At a certain point the hospital discharged him. Anthony was hazy on the details. The state was involved, workers’ comp, the union maybe. Claims were processed. He was assigned a caseworker whose name he forgot immediately.
He sat in a dark room holding his head.
In that year, 2002, he lived nowhere. He lived only in his body, a troubled neighborhood rapidly going to seed. Ringing in his ears, a sickening vertigo. He sat very still and listened to his interior weather, his organs slipping and sliding against one another like a bag of dying fish.
The body in all its exigencies, its variegated symptoms, its colorful complaints.
His mother hired an attorney who advertised on TV, in between reruns of Law & Order. A caseworker whose name he couldn’t remember gave him advice he couldn’t remember.
“Total permanent. I can’t imagine they’d refuse you,” she said, looking him up and down, and in spite of himself he was offended because she didn’t look that great herself.
His head was examined by every means possible. He lay in a metal tube that made otherworldly noises. After an hour or a month, who could tell, he was excreted through the tube. His vitals were taken—blood pressure, resting pulse. The numbers were a kind of code, elegant, inscrutable. Anthony added them together to discern their meaning, the unreported stories of the body contained therein.
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.