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Tales from the Other Side of Language 35 foreground of his words. It is a jumble. My brain spins and hurts. My old shyness augments the confusion, and I haven’t the endurance to push. Here in this professional place my desires for connection are lost … so lost … in the crowd of talk…. My condition shuts me out. I look normal. No one notices the ravage inside, even those who know what has happened to me. I want to connect, go out this evening for dinner or theater. I retreat, exhausted and disappointed, to my hotel room. I fall asleep at four in the afternoon, wake at ten, call room service for a sandwich and a beer, and return to deep sleep until the next day. After the closing morning session, I go to the National Gallery. Visually thirsty, I drink in every work of art in stunning detail, savoring it all. The patterns of color and form wash through my brain, washing out the fatigue and pain. My eyes revel in old Indian mandalas that I paid little attention to before, tracing through the vast detail of their stories. I move eagerly along centuries of painted visions. I stay for eight hours, lunch, then dinner, barely noticing time. I have never before had this stamina in a museum. My brain eases more and more, then becomes happy. I didn’t know that a brain could be happy! Watered, refreshed, with the sweet rain of so much beauty, my brain softly laps the shores of what is.
36 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: Frustration is unvarying in my life, but I try not to focus much on it. Along with fatigue, it chokes out my flimsy path to words like brambles concealing roses. I can’t afford the energy to struggle with everything, so I pull out just the brambles in front of my face. But by January, ten months after the stroke, I am flattened by fatigue. “I must … be depressed…. I’m… exhau…sted… all of… the time,” I tell Kathy, a savvy clinician and neuropsychologist. “Maybe … I need … psycho….therapy!” “You should see a speech therapist and start exercising!” She brushes off the idea of depression like dust, barely concealing her amusement. Kathy makes pronouncements, and when she does, I do what she says. I know I’m not depressed, but I can’t fathom the incessant fatigue. By late spring I’m on my way to my first appointment with Dr. Martha Sarno, the speech pathologist Kathy selected for me. My hurrying reflection in a shop window looks like a bag lady. The clothes hang limp on her, no style. I chose them carefully this morning. Her shape is worn and bent over; her skin damp and spongy. I can almost see the grocery cart of her life’s possessions. She’s insubstantial, out of focus; she could blow away in a gust. I walk into Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation, a very old hospital, feeling a bit haggard from the walk and from the window vision. I’m surrounded by yellow beige walls and hurrying people. I’m disoriented. I struggle to stay composed. I approach a uniformed guard and I’m slow to speak. He asks who I want to see and I stammer her name. He smiles cheerily, points to the elevators down the noisy hall, and tells me the floor number. I go up the elevator as he said and ask the only person in an empty and suddenly quiet hallway. She points, no words, down the hall, gestures left around a corner. I find a tiny office and a secretary. I wait standing, and then Dr. Sarno appears to greet me, a formal but welcoming smile. I like her already, in her tailored feminine ivory colored suit with a flared skirt. She is the Director of
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house as sentient. Tales from the O
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is now. Tales from the Other Side o
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lives around him in deep and import
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“Without Utterance is a testimoni
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