Where Nowhere Can Lead You

I've been to Nowhere twice, and I don't remember either time: once when I was eighteen months old, and once when I was sixteen-going-on-seventeen years. Each time, I was in the most literal of Nowheres—no maps or compasses or transport required. I was in a coma, caused both times by skull fractures.

It's extraordinary, they say, to survive one coma, much less two. But I've done it, and except for when I have a brain-damaged moment, I'm proud of it. The survival instinct is basic to all living things regardless of form. My lust for hanging in there seems to have been quite healthy from the start.

My first skull fracture was in May 1952. It happened when my mother twisted her ankle on the concrete stairs outside the home of my paternal grandmother, Gamma, in Elizabeth-town, Kentucky. She was holding me, but the twisted ankle startled her, and she let go to grasp the railing. I tumbled out of her arms down six steps to the concrete sidewalk below.

My personal recollection of this event is nil. I only know what the oral folklore of my Southern-accented family passed on to me. "Were it not for the doctor who lived across the street from Gamma's house, you would be dead, Alex." As my eyes became the color and size of plums and I could not be roused to consciousness—even by Mother's frantic wails—the neighbor doctor was summoned. He pronounced me fractured, soon to be in a coma if not already, and in need of the nearest hospital, which was in Louisville, forty-five miles away. My father drove at one hundred miles per hour, and my maternal grandmother, Grandear, held me carefully in her lap. I threw up on that lap on the way to Louisville and was immediately transported to Nowhere. In the real world, apparently, I arrived at Baptist Hospital in the nick of time.

The second skull fracture can be blamed on a car accident. A drizzly, stormy, November night; my boyfriend driving me home from the cast party of our senior production of Little Moon of Alban, in which I starred (I had to throw that in). A gravel road, the rain, the skidding tires, a "big ole" tree (or was it that "little stone bridge"?) and something hard on which I hit my head—who knows what it was—all a recipe for a single car, single head collision. No one's fault, really. As fortune would have it, a police car was just behind us, and an officer called for help. In the ambulance my eyes became the color and size of plums, and I threw up. Once again I was whisked away to Nowhere, with housing at a hospital. My body was suspended in a coma for three days this time.

Where exactly was Nowhere in the comas? Haven't the foggiest! I didn't see a bright light or a corridor or dead relatives or anything like that. That doesn't mean that the question, "Where did I really go?" has not haunted me. I have explored it throughout my life, and I have always wondered why I came back to reality. I have had nightmares, daydreams, conjectures, stand-up routines, and fantasies about Nowhere.

One dream was so vivid I was positive it was the fantastic reality. I see a beautiful park, very much like Central Park in New York City. I am pushed into the park by an unknown force. My head hurts something fierce. I stumble around trying to get my bearings and I meet a homeless man, Thomas, and his three-legged dog, Mac. Thomas is a poet who lost his mind as a result of a coma, but through some otherworldly trade-off has been given the opportunity to help other coma sufferers by being their coma guide. Mac represents imperfection. Give that dog a bone! Thomas waves his hand over my head, and the pain disappears. Then he tells me I have to make a choice while in...