Beginning
Now, right at the end, I need to go back to the beginning of our long-anticipated Californian life. We flew from London, were upgraded to business class (I’d finally got the seat I deserved, as the Norwegian flight attendant had promised) and moved into a little bungalow in Venice in January 2014. The timing was perfect: while England was sinking beneath the waves, or the rivers at any rate, the weather here, even by the high standards of Los Angeles, was exceptionally wonderful. We quickly established a nice routine: at eight o’clock we’d go for coffee — an eight-ounce cappuccino and a twice-baked hazelnut croissant at Intelligentsia. Jessica would go to her office in nearby Culver City, and I would return and try to work. Every other afternoon, I’d cycle down to the tennis courts by the beach, play for an hour and ride home again as the sun was setting over the Pacific.
Then, only a few weeks into our new life, I bent down to push some garbage into the already stuffed bin. When I stood up half the world had disappeared. It had disappeared but it was still there, sort of. The kitchen wall was visible but it didn’t seem quite right: familiar but changed, as happens in dreams. Ah, now, here was something I recognized: a strip of brown wood against the pale yellow wall. It was the frame of the mirror — I was looking into a mirror but, like a vampire, I couldn’t see my reflection. The mirror had become a window, but all that could be seen in this window was the wall on the other side of the room, behind me or behind where I used to be. So where had I gone?
‘Something’s happened to my eye,’ I called out to Jessica. She was in the bedroom, but she too had semi-disappeared. I could see half of her body, but her face had gone. I thumped myself slightly on the side of the head as if that might knock everything back into place, dislodge the opaque filter that had come between me — though even that, the idea of there being a me, had become less certain than usual — and the world. I was getting confused as I tried to make sense of this insubstantial world in which things were and were not.
‘What’s happening?’ she said.
‘Well, whatever it is, it’s well trippy!’ I said. ‘Where is the. .? Why is the wall a door?’
I was covering up one eye and then the other, trying to eliminate variables, as one does with an electrical fault (bulb, fuse, socket. .), trying to ascertain exactly where the problem lay, which part of my sight had gone.
‘I seem to be blind in one eye, the left, but I can sort of see out of it. Where have you gone?’
‘I’m here.’
‘So why are you just hallway?’
Jessica has often had problems with her eyes. Ten days earlier she’d gone to the ophthalmology department of the hospital with an ulcer on her cornea. That’s where we should go now, she said. We had health insurance, courtesy of her work, so she called and made an appointment. They could see us at nine-thirty. It was eight-thirty now, would take twenty minutes to get there in a taxi. Which meant there was time to do what we did every morning: go to Intelligentsia for our eight-ounce cappuccinos and twice-baked hazelnut croissants, which were not as nice as the Doughnut Plant doughnuts I’d had every day when we’d lived in New York for four months the previous autumn but which had become part of our unchangeable routine. Getting ready took longer than usual. I kept asking where the thing was, the thing that I kept my health-insurance and credit cards in, the Oyster card-holder thing. And my keys. As soon as she told me, I would ask about something else, and by then I wasn’t sure whether I’d picked up my cards and my keys and I’d be wondering if I needed my passport and it would turn out that I had my keys in my hand and my credit cards in my pocket. It took ten minutes to get out of the house, during which time Jessica’s patience quickly frayed. It was, she said, like dealing with a cross between a half-senile pensioner and a totally monged-out teenager.
We walked to the café. I held on to Jessica’s arm. The sidewalk was the sidewalk and the road was the road. There were people and cars, brilliant sunshine, colours. We waited in line and ordered the same things we ordered every day. We ate and drank as usual, and some of the world seemed to have come back. It was more like, as my mum used to say of people with some kind of mental trouble, that I was not all there.
Our Uber arrived and we were soon speeding along Venice Boulevard. I could now see something out of my left eye but I had no peripheral vision.
At the hospital, a nurse immediately gave me drops to dilate my pupils so that the ophthalmologist could take a look inside. As a result, my vision, having improved slightly in the taxi, became distorted in both eyes. An already bright world became brighter still. The ophthalmologist did simple tests, covering up one eye at a time, waggling her fingers on each side of my head, to test my peripheral vision.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
‘Two.’ I could see them on the right side. On the left side, I couldn’t even see her arm. The weird thing was that the result was the same whether using my left or right eye.
Within minutes she had succeeded, where I had failed, in eliminating some potential causes. Since the problem was the same in both eyes — lack of vision on the left — the cause must lurk behind the eye, in the brain. So it was either a migraine or a stroke. This was the first time the word ‘stroke’ cropped up. It was a word I didn’t want to hear, but it was what Yeats, in a quite different context, called the surprising word that is also exactly the right word. If I’d had my wits about me I might have joked, when my sight first went, that I’d had a stroke — but the reality, the ophthalmologist made quickly clear, was no laughing matter. We needed to go straight down to Emergency, she said, picking up the phone to alert them to our imminent arrival. Since I was ambulatory it would be faster if we walked rather than waited for a wheelchair.
So that’s what we did. We ambulated through the hospital as we had previously walked to the café, with me clinging to Jessica’s arm. The difference, because of the drops, was that, besides acting like an ageing teenager on E, I now looked like one as welclass="underline" my pupils were the size of dinner plates.
A nurse showed us into a curtained cubicle. I changed into one of those hospital gowns that tie up at the back, the purpose of which seems to be to enfeeble you, to reduce your capacity for independent action. To walk even a few steps risks the ignominy of exposing your bottom to the world. You are now a patient, the gown decrees, the recipient of treatment, someone to and for whom things are done. An ER doctor saw me straight-away, went through the same tests as the ophthalmologist while adding some of his own. He touched my legs and face on both sides, asked if I could feel what he was doing — I could. I could also grip hard with either hand and extend both arms and legs. I could swallow and speak perfectly. After each of these little tests the doctor said ‘Good.’ It wasn’t just reassuring to hear this; there was also the pride you felt in school, that you still feel in the course of a tennis lesson, when you get the answer right or execute a stroke correctly: the clever-kid-in-class glow, the sense of achievement and pride that you are not such a klutz, not a complete physical and mental wreck, like that guy moaning over there, all whacked out and smashed up on a gurney. Less encouragingly, I had been downgraded from my previous ambulatory status: I was now wheeled along on my own gurney to the MRI scanner in a different building. With my pupils enormously dilated, the Californian light was so strong I had to keep my eyes screwed shut.