He introduced my mother and father to each other as if they’d never met, saying, “Mom, meet Dad; Dad, meet Dixie Jean.” Asked by the neurosurgeon if he knew how to spell his own name, he said, “Well, doctor, if you were Spenser, you might spell it w-o-r-t-h-E.”
Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality. Like a lot of people, I’d always assumed, in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitably be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature. My brother changed my mind about all that. Here was a consciousness reduced to its matter, to a ball of crackling synapses—words that he knew how to use but couldn’t connect to the right things; strange new objects for which he had to invent names; unfamiliar people who approached and receded like energy fields—and it was a good place to be, you might even say a poetic place. He had touched death, or death had touched him, but he seemed to find life no less interesting for having done so.
* * *
There is this one other remark:
Late afternoon of April 25. The window slats casting bars of shadow all over his room in the ICU. I had asked my mom and dad if they’d mind giving me a moment alone with him, since I still wasn’t sure he knew quite who I was. I did know he wasn’t aware of being inside a hospital; his most recent idea was that we were all back at my grandparents’ house having a party, and at one point he slipped loose and went to the nurses’ station to find out whether his tux was ready. Now we were sitting there in his room. Neither of us was speaking. Worth was jabbing a fork into his Jell-O, and I was just watching, waiting to see what would come out. Earlier that morning, he’d been scared by the presence of so many “strangers,” and I didn’t want to upset him any more. Things went on in silence like this for maybe five minutes.
Very quietly, he began to weep, his shoulders heaving with the force of emotion. I didn’t touch him. A minute went by. I asked, “Worth, why are you crying?”
“I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
Certain that I’d heard him right, I asked him again anyway. He repeated it in the same flat tone: “I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
How could he know he’d been dead, when he didn’t even know we were in a hospital, or that anything unusual had happened to him? Had a sudden clarity overtaken him?
“What was it? What was your vision?”
He looked up. The tears were gone. He seemed calm and serious. “I was on the banks of the River Styx,” he said. “The boat came to row me across, but … instead of Charon, it was Huck and Jim. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man … like, ninety years old or something.”
My brother put his face in his hands and cried a little more. Then he seemed to forget all about it. According to my notes, the next words out of his mouth were, “Check this out—I’ve got the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake.”
We’ve never spoken of it since. It’s hard to talk to my brother about anything related to his accident. He has a monthlong tape erasure in his memory that starts the second he put his lips to that microphone. He doesn’t remember the shock, the ambulance, having died, coming back to life. Even when it was time for him to leave the hospital, he had managed only to piece together that he was late for a concert somewhere, and my last memory of him from that period is his leisurely wave when I told him I had to go back to school. “See
Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality. Like a lot of people, I’d always assumed, in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitably be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature. My brother changed my mind about all that. Here was a consciousness reduced to its matter, to a ball of crackling synapses—words that he knew how to use but couldn’t connect to the right things; strange new objects for which he had to invent names; unfamiliar people who approached and receded like energy fields—and it was a good place to be, you might even say a poetic place. He had touched death, or death had touched him, but he seemed to find life no less interesting for having done so.
* * *
There is this one other remark:
Late afternoon of April 25. The window slats casting bars of shadow all over his room in the ICU. I had asked my mom and dad if they’d mind giving me a moment alone with him, since I still wasn’t sure he knew quite who I was. I did know he wasn’t aware of being inside a hospital; his most recent idea was that we were all back at my grandparents’ house having a party, and at one point he slipped loose and went to the nurses’ station to find out whether his tux was ready. Now we were sitting there in his room. Neither of us was speaking. Worth was jabbing a fork into his Jell-O, and I was just watching, waiting to see what would come out. Earlier that morning, he’d been scared by the presence of so many “strangers,” and I didn’t want to upset him any more. Things went on in silence like this for maybe five minutes.
Very quietly, he began to weep, his shoulders heaving with the force of emotion. I didn’t touch him. A minute went by. I asked, “Worth, why are you crying?”
“I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
Certain that I’d heard him right, I asked him again anyway. He repeated it in the same flat tone: “I was thinking of the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”
How could he know he’d been dead, when he didn’t even know we were in a hospital, or that anything unusual had happened to him? Had a sudden clarity overtaken him?
“What was it? What was your vision?”
He looked up. The tears were gone. He seemed calm and serious. “I was on the banks of the River Styx,” he said. “The boat came to row me across, but … instead of Charon, it was Huck and Jim. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man … like, ninety years old or something.”
My brother put his face in his hands and cried a little more. Then he seemed to forget all about it. According to my notes, the next words out of his mouth were, “Check this out—I’ve got the Andrews Sisters in my milkshake.”
We’ve never spoken of it since. It’s hard to talk to my brother about anything related to his accident. He has a monthlong tape erasure in his memory that starts the second he put his lips to that microphone. He doesn’t remember the shock, the ambulance, having died, coming back to life. Even when it was time for him to leave the hospital, he had managed only to piece together that he was late for a concert somewhere, and my last memory of him from that period is his leisurely wave when I told him I had to go back to school. “See
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