Shock Waves

Anna and I crept to each side of Robert’s bed. It took a tremendous effort to grasp his hand in mine, and even more to begin speaking. As we each held one of his cold, bloated hands and began talking to him in shaky voices, I found it hard to regulate the volume of my speech; it came out dreadfully squeaky. “It’s us,” we said over and over again. It was worse than talking to a corpse. I felt there was no way to reach him and that my words would only emphasize this chasm between where he was and where I was. “We never thought we would have a reason to come to Maryland,” my sister whispered. She seemed unsure of who to look at, me or our brother.

It was awkward, but as the wildness of the initial shock wore off, we gradually remembered some of the things we had decided to say on this first visit. A nurse lowered the level of his sedation, hoping that he would become more aware of us, and we chattered about how much we had wanted to come. Our sentences tumbled out rapidly, blurring together at their edges. “You did everything right, your men are safe,” we said repeatedly, like a mantra. “We’re so proud of you.” We told him to come home soon, because our other brother was already driving his car and had taken his leather jacket. His eyes wandered. In my distress, I wanted to lean down and shake him. He hovered below the surface of some great torpor, and I felt that if only I could break through its glassy layers, I could pull him out to be with us. It was all I could do to keep from yelling, “Robert, this way!” Yet despite my desperation, he remained remote, as if he were hearing the echoes of my voice in the wind but could not tell which direction to turn. His mouth began twitching, its corners turning down. A teardrop slowly came out of one eye. “He’s crying,” my mother croaked.

Today, two years into his injury, Robert lives in an apartment next door to our family home. My parents care for him and help him with daily tasks, managing his affairs, cooking his meals, cleaning his apartment, doing his laundry, cutting his fingernails, cajoling him to do what he needs to do, and cheering him up when it all gets to be too much. He has become their child all over again and their full-time job. His neurological signals remain “markedly abnormal,” and he goes to occupational and physical therapy three times a week to work on his limitations. He is still unable to use his left hand and arm very much, and it curls against his side like a fractured wing, the white, cold fingers curved into a lifeless ball. He sometimes stretches it out, displaying his hard-won ability to part the fingers and lift the arm above his head. But then it pulls back into its bent, wounded position and languishes there with an extraneous air, flopping about as he walks with his uneven and heavy gait.

The oddities of traumatic brain injury become more apparent to us every day. It is a cruel fate that allowed him to come so close to being normal, and yet miss it altogether. Outsiders are sometimes amazed by how well he functions. But we who live with him and care for him would find it exceedingly difficult to characterize him as anything resembling a typical 25-year-old man. Robert was certainly not a saint before his injury, as few men his age are. He could be angry, violent, indignant, ungrateful, and rude. Now that he is living with TBI, we have noticed that many of his less-desirable character traits, noticeable yet controlled before his injury, have been amplified or twisted into a puerile caricature of adult emotion. Even my parents acknowledge that their son has become an uncomfortable mix of a child and a man. He “lives on his own,” yet once pitched a temper tantrum because he needed to make a phone call and my father would not do it for him. He is often petulant and capricious, self-centered and unreasonable. One night he loves chicken Parmesan, the next night he insists he has hated it his whole life. If he is physically uncomfortable, he is crabby and will snap at whoever is near him. Sometimes when he is exhausted and overwhelmed after his day of therapy, he will sink into a teary sulk, rubbing his red eyes and sharply demanding food or something else that he needs. Even his voice enhances his juvenility, being a little squeakier and more slurred than it used to be.

My brother’s childlikeness can bring a degree of awkwardness into our interactions with him. His new demeanor is more often characterized by excessive giggliness than by anger. He will frequently prattle away with a wide-eyed seriousness and then collapse into silly laughter that is sweet and uninhibited but also a bit sad coming from a 25-year-old man. He finds it especially funny when he baffles us with some strange observation like “So you want to put on those pants and walk down that path?” When the response is a perplexed stare, Robert will gleefully chortle away at his wittiness. Although he fully knows who we are, my brother calls my sister “Albert Hanesworth” and addresses me as “Edward Hackinson.” He will laugh outrageously at our protests and never seems to tire of the joke, if indeed that’s what it is.

Sometimes Robert’s contributions to our conversations don’t quite make sense, yet often they are witty or even insightful. When Anna was discussing a poem she had talked about in class at the University of Rhode Island, she read it aloud and inquired what we thought it meant. My previously liberal arts-phobic brother immediately responded, “The anonymity of strangers,” which upon a second reading, seemed to be the very thing the poem was talking about. In defiance of his previous distaste for research, our brother sometimes tells us of his “unquenchable thirst for the elixir of knowledge,” which often leaves him unable to sleep in the middle of the night until he has powered up his computer and researched some burning question, such as who Adonis was or why we sometimes get “brain freeze” when biting into something cold.