlights and the concrete pillars I was parked up against lit up. I rolled down the window, adjusted the side mirror, and shifted the car into reverse. My backup lights brought the dark area behind me to life, light and shadows shifting slowly as I inched backwards. I jammed on the brakes as a car came whipping around the corner and past me. You took your life in your hands, backing out of a parking spot at the beginning of a row with assholes like that tearing down ramps as if they’re practicing for the Indy 500.

  I checked my rearview mirror again. The elevator doors were open. Someone in a dark coat was backing out of the elevator, turning around and pushing a wheelchair out into the garage. I could hear voices and laughter. Sylvia Jackson and Nurse Lovely were on their way to celebrate Syl’s birthday.

  Nurse Lovely eased the wheelchair down from the raised sidewalk and out onto the ramp. From far above us, I could hear the squeal of tires. Someone was starting his decent.

  Nurse Lovely paused to rummage in her purse. Then she continued, pushing Syl past my car and on toward the remaining cars parked on the level.

  Tires squealed, closer now. I could hear the roar of a car’s engine. Oblivious as only pedestrians can be, Nurse Lovely was taking her time. With her dark coat, she’d be nearly impossible to see, even if the descending driver were observing the posted five-mile-an-hour speed limit.

  I inched my car out, put it in neutral, and shouted, “Get out of the way!”

  Nurse Lovely stopped. “Oh, cool your jets, asshole, we’ll be out of your way in a minute.”

  Then she pushed the wheelchair steadily, deliberately, down the center of the ramp. The car I’d heard was now closing in. The tires squealed again, much closer. Headlights appeared and disappeared in the gaps between the concrete dividers that separated the level I was on from the adjacent ramp to the next level up. I leaned on the horn, filling the garage with a blast of noise, hoping it would slow down the oncoming car or at least motivate Nurse Lovely to step aside. She flipped me the bird.

  The tires squealed for what I knew would be the last time and the engine roared as whoever was driving accelerated onto our level. I leaned on the horn again, slammed my car into reverse, and gunned it. I shot out into the middle of the ramp, my tires screeching in harmony with another set of tires.

  A low red car swerved, clipped me, and jumped the curb by the elevator before caroming off the cinder block wall. The sound of metal against metal made me sick to my stomach. It figured — I’d just finished replacing the rear panels. I watched the taillights recede. The car’s rear end sashaying as it roared into the turn and disappeared down the ramp. The driver never even slowed down to see if anyone was hurt.

  I jumped out of the car. The wheelchair lay overturned near the bumper of a parked car. I ran over and righted it, expecting to find Sylvia Jackson lying crumpled beneath it. But she wasn’t. I heard her labored breathing before I saw her, huddled between two nearby parked cars. She was standing, but barely. In two steps, I was beside her, holding her up.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  She was trembling.

  “Hey. Everything’s going to be okay.” I helped her back to the wheelchair and crouched in front of her. “Just some idiot driver.” My voice sounded completely calm but I was feeling like I wanted to punch a hole in something or somebody.

  “Goddammit … shit … where the hell!” Nurse Carolyn Lovely was furiously gathering up the belongings that must have spewed from her purse when it hit the ground. “You — you idiot!” she sputtered at me. She reached underneath a nearby car and scooped out an open cell phone, its aerial bent. “I might have guessed it would be you. Don’t you look when you back up?”

  “I did look. That’s why I backed up! That guy could have killed you both.”

  “Don’t you mean you could have killed us both?” she demanded.

  Nurse Lovely shook the voluminous bag and peered inside. Then she stalked up and down the cars near her, checking underneath and in between.

  I went to fetch Syl’s purse, which was near where her wheelchair had upended. There, I found what Nurse Lovely was looking for.

  “This yours?” I asked.

  She came over and peered into my hand. She snatched the small silver handgun from my open palm. Then she stared down the ramp after the now vanished car. She looked back at me. “It wasn’t your fault? You didn’t — ?” she started to ask, but didn’t seem able to wrap words around what it was that I hadn’t done.

  “No, I didn’t. I just tried to get in the way so you wouldn’t get hurt.”

  “Sylvia,” Nurse Lovely said urgently, remembering her companion.

  “I’m okay, Carolyn. Shaken. But I’m not hurt.”

  “Did you see the car?” Nurse Lovely asked, more urgently.

  “It looked kind of like what I drive,” Syl offered. “Red. Maybe a Firebird or a Camaro.”

  “Is that what you were expecting?” I asked Nurse Lovely.

  She glared at me. “What I was expecting is none of your business,” she snapped. The hand she lifted to brush away a piece of hair was trembling.

  A formidable presence in the hospital, here she seemed smaller, younger, and far more vulnerable. I held out my hand to her and she didn’t resist. I helped her over to my open car door, where she sat, her shoulders shuddering beneath the dark wool of her coat. She was ashen and a film of perspiration coated her forehead. When people feel threatened, first there’s anger, then shock. I knew I’d be there, too, when I let my guard down.

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Really nothing. It’s so foolish of me. It’s over. It’s all over. And still, all it takes is something like this to stir up the feelings again, to make me lose it.”

  Syl had wheeled herself silently over beside us. “Carolyn’s ex-husband. He’s been harassing her for years.”

  “Do the police — ?” I started to ask.

  Nurse Lovely cut me off. “Restraining orders,” she sneered, “are a joke. You’re the lucky one,” she said to Syl. “At least your ex is in jail where he can’t get at you.”

  We all jumped at the sound of screeching tires. A car pulled up behind mine and slowly ea
sed its way around. A man leaned out the window. “That’s a helluva place to leave your car,” he called out before continuing on his way. The words of a rocket scientist.

  Syl rolled over to examine the back of my car. She let out a breathy whistle. “Nice car,” she said. “Vintage — ’67 or ’68. A 2000 TC. Pretty rare. And nicely restored.” She sounded impressed. My glow of pride faded as she continued. “Needs a new fender, taillights, bumper.” I groaned. “Probably a trunk.” I’d just finished working on the goddamn trunk. “You’ll never find replacement parts.” As if I didn’t know. “It’ll cost a bundle to fix this baby.”

  Clearly, her skills as an appraiser were still intact.

  20

  AFTER SYLVIA and Lovely had driven off, I moved my car to where I could get a better look. Steaming, I inspected the damage. The rear quarter panel was dented and scraped. The trunk wouldn’t close and the rear bumper was hanging off on one side. So much for the last six months of work. I took hold of the bumper and yanked and twisted, cursing and stomping until I managed to break the whole thing loose. Then I stuffed as much of it as I could into the trunk and tied the trunk down with some cord. I slid underneath and flashed a light up at the chassis. Oh, shit. That crimp in the frame wasn’t something I’d be able to fix myself,

  I drove home, the car shimmying, replaying the accident over and over in my head. The sound of tires screaming, metal against metal, metal against concrete. The overturned wheelchair. Syl’s body, shaking with terror, pressed against mine. The little silver handgun. Nurse Lovely’s anger and then shock.

  Sylvia’s overdose, the hit-and-run on the Charles, and now this. There had to be a connection. Or was I being paranoid? Accidents happen in parking lots all the time. But why hadn’t he stopped? I closed my eyes and tried to picture the car, the driver. Why did I think a man was driving?

  Preoccupied with my thoughts, I wasn’t prepared for the scene at my house. Two police cruisers, blue lights flashing, were parked in front. A dark sedan was backed into my driveway. As I bolted out of my double-parked car and tore up the walk, my heart racing, time seemed to slow. Please God, I thought, not again. My mother’s front door drew open and she stood silhouetted in its frame. I was flooded with relief, noticing at the same time that there wasn’t any yellow scene–of–the–crime tape strung across our front porch.