Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (7 page)

One morning I woke with the belief that John was dead. It hit me like a truck. My mind was different since the attack, and I didn’t always react in a timely fashion. I couldn’t even choose among various cans of corn on a supermarket shelf back then, and I still tend to ask people around me for help with decisions. Before the mugging, I always knew what I wanted and I’d walk through walls to get it; now, except for the emergencies of solving my mugging and finding my brother, I just wanted to hide behind walls. Keri had immediately known that something was very wrong when John left, and I had shrugged it off.

One day, I lay in bed thinking about my brother being dead, my stepfather being dead, and what had happened to me. Suddenly I snapped.

I jumped up and pulled my blankets off the bed and frantically ran for my toolbox. I took out the hammer and went window to window nailing the blankets over the frames to block out the world. When I used up those blankets, I went to the linen closet and got more blankets and sheets and worked my way around the rest of the house. My heart was pounding in my chest and I began to sweat. I was so manic that I tripped over the fabric a few times in my haste.

The last clouds I saw, before covering up the final window, had discrete components, a stream of still pictures, each one slightly different than the last, as the cumulus forms changed shape in the wind. I paused momentarily to consider them, teetering on my stepstool with vertigo from the impression, and then I hurriedly got back to my mission. In my altered perception, motion still occurred in stop-action frames. It was as though the great animator of us all had pulled the veil back to show me the individual sketches that, when streamed, gave movement to everything.

I wondered where John’s body was, and if I hadn’t been so afraid of stepping outside my house, I’d have conducted a search myself. Terrible images of his lifeless form began flashing through my mind. I was reeling from the compounded losses and overwhelmed by a need to hide. After I finished with the blankets and sheets, I checked the chains on the doors multiple times and wedged brooms and bats against the undersides of the doorknobs as early-warning devices. I looked inside all the rooms, even opening the closets and pushing things aside to make sure no one was lurking in them. Then I repeated the sweep, somewhere between five and ten times in all.

I was aware of my blossoming OCD during this frenzy. In addition to checking and rechecking the locks, I’d been checking over and over to make sure the stove was off, washing my hands raw, and peering out the windows suspiciously several times a day. Unlike the other things going on with me, OCD was something I’d heard of; I knew it was related to anxiety, but I was powerless to stop it. I became a hyperaware sentry in my own home.

In the days that followed, in my darkened cave, I decided I would stop going to work at Planet Futon altogether and live off my savings. While my dad was concerned about me, he was also very upset that I was quitting, and he tried to talk me into going back. I couldn’t snap out of my agoraphobia. One of our salespeople took over the management of the store. When I needed groceries, I slipped out at three in the morning and filled the car to overflowing so I wouldn’t have to go out again for several weeks, checking my rearview mirror constantly on the way home to see if I was being followed. The light of the grocery store, bright by anyone’s standards, was blinding to me. I seemed to be developing photosensitivity from my isolation in the house. All people seemed suspicious to me after the attack, and the people in the store just jabbered on and on nonsensically. Their mundane world of appointments and coupon-clipping and idle talk on the checkout line didn’t interest me. In retrospect, I realize I must have seemed pretty strange to them—looking over my shoulder constantly and scooting from the aisle if anyone else came down it. I mostly subsisted on Pop-Tarts and breakfast cereals and frozen pizza rolls. I’d never really been one to cook because I spent most of my nights out in clubs that served bar food or dinner. I hated going to the supermarket, and if I could have forgone food altogether and stayed in my isolation, I would have. But I was afraid to have food delivered by strangers, and home delivery was too expensive for my budget anyway, so the shopping trips were a concession, an unavoidable risk. Though I formerly had had a healthy appetite, now it was gone; I ate very little, rationing my provisions to postpone those forays into the now-surreal market. I didn’t care what anything tasted like. I would eat once a day, just to prevent hunger pangs. My once-muscular frame began to wither away.

Before I retreated permanently to my house I’d gone to the barbershop and said, “Cut it all off!” My eyes started hurting from the hours I spent researching online, so I dug out an old pair of reading glasses and began wearing them all the time. I looked in the mirror one day and didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to hide from that realization as much I wanted to hide from the outside world.

Perhaps my darkened enclave was a womb of sorts; a cocoon where I could transform before I went out into the world as a new person. I didn’t know how to be that new person yet. Was this person a crime victim? Was he a brain-injury sufferer? Would the new visions I was having define who I became? I was able to compare the me from before the mugging and the me after it, and they didn’t match up, which was very confusing to me. I had trouble identifying with the fun-loving young man I knew I’d been before the attack. Now I felt like I had developed a completely different personality, changes well beyond the new visual abilities. I thought back to Phineas Gage, the brain-injury survivor who was described as being “no longer Gage.” Was I no longer Jason?

It was hard to let go of the old me. In the beginning, I mourned the loss of my old familiar feeling of self, which was only a memory now. I’d been a popular guy with lots of friends and I’d had plenty of fun times, from going out on dates to clubbing. I couldn’t imagine doing any of that now, though sometimes I still wanted to be out there engaging with the world. I remember seeing a weather report on television during that time showing people playing at a swimming pool. Part of me wanted to be out there having fun, but the rest of me just couldn’t move to do it. I thought enviously about cases of amnesia I’d heard about. It would be so much easier to accept this new me if I didn’t have to remember who I once was.

I took out some old Polaroids and marveled at this other self from the past; gone were the muscle T-shirts that best displayed my bulging biceps, and gone was the spiky fade haircut. The man holding these images had adopted a studious, bespectacled, but toned-down look, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I wasn’t the carefree boy in those photos any longer. I had too many unanswered questions about my brain and consciousness and reality.

While I couldn’t change who I now was, there were steps I could take to better enable me to face the world as my new self. I decided to learn as much as I could about my medical situation and hopefully take small steps toward embracing the diagnosis, whatever it might be. At the same time, I knew I needed to learn all I could about science and math to help me understand the strange new phenomena before my eyes.

I was seeing shapes and grids that I couldn’t understand, as well as bright horizontal lines that would appear from moving objects. At first, I wondered if they were hallucinations. I’d never seen anything so strange and beautiful. But in my core, I felt the visions might be more profound than that. Perhaps they were manifestations of deeper patterns that had always been present in nature but that had been hidden from me up till now. They certainly opened up the world in a new way. It was as though I’d lived all my life in a Magic Eye poster, seeing only the obvious picture; now the hidden image was
all
I could see. I began to see and think about the geometry of everything. The mysteries of the universe were beckoning a man who had never even thought about them before.

I was unaware of this at the time, but in the silent recesses of my skull, my brain was working to heal itself, forming new neuronal connections to compensate for the ones that had been damaged. As my interests began to change and my personality moved from outgoing to bordering on antisocial, my brain was actually recovering in a miraculous way. This updated wetware, as some scholars and theorists refer to the human brain, would go on to make me capable of the biggest intellectual leaps I had ever taken. It would go on to be my bright side. But first, it locked me away from the rest of the living world.

If there was a consolation to my growing isolation, it was that my inner life was now filled with wonder. My vision was overlaid with rays of light, floating interlocking squares, and multiple frames of images of things in motion. It was as if the blows to my head had opened a window onto a geometric realm that had previously been painted shut. Many of the images I saw would turn out to correspond to concepts from physics that I had never studied. Theories of my own about the way things worked, particularly regarding movement and time, began percolating.

Clearly, something about me had drastically changed as a result of the attack. The gregarious old me, in search of the next good time, now found himself steeped in profound and serious thought all day. I’d be deep in contemplation, and the rare visitor I let in would walk up to me and I wouldn’t even see him. The blows had changed me fundamentally. It seemed impossible, but I actually felt smarter, yet more and more isolated.

I could not stop thinking about geometry. I retreated into a pristine world of mathematics and cosmology—it was easy to ponder the heavens from inside my darkened house. My brain wouldn’t turn off.
Everything
became related to geometry. I barely noticed my obsessive counting anymore. My brain felt full, bursting with thoughts and images. It wasn’t just a form of escape, though there was that. I was unable to stop paying attention to the smallest details of the world that I had previously never noticed. I was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all.

Sometimes I pondered the new workings of my brain and tried to figure out where John was simultaneously. My addled gray matter had grown expansive, capable of multitasking—even when the mysteries were as enormous as these. It felt like my brain couldn’t fit inside my skull anymore. It was as though the blows I’d received on that sidewalk opened my head and freed its contents. It was now oceanic in proportion. Life had a before-and-after quality. There were the forms and impressions before the mugging and after it. Before it, everything had seemed so large relative to my own size and self; afterward, I sometimes felt like a giant looking through a microscope.

The phone was my only lifeline to my fractured family; my mother was still living in Alaska, and my father had moved to Illinois. With my only sibling, John, gone, it was very easy for me to hide how dire things were. My family and friends didn’t realize what was going on for a while because my phone manner was usually upbeat. My mother never got mad when I telephoned at all hours, and she would ask me to describe what I saw. My dad, however, got one too many late-night calls and took to saying, “Jesus Christ, Jason, do you know what time it is?” before I started talking.

My friend Angela, present the night of the mugging, tried desperately to get me out of my isolation. She phoned repeatedly and asked me to come out with her and our friends. I always declined. So one day she showed up at the house. I reluctantly let her inside.

“You need to take down those blankets, go take a shower, and come out with me,” she announced. “Enough already—it’s been weeks. You can’t live like this.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to be left alone,” I told her.

“You need to be with people. This isn’t normal, Jason.” She was beginning to get angry.

“You’re not in this situation—how could you understand?”

“If you stay in your house, that’s them winning!” she yelled. “There will be a lot of people there tonight. You’ll feel safe!”

I exploded. I can’t remember raising my voice so fiercely to anyone—it just wasn’t my nature, either before or after the mugging. But I’d heard enough. “Well, there were a lot of people around the night I was attacked, including you, and none of you did a damn thing—you just stood there. I’m not going. Now, get out!” I showed her the door. After that, I wouldn’t even answer the doorbell. My loved ones tried to coax me from my cave from afar, but I seldom let anyone visit me. The one exception was my young daughter, Megan. But that didn’t mean our visits were normal.

The doorbell would ring, and even if I was expecting my five-year-old, I’d have to make sure it was actually her. I’d tiptoe cautiously toward the front door and then peek out the side of the blanket covering the window closest to it, straining to look down at an angle toward what would be the height of my little brunette daughter. If her saucer-large blue eyes met mine and I was sure it was her and no one else, I’d remove the bat I’d propped against the door and quickly unbolt the locks, then open the door just wide enough for her to squeeze through. The less time the door was open and the smaller the angle, the greater my sense of security. I wouldn’t even pause to wave at Michelle, who always dropped her off. Megan knew the drill and would rush in. She’d drop her book bag, fling her arms wide open, and run toward me for a hug, but I’d recoil. I always did when she was coming straight from kindergarten. Megan hadn’t figured out why, she just knew her dad was different now. It wasn’t her; it was that I knew she’d been in contact with strangers and their germs all day.

I’d tell her to go wash up and she’d dutifully run off. I often wondered if it seemed like a game to her, because she giggled as she skipped. Once I could hear the water running in the bathroom, I’d find my bottle of antibacterial lotion and pump it around ten times into my hand. I’d taken to buying this instead of washing my hands until they bled. I’d slather it on my arms, my hands, my neck, and my face—every bit of skin was covered that might be exposed to any lingering germs from the kindergarten class.

Megan would reenter the room, shaking her hands dry as she approached. “Are you shiny enough now, Daddy?” she’d ask, and I’d nod.