The video ends before she can give me what I really want: an explanation. More than the cat lady’s, this woman’s experience resonates with mine. She, too, lived through more time while she was unconscious than she did while she was hooked up to machines. And her journey was filled with real-world details that weren’t part of her life pre-accident. But then, who knows what cognitive thorns caught in the folds of her brain? Like Dr. DeSantos said—maybe she had read the Guinness World Records when she was younger; maybe the facts she unconsciously retained bubbled up to the surface of her subconscious like a hot spring.
The third story is a newspaper article about a fifty-two-year-old man named Eric Genovese, who has lived in Cedar Rapids since birth. He was a Poland Spring truck driver and he got hit by a car as he was crossing the street with a corporate water delivery. In the time it took EMTs to resuscitate him—a matter of minutes—he said he lived an entirely different life. “When I looked in the mirror I knew it was me, but I was completely different. Younger, and with a new face, and that felt right. I had a different job—I was a computer engineer,” he was quoted as saying. “The woman who worked next to me in a cubicle, she had an abusive boyfriend, and I spent months trying to get her to ditch the guy and to realize I was in love with her. I proposed and we got married, and a year later we had a little girl. We named her Maya, after my wife’s mother. When I woke up, after I was revived … ?none of it made sense. I kept asking where my wife was, and my baby girl. For me, years had passed, but for everyone else it was like twenty minutes. I had this burning urge to pray a bunch of times during the day and I knew whole passages of religious text that no one could identify, not even me. Turned out to be the Quran. I was raised Catholic; I went to parochial school. But after I woke up, I was Muslim.”
Even though this is an article and I cannot hear his voice, there is something in his words that speaks to me. A desperation. A discombobulation. A … ?wonder.
I type his name into Facebook. There are a plethora of Eric Genoveses, but only one in Cedar Rapids.
I click the message button. My hands hover over the keyboard.
The psychologist has encouraged me to find a footing in this world, even if it feels strange. There is more than enough scientific evidence that the medication used to sedate me could have messed with my mind sufficiently to create what I thought was an alternate reality, but what everyone else recognizes as a drug dream. There are dozens of witnesses to the fact that I was lying in a hospital for ten days; I am the only person who thinks differently. Or to put it another way: the facts add up to one explanation that anyone rational would accept.
But none of those people experienced what I did.
And there are all kinds of things that used to be considered inconceivable but that turned out to be the opposite—from the earth circling the sun to black holes to diseases that jump from bats to humans. Sometimes the impossible is possible.
I don’t know why I keep feeling the tug back to that other place. I don’t know why I’m not thanking my lucky stars to be alive and here. But I do believe that there’s a reason I cannot let go of this—science and doctors and logic be damned.
And I think Eric Genovese might know what I’m talking about.
Hello, I type. You don’t know me, but I read your story in the newspaper.
I was on a ventilator for five days.
I think I lived a different life, too.
On April 19, we celebrate my birthday.
Finn orders a fat slice of cake from one of our favorite delis. “Carrot cake?” I ask, when he sets it on the table.
“It’s your favorite,” Finn says. “We always split it when it’s on the menu.”
Because it is his favorite, but I don’t say that. He’s gone out of his way to make sure he’s not working tonight, and he’s trying to make the day special for me, even if it looks and feels exactly like yesterday and I haven’t left the apartment in days.
When he sings to me, I have an uncanny sense that I’ve done this before, because I have. I think about how Beatriz made me a cake; how Gabriel and I slept outside by a campfire. How he gave me a volcano as a present.
Since we don’t have birthday candles, Finn scrounges up a fancy Jo Malone scented candle that Eva gave me for Christmas and lights it. When he hands me a jewelry-size box, my blood thunders in my ears.
Thisisitthisisitthisisit. The thought becomes a second pulse. It feels like more than just the biggest question I will ever be asked; it is the understanding that the answer will be for life.
For life.
Which one?
Finn bumps his shoulder against mine. “Open it,” he urges.
I manage to stretch a smile over my face and I tug at the improvised wrapping paper—yesterday’s Times. Inside is a little bracelet that says WARRIOR.
“That’s how I think of you,” Finn admits. “I am so fucking glad you’re a fighter, Di.”
He leans in, threading his hand through my hair and kissing me. When I pull away, I lift the bracelet from the box and he helps me put it on. “Do you like it?”
It is rose gold, and catches the light, and it’s not an engagement ring.
I love it.
I look up to find Finn already digging into the slice of cake. “Get in here,” he says, his mouth full, “before I finish it all.”