Day 27 - Only Laugh - Chapter 27 (2172 words)

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ONLY LAUGH WHEN IT HURTS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 27

Aida sat next to Tony in the Garden outside the private hospital where he had been moved to a few days after he woke up. He had the means to pay for a private bed and room with attention from specialists working on his condition.

The doctor had explained it to him well enough that his symptoms were obviously caused by the lightning strike affecting the speech centre of the brain. This had resulted in a case of Apraxia of Speech where the ability to form the sounds that make up words could not be made properly.

They had been trying speech therapy but while Tony knew all the words and the meanings of them quite clearly, he was unable to say them out loud. He still had shaking in his hands from the shock his body had received, but with a lot of effort scrawled out enough notes on pieces of paper to get himself in contact with his accountant, get funds and medical records transferred to him locally and get his recovery paid for and his comfortable lifestyle back, even when severely injured.

The consulting specialist was fascinated by his medical history and spent many sessions asking questions and testing the assumptions made about his last head injury and seeing if there was any change in the Amnesia symptoms. He explained to Tony what the various scans and MRI's showed in his head, the lesions and marks in the patterns that swirled about where his brain should be clear and indicated that it was a particular type of problem. Tony stopped listening and wanted to focus on treatment, recovery and other options. After all the problem had occurred already, there was no changing the cause now, just working on getting his speech back.

In his new life he was hardly verbose, certainly when compared to the videos of him before talking up a storm in public, on stage. Now he spoke little, and even when he did it was taciturn at best, but take it away and all of a sudden those words became powerful tools he could feel at his fingertips, but simply were not getting any power to be used. He wondered long and hard about whether or not speaking again would ever be necessary, perhaps he could easily walk away from the power of speech. He could write, learn some sign language and just carry on without it. He certainly had plenty of practice and lived in a village where he was not particularly expected to talk much at all.

Then Aida arrived just when he was thinking about never talking again and it hit him that he wanted to tell her things about him, things that he did not understand but would just not work on paper, things he had to say face to face, out loud so she could understand more than the words themselves.

The Doctor predicted that spontaneous recovery was possible yet unlikely. The most common occurrence of the condition was in children and they grew out of it with some practice and therapy, but every now and then there would be a watershed moment, an epiphany, a click where it all fit together and then speech jump started itself. That was in kids, in adults it was much rarer. It tended to happen to stroke victims, and they often got the slurred and stumbling speech that you associate with a stroke with a long period of therapy and the hard yards of working at it for a long period of time. Some people never got it back.

With Tony they simply did not know, he had none of the markers for a stroke, but he had been struck by lightning and that had knocked him out for a few hours and obviously had to have some kind of effect, but mostly they were guessing at what that was. The scans and the MRI told them all that something was different about him after the strike, but it was not an easily identifiable thing. The previous injuries he sustained had complex and extensive brain mapping done from trying to treat his Amnesia, which had not yet gone away. He still had no idea who he used to be or why anyone would ever want to be like that.

The doctors though had plenty to study and to plan papers on, examinations of a lightning strike and it's affect on a brain and body with excellent data collected both before and after the incident. He signed all sorts of forms demanding privacy and anonymity before allowing them to use his files towards a case study. They also excised the details and locations of the accidents, as his initial one was famous enough in it's legend to be recognisable to anyone looking for Tony.

The doctors kept his identity as secret as they could and all the references to his past were only ever mentioned in private sessions with Tony and the Specialist in person. Aida had no idea that he was who he said he was, but that he had also been someone else.

He wanted to tell her, let her know before this house of cards came tumbling down. Sure he was paying for privacy and respect in this private care facility, but it would only take one person to put two and two together and before you know it his details were on sale to the highest bidder. He hoped and hoped that his day in the sun had gone. With any luck he'd not get anyone's attention if he did get revealed unexpectedly.

He wanted to tell her, but did not know how. She looked so worried and stressed about his condition whenever he tried to speak and merely made the nor familiar bubbling noises in this throat. He tried to suppress the urge to talk when she was around and he wrote her endless notes trying to spare her of the guilt.

It was her daughter that lost her parasol, it was to impress her that Tony went up on that roof, it was her fault for letting him go, it was her fault for being impressed at his gymnastics on her behalf, it was her fault for loving another man, a widow's curse. It was all nonsensical and she knew that, but the irrational however rationally viewed can still have that powerful and affecting grip on you that wont' relent for the sake of simple common sense and logic.

He tried to let her know that it was random, it was just fate or luck or whatever the quantum physicists wanted to name the probabilities of existence.

They sat in the private garden outside his room, he had the best room in the place and it had a small rose garden attached to it, he had a dedicated staff and people to help and care for him. He was spending a small fortune on the services and Aida was amazed at how much he seemed to not care about the price of this. She tried insisting on paying for or contributing at least, to his bills but he waved her off not really wanting her to know the tens of thousands of Euros he was paying out for this comfort. His life was going to collapse in on itself and she would leave him, he would lose his chance undoubtedly. He may as well enjoy the last moments of it before it did.

No one ever sold his information, no one leaked his details, his identity or even the nature of his history so that people could piece it together. Instead he was caught out by his best friend and worst enemy.

The sun was shining and they sat holding hands in the Garden in silence. Aida wanted to say as little as possible, in sympathy sure but also because there was nothing to say. When silence was enforced then words were at a premium, and less and less seemed to be worthy of the admission price. So they looked at each other a lot, signed basically when initiating activity or meal times. Even appointments to visit again could be conducted in complete silence.

They were eating lunch when the nurse, a male one on Mondays, came into whisper in Tony's ear that Vittorio was here to see him. Aida in the silence heard her son's name and beckoned to the nurse in sign language to let him in, that he was OK and with her, all with a few fluid motions of her wrist. The nurse turned to his client for confirmation and he didn't think twice he just nodded dismissively and indicated with a short point that his girlfriend should be listened to.

The nurse left the room to fetch Aida's son, she looked at Tony and smiled, and he was happy to receive that. They were not expecting that he would be visiting today but both were happy to see him.

Vitorrio came in brandishing a laptop, a huge grin on his face.

“Dude, you have to see this, you're famous!”

Tony froze while eating his lunch. This was, not good. There was no way that the sentence could go anywhere. Aida was rolling her eyes at her son, but Tony could only look at her and wait for the inevitable.

“This is awesome, some tourists were filming you, they started when you were about halfway up the church door, and they got the whole thing. I just got emailed the link to youtube.” Vittorio was shining with excitement.

He didn't know, he didn't know that he was someone else, someone he thought he knew from before but didn't really. Tony wasn't sure any one who thought they knew the old him knew him at all.

“Tony, they got the whole thing, got some wicked close ups on it, they got the whole thing in HD, someone edited it, zoomed in, slowed it down, cleaned up it and got a fantastic view of you.” Vittorio was readying the clip and then was about to show Tony the close up before coyly pulling the lid of the laptop down towards his chest. “Wanna see it? Want to see yourself get hit by lightning? It must be freaky, like an out of body experience yeah? Wanna see?”

“Leave him alone Vittorio, he was there remember? He doesn't need to see, do you Tony?”

Tony did not nod or shake his head. He reached over for the laptop and turned it to himself while Vito clapped his hands like a little girl in anticipation. He realised how that was not at all cool, and tried to change himself to be a little more ambivalent, but could not contain his enthusiasms.

Tony opened the link, the video spawned and her saw himself climbing, he had not thought he had gained that much weight retiring to a café/bar in Tuscany, but he looked to be a little bigger than his self image allowed for. He saw the flash, slowed right down and repeated, with frame by frame progression of his facial expressions, blurred by speed slowed down, but noticeably him. He then saw what he had missed in his black out. He rag-dolled off his perch and fell flat on his back sliding down the slope of the roof. A child was screaming and crying, Oriana no doubt. There were shouts and cries for people to call for an ambulance. Someone near the camera person could be overheard calling for emergency services in English. The he saw his inert body drop gracefully over the edge of the church roof and fall the twenty or or so feet to the ground, flicking about and landing feet first, crumpling like an accordion. That explained his legs being so bruised and unhelpful the firs few days after waking up. They had explained that to him at the time, but it made little sense until he saw it.

The video was over, and then he scanned down through the comments at the bottom of the video, there were already over five thousand views and dozens of pages of comments.

He clicked to the second page, nothing. Then the third and the fourth respectively. That was where he saw it, and then several people responding to his identification. Someone recognised him, outed him and someone else agreed. A load of people were agreeing, but Vito had not been reading the comments, just watching a man he new get hit by lightning and fall.

Tony went cold, and he felt the muscles in his jaw tighten and swell stressfully, immediately clenching as he watched Aida for a reaction. She was reading the comments as he was and he could see a thought dawning on her.

She looked directly at him, her eyes wide. Vito looked at the both, still grinning and not realising what was going on.

Tony tried to swear but all that came out was the familiar strangled bubble of air.