The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  3

  Gradually, smashed-up time starts to order itself, the fragments becoming sequential. One thing happens and then another thing comes after it, and he can look back and remember how it went together. He starts to anticipate how things are supposed to go before they happen, to feel himself living forward through minutes and hours and days. The same thing is also happening to words, they are falling into an order.

  “If you understand me, blink twice. That’s two blinks, like this, for yes. Oh gracious me. Now blink three times—three times means no. Do you know what a cat is? Good. Now answer this question. Am I a cat, me, speaking to you? No? Good. Am I a woman? No. Good. Am I a man? Yes. Excellent. So excellent. I could cry, I really could.”

  In the mornings different women clean him, rub his skin. But the same one always comes to twist his limbs and he’s always afraid of her because of the pain. In the afternoon it’s another constant one, the one with the toys and the music. When the light is fading the man with the helmet and the gas tank arrives. In between all of them is the chunky bald controller, always talking.

  “Do you recognise these? Let’s take the first one. I’m going to say different names for this one. You blink and stop me if you think I’ve said the right name for the thing. Okay? Dee. Eff. See. Kay. Jay. Ay . . . Ay? Are you sure? Yes, you are. I can see. And you are right. This is an A. Wonderful. So wonderful.”

  After the beginning most things still had no names. So they brought objects before him and pictures of objects and of living things and he was asked to pick their names. A kettle, a beach, an elephant, an egg. They brought the world before him in tiny pieces and he named the world, fragment by fragment, building it up, and forgetting and remembering and remembering again. The woman who so terribly stretches his limbs for him is Ms. Roberts. The woman with the music is Mrs. Lobenza. The one with the helmet is Mr. Rajbunsi. And the bald controller is Dr. Norman Meltzish. Call me Dr. Norm. Dr. Norm shows two hairy fists with thumbs on top, holding them vertically together in the light from the window.

  “That’s about what a human brain is. A little under a kilo and a half of wet matter floating in about a hundred and fifty millilitres of cerebrospinal fluid. When Leonardo da Vinci first dissected the brain in 1504 he thought the human soul was situated in the cerebral ventricles. Today we think we know better, but the truth is we’re still blind—maybe that’s all we’ll ever be in neurology. The human brain can understand a watch or a heart because it is more complex than those simple things. We can look down on them and know them fully. Similarly, only something more complex than the brain can understand it. Something has to look down on us, to find the true seat of the soul. But that thing does not exist. We’re doomed that way. We’ll never grasp the human mind because we can never escape it.”

  It makes him so tired to hear Dr. Norm talking this way, droning, standing there by the window and looking out. And what is his own name? Who is he? He has started to make word sounds, his tongue clomping around the mouth. Moaning noises that frighten even him.

  “You were a transfer from Joburg General. You were first admitted there, from Emergency, and after a lengthy stay they sent you on as a hospice case. To be brutally honest, there was no family consent to switch you off. If there had been you probably wouldn’t be here. All this happened before my time. Patient Number 975-A12-89—that’s you. That’s all your chart has ever told us.”

  His name is Patient. He is a complicated, damaged organism and his name is his essence: pure waiting.

  “We have no other information about you. Whatever details Emergency might have had at the Joburg Gen has been lost in paper records that no longer exist. I’m sorry. I can tell you you were treated for significant skull fractures, including a nasty depressed bugger on the posterior right side and a very unfortunate basilar number. Evidently they went for a decompressive craniectomy to relieve the brain swelling. That’s where they lift off a nice-size chunk of your skull like a cap and keep it on ice for a few months while you heal. They put it back. Of course.”

  The garden outside is terraced, falling away in levels toward the high brick wall at the base. The sun shines on red dirt and the rocks are yellow, banked at the ends of each terrace, and formed into stairs between. Down there past the flower beds and the big trees there is a sunken greenhouse that was once a tennis court and also a cactus bed in the shape of a swimming pool. Beyond the garden and the high wall is a view of the city all blotted green by the tops of the trees, a forest broken by rooftops, and stretching on toward the hazy smudge of dust on the horizon.

  “The name of this city is New York, London, Amsterdam, Cairo, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Moscow. Moscow? No. That is not correct. This is not Moscow. This is Johannesburg. You’ve forgotten we’ve told you that many, many times. Johannesburg. Jo-hann-es-burg. Joburg. That is the Brixton Tower. This must be the city where you are from, Patient. Maybe you were even born here.”

  But there are no places in him when he tries to find them. There is only what he sees here, the institute, the grand mansion of stone with chimneypots on top and a falling garden in the front. The other patients wear whites like his and the staff are in their greens. Dr. Norm wears corduroys and no tie. He holds out a pointer and Patient opens his jaw like a rusty gate to take it in his teeth. With pain and practice he can turn it, aiming at the board full of letters. Laboriously, he communicates: WHER WE??

  “You know what this place is. You’ve been told many times. Fight for it now, try to remember.” Patient blinks twice, and waits. Dr. Norm inhales. “This is the Linhurst Institute. We are in upper Parktown, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mansion country. Up on the high ridge where the Randlords built their piles. The Linhursts are old-money Anglos. This was a family home. Donated for brain treatment research. My work here’s been focused on traumatic brain injury.” He smiles. “People in your line—but nowhere near.”

  His room is 253. This means second floor. The first thing he starts to move after his mouth and his head is the index finger of his right hand. The ability to move spreads from there, like an advancing skin rash, gradually enveloping the arm. Dr. Norm draws a diagram and tells Patient what the Glasgow coma scale is. “Your score was a three,” he says. “Pretty much the lowest you can get.” By this, Patient understands that a low score is not a good thing. Coma, he thinks. The word feels steep in him, unassailable, like a tower of stainless steel he must try to climb. Dr. Norm is showing the bottom of a diagram he has drawn. It goes down from being dazed to being knocked down, to being confused, to being out cold. Senseless. “That was you,” he says. “But a case like yours, Mr. Patient—there are no charts for it. It doesn’t happen. You’re as rare as spontaneous total remission from advanced terminal cancer.”

  Patient tries to concentrate, to raise the pointer again with his tingling right arm; there is a vital question that must be asked. But the question is too huge inside him, like that rearing, steely word coma. He sweats and trembles. The pointer falls.

  4

  It’s only when the headache stops that he realises he has always had one, or most always, and that it’s always strongest after Rajbunsi the helmet man leaves him. He communicates this to Dr. Norm and Dr. Norm says the helmet is the reason he has made his recovery. “I invented it. The Meltzish Protocols. Oxygen and mild electric current together. To stimulate neural regeneration. My thesis is that the brain is like a biological electronic device. Think of it like running a laptop on battery versus plug-in. As soon as you unplug, the screen goes dim and process speed falls off. But plug it in and it brightens up and starts zooming. This is my attempt to plug your brain in.”

  Labouring, trembling, moaning, drooling, Patient points at letters on the board: LAP TO??? Dr. Norm’s laugh booms and takes a while to mellow to a chuckle. “Of course, yes. I’m sorry. A laptop is a portable computer. Small enough to use on top of your lap, hence lap top. I’ll bring one to show you.” Then he leans in, narrow-eyed. “You know what computers were like, Patient. You can rememb
er. Can you remember computers? Yes you can.”

  Patient blinks thrice. Dr. Norm winces. Then, ponderously, Patient raises the stick of his good arm to the letter board: CO MU

  “Yes, coma. Comatose. That’s what you have been all this time. Well. Technically a persistent vegetative state.”

  HOW

  LONK?

  Dr. Meltzish looks at him with his round bald head on one side. “You know this, Patient. I’ve told you. It’s in you.”

  TEL

  Dr. Meltzish shakes his head. “Not this time. You fight for it. Look for associations. Find those memories. They are in there.”

  TEL!!!!

  “Goodnight, Patient.”

  Nobody understands concussion and traumatic brain injury. There is invisible trauma to the cells. Acutely, this is akin to an electric short or an emergency shut-off valve. Some view it as vascular in nature. Blood supply. There is the issue of potassium flux and calcium uptake. Dr. Norm talks of whiplash and coup and contrecoup, the way the brain slams against the sides of the cranial cavity. Shockwaves through jelly. Shearing damage of white-matter tissue. But after the swelling goes down there are often only symptoms left to deal with and no obvious visible lesions.

  “My view is that there is malfunction on a microscopic level we can’t pick up. Maybe one day when scans get good enough. Until then we keep working, you and I. Get our paper published. Push the frontiers of knowledge. Onward.”

  Mrs. Lobenza takes him to the basement every day. On the mats and benches, around the weight stacks and rubber bands, he is forced to try to pull himself up, or push against her resistance as she bends him and twists him, with the musket balls of sweat popping from his trembling forehead. Afterwards he will receive a bath and a rubdown with the chemical emollients designed to combat the bedsores that still plague his flesh. He is then given breakfast. They feed him well on Dr. Norm’s regimen. The brain needs fats. Eggs fried in butter and avocado smeared thickly on his toast. Salmon or lamb or sausage for supper, nuts to browse on. Sardines at lunch. After breakfast he is wheeled to the balcony on the second floor. This is his favourite time. If it’s chilly the nurse will leave him with a silky Sotho blanket over the legs, but normally the sun is bright and warm. He will sit with one of the oversize-type books and try his best to learn to read again. A word at a time. A comma at a time. He can understand the individual units, but his mind keeps swiveling away from the sense held in the length of a line, a sentence. He’ll put the book down and stare out above the terraced gardens of the Linhurst Institute and try not to become enraged. Rage is always there. It billows up in him like toxic smoke and there is nothing to restrain it. Just as there is nothing to hold back bouts of racking sobs and deep sorrow that come over him with no warning.

  TEL HOW LONK?

  “You’re the impossible young man. You should be dead. We understand nothing of the brain. A woman in the UK was hit by a car. In a coma for eleven months. When she came out of it she spoke English with a thick Japanese accent. Never been to Japan, never knew any Japanese people. There is no explanation.”

  HW LONK?

  “Try to remember, Patient.”

  JIS ANSER

  “All right. Look at me. Watch my lips. Are you ready?”

  YES!

  “Six years. Nine months. Three days. The miracle kid.”

  5

  Time passes and other limbs twitch into life, fibre by agonised fibre, just as the fibres of memory within his skull begin also to pluck and strain. Dr. Norm says memories are locked in brain cells in long chains. If one cell “comes right” it will tug its neighbours into “coming right” too. He says Patient has to listen in himself, to “pay quiet attention” for the tiny flashes of memory, those are cells “sparking up” in a dead chain. Patient is to take encouragement from this process and not lose heart. Patient wonders how memories can live inside cells which he pictures as soap bubbles filled with jelly. How can taste be written there? Light and noise and feeling and faces.

  “We know nothing. It will happen.”

  His speeches by the window. His hairy fists. Patient never understands these monologues, but he appreciates them since so long as Dr. Norm is speech-making he is not testing him in some painful way and the end of another of the exhausting sessions is getting closer. He wants to please Dr. Norm with his progress, but he is always failing him, it seems. Dr. Norm and his plans for “their” paper that will stun the world. The Meltzish Protocols. Patient understands how lucky he is to be here, to have been severe enough, alone enough—and picked as the case study. He must remember to be grateful.

  Months and months slip by like the brushing of the soft Sotho blanket over his shins. He is wheeled out to watch musical performances with other patients. One time he sees the notes, the brass sounds of a saxophone like syrup in the air. Dr. Norm says such visual-temporal hallucinations are “part of the cure.” A lot of things are part of his cure. The fact that Patient still can’t remember almost anything, that the flashes refuse to come together into anything coherent, is also “part of the cure,” and that Patient’s muscles remain stubbornly atrophied—that too is “part of the cure.” Patient says—he is speaking now, slowly masticating on each syllable like a mouthful of raisins—“Why I’m. Here? How’d I get?”

  “I’ve told you many times. All we have on your chart is Patient Number 975-A12-89. All I know is I started treating you with my protocols in ’ninety-two, never losing hope. And here we are, my friend. Making history.”

  “My . . . family.”

  “We have nothing.”

  They stop the last of the helmet treatments and the headaches fall off completely. Dr. Norm shows him an album cover with a picture of George Michael, a movie ad for Top Gun starring Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, a Wielie Walie lunchbox, a blue two-rand note with Jan van Riebeeck’s face on it, a striped cricket cap from a primary school, a Super M milk carton, green for lime flavour, a Rubik’s Cube. “Remember,” he says. “Remember this forgotten world.”

  6

  It’s cold weather, the cold seeping through the big stone house so that people are plugging portable heaters in everywhere, when Patient first starts to walk by himself. It brings him so much pain he almost prays his motherloving legs will go back to sleep forever and ever amen. Mrs. Lobenza puts him upright between two horizontal poles and he has to work his way down, his weight shared by the arms, the hopping hands. His arms have thickened out by now, even the wrists. All those fatty meals are being turned into useful tendon and bone and muscle. The body is a most wondrous survivor. He keeps working. He begins to walk unaided. It’s hot then, another season, another year, the sweat saturating his shirts. Dr. Norm has been away for a long stretch. Even before he disappeared he was there only in spurts, always seeming distracted. Now Patient can read more than a page, sometimes more than a few, and keep it all together in his head. Suddenly he remembers a dog with a name that whispers to him, just under the tongue until he dreams it and sees her: Sandy. Of all the family members it is the dog that comes first. He remembers riding her in diapers, with a woman’s hands holding him in place, warm brown hands around his middle. These first memories change everything. He starts to see that Dr. Norm must be correct. His confidence and hope lift. His brain cells are rebuilding themselves up there above the eyes, rewiring. It’s been one hell of a costly renovation job, but now some lights inside are starting to flicker back on, showing him things he has stored away in those gloomy, chaotic rooms he cannot see. Gradually he gains impressions of a childhood. The maid in the brick room in the back, she was the one who held him on Sandy, and the softness of her vast bosom. And an old man who spoke a language he couldn’t understand but felt warmly toward, who sat on the sighing plastic cushion underneath the maroon branches that the sun poked through and the branches were two plum trees on the other side of the garden opposite a house. The phone in the house was green and hung on the wall in the kitchen. His room faced the garden, had a metal desk. He put a padlock
on the door. He doesn’t know why he would do that. His mother had her own funny vocabulary—“gribble grobbles” and the “twinkle toes”—and her dreamy ways. And he remembers the man of the house who must have been her husband, his father, that mashed mug of used-up flesh with the big lumpy ears sticking out, the steel-wool hair the colour of salted carrots. He remembers a blue hall with a high, hollow ceiling. A choir of men singing a mystery language. A feeling of awe. White robes. Letters of an alien script.