I almost got myself killed once and have never written how.
I was just grabbing a soda from the machine here at work. It’s a slow afternoon the day before Thanksgiving, and I was thinking to myself that I really should quit drinking soda, it’ll kill me some day. Actually, it almost did kill me one day. Kind of.
In the spring of 1996, I was a middling to underachieving high school junior. One school day in June during the last week of finals the weather was so excellent that my friends and I opted to spend the afternoon at a picnic table at the end of a path through a wooded half acre that bordered the tennis courts that marked the school limits, across a corn field, near a small creek that ran behind the school grounds.
Third and fourth periods at the end of the semester have nothing on smoking cigarettes with friends at 16. At the end of the afternoon I could ride the bus home, or I could catch a ride with a friend that was not skipping class with us.
But first, I wanted to get a coke. There were two coke machines in the school, and I opted for the one closest to the parking lot at the risk of being spotted by the teachers from my afternoon classes. The halls were crowded with students dumping books into lockers, heading for the doorways to the rest of their afternoons. I was going against traffic at first, then with traffic as as I reached the midpoint between the parking lot door I’d entered through and the bus driveway doors.
I got my coke and reversed course. As was my habit, I tapped the pull-tab with the pad of my right thumb while holding the can in my left during my walk back up the hall. I pushed through the door with dozens of other students back out into the sun I’d enjoyed all afternoon, still tapping the pull-tab on my can of coke.
“So what do I do now?”
There were three cards face down on my lap. I was holding most of a deck of red bicycles. I looked up at my interrogator, a family friend, and tried to remember how far I was along in the trick.
“Uhm…”
I’d learned this trick a few months prior. Use any old deck of cards, jokers in or out, and fan the deck. Offer the subject a card, any card. Ask them to memorize the card. Cut the deck. Place the memorized card back in the cut deck. Shuffle the deck a few times for show, then place the top three cards side by side on a flat surface and ask the subject to pick the one that is their card. They will be wrong. Offer them a second chance. They will be wrong again. Give them the last face down card, which again won’t be their card. Then peel off the top card from the remaining deck. It is their card!
I don’t remember the magic part that moved the card to the fourth from the top position.
I didn’t remember then either.
“What happens next in the trick?”
I looked around for help. I was definitely in a hospital, and there were definitely my parents and a few aunts and uncles outside the door.
“What happened? Why am I in a hospital? What’s going on?”
There was immediately, as I recall it, commotion. I was surrounded by faces.
“Grant, you were in an accident, you are in the hospital, you hurt your head.” someone said.
“Lets move him”
My bed was reclined to nearly flat and the ceiling started sliding from left to right above me, and then from down to up.
“Hey Grant, we all ditched to come up and see you. You looked fucked up man.”
Some of the friends I’d been with that afternoon had come to see me. I was in a room by myself. Some time after they left, a second group of friends stopped by. Family was in and out. The right side of my head was shaved completely, the left was not. My Minor Threat t-shirt was gone, my favorite pair of Vans were gone, my jeans were gone.
From then on, my memory is complete. There is no blacked out gap during which the catheter was removed. There is no blacked out gap failing to store the first time I got out of bed in a few days to walk, with help, to the bathroom, in long term memory. I spent the rest of the hospital stay finishing Stephen King’s The Green Mile serials which family had brought me, having visitors, dozing, and trying not to upset the scabs on my heels, right hip, and right shoulder. All left scars.
I have since been told from multiple people what had happened to me, but not from any actual witnesses. I’ve been told what probably happened though. I’ve been told what the EMTs did when they arrived, where the helicopter picked me up, how I almost left the hospital that evening before losing my lunch in the lobby, and how I was awake and conversing almost the entire time.
The funny thing about memory is that each of these stories I’ve been told has been stitched into my memory alongside the events I witnessed. My brain has no problem continuing the narrative after I opened the coke that afternoon outside high school and saw a friend in the parking lot, pulling his car around. My brain has fabricated the precise point in the hospital that my parents and I decided to go back in and ask for a head scan to figure out why I was vomiting. My brain has filled in the doctors telling me I have a subdural hematoma and describing the baseball-stitched scars the operation will leave on my head.
But I don’t trust any of it. The only reason I don’t trust any of it is that I remember where the gaps started. I remember the gaps, and I remember each source that filled in their version of the events that have since filled them. There is no other obvious tell. All long term memories are brief episodes bordered by gaps, and these fabricated ones aren’t any different.
As time passes, these distinctions are blurring. Maybe I am gradually recalling the waking moments of that afternoon and these are genuine memories being reconnected through the suggestion of hearing them from others?
I don’t believe that. None of the resurfacing memories have been contradictory to the suggested versions. Isn’t that strange considering I was the only witness?
The brain is amazing.
When I am a tottering old man, be wary of my telling of this story with no gaps, as I likely will. I will have forgotten the second black out, as I tend to do already. I will never forget the card trick. My long term memory kicking-in mid-card trick is the most surreal thing to ever happen to me.
