I remember the catatonic victims of the sleeping sickness epidemic on the Jersey Shore leftover from the early 20’s. Forty years later they sat frozen and staring like ancient mannequins in wheelchairs being pushed slowly along the boardwalk. Sometimes it was nurses in white uniforms pushing the wheelchairs. Sometimes it was just people, their children, apparently, or grandchildren. Some might have even remembered four decades before when this inanimate person they were pushing along was as animated as all the people on the boardwalk were now. The person in the chair just stared, frozen, never moving. People walked by, some unnoticing, some staring and whispering like we were doing. It was rude to stare, but it was the eeriest thing I’d ever seen when I was a kid. I couldn’t take my eyes off each of them. There must have been a convalescent home nearby. Maybe more than one. There had been thousands of people who’d been stricken with sleeping sickness in that part of New Jersey.

Encephalitis lethargica was the medical term for it. Victims could scarcely move. There were five million cases world wide in the 1920’s, a third of them died (in comparison the Spanish flu pandemic killed 10 to 20% of its victims.) Nearly all the rest recovered fully, except the small percentage who never unfroze. There were probably hundreds of those people in New Jersey, especially on the Jersey Shore, where the disease had clustered. No one knew why there were so many cases in that part of Jersey then, I have no idea how much more they know now. I read once that doctors theorized it might have been some bizarre after effect of the Spanish Flu that had swept the world a couple years before, like how you get shingles if you had chickenpox. Not everyone who had chickenpox gets shingles. Not everyone who got the Spanish flu came down later with encephalitis lethargica. Apparently it’s still unproven. All they know for sure is that it’s only seen in very rare instances anymore. No epidemics. It’s forgotten.

But when I saw Awakenings four decades later it brought all those memories back. A beautiful summer evening in Asbury Park. I was eight or nine or ten. A statue rolled by in a wheelchair. Then another. Are they dead, I asked. No, the poor things are alive, they just can’t move. Like they’re frozen? Yes, but look at their faces, my grandmother said. The one being wheeled past was smiling. I still remember that frozen, unlaughing smile. The eyes looked at me, through me. The hand waved, never moving.

Everybody on the Shore knew what they were. They got the sleeping sickness and never recovered, my grandmother whispered, Lord have mercy on them. I don’t think I heard it called encephalitis till years later, and I never knew their catatonia was a particularly tragic variant of Parkinson’s Disease till I read Oliver Sacks’ medical memoir. I just knew sleeping sickness came from a mosquito bite, though it didn’t. It was some viral thing. African Sleeping Sickness was passed on by a bite from a tse tse fly, and terrified folk wisdom assumed this sleeping sickness came from a mosquito bite, like yellow fever. A frightened public mixing up epidemics. I know I was terrified of being bitten by a mosquito and freezing and staring, but my mom said it didn’t happen anymore. My terror subsided and we moved to California and I never saw one of those profoundly paralyzed victims of encephalitis lethargica again. They became part of my collection of Jersey Shore memories with the elm trees and salt water taffy and the sad but funny bloated faces of puffer fish left way up the beach after a storm.

A lifetime later the memory is still vivid as I remember the people in their wheelchairs on the Asbury Park boardwalk. Watching them stare frozen as the summer crowds streamed past them, as the years streamed past them, as time itself streamed past them. I feel a dead chill inside. A ten year old’s quiet terror. Stop staring, my grandmother said.