Having realized this much, I felt certain that the face I had seen in the depths of the pool at the Couple, with the inverted V's for eyebrows, had indeed been my mother's face, and I felt I understood as well that she had angrily written me off at the moment of the accident as a person capable of stepping off the road to life intentionally. Looking back, I could identify a number of instances between my son's birth and his first operation when she had revealed this judgment about me.
Thanks to Dr. M and his assistants, the long operation was a success, my son was liberated from the glistening lump that was like a second head, and my wife and both our mothers were understandably overjoyed. As the young father, I was also very happy, but I recalled the conversation the night before the operation and felt constrained and embarrassed about demonstrating my joy.
A definition of death. I am not able to say that I have provided my handicapped son with a definition of death that is at once accurate, uncomplicated, and capable of encouraging him. What is worse, my wife and I have used the word carelessly in his presence. Looking back, I realized that this had been going on for more than two years until the crisis that made us aware of it, repeatedly. I am clear about how much time had passed because it was late in the spring two years ago—my experience has taught me to believe in the hidden link between the changing seasons, that is, the cycle of the universe, and events that occur deep inside our bodies—that my son experienced an epileptic seizure, an incident that was an unmistakable turning point in our daily life with Eeyore at its center. As we didn't consult a specialist at the time, it wasn't exactly the case that the seizure was diagnosed as epilepsy. Even so, when we informed Doctor M of what had happened, he did not object to my insistence on describing it as an epileptic seizure.
From the onset, my wife and I were of different minds about this. We weren't necessarily opposed—where my son was concerned we often faced in the same direction but took different views. There were times when my son lost his sight briefly and froze where he stood in the street. If this had happened at a railroad crossing or in a crosswalk it would have been dangerous. These events had been occurring intermittently for five or six years, and Dr. M had been controlling them with Hidantol, a drug that caused Eeyore's gums to swell to rosy redness until they protruded from the spaces between his teeth like kernels of red rice but had no other apparent side effect. Hidantol was an antiepileptic, and as such provided me with a basis for diagnosing my son's new seizure.
My wife had heard from her friends in the PTA at our son's special school that epilepsy was a different animal, and that if this were indeed epilepsy it was a very mild case. The term used on the report after the medical exam for middle school was “brain separation syndrome,” and although these words were more than adequate to strike terror into the hearts of our nonmedical family, the word “epilepsy,” as my wife insisted, did not appear. I searched a number of encyclopedias, looking under “epilepsy” for a subentry on “brain separation syndrome,” and failed to find it.
As it happened, my wife wasn't even home when my son had the first of these major new seizures. It began with an unusual atmosphere that felt like the concave underside of pro-truberant symptoms like screaming or spasms. We were in the living room; I lay reading on the couch as always, and my son was sprawled on the rug on the floor listening to a Mozart record at low volume. Presently, instead of putting on a new record, he pushed away from himself with both elbows, like an infant with no appetite weakly rejecting his food, the pile of records he had selected. This registered in my consciousness like a small thorn. But I continued to read. Before long, an impression of interruption reached me from where my son lay. I looked up. He was propped up on his elbows, all expression gone from his face and his open eyes like stones. Saliva was drooling from between his slightly parted lips.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! What's wrong?” I called out to him. But Eeyore was engaged completely with the difficulty inside himself; as if to say this was no time to be responding to the exterior, not even to the voice of his father, he remained motionless, his head propped heavily in his hands, his face a void.
I jumped up, and, in the brief moment it took to move to his side, he began slapping the floor with his left palm and arm, not wildly but with deliberate force. Slap, slap, he struck the floor, and now his eyes rolled up and showed white.
“Eeyore! Eeyore! Are you all right? Does it hurt?” As I shouted meaningless questions I wrapped the handkerchief I took from my pants pocket around my left thumb and forced it between my son's teeth. He bit grindingly down on the joint and I moaned as though to express the pain he was enduring in silence. A minute or two later, he stopped slapping the floor and relaxed his clenched teeth. I lifted him as he rolled over on his back, and when I laid him on the couch he fell into a deep sleep and began to snore at a menacing volume.
It was this physical display by my son's body that I chose to interpret as epilepsy symptoms. Partly because he was home on spring break, my son had apparently neglected to take his medicine for several days. But was this really epilepsy? I needed a definition, and though I consulted a number of encyclopedias in search of one, my wife and I did not go back to Dr. M for a detailed explanation. Over the course of more than ten years we had come to understand that, where our son's illness was concerned, the doctor would make sure to inform us about anything it would avail us to know, and that asking about the rest was an exercise in futility for laymen like ourselves. Admittedly, our custom of not asking may have had to do with deep-seated fear.
Since that first episode, I find myself constantly on the lookout for information that I can feed into my definition of epilepsy. For example, a recent article by the cultural anthropologist Y, in which he analyzed the Greek director Theo Angelo-poulos's film Alexander the Great, Apparently the chieftain of Greece's peasant guerrillas is portrayed as an epileptic. When the troops descend to the banks of a river to replenish their water, Alexander has a seizure as he gazes at the river's surface. Instantly, to shield him from the gaze of his men while he is in spasm, his next-in-command shouts “About face!” On the march, Alexander baptizes the young men they encounter along the way and christens each one of them Alexander. In an attack by government forces, one of the young men is wounded in the head but is lifted onto a horse and manages to escape from a same battle in which the chieftain is killed and the army decimated. Later, in the scene where the youth enters Athens, the narrator intones: “Thus did Alexander enter the city.” The almost too obvious significance of the line was to establish a connection between this scene and the episode when Alexander the chieftain appears in the village as a young man with a wound in his head.
In my biased reading of Y's analysis, I paid particular attention to the above references to epilepsy. Superimposing the wounded youth who was entering Athens now onto the chieftain Alexander in the past led me to the following conclusions: leaders were epileptics because of wounds to the head sustained when they were young; the youth who had just now received his head wound and who was destined to lead the resistance as the next Alexander would just as certainly develop epilepsy. In this manner I created a mythological logic that connected head wounds, epilepsy, and leaders.
I was reinforced in this by the fact that the articles on epilepsy I had found in encyclopedias cited head wounds sustained in infancy or childhood as one of its causes. I concluded that my son's epilepsy was the result of his head surgery when he was two and a half months old. During the operation, the lump on his head was found to contain something like a Ping-Pong ball. When my wife and I had visited Dr. M's office to learn the results of the operation, he had asked if I would like to see it and at first I had declined.
It had never occurred to me for an instant that my son's brain may have been injured during the operation. And yet how could surgery that removed so large a lump and closed the