Mercy Street(32)

He was given a PET scan and a CAT scan but curiously, no dog scan.

By every means possible, short of cutting his skull in half.

He sat in a dark room holding his head. Upstairs his mother watched Law & Order. In between scenes came the chinking noise he could hear through the floorboards, like the door of a prison cell being closed.

His brain didn’t work the way it once had. Reading made his head ache. He had trouble matching names and faces. An Indian doctor with a musical accent peppered him with questions. Were these new deficiencies? Was his memory better before the accident?

“I don’t remember,” Anthony said.

His traumatic brain injury was classified as moderate. There had been some impairment of his executive functions. To Anthony, who wasn’t aware of possessing any to begin with, it was confusing news.

He listened for the chinking noise.

Each doctor referred him to another doctor. The acupuncturist, the inner-ear specialist. He swallowed capsules and was palpated. A psychologist asked questions about his childhood. He lay on a table listening to soothing music while a Chinese woman stuck needles into his neck.

When he was advised to resume his normal activities, it was like being told to burst into flames.

Head injuries were unpredictable. On this point only, the doctors agreed. A mild concussion could cause symptoms for years afterward. A massive, bell-ringing concussion basically doomed you for life—according to the Traumatic Brain Injury message board, which Anthony checked daily. The posts were like dispatches from another planet—a bleak, ruined planet inhabited by dizzy, nauseated, clinically depressed people who’d lost all interest in living.

On the message board they shared useless information. Melatonin, B vitamins, a drink containing electrolytes. Plastic bands around the wrists to prevent seasickness.

Days got longer, shorter, longer. Warmer, colder, warmer. In this way, years passed.

Unpredictable was the sole point of agreement. The doctors were happy to take his money. Several times a week he rode the Care Van, a free shuttle that made regular stops in Grantham—to ferry decrepit elders to their medical appointments, multiple stops on their journeys to the grave.

On one of these trips, the driver—a friendly old hippie whose name he couldn’t remember—gave him a hand-rolled cigarette.

His brain didn’t work the way it once had. He felt, always, that he was moving at half speed. Smoking weed didn’t make him any quicker, but it quelled his seasickness, the gyroscope spinning inside his head.

He smoked the joint at bedtime and slept deeply. The next morning he went for a walk.

On the bus driver’s advice, he called Tim Flynn.

Each day he walked a little farther. One morning he made it as far as St. Dymphna’s. The church was warm and smelled of candle wax, birthday candles, the best moments of childhood. Gradually the pews filled; the morning Mass happened around him.

He sat in a back pew holding his head.

At Mass he was the kid in the room, the object of geriatric cooing. At Christmas Mrs. Paone knitted him a muffler. Mrs. Morrison baked him a pie. It may not have been accurate to say that faith saved him. If he’d gone through the motions of daily Mass without actually believing, it might have worked just as well.

Each morning he set out walking. He took off his hat so the salt breeze could aerate his brain.

WHEN HE RETURNED TO HIS COMPUTER, AN ALERT WAS FLASHING on his screen, an instant message from Excelsior11—after Tim Flynn, his second-best friend.

Excelsior11: How was turnout?

Not bad, Anthony wrote. Maybe 30, give or take.

Excelsior11: Pix?

Anthony wrote, Uploading them now.

THEY HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR SIX MONTHS, IN THE PECULIAR way strangers know each other online: screen name, alleged age and gender and whatever else the other chose to reveal or embellish or outright fabricate about himself. Excelsior11 lived in a log cabin in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. A Vietnam vet and former long-haul trucker, he now devoted himself, full-time, to the defense of the unborn. These facts were, of course, unverifiable, but Anthony accepted them at face value. It wasn’t the sort of biography anyone would bother to invent.

Excelsior11 was not Catholic. His insistence on this point was, at first, disquieting.

Excelsior11: I reject the worship of saints and angels. But I can see that you are a righteous man and I have no quarrel with your beliefs.

Anthony found these words reassuring. He had never been called righteous before. That his second-best friend was a Protestant made him feel worldly, cosmopolitan. He began to see Excelsior11 as a kind of mentor—like the old Japanese coot in The Karate Kid, the all-time favorite film of his youth.

Excelsior: ever upward. Though not Catholic, he had chosen a Latin screen name.

His method was Socratic. Each day, he sent Anthony a question to ponder.

Excelsior11: How would you defend the Right to Life if you found yourself in discussion with a Nonbeliever?

Excelsior11: What is the appropriate legal punishment for a woman who chooses to kill her child?

These questions lit up his brain. In thirty-nine years of attending Catholic Mass, he’d sat through so many sermons about abortion that the word itself had a soporific effect, like the “midnight sedation” he’d been given when his wisdom teeth were removed. To Anthony, who had never impregnated anyone and had little hope of doing so, abortion was a distant, abstract problem—a thing you were supposed to care about, like the national debt.