Unfrozen Adam Matson

Unfrozen

ADAM MATSON

I was born frozen, and did not thaw out until my twenties. Born to unfrozen parents, I was a mystery and a tragedy. I had no control over my body. I could not speak, could not even breathe on my own. I had a tracheotomy tube sticking out of my throat. My arms and legs bent at odd angles, like collapsed branches of a tree. My mouth gaped open, drooling. My eyes wandered without focus, like marbles in my heavy head.

I remember someone asking my parents when I was a child, “Does Tom know what’s going on?”

“No,” my mother replied. “Thank God.” My condition had been studied and the consensus among doctors was that frozen people like me were not cognizant.

I was a prisoner in my body. But I heard everything people said. I learned to comprehend language like any child, and spent years listening—without choice—to everything from idle chatter to heartfelt confessions.

Ellen was frozen also. I had known her since childhood. We were together in school, and by together I mean together. There were two kids in our class every year— Ellen, and me. We had the same teachers, nurses, physical therapists—professionals who spent all day trying to build our muscular refexes and teaching us basic things about music, colors, and animals, while standing guard to

Like mine, Ellen’s body was a cruel imposter of a normal kid. She had gawky, wobbly arms and legs. Her head looked too big for her body and often drooped forward on her useless cervical spine. Her eyes drifted without method. Ellen seemed to have marginally more control over her body than I did. She did not require a tracheotomy to breath. And she could spit, which she did often, and make a sort of moaning, hissing sound. Her voice was girlish, though broken and distorted. I never knew what my own voice sounded like.

Ellen and I were together through every type of bodily humiliation. Our classroom was the site of frequent clean-ups of urine, excrement, saliva, vomit, and sometimes blood. Nurses cleaned us, fed us, combed our hair, clipped our fnger and toenails, discussed our bowel movements. We had our diapers changed in front of each other. We were dressed and undressed, poked, wiped, and sanitized. I saw her vagina many times, as much as it can be said that I “saw” anything, since my vision was random and unfocused. She saw my penis many times over the years.

Ellen and I were also revived several times in front of each other. When I had a bronchial infection and my breathing tubes clogged with mucus, Ellen sat nearby while the nurses quickly suctioned out all the snot. When Ellen stopped breathing and her eyes rolled back in her head, which happened occasionally, I sat right there while the nurses administered CPR, medications, or if the ft was not drastic, a simple massage to bring her back to her version of normal.

We survived many embarrassments and near-catastrophes together, and the trial of those years made me love Ellen more than I have ever loved anyone. When the nurses tried to feed Ellen her mushy asparagus paste and she spat it out, I thought it was funny. While my useless body stared dumbly at nothing I was cheering for her on the inside. Mentally, I encouraged her to rebel against her asparagus. Spit it out, Ellen. Spit it all out until they feed you something you like. When she had her seizures I worried that she would not survive. The greatest moments of my childhood were the relief I felt when Ellen started breathing again. She was my constant companion, my only friend. If she had died I would have

“She’s a brave girl, Tom,” the nurses would say to me after reviving Ellen. “Isn’t she a brave girl?”

I knew that she was. And I loved her, sympathized with her, and understood her, because I was certain, despite what I heard doctors, teachers, and other adults say my entire life, that Ellen was cognizant, just like me. I imagined she knew exactly what was going on, and was equally powerless to control her body enough to let anyone know the truth. In our mutual helplessness, we were bonded, connected on a level only we could understand.

I saw Ellen every day at school, but not at home. I lived with my biological parents, and for this I was lucky, because I knew that at least somebody loved me.

My mother kissed me goodnight, asked me questions, and generally spoke to me as if I were a normal person with the intelligence of about a seven year-old. I think this made her feel normal, but obviously she never waited for me to answer her questions. She would say, “Do you want me to leave your nightlight on, Tom?” then of course she would turn it on every night at bedtime. Often I heard my mother crying, sometimes alone, sometimes on the phone, especially when I was young. I knew she was crying about me because she would say so.

My father was less adaptable. He helped my mother and our live-in nurses tend to my issues of maintenance, but he rarely spent any real time with me.

“If it weren’t for you, Tom, I could open that furniture store,” he would sometimes say, grumbling under his breath while he changed my clothes or fddled with my breathing machine. My father’s dream was to quit his corporate job to make and sell furniture, which he could have possibly done if we—I—were not dependent on his company’s generous health plan.

Ellen’s home life was not so fortunate. She lived in foster homes, as her biological parents had not been able to afford her care. Her transition from each home to the next leaked out to me through

classroom dialogue, such as when a teacher would say, “Ellen’s new mommy is coming to pick her up today.” Our caretakers reacted to everything that happened to us with unbroken singsongy optimism. When you live among the abnormal, everything becomes normal. The nurses would discuss Ellen’s moving between foster homes as a matter of business: “Mrs. Gates couldn’t afford it anymore,” “Her home nurse moved to Georgia,” “The incentives are not what they used to be.” Then they would stroke Ellen’s hair, and smile, and show her a picture book about rabbits.

I worried that Ellen would think nobody loved her, and that’s why she was moved from house to house. I promised myself that I would tell her I loved her one-day, if I ever could.

High school, for Ellen and me, was a relatively seamless transition from elementary school. Some of our caretakers changed, and we were transported to a new building with a new room, but the lessons and the messes remained basically the same. I often wondered what would become of us once we aged out of our high school years. Would we leave school, and if so, what would be the purpose or end result of our education?

I was not overly interested in colors, animals, and music, but most of my education during high school came from listening to conversations. People spoke as if I weren’t there. I learned that people formed bonded pairs and that these relationships could be alternately exciting, rewarding, frustrating, heart breaking. I also learned about sex and love.

The concepts of sex and love came to me in pieces. Initially I heard phrases like “I love caramel frappucinos,” and “I love my boyfriend,” and wondered how the two ideas could be connected. I did not know what a caramel frappucino was, but I was intrigued by the concept of experiencing love for a person. I believed I loved Ellen, my frozen companion. When my mother kissed me and said she loved me, I felt excited. I wanted to transfer that excitement to Ellen.

My understanding of sex took years to crystallize. I knew that something warm and exciting sometimes happened in my groin, but did not know what it meant. Like all of my bodily functions,

these phenomena inevitably came to light in the classroom at school, a fresh wave of routine humiliations. For example, I would sometimes get erections when my diapers needed to be changed.

“Oh my goodness, that’s quite a boner,” my nurse exclaimed as she changed my underwear. The other caretakers would shift uncomfortably, never sure what to do. “We should turn Ellen,” someone would suggest, although they did not always turn Ellen away, and eventually my public sexual maturation became just another normal part of the abnormal.

During high school I began the frst steps of unfreezing. The “special needs” class of Ellen and me had grown in number to six, although none of the others were frozen like us. Some of them could even talk or complete basic tasks on command. I envied these higher-functioning creatures, but pitied them too, assuming, as I assumed about Ellen, that they were fully cognizant beneath their oafsh molds, and probably as eager as we were to escape their prisons. The new special needs class, unlike the one in elementary school, had a program whereby interested students from the normal student body could come into our classroom for an hour each week to interact with us abnormals. It was through this initiative that I met the frst of my few true heroes in life, James Clark.

James was sixteen or seventeen, a skinny, shaggy-haired kid with a pierced ear who always carried around a large backpack, though I never saw him open it. James was assigned to be my buddy, and he began his introduction by thoroughly interrogating my nurse about my capabilities.

“Does he understand what’s going on?” James asked. “Will he understand what I say to him?”

“I like to think he understands some things,” the nurse said. “He knows things like hot and cold, but people with Tom’s condition are generally not self-aware.”

“But you don’t know that he doesn’t know what’s going on,” James persisted.

My nurse went into further detail about the history and

specifcations of my condition, but James remained stubbornly unconvinced.

“Just talk to him like you would talk normally,” the nurse suggested.

As soon as the nurse drifted away to help Ellen and the other students James Clark began his dedicated, single-handed effort to convince himself that I was a cognizant being. He started telling me jokes, and not stupid childish jokes, but real jokes, with dirty punch lines. He studied my face for a reaction. I wanted to laugh, of course, give him a sign that I enjoyed the jokes, but instead my head bobbed forward, my eyes glazed over, or I drooled on the tray attached to my wheelchair.

James returned to my classroom each week, dropping his backpack next to me, helping the nurse feed me or read to me, then persisting in his exploration once we were alone. He showed me a picture of his girlfriend, held it in front of my face for a long time, and asked, “Hot, isn’t she?” As before, he stared hard at my face, watching for a reaction of agreement. As before, I agreed with him, wanted to tell him so, but the only response I could muster was a slight dropping of my left arm.

Still, James Clark did not give up, and one day he came up with an idea to prove I was alive within my frozen shell. On my tray there were always three children’s building blocks with letters on them that, when stacked vertically, spelled TOM. James took one of my hands and rested it on my tray.

“All right, Tom,” he said. “If you can understand what I’m saying to you now, knock over these blocks with your arm.”

He pointed to the blocks, then sat back and watched. Feeling a combination of hopelessness and excitement, I sent a futile message to my arm to knock over the blocks. Nothing happened. James continued to watch and wait. Inside I was screaming, cursing my useless body. I have no idea how much time passed, but eventually the bell rang over the intercom, and all the students in our classroom grabbed their bags to leave. Slowly my hand inched toward the blocks and knocked them over. James Clark jumped out of his seat.

“He did it!” he exclaimed. “You did it, Tom!” He waved madly at my nurse. “He knocked over the blocks!”

James then explained his experiment to the nurse, who smiled with skepticism and told him that I had no control over my bodily functions, and that the knocking down of the blocks was simply a coincidence.

“He does it all the time,” the nurse assured James.

James Clark, God bless him, still did not give up. The following week he repeated the block experiment, and somehow, against all odds, I was eventually able to knock them over. The next week I knocked them over twice. The game became part of our routine, and each time James enthusiastically solicited the attention of anyone who would listen. The nurses and teachers generally thought it was cute, but not necessarily a sign of progress.

James also believed, as I did, that Ellen too was a cognizant being. He quickly deciphered her spitting tendency, and thus developed a version of the block test for her.

“Would you like some asparagus, Ellen?” James would tease, leaning close to my friend, and Ellen would respond every time by spitting. Again the teachers and nurses applauded this trick, characterizing James’ efforts as “cute,” or “very good.” But I felt even more deeply connected to Ellen now that someone had fnally given us both the chance to escape our bonds together, if only minutely.

As weeks became months and James Clark proved an ace at eliciting responses from Ellen and me, the skepticism among our caretakers fnally cracked. One day toward the end of school one of my nurses, Rosemary, sat down next to me and placed my hand on my plastic tray. We were alone in the room and she stared at me with a look of soft curiosity I had never seen before.

“If you understand what I’m saying, Tom,” she said quietly. “Knock over the blocks.”

As before an eon seemed to pass while my mind screamed at my useless body, but eventually I was able to knock over the blocks. Rosemary’s expression changed again, becoming at once serious

and deeply sympathetic, and I wonder if she was reliving our years together, all the feedings, changings, medications, nudity, all the conversations she had had with me hearing everything nearby, and realizing suddenly that she and I were much more intimately connected than she had ever imagined.

James Clark had made a believer out of my nurse, Rosemary, and I came to learn gradually that believers were like dominoes, pushing each other forward. Rosemary stopped working with me after I “graduated” from high school at the age of twenty-two, but she did not forget me, nor the strange glimmer of hope I had shown when knocking over the blocks. As I learned years later, Rosemary contacted a specialist in the feld of my condition, Dr. Adolph Brandaur, and suggested that I might be a strong candidate for a radical series of operations that Dr. Brandaur was trying to pioneer.

Dr. Brandaur contacted my family, and I became a centerpiece of his career and subsequent rocket to medical fame. Like James Clark, Dr. Brandaur did not believe I was a catatonic vegetable person with no awareness or comprehension of my surroundings. He spoke to me normally and carefully, as if it was only a matter of time before I emerged from my shell, and when I did, I would remember everything anyone ever said to me.

Dr. Brandaur spoke to my parents as if they were old friends. He explained the series of long-term operations and therapies he wished to perform. Cutting-edge breakthroughs had been made in the feld of my condition. New information was emerging all the time. It might be possible, he told them, through years of hard work, and with incredible risk, to fx my nerves, stimulate my muscles, give the power of control back to my brain. Make me normal. My parents bristled. By the time Dr. Brandaur played his trump card, offering to cover the expenses entirely, my parents were eager to consent. Believing as they did that I had no idea what was going on anyway, they concluded, “It cannot possibly make Tom’s life any worse.”

Overhearing parts of conversations, I was aware of what kinds of operations were going to be performed on me. It was possible to make my life worse. I could turn into a vegetable, or

live forever after in excruciating pain. Although nobody knew it, the last moments before I was put under anesthesia for my frst operation were the most terrifying of my life.

One day I woke up and realized I could breath. Air moved freely through my mouth and nose, and the hole in my throat had been sealed, the tubes removed. My throat tickled for a while, but eventually oxygen fowed normally. I lay in the hospital bed for a long time breathing in and out. After several operations I could now focus my eyes and control the muscles in my face, and when Dr. Brandaur came in I smiled.

“We’re getting there, Tom,” the doctor said.

It took years of physical therapy for me to build up the muscle mass to perform simple tasks like breathing and eating. Then I learned to talk, which was not as easy as I thought it would be. I knew thousands of words in my mind, but it was a long time before I could trust my lips and tongue and throat to pronounce them. Eventually I established an accent of my own, somewhere between that of a deaf person and a child, which I refned into some version of almost normal over long years of exhaustive practice.

And I learned to move. I could walk, run, change pace. For fun, I learned how to handle a wheelchair, though I no longer needed one, and Dr. Brandaur teased me that for someone who had spent his life in a chair, I handled one like a rookie. Physical therapy continued throughout my twenties, but eventually I grew strong and there wasn’t much more the doctors could do for me.

Physically, I was skinny and small, as before. After the operations and therapy I gained a tight layer of muscle, like a long-distance runner. My arms and legs were still gawky, but they worked well. I found a job delivering newspapers, proud that I could perform the simultaneous tasks of driving a car and pitching a newspaper out the window onto someone’s porch. Dr. Brandaur employed a plastic surgeon to “tweak” my face, as he put it, which had molded into a stiff, horsey sculpture over years of muscular atrophy. Looking in the mirror after the operations, I thought I looked normal with a set jaw, combed hair, and eyes that could now focus, though I had to wear glasses.

My “completion” was celebrated during a lecture/gala at the university where Dr. Brandaur taught medicine. I was hailed as a miracle, a living unfrozen man. I was on the cover of magazines. My parents became reborn optimists. Without me to take care of, they almost did not know what to do with themselves, and eventually they pursued my father’s longtime ambition of making and selling furniture.

I never specifcally told anyone, including my family, that I had been cognizant the whole time I was frozen, never came screaming out during a moment of glorious self-righteousness and cried, “I heard everything!” My family and caretakers would probably have been embarrassed beyond recovery if the truth were known, so I kept quiet.

Shortly after my twenty-ninth birthday, Dr. Brandaur met me in his offce for a routine physical and, having found me to be in good shape and good health, announced that my rebirth would now leave the reconstructive phase and enter an indefnite period of monitoring and routine follow-up.

“Congratulations, Tom,” he said, throwing up his hands as if the game was over and we had won. “You did it. You’re on your own. You’re both doing very well.”

“Both?” I asked in my small, squeaky voice.

“You and Ellen,” he said, and my heart rose suddenly to my throat.

Of course I had not forgotten Ellen during my near-decade of physical transformation. In fact, though I had not seen her since school, I imagined her with me every step of the way, emerging from her own shell as I did. When I learned to breath, I thought of Ellen. When I learned to speak, I recited monologues to her when I was alone, encouraging her in her own progress. When I went for walks through my neighborhood, and later runs, I envisioned her training with me, growing stronger. But I never knew that after high school, all those years ago, Ellen, too, had been chosen for reconstruction, as another disciple of Dr. Brandaur. Thank you again, James Clark, for convincing one of our nurses that both Ellen

and I were cognizant. Thank you, Rosemary, for recommending both of us to Dr. Brandaur, whose university, instead of balking at his request to fund two projects, had hedged their bets by granting the doctor the money to perform his miracles on both of us.

The question of whether or not Ellen had been alive inside her body for all those years burned inside me, but once granted the freedom to discover this truth, I was again paralyzed. If she truly had been cognizant then she would remember our years of trials and humiliations, our seizures and resuscitations, our vomiting, defecating, changing, and wiping. She would remember all the times we sat together in class, drooling eternally, watching children’s television programming, while our caretakers casually compared our conditions and gossiped about their own lives. Together, Ellen and I might be the keepers of nearly two decades of secrets, patient prisoners fnally freed, and I wondered if she would truly want to see me, and be submerged once again in the ice of our shared past.

I wanted to see her. I had promised myself years ago I would one day tell her I loved her, and I decided it was worth the risk to fnd her, since no one on earth could possibly understand my life as she did.

Ellen, I learned, had become an avid tennis player. I, too, had been encouraged by Dr. Brandaur to keep in shape through sports, and I chose swimming, basketball, and newspaper throwing. When I drove to a tennis club not far from my house to meet Ellen for the frst time in seven years, I sat parked in my car for a long time. She had never contacted me either, and this bothered me, and I wondered if I should just drive away.

Eventually I got out of the car and shuffed through the cold, rainy afternoon into the tennis club. I scanned the players on the various courts and found Ellen after a moment. My heart shuddered. Like me, she was skinny and small, and pale, but she looked healthy. She was half-crouched in a tennis player’s ready pose, and at frst I thought she played sort of like a child, gently and cautiously. Then she stepped back to the baseline and plucked a ball out of her pocket, tossed it up in the air, and smashed it forward with surprising dexterity, charging the net after her serve to return the volley. I smiled as I watched her. She was not helpless or inept

Ellen spotted me while I was standing courtside, wondering how I should approach her. She walked off the court and paused mid-stride, staring at me. Finally her face broke into a smile.

Walking towards her my legs felt like Jell-O, but I knew this was not a relapse of my condition. I had read about people going “weak in the knees,” and though I feared pitching forward like a dolt, I felt cautiously normal. Ellen came to meet me and we stood only a few feet apart, studying each other while the hollow “thwok!” of tennis balls sounded all around us. Her face was round, as it had always been, and she wore glasses as before, but now her eyes were focused, like mine, and no longer glazed over. Her mouth, once encumbered by an overbite and gawky teeth, had smoothed out from cosmetic surgery. When she smiled, I saw that she had dimples.

“Hi, Tom,” she said in a quiet voice.

Ellen and I had lunch at a café near her tennis club. For a long time we sat without speaking. When we did speak I noticed Ellen had the same childish accent I did. We spoke of the present, things we were doing now, sports we played for leisure. Of course I wanted to ask her the ultimate question, the one that had been nagging me for more than twenty years. But I did not ask, and she did not tell.

“I went to Montana,” I told her. “Mountain climbing. I had some trouble breathing, but the views were spectacular.”

She nodded, her eyes fxed on me. We spoke in low voices, leaning toward each other like conspirators.

“Tom,” she said softly. “Have you tried sex?”

“Not yet,” I replied. “But my parts all work.”

She grinned at me. I remembered that she probably knew my parts all worked, had worked since long before the operations. She had seen me in a state of arousal.

Her grin quickly faded. “I haven’t,” she said, sipping her water nervously. “I’ve been touched in so many ways, in so many places. But never like that.”

“Would you like to try it?” I asked. “I mean, theoretically?”

“I don’t think I would enjoy it,” she said. “My body is just so… medical. That’s all it is.”

She opened her mouth quickly, as if to continue, but snapped it shut again, and she did not say much of anything for the rest of our meal.

We agreed to meet again the following week, and soon our lunches became a regular event. We talked about the present and recent past, about subjects such as work, and food we had discovered to be delicious now that we could eat properly. The subject of sex did not resurface in conversation, nor did love. But I ached to tell Ellen I loved her, that I always had, that I had always envisioned us as secret companions. And as I thought of these things, I remembered James Clark, and an idea came to me.

One day on our walk from the tennis club to the café, I reached out and took Ellen’s hand. She did not resist or pull away but squeezed me with her frm tennis player’s grip, and on we walked. I repeated this move every week thereafter, and over time her grip relaxed until her hand was soft and warm in mine and she even occasionally rubbed my skin minutely with her thumb. It was James Clark’s block experiment all over again, and the test came on the week when I did not take her hand. As I had hoped, she took mine instead, without any hesitation.

From holding hands I progressed to kissing her on the cheek every time we parted from the café. As before, she met this gesture initially with humble silence and downcast eyes, but within a few weeks she started returning the kiss, her lips sometimes fnding my cheek before mine could reach hers. And as the experiment continued I upped the stakes, kissing her fully on the mouth one day, and discovering that she did not resist, but actually reached her hand up to the back of my neck to hold me in place. When we parted she looked at me with an expression of cautious trust.

On a summer evening too hot for tennis Ellen and I fnally completed our glacial process of thawing out. We made love in my apartment with all the windows open and a gentle breeze stirring the air—silently at frst, then loudly, using not only our bodies to reach each other but our voices as well, using as many functions as we could, abandoning all the constrictions we had known all our lives. When it was over we held each other, sweating and breathing. She kissed my tracheotomy scar and nestled her face into the crook of my neck. At long last I told her that I loved her, that I had always loved her, and I was on the verge of asking her the ultimate question, when she answered it for me.

“When we were in school, I used to play a game with myself,” Ellen whispered. “When you and I were sitting in our wheelchairs, with our teachers and nurses feeding us and cleaning us and playing songs for us, I imagined that all of sudden we would both just stand up and cry ‘We fooled you!’ Then we would run out of the classroom together laughing. I would count down in my head, ‘Three, two, one!’ And then we were supposed to stand up. But since we could not stand up, I would spit instead, because that was all I could do. Spitting was supposed to be the signal for us to stand up and leave.”

I held her and ran my fngers through her hair. So I had been right. We had been prisoners together, inwardly fghting to be free, loving each other across the impossible distance of paralysis. While I had rooted for her she had rooted for me, and if we could have spoken to each other with our minds, we could have truly shared everything.

“I thought it was funny when you spat out your asparagus,” I said.

“I didn’t hate asparagus,” Ellen said. “I just wanted someone to listen to me.”

Arms and legs entwined, we kissed each other in the gentle breeze.

“I think we should make love again,” Ellen said.