Concussion Read online

  Well, that was pretty succinct. He feels good about that. He does not feel good about anything else. Tight. Can’t wiggle his damn toes. Wecht sitting there, hating him. Wecht’s wife, Sigrid, not even here, not even able to watch this appalling act of betrayal. I’m sorry, Mrs. Wecht. I had to do it. If it’s the truth, you have to tell it, even if it’s painful, even if it means laying bare a guy who gave you everything.

  “The body has three major cavities, the cavity of the head, the cavity of the chest, and the cavity of the abdomen,” he continues. “We open up the cavities of the body, we examine. We examine each organ. We take each part of the body for microscopic examinations and for other specialized types of tissue analysis. We also take some blood, the eye fluid, bowel, do toxicology analysis for the presence of toxins and drugs. We take it to any dimension of science. We can take the tissue to very sophisticated analysis, but our objective is to devise a cause of death within a reasonable degree of certainty that can be supported with prevailing medical knowledge.”

  How many, the prosecutor wants to know. “Doctor, could you just give the jury some idea of how many autopsies you would do in a given time period?”

  “The Allegheny County coroner’s office was a remarkably busy office,” Bennet says. “I did generally maybe three hundred, three hundred fifty, three hundred sixty, three hundred seventy. The last year before I left, I think I did four hundred seventy, some ridiculous number.”

  The jury stirs, everybody shifting weight as if on one collective pair of buttocks. It’s unsettling to think about all those dead bodies. Bennet gets that.

  “During the course of your forensic training, Dr. Omalu,” the prosecutor asks, “did you develop an interest in matters that have to do with the brain?”

  “Yes,” Bennet says. “I realized that most deaths are actually caused by trauma to your brain, and I wanted to study the brain.”

  He looks over at Wecht again. Nothing.

  It’s largely because of Wecht’s confidence in him that Bennet became a brain expert in the first place. The field of forensic neuropathology—the study of the brain to determine cause of death—was still in its infancy, and Bennet proved himself something of a savant in this area. Wecht recognized it, encouraged Bennet to pursue a fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh.

  “I would examine brains once a week,” Bennet tells the court. “Either Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, but usually once a week, I would examine brains and sign out those brains. An example is, okay, Mike Webster, the NFL player who died? We suspected he may have an underlying brain disease. We saved his brain.”

  Bennet considers explaining to the court that Mike Webster was a famous Pittsburgh Steelers football player who played that game in the 1970s and 1980s and won many awards, including four large gold rings for U.S. football championships. But people in America, and especially in Pittsburgh, seem to have a handle on the basic biography and some will laugh at Bennet when he begins to offer it, so he has learned not to do it.

  Bennet had no idea what a Steeler was until he encountered Mike Webster’s body in the morgue in 2002. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, truthfully. Bennet grew to love Mike Webster. His spirit. Like, his soul. It is difficult for some Americans to understand that. He gets that. But meeting Mike Webster changed Bennet’s life. Bennet made a discovery in Mike Webster’s brain that would help people forgive Webster for turning into a madman the way he did—and would go on to rattle America in ways Bennet certainly never intended.

  Bennet gives Wecht a lot of credit for making the discovery possible, for giving him permission to study Mike Webster’s brain in the first place. That was when everything was going great, business as usual at the morgue. Three hundred, four hundred dead bodies a year moving through the place, Wecht and Bennet running around doing Wecht’s private cases, Bennet studying brains. Then one cold Friday morning in 2005, FBI agents showed up at the coroner’s office and started ripping through boxes, logbooks, hard drives. It had nothing to do with Bennet or his brains. It was the culmination of a decades-long political fight with local Republican Party leaders who wanted Wecht out of the coroner’s office. They had found a vulnerability and they pounced hard on it. Wecht was indicted on eighty-four federal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, and related offenses arising from his alleged use of government resources to benefit his private practice. Sending personal faxes, mileage vouchers, misusing office stationery. Piddly shit! Honestly, half the city says it’s piddly shit and a waste of taxpayer money to pursue this. Let the old man go. But it’s piddly shit that Wecht’s political enemies, who are numerous, can hang him on, so they’re going after him, depleting his life savings in legal fees and dangling the very real possibility that the famous Cyril Wecht could live out his last years in prison.

  I can’t believe I’m a part of this. It’s like joining the villagers flogging your own father. I’m sorry, Dr. Wecht.

  Seven years. Seven years Bennet worked for Wecht. Seven of the most productive years a scientist could ever dream of, and Bennet can’t, at this moment, pinpoint how it all unraveled so completely. He can only say for sure that it did. And I’m collateral damage. He wonders if his former boss has any idea how Bennet’s own life got tangled up and derailed in the wake of his sorry mess. No, Wecht has no idea. That’s always been part of the problem. Bennet was run out of Pittsburgh, kicked into obscurity, kicked off to some grape field south of Sacramento—and his groundbreaking research was all but stolen from him. Now he’s back to testify against his former boss, and he feels like a traitor, like the lowest of God’s creatures, and so, yeah, he wants a cigarette, he wants to kick off these cap-toe oxfords and flee, run the hell out of there, go home to Prema.

  If there’s one reason why he chose to spend his life with dead people, it’s captured here in this trial in Pittsburgh in 2008. Living people mess you up. Living people are messy. Dead people are clean. There is no politics with dead people. With dead people what you see is what you get and you can keep looking and looking and get more, and once you look inside the brain you find the story is beautiful in the way all things infinite are beautiful. Holy. Every dead person is a controlled story, a distinct narrative revealing itself on the edge of a scalpel and through the lens of a microscope. It’s honest. It’s linear. It’s all right there for you, solid, still, not a single moving part.

  It became an escape, a place to run to. Save yourself. Put yourself first. Run! He does not fully understand save yourself or put yourself first, but he understands run. In Nigeria, there was no self to put first. In Nigeria, you were part of a unit. You didn’t move without the unit. It would be like a spider leg crawling without the rest of the legs and the body attached. In Nigeria, the family, not the individual, was the unit that moved in relation to the rest of the world. Collective finances, collaborative meals, communal decisions behind walls that protected you. You stayed with your family inside the walls of the compound. A solid steel gate, tall concrete barricades, loops of barbed wire on top, until your family told you okay, everything is set, it is time to go.

  CHAPTER 2

  RUNNING

  Bennet never stood up to Oba, his father, and never disobeyed him, and neither did his brothers or his sisters or his mother. To do so would be to spit on Oba’s legendary history of survival, a kind of sacred family allegory. Bennet himself appeared as an angel in the story, and so for him, the pressure to believe and obey was particularly acute.

  In Igbo, the name of his boyhood village in southern Nigeria, Enugwu-Ukwu, means “on top of a hill.” The terrain was all up and down, round, low mountains glowing lime green in the hot sun, the earth a bright, dusty red. There were seven children in the Omalu family and Bennet was second from the youngest. All of the Omalu kids were smart, but Bennet and his baby sister, Mie-Mie, were said to be especially gifted. Bennet did not challenge the notion, but he kept his doubts private. Mie-Mie was a genius, unquestionably. But Bennet believed himself to be merely studi
ous. Let them think I’m a genius. I will work hard, and harder still, so they will think it! Early on he figured out that if you got labeled “genius” you could get out of doing work around the house. You could open a book and furrow your brow as if processing important information and someone else would sweep the floor. Rake. Do the dishes. “Oh, Mommy, I have to study,” he would say when she would assign him household tasks. She would relent, send him back to his books. “How are you ever going to make it in the world if you don’t learn how to do chores?” she would say. “There will be machines,” he’d say. “Where I am going to live there will be machines to do everything for me. Don’t worry about it.”

  No one did. He became known as the kid who simply could not abide physical exertion. The other kids picked up the slack, especially Chizoba, the brother Bennet was closest to, just two years older. Chizoba was freakishly normal, Bennet thought, as they reached school age. Bennet would watch him outside the window playing in the dirt. He would watch him kick a soccer ball around the compound with his friends. Kick? A ball? Friends? Bennet had none of these things and none of these aspirations. He hated the outdoors. He could not be bothered with friends. He loved his mom and whenever he imagined God he pictured her square dark face.

  As for Bennet’s father, he was in and out, doing highly impressive father things. Government matters. Village chief matters. When he was home he would receive visitors in the obu, the reception room in which he alone was allowed to sit in the velvet chair and break open the kola nuts, the green ones, breaking them with his thumbs, plucking the fleshy lobes as he prayed the Igbo blessing: “Ihe dï mma onye n’achö, ö ga-afü ya.”

  He was said to be defender of the widow, voice of the underdog, protector of the fatherless and the orphan, helper of the helpless, and these matters occupied him. He was a learned man who expounded generously about the value of education coupled with a radical and absolute surrender to the love and mercy of God.

  Because of his reputation in the village as a wise leader, Bennet’s father earned the Igbo title of Oba, or “ruler,” and when villagers would come to the compound to partake of his wisdom he would greet them in his tall red hat adorned with three white feathers. This was the highest level of distinction. When you become an Oba, people no longer refer to you by your given name; they call you simply Oba. Bennet’s oldest brother, Theodore, aspired to become an Oba one day, and so did Ikem, the middle son, and so did Chizoba. Bennet had no interest in that whatsoever. Much of the tribal mysticism associated with his Igbo ancestry was lost on him. So much silliness. But he would come to recognize that the culture he came from was distinct, the values particular, the violent history inescapable, and that these things were a part of him.

  —

  Oba’s legendary history of survival began when he was orphaned at age three. Onyemalukwube, his surname, means “If you know, come forth and speak”; the shortened form is Omalu. He was born in 1923, not quite a decade after the country of Nigeria was formally established during Britain’s imperial expansion into West Africa. Britain chose boundaries that made economic sense to Britain, not to the indigenous people. The oil-rich lands of the Niger River basin were some of the most densely populated of Africa, representing hundreds of distinct ethnic nationalities and countless cultural and religious traditions. The three most prominent groups were the Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo in the southeast. None of these people ever agreed to get together and form one country.

  In 1927, Oba’s father drowned in the village river, and the suspicion that he had been murdered would haunt the Omalu family for generations. Oba’s mother found another man to marry and she left Oba behind. A church elder took him in and put him to work as house help. Oba was smart so the church elder sent him to school. Education equaled freedom; Oba caught on to that equation early and put his teeth into it. He got a job as a trainee in a government office where they dealt with mining and engineering. He worked hard to impress his superiors, and because of his outstanding performance he was offered a scholarship to study engineering in England. He came back five years later with a job as a mining engineer for the Nigerian government—the orphan boy who made good.

  Oba married Bennet’s mother well after he had established his career. As teenagers, the two had been paired by villagers for an arranged marriage, but her father had rejected the union on the grounds that Oba was penniless. Now he was back, a civil servant, and she was unmarried and poor, a seamstress with no schooling. Charity as much as love drove him to her. Catholic doctrine demanded that you serve the meek and he felt the calling intensely. He took her in. He bought her clothes and gifts. In time he would search for his own mother, the woman who had abandoned him, and he took her in, too. He built a home just up the road from the house in Enugwu-Ukwu where he was born. He assigned his wife the role of taking care of his mom and he put a concrete barricade around the house to protect them, as many villagers were doing. He added rolls of silver barbed wire with razorblade teeth on top of the barricade, and he would add rooms and more walls and buildings to the compound as his family grew. If there was talk of war back then it was still just a rumble.

  Oba rose quickly in the ranks to become Nigeria’s assistant director of mineral resources, and so the family enjoyed many privileges of the country’s elites: cars, drivers, housing, cooks, butlers. They relocated around southern and eastern Nigeria according to Oba’s postings, but their compound in the village would remain home base, the place to return to for holidays and vacations.

  Eventually, Oba moved north, to the city of Jos. Political tensions were mounting in the region. It was the 1960s; the great wave of nationalism and demand for self-governance was sweeping across West Africa. Nigeria had declared independence from Britain. After a half century of trying to figure out how to coexist as one country, the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo tribes were now jostling for supremacy. The cultural and political differences between them were sharp. Christian missionaries and the Western education and culture that came with them had been excluded from the conservative Muslim north—the most underdeveloped region in all of Nigeria, with a literacy rate of just 2 percent by the time the British left.

  The opposite had happened in the south. The Yoruba were the first to adopt Western forms of education, and they provided the country with its first Nigerian doctors, lawyers, and professionals. They remained mostly Islamic, with only a portion of the population converting to Christianity.

  The Igbo went full-on Christian, full-on education, full-on Westernization. The Igbo people were always said to be freethinkers, with an individualistic ethic—completely at odds with their Muslim countrymen in the north. By the 1960s they had become the country’s literate elite. They moved to other parts of Nigeria in search of opportunity, thousands of Igbo emigrating north, opening businesses and small companies. They thought of themselves as the engine of Nigeria’s advancement onto the world stage—but northerners regarded them as a threat. The Hausa and some of the Yoruba derided the Igbo, called them the Jews of Africa. Economic and social modernization—the very goals of the Igbo—were considered sacrilegious and intolerable to the Hausa.

  These tensions boiled, and then, in 1966, after a military coup led by the Igbo to take control of the government and a countercoup led by the Hausa and Yoruba to regain it, the lid blew.

  The genocide against the Igbo began in the north when Oba was working in Jos. Tens of thousands of Christian Igbo were slaughtered by the Muslim Nigerian army, their bodies left disemboweled and savaged on roadsides.

  An eyewitness quoted in the October 14, 1966, issue of Time magazine remembered his visit to the northern city of Kano this way:

  The Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles…hauling Ibo passengers off the plane to be…shot….The troops fanned out through downtown Kano, hunting down Ibos in bars, hotels….They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians…looting and burning Ibo homes….All night long…the massacre went on….Municipal garbage
trucks were sent out to collect the dead.

  More than a million Igbo fled south. They declared independence from the rest of Nigeria in 1967 and tried to carve out their own country in the south. They would call their new nation the Republic of Biafra, taking the name from the Bight of Biafra, the vast blue bay where the Niger opens like freedom to the Gulf of Guinea.

  The Nigerian army would have none of the secession; the resulting bloody civil war between the Nigerian army and the Igbo would rage on for more than two and a half years.

  Oba was stuck hiding in Jos during the massacre of the Igbo in the north. Friends in his office, British engineers of no political allegiance to the north or the south, wrapped him in blankets and shoved him onto the floor of a truck. They hid him in basements and on train cars on a weeklong journey from Jos to Enugwu-Ukwu. The family back in the compound did not hear from him for more than a month, because communication had been cut to the south; they presumed him dead.

  When he came staggering down the hill toward the compound, starving, emaciated, and filthy, the children and their mother ran in tears to greet him. They led him limping inside the gates.

  Bennet wasn’t born yet. Winny, his older sister, was six:

  He came down this hill. It was more than a month. Everybody yelled like he’d come from the dead. Broken. Stories to tell. Horrifying stories. There was no time to plan. We have to run, he said. You only listened to the radio to know where the soldiers are. Or people tell you, they tell you, fifteen miles away, you start to run. Daddy! Mommy! Don’t ask me questions, just go get this and that. One car. Luggage. We packed some clothes and then food and water. Just one car. Packed in the night. Where are we going? They say don’t ask questions, just pray.