Letter to Nina
Dear Nina,
before we try to explain what happened, we must preface this letter by explaining that we have a condition that prevents us from referring to ourselves as a single person. What we mean to say is, no matter how hard we try–and God have we tried–we are unable to say or speak or even think the typical pronouns used by someone referring to themselves as a singular entity. We are talking of course about that one-letter word that rhymes with “spy”, as in “{blank} spy with my little eye–”. How it pains us to the very core to even do this, imply the singular as an omission. We apologize for this. We know it must be a distraction. Perhaps someday if we ever get out of this jail cell we can find someone to treat it. Until then, know that when we say “we”, “us”, and “our”, we are simply referring to the sole person writing you this letter, your old friend and former client Jon.
The doctor that sees us in here says that this deviation in the way we think and communicate is our subconscious minds' effort to remain apart, despite being sewn back together after the Brain Gain treatment, the story of which we will tell soon. There is only one way that we are able to break the tendency of referring to ourselves as multiple, which involves you and we will get to that shortly as well. With your patience, we'd like to tell the story as it occurred, from when we last saw you. Telling it this way preserves us a small bit of dignity, perhaps explaining how we came to end up in the jail cell and with no other way to reach you save this letter.
It was nearly a year ago we saw you last. You knocked on our door wearing your paint-spattered jeans and an old sweatshirt, the hat we gave you that one time you confided you were having a bad hair day, that you wore more often than not when you came over. It must have been a shock to see us in that post-stroke state, but you hardly showed it. You left your vacuum and tote of spray bottles by the door and went to the couch. Don't think we didn't notice that. You took us over to the couch seeing we were leaning on the wall and had us explain what had happened. The stroke from the night before, leaving the hospital against the wishes of the doctors, the grief and confusion we'd had trying to manage on our own. We didn't want to go to a nursing home, didn't want nurses and doctors pestering us by the hour with endless questions. You were kind enough to limit your own questions, stick to the essential bits and talk some sense into us. We needed that, Nina, so thank you. We can't recall if we ever thanked you.
Our appearance clearly worried you and after sharing coffee, you took us back to the hospital and after that was the last time we saw you. Now maybe you could tell by our love-sick smile and listening to our mangled words how we felt about you then. Maybe not. If not, let us just say that whether we like it or not, we feel a certain way about you, probably as a result of the stroke, but really, truly, this feeling has always been in our heart, ever since we met you, ever since five years ago when you first came to clean our house, but our intact brain had locked that away, swore it off, said not in a million years would it ever happen, let alone come out. The stroke changed that, but we were still woozy from the effects of it and the medications they’d given us, we allowed you to drop us off at the emergency room door, and after a brief hug and a hand-squeeze (your hand was so cold!), that was our last look at you.
We were transferred home from the hospital officially a day later and given translator that we wore around our neck, that spat out robotic words after our mushy hard-to-understand ones. We were also given a referral to a brain specialist with a fancy brain machine called “Dr. Brain Gain”, purported to be able to insert new brain material where the old had died, restoring our functions. All days and hours leading up to that appointment we reflected over all the false declarations of love made to partners, two of which led to marriage, none as palpable as the love I felt for you then (and still feel!), this desperate thrum bringing you into all aspects of our life, honey-brown hair evident in the morning sunshine, your stocky limbs seen in bedposts and trees and telephone poles, that heart-ballooning half-smile of yours seen in every face we encountered, our love for the world growing by your presence in it, plying our being into new planes of tenderness and understanding. Nina we'd never loved life so much in all our 79 years on this Earth!
Two weeks later we were sitting in the brain specialist's waiting room, hair and teeth a mess, dominant arm hanging at our side like withered meat, translator still piping up behind our words to iron the mush that they were.
A heavy set nurse called us back, asked how our day was without listening to our answer, took our blood pressure and left us in a little room with posters advertising services from the Dr. Brain Gain... the shining white tower with tubes hanging down, speech bubbles of diseased muscle, brain, skin, and bone pumped in and healthy versions pumped out to patch people up. We had a dead zone the size of a walnut just above one ear, and in the patch of brain was the wiring that worked our arm and helped us speak well but made us content to be your client and friend, something like a father or perhaps even grandfather-figure to you. Remember when you showed us your water paintings you'd been making in your spare time over the past year, how dark and foreboding they were? You said you began shortly after your fall-out with your son, after an argument you'd had with him about raising his own child. You didn't go into much detail, but we could tell from your paintings how hard it had been not to see your son or grandson, how it tormented you to have those connections cut. We hope we were reassuring in talking about our own rocky relationship with our mother, who did not approve of our departure from church and God, but eventually made peace with it, choosing us (as we did her) over our differences in lifestyle. From there you opened up to us, sharing other little intimate pieces of your life, little home remodeling projects you were working on, silly anecdotes about other clients, bad dates you'd been on. None of it, not the dates or fact you were single gave us pause to consider you a potential love interest, despite this intimacy you maintained with us. Before the stroke we were fixed in our notion of who we were to you, but that missing piece of us bloomed into something beautiful and peculiar.
The doctor was late getting to us, guess his person before us was taking longer than expected and in comes a squat snack bot with hot coffee and a cookie held steady on swiveling black arms. Not a drop spilled or crumb lost despite its speed in and out, made R2D2 from our childhood look cheap and clumsy, reminding us the robot era is very much here human physical labor quickly becoming something of the past... had become strange doing many basic tasks with left hand only like eating, drinking, brushing teeth, etc., slowly feeling less and less like we were performing these tasks for someone else, wondered if when the Brain Gain replaced the gray matter hole in our head if we might hold onto this bit of ambidexterity or it would fade. We were damned sure to tell the doc to turn the nobs however he could to give us the best shot of keeping the love I was feeling for you, that had reared its beautiful head and illuminated your existence to us like you were an angel, a warmth we'd forgotten we could feel.
The doctor rushed in, a stout smooth talking fellow introduced himself and stuck his hand out all at once, glanced at our dead arm and chuckled, slapped us on the shoulder instead. We smelled mouthwash and perhaps beer underneath, our smell sense keener since the stroke, but he was all business and took the thought away with a gloved finger pointing to the dark spot of our brain image thrown onto the wall, blew it up and pointed at our mind's insides, all his words jargon but full of passion, had us convinced the procedure was right for us.
We remembered the bit about nobs and our passion, said: listen doc... one thing [we] need to mention, [we]'ve found this newfound passion since [our] stroke, a, er, love interest–
Doctor looked at us like a confused canine, then our translator perked up, ironed out our words and spat them out in flat tones, emptied of feeling.
Doctor scratched his stubble, flashing a yellow fang, said sounds like near-death perspective. Don't worry, your memories won't be affected.
So we leaned back, closed our eyes, heard the Dr. Brain Gain machine enter the room, wheels so smooth it seemed to hover, snuck glimpses at the doctor while he pecked at the screen, entering our information, running diagnostics, making our palms sweaty.
We thought of all the heads this machine had reached into, all the guts it had pumped out, pumped in. We heard the thing whir to life and sat up.
We babbled: do [we] need to wear an apron or anything?
The doctor anticipated these words, answered no before the translator could spit, assured us the operation isn't messy, in fact [we]'ll hardly feel it go in and certainly won't need any anesthesia.
Then came a sharp knock on the door and it bursted open and the heavy set nurse was back, flush faced, pulling the doctor out of the room.
We settled back and closed our eyes again and saw you, dear Nina, as if painted on the insides of our eyelids, your broad beautiful face, honey-brown bob, sturdy limbs, smirking, always
something funny occurring to you. Ashamed to say we don't know your age precisely but our best guess is thirty years younger, by the interspersed gray (as lovely as the brown), your frame still bouncing with youth, too young for us we'd thought before the brain bleed but passion has a way of insisting, challenging the odds, whispering you'd come around if we play our cards carefully, divine something sweet beyond our current imaginings, better than flowers or poetry (you deserve so much more)... something so touching you'd understand how we see you, a perfect soul contained in those lime green gems of yours. No clue how a stroke caused us to feel this way. It wasn't like we'd forgotten your age or ours or how we used to see you like a daughter (or even granddaughter!) and felt shame any time we came anywhere close to a romantic or possessive thought about you.
Something about your self-assurance and joy derived from simple tasks like cleaning (or painting!) like it was the only thing in the world at that very moment, that crumb-speckled countertop or grimy end-table, we recall you getting at it like it were a flower in a field, that precise/caring touch taken all of the house, imbuing a shiny/lemony sheen that makes the heart ache, makes us wish we could line up for the same treatment, such attentiveness a wonder.
Just thinking about it had us grinning dumbly, rubbing our cheek with a clumsy hand... always we reminded ourselves we way too old for you and yet our passion demanded our trying, climbing hills and mountains, bearing and examining our soul, reclaiming youth and true love by whatever means possible...
It seemed like we'd waited there a half hour, a decidedness building in us that we wouldn't lose this passion for true love no matter which way the nobs were turned, peeked at the machine's screen, saw it was all programmed to go, green button flashing at the bottom, and desperate feeling drove us to press it and lay back, let it bless us with new gray matter and leave quickly with a new lease on life, a chapter unwritten and more clearly the life we'd always wanted and needed to die willingly, having lived fully and thoroughly, you pulling up our covers, your lips held to our forehead...
We felt a tap on the back of our head. Vibrations and pinkness on the edges of our vision. Our breath was held. Couldn't seem to open our lungs try as we might. Jaw was tight, growing tighter by the second, like the screws on either side had twisted into the bone, turned and turned and turned... closed our eyes to see you, dear Nina, held you in our mind out of fear you might slip away.
You were just a face then, so large and close we made out pores and roughness of your cheek, saw your cheekbone as a bump on the horizon, felt ourselves shrinking, plane of your face rising until our feet were planted in a great dune, fell to our hands and knees.
Our right hand was outstretched to our surprise, splayed fingers full of feeling and when we opened them we were out of the chair on the floor, heard/felt a sucking sound in the back of our head, turned to see the white tower withdrawing its white tube, pinkish with body fluid alongside a metallic arm with a dozen fingers all different shapes, closing into itself like a flower in reverse, pulling back into its clean white form, concluding with an innocent beep.
Patting the back of our head with our reawakened hand, we felt a tender incision about an inch long. Staring down at the white tile we recalled with picture-perfect clarity that time you sprained your knee while running up the steps to our house during a violent storm. We heard you yelp from the living room and found you collapsed on the porch, hair plastered to your face, clothes drenched. Somehow we mustered the strength to scoop you up and carry you into the house, lay you carefully on the sofa. Before the Brain Gain, we hadn't recalled the scent of you, lemon-lavender wafting to our nose through the aroma of rain. And suddenly we could feel your heft again, the weight of your arm over our shoulder and your legs in our arms, as if we still held you. It was like entering a time machine, laying you down on that couch and fetching ice for your swollen knee, draping a blanket around your shoulders and toweling off your head. This reawakened memory brought us closer to you, somehow shifted from a paternal feel to something of tender intimacy. We know you were in misery and frustrated because you had all these other houses to clean, but for us, there was the thought, “if it had to happened somewhere, thank God it was here.” Before the re-awakening, we recalled this as a deep shame at thinking that... but now it was more acceptance and gratitude, perhaps a small savoring of that precious half-hour we got to care for you in your moment of need.
Settling back into the chair (tender on scalp) it dawned on us we might leave clues in the crumbs and dust around our house conveying our true feelings for you, instead speaking them directly and let you make the next move. We were overcome by the shear strata of thinking rebuilt by this wonderful machine, sharpening recollection and flexible thinking, fresh gray matter sharpening my love for you, allowing me to see you from new perspectives. We understood immediately that you lived your life in a state of wonder and fed on its absurdities instead of them feeding on you, and always you played, swept our kitchen in differing patterns, wiped our counters capriciously, chose our rooms and surfaces and approaches with the whimsy of a child playing in a sandbox, making rules as you go. So perhaps, perhaps if we made messes with this same energy we thought we might meet on the same plane and you would seek to immerse yourself in us as we do you, whimsy taken to our (both of our) bodies and souls, your lovely thick limbs finding purchase on our thin frame, our lives dipping greedily into one another's, gray matter taking to gray matter...
Our first act of whimsy took us out of the chair over to
the white tower's screen, past the post-treatment screen and into the next procedure, shuffled through patient names and medical histories until we came upon another fellow with a brain bleed, just like ours but on the opposite side. We figured there was probably a bit of atrophy on that side, plenty of room to pump in some fresh gray matter. Was briefly snagged on the confirmation treatment screen, the tower wanting the doctor's 6-digit password, memory of his finger strokes crisp in the corner of my eye and got the right combination on the fifth try.
We laid back and just as the machine started whirring it stopped, screen was flashing and saying our brain was incompatible with the treatment, had us second-guessing our whimsical thinking, that we ought be happy with results as they are, new arm, sharper memory, better insight.
[We're] better, we said aloud, and felt our lips flop around.
The translator piped up behind it, ironing out the words. Somehow the speech hadn't got corrected, mouth behaving like it was full of numbing agent, tongue tripping over itself despite our head ballooning with thoughts... couldn't imagine you and us sitting somewhere, us playing with your hand and your head on our shoulder, the world spread out around us, our brain humming and sloppy words falling out, our translator kicking in on our behalf. Soon as we spoke the dream dissolved, impossible, impossible, we needed our words back, free of the translator.
We overrode the warning screen and laid back, felt the tap, pinkening vision, breath held and jaw tight...
A curious squeaking sound seemed to emanate from within our head and we felt the tower rumble, its tubes and retractible hand shaking us in the chair. The squeak waned and renewed, it and liquid warmth moved down our neck. For one pristine moment we envisaged the process of our coalescence with you, not so much as a series of actions but in a rhythm of expansive understanding, our time so finite and tender, perhaps only hours but maybe years that etched themselves into memories like lifetimes. There was no secret to true love, it was a molecular storm guided by seers, and had we maintained that great stretch of gray matter, gradually shorting/separating somewhere in the middle (the squeaks we were told were dendritic shearing, the flame of our reality flaring before ebbing), we would have carried what had previously been one continuous mind to you straight away.
How can we convey our division? We hate to bore you with a short anatomy lesson, but it's crucial to understanding what happened to us. The tissue called the Corpus Callosum connecting our right and left brain was badly damaged during the second Brain Gain treatment. That division prompted a fight between the two halves of what we were to do about it, the right side desperate to go see you, the left side convinced this was a bad idea. But how could this be, two separate minds in one skull? We thought for sure it was a side effect of the Brain Gain treatment, but a neurologist explained that we are all of multiple minds, and it is the Corpus Collosum that forges consensus. But why then would the right feel one way and the left another? It turns out that in most people, it is the right side of the brain that processes deep emotion, while the left side processes language, so when you write a poem from the heart, it's largely the right communicating to the left how you feel. Some other details: the circuits going down to the arm and leg cross in the neck, so the left half controls right arm/leg, right half controls left arm/leg. Those are the most important aspects.
The tower pushed fresh brain tissue into the left side of our head, dislodging the existing left half downward and into our neck. How we managed to operate like this for a good twenty minutes prior to medical sedation is unfathomable by the doctors, and how we managed to disconnect ourselves from the machine and walk around most didn't believe, asserted we hallucinated or were lying, but there are witness testimonies and surveillance footage to support it. We explained this all to our cellmate and he was nice enough to produce a diagram of brain hemispheres and their functions for your understanding:
ˬRIGHT brainˬ ˬLEFT brainˬ
We struggled for days when writing this letter, whether or not to explain, as best as we could, what exactly the right and left halves were thinking after the split. We have memories of both and think you deserve the unvarnished truth, as best as we can tell it, even if it is a shocking and gruesome revelation of our inner-workings. We wonder if anyone can claim complete innocence in a divided state... with the right half flooded with raw feeling and no words to temper it... the left half armed with words but no emotion to give it purpose or passion. One issue you'll soon see is that because the right half of us must rely on the left half for words, our account of the right will be somewhat skewed. But of course it cannot alter the events that followed. What you see below we've struggled to convey by the simplest means possible. For that reason, you'll notice that instead of referring to right arm and left arm, we say Right's arm and Left's arm, etc. That is all we will say.
How Things Went, According to the Right Side of the Brain:
Right side: NINA. DEAR GOD. WHAT HAVE WE DONE!?
Left side: “We need to remain calm–“
Right side: [Right's hand groped at the tubes and instruments still stuck to the back of our head.] OUCH. OUCH. OUCH.
Left side: “What the hell! Christ, hold on man. We need medical help–” [Left's hand grabbed Right's wrist and pulled it away from the instruments.]
Right side: LET GO. WE MUST SEE HER!
Left side: “What's wrong with you!? Look at us! We're in no shape to go anywhere!”
Right side: [Right's arm jerked free and squeezed our neck, squishing Left's brain.]
Left side: [Left's arm and leg broke into a convulsions.]
Right side: DEAR GOD... WE DIDN'T WANT TO DO THAT.
Right side: WHY DID YOU MAKE US DO THAT?
Right side: OUCH! OUCH! OU–
Right side: [Right's hand ripped the Brain Gain instruments out of our head. Blood gushed down our back and onto the chair, splattering onto the floor.]
Right side: NINA, WE'RE COMING!
Okay, we'll stop here briefly. This is probably a lot for you. It isn't easy for us to share, but we haven't any other way to explain our behavior. Even still it would be somewhat pointless to go on this way, detailing the Right and Left's interchanges through the Right's perspective. They haven't actual words, only feelings, which we've done our best to translate. We will move on to the Left's perspective, also hard for us to share because of their skepticism of you. Unlike the Right and even our united halves, on their own the Left can't fathom our attraction for you, as you will soon see. As much as it hurts us to recall, we must share this to tell the entire story.
How Things Went, According to the Left Side of the Brain:
After the Right smooshed us into seizures and ripped the Brain Gain's instrumentation from our skull, he realized he wouldn't get very far with the gaping wound in the back of our head. He crawled us back to the tower and flipped through patient profiles until he found the dermal repair mode and guided the tower's surgical hand to the incision, activated the machine and braced our body against the tile.
All this for you, Nina. Somehow he thought he had a chance with you, and so desperate he was, he tried to pursue it in this sad state we were in.
He pulled us into standing, the Left's arm and leg still quaking in convulsions, blood trickling down our back. He shambled us back to the door while hunched over the rolling tower, pushing it like a walker. When he opened the door, the hallway was empty, and so was the nurse's station at the end of the hall, suggesting some all-encompassing emergency in the office, probably having to do with that patient before us for which the nurse plucked the doctor out of our room. He pushed us past the nurse's station towards the emergency exit.
Nina, you seem like a nice woman, but how on Earth did you manage to charm our emotional half into this madcap stunt? He was intent to drag us to our car and auto-route us to your house, crawl up to your front door, and try to force me speak on his behalf.
He pushed us through the emergency exit and we spotted an ambulance on the far side of the parking lot. A small crowd was gathered, a couple EMTs wheeling someone into the vehicle. The crowd's attention shifted to us. He spotted our car a short distance across the parking lot and dashed for it. We barely got inside before bystanders reached us, began pounding on the windows. As he programmed directions for your house, the Left's limbs were quieting down.
Members of the crowd hammered on the car as he reversed out and swung towards the road. The heavy set nurse planted herself in front of the car, triggering its auto-routing to stop. We felt the Right doing mental calculations of overriding the safety feature, bowling through the fat nurse.
“Don't you dare!” we hissed.
You see Nina, this desperate love made him so deranged he was willing to run through the poor nurse just to get to you.
We caught his hand before he could get to the control panel, but then he threw us back into the headrest, squishing our dislodged half once more. We broke into convulsions again, our vision faltering. We heard him tap the keys and felt the car pull forward.
The car jolted as we drove through the poor woman. We heard screams on either side of us.
We decided our only recourse was to end it. Despite the tremors, we were able to bite down on our tongue until we were choking with blood. We were told the car stopped in the middle of the road as soon as we lost consciousness.
- - -
There you have it. Told from both sides. We... the left and right parts... feel such a deep shame at what became of us in that divided state. Never in our life would we have imagined ourselves capable of killing a person. Having done it, we can never forgive ourselves for it. And our left side, despite all its reasoning, shames us for how little he understands our feelings for you. We hope... this helps you understand us, understand we didn't intend for any of this. We came in to recover what we had lost from the stroke, and perhaps, if we still felt it in our heart, to pursue you romantically, but only if you would have us. Nothing else.
A month following the nurse's death and several operations later, we were somewhat reunited, able to speak and write as we do now, mostly unimpaired. The news of the nurse's death drove us to overwhelming despair, and we considered clamping down on our tongue again, ending it all. How repugnant we felt, how shameful and conceited. But we couldn't do it. Thinking of you kept our self-hatred and recklessness at bay.
If you haven't been following our case on the news, we just learned that our insanity plea was denied. The judge reasoned if we could program the Dr. Brain Gain and override the car's safety feature that we knew right from wrong. There's a part of us that agrees, and yet we think if we had remained in our divided state she would have treated us differently. Our lawyer is now recommending we take a plea deal for second-degree murder, which in all likelihood would mean our death in jail and no chance of being near you, my love.
Even the slimmest possibility of a chance to see you in the flesh, to touch your hand and stroke your hair would be worth an eternity behind bars.
Likely though, that will not happen, and the best we can hope is that you might visit us, or at the very least write us, grace us with your presence in whatever way you can manage. We live for you Nina, you and only you, no one or nothing else, you are our one vital nutrient and if you don't love us see that it is cruel to starve a creature such as us with this terrible, beautiful affliction. We beg you Nina, please don't leave our life, you mean everything to us, you make the world more than just window dressing beyond this cold little cell where they keep us.
For you always,
Jon