Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole by Allan H. Ropper

but not entirely irrational, and certainly not inattentive. Gordon could be extremely focused on the details of our comings and goings in his room. Our presence pissed him off, and he let us know it, yet day after day he could not tell us his address, how many children he had, or what kinds of jobs he’d held. And not out of obstinacy, because he was fine with other details. He was disoriented and did not know where he was or why he was here. Gilbert the medical student recorded this as “orientation times one,” again that unfortunate and unenlightening phrase. But Gordon also had his moments of lucidity. On good days he could tell us where he went to college and the name of the bowling alley where he had worked. He could, on occasion, be quite congenial.
    During the three months of his stay at the Brigham, we performed every conceivable test on Gordon Steever, and they all came up either negative or inconclusive. He became very popular with the staff, less profane, but no more oriented than on the day he arrived. When he finally ventured out of what Hannah referred to as his man cave, he enjoyed tossing a tennis ball across the nurses’ station to anyone who seemed willing to field it. Eventually, he was transferred to a psychiatric nursing home, and we lost touch with him for six months. He was a ward of our hospital, and the best we could do was fob him off on a place where he would languish, and quite possibly die of neglect. He was gone but not forgotten. It was not clear where his confusion came from, but for now we knew where it was going to take him: Saugus, the only town in which Hannah could find a facility that would offer a bed.

    In the room next door, Wally Maskart sat awake through most of the night, as he did night after night, frantic. In his sleep-deprived,hyperactive state, he would write for hours on end, collecting his disjointed thoughts and memories in a loose-leaf notebook, producing up to twenty pages a night, and each morning, Hannah would photocopy some of the more interesting pages and insert them into Wally’s medical notes. Hannah was searching for clues. One night she found one.
    While most of his jottings were gibberish, Wally had moments of lucidity during which he displayed a practiced prose style. In one burst of creativity, he wrote a brief memoir of the summer of his twelfth year, when his parents sent him to stay with his uncle, a fisherman in Nova Scotia. He didn’t understand how or why an East Boston kid like himself wound up on the open sea, hauling halibut into a dory, but he reveled in every day of it. The sight of baleen whales surfacing every morning beyond the bay, he was told, was the result of their being driven closer to shore by the German U-boats that infested the waters. It was 1943. The summer culminated in a village tradition, in which the fishermen and their families came together on the water to haul in a large co-op net trap, some hundred meters across, containing a large school of pollock. As the depth of the massive net was drawn to within six feet of the surface, the water came alive with the thrashing of thirty-to forty-inch-long fish, and the fishermen and women scooped them into the dories using pole nets. In the process, fish scales flew like sleet, covering everyone from head to foot, leaving only the whites of their eyes showing. Wally recalled being assigned a spot next to a young girl wearing a yellow slicker that gradually turned silver under a spray of glistening scales. Hannah decided that this was the most serene moment in Wally’s long life: standing next to a cute girl, being waist-deep in thrashing fish, living in a safe place among strong, stoic, caring people, covered with fish scales. It was probably the last time that Wally was at peace with the world and with himself.
    When she showed me the journal, Hannah said, “It reminded me of something Gordon said the other day. I don’t know why it stuck with me. He said, ‘Do you want to know