When I awoke it was morning. My first awareness was a feeling of amazement over the goodness there was in the world, the presence of so many kind people in the world. Then came the conviction that I did not want to die.
Another day, another night, more voices in empty rooms:
“It’s me, Billy. It’s Carl Friesen.”
A hand grasped my hand.
I opened my eyes on a stranger, a middle-aged man.
“Thank God you’re going to make it, boy. Marian sends her love. Everyone back home is pulling for you.”
“Who are you?” I groaned.
The man looked away, sighed, squeezed my hand.
“I’m a distant cousin of your mom’s, Billy. I guess you’re too unwell to remember me right now. I’m the executor of your parents’ estate. You mustn’t worry about anything. Just concentrate on getting stronger.”
“Okay,” I croaked.
“This is the first time he’s spoken,” said a nurse to my visitor, as if I wasn’t there.
I remember the day they cut the casts off my body. My exposed skin looked yellow and was covered in a million red spots. It was tormentingly itchy, and the first thing I did was to scratch and scratch and scratch. I felt incredibly free, though I was shocked at the thinness of my arms and thighs.
There were physical therapy sessions, followed by the first attempts at walking, supervised by doctors and nurses. Because of my size, two hefty orderlies helped me to shuffle back and forth across my room. But I couldn’t support my body at first.
“You’ve lost a lot of muscle mass,” one of the doctors explained. “Don’t worry, you’ll rebuild it.”
I sat up in bed most of the time, staring out the window at nearby buildings, or watching TV. I couldn’t bear the programs for long, the noise and franticness, and I always switched it off. Neither could I focus on reading anything people brought me. Mostly I slept. Four times a day the staff made me walk up and down the ward, pushing a rolling walker that was specially made for a person my size. My greatest pleasure in life was to go to the bathroom on my own—the hateful catheter had been removed. Next favorite was the simple act of feeding myself, which was a return not only to liberty but to adult responsibility.
Pieces of memory:
Three of my teammates dropped in to my room by surprise one day, bringing me a gift. It was a New York Knicks tank-top shirt, signed with felt-tip pen by some of the major players. I could talk now, no longer rasping and croaking. I thanked them, but I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know who they were, really—not as individuals.
“I can’t remember your names,” I said.
One of them, a big black guy, started crying. One of the other guys punched him hard on the shoulder and said, “Stop that!”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Billy.”
He later joined the army, the young man who cried. He won medals and was killed in Iraq.
Another memory:
A box full of get-well cards had been saved for me, hundreds of them. It took a whole day to go through them, squinting my eyes at the messages, straining to recognize the senders’ names. I could identify none of them.
There were a series of tests and interviews with doctors.
“That’s why we suggest you stay with us a while longer, William. Unless we put you on the rehabilitation program immediately, you’re going to have problems with arthritis when you get older. We want to start you on a combination of general and sports-injury therapies. Of course, it’s your choice. You can go home whenever you wish, and you could take the outpatient route.”
“I don’t know where my home is,” I said.
A much longer course of testing followed, including interviews with psychiatrists and other physicians.
“William, your body has recovered remarkably well. The physical therapy department tells me that you’re gaining muscle and mobility. I think they’ll soon be letting you get around without the walker.”
“I practice walking without it whenever no one’s looking,” I told him.
“Any dizziness or falls?”
“None.”
“Excellent, but you’re not quite out of the woods yet. Your medical team would like you to be admitted to a psychiatric facility here in Manhattan, the Wilder Penfield Institute. Would you agree to that?”
“Am I crazy, Doctor?” I asked with a sinking heart.
“No, not in the sense of mental derangement or dementia. You’re quite sane, William, but you are suffering from amnesia.”
“I know I can’t remember a lot of things. But I feel sure it’ll all come back to me.”
“That’s very much what we’re hoping for. There are various kinds of amnesia, you see, and with most of them there’s partial or total regain of memory. I think your prospects are very good.”
“What kind of amnesia do I have, Doctor?”
“You have what’s called Retrograde Amnesia, which means an inability to recall memories from before the onset of the condition. In other words, from before your accident.” He paused. “Do you remember the accident, William?”
“A little bit, maybe a second or two. A loud bang, rolling upside down, blood. But I don’t know what happened.”
The doctor then proceeded to tell me more details. When he described my parents’ deaths, I wanted to feel something but couldn’t.
“Those poor people,” I said.
“Do you remember your parents’ faces from the time before it happened?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Do you remember seeing them during or immediately after the accident?”
Again I shook my head.
“We don’t believe you’re suffering from Dissociative Amnesia, which has purely psychological causes, the repression of memory due to severe emotional trauma when seeing something horrifying; for example, a child who witnesses a fire that destroys all his family, or a person who sees the violent dismemberment of a loved one. But we haven’t entirely ruled out dissociation as a partial influence in your present condition. Clearly, you’ve suffered severe trauma to your body, including skull fractures and internal bleeding in the brain, specifically in the medial temporal lobe. The tests show good physical recovery in that regard, but for the time being, the aftereffects of the head injury remain.”
“Will I always be like this?”
“Most people retrieve what they’ve lost, though it takes time and some professional help. In summation, William, you have a fairly common form of amnesia. The good news is that it’s usually temporary. You’ll probably find that most or all of your general knowledge is still available to you, though occasionally weak on specific information. Also, the hospital staff informs me that you’ve been learning new things and remembering them. This means you’re not suffering from associated Anterograde Amnesia. Can you remember all this? Can you say it back to me?”
“I have head-trauma retrograde amnesia. I probably don’t have dissociative amnesia, but you haven’t ruled it out.”
“Excellent.”
“But why can I access some things and not others?”
“Because different parts of the brain do different jobs, and the zone regulating your pre-trauma memories has suffered quite a blow. You might say it’s in deep storage. It’s all still there, and the odds are in your favor that everything will eventually reconnect.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
The middle-aged man from Iowa returned during my third month of recovery. By then I was living at the Penfield Mind-Brain Institute.
“Hello, Carl Friesen,” I said when he walked into the room, which made him grin and shoot two thumbs into the air.
I still couldn’t remember anything from pre-trauma times, but Carl told me a great deal about my past. It seemed abstract to me, like hearing the details of another person’s life. He had also been given Power of Attorney, he told me, and had opened a bank account in my name, here in New York City. I had to sign documents for the selling of the farm, and ot
her documents directing the funds into my new account. There were insurance settlements as well.
He came to see me three more times that week. During the final visit he asked if I would like to return to live in the Des Moines valley.
“You could stay with me and Marian until you get settled,” he offered. “Make a fresh start. You could continue your therapy at the local hospital.”
I considered it, but felt that it wasn’t a place I really knew. I thanked him sincerely, explaining that doctors here at the psychiatric institute were working with amnesia patients in a special way. I might move back west someday. Or I might return to school in the fall, if I had improved enough by then. And there was basketball too. I needed more time to think about the future.
Carl was an honorable man, and he did everything he promised. He left me with a box of photographs, offering to send me my high school trophies and other personal effects as soon as I decided where I would live. I wrote to him in July, asking him to wait on sending me any objects from my past. The photographs were enough for now. I spent long hours gazing at the faces in them, especially my mother’s and father’s. A trickle of emotion began to flow, along with a few flashes from my childhood and youth, no more than quickly passing scenes.
Daily I swam in the institute’s ground-foor indoor pool and lifted weights in the gym. I hiked up and down the staircases, to and from my tenth-floor ward, avoiding elevators, doing everything possible to increase my strength. Each day I spent two hours with a speech-language therapist, seeking reconnections by working on word association, language skills, general knowledge, and dialogues. My room was a private one, modern and sterile, warmed a little by a soothing art print of a landscape and a pot of plastic flowers. Eventually I replaced them with the photos from my past, taping many to the walls. I felt depressed at times, seeing little progress with the amnesia, and sometimes I awoke at night in a state of panic—feeling that I was completely alone in the world, without a family.
I made an effort to spend more time in the common room. There were a lot of suffering people in the institute, all of them afflicted with mental troubles, most of them on medications that kept them tranquil. It seemed that by engaging them I lifted their hearts a little. I frightened some of them at first, because they believed I was a hallucination. As we got to know each other, however, things settled down and I learned that I had a gift for making people smile.
One old man in a wheelchair caught my special attention. He looked very angry and never spoke with other people. I sat down across from him in the recreation room one evening and asked him if he would be interested in playing a game of checkers. He glared at me suspiciously, grunted, and then said in a conspiratorial tone of voice:
“Are you the count of Monte Cristo or the prisoner of Zenda?”
“Mmm, neither,” I answered.
“Me, I’m the man in the iron mask.”
“I’m Billy Revere,” I told him, offering my hand for a shake.
“Watch out how you use that thing,” he grumbled, indicating my hand. Nevertheless, he took it and gave it a single pump.
“Okay, I can see you’re one of us prisoners, so I’ll trust you. My name’s Giacomo Loncari. My children put me in here because they’re after my money. Non compos mentis, if you know what that means.”
“I don’t, sir.”
“Psycho, nuts, buggy, schizo.”
“Would you like the black markers or the red?” I asked him.
“Black. I prefer to be in the black, not in the red. So, what’s your opinion? Am I crazy?”
“I have no way of telling at this point, sir. I myself am not in the best of condition.”
He laughed. “Seems like you’re not only industrial size, you’re also an honest guy.”
“I hope I am, sir. However, I have no way of knowing if I was honest before I lost my memory.”
“Oh, you were honest, all right. It’s written all over your face. You’re so honest it’s sickening.”
“Your move, sir.”
“Stop calling me sir. And here’s my card. Call me when they set you free. My lawyers are busy trying to get me out of this hellhole even as we speak, so I should be home soon.”
“Thank you, Giacomo. I will call you.”
On the first day of August, I went to bed in a state of anxiety, realizing that at the present rate of progress, my full mental recovery could take years, if it happened at all. I hadn’t slept during the previous two days and nights, and now exhaustion overrode my fears.
During the night I awoke, groggy and somewhat disoriented, my heart banging hard from a nightmare. I had dreamed of two skyscrapers burning, people jumping and falling out of them, and then the towers collapsing. I felt a hand placed gently on my forehead. Only half-awake, I thought it was part of the dream, until I smelled an enchanting fragrance—the same scent associated with the warm feminine hand that had come to me during a painful stage of my time in the hospital.
The door of my room was open partway, and the night-light from the ward hallway filtered in. I tried to sit up, to see who was touching me, but the hand and the scent faded away.
I reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. I was alone in the room. Restless, I padded barefoot in my pajamas down to the nursing station. The nurse on duty told me there had been no visitors; no one had entered or left my room.
I wandered into the darkened games room and over to the large picture window—made of very thick glass, to prevent anyone from breaking it and committing suicide. I stood for a while looking out at the city lights, a million stars blazing from hundreds of office towers. The winking lights of a jetliner passed from east to west. I gazed at it all until my heart grew quiet again. And then it skipped a beat and began racing, because I noticed that the two highest towers were the ones in my dream. I had seen them many times before, but had taken no particular interest in them.
The next morning, August 2, 2001, I asked for a day pass, explaining to my psychologist that I needed to have some fresh air and to see the outside world. He wrote out the permission slip and gave it to me along with a card, on which was written my name and the clinic address, and a message requesting that any person or persons reading it would return me to the institute if I should lose my way.
When I set out on my walk, I thought the towers were almost next-door. But block after block seemed to bring them no closer. The nearer they came, the higher and higher they rose in the sky. So enormous were they that when I arrived at the plaza half an hour later, I put a crick in my neck looking up at the top. Entering one of the towers, I crossed a lobby as big as a cathedral, and at an information desk I asked a uniformed man if the building had water sprinklers in case of fire. He told me that it did.
“Why are you asking?” he said with a look.
“I had a dream that it was on fire,” I answered. “The other building too. They both burned from the top and then they collapsed.”
He smiled. “Well, pal, the chance of a fire in one of these is just about nil. As for both of them catching fire at the same time, that’s impossible. And nothing is going to bring them down, not even the worst kind of earthquake. They’re built to last forever.”
“That’s very reassuring,” I said. “Thank you for your time, sir.”
“No problem. Hey, how tall are you anyway?”
I left the building and crossed the plaza to the other tower. There I asked the same questions of a man at the lobby desk. He gave the same answers.
Greatly relieved, I went back outside, and sat down on one of the low benches around the golden-globe fountain. I guessed the globe was supposed to represent the world, but I thought it was a poor design, the way they’d made it out of broken pieces.
I chided myself for taking a dream too seriously. People dream all the time, I thought. Dreams are produced by the imagination. You had a hard blow, losing your family and your past. Your world fell apart. So you had a nightmare about a disaster striking the city. Your subconscious turned you
r tragedy into someone else’s tragedy, so you could look at it from the outside, symbolically.
I was glad to realize I knew words like symbolically and subconscious.
It was a warm summer day, and I was tuckered out from my long walk. I lay back on the bench, with my knees sticking off the end and my feet on the pavement stones. With my arms behind my head I stared up at the sky. Without warning, an airplane shot like an arrow across my field of vision, hitting the tower on my left. A huge fireball blew out through the side of the building, close to the top. Instantaneously, a second plane hit the other tower, with more fire and smoke. Tiny human shapes began to fall like rain.
I jumped to my feet, throwing up my arms to catch the people and to stop the buildings from collapsing. Then I blinked and everything was normal again.
I went back into the lobbies of both buildings and spoke to the guards on duty.
“Airplanes are going to hit these buildings,” I told them. “I don’t know when but it’ll be soon. You’ve got to warn people, you’ve got to get them out of here.”
The guards’ reactions were mixed: some were amused, some were suspicious, a few questioned me about “inside knowledge”. When I told them I had seen it in a dream and a vision, I was escorted out of the buildings.
“That’s the third one this week,” I heard a guard say. Back at the institute I realized my foolishness. I had tried to warn them with no evidence whatsoever. How were they to know I wasn’t a crazy person? How could they tell whether or not it was all in my mind? Then I thought maybe it was all in my mind. What kind of medication were the psychiatrists giving me? Could there be side effects like this?
I described to my psychologist what had happened. He informed me that I wasn’t on any medications, because there was no pharmaceutical treatment for amnesia, and otherwise my mental condition was stable. They were, however, giving me a heavy dose of vitamins with every meal, including a concentrated dose of the Bs. He attributed my dream and vision to anxiety.
The Fool of New York City Page 19