Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 workdays has gone up. But mostly, it's because the parts of my mind shared between the online world and the fictional are starting, once again, to be given over to early-morning and (on Saturdays) all-morning writing sessions. I've been so distracted by other stuff since November, in short, that I haven't worked much on the novel. That's changing -- for good, I hope, at least until this draft is done.
In the meantime, you'll probably continue to find me fading into and out of view.]
The prospect of having a stroke has always terrified me, even more than the prospect of Alzheimer’s; at least to my way of thinking, the gradual dissolution of the self in the latter case is a kindness (surely the only one) compared to the sudden wham! of the former: the blow to some faculties while leaving others intact.
And because I’m someone who lives with words so much, not surprisingly, the most terrifying of all faculties to lose would be verbal ones. What (I wonder) would I do if I could never talk again — and knew it? What if I not only couldn’t talk, but couldn’t even within my own head any longer form a particular word when I needed it? How would I cope with losses like these? Could I cope with them?
Such questions drove the opening of the excerpt, below, from the current chapter-in-progress. This chapter takes place (if anywhere) inside the head of a main character. By this point in the story, the reader, like some of Al’s friends, has seen Al topple suddenly to his driveway on a Sunday morning, and has seen him in the hospital, alive but inert.
All the usual disclaimers about first-draft work apply. :)
Seems to Fit: Excerpt
His eyes were not open, not yet; he still hadn’t remembered all the steps required to pull that particular trick off. But behind the twitching lids, Al’s mind lurched about in a jumbled warehouse of thoughts. Each thought occupied exactly one box in the warehouse, most but not all of which were labeled, and each box might contain a thought, or perhaps none. Sometimes the lighting failed, so when he opened a box he couldn’t read the label or tell what was inside. None of it made any sense for a while.
But then he had an idea. Or rather, he had an ( ).
That was another problem: as his mind grabbed at the boxes, it kept coming up short with actual words. Little rectangular voids dotted his consciousness where he expected to find words: words to describe what he was finding, to identify the thoughts inside the boxes, the shelves, the aisles, the heaps of cardboard and tissue paper which bestrew the floor at his ( ) and made walking difficult. Sometimes, he was already learning, if he lacked a word he might be able to fabricate a phrase to use in its stead, something to distinguish it from all the other sudden holes in his vocabulary. Maybe he didn’t know the word “( ),” but he could feel what he meant when he encountered that hole in the context of a thought: the knee bones connected to the shin bones, the shins to the ankles, and the ankles to the pale-fragile-bony-things-with-five-toes-each.
But this strategy didn’t work for all words. While he knew he didn’t have an ( ), exactly, just an ( )-shaped hole in his mind, he had no phrase to replace it because “( )” stood for an abstract something, something which he couldn’t point to or hold in his hands and show somebody else.
He guessed it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be showing his ( ) to anybody else. He knew what he meant, and gosh darn it, he knew that he’d had an ( ) there as he fumbled around and tried to maintain his balance among the boxes and the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The ( ) he’d had was this: he could connect the thoughts, butt them up against one another to make longer thoughts. He experimented for a long, long, long moment, first clearing a space on a long shelf and then picking up and inspecting the nearby boxes of thoughts, arranging them in a row so he could read them from ( ) to right.
So…
…all right then. Hands on hips, checking his handiwork. His first connected thoughts: He knew that he’d had a thing-you-have-when-a-blood-clot-gets-loose-in-your-head. He knew that he was lying down on his back, knew that he couldn’t open his eyes, knew that he couldn’t… couldn’t… couldn’t twist-his-body-extend-his-arms-and-legs-and-get-up-so-he-was-on-his-pale-fragile-bony-things-with-five-toes-each. His friend Larry was somewhere nearby, and also his other friend, umm, Large-Round-Head — he’d seen both of them, the looks in their eyes at the moment the blood-clot-thing hit and he pitched forward onto the—
My gosh but this is exhausting, he thought. And as soon as he’d thought that, he went truly unconscious, passed for a while from this tangled confusion of mind and spirit to a space with no vacancies to frustrate him, with no words present, a space in which the thoughts and ( )s ran smoothly, consecutively, of their own accord and with no intervention required…
A heavenly night in mid-May, 1945. France, the northeastern corner of the Lozère department, nestled in a fold of the Massif Central. Corporal Al Castle has the evening to himself — an experience he has almost forgotten possible. From overhead, the stars shine their little silver lights down through the blackness. Al loves looking at the stars, especially when no growling, winged-machine silhouettes interrupt their silent winking.
One hand in a pocket, the other gripping a service flashlight to illuminate his way, Al trudges along the side of a road which winds up from the encampment outside a small town, up into the hills of the Margeride. He has no idea where he’s going, he’s just walking, but is nonetheless surprised to find himself quite suddenly looking down on the town from a substantial height. It must have taken him over an hour to get this far; the evening sky has passed into night, and in the town he can see individual lights winking on here and there, sad weak echoes of the starlight. Some of these lights appear in the windows of houses, but not many. Most are floodlights, mounted on posts, illuminating tumbledown walls and rubble-filled craters—
Now Al does recall walking along some of the streets down there, lined by the collapsed shells and shadows of what used to be domestic life here: stout elderly men and women taking the air (between clouds of smoke and ash) from porches leading to nonexistent front doors, sitting on chairs and benches made of lashed-together boards and pipes, waving and calling to Al as he passed, pretending to offer him swigs from the green bottles of what cannot possibly be potable wine, stumps of trees, blasted hedges, a dog too recently dead to have been buried yet, lots empty of life and civilization save for piles of bricks and lumber, Américaine, vin, vin!, the shattered wooden fence with a dead horse lying across its shards — a horse which a closer look shows to be just the front half of a horse, the back end that of a cow which just happened to land next to it — and a little girl sitting on a curb, silent, her face smudged, her once-pretty dress stained and torn and bloodied, staring at Al as he walked by and pretended not to see her, not to see the doll in her hands, the doll with its head missing, the little girl stroking the stump of a cloth neck, pushing against it with a thumb to keep the stuffing from bleeding into her hands…
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[Etc. Copyright 2010, so on and so forth.]
You’ve made me want to know what happens to Al now with his stroke and what happened to Al then in the war.
So, oddly enough my latest novel has a character who forgets words too. It was interesting to read how you imagine this loss to be, how you convey it. But my character is a teenage girl and her memory loss is for other reasons. We’ve got very things going on obviously.
Good luck with your writing. I miss “seeing” you more regularly, but it is for a good cause!
Oh, wow. I’m with Marta. I want to know more. I feel like this is a gift — when you share your writing like this. Thank you.
I’m SURE I have apologized about being behind on blog-reading before, but I truly believe we shouldn’t do that. There’s just so much to do in life; blog-reading is always what suffers for me, too. It’s hard to keep up. (I’ve actually limited myself to just a handful of favorites, such as yours, so that I can really take in what I’m reading and not rush, like I used to do.) Anyway, all that’s to say: You do what you need to do. Though, of course, we all love when you visit.
Thanks again!
Yeah…what they said (marta and jules, of course). Recently had a first hand experience with a potential client having a stroke during my initial meeting with him. Let me know if you want to compare notes for how that played out over about 20 minutes time. Very weird.
(Hmm. Anybody still reading this thread?)
Appreciate everyone’s comments, as always. I am woefully under-read, if that’s a word, about strokes, and I’m sure someone who knows more about them would laugh at my depiction. (At the least, it may be stretching things too far to say that even a healthy brain is so literally language-bound that it “notices” the unavailability of individual words.)
About WW2, though, I may possibly have read too much about it. For instance: General Eisenhower makes a brief cameo appearance in this chapter; does anyone really care that I knew to say he lit up a Camel, vs. lit up a plain-old cigarette?
(reCaptcha: Spofford Lousiana. Huh.)