WATERBURY, Conn. -- Bob Veillette doodled.
In the endless news meetings that held us captive over at the small Connecticut newspaper at which we worked, he scribbled geometric honeycombs on plain white paper, the effect something like a hybrid of M.C. Escher and Sol LeWitt. I used to wonder where his mind went in those abstracted sketches he made. Perhaps to the Shakespeare stanzas he had memorized, or the construction of jazz harmonies he conceived on piano.
The question has become more poignant now, a year and a half after Bob, my managing editor at the Republican-American here, was felled by a massive stroke. The stroke left him fully aware but mute and paralyzed, imprisoned in his own skin. The stroke hit his brain stem, a kind of neural funnel that pours the brain's impulses into the spinal cord. Disabled, it leaves the mind blisteringly aware and the body utterly lifeless; hence, its name, locked-in-syndrome.
Bob's Poe-like condition is the same that afflicted Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle, whose book, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," has now been made into a film by Julian Schnabel. Bauby's book was "dictated" by blinking his left eye, a system in which I have become painfully proficient. Bob's former speech, an animated ramble that he peppered with Shakespearean quotes such as "a good deed in a naughty world" and "with malice toward none," has been reduced to a series of eye movements. His visitor recites a series of letters, "E, T, A, O, I," used most frequently in the English language. When the visitor arrives at a letter Bob desires, he raises his cerulean blue eyes.
It is a laborious process, and I have learned to curb my temptation to guess. ("Revolt? Is the word revolt, Bob?") Often, as I jot a long-arrived-at letter onto a yellow legal pad, I remember the lightning liquidity of Bob's fingers on the computer keyboard, a movement hauntingly reminiscent of his fingers on his piano keyboard, the place where he felt most at home and most alive.
Bill Evans, Dave McKenna, Art Tatum. These were lions to Bob, jazz geniuses along the lines of Chopin, whom he could not listen to without feeling his own inadequacy. I cannot play a lick of piano, but I was an attentive and appreciative audience member, and Bob accepted with delectation the recordings I copied for him, explaining the delicate points of jazz with an animation and precision that enlightened and engaged me. I had not understood how the "stride piano" of Marian McPartland created a particular cadence before. But I now visualize Bob's simulation of it whenever I hear her play.
