Now, I have nothing to do and nothing but time. I can cook, but only if I can find a time slot for grocery deliveries, and only if they have the actual ingredients I ask for. And there’s only so much homemade bread a single human can consume.
I finish Tiger King. （I think she’s totally guilty.） I binge Nailed It! I become obsessed with Room Rater, and after seeing a pundit on television I immediately go to see how their home space fared. I hold virtual happy hours with Rodney from his sister’s home in New Orleans. I stop wearing pants with buttons. Sometimes, I just cry until I can’t anymore.
One day, I type Coma dreams into the search bar of Facebook.
There are two videos and a link to a story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The first video is a woman who was in a coma for twenty-two days after giving birth. When she woke up, she did not recognize her baby, or remember that she had been pregnant. While unconscious, she’d found herself in a palace and her job there was to interview cats—all of which were dressed like courtiers, and all of which could talk. In the video, she shows sketches she has created of each of them, with tiny ruffs or dangling diamond eardrops or velvet doublets.
“My God,” I whisper out loud. Do I sound as unhinged as that?
The second video is another woman. “When I was in a coma,” she says, “my brain decided that the hospital was a conspiracy theory. My ex-boss—I was a barista, before the accident—owned the hospital and millions of other corporations. In real life, she’s kind of flaky and has a misspelled Chinese tattoo. Anyway, she wanted me to sign a contract with her and I didn’t want to. She got so mad she kidnapped my mother and my brother and said that if I didn’t sign the contract, they’d die. Now, I was in a coma just for two days, but this went on for weeks. I went all over the country trying to find friends who had money I could borrow. I flew on jets and stayed at hotels and saw things at places I’ve never been to in my life—but when I came out of the coma and looked them up on the internet, there they were.” There’s a muffled question, and she shrugs. “Like that shiny mirrored bean in Chicago,” she says. “And this place in Kansas that has a twenty-thousand-pound ball of twine inside. I mean, why would I have known that?”
The video ends before she can give me what I really want: an explanation. More than the cat lady’s, this woman’s experience resonates with mine. She, too, lived through more time while she was unconscious than she did while she was hooked up to machines. And her journey was filled with real-world details that weren’t part of her life pre-accident. But then, who knows what cognitive thorns caught in the folds of her brain? Like Dr. DeSantos said—maybe she had read the Guinness World Records when she was younger; maybe the facts she unconsciously retained bubbled up to the surface of her subconscious like a hot spring.
The third story is a newspaper article about a fifty-two-year-old man named Eric Genovese, who has lived in Cedar Rapids since birth. He was a Poland Spring truck driver and he got hit by a car as he was crossing the street with a corporate water delivery. In the time it took EMTs to resuscitate him—a matter of minutes—he said he lived an entirely different life. “When I looked in the mirror I knew it was me, but I was completely different. Younger, and with a new face, and that felt right. I had a different job—I was a computer engineer,” he was quoted as saying. “The woman who worked next to me in a cubicle, she had an abusive boyfriend, and I spent months trying to get her to ditch the guy and to realize I was in love with her. I proposed and we got married, and a year later we had a little girl. We named her Maya, after my wife’s mother. When I woke up, after I was revived … ?none of it made sense. I kept asking where my wife was, and my baby girl. For me, years had passed, but for everyone else it was like twenty minutes. I had this burning urge to pray a bunch of times during the day and I knew whole passages of religious text that no one could identify, not even me. Turned out to be the Quran. I was raised Catholic; I went to parochial school. But after I woke up, I was Muslim.”
Even though this is an article and I cannot hear his voice, there is something in his words that speaks to me. A desperation. A discombobulation. A … ?wonder.
I type his name into Facebook. There are a plethora of Eric Genoveses, but only one in Cedar Rapids.
I click the message button. My hands hover over the keyboard.
The psychologist has encouraged me to find a footing in this world, even if it feels strange. There is more than enough scientific evidence that the medication used to sedate me could have messed with my mind sufficiently to create what I thought was an alternate reality, but what everyone else recognizes as a drug dream. There are dozens of witnesses to the fact that I was lying in a hospital for ten days; I am the only person who thinks differently. Or to put it another way: the facts add up to one explanation that anyone rational would accept.