427 was the last, a man of thirty-eight, with a possible lesion of the temporal lobe. He was one of the janitors in the hospital, and only the day before had been discovered in a basement storage room where he had placed a dozen or so electric light bulbs in a bucket of water and was rapidly bobbing them up and down. Afterward, he couldn't remember what he'd done. This was an automatism, a so-called "automatic action" characteristic of a pyschomotor seizure. Such attacks could be seriously destructive, depending on the patient's unconscious emotions, though most often they were harmless and simply innapropriate. Always bizarre, such fugues were normally brief in duration, although in rare cases they had lasted many hours and were considered to be totally inexplicable, like the baffling case of a man who had flown a light aircraft from an airport in Virginia to Chicago, yet had never learned how to fly a plane and had no recollection of the event. Sometimes, violent assaults took place. One man, later found to have a scarred temporal lobe in assocition with hemangioma, killed his wife while in a state of epileptic furor.

The janitor's case was more the norm. His history was studded with uncinate seizures, auras of unpleasant tastes or smells; he gave descriptions of a chocolate bar tasting 'metallic' and a smell of 'rotten flesh' without an apparent source. There were also fugues of deja vu, as well as it's opposite, jamais vu-a sense of strangeness in familiar surroundings. These episodes were often preceeded by a peculiar smacking of the lips. The consumptionof alcohol often triggered them.

Further, there were visual hallucinations, among them microscopsia, in which objects seem smaller than they are; and levitation, a sensation of rising in the air, unsupported. The janitor also had one brief episode of a phenomenon known as 'the double.' He had seen his three-dimensional likeness mimicking his every word and action.

The EEG had been especially ominous. Tumors of this nature if such it was, worked slowly and insidiously for many months, putting upward pressure on the brainstem; but at last it would gather a sudden momentum and in a matter of weeks, if left unattended, compress and crush the medula.

The result was death.

--Legion