Free The Memory Book by Howard Engel Page A

This was my bum head talking. Anna was in no danger; my encounter with the Dumpster was weeks—no, months—ago. Why couldn’t I hold on to that fact? Why did my ideas now have big holes in them?
    None of this helped to relax me. Thank God, my Czech friend from the dinner table came by and asked me whether I would like to play chess. As luck would have it, I did play. The odd thing was that he seemed to know that already. I wondered whether my brain injury would give me an advantage over my partner, who had suffered a crippling stroke. The next few hours passed by quickly as I demonstrated to my friend just how badly I played the game. And as for my earlier worries about Anna, they vanished for a time as the fate of my beleaguered queen had to be dealt with.
    After my new friend left, the worries returned. The outing with Anna got me thinking about life outside. Did the hospital have a course on reintegrating former patients into their neglected lives? Or was the Memory Book all I could hope for? How would I learn to pay my bills with my trick memory? How could I remember the names of my clients? I pictured one sitting across from me, telling me her problems, while my problem was trying to remember the name she gave me. I could install a blackboard on the wall facing me. Here I could enter the names of my clients. The client wouldn’t see it, and itwould help bolster my assurance. The idea made me feel better, and I began to invent other ways to make life away from University Avenue supportable.
    My new life was going to depend on such strategies: the Memory Book, pocket notebooks, and diaries. I was at last going to have to get organized, as my teacher Miss MacDoughal kept warning me back in grade four. It was going to be a peculiar life, I had to admit: part of my old memory worked—I could still remember about the Battle of Hastings and when Julius Caesar crossed his Rubicon—but I could no longer remember the names of my many first cousins. While I was trying to list all sixteen of them, I had the haunting feeling that I had done this before. I didn’t so much mind the duplication of the work as I did the feeling that I was looking over my own shoulder to see what was going on. I could remember Anna and her father, but I had lost his first name. And in order to remember his last name, I had to go back to Anna’s, which, of course, was the same. I kept surprising myself with my own ingenuity; for instance, I was trying to recall the name Grant for some reason. I spent ten minutes going through the alphabet searching for the name. I succeeded only when I remembered that I’d once worked for a Saul Granofsky, whose daughters had changed their name to Grant. My memory was full of such filigrees of twisted silken strands. My new memory required me to build a latticework of aids to criss-cross my experience and expectation.

ELEVEN
    There were days and days of tests. Some were simply physical, like the blood pressure monitor I wore around my arm for twenty-four hours. Every so often it would begin to squeeze my arm like a persistent python, then release me after a minute: a silent companion who followed me everywhere. I was able to take more pride in the tests of my mental functions. They were more involving. I was childishly delighted in my correct answers, but the seeds of depression were planted with every incorrect response.
    “That was excellent, Mr. Cooperman. You got them all.”
    “I wish I could read faster.”
    “That’ll come. With practice and time.” The therapist that day was a woman in her late twenties. She had a pleasant manner; I didn’t feel as though I were being made to jump through hoops. She never spoke about me to another therapist while I was standing there listening. When the therapist left, I’d continue the conversation with my nurse.
    “Should I be doing something about my reading?”
    “You’re going to speech therapy twice a week.”
    “I know, but isn’t there something more I