Aphasia

He taught aphasia. He drew the circles on the diagram himself.For eight years David Whitaker stood in front of second-year psychology students with a laser pointer. This part of the brain makes the words. This part understands them. The students wrote it down.Now he is fifty-six, on indefinite medical leave, living above a café in Đà Lạt, and he has just opened his mouth to order the coffee he has ordered a thousand times and produced a sound that is not English, not Vietnamese, and not any word at all.The sentence is still in his head. Perfectly formed. The door simply will not open from the inside.Around him, a town that has never asked him to explain himself. A landlady who has made too much soup four days a week since Christmas. A driver who arrives every Tuesday and says nothing until the end. A letter from a university that has changed its name, addressed to a man on a staff card he no longer recognises. A monk who died two years ago and keeps visiting. And a woman he loved whose face he can no longer reconstruct, however many times he draws it.Whitaker knows exactly what is happening to him. That is the worst of it, and the best.Aphasia is the fifth book in The Expat Psychologist. It can be read on its own.