Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (7 page)

My wife spoke absently, her voice thin and frail. “Eeyore doesn't respond to his parents’ voice like a normal baby. If there's a moment during the surgery when life and death separate, we won't be able to call him back to the side of life, it worries me sick …” My wife had been saying the same thing for days, and my response had been that a normal child wasn't going to be much better off if that happened, all we could do was leave it to the surgeon and hope for the best.

My mother's agitation was resonating with my wife's anxiety and amplifying it. With emphatic nods more like a furious shaking of her skinny neck, she said, “That's exactly the way it is! In our area, there were lots of times when a life that was bound to die heard the voice of its relative and came right back to life!” Inhaling sharply, she seemed to bite down on her tongue.

On an impulse, selfish when I think about it, to find someone who would commiserate with me about my son's abnormality, I had gone to see my mentor, Professor W, at the private college where he had moved to create a new department of French literature. I had written elsewhere that I watched him flush bright red from his brow to his neck, and now I was recalling what he had said in that state, in a tone of voice he might have used to tell a joke with grief in it. Sitting in his bright new office, his eyes averted from everyone, he had whispered: “In these times, it's not clear that it's better to have been born than not to have been born.”

“If the body incorporates elements aimed at both life and death,” I said now, “and if a baby exists at the border between the two, maybe we should honor the baby's freedom, the baby's body's freedom! In times like these, it's not clear that it's better to have been born than not to have been born!” These words, spoken diffidently as I banged my chair against the wall in the cramped room, my wife and my mother both ignored, but I saw the profile of my mother's face turn pale and stiffen. Ah, I thought to myself, regretting the imprudence of my remark, this face with eyebrows like inverted V's isn't simply tense, it's very angry!

“You heard him, that's who we're dealing with, so we can't count on him, we're obliged to use your
strength
to help our Eeyore.” My mother spoke in a whisper, and my wife, her hair in pin curlers and her face seeming even smaller, nodded fecklessly.

It wasn't until later that night, when I sprawled alone on the bed in my study, that I came to the conclusion that I had misheard my mother, or rather, misunderstood her. It was clear to everyone that
strength,
mine or my wife's, would have nothing to do with the operation in the morning. All we could do was rely on Doctor M. That had been implicit in my wife's apprehensive conversation with my mother about the difficulty of ascertaining the baby's own will toward life. Then I realized that my mother must have meant blood, from the blood—
chi-kara,
rather than strength,
chikara.
Two kinds of blood flowed in the infant's body, mine and my wife's. Having decided that blood from her side of the family could not be counted on where the body's inclination toward life or death was concerned, my mother must have been suggesting to my wife that
her blood
would have to encourage Eeyore in the direction of life.

Having realized this much, I felt certain that the face I had seen in the depths of the pool at the Couple, with the inverted V's for eyebrows, had indeed been my mother's face, and I felt I understood as well that she had angrily written me off at the moment of the accident as a person capable of stepping off the road to life intentionally. Looking back, I could identify a number of instances between my son's birth and his first operation when she had revealed this judgment about me.

Thanks to Dr. M and his assistants, the long operation was a success, my son was liberated from the glistening lump that was like a second head, and my wife and both our mothers were understandably overjoyed. As the young father, I was also very happy, but I recalled the conversation the night before the operation and felt constrained and embarrassed about demonstrating my joy.

A definition of death. I am not able to say that I have provided my handicapped son with a definition of death that is at once accurate, uncomplicated, and capable of encouraging him. What is worse, my wife and I have used the word carelessly in his presence. Looking back, I realized that this had been going on for more than two years until the crisis that made us aware of it, repeatedly. I am clear about how much time had passed because it was late in the spring two years ago—my experience has taught me to believe in the hidden link between the changing seasons, that is, the cycle of the universe, and events that occur deep inside our bodies—that my son experienced an epileptic seizure, an incident that was an unmistakable turning point in our daily life with Eeyore at its center. As we didn't consult a specialist at the time, it wasn't exactly the case that the seizure was diagnosed as epilepsy. Even so, when we informed Doctor M of what had happened, he did not object to my insistence on describing it as an epileptic seizure.

From the onset, my wife and I were of different minds about this. We weren't necessarily opposed—where my son was concerned we often faced in the same direction but took different views. There were times when my son lost his sight briefly and froze where he stood in the street. If this had happened at a railroad crossing or in a crosswalk it would have been dangerous. These events had been occurring intermittently for five or six years, and Dr. M had been controlling them with Hidantol, a drug that caused Eeyore's gums to swell to rosy redness until they protruded from the spaces between his teeth like kernels of red rice but had no other apparent side effect. Hidantol was an antiepileptic, and as such provided me with a basis for diagnosing my son's new seizure.

My wife had heard from her friends in the PTA at our son's special school that epilepsy was a different animal, and that if this were indeed epilepsy it was a very mild case. The term used on the report after the medical exam for middle school was “brain separation syndrome,” and although these words were more than adequate to strike terror into the hearts of our nonmedical family, the word “epilepsy,” as my wife insisted, did not appear. I searched a number of encyclopedias, looking under “epilepsy” for a subentry on “brain separation syndrome,” and failed to find it.

As it happened, my wife wasn't even home when my son had the first of these major new seizures. It began with an unusual atmosphere that felt like the concave underside of pro-truberant symptoms like screaming or spasms. We were in the living room; I lay reading on the couch as always, and my son was sprawled on the rug on the floor listening to a Mozart record at low volume. Presently, instead of putting on a new record, he pushed away from himself with both elbows, like an infant with no appetite weakly rejecting his food, the pile of records he had selected. This registered in my consciousness like a small thorn. But I continued to read. Before long, an impression of interruption reached me from where my son lay. I looked up. He was propped up on his elbows, all expression gone from his face and his open eyes like stones. Saliva was drooling from between his slightly parted lips.

“Eeyore! Eeyore! What's wrong?” I called out to him. But Eeyore was engaged completely with the difficulty inside himself; as if to say this was no time to be responding to the exterior, not even to the voice of his father, he remained motionless, his head propped heavily in his hands, his face a void.

I jumped up, and, in the brief moment it took to move to his side, he began slapping the floor with his left palm and arm, not wildly but with deliberate force.
Slap, slap,
he struck the floor, and now his eyes rolled up and showed white.

“Eeyore! Eeyore! Are you all right? Does it hurt?” As I shouted meaningless questions I wrapped the handkerchief I took from my pants pocket around my left thumb and forced it between my son's teeth. He bit grindingly down on the joint and I moaned as though to express the pain he was enduring in silence. A minute or two later, he stopped slapping the floor and relaxed his clenched teeth. I lifted him as he rolled over on his back, and when I laid him on the couch he fell into a deep sleep and began to snore at a menacing volume.

It was this physical display by my son's body that I chose to interpret as epilepsy symptoms. Partly because he was home on spring break, my son had apparently neglected to take his medicine for several days. But was this really epilepsy? I needed a definition, and though I consulted a number of encyclopedias in search of one, my wife and I did not go back to Dr. M for a detailed explanation. Over the course of more than ten years we had come to understand that, where our son's illness was concerned, the doctor would make sure to inform us about anything it would avail us to know, and that asking about the rest was an exercise in futility for laymen like ourselves. Admittedly, our custom of not asking may have had to do with deep-seated fear.

Since that first episode, I find myself constantly on the lookout for information that I can feed into my definition of epilepsy. For example, a recent article by the cultural anthropologist Y, in which he analyzed the Greek director Theo Angelo-poulos's film
Alexander the Great,
Apparently the chieftain of Greece's peasant guerrillas is portrayed as an epileptic. When the troops descend to the banks of a river to replenish their water, Alexander has a seizure as he gazes at the river's surface. Instantly, to shield him from the gaze of his men while he is in spasm, his next-in-command shouts “About face!” On the march, Alexander baptizes the young men they encounter along the way and christens each one of them Alexander. In an attack by government forces, one of the young men is wounded in the head but is lifted onto a horse and manages to escape from a same battle in which the chieftain is killed and the army decimated. Later, in the scene where the youth enters Athens, the narrator intones: “Thus did Alexander enter the city.” The almost too obvious significance of the line was to establish a connection between this scene and the episode when Alexander the chieftain appears in the village as a young man with a wound in his head.

In my biased reading of Y's analysis, I paid particular attention to the above references to epilepsy. Superimposing the wounded youth who was entering Athens now onto the chieftain Alexander in the past led me to the following conclusions: leaders were epileptics because of wounds to the head sustained when they were young; the youth who had just now received his head wound and who was destined to lead the resistance as the next Alexander would just as certainly develop epilepsy. In this manner I created a mythological logic that connected head wounds, epilepsy, and leaders.

I was reinforced in this by the fact that the articles on epilepsy I had found in encyclopedias cited head wounds sustained in infancy or childhood as one of its causes. I concluded that my son's epilepsy was the result of his head surgery when he was two and a half months old. During the operation, the lump on his head was found to contain something like a Ping-Pong ball. When my wife and I had visited Dr. M's office to learn the results of the operation, he had asked if I would like to see it and at first I had declined.

It had never occurred to me for an instant that my son's brain may have been injured during the operation. And yet how could surgery that removed so large a lump and closed the default in his skull have failed to affect an infant's brain? In fact, he had done well to survive the surgery, and I had come to feel respect for his symptoms, as though the recent appearance of epilepsy were a medal for his vitality. Further, and I realize this is hardly more than a mystical reverie, I felt at times as though my son were standing in for me, taking on the epilepsy that might have been produced by the head wound I received at the time of my narrow escape at Carp Cave. At those moments, as I fingered the scar that was in the same place on my head as was the fault on my son's skull, it seemed to me that the huge power that had manifested underwater at Carp Cave was connected directly to whatever it was that had caused my son's abnormal birth.

Eeyore was lying on the couch watching the news on television—for several days after his first seizure, as though the twisting inside his body had yet to untangle, he had been withdrawn, doleful, and silent—when suddenly, as the newscaster reported the death of a certain elderly master in the world of Japanese classical music, he sat up with surprising agility and shouted, emotionally, “Oh!
He died! He's dead, he's completely dead!
”

The poignancy of my son's lament was a shock to me. It came from somewhere so unexpected and took me so completely by surprise that it was also comical.

“What's wrong, Eeyore, what happened? Did he die? Did you like him that much?” As I questioned him, I felt I might burst out laughing. I'm sure I was smiling.

But Eeyore didn't respond; he fell back on the couch and covered his face with both hands and went rigid. Halfway to the couch I could only keep moving, though I did lose the smile from my face, and continued, “C'mon, Eeyore. You don't have to be so upset.” Kneeling at his side, I shook him by the shoulders, but he went even more rigid. For no reason, I tried pulling his hands away from his face, but they were locked into place like a steel lid—I recall that it was around this time that his strength was developing to a point that was beyond our ability to manage—and I could only kneel there staring at his fingers, sentient and refined in a way that seemed to set them apart from the rest of his body.

The comprehensive impossibility of approaching my son. I had experienced the same feeling after his epileptic seizure. He had been used up, as though his entire body had been involved in frantic exercise. Just before he had fallen asleep and begun to snore, and again afterward, when he had awakened, I had repeatedly asked, “Eeyore! Were you in pain? Was it hard to breathe? Were you nauseous? Were you in pain?” but he had remained locked away inside himself, disgruntled and feeble and refusing to respond to my inquiries. Then and now, on two occasions since his seizure, I had experienced my son as an individual whose interior world was closed to me.