In this fiction I have a character I’ve named Jed, who you can imagine is tall, wears a cowboy hat and red cowboy boots, which have been roughed by age and wet weather.
Jed has a habit of asking people what “something” was like. He’d ask, “What was it like to sky dive?” “What was it like when you heard about the birth of your son and you overseas?” What was it like, that first date?” “Tell me about it, then, what was it like to get a colonoscopy.”
Cruz, an old friend of Jed’s said, “You’re always asking what something was like. It’s an interesting method of conversation, Jed. You require your friends to think like poets.”
Jed took off his hat and looked at it. He held it in his hands like the lid of a heavy pot. Then he threw it outward like a disk and watched it spin to the right and land in the grass. “I guess so,” he said. “But I’m not really sure what you mean.”
“Did I tell you about Tinkerton? He had a stroke,” Cruz said.
“No shit,” said Jed.
“And what’s interesting about Tinkerton’s stroke is the portion of the brain that was affected,” Cruz said, going to Jed’s hat and picking it up. He put the hat on his head. “Sometimes a stroke will change people in dramatic ways. I heard about a man who’s ability to read was altered. When he looked at written text in English what he saw was Chinese. He became, as they say, word blind.”
“It’s amazing. But what about Tinkerton?” Jed asked.
“In Tinkerton’s case, the stroke affected his ability to keep events–sounds, images, smells–in his memory in order. It made him image blind or memory blind. Where for most of us, what happened hours ago can be ordered without much effort so that we know why we had turned on the over or why we put that hunk of meat on the counter for defrosting–but for Tinkerton, the life encased in his memory is now all a jumble. I saw him at his house yesterday and he asked me when he’d been on the subway. I asked him why. He said that he remembered just being on the subway–the sensations of the subway were as immediately with him as if he had just stepped onto the platform. But he said that his wife claimed he’d not been on a subway for ages.”
“Incredible,” Jed said, lifting the hat off of Cruz’s head. Then he said: “I wonder what that’s like.”
