Many people who know a chronic alcoholic will have experienced the phenomenon of blackouts. As you circle this collapsing star, as you sense its gravitational pull, you may feel the edges of your own reality wavering. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, has it made a sound? If you talk to an alcoholic for two hours …
Last year, I had many long conversations with my old friend, N. He was articulate, formulated thoughts, had a good sense of humour, recalled mutual experiences and friends. But when he’d been on a binge, I encountered the eerie fact that he would have no memory of our conversation afterwards. Often, he didn’t even know he’d called me.
He wanted to talk, was sometimes unhappy – and so I responded – but who was I talking to? It would have been less strange if he’d been slurring or raging, but he was lucid, discussing books and events with wit and accurate recall. I can still hear his voice. I used to feel I’d been talking to a ghost.
I always hoped the conversations helped, even if he didn’t remember them. I felt sure he registered them on some level. I was pleased to learn, when I asked a neuroscientist, that this was probably the case. Studies suggest that a person’s thoughts can be influenced in subtle ways by events that happen during an amnesic blackout. After all, he kept on ringing and engaging.
I was walking the dog in the park when N called. It was hot and still, the grass so dry it crackled. The dog settled down to chew a stick, and I began to listen. N reported on the day’s drinking. I said, “Four bottles of wine? Are you out of your mind?” The answer, unquestionably, was yes.
He was out of his mind and full of ideas, and I sat on the grass and listened. He made jokes, we laughed, discussed old times. My friend the ghost, spinning through ancient memories.
The dog approached, eyes fixed on me, his mouth hanging slightly open. As I listened, the dog stared. He wanted something. Was there an oddity with his mouth? My friend talked on; I held out my hand.
The dog didn’t move, only stared and implored. A cat would have bitten, scratched, panicked, but the dog, a higher order of animal, stayed still as some instinct compelled me to reach, very slowly, between his fangs.
The conversation continued. I felt around, and found a piece of stick lodged in the roof of his mouth.
It was bloody, it must have hurt, yet he was motionless, waiting for me to help. One hand holding the phone, still listening, I worked between those big, sharp teeth. Finally, I hooked out the piece of wood.
The dog relaxed, flopped on the grass and rolled, over and over. The cicadas sent up a wave of applause and I laughed as if I, too, was relieved of pain. “You sound happy,” N said.
When I asked the neuroscientist about blackouts, he told me that mood and feelings, as well as thoughts, could be influenced by a conversation, even if an alcoholic had forgotten it ever took place.
He added that the neurologist, Antonio Damasio, wrote a book called Descartes’ Error, in which he argued that the separation between thoughts and feelings is overemphasised in Western thinking.
It was a short story about connection. The dog trusted me to help, and I trusted him not to bite. My old friend N trusted me. He kept calling me, even as he was losing his mind and spinning away, out into the void.
