"How long it been like this?"

"I understand that this is not easy for you. You have questions. I appreciate your cooperation," recited the doctor. "We have a routine. You will receive more information in a few hours, but first you will perform certain tasks which will help us to better understand your condition. You have agreed to this."

After a due moment of recuperative silence, he led the patient out of the room and down the hall. It was a pleasant old wooden house. They seemed to be on the second story. Whoever had taken the television stand away earlier was nowhere in sight. Who had it been? A graduate student? A thick-necked orderly? He could sense the physical seed of his loss and humiliation throbbing in the center of his brain.

To his surprise, the patient was now able to juggle. He could manage four balls at once. As the patient juggled, the doctor asked him a series of increasingly difficult questions to test his short-term memory. They ate breakfast off of worn white china at a small table in the bedroom, and the doctor asked the patient to recount some early memories in Portuguese.
"Just try your best," said the doctor, in Portuguese.

The patient understood. His scrambled eggs—very soft, light eggs, without too much butter, just a little salt—became almost impossible to swallow. The reader will be familiar with the feeling: a heavy stone detaches from the roof of one's chest cavity, sinking slowly down as if through a cold underground river to settle with a hollow sound among the entrails. An awful feeling.

"Tell me about your mother," said the doctor.

The patient began so speak. His Portuguese was not fluent. He stopped to take bites of his eggs, which a moment before had tasted familiar.

The doctor cleared the table, and replaced the dishes with ten hand-sized ten pieces of cardboard, each a different color.

"Let's play a short game," he said. "One of these cards has a picture of your mother on the back. Can you try to guess which one?"

The patient immediately turned over a yellow card. There was nothing on the other side. The doctor failed to hold back a small sigh. He made a mark on his clipboard.

"You want I try again?" said the patient in broken Portuguese.

"That's all right," said the doctor, standing up and switching back to English. "We're going to take a break for about twenty minutes. Next to your bed are some books you enjoy."

"I don't know if this is important," the patient said, "but the eggs tasted really familiar." His hands were sweaty. Do I say this every day? he thought.

"I see," said the doctor, collecting the cards.

A silence. The patient waited for the doctor to write something on his clipboard.

"It's the way your mother used to make them," said the doctor. "This part of the experiment is over, so I can tell you that. It took a lot of effort to learn to make them in a way you find authentic."

On the patient's part, more dislodged stones clacking down through his body. The phrases books you enjoy and a way you find authentic were so prominent in his mind that we are again left only with non-linguitic thoughts. To try to convey the feeling of being informed by a stranger that you enjoy a particular book: the narrator's imagination fails here.

"Do we have this conversation every day?" asked the patient. Should we say mortified?
"Every day is different," said the doctor. "Try not to think too much."

"But do I always mention the eggs?"

"No, not the eggs."

"But other things."

"Please," said the doctor, bending to pick up a brief case. He was not a charismatic man. He spoke the following as if reading from a card: "This kind of thinking won't help you. You're suffering from a severe neurological condition. It's not your fault if you behave similar from day to day. You're an intelligent and an insightful man, and considering what you go through every day you do very well. Everyone here has a great deal of respect for you."

There was a very short pause. It is truly impressive how much insecurity and indecision can be processed and compressed into a nearly imperceptible lapse in conversation. If the brain were a computer, even the least able among us would be a true marvel of technology.

Still, here we will have to turn to some overworked and perhaps overwrought language. At a time like this, who among us would have the mental resources for aesthetic considerations or rhetorical rigor? Everything he does changes me in measurable ways. Everything I do is a response to him and the environment he has created. (The doctor would no doubt have objected to this as an impossible ideal.) I am powerless. Trapped. There is no escape.

"This is impossible," he said.

The doctor had just begun to move toward the door. He stopped and let his head drop. Turning around, he began, "Jesus, I can't—" then stopped, shut his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

"I don't speak Portuguese," the patient interrupted.

"Try not to think too much," said the doctor. His voice was strained and tired-sounding. Who knows how often he went through this?

"You said that already."


A tiny laugh through the doctor's nose. "See? It can happen to anyone."

"Let me go," said the patient.

"Listen," said the doctor, "I can't do this today. You and I have had this conversation before. We go back and forth. It takes a long time, you get angry, sometimes I do too. You always give in in the end. Please."

The patient felt as though all the stones that had collected every day down at the bottom of his being had evaporated and bubbled up in a rush of air and energy and hope.

"No."

The doctor sniffed-laughed again. "That usually works. You're a very reasonable person."

"I'm sick of being reasonable."

"No you're not."

The patient felt a fresh rush of shame. "You have to let me go."

"You know I can't do that."

"Why should I trust you? What kind of a psychiatrist wears a lab coat?"

"I'm not a psychiatrist. And don't start on the the lab coat today. I know you don't seriously believe that this is some sick science-fiction laboratory where we inject you with 'glowing green drugs' every night as part of some experiment."

The patient blushed. "That's not what I was going to say," he said. In fact, the patient was not confident of this, one of the many perverse aspects of consciousness being that one does not always know in advance what he is going to say.

"Oh?" said the doctor. But the patient could not think of what he had been going to say instead.

"How can I convince you to let me go?"

"You can't. You've made all your arguments before. You always lose. You're not going to think of anything new."

"Maybe you will. Maybe today—"

The doctor interrupted. He spoke while pressing his temples with his fingertips. "Maybe today the accumulation of your imprecations will finally melt my cold professional heart? Maybe I've had an event in my personal life that will make me look at this differently? Maybe my wife said something to me last night over a dinner of baked chicken and peas?"

The patient had stood up during the exchange. At this he sat back down.

"Why is it always baked chicken with you, anyway? Could I possibly eat that every night? Do you have any idea how many nights in a row of baked chicken that would be?"

"No." The patient looked at his hands again. They were not the dried, blue-white, spotted hands he imagined he would have as an old man, but they looked subtly different. But we are not as familiar with the sight of our hands as idiom suggests, and it was impossible for him to tell (and, perhaps interestingly, irrelevant for our purposes) whether or not they actually were.

The silence was the kind that ends arguments. Pacifying, even soporific. The doctor sat down on the bed, remained there for half a minute, and then stood to leave again.

"I'll be back in five minutes," he said. "Don't go anywhere."

"You wouldn't be acting like this if I would remember tomorrow, would you?"

"If you could remember this tomorrow, I wouldn't be here," said the doctor.

"You know what I mean."

"Please just wait here," said the doctor, and left.

There was another door in the patient's room, leading to a small restroom with a toilet, a sink, and bathtub. The mirror on the cabinet above the sink had replaced with a familiar-looking watercolor of a whitewashed stucco lighthouse on a low grassy jut extending into a windswept blue ocean. The patient did not remember that he had briefly imagined a similar scene earlier that morning. One wonders what difference it would have made—assuming he had experienced a sort of memory, then what?

Inside the cabinet, the patient found a toothbrush and a razor. The toothbrush bristles were slightly soft and curved outward like the top of a bushel of wheat; the toothpaste tube had been rolled from the bottom. The patient had always had a habit of brushing his teeth first thing in the morning. He thought: This must be my toothbrush. On the lip of the bathtub was a half-used bar of soap. It is not inconceivable that for one in the patient's position, each of these items proposed a unique and terrible angle from which to view the situation. The razor offered a sort of hope. He did not have the least resolve to commit suicide, but it occurred to him that it would constitute a sort of victory. He turned on the water and brushed his teeth.

Would suicide have made a difference for the patient? Or was he obliterated at the end of each day to make room for a fresh consciousness? It could be speculated—and has been—that no conscious existence is anything but a flicker, a function of the unrepeatable state of the universe at any point, replaced from moment to moment. For us, dialectic concerns like these are a frivolity for undergraduates and the drug-addled; for the patient, they were of immediate, crushing importance.

He finished brushing his teeth and spat in the sink, then stared at where the mirror should have been.

The doctor re-entered. The ritual of brushing his teeth had calmed the patient's nerves. He exited the restroom and sat down at the table with the doctor.

Continuation of 20.2.07 2:14 AM
C.f. 19.2.07 1:44 AM; 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM; 20.2.07 2:14 AM