9 March 1980
Worse
Nat eased himself down at the breakfast table, using all of his scant energy to squash what could easily have blossomed into a full-on state of panic. He couldn’t believe he’d wakened up to find the headache had gotten worse. He wouldn’t have believed, if anyone had tried to tell him, that there was such a thing as worse.
He tried to smile at Nathan, but was pretty sure it came out as a grimace.
“Do you still have a headache?” Nathan asked. “You look terrible.”
Nat nodded ever so slightly. His neck felt locked into place. As if with steel braces. He had to move his whole upper body to give the appearance of a nod.
“Is Carol coming to breakfast?”
Nat shook his head as best he could.
“Already gone to see her grandparents?”
Nat nodded.
“I hope she had some breakfast.”
Damn. This did not seem to be a yes or no question.
“I think she had cereal,” he said. But something went wrong. Something happened to the words. They slurred and blended at the edges. As if he were drunk.
Nathan looked up briefly. Curiously.
They both held still for a split second. Then the moment seemed to pass on its own. He had just wakened up and he had a headache. The perception was dismissed.
It must have been nothing.
Nat put his head in his hands, shielding his eyes from the light.
He heard a small noise in front of him, and opened his eyes to see that Nathan had set a plate of poached eggs on toast in front of him. The smell made him a little bit nauseous. The last thing he wanted was food, but he had to get something in his stomach. So he could take another fistful of aspirin.
He reached to the middle of the table for the salt.
His fingertips touched down a good ten inches to the right of it.
He stared at the hand for a moment, detached. As if it must belong to someone else entirely.
He tried again. This time it landed three or four inches left.
When he tried to pick up the hand for a third try, he failed. It just didn’t pick up. As though it had never received a signal. As though the lines were down.
He looked up to see Nathan watching him, a shocked look on his face.
“Nat,” Nathan said. “Are you drunk?”
“No!” he said, or tried to say, but it came out sounding spastic. Like the retarded boy in his fourth-grade class. The one everybody made fun of. Like a person who had been born deaf learning to talk for the first time.
“Nat,” Nathan said again. Clearly alarmed. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he tried to say. But this time it didn’t sound nearly so good. This time it sounded like the howl of some wounded animal.
His stomach suddenly revolted in response to the pain, and Nat knew he was about to throw up. He lurched up from the table and turned toward the sink, but the first step opened a whole new category of trouble. His legs felt rubbery and weak, as if his muscles had turned to rubber bands, and they refused to follow the simplest instructions.
He felt himself pitch forward. He braced for the pain of landing.
But he never felt himself land.
11 March 1980
White
Nat opened his eyes.
He saw white walls in front of him, and on either side. White sheets beneath his direct field of vision. A television set hung suspended high on the wall. It was the only thing he saw that was not white.
The headache was gone.
He let his eyes drift closed again, experiencing and blessing that relief.
When he opened them again, a pretty young black woman stood over him. Wearing a white uniform.
“Well, look who’s awake,” she said. She spoke with an accent. It was lilting and songlike. Probably from one of those islands where you go on vacation to snorkel and drink rum. “That’s a lovely thing now, to see those eyes open. Are you in much pain, darlin’?”
Nat shook his head slightly.
“OK, well, if you feel a lot of pain, you can ring me with this button. Can you reach this button on your own, do ya think? Try it now, so we see.”
She held up a power cord with a red push-button device on the end. Then she set it down on the bed again, beside his right hand.
Nat gathered up all of his powers of concentration and reached for the button. But his arm felt weak, and his aim was off. The hand wavered on its way into the air and never quite touched down anywhere different.
“Don’t worry, darlin’, I’ll be checkin’ in on ya. If you need your morphine adjusted, you just give me a nod or a blink. ‘Kay?”
Nat nodded hazily.
She disappeared from his field of vision, leaving mostly white.
Nat’s eyes closed again, and he drifted back to wherever he had been before.
12 March 1980
No
Nat opened his eyes. Let them close. Willed them open again.
He saw Nathan fill up nearly his entire field of vision. Leaning over his bed.
“There you are. Good to see you back with us. Carol will kick herself. She just went down to the cafeteria, and it’s all my fault. I twisted her arm, because she hadn’t eaten in more than two days. She had to eat something. How do you feel?”
He felt great, actually. Maybe it was just the morphine. But he wasn’t convinced that even morphine could have cured a headache like that one. Not completely, anyway. So he figured it was really, blissfully gone.
“Better,” he said. But it came out sounding like the same mess. The vowels twisted into spastic, howly nonsense, and the consonants seemed not to have been found at all. “Huh?” Nat asked reflexively. Alarmed at his own voice. But even that was barely intelligible. It was only the inflection, the way he raised his voice at the end of the word to suggest a question, that allowed it to make any sense at all. “What?” He tried again. He felt, even through the haze of drugs, the beginnings of a rising panic.
“It’s OK,” Nathan said. “Relax. It’s normal. The doctor says it’s normal. You’ll have trouble with speech for a while. We’ll probably need to get you a speech therapist. And a physical therapist. There’ll be some muscle weakness. And—”
“What? No!”
He wanted to ask how much muscle weakness, and for how long. But he wasn’t even sure his last two syllables had come through. He couldn’t have muscle weakness. He was a boxer. Boxers can’t have muscle weakness.
He had to ask the important question. He had to make those words come out right.
He gathered his inner resources together, much the way he would if someone had asked him to lift up a car.
“When can I box?”
It was pathetic. Maybe the “when” came through well enough to guess at. The l sounded like a, and the other words never made it out of the gate in one piece.
“When …” Nathan said. “When what?”
Frustrated, Nat raised his right hand and tried to imitate writing. But the loops came out looking shaky, and bigger than he had intended.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me.”
A flash of silver caught Nat’s eye. In Nathan’s shirt pocket. It was the clip end of a good silver pen. He pointed to it.
Nathan looked down. “Oh. You want to write something.”
Nathan took the pen out of his pocket. Twisted it open. Then he produced a leather case of index-card-sized note cards. He pulled out a blank card and set it on top of the case, then laid it on the bed within Nat’s reach. He handed Nat the pen, helping him wrap his fingers around it.
Nat knew this wasn’t going to be much easier. So he set the bar low. Just three letters.
They came out looking as though he had written them with his left hand. Or foot. But they could be read.
B — O — X.
Nathan’s face fell. “Nat …”
Nat turned his face away. Squeezed his eyes closed. As if that would close his ears as well, and then he wouldn’t have to hear.
It didn’t work. He heard.
“Nat … You’ve just survived a craniotomy. And you were lucky to survive it. Do you know what that is? It’s a procedure that involves peeling back a huge crescent of scalp and removing a square window of bone out of your skull. So the surgeon could flush out a very large hematoma that was putting pressure on your brain. They replaced the piece of skull, but right now you have steel plates holding it in place. Not forever. But you’ll have other problems, and they’re not going away overnight. Muscle weakness …”
There it was again. Nat shook his head, as if he could deny it and thereby avoid it.
“… speech difficulties. Motor-skill difficulties. You may even have seizures, but they can be controlled with—”
Nathan stopped speaking. Because Nat had raised a hand and was moving it, carefully, inexactly, toward Nathan’s face. The hand, much as he tried to direct it accurately, landed gently on Nathan’s forehead. Nathan remained tensely silent, as though straining to understand.
Nat tried again. This time the hand found its mark. It pressed firmly over the older man’s mouth.
They remained that way for a beat or two.
Then Nathan gently took hold of Nat’s wrist, removed the hand, and placed it on the sheet near Nat’s hip.
“I guess we can talk about that some other time,” he said.
Nat held very still, his eyes closed. Hoping he appeared to be doing something other than what he was doing. Trying desperately not to cry.
“Nat,” Nathan said. His voice low. Almost reverent. “What happened? What happened to you on your last night in New York?” A silence. “How do you sign on for some practice sparring and come home with a traumatic brain injury?”
The tears gained the upper hand. Nat concentrated all his effort, all his strength, into his eyelids. But apparently they were suffering from muscle weakness, too. Or maybe the tears were stronger than he had realized. Stronger than he had ever been. Anyway, it was too late. A couple of tears had made it past the guards. Out where Nathan could see.
“Never mind,” Nathan said. “I guess we can talk about that some other time, too.”