Excerpted from "Anosognosia" by John Crowley CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come? HAMM: Mine was always that. - Samuel Beckett, Endgame In the last week of May in 1959, a high-school student, John C., made a misstep at the top of the stairs of the family house on Ponader Drive in South Bend, Indiana. Perhaps it was a yellow Ticonderoga pencil that caused it, lying crosswise on the floor at the top of the steps, and perhaps he stepped on it in such a way that it rolled under his foot and threw his leg out over the first step or over the first and the second steps, whereupon he fell turning head over heels, or more exactly heels over head, to the bottom. He must have struck his head very hard at some place on the way down -- on a step, on a banister, on the floor at the bottom of the stairs -- for he lay there inert, his legs twisted on the lowest stairs, shoulders and head on the floor. His initial cry of amazement and horror, and the noise of his falling, brought his mother from the kitchen where she had been pondering dinner and sipping a glass of inexpensive sherry. According to her later account she tried to wake him, listened to his heart -- which seemed to be beating in normal fashion, unlike her own -- and then, being a doctor's wife and knowing the basics of first aid, did not attempt to move him but called the operator (dropping the new Princess phone that sat on a table in the hall at first and fumbling the earpiece in desperate hurry) and asked for an ambulance. Then she called her husband at the college infirmary where he worked, and knelt on the floor beside her son and held his hand, which she thought surely couldn't count as moving the patient. He had a pulse, fast but not wild or irregular. They two were alone in the house. John C. was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived, and when his father arrived very soon after. He remained unconscious -- a state that was described as a coma but which didn't meet all the criteria for such a diagnosis -- for three days; he was given intravenous fluids and his temperature, heart rate and blood pressure were monitored. Whatever injury he had suffered internally didn't appear outwardly; a scratch on his cheek from something, a bump on the back of his head that soon resolved. His parents sat with him, singly or together; his four sisters came from school to sit in turn by his bed, and the eldest and most pious of them got them all to say the rosary there for his recovery. It was his mother who was beside him when he opened his eyes, took a huge breath, and lifted his hands from the bedclothes as though they stung, or perhaps in preparation to arise. He didn't do that, though, only looked around cautiously and then at his stricken mother, sitting forward in her chair waiting in awful suspense for what he'd say, if he could say anything at all. Are you all right? she said, conscious of the fatuity. I am, he said. I am all right. Then he closed his eyes again. Excerpted from And Go Like This: Stories by John Crowley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
