Silence, Memory

At the time of the accident McDavid, Florida had only one stoplight and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Back then you could refer to it simply as “the accident” and everyone knew to what you were referring. Their recognition of the event would typically be followed by something along the lines of, “that poor boy”, or “what a peculiar tragedy”.

Logan Graham was seventeen when he and his mother, Pearl, were in a head on collision on Cotton Road, ironically with Logan’s uncle Charles who had been driving home from a long day of fishing and drinking on Cotton Lake. The crash killed both Charles and Pearl instantly and Logan was rushed to the hospital with a steel rod protruding from the middle of his face. It took doctors nine hours to reconstruct Logan’s nasal cavity and olfactory system, as well as the bone structure of his right eye socket whose inhabitant had been dangling outside of it during most of the surgery.

Three weeks later, Logan emerged from the hospital with a consistent headache and a sore back and was sent to live with Charles’ widow, Pearl’s sister Blanche. Charles and Blanche had never had children and lived a meager life, so as far as a room for Logan was concerned, there wasn’t one. He slept on the couch in the living room next to a shared wall where just beyond he could hear his aunt whimpering and quietly speaking her deceased husband’s name each night as she lye in an empty bed.

It wasn’t but a few days before Logan realized that he needed something more in order to feel at home at his aunt’s house than just the small suitcase of clothes he had brought home with him from the hospital. Blanche drove him over to his old house down on Perdido Road which now had a “For Sale” sign hanging in the front yard. From the moment he stepped through the front door, a flood of memories began rushing to the forefront of Logan’s mind and an electric bolt of pain pulsed behind his eyes. He saw himself at six sitting on the living room floor unwrapping Christmas presents which then turned into a fifteen year old Logan sitting on the couch with Becky Denton, kissing her neck and trying to get his hand up her shirt. These and dozens others flashed all at once through his mind. It was a conglomerate of slides from the picture show of his mind, creating a blurred insanity, as though each memory was fighting the others to get into the spotlight of his mind.

With his palms to his eyes, Logan fell to his knees and screamed out in pain, then passed out cold on the floor. Once again he woke up in the hospital. He told the doctor of the piercing pain he’d had just behind his eyes, but didn’t explain the scenes that he’d seen just before it happened because he didn’t really think there could be a connection. The doctors diagnosed him with sinusitis, gave him antibiotics and sent him back home with Blanche.

Over the next few weeks, the episodes grew worse and more frequent. Some were so bad that they left Logan mentally paralyzed for hours afterward until he was able to finally speak of things he saw, smelled or heard during them that weren’t actually happening outside of his own head. Eventually Blanche told Logan that she could no longer take him to the hospital. There wasn’t much money left and neither of them had any insurance.

His sensitivity to odor intensified to the point where he had to wear a swimmer’s nose plug that Blanche gave him twenty four hours a day in order to block all that his olfactory senses were picking up. He breathed through his mouth only, causing the cracks of his lips to be consistently caked with a viscous white film. He was no longer able to taste anything he ate and eventually got to the point where he just stopped eating much of anything other than applesauce. Within a year he had lost forty pounds and most of his hair had fallen out. At just eighteen he looked like an elderly man. The swimmer’s nose plug had become a permanent part of his face. From constant wear his skin had actually begun to grow over it, causing a giant yellowy flesh colored bump on his nose. Children pointed and laughed at him as he walked down the street during the brief periods that Blanche forced him to get out of the house for fresh air. Air. Air he couldn’t enjoy.

Logan finally gave in. His life had become a constant struggle with his mind and he had lost the battle. Early one July morning Blanche found him lying in bed, his lips cracked with dried blood, were sewn shut with black thread. The needle still lie in his hand.