There was only a short wait before I was fed into the MRI scanner. The procedure was very similar — but quite different — to one I’d had a few days earlier in the Perceptual Cell at James Turrell’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum. The highlight of that exhibition, for the fortunate few who’d managed to book or cadge a slot, was to be slid horizontally and alone into an MRI-looking gizmo by two assistants in white lab coats (both female, as gorgeous as the nurses in the film of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Once sealed inside, you were bathed in soft blue light. There were two settings, and I had, naturally, opted for the strongest. The light began to pulse and change. Headphones played beatless music that encouraged complete surrender to a non-corporeal world of pure light. As the fractal geometries and strobes of colour gathered pace it became impossible to tell whether these glowing patterns and acid flashes were emanations of an external world or if they were in your head. Deep space or inner space? Either way it was like a glimpse of infinity. Infinity, not eternity. The experience only lasted ten minutes; it was possible to lose track of oneself but not of time. I would have liked to spend hours in there, a whole day even.
In the same length of time that I’d spent in the Turrell Cell, the MRI made a map of whatever had happened in my brain. I emerged from the clattering soundtrack of the scanner, clambered onto the gurney and was wheeled back to my cubicle to await the results. The doctor returned within an hour.
‘I’m afraid there has been a stroke,’ he said. ‘An ischemic stroke.’ It had occurred at the back of my brain on the right side, affecting the working of the left half of my vision. They’d need to keep me in hospital overnight for more tests. My immediate reaction — Shit, I’ve had a stroke — was followed immediately by a second: Thank god we have health insurance. These, in turn, were quickly followed by a third: that a series of trapdoors might be in the process of opening up beneath me. One thing leads to another, each more serious than the previous. This has happened because something else is not working correctly, and that is wrong because something else is faulty. To find out what that next thing is, it will be necessary to burrow more deeply into your being and discover how much if any of that — your continued being — you have left.
I was wheeled up into what looked, to my still dilated, NHS-habituated eyes, like a business-class hospital room. Jessica went back to our apartment to get various things I’d need for my stay. In the rush to get out of the house and into the café—why hadn’t we thought ahead, why were we so obsessed with having our coffee and twice-baked hazelnut croissants? — I had arrived like a guest who turns up at a party empty-handed. I hadn’t brought a book, because I’d be unable to read. But my regular fortnightly column for the New Republic was due the next day and I had left my laptop at home. The column involved looking closely at a news photograph and writing five hundred words about it. Fortunately, I’d already chosen the photograph, so, in the interludes between getting wheeled in and out of tests, I began jotting down my blurry thoughts about this remembered image on the back of an envelope. One of the intervening tests was an ultrasound of my heart and carotid artery, which would, in the words of the technician running it, ‘show us where we’re at.’ I could hear my heart whooshing and splooshing on the monitor. I had no idea if this was how it was meant to sound, but I had absolute confidence in my cardiovascular system.
‘Ten bucks says my heart’s in perfect shape,’ I said. But he wasn’t a betting man, the technician. Which was just as well — for him — because my heart and arteries were, as I’d boasted, pumping away like there was no tomorrow. Like there was going to be no end of tomorrows — tomorrows and tomorrows — any time soon.
‘Least now we know what it’s not,’ he said when the test was completed. We knew where we weren’t at.
In the early evening I had an intravenous CAT scan and Jessica returned with my laptop. We went through a personalised, amateur series of finger-waggling tests, and it seemed my vision had continued to improve. After she left I was able to type up the notes for my column, knock them into shape and file my copy, in case, for whatever reason, I was unable to do so the next day. A good decision, it turned out, though not because of any sudden deterioration in my condition. It was such a busy night that, in the morning, I was too exhausted to think. Whenever I was about to sleep someone would come in to check my blood pressure, my pulse, my temperature, to take more blood or monitor whatever else was happening in the gates and alleys of the body. I was glad of the attention, was even pleased to see the physical therapist — it’s important to get stroke victims moving again as quickly as possible — even if his skills were, in my case, entirely superfluous. All of this was really just build-up to the headline attraction: the neurologist who came by shortly before midday. He was Korean, bespectacled, a little younger than me and — I’m not sure how this came up — he had a daughter at Stanford. To be in his presence, to be the beneficiary of his training and expertise, was to marvel at how thoroughly the idea of rude health had been left behind. He was a reassuring advert for the efficacy of polite well-being.
All the test results so far were negative, he said. Apart from the small matter of the stroke, I was in great shape. This was as expected: I played tennis and Ping-Pong all the time, cycled everywhere, was as thin as a rake. I loved soy milk. My favourite meat was tofu.
‘I even take the skin off chicken!’ I told him.
We then went through the familiar round of tests, at which, without wishing to boast, I had come to exceclass="underline" hand squeezing, face stroking, finger counting and so on. I was fine, my vision was almost entirely back, I could go home as soon as the paperwork was taken care of. The discrepancy between the seriousness of what had happened — everyone at the hospital was at pains to emphasise that any stroke is extremely serious — and the speed of my already almost complete recovery was echoed by the contrast between the extravagance and expense of the diagnostic technology and the modesty of the cure: low-dosage aspirin. Then, as the neurologist was about to leave, in anticipation of a few test results that were not yet in, he added a pre-emptive prescription for cholesterol-reducing Lipitor.
By two o’clock I was back home. I had a terrible headache but it was a very familiar form of terrible, nothing untoward, the kind I’d had hundreds of times before, a kind of hangover from the momentous events of the previous thirty hours. I slept for a couple of hours, cycled to the beach and walked by the ocean in the late surge and swell of afternoon light.
It seemed inconceivable that I could have had a stroke. I was fifty-five, way too young, and of all of my contemporaries I would have put myself last in line for such a thing happening. I’d never had a cigarette. I drank a fair bit, less than many of my friends, and was drinking less with every year. I actively disliked all the foods that you’re meant to avoid. Except doughnuts and croissants. I’d always eaten a lot of pastries, and in New York my doughnut habit had got. . not out of control exactly, but I was doing one a day for four months. Twice a week I had a couple of eggs, lightly poached, but what did that count for in the face of the overwhelming healthiness of my diet and life?