Head Wounds

THIRTEEN

WHEN I FINALLY located Amanda she was covered in soot. She was stationed with another blackened soul next to a large dumpster at the end of a relay line starting inside her burned-out house. Charred chunks of sheetrock, two-by-fours and melted fixtures were traveling down the line to where the pitch team tossed them over the seven-foot dumpster wall.

The day had turned bright, the hard light of the season flooding down through the bare tree cover and revealing the ugliness and wreckage of the destroyed property in stark detail. The air was clear, but thick with the bitter, sickly smell of soaked charcoal.

Amanda used the back of her forearm to clear a wave of hair from her face, exposing a smile for me and Eddie as we approached.

“Welcome to the glamorous world of real-estate development,” she said.

“Thanks. I think I’ll observe from here,” I said, standing clear of the ash and dust. Eddie didn’t like the smell and feel of the place, and was happy to stay close to my side.

“I hope we can talk,” she said as she took one end of a shredded piece of half-inch plyscore to help hoist it up and into the dumpster.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

Amanda stepped out of the human chain, which reconfigured itself without interrupting the flow of debris.

“I want to plead temporary insanity,” she said as she wiped her hands.

“You had a rough night.”

“I’ve had rougher. I’ve been storing up a little too much lately,” she said, moving out of earshot of the crew. “I wasn’t even aware. Not consciously. The fire triggered something. I took it out on you. I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s adequate.”

Like Rosaline Arnold, an excess of curiosity was one of my greater failings. But there were a lot of things I didn’t want to know about, that I preferred to leave unexamined. How I felt about Amanda was one of them. Maybe because of that I never tried very hard to understand her. As if I was afraid of what that understanding would reveal.

One thing I did know was she’d absorbed a disproportionate amount of sorrow in her life, probably more than you could withstand without some adverse consequences taking root. More than I could take, that was certain.

My wife Abby’s life was one of uninterrupted good fortune, if you discounted her choice of husbands. She honored that providence by filling nearly every waking moment with expressions of disgruntlement and complaint. I realized over time that she really didn’t care if I agreed with her or not, as long as I said something that sounded like I was listening, which I did less and less. Eventually all conversation, acerbic or otherwise, dwindled to nothing and a permafrost of silence and disappointment settled into the structure of our relationship.

Long before I’d ever imagined I’d be sleeping with Amanda, I loved to talk to her. I used to go see her at Roy’s bank, pretend I was a worthwhile customer, which I wasn’t. It was the only pleasure I knew in those days. She didn’t know it, but she was the last and only tether I had to the world, more like a gossamer thread, barely holding on.

Standing there next to her burned-out house, I remembered what it was like to see her at her desk. To bathe in the glory of a welcome look. I didn’t trust it, but I loved it. I didn’t know there could be such a thing.

I’d said to Sullivan that it couldn’t be worth it. But it was.

“I won’t fight with you. I wouldn’t know how,” I said.

“I know. It’ll never happen again,” she said. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Just give it a little while, and you’ll see.”

Her voice was tired, but the words were clear and unstudied.

She reached up and took my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead.

“There. Now we look almost the same,” she said.

“Hardly. You look like the inside of my hibachi.”

“I went to see my friends in the City. I hadn’t heard about Robbie until I read the paper this morning. They don’t really think you had anything to do with it, do they?”

“They have all this damning evidence and no other suspects. I’m new to this, but I think that emboldens the prosecution.”

“It was that dreadful scene at the restaurant,” she said.

“Didn’t help. Jackie’s going to want you to back me up on that one.”

“So ridiculous,” she said.

“That’s what I kept saying until they were sticking my fingers on pads of ink and asking me if I had a passport.”

She wrapped her arms around me and held on for about a minute.

“What a nightmare,” she said into my shirt.

“So you never wondered about it,” I said.

She looked up at me like she didn’t understand what I meant.

“About what?”

“The fire. Robbie.”

She looked at me carefully for a second, then shook her head.

“At first, of course,” she said. “But I’ve known Robbie Milhouser my entire life. He was all show. You saw that. Even if he was capable of the thought, he didn’t have, you know …”

“The courage?”

“That’s right. All bluster, no balls,” she said.

“He took a swing at me. Imprecise, but enthusiastic.”

“He didn’t know you. Misinterpreted the gray hair.”

Even under the grime, I could see that Amanda’s olive skin was approaching its palest state—which on her showed more as a spectrum shift from the deep reddish brown of summer to a slightly yellow cast that a few bright days in May would quickly dissolve.

“How long had he wanted to team up with you?” I asked.

She shook her head and shrugged.

“I don’t remember exactly. He came by the job here and tried to get me into a conversation. It took a while for him to come out and say he wanted to form a partnership. I tried to be polite, but all I could think was, how ludicrous. Then he left and I forgot all about it. Until he spotted me in the restaurant.”

Holding her, I thought she felt thinner than I’d remembered, more fragile.

“And what do you mean by damning evidence?” she asked.

“He was killed with my hammer stapler. I bought it last year to install the insulation in my addition.”

The worry on her face that had been competing with other emotions took over. Worry and disbelief.

“That’s just nuts,” she said. “How can they be sure?”

“Fingerprints. And it still had the bar code from the store. It’s mine.”

I explained what else they had on me. Including my footprints all over the scene.

“Of course your footprints were there. We went there together so you could show me all the wrong things they were doing. A lesson in crappy carpentry, I think is what you said.”

“You’ll need to say that, too,” I said. “About being there. You can hold on the construction critique.”

“Burton won’t let this get too far,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

“Jackie’s my lawyer. Burt’s consulting.”

“You can’t ask for more than that,” she said, her voice pitched for ambiguity.

Jackie had defended Amanda’s husband after he’d tried to defraud her. There wasn’t much Jackie could do to save him from the foregone conclusion, but she mounted a spirited defense. Everything she did was spirited. But you couldn’t blame Amanda for having a few mixed feelings.

I cast about for a change of subject.

“Any more trouble with the houses?” I asked.

“Can’t do much more with this one. So I had a security company concentrate on the other site,” she said. “All quiet so far. The only thing worth reporting was a guy in an old Pontiac who drove by every day, slowing down when he passed the house. I told them if he made a move to shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“Is that your philosophy?” she asked. “Always play it safe?”

“Yes. In principle. More honored in the breach.”

“I think it’s safe enough to take a walk, what do you say?”

She took my hand and led me toward the street, then north toward the bay.

Eddie took the lead and we followed him through the neighborhood of plain but cared-for single-story houses that Amanda owned along the lagoon to the east. For years they’d been occupied by long-term, year-round renters, but most of those people had died, or retired to Florida, or wised up in time to buy a place of their own before real-estate prices in the Hamptons wiped out its own middle class. Now they were mostly seasonal rentals, though at least one had emerged as a full-time group home for an illegally large number of immigrant laborers.

I asked her about it.

“I can’t have the place teeming with people, but I’m not going to throw them out,” she said. “Everybody wants them to cut the lawns and clean the toilets, then just disappear at night like vampires in reverse.”

“You got bigger issues than that,” I said. “Like the DEC?”

She looked up at me.

“You heard? That was quick.”

“Jackie caught word of something down at Town Hall. I just guessed it was environmental.”

Several houses down from the group rental, right before a swath of wetlands that fronted the Little Peconic, was the house Amanda had grown up in. It was the freshest-looking place in the neighborhood. She’d had the exterior completely refurbished and the grounds professionally landscaped. Nobody lived there, but housecleaners and gardeners came and went to maintain the property in its pristine, revitalized condition.

She squeezed my arm as we walked by, but whatever associations the sight of the house had stirred were left unspoken.

Eddie caught the smell of the wetlands and hurtled ahead, ears up and tail fully raised. The breeze picked up as we moved closer to the water, a sturdy northwesterly bearing the aroma of the saline, mildly putrescent tidal marsh tucked in behind the narrow pebble beach. Various species of seabird took flight in a burst of fluttery panic, flushed out of the tall grass by Eddie’s unwelcome arrival.

The road ran over a narrow causeway across the wetlands and stopped at the beach, which you entered by squeezing through a white-painted barrier intended to prevent SUVs from trampling the wildlife preserve. Amanda led the way to a dry strip just shy of the tidal line, where she dropped to the ground and lay flat on her back, arms out and feet crossed. I joined her, noticing the deepening blue sky for the first time, etched as always by the leisurely flight paths of gliding gulls and hulking terns.

“I’m screwed,” she said, after a few minutes.

“Put that in layman’s terms.”

“I’m thoroughly screwed.”

“Oh,” I said.

“The DEC has shut me down pending a further investigation into why they should or shouldn’t ruin my life.”

“I thought you had all that stuff worked out.”

“I had a full phase-one environmental study completed and approved.”

“I remember. I was there for the celebration. Party of two, as I recall.”

“I recall being issued building permits for a half dozen houses. One of which I’d be installing carpets in right now if it hadn’t been for the pyrotechnics.”

“The DEC trumps the local boys. Even I know that,” I said.

“The DEC were the ones who passed on phase one in the first place. I had a whole testing crew on the WB site for a week. I took them into every nook and cranny and fed them coffee and expensive pastries—even offered to launder their gaudy orange jumpsuits.”

“Must have changed their minds.”

She was quiet again for a minute.

“I guess. I don’t know. Who knows?” she said, finally.

“Are you allowed to clean up the burn site?”

“Probably not, technically. But I’m not losing that crew. Too hard to replace.”

“So you don’t know what caused the change of heart.”

“Nothing they’re willing to share. All I have is some bureaucratic gobbledygook about new information and my options for redress. That’s a laugh.”

“They might just want to double-check. Sniff around a little, write a report, hit the town and go back with tales of drunkenness and cruelty.”

She scooped up a handful of smooth rounded pebbles and tossed them at the water. I heard two or three plunks.

“That’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thing to say,” she noted.

“Always been a fan of a half-full glass.”

Some more time went by, which Amanda filled by tossing pebbles into the bay. Eddie checked in on us, licking our faces to make sure we weren’t dead. His breath was perfumed with the dross that collected along the bay shore.

“I’ve always just done what I’m supposed to do,” said Amanda. “I bought all the bullshit about how to be a person, and all that’s ever come of it is crap. I used to have nothing and life was crap, and now I have so much, and it’s still crap. Tell me why I should keep trying to make something worthwhile out of all of this …”

“Crap?”

Amanda was a person I always had a hard time getting into focus. That was my fault, not hers. Even when she was right in front of me, or like now in profile, something about her or me made it impossible to know if I was really seeing her at all.

“I’ve been getting into Kant,” I added. “Maybe he knows.”

“Who else reads all the books the rest of us tried to avoid in college?”

“You need to meet more retired fighters. The heavyweights are a bunch of crazy existentialists. Just love Being and Nothingness.”

“That’s sounds more up my alley.”

“Not if you ask me. If somebody said, ‘What’s up with that chick Amanda Anselma?’ would I say, ‘Oh, you mean Ms. Abject Fatalist? Ms. Existential Despair?’ No, probably not.”

“I can’t believe it. You’re actually trying to cheer me up.”

“That’s what I do. Spread cheer wherever I go. A mission from God.”

She laughed a not entirely cynical little laugh.

“Weren’t you the one who said God had a lousy sense of humor?” she asked.

“No. I said God wanted to be a practical joker, but had trouble coming up with jokes that were actually funny.”

“Maybe only to Him.”

“Another question for Sartre.”

“Maybe he knows why God doesn’t want me to develop Jacob’s Neck.”

“With all due respect, I think the Almighty’s got other things to do. The answer to that is entirely within our ability to grasp.”

“So you think there is something going on?” she asked. “Not just rotten coincidence?”

“Rotten, yeah. Not sure about anything else.”

“Meaning you’re only partly sure, but you’re not going to talk to me about it.”

“Engineers keep half-baked hypotheses to themselves.”

“Oh, now we’re engineers. Do they read Kant?”

“Only the empiricists. In between crossword puzzles.”

“Let me know when one of those hypotheses is ready to come out of the oven.”

“Only if we get to celebrate.”

“Half-full glasses all around.”

Eddie and I escorted her back to her burned-out house. I opened the door to the Grand Prix so Eddie had a place out of the way to curl up, which he was more than happy to do.

I spent the rest of the day helping Amanda and her crew pick through the charred remains and assess what might be saved. She was expecting experts to come by the next day, which is why she wanted to clear out as much of the clutter and destruction as possible.

It looked to me like the first-floor joist system and a big part of the northwest corner were salvageable. As were all the mechanicals in the basement. I pointed that out, which I pretended cheered her up a little.

It was dusk when we made it back to Oak Point. I’d dragged my homemade Adirondacks out to the edge of the lawn facing the Little Peconic at the first hint of warming weather. It was too cool for rational people to sit outside and drink, but that’s what we did anyway, which speaks to the prevailing state of our rationality. Amanda even had a special concoction her friends in the City had stuffed into her suitcase, a customized cosmopolitan mix featuring Absolut Citron and pomegranate juice.

“What a thing to do to an innocent vodka,” I complained.

“Vodka’s never innocent, and even empiricists need to try something different once in a while.”

It wasn’t bad if chilled properly, especially after the second or third glass. And the air wasn’t as cold as it should have been, or maybe we were warmed by seasonal expectations, reflected back upon us by the iridescence of a moonlit Little Peconic Bay.

“I think I’m getting hungry,” said Amanda eventually “It’s all the pomegranate juice. Whets the appetite.”

“I’m too loopy to cook. But I bought lots of cold edibles that’re in the fridge.”

“After I wash this crud off of me.”

“Agreed.”

I went down the basement hatch and turned on the water to the outdoor shower. The faucets were already open, so the water would be warmed up by the time I stripped off my clothes. There was still a slight danger of freezing temperatures, so I was pushing the timing a little, but next to sleeping out on the uncomfortably chilly screened-in porch in early spring there was nothing like a stupidly frigid outdoor shower.

It was too dark to see the cloud of vapor, but I could feel it when I stepped into the enclosed shower stall. I stood motionless under the scorching stream for a few minutes, lost in the feeling of the water as it steamed away the day’s accretion of stress, effort and avoidance.

I kept soap and shampoo in a little cedar cabinet mounted to the wall. I think I was about to reach over to pop it open when a tiny click, like the snap of a very thin glass straw, went off somewhere deep inside my head. A shrill ring followed the click, which would have drawn more of my attention if my throat hadn’t choked on the air and my heart rate hadn’t suddenly ripped into a thudding staccato. The floor of the shower stall began rocking like a washtub caught in a ship’s wake, sloshing up and down at random forty-five degree angles. And then all the way to ninety degrees and over I went, my left shoulder absorbing most of the fall.

The phrase “my heart beat right out of my chest” ran across my mind as I felt the pounding heartbeats interrupt every shallow breath. The shower stall by now was rotating like a carnival ride, and all sense of up and down, side to side vanished. The ring in my ears was escalating into a siren. I somehow made it to my hands and knees, feeling the slippery redwood slats that formed the floor.

The world continued to turn and spin, but I stopped caring about that and concentrated on slowing my heart. I wondered, how much can it take? Can a heart actually beat itself to death? I sat on the floor and wedged myself against the wall, steadily slowing my breathing, cupping my hands over my mouth to retrieve CO₂.

Then I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My throat clamped shut and the siren in my head began to crackle, and then decayed into a wet scream. A scream no one could hear because it wasn’t audible to the world. It was all inside my head.

Another voice was in there, too, questioning, is this it? Is this what we’ve all been waiting for? Is this how the end feels—hot, wet and naked, screaming silently into your hands as you wait for the final ball of incandescence to burn it all away?

I didn’t get the answers, but I was still producing questions when I heard another click, or more like a dull thud, that instantly caused everything to go black as time, as consciousness and further interrogatives flicked into oblivion.

——

I lay frozen in the cold rain. I could see a grass hut just a few yards away. It was crowded with people huddled under the dubious shelter. I wanted to join them, but all I could move was my eyes, which I had to blink frequently to keep them from filling with water. I wanted to shift positions to take pressure off my sore shoulder, but I couldn’t. A vast weariness clung to my limbs, drawing me down to the earth, my jaw slack and my tongue lolling, an uncontrollable wad in my mouth.

The gang under the hut stood looking impassively at the rain. I knew they’d be no help to me. But the harder I tried to move, the less possible it seemed to be. It was like this for so long I almost started getting used to it when Eddie suddenly trotted into the area between me and the hut. His tail was wagging, slowly, the way it does when he wants to say hello, usually out of the blue, just for the hell of it. He looked over at me and barked, something he rarely did. I liked that about him, that he dispensed his barks sparingly, strategically.

I wanted to say to him what I usually said, something like, “Yeah, yeah, easy for you to say,” or “Frame that argument a little more clearly and maybe we’ll have something to debate.” But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t move my mouth or activate my vocal chords.

So, naturally, he kept barking. More and more insistently. I started worrying about the neighbors. I didn’t know them, except for Amanda, and I didn’t much care what they thought of me, but I always thought a barking dog was sort of rude.

“Knock it off, will ya?” I demanded, in my mind.

But he kept barking, and waving his long feathered tail.

“Sam, Holy Christ,” said Amanda.

Then the rain abruptly stopped. Eddie was still barking.

“Eddie, shut the hell up,” said Amanda, which he did, more or less.

The hut evaporated before my eyes, and the cedar walls of the shower enclosure emerged. That and Amanda’s wet hair, which fell from her forehead and smelled like tropical flowers, covering her face as she felt around my body.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

She had a flashlight. When I opened my eyes she pointed it away from my face. She kept asking me urgent questions, but she didn’t know I couldn’t speak. Or move. On the other hand, maybe I could.

“Uh,” I said.

“Uh?”

“Fell.”

“You fell?”

Now I had Eddie’s wet nose poking around my face, his warm, prickly fur scraping over my wet body.

“Eddie!” Amanda yelled. “Get the hell out of here. He’s all right.”

“I am?”

I picked my left hand up off the floor and wiggled my fingers. I located my right hand and used it to push myself up so I was sitting with my back against the wall of the shower enclosure.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I looked at my legs sticking out in front of me. In the cold dark it was hard to see my toes, but I knew they were wiggling. I drew my knees up to my chest and flexed my leg muscles. Everything operational.

“Fucking hell, I’m cold. I got to dry off.”

“I’m calling an ambulance.”

“No you’re not. You’re going to help me stand up. Then you’re going to hand me that towel.”

“What happened? Talk to me.”

“I am. I’m talking to you now. I’m telling you to help me stand up.”

I gripped her arm and together we stood. The floor of the shower enclosure had been reattached to the earth. I snatched the towel off the hook and wrapped it around me.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“Let me drive you to the hospital,” said Amanda.

“You want to help me?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Follow me into the cottage. If I pass out along the way, leave me where I fall.”

“Okay. Sure.”

My equilibrium seemed as good as it ought to be after a few tumblers of Absolut and pomegranate cosmopolitans. My head was clear—no more little clicks—but I thought I heard a distant ring. Before we reached the side porch I gently shook off her grasp and walked on my own. The ground held and my heart stayed calm in my chest.

Eddie had stayed welded to my side. When I reached the side porch I squatted down and scratched his ears, letting him look me over.

“I’m okay, man. Everything’s okay.”

“You have to let me get you to the hospital,” said Amanda, almost knocking me down as she shoved her way into the kitchen.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

“That’s not up to you.”

When I stood up the world tipped a little, but then righted itself. The ringing in my ears was gone. My mouth was dry and my hands and feet tingled, but otherwise, no major upheavals. I walked into the house.

“It has to be up to me, beautiful,” I said to her. She and Eddie followed me into the bedroom where I dug out some clean clothes. After slipping on my jeans I sat on the bed and took stock again. All faculties seemed nearly intact. Acuities an open question.

“You’re afraid to go,” she said.

“I am.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything.”

“I’m afraid of hospitals. People die in those places.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“Just had a little vertigo. Slipped and hit my head.”

“You should have seen your face when I found you. It was awful.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I said.

“Eddie was going berserk. It didn’t sound normal. I knew something was wrong.”

“Worried about getting his dinner.”

I went into the kitchen and poured another drink. Amanda scowled at me, but didn’t say anything. The three of us went out to the screened-in porch where I sat at the pine table. Eddie and Amanda secured the floor. As I settled down, I noticed tiny pinpricks were sticking at my fingertips where I held the chilled glass. I worked on regulating my breathing and slowing my pulse rate. Amanda worked on her scowl.

“What happened to all the edibles?” I asked.

“You actually want to eat?”

“And drink and be merry.”

I let her talk me into staying put while she went to get the food. I was glad to be alone on my porch for a little while. I took off one of the storm windows so I could look through the screen at the water and hear the sounds of the birds and bay waves. The air was cool but calm, and the porch would stay warm enough as long as I stoked the woodstove.

My hand had a slight tremor when I took a drink. I switched the glass to my left hand, which was steadier. An unwanted recollection of the punchy old guys who hung around the gym in New Rochelle forced its way into my mind. Their lumpy faces and hands swollen into balloons, the flesh pink and smooth, stretched taut with edema. Hands that shook so badly they couldn’t hold a full cup of coffee. Their heads bobbing uncontrollably, involuntarily agreeing with everything you said.

You’d think the owners of the gym would shoo them away, afraid the ravages of the trade would deter young fighters. But every gym had the same old guys. A standard feature of the ambiance. Nobody saw them as a cautionary tale, the blindness of youth and commerce being what it is.

The next time I took a drink my right hand was steady. Along with my resolve. As of that moment I was alive and as fully functional as I had a right to expect. Until that status changed, I wasn’t living in anticipation of the moment it would. Thoughts like that are dangerous. Inhibiting. Make you think you might actually have something to lose.

“Fear and anger make you stupid,” I told Amanda when she showed up with a wicker basket full of comestibles.

“Some manage it with a light and cheerful heart,” she said.

She had the good sense and generosity to keep our dinner conversation superficial. I bored her with tales of my days as a troubleshooter for the hydrocarbon-processing business. Drinking coffee under a tent with guys in white robes after spending the afternoon scaling a cracking tower that soared above the desert sand. The sweetness and gentility of the maintenance teams, desperate for knowledge and thrilled by my company’s technological prowess.

I taught them what I could, though I doubt those young engineers, or the people back at our office in White Plains, ever understood what the enterprise truly meant to me—the ideal undertaking for a brain never safe on its own, undistracted and free to wander, malevolent, into dark and lethal domains. Places where things could happen that were incomprehensible, unexplainable in the cold light of day, even to myself.

——

Southampton Hospital was only a few city blocks from the high school. It was also made of red brick, the Village standard. Unlike the school buildings it was tucked inside an established neighborhood of Victorians and early shingle-style homes, mature Norway maples and copper beech festooned with building permits, or notices of an upcoming hearing before the architectural review board. Likewise, the streets were lined with pickups and vans, and the syncopated rhythm of construction filled the air. Fresh framing lumber and reddish brown cedar shakes strained against zoning setbacks and height restrictions, casting shadows over the occasional bungalow or modest two-story colonial, bearing uneasy witness to the neighborhood’s original intent.

I found the guy I was looking for in the hospital canteen. This was easily done, since the canteen was so small and Markham Fairchild was so big. He was working on a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich from one of the vending machines, nodding his head to a compelling beat coming through a pair of white earphones. I imagined something along the lines of Bob Marley, a stupid stereotyping of Markham’s Jamaican origins, since it turned out to be Dwight Yoakam.

“I like all those country guitars,” he said, peeling off the earphones. “And the lyrics. Little stories.”

I sat down across from him with a cup of astringent vending machine coffee.

“If they have to plug it in to play, Doc, I’m not interested,” I told him.

He wiped his hand with a napkin and reached across the table. I saw mine disappear briefly into his handshake.

“You bleeding out from somewhere or just come to call?” he asked.

“No blood, no buddies in the ER.”

“Capital.”

“I’m just looking for some free information.”

“That’s fine for you, Mr. Ah-cquillo, but I pay a lot of money to Georgetown University for the information up here,” he said, tapping his temple.

Markham’s specialty was trauma care, often fielding patients fresh out of the OR. I’d first met him while regaining consciousness. The hallucinatory sensation that I’d been transported to a land of brilliant and affable giants had never quite left me.

“I’m a carpenter,” I said. “What’ll you take in trade?”

“I could use a new house. Somet’ing with a little elbow room for a change.”

“Big order.”

“Big doctor.”

“I’ve only got a couple questions. How about a bookcase?” He took a bite of his sandwich and nodded.

“A deal,” he said, letting me off a lot easier than Rosaline Arnold.

“You remember the first time I was in here, after getting beaned by Buddy Florin?”

“Didn’t know the name of the perpetrator, but I remember the hole in your head.”

“They stuck me for about an hour in a tube that made a noise like a four-cylinder engine with a couple of burned valves.”

“That’s the MRI. How dey examine your brain, or whatever you got left in der.”

“That’s my question. Do you remember what it said?”

“I had an attending in those days. He told me what it said. Now I’m an attending, so I got to look again to see if he was right.”

“But you remember what he said.”

Markham’s mouth stretched into a smile wide enough to catch a sparrow.

“That’s one of the t’ings you learn at Georgetown. How to remember everyt’ing. How technical you want it?”

“Just looking for headlines.”

He looked at me the same way he did back when my scalp was full of stitches.

“Funny you ask about this now.”

“Just curious.”

He paused, scrutinizing me. Then his face relaxed, as if an internal debate had been resolved.

“Okay, if you really want to know, you’re a classic right prefrontal cortex.”

He reached across the table, and without having to lean forward, tapped the middle of my forehead.

“Lot of action there, according to the MRI. Lots of bangs and bruises.”

I felt my heart cinch up inside my chest. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about frontal lobes.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“You know, the most complicated t’ing in the universe, that we know about, is that three pounds of pinky gray cauliflower inside your skull. That goes for everybody, even the dumbest Homo sapien on the planet.”

“Or the smartest chimp.”

He shook his head.

“Not quite. His brain is wired up different from the one you’ve been using for a battering ram. Especially in the prefrontal cortex. That’s where you get to be human and he don’.”

“So it’s too complicated to know.”

He shrugged.

“They researching these t’ings all de time. Got lots of ways of chasin’ down traumatic brain injury. I can show you the diagnostic guide. Bigger than the phone book.” He tapped his head again with his index finger. “Though I got most of it up here. No damage.”

“Okay, what about vertigo?”

“Sure. See that more with the cerebellum, but sure.”

“Same as memory loss?”

“That’s your frontal lobes, for sure. And big time over in the temporal. Different neighborhood, but I remember you had some flare-ups there, too.”

“Flare-ups?”

“On the MRI. Very colorful t’ings.”

“Amnesia?”

“That’s a nice myth for Hollywood to make movies about. You can destroy the short term. Strokes and Alzheimer’s do that. Not usually the long term. Though you can have a gap that doesn’t come back. That’s pretty common with the head trauma. Or lots of blood loss. Like your blond friend the cop. He got plenty of each in a big fight and don’t remember anyt’ing.”

“Do you see progression over time?”

“Sure. Come in for another MRI, throw in some other tests, we know for certain what sort of trouble we looking at. I’ll know better den because I have my hands on the wheel. Much better than lookin’ at other people’s tests.”

He sat back in his chair and rested his hands on the tops of his thighs, elbows akimbo.

“But, like I say, Mr. Ah-cquillo,” he said, “we only know about one percent of what actually happens in the brain, or why. There are more possible connections in der than there are molecules in the universe. Too much to know. We can see patterns, but almost anyt’ing is possible with the traumatic brain injury. Especially multiple injuries over time. But we do the best we can.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I can’t give any more discount information. They’re waiting upstairs for the attending to finish his snack.”

“Sure, of course.”

He’d been looking hard at me while we talked. Even with his abiding grin, it wasn’t a particularly happy look. But now his face hardened even more.

“One more t’ing. You don’t always see a damaged prefrontal right away. The symptoms sneak up on you.”

“Why’s that?”

“‘Cause, like I say, that’s where you keep your personality, the trickiest part of the brain function. The effects can be subtle, almost invisible, even to the patient himself. It’s a clinical consequence, but sometimes you need a good head shrink to spot the signs. And den, trust me, you might not want to be meeting up with these people.”

“You don’t?”

“Most common indication is a change in social behavior. Empathy, judgment, awareness of risk, rejection of authority and a whole collection of personality disorders the head shrinks call pseudopsychopathic, though it don’ seem so pseudo to me. Anyway, that’s what I didn’t tell the boss of that cop friend of yours and this other guy lookin’ like he’s straight from IBM when they come to see me, just like you, asking for free information, which I tell them to go find somewhere else. And that’s who’s got those MRIs of yours. I tell dem, don’t go flashing subpoenas at me. Take it down the hall to the people who care about all that.”

With that he stood up to leave. I almost sprained my neck looking up at him. He reached over the table again and took all of my shoulder along with a fair amount of the rest of me in his huge paw.

“Jus’ do me a favor and stop by my nurses’ station. Give dem some of your blood and make an appointment to come back and we take some more snapshots. I write the order.”

“I think you’re the one doing me the favor.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big bookcase,” he said. “And no tropical hardwoods. Remind me too much of home.”

And then he left me in the hospital canteen, alone again with my mental powers, however suspect and capricious. I’d spent most of my life devoted to logic and reason. Whatever the value of intuition in solving engineering problems, everything was ultimately based on trust of hard fact. Quantifiable, testable, empirically sound truth.

But old Kant would tell you, reality is only as sure as the mind perceiving it. I wished I could get him to take Markham’s seat across from me in the hospital canteen so I could put it to him straight:

Can a man be outsmarted by his own brain?