In the diorama I’ve built of his life, a wife with box-blond hair, a young son in a karate uniform, and a dog named R2-D2 stand in a kitchen covered in Post-it notes. Like many of my clients, Danny uses these strips of paper as surrogates for the parts of his brain clear-cut by that hose. Over the course of several months, I’ve interviewed his family, doctors, fellow truckers, grade school teachers. I’ve plotted their anecdotes on a careful timeline I will present in court, chronologically to elicit more sympathy and a bigger settlement. I will ask the jury to imagine young Danny posed against lockers, popping an orange against his biceps. Studying for his trucker exams at night. I map pain to show what medical charts can’t—how he can no longer coach his son’s karate class, volunteer at church, pet his dog.
Danny flicks an ashless cigarette and bounces in place on the couch, occasionally checking the door leading to the kitchen. Crates are stacked along the wall, magazines piled on the floor. I smell fish and char. “You baking?”
He frowns. “Nah.”
I’m undermining him if I check, but the smell of burning thickens. We enter the kitchen, where hundreds, maybe thousands of reminders blink in the occasional ocean breeze. I never escape the sensation I’m being surveilled, except instead of a penetrating gaze they are commands, observations. DON’T FORGET RICE. PETER IS THE COUSIN WHO STEALS. AN HOUR IS SIXTY MINUTES. CLOVER HATES LILIES. TAKE SHOWER. Some are so old the paper has become cloth soft.
Danny plucks one from the wall. SALMON IN THE OVEN. “Damn.”
He opens the oven door, releasing smoke. “Oven mitt,” I warn when he is about to barehand the rack.
He pulls out a blackened piece of fish, throws it onto an unkind pile of eggy dishes in the sink. “Trying to be healthy. Hopeless.”
I write: GO EASY ON YOURSELF with a smiley face. I show him before attaching it to the wall where the previous note had been.
Clouds silver with rain over his cluttered yard. Atmospheric condensation aggravates already aggravated bodies. My clients normally bail on rainy days but Danny never cancels.
His pelvis healed, but it’s the invisible injuries that make him feel submerged. His friends, flannelled, soft-spoken men, showed up regularly throughout his hospital stay, helped his wife, Clover, fix a makeshift bedroom on the first floor. They were confused when Danny still couldn’t work a few months after returning home. It didn’t matter how many times I explained that brain injury is unseen, they wanted to see it. Injuries, like god, require faith. Clover resents the burden placed on her salary. She takes out-of-town jobs that pay more. Whenever Danny mentions her work, he uses his fingers to place quotes around the word.
I don’t share anything about my personal life with my clients. Friendship creates an unhelpful bond.
Danny fills a pitcher with water as R2-D2 gallops into the room to nuzzle my thigh. He is a two-year-old unexercised and panicky Labrador who looks as if he will at any moment speak. Everything in him wants to run. R2-D2 hunts scraps on the floor underneath Danny, who holds the pitcher brimming with water. I worry about his grip, but he wants to tell a story like an intact man about a fair he went to where a man balanced on top of a Ferris wheel. A tremor grows in his forearm.
I say, “Why don’t you let me hold that?”
“Are you listening? I’m talking to you.” He sways as if regaining his balance. The pitcher slips silently out of his grip, barely missing the dog as it shatters against the floor. R2-D2 yelps, scrabbles out of the room.
I collect the chunks of glass. “Was I holding that?” he says.
“Don’t move,” I say.
He says he won’t but forgets.
“Don’t.”
He roots in place. I’ve never raised my voice to him.
“Did you drop the pitcher?” he says, when I am transferring the large chunks to the trash can.
“Yes.” I guide him over the mess and into the family room. I motion for him to sit and hand him the remote. I wipe the kitchen floor and take the garbage to the outside patio where several other bags are stacked. The dog jogs beside me, sniffs a tree trunk.
On the train, I scoured online listings for wedding dresses, and e-mailed the sellers. Shotgun wedding, I joked. One of the brides has written back including her phone number. She signs the e-mail, Yours, Ada. My aggravation with Danny transfers to this woman’s salutation. How dare she be so trusting, personal. How dare my grandmother arrive at the last minute and make demands.
In the bathroom, I dial the number. I’ve cataloged every item in the sparse medicine cabinet: the knife on the shelf, the jars of baby oil crusted with disuse, Clover’s curlers like bright smacks against the earthen walls.
“Hello,” I whisper. “I’m the bride who e-mailed about the dress.”
“Hello,” she whispers. “It’s nice to sort of meet you.”
“I’m at work,” I apologize. “I have to be quiet.”
“Why am I whispering?” I hear a giggle. She readjusts to normal volume. “Would tonight be okay to pick it up?”
“Absolutely,” I say, and she says, “I live on Fourth Street.”
“Which one?” I say. “East or West?”
“Northeast,” she says. “By the park.”
“I didn’t know there was a Northeast.”
“You’ll have to try it on while you’re here,” she says, as if this thought has just occurred to her. “You’ll want to make sure it fits.”
“I’d be grateful.”
“Absolutely,” she says. Our word for the conversation.
“Is Northeast Fourth Street where the historic brownstones are?”
She says, “By the park.”
Footsteps behind me. Danny stands in the doorway, glaring. “I don’t have all day.”
Ada and I make final agreements and hang up. I follow Danny into the family room, apologizing without mentioning the reason for the call. He is upset, perhaps because he does have all day. Like most of my clients, his marriage is splintering. It’s challenging to be around someone in pain. People worry it will get on them. When I was hired, my boss, an injury attorney whose collar is never completely folded over the back of his tie, assigned me a book called The Reptilian Brain. The cover is a drawing of a reptile in the act of contemplation. The head is transparent, its brain waves represented in blue squiggles that emanate out of the parameters of the jacket and into the world, this suggests, into the reader.
A reptile’s biggest fears are isolation and immobility. Most of my clients deal with both. “Think about the reptile,” my boss reminds me. “How the reptile in you responds to the reptile in them.” I am encouraged to phrase my reports in reptilian terms.
A reptile wants anything there is to want—the sun, your best ideas, the center of the center of the eclair, everything. It wants to flip itself inside out and emerge a new and shiny reptile encrusted in star matter. It wants to sit on a blanket with its friends, dominating everyone. It wants to control storms. Our waking reality is their dream state, and vice versa.
Who’s driving? my boss writes in the margins of my reports. The reptile or the human? I think it is the only book he has ever read.
Danny’s synapses are unreliable and finicky. Even if they convey the whole message, they can’t be trusted to keep conveying it. You are holding this pitcher. Continue to hold this pitcher.