All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was “syncope,” fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on “pre-syncope symptoms” (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply.I had been alone in the apartment.There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach.I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room.I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time.This was dangerously soothing.I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me.I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head.I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up.At which point I called a friend.At which point he came over.At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital.It was I who said Lenox Hill.Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill.Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill.
