Free The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy Page B

the few times Clare’s dad actually worked with his hands); Clare’s dad on the cover of his company’s magazine, pictured as a captain on a boat; a trip during a wedding anniversary, around when he turned seventy; and a photographof Clare’s dad from ten years ago. “There’s been a tremendous decline since then,” says Clare.
    Clare’s sister’s attempt to jog her father’s memory, to give him back his narrative, his coherent story, his self, with this scrapbook hasn’t made much of a difference as far as Clare can see.
    We go back to see Clare’s dad. This time he lets Clare hold his hand briefly. He even squeezes her knuckles. Clare blows a kiss at him, and a few kisses later, he smiles and does the same. I turn to Clare and ask if that means he recognizes her. She says she doesn’t know. He hasn’t said a word. There’s no way to tell. I too try to shake his hand; he doesn’t respond at first, but then for a brief moment, he smiles and shakes my hand firmly. He then squeezes my knuckles too. There’s no way to tell.
    Or maybe there is. For Clare, the knuckle-squeezing takes her back to childhood, when her dad would do that to her playfully. It would make her wince. “‘Ha-ha-ha, little joke,’” he’d say, Clare recalled. Could it be that somewhere in that body, Clare’s dad still persists—a fragment of his self, a memory, a strong, strapping man still playing with his daughter?

    About a month and a half after I met Allan, Michaele took him to check out a board-and-care home. Allan had been incontinent for days, suffering from severe diarrhea. Michaele had spent sleepless nights changing sheets and giving Allan numerous showers. Realizing that they needed help, she drove Allan to visit the care home, which was beautiful, with a nice backyard full of trees overlooking a park. Allan seemed to like it. As they were driving away from the home, Michaele said to him, “Do you think you’ll be OK there?” To her surprise, he answered, “I think it’s nice, it’ll be nice.”
    He said it with such lucidity that Michaele was immediately guilt-stricken. “Oh, Allan, I feel terrible. I’m going to miss you so much. It’s so hard for me to do this. But I know I can’t keep going on,” she told him.
    “That’s OK,” he said. “We will always be connected no matter what happens.”
    “That blew me away,” Michaele told me. “His ability to communicate with me so clearly that day was phenomenal. He got very quiet again. But I just felt so close to him that day.”
    Allan would spend just two weeks in the board-and-care home, and then he passed away.
    I met Michaele a few weeks after Allan’s death. We sat in the same living room where I had first met him. On a small table next to Allan’s brown leather sofa, Michaele had set a small white vase full of fresh flowers from their garden, and placed a small clay tortoise atop a few of his favorite books. A candle of lavender-colored wax burned beside a framed photograph of a younger Michaele and Allan. On the sofa’s high back, Michaele had carefully draped Allan’s brown corduroy jacket.

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    THE MAN WHO DIDN’T WANT HIS LEG
    IS THE FEELING THAT YOU OWN YOUR BODY AND ITS VARIOUS PARTS BASED ON REALITY?
    The leg suddenly assumed an eerie character—or more precisely, if less evocatively, lost all its character—and became a foreign, inconceivable
thing
, which I looked at, and touched, without any sense whatever of recognition or relation. . . . I gazed at it, and felt, I don’t know you, you’re not part of me.
    —Oliver Sacks
    Theoretically you can have a phantom of almost any part of the body, except of course the brain; you can’t have a phantom brain, by definition, because that’s where we think it’s all happening.
    —V. S. Ramachandran
    T his wasn’t the first time that David had tried to amputate his leg. When he was just out of college, he had tried to do it using a tourniquet fashioned out of an old sock and strong