He stepped out of his father’s pool and went in the house to change. The savage whack came from nowhere. It came from wherever neurotransmissions go mad. It came from inside Mark Bennett.

The Taser-like jolt, an uppercut from the Tourette’s syndrome that had tormented him for years, slammed his palm into his chin with a wrenching snap. His head rocked back and to the side. Next thing Mark knew, he was dizzy, nauseated, spitting up.

“Something’s not right,” he told his dad.

Mark took a Tylenol, but only felt woozier. His breakneck convulsion had injured an artery at the base of his brain.

It was May 2007, a Friday. It was dark by the time his mother arrived from Macon. At his bedside in a Savannah hospital, she rubbed his back, soothed him.

Suddenly, Mark couldn’t breathe. He ended up on a respirator, life support.

He’d had a stroke.

A doctor told his mama, “I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

* * *

Tammy Singleton was 49.

She pleaded for the doctor to save her son.

“This is my only child,” she said.

Doctors induced a coma.

Mark had what is known as a brain-stem stroke. A pair of arteries climb the back of the neck along the spinal column and stream into the bottom of the skull at the brain stem.

Though rare, freak flinches or odd tweaks -- even hard sneezes -- can tear the linings of those arteries. Such tears can send blood pumping into an artery’s wall, creating bulges that restrict blood flow and cause strokes.

The brain stem is vital. A dense cluster of nerve pathways runs through it.

Even a small stroke that originates there can be devastating.

Dr. Richard Bernstein, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University, says, “It’s kind of like dropping a bomb in the middle of Manhattan.”

* * *

Tammy and Mark’s stepdad, Terry, slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor of the ICU waiting room.

Terry was shaken by what he watched Mark endure.

“To see him gagging and them trying to suction him,” Terry says. “He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe.”

A doctor asked Mark’s family if they wanted him taken off life support. Mark, he said, would be lucky to breathe on his own, much less talk, eat or walk. Mark’s parents did not like the doctor’s brusque manner. “People die here,” he’d told them.

One of Mark’s nurses sensed something about her patient in the coma.

“He’s in there,” she told Tammy.

Tammy wasn’t sure.

She went to the hospital chapel and prayed, “God, just let me know he’s in there some kind of way.”

The next morning, she clutched her son’s lifeless hand.

This was it, do or die.

“Mark,” she said, “if you’re in there, squeeze my hand.”

Mark remembers nothing of her gentle request.

His eyes well up when he hears of it. How the synapses in a body that had betrayed him mustered the slightest twinge of a clench and saved his life.

* * *

Mark regained what amounted to groggy consciousness two weeks after his stroke and the induced coma.

Weeks would pass before he could make his head and neck conjure the feeblest of nods.

At a rehab center in Augusta, he began nodding to communicate.

His mother would point at letters on a chart, and he’d nod when she touched the right one.

“Silent Wheel of Fortune” he called it.

His first sentence was “Don’t worry, I will walk again.”

“Give me a week,” Mark added.

That was almost four years ago.

* * *

Janitors, nurses, other patients, it didn’t matter. At Walton Rehabilitation Hospital overlooking the Augusta Canal trail, they all took an interest in Mark’s progress.

He was there from July to September 2007. That August, he celebrated his 25th birthday there. They smeared yellow birthday-cake icing on his lips, but he couldn’t eat it. Food, drink, anything in his mouth was a gagging hazard.

He survived on a feeding tube. Six cans of nourishment a day, pumped straight into his stomach.

Yes sir, the stroke had done a number on him.

“I stopped drinking, smoking, eating and going out with women cold turkey,” Mark says.

At Walton, his speech gradually improved. From slurs to understandable groans. But he was a long way from conversation. He still relied on the alphabet chart.

There was another development. The only troubling sign of his once-relentless Tourette’s was the way he sometimes poked his eye sockets with his fingers and gave himself black eyes. Those tics passed, but not without the anxiety they spun up. Mark couldn’t take this: Tourette’s on top of life in a wheelchair.

Mysteriously and, according to a renowned expert at Yale University who later heard about Mark, perhaps even extraordinarily, the stroke seemed to erase the majority of Mark’s tics. No one knew why. It just did.

Mark deemed the stroke “a blessing.” As cocooned as he was in immobility, Mark told a doctor, “I’d rather live like this than have Tourette’s.”

Physical therapists would sit him up in bed to see if he had the strength to hold himself there and not keel over. They’d time him with a stopwatch. It was considered a breakthrough when he could remain upright for one second.

He still couldn’t eat or drink. He craved sweet tea, coffee.

Those who tended to him knew better than to mention food, much less take him anywhere near the cafeteria. But one day, by mistake, a nurse pushing him around in his wheelchair did. Breakfast smells enveloped him. To a man who couldn’t eat, it was brutal. His eyes and nose feasted on what his throat was in no shape to swallow.

Back at his room, he spelled out a message to his mother.

“I saw grits and eggs,” he informed her.

Then he broke down crying.

* * *

“Do you want to come live with me?”

That’s the question Mark’s mother posed. She could quit her job with the bank.

His real dad, Mark Sr., worked full time. He couldn’t offer the round-the-clock care Mark would require.

It was September 2007, four months after he’d nearly died, and here Mark was needing somewhere to live. Or rather, someone to live with.

“I better take what I can get,” he thought, even if it meant sacrificing independence, moving back in with his mother and stepdad, back to his childhood home beneath the roof he’d never envisioned himself living under again. What choice did he have? He couldn’t afford a care home. Mark told his mama, “Yes.”

Terry, who’d turned 70 that year, welcomed the prospect of his stepson’s return. Terry told himself, “I’ll make this as easy as I can for Mark.”

At home, Terry helped Mark move his arms and legs, keep him loose. He helped coax Mark’s stronger left hand to wiggle one of his fingers. Mark’s middle finger was the first to flicker to life. He learned to lift his arm, to raise it high, to wave. But when his arm went up, up shot that frisky middle finger.

On a checkup at the Savannah hospital, Mark and Terry happened to see the doctor there who’d been so blunt, so certain that Mark’s life was kaput.

When he spotted the man, Terry -- who despised the guy -- got Mark’s attention.

“Wave at the doctor,” Terry said.

And wave Mark did.

* * *

To get Mark’s tongue working, a speech therapist dangled a cherry Popsicle in front of his mouth.

She’d touch it to his tongue. The taste was indescribable, heavenly. The cool droplets he lapped in made him hack. It was worth it.

In January 2008, a doctor back home told Mark, who’d lost 60 pounds in the hospital, that it was time to start living again. To eat, consequences be danged.

The first thing Mark wanted was lunch at Burger King. He thought better of it and went with Dippin’ Dots, the ice cream pellets, instead. Then baby food.

His first full meal came at a Mexican restaurant a few miles up the road from his house. It was glorious, a combo dinner: burrito, taco, rice, refried beans.

It took Mark two hours to eat it.

* * *

Terry never figured he’d spend his retirement as a caregiver to his stepson, yet he embraced it.

Mark was not only a part of Tammy’s and his life, Terry says, “He is our life.”

Mark says of Terry, “I’ve always looked at my real dad as the one I want to be like, but my real dad doesn’t deal with this all the time. At the end of the day, Terry’ll be there. I’ve seen a totally different side of him.”

When Mark first got home from rehab, his bladder worked overtime. He had to urinate every half-hour.

“You’ve got to have help,” Mark says, “but Terry never complained. He’d be like, ‘All right, buddy, you’ve got to pee again.’ That makes it so much better, because you’re already upset that you’ve got to put somebody out.”

Terry has sensed Mark’s appreciation.

“He realizes that we have love for him,” Terry says, “that we had love for him before.”

Terry recently custom-fashioned a metal rifle stand so Mark can sit with it between his legs and fire a rifle, go deer hunting. Mark returned home from shooting with it earlier this year and said, “I actually felt human today.”

* * *

Home is just up from an Ace Hardware, a little north of the path a tornado took earlier this spring when it slashed the county’s south side along Liberty Church Road.

Jerry Lee, Mark’s German shepherd, lives out back. His doghouse is in the shade near twin Bradford pear trees, backed up to a stand of woods and bushes that run along to the eastern edge of Houston Road.

There’s a big yard and an open field stretching out from the deck outside Mark’s bedroom. Mark, who is nearly 29, sits there sometimes in his 303-pound electric wheelchair and strokes Jerry Lee. The petting exercises muscles in Mark’s still-weak hands and arms.

“Good boy,” Mark will whisper to the dog. “You’re a good boy.”

When his mom asked Mark if he wanted to move in with her, Mark said he would on one condition. That Jerry Lee could come, too.

Jerry Lee seems to like it. There’s a cat to chase, to bark at.

Mark has one of those white-noise machines on his nightstand. It emits a fog of electronic static. The sound of nothingness. It blocks out Jerry Lee’s yips while Mark is trying to sleep. That and any strains of the world Mark misses so much.

* * *

When Mark talks, his words come out low and dry from the root cellar of his voice box. He speaks in slightly moaned, deep breaths.

“My life is like a scratch-off lottery ticket,” he says. “You don’t know if it’s gonna be richer or poorer. It’s like you’re always in a battle. … When I think I’m a little better, I get kicked back to reality. … I’m the same old person I used to be, just trapped in this non-working body.”

He daydreams about traveling, flying to Vegas, hunting whitetail deer in the Midwest, of one day having “a healthy wife and kids” so his mother can have a grandbaby.

He tries to heed his father’s advice: “Don’t look back.”

But it’s hard. He yearns for women, dating. He longs to get behind the wheel of his black ’07 Chevy pickup.

He hasn’t been in a convenience store in more than four years, a small thing maybe, but for him the everyday world has become foreign.

Mark says it sometimes “feels like you’re in a prison with no windows.”

Mounted on the walls in his room, there’s a deer head, a bass, a ring-necked pheasant, all animals he caught or shot years ago.

A few weekends ago, on a fishing trip in Alabama, a professional angler took Mark out on a boat. It was a charity event. Mark, using a specially mounted pole, reeled in a bass. But Mark got more out of it than that. He realized even more how his story is really “about everybody around me, all the help I get.”

At the fishing event, there was an auction. Mark saw a print of a painting he had to have. It’s an outdoors scene from an underwater perspective. The water is Coke-bottle green and, in it, a largemouth bass lurks beneath a patch of lily pads, mouth open.

Inches away, at the surface, a frog, his hind legs flailing, struggles to crawl onto a lily pad and escape. Or be swallowed.

The picture’s title? “Outcome Uncertain.”

Mark studies the stalking bass. It appears almost serpent-like -- scaly, flint-gray and glistening -- poised to strike in the center of the frame.

Mark then eyes the frog, its front end already aboard the lily pad, its hind legs thrashing, kicking up bubbles a swish or two below the surface.

The frog can’t see the fish, that its mouth is open.

Mark says, “I think he probably gets blindsided.”

Even so, the lily pad might just save him.

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.