What is it like to be a bat? - Thomas Nagel

The bell rang and he , with my grudging support, opened the door.

"Nice to see you in one piece, Sam", was Joey's smiling greeting. "I brought you some wine", he said, holding up the bottle.

That's a funny way to put it, I thought as I heard him reply. "Thanks, man. Don't think I'll be allowed to drink it anytime soon, though."

"Yeah, I did think of that… But still, I figured you'll go back to your old one-glass-a-wine-with-dinner ways at some point." He shrugged, walking past me into the house "If not, you'll always have your friends to take care of that for you!"

I felt my head shake and a smile forming on my lips as I followed him into the living room. "As always, you are too generous, my friend."

We sat on the couch, the bottle of what I could now see was Paulo Laureano resting on the coffee table by the box of codeine pills I'd been prescribed after being discharged from the hospital. It wasn't expensive wine — Joey wasn't one to splurge, and he knew I wouldn't be happy if he did — but what it lacked in monetary value, it more than made up for in nostalgia. It was the wine of summers spent back in Portugal, with a smell of home and a taste of family. It felt good that he thought to get it.

"So, how's it going?" asked Joey, yanking me out of my reverie.

"To be honest, I'm just bored out of my mind," was the reply that came out of my mouth. It pissed me off. My life has been turned upside down and he's bored? "The doctors say I can't do much of anything for something like six weeks. It's barely been one and I'm ready to start climbing walls!" He's annoyed because he has nothing to do?! I'd kill to actually be capable of moving around the house at will!

"I don't know, man. You get six weeks off work! That sounds like a win to me." He stopped himself, hesitating for a moment before continuing. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I know you just had brain surgery and all..." He smiled "But still!"

"Yeah, I'm living the life!"

We were quiet for a while. I imagined that for Joey it was a peaceful moment. A content silence shared between two people who know each other so well they don't feel the need to fill lulls in conversation with mindless chatter, happy to simply indulge in each other's company.

That's not what I felt, though. I'd been over the moon to see Joey at the door; the first friendly face I'd laid eyes on since the operation. But that had since faded and given way to angst. To hear myself talking to him while not being able to do anything about it… It was driving me insane. I wanted nothing more than to share what I was going through with him, as we had always done ever since we were kids. Especially in the past few years, since we'd made immigrants out of ourselves, coming halfway across the world with freshly anglicized names and no one to rely on but each other. Growing up we had always been good friends, but now we'd become as inseparable as two people living a couple of hours apart can be.

And yet this I could not share with him. I was stuck inside my own mind, with no way to reach the outside world. The intruder, him, had taken over my body — was it our body now? — and that included vocal chords. So I sat there in anxious isolation, my longing for connection unattended, doomed to wither and die.

Joey broke the silence, "How are the folks?"

It would have been a routine, performative question coming from anyone else. But Joey... Joey genuinely cared. He loved my parents, and they loved him. I used to tease them saying he was the son they wished I was.

"Worried sick. You know how they are." We smiled. There were these occasional moments in which he said exactly what I would have said and for a second I could pretend it had been me saying it, and that everything was right with the world. But it never lasted long, and later I was left feeling disgusted at myself for fraternizing with the invader. "Mom sent cookies, by the way. I've saved you some if you want them." He just went on, ignorant of my inner turmoil.

Joey sprang off the couch, ready to scavenge the kitchen "Is that a joke? I'd kill for some of her cookies!".

We smiled in unison at his childlike enthusiasm. He came back with the box holding Mrs. Machado renowned chocolate chip cookies and we sat together to savour the sweetest part of our childhood.

"Remember that time Pedro fell into the brook?", asked Joey through a half-eaten cookie and chocolate-brown teeth.

"I remember he dragged us both with him!", we laughed, "we were browner than your teeth are now, man!"

"What, browner than this?", Joey bared his teeth at me. "No wonder your mom was pissed!"

"Not for long though… She could never stay mad at you for long! It couldn't have been five minutes after seeing us like that before she brought us some of these", he said, holding up the box.

Joey smiled and said nothing. It was the same modest smile he always put on when complimented. A smile that said he acknowledged the compliment, but would rather not dwell on it. If I were to react like that to praise it'd look like I was putting on airs, but it worked for Joey. It made him seem modest, probably because he actually was.

"I guess they're not coming to see you?", asked Joey, his teeth back to a healthy white.

We shook our head no, "You know they can't afford it", he said, "We've been talking on the phone every day, though. I'll go back and see them whenever I'm allowed to travel again."

"Soon!"

"Soon."

We sat in silence, Joey lost in happy thoughts and childhood cookies. Perhaps him as well. I, on the other hand, could not help but think of my predicament. My disgust at him was nothing new — dwelling on it had taken up most of my time since the surgery — but I also could not help but feel frustrated at Joey. How could he not notice that something was off? An intruder had taken over my body, my voice, possibly even half my mind and Joey did not notice? Did he not know me better than anyone else? How could he not recognize this as the hack's job at identity theft that it was? He sounded nothing like me, moved nothing like me, was nothing like me. I felt miniscule, as if no one had ever noticed who I truly was. As if my passage through this Earth had been so pathetically unremarkable that I could just be replaced by a second rate impostor without anyone giving it a second thought. But even at my lowest I knew that this was just desperate, self-pitying thinking on my behalf. I could not expect anyone outside my head to know of my plight because my plight was fully confined to my head. Indeed, my whole existence was now contained within the bounds of my skull. I had no outward expression, no way to make my presence known. In a way, I was a ghost, doomed to haunt the body I once owned for the rest of my life.

I was barely there when Joey left. They hugged and promised to see each other soon, but I felt like I wasn't part of that arrangement. I was just a spectator, dragged along for the ride. The sheer chasm splitting our states of mind astonished me: just a few hours ago, when Joey arrived, we were both excited to see him, and look how quickly we had diverged! We truly were different people now, even if condemned to inhabit the same body. Our life had been one up until the point of the surgery, but the scalpel had split more than our brain; it split one person into two as well. If I can even be called a person, I thought. In all honesty, the scalpel had cut us into a host, with full personhood rights, and a parasite, sucking whatever little life it could to sustain its sad excuse for an existence.

Weeks have passed since we left the hospital and we have finally gone back to work. There have been no seizures, big or small. Memories of them feel foreign to me, like relics of a previous life. Promises of such a life would have rendered me ecstatic before the surgery — indeed, they convinced me to overcome my terror of doctors and get it in the first place — but I was definitely not ecstatic now. To have limited control over your body is frightening in any situation, but I found it was the least so when we were, following doctor's orders, vegetating at home in front of the television. Leaving the house and going to work in these circumstances, though? That was excruciating. To see the people I'd missed and not be able to greet them, tell them how I was, even have them acknowledge I was there… Of course they knew nothing of my predicament, and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. They were happy to see him, delighted to hear that the surgery had gone well and that I was doing better. But I was most definitely not doing better. Having to hear everyone rejoice at my having decided to go for the surgery that had effectively ripped me out of the real world and banished me out of the realm of autonomous beings did a number on me. I felt stuck in my own version of hell. It was not other people; it was being someone else. Was this to be my fate? Confined to the passenger's seat of my own body, forced to watch an impostor take my place in the world for every day of the rest of my life. I could hardly imagine a more dreary existence.

Back home, he decided to go online and break our ongoing unspoken agreement of never trying to decipher doctor talk. I did my best to resist. Not because I did not want to know — I had to admit that my curiosity was beginning to get the best of me. For the first time I could remember, my desire to understand it was bigger than my fear of doing so — but out of sheer principle. We had an agreement, dating back to when we were still one and the same, and he most definitely did not have the right to unilaterally break it. However, my resistance proved to be futile, and he went ahead with his research, barely acknowledging my feeble attempts at stopping him.

And so, thanks to his authoritative decision, we both learned that the surgery we had blindly agreed to undergo consisted of severing the links between the right and left hemispheres of our brain. We learned also that the left brain is responsible for speech, making evident which one of us that was. It further made obvious that the right brain was condemned to a life of isolation from the outside world, cut-off from virtually all forms of communication. Virtually, yes! I had come to notice I could sometimes, through sheer force of will, move the left part of our body. They were never big movements, nor did they last long, but they were something. Having this confirmed by the slick-looking medical website he'd brought us to left me feeling elated. It was corroboration that even though I might be going insane, I had not imagined my precious moments of power. I had no idea if or how I could use them to my advantage but they gave me at least something to hold on to. They gave me hope.

Hope that would not last forever.. As we learned scrolling down the page, it is a well-documented fact that one of the post-split brains — typically the left one — will gain power over the other one and eventually take full control of the body. He made a point of reading this sentence out loud, not managing to keep a note of triumph from his voice. Did he even try, the sick fuck? We learn I'm doomed to a life of complete, heartless, inhumane isolation and he gloats? I saw red. I was livid. I raised our left hand, closed it into a fist and brought it down towards the table. I had no plan but to slam the anger away, and this was the only way I still could. Our hand stopped before hitting the wood. Against my will, our fingers slowly started moving, opening up and turning the mighty fist into a harmless open palm. He gently laid it down on the table and continued reading. I could feel the corners of our lips rising up into a mocking smile as he did so.

It was humiliating. I spent the rest of my day, having no alternative, thinking. The more I did so, the more my resentment festered into hatred. As the day came to an end and we got into bed, I felt like my anger was starting to spill out of the half of the brain I now inhabited. My last thought before falling asleep went to the impossibility of him having no idea how much I detested him, even though I was right there with him.

Morning came and brought the only reprieve I had left. For a few short moments just after we wake up I am again lord and master of our movements, sitting on my throne to the right of our skull. Perhaps the left brain takes longer to wake up? Lazy fuck. I don't know if he knows it. Does he notice that he is, even if briefly, not the boss? I am certain we did not read about it. One way or the other, I dared not make this power of mine obvious to him. I resigned myself to savouring my control by leisurely moving my hands and feet while waiting for him to wake up and get us out of bed. I rejoiced in knowing something he didn't.

The phone rang and he picked it up. It was mom. She sounded ecstatic, telling us through tears of joy that everyone back home chipped in so that dad and her could get on an airplane for the first time in their life to come and visit me. That was the goal, at least. The conversation between her and him was so sweet it made me sick, so I did my best to tune out. I was of course overjoyed for her — for them — that they would get to see their son and, for once, the world. Unfortunately I could not partake in the same feeling. All I could think while hearing his saccharine tone is that I could not bear to see my parents and have them not see me. Not see that he is not me. I had no further illusions about anyone outside my head being able to discern what was happening inside it — my afternoon spent with Joey had put an end to that — and I would rather die than see mom and dad sharing such a moment with an impostor.

The instants after the phone call were the lowest of the last weeks, and that's saying something considering how miserable I already was. It was as if I, thinking myself at the bottom of the well, suddenly slid down into some hidden pit and fell and fell and fell, my descent accompanied by the soundtrack of my mother's delight at the prospect of seeing him, until I landed in the new low I now found myself in. An inspirational commonplace about rock bottom being a solid foundation to build upon popped up in my mind. I scoffed at it. I was exhausted, bereft of energy to build back. I just wanted an exit from the pit, and I was ready to take whichever presented itself.

Stuck in the bottom of my well, I'm dragged along with him as we make our way to the kitchen and pop open the bottle of wine Joey had given us some weeks back. We hadn't drunk since the surgery, but according to the doctors it should now be fine to do so, and I suppose he would be in the mood for celebrating. I most definitely was not, but to be frank filling my well with alcohol did not sound like such a bad idea. I just wanted to get something mind numbing in me and do my best to ensure that I had no free bandwidth left to think of putatively happy reunions. We sat down on the couch, glass in hand and bottle standing tall by the box of codeine pills on the table. I tried to keep my mind everywhere but where it wanted to go; isn't it weird that we use the same substance for celebrating and commiserating? It's a bit as if we were to use coffee to wake us up but also to put us to sleep… Is mom going to tell him all about what she's been reading? Is dad going to watch the matches with him? Fuck! The pattern — thinking of something, anything, no matter how inane to avoid thinking of my parents and yet anyway ending up back at them — kept repeating itself. I cursed at myself for not having tried harder with mindfulness.

In the meantime, he kept making his way through the bottle, with a seemingly always full glass on one hand and some book by Pessoa on the other. I did my best not to focus on it - it brought back too many beautiful but painful memories of long summer days as a teenager back in Portugal, discovering Fernando's multitudes for the first time. Being fascinated by Alvaro, grudgingly admiring of Alberto and empathetic as never before with his Disquiet. And, of course, at the end of the day sharing it all with my parents, who'd been through it all some thirty years earlier. I hadn't read any Pessoa in a long time. I guess he picked it because the call with mom made him miss home. It had the same effect on me to the extent that I was missing home so much my chest hurt, but it definitely did not make me want to read it. So I tried to think other thoughts as he lazily flipped through the pages. I was sadly met with limited success: the hole I felt to the left of our chest proved hard to ignore. The wine continued steadily disappearing, the pages kept turning and our eyes started to close. We dozed off, rocked to sleep by Fernando's words mixed with red wine. I dreamt I was finally alone and wondered if he did too.

It was dusk when I woke up, slightly confused as to where I was. I felt the usual twinge of anxiety at the feeling of time slipping by one always gets on a Sunday evening. As my grogginess started dissipating and the recollections started pouring in, the little anxiety-induced twinge started expanding outwards from our belly button, threatening to escape from our insides and swallow us whole. The surgery, the isolation, Joey, my parents… It was so overwhelming it overflowed out our eyes. I wished I was one of those tears to have a way out of the prison this body had become.

Through them I saw the codeine on the table. On a snap decision, I took advantage of my brief just-woken up control to shove as many pills down his throat as I could.