About a Girl
She can barely see, she doesn't like to be hugged, and she's already forgotten most of what happened last winter. Which is why, just maybe, Audra Thomas has such a strong sense of the world around her—and of herself.
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In the spring of 1997 Nancy attended a lecture in Dallas by Oliver Sacks, a well-known neurologist. She had noticed in his books that many of the patients he described suffered from symptoms like Audra's—deficiencies of memory, of balance, of vision—so she wrote to him. Sacks called her shortly thereafter, referring her to a clinic in New York City. In June Audra was admitted to New York University's Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, where doctors attached electrodes to her scalp and monitored her brain activity for several days straight. Once again, no significant malfunction was detected. Her parents then agreed to let the doctors give Audra a dose of sodium amytal, a so-called truth-serum drug that often prompts patients to report traumas they have repressed. But according to the report by one of her treating physicians, there was no evidence of physical or sexual abuse. All that her doctors concluded was that Audra's complaints seemed to be the joint result of head injury and conversion disorder.
Vague as that diagnosis was, says Nancy, it was a turning point. Although the doctors hadn't found any neat solution to the puzzle of her illness, Audra was heartened by the fact that they believed that her head injury had something to do with it; also, they prescribed anti-depressant medication, which helped to calm her. The Thomases at last could set aside the search for absolute answers and concentrate instead on Audra's rehabilitation. Which was no easy task in itself. After a therapist recommended skin-brushing techniques for Audra's sensory problems, Nancy resolved to see whether it would help. "To get her to do it," she recalls, "I'd literally have to go tackle her and hold her down and brush on her. It was four or five times a day."
Nancy says she's a multitasker, which is an understatement. Besides having five children and a full-time job, she was, at various times that I was in Celina, substitute-teaching on her day off, collecting items for a yard sale to benefit the senior class, working at the yard sale, and attending a school-board meeting. Audra calls Nancy a busybody and insists that she herself takes after her dad, but in her stubbornness she perhaps more closely resembles her mother. After spending some time with both of them, I came to suspect that the plain obstinacy of both mother and daughter had played a large role in Audra's recovery.
I also came to believe that Nancy's suffering might have been, in a way, more intense than Audra's. For not only did Audra forget each day's torments once they were past, she'd also forgotten what her life had been before. Nancy remembered. "Her real generosity, her real lovingness—it seemed like it was gone. For a long time she was just blank. You couldn't call her sweet; you couldn't call her hateful. Just blank.
"On the darkest days, it's not that I wished her dead," she says. "It's just that I wanted Audra back."
ONCE I ASKED AUDRA WHAT she thought a portrait of herself ought to look like. "It would have a round head and cute glasses and a small nose," she said. "A dimple on my chin—I have a dimple, right? Wide-set eyes, oh, and a very distinguishable v on my upper lip. If you were to draw the inside of my mouth, I have a giant tongue. I don't have very distinguishable cheekbones. I have pretty straight-across eyebrows and loopy ears. Well, they feel loopy. My favorite color is purple, and I'd have me with books, even though I don't like to read books that much. And my pupils could be little globes, because I like the world so much. To symbolize my worldliness."
From her bedroom in Celina, she keeps close tabs on world events. Her mother can't recall a time when Audra didn't like to watch the news. These days she peruses the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time online (with the help of special software that reads the text to her) and watches (or more accurately, listens to) BBC news and C-SPAN; her plan is to major in political science or international relations in college. After that, a master's degree and maybe a law degree, and then "I want to live overseas, and I want to work in an embassy," she says. "I'd also like to work for the U.N. ambassador. I don't want to be the front person, but I'd like to be the behind-the-scenes expert in whatever my field is and be called upon to advise. That could be really fun to do." Audra also hopes to travel widely. "I just want to live all over the world," she says. And while she's at it, "I want to learn, like, ninety languages: French, Russian, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Farsi, Swahili, and there's another African one, I can't think of the name. Also Mandarin. There are some others."
For a few days every spring, certain Texas community college campuses fill with teenagers quizzing one another on the names of world leaders, the current administration's latest initiatives, and other ephemera of recent history, as they prepare to take the Current Issues and Events test, consisting of an essay and forty multiple-choice questions, given by the University Interscholastic League. Audra first competed in the tenth grade. She'd started at Celina High the year before, and from the beginning, says Nancy, "she had to be in regular classes. Some people wanted to baby her, but Audra was very adamant." Still, in ninth grade she had to be trailed by an aide all day and take special-ed math. She had undergone inner-ear surgery to help with her balance and had to learn to walk all over again. As her balance improved, her memory seemed to improve as well, as if her brain, no longer focused on the task of keeping her upright, could devote more of itself to remembering events, at least from the previous couple of weeks.
The following year, when Audra's special-ed teacher recommended that she participate in the current-events contest, no one had much faith in the quiet, blind girl. That changed when she won first place at the district meet. Placing third at the regional contest, she advanced to the state competition, held at the University of Texas at Austin. After the test, when Audra, her mother, and a teacher from Celina went to a crowded auditorium to learn the results, "it was really bothering her to be in there," says Nancy. Then, she says, "we got this paper with her score on it, but we didn't make the connection." In fact, Audra had won the state title for Division 2A. "When they announced it, we just cheered and went nuts. It was so exciting," says Nancy. Audra's response was more measured: "She just did that half-grin of hers—she was doing all she could just to be in that room." It was the first time anyone could remember a student from Celina winning a state academic meet, and when she got back home, the local papers ran stories. Speaking of his daughter, Dave Thomas once said to me, in all seriousness, "She's got a good memory." When it comes to factual knowledge, this is true.
It's tempting to draw too neat a picture here, though, of Audra as an information fiend, a data processor with no experiences of her own. For much as she may like to debate the wisdom of going to war with Iraq or demonstrate her familiarity with what's been in the news recently, she's more likely to talk about the kid who annoyed her at a recent Model U.N. session or about the time last week when she and her friend Chris led their entire Spanish class in a protracted discussion of politics. Even with such an impoverished base of remembrances to draw from, Audra still tells stories, lots of them. The events of Spanish class may not constitute the most compelling of yarns, and she's liable to forget the story later on, but through these narratives she seems to place herself—to keep on placing herself.
Audra also loves movies. One of her favorites is Contact, in which a scientist, Ellie Arroway, receives a message from an alien civilization. She especially likes one of Arroway's father's lines: "If it is just us [in the universe] . . . it seems like an awful waste of space." She also likes the fact that when the aliens ultimately communicate with Ellie directly, their representative assumes the form of her father, who dies early in the movie: A woman travels to another galaxy and meets her own memory.
Last January Dave had heart surgery, and according to Audra, this has made him more philosophical. He has asked his children what of his they want to inherit or what sort of funerals they themselves would like to have. "I want to be shot up into space," says Audra. "To have a portion of my ashes taken up into the shuttle. I think I saw it on the news, and that has stuck with me—that sounds so cool. You circle the earth in orbit for, like, two hundred years, and then you come back down to earth, collected with other things, as a shooting star. I'm a big geek. I believe in aliens, and maybe the aliens will get me. But if the aliens haven't gotten me, I should come back to earth as a shooting star."
IMAGINE HAVING NO RECOLLECTIONS OF high school, or even feelings about high school: A few months from now, Audra won't have either. Even before she graduated from Celina High, she'd already forgotten most of her four years there. Nonetheless, at the end of her senior year, she knew she wasn't too fond of the place. "It's small, it's football-crazy. I don't like it that much. It has nothing interesting that happens," she said.
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