Finally he gave up trying to speak, and blinked once. It felt strange, as if only one eye had done it.
“Good,” Dr. Zadeh said, so encouragingly that he felt as if he’d accomplished something superhuman. “I’m going to ask you a few questions to better understand where we are with your recovery, and then I’ll be able to give you more information. I want you to blink once to mean yes. Blink twice to mean no. Do you understand?”
The man blinked once.
“All right. First, are you in pain?”
He stared at the ceiling. Slowly things darkened and then brightened again twice in a row, to mean no. Blink, blink. The drugs were good. In fact, they were so good that he almost wanted pain—only so he could know that the rest of him was still there, on the bed.
“That’s excellent, excellent. If you ever are in pain, I want you to blink very rapidly and continue until I notice. I’ll be able to adjust your dosage immediately through your IV and then find the surgeon on duty.”
He blinked again once, to indicate he understood. Dr. Zadeh took a slow, thoughtful breath. The man waited, curious. He couldn’t imagine a single thing the doctor might want to know. He couldn’t move or feel, or really even think. He seemed to just exist—nothing more. “Do you know your name?” Dr. Zadeh asked.
Oh, the man thought. How strange.
“I need you to blink your answer to me,” Dr. Zadeh reminded him gently. “Do you know your name?”
Blink, blink.
“Thank you,” Dr. Zadeh said in a practiced, neutral way. “Next question. Do you know to where you were going in your car when you had the accident?”
The man looked at the walls, then the ceiling. His eyelids shuttered twice.
“Thank you. Do you know what city you grew up in?”
Blink, blink.
“Thank you. Do you know where you went to school?”
He hadn’t realized that such things as cities and schools existed. Then as soon as Dr. Zadeh said the words, he could name the names of a hundred of them—but not a single thing about himself. Except that he had eyelids. Blink, blink. He waited for the next question. Blink, blink. Then the next. Blink, blink. Gradually the ceiling grew hot, then wetly blurry.
AFTER HE’D HEALED ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK EASILY again, the man was told more of what had happened. In the rain, the car on the other side of the street had hydroplaned. He’d swerved to avoid a head-on collision and rolled his own vehicle down the side of a hill. It had been pouring so hard that night, the other driver didn’t realize where the man’s car had gone, the police report stated later. That it wasn’t still on the dark road, traveling safely away in the other direction. It was another passing driver who noticed the headlights, like two stars in the black, but floating far too low to be in the sky. The man had been wearing a seat belt, but something went wrong. His head still hit the windshield twice, fracturing his skull and one eye socket. Underneath the gauze patch on the left side of his face, there wouldn’t be an eye, he was warned ahead of the bandage’s removal. There had been nothing left there to save. The man listened to it all, waiting for any fragment of that terrifying crash to hit him again. But there was nothing.
Dr. Zadeh spent a full week on his assessment. Brain scans, endless questions, more brain scans. He came in one day without his clipboard and sat on the edge of the man’s white hospital bed. Total retrograde amnesia, from the moment of the accident, Dr. Zadeh told him softly. He was born at forty-two years old. A man with a middle, but no beginning.
THE ASSISTED-LIVING FACILITY WORKED MOSTLY WITH ALZHEIMER’S patients, but Dr. Zadeh managed to secure him a room there. He was one of the foremost neurologists in the country, the man learned from a fellow resident during a game of bingo. The hospital funded the facility for Dr. Zadeh in exchange for his research. The man became his star patient.
Every morning Dr. Zadeh gave him another test or watched him practice something he’d learned in afternoon rehab the day before. The man grew skilled at reciting his personal information from the flash cards he’d made, but it was worth nothing. It was like learning the stale, meaningless biography of another person. He didn’t want to know that he learned how to sail in high school. He wanted to singe his palms on the rough rope, breathe salty air. He wanted to feel whether he had hated it or loved it.
He should have clung to it, but he began to despise the name that was stated on his driver’s license. It was not him. It was someone else, whom he was never allowed to know but also not allowed to forget.