Damage Assessment

The GP didn't find anything wrong because he was looking for the wrong things. He was seeing if I knew my name, or if I knew it had been Thursday, 1953. He wasn't looking for my other personality.

Alaka'i was still MIA the second day and Kona was scared and lost. It felt like, well, loneliness. I felt loneliness.

But it wasn't until the second day after my birthday that the most serious symptom of brain-damage revealed itself. It was something that the GP was unlikely to have noticed.

A cat appeared from the woods. That was a common occurrence at the House in Shirley. Our neighbors were half a mile or more away, but that was nothing to their rat-catchers. The cats roamed far and wide looking for rodents and other cats.

I called Mother out of the house and asked her what it was. She said, "You know what it is, honey, it's a cat."

I didn't remember knowing that it was called "cat". But that wasn't the serious symptom. OK, so I "forgot" the word for cat. Not a biggy. Relearn it, move on.

But an hour or so later another cat came by. I said to my Mother, "What's that?"

"I just told you when the last one came by. It's a cat."

"The other one was cat. What's this one?"

My Mother just shook her head and returned inside. But I was shaken up by the whole incident. I knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was right away. It took another week and more incidents of the same nature for me to work out what had happened.

It was only a couple of years ago that I read about research that proved that the human brain processes names and words differently. That's what I discovered for myself, the hard way. My ability to absorb words was affected but I could still learn names. New words could only be understood as names.

What was really weird about it was that I could remember what it was like before. I could remember being able to use a word like "cat" to stand for cats in general. I knew that the sound that you make when you say "cat" is meant to be a general term for all creatures of a certain class. But I couldn't use the sound that way. I could only use it to stand for one particular cat. I could only use it as a name.