Read Online In a Heartbeat by Sandrone Dazieri - Free Book Online

received like a welcome guest directly by my physician at the Capitanio Private Clinic. Monica had persuaded him to be at our disposal after normal working hours. At nine that evening, dressed in only socks and underwear, I was put into what looked like a huge white washing machine. The doctor tied me to a bed which slid back and forth inside a tunnel. Electronic sounds whirred around me. I felt nauseated and like I was suffocating. Luckily, it didn’t last long. I went to wait for the doctor in his surgery while he got the CAT-scan results.
    Monica was with me. She said that I could call the doctor by his first name, Giulio, and that I played squash with him every now and then. She explained exactly what squash was.
    Giulio came back after twenty minutes with a medical chart in his hand. He was in his fifties, with glasses and long salt and pepper hair.
    ‘Good news. You don’t have anything.’
    ‘Are you sure that’s good news?’
    ‘Sure,’ he smiled. His teeth were too bright to be real.
    ‘Episodes of retrograde amnesia can be caused by tumours, post-traumatic lesions or conditions such as dementia. From what we see here, you’re fine.’
    ‘And the electric shock?’ Monica asked.
    ‘Honey, an electrical shock can provoke confusion. And in some rare cases amnesia, but it’s limited to the events immediately preceding. It’s one of the consequences of electric shock, but normally it regresses after a few hours and it doesn’t normally provoke extensive time lapses.’
    ‘Maybe it was a serious shock?’ I said.
    ‘A high-voltage shock provokes cardiac and respiratory arrest. You’re still alive and you don’t have any organ damage. We can do other tests, but … ’
    ‘So you’re telling me that the shock has nothing to do with this?’
    ‘No, I don’t think that the cause is biological. Technically, what you have is what we call lacunar amnesia; in other words the complete cancellation of a certain sequence of events.’
    ‘Fourteen years is quite a lot.’
    ‘That is uncommon, but the diagnosis is still the same. Lacunar amnesia is rarely due to physical causes. Our brain isn’t a tree where you can see the rings. We can’t cut away a specific year, let alone fourteen years. We still know very little about its function, but long-term memory isn’t organised along our synapses in a linear way.’
    I understood about half of what he said.
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Yes, let me ask you a few questions.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘If you want we can ask Monica to wait outside.’
    ‘I’m staying,’ she said.
    I shrugged my shoulders. At this point …
    ‘Fire away.’
    ‘Have there been cases of Alzheimer’s in your family?’
    ‘Not as far as I know. My grandfather was a drunk and was run over by a tram.’
    ‘Irrelevant. Do you use drugs or have you used in the past?’
    ‘No,’ Monica said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    Monica gasped. ‘You never told me.’
    ‘Now you know.’
    ‘Was it a joint every now and then or something harder?’ Giulio asked.
    ‘Coke, speed, some acid, ’shrooms, and one time peyote, and man, that was a trip!’ It lasted for three days, and I spoke directly with the Inca King Atahualpa. He gave me the numbers for the lottery, but they didn’t come out. ‘I can’t tell you right now if I’m clean.’
    ‘Of course you are!’ Monica said.
    ‘Ah, youth.’ Giulio was beginning to get on my nerves.
    ‘Alcohol?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But you don’t drink anymore,’ Monica quickly added.
    ‘Until yesterday,’ I said.
    ‘OK, from what you remember have you ever had any similar problems in the past?’
    ‘No.’ Monica said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    Monica: ‘What the hell was I doing with you?’
    Me: ‘What, a prick like me?’
    ‘Excuse me,’ Giulio interrupted. ‘I’d like to finish. Santo, would you please be more specific?’
    ‘I was put in an asylum when I was twenty-six.’
    Another gasp from Monica.
    ‘They’re not called asylums anymore, maybe a mental