interlude: from the outside looking in
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
Kurt settles Blaine down on the sofa gently, holds him, while Clare raises the back of her hand to her forehead, discovers the world of blood and emotion seeping from a cut. (Kurt notes it’s one of Aunt Mildred’s old vases - lucky!)
Soon, Blaine’s tears subside, and Kurt helps him upstairs after a quick “I’ll be down again soon. You want something for that cut - oh, yes, you do need something. Give me a few minutes. Take the sofa. Just try not to bleed on it, okay? I won’t be long.”
She stands up doe-legged, a little uneasy, a little shaken, takes in the disruption she caused. China covers the floor, and she notes the sharp edge of the fragment that cut her forehead. She can feel the tear in her skin, the barrier broken, and it fascinates her. It’s a glimpse of what she is, of what makes her, of what makes everyone.
From doctors like herself, to intellectuals, to artists like Kurt, to professors and their students, to builders and body-builders and rebuilders and the old and the young and the homeless and the desperate to those in the heights of ecstasy, all somehow fitting into the jigsaw of human life with the same textures and tones and things that link us all, down to the basics of flowing through the veins of history. And then there’s Blaine.
What is Blaine?
What is Blaine?
-
She allows Kurt to tend to her, wincing as he dabs at the area with cotton wool before covering it with a plaster.
“You sure this is okay? You don’t need stitches or anything?”
“I doubt it. It’ll heal eventually. And I don’t want to drive to the hospital right now anyway, considering I’ve just come from there.” She smiles faintly, adds a small laugh. “Where’s Blaine now?”
“Asleep. He needs to calm down. I’m really sorry about what happened earlier; he just gets like that sometimes. When he doesn’t understand. Our friend Rachel came over, just when he first came home, and he didn’t recognise her and he got so upset. Then she sang to him, and that helped, but then we all started talking again and because he didn’t know what was going on, he just got more and more frustrated.”
“It’s perfectly normal, Kurt. And for someone intellectual such as Blaine, it can often be worse. You know the feeling, when someone tries to get you to understand something that you know is simple, but something just blocks you, and it feels like this spring inside of you is just winding tighter and tighter and then it just, well, snaps? And I’m sorry about your vase as well. Something special? I can give you something as a replacement if you’d like - ”
“No, no, it’s fine. It was my Aunt’s, and I never liked her that much.”
“But it was a nice vase - ”
“Honestly, it’s fine. I have more important things to take care of - ,” Kurt tells her, not all quite there.
“Like Blaine?”
“Like Blaine.”
-
She settles down at her laptop that evening, opens the document titled Blaine Anderson Report and Findings, scrolls through the previously-typed pages of her research paper before unfolding Blaine’s answers from earlier.
A mug of tea whispers at her side and she sits in the darkness, the curtains closed, and types out her latest findings. She notes how Blaine’s humour remains, the self-depreciation to his answers and the lack of self-esteem due to his “incapability of thinking”, as he refers to it himself.
She greets her husband when he walks in, allows him to kiss her on the cheek, ask about the cut, before slipping away again with yet another, “I’ll be late to bed, darling. Go without me.”
-
The night stretches on, pulled by caffeine and determination to write more, to get this paper finished.
At some point, she types out an email to the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, telling them she’ll have it finished in two weeks after one more visit.
-
Eventually, she shuts the computer down, climbs into the opposite side of the bed to her husband and shuts her eyes.
The clock reads 03.47.
-
She’s awake again at 06.38.
The same routine; bathroom to wash, brush teeth (and change the dressing on her forehead, inspect the cut through hazy eyes), back to the bedroom to dress as quietly as possible, a flask of tea, money to buy a croissant on the way to work, briefcase, check files, keys, phone, and out of the door.
-
By the time her husband wakes up, she’s long-gone, and her side of the bed is left cold.
-
To: mdesposito@universitycalifornia.edu
From: claresmith@gmail.com
Subject: JCN Submission: Final report
Attachments: IncapableOfThinking JCN.docx
Mr D’Esposito,
Please accept my final submission for the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: Incapable of Thinking: An observation into the effects of severe memory loss on cognitive processes and emotional expression.
Clare Smith
-
“I finished my paper,” she tells her husband, trying and failing to disguise the pride in her voice.
“Well done. How about we have a celebration? Dinner, tomorrow night? We’ll go somewhere nice,” he hints, full of promise as he welcomes her into his arms, an embrace all too familiar to both of them.
She answers into his shirt, “I can’t. I’m on night shift.”
“That’s okay? Another night? Sometimes in the next week?”
“I don’t know if I can. Let me check my diary.” She pulls away too fast. “No, I’ve got either nights or on-call most days, and I’ll be feeling awful the day I’m not on.”
“Oh,” is all he can say. “Well, how about a little thing tonight? I’ll cook something nice, open some wine?”
“Yeah.” She nods. “Yeah, that sounds nice,” she adds, a little more conviction in her voice.
-
That night is the first in a long time where they rediscover the kiss, the touch, the heartbeat.
Their bodies, long-foreign, find the old rhythm, retrace old routes, note the landmarks, the web and thread and mess of veins, meadows of skin, the rivers, oceans of eyes, hills and valleys and the old familiar.
But by the time they’re finished, broken apart, and he’s whispering, “I love you,” she’s already asleep.
-
“Where’s Blaine?”
“Asleep.”
“I sent the paper to the journal. I’m hoping for it to be published soon.”
“You finished it?”
“Yep. All ten thousand words of it.”
“Impressive! Well done,” Kurt congratulates her, holding his arms out tentatively. She pauses for a moment, before stepping into the embrace and smiling, and suddenly she gets a glimpse to just why Blaine’s love for Kurt stays as strong as it does; Kurt is safety. Kurt stays strong, steady as monument when the rest of the world is falling through the cracks in time. When the walls start to melt, the clocks twist like Dali, the money slips through fingers - because, really, it’s of as much value as any old piece of paper - the very darkness bleeds and scratches and scars and screams, Kurt is a star burning. And it’s not much, but in this chaos, this ever-infinite-spinning world, it’s everything.
-
“Kurt, would you mind me asking you about Professor Buckham’s friends? Their visit is next week, and, well, the last time I asked Blaine, well - .” She points to the steadily healing cut on her forehead to exemplify her point.
She doesn’t add that she’s emailed them all a copy of her paper before it’s even been published, and that’s they’d all responded with interest, that they all hoped to see her (and Blaine included!) very soon. And where did Kurt stand in all this? No one had made mention of the KH in the report. None expressed a desire to meet him, not a person who would actually remember their faces, their names, play the perfect host no doubt while they suffocate BA, to whom they would forever remain a mystery.
“I know. Personally, I’m okay with it, I think. It could help in some way, right? Advance research or something? I don’t know a lot about it, but it could? But it all depends on Blaine, really. The Blaine I used to know would have said yes in an instant. You know he was a teacher? Do you know why he chose that profession?”
“No - ”
“Because he wanted to make a difference. Because he wanted to help people. Because he loved getting up every day knowing that he had the chance to change a life. To widen a mind. To implant that one seed of inspiration into someone that could grow into something beautiful somewhere in the future.
“That’s the Blaine I know and love. One who wants to help, and help as many people as possible, and even now, he could do that, right? Please say he can. Please.”
Kurt’s imploring her, his eyes low-lit and fixated, tears starting to form at the corners like drops of blood drawn from a needle, desperate for an answer, for something to tell him this isn’t all a waste of time, of his everything -
“I hope so, Kurt.”
“You hope? You hope?
“Remember those nights in hospital, those first few weeks? I was a mess. I was broken. And the one thing that got me through then is hoping he’d get better. Not prayer, not wishing on shooting stars, I just hoped, hoped he’d be okay. I had this one thought, this one goal, that he’d be okay, and now - look what I’ve got! Look at this existence! It’s less than nothing.
“You see what he writes in his diary. How happy he is to be alive followed by how he doesn’t know he can think! How can someone live for anything when they don’t even know that they can think? The most basic, but the most complex of human functions that make us able to deal with our stupid lives, and his understanding is that he no longer has that ability? What does that make him? Isn’t he human anymore?
“You can see yourself just how much he hates this. He hates believing that he’s good for nothing. That he can’t help anyone. And I thought maybe, just maybe, he might recover, even if just a little bit, gain some kind of understanding. But no. It’s been nearly a year now, and we’ve got nowhere. And I’ve watched it all. I’ve seen how the only times he can ever truly be properly happy, when he can even feel anything at all, is when he’s playing music that he’ll forget as soon as his hands leave the keys or put down the bow or whatever, or he sees me. Not our best friend, not his parents-in-law and guess what, he has no parents because they’re fucking dead. And he doesn’t even know that.
“Don’t you see now? Don’t you see how much he hates this, feeling useless, feeling as insignificant as the - as the dust in the light? He’d rather be dead than this. I’d rather he be dead than endure this sometimes. And he’ll never know how close he came. He’ll never know and - ”
“Shh, Kurt, it’s okay. Come here.”
And they’re in each other’s arms, and they’re both crying, and at this point, she feels closer to the raw, torn, unhealed scars of nerve endings than she’s ever been, comes closer to knowing, just knowing and feeling.
She can almost touch it.
chapter eleven