Page 4 of Brain Damage

The light feels like a knife.

Yellow light inches away from my pupil, jabbing at my eyeball like an ice pick through my brain. I want to close that eye to block it out, but I can’t. My eye won’t close. Something has wedged it open.

I try to cry out to protest, but my lips don’t move. While something holds my eye open, something holds my lips shut. Tape, I think.

“No pupillary response,” a voice announces.

With those words, my eyelid is released, and I am plunged back into blessed relative darkness, marred only by a large green spot in the center of my vision. I want to live in this darkness.

“No way,” a second voice says. “Are you blind? I got a definite constriction of that pupil.”

It happens again. My eyelid is yanked open and I see the blurry outline of a face before the light floods my field of vision again. The pain came slower before, but this time it is immediate. I’ve never been a religious person, but I find myself praying that the light will go away.

Please, God, make it go black again…

“She had pretty eyes,” a voice comments.

They are complimenting me in the past tense. That can’t be good.

“See?” a triumphant voice announces seconds before the light shuts off. “I told you it constricted.”

“I didn’t see it.”

That light again. It’s so painful, I can barely stand it. It seems to go on for an eternity as the two voices talk. Finally, I reach out an arm and swat at the source, hoping to make it stop. Anything to make it stop.

Whatever I did works. There’s a sharp inhale of air, and then the light goes out once again. Thank you, God.

“Did you see that?” says the second voice. “She was responding to us. A purposeful movement. She’s in there!”

“Fine, maybe she’s not gone,” says the first voice. “But you and I both know how poor her chances of a meaningful recovery are.”

“If she goes to rehab…”

“Her prognosis is still terrible.” The owner of the voice sounds angry, although I don’t know why. “So go ahead and try to rehabilitate her. Keep her alive in a vegetative state for the next decade, instead of giving her organs to somebody who isn’t practically brain dead.”

There’s a long pause before I hear: “She’s an organ donor?”

“Said so on her driver’s license, apparently.”

Another long pause. The pain in my head is fading and with it, my consciousness. Blessed darkness. Thank you, God.

“Well, she’s not dead yet.”

Those words are comforting to me. Something has happened to me, but I’m not dead. I’m alive. I’m still here. Not dead.

Yet.

3

I don’t know this girl, but she is very pretty and her hair is tied back into a blond ponytail. She is young, maybe in her twenties, with a fresh-faced eager look. There are freckles sprinkled across her nose, which make her look even younger and more fresh-faced and pretty. Her smile fills my vision and makes me feel comforted, optimistic.

“Are you ready to try eating something today, Charlotte?” she asks.

Charlotte? Who is Charlotte?

I have no idea who she is talking to. But her eyes are locked with mine. I think she might be talking to me. Yes, she is definitely talking to me. I am Charlotte. That is my name, I think.

It’s a pretty name. Charlotte. I like it.