Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich Read Free Book Online Page A

riding that unfamiliar surge of optimism. Eventually the lasers blinked off, and the darkness descended. The tourists left their seats, and I stood and looked out over the smog-choked lights of Cairo. A light wind carried a fine grit of desert sand and the faint sound of car horns. The pockmarked Sphinx, 455 feet below, seemed as small as a kitten, and the stars above were nowhere to be seen. The Great Pyramid had been there for 4,600 years, and on that night, for a few hours, it was mine alone under my feet.
    —
    My grandfather sat shivering on the top of the George Washington Bridge. Later he would speak about the climb many times to many people. He would speak about the cold, the height, the fear, and the long night spent waiting for dawn, hiding in a packing crate. But he never, that I’m aware of, spoke about
why
he’d decided to climb in the first place.
    I think I know.
    He was twenty-four years old and in the process of burying his old self, the one who’d worried about always being a failure. He was halfway through medical school and discovering gifts he’d never known he had. He was learning how to make sick people better, and he was learning that this was something he could not only do but do well. He was newly confident that he was on the right path, and this feeling, this revelation, cried out for commemoration.
    Of course this leap I’m making might be bullshit, but I’ll defend it. There is only one way we tell stories about other people, and it’s the only way we’ve ever told stories about other people. We find the connections between us and them, and then we use those connections as a bridge. Sometimes the connections are solid, buttressed by primary sources and interviews and every other sort of documentation you can imagine. Sometimes they’re tenuous. Sometimes they’re as ephemeral as two young men, divided by two generations, climbing two monuments for what the younger man believes must have been the same reasons.
    My grandfather waited on top of the bridge until dawn. Maybe he slept at some point. I doubt it. I imagine him sitting there watching the lights of the city below until they were eclipsed by the light of the brightening sky. Eventually he stood and walked back to the cable and stepped out onto it. Like the man who’d jumped months before, my grandfather couldn’t see the thousands of tiny filaments that united to form this one massive rope of steel beneath his feet. He didn’t need to see them. He just needed them to sustain and hold him while his body coursed with adrenaline and endorphins and the sun began to warm him. Inside his skull, new neuronal connections were made, fresh impressions conveyed across yearning axons destined to imprint themselves as a memory trace that would reside there, inside him, until his last day.
    One more thing: The length of all those thin strands that made up the thick cables of the George Washington Bridge—108,000 miles—not only could circle Earth four times or stretch halfway to the moon but also happened to match, almost exactly, the combined length of all the axons in the average adult human brain. Of course, they are very different, axons and steel. In the bridge, the wires came together in lockstep formation, pooling their strength in accordance with some civil engineer’s formulas. In the brain, as my grandfather would have already learned during his first two years of medical school, axons came together and fell apart in infinite patterns that changed from microsecond to microsecond, conveying and creating everything we know and feel, believe and remember. He would have learned that there was no formula to describe what axons did, that they were the wiring of the brain, and that this wiring was embedded within small circuits, and those small circuits were embedded within larger ones, and the brain as a whole was made up of entire constellations of interlocking circuits. He would have studied these things and learned that a working