The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Naomi's Way of Knowing - 11/02/04

Tuesday, November 2, 2004

Okay, back to the telling. It's around one in the morning now, and I'm alone here at the computers... no more fat guys, or anyone else. Sorry to keep you all in suspense for a couple of hours. Not that anyone's out there and reading this, likely, beyond a few random nighttrippers in cyberspace. As always, this is an exercise to preserve my own sanity, and if the story "grows in the telling," so be it. 

Finally I've got Naomi’s story and a chance to tell it. I'll paraphrase here as best I can from her version and our conversation. 

See, I learned that Naomi and I have something in common, more than just the fact that we're both effectively homeless. We both have a hole in our memories... missing time. Mine is a whole year— hers is slightly less than that. Mine's from when I was nine, after I perforated Mrs. Samuelson with my pseudo-knife. Hers is from when she was thirteen and just diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. 

It doesn't take a brain surgeon, ho ho, to know that most people who grow something extra in their heads don't survive very long. Yet here she still is on God's green earth. Well, God's for the time being, I guess. 

“We were living in New York at the time, my family,” Naomi said. “Just a couple years away from D.C., because of my mom’s fellowship.” She was curled up in a comfy papasan in my room. Rence and I were her rapt audience. 

"My parents were both doing pretty well financially— then. They threw some money together to consult the best doctors around on what could be done. I was just a stupid kid barely into her teens who didn't know what was going on, so I let them handle everything. My only request was that I didn't want to die. They ran into a bunch of places that just said sorry. But then they heard, I don’t know how, about this one place that had broken new ground in neurological research. It had helped a bunch of people by using a new, experimental brain operation. People like me. It all sounded risky, but there was this awful intruder in my brain that would kill me someday anyway, so..." 

"So you went under the knife," Rence said. Then glanced at me uncomfortably. Wrong metaphor.

"Well, it was more than that. More than just the operation. The doctors needed to keep me at their facilities for a while beforehand, for some kind of... procedures. In preparation. And then afterwards for a while too, to observe my progress, or, you know, lack of progress. That whole time, around seven months or so— I don't remember any of it. Not a single day, not even a single hour. But after—" 

"And what was this place?" I interrupted. "You say facilities... was it a hospital? Or a specialty center?" 

"I don't even remember that," Naomi said. "I know I did at one point, and maybe I used to remember the whole experience too. But it's faded, it's gone. I don’t remember the recovery at all, either. Don’t remember leaving the place any more than I do entering it. It didn’t really strike me how weird that is until recently. But I was better. More than better. They’d cut the tumor down to almost nothing, and it was completely benign. I was so grateful for that, it was the only thing that mattered. There was something... different about my head from then on, though. Something new. I started getting these feelings.

"Hold on," she said before I could interrupt again. "Tryin’ to clarify myself here. What I mean by feelings is... not premonitions, exactly, not even really thoughts. Yeah, I guess feelings in the most literal sense. Without knowing why, I would feel that I had to do something, like take a ladle from the kitchen and put in my backpack in the morning. And then at school that day, I'd suddenly find a use for that ladle, in some bizarre situation. Or I might stand in a particular place at a particular time without even remembering how I'd gotten there or why I was there, but that would turn out to be the, uh, right place at the right time. It wasn't like knowing the future on a conscious level, but maybe on some unconscious level I was. Or, or like a muscle memory, but of something that hadn't yet happened. Is this making sense at all so far? You following me, Mark?"