The Memory Book (2 page)

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“What the hell is ‘all right’ in these circumstances? Will you tell me what’s going on? Why can’t I remember yesterday? What’s wrong with me? What have I got to look forward to? Am I finished? That’s the question, damn it.”

“You don’t want to raise your voice, Mr. Cooperman. I can hear you. Don’t get yourself excited. You are improving every day. Yesterday we didn’t get nearly this far before you dozed off. Are you feeling tired now?”

“I want to know what’s up first. How long will I be here?”

“That depends on your progress. Head injuries are slow healing; slower than fractures, slower than sprains, slower than most surgery. You’re going to have to learn
patience. You’re on the fifth floor. Everybody on five has had a stroke or brain injury. We’ll see to it that you work with people who can help you get over the injury and others who will help you adjust.”

“Damn it, I don’t want to adjust! I have to be able to work. People depend on me. There are bills that need paying and things that can’t be put off.”

“I hear that all the time, Mr. Cooperman, but patients learn that with a little time most things can be accomplished. Rome wasn’t built overnight. We have to learn to walk before we learn to run. Just try to remain calm.”

“Yeah, and walk directly to the nearest exit. We who are about to die salute you. Beautiful! This sounds like lifeboat drill on the
Titanic!”

“It’s early days, Mr. Cooperman. Don’t rush yourself into having a stroke. You may never again have such a good excuse for taking it easy. Are you getting tired?”

“No, damn it! I
told
you, I just want to know what’s going on. You can’t put me off with a bunch of platitudes. I know that day by day in every way I’m getting better and better. So, let’s wave Pollyanna off into the sunset and get back to reality. Have there been any policemen looking for me?” How did I know the cops were involved? The nurse hadn’t said anything. The idea came from me. Where did I get it?

Her eyebrows shot up. Good! At last I’d asked a question that made her expression change.

She took a moment to calm her features, then became the inquiring machine again. “The police have only asked
if they will be able to speak to you when you feel better. The police are not
after
you, Mr. Cooperman. There’s no guard at the door. They simply want to talk to you.”

“Sure.”

“Can you remember how you acquired this injury, Mr. Cooperman?”

“A train fell on me. It turned over.”

“You’ve said that before. Anything else?”

“I can’t remember. If you know something, please tell me.”

“You’ve had a serious blow to the back of your head. Can you remember anything about the time before the insult to your brain?”

“Insult? What happened was more than unpleasant words.”

“It’s our way of describing a serious brain injury, Mr. Cooperman. It has nothing to do with bad manners,” she said. “Now, can you think back to when you were little. Where was home?”

“Right here. The banks of the Eleven Mile Creek. My father runs a store.”

“Good! Except that this is Toronto, not Grantham. What else can you remember?”

I turned my eyes back inside my head, figuratively speaking. I looked for anything that came to mind: images of children playing with alleys and marbles on the hard-packed earth of the schoolyard; the same children sliding down an icy slope behind Edith Cavell School;
the principal, Mr. Martin, whistling the end of recess through two fingers placed between his teeth.

“Public school’s intact. I can remember the schoolyard and my grade six teacher.”

“That’s more than I can do. What about high school?”

I thought of the bus ride with wool-clad kids my own age. I could see the monumental façade of the collegiate, girls going up and down the stairs, carrying books before them, hugged to their young bosoms. I could see faces of my fellow students, lined up for an annual photograph, the teachers looking grave in serried ranks.

“Let’s see. Mr. Kramer (we called him Otto), Miss Smith, Mr. Ogilvy, Mr. James Palmer, Mr. Price, Mr. C. Evan Macdonald, Miss Smith …”

“You said Miss Smith already.”

“She was
worth
two mentions. They said she was a former cheerleader from the University of Toronto. That’s what we wanted to believe, anyway.” I recalled how we boys sighed for Miss Smith’s history classes.

“What can you remember about last fall or this past winter? Were you working hard after the snow cleared? I’m sorry, Mr. Cooperman, I’m a bit vague about what it is you do for a living. Are you a debt collector of some kind?”

“Sometimes it amounts to that. I’m a private investigator.”

“Oh, like Sam Spade and Lew Archer?”

“Yeah, but without Bogart. I don’t think he could have stomached the tedium.”

“Can you remember any of your recent cases?”

I lay in silence thinking about this for some time before I could answer. “When I get close to the present, my memory is not as certain. Things, images, are more like Jell-O that hasn’t set properly yet. I can picture my office and my apartment, but I can’t quite remember where they are or how I get from the one to the other.”

“Keep thinking about your work,” she said.

I thought, trying to clear away the fog. All I could find were fragments, shards, confetti, like the pieces of a smashed dish. Echoes of voices in a great hall. Maybe a museum. Nothing that made sense. Then there was the recurring image of falling about in my tumbling railway car. Sometimes I could hear names from my past, forgotten names that I tried to place, to find a context for, to put a date on, to measure against some other familiar monument in my life. Doug Slack, Garth Dittrick, Billy Challace. Most of them I hadn’t thought about in years. Kids from my kindergarten class, clients from my first cases, girls I’d dated only once, characters in novels and movies. The nurse was still waiting for an answer. I tried to remember the question.

“There were a couple of new cases.” I was really rolling back the clouds now. I tried to picture the view from behind my desk. “I think there was a skipper, and …” My mind wouldn’t give up anything more. I tried harder until my head began to hurt. “Nurse, I know that loss of memory is called amnesia. It’s a very popular device in old movies like
Lost Horizon
…”

“That was the one about Shangri-La. You’re thinking of
Random Harvest.
They’re both from books by James Hilton. Are people still reading them?”

I was impressed, but not enough to let her off the hook. I was looking for the name of what afflicted me.

“Tell me about my amnesia,” I said. “Is it temporary or permanent? How much of my memory is permanently blasted?”

“Well, Mr. Cooperman, since you ask, I’ll try to explain. As far as we can tell, your mind, your ability to think, to talk, to figure things out, is intact. Like the way you remembered the James Hilton novel just now. You picked the wrong title, but it was by the same author. That means that your cognitive powers are mostly intact. We have tested your reflexes and your motor abilities. All intact. You won’t remember this, but last week you played chess with another patient. I think you won at least one game. That’s the good news. The bad news is we are almost certain, from tests you won’t remember now—”

“Tell me, damn it!”

“This isn’t easy, Mr. Cooperman. We think, we
know
, that you have lost much of your ability to read.”

“To read!”

“That’s right. You may not have noticed it yet, but we are more than pretty sure.”

I looked around me blankly. I could see everything I could normally see. I saw the nurse, the curtains, the bump of my knees under the covers. Through the window,
I could see the hospital across the street. There was nothing wrong with my vision. What’s-Her-Name reached over to the folded newspaper by the window and handed it to me. I picked up the first section and opened it. I looked at it in disbelief. It could have been written in Serbo-Croatian or Portuguese or Greek. I couldn’t make out the words. I squinted hard at the front page, recognizing the logo of
The Globe and Mail
. It was English, but the words below were foreign. My hands began to shake. Again I squinted hard; I could make out most of the letters—I saw
“The”
and
“and”
—but the normal blackand-white words kept their secrets from me. I couldn’t decode the letters. I turned the page to see whether an inside page would yield a different story, a better result. It didn’t. Not only was I an amnesiac, I was illiterate to boot! I must have blinked to stop the tears. That was all my damned eyes were good for.

I think I started to yell about then.

TWO

Somewhere in my mind I suspected a trick, a plot. I remembered an old movie in which the Nazis convince a captured Allied officer that he has just recovered from amnesia and that the war has been over for many years. To make the device work, they bleached his hair white, aged his face and skin, and showed him newspapers that had been specially concocted with a date well in the future that told of the Axis victory. They almost got away with it, until the officer remembered a recent paper cut on his finger that would have healed if so much time had passed. At the last moment, he was saved from giving away the Allied plans for the invasion of Europe. I resolved to look out for newspapers down the hall. The safest thing was to be suspicious of everything. For instance, if this was a real hospital, where were the doctors? I couldn’t remember seeing any. I had them there!

“What’s a skipper?”

“Huh?” It was my nurse, my own special nurse, whose name was … I just noticed that she was black. From the Caribbean, maybe. The fact wasn’t important, but it hadn’t registered earlier.

“You said you’d been working on a case involving a skipper.”

“Oh, a
skipper
. A skipper is— Don’t try to change the subject.”

“We’ll get back to the subject, I promise. Right now, you need a breather.”

“A skipper’s a deadbeat. This one was a poor guy from Grantham. I’d met him in an amateur theatre group a year before I had to deal with him professionally. Charming as hell. Small-time bunko artist, but a crook with the soul of a poet. He fell in love with the names of the legal firms that were prosecuting him! He loved the sound of their names: Trapnel, Fleming, Harris, Kerwin and Barr; Heatherington, Cavers, Goodwyn and Chown. He used to recite the names as if they were poetry. Not a bad fellow, really, not somebody you’d take to be a crook, but he lived high, never worked, and finally ran out on
both
the women he was exploiting. He claimed that alimony was bleeding him to death, which meant there had been other women. The one who hired me thought there was good in him that he hadn’t discovered yet. She may be right: he once sent me a postcard from La Jolla, California. But right now I suspect he’s down in New York State on a farm. His family comes from around there.”

The nurse was rapt. I think that’s the word for it. Entranced. I went on, “I once had another case of a deadbeat. This one got behind in his support payments to his wife and kids. Alimony. Accumulated arrears amounting
to more than I make in a year.” The nurse was right: talking about the past had a calming influence. I was amazed at myself. I’d just been told that I was cut off from the whole of the Grantham Public Library, to say nothing of the Grantham daily paper with my crossword in it, and I was chatting away as though my whole life hadn’t just been flushed down the toilet. I paused, scanning my recent memory before going on. “I can’t seem to remember my open files. I’ll have to check the office as soon as I can drive down there.”

“All in good time. What you have, Mr. Cooperman, is called
alexia sine agraphia
. It’s quite rare.”

“What are the chances they’ll name it after me?”

“There are better ways to be remembered.”

“When you told me about my reading, I sort of blew up. I’m sorry about that. But did I let you finish? Is there more?”

“Are you ready for it? It’s not as bad as not being able to read, but it’s just as annoying.”

“Better tell me. I’ll be brave.”

“You may have noticed this already. You forget things. You mix things up, like apples and pears, oranges and lemons. You remember faces better than you do names. Like mine, for instance.”

“I’ll get it yet. It sounds like something. Right?”

“Right. Carol McKay, rhymes with ‘day.’”

I repeated the name under my breath, trying to anchor it in my brain. I didn’t test it; I just held on to the hope.

She was looking down at me again with those playful brown eyes. “Have you been able to trace the edge, the time when your memory breaks off?”

“When I try too hard, everything implodes. I can’t remember your name or even my own when I get rattled. It’s better when it just comes to me. When I go after it, it’s like trying to place a name at a crowded party. You have to winkle out a memory like that. No good galumphing after it. Hey, how is it that I can still talk and remember words like ‘winkle’ and ‘galumphing’?”

“Has to do with the location of the blow to your head. An inch higher or lower and you might have trouble with other things. There was a case last Friday of a man who had lost the ability to swallow. That required surgery. Whoever hit you, Mr. Cooperman, picked a good spot. With some time doing rehab, you’ll be surprised by what you can do.”

“Thanks,” I said, without putting much life into it. I didn’t want to make progress, I wanted to get on with my life. Anything less was makeshift and unsatisfactory. I could feel a deep depression beginning to percolate through my legs and into my stomach. A black mood had hove to in the harbour of my mind, awaiting further orders. Rehab, she’d called it. I could tell that I wasn’t going to like rehab. Even before I started on it, it already had the aftertaste of artificial sweeteners.

“I know it’s not what you want to hear, Mr. Cooperman, but it’s what we have to offer. If you walk down the hall, you’ll see people worse off than you.”

I didn’t give a damn about the people down the hall. I wanted to roll over and face the curtain. She wasn’t even going to allow me a moment of self-pity. If I couldn’t feel sorry for myself now, when could I?