Bradford’s right arm was lying straight down at his side, under the sheet and the light summer blanket. Three minutes into the stroke, the covers were agitated in a small way, as though a mouse were ducking and rising under there. It was Bradford’s right hand, grasping. Opening and closing, grasping at the sheet, grasping at air, just grasping.
Starved cells begin to die after three minutes. If a cut-off supply of blood and oxygen is started up again in less than three minutes there will probably be a nearly complete recovery, which is the meaning of the term transient ischemic attack. But if the supply remains cut off longer than three minutes, brain cells begin to die. The knowledge, or training, or instinct, or motor control, or memory that they contain die with them. The process is irreversible, if the blockage lasts more than three minutes.
The area covered by the anterior cerebral artery contains cells charged with a variety of missions. The sensory area for the foot and leg are there, as well as the motor area for the foot and leg and urinary bladder. The supplementary motor area for the grasp reflex and the sucking reflex are here, and so are memory areas, and areas of thought processes. The supply of oxygenated blood to all of these areas had been cut off now for nearly four minutes.
Bradford’s face, even in the uncertain pale reflected moonlight, now showed clear and distinct signs of the brutalization taking place within. The two sides of his face no longer matched. Whereas the left side looked much the same as it always had, the right side was a different face, and belonged to a far different man. A less intelligent man, a less confident man, a less healthy man. That side sagged, the skin looked gray and lumpy and not quite real, the mouth drooped down so much it looked like an expression of twisted bitterness, and saliva still trickled down into a growing damp circle on the sheet.
Bradford’s bowels and bladder released.
His right hand continued to scratch and contract under the covers, making a tiny gray sound in the silence.
The pressure of blood against the thrombus was pulsating and unyielding, it made a kind of soundless roar within the artery. From time to time the thrombus was pushed a tiny jerk forward, or around, but not free.
In the fifth minute, the thrombus gave ground again, and this time a thin trickle of blood found a channel between the blockage and the artery wall. A dribble of blood moved through the depleted artery, finding some cells dead, some dying, some severely injured, depending how close they were to other sources of blood. This fresh streamlet of blood drained off into brain cells and into sub-arteries.
The push of blood through the new channel increased, forcing the channel wider and wider. The clot was being slowly broken up, like an ice floe in spring. More blood rushed through the artery and across the surface of the brain, oxygenated blood bringing rescue where there was still life, bringing nothing where the cells had died.
For a long while, there was no visible change in Bradford’s exterior. The moon moved across the sky, changing the shape and position of the gray-green-blue-white trapezoid of light on the bedroom floor, but for a long while Bradford did not change in any way. His face remained two faces, and his right hand grasped at nothing.
Toward four o’clock, the right hand eased and slowed, and finally stopped. And very gradually the right side of Bradford’s face was beginning to regain its former appearance, the flesh slowly firming again, the twisted sagging mouth inching upward to its normal expression, the trickle of saliva ceasing.
By five o’clock, the stroke was over. Most of the thrombus had broken up and had been carried away on the now-normal stream of blood. The remainder of the clot had become too firmly wedged into the soft atherosclerotic formations on the artery wall, and would remain there until gradually worn away by the flow of blood, or until it hooked another thrombus traveling through the bloodstream, perhaps caused another attack, that one perhaps larger or smaller than this, perhaps fatal.
At eight-fifteen, Bradford awoke. He was annoyed to discover he’d soiled the sheets, but no more than annoyed. Not frightened, not surprised, not even very aware in any useful sense of what had happened. He stripped the bed, put his pajamas in with the rolled-up sheets, and took a shower. His limp was back, worse than at any of the other times, and it seemed as though he could feel the hot water less on his right leg and the right side of his face. But he paid no particular attention. And when he couldn’t seem to shave with his right hand, he simply did the job with his left, not even questioning the disability that had caused the change.
Before breakfast, he took his soiled linen to the laundry room off the kitchen and started it through the washing machine himself. Naturally, he spoke of it to no one.
The Last Race
1
The house was a flurry of clean linen, the gravel drive was full of delivery vans, the cook was threatening to quit. She had lived through descents of Harrison and his tribe before, and she swore she would never go through it again. She stood in the kitchen, a buxom aggrieved Swedish woman all in white, and shook a wooden spoon under Evelyn’s nose. “No! Definitely no!”
A maid was simultaneously trying to tell her the men were here with the meat. “Well, you know where the freezer is,” Evelyn snapped at her, and as the maid went off biting her lips and blinking back tears Evelyn turned back to the cook and said, “I promise you we’re getting extra help. I promise you.”
“Extra help! Always! Never!”
Evelyn understood the cook to mean she was always promised extra help in emergencies but that the extra help never arrived. “This time,” she said, “we went straight to an agency in New York, and they guaranteed us help. From Wednesday, the day they get here, till Saturday, the day after they leave. One extra cook and four extra helpers. They guaranteed it, I promise they did. We’re even sending a car all the way to New York to get them and bring them here.”
The cook lowered her wooden spoon to half-mast, but then frowned and said, “Strangers? In my kitchen? An extra cook?”
But Evelyn was ready for that one. “Only for the children,” she said. “The extra cook will prepare the children’s food, so you won’t have to do any of that. And with Mr. Lockridge and myself there will only be nine adults.” And seven children, she didn’t add, hoping to keep the cook distracted from thinking about the youth invasion they were all about to undergo. She added quickly, “And you’ll remain in complete charge, of course. They all understand that, they’ve had that explained to them. You’ll be in complete and total charge.”
The cook was weakening, and when Evelyn saw her glance sidelong around at her kitchen she knew she’d won. The woman had been here nearly twenty years, she couldn’t leave her domain to strangers and barbarians. “Well,” she said reluctantly, grudgingly, “we’ll try it. For one day only.”
“That’s all I ask,” Evelyn said joyfully. “If it can’t be done, well, it just can’t be done. But anything you want, I’ll do my very best to get it for you. You know I’m on your side.”
“I know,” she said fatalistically. “I know it ain’t your fault. Or Mr. Lockridge either.”
“All any of us can do,” Evelyn said, propagandizing for the notion that they two were on the same team against the outsiders and should therefore stick together, “is our best.”