Spell B-I-D-E-N Backwards

Susan Schneider

Word Count 1078

As usual on an early Friday morning, I crossed Amsterdam Avenue, Broadway, and West End, to my yoga teacher’s basement studio. I walked in and leaned mutely against a wall. The teacher and four other students stared at me in puzzlement. Someone must have asked if I was all right. Maybe I answered. My old friend and yoga mate Emmy took me in a cab to my doctor’s office. Emmy told me all of this later. I remember nothing.

My doctor found that my vital signs were normal and then said I had to see a neurologist. I had a couple of hours to wait, and I wanted to go home first. Emmy said she’d come with me; I said no, I’m okay. Emmy said I wasn’t okay. I have no memory of any of this.

Dear friend that she is, Emmy took my arm and guided me home, where I have a dim memory of standing over my sofa and discovering it to be cold and clammy-wet. I asked Emmy if I had peed on it. She told me she thought it was a coffee spill.

I’d made coffee? When? And spilled it? Really?

She brought me to the kitchen and showed me my empty coffee cup in the sink, as if the same eerie presence that spilled the coffee had tidied up after itself. I felt distantly terrified. Was I a ghost? Had I died? Emmy handed me my glasses; oddly, one earpiece was bent at a sharp angle like a broken wing. It looked sad. How had it happened?

We left my apartment and got to the neurologist’s office without my knowing how. The dark-haired, featureless neurologist, whose name is long lost, asked me to describe my day. I said something about going to yoga. Emmy, as my “reliable witness,” said, “She seemed lost. Not herself. The opposite of herself. Flat. Affectless.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it.

Because I remember this, I think my mind must have started to come back right around then.

The doctor asked me a few nonsensical questions, like the president’s name and how to spell “world,” which I did, very carefully. But when she asked me to spell it backward, I intoned, “b-a-c-k-w-a-r-d.” I can remember hearing laughter. I remember feeling stupid.

“The sofa was wet,” I said.

“Yes!” Emmy smiled and hugged me. Her arm felt warm and real around my shoulders. I was scared and grateful for her touch, her connection to me. I seemed to be having real feelings, but something was still wrong; nothing I felt seemed to be coming from me. It was as if I were an observer.

Emmy mentioned that I’d recently been on an 18-hour plane trip, during which I’d taken a couple of sleeping pills as I usually did on planes.

“That drug can cause weird behavior. It might be confusional arousal,” the doctor postulated. That sounded like sex. Or maybe not. I sort of remembered that I’d been on an airplane a week ago. Or two weeks ago?

The neurologist made me promise never to take that drug again. Then she mentioned something called Global Transient Amnesia, which causes a temporary loss of short-term memory. Oh, God, I thought. The word amnesia sounded like something from an old movie when someone is hit on the head and wanders the earth until they’re hit on the head again, and miraculously recover, and it’s ten years later. But the neurologist assured me that GTA only wipes out your short-term memory for a while. It isn’t a stroke, and it isn’t dangerous, and it almost never happens more than once. Nothing to worry about.

Really?

She continued, “In any case, you’ve bought yourself an MRI,” which struck me as not especially amusing. And the upshot of that costly purchase simply revealed—a not unexpected anticlimax--my brain, the same as ever. No secret codes or black holes. I didn’t exactly wish that something had shown up, but at least I could have pointed to it and said, “There. That’s what happened.”

Over the next several days, Emmy and other friends checked in regularly, but I knew they could have no idea of what had happened to me, and I felt very alone. But my mind continued to gingerly pick up its jigsaw assortment of pieces. In a week or so, I felt that I’d fitted most of it back together. “It” being the previous configuration of my mind.

I found that I was still really bothered by the sight of my glasses, bent so oddly. That—and the thought of the spilled coffee made me feel that something violent had happened to me at the moment that my mind absented itself. It was creepy.

I tried fixing the glasses, but it was no use. Emmy came with me to a neighborhood optician. Looking at myself in the oval mirror as I tried on frame after frame, going for bright, emphatic colors, I chatted about what I’d experienced, walking the streets of New York like a ghost, while the world spun on without me. It might be something like death, I said, or a rehearsal for it. I’d become slightly fixated on the topic.

Standing behind me, Emmy focused on fixing my hair around the frames.

“So, the blue or the red?”

Red, for sure: I wouldn’t feel ghostly in bright red glasses. Back out on the street, something else occurred to me. “It was almost like a religious experience. Don’t laugh.”

“You’ve never been religious,” Emmy reminded me. We’ve known each other since college, a million years ago. “To the contrary.”

But I’d been left feeling not only alarm but wonder. How did I lose my mind so completely? Where did it go? And how did it come back? What was the mind anyway? And memory—what was that?

“It’s all so mysterious,” I said. We looked at each other and shrugged.

But at least I’d gotten a pair of great new glasses out of it and a way of looking past ordinary existence into the unknown. Another thing I understood now was just how much I need friends, and how desperately we all need our human connections. Emmy had kept me tethered to earth. She’d helped me gather myself up again. That Friday has stayed gone, probably forever, except for the scraps she helped me to save and, finally, her hand grasping mine and the weight of her warm arm around my shoulder.

Susan has published a novel, The Wedding Writer, based on her experiences working as an editor at a bridal magazine. Way back when women's magazines still published good fiction, she was the fiction editor at Mademoiselle. She's also written nonfiction books, poetry, and short fiction. She is the mother of a wonderful grown-up daughter named India who studies monkeys and teaches at Arizona State University. Susan lives in New York City with her husband, Larry.