What is a brick for? A brick is for building things. And what is it that is built with the brick? Certain kinds of buildings. And where are these buildings being built? In a town or city, mostly. These things are elementary, and even a brain that has been badly distressed, and on which there have been performed various surgeries, has stored enough information, somewhere, to know these things. Bricks are for buildings in the cities and towns. And who builds the buildings? The buildings are built mostly by men. There are men with wheelbarrows, and they are moving many bricks from one spot to another. Or there are men driving forklift vehicles with many bricks being transported from one place to another, so that buildings may be made of these bricks.
These bricks are from Utica, and Utica is a place in Asia. She assumes that Utica is in Asia, and therefore it follows that many Asian men have cooperated in the making of these bricks, and these bricks have come from Asia because they are cheaper in Asia, or the creation of these bricks is inexpensive there, that is why bricks would come a long way, because she believes that New York City, where she imagines herself to be, is a long way from Asia. She believes that she is a woman who is in New York, and the bricks are in New York, too, having come from Asia, by boat.
What does the idea of the woman have to do with the brick? When she is seeing things again, she is in a place that is white and pale green, and there is a television mounted on the wall, and there are these people, and the people are looking at her, and she can see and hear. People are blinking at her, and there is something unusual about the people that she can’t understand at first. They look unusual, not like the people that she would have expected to be in the room. They blink and stare. Is blinking a method of communicating? She stretches her arms above her, and they cannot, apparently, believe what they are seeing. They begin saying something, and the thing that they begin saying is probably her name. At least she later believes that it might be her name, because they keep saying it. Samantha, Samantha, Samantha. She doesn’t know anything about this word, which would imply that it must be a name, because a name is a word that has no other useful associations. A name is a word that doesn’t do anything. “Samantha, can you hear us? Samantha?” Could it be possible that these are her parents? These little disheveled people? What’s wrong with their eyes? They have strange eyes. It occurs to her, after a while, that this must be the way people look when they are from Asia, but maybe she is only thinking this because of the brick. The brick comes from Asia, after all, so now everything comes from Asia. The nurse probably comes from Asia. Everybody is from Asia.
She says, “Can I have a glass of water?”
Pandemonium. The man who may or may not be from Asia goes rushing out into the corridor, calling for a nurse, and the woman who is still in the room runs back and forth thanking God. Many things are getting clearer to the victim now. For example, there is some reason why she keeps thinking about Utica and about the factory there that makes bricks. But a lot of other things are not clear, like whether she is truly Samantha, and who these people are. The nurse comes, and the nurse is followed by a doctor, and the doctor is followed by a policeman, why a policeman she does not know, and they are all in the room, and they are laughing, and the people who were waiting, the Asian people, are hugging her, and this goes on for a moment, until composure sets in generally, and then the doctor asks if he can make a brief examination. Not being able to think of much else to say, she agrees.
He produces a small flashlight of some kind, it is clipped onto his shirt, and he says that he is going to shine this flashlight in her eyes, and he does so, and the light is so bright that it seems to be shining all the way into the dark places of her body. She closes her eyes. He asks her to open her eyes, and she opens them, and he shines the light, and then she closes her eyes. He says okay let’s move on. He asks her to stretch out her arms. She stretches out her arms. He asks her to keep her eyes closed and to please touch her nose. She doesn’t know what this means, really, and yet she attempts to touch her nose, but unfortunately her hands go wide, her hands seem to have no force guiding them, no volition. After she attempts to do as she is told, there is some silence in the room, and she recognizes that she has not passed this particular test. The doctor asks if she can turn sideways in the bed, so that he can see her feet, and he asks her to close her eyes again. He asks if she can feel this and this, and she wonders what he is doing, because she can feel something, but she is not certain what it is, nor where it is meant to be occurring on the surface of her body.
The doctor introduces himself and tells her his name, and she says, “Pleased to meet you.”
“Can you tell me how you came to be here?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital.”
“Why am I in the hospital?”
“You’ve had an accident,” he says. “And I’m interested for the moment in whether you remember anything before your accident. Am I right in assuming that you don’t remember much about that time?”
The questions seem difficult. They must be trick questions. She thinks there are right answers and wrong answers, and also answers that are both right and wrong, and answers that will have something to do with Utica, with Asia, with bricks, and with women, but she is frightened at the possibility of giving the wrong answer or of people knowing the degree of uncertainty that she has about the questions, and so she begins to cry. The tears are involuntary, and she does nothing to conceal them, and because of the tears the doctor says that probably it is best if she rests. And the rest is not like a gentle interval in the day, a sweet and relaxing nap, it’s like a sickness, which apparently it is, because before she knows it she is back in a place that is no place and that is indefinite and characterized by blackness; in this place there are emotions now, and the emotions rotate through her chaotically: frustration, boredom, sadness, apprehensiveness. It is worth noting that never does she feel a pleasant emotion.
Why shouldn’t she just feel happy about the fact that she has consciousness and that her consciousness is separate, she now realizes, from the consciousness of a brick? Why can’t she feel good about not being a brick? Wednesday would perhaps be the day to feel good about it, but Wednesday is the day when they begin to assume that she is going to be awake on a regular basis, and because she is awake, they now believe that she should be doing some things besides simply sleeping and eating and listening to the horrible television on the wall. She doesn’t know what she thought before, if there even was a before, but she knows that she hates that device because everything on the television is like the explosion of lights in her head, and that explosion was so violent that she hopes she never has to experience anything like it again; better to be asleep. Yet every day, every minute, the television is like an explosion of light, and at the end of every one of these explosions it seems as if someone is getting punched or shot or stabbed or arrested by the authorities.
Meanwhile, the torture that is designed for today is the torture referred to as physical therapy. They mean to take her to the floor where exercises are done and see how much she can do. And this is because she has begun attempting to make it unassisted to the bathroom of her semiprivate room. Thus, there is a pair of nurses, and they lift her up, and she puts an arm around each of them, and they lift her away from the bed and they put a robe on her, and now her feet are touching the ground, or, if she looks down, it looks as though her feet are touching the ground, and one of the nurses says that they are going to walk toward the door, and they just need her to put one foot in front of the other foot, that’s the job for now. This sounds so easy when it is said in this particular way.
One nurse says, “You’re our little miracle, right?”
The victim says, “What?”
“We’re just so glad you’re up and around, Samantha. You’re our miracle of the eighth floor.”
“Thanks,” she says. “I guess.” And she thinks that she should get used to the fact that she’s named Samantha. No one seems to be call
ing her anything else.
Walking is harder than anyone explained. The phenomenon of balance seems as if it must be magic. Is it something that people have to learn or can they just balance themselves? Because whenever the nurses loosen their grip on her, in the thirteen steps to the door, where there seems to be a wheelchair waiting for her, she slumps sideways, collapses, and feels horribly dizzy. The dizziness is overwhelming, and her legs do not do what they are supposed to do, and she begins to tremble at the difficulty of the whole project. Where are those people, the people who must certainly be her parents? They are always here, but today they are not. Why aren’t they seeing this?
Nonetheless, there are things out in the hall. And there are people to see. For example, there is a policeman who seems to guard her room and only her room, though she doesn’t know why, and, though he probably has other things on his mind, he always seems to smile at her. He smiles when she makes it out of the room and into the hall, and he says, “Looking good.” And there’s something about the officer that she forgets at first but then recalls. The officer is an African American police officer. Some of the nurses are also African American. How could she have forgotten about these things?
Everyone seems very happy to see her in the wheelchair. She is the sort of person whom people are very happy to see out in the hall. People actually stare at her, which reminds her that she should know what she looks like. She must look either beautiful or repulsive if everyone is pointing at her. But she doesn’t really have time to think about this too much. Before she can think about it, she’s asleep. Right there, in the wheelchair.
In the night, in the incomplete darkness, there is time to think, and she knows that there was something about being African American that was important. She has to make a note to look at herself when she gets the chance, because she keeps forgetting.
When she is next aware of the day it is a weekend, and the breakfast tray is in front of her. How is it possible that she has been awake for hours before noticing? She has eaten half of her breakfast, and maybe she has even carried on conversations, before being aware of any of these things. How can she eat this appalling food? Everything in her body hurts, and something terrible has happened to her, because she was not always this way. There was a time before this time, and there was a self before this self, and there was a Samantha who wasn’t this Samantha, and therefore this is the moment when she asks of the woman who is often by her bed, “Tell me what happened to me. I want to know what happened.”
The woman looks at her husband, and this is how the victim knows that this woman must be her mother, because, she thinks, a mother is a person who does not want to give bad news to a person, and apparently the victim is a person who is loved by this woman, and so this woman must be her mother, because the mother looks so stricken at the idea that she has to tell the victim what has happened that she passes along the responsibility to the father, who sets aside his newspaper, because he is a man who spends a lot of time reading the newspaper, and so it is given to the man to be the husband of the mother. A father is the person who brings the worst news.
“You were walking down the street and you were attacked by someone,” he says. “You were struck in the head.”
“How was I struck in the head?”
“You were struck with a brick or perhaps a cinder block,” the father says. He looks pained to be saying it.
“Where was I going?”
“You were going to the library.”
“Why was I going to the library?” she asks, because now she has a great number of questions. Every question sends her scurrying off in a number of directions, and each of these questions generates further questions.
“You were going to read,” he says, “or you were going to do research. We don’t exactly know why you were going to the library. We think you were going to do some research for a project that you were preparing.”
“You were always going to the library,” her mother adds. The two Asian people have risen from their chairs now, as if rising from their chairs were some kind of synchronous ballet that they have prepared for this moment. The mother takes the victim’s hand.
“And then what happened?” the victim asks, because this is what she wants to know. How does a thing cause another thing to happen? How does one event become another, as when a brick becomes a sort of vengeance? Or is this just a condition of her brain, to believe that one thing always leads to another? Some days she goes from her room out into the hall, and from the hall to the elevator, and from the elevator to another floor, where she is meant to attempt to walk and to move her limbs in a coordinated way, and in the complexity of this there is nothing for her but to marvel. Because there are so many persons rushing around the hospital, and for these persons and for the persons recuperating in the hospital, there are all these causes and effects. Things causing other things.
“After the brick,” she says.
“Then you were very badly injured, and of course people called for an ambulance.”
“I want to see it,” she says.
“What do you want to see?” her mother asks.
“I want to see what my head looks like,” she says, because she knows now that they have concealed this from her. They have waited for a time when she will be sturdy enough to see. They have been in possession of the story for a long time, the story of the brick, and they have doled out portions of the story, and they have discussed the story when they believed that she was not conscious or was sleeping. There was a time when she was not able to be in possession of her story, when the two people who are her parents were its stewards, and they concealed things because there were many things that she might have known, but she was not ready to know them. Now she is ready.
“I don’t want you keeping it from me. I want to know what it looks like.”
The mother gives the father another one of those wounded expressions, and then the mother begins to go rummaging through a handbag beside her chair. The word occurs to Samantha now before the mother even produces the object, and the word is mirror.
The victim says, “I know about the brick. I learned about it. The brick is from Utica, which is in Asia.”
The mother and father look at each other, and the father begins to move toward the door, but the victim shakes her head no because she does not want the doctor and she does not want any restriction on the liberal flow of this catechism. She wants the free exchange of information because she will be asleep again soon, and while she is awake, during this brief day, let her experience its dramas. The father stands at the foot of the bed while the mother takes from her handbag the object known as a mirror, and now she is beside Samantha, and Samantha seizes the mirror, and she moves it around, and she tries to arrange it so that she can see her face, but the mirror keeps pointing in the wrong directions. She sees the wall behind her or she sees the curtain that separates her from her roommate, who is about to have brain surgery. She can’t hold the mirror steady, the mirror is capricious, and she feels some sensation in her, the feeling is known as rage, and she demands that her mother should steady the looking glass. She needs for it to be held where she can see it, because her hands don’t work, not the way they ought to, and nothing in her body works. It is a useless piece of equipment, this body, it is a mess, she tells her mother. “Now, just hold the mirror up where I can see and don’t say anything,” and the mother has to reach around her, to the far side of her head, because it is on the right side of her head, because the brick was used on the right side of her head, because whoever used the brick was behind her, and then alongside her, and so they hit the right side of her, and she was thrown to the ground, and her brains were dashed out of her head on this right side; of course, her cell phone went flying, and now she and the brick and the rage are one, and she can see, she can see how they have shaved all of the hair from her, and she can see that there is a scar and stitches, and the scar runs the length of her skull from her forehead back and down, to her ear, and the shape of
her head is irregular where the scar is, there are some bulges here and there, it is not a round head or a smooth head, her head is not shaped like a head, it is shaped like a mess. Her head looks like something in a butcher’s shop.
She also notices that her eyes are strange. That she is Asian.
“What kind of nationality am I?”
“You’re Chinese American. Your grandparents came from China.”
“Who did this to me?”
It’s the question that they aren’t prepared to answer, these people. The question of who did it to her. Also the question about why she is not dead. She knows now that these are the questions that they don’t want to answer and don’t want to talk about. Maybe it is a Chinese characteristic, not wishing to discuss things that are painful to discuss. Maybe before, she was the kind of person who accepted this reticence. She doesn’t remember. She will not tolerate it now. She knows which questions to ask because she feels sick when she asks them. She feels as if the room itself wants to scream.
Again, it is given to the father to answer. “We do not know who did this to you. They believed they knew who did it to you, but now they are not so sure.”
This is all on a Monday, or so she thinks. She will wake tomorrow and she will ask more questions, and they will not want to or will not be able to answer.
Will she have to have more surgery? They do not know. What is wrong with her brain? She has had several strokes. When will she be able to walk? They do not know, but she has to keep trying. What’s wrong with her arm? She has carpal tunnel, from typing. What did she do before? She worked in an art gallery. Can you explain art to me? Well, art is the category of human endeavor that has no purpose. Art is what people do to describe general human aspirations. Why was I interested in art? Your mother and I do not know why you were interested in art, because we do not understand art very well. Your grandfather worked in a laundry, and I worked as an accountant so that you could go to the university. When you went to university you became interested in art. You taught us a lot about art, her father goes on, but until you grew up we knew nothing about it. It was something you put over the sofa, if you were lucky enough to have a sofa. You took us to see paintings, her father says, and you took us to see photographs, and they were so complicated and so powerful that we didn’t know to what to compare these things. What kind of art did I like? We don’t know how to describe the kind of art you liked. You liked very modern things. Whereas we liked very old things, things that reminded us of China. The people you worked with, they can explain to you about art. How will you put me in touch with them? You could telephone them. Who were my friends? Your friends were people you knew from the gallery and from when you went to college. We didn’t know many of your friends. Why not? Because you didn’t choose to bring them home to us. Was I in love? We don’t think you were in love. Are you sure? We don’t think you were in love. You had a boyfriend for a while, but then this romance ended, as things often do when people are young. Why do you say that? Because young people do not understand love.