swung my palm and fingers upwards from the wrist, but then to bring the whole hand towards where the carrot was I’d have to slide the elbow forwards, pushing from the shoulder, something I hadn’t learnt or practised yet. I had no idea how to do it. In the end I grabbed my forearm with my left hand and just yanked it forwards.
“That’s cheating,” said the physio, “but okay. Try to lift the carrot now.”
I closed my fingers round the carrot. It felt—well, it felt: that was enough to start short-circuiting the operation. It had texture; it had mass. The whole week I’d been gearing up to lift it, I’d thought of my hand, my fingers, my rerouted brain as active agents, and the carrot as a no-thing—a hollow, a carved space for me to grasp and move. This carrot, though, was more active than me: the way it bumped and wrinkled, how it crawled with grit. It was cold. I grasped it and went into Phase Two, the hoist, but even as I did I felt the surge of active carrot input scrambling the communication between brain and arm, firing off false contractions, locking muscles at the very moment it was vital they relax and expand, twisting fulcral joints the wrong directions. As the carrot rolled, slipped and plummeted away I understood how air traffic controllers must feel in the instant when they know a plane is just about to crash, and that they can do nothing to prevent it.
“First try,” said my physio.
“At least it didn’t fall on anyone,” I said.
“Let’s go for it again.”
It took another week to get it right. We went back to the blackboard, factoring in the surplus signals we’d not factored in before, then back through visualization, then back to a real carrot again. I hate carrots now. I still can’t eat them to this day.
Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think That’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you’re wrong. Completely wrong. That’s just it, see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits—holding my head wrong, moving my foot before I’d bent my knee, who knows what else. He was like an obsessive trainer, one of those ballet or ice-skating coaches from behind the old iron curtain.
“Toes forward! Forward, damn it!” he’d shout. “More knee! Lift!” He’d bang his fist against the board, against his diagrams.
Every action is a complex operation, a system, and I had to learn them all. I’d understand them, then I’d emulate them. At first, for the first few months, I did everything very slowly.
“You’re learning,” my physio said; “and besides, your muscles are still plastic.”
“Plastic?”
“Plastic. Rigid. It’s the opposite of flaccid. With time they’ll go flaccid: malleable, relaxed. Flaccid, good; plastic, bad.”
Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed. Almost up to speed—I never got back to one hundred per cent. Maybe ninety. By April I was already almost up to speed, up to my ninety. But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.
After I’d been out of hospital for a week or so, I went to the cinema with my friend Greg. We went to the Ritzy to see Mean Streets with Robert De Niro. Two things were strange about this. One was watching moving images. My memory had come back to me in moving images, as I mentioned earlier—like a film run in instalments, a soap opera, one five-year episode each week or so. It hadn’t been particularly exciting; in fact, it had been quite mundane. I’d lain in bed and watched the episodes as they arrived. I’d had no control over