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Excerpt
Prologue
Accidents divide things into the great Before and After.
"Even before his brain injury, Alan had a hard time remembering
names," I'll say. "Since Daddy's accident, I have to work more,"
I tell our daughter, Kelly. The brain injury community marks time
by asking how long someone has been "out of" injury, the same way
bereavement counselors ask how long your loved one has been dead.
Six months out, two years out, ten years out.
Out of what, exactly?
Out of the giant crevice that has been exploded into the bedrock
of your life.
Here's how I see it: One day, you and your family are hiking across
a long, solid plain, when out of the sky comes a blazing meteor
that just happens to hit one family member on the head. The meteor
creates a huge rift in the landscape, dragging the unlucky one down
to the bottom of the crevice it has made. You spend the next year
on a rescue mission, helping him climb to the top, but when he gets
up there, you realize that he has been greatly changed by the hardship.
He doesn't know a meteor has hit him. He will never know, really.
He only knows that he has spent a lot of time in a dark, confusing
place. He left a lot of stuff behind, the stuff he was carrying
with him, down in that big hole, and it's impossible to get it all
back.
How do you even get him out? Well, you and your family have to jump
across the crevice first and then pull him up on the "other" side
of your life. Or you have to stay on the side where you were, drag
him out, and then all leap together to the other edge of the crater.
It's not easy. The chasm between the old life and the new is wider
than you think. You could fall into the darkness yourself, trying
to jump across.
And the damned crevice is always there, the bad-luck meteor stuck
down inside it. You turn your back on it and go on, across that
wide plain of life, again. But along the way you have to tell the
improbable story of the meteor. You have to describe the big hole
in the ground and the little holes it left behind. You dream about
the crevice. You dream about the time before the meteor came down
without warning. And you can never again hear about anyone getting
hit on the head without knowing it is the beginning of a new and
bewildering journey.
"Look at what he did with that light," says my husband, Alan, studying
a canvas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's the last day of
the boffo, much-publicized Cézanne exhibit. Supplied with
free last-minute tickets from friends, we jump at the chance to
get in under the wire, though we know the gallery will be packed.
Stories about the city's Cézanne-crazed summer had reached
us in airless hospital rooms, seeming more like reports from another
planet than an event we could actually attend.
Alan has a long history of never going through an art exhibit just
once. He circles it two or three times or more, returning to study
individual paintings in detail. I've usually been cooling my heels
in the gift shop for twenty minutes by the time he wanders in.
But today a weak, subdued version of Alan leans forward on a cane,
gazing at Cézanne's brushstrokes as he listens to the canned
narration clamped onto his head. He has no spare energy to walk
around the exhibit more than once -- he'll have to drink in each
painting in one thirsty gulp.
Right now I don't care how long he spends in front of each painting.
He can stay there all day, wearing his dorky headset and listening
to the droning narrator a couple of times for each picture. I'll
wait.
"He can still analyze art!" I think. A revelation, like the one
only a few weeks before: "He can still read!"
The brain is an amazing organ. The three-pound blob keeps lots of
great information up there, like the lyrics to the Beverly Hillbillies
theme song, the sensation of your first kiss, and the digits of
your childhood phone numbers. Put your brain through a windshield
at seventy miles an hour or bash it with a sledgehammer, and then
it's a crapshoot. You might remember something or you might not.
You might not even recall who was in the room with you five minutes
ago. You might not walk or talk again. You might never wake up from
that coma. You might wake up and be nasty and aggressive. You might
talk in jargon. You might only sing a sitcom theme song, over and
over and over.
Alan's brain got run over by a speedboat.
That last sentence reads like a bad country-western song lyric,
but it's true. It was a silly, horrible, stupid accident. Only months
before touring the Cézanne paintings, Alan was lying in a
coma in Kingston, Ontario. A Canadian government helicopter touched
down on a highway near the remote lake where we were staying and
rushed him to a teaching hospital. In the helicopter Alan began
to have seizures and stopped breathing. By the time he was stabilized
in the emergency room, doctors and nurses were telling me they didn't
know what would happen to him.
"You just love me for my brain," says Alan, smiling in his new affability.
I laugh every time he says it, sharp tears stinging the corners
of my eyes. We used that phrase all the time when we were work-obsessed
graduate students newly in love. Now Alan uses it ironically. His
brain has been damaged and will never be the same. His rehabilitation
counselor says that the "old" Alan died on July 1, 1996, and a new
one arose, created by the rivers and lakes of bruises that coursed
over his brain as he lay unconscious in the days after his injury.
He is a man with different frontal lobes, and a different personality
to match.
Several weeks after his accident, while still in an addled state
at a rehabilitation hospital, Alan told a doctor that he felt reborn.
"That's a common feeling among our brain injury patients," said
Dr. Weinstein.
"I have a question, though," continued Al. "If I had to be reborn,
how come I'm still forty-four years old?"
Excerpted
from WHERE IS THE MANGO PRINCESS © Copyright 2000 by Cathy
Crimmins. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Knopf, an
imprint of Random House. All rights reserved.
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