Mind Catcher

i Also by John Darnton

The Experiment Neanderthal

ii

^ť

John Darnton

2

DUTTON

iii DUTTON

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

First printing, August 2002 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright ŠTalespin, Inc., 2002 All rights reserved

fA REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REG1STRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CAI'ALOGING-IN-PL'BI.ICATION* DATA

Darnton, John.

Mind catcher /John Darnton.

p. cm.

1. Brain-Research-Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y)-Fiction.

3. Neurosurgeons-Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.A727M56 2002

813'.54-dc21

2002025540

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Janson

Designed by Erin Benach

PUBLISHER'S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without
the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. 0

iv To the memory of my father, Byron Darnton, who died in New Guinea in
World War II

And to the memory of my mother, Eleanor Choate Darnton, who said she
knew of his death the moment it occurred

v

vi Mind Catcher

vii

1

Tyler pulled the blanket up to his chin, like a bib, and tried snuggling
deeper into the mattress. He turned onto his side, then his stomach,
then his side again. Nothing helped; he still felt antsy. His nerves
jangled. He was hot. His legs tangled up in the sheets and he kicked
them free. The blanket was too heavy, and he turned onto his back and
threw it down below his knees and lay there, sweating, exasperated, and,
as ever, taut with fear.

To him, six years old, sleep was a monster. It lay in wait for him every
night and ambushed him. It always caught him off guard, even though he
had long ago learned to expect it-and the expecting brought its own kind
of dreadful anticipation and made everything worse. He and the monster
wrestled, and the monster always won, dragging him down into a sea of
darkness and fear. Moments later, he would awake, bursting to the
surface and gasping for air as if he had been held underwater by a giant
hand. Cold water, cruel hand.

His parents called it "night terrors"-he had heard them talking about it
once in the living room-and they assured him it would pass. They stayed
in his room, read to him until their voices were hoarse, put in a
night-light that was supposed to alleviate his fears but whose ghostly
glow cast frightening shadows and changed the horses on the wallpaper
into beasts. Nothing helped. Every night, in the darkness under his bed,
the monster waited.

And tonight was worse. Tonight his mother was away on a business trip.
He didn't know where she was going, only that she was going to take an
airplane. It felt horrible, her being away from home-the universe was
out of kilter. It created an emptiness so large that he took it inside
himself and felt it as if something were physically

2

wrong, a painful bloating. He clutched his koala bear, which she had
bought him on her last trip, and rubbed his cheek upon the soft fur,
already wearing off in patches, and smelled the warm musky smell.

At least his father was there. That helped a bit, a comforting thought.
Earlier, his father had tucked him in and, like every night, sitting on
the edge of the bed had told him a Jingo story. They always began the
same way. Jingo, a little boy "very much like you," felt bored. So he
reached under his bed, and there he found his magic pebble. He rubbed it:

And then something very strange happened. At first he felt hot, and then
he felt cold. And then he felt warm, and then he felt cool. And finally
he felt just right. Then he opened his eyes and he was standing before a
huge white mansion. He went up the front steps and opened the front door
and before him was a long corridor, stretching as far as he could see.
And on both sides there were door after door after door. It was the
house of a thousand rooms. So Jingo walked down the corridor and opened
one of the doors. . . .

Each night a new room, a new adventure. Lions and tigers and jungle gyms
and tree houses and circuses and dodgem cars and hurricanes and
sandstorms. Sometimes Jingo shrank down to the size of an ant, and other
times he grew up to the height of a house, and sometimes he was a knight
or an Indian, and other times he was an astronaut or a caveman. But
always, the stories ended the same way: Just as the situation became
impossible, as the danger became too threatening or the excitement
became too much to bear, he spotted a small white door. He opened it
and, magically, there he was, back in bed.

Tyler loved the ritual. He loved it so much that he didn't tell his
father that he made up his own stories and that some of these scared
him. There was one that scared him more than all the others. Jingo was
lying down on a bed and he couldn't move, and people were around,
grown-ups who whispered and were worried. Everything was white. And then
he felt himself rising up and leaving his own body except that the other
people didn't notice it, and when he reached the ceiling he looked down
and he saw himself lying there, with the

3

people crowding around him. And at last he spotted the emergency door,
but it wasn't white. It was dark, grayish, almost black. And he knew
that whatever was on the other side was the most frightening thing in
the world. He knew he shouldn't open it, but he couldn't help himself.
He put his hand on the knob and began to turn it, and suddenly he heard
an awful sound: a loud, roaring, frightening sound, as if the whole room
was collapsing behind him and everything was being sucked out through
the narrow opening. And the door began to open wider and wider. At that
moment, something always happened-he gave a start or, if he had been
sleeping, he awoke quickly, just in time. And so he never saw what was
on the other side of the door, except that he knew deep down that it was
horrible.

Tyler tried to think of other things.

His mother was away. That was bad; it filled him with emptiness. Still,
the thought of a plane excited him. He had been on a plane last year,
flying to Florida. He blushed when he remembered how scared he had been
when his father told him they were "flying," because he didn't know how
to fly, and how when the suitcases were brought to the hall he had
hidden behind the couch. Then his mother found him, and when he finally
admitted the reason for his fear, his father laughed and Tyler felt
ashamed. But she hugged him so tightly it almost hurt; she wrapped her
hands around his face with her palms holding his cheeks and kissed the
hot tears that streamed down them. And he smelled her smell, that
indescribable fragrance that always shot him in the heart because it
meant that everything was fine, it was all going to be all right because
she was right there with him.

The plane, it turned out, had been fun-crayons and coloring books, white
cotton clouds out the window as far as he could see, and the pilot in a
crisp uniform walking down the aisle and putting a hand on his shoulder.

Tyler was an only child, but he didn't feel lonely. His world was a snug
clapboard house and trim backyard in Westport, Connecticut, and he
peopled it with all kinds of imaginary creatures. A wall in his room
contained shelves that were piled high with toys; his dresser had decals
of Disney characters. Outside, underneath a bush that hugged the house,
in a space where he alone could fit, he had created a miniature town; he
cut roads in the earth with the heel of his hand, stacked twigs as
woodpiles next to the doors of the small houses his

4 father made, and sometimes maneuvered the metal Matchbox cars into
sensational wrecks. He loved climbing trees-especially a friendly old
pine tree in the center of the yard-and sitting high on the swooping
branches, watching the neighborhood and swaying in the breeze.

Then there was school and the friends he had already made: Johnny, tall,
scrawny, with a perpetually runny nose; Tim and Craig, the redheaded
twins; and Lovett, a quiet boy who had a comic book collection two feet
high. Tyler was striking-looking, with his olive complexion and shock of
dark hair and bright, burning eyes under long black lashes. At recess,
quick to devise games and fleet as a jackrabbit, he was at the center of
things. Other children took to him, fell naturally under his spell. Mrs.
Spangler, the first-grade teacher, often called upon him to read the
words in large print under the pictures splashed in color.

His life-if he had ever stopped to think about it in such terms- was
perfect. . . except for the nights, the horrible nights.

Tyler pulled the blanket up again and flopped over onto his stomach. His
face sank into the pillow so that it was hard to breathe. He bunched the
pillow under his right cheek. He could hear his father puttering around
in the bedroom next door and a snatch of music. That made him feel
better, less alone. Still, it wasn't the same with his mother gone. He
had no idea where she was or when she would be coming back or even-and
this was the fear that cut into him-if she would be coming back. When
she had knelt down to hug him goodbye in her gray suit, her long hair
sweeping over her shoulders as she gathered him into her arms and the
smell of her perfume covering every pore of him, she had said she would
be back "before you know it." But he had known, as he watched her
through the front window, stepping briskly down the walkway, that that
was just one of those meaningless things adults say.

Suddenly, he froze. He lifted his head off the pillow. Something was
there. He heard something.

He didn't know what it was. But this was not falling asleep, not
dreaming. Something was in his room.

Tyler held his breath. He could feel a presence. He could feel it
feeling him. His ears were flooded with no sound, and his heart jumped
around in his chest. Did he dare to turn around? Slowly, he

5

pressed his arms into the bed and raised his chest up and rotated his
head. He faced the door and opened his eyes-wide, in the dimly lighted room.

There she was!

Standing in the doorway, still in the gray suit. Mother!

The light came from behind her, covered her in an aura so that it was
hard to see her. But he knew instantly that it was she. And she was
looking down at him, longingly, with an expression so intense he had
never seen it before. It was love and pain mixed together.

The lower portion of her face was covered in shadow. He couldn't tell if
she was smiling at him. Something about her, her posture framed in the
light, slightly slumped, made her seem different... distant, sad.

He was scared. He was ecstatic. He wanted to hide from her and to get up
and run to her. He felt so many things all at once.

And then the figure in the doorway moved a bit, shifted to one side.
Slowly she raised her right arm. Her fingers were extended. They were
moving. Tyler knew the movement was important. Was she motioning to him
to follow her? Or was she waving good-bye?

The moment was frozen in time, forever. Then slowly she turned, took a
step away, looked back over her shoulder. And then she was gone.

Tyler blinked. He closed his eyes firmly, held them closed for a second,
and then opened them. There was nothing there, no remnant, not even a
shadow. He looked around the room. Nothing had changed; nothing had
moved. And the door-the door was firmly closed!

The next morning passed in slow motion. He stayed in his room much of
the time. The phone rang often and neighbors came to the house, speaking
in low voices. He heard a newscaster speaking solemnly on television. He
heard his father talking-a choked sob, so low he couldn't believe it
came from him.

And then, after a while, when he heard his father's footsteps in the
hallway, moving toward his room heavily, he already knew somewhere
inside what his father was coming to tell him. He knew that his life was
about to change forever. He wondered in the welter of emotions why it
was that he was able to keep standing, why

6 6 JOHN DARNTON

his mind was still working, why he was able to make out the patterns on
the wallpaper. And he wondered, as he clutched his koala bear and saw
the doorknob turn, exactly how his father was going to tell him, and for
some reason he didn't know he prepared himself to feign surprise.

7 I

The Accident

8

9

Cleaver leaned over the hospital bed to straighten the sheets on the old
man's bed and reached out to touch the back of his hand. He thought of
mopping the old man's brow, but there was no point. He was too far
gone-he probably wouldn't even feel it. And besides, with the helmet
stuck on his head and the wires and cords running out of it and feeding
into the apparatus that stood behind the bed, there was precious little
brow showing. Only a thin band of skin, wrinkled and hoary, gray as a fish.

He checked the breathing. It was labored and raspy, as if his chest were
filled with marbles.

Now that the moment was at hand, Cleaver was barely able to suppress his
excitement. He felt pleasantly, surprisingly, boyish. Who knows what he
would have done if he'd been alone-spun around in his doctor's cloak?
Clicked his heels in midair?

"Shouldn't be long now."

That was Felix, his young assistant, taking the old man's pulse across
the bed, holding two fingers on the limp wrist in a tableau that looked
posed-doctor at the bedside of a dying patient. It was pointless to take
the old man's pulse with the heart monitor blipping away in the corner.

Cleaver grunted in reply. "Think I'll go check on his wife," he said,
turning on one heel and walking toward the door.

He felt like being alone. A time like this called for something special,
a bit of introspection-a sense of history.

In the hallway, Cleaver detoured off the corridor to the old smoking
veranda. It was dimly lighted, but he knew the furnishings by heart: two
battered sofas, half a dozen metal folding chairs, a bridge

10

table whose brown coverlet had a ten-inch gash. The linoleum was
pockmarked with cigarette burns, and in one spot the tiles were missing,
dark squares with snakelike squiggles of dried glue.

It never ceased to amaze Cleaver how the state had let Pinegrove slide
into ruin. Here it was smack in the middle of New York City, stuck on
the southernmost peninsula of Roosevelt Island in the East River.
Tugboats and barges passed within fifty feet of it, and hundreds of
thousands of windows peered down upon it; yet few people could tell you
what the building was. For all that it mattered, he could be working in
a lunatic asylum from the Middle Ages.

Pinegrove had been built in the 1930s, a time when people still used
that word-lunatic-and contemporary literature spoke of it as a
progressive institution. But times changed; treatment of patients gave
way to warehousing them, and then, with the advent of psychoactive
drugs, to releasing them. In the 1960s, it emptied three entire wards of
confused schizophrenics onto the streets. The hospital workers' union
exerted sufficient muscle in Albany to keep two floors open, thereby
requiring staff, but the legislature provided scant money for upkeep.

Over the years, the place fell apart. The English garden that had been
the pride of an early administration choked with weeds. Trees that
needed pruning sometimes dropped leafless limbs on the roof, and twice
slabs of lethal slate fell to the ground. On the deserted top floor,
Cleaver had found water stains in the ceiling.

Now Pinegrove was a last redoubt. Its forty beds were for the most
severe and hopeless cases of mental derangement and brain impairment.
"If you can walk, talk, or lift a fork without killing someone, you
don't belong here," the chief attendant used to joke.

But at the same time neglect had conferred a cloak of anonymity for
Cleaver's work, which suited him fine. No bureaucrats to tangle with.

He walked over to the wall of thick glass planes threaded with wire
loops, protected by a metal grille running from floor to ceiling, and
looked out on the Manhattan evening. The cars rushing by on the FDR
Drive already had their headlights on, and the lights in the residential
towers above, gleaming in the dusk, made them seem closer.

His eye caught his own reflection. The white lab coat gleamed back at
him in the dark glass like a ghost, and he could see his face:

11

the large brow, the bald pate, the longish hair on the sides only
beginning to show flecks of gray. He was forty-two, and ready for fame.

He knew the experiment with the elderly couple would work. He had been
touched by them-a husband and wife, together for some thirty or forty
years, down on their luck, no place to live. But he had had to put his
compassion to one side. The old man was ready to die, and now waiting
for him to expire was like waiting for the sun to set. No more personal
than that.

Cleaver looked outside. Tiny waves lapped at the shore; the rocks were
shiny with slime that gleamed gold in the reflected light. An old sewage
pipe ran down to the water's edge. He almost shook his head. Pinegrove!
What a place for an experiment that would smash the frontiers of
neuroscience. Why did Science put so little stake in the surroundings
for her chosen moments? All those humble backdrops: the Manhattan
Project-the basement of a Chicago football stadium. The A-bomb-a cottage
in the Nevada desert. And now here, this place . . .

He stared across at the Manhattan skyline and found St. Catherine's
Hospital and frowned. Saramaggio was there-the world-famous Leopoldo
Saramaggio, chief of neurosurgery. Those talented enough to be on the
surgeon's team basked in the glory that he brought, and the adulation
bothered Cleaver. He worked side by side with the man; his expertise
with computers was essential to his operating room. Saramaggio needed
him more than he needed Saramaggio. Saramaggio hadn't realized that
yet-but someday he would.

He brushed the thought aside. At Pinegrove, he was the top dog. It might
be run-down and partially abandoned, but it was all his. And look what
he had done with it! He had begged and cajoled six million dollars from
medical foundations and installed a modern laboratory. All the equipment
he required was tucked away out of sight in the basement. And most
important, he had a steady supply of patients to study. They were the
hard core, the lost and rejected who had no hope of seeing daylight-the
paranoid who would never recover, the dysfunctional man with a syndrome
so bizarre it had no name, the boy born with the left hemisphere of his
brain missing. Some had been abandoned on the streets, others sent by
parents who were at their wits' end. If they once had had caring
families, those families visited for a while and then usually stopped
coming. Because-face it-the place was depressing.

12

All this meant that Cleaver had a certain necessary latitude in his
work. It was part of a long and venerable tradition in neuroanatomy:
Paul Broca's work with epileptics at the Bicetre Hospital in Paris in
the 1860s, Carl Wernicke's probings of the brain's receptive language
center in Germany in the 1870s, Wilder Penfield performing brain
surgeries under local anesthetic to draw his map of bodily sensations in
the 1940s and '50s. None of them had been constrained from their work.

And after all, there was nothing to be gained by studying normal people.
Advances were made through the injured and the freakish, as cruel as
that sounded. Great strides came from great men who did not shrink from
operating: They cut through flesh and sawed through skulls; they split
the brains of monkeys and planted electrodes deep into the cerebra of
cats. He thought of Friedrich Goltz, the young professor of physiology,
making a point about the localization of brain function at the Seventh
International Medical Congress in London in 1881-of how he had opened
his suitcase to pull out the bloody head of a dog that had undergone
four major brain operations. Now he had been a true scientist.

Someday, perhaps, Cleaver's name would be joined with theirs. He would
finish what they had started. For he was trying to do nothing less than
delineate and measure the most elusive of theoretical concepts: the mind
itself. Call it what you will: human consciousness, pysche, reason, what
the ancients called "the seat of the Soul," or theologians called the
soul itself. It constituted the first and last great riddle. For how
could the human mind examine itself? That would be like an eye trying to
view itself without the aid of a mirror.

But we know that it exists. We know it intuitively because we experience
it from within. Socrates, who didn't even know that the brain was the
center of mental functioning, who believed that the heart was the organ
that did the thinking, still knew that something ruled us that could not
be explained only in physical terms.

Cleaver called it anima, the quintessence of consciousness, that bit of
us that makes us aware of ourselves and separates us from everything
else. Derived from the Latin, the feminine of animus, the mind or
spirit; a word with a long and honorable lineage, including Carl Jung,
who'd depicted it as the true inner self. But Jung had merely theorized
that it existed. Cleaver was out to prove it. He was going to do so this

13

very night by setting a trap. If the anima exists in life, then it must
be released in death. And if it is released in death-and as folklore has
it, travels through space to make contact with a loved one at the
precise moment of expiring-then why not try to record it through neuro
imaging? And record it not just in the person dying-you'd expect to see
dislocations in brain activity there-but in the living person, the
receiver. Why not see if the living person registers extraordinary brain
activity at the exact moment the dying one gives up the ghost?

Cleaver broke his reverie and walked back down the corridor. He passed
the ward and peered through the thick glass window of the door. He could
see a dozen or so patients, some lying immobile in bed, others shuffling
around the room, and he could hear the muffled hubbub of monologues and
ranting and pitched discourse. He continued on past the nurses' station
and the bisecting corridor until he came to the room he was seeking.

Like the old man's room, it too looked out upon the river. He'd done
that on purpose when he set up the experiment: Why not at least give
them a pleasant view, he had thought-something ethereal, something
transcendent. He entered without knocking and fixed his eyes upon the
old woman. She wasn't looking at the view. She was propped up in bed,
pillows behind her, the helmet fixed in place from above, so that in the
dim light for a minute she gave the appearance of a hydrocephalic. Her
eyes were closed as if she were dozing. Felicity, the other assistant,
was fussing with the machines, checking the dials and taking readings.

"How's it going?" asked Cleaver.

Felicity startled at his voice. She had not heard him approach.

"Fine," she said, all businesslike. She had a clipboard close at hand,
though it was superfluous. The data on the machines were being recorded.

"And the TMR?" he asked, looking at the helmet that fit snugly around
the old woman's skull. The acronym was short for transcranial magnetic
receiver, a device that recorded the electrical impulses of brain
activity. It was almost as efficient at picking them up as a
positron-emission tomography scan and had the advantage of being
portable. The information was sent into a computer, and the turn of a
knob could bring the cross section of any part of the brain onto a
two-foot-wide screen.

14

"Seems to be okay. It's quiet at the moment."

"Of course it's quiet," came a rasping voice from the bed, surprisingly
assertive. "You told me to rest."

Cleaver was amused by the old woman's spunk. She had always seemed
stronger than her husband. He walked over and put a hand on her
shoulder, the way long ago he had once seen a professor at NYU Medical
School do it during rounds with his students. In response, the woman sat
up straight, so that a pillow fell into the crevice behind her back. She
looked up at Cleaver.

"Elmore," she said, in a plaintive voice, her face crinkled with worry.
"How is he?"

Cleaver debated his answer. It wouldn't do to let her know too much. He
didn't want to alert her-it could throw everything off. But that was
unlikely. Besides, there was no point in lying to her.

"He's close to the end. He's not in any pain, and he's lying there
quietly. But I don't think he has much more to go."

The woman bit her lip and turned away, facing the river. Cleaver walked
over to the machine and twirled a knob. The screen filled with an
exterior view of her brain, rising up like a twisted fist at the wrist's
end-the folds of the cortex, the tight little knot of the cerebellum,
the nub of the brain stem. He turned two more knobs and pulled up cross
sections, thin slices cut along the sagittal, coronal, and axial planes.

Right away he could read her state. Her emotions were causing little
bursts of activity that registered in glowing colors from the dye she
had ingested. It always reminded him of storms, heat lightning
illuminating clouds over the ocean.

That was good. That was just what he wanted to see. Any time now, surely
within an hour or two, the moment would come.

As it turned out, Cleaver had to wait considerably longer. Time enough
for him to have slipped into his office, taken off his shoes, and
grabbed a catnap on the old leather couch, had he not been too excited
to sleep. Even time enough to have walked up to the Queensboro Bridge
and caught the aerial tramway to Manhattan for a solitary dinner, had
not the prospect of being so far away filled him with anxiety. As it
was, Cleaver tried to read but couldn't concentrate. He watched
television alone in the lounge and then went out for a nighttime stroll.

He was walking on the Queens side of the island when the call

15

came. He had been negotiating the crumbling promenade, a whiff of river
muck in the air. A salt-tinged breeze blew past the red Pepsi-Cola sign,
and he could hear it whistle faintly as it passed under the bridge to
the north. Then, with a shrillness that startled him, his beeper went
off. He raced back to the building, slipping on the lower step and
banging his left shin, which caused him to curse loudly.

He arrived on the third floor, breathless.

"Well," he said to Felix in an accusatory tone, as if his assistant had
been the one wandering around outside in the dark.

"His vitals are falling fast. He's circling the drain."

"All right. I'm going to the other room. You know what to do- remember,
watch the brain activity and send a signal at the exact moment of death
as near as you can determine it, not a moment before and not a moment
later."

Felix nodded.

Cleaver dashed down the corridor, the tails of his lab coat flapping
behind him. When he got there, he could scarcely believe his eyes: The
old woman was asleep.

"Wake her up," he said, more sharply than he intended.

Felicity jumped up from a chair and ran over to the bed, but the old
lady had already opened one beady eye.

"No need to shout," she said. "I'm up."

Cleaver was tempted to apologize, but he held his silence, for already
he had noticed something. The old lady's other eye had opened, and now
both of her eyes were suddenly widening with alarm and she was looking
over into a far corner as if she were seeing a terrible vision. Her
bottom lip was trembling.

He looked behind her bed. The small light, behind her and out of her
sight, was illuminated. Felix had sent the signal. Cleaver turned his
head slightly and saw that the screen was registering all of the
electrical impulses that she was firing off, explosions of color here
and there; they were bouncing around like fireworks, but he could
already see that they were concentrated deep below the cortex, close to
the hypothalamus. The switch Felix had thrown had also registered in a
wavy line on the screen; now there would be a chronological record of
the activities of both brains, perfectly synchronized. The video cameras
in both rooms were also operational.

The old woman's lips trembled more and formed themselves into

16

a tight, dark hole. She began to speak-a low, almost guttural sound of
amazement.

"Elmore," she said. "Elmore." She repeated the name over and over. She
was now staring at the corner, leaning toward it as if she were being
pulled by a strong magnetic force.

"I see you, I see you," she said. "What is it? What is it, darling?" She
was oblivious to them, totally absorbed in the vision, lost in another
world.

Cleaver felt his own pulse racing. Everything was going perfectly. He
was getting it all down, a record to be scrutinized and analyzed and
made sense of.

The old woman stared at the corner for several minutes, but stopped
talking, only nodding. Then she sank back against the pillow, her eyes
still wide but no longer focused on the apparition. Her features were
hard to read-upset but also close to rapturous. Whatever secret she had
learned, she was keeping it to herself. Cleaver could see on the screen
that Elmore was brain-dead.

It was over.

He collected himself and puffed himself up and looked portentously
across at Felicity, who appeared dumbstruck. She coughed lightly, as if
to bring herself back to earth.

"Well," Cleaver said, "you have just witnessed something extraordinary.
Do you know what you saw?"

She stared at him and shook her head mutely.

"Psychic contact at the moment of death, fully recorded for the first
time. What do you say to that?"

"Gosh," said Felicity, leaving her mouth open.

Cleaver looked away. Gosh, he repeated to himself. He shook it off.

It had been a great experiment, he thought. And like all great
experiments, deceptively simple. It was like a nut inside a shell.
People had talked about the phenomena of death visitations for
centuries, probably for millennia-all those old wives' tales about
seeing a loved one at the stroke of dying, about people separated by
vast distances who come together at the final instant, about near death
experiences in which people rise up from their own bodies and move
toward a blinding light. There had to be something to them. But only
Cleaver had thought to try to measure the phenomenon-the neurobiology of
the soul-and devised a means to do so.

17

For as long as Cleaver could remember, his intellectual life had been
driven by two concepts. One was the idea that the mind could exist
outside the body; that the thoughts, fears, dreams, nightmares, and
emotions had an independent existence. He had just proved that. The
other was the idea that machines and man could merge-through that
disembodied mind-to create the new man of the future. For if the mind
could be measured-if it existed as something that traveled from one
point to another-then it could be captured. And if it could be captured,
it could be yoked to the endless potential that machines provided-a sort
of divine spark of guiding intelligence that would make the Creation
look like child's play.

He looked over at Felicity and sighed. Too bad he didn't have a lab
assistant befitting the moment.

No Mr. Watson, come here, I want you. No What hath God wrought?
Instead-what did he get?

Gosh.

18

Kate Willet had resisted putting the name-tag sticker on the breast
pocket of her new pin-striped suit. The truth was, she was not big on
guided tours, had never been one of the crowd.

Certainly, she was not one of this crowd. She looked around as they
filed onto the bus-mostly women with frizzy hair who were too old for
the short skirts they wore and men whose meticulous grooming (one had a
black goatee with not a single hair out of place) suggested
self-satisfaction. Practicing members of the American Psychological
Association.

A lanky young man her age, in his mid thirties, sat down beside her. She
flashed him a smile, more of a half-smile, just to be friendly. It was
her small-town upbringing.

"Some trip, huh?" he said, pointing out the window with his chin.

She took it as a reference to the earlier tour of the South Bronx. The
day was hot and the fire hydrants were opened; small dark bodies ran
through the gushing water, screaming.

Kate nodded noncommittally. She had lived in the city for only three
weeks and was trying hard to adjust. What she liked most so far was the
street life. Besides, children made her homesick for normalcy-when you
looked at them, they looked back.

A large hand came across her lap, open and eager.

"Butterworth," he said. "Fred Butterworth."

She had to turn toward him to shake it.

"Kate Willet."

There was a slight pause.

"So, Kate. Where's your practice?"

19

"Afraid I don't have one," she replied. "I'm not a psychologist. Or a
psychiatrist. I'm only along for the ride."

"Oh, and what do you do?"

"I'm a neurosurgeon."

"Oh."

She could recognize the disappointment. Her profession tended to stop
people in their tracks, especially men. It made them defensive.

"I've transferred to New York only recently, after residency in
California. I'm at St. Catherine's."

He perked up.

"Under the famous Saramaggio, I presume."

"That's right."

He actually whistled, softly.

"What do you think of him?" he asked.

"Well, he's certainly brilliant. Good hands, as they say. If I can be
half as good someday, I'll be happy."

Her seatmate nodded, and she fell silent. The truth was, she was nervous
about meeting Saramaggio again. The one interview had gone well
enough-in fact, he had been charming-but his reputation as an implacable
perfectionist was scary. She loved medicine and wanted nothing more than
to excel at it. That was why she had come east to work with one of the
best neurosurgical teams in the country. But something about him was
off-putting, a whiff of the god complex that afflicted so many
neurosurgeons. She had come to dislike her previous head of surgery in
San Francisco, a man who was technically superb, but had had an ego the
size of a beach ball. When all was said and done, he didn't really seem
to care about his patients. He rarely saw them after the operation, and
they in turn rarely sent in snapshots after their recovery. It was
disillusioning to think that genius might be a question of manual dexterity.

She shared none of this, of course, with Mr. Butterworth. She stole a
sideways glance at him. He wasn't bad-looking, but his eyes looked dull.
Like a number of women, including her Shakespearean namesake, Kate was
choosy: She could be interested only in a man who matched her
intelligence. She needed him to have that hard edge, a playful acuity
that could race alongside her so that not everything had to be spelled
out. It was the flint that sparked flirtation in her.

20

Her standards were high, but not, she believed, unreasonable. She had
come close to love once or twice, close enough to feel something but
without going down in flames, and she was beginning to despair that she
would find the right person. Her loneliness was accentuated by New York,
which overwhelmed her. On the sidewalks, people walked so fast they
seemed to leave her standing still, and once or twice in the evenings,
rubbing her sore feet after a day of exploring, she worried that she had
made a mistake in coming here. She had left behind a good man in San
Francisco-Harry. He was witty and kind, so presentable that her
girlfriends joked that they wanted to be notified the moment a breakup
was imminent. But she had begun to suspect he wasn't for her, and now
the separation told her she was right.

"This next place we're going-Pinegrove-it's really supposed to be
something," said Butterworth. "Like some kind of horror show."

His face clouded over.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he continued. "Your place-St. Catherine's. Isn't that
affiliated with Pinegrove?"

"Yes," she said. "That's the reason I'm here. I want to see it."

"Good. That makes sense. Say, here, let me give you this."

He lurched up, half standing, and fished into a pocket, brought out a
card and handed it to her. She looked at it:

Frederick Butterworth

The Hospital Supply Corporation

Flushing, Queens, NY

From ambulances to X-ray machines, If we don't have it, we know where to
get it.

"Thanks," she said. She put the card in her purse and turned to look out
the window, trying to figure out the route. When she turned back to talk
some more, she had to smile. Mr. Butterworth was asleep, and he didn't
awaken for half an hour, not until the bus turned a corner around a
warehouse in Queens and ground down to second gear to cross the tiny
bridge onto Roosevelt Island.

21

After the tour, the visitors filed into a large room painted in
institutional green, with chairs arranged in ragged rows. They were as
quiet as children at a hanging. Perhaps they were shocked by the wards
they had just visited-the antiseptic smell that assaulted the nostrils,
the jabberings and harsh sounds of chairs scraping against the floor,
the patients wandering aimlessly around or sitting and rocking on their
beds. One patient, a man in a crew cut with an empty grin and darting
eyes, had open sores on his head.

As psychologists and psychiatrists, they had spent time in wards that
housed the mentally ill and were hardened to the sight of people
babbling back at their own hallucinations. And many of these patients
were like those in state institutions anywhere. But it was the whole
package that was hard to take-the old stone building, the vacant floors
echoing with the sound of their footsteps, and finally the wards themselves.

Kate sat near the back on a wooden chair whose right arm spread before
her, a test-taking chair. She was angry at what she had seen. It wasn't
that the patients looked as if they were being mistreated, just that
they had been so clearly shunted off to a place where they could be
forgotten. She imagined them living their lives out one long day at a
time in these dreary surroundings, meaninglessly and endlessly, without
respite.

Butterworth sat on her right, and she could see that the brief tour had
had a sobering effect on him. They exchanged looks, and he raised his
eyebrows and slowly shook his head from side to side.

A man in a doctor's coat was introduced, Dr. Warren Cleaver. Kate
recognized the name. He worked with Saramaggio and was said to be
brilliant, with degrees in both artificial intelligence and neurology.
Rumors dogged him-that he was more of an automaton than his
computers-but she had put some of that down to envy because he was
clearly going places. What was he doing working with mental patients?
she wondered. She examined him-a short stocky man with a large head and
a bald dome, like Lenin, she thought.

The administrative assistant, a gray-haired woman with thick spectacles,
did most of the talking. She described Pinegrove's history, talked about
the budget and how hard it was to wring more money out of the state and
to find competent nurses and attendants. Money

22

was hard to come by; clearly the administration was working against
formidable odds. Her recitation of complaint came in a passionless monotone.

She mentioned that Pinegrove had received a research grant. A hand shot
up in the front, and a man stood to ask a question: "What research do
you do here? Do you specialize?"

She glanced over at Cleaver. "I think it's fair to say that our program
is drawn up by Dr. Cleaver and it closely parallels his interests."

"And what are you interested in, Dr. Cleaver?" asked the man.

Cleaver walked over and stood before the group, his hands resting behind
his back.

"First, let me say that I sense some of you are a bit shocked by what
you've seen here today. I hope so. That is why I want visitors to come
here. I want them to see what happens to an institution when the only
ones who care for it are those who work there. What you've see here
today is the emblem of society's negligence."

He looked around at their faces.

"Now let me try to address the question. What am I interested in? I am
interested in the human mind, pure and simple, in all aspects of it-how
it grows, how it develops, how it thrives, and how it breaks down.
Especially how it breaks down. Disease and misfortune are great teachers."

What an odd thing to say, thought Kate. But it was true.

Cleaver looked around again and continued.

"That's my reason for being here, to help some of these poor souls and
by working with them to help others. So far, my work has taught me two
things. One: The study of the abnormal is the path that will lead us to
understand the normal. By looking at something that is broken, we can
understand how it functions when it is whole. Two: The mind is truly a
marvel. It is capable of more things than we can ever imagine."

A woman in the back row raised her hand.

"Can you tell us what part of the brain you're working on now?"

"No, no, not the brain" he said. "I never said the brain"

She looked quizzical.

He walked over to a wall and pulled down a chart that depicted a cross
section of the brain. So the room was a classroom after all, thought
Kate. Cleaver looked around, apparently for a pointer, and,

23

failing to find one, turned to the chart and tapped it with a
forefinger. When he spoke, the words came out in a rush.

"This is the brain. The limbic system, the brain stem, the upper brain,
the cortex, the cerebellum-everyone here knows it all; you can see it,
name it, talk about it. It is something you can put on a piece of paper,
something you can cut into. That is not what I do."

He tugged a cord and sent the chart flying back into its case.

"What I examine is the mind. And I examine the difference between
them-the brain and the mind. That's the whole point-the difference.
People speak of the mind-body problem, but that misses the boat. Think
of the mind-brain problem. Where does one stop and the other begin?" He
looked searchingly at them. "What makes consciousness? What makes us
conscious?"

He was speaking like a college professor now.

"Descartes. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. What does that
mean? Most people misconstrue it. It doesn't mean that thinking is in
itself proof that I exist. It means that the knowledge that I am
thinking is proof that I exist.

"The riddle is not that we think. The riddle is that we know we are
thinking. Animals think, up to a point. Put a piece of meat on a table,
leave the room, and a dog will conceive of a way to get it. A rat can
negotiate a maze. That is thought-a crude form of thought, but thought
nonetheless. Yet it's limited. When a human hatches a plan or engages in
some activity, he is not only thinking, he is simultaneously aware of
the fact that he is thinking. Do you see?"

The woman who had asked the question nodded. Cleaver began pacing back
and forth at the front of the room.

"The brain is no big deal. We can figure out how it works. Blood
bringing nutrition to cells, neurotransmitters firing across synapses.
But what does that tell you? Not much. How does all this activity give
rise to a uniform collection of higher thought that can step aside and
examine itself? How does it give rise to consciousness? How-in other
words-does the mind come into being? For the mind is built of
consciousness. And the existence of consciousness is not derivable from
physical laws."

He was clearly getting carried away by his own thoughts.

"It is that sense of consciousness-or whatever you want to call it-that
creates a sentient being. It's what makes you realize that you

24

are you and nobody else, and that when you wake up tomorrow you'll still
be you. Because otherwise you'd be nothing, only a shadow. You'd live in
the exact moment, the precise present. There'd be no past, no future.
There would be thousands of yous, hundreds of thousands of yous, each
one for a different moment. What links you from one moment to the next
is consciousness. It's our mode of existence. It's the shell that keeps
us intact. Without it, we'd last about as long as a naked snail on a beach."

He came back to earth. The woman in the back row persisted.

"I thought your interest was artificial intelligence," she said. "Why do
you work to make machines intelligent if you believe that only humans
are capable of conscious thought?"

He didn't reply instantly, then said, "I didn't say that only humans
were capable of it. I said humans are the only ones with that capability
now."

"So are you working to provide it to machines? Do you think machines
will be as smart as we are someday-or smarter?"

"As smart as we are? Hard to say. I don't think so. Do you?" It was a
rhetorical question, and he didn't wait for an answer.

"Any other questions?"

Kate raised her hand.

"I was wondering about the patients here. Do you have any programs to
help them? Can you do anything to ease their suffering?"

Cleaver hesitated, then shook his head regretfully.

"I wish we could do something. But if there's anything we've learned as
scientists, it's that we have to choose our priorities. We have to
accomplish what we can, what's realistic. These people can't be
helped-not with our current state of knowledge. That's the painful
truth. So what we have to do is think about the ones in the future, and
how we can help them. Now, then. We promised you earlier that we'd be
taking a closer look at some of the more unusual cases here. Let's do
that now."

He sat down, and there followed a parade of patients with bizarre
symptoms. They were ushered in by the administrative assistant, who
seated them one by one in front of the group. She had the timing of a
ringmaster-and the sensitivity as well, thought Kate. Some of the
patients appeared heavily drugged, and others were clearly confused by
the ordeal.

25

The first was a mousy-looking man in his fifties with long stringy hair
and darting eyes. He was presented as a classic paranoid. He had, it
turned out, killed his family-a wife, a seven-year-old son and a
three-year-old daughter. It was, he said, "the voices" that had told him
to do it.

The assistant questioned him. When did the voices begin? Many, many
years ago. And had they stopped? He hesitated, then nodded yes. Bits of
spittle formed around his mouth.

"Really? Totally stopped?" she pressed.

"Yes. Almost always. Except. . . except when I wear the goggles."

Cleaver took the floor and expanded on "the closed system" of paranoid
reasoning-how the mind searched for an explanation, no matter how
far-fetched, to account for something deeply unsettling like auditory
hallucinations. Once the outrageous premise was accepted and accounted
for, then everything else followed in logical order. The house was
solid; it was the foundation that was cockeyed.

"In this instance, we have a disruption in the auditory center of the
cortex. The paranoid incorporates that into a larger scheme of
rationalization, attributing it to nonexistent goggles, and proceeds to
act as if that were an unshakable truth. He follows the delusion
wherever it leads him, even to murder."

Kate didn't like that they were discussing the patient in front of him,
as if he didn't exist. She looked at the man, but when he gazed back at
her, he rapidly dropped his eyes and she looked away.

There followed half a dozen others-patients with severe memory loss,
multiple personalities, frontal lobotomies, and various personality
disorders.

One woman in her thirties with long blond hair would have been beautiful
but for the fact that her face registered no feeling whatsoever. She did
not respond to questions and sat in the chair immobile, but her eyes
moved and slowly surveyed the audience.

"Akinetic mutism," said Cleaver. "A rare disorder, sometimes
misdiagnosed as catatonia. You see how her eyes can track movement. She
is alert, in the sense of being aware of her surroundings, but she does
not react to them. She is sluggish and will lie without moving for
hours. She is in what we call a coma vigil.

"Patients who recover-which is extremely rare-describe the

26

state as one of unending eternal listlessness. Nothing reaches them.
Free will does not exist. Life goes by like a movie."

The woman was led slowly away, and a garrulous young man took her place.
He introduced himself as Bruce, and to all intents and purposes appeared
to be normal. Then the questioning began. He was raised, he said, in a
small town in Michigan, but he didn't miss it particularly and he didn't
want to return because "both of my parents are missing."

"But, Bruce, how can they be missing?" asked the administrative
assistant. "Both of your parents came with you to check you in last
year. They visited you two months ago."

"No, those weren't my parents," he replied matter-of-factly. "They're
perfectly nice people. But they're not my parents. They're impostors."

Cleaver stepped forward and addressed the visitors.

''Impostors is the key word," he said. "It occurs over and over in
patients with Capgras's syndrome. Bruce here is not being paranoid. In
many respects, he is a normal young adult. He is simply convinced that
the people who are closest to him have been taken away and replaced by
people who look just like them.

"It's my contention that this disorder resides in a malfunctioning of
the amygdala. When Bruce looks upon a loved one, he lacks an emotional
response. He literally feels nothing whatsoever. The seat of his
emotional attachments has been short-circuited. And yet he knows on an
intellectual level that he should be feeling something. How is it
possible to look at your father and mother and feel absolutely nothing?
The mind has to come up with an explanation. So the explanation is they
are not really your parents-they are stand-ins, impostors."

"What you are looking at is a pathology of the emotional self. I believe
it is caused by damage in the limbic system. How else could the
abnormality be so minutely specialized? Bruce only spots an impostor
when he is actually looking at a human face. If he talks to his father
on the telephone, he has no doubt that he is talking to his real father.
To me, that indicates a disruption in the pathways between the visual
area of the cortex and the amygdala."

The man who had asked the first question interrupted.

"Freud would disagree with such a mechanistic interpretation,"

27

he said. "He had a view of the human personality that based it in social
relationships. It was-if I may say so-a more complicated approach. More
sophisticated."

"Occam's razor," Cleaver replied. "In science, the more complicated the
theory, the less correct it tends to be. I wonder what Freud would make
of Phineas Gage."

The questioner looked chastened. Kate knew the name; it was one of the
most famous cases of personality transformation. In 1848, Gage, a
Vermont railroad worker, had been caught in a dynamite accident that
sent an iron bar through his left cheek and out the top of his head.
He'd survived, but with his prefrontal cortex damaged, causing him to
undergo a mysterious metamorphosis from a law-abiding, churchgoing
family man to a lying, drinking, cheating reprobate.

"May I ask," continued Cleaver, fixing the questioner with his dark
eyes, "do you believe in God?"

"Well, yes, I do."

"I would be willing to bet that if I could get you on my operating
table, I could seek out a certain tiny portion of your left frontal lobe
and remove it, and when you woke up, you would find that your belief had
deserted you. And who knows-perhaps even your belief in Freud."

There was a ripple of laughter at that.

He looked around and added, "And now, if there are no further questions ..."

So saying, Cleaver thanked everyone and walked out the door.

After a few minutes, the administrative assistant led the tour toward
the exit, but along the way, a small group clustered around the window
of a door, peering inside the room. Kate joined them and gave a small gasp.

"My God," said the man next to her, shocked. "What's wrong with him?"

The room was dimly lit and she could not see very well, but she did not
care to get a better view. There was one bed in the room and a young man
supine on it. His wrists and ankles were tied to the sides of the bed
with thick white straps, and he was lying totally stiff, as if he were a
piece of wood. His eyes were open and staring straight up at the
ceiling; they did not move. Nor did he seem to blink. His skin was ashen
gray. His shirt was off, and when Kate looked closely, she saw that his
upper torso and his arms and his ankles and his face were

28

covered with wounds-deep angry red gouges running in parallel lines. He
had evidently inflicted them upon himself with his fingernails.

The administrative assistant came up behind them. When she spoke, Kate
almost jumped out of her skin.

"That is a most unfortunate man," the woman said. "He has an extremely
rare illness called Cotard's syndrome. It is, Dr. Cleaver believes,
closely related to the Capgras's syndrome that you saw earlier, only a
much more severe form. In this case, the patient has no emotions
whatsoever. He is totally without affect.

"The patient is stripped of all signs of life. In fact, he becomes
convinced that he is actually dead, and it is impossible to rid him of
this peculiar delusion. At times he will smell his own flesh rotting.
And at other times he becomes convinced that worms are crawling over his
rotting corpse, and he scratches himself without ceasing. For that
reason, he must from time to time be restrained."

Kate couldn't wait to leave. Butterworth was waiting for her at the
nurses' station.

"Pretty grim, huh?" he said.

She nodded, preoccupied. She was looking over his shoulder, searching
for someone.

"Excuse me," she said. "I won't be a minute."

She went over to the administrative assistant and pulled her to one
side. They talked briefly, and the woman frowned; then Kate came back,
and the group gathered in the lobby to leave.

"What was that all about?" asked Butterworth.

"Nothing, really," said Kate. "I noticed that the man back there had a
sore that looked infected. I told the administrator, and she said they'd
look into it."

"She didn't look too happy about it."

"No," agreed Kate. She seemed preoccupied again.

29

All the way down the corridor, even through the heavy door that sealed
with a tiny sucking sound when it closed, Saramaggio could hear the
craniotome. High-pitched and piercing, it drew a distinctive hollow
sound from the material that was being cut by its rotating bit-the
resistant bone of the human skull. The sound was unmistakable-oddly
enough, even to people who had never heard it before.

Saramaggio was infamous for having his business calls switched to the
operating room during surgery. A nurse would hold the receiver to his
ear while he held arms encased in sterile gloves in front of him like a
sleepwalker. Meanwhile, ten feet away, the assisting surgeon would be
opening a bone flap in the skull, standing above the patient, whose head
was draped in green sterile cloths that tented the face. He would pin
the square flap of skin from the brainpan to the Layla bar. Then his
foot would strike the pedal, he would raise the long black drill, lower
it gingerly, and that earsplitting sound would come screaming off the
walls. Sooner or later, the caller-a credit card representative or a
bank loan officer or stockbroker-would ask, with that telltale hint of
dread in the voice, "By the way, what is that sound in the background?"

"You don't want to know," he delighted in answering.

Leopoldo Saramaggio-Leo to his friends-was nothing if not dramatic. He
liked being talked about, being at the center of things, and being in
charge. From the start, he had been blessed with the ease of privilege.
The scion of a family who owned a ranch in Nebraska, which he called "a
farm" to give an up-from-the-bootstraps arc to the narrative of his
life, he'd gone to Yale undergrad and

30

Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins for residency without so much
as a blink. He was a good surgeon, very good, and probably would have
risen quickly even if he hadn't been in all the good clubs, from Skull
and Bones to the Knickerbocker. Now middle-aged, he was in danger of
becoming a cliche, the high-living, fast-talking, dashing brain surgeon.
He drove a black Ferrari, though without vanity plates, which he judged
to be tacky. He had a pilot's license, and a plane was his to use at any
time, courtesy of a CEO whose aneurysm he had repaired. Any number of
places in New York happily threw open their doors to him-restaurants
where he was not permitted to pay the check, grand-tier boxes at the
Met, courtside seats at Knicks' games.

It was amazing how many of the wealthy and well-connected sooner or
later required the intervention of a top brain man in some medical
emergency. Leopoldo-please, you can call me Leo, he would say right off
the bat-accepted these tributes as his due. They were not graft but
tokens of esteem. The difference was important to understand, for what
motivated Leo Saramaggio was not money, though he did not lack for it,
but the look in the eye of a person whose life he had saved. Or the way
the husband or wife bolted upright in the waiting room and practically
ran to him, anxious but hopeful. There was no experience like it; Zeus
himself couldn't have felt a deeper pleasure.

At St. Catherine's, it was an open secret that Saramaggio was the power.
If there were ever to be a showdown between him and Calvin Brewster, the
hospital administrator, there was no doubt who would come out on top.
But a showdown was the last thing likely to happen; Brewster wouldn't
let it come to that, no matter what Saramaggio did. And the chief
neurosurgeon could be imperious and demanding. He wanted only the best
equipment to work with, hang the cost, and the best assisting surgeons
to work under him, salaries to be commensurate with talent. He thought
nothing of barging into Brewster's office to complain if the paper towel
dispenser in the residents' bathroom was empty.

In Saramaggio's life, there was only a single dark cloud. At the moment,
it was on the far horizon and no bigger than a man's hand, but he knew
it was going to be growing larger. He had hit fifty-five two weeks ago,
and though he was fit and played tennis (twice a week,

31

31

with a savage competitive edge), he was beginning to feel his age. Not
so much physically as psychologically. It took the form of a quiet
desperation, like someone's footsteps at his heels. Yes, he was an
accomplished and well-known surgeon, but what he needed, what he craved,
was something that people would remember him for-a feat of medical
greatness. And he was working toward this with every fiber of his being.
He had the idea. With Cleaver's help, he had the equipment. Now all he
needed was time for research and experimentation, and then, one day, the
right patient.

Zeus was born immortal; the rest of us have to work at it.

"You'll learn your way around here in no time," said Saramaggio, talking
over his shoulder. He was speaking to the new resident surgeon, Kate
Willet, showing her around.

They entered his office, the walls covered in diplomas, plaques, awards,
and VIP photographs.

He knew all about her, of course. Her file, at least an inch thick and
bursting with excellent reports, had been sitting on a corner of his
desk for weeks, and he had interviewed her himself after she'd won the
resident of the year award at Moffitt Hospital in San Francisco. But
when she'd reported for work this morning, he had been
uncharacteristically reserved and standoffish, almost as if they had
never met. Perhaps he acted that way because she was so young and
attractive. Having her around would be pleasing but also distracting.

Saramaggio had a reputation as a Lothario. He was married to a
long-suffering woman named Joy, and their hundred-year-old Colonial on
Round Hill Road in the back country of Greenwich, Connecticut, was home
to them and their three children. Still, someone at his level and of his
creative temperament could hardly be expected to be a slave to monogamy.
He slept with many of the nurses and interns but rarely carried on
long-term affairs. As soon as he'd seen Kate, when she'd walked into his
office for that initial interview, he'd known he would hire her, and
that sooner or later he would have to make a pass at her. But in truth,
he didn't feel up for it just at the moment. He was beginning to wonder
if affairs of the heart, with all the attendant emotion and Sturm und
Drang, didn't drag you down. He was starting to think that women took
away more than they brought.

"Today, of course, you can just observe. I like my team to get

32

accustomed to my rhythm. If you have any questions, just shout them
out-provided of course that you pick your moment."

She nodded.

"I'll let you choose the music for the OR today," he said, raising a
hand, palm upward. "As long as you don't choose any of those California
mantras. They drive me crazy."

How about rap? she thought subversively. Instead, she asked, "What
operation are you doing?"

"A lobectomy."

"Epilepsy?"

"Yes."

"Severe?"

"Well, we're doing surgery-aren't we?"

She blushed. The question had sounded stupid to her the moment she'd
said it. She asked it largely to keep the conversation going; she wanted
to impress him and show that he had been right to hire her. Now she felt
nothing but awkward. He was definitely no longer the charming man who
had interviewed her.

Saramaggio excused himself-he had to make a phone call-and so she
slipped out of his office. Waiting in the hallway with nothing to do
made her feel twice as uncomfortable. She pretended to study a large map
of Manhattan and parts of Queens tacked up on a bulletin board. It was
covered with red pins and white pins. She noted that the pins were
clustered around the housing projects of East Harlem.

"Looking for an apartment?"

The voice startled her, and when she turned around she saw a young,
thick-shouldered man in green scrubs. His skin was light dark; he was
Indian or Pakistani, and black chest hair grew in the V neck of his
jersey-like a little garden of shrubbery in a vest-pocket park, she
found herself thinking.

"No . . . I. . ." She felt flustered again. "I was just wondering ..."

"It's a map of our emergency cases. The information is called up from
ER. The red pins are for penetrating trauma, and the white pins are for
blunt trauma."

"I see."

"God knows why we keep it. I guess it'll make for a doctorate in public
health someday."

"And it tells you what neighborhoods to avoid."

33

"Yes. That could be."

He smiled and stuck out his hand with warmth that seemed genuine. He had
the slightest singsong of an accent.

"Singh. Gulchaman Singh. Call me Gully."

"I'm Kate Willet."

"I know. Word travels fast. Welcome to our team. I'm- assisting today."

Finally-a friendly face, she thought.

He led her to a large board partitioned off by operating rooms; it
listed a dozen operations: the time, patient, procedure, surgeon,
anesthetist, scrub nurse, and circulating nurse. They found the one for
Dr. Saramaggio. Room 7.

"We might as well go in," said Gully. "He likes to come in at the last
moment, just when the patient is fully opened and his expert touch is
required. Sometimes he's gone again before you know it."

She listened to detect a tone of criticism, but didn't find it.

They suited up and entered the OR. The scrub nurse was already there and
had lain out the sterile instruments on the Gerhardt table, high above
the operating bed. She stepped down from the platform to help Singh on
with his sterile gown and gloves and did the same for another man. The
anesthesiologist came and checked the array of gadgets that kept tabs on
the vital signs. Finally, the patient, a Hispanic-looking woman in her
thirties, was wheeled in on a gurney. She had been drugged with Valium,
but her eyes looked scared as she was transferred to the operating bed
under the powerful overhead lights. An intravenous line was started, and
she was sedated by an infusion of propofol, or "milk of amnesia," as the
residents called it. She was placed on a ventilator and taped down on
her back with one shoulder raised by padding.

The music, chosen by someone else, was Vivaldi-The Four Seasons.

The assisting surgeons worked quickly. They sterilized her shaved head
with iodine, turning the skin bright orange, then placed green sterile
clotfis across a retainer bar surrounding her forehead; her face
disappeared within a three-sided tent, open to the anesthesiologist.
They cut through the skin. There was a smell of burning as they
cauterized the frontalis muscle and separated it from the skull, then
used the screaming drill to cut a rectangular piece of skull that was
lifted off and handed to the scrub nurse, who placed it on the

34

sterile pads of her table. They extended the bone window, gnawing away
at the edges with sharp-edged pliers and then cut through the dura,
exposing the brain, a mass of blue-and-red bumps and blood vessels,
slightly pulsating. The monitor showed three lines: heartbeat,
respiratory rate, and temperature. One surgeon cut deep inside while the
other suctioned off the blood and rinsed the tissue every so often with
saline.

Kate stayed to one side. Soon she was joined by two other observers, a
boy and a college-aged woman, who looked about wide-eyed and talked
softly, as if they were in church. She gathered that they were guests of
Dr. Saramaggio, and she took their presence in the OR as another sign of
his ability to run roughshod over the rules.

After two hours, the surgeons began to map a portion of the cortex. The
anesthetist brought the patient up to consciousness, and Gully fixed a
sterilized coronet with sixteen electrodes suspended on thin, coated
wires onto her skull. He inserted one depth electrode into her amygdala
and another into her hippocampus, and the other assistant asked her to
count. A halting voice came from within the tent. She reached twelve and
then stopped for several seconds before going on to twenty. The
assistant held up a picture of a farm and asked her to name the animals
one by one. Several times, she opened her mouth, but no sound came out;
they stopped and made a notation.

"This is to preserve her language center," Gully explained to the
puzzled young visitors. "You know, she's an epileptic, so we'll be
removing the part of her brain that kindles the seizures. If the
electrode stimulates the spot and she can't talk, we know that we must
save it."

Saramaggio entered with a flurry, looking somehow dashing with a thick
microscopic lens over one eye. He acknowledged the visitors with a
princely nod, was helped into his gown, and peered into the brain. Then
he stood up and examined the MRIs pinned to an electronic board.

"The area of seizures is interesting in this case," he announced,
speaking to his young guests. "She has what we call absence seizures,
which means a total suspension of consciousness. She had one in my
office two weeks ago. She sat there and suddenly went blank-her face was
a mask, no emotion whatsoever. Then she stood up, opened the door,
walked out into the corridor, and sat in the waiting room. All

35

without any idea of what she was doing. Totally unconscious. When she
awoke several minutes later, she had no memory of any of it."

"Uncle Leo," said the boy. "She's awake now. How can she stand the pain?"

"She doesn't feel any pain. There are no nerve endings in the brain.
That makes sense, the way things in the body usually make sense: Nerves
exist to warn the brain of danger elsewhere. There's no reason for them
up here-anything gets this far, and the jig is up."

"But will she be okay? Missing all that brain that you're taking out?"

"I can't promise that she won't show any difference. But we try to
minimize it. That's what all that mapping was about. Above all, we try
to preserve language. Now in this case, she is a Latina and Spanish is
her primary language. We've decided to preserve English, which is her
secondary language. It's located in a different area, farther back in
the cortex."

"Why the English and not the Spanish?"

"She needs it for work," Saramaggio answered. "Naturally, we consulted
with her."

"What's she do?" asked the young woman.

Saramaggio looked over at Gully, who answered for him.

"She's an assistant computer programmer up in White Plains."

"But will she be any different? Will she be able to function just as well?"

"You never know," replied Saramaggio sententiously. "I've seen amazing
things. I've seen patients who lose half of the temporal lobe and if you
sat next to them at a dinner party, you wouldn't notice a thing. Others
... just a little piece and they're permanently changed."

Kate found it disconcerting that he was talking like that at the precise
moment that he was using a Penfield #4 to probe the soft brain tissue,
with its milkshake consistency. He was searching for a pathway to go
deeper. She could tell how dexterous his hands were; they moved not
quickly, but continually and efficiently.

"We used to do a lot of split-brains. When the epilepsy is so severe and
widespread, you have to separate the two hemispheres-you do it by
severing the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects
them. The left brain, you know, specializes in language and the right in
certain perceptual tasks, but it's not always so cut-and-dried.
Sometimes-and this is really strange-the two hemispheres

36

fight. I had one patient whose left and right arms would hit each other."

"No kidding," said the girl, suddenly interested. "What happened to him?"

"Luckily for her, it didn't last too long. The right hand won. Usually
the brain works it out-one of them becomes dominant. But sometimes they
still battle on in little ways, like one hand will always turn the
faucet on, and afterward the other turns it off-that sort of thing. A
tug of war."

He said something to Gully and pointed into the brain with his other
hand. Then he stepped back and watched while Gully cut out small slabs,
which were placed inside a sterilized dish and handed to the scrub
nurse. "You know, it's not really such an elegant piece of engineering,"
he continued. "It's jerry-built-billions of neurons thrown together and
trillions of synaptic connections, just trying to muddle through.
Pathways fire and misfire; electrical malfunctions occur; small strokes
happen. Parts spill over into other parts. Areas turn soggy or
short-circuit and no longer function, and other areas carry on.
Sometimes they do it well enough, and other times they don't-they get
overloaded and crash. And then all of a sudden you're hearing voices out
of radiators. And another part of your brain will tell you that it's
perfectly normal to hear the voices, and before you know it, the
radiators are telling you to do something; you're on a mission to
perform a heroic task-like assassinate the president."

Kate was impressed by his eloquence and decided to forgive him for his
rudeness to her earlier.

The OR was silent for a moment, except for the steady bleeping of the
monitors, until Gully said quietly, "Dr. Saramaggio, we're ready."

At that, the surgeon stepped into position, pulled his glasses down, and
was handed instruments. Now his hands were moving quickly, but still
with that same sense of certainty.

At one point, the probe dug deeply and the woman reacted with a quick
intake of breath. Then she gave a little sob.

"I don't want to go on," she cried out abruptly. Her voice, coming from
under the tent, startled everyone.

Saramaggio moved his hand slightly, and instantly she fell quiet.

"That reaction," he said calmly, "was caused by me. You see what

37

a little stimulation can do. I touched the amygdala. It's the gateway to
the emotions. Fight or flight. All of the senses-sight, taste, touch,
hearing-feed into the limbic system. But smell is the most powerful of
them all, the one that triggers aggression and sexuality and territorial
defense. And smell is hardwired straight into the amygdala." He paused,
then pointed to a plastic hose. "Ms. Willet, would you mind?"

Kate swabbed the brain with saline solution. She was working so intently
that she didn't pay attention to the new figure, decked out in scrubs,
who slipped into the room and stood to one side. Only when he took up a
position directly across from her and she looked into the eyes above the
mask did she realize who it was: Cleaver.

He wheeled over a bank of machines that she had never seen before.

What was he doing?

Saramaggio stepped aside, sat down, and lowered his mask. It lay under
his chin like a tiny hammock. He ushered his guests out of the OR.

Cleaver attached another coronet, this one with twenty-four electrodes,
and began to place them methodically at key points on the patient's brain.

"What's going on?" asked Kate.

"Just a little detour," said Saramaggio from his chair. "It's routine
experimentation."

She watched, disbelieving, as Cleaver finished attaching the electrodes
and turned to the bank of machines, adjusting knobs and reading dials. A
computer screen flashed on. The second assisting surgeon gave the
patient an injection.

"What's that?'" Kate asked.

Cleaver remained silent, so Saramaggio answered for him.

"Two-deoxyglucose. It's like glucose, but it can't be broken down by
metabolic activity."

Kate thought for a moment, then pieced it together. "And since cells
consume glucose for energy, they'll absorb it. The more active the cell,
the more it takes in. And if it can't be broken down, it'll accumulate.
And that way you can read it."

"Precisely," said Saramaggio, with a hint of admiration in his voice.
"Advanced autoradiography. You're a quick study."

38

"But it's only used on animals-and you have to kill them to read it."

"No, we have a sensor we can use."

"But what do you want to read it for?"

"For this," cut in Cleaver, holding up a thin stimulator.

He sank the stimulator deep beneath the cortex. Then another and
another, until seven were in place. He checked the machines and signaled
to the second attending surgeon, who gave another injection. The
computer screen danced to life, a cascade of throbbing pulses. Cleaver
and Saramaggio stared at it, spellbound.

Two minutes passed.

"Enough," said Saramaggio.

"Give me one more minute."

Saramaggio sighed.

The minute passed, and Cleaver signaled to the nurse, who lifted up the
shock pads, placed them on the woman's chest, and yelled "Clear!" With
the jolt, the patient's body twitched. The screen cleared.

"Perfect," pronounced Cleaver, who began removing the stimulators.

"Right," said Saramaggio. He stood up, examined the open skull, then
turned to Kate and said, "Close her up."

Five minutes later, the two men left the room.

Kate moved into position and worked quickly to stanch the wound, slowly
sewing it up. Gully helped her.

"Okay," she said. "I want you to tell me exactly what happened here."

Gully smiled uncertainly. "As he said, experimentation," he said. "They
do it fairly often on cases like this where the probes go deep and the
lower brain is laid out."

"But what's the point of the experiment?"

"Oh, that-I thought you knew. It's big."

"Big what?"

"That injection, the second one, it stopped her heart for ever so short
a time. And the computer, the one that was attached directly to the
limbic system, it took over for her. It was sending the signals that
made her breathe and her heart beat. When they turned it off and
administered the shock, that was to restart her own system."

39

"I've never heard of such a thing!"

"Yes, it's amazing. They've done it a dozen times now. They haven't
published it yet."

He could see that she looked disturbed.

"It's all legal," he said. "The patients all sign papers giving them the
right to do it."

"But what if something happens-the risk, if something goes wrong?"

Now he smiled.

"But it doesn't. It hasn't yet, not once."

"And why do it? What's it for?"

"It's Dr. Saramaggio's dream. Someday he will perform an operation
that's so very complicated he will need help keeping the patient alive
while he does it." Gully smiled. "And that is what the computers will do."

Long after she left the OR, Kate wondered about what Gully had told her.
What kind of operation could Saramaggio possibly have in mind?

40

Tyler was having a great day so far-the kind of day he used to dream
about on those dreary winter afternoons in school in New York City. It
was early July, which meant that most of the summer still lay ahead, a
prospect diat filled his thirteen-year-old body with a glow of
well-being. He didn't hate school exactly, and he knew he should
appreciate the fact that his father worked so hard to send him to Horace
Mann. It was just that he dreaded getting up in the half-light of
morning to take the subway up to the Bronx and that he felt so confined
in a classroom-at times his legs ached under the desk and he would
daydream himself out the window and imagine running across a field as
fast as he could, with the wind ruffling his hair, or lying on his belly
and watching an ant crawl up a blade of grass. And now he could do that
for real.

He was with Johnny, still his best friend from the early years in
Connecticut before Scott had sold the house and moved into the loft in
midtown Manhattan. Johnny's parents had moved into the city, too, and
they loved to go on excursions and often brought Tyler along. Now they
were spending a perfect weekend in the Catskills.

Tyler knew somewhere inside that they felt sorry for him because he was
motherless. Motherless. How he detested that word! It made him feel as
if he had some kind of illness. He had come to recognize a certain look
that people, especially women, cast in his direction when they thought
he was busy doing something and wouldn't see it. The look was sad and
pensive, with a moistness in the eyes that made them glisten. He didn't
like it at all-and Johnny's mom specialized in it. More than once, he
and Johnny had talked about how she seemed to be always trying to mother
him.

41

They were staying at a hotel called the Balfour, a wonderful ramshackle
old place made half of wood and half of stone, on the rim of a
crystal-clear glacial lake on top of a mountain. The hotel hadn't been
built according to a thought-out plan; it had simply expanded over the
years, adding on new wings in a helter-skelter way, the way a boy would
have built it. So it had dozens of hidden passageways and secret
compartments and dumbwaiters to hide in. Outside there was swimming in a
roped-off area of the lake with a small gray sandy beach, miniature golf
on a manicured lawn, a garden with a hedge maze, and scores of paths
that wound up to a stone tower that crowned the mountain summit. From
there you could look for miles in every direction over a blanket of pine
forests.

From the moment they had woken up, Tyler and Johnny had been racing
around. They had the run of the place, wrestling on the beach, dunking
each other in the cold water, and rolling down the hill like logs,
giggling. To get them out from underfoot, Johnny's mother had ordered
some sandwiches for lunch, put them in a backpack with some Cokes, and
sent the boys hiking.

They came to the trail that was nicknamed "the Teardrop," a scramble
that eventually wound its way to the top up and over giant boulders. A
notice at the bottom warned that it was risky, but also held out the
lure of adventure with names like "Skinny Man's Squeeze" and "the
Pancake" and "Don't Look Down Bridge."

They looked at each other.

"My dad said we shouldn't take this one," said Johnny.

"Mine would say the same thing if he were here. He can't stand for me to
take chances."

"What d'ya think?"

"I dunno. It looks good."

"Maybe we should flip," Johnny offered, pulling a quarter out of his jeans.

"Heads we go, tails we don't."

The coin caught a sliver of sunlight and glinted in midair before
landing on the dirt path. They bent over it. Tails.

"Shoot."

They decided to go anyway.

42

Halfway up, they stopped to rest. The climb was as advertised, if
anything even more difficult. Tyler had gone first, climbing up boulders
five feet wide, slipping into crevices and caves where he had to crawl
on his belly, and crossing ravines on narrow wooden ladders. Just when
he'd see an obstacle that convinced him he must have strayed from the
path he'd see another red arrow painted on a rock, pointing the way.

It had been exciting. When he negotiated a particularly arduous
passage-as when he'd squeezed through two boulders and then stepped
across a crack that ran down fifty feet-Tyler would yell back, "You're
not going to believe this!" Sometimes his echo would carry.

And a few minutes later, Johnny would reach that spot and Tyler would
hear him cry with delight from deep within the rock: "You're right! I
don't believe it." And then his voice would echo.

Tyler sat on a boulder and put his feet up on a facing one. He leaned
back and spread his arms behind him and faced the hot sun. The warmth
bathed him. Johnny sat nearby, took off his pack, and reached in for a
bottle of water. He took three or four long swigs and handed it to
Tyler, who drank some and poured a little into his cupped hand and wiped
it on his forehead. It dripped down the front of his T-shirt, feeling cool.

"This is great," Johnny observed.

Tyler thought of how his dad always worried about him and wouldn't let
him do anything that even hinted of danger. And those were the very
things that were fun. Only two weeks ago, they had had a fight about
rock climbing; a long time ago his father had promised that he could try
it, and now he was changing his mind. It wasn't fair.

Still, he said to himself, there's nothing dangerous about this. He
looked down at the jumble of rocks spreading below them, getting smaller
as they receded into the distance and disappearing below the treetops.
He could see the hotel, which looked suddenly small and oddly artificial
from this height, like a photograph. Except that he could see things
moving-on the lake there were miniature boats and even tiny figures bent
over, rowing. He suddenly had a flash of memory: the little houses he
used to play with under the bush near the back door of his home.

"It's more than great," he said quietly. "It's perfect."

43

Something in his tone made Johnny turn toward him.

"You sound weird."

Tyler smiled.

If Johnny only knew what he was thinking sometimes, if he could get
inside his head and see the thoughts that lodged there-not thoughts
exactly, but feelings, sometimes scary ones, but other times
comforting-then he would know just how weird he was. The feelings were
impossible to describe. They came at the strangest times, usually at
night when he was looking up at the star-studded sky. Something took
hold of him; it seemed to grasp him around the chest-he didn't know how
to describe it except to say he felt time breaking up into small pieces,
to open the way for something big and everlasting, and then something
inside him was soaring upward and outward and he was floating magically,
so that he was a part of everything and everything was a part of him.
That was the only way to describe it. A merging with something,
something huge and cosmic. The feeling didn't last long, a couple of
seconds, but it had an afterglow that he could hold on to, sometimes for
hours.

He didn't quite feel it now, but he almost did. He knew it was close,
and that was comforting; for it had been a long time since he had
experienced it, and he was beginning to fear that as he was growing
older, he was losing the gift for it.

The cicadas were making a din that rose up from the trees below.

"Do you wanna eat now or go on?" asked Johnny.

Tyler looked behind them at the almost sheer cliff that disappeared out
of sight far above. The path looked as if it ducked inside the rock
somehow. Maybe there was a chimney that they would have to climb. That
would be fun.

"Let's go on," he said. "We can have lunch at the top."

They stood up, and Tyler could already feel the soreness in his thighs
and his calves. His sweat had dried on his shirt, and it felt cool
against his back. Again he led the way, and he clambered over the rocks
for scarcely ten feet before he saw another red arrow painted on the
grainy surface of a boulder. He was right: It was pointing directly
toward a crevice that split the cliff and ran all the way up to the top.
He could see that it was dark inside, and that made it even more
inviting, like Aladdin's cave.

He stepped inside between the two sheer sheets of rock and

44

looked up. They twisted and bulged and slanted so much that he couldn't
see daylight. He walked along the base, and as he stepped across a muddy
puddle he felt water dripping down on his head and shoulders. About
twenty feet in, he came to a ledge where the out-croppings of rock
formed a natural staircase, which he climbed until in the half-light he
came upon a slender ladder. The worn wood felt cool to the touch. He
went up the ladder and felt it twist gradually to the left as the rungs
narrowed and it squeezed behind a boulder that was wedged between the
two giant slabs of rock. He came to a ledge and walked across it
sideways and then came to another ladder. He could hear Johnny
underneath him, breathing excitedly. He dropped a pebble down upon him.

"Hey, cut it out."

"You're lucky that's all I drop."

"Knew I should have gone first."

"You ever seen anything like this?"

"Never. It's great. . . unbelievable."

There were two more ladders ahead, and Tyler climbed them. At one point
the rocks verged so close together that he could feel the rough
unyielding surfaces in front and behind. This must be Skinny Man's
Squeeze, he thought.

He didn't feel claustrophobic. On the contrary, he felt snug and secure
in the dank darkness.

Then, finally, he saw a stab of daylight. Five more steps and a final
bend and he was suddenly outside, blinking in the sun and lifting his
head to a breeze. Before he knew it, Johnny stood beside him and gave a
little gasp.

They were standing on a giant dome of rock, and on three sides tlie view
fell away as far as they could see. There were valleys of forests, and
farms with tiny white houses and red barns, and twisting little ribbons
of road, and purple ponds and lakes. Way off to the north, they could
see a cluster of buildings gleaming in the sun, a town, and beyond that
a river flanked by trees. Off in the distances on all three sides were
mountains that sat frozen in green humps and marched off in waves that
got dimmer and dimmer and then disappeared altogether in the hazy
horizon. Above, against the light blue sky, white clouds rose up in
billowing luminous towers. They changed shape in slow motion and cast
shadows upon the land, large dark puddles.

45

The rock they were standing upon sloped down on all sides so they
couldn't see the edge. Standing upon the crest of it was like standing
on some huge creature, the brow of a whale maybe, and it made them feel
giddy. The sun was at its height now, and it beat down relentlessly.
They could hear a chorus of cicadas coming from the underbrush on the
mountain behind them.

They found a small indentation in the rock where they could sit and
dangle their legs. Johnny took his knapsack off and set it down. He
began unbuckling it to bring out lunch.

Tyler rose and walked down the slope. It was scary because the rock just
kept curving downward toward nothingness. If he stumbled, he would roll
until he hit the air, and then he would drop straight down like a stone.

"Hey, be careful," yelled Johnny. "Come on back."

Tyler stood where he was for a few seconds, enough to save face, and
then turned and walked back.

He looked up ahead. Johnny had pulled out a sandwich and was eating it,
holding it by the wax paper. Behind him the mountain rose up another
fifty feet or so. To the right side, Tyler could see the beginning of a
path, half-hidden by wild grass. It headed up a gentle slope and
disappeared; it looked like an easy walk all the way to the top. But on
the other side, on the left side, was a rocky ledge about four feet wide
at the base of the rock face. It seemed to be a miracle of nature, it
was so perfectly carved, like a balcony set in the mountain for a view
of the valley.

He felt himself drawn to it.

His eyes moved up the rock face above the ledge. It ran up sheer and
solid for about twelve feet, and then it jutted out into a thin
overhang. There was a dash of color. He focused. It was one of those
devices that climbers stuck into the rock. It trailed yellow-and-blue
bits of rope that swung in the breeze, and white powder-rosin, he
thought-caked the edge of a nearby crevice. For traction, he had been
told, so they can grip with their fingertips or cling with the tips of
their shoes.

He felt the exhilaration of knowing that someday soon, maybe sometime
this year, he would be joining them.

He looked higher. A flicker of movement suddenly caught his eye. A
climber, splayed against the rock face. Then another higher

46

up. And another. Once he saw them, he couldn't miss them. They were
apart from the rock but also seemed to belong to it, hardly moving, then
bursting in midair like some magnificent creatures, like gods. The three
figures were moving slowly and carefully, like spiders hanging from
gossamer threads, with equipment dangling from their belts. They wove
their web assiduously, from crevice to ledge to crevice again. The sun
abruptly peeked out from behind a cloud and reflected so brilliantly off
the rock it was hard to make them out. They seemed suspended in slow
motion, utterly silent.

Tyler walked over to the rock face near the ledge and leaned against it,
feeling the hardness and the rough surface on his fingers. He leaned
into it and began to move sideways, crablike, toward the ledge.

"Hey, c'mon," yelled Johnny.

Tyler ignored him.

He moved more quickly now, without thinking. And before he knew it, he
was all the way out on the ledge. He turned his head slowly, and the
view took his breath away-a green carpet stretching off into forests and
fields and mountains. He could no longer hear the cicadas; instead, he
heard wind whipping by at his feet. He felt the sun directly on him,
like a spotlight. The climbers were far above him.

Slowly, Tyler crouched into a squat and turned toward the nothingness,
and then stood up. Now he could see everything, facing it all; it was
spread before him as if it had been tossed at his feet. His arms behind
him were still touching the rock. Out of a corner of his eye, he could
see Johnny, standing now, staring over at him.

He dropped his arms to his side. Then he stepped forward a foot. He was
standing in the middle of the ledge. Looking down his nose, he could see
past the edge into the chasm. He was perfectly balanced, solid and fearless.

He heard something, a sharp smack near his foot. Then another. The
ground moved a bit, and it took him a while to realize what it was:
pebbles, rocks, dropping down.

There was a shout, a yell. He was confused. Things were happening
quickly. He looked over at Johnny, who was waving his arms. More rocks,
a big one now.

He touched the rock face behind and looked up. One of the climbers was
dangling by a rope, groping at the cliffside awkwardly

47

and then turning slowly away from it, suspended in midair, so that his
hands were pawing the emptiness helplessly.

"Look out!" yelled Johnny.

He heard a clang of metal bouncing off rock. But it was too late. The
thing came out of nowhere and struck him. He barely registered it, a
crash on his head. A darkening. Then his knees began to buckle.

Johnny saw it all-the climber suddenly plummeting down, falling backward
with his arms flailing until the rope caught him and he bounced a bit.
The rocks raining down, the metal device bounding down the rock face and
turning as it hit, looking like a beast running for its life, falling
and leaping up again. He saw it crash into Tyler, actually into him, his
head, so that when Tyler turned slowly to begin his long fall, he was
frozen for a second in silhouette and it was sticking out of him. He
looked like someone shot by an arrow right in his skull.

Johnny scrambled frantically down the mountainside, tripping, jumping,
half running, half falling in stretches. He was bruising his shins and
elbows and ripping the skin on his fingers and his nose was running and
his legs were bleeding, but he didn't feel any of that. He had to reach
Tyler.

He had looked down and seen him lying on another ledge about twenty or
thirty feet below. He couldn't determine if he was still alive. He
looked hard to see if he was still breathing, if there was any movement
at all under the red T-shirt, but it was too far to be able to tell. The
more he looked without being sure, and the longer Tyler lay there
without moving, the more he feared for the worst. It was all so
unreal-one moment Tyler was standing there, full of life, and the next
he was lying on the rocks below. His body seemed crumpled up, collapsed
in on itself in some unnatural way. He was on his left side, his face
turned away into the rock, and his right arm was pinned behind and
twisted up into the air. Johnny hadn't been quick to decide what to
do-whether to go straight to him or to run down the path to the hotel.
And then he had heard the voice from up above, one of the climbers, a
woman. She shouted that she would go for help, that he should try to
reach his friend.

At that he'd sprung into action. But getting there was taking forever.

His heart was racing. Without quite realizing it, he was having

48

the spooky thought that if he didn't reach him soon, Tyler would die,
that it was up to him somehow. He didn't know what he would do to help
him exactly, just that he had to get there right away and do something.
Comfort him in some way and make him feel better. Make him feel not so
alone. But getting there was not easy. Finding him in the tangle of
boulders and scrub pine, getting to the right level, was infuriatingly
difficult. Twice Johnny was sure he was at the right spot and saw a
ledge, but when he reached there, it was empty. The second time he
looked down and saw that he was standing only about eight feet above
him. He climbed straight down, falling part of the way and smashing his
knee, but he didn't feel it at all. Instead he walked over to the body,
taking his time now, and peered down. Tyler's T-shirt was pulled halfway
up; his back had been bleeding from gashes, but the blood had stopped
and was caking against his skin. Johnny half closed his eyes and looked
at the head. The piece of metal was still there, sticking out of one
side, embedded. His skull seemed closed in around the wound. A thin
trickle of blood had fallen on the rock, following the grain and
collecting in a tiny crevice a few inches away.

Johnny knelt down and lifted the arm that was twisted-it fell limply
back into a normal position-and felt for a pulse. But he didn't know if
he was doing it right, and before he could even try, Tyler shitted a
little, shuddering and bending his top leg so that he gently kicked
Johnny on the thigh. Then Johnny could see that he was breathing. He
knew that he should somehow keep him warm, so he took off his own shirt
and draped it over one shoulder. It looked pathetically small. Then he
took Tyler's hand in his and squeezed it tightly and told him, over and
over, that it would be all right and that people were coming to get him
and that he should just hang on. He had no idea if Tyler could hear him,
but he didn't know what else to do. Johnny looked up. There was a breeze
now-the tree branches were waving.

The emergency workers didn't come for a long, long time. Johnny saw them
first up above, on the ledge where Tyler had been standing when he had
been struck-ages ago, it seemed-and when the two men arrived, he saw
they were wearing climbing gear and realized they were not rescue
workers but two of the climbers. They didn't know what to do either, and
after looking closely at Tyler's wound-one of them grimaced and looked
away-they just stood

49

around nervously without saying much. Johnny knelt over Tyler and felt
protective of him. Then another group came from below. It included two
men wearing white jackets and a third who wore a jacket with the words
The Balfour stitched on a front pocket. He was lugging a large first-aid
kit.

He opened the lid of the kit, and they looked inside.

"We better wait," said one. "We need more than this. His bleeding has
stopped."

"What's that in his head?" asked one.

They looked over at the two climbers, who looked away.

"It's a camming device," said one quietly. "It's a ... it's called a
Ca-malot number two."

"I dropped it," said the other, after a while. "It just slipped. I. . .
I was taking it off my belt and with my other hand, I was holding on. I
lost my grip. So I just... I fell and as I fell I just let it go."

He was crying, but not making any sound.

No one spoke for a while.

"Is he going to be all right?" the climber asked.

"It's hard to say," said one of the emergency workers. "We have to clean
him up before we can get a good look. He's breathing okay, which is
good. But I don't want to even try to remove this-we'll leave that to
the hospital." He pointed at the piece of metal.

After a short while, two more people came, a man and a woman, and they
were carrying all kinds of equipment. They arrived out of breath. One of
them unpacked a neck brace that he slid under Tyler, straightening his
head and binding it in place with a roll of adhesive, carefully avoiding
touching the head wound.

"Jesus Christ," said one. "What the hell is that?"

"Equipment," said a climber. "It fell from up there." He pointed, and
the man and woman both looked up.

"Heavy?" asked the man.

"Yes," said the climber.

"Heavy enough to smash his skull," said the emergency worker, a tone of
anger in his voice. "What do you think?" he asked his partner, nodding
at it.

"I think we bind it, just to hold everything in place. Until we get him
down the mountain. We have to get some blood in him."

Meanwhile, the other two men pieced together a stretcher. They

50

pushed it under Tyler, gently shifted him onto it, and bound him to it
with straps. Then they hoisted it up into the air, lightly, as if it
didn't weigh much, and started off across the boulders. They made slow
progress, taking pains to keep the stretcher level. Every so often, the
one in front would stumble a little and that end would dip down.

"For Christ's sake, be careful," said the man in the back. His voice
sounded suddenly strained, and he was sweating.

Johnny realized that he hadn't seen Tyler move since that one time.

51

Scott was home when the call came. It was four P.M. on a Saturday, and
usually he would be out somewhere in the city, doing something with
Tyler. But Tyler was off in the Catskills, and the day was muggy. He was
feeling lethargic, so he stayed at home lounging about and reading.

He did not have a premonition. Sometimes when Tyler went away, even with
Johnny's parents, whom Scott trusted, he had vague feelings of anxiety.
If they persisted, he was apt to pace around, and even from time to time
look into Tyler's bedroom, staring at the unmade bed and everything
else. He always knew he was being neurotic, but he actually did feel
better looking around at the room with all its familiar objects-the
bookshelves jammed with books, the computer, the desk with drawers
hanging open and papers lunging out, the posters for Trainspotting and
Reservoir Dogs on the wall, and the koala bear sitting in a place of
honor on the easy chair. Surely if anything had happened they wouldn't
just be resting in place.

But this time he did none of that. This time he scarcely even thought of
Tyler. He knew he was in good hands and that he would be having a good
time. Instead, he thought vaguely that when his son came back, Sunday
night, he would take him out for a pizza and maybe a movie. He knew that
Tyler preferred seeing movies with his friends now, but his son was too
considerate to object when his father offered, and they usually ended up
having fun.

So Scott was not at all prepared when the call came. At first he didn't
even know who was calling. It was Johnny's father, but his voice was so
strange, low and with a trembling to it, that it took him some time to
recognize it.

52

"Scott, listen . . . listen. . . . There's been an accident. . . ." He
couldn't hear anything else, although he was listening and paid
attention to every word. His mind got in the way. He felt it darken
over, like a curtain descending, so that he couldn't hear anything or
see anything or think anything, not right away. That was probably his
body, shutting down to protect him.

Only two weeks before, Scott and Tyler had gone camping in an ideal spot
in the shadow of the Shawangunks an hour and a half north of the city.
For Scott, it had been a perfect night, one of the best in years.

Not another soul was around. The cliffs rose up about 150 feet behind
them and made the campsite feel secure, tucked into the base of the
escarpment. Looking up, they could see clumps of twigs sticking over the
outcroppings, the nests of hawks that were slowly circling in the
evening air currents. Down a slope ahead was a small lake. Scott had
checked the map and thought it was probably Goose Pond, though he
couldn't be certain. The paths had twisted and doubled back so often
that he wasn't exactly sure where they were. But that didn't bother
him-being a little bit lost was part of the fun of camping in the wild.

Tyler collected wood for the fire, and Scott could see his red T-shirt
in the distance, appearing and disappearing through the slender trunks
of the cedars. His heart soared at the sight-his boy looked so big to him.

Comet, their dog-years ago, Tyler had provided the name, one only a boy
would come up with-traipsed at his heels, a happy mongrel.

Scott dropped a slab of bacon in the skillet and then cut up Irish
potatoes and added them. They sizzled in the grease. He put on a can of
baked beans and set out the hot dogs and rolls. Tyler liked to cook his own.

Tyler came back, lugging an armful of wood, excited.

"Dad, I saw four deer," he said, dropping the logs. He pointed back
toward the lake.

"Good."

"One was right there on the shore, drinking. Two of them were fawns.
They had little white spots on their fur."

53

"Deer are one thing. Let me know if you see a bear."

"I wish you'd told me. I've seen dozens. They were following us all the
way in here."

"Ha ha."

"They looked hungry."

"Well, then, you better eat your hot dogs before they get here."

The next day was to be Tyler's thirteenth birthday. Scott had wrapped
his present-a Swiss Army knife, the jumbo model with four different
blades and eight pull-out tools-and hidden it inside the knapsack. He
planned to get up first and cook scrambled eggs with onions-Tyler's
favorite. He'd place the knife on the log next to where he'd sit. He had
a tape of three of Tyler's best friends from school singing "Happy
Birthday"; he'd use it to wake him up.

Gone were the days when Tyler jumped out of bed right away. Now he
grunted and groaned and curled back up in that posture that said,
Please, just a little bit longer. Adolescents-why did they need so much
sleep? Was it because they were growing so much? Or because of all those
hormones pouring into their systems. Or maybe, he thought with a little
smile, it's exhaustion from all that scheming and plotting to get around
their dads.

They ate hungrily and mostly in silence. Tyler wolfed down three hot
dogs and was still hungry and cooked two more. Scott always
underestimated his appetite.

In the store on Forty-second Street, he had hesitated a moment before
buying the knife-was Tyler old enough to use it safely? He had caught
himself. Old enough? He s practically four years older than I was when I
got my first knife. Still, he would have to make a point of teaching
Tyler how to hold it, how to keep his fingers on the edges of the handle
and open the blades outward.

"Dad, what was that you were saying about the trees?"

"These are cedars. You see how they rise up straight and tall and their
branches form a canopy way up there. Nothing else grows beneath, and
it's quiet with the blanket of needles on the ground. That's why the
Indians thought this area was so special. It was sacred ground to them."

Tyler peered around, taking it all in.

"Cool."

54

Scott looked across at his son. The fire cast a glow on his face, so
that his features, which lately seemed to sprout out of all proportion,
swam about. Still, he was striking, He would make a handsome adult. His
brown eyes burned with intelligence, and when he smiled he could charm a
snake. His lips were full and sensual-like his mother's.

Scott was proud of the boy Tyler had become. So many times these days,
he had to fight down the impulse to be overprotective, to swaddle him in
layers of cotton. So much was at stake. He felt it selfishly sometimes:
So much of his own world resided in that one little-now, not so
little-body. He would be devastated if anything happened to him. So he
had to hold himself in check sometimes, difficult as that was, because
he wanted Tyler to grow up to be a strong and capable man, ready to take
on the world. He knew Tyler was at an age when he needed to build
self-confidence by meeting challenges, and that challenges inevitably
carried risk. But it was hard on a parent. The world struck him as such
a dangerous place-and with good reason. It was filled with storms and
earthquakes and poisonous animals and cars that crashed and germs that
spread disease. And planes that fell from the sky.

If only, he thought to himself, there were some way for a father to
control the risk, to dole out the risk in acceptable doses-like
spoonfuls of medicine.

He searched in his pack for the old beat-up coffee percolator, filled
the top with fresh grounds, and set it over the embers. While he was
waiting for it to brew, he opened up his second beer. He had wanted to
bring along some scotch, but had dismissed the idea; he knew the dangers
of strong drink-it was a curse that ran way back in his family. His
father had died in a car crash when he was young, and his mother, who
had never remarried and had raised him alone on a leafy street in
Washington, D.C., had been an alcoholic for much of his childhood. She
had been sober twelve years, with the help of AA, by the time she died,
and so he knew the lore. He knew one of the first signs of trouble was
drinking alone.

They sat back and watched the trail of smoke wend its way through the
tops of the trees. It was beginning to get dark, and they could see bits
of sky where red streaks were lingering in the clouds.

They fed their scraps to Comet, who devoured them greedily.

Tyler looked contented, which made Scott happy. Nothing in the

55

world, he thought, could make him happier than seeing his son at peace.
He was glad that they had gone camping when Tyler was young. For years
they had explored the outdoors together-skiing in Vermont, sailing on
the Sound, hot summer nights sleeping in the craters of dunes along Cape
Cod. It didn't make up for a mother's love-nothing could replace
that-but it was a bond of male kinship. It was something they could hold
on to during the years of conflict that were now upon them. Already,
there were unaccountable spells of distance, times when Tyler came home
from school moody, remote, and wrapped in a shield of inarticulate anger
and went straight to his room to blast himself with music. And there
were times when they were awkward in each other's company and didn't
have much to say to each other.

The coffee was ready. He poured some into a metal cup and felt the heat
travel up through the handle.

"Dad," said Tyler, looking up at the escarpment. "Don't forget your
promise."

"What's that?"

"You said that when I was thirteen, I could take up rock climbing. Right
here is the best spot in the country."

Scott felt a slight sense of panic rise up from his stomach.

"Don't be crazy. We don't have the equipment or anything. We don't even
know the first thing about it."

"I don't mean tomorrow. I mean sometime soon. I've been talking it over
with Johnny. He wants to do it, too. There's a place up here where they
teach you."

Scott felt his pulse quieting down. It wasn't a problem for right away.

"Well, we'll see," he said.

"Dad"-the word had a nagging tone to it now-"you promised."

"I said we'll see. Now that's enough."

He knew his admonition carried less weight that it had only a short
while ago. Time was, when he'd said "that's enough," it was enough.

"And you said I could get my learner's permit when I was sixteen, and go
skydiving when I was eighteen."

"Maybe."

"You didn't say maybe. You said definite."

56

"We'll see. That's enough now."

Tyler sulked.

Scott took the burdens of single parenthood seriously. He tried to have
a normal home, though that was difficult with just the two of them. He
had moved into New York City to cut out the commuting time. Those
additional hours were precious. They had a spacious loft crammed with
bikes, baseball bats, sneakers, male paraphernalia of all sorts. Doing
double time as a parent, Scott had let his career slide. To become a top
photographer, as he had wanted years ago, you had to be a
globe-trotter-you had to have that packed suitcase waiting by the door.
He had learned to ratchet down his ambition. He turned down out-of-town
assignments, took on the occasional fashion shoot, even, God help him,
actor portfolios. Anything to pay the rent. He was good enough for some
of the top magazine editors to turn to him when their backs were to the
wall.

He and Tyler. A twosome against the world. It almost tickled him how he
scrambled to construct a world of almost bourgeois comfort for his son,
but without a mother it wasn't complete. Every time he saw Tyler
watching some TV show about some suburban family of five, he felt his
heart sink. He went alone to teachers' meetings, school plays, baseball
games in Central Park, feeling out of place as a "singleton." The others
all seemed to come in pairs-just like the animals walking up the plank
to Noah's ark, he used to think. How his heart soared when Tyler's
friends came over just to hang around-it made everything seem, for a
while, so blessed normal.

When he'd gotten the phone call that said Lydia's plane had gone down,
he'd felt his life snap in two, just like that. He'd carried his grief
everywhere, like a sack of stones, and had overcome it only out of sheer
will for his son's sake. At first he refused even to consider
remarrying. It seemed disloyal. They had been married such a short while
and they had formed such a partnership, such a strong unit. She had
loved to plan their future together, talking about everything, from the
coat of paint for the house of their dreams (pale yellow, clapboard
Colonial) to the number of children (four, maybe five). She had drawn it
so vividly, it was hard to turn his back on it. And then when he was
ready for other women, they never quite worked out. He'd had a number of
girlfriends, some of them serious, but none seemed to fit just right. He
took care to

57

have them sleep in the small walled-off room at the rear of the loft, so
that Tyler, when he came in to snuggle as he did every morning, would
find him alone in the huge bed. It was funny, this insistence upon a
strict moral code; he was certain that if Lydia had remained alive, the
two of them would have been much more liberal in their child-rearing.
Sooner or later, the girlfriends stopped trying to compete.

He finished the coffee and set the metal cup down.

Seven years, he thought, since the phone call. Seven long years. He had
muddled through somehow. He had done the best he could. And sometimes,
like now, when he looked across at Tyler, he thought he had done pretty
goddamned well.

"Ready for sleep?" he asked.

Tyler nodded.

They moved away from the fire and found a small clearing to unroll their
sleeping bags in. They could feel the hay underneath. Their feet, in
socks, inside the bags, were warm. Comet lay down with a grunt, four
feet away.

There was a half-moon, enough light to see a straggly cloud go by. Then
it cleared and they were looking straight up at the stars.

"Dad, could you point them out again?"

It was an outdoors ritual. Tyler wanted to spot the constellations, but
in reality he wanted something else, something that came at the end.

Scott ran through them, guiding his son from one to the other. The North
Star. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Cassiopeia. He covered the
whole dome spread above them. And then he came to the one they were
waiting for-Orion.

"And there, see his belt. And look, hanging from his belt are the three
little stars that make up his knife. Now follow that down to where it's
pointing."

Tyler did. He saw a trim little star, all on its own, sparkling.

"See it?"

"Yes," he replied.

"That's it."

Scott remembered the first time he had found the star for Tyler and told
him it was hers, and he remembered telling him about the corny rhyme he
and Lydia had made up years ago, on their honeymoon: By the stars of
Orion, I swear you are mine.

58

He remembered checking into the hotel, signing in for the first time,
Mr. and Mrs.

It touched him how the boy loved to hear stories about the two of them.

"You remember, Dad, how you used to tell me Jingo stories."

"Of course."

"Every night a different one. Jingo would end up fighting alley cats or
falling down an old well or eating a funny leaf and shrinking to the
size of a grasshopper."

"But he always got home safe and sound, in bed."

"Once he went through the small white door."

Scott had a sudden image of Tyler lying in his bed under the carved
wooden headboard years ago, the blanket tucked under his chin, listening
with his brown eyes opened wide. How Tyler had loved the ritual. And
when he got a little older, he loved to hear just the opening line-the
rest he recited back himself, never missing so much as a single word.
Jingo rubbed the magic pebble:

And then something very strange happened. At first he felt hot, and then
he felt cold. And then he felt warm, and then he felt cool. And finally
he felt just right.

And when he opened his eyes he was standing before a huge white mansion,
"the house with a thousand rooms."

As he turned over to sleep, Scott had wished that real life could be
like that, always assured of a happy ending, even one that was tacked on
for convenience-a little exit door to make sure that everything turned
out okay.

Scott drove up the New York Thruway at breakneck speed. He tried to slow
down once or twice so that he wouldn't get stopped for speeding, not for
fear of the ticket but because he didn't think he could abide the delay
while a patrolman wrote it out. But his mind was racing off in so many
directions that he couldn't concentrate on driving. Whenever he looked
at the speedometer it had climbed back up to eighty.

59

He heard a voice-his own-murmuring the same phrases over and over: Oh
God, please don't let him die. Just don't let him die. I'll do anything.
Just don't let him die. Ordinarily he didn't think of God at all, but he
didn't find it strange that he was now pleading with Him. He prayed for
a number of things, and he set them down in order: First, that Tyler
live. Then, that he not be hurt too badly and make a complete recovery.
And pain-please let him feel no pain. Put that high on the list. And
please make sure the hospital is a good one and that there is a good
doctor on hand who knows what he's doing, and if they have to
operate-please don't let that happen, but if it does- then make sure the
surgeon is really good and doesn't make any mistakes.

He didn't have much to go on-just that there had been an accident. How
his heart seemed just to stop at that instant; his whole body went rigid
when he heard the dreaded word, and he knew right away that it was about
Tyler. Johnny's father was calling, and Scott hoped for a brief second
that it was Johnny who had had the accident. But of course he knew that
wasn't the case-because why would Johnny's father be calling him, and
why else would he have that quivering, guilty tone in his voice? All
this went through his head before he even heard the next sentence. And
then Johnny's father told him what had happened and said it had occurred
while they were climbing-climbing. He told Scott that it might be
serious, but that it was too soon to tell. He was probably lying,
hedging it-he probably knew it was serious and thought he was doing the
decent thing by breaking it to him gently.

Scott had told Tyler over and over that he couldn't go climbing until he
was fully prepared and had taken courses and knew what he was doing, for
God's sake. But Tyler hadn't listened. He had wanted to do it anyway; he
couldn't wait. He was so eager for adventure, for life-he was so
impatient. And why should that thought make Scott love him more? Because
he did-not love him more exactly, because that would be impossible, but
connect to the love so strongly that all this was doubly unbearable. He
pictured Tyler thinking the decision through, on the threshold of
disobedience, wondering whether he should go climbing or not and finally
deciding to go ahead. Thinking about it just drove home how unique Tyler
was, how so very precious. And without meaning to, Scott started
thinking all kinds of things

60

about Tyler-how smart and good-natured and funny he was, and how he had
a dear little laugh that jumped out when he was telling a joke, and how
he was open in his love and gifted in so many ways, and even-superficial
though it might be-how handsome he was. He had his mother's long dark
eyelashes.

Lately he even seemed to be looking out for me, Scott thought. That was
so touching, so typical of his generosity, like how he got so good at
Ping-Pong and before, when he was little, I used to try to throw a
couple of points his way to save his pride, but carefully so as not to
get caught, and the last time we played-where was that? Oh yes, the
basement of that kids house- suddenly he was way ahead and I started
catching up and I looked across the net at him and when I saw his face I
knew: he was intentionally missing some shots and trying to do it
sneakily, just like me.

And out of nowhere, an image ran through Scott's mind: Tyler running
along the beach on Cape Cod, Comet yapping behind him and Tyler veering
off into the surf and grabbing Comet and the two of them rolling around
in the water, laughing. So much life-so much love for life-in those
little bones.

Scott started to cry. Tears streamed down his face so that it was almost
hard to see the road, and he didn't bother wiping them away but just let
them come and fly back in the wind. Please God-please, please,
please-just don't let him die.

And he remembered Johnny's father had mentioned something about a wound
to the head and that he had fallen a bit. The head- that was scary; that
could mean something really serious. He couldn't think about that. And
falling a bit} What does it mean exactly to fall a bit} What kind of
euphemism was that?

He got angry thinking about it, and he held on to his anger as long as
he could because that felt better in some weird way.

Scott arrived at Kingston Hospital not long after the ambulance. He went
straight into the emergency ward, and as soon as he saw Johnny and his
parents in the waiting room, the look on their faces, he knew that the
news was not good. He walked over to them, but couldn't look them in the
eye. Johnny hung back, looking guilty.

They said that Tyler was inside and that the doctors seemed to be really
competent and that they were waiting for one to come out and report.

Scott spun on his heels and walked right through the swinging

61

doors into the emergency area. There were four or five separate rooms,
but he could tell instantly which was the right one by a kind of
invisible commotion inside and he went straight for it, and if anyone
got in his way he was going to push that person aside. He stopped for
just a moment at the threshold and saw a wall of people in white, their
backs to him, bending over a table. And then one of them moved slightly
and he caught a glimpse of the body covered in a sheet-his son, for
Christ's sake-and then he saw the head, which was turned away, some
blood. He walked over, and they parted and let him stand there. He took
his son's hand.

He stood for some time just looking, examining him, taking in everything
intently, every speck of blood.

What is that sticking out of his head?

He tried talking to him, softly first, calling out his name, then more
loudly. There was no response.

A doctor came over and introduced himself-Scott didn't hear the name-and
the doctor began to put his arm around his shoulder, but then thought
better of it.

"Can we step outside for a minute?"

Scott was about to say no, he didn't want to leave his son, but then he
thought that maybe on some level Tyler could hear them talking and so
perhaps it made sense after all. They went two steps beyond the door.

"I wish I could tell you more, but everything is still preliminary. We
don't know how extensive the damage is. He has some broken bones, his
left shoulder and his right arm. It was some fall. I think he twisted in
midair and tried to right himself."

The doctor attempted a half-smile. He was young. Scott looked at his
upper lip, where there was a bead of sweat, and tried to concentrate on
what he was saying. He knew that the man was avoiding the main issue.

"His vital signs are good, surprisingly good. His heart is strong. His
pulse is okay. He lost a lot of blood and we've given him extensive
transfusions and he's accepted it all just fine. That's all to the good."

He paused, choosing his words.

"What we don't know-what we can't tell-is how severe the head wound is.
We're freezing it to hold down the swelling. We've taken X rays. They
show some damage to the cortex and perhaps

62

deeper. They're a bit difficult to read. We can't. . . It's hard to tell
the extent of the trauma with the implement still embedded."

"What is it?"

Scott's words sounded hollow.

"It's called a Camalot number two. Rock climbers use them to hold their
ropes. They insert one into a crevice and it expands. It fell and struck
your son-apparently from fairly high up." The doctor furrowed his brow.
"Didn't anyone tell you what happened?"

Scott shook his head. "Not in detail."

"That other family . . . outside in the waiting room. Friends of yours,
I'm told. They can tell you everything. Their little boy was there. He
saw it."

Scott didn't want to leave Tyler.

"But in any case, I've seen enough to know that we're not really
equipped here to deal with it. He requires a level of expertise that. .
. we don't really have. He needs the best-the best neurosurgeon, the
best equipment, the best care. I'm sure you agree."

Scott did. No question about it.

"So I'm arranging for an immediate transfer. To St. Catherine's in New
York. It's the hospital with the foremost neurological center in the
country, maybe the world. Dr. Leopoldo Saramaggio. There's no one better
anywhere. If I had to have someone operate on my son, he'd be the one."

"But how-?"

"How do you go? Emergency evacuation. Helicopter. It's already on the way."

Scott didn't even ask if he could go on the aircraft. Nothing could have
kept him off.

He met briefly with Johnny's parents, who told him everything they knew
about the accident. Johnny himself remained quiet, and so at the end,
Scott put his arm around the boy.

"Scott," began Johnny's father. "I don't know how to say this. . . . I
feel so bad. I'm so sorry that-"

Scott waved him off. He didn't want to hear it, not now. There was too
much to do.

He made arrangements for them to drive his car back. They offered to
wait with him, but he said no, that wasn't necessary. They left,
stricken, without looking back.

63

63

Scott went back into the emergency room. After a while, he heard the
chopper approaching, the odd pounding sound of the blades. Outside, the
bushes waved wildly in the dust.

He was surprised not to see it-it landed on the roof.

Tyler was transferred to a stretcher that was wheeled into an elevator
and carried to the helicopter because the roof was lined with pebbles
stuck into the tar. The aircraft had landed on a square of tarmac, right
inside a painted white circle. The stretcher was loaded from the rear,
and Scott went with it.

He managed to do the whole trip, from the emergency room to the inside
of the shaking noisy behemoth, without once letting go of Tyler's hand.
His son's head was wrapped in plastic tubing filled with ice. Still,
Scott could see the handle of that hated metal thing.

He had to force himself to look at it.

64

Saramaggio was stuck in a traffic jam downtown when he got the call on
his cell phone. His car was inching down lower Broadway in Soho, and he
was heading for his favorite gallery on Prince Street for an exhibition
of German Expressionists. He had been hoping to add another Schiele to
his collection; he already had two hanging on the walls of his beamed
living room in Greenwich. He hated paying the extra insurance premiums,
but Schiele's paintings, which had doubled in value ever since the
controversy over ownership of Nazi-seized art in the late nineties, were
well worth it.

His phone had an unmistakable Nietzschean ring, the opening bar of Also
sprach Zarathustra. He had chosen it as a joke at first-after a
colleague in the OR had called him an Ubermensch-but he had gotten
accustomed to it and even thought of it as something of a personal theme
song.

He reached into his coat pocket.

"Yes, I'm here."

His driver, provided by St. Catherine's as one of numerous perks to
ensure that he would never dream of going to another hospital, heard him
groan.

"What hospital is he coming from? And what is it exactly that's stuck?"

A pause.

"How the hell did that get there?"

Another pause.

"Uh-huh. And how old is the boy?"

A third pause.

In the rearview mirror, the driver saw him look at his Rolex.

65

"You say they just left? They should be there in half an hour-maximum."
He sighed. "Get everyone lined up. I'd like Gully. And that new surgeon,
Ms. Willet. I want room seven. And of course Betsy."

Betsy was his scrub nurse, who knew the procedure so well- which
instrument he wanted and when he wanted it, almost like a top golfer's
caddy at the U.S. Open-that he rarely had to speak to her. He would work
with no one else for the moment, at least until he found her wanting in
some way and took on someone new. That was-literally-his standard
operating procedure.

He punched the o/f button.

"Turn around, Harry. We have to go back to St. Cat's."

He sighed again and looked out the window. He disliked emergency
surgery, especially when it was done on the fly, when the patient
arrived just as he got there himself and he didn't have time to prepare.
When an operation was scheduled, he usually began thinking about it
hours before, sometimes even the day before, running through all the
possibilities, playing it out like a film. That way, when he stepped up
to the table, he found that he was working almost on a subconscious
level; sometimes his mind wandered and his fingers seemed to moving on
their own. That was when he was at his best. And of course he couldn't
do that when he didn't have any idea of what he would find. That was
pure improvisation, and improvisation involved a certain amount of
chance. He didn't like chance.

Oh well, at least it sounded like an interesting case. And there was
always the distant possibility-he didn't want to anticipate it because
that would be too providential-that the wound would fit the profile he
was looking for, would finally allow him to cap the myriad of
experiments in the OR. That, of course, would be the final coup de
theatre. All that time in rehearsal-could it really be the moment to
step out on the stage?

And the boy was young. That was good. His brain was still growing. It
was malleable.

He punched out a number on the phone and reached the gallery manager and
commanded him to hold the Schiele for him.

"Of course, I'll take it," he said. "And if I don't like it, I'll return
it and you can sell it to someone else."

66

On the trip down, Scott didn't stop talking to Tyler once, even with the
thumping roar of the helicopter's motor threatening to drown him out.
Sitting on a thin cushion on a fold-down metal bench and leaning over
the stretcher and holding his son's hand, he filled Tyler's ear with a
steady stream of encouragement.

"Everything's going to be all right. Don't worry. You'll see. We're
getting you to the best doctor there is. You'll be fine."

He repeated it over and over like a mantra, as much for himself as for
his son. But after a while, the words seemed to lose meaning, and then
he just started saying whatever came into his head. He began recounting
Tyler's favorite stories, like the one about how he had met his mother
(at a lecture hall in college-she arrived late and breathless). And how
ecstatic his mother had been in the maternity room when she pushed and
pushed with all her might and finally he emerged all slippery and bloody
and she learned that her newborn was a boy.

"She leaned up exhausted and sweating and still panting and told the
doctor to bring you over to her. And then she counted all your fingers
and all your toes, twice, and looked between your skinny legs-at your
penis and your testicles-and finally when she was satisfied that
everything was as it should be, then and only then did she lay back with
a huge smile and hold you on her chest. I don't think I've ever seen her
happier."

At one point he found himself singing lullabies: "Hush, little baby,
don't say a word. Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird..." And reciting
nursery rhymes.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat His wife could eat no lean. . . .

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner Eating his Christmas pie. . . .

Scott suddenly remembered the Jingo stories; it was their own private
world, the "house with a thousand rooms." A thousand rooms, a thousand
adventures. It was their way of communicating, Scott's way of telling
his son about the world and how to live in it and dominate it and how
even though unspeakable things could

67

happen (like the death of a mother), it was not really a bad place after
all.

Except that it is a bad place. You are never safe. His boy lay before
him, smashed, his beautiful brain, his mind, scrambled like an egg.

Memories and half thoughts flooded into Scott's mind, and he opened the
sluice gates and let them out and said everything he was
thinking-except, of course, for the one thought that wouldn't go away,
the thought that he kept trying to push back into whatever cave it came
from. It was like trying to slam a door on a monster that could change
shapes and sizes and shrink down to slip in over the transom or turn
into smoke to squeeze through the keyhole. The monster was the fear that
Tyler was going to die. And behind that monster was another one: the
fear that he would survive, but that he would be brain damaged-a
vegetable, as that horrible word summed it up.

Scott kept looking for signs of life-fingers moving, the chest rising, a
sound from deep within his throat. He could not bring himself to look
closely at the white bandage that protruded out of Tyler's head like
some grotesque appendage. It was packed with ice that was melting and
dripping onto the metal. He wanted to reach over with both hands and
grip the bandage and the piece of metal underneath it and rip them out.

He looked up at the interior of the helicopter-the backs of the seats of
the pilots, the attendant sitting by so quietly he was scarcely there,
the ribbing and rivets that held the green metal skin, the plasma and
glucose bags dangling madly from their metal perches leading into
plastic tubes that fed into his son's arms. The invisible blades above,
making a thudding sound. Everything so unreal. So terribly, terribly
unreal. How to believe that all this was actually happening?

He realized with near panic that he had stopped talking. So he leaned
over the stretcher and started up again.

There was a little boy named Jingo,

A boy very much like you.

One day he was feeling bored . . .

Kate went to the top floor to watch through the plate glass window as
the helicopter landed. She liked to know as much as possible about

68

her patients, especially in cases like this when there was so little to
go on. Saramaggio hadn't returned yet, and short of prepping the
patient, they couldn't do much until he was suited up and ready to go.
At least she could make sure that everything was prepared.

The report had mentioned a passenger on the helicopter, a distraught
father. As soon as the stretcher was carried out, with a young man about
her own age hovering beside it, she saw that the report was not
exaggerated. She felt moved by the sight of the man, his face tight and
numb, stumbling a step or two to keep up with the stretcher and refusing
to let go of the boy's hand, clutching it as if he wanted to pour his
own life into him.

The thought struck her instantly: We've got to be able to do something.
There are two lives at stake here.

She met them on the floor of the OR. The boy was wheeled into a preop
room and worked on by three nurses. Kate supervised. They gave him
morphine, took his pants off and cut his T-shirt away, and washed his
upper torso in strong disinfecting cleanser. Finally, they fixed him
tightly to the gurney with a strap across his chin and another across
the lower forehead, and removed the bandage and the ice packs and began
disinfecting the wound and cutting his hair away and then shaving his
head carefully with a sterilized razor.

Kate went to check on the father. He was in a small office near the
waiting room, sitting across a desk from a nurse's aide, a woman with
short-cropped hair who was taking down information on a clipboard. She
was running down a list of diseases and ailments and allergies, and he
was shaking his head in response to each one. He stopped the litany only
once: to report measles, at age five. The aide wrote this down,
laboriously. Kate could tell that this was exasperating the father. He
was looking at the wall and responding in a monotone. He seemed younger
up close and looked incomparably, inconsolably anguished. She could see
tear streaks on his cheeks, and she felt that same rush of empathy she
had felt when she saw him leave the helicopter.

She looked over at the form and read his name: Scott Jessup.

"You say you're the father?" asked the aide.

He nodded.

"And the mother-where is she?"

"Dead."

69

The aide stopped writing and looked up.

"Cause?"

"Pardon."

"Cause of death."

"Accident."

She looked at him questioningly.

"Plane crash."

"Was she in good health?"

The father nodded.

"Did she have any of the following diseases? Arthritis, rheumatism-"

"Look," he snapped. "How does any of that matter? I mean-for Christ's sake."

"I'm sorry, but we're supposed to ask."

Kate cut in.

"Susan," she said gently but firmly. "Why not let me finish up?"

The aide got up and left.

"I'm sorry," she said. "She's just-"

"-doing her job."

"Well, sort of. We can skip all that. The only thing that's important
for us to know is whether he's allergic to anything, whether he's had
general anesthesia before, and what kind of medication he takes, if any."

"No, no, and none."

"Good. And is he right-handed or left?"

"Right," Scott replied, looking puzzled.

"That's so we know if the injury occurred on the dominant side."

She made the notations on the form, and looked on the desk and saw a
Xeroxed copy of his health plan card: Blue Cross Blue Shield.

"Don't even think about this," she said.

He nodded.

"Good. Now, you should know that you have one of the best neurosurgeons
in the country-maybe the best. Leopoldo Saramaggio. He will be here any
minute, and he will start right away. At first, I expect it will be
exploratory. It will probably take at least two hours and maybe more.
You can wait right here and one of us will come out as soon as we have
anything to say. And we can take it from there."

"Will you be in the operating room?" He paid attention to her for the
first time.

70

"Yes. I'll be assisting. Do you have any questions?"

He shook his head no.

"Now there is one important thing left to do." She reached into a drawer
and pulled out three pages of printed material and handed it to him,
along with a pen. "This is a consent form. Please read it carefully, and
if you agree, then initial the first two pages and sign and date the
last page."

He signed it without even looking at it and tossed down the pen and left.

Tyler was given a CT scan. The operation began as soon as Saramaggio
arrived. Scott caught only a glimpse of him, a lanky figure in a
surgical gown moving quickly down the hallway. Then he watched through a
small rectangular window in the door as Tyler's gurney was wheeled out
of the prep room to the OR. He saw him clearly. His head was gleaming in
the light-it was totally shaven, which rendered his facial features
smaller and made him look vulnerable, as if he were being carted away to
be sacrificed. The hated piece of metal was visible, sticking up into
the air. Now that some of the blood was gone, Scott could see the wound
that it had made, an indentation at the base that was frighteningly
large. It looked as if it had been sucked into the skull. The metal base
had some sort of wires and gears red with blood.

The operation lasted three hours.

Scott didn't know how to interpret the time. Was it better if it took
longer? Did that mean they were somehow patching him up? Or was it a bad
sign-did it mean that the damage was so severe that every step of the
way was dangerous?

While he waited, he paced around the dreary waiting room with its mix of
nonmatching hard-backed chairs and aging couches and a wall with prints
of English landscapes. From time to time, he walked over to the window
and looked vacantly out at the cars moving along York Avenue and watched
a traffic light change. Twice he sat down and picked up a dog-eared
magazine; he read the first three paragraphs of an article over and over
and then threw it back on the wooden coffee table.

71

At last, the woman-what was her name?-came out. He rushed over, and she
led him into the side office again, away from the other people.

"Dr. Saramaggio is on his way out to talk with you. Please sit down."

She knew that he needed to know something right away.

"Basically, as I said, it was exploratory. We got a good look. Your
son-Tyler-is holding up well."

"Will he live?"

She looked at him directly. His eyes were blazing.

"Yes. For now. He does not seem to be under immediate threat. But that
is what Dr. Saramaggio wants to speak to you about."

They did not have long to wait. Saramaggio came in, and his long frame
seemed to fill up the room. His shoes and the cuffs of his green pants
had brown streaks of blood on them. Kate saw Scott stare at them.
Saramaggio extended his right arm and shook hands a bit too vigorously
and then asked the two of them to accompany him to his office.

The walk, down a flight of stairs and along two corridors and through
three pairs of swinging doors, seemed to take forever. Kate thought it
unconscionable. Why couldn't he just have talked to him up there?

Saramaggio settled behind his desk with a little sigh that connoted
exhaustion. The framed plaques and diplomas and certificates behind him
filled the walls.

"Mr. Jessup," he began, propping both elbows on the desk and leaning
across it. "I don't have to tell you that your son's case is
ominous-extremely ominous. It is life-threatening, and the sooner that
we all accept that and come to grips with it, the sooner we will be able
to proceed."

Scott was sitting on the edge of his chair, immobile.

"In fact, I don't mind saying I haven't seen anything quite like it. The
foreign object-what is it called . . . ?" He looked over at Kate.

"A Camalot number two."

"Camalot. We've left it in place-as I said, this was an exploratory
operation. It must have fallen from a great height. It has penetrated
the brain to a distance of 10.2 centimeters. That is substantial." He
held up a thumb and forefinger in a C, to demonstrate.

72

"It has bisected the cortex and reached the lower portions of the brain."

He paused, looking grave.

"However-and this is the part that is so very unusual-the implement
appears to have missed the vital life centers. It does not appear to
have irreparably harmed the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus,
or the brain stem. As a result, the autonomic nervous system appears to
be still working, and as you undoubtedly know, that is what keeps all of
our necessary and involuntary functions going- the lungs, the heart, the
circulating system, and so on."

"So he's not in immediate danger?"

"For the moment, apparently not, no. But only for the moment. The
situation is very unstable. It could change at any moment and everything
I've said so far could be nonapplicable. And so far I've told you only
the good news."

"What's the bad?"

"The bad. Well, even though he is relatively stable in this odd way, he
is completely unresponsive to external stimuli. His brain is registering
activity, but it is doing so randomly. He is not responsive to sounds or
sight or touch. It is almost as if he is in some state of shock or deep
coma.

"And in the meantime he still has that damn piece of metal in there. Why
it hasn't yet brought about some virulent infection, I don't know. It
must be removed, but it's difficult to imagine doing that without
causing extensive damage. The effect could be traumatic and
instantaneous-it could shut down his system in a second. Or it could be
something more subtle and long-term-it could change him in ways that are
impossible to predict. Change his whole personality."

Kate was worried for a moment that Saramaggio was going to tell the tale
of Phineas Gage-who eventually died in the OR when a neurosurgeon
persuaded him to have an operation-but he continued on. His mind had
darted ahead to something else.

"So what is to be done?" asked Scott.

Saramaggio leaned back in his swivel chair and linked his hands behind
his head so that his bony arms stuck out on either side. They looked
like the wings of a giant pelican.

"Well," he said. "If we're all agreed that the situation is desperate-
and it is, I assure you-then perhaps desperate measures are called for."

73

"Like what?"

"There are certain experimental procedures. They are highly unusual. In
fact, I am compelled to say that they have never been attempted-at
least, not on humans. But as I say, we are presented with a highly
unusual case.

"It will be your decision, and I warn you: It won't be an easy one to make."

Kate looked at Scott, lost and alone in his nightmare. Saramaggio was
peering up at the ceiling, a kind of suppressed energy in his casual
pose, almost as if he were afraid that if he looked at them, they would
read his mind.

74

In the cafeteria line, Scott pushed the brown tray slowly along the
metal rails without realizing that he was holding up the line. He went
to a cashier's station and put his money down, but it was closed; then
he found the right one and paid for the coffee. He sat down at a table
in a corner and stared at the Styrofoam cup, the river-brown liquid
inside. He looked out the window at the gathering dusk.

He didn't know what to do. He was drained and blank-unable to react,
unable to think. He couldn't make even the simplest of decisions: Should
he stay at the hospital or leave? He hated it here, and yet he wanted to
be nowhere else.

Some time and space away from here to think, that's what he needed. What
to do about Saramaggio's proposition? But how could he go? Tyler was up
in the intensive care recovery room on the sixth floor, and Scott had to
be near him. He had to be near him even though he couldn't actually see
him because he was not allowed inside. Saramaggio had told him Tyler
would spend the night there, in an isolated room off to one side that
was germ-free. At this stage, infection was the enemy, he had said.
Enemy. Saramaggio had used a number of battlefield metaphors when he was
presenting the case for the operation. Words like attack and retreat and
surrender. He was not a likable man, but Scott didn't care about that.
All he wanted was for him to be the best surgeon in the world. I don't
care if he's the biggest son of a bitch around. I don't care if he
thinks he's a goddamned general as long as he's the best man for the job.

Scott knew that Saramaggio was pushing for him to give his permission
for the operation, despite his attempts to appear casual. He'd admitted
that it had never been attempted before. He was probably

75

itching to do it. Maybe he was lusting after fame-an operation like this
one would surely bring him a lot of publicity. What was the word he'd
used? Procedures. That was a laugh-how could something that had never
been done before be relegated to a procedure?

He fought back a rising tide of anger and reviewed what the surgeon had
told him. Because the piece of metal had extended so deep, into the
subcortical portion of the brain, it had already caused extensive
damage. Who knew how much exactly? Impossible to say. Under normal
circumstances, damage of that sort would be irreversible- and it might
well still be irreversible. Those were his words, and they hit Scott
like a splay of machine-gun bullets. But ... A slender ray of hope, a
thin reed on the riverbank to grab at. . . . But recently-and here
Saramaggio had measured his words carefully, like a jeweler placing
weights on a scale-recently there had been significant new discoveries
in the field of neurobiology. Discoveries so astounding that the full
implications weren't yet understood. Among other things, they might make
possible radical treatment of spinal and brain injuries.

The discovery, Saramaggio had said, was neural stem cells. The basic
building-block cells-cells that had not yet differentiated into becoming
skin cells or liver cells or stomach cells. He explained that these were
not the stem cells from embryos that had been in newspaper headlines;
these stem cells had been discovered deep inside the central nervous
systems of animals and then of humans. In laboratory dishes, they had
done wonderful things: They had been coaxed into developing into
neurons, the basic brain cells, and glial cells, cells that are the
"glue" of the brain. Because they came directly from the patient, they
were a perfect match.

"What we're proposing here," Saramaggio had said, "is a twofold
procedure. We extract stem cells from the brain, which will then be
cultivated in the lab. When they are fully developed, we will reim-plant
them. We repopulate the damaged area with functioning cells."

"Has this ever been done before?" Scott had asked.

"As I said, only with animals-specifically mice. But we've had good
results."

Mice! Scott had thought to himself. Mice! He suppressed a desire to
strike out. "What happens to him in the meantime? How can you assure
that he stays alive?"

76

Saramaggio had paused for the first time.

"That's the tricky part," he had replied. "We're counting on his own
system to keep him going. But we have a backup if that fails. One of my
associates-Dr. Cleaver-has been developing a computer that can assist
the brain. It monitors activity in the hindbrain-specifically in the
medulla, which regulates vital body functions including respiration,
heart rate, and gastrointestinal functioning. If there is a problem, it
can actually send electrical impulses to the specific nuclei-which are
clusters of neurons-to get things going again."

Scott couldn't believe what Saramaggio said next. The hubris of it.

"The medulla, incidentally, was where the bullet from the assassin of
President Kennedy struck. That's why there was not a sliver of hope for
him. But today-or maybe in a few years-we'd be able to save him.
Provided, of course, that he had the good fortune to be transported to
St. Catherine's."

Good fortune. Scott had felt anger rising up like bile in the throat.
But he knew he had to contain himself for the sake of his son; he was
more interested in coming to the right decision about him. He had asked
the question foremost in his mind: Was Tyler suffering? "Not one iota,"
Saramaggio replied. "Believe me-he has no idea what's happening. It's
like he's sleeping on a rubber raft in the middle of a lake on a
windless day." For once, the surgeon's hearty enthusiasm was comforting.

Saramaggio had said that the Institutional Review Board would convene
the following morning to approve the operation and that it would take
him a day or two to prepare. Scott had the night to think it over and
come to a decision about giving permission.

The cafeteria was almost empty. He took a sip of coffee. He had never
missed Lydia as much as he did at that moment.

A shadow crossed the table, engulfed his cup.

"Do you mind if I join you-or would you prefer to be alone? I understand
if you do."

He looked up. It was that surgeon, the woman who had appeared
empathetic. She was standing before him with a cup in her hand.

He gestured at the empty chair across from him. He acted out of some
vestigial sense of politeness-to be honest, he did want to be alone.

She sat down, settled into her chair, and looked over at his cup.

77

"It's pretty dreadful, I'm afraid."

He nodded solemnly.

She blushed.

"I meant the coffee. So weak."

Distracted, he gave a little sign of comprehension by lifting his chin.

"Ah, Dr. ..."

"Willet. Kate Willet."

"Dr. Willet. Let me ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"This review board, the one that's meeting tomorrow. How often do they
do that-get together to decide if an operation can be done?"

"Rarely. Very rarely. I've only been here a few weeks, so it's hard to
say. But at the previous hospital where I was-in San Francisco- it
happened only five times in ten years. Once for a heart transplant that
was special-it involved a new kind of temporary valve-and another time
for a new method of repairing aneurysms. The board has to give its
approval. It happens whenever there is something that is new in any of
three areas-procedure or equipment or technique."

"And in this case?"

She looked at him directly.

"In this case, it's all three that are new."

He nodded and looked down at his coffee. They were silent for a while.
Finally, she spoke.

"I think you should know-I hope that Dr. Saramaggio made it clear-that
this operation is revolutionary. It's never been attempted
before-nothing like it has. So we are literally stepping into unknown
territory. I know you are trying to compute the odds, but it's
impossible in a situation like this."

"It's not a poker game. It's the life of my son."

"I know." And she added softly, "I can see how much you love him."

He turned away, his eyes welling up with tears.

"If you only knew. . . ." he said, and he stared out the window.

They fell silent again.

"If only there were some way to get him back," he said. His words
sounded stupid to him, but he didn't care-it was what he felt.

She nodded.

"I know how you must feel."

78

"Do you?" he replied.

"Well, not exactly. I think it's different for everyone."

He looked directly at her. Then out the window, then back at her.

"So what happened in your case?"

"It was my mother. She raised me-alone. My father was killed in Vietnam
when I was a baby, and she never remarried. The love of her life and all
that. She was a teacher in a small town in Washington, and some years
back she had an accident. She fell off a ladder-she was cleaning out the
gutters of our house, if you can believe it-and she struck her head. She
never really fully recovered. It was hard, of course. I remember what
one doctor told me. ..."

"What?"

"One day the doctor took me aside, and she said that I had to stop
thinking of the way my mother was, that I had to stop measuring her
against what she used to be. That I shouldn't think: She can do sixty
percent of what she used to do, she knows half the words she used to
know. Instead, I should regard her as someone different in a basic way.
She had closed a chapter and was now off on a new life. And what was
important was the new person she was becoming and whether she could
become one hundred percent of that new person.

"I don't know if I ever really believed it, but it seemed to help when I
thought of it in those terms. And she recovered gradually, almost one
hundred percent. But as I said, everyone is different."

"And-now? She's still alive?"

"No. She died last year. Cancer."

"I'm sorry."

"No-I'm sorry." She lowered her voice, ashamed. "I shouldn't be talking
about myself."

"Don't be sorry. It helps."

That was being truthful. It did help-for just one moment.

He pushed the cup aside and stood up. So did she.

"You really can go home, you know. There's nothing you can do here. You
might as well try to get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be grueling, no
matter what you decide."

"I hate to leave. I just wish I could see him."

She didn't hesitate a second.

"Come with me," she said, turning on her heels. She took him up in the
elevator to the sixth floor, then unlocked a storeroom and

79

turned on the light. He saw stacks of surgical gowns, neatly pressed, on
a shelf.

"Put on one of those and a mask and a cap. I'll meet you down the hall."

She escorted him through the double doors into the operating area, down
a hallway and through another pair of doors on the left. They entered
the intensive care recovery room and passed by half a dozen patients,
most of them lying motionless with their eyes closed, surrounded by an
array of equipment that hummed and bleeped every few seconds. Three
nurses bustled around the beds. One elderly woman, her gray hair frizzed
around her head like a halo and a tube extending out of her mouth,
watched them with an eagle eye.

Kate opened a door and motioned him into a dimly lit room.

"Just try not to breathe too near him." She walked away.

Tyler was lying on a bed that was partially raised, so that his back was
reclining upon a pillow. Another pillow was under his legs. It took a
moment for Scott's eyes to get accustomed to the dark, so that he didn't
immediately notice that his son's upper torso was strapped tightly to
the bed. Tyler's head was held in a brace so that he couldn't move at
all. It was bandaged thoroughly so that it was gigantic, a large white
balloon. The tip of the camming device, also under the bandage, was only
a slight bump. A night-light over the bed shone down and cast a glow
upon the sheer whiteness of the bandages.

Scott moved closer quietly, as if he feared waking him. He leaned over
the bed and looked down at Tyler's face, which seemed compressed under
the bandage. He was surprised at how the bandage threw everything off.
It was shocking-his boy looked freakish, a swollen mummy. Then Scott
concentrated on the individual features- the long lashes, tightly
closed. Why did he have bruises around the eyes? The strong nose, the
full lips that used to be so expressive- they always betrayed a joke
ahead of time. That part was still there, so familiar-so ... so
inexpressibly beloved.

He held his son's hand and squeezed it hard and thought for a moment
that he felt a slight pressure: Was he squeezing back? No. And then
Scott realized something-that as he was standing there he was crying. He
realized that it had been happening for some time but that he hadn't
been aware of it, as if it had been happening to someone

80

else. He could feel the tears streaming down his cheeks and his body
quivering with sobs. He stood there a long, long time, holding his son's
hand and crying.

When he left, he didn't see Kate. He dropped the gown in a laundry
basket and pushed the down button on the elevator and walked through the
lobby out into the street.

He was surprised, outside, to find that it was already pitch dark.

Scott walked home, all the way down the East Side and then across town
to his loft on West Twenty-eighth Street. It was Sunday night. The
streets were filling with cars returning from the weekend, and the
restaurants were booming; but he didn't notice any of that, and he
couldn't have even said what day of the week it was. He passed by the
store in his building that sold used furniture-once a thriving fur shop,
the name LIEBERMAN BROTHERS still visible in oudine on the plate glass
window-and turned into the long entryway. At the end was the large
elevator, originally used for freight. He felt a stab of memory-years
ago, he had instructed Tyler on its use, and he had a vision of the
little boy standing there, stretching to his full height to try to reach
the button for the fourth floor.

It felt odd to be home. Comet lunged at him, her paws scraping his
thighs, the tail thrashing back and forth. Scott petted her, then sat
down on the floor and hugged her. The dog was suddenly important to him
in a way she hadn't been before. He stood up and found the dog's bowl
and filled it. He looked around; everything was in place-the dishes from
breakfast in the sink, the newspaper where he had tossed it on the floor
next to the sofa, the crammed bookshelves lining a brick wall. In the
back, he could see his lab; the door was open and a stack of prints lay
upon the enlargement table, and behind it was a shelf of chemicals with
the names neatly printed in his own hand. How many times had he warned
Tyler not to touch them?

He felt a gnawing in his stomach, probably hunger, but he didn't want to
eat anything. Instead he went to the wooden cabinet under his CD and
record player and pulled out a bottle of J&B and poured himself half a
glass of scotch. He took a long swig. He remembered something: A
sometime girlfriend had kept a pack of cigarettes in the bedside table.
He went rummaging and found them, a crumpled pack

81

of True Blue. He went back to the living room and lit up, pulling the
smoke deep into his lungs the way he used to. He coughed and felt dizzy
and had to sit down. It had been more than five years since he had smoked.

He took another sip of scotch. He looked around. How strange that
everything seemed undisturbed, all the artifacts and remnants of a
normal life-the chairs, the books, the lamps-as if it were not true that
the entire universe had just sucked itself into a black hole and blown
itself to smithereens.

In one corner, a light was glowing, the readout light of the video
machine. He looked at it, disregarded it, and took another sip of scotch
and another drag on the cigarette. Now he could keep the smoke down, and
he felt it actually cut into his lungs. His blood was racing through his
veins, tickling.

He was alone, totally alone, the last man in a dying ember of a world.

Then he did what he had known he would do. He stood up and went to the
door of Tyler's room and opened it and stepped inside. It was dim, but
he didn't want it to be brightly lit; he didn't want to see the objects
but just to stand in their presence, to feel them. He smelled the smell
of his son. He saw the Trainspotting poster, a pile of homework and
reports and letters and a copy of Huck Finn lying on the floor beside
the unmade bed-how Tyler had loved that book, filling his father with
such pride. There was a pile of dirty clothes. He picked up a shirt and
put it to his face and inhaled deeply.

He left, closing the door behind him. Then he took Comet for a walk
around the block. The dog pulled at the leash, eager for a romp.

He came back to his room, undressed, and sat on the edge of his bed.
Think of Tyler as someone else, she had said. Think of him having to
become one hundred percent of a new person. He tried. He couldn't. It
was impossible. Tyler was Tyler. He wanted him back-all of him.

He fell asleep quickly, but woke up after only an hour. The red numbers
on the clock gleamed at him from two feet away. He got up, finished the
scotch, and walked around the vast room. As he walked, he began touching
things-the edge of the bookcase, the top of the easy chair, the doorknob
of the kitchen. He retraced the circle over and over, touching the same
objects in the same places. He did this for a long time.

82

Then he went back to his bedroom and tried to sleep again, but couldn't.
The sheet twisted and turned around his legs; the blanket felt too
heavy. The red numbers gleamed some more. He felt a weight, as if the
ceiling were pressing down upon him.

Finally, when the numbers read 5:00, he nodded off to sleep again. He
had nightmares, one after another-murderers chasing him, rabid dogs
jumping out from behind trees, his own mother trying to kill him, a
manor house of ghosts living in thousands of empty rooms. He awoke sweating.

Right away, as soon as he opened his eyes, he felt the weight again and
the presence that had taken over his mind-the knowledge of the accident.
It rushed in at him like water rushing into a sinking vessel.

But somewhere in the long night, at least, he had come to a decision. He
would let Saramaggio perform the operation. In the dawn light, he saw it
clearly. There was no other choice.

83 II

The Operation

84

85

The next morning, Cleaver drove across the George Washington Bridge into
the hazy suburbs of New Jersey. The traffic was heavy, so to pass the
time he occupied himself with one of his favorite sexual fantasies. He
was undressing a woman in a white room with stainless steel
tables-except that she was not exactly a woman. She was a cyborg. And
she was beautiful. Her flesh, or what passed for it, gleamed and had a
slight plasticky feeling, though it contained a fine mesh of wiring that
made it pleasantly warm to the touch. She had sense receptors implanted
so that she could respond with heavy breathing when he removed her
blouse and placed his hands on her perfect upright hard breasts. The
breathing turned into soft moans when he reached under her skirt.

Cleaver was excited. He looked up-the car was drifting into the bumper
of the car ahead of him, and he hit the brake. Damn. He had better
concentrate on the driving. He wiped the cyborg out of his mind, sorry
to see her go. No matter how many times he allowed himself to slip into
this fantasy, it never ceased to arouse him. At first he had been a
little embarrassed, even to himself. But he had never had luck with
women, so he'd decided to build himself one in his mind. Over the years,
he had honed it down, polishing the details- the jut of her chin, the
glint of the metal table, how her sharply cut hair, purplish black,
brushed against her shoulder. What made it so titillating, he admitted,
was that she was a machine and that she had been designed to service
him, submissively and without choice.

After inching his way over the final stretch of the bridge, he turned
onto the Palisades Parkway, then took the first exit, turned right at
the light, and eased the car along the depressing boulevards

86

of Englewood Cliffs. The afternoon was warm, and from time to time the
sun cut through the smog to dapple the roadside. He knew the way, and
soon he found himself in a development of look-alike houses and
gracefully curving driveways. The layout buoyed him: slight dips and
rises in the road, bosky groves, clumps of pines hugging the
shoulder-all created to fit some developer's vision of rustic living. He
liked the artificiality of it.

He stopped in front of the one house that stood out because of signs of
neglect. There was nothing major-the ranch house was of indestructible
brick-but instead an accumulation of small insults: rank leaves
overflowing the gutters, water stains on the white plastic shutters, an
unmowed lawn sprinkled with ghostly crowns of dandelions. How all this
must rankle the neighbors, mused Cleaver, as he walked up a pathway of
cracked flagstones. He had to knock a long time before the door opened.
A young man in a tie-dyed T-shirt and dirty chinos looked him over
uncertainly and then retreated without a word.

Cleaver entered the living room. The wall-to-wall carpeting was
cluttered with empty furniture and papers and books. A TV set was on-a
film clip of a car careering around a street, its tires screaming-and
from a corner came the sound of a CD playing techno. He could feel the
repetitive throbbing in his feet and mounting his legs. It bothered him.
He crossed the room and stepped into a long hallway. To the right was a
bedroom filled with young people. A cloud of smoke hung over them. He
looked in: six or seven men and women sitting on two beds and chairs.
Only one looked up, his face blank. Cleaver didn't recognize any of
them. He walked down the hallway until he came to a door and pushed it
open. Inside was the master bedroom. The curtains were drawn, but the
room wasn't dark. A halogen lamp sent a harsh light onto one wall and
part of the ceiling, and three computer screens were lit, casting a glow
outward. He could see two bare mattresses lying on the floor, gray with
blue stripes and large brown stains. The room's corners were lost in
shadows.

He found Quincy seated before one of the computers, his face reflecting
the ghostly iridescence. Quincy looked up, mumbled something, and went
back to the screen. It was hard to read his expression in the
half-light, but he seemed irritated by the interruption.

"I told you I was coming."

87

"Yeah, right."

Cleaver waited a moment. Quincy continued typing.

"I didn't come all the way out here to watch you hack," he said.

Quincy looked at him again, hit a few keys, and shut down the program.

"Shit."

Cleaver wondered whether he was destroying a virus or creating one.

"What's the matter?"

Quincy waved him off.

"I got a lot to do," he said, almost pugnaciously. "This is work, too.
You're not the only one."

The young man had a hatchet-blade sharpness to his face and a sunken
chest that made him look frail. Long strands of hair fell down from a
widow's peak and bounced along his cheekbones when he turned his head,
which he did frequently, in quick sharp movements like a bird. He had a
lingering case of acne that reddened his cheeks and made him look dyspeptic.

"But I want to see how it's coming along."

"And I told you I'd prefer to wait. It's not finished."

"It'd better be finished soon. Anyway, I want to see it."

Quincy sighed, stood up, and attached a ring of keys on a long chain to
his belt. He left the terminals running, walked out the door without a
word, and reached back to turn out the lights, leaving Cleaver to
stumble after him in the dimly lit room.

He went into the room down the hall, and Cleaver followed him. Now he
could see: There were four boys and two girls, spread out on facing beds
and pillows. Two of them lay flat on their backs, with their heads
propped against the wall. The others were sipping beer from cans and
passing around a joint. Cleaver noticed the pungent smell of marijuana.
They barely looked at him, too engrossed in conversation to care. Or too
high.

"Moravec is the thinker of the age," said one who looked like a
skinhead. "He'll be recognized years from now when people look back.
Darwin and Einstein all rolled into one."

The boy who had looked up before was seated to his right, working a
computer that was sitting on a bridge table. He had his shirt off, and
his back was covered with a body-ripper tattoo; it showed the flesh
opening outward, exposing wires and rods, cyborg-style. It was

88

oddly realistic-looking, thought Cleaver, as if the skin had been peeled
back to show the innards of a machine. Over his shoulder, Cleaver looked
at the screen. Someone out there had just finished writing a sentence:

My hair spreading out like rays of the sun as you kneel next to me
beside the waterfall.

The boy typed back.

>yes, yes. And then . . .

and softly you caress my cheek and then gently, you place your hand upon
my sex.

Cleaver recognized the stilted style, the almost Victorian prudery of
text sex. The boy shifted in his seat and began pounding the keyboard.
Cleaver could not see his reply. The boy hit a button, spun around in
the chair, and lifted a beer by hooking his hand upside down around the
can. He took a long swallow and smiled, oddly enough, at Cleaver.

The skinhead was still talking with a laborious intensity.

"Now, Moravec, he talks about the postbiological universe. The new cyber
life-form will outstrip us. They'll become more and more complex and
procreate and leave us behind in the dust. We'll have no choice."

"So we're slaves?"

"Unless we join them."

"And how do we do that?"

"We'll have to download our minds into computers and link up and leave
our bodies behind."

"I thought that was Kurzweil," said a girl sitting with her legs
crossed. "He says computers are going to be smarter than us in the next
twenty years. So it's just a matter of time. If we're going to survive,
we have to connect up with them somehow. It's the next big step in
evolution."

89

"No shit," said a young man as thin as a rail. "I can see fucking a
machine, but how do you get little baby machines?"

"That's Moravec," said the first boy. "He explains it. You download your
human consciousness into a computer. A robot surgeon removes your skull.
They use a high-resolution magnetic resonance to make a simulacrum of
your brain. They do it bit by bit and layer by layer, throwing away the
brain stuff once they're finished with it. Until finally the braincase
is empty. Then they just disconnect life support and your body's thrown
out."

"Just like Hannibal Lecter," said the thin young man.

They giggled.

"Fred, you asshole," said the girl.

Quincy leaned over to the second girl.

"I've got to go into the city," he said. "You can take the car to J and
R. But don't wreck it again, for fuck's sake."

She grunted.

On the way out the front door, Quincy unbuttoned his blue work shirt in
the sunlight, looked up and down the deserted street, and turned back to
Cleaver. He carried a motorcycle helmet in his right hand.

"Funny shit, huh? All that talk. If they only knew."

It was faster crossing the bridge from the Jersey side. Quincy led the
way on his motorcycle, his shirt flapping in the wind, tufts of hair
waving demonically below the helmet. Cleaver drove behind in his car,
irritated. To begin with, he disliked following anyone. And this ...
following a motorcycle, it made him feel stupid. Quincy could slip in
and out of the interstices between cars and shoot way ahead, which he
did from time to time. Then he slowed down and looked back with
annoyance until Cleaver caught up. The only reason Cleaver had gone to
New Jersey in the first place was to be sure that Quincy would show up.
Unreliable geek. They were all unreliable, the whole collection of them
in that commune, stoned-out computer heads and spaced-out hackers,
sitting around getting high on their millennial mysticism and
technophile riffs. He despised dealing with them. The only problem was
that they were so damned smart. There was no firewall they couldn't
breach, no program they couldn't devise. And Quincy was the smartest of
them all.

90

They took the Henry Hudson to the West Side Highway and turned left onto
Canal Street, crossing town past all the open-air markets. Quincy
thundered past Chinatown, pulled over on the Bowery and shut off the
engine. Cleaver parked the car behind him. Clicking the lock shut with
the remote, he heard the answering bleeps. The curbside was littered
with glass. He always felt nervous leaving his Lexus on the street,
especially downtown.

They walked half a block, past two empty storefronts, until they came to
a six-floor brownstone. Inside, in a vestibule, was a panel of black
buttons. One of them read BRAINTRUST.

Quincy pulled out a key to open the inner door, which was made of thick,
reinforced steel. "Come on up. You might as well see what you're getting
for your money."

He held the door open, only a few inches, so that Cleaver had to push
it. It was surprisingly heavy.

They walked up three flights, Quincy striding upward quickly and not
even using the banister. Cleaver began to feel one of the waves of
intense dislike that periodically overtook him whenever he was with Quincy.

"Not so fast," he said.

But Quincy rounded the landing ahead of him and started up the next
flight without so much as a pause.

On the fourth floor, by the time he got there, breathing heavily, he
found a door ajar and walked inside. Quincy had already thrown open the
windows. A racket was coming from one side: a door pounding on its
hinges and behind it, a frenzied scratching. Cleaver listened in alarm.
A large animal. Quincy had locked him in the adjacent room.

"A mastiff," Quincy said. "Low-cost insurance."

"But who looks after him?"

Quincy shrugged.

"Me," he said. "When I'm here. It's good if people know you have one."

He told Cleaver to avoid any sudden movements and opened the door. A
huge gaunt gray dog bounded out, running over to Quincy and then
sniffing Cleaver's pant leg. He circled the room four or five times and
bucked under Quincy's outstretched hand, slobbered a bit, and eventually
settled into a heap near the door.

91

Cleaver shook his head.

Quincy was irritated.

"Look, it's not the Waldorf, all right. It's cheap-you shouldn't complain."

"I'm not. It's just-that dog smells to high heaven."

" 'High heaven!' Where'd you pick that up?"

Cleaver held himself in check and remained silent. It wouldn't do to get
into an argument at this stage.

Quincy walked to the rear of the room.

"Well, what the fuck-do you want to see it or not?"

"Of course. That's why I'm here."

With a slightly theatrical mincing gesture, Quincy unlocked the door and
flung it open. Cleaver could see that it had metal backing.

"Ta-dah," sang out Quincy. He was being ironic.

Cleaver held his breath and walked in. The instant he crossed the
threshold, he got excited at what he saw. All this time . . . Quincy
really was building it. He felt a pang of guilt: And to think that I
doubted him.

The laboratory was large and airy, two floors joined together so that
the brick walls were twenty feet high and sunlight streamed in through
two rows of windows. Below, there were four long worktables crammed with
wires and zip drives and boosters and bowls filled with computer chips.
Along one wall were two huge cylindrical vaults that looked like
truncated MRI machines, complete with sliding plastic stretchers. Inside
them were large helmets with visors, arrayed in cocoons of wires.

Quincy patted one of the machines.

"The first fully operational transcranial stimulator-receiver. It's
fucking brilliant."

Despite himself, Cleaver was impressed. He had given Quincy piles of
money-it had been easy enough to divert grants funds from Pinegrove-and
he had provided him with assistants and time, lots of time. But somehow
he had never backed him with the requisite confidence.

"Does it work?" He scarcely dared to ask the question.

Quincy didn't answer right away. Instead, he busied himself throwing
switches and checking connections. He acted as if Cleaver weren't there.

92

Cleaver repeated the question. Quincy scowled.

"Well, we won't know that until we try it, will we? One thing's for
sure-it's a lot better than those fucking space goggles you use over at
Pinegrove. You still running experiments with those patients? Isn't that
against the law or something?"

Cleaver ignored him. "When's it going to be finished?"

Quincy shrugged.

He's playing the role of the temperamental inventor, Cleaver thought.
Try flattery.

"I have to say-I never thought..."

"Yes?"

"Well, that you would come so far. I mean, it certainly looks impressive."

"Looks impressive. It is impressive."

Quincy walked over to the tube, patted it, and peered inside.

"Look at this," he said. He reached in and unsnapped a helmet, then
brought it out and set it on a table. It touched down with a thud. The
device had what looked like a face guard in the front, holding in place
two concave disks that looked like eggcups.

"Inside here," said Quincy, fingering the side of the helmet, "are five
hundred thousand recording electrodes, extremely sensitive. They're
arranged in a flat, hexagonal array. They're like the ones you used
before in your transcranial magnetic receiver but much finer. Their
ability to record electrical synaptic transmissions is five times
greater. The signals they pick up are deeper, too, all the way to the
brain stem. It paints ninety percent of the brain."

"Ninety percent," repeated Cleaver. "So what's it missing-the rear of
the cerebellum?"

"That's right."

"And that's for fine motor coordination. So we don't need it."

"Exactly."

"What's the operating principle?"

"It works like your TMR-only better. I've coated it with a silastic that
reduces interference from the skull. The moving electrons in the brain
create a magnetic field that's picked up by the electrodes. The brain
activity is registered and scanned into a neuro-model on the screen
there." He dipped his head toward a computer console nearby. Then he
touched the eggcups.

93

"Now here's the breakthrough. The scanner allows us to read the brain
and see what it's doing. But how can we send messages back to it? That's
what these little babies are for. Each one fits inside your eyelids and
covers the eyeball completely. You can't blink, so we inject saline
solution continually through these side vents." He pointed to tiny tubing.

"Why the eyes?"

Quincy threw him a supercilious look. "The visual system is the most
efficient pathway into the brain. The optic nerve is our point of entry,
and we can ride it like a superhighway-right smack inside." He now
seemed expansive, now that he was warming to his subject. He continued.

"What happens when you see something? The retina transforms light into
neural signals. The signals are sent to the interneurons, which relay
them through the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then
to layer four of the primary visual cortex."

"In the occipital lobe."

"Right. So basically all we have to do is to encode signals from the
computer to mimic the retinal signals. That fools the optic nerve that
carries it into the occipital lobe. We're home free."

"So you can not only listen to the brain-you can talk to it."

"Right," said Quincy. "Decoding and encoding, both. A perfect loop."

"And you think you can actually feed in information? Concepts?"

"Information, yes. We convert it to megabits through the computer and
download it. Abstract thoughts, concepts, are more difficult. They
involve more than one brain center. We won't know about that until we
try it."

"Will the information stay in?"

"No reason for it not to. We're counting on the brain's ability to sort
it out and send it to the proper area. We might be able to tap into the
vast portion of the cortex that just sits there unused. We could, in
theory at least, hook you up and give you a second language. Or implant
you with the theory of relativity. Or an encyclopedic knowledge of
Renaissance painting."

Cleaver found it hard to suppress his admiration, and he hesitated
before asking the question that was burning inside.

"So, do you think-is it possible that it could work the other way?"

94

"Meaning . . . ?"

"That the brain itself could travel out?"

Quincy laughed.

"It's possible, but far-out. Who knows? I talked about a highway-a
highway runs in both directions. It might be feasible, if the neural
transmission runs in the other direction, for the brain to hook itself
up to a computer and to rummage around inside it and access all the
information there."

Cleaver felt his heart rate quicken, and he willed it to slow down. This
was what he was waiting for.

"So you'd create external intelligence, an addition to the brain outside
the brain."

"An exo-brain. A form of artificially enhanced intelligence. Imagine if
you could hook up Deep Blue to Kasparov. You'd have the sweep of human
intelligence combined with the computation speed of the computer."

He snapped the helmet in place and slid the stretcher back inside the tube.

"The only thing is ... it would have to be a short match."

"And why is that?"

"This draws so much power, the micro-encrypting, that the system can't
handle it for long without crashing. We figure it will last seven minutes."

"And what happens to Kasparov?"

"If he's still out there, I'd say he's fucked. That part doesn't come
back. And Deep Blue-he starts ordering caviar."

"Very funny."

Cleaver tried to make his words sound sarcastic, but it was hard. He had
suddenly gained too much respect for this unkempt young man whose face
was blotched with angry red pimples.

"Now let me ask you something," said Quincy. "Are you still obsessed
with that whole thing-what do you call it?-the anima?"

Now it was Cleaver's turn to smile.

"Yes and no," he said.

95

Scott paced around the waiting room for five hours. He already felt he
knew the place inside out, as if he had been coming here for years. The
same old coffee table of mud-brown varnish spread with torn magazines,
the same dust-covered Venetian blinds, and the same faux English prints
on the walls-red-coated riders leaping across the countryside on a fox hunt.

He was not good at waiting. Nor was he good at dealing with large
institutions like hospitals. Their size put him off, and their
bureaucracies offended his sense of individuality and called up an
almost childish rebellion. He tended to think of all of the nurses and
doctors and aides in the collective generic, embodied in the single
pronoun they, as in: They don'tell you what's going on. It wouldn't kill
them to give out some information. And now, in this particular hospital,
he felt totally bereft and dependent upon them, powerless. It wasn't
their fault-they were nice enough, especially that one surgeon, Kate. It
was just that he was a man in crisis, watching helplessly as his life
went down the drain, and they were his only lifeline and he didn't trust
them.

Time had come to a complete stop-he was no longer conscious of it-and
yet everything, even a turn around the room, seemed to take forever. The
world was happening in slow motion, except when it fell off its axis and
lurched about madly.

They had told him, when they were briefing him the other day- when was
it? only a day and a half ago?-that the operation would be lengthy. But
this was so lengthy it was interminable. Yesterday morning, when he had
phoned to give his consent, Kate had responded sympathetically and had
made him feel better, stronger in his

96

certitude, by saying, "I think you made the right decision. You want to
give him every chance." And when he had arrived this morning, unable to
eat breakfast, fumbling for money to pay the taxi driver, she had sat
him down and calmly explained to him the intricacies of what they were
going to do. She had made it all sound feasible by using a
matter-of-fact tone, but he could sense the huge void of uncertainty at
the core of it. Then Saramaggio had waltzed in, stooping reflexively in
the doorway the way tall men do. His demeanor was solemn enough, but
Scott couldn't avoid the impression that he was barely able to contain
his excitement. After all, he was about to embark upon a "procedure"
that medical students might be reading about for years to come.

Saramaggio had once again taken him into his office, and Kate had
followed. There, the doctor had motioned for the two of them to sit
down, side by side, as if they were a couple. He had put his tweed
jacket into a closet, donned a white jacket, and seated himself behind
his desk to explain some of "the fundamentals," as he put it.

"Good news," he began. "The review board has approved the operation."
His eyes met Scott's across the desk. "Contingent-of course-upon your
approval. Kate . . . Dr. Willet, here . . . has told me you agree.
That's a sensible decision. The only decision, really."

He seemed to feel that Scott needed bucking up, that he wasn't
sufficiently enthusiastic.

"If this had happened five years ago," he said, "you and I wouldn't be
sitting here. The field is moving that fast. In another ten years, we
probably wouldn't be here, either-because you would already know about
it. One day, it'll be routine. Someone has to be first."

He seemed to feel the occasion called for the philosophical long view.
Scott didn't feel reassured. He still had questions.

"You said last time that a computer is going to be involved. And Dr.
Willet just described it to me. But I don't get it. . . . How can a
computer tell a body what to do? How does it work?"

"It won't do any thinking, if that's what you mean. We're a long way
from that. All it does-and I don't mean to minimize it, because it's
truly extraordinary-but what it does is ensure that the involuntary
brain functions continue, that the autonomic nervous system stays in
operation. It does this by taking the functions over-or rather the
guidance system for the functions. Think of it as replacing a

97

human pilot with an autopilot. Or as a pacemaker-except it's for the
brain, not the heart.

"Basically, we're going to make a complete map of your son's brain. We
do this from top to bottom by making high-resolution magnetic resonance
measurements. The measurements go into the computer one by one, layer by
layer, so that by the end of the process, his entire brain is scanned.
The computer holds all this information-in effect, it replicates the
brain's entire architecture. Then we implant electrodes into the real
brain. They record the activity and forward it into the computer, which
reads it and stores it. The computer can then imitate the neural
transmissions by firing off similar electrical impulses. We feed them
directly down the brain's motor pathways of the spinal cord. The lungs,
the heart, the glands-they don't care where the signals are coming from
as long as they keep coming. And in the meantime, we can, in effect,
disconnect the brain and work with it."

"But I thought you said you might not need the computer. I thought it
was . . . like a safety net. Backup-that's what you called it."

"I don't think so. I certainly didn't mean to give that impression. No,
we will need the computer. You see, to extract the stem cells, we will
have to shut down his brain stem. The computer will have to take over."

He paused and looked at Scott to see if he was following him. He was,
and he seemed horrified-and angry.

"But what happens then? I mean, at the end, can you reconnect it?"

"Well, yes. If we couldn't do that, the whole procedure would be out the
window."

"But have you ever done it?"

Saramaggio hesitated a millisecond.

"It's been done, yes. But as I said before, with animals."

"But not humans."

"Not humans, no. Mice mostly. Once in macaque monkeys. We've done the
entire operation. And monkeys are quite predictive of what occurs in
humans. It's the same setup, basically."

"And what were the results?

"Well, they seem to be good. They recover; they function. Impairment
seems to be minimal. Of course, it's a little hard to tell with monkeys."

98

Saramaggio looked down at his desk blotter.

"Look," he said finally. "Your son has undergone extensive brain damage.
I don't know if I can bring him back. I don't know if he'll ever be the
same. But I do know that this operation, as radical and frightening and
unique as it sounds, is his only chance."

Scott tried again not to let his anger show. Blackmail. Hobson's choice.
But he didn't want to do anything to jeopardize his son's chances. He
let Saramaggio continue.

"Now-you've given your permission. You can withdraw it if you like. But
once we get under way, once I walk through those doors of the OR, I
don't want-"

"I think he understands," put in Kate abruptly, in a tone that suddenly
silenced him. She rose, and Saramaggio, with exaggerated courtliness,
sprang up also. Then Scott stood, slowly and warily.

"I'm not going to change my mind," he said. "I just want to know all the
details."

Saramaggio explained that there were, in effect, two operations- one to
extract the metal object, install the computer, and extract the stem
cells, and then some weeks later, once the cells had multiplied to many
millions in the lab, another one to plant them.

On the way out and almost as an afterthought, Saramaggio had touched
Scott lightly on the elbow and had said, "By the way, this first
part-the MR scanning-it takes a long time."

"How long?"

"Well, with a monkey, almost two, three hours. With a human, it's hard
to say, but it's bound to be longer. We can't say for sure."

That certainly hadn't bolstered Scott's confidence.

Operating Room 7, Saramaggio's favorite, was out of the question; it
wasn't large enough to fit the operating table with all the new computer
equipment, and it was too far from the room containing the magnetic
resonance imager. So they had to use OR 9. It was spacious and spanking
new, but Saramaggio was not happy with it. Like most neurosurgeons,
whose need for exactitude bordered upon superstition, he felt
comfortable working only among familiar surroundings. If your patient
suddenly began bleeding

99

uncontrollably, you didn't want to start looking around for the bipolar
electrocautery.

Nor was he happy with the MRI. He had wanted the slightly older version,
snug as a cigar tube, because the resolution was fractionally higher,
and Cleaver, throwing his weight around, had also insisted upon it. But
the closer walls of the older model increased the danger of infection,
and he had finally decided the risk was not worth taking. As it was, two
aides had been swabbing down the machine, every surface and every curve,
for two hours.

A team of fourteen had been assembled. The anesthetist had two residents
backing him up; the scrub nurse had two circulating nurses; Saramaggio
had Gully Singh and Kate and Thomas Greer, a fifty-nine-year-old
neurosurgeon known as a level-headed thinker, who would be good for a
quick opinion on the spot. Then there were the three MRI technicians and
a computer expert to assist Cleaver. Furthermore, all kinds of
neurologists and surgeons would be dropping in for a while, probably
even the administrator himself, Calvin Brewster, the old buffoon. They'd
stand around in a corner, kibitzing and straining to get a look, all to
be able later to say that they had been there when the great event
happened-provided, of course, that it all turned out all right. If it
didn't, they'd disappear into thin air.

Saramaggio was not entirely sanguine. But he made a point of exuding an
air of supreme confidence all morning-amazing how theatrics enters into
our profession, he used to tell himself. He believed he'd handled the
conference with the boy's father successfully, no matter what Kate
thought. He could tell she faulted him for lack of what she might call
sensitivity, and this bothered him; if there was one thing he prided
himself on, other than the surgery itself, it was his ability to explain
things in a simple way to concerned relatives. He even liked doing it.
But Kate seemed to have this air of recrimination. And perhaps he had
imagined it, but she had seemed to end the meeting abruptly. He had to
admit it: She was beginning to get on his nerves. She seemed to think
she had all the answers. He hoped he hadn't made a mistake in choosing
her. She was intelligent and capable; he had to give her that. And it
was good to have a beautiful woman around-just the scent of her perfume
was enough to call out the bantam swagger in him that always helped him
do his best work. But if she was going to turn into a judgmental harpy,
then the whole

100

thing wouldn't hang together. Not to mention the fact that he wouldn't
be able to lure her into bed. Ah well. He sighed. Maybe he was getting
old for this.

He called the surgical team together and explained that the operation
would proceed in four stages. First would come the removal of the
foreign object. In many ways, that would be the most dangerous part:
extracting it without ripping out essential brain tissue. Next, provided
the damage was not too substantial and the patient survived, would come
the total MRI scan. That alone would take some four or five hours. Then
the electrodes would be implanted and the computer switched on. The
fourth stage would be the removal of the neural stem cells from the
subventricular zone below the fluid-filled lateral ventricles. These
would be set aside for cultivation exocranially.

Finally, the skull would be replaced, though not secured, and the
patient would be kept in a germ-free environment for weeks. During this
time, while the computer aided the lungs and heart to function, the stem
cells would multiply in petri dishes, using fetal bovine serum as the
medium. If they successfully grew into a colony of healthy,
undifferentiated neurons and there were enough of them, then further
down the line-who knew how long it might take-there would be a final
operation. The skull would be reopened, and the neurons would be
reinserted into the damaged region by means of a micropipette attached
to a syringe. The hope was that they would integrate through the same
genetic program that caused the brain to develop in the first place. At
some point, if there was evidence that they had taken hold, the computer
would be turned off. He didn't have to say how much of the multiple-tier
operation had never before been attempted; the team knew it.

"Any questions?" he asked with a rakish understatement, rather like-or
so he thought-a group commander giving orders to a cluster of young,
scared, but indomitable RAF pilots about to drop their ordnance over
Germany.

He looked from face to face; he could read the strain in their features,
and he fancied that he felt a sudden rush of affection for his colleagues.

Something more-some words for history-were called for. But what?

"I know what you're all thinking," he said, though in fact he had

101

no idea whatsoever. He paused, stumbling. "And I'm thinking the same
thing. But we can't let that interfere with our work. The first X ray,
the first heart transplant, the first use of sterile equipment. Medicine
advances this way, in starts and lurches, through us, its practitioners.
But we shouldn't feel that today-the weight of history. We should just
do what's expected of us, just do our jobs."

He looked around again, finished. Somehow, his speech didn't seem to
have had the effect he had hoped. Still, the words were eloquent, in a way.

"So," he added. "Let's get to it."

They took their places in the operating room, moving easily with
well-timed movements.

Gully broke the ice with another one of his doctor jokes, but the
response was tepid. Usually ORs were perfect settings for tall tales,
long narratives, shaggy dog stories-"It's like a campfire without the
fire; instead we gather around a prone body," Kate's old professor used
to say-but in this particular OR, she noted, there was no levity.

Saramaggio looked to his left, near the Gerhardt table. There was a
stainless steel rack, still hot from sterilization, bearing a metal pan
of tiny electrodes and a series of small petri dishes. He realized that
he hadn't seen them there before, and the realization struck him with
renewed force, as he understood that he would soon be filling the dishes
with tiny cells taken from the very central cavities of the brain, that
what he was about to do had never been done by anyone.

The patient was wheeled in, his head swaddled in sterile cloths, that
obscene obstruction still there sticking out like a unicorn's horn. The
poor boy-his face looked so inert and haggard. Saramaggio knew, from his
earliest years in med school, that it didn't pay to look at the patient
this way. Better to think of him as a nonperson, a machine that needed
to have its wiring rejiggered-that's all.

The anesthesiologist went to work, and soon the patient was deep under,
a tube coming out of his mouth, strapped tightly down. The scrub nurse
had everything lined up. Kate was there at his side, and so was Greer, a
few strands of silver hair peeking out from below his cap. The machines
were ticking and humming.

And before Saramaggio knew it, he heard the whirring of the drill

102

and the rending scream it sent out when the resident leaned forward,
touching the bit to bone.

Then Cleaver walked in, more than a touch of arrogance to the way he
swung open the door. He carted along his machines and quickly started to
fiddle with them. Saramaggio hated to admit it, but he felt a wash of
relief as soon as he saw him dressed in scrubs and ready to go. He was
such an odd, unpredictable man, but face it: The operation couldn't
proceed without him.

The route to the cafeteria was burned into Scott's memory, and he walked
it like a zombie. Up the hall past the nurses' station to the elevator
bank. Press the button with the arrow tip pointing downward, the one
that lit grudgingly. Wait an eternity before stepping into the lumbering
boxcar filled with doctors, aides, anxious-looking relatives, the
occasional gurney. Then out on the second floor and follow the pale
green corridor all the way to the end. From there, it was only a few
steps to the stainless steel container that dispensed watered-down
coffee with the pull of a tiny black lever.

But so befuddled was his state of mind that he lost his way and wandered
along the line of garish-looking Danishes and plastic cups of peach
halves and grapefruit slices. He wondered in a moment of sudden clear
confusion what he had come there for. He began to understand what it
must be like to go insane: So many inchoate thoughts were crowding into
his head that he could no longer sort through them to separate the
meaningful from the accidental. He was lost like a cork in a stormy sea.

He carried his coffee to his customary corner table and sat down,
stirring it absentmindedly. Beside him was a window, and he looked at
the traffic down below on York Avenue. It was raining. He scarcely
noticed the three men who sat down at a table nearby. Only when their
conversation caught his attention did he turn to look at them.

"This trumps everything else," said one. "It leaves everyone else in the
dust."

"Like Duke," said another. "Nicolelis, eat your heart out."

"Provided-of course-that it works."

"What are you guys talking about?" asked the third.

103

Scott studied them. Two were young men wearing white jackets; one had a
professorial air, accentuated by a trim beard, the other had longish
hair swept back over his ears. Clearly, residents or interns to judge
from their overconfident airs. The third was in street clothes, and his
manner marked him as an outsider; he was the one who had posed the question.

"Miguel Nicolelis-the neuroscientist at Duke. He led a team that worked
with owl monkeys. Amazing stuff. This monkey had electrodes implanted
throughout his brain. A computer had recorded signals fired off for
various movements, so it could recognize them. When he began to think
about moving his arm-just thinking about it-the computer spotted it and
send out a similar signal to a robot that then lifted its arm."

"Say that again."

"The monkey could move the robot's arm just by thinking about it."

"Apparently," said the second doctor, "they discovered that cells in the
cortex that control movement start firing long before the movement occurs.

"It means your brain is planning out all kinds of voluntary movements
beforehand. Those movements can be read and acted upon by machines.
Think what it means if robots can read your mind and do your bidding."

"What that could mean for paralytics-or anyone else, for that matter-is
unbelievable," put in the other. "You could have a robot do whatever you
wanted. You could lie on your back and paint your apartment. Or create a
sculpture."

"Or unzip your fly."

"You would think that."

"Seriously, it's a first step."

"Yeah, but a first step to what?"

"Connecting human intelligence directly to machines without the middle
man-our bodies."

"Get out," said the younger man.

"You have no idea what's going on in neurology these days."

"And this thing could be bigger than that?"

"Sure. In terms of neurology, it means we've crossed over a frontier.
We're in a whole new country, pioneers in a land where almost anything
is possible."

104

"This is history in the making," said the man with the beard.

"Andyou are there," said his colleague.

"What's it mean for the hospital?"

"For Saramaggio, you mean. For him, it's fame and fortune. Maybe even a
Nobel Prize."

"No," said his colleague. "They give the Nobel for research. This is
applied medicine. He won't get it, even if everyone admits he deserves it."

"Don't be so sure."

"It'll go to someone like Gould and Gross."

"Who are they?" asked the outsider.

"Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross. At Princeton. They discovered
neurogenesis."

"What's that?"

"They discovered that the brain continues to make new cells. That opened
up a whole new area. Before them, it was believed that the brain simply
stopped developing. You got your one hundred billion neurons and that
was it; you got older, the cells expired, your brain deteriorated, you
turned senile, and you died. Now, we know that new neurons are produced
all the time."

The other resident chimed in.

"This corresponds to work done at Rockefeller University on
canaries-believe it or not. A guy named Fernando Nottebohm showed that
canaries grow new neurons to learn new songs."

"So-Frank Sinatra, he was one smart guy."

The two residents ignored the wisecrack.

"And the other interesting thing, considering what's happening here
today, is that the same general region-the hippocampus-is where the
brain's stem cells come from."

"And stem cells are . . . ?"

"The basic cell-the undifferentiated cell from which all other cells
develop."

"And they're the ones that this guy here, this doctor, is going to take
out and grow and then put back in. Is that it?"

"In a nutshell, yes."

"And the chances of success?"

The two interns exchanged looks.

"Considering that it's never been done before . . ."

105

"Considering that it's largely theoretical at this point and no one can
be sure if the theory is even correct..."

"Considering all that, I would say the chances of success are about one
in fifty."

"You're being generous. I'd say one in a hundred."

"And we're just talking about survival. Never mind the question of
regaining faculties."

"And from what I understand, the patient's a vegetable already."

"So now he'll be a supervegetable. Genetically engineered."

"Christ," said the outsider. "And they allow that?"

"Allow it. They encourage it. They beg for it."

"But why?"

"Prestige. Operations like this equal prestige, and prestige equals money."

"Provided, of course, that they're successful."

"Yes, well, there is that little problem."

Their conversation was drawing to a close. It was just as well, because
Scott didn't think he could stand hearing any more.

106

Kate tossed the surgeon's gown into the steel laundry hamper, the one
for deep washing and sterilization, and undressed, tucking her
comfortable operating room sandals away in the bottom of her locker. She
picked up a towel, wrapped it around her, and headed for the shower.
After a long operation, that's what she needed to relax: the strong
stream of water pounding down, blocking out everything else.

Saramaggio. She had once again marveled at the man's skill. He's a
genius, she told herself as she tested the water on her left elbow (like
any surgeon, she was protective of her hands). It was nothing short of a
miracle, the way his slender fingers moved with such unhurried sureness.
Probing the pathways, moving to stanch heavy bleeding, testing damaged
areas with his fingers-not a single wasted movement. But beyond that, he
demonstrated that instinct to go directly to the correct spot, even when
it was hidden behind a mass of brain tissue, almost as if his fingertips
could think on their own. She had to give him credit.

Human brains are alike in their fundamental structure, but when it comes
to the not-so-fine points-the size of the ventricles, the mesh of blood
vessels, the serpentine turns of the cortex-each one is unique. A brain
surgeon picking up a scalpel is about to enter a labyrinth of double
deception; from the outside it looks like any other, but inside it is a
mystery unto itself. The good ones somehow manage to steer clear of the
blind alleys.

The water felt cool against her face. She turned to let it run against
her neck and down her back and legs and then reached out for the faucet
to make the water cooler still. She did this in stages until

107

the coldness made her gasp. It was the remnant of a game of endurance
she used to play as a child, jumping into the frigid mountain rivers of
Washington.

Her admiration was tinged with ambivalence that she didn't want to
examine too closely. On the one hand, she was enthralled: This was what
medicine was all about; this was what she had spent all those years
dreaming about-curing the hopeless, helping people, patching back their
lives. On the other, she was filled with self-doubt and even envy. For,
watching the man work, she wondered: Would she ever be that good? Did
she possess that overweening confidence, the requisite assurance that
each and every move was absolutely correct? Here she was at the ripe old
age of thirty-four, about to enter the surgeon's prime years when
coordination marries experience, and she was light-years behind
Saramaggio. Sometimes when she made an incision, she felt a dangerous
hesitancy. How would she acquire the arrogance to do it passionlessly?
Would she have to turn into an egomaniac to become a great surgeon?

And on top of everything else, she was beginning to fixate on
Saramaggio's shortcomings as a person. She could see the lust in his
eyes. He was parsimonious with his gift. It was expected that a chief
surgeon would pass along his secrets-that was how the whole system was
supposed to work-but he was too competitive to share them. Why was it,
she wondered, that so many good surgeons were deficient in the
old-fashioned virtues of magnanimity, generosity, and compassion?

She stepped out of the shower and toweled herself dry. She swung her wet
hair to one side to shake the water off and wrapped the towel around it
like a turban.

The operation had gone as well as could be expected, but it was the most
complicated and risky one she had ever witnessed. It had lasted ten
hours. The first five had been taken up with removing the hideous hunk
of metal. Kate noticed at one point that Saramaggio was laboring. He
would raise the metal rod a millimeter, clean-cut the bottom to minimize
extraction of brain tissue, and work his way around in a complete
circle. How could he prevent it from falling back? He had an
inspiration: He clamped forceps to the rod and used a brace and wire to
jerry-build a small hoist. This way he could gradually extract it while
continuing to cut free the newly exposed base,

108

while an assistant slowly revolved it to open up space. He moved by
minute degrees and finally got the damned thing out, letting it dangle
for a moment in midair, an ugly and complicated contraption with four
half-moons of metal and wire attached to a long base of parallel bars.
When it was gingerly placed in a sterile container, they all felt like
applauding. Instead, they showed their relief by banter. Saramaggio
chattered away about a recent vacation in Barbados.

But when Kate looked into the injury, she felt her heart sink. How was
it possible that such a deep wound hadn't already killed the boy? She
stared closely She could see all the way down to the hippocampus; the
damage was widespread. But the more she looked, the more she realized
that, remarkably, it seemed to have somehow spared the vital areas. Was
it really possible that new cells could grow and be implanted and repair
the connections? She began to feel something stirring: Maybe this was
going to be a milestone in neurosurgery.

"Make sure you get it all," said Saramaggio to the technician running
the video. They stepped back a moment to let the camera take its close-ups.

Then Saramaggio set about searching for the stem cells in their hiding
place, in the lining of the fluid-filled central chambers, the
ventricles. He reached deep inside the lining and extracted forty-five
infinitesimal samples and placed them in the petri dishes. Under the
microscope, they would look like featureless blobs of protoplasm, and
they had tiny waving hairs, like tentacles only thinner, that propelled
them around the liquid surface.

Then came an equally delicate phase of the operation, the implantation
of 126 hair-thin electrodes made of titanium so they wouldn't be pulled
out by the MRI. The placement concentrated on centers controlling the
somatic system. Each electrode picked up a nest of firing neurons and
relayed the signal to a computer, which read it, learned to replicate
it, and stored it, so that the transmission could be reversed later to
keep the vital organs functioning. During this phase, they relied upon
Cleaver, whose deep eyes, accentuated by the pale green of the mask and
the dome beneath the cap, gleamed with intelligence. He had a way of
sending a frisson of dislike up Kate's spine, but she had to admit, as
she watched him attaching the tails of the electrodes, running the
wires, spinning around to check

109

the monitoring by the electroencephalogram, that he was a thorough
professional.

Saramaggio let Gully sink some of the electrodes so that he could rest.
But a few minutes later, he was back, looking over Gully's shoulder and
then, dissatisfied, gesturing him aside to redo some of his work and
taking charge again. The kibitzers stood around quietly in the rear,
sometimes whispering among themselves. Then came the MRI mapping, in
which numerous segments had to be repeated.

Saramaggio worked relentlessly for another two hours. The rest of the
operation was restorative-covering the wound, dressing it, sterilizing
everything within yards of it, and securing a specially cut plate to
cover the hole in the skull. It was made to be removable, for the
connection of the electrodes through which the computer would send its
signals would have to be checked and changed from time to time. How
often, no one knew. Such a thing had never been done before.

At the end, Saramaggio backed off and looked at his handiwork, a
helpless body lying there with the head swathed in bandages, almost as
if he were contemplating a work of art. Then he doffed his gown,
revealing a simple T-shirt and black hairy arms, and said, "Well, let's
keep our fingers crossed." He added an afterthought: "We better make
sure we have a backup power supply for the computer."

"That's my department," said Cleaver, hovering over the computer. "He's
in my territory now."

There had been intense emotion in his tone, but whether it was jealousy
or triumph, Kate could not say.

After the shower, she dried her hair quickly, dressed, and entered the
corridor. As she walked past the waiting room, she looked inside and was
shocked to see Scott still there. He was sitting on the edge of a chair,
his head in his hands, an exhausted bundle of nerves. Was it possible
that Saramaggio hadn't come out yet to give him a report? That would be
such a breach of protocol, of normal decency, that she could scarcely
believe it. But looking at Scott told her it was true.

He spotted her and rushed over. She spoke before he did, hurrying to
supply the vital information in the order she thought he would want it.

She told him that Tyler was alive, that the operation was over, and

110

that it had seemed to go well. Everything that they had wanted to do,
they'd done. Tyler was resting comfortably, or at least in no pain. The
metal fragment was out, and they believed they had secured brain stem
cells. The computer appeared to be monitoring his activity, and at some
point in the future it would begin to direct it-it was difficult to say
when that would be. That would be the next crossroads. In the meanwhile,
they would all just have to hope-to hope and to pray.

She answered a few questions and then said she would look for Dr.
Saramaggio, who had been, she repeated several times, nothing short of
brilliant.

Saramaggio was in his office, sitting at his desk, still in his white
T-shirt, his head resting in his arms. At first, she thought he was
asleep. But when he heard her, he sat upright, quickly, as if he were
embarrassed, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. He suddenly
looked like a little boy.

"Look at this," he said in a choked voice. He held his right hand up,
and she saw that it was trembling slightly.

"I honestly didn't know if I could do it," he said.

"Well, you did."

"Yes, I did, didn't I?"

"And now I think you should come and talk to the father. He needs to
know what's going on."

He looked stricken.

"My God, I forgot all about him. How could I do that?" He stood up.
"Where is he? Will you come with me?"

"Yes," she said.

And she opened the door wider for him and was even tempted to take him
by the elbow to guide him, but the moment he stepped over the threshold,
he seemed to revert to his old self.

She wasn't sorry the episode had happened. I guess he's human after all,
she thought.

Kate was exhausted. As she rode the creaking elevator to her three-room
apartment on West Twenty-first Street, she felt like forgoing supper and
collapsing in bed, even though she hadn't eaten since breakfast. She
realized that something was troubling her, something

111

about the day's events, although she couldn't say what it was. She
scarcely had the energy to figure it out.

Luis, the elevator man, smiled sweetly as he swept the door open for her
on the fifteenth floor. She thanked him, walked down the aged hallway,
unlocked the heavy wooden door, and tossed her pocketbook on the sagging
but comfortable couch. Then she went to the window and threw open the
curtains.

Twilight was settling in. Spread below for five or six blocks was a
valley of low-rise buildings, tar-covered rooftops set apart by low
brick walls. They were crowned with wooden water tanks; she loved the
look of the tanks and had counted them when she first arrived- seven in
all. In the mid distance behind the valley was a wall of higher
buildings that rose up like steep cliffs. They were close enough so that
she could watch the people taking morning coffee on their balconies or
could spy upon scenes of domestic harmony or strife through the
occasional curtainless window. Behind the wall, still higher buildings
loomed, mountainous skyscrapers that marched off to the north all the
way to midtown. Now, at dusk, lights were appearing everywhere. Entire
floors of office buildings were blazing, and new lights were flicking on
in the faraway residential towers, tiny glowing squares that illuminated
as she watched.

The sight set her blood racing. It was the reason she had rented the
apartment six weeks ago when she'd arrived from San Francisco with two
suitcases and a backpack. It seemed to sum up everything she was feeling
about the city, all of its infinite possibilities as well as its gifts
of anonymity and privacy and even loneliness. You can remake yourself
here into anything you want, it seemed to tell her; it's all the same to me.

Out of nowhere, she thought of her mother. So brave after her husband
died in Vietnam, raising her alone in a small mountain town outside of
Seattle, teaching her the importance of education. We're tough women,
she had said, speaking of herself and her own mother, who had come all
the way across Canada from Greenland. Generations of tough,
single-minded women. We've ice water in our veins, her mother used to say.

It was odd, the other day in the cafeteria, how she had told Scott
Jessup how her mother had died. She didn't usually open up like that to
strangers, but he had seemed to need to hear about someone else's

112

loss. And strangely, she had omitted the most important part of the
story, how her mother on the Washington mountaintop had known of her
husband's death in Vietnam. Her mother had said that she'd seen him at
the moment of his death, that he'd appeared before her in his military
uniform. She was not superstitious, but ever afterward she'd insisted
that her husband had come to say good-bye. And who's to say it was
impossible-the other side of the earth notwithstanding-if the spirit is
willing and the love is strong enough? And then, years later, long after
her fall, when it came her time to die the long slow death of cancer,
she'd seen him again near the end, materializing at the foot of her bed,
and she was no longer afraid.

That was a story Kate rarely told, and even today, when she was turning
it over in her mind, she didn't know what to make of it. She didn't for
one moment deny that her mother thought she had seen him. But had she
actually? Could the timing of his death have been a coincidence? And if
she had seen him, was he inside her mind or was something actually there
outside herself? It was a fundamental riddle that challenged her
scientific bent, and she'd settled the contradiction by shelving the
whole thing. She believed it and disbelieved it at the same time.

And there was something else she hadn't told Scott, or anyone else for
that matter. She didn't like to think of it, and when she did, she
cringed mentally and tried to turn her mind to something else. When her
mother had been dying, in the final days, Kate was at the tail end of
medical school exams; if she had left to take care of her full-time, she
would have lost her scholarship and a precious year or maybe more. Her
mother had understood fully the need to go to a nursing home; it was the
only practical thing to do, she had said, and she'd meant it. Kate had
visited often, every weekend and sometimes during the week. She had
buttered up the staff and brought them presents to make sure that they
would take special care of her mother.

But-and this was the thought that cut so deep-she did not drop out of
school; she did not take her into her own house and nurse her for a
couple of months and tend to her the way an only daughter should. She
didn't ply her with treats and sit by the bed for long talks and play
music and read to her for hours on end. And, perhaps most of all, she
wasn't even with her at the moment of death. She was

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taking an exam and missed it by two hours. At the funeral when she
spoke, a sparrow came out of nowhere and lit on her head. It got caught
in her hair and she shooed it away, but it came back and she thought it
even pecked at her. Later, she had had the odd thought that the sparrow
was an avenging spirit sent by her mother, and though she didn't really
believe this, she had had nightmares about it for years afterward.

Why was she thinking of all this now? Something was nagging at her;
something from the operation was making her think about all this. What
was it?

She went to the tiny kitchen with its stained enamel sink and two-burner
stove, brewed a cup of coffee, and sat on the couch in front of the
scarred but serviceable coffee table she had found on the sidewalk weeks
ago, lugging it home like a trophy.

Ordinarily, she was good at plumbing her own feelings. She was a
straightforward woman from the northwest, and she wasn't given to
pretense and games.

But there was one game that she had learned to play, and maybe that was
part of whatever it was that was tugging at her ankles now. It was the
surgeon's game of pretending that the patient wasn't really a person. A
game with a deadly serious purpose, as had been drummed into her during
med school, because it allowed the surgeon to slip a blade into a chunk
of pulsating gray matter and excise it, knowing that it might contain a
mathematical formula, a snatch of poetry, or a memory of a lost love.

But this time around it was difficult for her to objectify the patient.
Something about this case-about the boy who was so young and the father
who loved him so much-was upsetting her and involving her on a new
level. And now that she considered it, she knew in part what it was-it
was her inability to regard it as a "case" at all. But why?

Try as she might, she couldn't erase the image of Tyler lying so small
and helpless on the operating table, or Scott during that split second
when she came upon him in the waiting room and their eyes met and she
felt his worry and loss. The sight echoed something in her and stirred
her. It was the profundity of her feelings, and the fact that they
seemed threatening to her equilibrium in some way, that she couldn't
have predicted.

114

She awoke to the ringing of the phone and grunted into the receiver.

"Dr. Willet?"

The voice on the other end was a man's voice. At first she couldn't
identify it-certainly not Harry, her ex-boyfriend out on the Coast, who
in any case was too considerate to call in the middle of the night.

"Yes."

"This is Scott. Scott Jessup. Tyler's dad."

She turned on the light and looked over at the clock. Two-thirty in the
morning. She expected him to apologize for the hour, but he did not. He
was too distraught.

"I need to ask you something, and I hope you will answer me straight out."

"Of course."

She was by now wide-awake, and she added warmly, "Ask me whatever you want."

"That doctor today, Saramaggio ... he seemed to indicate ... he said
that everything had gone okay and that Tyler would recover."

"Yes. I remember when he said that."

"And then I asked him what . . . what he meant by recover. . . . Do you
remember? And at first he wouldn't answer-he was talking all this
medical jargon-and finally I cut him off and I said, 'But will he get
better?' And he sort of looked at me, surprised, and he wouldn't answer
for a long time, and I... I asked him again. And he looked at the floor
for a while. Do you remember that?"

"Yes, I do."

She wondered if he had been drinking. His words sounded . . . not
slurred exactly, but rounded at the edges.

"And then he said, 'Yes, he will get better.' But he said it in a way
that suggested he didn't really mean it."

She didn't know what to say. She had had that same impression at the
time. So she just said, "Uh-huh."

"Well... I was wondering what you thought. You were there; you saw the
operation. You know . . . you seem to know what's at stake. You . . .
you're someone a person could trust. And so I wanted to ask you ... I
wanted to ask if you thought Tyler has a chance, any chance at all of
getting better ... I mean really better, not just living, surviving

115

in an iron lung or something like that. But becoming himself again . . .
recognizable . . . Because otherwise ... I don't know if it's worth
going ahead with the second operation. I mean what's the point. ..."

He was choking up and couldn't go on.

"I'm not sure what to say," she said. "I hear your question and I know-I
think I know-how important it is to get an answer. But I'm not sure at
this point that there really is one. So much of what happened in there
today is new-so new that we don't know much about it."

"I realize that." His tone was suddenly hard. "And I'm not looking for a
hard and fast answer, a percentage or anything like that. But for
Christ's sake, you know about the brain; you know how much damage he's
had; you know something about this new stem cell business. . . . Do you
think it could conceivably work?"

She paused. She knew that under his question was another question-should
they continue? Should he as the father stop the whole thing?

"Do you remember our talk in the cafeteria?" she asked.

"Of course. And I've been thinking about it . . . about the idea that he
may be gone forever, and the question now is whether this new person, a
new Tyler, can live a full life and become as much as he can become. But
I have to say, I'm not sure that works. I'm not sure I can accept that."

What he needed was information-hard facts insofar as there were any.

"I'm not sure I could accept it either if I was in your place-or at
least not right away. I don't know what to say. Why don't I just go over
some of the things again and you can ask me questions if you want to and
we can go through it together. Okay?"

"Okay."

"First of all, there was, as you know, a lot of damage. If Tyler were to
somehow awaken, if that were even possible, we have no idea what he
would be like. The brain is a remarkable organ-it can take a lot, it can
compensate, it can even grow. But in my opinion, the damage he sustained
was severe. It was amazing that the autonomic nervous system was still
functioning so well-that it did so is a good sign, in terms of remaining
alive. But I don't believe he would have ever really regained
consciousness-full consciousness."

116

"You mean you think he would have always been like that? In a coma? A
vegetable?"

"Yes. Now this operation, as we said-it's never been done before on
humans. It's complicated and risky on four counts. One: taking out the
object, which could cause more damage. That was done. It seemed to go
well-Saramaggio is the only surgeon who could have done it- but we won't
know for a while if the removal itself caused further damage. Two:
extracting the stem cells and growing them in a lab until they multiply.
The first part of this has been done. How fast and how well they
multiply, we can't say yet. Three: letting a computer run the autonomic
system. That's entirely new. It's worked in animals-specifically in
monkeys-and so it's theoretically achievable, but I have to emphasize
the word theoretically. Finally, number four: reimplanting the stem
cells and encouraging them to take over from damaged cells. That is the
most complicated of all. It's on the outer reaches of experimentation.
It's been done seemingly successfully with animals- mice-and they seem
to take it pretty well. They've been tested, and to outward appearances
they seem pretty normal. But of course we can't talk to them, and humans
are much more complicated."

"You say pretty normal. What do you mean? How do you judge?"

"Perception tests. Learning tests. We run them through mazes or have
them press a bar for food, things like that. Some of them seem to be
able to do as well as they did before on these tests, but others have
difficulty. It may depend on a lot of things-the extent of the damage,
how much debris of the dead cells is removed, how strongly the new cells
regenerate and establish neural connections to the surrounding cells.
Tyler has one thing in his favor-youth."

"How so?"

"He's thirteen. The brain is still growing and establishing
connections-up until the age of sixteen, at least."

"That's hopeful."

"It's all hopeful. Every step of the way. It's just that no one has ever
taken this particular path before, and so I'm afraid that uncertainty is
unavoidable."

He was silent for a moment, then said, "This is a big help. I have one
last question."

"Yes."

"Is he ... is there any chance that he is in pain?"

117

"No. That's the one thing we can be sure of. The brain feels pain for
everything but itself."

"Then that settles it."

"You're going ahead?"

"Yes. There's nothing to lose. And there's everything to gain, no matter
how slim the chances."

"That's the way I'd look at it."

"Thank you. You've been a big help. I'm sorry I called so late."

"That's all right."

"Good night."

"Good night."

After she hung up the phone, she couldn't go back to sleep for some time.

118

Cleaver walked along the path from the bridge to Pinegrove. It was dusk,
a summer's evening, the salt air churning in the heavy heat. Behind him,
he could hear the whir of cars crossing the bridge; on both sides,
barges and small craft moved up and down the river; above, a plane flew
toward the setting sun.

His thoughts tumbled to a drumbeat of excitement. The operation-so
far-had been a success. Saramaggio had been superb in the OR; Cleaver
had to give him that. It was groundbreaking stuff, the kind of thing
that could make him a legend. But the real breakthrough had come with
the computers, which functioned perfectly and were beginning to take
over command of the boy's autonomic system. Cleaver had held his breath
during the changeover, but it had gone as smoothly as a locomotive
switching onto a sidetrack. Now- if only it would continue to work.

No one seemed to recognize the importance of the computers. In the
excitement, which was consciously held in check-it was after all a
hospital-the credit went to Saramaggio. That rankled. But on second
thought, it was all right. It allowed Cleaver to continue his research
out of the spotlight. And someday it would all be sorted out. Someday
they would learn the significance of what had happened. It was almost
funny: Saramaggio was puffed up with pride; he thought he was the
important one because he was in the driver's seat. He didn't realize
that the importance came from the new vehicle he was driving.

Cleaver thought back to the days when he'd started out, twenty-five
years ago. Even then he had heard of Saramaggio, the whiz-kid surgeon
performing split-brain operations in assembly-line style. He

119

was in it for the traditional reason: He wanted to ameliorate the
symptoms of epilepsy and relieve suffering. Cleaver was interested in
the operation, too, but for a different reason: He wanted to split the
hemispheres apart because he wanted to see what would happen. He wanted
to set them at war. He was gripped by the concept of dual consciousness.
Imagine: two contending personalities in the same body. Which one would
win the struggle for supremacy? The left brain working through the right
hand would perform a certain action, and the right brain working through
the left hand would do the opposite. The simplest act turned the person
into a battleground of competing wills. He recalled reading about the
young woman patient in North Dakota who was asked if she had any
sensation in her left hand and replied, "Yes! Wait! No! Yes! No, no!
Wait, yes." She was handed a piece of paper with the words yes and no
written on it and asked to point to the correct answer. She stared
helplessly; then her left forefinger stabbed at yes and her right
forefinger at no.

Cleaver, not a surgeon, had of course not operated on people. But he had
operated on animals. Those early experiments, so long ago- he felt
nostalgic for them. How many hundreds of monkeys and cats had he
experimented on? How many had he sacrificed}-a medical term whose brutal
simplicity always appealed to him.

He thought of phantom limbs and how they had pointed the way to his
life's work. Doctors used to scratch their heads in perplexity,
confronted by amputees who insisted that even though an arm or leg was
missing, they could still feel it. Sometimes the limb merely itched,
sometimes it seized up in an excruciating paralysis. People were
dumbfounded. How could this be? They theorized that the sensations must
be caused by damaged nerve endings in the stump.

Only recently was the mysterious phenomenon explained: a mix-up in the
brain. Areas of sensation overlap-the part that registers a touch on the
face, for example, lies next to that for the arm. With phantom limbs,
neural pathways spill over onto adjacent ones, so that a touch on the
cheek registers as a touch on the hand-it feels like it, even though the
hand isn't there. And then came a brilliant move by a brain researcher,
V. S. Ramachandran, who devised a method to treat a patient with a
paralyzed phantom limb. He rigged up a box with mirrors in such a way
that the patient seemed to be looking at his phantom arm but was
actually observing his good arm. The patient

120

was told to relax his hand and open it-and, miraculously, the paralyzed
feeling disappeared. In effect, the brain tricked itself into believing
it. Or, as Cleaver preferred to think of it: The brain did one thing and
the mind thought another. For him it was final proof, if any was
required, that the two were not synonymous. His own work had paid off,
providing him with the inspiration to use computers to work on the
brain, to search for the anima. It had led Cleaver toward an irrefutable
truth: Consciousness is real and palpable, not some phantasmagoric
creature of the imagination. It is rooted in physiology, even though it
rises above the mechanics of the brain, and it is therefore something
that can be located and mapped, like a continent waiting to be discovered.

Saramaggio is good at what he does, but he is a technician. I am more
than that, thought Cleaver, much more.

He recalled sitting in a classroom, hearing that there were two types of
scientists-the integrators and the inventors. The integrators produced
systems; they accumulated data, synthesized things, sifted and winnowed
calculations to form a theory. It was like constructing a
building-valuable work, in its own way. But the inventors-ah, they were
the revolutionaries. They cut through everything with one blow, a leap
of deductive thinking. They dynamited the entire building and leveled
the landscape and made way for something new.

Saramaggio is an integrator par excellence, thought Cleaver, but I
belong to the tiny band of revolutionaries. I am an inventor.

A line came to him out of nowhere, a snatch of a poem by Wordsworth: "We
murder to dissect."

Cleaver could see Pinegrove looming up ahead, lights already on in the
bottom floors, the top floors dark. He spotted a figure moving about in
the window of the experimental ward where the old lady was.

It was probably Felicity, he thought, fussing over her and trying to
make her comfortable. That was hardly objectionable-it couldn't hurt the
experiment and in some ways it would expedite it. Still, it was
worrisome. Felicity was eager to help and wanted to learn, but her
attitude toward the thrust of his research was shifting in a negative
direction-he could detect undercurrents of concern. She was keeping her
thoughts to herself. And she was meddlesome. That could be dangerous.

121

He hurried closer, almost broke into a run. At a bound, he was up the
front steps, inside the door, and down the corridor. Felicity was
backing out the door, and she didn't see him.

"Hello," he said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

She gave a start, then held one hand to her chest.

"You scared me."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to. How is it going?"

"You mean Myra?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she said. " She's about ready to nod off."

"Let's see," he said, opening the door.

"You want me, too?"

"Sure, why not?"

The old lady was lying motionless in bed, the sheet forming a mummylike
mold around her frail body. The transcranial magnetic receiver was in
place around her head, and the helmet and goggles led to wires that
swirled in a Medusalike headdress. That made it difficult to read her
expression. Her eyes were closed.

He checked the monitor. It showed that she was approaching the abyss of
slumber, the first of four levels of sleep.

"We're looking for REM sleep," he said. "Rapid eye movement. That
indicates dreaming." He glanced at Felicity, who was looking back at
him. "Did you know that our muscles become completely paralyzed during
REM sleep? That's to prevent us from lashing out when our dreams turn to
nightmares. It's amazing, isn't it, how our minds try to take account of
everything our bodies might try to do."

"Yes," she said uncertainly. "I guess it is."

"Say, we've got some time yet. You want a cup of coffee?"

Felicity surprised him by nodding yes. She did so with a slightly
suspicious air.

They stepped into Cleaver's office, and there was a long awkward silence
as he put the electric kettle on and spooned out instant coffee into two
mugs. He made a show of waiting on her and asking if she wanted cream or
sugar. They sat far apart, self-conscious, like two lonely hearts out on
a first date. There was nothing to do but begin, he thought.

"So," he said, clearing his throat, "what do you think of what we're
doing here?"

122

"What do you mean? The experiments?"

He nodded yes and busied himself pouring coffee, as if the conversation
weren't all that important.

"You really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Well, since you ask, I think they're interesting, probably really
important. But I don't see why we have to treat people like that."

"You mean Myra there?"

"Yes, and Elmore."

"I see."

Cleaver took his time in answering. Myra was Elmore's wife. When he'd
died and was placed in a pine coffin purchased by Cleaver himself and
buried at a service with inmates doubling as mourners, she had had
nowhere else to turn. Cleaver had made her an offer, exchanging room and
board at Pinegrove for the right to conduct experiments inside her
cranium. She had accepted with her customary old-biddy bluster and now
was as complacent as an African subject giving herself over to the
unfathomable exigencies of a Western anthropologist.

"We took them in, you know. They were both homeless and had no place to
go. We fed them and clothed them and gave them a place to sleep. You're
aware of that-right?"

Felicity nodded yes, but her words came tumbling out, as if she had been
bottling them up.

"But why did you have to do all that to him when he was dying, all those
wires and machines? Why not make him comfortable instead-and why not let
them be together and let Myra care for him?"

"I suppose we could have done that. But that was the deal. We made him
as comfortable as we could under the circumstances. And you know, they
were together-that was the whole point. She felt she was with him, and
he probably felt the same thing. You saw it with your own eyes."

"They may have felt it, but they weren't actually together."

"But if they felt it, they were-don't you see? That's what this is all
about. It's about the human mind, how it works, how it experiences the
world."

She was quiet.

"You see," he continued, speaking slowly now and trying not to

123

sound as if he were talking to a child, "all of my work is really
concerned with a single human faculty, and that is human consciousness.
I call it anima. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Think of it as a spirit of consciousness, a spark inside that makes you
you."

He could tell she was hanging on his every word.

"What are you? A complicated bundle of trillions of cells that is
convinced it is separate from the rest of the world. You believe that
everything that is you is contained within you, and that your mind is in
control of it-but that belief could be wrong.

"Take memory. We think of our memories as replicas of events that
happened to us. Almost as if we made little films of our daily lives and
stored those films away in brain cells somewhere, canisters that can be
opened at will. But now we know it doesn't work like that. Memories are
not recaptured-they are made new each time. Our brain tries to construct
them out of fundamental elements that are there because they touch us on
some deep emotional level. And each time we construct it, the memory is
different in some way or other, but we are not aware of the difference.
So, strictly speaking, the memory is not of some past event, something
over and done with that we are recollecting afterward. It's a current
event, a new experience happening in real time. The part of you that
creates the illusion that you are re-creating it-the projectionist for
the film that isn't there- is your consciousness. You follow?"

She did.

"Consciousness exists outside of time. The events you believe are over
aren't really over. And that's what philosophers mean when they say that
every action that ever happened is still happening out there somewhere,
and that every person who ever lived still lives on. They are in our
consciousness, and our consciousness is not limited to our physical
bodies. We use our anima to tap into this larger domain."

Felicity took a sip of coffee. Cleaver felt her resistance crumbling. He
wondered if she realized that hungry biographers might someday beg her
to reproduce this conversation. He hoped she was listening carefully.

"So what's the experiment all about?" she asked.

"I'm getting to it," he replied archly. "If consciousness rises above

124

mere mechanics, then there's no reason to assume that it's confined to
the physical vessel of the human skull, is there? Why shouldn't it be
able to roam?"

She nodded.

"In fact, if you're honest with yourself, you'll probably admit you
already know this. How many unexplained mental phenomena can you think
of? How about ESP-doesn't it stand to reason that some perceptions can
happen outside the five senses and that some of us are more adept at
gathering them in? Dreams that are incomprehensible and fill us with
incredible dread or incredible well-being? Blind sight-the phenomenon of
seeing something without being aware you are perceiving it?

"How about all those stories of dying people who are able to appear
before loved ones at the precise moment of death? Or people who have
died for a second and describe the out-of-body experience of rising up
to the ceiling and seeing themselves stretched out below? The white
light at the end of a tunnel. Is it so unreasonable to think that your
consciousness-at the final moment, the moment of death-can summon up all
its energy and will in order to perform some dramatic act, some final
farewell?"

Cleaver's voice dropped a notch, a hint of intimacy.

"In point of fact, Felicity, you have seen this. You've seen the
objective measurement of anima. You saw it with Elmore, who appeared
before our friend there in the other room."

"What I saw was that Elmore appeared before her just as he was dying.
She saw him. And why not? They loved each other deeply."

"Exactly, Felicity! What she saw was his anima. And I am the first
person to prove it exists. And not only prove it, but document it,
measure it, locate its site in the brain. I know where it resides-in a
subcortical spot no bigger than your little finger, the amygdala. The
amygdala and the hippocampus, the centers of emotion and memory. And
that's what the anima is, what makes each of us different and
special-our emotions and our memories all wrapped up together, being
newly created all the time.

"This is pioneer work. Because . . . well, think about it: How can a
scientist grapple with consciousness? Consciousness is elusive. As the
ultimate examiner of everything else, how can it examine itself? Have
you ever tried to write down your thoughts exactly as they

125

occur without leaving any of them out? It's impossible, like trying to
catch lightning in a bottle. So one must find traces of consciousness.
One must leave powder on the floor to catch the footprints of the ghost.
Construct mirrors. And that's what I've been doing: devising experiments
to capture the reflection, to see where the ghost has been and what it
can do."

"And that's what you're doing in the next room there? With Myra?"

"That's all. I'm just monitoring her dreams, trying to catch her
consciousness as it roams. It doesn't hurt her. We're not causing her to
have dreams any more than we caused Elmore to die. We're just going
along for the ride."

He stood and motioned for her to follow him into the room next door.
Myra was still lying motionless. Cleaver walked over to the monitors.

"She's dreaming right now," he said.

"How do you know?"

"For one thing, her EEG is active. Only in dreaming is a person's EEG
the same as when she's awake. Now, take a look at this."

He tapped some keys on the computer and turned several dials, and a
cross section of her brain appeared on a recessed screen. The view was
from above, so that it looked like the meat of a walnut cut in two.

"See that?" He pointed to an area where dark spots were exploding like
shell bursts. He turned another knob and they turned into colors,
brilliant blue and green and yellow. That was from a tracer element that
flowed through her IV

"What is it?"

"It's a particular pattern of brain activity that I have come to
recognize. It cuts through a number of deep brain centers. The pattern
varies a bit from person to person, but for any one individual it's
always the same. You can see it involves a large number of neurons. They
always fire in the same sequence."

"When she dreams?"

"Yes."

"And that means her-what did you call it?-her anima is outside her body?"

"No, not entirely outside. It's still rooted in her brain. But it's able

126

to extend itself far beyond the waking mind and experience things
outside the body. It's like a dog that roams on a leash-until death.
Then the leash drops away."

Felicity stared at the screen, fascinated.

"Freud thought dreams were the product of the unconscious mind. The
metaphor was something bubbling up to the surface from the lower depths.
But it's much more than that. It's like stepping into a large lake and
being aware of everything else that's in the lake. Some of those things
are wonderful and enthralling, and some are monstrous and dangerous.

"Now I'll show you something else."

So saying, he pushed a button, and out came a black-and-white negative
of the picture on the screen. He slipped it on a luminous board next to
another picture of a brain scan. They looked remarkably similar.

"The one on the left is Myra when she saw Elmore at the moment of his
death. That's what people who deal with death every day, people in
hospices, call a visitation. The other one is Myra dreaming. In both,
her consciousness is in a state of high arousal. You see how similar
they are?"

"Yes. It is interesting."

"And important."

"Yes, I see that."

"So now you see what we're doing. And you have to understand what we're
doing with these people-Myra, Elmore, and the others. They're not being
treated as guinea pigs. They're living their lives out as they would,
only they're doing it-I hope this doesn't sound too corny."

He hesitated.

"What?" she asked. "What are they doing?"

"They're doing it on the altar of science."

Felicity brushed a wisp of hair away from her broad forehead, a
characteristic gesture that he suddenly found fetching. Her face seemed
slightly flushed. She seemed to feel it was time to leave. At the door,
holding one hand on it, she turned back and looked at him, square in the
eyes.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't mention it. I should say thank you."

127 She closed the door behind her.

Cleaver finished his coffee and checked the monitor. Then he went to a
supply cabinet, filled a syringe, stepped over to the old woman's
bedside, and raised her thin wrist, exposing the upper arm. He jabbed
the needle in. He slipped behind the bed and fiddled with a valve,
cutting off her oxygen. After a moment, she gave a little heave in bed,
twitching slightly and raising her chin. Then her head dropped to her
chest, and she remained still of all movement. Cleaver watched her
closely. After a short period, he turned again to the valve, opened it,
and gradually she came to life again.

He returned to the computer and pushed a button. The negative that came
out this time looked different. The explosions were larger and had
shifted to an opposite corner of the lower brain. He put the negative on
the viewing light board, opened a drawer, and extracted yet another
brain scan, which he placed next to the new one. It looked very much
like it.

He compared them avidly, the one from the drawer that he'd taken from
Elmore at the moment of death and the other one from Myra just a minute
ago. Very similar, very similar indeed. Two different brains and they
registered the same activity in the same regions.

Another breakthrough.

He wondered what Felicity would have made of that. If she had been there
to ask him one of her questions-"So what does it show?"-he could have
replied, "That's what the brain looks like when it gives up the ghost."

And if she had persisted, asking, "And what did you do to Myra?" he
could have replied, with an untroubled conscience, "Nothing much. You
can see she is breathing normally now. She simply went for a plunge-in a
very large lake."

128

The following day, Cleaver met Quincy again. Quincy had persuaded
Cleaver to accompany him on the chance that he might meet Cybedon, whom
he had described as his "virtual Virgil." And so there Cleaver was, on
the outskirts of an abandoned, packed warehouse in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, fighting to get inside, where the pounding, monotonous
techno-music had ratcheted up the dancers into a frenzy. There were
bouncers outside the entrance, which was through a loading dock, and
spaced-out druggies worked the crowd, wearing the initials of their
chemical wares on signs taped across their foreheads.

Quincy reached back to help Cleaver up onto the dock.

"Just follow me," he said.

"Who are all these people?" Cleaver shouted back. He was surprised that
so many of them were so young.

Quincy shrugged.

"Cybergypsies, booters, starpunks, you name it. Technopagans, cocooners,
mystic mercenaries, silicon hippies, crystallites-hackers and bounty
hunters of all kinds."

"All here for the convention?"

He had seen two men in suits, which prompted the question.

"More like an anticonvention," said Quincy. "These are people who
wouldn't be caught dead at the Javits Center. The computer companies try
to crash because this is where the next is."

"Next what?"

"The next next."

Quincy ducked under the arm of a bouncer into the cavernous room.
Cleaver followed, and the heat and smoke and music struck

129

him like a wall. He could feel the drumbeats against his cheek. About
forty people bounced on the dance floor, jumping up and down like Masai
warriors, and Cleaver spotted small mechanical robots on the floor,
bouncing in rhythm.

"That's X-Mundo," shouted Quincy, pointing toward the DJ, who was
stripped to the waist and sweating like a pig. He had not a single hair
anywhere-even his eyelashes had been plucked-and Cleaver spotted a shunt
sticking into his shoulder. Quincy followed his gaze.

"Goes straight in," he said. "Hits him sixty miles an hour."

Quincy threaded his way through the crowd toward the back of the
warehouse, where there were booths and bridge tables with computers and
displays. It looked like a conventional sales conference, except that
the material on sale-virtual reality setups, bootleg computers with
megahertz drives-were anything but conventional. In one booth, an artist
was drilling cyber tattoos. Across another, a curtain was drawn, and
looking through a tear, Cleaver saw a young woman lying on a cot, naked
except for a Turkish towel across the midriff and a steel mask upon her
face and electrodes attached to her breasts and thighs and lower
abdomen, quivering slightly.

They went down a broad staircase and into the basement, where it was
quieter. Quincy opened a door, and inside sat about sixty people on
folding chairs, facing a fat man standing at a lectern. He was old
enough to have a face crisscrossed by wrinkles and had yellow-white hair
tied into a ponytail.

Quincy took a seat and motioned to Cleaver to sit next to him.

"Cybedon," he whispered.

A woman in the back finished speaking and sat down. She had apparently
asked a question.

"Okay. What is my concept of the postbiological change, and how does
that differ from escape velocity?" the man repeated, looking out over
the audience. He took a breath.

"Escape velocity, as used by Mark Dery, is a metaphor. It occurs when
speed and distance reach the critical point at which a moving object-a
planet, a spaceship, anything-breaks out of the gravitational pull. It
achieves hyperacceleration and moves into another dimension.

"This idea-of a striving and a sudden break with the past that

130

will lead us into a new world-is not new in Western thinking. It's found
in the myths of Prometheus and Icarus. It's in Janus, the god of the
doorway, and in the Garden of Eden and Paradise Lost and Shangri-la.
It's in Socrates and Plato and Marx and Adam Smith and modern thinkers
like Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin.

"What I and others have done is recognize this theme for what it
is-deliverance from human mortality-as applied to the scientific
principles of Darwinian evolution."

The woman stood up again. She looked frustrated.

"But how does that apply to machines?" she asked.

"Machines are evolving rapidly. The first modern computer was Colossus,
built by the British in 1943 to decode the Germans' Enigma machine. It
was powered by two thousand vacuum tubes. When ENIAC went into operation
in 1946, it was the size of a room. Then came transistors in the
fifties, integrated circuits in the sixties, and microchips in the
seventies.

"As the machines got smaller, they got smarter. And now they're getting
smarter quicker. The first computer to play chess was designed in 1958.
It took thirty-nine years for Deep Blue to arrive and beat Gary
Kasparov. But it was inevitable: Deep Blue's thirty-two separate
microprocessors can examine two hundred million chess moves per second.
It can look thirty-five moves ahead. Kasparov can see four, maybe five,
moves. In contrast to the computer, neural connections in the human
brain move at a snail's pace.

"Ray Kurzweil says that computers will exceed human intelligence by
2020. He foresees that man and machine will link up and evolve together.
This is inevitable once machines replicate themselves. And so the only
answer for humankind is to figure out a way to enter into that system of
evolution. If we don't, we'll be left behind. Evolution teaches that
there is room for only one entity in any particular niche, and the niche
we're talking about is the one reserved for the planet's supreme intellect.

"So how is this evolutionary conjunction going to take place? It's a
little difficult to imagine people mating with machines. That's where my
theory comes in. My contribution is to posit the medium for the
connection to occur. There is only one area where it can happen, and
that is through defused and incorporeal artificial intelligence."

131

The questioner, the woman with a whiny voice, was still on her feet.

"Explain, please," she said.

"Artificial intelligence has grown exponentially since the 1970s, and it
has organized itself into a quasi life-form encircling the globe. I
speak of the Web. Its pattern of growth mirrors that of a multicellular
organism. It fulfills the two criteria for life: It expands through a
process of regeneration, and it can communicate with its furthest parts.
It even has natural enemies, in the form of viruses.

"If we conceive of the Web as the ultimate expression of machine
intelligence, and the bundle of neural connections we call the brain as
the expression of human intelligence, then it is at the point where they
converge that a linkup will occur. Both operate on electrical impulses,
so they speak a common language. As a consequence, I believe that at
some point soon, human intelligence will merge with computers in cyberspace.

Next question."

"I can see why we would want to merge with machines. They have superior
calculating abilities. But why would they want to merge with us? What do
we bring to the table?"

"Consciousness. The spark of creative intellect that can drive the
calculations and make sense of them by directing them to a higher purpose."

"But exactly how will it happen?"

The old man shook his ponytail. "I'm not a prophet. I'm not a futurist.
I don't do how. I also don't do when. I am talking about the larger
forces of history here. It's for others to work out the details."

"And will that be the end of us?"

"The end? Far from it. It will be the beginning. It will be the quantum
leap that science and religion promise. The moment of deliverance. Our
minds will no longer be bound to our bodies. Perhaps if we can truly
shake off our physical vessels, we will achieve an immortality of sorts.
The my sternum tremendum. Physicists call it escape velocity.
Pentacostalists call it the Rapture."

At that, the woman sat down.

Cybedon took a quick look around at the audience, ignored several hands
in the air, and stepped away from the lectern. There was no applause,
but many of his listeners appeared rapt in thought. Some

132

rushed up to speak to him; he all but disappeared in a tight knot of
admirers, save for his ponytail, which bobbed up and down above the
group like the mane of a skittish horse.

"What do you think?" asked Quincy.

Cleaver shook his head in amazement. He didn't respond.

"That's what Leo Marx calls 'the rhetoric of the technological sublime.'
Want to meet him?"

"Not if it means fighting through that bunch."

Quincy walked over, and as soon as Cybedon caught sight of him, he broke
free from the throng and came over with both hands outstretched.

"My boy, my boy," he said several times, grinning. He held Quincy by
both shoulders and pulled him into a violent hug, enfolding him into his
flab.

Cleaver was surprised. He hadn't expected the man to be so genial.

"Beer?" asked Cybedon.

Cleaver heard the thumping of the dancers above.

"Sure," said Quincy.

He introduced the two. Cleaver felt the dark heat from Cybedon's stare.

"I ... I liked what you said. How you said it," he said, feeling foolish
as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

"You can join us," replied Cybedon.

They went upstairs, Cybedon moving with surprising agility for such a
fat man. They negotiated across the dance floor-a path seemed to open up
before their Moses-and then walked outside behind the warehouse, where a
crowd had gathered. Three young men seated at a card table gave up their
chairs. Quincy went off for three beers and was back in a flash. People
dispersed in front of the table so that they could see. They were at the
edge of a parking lot. Hanging from a lamppost was a gigantic human
effigy, the head outsized and misshapen.

"What's that?" asked Cleaver.

"That's the Melting Man," said Quincy. "The raison d'etre for the whole
festival. It started twelve years ago, when this man here"- he gestured
across to Cybedon-"was fired from Microsoft."

"What for?"

"Insubordination," cut in Cybedon. "That, and free thinking."

133

"And morals," added Quincy.

Halfway through the beers, a murmur of excitement ran through the crowd.
A man appeared, holding a small candle, and a humming began that seemed
to come from everywhere. Cleaver knew the tune, but it took him a while
to identify it from the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire: "Jerusalem," the
English hymn from the Blake poem that never failed to moisten Albion eyes.

The man with the candle approached the effigy, and the humming grew
louder. Cleaver sipped his beer and looked around at the ravers and
sci-fi fanatics and technopagans and hackers. How odd they looked, with
all kinds of dress, from hippies to bikers to nerds to suits, and all
kinds of hairstyles, from dreadlocks to skinheads. The only common
denominator was youth. He and Cybedon were practically the only ones
over thirty. The realization made him feel like an intruder. Who knew
such a tribe existed?

The flame from the candle licked at the left foot of the effigy. It
sparked and traveled upward-a fuse. Suddenly, a crack rent the air and a
shower of fireworks burst out of the belly, pinwheels and fountains and
Roman candles pouring out streams of color amid the rat-a-tat-tat of
exploding firecrackers. In no time, all that was left was the huge paper
head, still grinning as it slowly burned.

The crowd cheered and lifted their glasses.

"I give up," Cleaver whispered to Quincy. "What's the point?"

"The point?" Quincy was engaged in the spectacle and barely paying
attention to him. "No point," he said absentmindedly. "Not everything
has to have a point."

Cleaver peered around at the New Age revelers and downed his beer.
Across from him sat Cybedon, his eyes half-closed, his bulk settled onto
the chair like a gelatinous mass, a big sleepy toad.

Strange that the proposition of the mind casting off the body should
come from such an unprepossessing person, Cleaver thought. Or maybe,
come to think of it, not at all strange.

He felt suddenly emboldened.

"Let me ask you something," he said. "Do you think in everyday life the
mind-our consciousness-is inextricably bound up with the body? Or can it
lead a separate existence?"

The toad opened both eyes slowly. "And what do you think?" he asked.

134

"That consciousness can roam, but we just don't know what to call it.
Visions, religious ceremonies, dreams, near-death experiences,
visitations from the deceased-they're all examples of the same thing:
consciousness spilling out of the physical vessel."

"Congratulations," he said, "you've discovered the multiverse."

"The multiverse?"

"Because we spend most of our waking lives in the narrow dimensions of
our singular universe, we don't acknowledge all these clues that there
are many universes out there, all of them existing side by side. Who
knows what they contain? Memories, dreams, every action that was ever
taken, every word ever uttered, every person who ever existed, anything
and everything that our consciousness has ever experienced, all parallel
to each other like hundreds of circuit boards in a computer." He closed
his eyes again, then muttered softly, "Many rooms are there in my
father's mansion."

A strange biblical metaphor, thought Cleaver. But he was feeling a
thrill he could barely suppress, a warm flood of self-satisfaction.
Never before had he encountered someone who could put into words
everything that he had been thinking, everything that he had been
working on, his theories that had now finally reached the ultimate
scientific stage of experimentation.

He felt drawn to Cybedon, understood his power. He glanced over at the
fat man sipping beer. If Cybedon only knew what he was up to. If he only
knew . . .

Cleaver savored the secret thought that someday Cybedon would have
reason to look back and remember this meeting, reason to remember
meeting him.

As Kate was leading Scott toward the special ward, they were called back
to the nurses' station and told that he had to sign in.

"But he's the boy's father," she protested.

The nurse, a battle-scarred veteran of hospital wars, stood her ground.
Everyone had to sign in-those were the orders, she said, though she had
the grace to show a blush of embarrassment.

Kate was furious. It was the bureaucratic mind-set that she had been
fighting ever since she went into medicine. But Scott didn't

135

object and signed the log. He still had the look of someone lost in the
daze of mourning.

He hadn't expected to find such an elaborate setup. They came to a
locked set of glass doors that could be opened only by a coded ID card.
Kate kept hers on a chain around her neck, and as she held it over a
scanner mounted on the side of the wall, the door clicked. She pulled it
open and held it for Scott to go through first.

Then they came to a dead end before an observation window that was thick
and ran up a good eight feet, stopping three feet short of the ceiling.
Behind it was a hospital bed pitched at a forty-five-degree angle, on
which lay a small immobile figure. With a shock, he realized it was
Tyler. His son's head was swaddled in so many cloth bandages that his
face seemed scrunched into a tiny window in a tower of white. Tubes ran
out of his mouth and nose, and his eyes were shut and swollen round with
bruises. He scarcely looked human.

"I know how hard it is to see him like this," said Kate softly. "I wish
we could get closer, but we can't. He's being kept in a totally sterile
environment. That's necessary because the wounds to the skull are still
open. That's to gain further access if necessary. The computer is
activated, and if an electrode slips we have to quickly reinstall it."

Only then did Scott see a sheath of thin wires, neatly bundled by a
plastic tie, rising up from the back of the bandage and fastened to the
bedsheet above. It looped around to the wall and then ran to the corner
and through the plastic into the back of a desktop computer. With a
shudder, he realized that the wires began in his son's brain.

"They carry the computer's signals," Kate continued. "The electrodes may
have to be moved from time to time. And Dr. Saramaggio will need to
reimplant the stem cells at the final stage. So it makes no sense to
subject Tyler to the trauma of a whole new operation."

"But this way, it's like . . . the operation never ends."

"I know it seems that way. But now, for example, he's resting quietly.
He's tranquil. He's in no pain. It's a kind of suspended state. So he's
recovering."

"And how do you care for him if you can't touch him?"

"We can."

And just then, as if to prove the point, the door behind them clicked
and a nurse joined them. She was carrying a metal container.

136

She unlocked another door, this one to the right and marked MEDICAL
PERSONNEL ONLY and entered the small antechamber where the computer was.
She reached into a wall cabinet, pulled out a sterilized envelope
containing rubber gloves and a mask and put them on. Then she pulled out
a syringe, lowered the sheet to Tyler's waist, raised a sleeve of his
gown, and quickly jabbed him in the shoulder.

With the sheet down, Scott saw that Tyler was belted to the bed.

"We have to do that, I'm afraid. We can't take the chance that he might
move and rip out the electrodes. But he's not aware of it, I'm sure. And
we will change his position often so that he won't get bedsores."

"How the hell do you know what he's aware of and what he's not?"
retorted Scott. The anger in his voice surprised even himself.

By way of answer, Kate rested her hand upon his elbow. The touch was
startling to him.

"Of course we don't know, really," she said. "But we have some idea by
looking over there."

She pointed to a bank of machines near the bed, and Scott looked at the
loathsome battery of monitors with their irrepressible green lines
moving across the screens-oxygen level, blood pressure, and the rest. He
felt he knew them all by now, knew what the needles and fever lines
measured and where they should be if all were normal. They never were.

"I don't know if you noticed," she said, "but that one there"-she
pointed at a round window with the jagged lines of pulse racing across
it-"sped up when we came in. I think that means that he can hear us. On
some level, he's registering our presence."

Scott took hope from her words.

"Tell me which one registers his brain waves," he said. "And what it's
supposed to look like."

"This one here," she said, pointing toward a small round screen with a
bouncing movement that went across it.

"The spikes should be larger. About twice as large as they are now and
more pronounced, sharper. But they will be-someday. I'm convinced of it."

She sounded as if she meant it, and that made him feel a little better.
He saw another machine he didn't recognize.

"What does that one indicate?" he asked.

137

"Brain swelling. That one's important-well, they're all important. But
the swelling has to come down if he is to be . . . to have a chance."

"And where should the needle be?"

"About halfway where it is now."

He stared at it. One thin little piece of black metal, hardly larger
than a toothpick. He could almost imagine it moving downward if he
stared hard enough.

"Look over there," said Kate. "Next to the computer. There's a second
bank of monitors. That measures the computer's activity. We've converted
the outgoing impulses into signals of body functions. You can compare
the two banks of monitors and see that they're in harmony."

The nurse put the syringe back inside the metal container, then opened
the side door and gave them a small smile. She stood next to them
looking through the window at Tyler.

"We're doing a little better," she said.

We. Scott looked at her with horror. We.

Then he felt Kate's hand on his arm again, and he looked away and tried
to collect himself. But it was hard. No one knew what he was going
through, really. No one could understand, even if they tried, like Kate.
And the funny thing was that the more he allowed himself to believe that
there was a possibility that Tyler could someday heal, the worse he
felt. Because that thought was followed by the thought that it was only
wishful thinking. Who are you trying to kid?

He didn't know what to wish for, really. It was all so incalculable.
These doctors knew how to say things, hopeful things, but what did they
know, really? He couldn't calculate how much hope to let into his heart.
He felt he had already died. Why die a second time?

138

Scott knew by heart the inside of his darkroom, tucked away at the rear
of the loft, so much so that he literally could have worked there in the
dark, without the eerie red glow from the single bulb in the ceiling. He
knew where the large plastic bottles of chemicals were and, by their
weight, how much of each was left. He knew the exact location of the
developing trays, the enlarger, the taps for the faucets and every piece
of equipment. He had spent so many hours there, day after day, year
after year, that he used to take comfort from the boxlike room, like a
phantom prisoner not altogether unhappy with his confinement, laboring
away in solitary.

But no longer.

Now, three weeks after the operation, comfort was out of the question.
Still, the lab was a sort of refuge. He could lose himself there and,
for whole minutes almost, not think much of anything. That dead weight
of emptiness was still in his gut, and he lugged it around like a piece
of shrapnel, but he could keep it more or less under control, keep it
from rising up and exploding in his brain, through the mindless routine
of make-work.

His stretch in the darkroom had begun two days after the operation, when
he had stayed up late drinking scotch at home, wandering aimlessly
around the loft, going into Tyler's room and picking up his things-his
shirts, his old video games, his soccer trophies, the signed photograph
of Sean Connery, the koala bear-then wandering back to the kitchen and
pouring another drink. He had fallen asleep in his clothes and awakened
in a cold sweat, his heart racing, at dawn.

Then he had remembered something: the undeveloped negatives. He'd leapt
out of bed. They were in a series of coffee cans, rolls of

139

film that he had taken as a matter of course on outings around the city
or just hanging around, back in the days when he was never without his
camera. He had known instinctively when a roll was worth developing; the
others he tossed aside the way an artist will discard preliminary
sketches. Except that now they were priceless. He hurried to the lab and
began developing them. Some were so old they were barely discernible,
but still, by highlighting the film, he could make the figures out,
ghosts on a membrane. He lived for that moment when the naked white
paper floated gently in the bath of developer, and magically dots would
form and gradually assemble themselves so that gray shapes would
materialize. Then sometimes, the rare pearl in the oyster-the shapes
would darken, become recognizable, and then out of nowhere Tyler would
gradually appear, coming to life.

Sometimes, Scott remembered instantly where the photo had been taken, in
front of the Museum of Natural History on that sunny day in October or
on a bench in Central Park that time they'd talked about death for three
hours. Other times, he had no recollection at all and he stared at them
and lined them up on the kitchen table and thought about them for a long
time. Among them was a real prize: three rolls of Tyler taken as studio
portraits, full 4-by-5 negatives. He remembered the shoot well; he'd
used backlighting and had worn white to reflect in his son's eyes. He
had focused the camera perfectly, using Tyler's eyelashes, those long
fetching eyelashes. Why had he not developed them? Too busy, no doubt.
But now they were a godsend. He enlarged the close-ups to the size of a
broadsheet newspaper and tacked them to the walls. How handsome the boy
was-is, damn it. After two days, he noticed he was running through the
rolls too rapidly and he began rationing them, one every other day.

He was not rationing his drinks. He began drinking earlier in the day,
and sometimes when he was up until four or five in the morning and dozed
for a couple of hours, he took a shot or two to get started. He was
smoking so much that his lungs ached. He was doing almost no work. He
began turning down jobs; he didn't say why-he couldn't bear to talk
about the accident, and the one or two times he did, he hated the
saccharine sound of sympathy that crept into people's voices. Soon
enough the phone stopped ringing. Kind of remarkable, he thought, how
soon that happened. Only a few of his old clients kept

140

calling, three or four photo editors at magazines who themselves had
been photographers. He missed deadlines for the first time in his life.

Something else was happening. He was having horrible nightmares. Some of
them were constructed around deep-seated fears, as if the entire dream
had been choreographed to produce a moment of pure horror. In one he was
pursued by hounds across a marsh and fell into a pit that turned into an
open grave, where he lay pinned and helpless while dirt and rocks rained
down upon him. He awoke on the floor, half under the bed. In another, he
felt himself go insane and watched himself as he walked through a house,
turning off lights one by one, mounting the stairs to his son's room and
seeing him asleep and smothering him with a pillow. In another, his body
began to decay, and the blood vessels on his wrist turned into long
bloodsucking worms. And there were others-which he tried to repress
immediately-about his mother, from the time when she was drinking.

It became hard to separate the nightmares from the drinking. The images
of horror were so vivid and stayed with him so long afterward that he
wondered if he was having DTs. He noticed sometimes, reaching for a
carton of orange juice in the morning or trying to shave, that his hand
was shaking, and that scared him greatly. He knew the signs of
alcoholism, and he kept discounting them in himself. And then he
remembered that that-the denial-was the surest sign of all.

Even Comet, lying in a large ball sleeping most of the day, seemed
depressed.

In spite of the drinking and the loneliness and the fears, he never
missed a day at the hospital. The nurse would swipe a card to unlock the
door to the observation area, and he stayed there for hours on end,
pulling up a chair and observing his son. Every so often, rarely but
enough to keep him vigilant, he could see Tyler's eyes twitch; during
those times he thought his son must be dreaming, and that brought him a
sort of solace; if he was dreaming, he might wake up. No? The chest
moved slowly but steadily up and down, and the machines never varied.
The needle that indicated brain swelling, he thought, had moved down
perhaps a little.

He thought he noticed by scrutinizing the monitor of Tyler's heartbeat
that it sped up a little when he appeared and when he spoke. So maybe
Kate was right-maybe on some level Tyler was still

141

partially conscious. The pulse rate that came out of the computer did
not change, however. Its rhythm was invariably, inhumanly, always the
same, a perfect pattern of jagged lines marching across the screen.

Then Scott noticed something that puzzled him greatly. Sometimes when
Kate would appear, Tyler's heartbeat would accelerate even more. The
thumps from the monitor came in rapid-fire staccato. Even more
mystifying, this did not happen every time Kate was there, but only
sometimes. He pointed it out to her and she, too, was stumped for an
explanation.

Partly to humor Scott, a hospital resident set up a speaker system so
that he could talk to Tyler, and this he did incessantly. Then he
brought a book-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of course-and read to
him. He was convinced that his son could hear him; even if he couldn't
follow the words, he would perhaps recognize his speech patterns, and on
the off chance that his son was lonely and having horrible nightmares,
too, locked away somewhere at the bottom of a grave, he wanted him at
least to hear a familiar, comforting voice.

Sometimes the bed was rotated so that Tyler was suspended upside down,
facing the floor and held in place by thick bands that ran across his
chin and chest and abdomen and legs. This was to avoid bedsores. But it
was even worse seeing him like that-he appeared lost and small in all
the paraphernalia surrounding him, a doll-like figure in a machine that
looked like a giant gyroscope.

A daily routine was established: the hospital, a coffee shop for half a
hamburger or a tuna fish sandwich, then home to walk Comet and spend
more time in the darkroom, and finally drinking almost to oblivion late
into the night.

One day as he was leaving, he ran into Kate, and she seemed to be
looking at him closely. That evening, he examined himself in the
bathroom mirror and saw that he looked a mess; his chin was covered with
stubble, his eyes were red, and his skin looked flaccid and pale. He
shaved, but it did not help.

The next morning, she called. When he heard her voice, he feared that
she was calling with bad news about Tyler, but she quickly calmed his fears.

142

"It's my day off," she said. "If it's not too much to ask, if you're not
busy, do you think you could do me a big favor?"

"What?"

"There's an exhibit of photos at the International Center of
Photography, and I'd like to see them. But I want to see them with
somebody who knows about photography. Would you go with me?"

He paused a long time, long enough to be rude. He didn't want to go. But
he couldn't think of how to say that, and so, finally, he said yes. As
soon as he hung up, he regretted it. He thought of phoning her back to
call it off, but that was too difficult. He put on his jeans and a
T-shirt and left.

He found her on Sixth Avenue, waiting for him on the sidewalk, leaning
up against a building. He hadn't expected to come upon her just like
that, and so he found himself looking at her for the first time. It was
odd to see her without her doctor's coat. She was wearing a silk blouse,
with a single strand of pearls, and her arms were crossed, casually. She
smiled pleasantly when she saw him. The photographer in him noticed that
at that moment she would have made a strong subject.

"I was beginning to worry you wouldn't come," she said.

He looked at his watch, confused.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Did it take so long? I left right away, more or
less, I think."

"No, no, it's all right. I got here too early. I called you from near here."

He mumbled another apology, but she was already off, turning the corner
to the entrance. He noticed that she pulled two tickets from her pants
pocket. She stepped aside to let him go in first.

"I've been wanting to see this exhibit. I read about it in the Times.
Mostly news photos. Three or four of them won a Pulitzer."

The exhibition was called Up Close. The first section, titled "The Urban
Landscape," was replete with the usual bleak photos of inner city
ghettos, kids playing against a stream of water from a hydrant, and
world-weary old folks staring out from the stoops. But every now and
then Scott spotted a shot that went against the grain and captured
something surprising. He knew many of the photographers, and he could
identify most of their work at a glance.

Kate was standing in front of one that showed a group of black

143

teenagers hanging out in front of a candy store, a subway entrance in
the background. She seemed absorbed by it.

"I like this one a lot," she said. "Though I'm not even sure why."

He stood next to her.

"The kids, they're smiling, probably at something this one's done." He
pointed to a young man who was making a long face. "They're flirting.
Just at that age, twelve or thirteen. A rough age. Sex on the brain.
There's anxiety in the air despite the smiles. Three guys and two
girls-a dangerous combination. The guys are probably figuring one of
them's going to be left out."

She nodded and added her own interpretation.

"And each of the girls is worrying that the other one is more
attractive," she said. "That one smiles halfheartedly, like she's trying
to hide braces."

"And if you look through the store window, you can just make out an old
white guy looking at them. He looks amused."

She smiled.

"Now I see why I like it."

"There's a lot going on there, and the camera catches it all," he said.
"Looking at it makes you want to make a story up about it."

They moved on, through a section called "Catastrophe" that depicted
fires, explosions, floods, and earthquakes. Humans of all sizes, shapes,
and colors reached out, peered out, were carried out of flattened
houses, mounds of rubble, charred timbers. After a while, so much
suffering was numbing.

"This is a lot to take all at once," Kate said. "I guess you
photographers get to see the seamy side of life."

"Some do. News photographers, mostly."

He started thinking of the photojournalists he had known, the
seedy-looking ones who listened to the police band radio and raced out
after the big calls, the high-flying international types who worked for
Magnum and Sygma and jumped on airplanes to get to places that other
people were desperately fleeing from. Most were burnt out. Some had been
killed. None of those who survived seemed like whole human beings.

"They're not what you would call a happy lot."

As if by design, they came to the next section, titled "The Scourge of
War," a mix of shots from Afghanistan and Kosovo and

144

Chechnya and the Congo and West Africa. One after another, the corpses
piled up. Kate was horrified in particular by three photographs from
Sierra Leone, young boys who had been captured by rebels and had had
their hands severed by machetes, lying back on dirty hospital linen and
holding stumps into the air. She shuddered and shook her head slowly to
herself and then fell silent. Scott tried to hurry her through, but she
lingered and forced herself to look at every picture.

"It's enough to make you despair for the human race," was all she said.

They came with relief to the next section, "People and Portraits," a
hodgepodge of shots of Americans at work and play. Boys skateboarding,
construction workers on lunch break, models on the catwalk, families
picnicking and river rafting-it was all there.

Then she gave a short gasp. She was standing in front of an arresting
photo. It showed four men with their sleeves rolled up, tilting back in
wooden chairs that rested against a brick wall. Above them, sticking out
of the wall, were large lightbulbs in different colors, blue and green
and red, and nearby a man with his jacket hanging over his shoulder by
one finger was talking to two policemen. It was evening-time and hot.
The men on the chairs were sweating and looking bored, but ready to jump
into action. The picture had a strange mystery to it.

Scott almost did not recognize it at first.

"That's yours," she said in amazement. She had been reading the wall
label. "It's called 'The Police Shack.' What's that?"

And so he explained. He told her about the old building on Mulberry
Street where years ago reporters from the major papers all had grubby
offices, each with only one piece of furniture, an old desk. Police
radios were constantly blaring, and in the hallway an old bell would
clang in code from time to time, signaling the call box for a fire. On
hot nights, the reporters would sit outside and shoot the breeze with
the cops. When the home office rang, a colored lightbulb outside would
tell them which paper was calling.

"It always struck me like a hospital emergency room, long stretches of
boredom and intermittent times of panic. I liked that weird sense about
the place-of utter lassitude that could break out into frenzy at any
moment. That's what I was going for."

145

"Well," she said. "You got it."

He could see the respect in her eyes when she looked at him.

In the next room was a photo that he wished was not there. As soon as
they walked in, it seemed to reach across the room and grab him. He
tried to avoid it, but he was drawn to it. It showed a man and a boy
sitting on a dock in summertime, their legs dangling into the water and
sending out ripples. The man was speaking-he looked as if he was
explaining something, maybe communicating some important fact about the
world or maybe just telling a story-and the boy was taking it in. His
face was rapt in seriousness. This was clearly an important talk. And
the father-for it was clear that the man was the boy's father-was just
as clearly investing himself in the talk. He seemed deeply serious and
somehow deeply contented.

Scott walked over to the picture and stood before it, transfixed. He was
there quite a while, and he lost track of time until he felt a gentle
pressure on his elbow. Without words, she guided him away.

They went outside and walked for a few minutes without saying anything.
Then they came to a coffee shop and went in and sat down at a booth.
They signaled to the waitress, who brought them two cups.

"You know, I'm not good at talking about my feelings," he said. "And
sometimes, a lot of the time, I don't even know what I'm feeling. It's
so intense it doesn't have a name."

She nodded.

"I'd like to say what I'm feeling about what's happened. Anything I can
say-that my whole world is shattered, that there's this great void, that
life isn't worth living-it all sounds trite. It's a cliche. And yet it's
true. I feel all of it and even more. Things I can't come close to
expressing."

Now she leaned across the table and rested her hand on his wrist.

"The only thing I know is that I have to be with him. And whatever
happens, if there is even a little shred of him left, I want it to live.
I want him to live. But if he's gone-if he's truly gone-then maybe he
should go. I don't know. He was so wonderful, so alive . .. so-this
sounds ridiculous, to pick up on this one thing, but-he was so funny. He
was such a presence, even as a little kid. He used to sing around the
house, all the time, different voices, corny little songs, making
believe he's a rock star or a blues singer. He was always one for games, for

146

fun, all kinds of projects. He threw himself into them. I don't even
know where the ideas came from. Like once he made a video tour of our
loft, acting like he was one of those stupid announcers with a deep
voice. It was wonderful, so funny.

"People loved him on the spot. He had all these contacts, these
relationships-I couldn't keep up with them. I'd go into the deli and it
turned out he and the counterman had been pitching nickels. The counter
guy joked that Tyler owed him a lot of money, so one day he came in with
a suitcase with a whole bunch of fake money in it. He put it on the
counter and flipped it open dramatically. The whole place just cracked
up. We'd walk down our block and people would wave to him.

"He was one of those truly special ones-you know it when you meet them.
People would just see him, his smile-it spread across his whole face-and
they would just fall for him. People would meet him once and ask about
him every time afterward. He was like that. So smart, so friendly, so
open. So ... so much his own person, really different . . . really
special. I just don't know ..."

She held his hand now and squeezed it, and he began to cry. The tears
felt good, so he just let them come, not even wiping them off his cheeks.

He realized that, for the first time, he was talking about Tyler in the
past tense. Did he think about him in the past tense?

The waitress approached with a pot of coffee, then looked at them and
retreated.

Kate smiled at her, and Scott was grateful for it. He took a deep
breath, and she softly moved her hand away.

"I want to say it's good for you to get it out," she said. "But, I feel
foolish saying that-I mean, speaking of trite-"

"No, it is good. Except that it doesn't really get out. But for the
moment-right this second-it's good."

He finished his coffee, and now the waitress refilled their cups.

"And you know, when I was looking at that picture-yes, of course, it was
painful. But somewhere, on some level, it felt at least like I was
connected to something outside myself. Fatherhood or something . . .
universal. It wasn't all a bad feeling."

"No, you are still connected."

He paused and looked at her, then said, "I've got to stop drinking. I've
got to pull myself together."

147

Saying this, out of nowhere, surprised him. He felt suddenly embarrassed.

But she said only one word.

"Yes."

"You know, I'm not always this self-absorbed. I mean before all this
happened, I didn't use to just talk about myself."

"I'm sure," she said-and she was.

A few minutes later, as they were leaving the coffee shop, he held the
door for her and she brushed past him. He suddenly got a whiff of
something so strong, so unlooked-for, so deeply familiar, that he felt
dizzy.

"Your perfume," he said suddenly. "I recognize it."

"It's Jk m'en souviens by Lanvin."

He halted, uncertain.

"My wife used to wear it. The very same one."

She smiled. He looked pained. Then abruptly, she cried out.

"My God," she said. "Do you think-is it possible?"

"What?"

"Do you think that could be why Tyler has such a strong reaction when I
come into his room?"

He stood there open-mouthed.

She didn't say the rest of the thought out loud, because she knew it
would upset him. The rest of the thought was this: It would be logical
for smells to register with Tyler, because the sense of smell was the
only one that is hardwired into the lower part of the brain, the only
part still functioning on its own.

148

All morning, Cleaver had busied himself with make-work at Pinegrove,
filling out grant forms, checking pharmaceutical supplies, and making
rounds of the patients-though this latter duty consisted of little more
than strolling through the ward where pairs of darting eyes regarded him
with suspicion and fear. Leaving the ward behind, he walked down the
main corridor, his steps echoing with buoyancy. Once again he
experienced a surge of boyish excitement. He relished the sensation even
more by suppressing it. It was delicious-like a spy's secret.

He had phoned Quincy so often that he had rattled the young man, who'd
turned off his cell phone.

"For Christ's sake," Quincy had screamed during their last call, "it'll
get there when it gets there. Now piss off." Then he had hung up.

Cleaver decided he couldn't get angry at him-not under the circumstances.

That afternoon-finally-Quincy was to deliver the TSR.

At three o'clock, the movers came. Cleaver, running down the back stairs
to the loading dock, suppressed a pang of annoyance at seeing a large
U-Haul truck and a ratty old Chevrolet. Four young Hispanic men got out,
the driver hitching up his belt, and one of the olive-skinned passengers
tugging down his T-shirt at the waist to emphasize the bulge of his
muscles. To Cleaver, they had the look of illegal aliens. A third lit a
cigarette and exhaled smoke in a dim slow stream.

This was not what he'd expected-hardly the harbingers of the grand
occasion he had been anticipating.

But one glance at Quincy, who stepped down from the U-Haul

149

cab with a six-pack under his arm, told him to tread lightly. Quincy was
smoldering. And he looked a little unsteady on his feet. Had he been
drinking already?

"I figured you didn't want anyone to see us unloading it," he said
pugnaciously.

"No problem. It doesn't matter. This is all aboveboard."

"Like hell it is." He walked to the back of the truck. "You mean to tell
me you account for all this shit?"

"To the letter," Cleaver lied.

Quincy climbed up to the loading dock and lay down, leaving Cleaver to
direct the workers in his fractional Spanish that made them laugh. He
fussed about like a mother hen, pointing the way, probing the padding
under the crates, making sure that the machine wasn't bruised in the
freight elevators that carried it to the special room in the basement.
At one point, exiting from the elevator, they crashed into the wall,
smashing a hole and setting off a mini-avalanche of plaster. But the
machine itself was unhurt.

The room had been worked on for weeks, and now it was ready,
soundproofed, well lit, painted, fed by high-gauge electrical cables,
and cleaned spotless. Once inside, the workers attacked the crates with
claw hammers. Cleaver had them take away the wood and the padding. Then
he directed them in placing the machine where he wanted it along one
wall, standing back for the full effect, indicating an inch or two to
one side or the other with an extended forefinger.

He couldn't wait for the movers to leave, and when they finally did and
he was alone, he walked around the room surveying the machine from every
angle. He ran his fingers along the sleek outer cylinder. He moved the
sliding stretcher back and forth and held the tight-fitting helmet with
its two eye receptacles that looked like eggcups. The idea of fitting
them underneath the eyelids to send messages directly into the brain
gave him a tiny shudder of anxiety.

Quincy appeared in the doorway, sauntered over to a chair, and sat
there, swigging from a beer bottle, turning it upside down and pouring
it down his gullet with a kind of fury. His acne was erupting in half a
dozen tiny white-tipped volcanoes.

"This is gonna cost you a pretty fucking penny," he remarked, wiping his
chin. "You're going to subsidize my whole fucking commune for a long
time to come."

150

Cleaver was bothered by him, everything about him. And imagine talking
about money at a time like this.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head. I'll pay what we agreed upon.
And maybe more if I decide to give you a service contract."

Quincy scoffed at the idea and tossed the empty bottle toward a
wastebasket. He missed.

Cleaver retrieved the bottle and delicately placed it inside, standing
up. He rose and looked again at the transcranial stimulator-receiver.
Quincy had built two, which was good. A scientist demands backup.
Important things always came in twos. Fat Man and Little Boy.

"Let me ask you something," he blurted out suddenly. "Why did you leave
the other one in your lab? What are you planning to do with it?"

Quincy grinned unpleasantly.

"A spare. I need it to make improvements. And especially if I'm going to
be on a service contract."

Cleaver couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

"Let's get started. Show me how to run this thing."

"You're going to need an assistant."

"I have one. A young man. Felix. Not the brightest bulb in the place,
but he'll do."

He buzzed for Felix on the intercom.

"You'll need something else," Quincy observed, detached now, almost
philosophical.

"What?"

"Someone to put inside it. And . . . how can I put this? Someone who
might not be missed if things go wrong. Someone expendable."

Cleaver permitted himself a false hearty laugh. "No problem there," he
said. "I've got a whole ward full of candidates."

"And are they ready to sacrifice themselves for the great god Science?
Have you asked them that?"

"They've all signed waivers, if that's what you mean."

"Hmmm. Informed consent, was it? From nutcases."

At that moment, Felix appeared in the door and, standing next to him,
under his outstretched arm, was another man, a patient, to judge from
the faded seersucker bathrobe that hung from his shoulders. Quincy
looked at him-a mousy-looking man in his fifties with eyes

151

that seemed to bounce around the room, taking everything in. He had red
marks around his eyes as if he had been wearing goggles.

"Ah, and here's one now. How convenient."

"Come in," said Cleaver, sounding like a genial dinner party host.

Felix gave the man a little push, and he stepped forward uncertainly.

"Meet Quincy. Quincy, this is Herbert Mann. He's been with us for some
time now-what is it? Must be fifteen years or so. Herbert's a little
disoriented. He feels people are out to get him. But we're not-are we?"

Quincy stood up, but not to shake hands. Instead, he walked out of the room.

"Don't be afraid," said Cleaver. "Nothing's going to happen. I just want
you to become familiar with this room. Today, it's simply orientation.
Like the first day of school."

He led Herbert over to one of the machines.

"Now, why don't you try this? Just lie down. Right here. I want you to
get used to this machine. It's going to help you. See how this stretcher
slides back and forth? And it moves right into that big metal thing.
See? Nothing to be frightened of. It'll make you much better."

He was tempted to try the machine on the spot, but he resisted. Things
weren't ready, and the experimental protocols weren't in place. He told
Felix to take the patient back to the ward.

Quincy returned with another beer and provided rudimentary instructions
to run the TSR, but his heart wasn't in it. Besides, the machine was so
simple and revolutionary that it was actually easy to operate.

"There's really only one thing to remember," Quincy said. "That's the
time limit. Seven minutes and not a second more. After that the whole
system crashes."

"And then?"

"Who the fuck knows."

As he left, he glanced at Cleaver over his shoulder.

"Don't forget-Deep Blue starts ordering caviar," he added.

That night, Cleaver slept at Pinegrove, in a little bedroom attached to
his office. He often stayed over if his work-his experiments-kept him
past midnight, when the tramway cars to Roosevelt Island ran few and far
between.

152

But he had trouble sleeping soundly. He fell off quickly enough, but it
didn't last, and when he awoke two hours later, his heart was racing and
he was sweating heavily. He listened to the wind outside, rattling the
panes. Two trees rubbed their trunks, an unearthly creaking sound. He
knew what was upsetting him-he was having a dream, a nightmare. Ever
since his research on anima, on consciousness roaming outside the body
during REM sleep, he was apprehensive about his own dreams. They no
longer seemed harmless, and their incoherence no longer seemed
insignificant. To the contrary, they seemed dangerous and freighted with
dead-on meaning.

And this dream was more dangerous than most because it was about someone
from his past, the dark shadow so close to him. Cleaver's father had
been a respected Methodist minister in their tiny New Hampshire town. He
loved his only child, or so he sometimes said, but his calling kept his
preoccupations heavenward. He was a stern disciplinarian; whenever anger
seized his features, turning the blood vessels in his temples crimson,
the boy knew what to expect-the belt whipping through the loops of his
father's baggy black pants, soon to land across his back. Cleaver's
mother-God rest her soul-was a quiet woman with long, graying hair who
wore simple print smocks and was reluctant to step into the fray. She
never opposed her husband, never raised her voice.

At the raucous public school, Cleaver was shy and always without
playmates. He stayed indoors at recess and played with miniature cars
and trucks, humming in harmony with their movements as he propelled them
along tabletops and molding. He began stealing items at the hardware
store: switches, circuit breakers, timers, magnetic coils, anything that
looked mechanical. He kept them in a box under his bed and carried them
one by one in his pockets to school. He played with them for hours on
end, arranging them in artful patterns. He took apart clocks and wired
the alarms to his door to keep intruders out, although his father and
mother had not set foot inside for years. By the fifth grade, his
teachers called the parents in to tell them that their son was
brilliant, that he scored unimaginable grades on any test put before
him. The father was proud, as was his mother, but by then the
relationship between man and boy had taken a bad turn. Chess games that
had been fun were transformed into subtle battlegrounds, and now Cleaver
always won. When he beat his father and looked into his eyes, he knew
that the victory was costly

153

He was caught shoplifting, and his father beat him and locked him in a
closet and threw away all of his machines. They sent him away to school,
his mother weeping when he left. There, a chilly little New England
religious school, the other boys picked on him while the math and
physics teachers doted on him. He developed skin rashes and then boils
and eczema, and it became so serious that he was sent home. He knew from
the look his father gave him and the silence across the dinner table
that first evening that he had failed, that he was an excrescence, a
soul lost beyond redemption. He began rocking, thumped his head upon the
pillow at night to sleep, and finally found salvation through computers.

He spent endless hours at the keyboard, took the computers apart, built
his own. His submission to the high school science fair on algorithmic
complexity was turned away; no one could understand it. He graduated
from high school two years early and went to MIT, staying in a small
six-bedroom house on a leafy street that was set aside for brilliant but
maladjusted students. Not once did he date a girl, though he began
fantasizing about a thin young woman with stringy hair in his computer
linguistics class. She worked in the experimental psych lab, and so he
spent time there and developed an interest in the subject.

In a stab to become well-rounded, he took courses in philosophy and one
in the Romantic poets: Keats, Shelley, Byron-he liked Wordsworth the
most, for his improbable, old-fashioned sensibility. One day, he had an
epiphany: The center of the universe lay in the human brain. He would
learn its architecture. He began on rats, then cats, and finally
monkeys. "We murder in order to dissect."

When his father died, when he got that late-night phone call in winter
from his mother, sounding strangely calm as she relayed the news, he
looked out the window at the ice on the tree branches. He walked out
into the falling snow and promptly blacked out. He left college then,
with eight months to go in his senior year. But it didn't really
matter-the graduate schools were all after him and willing to overlook
the truancy.

Cleaver's palms were still sweaty. He couldn't believe how heavily his
heart was pounding. Had he really seen his father in his dream only a
few minutes ago, the long, slender fingers undoing the belt?

154

He wished he could pan the vision off as a mechanistic neural
phenomenon, some random sequence of firing synapses, but he no longer
believed in that. He saw his father because somewhere, on some level,
his father still existed.

All of his work, his research, his formulations, his instinct, conspired
to convince him of that.

Cleaver put on an old terrycloth dressing gown and slippers and decided
to go to the half-refrigerator in his office and have a glass of milk.
The cold liquid spread across the back of his throat-it tasted good. He
wished, for the first time in years, that he could have some chocolate
chip cookies with it.

He felt oddly frightened at the prospect of returning to his tiny
bedroom, so he walked the dimly lit corridor, past the attendant's
station. He looked in and saw the night duty man asleep, his shoulders
in a heap and his face pressed out of shape like a rubber mask on the
surface of a desk. It was quiet. The ward was dark.

On an impulse, he went into Room 3 5 and there was Benchloss, strapped
down, awake as he knew he would be. He was looking up at the ceiling,
and his eyes were wide open-two wide whirlpools of panic surrounded by
dark circles. Poor Benchloss, suffering from the most bizarre syndrome
of all, Cotard's syndrome.

Cleaver decided to talk to him. He walked in.

"Benchloss, my poor friend. Still awake, I see."

Benchloss could not, of course, respond, because in the deepest recesses
of his mind he believed himself to be dead. And dead people could hardly
talk, now, could they?

Cleaver stared at him. His skin was covered with jagged red rivulets of
scars where he had gouged himself picking off the larvae and worms
visible only to his own cracked mind. He looked closely at the eyes.
Were they moistening up a little? Was it emotion-fear or dread, forever
entombed in there? Or did he in fact feel absolutely nothing? Had he
achieved a nirvana of affectless tranquility? Cleaver felt his heart
soften, uncharacteristically.

"I wish I could do something for you," he suddenly blurted out.

He reached over to touch Benchloss, something he had never done before,
his fingers coming to rest lightly upon the man's forearm. The skin in
fact felt cold. The patient gave no perceptible reaction. How could a
dead man possibly react?

155

Then Cleaver once again felt the odd feeling of eyes staring at him from
behind. Could it be? My father! He turned around-not too quickly, in
case his fears would prove out, but calmly and slowly as he had trained
himself to do. No one there, just the dim light shining from overhead, a
chair, a wastebasket on the floor. Or was that a flicker of movement
through the window on the door?

He quickly went outside. Nothing in the corridor; it was empty, though
it was possible that there was a sound from the stairwell, a door
closing just ever so much or maybe hurried footfalls on the stairs. He
went to investigate, down a flight, all the way to the basement. Was
that his own shadow moving against the wall down there or the rippling
back of a black preacher's coat?

The special lab was straight ahead. He hesitated before the door,
certain somehow that the specter he was chasing had taken up station on
the other side. He felt the doorknob, turned it slowly to one side,
pushed gently. His hand glided inside along the wall, found the light
switch, and flicked it downward. Instantly, the room exploded in a
whiteness that seared his eyes. He blinked them furiously, trying to
accustom them to the light.

He looked around-quickly.

Everywhere, up and down, back and forth. The computer, the machine, the
cylinder. Then the shape caught his eye, the anomaly of it, the black
figure within the pristine sterile alabaster whiteness of the
transcranial stimulator-receiver. Cleaver's body registered the sight
first, an alarm deep within the amygdala that spread outward through the
limbic system like cracks in glass. The smell of fear in the air.

Then, just as abruptly, his brain processed it all, put it together, and
the fear disappeared like a puff of smoke. Nothing to be afraid of. Not
a specter, not his father. He saw who it was. Herbert Mann. The patient,
the paranoid.

He was lying down on the stretcher, ready to slide into the cigar tube
headfirst, a funny look on his face, a smile playing upon his lips,
trying to please.

Cleaver almost burst out laughing.

156

As Kate dressed in her apartment-she was becoming a New Yorker and no
longer lowered the window shades in modesty- she found herself thinking
of Scott. He popped into her mind at the oddest times, a snapshot of him
here, a snatch of his voice there. It was hard for her to say why this
should be-she certainly wasn't infatuated with him, though she could see
how, in other circumstances, he could be attractive. The reason for it,
she was convinced, was pity, and pity, she had been told, was not a good
foundation for a relationship. But still, it was hard to say where her
natural empathy for his horrible situation ended and other feelings
began. The whole story was so dreadful. Who wouldn't be thinking about
it a lot?

And lately she had begun to worry about Tyler's prognosis. It had been
almost three weeks now since the operation, and he hadn't moved so much
as a finger. She knew in her rational mind not to expect change-and an
unchanged status was in fact what was to be hoped for while his stem
cells were being cultivated in the lab. But she had seen patients in
deep comas more reactive than him, and the more time passed, the more
radical Saramaggio's treatment appeared. Scott's words still resonated
in her memory: It was beginning to seem like a single endless operation.

Her doubts about medicine had been growing on a number of issues lately.
All those contradictions born of so-called modern-medical miracles. Yes,
a premature baby barely twenty-four weeks old could be saved by all that
fancy incubation equipment, but would he live a healthy life? Yes, an
old man on the threshold of death could be kept alive on a ventilator,
but was that living? Maybe things had been in some ways better in the
not-so-distant days when the cycles of life

157

played out like the natural rhythms of the seasons and we bowed down in
our communal helplessness before the Grim Reaper. At least they were
more human-whatever that meant. Black and white: You knew when to give
merciful thanks on bended knee and when to beat your breast in grief.

She attached her bra in front, shifted it around, put her arms through
the straps, and pulled a light knit sweater over her head. She knew her
thinking was heresy. Doctors, never mind surgeons, were not supposed to
ruminate this way. But her mother had always encouraged a bit of
heresy-going against the grain, she had put it with a widow's pride.
Without it, we'd all still belong to England, she used to say.

That was another thing. Kate was thinking more and more about her mother
these days. Why is it, she wondered, that when you are deeply touched in
one area, your emotions fan out to other areas; they're like ripples
across a pond when a stone is dropped in-nothing on the shoreline
remains untouched. Maybe it was because she felt she had never completed
mourning; the wasting away from cancer had been so prolonged and the
image of her mother as helpless and emaciated had blocked out all the
happy memories. There had even been a certain relief when she was
finally gone, which had pulled Kate away from the natural inclination to
weep a daughter's tears. And then Kate had kept her grief inside because
her mother's dictum against self-pity resounded in her ears: We Willet
women don't feel sorry for ourselves; we get on with life.

But there was more to the story than that, and Kate knew that sooner or
later she would have to deal with it. The guilt that crept in around the
edges because she felt she had abandoned her mother in her hour of need
was becoming too strong to ignore.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee and
read the newspaper and then sat at the dressing table (thirty dollars
from the Salvation Army) brushing her long honey-blond hair. She looked
in the mirror, and her sky-blue eyes stared back. She examined her skin,
still pure, without blemish. Must be those tough genes forged back in
Greenland, the generations raised among the sharp rocks and sea spray.
Those were her good features. Then she looked at her nose, held it in
profile, tilted it upward. Not so good. Crooked to one side, a bit too
long. She cocked her head again. The

158

ears seemed too large-at least she could cover them with hair. Some
wrinkles developing around the eyes, across the forehead. Thirty-four
years old. How many years were left to her to remain single? Was she
becoming too much of a careerist to think of marriage and family? She
had always thought she would be a good mother. She had wanted to have
children, lots of them-the dream of an only child raised by a single parent.

She shook her head, a rebuke. Time to end idle daydreaming.

She stood up, straightened her skirt, and made the bed, and as she
placed the coverlet over the pillow she noticed that the double mattress
had developed a life-sized indentation on the left side where she
habitually slept. She made a mental note to try to switch to the right.

Kate had never been to Rockefeller University, tucked away on the
eastern edge of Manhattan along the bustle of York Avenue. She entered
the gate and followed the path beside the main drive. Cool green lawns
under a canopy of oaks, and ivy climbing brick walls. Ahead, up an
incline, was a massive building set on a hill, a temple to the gods of
science.

Inside, at the receptionist's desk, she gave the guard the name of the
man she had come to see-Ira Rosenfield. He was a legend in neurology and
neurosurgery, forty-five years in the operating room, now retired. He
was close to her mentor, A. B. Reinhardt, the professor of abnormal
psychology who had set her on her path and from time to time guided her
career by remote control, largely through his extensive network of
professional buddies.

Rosenfield received her graciously in his third-floor office, a cramped
room whose walls were covered with teeming bookcases from floor to
ceiling. On his desk, stacks of reprints and articles were crowding a
leather desk set on which he had been writing a letter, she noted, in
fountain pen ink.

He fussed over her and offered her chamomile tea and brewed the water in
an electric pot. His smallish pink eyes crinkled in delight. The two
exchanged pleasantries, mostly about Reinhardt, whose puckish sense of
humor tended to come out in practical jokes that were famous on both
coasts. He cackled at the recollection.

159

"And what brings you to see me?" he asked finally. "You mentioned
something about St. Catherine's and Saramaggio."

She thought she caught a tone of disapproval in the very mention of the
name, but maybe she was imagining it.

She told him the story of Tyler and Scott from beginning to end,
congratulating herself for the detached tone in which she delivered it.

"And so ..." he said finally.

She stammered and blushed slightly.

"I just wondered what you thought of it-of the whole thing, the
operation, the chances of success."

"Ah, that, well-it's hard to say. I don't know the facts of the case . .
. the state of the research."

Rosenfield blew on his tea, took a noisy sip, and settled back in his
chair with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. It was
not a flattering posture-folds of skin hung from under his chin like
turkey wattles.

He was quiet a long time, thinking it through. Then he looked her square
in the eyes. She realized he was taking her measure, wondering whether
he should be totally honest. He came to a decision.

"Let me declare at the outset-I put great stake in medical progress. Who
among us does not? But I more than most. I'm a believer in the pioneer
spirit. I was present at one of the very first liver transplants. And it
was wonderful to witness, not for the patient-in fact, the patient was
miserable; it was a long and painful recovery, and it was never
complete. It was wonderful for the operation itself, the sheer marvel of
the doing of it. Because it was one of the first. You knew that it was
the precursor of many such operations to come. You knew that with time
they would be refined, that surgeons would improve the technique, that
new drugs would come along to fight rejection and make things more
bearable for the patient. You felt history breathing over your shoulder.
You knew that an advance was being made, right then and there, the way
an army fighting on its belly for territory inch by inch knows it's
moving ahead when it sees the flag planted forward. It was an advance
because it was the right time for an advance."

He leaned forward, took a sip of tea, replaced the cup on an envelope
used for a coaster.

"Like everyone I know, every doctor, I'm a proponent of gene therapy. We
will use it to eliminate diseases, hereditary diseases of all

160

kinds. We will wipe them off the face of the earth. I believe in stem
cell research. I think stem cells hold incredible potential for
repairing and replacing damaged organs and body tissue. In three to five
years, we'll be in clinical trials for all kinds of diseases, strokes,
spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's, heart disease-you name it. Everything
but cancer. And someday we'll get there, too.

"But the advances have to come at the right time. Move too soon and you
threaten the whole endeavor. Every general knows that- keep your
battalion grouped and don't move too far ahead of your supply lines. Or
you risk defeat.

"All this publicity about stem cells has raised a lot of expectations.
They're running way ahead of us. The potential is light-years ahead of
the research. We can dream about these things, but we can't do them yet.
Christopher Reeve will not walk again anytime soon. And people will
still be getting Alzheimer's and slowly losing their minds."

He stopped and stared at his teacup, then continued.

"You know, I do a fair number of lecture tours, and I talk a lot about
stem cells. And you know what question I'm asked a lot?"

She shook her head.

"Afterward, a man will come up to the lectern, sometimes more than one,
and he'll hem and haw a bit and then come out with it- he'll ask me if I
can use stem cells to build him a bigger penis. And sometimes it's a
woman-she wants one." A small sigh. "That's what the public is thinking
about all our great advances. That, and are we killing babies to get the
cadaveric fetal tissue."

"So you think it's too soon? You don't think Saramaggio has much chance
of success?"

"I didn't say that. I'm loath to criticize a fellow surgeon, especially
one as renowned as he is. But rebuilding a brain! The arrogance of it!
We can't build a new liver or a kidney or a heart yet-much less a brain.
I mean do you know how many neurons we're talking about?" He looked at
her and halted, flustered. "I'm sorry, of course you do." He stood up to
cover his embarrassment, began pacing around. He was smaller than she
expected.

"Well, as I tell my patients, if you're talking about the entire nervous
system of a single human being, you're in the neighborhood of four
trillion neurons. Do you realize that that's approximately the same
number of stars in the sky?"

161

161

She looked at him, skeptical.

"Well, maybe not exactly. No one knows how many stars there are. But it
makes my point, and my patients get the idea. A human being is as
complicated as the entire universe. Every neuron is connected to
approximately one hundred other neurons. Those long pathways, all the
way down the spinal cord, they're formed in the embryo. If a neuron
doesn't connect with the right neuron, it dies away, and they keep dying
until finally the proper connection is made and two of them survive.
They're a micromillimeter apart, then they grow-they elongate with brain
expansion. As the infant grows, they grow, too. How can you achieve that
with a thirteen-year-old boy? He's almost full-grown. His brain is all
laid out. As you well know, it's the pattern of connectivity that
counts. All those connections zapping around the cortex, they give us
memories, make our personalities, make us fall in love-they're learned.
They're pathways formed over time, by habit. Why does one neuron connect
with a second neuron and not the ninety-nine others? Habit, that's all.
It happened last time, so it's likely to happen again. The same synapse
fired before, so it'll probably fire again. It's a pathway in the
literal sense, worn through use, just like a dirt path across your lawn.
So what happens? You get ten thousand of those neurons firing as they
did last time and you can lift your spoon. You get hundreds of millions
of them, billions of them, following some kind of crazy pattern, and you
get a complete human being. It's as simple as that-and as complicated.

"So tell me, even if Saramaggio is somehow able to replant all those
baby neurons, how in God's name is he going to replicate the connections?"

"A computer. He's got a lot of the brain activity simulated by a computer."

"And how about the part of the brain that was damaged? How can the
computer simulate that? Do you think that if a real person emerges at
the end of all this, there is the remotest chance that he will resemble
the boy he was-in any way?"

Kate looked down. Rosenfield saw this out of the corner of his eye, but
continued to press home the point.

"And what if something goes wrong? Have you thought about that? Tell me,
do you have that much confidence in computers? Would you want to trust
your life to one?"

162

She shifted her position uncomfortably, but he didn't let up.

"You know what your Saramaggio is trying to do?"

She was tempted to say that Saramaggio was not hers, but held herself back.

"Nothing short of trying to reconstruct the entire universe. He's trying
to string the stars in the heavens."

Rosenfield went back to his desk and sat down. He picked up his tea, and
the envelope stuck to the bottom of the cup and traveled up to his
chest. But he didn't notice, so intent was he upon Kate. He put it down
again without drinking.

"Now I didn't mean to harangue you," he said. "As you can tell, I feel
rather strongly about this whole thing. We have real guinea pigs, you
know; we don't need to use humans. I knew Christiaan Barnard. I knew
them all. The first one who operated inside the heart by touch-he lost
his first four patients. The first to use a heart-lung machine-he had
one success, then lost the next four and never did another heart
operation. For heart transplants, die early mortality was incredible. Of
die first two hundred or so, one hundred twenty died within months.
About twenty lived for one year. Out of two hundred! And that was the
heart! A muscle with four chambers and a bunch of valves. The kind of
thing Saramaggio is attempting-how many will it take until there's a
halfway decent chance of success? A thousand, maybe more."

Kate sat up, nodded.

"Well," she said. "I'm glad I came. I wanted to hear what you think, and
you certainly told me."

He chuckled, now suddenly avuncular.

"I do get carried away," he said softly. "The prerogative of old age.
I'm sorry-lecture over." He gestured down at his pen and inkwell. "I'm
very old-fashioned. I don't even use a computer to write a letter."

He bounded up again.

"Come-let me show you around."

He escorted her through a rabbit's warren of offices and laboratories
and libraries. In an adjacent building, they passed a large room with
swinging doors that had small diamond-shaped windows. She glanced
through one and saw a large oval-shaped table surrounded by a dozen or
so wooden chairs, all occupied. On a podium up front, a man stood before
a blackboard.

163

"Stuart Kauffman," said Rosenfield. "Complexity theory. Theoretical
biology. Good stuff. You should hear him sometime."

"What's he speaking on now?"

"Today? I think it's what he calls the concept of the adjacent possible."

"What's that?"

"Let's see: How does he state it? Ah, yes. For any set of objects or
states, the adjacent possible is the set of all objects or states that
do not yet exist, but are just one simple combination away from coming
into existence. In other words: Watch out-you never know what's likely
to happen."

"Like our neurons. One hundred of them lying next to the one that wants
to fire."

"Sort of," he replied politely. "It's easier to think of chemical
reactions-how one chemical compound can abruptly catalyze into another.
Or the cup of tea I just made-how the water got hotter and hotter until
suddenly it changed altogetlier and began to boil. If you didn't know
anything about water, would you have predicted that? Large bubbles
suddenly jumping all over the place."

They came to the ground floor.

"But Kauffman applies the theory to any complex system- economies,
societies, and of course organisms. It's intuitively obvious, but he's
looking to formalize it so that it will shed light on the history and
dynamics of evolution."

"Evolution?"

"Yes. On ancient earth there were simple molecules-ammonia, methane, and
so on-and now 4.5 billion years later, we've got ten to one hundred
trillion kinds of organic molecules, ranging from simple enzymes to
gigantic complex proteins and DNA chains. How did this incredible
diversity happen? Life creates it, steadily expanding into the adjacent
possible. And every time it ratchets up its complexity a little, the
range of opportunity for further expansion increases. Imagine a Rube
Goldberg tower rising up, getting more complicated the higher it goes."

He pushed through the front door, still talking, and they found
themselves on the front stoop of the building she had entered forty
minutes earlier.

"Basically, Kauffman speculates that life is persistently drawn, as

164

though by some inexorable force into the next stage-into its adjacent
possible."

"And no one can predict the next stage?"

"No, no one. Not even a computer. Unless maybe the computer's the next
stage, and in that case it'll probably keep it a secret," he said with a
chuckle.

They shook hands in the sunlight, and he cupped hers with both of his
and held on to it for some time.

"I think," he said slowly, "you're troubled by this whole business with
Saramaggio. I think you came to me because you wanted to hear the answer
I gave you, and now that I've given it to you and put it into words, you
will have to decide what you are going to do."

She nodded, partly to return his earlier politeness, partly because what
he said had struck a chord.

He's right, she thought, as she descended the stairs, too preoccupied to
turn and wave. I am troubled.

Her pace picked up as she walked down the incline of the pavement.

Expansion into the adjacent possible.

She couldn't say why, but she didn't like the sound of that.

Kate came in to work early the following Monday because St. Cat's had
organized a private symposium on Saramaggio's operation for a select
group of neuroanatomists, neurobiologists, and neurosurgeons. She had
received notice of it only the Friday afternoon before. Word of the
remarkable operation was already beginning to make the rounds, a memo
explained, and so it was best to confront the talk head-on and explain
just what had been done and how well the patient was doing so far. All
of it, of course, off the record-until such time as the New England
Journal of Medicine would carry Saramaggio's own account.

As she joined the others in the small auditorium on the fifteenth floor,
a cozy wood-paneled room with a glass wall that gave a spectacular view
of the river, she spotted some big names among the surgeons. Sitting in
the second row was Alex Berenstein of Beth Israel, and there two rows
behind her was Nick Barbaro of Moffitt. Could

165

he have flown all the way from San Francisco for this? She noticed
audiovisual equipment at the ready-another sign that this was not a
session hastily thrown together at the last moment.

Calvin Brewster, the administrator, took the floor first, speaking from
a lectern that had a control panel with an impressive array of switches
and gadgets. He fumbled a bit with the microphone, feigning modest
embarrassment when the feedback squawked. He welcomed the group, noted
that there were coffee and Danishes in the rear, joked that it would
hardly be necessary to ask such an eminent gathering to observe a pledge
of secrecy, and then did just that. The twenty or so people there
quickly agreed. His introduction to Saramaggio was downright fawning.

The lanky surgeon uncoiled himself from a seat in the middle and
sauntered languidly to the front. Applause would have been unseemly, but
Kate thought she detected the discreet acknowledgment of heads bowing
ever so slightly. Like reeds in a gentle breeze, she thought.

As the only woman there-a position she often found herself in- she felt
conspicuous.

Saramaggio began with a recitation of the early research. He
acknowledged the work of Dr. Cleaver in "the realm of computer-driven
artificially enhanced intelligence," and as he did so, his eyes cast to
the back of the room. Kate turned. Cleaver was sitting by himself in the
last row. He was slumped down in his seat. Did he make it a habit to
slip unnoticed in and out of rooms, or did it just seem that way?

Then Saramaggio recounted the accident that befell Tyler, whom he called
a twelve-year-old. She wondered: How could a doctor so meticulous in the
operating room get the age wrong? The question crystallized her growing
uneasiness. Then she felt a pang-maybe she was being too critical. Maybe
her little talk with Rosenfield was pushing her around a corner.

"So you see what we were confronted with," said Saramaggio. "We were at
a crossroads. We have a patient in a desperate state facing death or
lifelong severe mental incapacitation. And we have promising but
incomplete research in advanced medical techniques that could
conceivably alleviate his condition. It was, perhaps, a fortunate
conjunction."

166

A dramatic pause. She thought she had rarely seen anyone more pleased
with himself. A sudden image of the helicopter landing on the roof
flashed through her mind, Scott holding onto his son's hand as the team
rushed across the tarmac.

Saramaggio pushed several buttons on the control panel. A blackout
curtain drew across the window, the lights dimmed, and a silver-flecked
screen lowered behind him. A minute later, it was alive with images,
movement, light. It took her a few seconds to recognize the operating
room. There were the green cloths draped above Tyler. A close-up of him
with the metal object protruding out of his skull- she thought she could
hear a doctor nearby give a shallow gasp-and then she began to recognize
individuals. The anesthesiologist, Gully, herself. In the center, the
prima donna himself, Saramaggio, moving with fluid self-assurance. Odd
how she hadn't been aware of the camera at the time, though it had been
visible behind a tinted wall panel.

In a laconic voice, Saramaggio narrated both operations. As he
painstakingly removed the hideous hunk of metal, he stepped aside from
time to time. Was he doing that intentionally to give the camera a clear
shot? Kate chastised herself for letting the thought flicker even briefly.

With the device out, there was a close-up of the injured brain.
Saramaggio froze the frame on the screen and used a pointer to describe
the wound. Kate was shocked as the camera zoomed in for a close-up. The
gash seemed wide as a ravine. The damage was even more substantial than
she had realized at the time. Then the video resumed, showing the
extraction of the stem cells-enlargements of them in the petri
dishes-and the implantation of the electrodes. Slow, painstaking, boring
to watch. Cleaver appeared on the screen, working his infernal machines.
Soon the video was over and the lights came back on.

Saramaggio took a few questions, mostly narrow and technical. He seemed
eager to move on, and sure enough, he cut an answer short and made an
announcement: "Now, we've arranged a special demonstration for you."

Lights off again. There was Tyler lying immobile in his bed, slightly
blurry and indistinct behind the two sheets of glass. A closer view. You
could see his chest moving up and down barely; he was breathing. His
face twitched, ever so slightly.

167

"This is our patient today, right now. You see all the signs of a coma.
We want above all simply to keep him stable."

The screen went dark for a second; then another image came up- a petri
dish with hundreds, thousands of tiny spheroids, dark around the edges.
They looked like shadowy raindrops on a pane of glass.

"These pictures were taken yesterday. As you can see, the colony of stem
cells continues to grow. So far, they are multiplying even faster than
we had predicted. At the current rate, in two, three, maybe four weeks,
we will have enough to begin reimplantation."

A hand shot up. A question.

"Are you using any catalytic agents?"

"Fetal bovine serum with two proteins: fibroblast growth factor and
leukemia inhibiting factor."

"Do you see any variants among later generations?"

"No, the newest appear to be exact duplicates of the oldest."

The screen went dark again, then back to Tyler. The camera was moving
now-it was mobile, someone was handling it. It turned toward the bank of
machines next to Tyler.

"This footage is live. Right now. These monitors show the patient's
vital signs. Look closely at the EEC" The screen showed four portholes,
each with an impulse tracing a path from left to right. "We have
installed four submonitors to record brain function in four different
locations, three of them in the limbic region. Now watch closely."

The screen split into two. The four monitors were on the left half. On
the right, Kate recognized the bank of machines from the computer in the
room adjacent to Tyler's bubble.

"This represents the impulses coming from the computer. Here, too, we
have four submonitors." The right screen zoomed in for a close-up and
also showed four separate monitors. There were now eight altogether.

"The four on the left are directly from the patient's brain. The four on
the right are from the computer. You see how perfectly synchronized they
are. It is impossible to tell if the patient is originating the activity
or if the computer is doing it and sending it to the brain, which then
registers it as its own. But we do have a way of finding out which of
the two is calling the shots.

"Shift to master monitor," Saramaggio said. Only then did Kate realize
that the microphone he was using was hooked into an audio

168

headset for whoever was handling the video camera. The screen now showed
a single green monitor window with a black needle. To the left side was
a large zero and to the right a large number one. Kate realized that she
had seen the machine before, but had never bothered to inquire about its
function.

"This is undoubtedly the single most important measurement we have.
Every sixty seconds, we institute a minute time delay in the impulses
from the computer. If the computer's monitors lag behind the patient's,
then we know the patient's brain is sending the signals all by itself.
If the patient's monitors don't register anything until the computer
kicks in, then it is the computer that is doing the work. This
indispensable device tells us which one is paramount.

"You see the needle pointing to zero. That indicates that the patient is
still brain active. If the needle sweeps to one, then the computer has
taken over."

They all peered. The needle was indeed solidly pointing to zero.

"A very simple but effective indicator. We are indebted to Dr. Cleaver's
ingenuity for it."

Some turned around to look at Cleaver, who acknowledged them with a thin
smile.

"Now watch this."

By the time they turned back to face Saramaggio, the split screen showed
Tyler on the left side and a bank of monitors on the right. A figure, a
nurse, could be seen approaching his bed. Abruptly, the nurse
clapped-loudly.

Just as abruptly, a line on the monitor jumped suddenly, sending forth a
little peak that gradually trailed down to a normal progression of
slender spikes. The nurse clapped again, and the line jumped up again.

"As you can see," Saramaggio said, a hint of swagger in his voice, "the
patient, though in a coma, can register sound. Nothing unusual in that.
But there's a catch here. The monitor you are looking at is not the
monitor hooked up to the patient. It is the computer's monitor.

"In other words"-and here he drew out the sentence for emphasis-"the
sound is entering the boy's ears, but he is not the one reacting to it.
That is being done by the computer."

The nurse clapped a third time, and this time all eyes were upon the
monitor. They stared in silence at its little peak, as if it had
suddenly acquired the aura of magic.

169

When he called, she could tell by the background noises that he was in a
bar. The TV on high, a ball game. The murmur of voices, indistinct, a
burst of false laughter. She imagined it darkly lighted, old wood
stained with glass rings, a brass footrail and jukebox. The kind of
place Frank Sinatra would go to forget a woman.

It wasn't that late. She could join him. Except-he hadn't invited her.

Scott wasn't drunk, or at least he wasn't slurring his words, but he was
in a state, hyperemotional, excitable, angry. He had learned about
Saramaggio's demonstration.

"Were you in on it?" he demanded. "Did you just sit there? Didn't you
say anything?"

Finally, she got from him the name of the place. McHale's, Eighth Avenue
and Forty-sixth. He wouldn't have given it to her if he hadn't meant for
her to come.

"Stay there," she said. "I'll be right there."

His response was drowned out by another burst of laughter.

She jumped in a cab, and fifteen minutes later walked through the door.

The TV shone down from a mounted perch on uplifted faces, all men. The
announcer was excited, fans cheering, runners rounding the bases, a
close-up of the white ball bouncing in the outfield on a sea of bright
green grass.

He was at the end of the bar, sitting on a stool, leaning his cheeks
against his fists, looking down. The stool next to him was empty, and
she lifted one leg high to swing onto it. It was higher than it looked,
and for a moment she felt she would topple over backward. She gripped
the bar with both hands. Some entrance.

170

He looked over at her and smiled. She hadn't expected that. Where was
the anger? In the cab, she had been rehearsing her lines: It wasn't the
way you imagine it; this kind of thing is done fairly often in medicine;
it's a means of sharing important advances. It's not as impersonal as it
sounds; it's not intended to objectify-is that really a word}-the patient.

"Want a drink?"

She nodded. "Absolut, with ice."

He ordered for her and motioned for the bartender to refill his glass.
Scotch. She wondered how many he had had. He looked all right-for a man
in hell. He took a long last drag on a cigarette and crushed it out in a
black plastic ashtray that was half-filled with butts.

"Look," he said. "I'm sorry for those things I said on the phone. Some
of them, anyway. I don't want you to think I'm getting paranoid." He
paused and added, "Just because everybody's against me." He gave a
rueful grin.

"Of course. I understand."

"It's just that, when I heard about all those doctors gathered around,
talking about him. Analyzing him. The video feed, live-for Christ's
sake. And him just lying there, helpless."

He stopped, raised his glass, and took a sip to hide the crack in his voice.

She wondered for a moment who had told him-another doctor, probably, or
maybe a nurse, some of whom felt sorry for him. It wouldn't do to
ask-that would make it seem as if she was ferreting out an informer, as
if a conspiracy indeed existed.

"They don't really care about him, you know," he continued. "Especially
Saramaggio. He's out for prestige, fame, money. Who knows? They're all
the same. For them, this is the big one."

He halted for a second, then motioned toward the TV and lit another
cigarette. "Bases loaded. Two out, behind by two. Look at the batter;
look at his jaw. He lives for this moment. They all do. Same thing.
Moment of truth. The big one.

"I thought at first, that's okay. To hell with them. I can handle it. I
can exploit it. What we have here is a marriage of convenience. They
want to get famous. I want them to fix up my son. Motives are
irrelevant. It's the end result that counts. I'd kiss the butcher, the
devil himself, if it would help."

171

She was still struck by his dispassionate tone. Whatever it was that had
overcome him, that emotional storm that had caused him to phone her, it
had passed.

"To hell with all of them, I thought."

She noticed that he said them, not you. He seemed to have the same thought.

"Except for you. You were different. You understood and you cared. You
were what held me together, and I'm grateful for that. I guess that's
why I was upset when I learned you were at that session. But I know
that's not being rational. It's just that the whole thing, putting on a
demonstration, turning my son into some kind of specimen ... I mean, I
don't care if they think that way, but they shouldn't act that way."

She felt she had to say something. But what?

"I know it's hard," she said, wincing at the banality of her words.
"Maybe some of what you say is true-about motives and all that. Maybe
all of it's true. Except for one thing. They are doctors. And they do care."

"They treat him like a piece of meat." He raised his glass again, gave a
slight shudder. He stepped back from anger into irony. "Piece of meat.
Amazing how cliches come to you at a time like this. I guess it's
because they're true after all."

She felt the need to defend her profession.

"They've been trained. They've learned some of that hardness. You'd be
surprised at some of the things that go on in the OR, jokes, discussions
about golf, stocks-all kinds of stupid, immaterial, irrelevant things.
But I've seen those same surgeons, the ones who act like they couldn't
give less of a damn, the ones who act as if they're sitting in on a hand
of cards, I've seen them, when they lose a patient, sink into a
depression you wouldn't believe. One of them, a guy in San Francisco, he
used to just walk right out of the hospital, and people coming in would
say he looked like he was crying. He'd come in the next morning as if
nothing had happened. It's a macho thing."

Scott was silent for a moment, taking it in.

"Okay," he said finally. "I'll buy it. Maybe they are human after all.
But that doesn't change my decision."

Her stomach knotted.

"What decision?"

172

"I'm going to take him off life support. I'm going to end the whole
thing. The whole goddamned, pioneering, brain-stem-celling,
son-of-a-bitching thing. The whole experiment. I've already called the
chairman of that group-what's it called?"

She knew right away what he was talking about. The IRB-the Institutional
Review Board, which passes upon experimental operations. Once the IRB
approves the protocol, as it did in Tyler's case, the patient's parent
is given the chairman's phone number. Precisely for this kind of situation.

"The IRB," she replied. "That would be Kellman. And what did he say?"

"They'll meet. Tomorrow at nine o'clock. And guess what?"

"What?"

"I want you to help me."

A whoop went up from the other end of the bar. The batter walked away
from home plate, dragging the bat in the dust. He had struck out.

"Missed his big moment," said Scott, draining his glass and taking
another long pull on his cigarette.

Before strapping Herbert Mann into the TSR, Cleaver and Felix gave him a
double dose of Valium. Cleaver hadn't wanted to do that to his
subjects-it was impossible to call them patients under the
circumstances. He had wanted them to retain clear mental faculties, and
he feared the medication would introduce a contaminating variable into
the experiment. But the principle quickly dissipated once they were in
the basement.

Out of nowhere, Mann had rebelled at the prospect of entering the room.
He braced himself with both arms straight against the door jamb,
refusing to take one more step, and there was a moment of awkward
uncertainty when they tried to jackknife his elbows and force him
inside. He was strong for a little man, and at one point held on to the
jamb with both hands, like a sailor clinging to the mast in a storm. His
fit would have been comic if it weren't so damned inconvenient. It was
an odd display, given that he had seemed ready, even eager, to try out
the machine not so long before. Cleaver thought

173

back to the night when Mann had lain down in the TSR all by himself,
smiling like a babe. That's the trouble with paranoids, he had thought,
you never know what mood you're going to catch them in.

Cleaver led him back upstairs by the elbow, murmuring sweet
blandishments in his ear, and gave him a cup of tea, spiked with two
ten-milligram tablets that he'd crushed hurriedly in his office, using a
saucer and spoon as a mortar and pestle. He waited half an hour,
watching Mann's eyes take on a glazed sheen, and led him, now docile,
back downstairs. Even primed with the medication, Mann's face puckered
with a moment's alarm when they crossed the threshold. As directed,
Felix had a straitjacket waiting on a stool, but Mann abruptly relaxed
once inside the room, and Cleaver could tell they wouldn't need it.

"That's right, Herbert. Come along. There's nothing to it. That-a-boy."

Cleaver's high-pitched wheedling sounded insincere, even to himself.

They lowered him onto the movable stretcher at the mouth of the machine
as delicately as a bag of apples. Standing over him, Cleaver got hit
full in the face with a stench that almost made him gag. He could tell
by the expression on Felix's face that he was smelling it, too.

"Looks like our boy soiled himself," Cleaver said with distaste.

"Should we change him? It won't take a minute."

Cleaver thought it over. What if the Valium should wear off? Wasn't
worth the risk.

"No. Let's just get going."

With that, Cleaver threaded the thick strap into the buckle and pulled
it so tightly across Mann's upper body that his shoulders hugged his
chest. Felix strapped his feet in place across the ankles. There were
two smaller straps for his wrists, which lay palms upward. Standing up
and looking down at him all trussed up and lying in a bed of gleaming
metal, Cleaver thought he looked somehow shrunken, a corpse. He had the
momentary sensation that he was dispatching his subject off to cremation
and the nonexistent afterlife-pull the lever and the casket would slide
away into an oven. And an odd thought came out of the blue: How fleeting
and peculiar and pathetic it is, this whole messy business called life.

174

But Mann was hardly lifeless: His face was twitching and his eyes were
darting back and forth like windshield wipers.

"It'll be all right. Don't worry. It's like taking a little snooze."
This time, Cleaver thought his words struck just the right tone. He felt
it, too-he badly wanted Mann to calm down. Mann's face relaxed a bit,
and Cleaver was touched. He looked over at Felix and gave a quiet nod:
Time to proceed.

Moving slowly, so as not to alarm him, Cleaver pulled down the helmet
with its tangled array of wires.

"Now this won't hurt at all. We're going to fit this around your head,
and it will keep you nice and snug."

The helmet slipped on, surprisingly easily. Then Cleaver lowered the
eggcups so that they barely touched Mann's eyes. He turned a knob on the
side, and the metallic cups retracted into curved horizontal strips.
Mounting them in place was difficult: He and Felix had to lift his lids
one at a time, first the upper, then the lower, pulling them up by the
lashes and using a blunt scalpel to pry open a sliver of space. Mann lay
perfectly still-he seemed to have resigned himself to whatever fate
might bring. Once the metallic lip of the strip fit under the edge of
the eyelid, Cleaver turned the knob again to expand it to its full
convex oval shape. An automatic switch turned on the wash of saline
solution; Cleaver watched it slowly ascending through the translucent
tubing.

It was a bit of a relief, he confessed to himself, not to have to look
into Mann's panicky eyes.

Mann was the third subject to be hooked up to the machine. The first had
been a young man with a severe affective disorder who played solitaire
for hours on end and mumbled to himself. The second had been a
borderline personality who'd dug holes so deeply into her heels that
she'd reached the bone and could no longer walk.

Cleaver couldn't say precisely what effect the experience had had upon
them, and this bothered him no end. Where were they going, and what did
it feel like? He used injections of 2-deoxyglucose to read the brain
activity, and that part of the experiment worked perfectly. The tens of
thousands of minute electrodes inside the helmet picked up the
electrical impulses and fed them into the computer, which displayed them
in real time. He could literally watch the brain think- and he could
listen to it, too. Quincy had rigged up an analog sound

175

system. It reminded Cleaver of bursts of static. The first time he used
the audio, he turned out the lights. Standing there in the semidarkness
watching the screen and listening to the speakers, he felt he was in
outer space, observing the explosions of sunspots and hearing them tear
at the fabric of the universe.

But the experiment was intended to be much more than observational. The
idea, after all, was to link the brain to the computer. The first step
was to try to feed information from the computer directly into the
cortex-and it was here that the uncertainty lay. For the young man,
Cleaver downloaded a variety of new data, all kinds of information
transmogrified into on-off electrical pulses-even, ever so quickly, a
version of an Italian card game called sette mezzo. Whether it took or
not was impossible to tell. Cleaver ran various tests on him for
days-including, of course, providing him with the requisite deck of
cards-but they never turned up any sign that the information had been
processed or was in an area of the cortex that could be accessed by the
conscious mind. The same was true of the woman. In her case, Cleaver fed
in snatches of Polish, answers to riddles, even a piercing sound that
preceded a tiny electric shock, repeated ten times. Again, once the
woman was taken out of the machine and allowed to rest, she showed no
indication that she had taken any of this on board, except for a
response to the sound, which caused a spike of anxiety. But that,
theorized Cleaver, was a simple case of Pavlovian conditioning and had
nothing to do with the computer.

He was feeling doubly frustrated. One problem was clearly the time limit
for each session. Quincy had warned him that the system would crash
after seven minutes, and to give a margin of safety he had triggered it
to turn off automatically after five minutes. There was an override
button that would keep it going, but Cleaver sensibly declined to use
it. Who knew what might happen to the apparatus if it kicked into
overtime? And contrary to Quincy's predictions, he discovered that the
programs for encoding information were cumbersome-not very much
information could be packed into five minutes.

And then there was the problem of the subjects. Lunatics were not fit
for the job. They were unable to articulate anything that happened to
them, and they could hardly be grilled about newly acquired knowledge.
Sooner or later, Cleaver thought, he would have to enlist a mature,
rational human. But who? It would take a mighty persuasive

176

tongue to convince anyone halfway normal to lie down inside that cylinder.

Did the experience cause no change whatsoever in the subjects? Cleaver
was not prepared to conclude one way or the other, though he had noticed
one unusual occurrence. He'd happened to patrol the ward on the night
each of the two had undergone the session and he'd seen that each of
them was tormented by nightmares. He had tried to make out what they
were saying, but could not. A coincidence maybe, but he made a mental
note to drop by Mann's bed this night.

He swabbed the soft skin under the forearm with alcohol, gave him the
injection, and waited a few minutes for the tracing compound to work its
way through the system. Finally, he looked up at Felix.

"All set then?" he asked, a peevish tone setting in. He still disliked
his assistant and thought him incompetent. But he had gone this far with
him, and besides, if he fired him, who knew what Felix might do? Those
dull eyes were in part a masquerade-he was certainly capable of scheming.

"Yep. All systems go." Felix was standing at the computer controls,
which apparently made him feel he was about to launch a rocket.

Cleaver rolled the stretcher on its tracks and watched as Mann
disappeared headfirst into the tight cylinder until only his feet were
protruding. He gave a little shudder of empathetic claustrophobia,
straightened up, stretched his back, and walked over to take the
controls from Felix.

The first thing he did was to start the large clock set in the console,
its big black hand marking off the seconds in melodramatic lunges.

He flicked a few switches, and the screen leapt to life: an image of the
helmet with its recording electrodes, arrayed in limitless hexagons, lit
up like Christmas tree bulbs. By pressing the edges of a directional
button, he could rotate it 360 degrees in any angle.

He turned more switches, and Mann's brain image popped onto the screen.
He turned wheels that rotated the brain and allowed him to enter and
pull back at any point, like a cinematographer on a boom camera. He sat
for a full thirty seconds, just watching the brain work and listening to
the sound of its infinite machinations. Sunspots exploding.

177

He caught himself; they had work to do. The large hand on the clock was
marching forward inexorably.

They had decided to feed Mann algebra. They knew from his dossier that
he had not advanced beyond simple mathematics in high school, hampered
by personality quirks that were precursors to his illness.
Painstakingly, Cleaver, helped by an assistant at St. Cat's who had no
idea what purpose the work was serving, had loaded algebraic formulas
and theories into the computer. Testing whether they had taken-provided
they could get Mann to concentrate-should be possible.

He downloaded the material and looked again at the clock. Three minutes
had gone by. Still two minutes left.

On impulse, Cleaver decided to perform an experiment within the
experiment. He stopped transmitting electrical impulses from the
computer and flipped all the switches open. That might, in theory,
unobstruct the optic nerve. It would let the impulses flow in whatever
direction they wanted, like water seeking its own level. It was, he
thought, tantamount to lifting the gates on a series of locks connecting
oceans at different heights. Which way would the water flow?

He gave it a full minute. The sixty seconds ticked by, slowly, silently,
tensely. Outwardly, nothing was happening. It was a suspended moment,
like holding your breath.

Cleaver started the process of shutting down the connections. Felix
didn't seem to have a clue about what had happened.

When they extracted Mann from the machine, pulling down the stretcher on
its rollers, removing the headgear carefully and then undoing the
straps, he seemed a bit dazed and befuddled, but otherwise unchanged. It
could have been the Valium that disoriented him; once again, Cleaver,
holding his nose against the smell, cursed the fates that had forced him
to use it.

Mann stood up unsteadily, like an astronaut back on earth, but soon
regained his equilibrium. They helped him out of the room, which he left
in grateful haste. Upstairs, they cleaned him up, put him down for a
rest, then awakened him gently, gave him a light lunch of soup and a
cheese sandwich, and set him down for tests in the old smoking veranda.
Sunlight was streaming in through the grime-covered windows, reflecting
off a swirl of dust motes.

With forced casualness, Cleaver handed him a yellow pad and sat beside
him. He wrote on top of it:

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4y = 12

y = ?

"Now take your time," he said. "See if you can figure it out."

But one look at Mann was enough to realize that he hadn't the slightest
idea what the figures meant. The experiment was a failure, like the two
others before it.

Cleaver tried two other formulas, but by the end didn't even bother to
slide the pad in front of Mann. He had to curb a rising sense of anger:
Couldn't the poor slob try a little harder? How in God's name did he
manage to get so dumb? And to think this little mouse murdered his
entire family.

"I give up," Cleaver said. He stood up wearily. It had been a long day.
He looked down at Mann, sitting there in his striped seersucker
bathrobe, rocking slightly, the picture of contrition.

"I'm leaving," Cleaver said summarily.

"Czes'c. Do zobaczenia."

Cleaver barely paid attention. But then suddenly he whipped around.

"What did you say?" he demanded.

"Mowie po polsku," said Mann. "I'm speaking Polish."

"When did you learn to speak Polish?"

"I don't know. I just did it. The words just came out."

Cleaver's thoughts came fast and furious. They seemed to echo around his
head as he walked down the corridor.

So it did work after all. But in the wrong direction. His brain went out
and went into the computer and rummaged through it and came up with the
file intended for the other subject. My God! Who would have thought it
possible?

Walking down Second Avenue, Kate was having second thoughts. She didn't
know what had possessed her-maybe it was the Absolut. Maybe it was
Scott's resolution and the new strength it had given him. But in any
case she had clearly gotten carried away and made a pledge she might
come to regret. She had told him that she would back his decision. The
odd thing was that he had barely

179

registered a reaction; it was almost as if he had expected nothing less
of her.

She stopped into a deli and absentmindedly picked up a wire basket and
began filling it with the small foragings of a person living alone-one
quart of skim milk, a barbecued chicken, a head of lettuce, Pepperidge
Farm Orange Milano cookies.

But it could lead to trouble for her, no question about that. Saramaggio
would not take it lightly if she crossed him. Already he didn't like
her. He was the sort of man who would take a certain pleasure in ruining
careers.

The thought of placing her ambition ahead of her instinct to do the
right thing shamed her. And she was even more ashamed by the thoughts
that followed: She was tempted to go back on her word to Scott, but one
thing stopping her was the question of how she would tell him. She
didn't think she could face the opprobrium. And he wasn't a gentleman
who would let her off the hook easily. She wondered why his opinion of
her had come to matter so much.

Leaving the store and hugging a bag with one arm, she thought she
recognized a figure up ahead, the jet black hair. Gully! That's just
what she needed, someone to talk it over with. They could go for a cup
of coffee.

She hurried ahead, half trotting, awkwardly. The figure stopped at a
light, and she caught up and was about to speak when he turned around to
face her.

It was someone else, not Gully at all. The man's eyes registered
momentary alarm at the intensity of her look.

Walking back to her apartment, she felt twice as bad and twice as alone.
She set the groceries down in her kitchen and decided to go up to the
roof, walking up the flights of stairs, unhooking a thick metal door,
and stepping out onto an expanse of buckling tar paper. It was warm, and
the sky overhead was spectacular, with a shimmering aura from the
skyline around her. Directly overhead, in the blackness, the stars were
gleaming.

She thought-out of nowhere, it seemed-of her father. She had been only
two when he'd been killed in Vietnam, bombed by an American plane in the
Mekong Delta-"friendly fire," as that arrogantly lying oxymoron put it.
She didn't remember him at all, though her mother had described his
departure so often she almost felt she

180

could. A large man with a barrel chest and a mustache (this from a photo
on her mother's dresser), he'd picked her up and hugged her and said,
"I'll be gone a long, long time, but I'll be back. Don't forget
that-I'll be back." Then he'd turned and walked out the door and she'd
run to the window to watch him walk away down the flagstones outside.
The scene was so strong in her mind that she was sometimes sure the
memory was her own.

When she was young, reciting the Lord's Prayer-"Our father who art in
Heaven"-she often pictured her own father up there, looking down on her,
watching out for her, arranging things. It was comforting. And now she
felt, looking up at the bright stars, a little foolishly, that she would
like to feel that way again.

That evening, for the first time in a long while, she thought of calling
Harry in San Francisco, just to talk to an old boyfriend, to hear his
voice and maybe feel less alone. She picked up the phone to dial, but
then placed the receiver back on the hook. It wouldn't be fair to him,
she thought, to lead him on, especially when she'd hardly thought of him
in weeks.

181

Kate walked into the hearing room with trepidation, which she tried to
mask by making herself conspicuous. Her heels resonated loudly against
the wood floor as she stepped inside. Her hair was pulled back in a bun,
and for the occasion she had chosen her dark blue pin-striped suit with
angular no-nonsense lapels; it was cut snugly but conservatively around
her bosom and hips, and she thought of it as her "power suit"-much as
she detested the word, in fact the whole concept. Still, she needed
something to bolster her in this male bullring. An exoskeleton might do
the trick, she thought.

She noticed right away that the fifteenth-floor room had somehow
transformed itself. It was the same place where Saramaggio had held his
little demonstration three days earlier, but it looked entirely
different. Gone were the movie screen and refreshments and the lectern.
The atmosphere was stolid, businesslike. She glanced over at the window.
Even the view of the river seemed to have changed-it was a drizzly
morning, with wisps of mist circling the bridge towers, and boats moving
sluggishly upstream into the fog. Of course, it wouldn't be sunny, not
on a day like this. An interloping thought broke into her stream of
consciousness: What was that called, back in college days, when the
outside world mirrored your inner emotions? "It rains in the town as it
rains in my heart." Ah-hah-the pathetic fallacy. She was pleased she had
reclaimed that half-fragment from a long-ago life. Cleaver-she suddenly
thought of him. Gully had once told her that Cleaver had quoted a stanza
of Wordsworth. Imagine that-the computer maven frolicking through hills
of daffodils. Her heart sank-he would undoubtedly be here for this.

A podium had been arranged, a panel almost the width of the

182

room in front often empty chairs. The chairs would be for the
Institutional Review Board members. Black vinyl with high backs, the
kind that swing. Modern-day thrones, she thought. And look how the
podium is raised a full foot off the ground. It's revealing how some
authorities feel the need to demonstrate status through physical elevation.

The first question, of course, was where to sit. She would sit next to
Scott-she had resolved as much already-but where would he want to sit?
And if she got there first, should she actually save a seat for him? She
felt small, not for the first time, for worrying over such
inconsequential details, which reflected her own self-absorption,
especially when this hearing was a matter of life and death to him.

Problem solved-there he was. First row center.

She took the seat to his right. He turned and gave her a little
half-smile, forced.

"How are you?" she asked.

He didn't bother to answer, instead asking a question of his own.

"Have you ever sat through one of these things before?" He tossed his
head vaguely at the room. She detected the ember of anger burning
beneath his words and already knew him well enough to know where it came
from. She would try to calm him.

"Once or twice. In San Francisco. Every hospital has an IRB-at least
every one that gets Medicare funds. They're not really as formal as they
look, despite all the trappings. I mean, it's not like it's a court of law."

She was rattling on, but it eased her nervousness.

"What's it like?"

"Well, the officers are from different places-senior physicians, some of
them retired, chiefs of departments, the chairman of the ethics
committee, one or two community representatives. Don't worry-they don't
wear horsehair wigs, and nobody bangs a gavel."

He didn't smile.

"First they usually hear from the records division. They get all the
background on the case. Then they hear from the doctor. He says why the
operation is necessary or whatever it is that's under dispute. They
usually interrupt him with questions. Sometimes they take cases passed
up by the ethics committee-say, if a baby requires blood but the parents
are Jehovah's Witnesses and refuse to allow it. If it's

183

about a patient who's been badly diagnosed or threatened or something's
gone wrong under some mysterious circumstances-well, then the questions
can get pretty tough. And by the way, it's all private. No press, no
outsiders come in-except of course interested parties. Like you."

"Yeah. I'm an interested party all right."

"You will probably be asked to speak, as I told you the other night.
They'll ask you why you want to take Tyler off life support. And the
more straightforward your answers, the better. These are doctors and
scientists, for the most part. Sentiment doesn't get to them, common
sense does."

"What you're saying is I shouldn't say what I feel."

"No, not at all. Just be a little careful how you say it. Don't throw
everything at them all at once. Don't get their backs to the wall."

"I'm the one with my back to the wall."

"Well, they're not criminals. They're not trying to hurt Tyler. Don't
forget-this all began with them trying to save him. And at first you
were in favor of it. What's happened is you have changed your mind, and
they haven't."

"Because they want to try out their new toys. Not because they're really
thinking of him."

"Maybe that's part of it. But so what? What does it matter if there's
some professional pride coming into play, even arrogance? It doesn't
matter as long as they end up doing good."

"That's what I thought, too, at first. But that's changed now."

His voice was rising, and she worried that he was attracting attention
from the somber men beginning to file in and take seats. This was not
what she wanted to do-she wanted to calm him down, not wind him up.

More people came in, doctors, some in handsome, hand-tailored suits,
others in flashy casual wear, linen jackets with tight Italian shoes.
She saw the scrub nurse and the circulating nurse. They sat side by side
in the rear, whispering to each other and looking over at her. She
wondered what they were saying, then decided she didn't much care.

"One other thing," she said, cupping her hand around her mouth, because
the seats around them were filling up. "This may sound strange, but
technically, their decision isn't binding. What I mean

184

is-even if they decide against Saramaggio, he could continue the
operation. It just means that he'd be on his own and running a risk."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, for one thing, he wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on if you
decided to take it further ... to go outside."

"You mean-if I take it to the courts."

"Yes."

The ten chairs on the podium were almost all filled now. Robert Kellman,
the chairman, sat in the center. He looked the part-senatorial, with
wisps of white hair gently capping his ears. A urologist, whispered
Kate. The others were mostly middle-aged men, equally somber-looking,
almost interchangeable-dried peas in a pod, thought Scott. There was one
woman, pale and unsmiling, thin as an axe blade, whom Kate explained was
the chief nurse. One seat was empty. Finally, a ruddy-faced priest came
in to claim it by placing a briefcase next to it, then moved down the
line, working it like a politician, giving a hearty handshake here and a
backslap there.

Scott didn't like that: A gregarious establishment priest likely to
uphold the sanctity of human life could hurt his case.

"By the way," he said, "how do they decide? Do they vote-or what?"

"Yes. They vote."

He felt her stiffen beside him. And when he turned, he saw why:
Saramaggio had taken a seat directly across the aisle, next to Brewster,
the administrator. The neurosurgeon was looking at Kate, shooting darts
at her.

For the first time, it dawned on Scott that by associating herself with
his cause, Kate might be putting her career in jeopardy. He felt a
sudden rush of gratitude-along with a touch of remorse. He had been so
self-centered, so obsessive, that he hadn't even considered the
repercussions for her. Were these doctors accustomed to the dissent that
comes with contentious debate? Or would her defection be viewed as treason?

The proceedings began with a lengthy description of Tyler's condition at
the time he was brought to St. Catherine's, replete with arcane medical
terminology that sanitized his injuries and made the recitation easier
to listen to. Still, some terms he couldn't pretend to ignore-phrases
like "massive destruction of the lateral left cortex"

185

and "traumatic invasion of the limbic system." Sitting through this
would be even worse than he had envisioned.

Scott was shocked to learn that the method Kingston Hospital had used to
medevac Tyler to New York, wrapping the head in ice to cut down on brain
swelling, was no longer the recommended procedure for containing brain
injuries. Don't they notify people about changes like that? he wondered
to himself.

Then Saramaggio was called upon to present his views. He seemed to treat
the occasion as an opportunity to bask in the esteem of fellow
practitioners. He actually moved his seat to be closer to the panel and
began a long recitation of the operations: how much preliminary research
had been done, how well things had gone with animals, how Tyler's case
fit the protocol for the first ever Computer-Assisted Neural Stem Cell
Extraction, Cultivation, and Reimplantation. He was the soul of sweet
reason and sympathy.

One of the doctors leaned forward to ask a question: "And could you tell
us about your consultation with the patient's father and whether you
fully explained the procedure to him?"

Saramaggio gave an account of their two meetings and somehow made the
sessions sound more thorough and methodical than Scott remembered. He
told how he had precisely described the penetration of "the blunt
instrument," the chances that it had already caused irreparable damage,
the new research into stem cells, and the effectiveness with which they
had been reimplanted in animals. He told of how he had simply placed the
alternatives before Scott and made it sound as if he himself had been as
disinterested as a waiter who offered a choice between dishes.

"Excuse me, Dr. Saramaggio," asked one panel member. "How long would you
say these sessions lasted?"

It was a softball question, but Saramaggio seemed put out nonetheless.

"How long?"

"Yes."

"Well, the first occurred right after the preliminary investigation of
the patient, and I would say it was an hour or so. It's hard to-"

"Doctor," the priest interrupted. "You first met the father, eh, Mr.
Jessup here"-he glanced over at Scott paternally-"after the first
operation? Not before?"

186

"That's right."

"Is that customary? I would think that you might want-"

"It is customary when the patient is in extremis. You understand that in
such a situation, every second counts. I myself rushed back to treat
him-on my day off, I might add. Massive hemorrhaging, blood loss, shock
to the system. Anything could happen to bring on instant death." His
voice was rising, indignant. "And what is the point of meeting with the
father, might I add, when there is absolutely nothing you can tell him
because you know nothing about the status of the son."

It was a statement, not a question, and the priest quickly replied,
holding up his hand, meek as a lamb.

"Of course. Of course. I did not mean to imply that you should have met
with the father first. I was merely asking a question to find out about
procedures."

"Well, since you've asked, the procedure, as you call it, is to tend to
the patient first, to do what needs to be done and to get him out of
danger if at all practicable and as soon as possible. If you care to
suggest another way to conduct business around here, we're all ears."

The priest reddened and looked down.

"Of course not," he said. "Our purpose here is not to second-guess you.
But not all of us are as familiar as you are with the customary practices."

Saramaggio was puffed up with indignation. Like a rooster preening his
tail feathers, thought Scott. Maybe the priest isn't so bad after all,
but I would have liked him better if he had held his ground.

"Dr. Saramaggio," said Kellman, speaking in a basso voice and weighing
each word as if he were an Olympian arbiter of reason, "could you please
tell us what the chances are-in your view-that the patient will survive
the operation?"

Saramaggio had clearly been expecting the question, but he paused before
answering, as if reflecting deeply and searching for the precise words
to express a fine balance of ambiguity.

"I would say, all things considered, that they are good. We're sailing
on new waters here, and so predictions are fraught with imponderables.
But will he live? Will he survive the procedure itself? Of that I have
little doubt."

"And how about survival postoperatively?"

187

"Difficult to say. All I can do is provide a progress report. For the
moment, the stem cells are reproducing normally and rapidly under good
laboratory conditions. They belong to him, and so they will prove
compatible when they are reimplanted. His bodily functions are stable.
The computer is now matching his brain activity, and it stands by ready
to assist if need be. In other words, everything is running smoothly so
far and I have no expectation that they would do otherwise
postoperatively, though of course we cannot say for certain what might
happen."

"And his quality of life?" It was the priest asking the question. He
seemed to have regained his composure.

"Ah, there we cannot predict with certainty. I see no reason that his
stem cells shouldn't function normally. The neural connections already
made, however-rather those that had been made-some of them will perhaps
not persist into the postoperative state. We cannot say with one hundred
percent assurance that he will retain all of his preoperative
characteristics."

"Do you mean his personality may be different?"

"His personality? As men of science, we can't talk knowledgeably about
such an abstraction. He will have many new tasks to learn, some of which
he may once have known and may have to relearn."

Scott was sitting bolt upright in his chair, glaring.

"Will he-for example-know his father?"

Saramaggio hesitated, looked at Scott, then away.

"That could well be problematic. If he does not know him right away,
however, I would say he would be perfectly capable of learning to know
him again."

"Learning to know him?" Now the priest was almost truculent.

Saramaggio jumped back into the fray.

"Yes, he will have a lot of learning to do. The main thing is he will be
around to do it. I'm sure that if his father is like any other loving
father, he wouldn't want his son to cease to exist simply because the
filial bond might have to be reestablished." He looked back at Scott.
"You can ask him."

"That we will do," said Chairman Kellman. "In the meantime, we thank you
for your cooperation. Is there anything more you would care to say?"

Saramaggio paused a beat, then added, "I would like to repeat

188

what I said earlier. The waters we are navigating are new and uncharted.
Where they lead is not known. Our young man will be the first to cross
them, the first to step foot upon a new land. When he returns, we cannot
say for certain what he will be like. But he will be a pioneer, and
generations to come will know his name and be thankful to him."

Scott could no longer keep quiet.

"Your name is more like it."

The chairman turned toward him. "I beg your pardon."

"I think Christopher Columbus here is thinking about his own name, not
my son's."

The room was shocked into silence.

"And I resent-deeply resent-the implication that my only concern is that
my son won't recognize me if and when he wakes up. I'm worried that I
won't recognize him,-that I won't recognize him because he won't be him.
I'm worried that he'll have half a brain or be impaired in some horrible
way or be so emotionally damaged that his whole life will be a
nightmare. Or that he won't wake up, ever, that he'll continue in a
coma. Who knows what it's like being locked in there-maybe it's agony,
the worst torment imaginable. Maybe he's already in a nightmare, begging
for release. Or maybe he will wake up and he'll be so unable to function
that after I'm dead, he'll end up in an institution where no one will
care for him, no one will tend to him. ..."

His voice trailed off.

The chairman cleared his throat, then spoke. "Yet you gave your consent
for this operation to take place. And now you've changed your mind?"

"I have."

"Can you tell us why?"

"At first I had hope. Who wouldn't take up such an offer? We can save
your son's life, we can make him. whole. It's hard to say for certain,
it's risky, but we think we can do it. We can do wonderful things these
days- you have no idea. Who wouldn't say yes? Even if it's grasping at
straws, it's better than the alternative. It's better than just letting
him slip away into nothingness. Anything's got to be better than
that-one day he's there, he's off for a weekend with a friend and hugs
you good-bye and runs out the door, and then suddenly he's just gone.

189

Anything's better-even a never-ending round of operations where he's
sliced and cut and put on machines and breathing through tubes-at least
it seems so at the time.

"But now weeks have gone by, and I have no hope at all. He's still
breathing through tubes, and now a computer is doing it for him. I don't
think it will work. The enormity of it all has sunk in. I've been
reading up on this stuff. People talk about brain death-there is no such
thing as brain death. That central piece-the limbic system-it keeps
going long after the rest is gone. And you can probably keep it going
forever if you feed it the right amount of oxygen and glucose or
whatever. But there's no one there, no person inside. No human by any
definable term. That's not living. That's a jellyfish sloshing around in
a tidal pool. A piece of meat connected to a machine.

"I saw a documentary once on television, one of these magazine programs.
It showed a woman whose daughter was in an accident and in a coma. The
doctors wanted to pull the plug, but the mother wouldn't let them. She
took her daughter home and she kept insisting she was going to be all
right. The camera filmed her as she put her daughter in a bikini and
floated her in their swimming pool, holding her head out of the water.
And the thing is, when I saw that, I thought, Who could ever do that to
their child? Who could be so crazy? And now, I understand it. That's me.
That's what I've been doing to Tyler."

He looked directly at Saramaggio.

"You're not saving Tyler. You may think you are, but you're not. You're
killing him off, bit by bit. You're sacrificing him in pieces. And when
you're all done and there's nothing left of him, you'll end up
dissecting what's not there. And writing it all up. Pioneer-my ass!

"So, yes, I've changed my mind, but it's not because I'm fickle. It's
because I've wised up and now I see that I was duped. I know what the
right thing to do is. I demand that you take my son off life support. As
his father, I demand it."

When he finished, there was a rustling among the audience. The chairman
declared a fifteen-minute recess.

Scott collected himself and rose to go to the men's room.

There he opened a window a crack, stood next to it, leaning against the
wall, and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

A man came in, an Indian or Pakistani, with jet-black hair and a

190

pleasing face. Scott held his cigarette up apologetically and said,
"Sorry-but I really need this."

"That's all right," said the man, offering his hand. "My name's Gully. I
heard you in there. You were very . . . persuasive."

Scott nodded.

Gully frowned as if he were on the verge of saying something more, then
spoke.

"I'm afraid this one is going to go all the way."

"What do you mean?" asked Scott. "What're you saying?"

"Did you happen to see that gentleman in the back? The one taking notes ..."

"No."

"He's a lawyer. Curtis and Reinfield. That's the firm the hospital uses
for court cases. They're already preparing the way, you see."

Scott did.

When the session resumed, the chairman invited various others to speak.
Several doctors took the floor. Then Brewster spoke, full of platitudes.
The hospital wanted only to do what was right. It was trying to balance
the needs of the patient as articulated by the father- most eloquently,
he might add-with those of research, for the hospital was both a place
of healing and a center of learning, so that those in future generations
might also be served. It sounded to Scott as if he were speaking for the
court record, and he noticed for the first time that positional mikes
were recording. They had been there all along.

Cleaver was asked to speak about the functioning of the computer, but he
declined by shaking his head from side to side, almost vehemently, much
to Saramaggio's annoyance. Scott, who had not seen him before, studied
him, watching his abrupt movements, his eyes scanning the room. He
worried that such a person was on the team caring for his son.

Finally, the chairman looked at Kate.

"And do you have something to add?" he asked kindly.

She froze, looking uncharacteristically frightened. Then she moved up to
sit in the same seat Saramaggio had occupied an hour before.

"I wasn't going to," she began. "I did not come here prepared to

191

191

speak. And I doubt that I can add much to the medical nature of the
testimony."

"Please, please," interrupted the chairman. "Not testimony. This is not
a court of law. I hope I haven't given that impression."

Kate's cheeks flushed slightly.

"No, I know that. Forgive me. What I meant to say was simply that I can
add little to what has been said already, as far as the operation itself
goes. It's new to me-it is new to everyone in this room. And so it
follows that much of what we say, virtually everything we say-no matter
how deep the conviction that underlies it-is going to be conjecture.
None of us can say for sure what will happen, because none of us can
possibly know. We can only guess what the outcome of this operation will
be. There are no precedents to guide us, no statistics, nothing in the
literature. As Dr. Saramaggio pointed out, we have set foot on a new,
unknown terrain."

She paused, thinking, and when she resumed, she spoke with more assurance.

"Because it's new, the few meager instruments we have to guide us are
abstract principles. They are our map and compass-the time-honored
traditions of our profession. Foremost among these, we all agree, is the
Hippocratic oath that says, 'First, do no harm.'

"We cannot say today with complete certainty whether we have observed
this ancient directive or violated it. But because the situation was so
dire, we were in a situation of force majeure. Did we cause more harm
than good? We may have to face the possibility that the answer to that
question is ultimately unknowable. But that doubt does not mean that we
were in the wrong. Faced with a patient in such a desperate,
life-threatening condition, with a grieving father and the prospect of
so much further suffering, who here would not have made the same
decision? Especially since the tools to treat the boy were at hand, even
if they'd not been tried before. So I think we can all agree that the
initial decision to proceed with the operation was the right thing to do."

Scott looked around. Saramaggio was beaming, Brewster's face was clothed
in self-satisfaction. Kate took a deep breath.

"But now," she continued, "the situation has changed. It's changed
because the father, who is legally charged with making decisions on
behalf of his son, wants the procedure to stop. How can we

192

ignore his wishes? How can we pretend that he doesn't know what is best
for his own son?"

Saramaggio's face was beginning to sag now.

"It was said earlier that he has changed his mind. I don't think he has
really changed it. When he gave his consent-and I was there-I think he
had not fully formed his thoughts. He was looking to us for guidance,
and like the rest of us, he was just going along hoping for the best,
because there was little else to do. And you always want to do
something. But now, clearly, he has made up his mind. He's thought and
learned and watched us, and he has come to a decision. And he is the
only one who knows the patient, who loves him, who will have to care for
him if things do not turn out right. Who else can be said to be thinking
only of the patient? Not of medical science, not of other patients to
come, not of research or the hospital's reputation-but only the patient,
and nothing else."

She spoke the final words like a defense attorney winding down a summation.

"He has spoken, finally. His is the one voice we should listen to above
all others. I believe we would be immoral and someday face judgment if
we did not."

She stopped and heard her last words echo back to her. The room fell
deadly quiet. She rose and walked back to her seat, this time with a
self-consciousness she could not disguise.

Saramaggio and Brewster exchanged looks, then Brewster and Kellman.
Kellman waited a full thirty seconds, and in the silence, an air of
drama grew. Then he cleared his throat, as if he were about to make a
significant pronouncement, and fixed Kate with a hard stare. He asked a
question instead.

"Dr. Willet, can you please tell us-and I advise you to think carefully
before answering-have you established a close personal relationship with
the father of the patient?"

193

Cleaver sent Felix with a gurney into Room 3 5 to collect the patient
with Cotard's disease and waited anxiously in the basement near the TSR.
Truth was, he was becoming a little spooked by the patient with the
bizarre malady that turned him into one of the living dead. Benchloss.
Only twenty, and yet his full head of hair had gone all white. Even his
past was sketchy-his file was the thinnest of all. A young man from
Detroit. He had had a cousin who worked on an automobile assembly line
who'd looked after him and then gotten fed up as he drifted off into the
netherworld of psychosis. What could have happened to him, Cleaver
wondered, that metamorphosed him into such a psychological freak? What
deep-seated part of the brain had gone haywire? Did it happen by itself,
some kind of monstrous gene that exploded like a time bomb? Or was there
an external agent, some outside event so unspeakable that it took away
his tongue, his sight, his touch? No matter. He was ripe for
experimentation. And being dead, he certainly wouldn't complain.

Not for two nights, since the time he had put Mann into the machine and
discovered that somehow Mann's brain had connected with the computer,
actually entered into the memory of the damn thing and pillaged it to
come up with some snatches of Polish, had Cleaver been able to sleep
well. He had worked frantically, loading one diseased subject after
another into the TSR, turning all switches into the OPEN position, and
waiting nervously for the five minutes to roll by, pulling out the
stretcher expectantly-the image of a chef lowering the lid of an oven to
examine a souffle passing fleetingly through his mind-as he removed the
subjects and then sat them down to watch

194

for telltale signs that they had been transformed by their mysterious
journey in the tube.

He was not always disappointed. Some of the subjects showed advances,
along with a new kind of weirdness. They did indeed seem in possession
of some new information-data that they didn't have before. But the
information wasn't fully integrated-it came out in fits and starts and
didn't seem to do them all that much good. Transmission of a complete,
coherent body of knowledge seemed beyond reach.

But of course it was hard to tell-they were, after all, out of their
minds to begin with.

Bruce, the young man who thought his parents were "imposters," had been
a major disappointment. Cleaver had been anticipating his turn in the
machine; he was smart, reasonably well educated, articulate-you could
have a normal conversation with him as long as you avoided the subject
of family relationships. Surely he would be able to demonstrate the
effects of a psychotelegraphic experience. But it hadn't worked out in
quite the way that Cleaver had hoped. To begin with, Bruce had balked at
going into the TSR; in particular he was fearful for his eyes and
resisted having the eggcups inserted under his eyelids. When finally
this was done, he gripped the sides of the stretcher as it was being
loaded into the tube, so that the little fingers of both hands were
mauled. They pulled him out and dressed the wounds. Then they used the
straps, which upset him further, so that he actually began to scream
once inside, the sound oddly muffled as if it were coming from inside
the folds of a giant cocoon. Cleaver waited a full two minutes for him
to calm down a bit, and this threw the calculations off. Since the
machine had been partly started, Cleaver wasn't sure whether or not to
subtract the two minutes from the allotted time, then decided it was
safer to do so. Observing the safety margin, that meant that Bruce had
only three minutes or so with the throttle fully open. Nonetheless, he
came out dazed.

Cleaver took him to the smoking veranda and had Felicity bring him the
obligatory cup of tea. Bruce refused it, saying he hated tea. That was
odd, seeing as how he customarily drank three cups every morning.
Cleaver set up a chessboard, having loaded the computer with advanced
proficiency at the game and knowing that Bruce had never played it.
Bruce's first move was educated: he moved his queen's

195

pawn two spaces. Cleaver's heart leapt up and he leaned across the board
eagerly-his young opponent had learned the rules. But after four or five
moves that were nominally correct, Bruce's game fell apart. He seemed
totally unable to devise any kind of strategy or even to relate one
piece to another. More worrisome, he suddenly developed an odd tic, a
tug at the left corner of his mouth that gave him an odd-looking
grimace, which in a certain half-light made him look sinister. And soon
his eyes began darting around. Cleaver knew where he had seen that
before-the telltale sign of Mann's paranoia.

"What's this here for?" Bruce said abruptly, looking down at the board.
Then he shouted, "Roaches, roaches, everywhere!" He slapped the edge of
the board hard so that the chess pieces flew up in the air. Cleaver was
struck on his dome by an errant knight on the way down. It smarted. He
looked over anxiously at Bruce, who was in the throes of a psychotic
break. "Get out of here! Get off me!" he yelled, slapping his forearms,
then falling on the floor in a convulsive heap. Felix came running and
pinned his arms to the floor. Then Bruce gradually calmed down-he calmed
down too much, abruptly turning mute and descending into a psychotic
stasis that at first blush resembled catatonia.

Cleaver, who witnessed the scene with a clinical detachment, was deeply
perturbed. The guy seemed to have gone literally bugsy. Yet many of his
new physical manifestations were familiar: They were the mannerisms and
defense mechanisms of other patients who had preceded him in the TSR.
Was it possible? Did the patients, or rather subjects, somehow leave
something behind in the computer, an imprint, bits and strips of
themselves, their anima? Did others somehow pick this up when they
traveled on their own solitary trips into the unknown? He would have to
study the question, make detailed notes, maybe compile videotapes.

In the meantime, he was preparing for Benchloss. In the past, Benchloss
had managed to call some pity up from him. But in fact his fountainhead
of pity was not bottomless, and he had begun to view the unfortunate man
exactly as Benchloss himself did-as a creature beyond humanity's pale.
Benchloss believed himself to be dead, and so in Cleaver's eyes he was
at death's door already. No great matter if something untoward befell him.

Felix wheeled him in. Felicity had helped him slide Benchloss

196

onto the gurney-never an easy job, as he was a literal deadweight- and
now she was lingering at the doorway, too curious to leave. Cleaver
ignored her. In any case, they hadn't done a good job of it. Cleaver saw
that Benchloss's arm was partially pinned under his back. A few more
minutes like that and he would lose circulation there. A couple of
hours, and the damn thing would turn blue and then black and then
probably begin to rot. Not that Benchloss would even notice. What the
hell-he'd probably take it as confirmation that he was already
decomposing in the grave.

Cleaver lifted him, moved the arm, and lowered him, a silent rebuke to
Felix, who seemed not to get it. Cleaver stared closely into Benchloss's
face. Did he detect a flicker of fear there? Something rustling behind
those eyes, usually as lifeless as a shark's? No question about it-the
guy was creepy. Cleaver felt a shudder overtake him. He might as well
admit it-he was frightened, deeply frightened, by this most unnatural
patient. Benchloss's mouth was open, a hole into a fathomless black
well. Cleaver leaned down and put his cheek to it; he could feel
nothing, no breathing. He put his ear to it; there, in the far distance
way down, a dim rattle. The lungs working themselves, some elemental
reflex pumping them on. Or was it? Maybe he was imagining it? He
shuddered again. Why did that black hole conjure up his father, the
fear, the belt buckle opening to deliver punishment and humiliation? He
began sweating. In the old days whenever he felt like this, he could
divert himself-the cyborg slave fantasy or sometimes just numerology,
systems and systems of numbers multiplying, square-rooting, dividing,
and subdividing. A system, pure science, pure religion.

"So-are we going to put him inside?"

Felix's question startled him. It was sudden and rude, and he wondered
how to express his disapproval. At the door, Felicity was still hanging
around, so Cleaver walked over and shut it in her face, none too softly.

"Of course," he spluttered. He meant it to be a command, but it came out
like an uncertain whine.

They lifted the man onto the stretcher, Felix taking his shoulders from
behind like a wrestler and Cleaver hugging the legs-less strenuous but
undignified. Again, he was surprised at how heavy Benchloss was. Was it
possible for the mind actually to leaden the body like that,

197

bloat it, flooding the cells with water in preparation for the final
decay? Or was it just Cleaver's own imagination?

They straightened him on the mobile stretcher. Cleaver felt faint and
let his assistant do most of the work.

Felix pulled down the helmet, with its helter-skelter bird's-nest of
wires, and fitted it onto Benchloss's head. He picked up the eggcups and
retracted them into bands.

"At least this one should be easy," he said.

But it wasn't. The deadweight of Benchloss's eyelids made it difficult
to fit the band underneath; the upper eyelid, held open while working on
the lower one, would spring loose and half close. For a moment, Cleaver
suspected Benchloss of faking it, trying to sabotage the experiment. But
there was still absolutely no sign of life. Felix kept at it. Finally,
between the two of them, they fitted the eggcups in place and turned the
dials to extend them, watching the characteristic oval bulge under the
thin skin across the eyeball.

He was all ready to go. But Cleaver held off. He needed to collect
himself. Mumbling an excuse, he left the room, walked up the stairs, and
went outside. He sat on the stoop and looked at the water sparkling
brightly in the sun. At that moment, a strange thought invaded his
consciousness. It seemed to come of its own volition, out of nowhere, an
arrow sailing from the long-gone battlefields of the past. A memory,
long repressed and dangerous. It was of his father. He thought again of
how he had learned of his death while a student at MIT. And he suddenly
realized with a certainty that he had never before had the courage to
admit that he had known of his father's death the moment it happened,
before the phone call. He was absolutely sure. It all came back. Looking
out at the snow outside, he had seen his father, a dim shadow against
the white, staring up at his window, a funny look upon his face, as if
he had just been laughing- laughing at what? At the joke of seeing his
son again in the final second of departure, at this visitation to a
patch of snow near the Charles?

More than anything in the world, Cleaver feared being dead. Not the pain
of it, not the last lingering moments of life, but the state of deadness
itself.

Never before had the thought collected itself in such a crystalline way
and presented itself to him as a hard, immutable truth. He shook

198

it off, turned away from the water, feeling his eyes burning from the
brilliant reflection of the sun on waves, and went back downstairs.

Felix was there, looking at him curiously.

"Let's get started," Cleaver said.

He heard the rattle of metal against metal as the stretcher slid upward,
and he watched Benchloss slide off into the tunnel, the wires barely
missing the sides. He could see scrape marks where other subjects had
moved back and forth.

Felix was in place at the controls.

"I think I'll take this one," said Cleaver, motioning him aside. Felix
stepped away, a slight sulk to his shoulders.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

Cleaver was fiddling with the timer. He had turned off the automatic
override so that the machine could go beyond its safe allotment of five
minutes and even into the danger limit of seven minutes.

"I see no reason why we can't try something new," he said.

"But you said Quincy told you never to do that," Felix complained. "You
don't know what's going to happen. The whole thing could overload. It's
not safe."

"Not safe for the subject or not safe for the machine?"

The question stumped the thick-browed assistant, who thought for a full
five seconds.

"I'm not sure. Either one, I guess."

"Well, if you have to guess, I'd say you don't know."

Felix lapsed into silence.

They heard the hum of the machine starting up. Cleaver turned two knobs,
and Benchloss's brain sprang to life on the screen, the familiar large
clenched fist. Another knob and it rotated slowly, showing itself from
constantly changing viewpoints-the lava-hill ridges, the deep cleavage
between the hemispheres, the wrinkled lines separating the lobes. It was
disembodied like a hologram.

"A little accompaniment?" said Cleaver, covering over his fear with
forced lightheartedness. He switched on the audio, and out of two
speakers came once again the rush of static, neurons firing their
electrical charges. This time the crackling sounded like rifle fire from
a distant battle.

He checked the timer: two minutes. The electrodes had all found their
targets; the coverage was complete.

199

By now Cleaver had seen enough subjects to interpret the firing of the
impulses. He could stand back with enough distance and objectivity to
see the forest, not just the trees. He was able to read the overall
pattern of neural activity-an increase concentrating in the midbrain,
building up rapidly to a crescendo, and then tapering off to almost
nothing. Felix had noticed the pattern, too. "Like popcorn in a
microwave," he'd said last time. "It starts slowly and then the popping
comes all at once and finally it peters out." Cleaver had deemed the
metaphor infelicitous, but he knew the pattern was significant. It's the
way the brain would sound if its waves were moving outward-into the
computer. And then, when the time was running out and he began reducing
the power to the computer, the waves rushed back-back into the brain.
Like pouring water from one glass into another, he thought, though he
knew it was hardly that simple.

He manipulated the hydraulic dials to bring up a cross section and then
honed in on one side of the lowrer brain. He spotted the major
structures: the layers of the cingulate gyrus and the fornix, tfie
septum and mammillary body, the hard nugget of the thalamus, the curving
hippocampus opening outward like a horn of plenty, and the central
pineal gland-the innermost organ that secretes melatonin to regulate
biorhythms so that primitive man hidden away in his cave could keep
track of daylight. Poor Descartes, looking for "the seat of the soul"
had found it here; maybe on second thought he wasn't so far off-every
computer starts with a clock. Finally, the dials led him to the ultimate
treasure, the twin organs, slightly darkened and perfectly
almond-shaped-the amygdala.

Odd, how his heart was racing. Why am I so afraid? What am, I afraid of?

He looked at the clock. Four minutes had gone by. That was approaching
the safety zone. What happens if they reach seven minutes?

He looked at the amygdala. It was small; if he had it in his hand, he
could crush it between his thumb and forefinger. What kind of thing is
that to think? It looked odd, somehow . . . what? Empty, bleak.

When he was younger, Cleaver had used numerology to combat anxiety. He
could go on for hours, working formulas, reciting square roots,
enumerating pi: three . . . point . . . one . . . four . . . one . . .
five . . . What comes next?

200

"Dr. Cleaver," said Felix, "I think it's time to turn back."

Nine, I think. Or eight. . . no, nine . . . then two . . .

"We have to turn back; we really have to."

And after two . . . what? His father had looked so strange there,
standing in the snow, looking up at him. But Cleaver had had no doubt-it
was his father. And his hand was on his belt buckle.

Five minutes gone. Then six.

He was vaguely aware of Felix on his left, brushing up against him. But
he held his ground. The room seemed to be spinning. Pi.. . the mystery
of a never-ending number.

Gradually, he began exiting from his reverie.

It was strange how the colors and the tracing of the neurons firing on
the screen looked just as they had during the death of the old man while
his anima departed and he appeared before his wife one last time.

Sounds inside the tube, more neurons firing, or was it a thumping?

Seven minutes now. A sputtering and the screen went black. Not all at
once, but as if it were burning out, first dark around the periphery and
then all across the middle, leaving only a diamond of light in the
center. The diamond lost its luster, turned dull, and shrank away,
extinguishing itself.

Felix was quiet, aghast. Cleaver shook himself, shook off the fear,
feeling a little better, as if a nausea had lifted. His head was
clearer. The computer was silent, the screen vacant. Should they pull
him out? Why not-his time was up.

Felix took one side of the stretcher, and Cleaver took the other. It
didn't require two people, but both of them were curious, drawn to it
the way one is drawn to a car accident, driving past the shoulder
slowly, staring at the underbrush, senses all atingle.

Down the stretcher came, and it wasn't really a surprise at all. There
he was, Benchloss, lying immobile, all animation drained from his
slumped body. It was hard to say what the difference was; he had been
almost lifeless going in and now was totally lifeless coming out. But
there was a difference. No one could have mistaken this heap of cold
flesh for a diseased man playing at being dead.

He was dead.

And there was something else. His face was contorted, frozen in

201

a grimace, as if he had died of something horrible. As if he had died
afraid.

Cleaver wondered about that. He felt bad about it, sort of. But what
struck him, and what bothered him, was that he didn't feel nearly as bad
as he thought he should. He felt mostly a kind of lightness and only a
modicum of shame. He hoped he hadn't gone so far down the road that he
was no longer capable of regarding these patients as human beings.

What struck him, and what he couldn't escape, was the final arrow of
irony in fate's quiver: the patient with a disease whose main symptom is
believing himself to be dead suddenly comes alive and then at the end
does die.

Poor Benchloss. And now that he was finally, truly, irretrievably dead,
Cleaver found it strange that he was at last able to think of him as a
patient. Not a subject.

Scott was working again, a four-day shoot of nightspots in Soho for
Brio, a new hip magazine. Ordinarily, he would never accept an
assignment like this. He didn't respect the magazine or its editors, and
the photos themselves-crazed dancers strung out on Ecstasy, young women
dressed to kill waiting in a sleazy alley to be admitted-posed no
special challenge. But he had to do something. Kate had convinced him
that it was necessary for his own sanity. This job paid a lot. And it
had the added advantage of night work, which left the days free to stay
with Tyler at the hospital. In between, somehow, he grabbed a few hours
sleep. The last time he had looked, his eyes were puffy and hung by bags
the color of dark ash.

He dragged his camera bag into the loft and collapsed in bed. Comet
bounded around and jumped on the covers, licking his face. Scott
groaned; he would have to take her for a walk.

Last night had been long and exhausting because his heart wasn't in it.
He had hit three clubs, two of them in the newly fashionable
meat-packing district. As often happened, especially when he had his old
Nikon strapped around his neck, women came on to him. The camera
emboldened them. In one spot, Mickey's Roadhouse, a woman in a blue
dress had followed him into the men's room,

202

perched upon a sink, and opened her legs. When he'd walked out, he could
hear her cursing. He had come back home, developed twenty rolls, and
took the prints to the magazine. All day, until evening, the editors had
dithered over the choice. He found he didn't care.

He thought of Tyler all the time and wondered if the day would ever come
when he would stop. It had been four days since the hearing, and he had
yet to know the decision. Why was it taking so long? It wasn't as if the
board needed more information. Perhaps they had already come to a
decision; perhaps they were waiting for a decent interval to lend the
appearance of a spirited deliberation, like a jury that reaches its
verdict in the first hour and then sits out the clock playing cards.

He had bothered Kate with calls at all hours. Had she not heard anything
at all? She tried to sound encouraging, but he could tell she was
doubtful that the decision would come their way. She was trying to give
him reality in small doses.

He was worried for her, around the edges. She had been brave to speak on
his behalf; he had seen the look on Saramaggio's face as they filed out
of the hearing room. He knew that one day she might be made to pay for
her principled stand. Just one more thing that he owed her. But all of
that-everything she had done for him, even the fleeting thought that she
cared for him, beyond the obvious sympathy-all that was relegated to the
periphery of his consciousness. He wished it could be otherwise. He
wished, as he had told her weeks ago, that he could be less
self-involved. But he couldn't help it right now. After Tyler, there was
not room left over for much else.

He took Comet out for a walk all the way to the river. He took off her
leash and watched her zipping through the waterfront park, dashing this
way and that, turning from time to time to make sure he was still there.
Such simple joy. It did him good, for a minute or two, to watch it.
Darkness fell quickly.

When he returned to the loft, he heard the phone ringing, but by the
time he opened the door it had stopped. Then it started up again-not a
good sign, that would mean an important call. His heart rose up in his
throat, pounded his ribs. A premonition of bad news.

He lifted the receiver and said not a word. He heard her voice: "Hello .
. . hello . . ."

"I'm here," was all he said.

203

"Scott, oh, I'm glad I reached you." There was a pause, which his heart
made longer.

"I don't know what to say. I heard, informally, that the board reached a
decision." Another pause, which told him the answer. "It's . . . it's
not the one you want." Then she spoke more quickly, gathering strength.
"They've decided to go ahead with it. They say they think Tyler has a
reasonable chance to survive and that's why they want to do it, not
because it's some kind of experiment that they want to see how it ends.
I know it's not what you wanted or what I wanted, but maybe it's not so
bad, at least if they see some hope. You see? And if you still disagree,
there's always the possibility of filing an appeal to the courts. So
it's not really over. You see?"

But by this time, Scott had stopped listening. He mumbled "Thanks" and
replaced the phone slowly, one hand mindlessly rubbing the ruff on the
back of Comet's neck.

The bastards, he thought. The heartless bastards.

204

Kate entered the freight elevator wet from the rain and pressed the
button for the fourth floor without a second's hesitation. She glanced
down at the business card she held in her hand. Scott's address was
printed in neat block letters, with the tiny icon of an old-fashioned
viewfinder Brownie in the lower left-hand corner. She had no idea what
she would say to him once she got there or what she would do.

She knocked softly on the door. No answer. She grasped the knob and
found that it turned with no resistance-this was not surprising to her;
she was beginning to feel an odd sensation that inexorable, un-namable
forces were guiding her. She simply had to give in to it-and that, she
had realized, made everything less complicated. She didn't have to think
so much.

The door swung open. A large dog greeted her happily, its tail thumping
on the wooden floor. No one home. She patted the dog and put her
raincoat over the back of a chair and looked around the huge loft. Tall
crowded bookcases, two bicycles, intriguing abstracts on the brick
walls, a plethora of mounted photos. She took a moment to reflect: She
had guessed that his place would look like this; she was pleased to be
right.

On a coffee table were stacks of black-and-white photos. She felt a stab
to the chest-they were all of Tyler. She realized that she had never
seen him without the injury; he was a handsome youth. The eyes, the
cheekbones, the set of the jaw were all like his father's.

She crossed the floor and stepped inside a smaller room. It took a
microsecond for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She gave a start.

There he was!

205

Lying on the bed, next to a small object propped up on the pillow beside
him, an animal of some sort. A stuffed koala bear.

He looked horrible, closed in on himself.

Scott did not move, but his eyes shifted to her. He was not surprised to
see her; he barely seemed to register her presence. She tried to think
of something to say.

"I thought... I thought I should come here."

No reply.

She saw a bottle of scotch on the floor, half-empty. She walked over and
sat on the foot of the bed, and she could smell the alcohol on his
breath. But he didn't appear to be drunk. He sat up.

"Thank you," he said in a distant monotone. "I'm glad you came."

He swung his legs around to sit on the edge. Side by side, they were
almost touching thighs. He bent over to lean his elbows on his knees and
cradle his head in his hands. When he spoke, his voice had changed, was
more emotional.

"I didn't expect it, somehow," he said. "Though now, thinking back, I
can see how deluded I was. There was no chance. All along, there was no
chance. They wanted to continue it, and nothing was going to change
their minds."

She put one hand on his back.

"Maybe you're right. But it's not over. There're things we can do, more
steps."

"The courts. And how long is that going to take? Meanwhile, he's lying
there more dead than alive."

He stood bolt upright.

"I just don't get it. Who are they to make the decision? I'm his father,
for God's sake." He began pacing around the room.

For the first time, Kate realized the room was Tyler's. How could she
have missed that? The movie posters, the Rollerblades, the pile of
shirts, the adolescent mess. She surmised that everything was probably
just as Tyler had left it. That's the way it always was in literature;
and now, here they were, in life. On the bed, the koala bear fell to one
side, its shoulder fur worn to bare patches-from Tyler's hugs, she
guessed. The boy was becoming more real to her by the minute.

Scott was working himself up.

"You know what angers me more than anything? I didn't tell you

206

this at the time. What really pissed me off was when that guy, the head
of the hospital-what's his name?"

"Brewster."

"Brewster. When he started in questioning me and he asked if I
understood that Tyler was suffering no pain. No pain! Here he is hooked
up to those goddamned machines, sunk in some kind of coma and going
through who knows what. Maybe there is no pain. But maybe there is.
Maybe every time he flicks an eyelid, he's passing through some hideous
nightmare. Maybe he's in perpetual agony. Or maybe he feels lost or
alone or abandoned. Who's to say? They don't know. Nobody knows. Not
even me, and I feel so close to him, sometimes I used to think I could
read his mind."

He paced around some more. His voice softened.

"You know, when he was little and I put him to sleep, I would tell him a
story. It always began the same way-about a house with a thousand rooms.
I would lie next to him-right there-and I would put my head on the
pillow next to his, and I swear, I would look deep into his beautiful
eyes, and I could think what he was thinking, I could feel what he was
feeling."

She nodded, speechless.

"And even if he's not in pain, he should still . . . they should still
let him go. He's not Tyler anymore. I can see that. They don't want to
see it."

He stopped and looked directly at her.

"Let me ask you something. When you called just now, did they tell you
to tell me?"

"No. I heard about it. They're planning to tell you formally tomorrow."

Scott nodded. He seemed to be working up to something, but he shook the
thought away for a moment. Instead, he asked her a polite question.

"Would you like a drink?"

To her own surprise, she heard herself answer yes. And then, "Very much."

He picked up the bottle by the neck and left Tyler's bedroom, walking
across the loft into the small, cluttered kitchen. He picked two dirty
glasses out of the sink and rinsed them out. She sat on the couch in the
large room and watched him as he poured them both a

207

half glass and walked over to the couch and, standing above her, handed
one to her. He leaned down and touched glasses, a reflex done distractedly.

She took a deep swallow. She felt it burn her throat, then her chest,
and spread out to her arms and legs. The warmth felt good

He took a sip and put the glass down on the coffee table and sat next to
her and looked directly at her.

"I wonder if I could ask you something, if you could do me a favor. I
wonder ..."

"Yes?"

"Do you think you could take me there so I could see him?"

"When? . . .Not now?"

"Yes. Now."

She looked out the window. It was dark. She could see by the lights
across the street that it had begun to rain even harder.

"This very moment?"

He nodded.

She paused to think it over, but that was a bit of playacting-she had
known from the moment he asked that she would do it.

"I guess so. But you know-I think they've taken away my authorization to
enter that ward. Officially, I'm off the case."

He seemed stunned. For the first time, she thought, he's thinking of
what this means for me.

"I didn't know. I'm sorry."

"Oh, it's no big deal," she lied.

He left his glass where it was, but she finished hers in one large gulp.
Then they went outside in the rain to flag a cab.

The hospital was quiet, and they were able to walk past the nurses'
station without being spotted. But halfway down the corridor, a voice
boomed behind them.

"Excuse me-where are you going?"

It was the nurse on duty, and her battle-axe tone suggested trouble.
They turned and walked back toward the counter with its computers,
clipboards, and paraphernalia. They were no longer dripping water, but
their shoes were still soggy.

208

As soon as she saw Kate, the nurse's demeanor changed.

"Oh, Dr. Willet. I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you."

Kate relaxed outwardly. But her mind was racing: What if the pass code
had been changed and her ID swipe card no longer worked on the outer
door to Tyler's ward? In that case, they couldn't reach the observation
room to observe him through the glass wall, never mind the second lock
that closed off the inner chamber with the computers and his medical
equipment. If not, how could she come back here and talk her way through
the locked door? Scott didn't look as if he would stand being denied the
chance to see his son.

"That's okay. We're just . . . making a visit." Kate smiled. "After
hours," she added unnecessarily.

"I see." The nurse's expression suggested that she did not. She
hesitated for a full five seconds. "Well-he has to sign in, boy's father
or not." Scott went to the log with barely suppressed anger and scrawled
his signature. The nurse insisted that he add the time. Kate didn't want
Scott to get into an altercation with her. That would surely end
everything. He looked the worse for wear. He had insisted on hitting a
bar a block away, a dive with a linoleum floor and men in T-shirts who
looked as if they lived there. The bartender knew him. Another round of
quick drinks. It was not a casual stopover; he had insisted, and there
had been a hardness, almost a desperation, behind his insistence. She
wondered: Was he trying to fortify himself to see Tyler?

And as for Kate, she hadn't felt this unsteady for some time. She
noticed, leaving the bar, that the lines of linoleum seemed to waver.
And when they stepped into the elevator, she had hesitated before the
bank of buttons, blanking momentarily as she tried to remember the floor.

Now, the nurse was looking at her with opprobrium dancing in her eyes.

They turned around, and Kate felt the stare follow her like an icicle
dripping down her back. The hairs on the nape on her neck rose up. Their
footsteps were so loud they echoed, and as they traversed the corridor,
it seemed endless and the green pastel walls with white wainscoting
seemed to be narrowing, closing in on both sides. It took a long time to
reach the end. She didn't dare look back.

Kate opened her purse and pulled out her ID card. Her hair was wet, but
it felt hot and clammy as it clung to her forehead and temples.

209

Her blouse was wet around the shoulders and she shivered, but from cold
or heat, she couldn't tell. Her stomach tightened-she was suddenly
nauseous. She wondered for a fleeting instant if she could just turn to
Scott and tell him that she didn't think this was such a good idea after
all, and couldn't they just go back to the bar and have another drink
and talk? She shot him a sideways look. He was standing there, leaning
forward expectantly, waiting calmly. He would not be denied.

Her hand shook slightly as she aligned the card over the slot and swiped
it, holding her breath.

Click. The lock sprung.

She breathed, felt relief wash over her, and leaned over to grab the
door handle. But Scott was already there, anticipating her, tugging the
heavy door open fiercely. He was inside before she knew it, and she had
to hurry before the door clicked closed again.

Scott was at the glass, both hands up over his head, leaning into it,
staring through it. His body was tense, as if an electric current were
running down his spine.

Tyler was inside, behind the glass, suspended upside down in the frame
of the bed, held in place by straps and surrounded by tubes and wires.
She looked at his face, which appeared wooden, fixed as he hung in
space, as sculpted as a ship's figurehead.

Something nagged at her. Something was wrong.

Was it the sounds of the machines, slightly different, quieter? Or
something in the lights crossing the round window of the monitor, a low
undulating line where there should be jagged bouncing peaks and valleys?
Or something in Tyler himself, a gray cast to his features, an immobility?

"My God," said Scott softly.

He had noticed it too. He began banging against the glass.

Kate let out a gasp.

"Look," she said. "Look at the machines."

Scott turned, looking around frantically, then back at her. She pointed
to the computer in the room next door. There, the signs of life were
everywhere, lines pulsating across the screens with vigor and intent,
lights blinking, rhythmic purposeful beeps.

They didn't understand. The monitors on the left, connected directly to
Tyler's body, were barely operating. The lines screening his

210

heart, his brain, his breathing, his body temperature-all were barely
moving. The EEG was flat. The ones in the room to the right, coming from
the computer, were newly active.

"What's going on?" demanded Scott. "What's happened? Something's wrong.
Look at him."

"And over there," she said, her voice high and nervous. She pointed, and
Scott spun around to see what she was looking at.

The master monitor, the device that revealed which of the two, patient
or computer, was in command of the signals that told the body to
function, had its needle pointing squarely to one. Not to zero, but to one.

"That means the computer's registering activity before he is," she said.

"So the computer's taken over."

Scott froze a moment, then spoke rapidly.

"And when you came in, he registered nothing. The machines didn't jump.
Tell me-are you wearing that same perfume?"

"Yes. Yes, I am."

She rummaged quickly through her purse and pulled out the bottle and
removed its top. She sprinkled some on her arm. The aroma filled their
nostrils. They watched the monitors.

No response. The needle didn't fluctuate at all.

Kate pulled out a handkerchief, poured out the contents of the bottle,
held it upside down until it all splashed out on the white cloth. She
dropped the empty bottle in her purse and held the handkerchief up by
two corners. The smell was overpowering.

They peered through the glass.

Still nothing, no response.

Je m 'ot souviens.

So Tyler could remember nothing. Not even his primordial self, his
primitive second brain, just above the stem where the olfactory
sensation was supposed to shoot like a bullet.

"He's gone. He's totally gone," said Scott, his voice cracking.

Kate wondered whether she should speak. Because it was worse than that.
Some words came back to haunt her: Expansion into the adjacent possible.

She decided she had to tell Scott. She owed him the truth, now more than
ever.

211

"No, not entirely gone," she said finally. "His own brain is not
operative. But whatever was there-that part of his mind that regulated
his bodily functions-has gone over there." She pointed to the machines
in the room to the right. "It has flowed into the computer."

Scott struck the glass with his forehead and remained there for a while,
not moving, staring at Tyler. His son wasn't totally ashen; he was
receiving blood. But there was a lifelessness to him that was very
apparent now that he knew to look for it. There were no flickers of the
eyelashes, no little tics that he had come to know over the past weeks
and seize upon as harbingers of hope. Instead, Tyler's face was a kind
of waxen mask.

He found it hard to put the thoughts into words.

So this is what it amounted to. His son's body was an empty shell, kept
functioning by wires and tubes. His mind had fled. Whatever had been in
him that had made him unique, that made him the special loving living
human being called Tyler, had traveled down the wires and taken up
captive residence inside the computer.

The computer was more his son than the inert shell before him. The
computer had kidnapped him.

They had finally done it. They had finally done something worse than
kill him.

He felt like screaming.

And so he did scream.

Security guard Juan Montoya received the alarm shortly after midnight.
Even before the nurse called down, almost hysterical, he could see
trouble on the video monitor. A man up on the third floor moving around,
his figure discernible in oddly rapid movements through the snow on the
black-and-white screen. And when Montoya turned on the sound, he could
hear shouting-a man's voice, low and angry, and somewhere in the
background a woman screaming, "No, no, don't!"

Then came the call. Nurse Beadham, her voice tinged with
uncharacteristic fear.

"Come quick! It's the father of that boy in the isolation ward. He's
gone berserk."

212

Montoya allowed himself a moment of confusion.

"Isolation ward?"

"Saramaggio's patient. The one who's a vegetable. Anyway, it doesn't
matter-just get up here right away, damn it."

She paused horror-stricken. "My God, he's coming my way. No, he's not.
He's going into a room. What's he doing?"

Montoya was standing, staring at the monitor. The man had walked out of
the camera's line of sight. He looked at another screen and saw nothing.

A few seconds later and Nurse Beadham answered her own question. "He's
coming out again. He's got a chair. What's he doing with that?"

On the monitor, Montoya could see what he was doing with it. The guard
watched in a kind of frozen fascination as the figure hoisted the metal
chair over his head and then, summoning his strength, pitched it against
the glass in the observation room. In the background, a woman's voice,
begging him not to do it. There was a dull crashing sound. The glass
shook a little, but it held. Montoya saw the man pick up the chair
again. He indeed looked like a madman.

"I'll be right there," he said into the phone.

"You better," yelled back Nurse Beadham. Unvoiced but powerful threats
lurked in her words.

Just as soon as reinforcements arrive, Montoya thought to himself. He
was no fool: He had hit the emergency alarm button, plugged directly
into the station house one block away, even before her call. The phone
rang again. This time it was the police, and he told them to come as
quickly as possible. While he waited, he went to his locker and searched
for his nightstick and found it in the bottom, under a stack of
newspapers. He hadn't used it once in his four years on the job. He
picked it up and thwacked it into his left hand. Ouch. It was heavier
than it looked, weighted in the upper end. That could cause some real
damage, he thought.

Hardly five minutes later, two police officers, a man and a woman,
rushed in through the emergency room.

"What's going on?" asked the male cop. Montoya told them the little he
knew and pointed to the monitor, where the figure was still banging
against the glass. The cops stared at the screen, almost transfixed,
then the woman said, "Let's go." The three ran down the

213

corridor to the elevators. Montoya pressed the button, and they waited
in nervous silence for what seemed like a long, long time, until the car
finally arrived.

It didn't take long for them to subdue the man. Perhaps he had already
tired himself out by tossing around the chair, which lay upended to one
side. The thick plate glass was unbroken. Behind it, an apparition that
unsettled Montoya: A boy swathed in bandages was suspended upside down,
held in place by straps.

The door that was normally opened with an ID card had been propped open
by a shoe. That was so the man could go down the hall, fetch the chair,
and get back in, figured Montoya. He must have had some damn strong
reason to want to smash that glass.

"Take it easy, take it easy there, bud," said the male cop, holding
Scott down by planting a knee, not too gently, into the crook of his
shoulder.

"Officer," interjected Kate. "Please, don't hurt him. He's the child's
father."

The male cop looked at the female cop, and she gestured toward the
glass. Slowly, comprehension dawned on the cop's face-he glanced again
at that horrible view of the boy suspended upside down-and he lightened
the pressure on his knee.

"You gonna behave yourself now?" he asked, almost rhetorically. It
seemed like the right thing to say under the circumstances. He didn't
really expect an answer, and he got none.

"Why's the boy like that, anyway? Upside down?"

Kate moved into his view, standing just above Scott. "It's to prevent
bedsores."

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's had an accident," she replied, not wanting to go into it any deeper.

"And he's the" father?" the cop said, none too quick a study.

"Yes."

"So what was he doing up here late at night? And how did that chair get
there?"

"He was trying to smash the glass," said Nurse Beadham, who had waddled
over to join them, sounding even more officious than usual. "God only
knows what he would have done if he had

214

succeeded." She seemed to feel that the cop's sympathies were shifting
over to Scott.

"And who are you?" said the female cop, addressing Kate.

"I'm a doctor. Dr. Willet. I've been handling this case."

"Aha. Well, what do you think? You witnessed the whole thing, I take it."

"Witnessed it. She helped him get in," put in Nurse Beadham.

"Please. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Doc Willet here."

Kate thought quickly. What would defuse the situation?

"His father-Scott's his name-had just gotten some bad news about his
son's prognosis. He was upset, understandably. And he wanted to come and
... see him, maybe for the last time, I guess. And the situation sort of
got out of hand-"

"And you aided him-is that right?" said the female cop. "I take it you
need a swipe card to get in there. Is that how you and he got in? With
your card?" She motioned to the card resting on Kate's chest.

At that moment, Scott began to struggle and bellowed out, "Let me up,
goddamn it."

"Hey, take it easy there, fella," said the male cop.

"Watch out," yelled the woman.

For Scott had raised one leg and, arching his back, hooked his ankle
around the man's shoulder. With one swift jerk, the policeman went
flying on the ground. He leapt up, red-faced and furious, while his
female companion jumped on Scott and pinned him to the floor by holding
her nightstick against his windpipe.

"You take it easy," said Kate, rushing over. "You're hurting him."

"Hey, shit," said the woman, leaning down into Scott's face and inhaling
deeply. "This guy reeks of alcohol. He's drunker than a skunk."

The other cop pushed aside her nightstick, grabbed Scott by the collar,
and hoisted him to his feet. He took his own nightstick and jabbed him
in the ribs.

"Lemme see you walk. Lemme see you walk a straight line."

Scott refused. He looked at the cop and shook his head.

"Looks like we got an uncooperative guy here," said the male cop.

"Wait a minute," said Kate, interposing herself between them. "Let's all
calm down a moment."

"You calm him down. He struck me. That's an offense. I'm going to run
his ass right down to the precinct."

215

"But surely there's some way to work this out. He's distraught. He's
worried about the life of his boy. Have some sympathy."

"Lady, he just struck an officer of the law. As far as I'm concerned,
that just stopped all my sympathy right there."

The man swung Scott around, gathered his arms behind his back, and
clamped a pair of handcuffs on him.

"What's he going to be charged with?" asked Nurse Beadham, not without a
trace of excitement.

"Could be a lot of things. Drunk and disorderly. Assaulting an officer.
We'll see when we get there."

"I'm going with you," said Kate.

"Like hell you are."

"Well . . . where's the precinct?"

"Lady, look it up."

They marched off, Scott between them looking down, each with a hand on
his shoulder.

"Come with me, Doctor," said Montoya softly. "I have the address
downstairs."

Kate left, after turning to take one last look at Tyler, behind the
sheet of glass. He hadn't stirred one iota, lost in another world and
snug in his medical cocoon, wrapped up like a fly in a spiderweb.

216

As Kate was about to leave the security guard's office, a shadow loomed
in front of her, cutting off her exit. Instinctively, she stepped back.
It was Saramaggio.

He was glaring at her, his face red and puffed.

"You will come to my office," he commanded. "Right now."

"I can't. I've got to go to the police."

"Police? What for?"

"Scott Jessup's been arrested."

"I saw them dragging him off. Serves him right."

"No, he didn't do anything wrong. They shouldn't have arrested him."

"That's not the way I hear it."

Saramaggio turned to the guard.

"You there, what's your name?"

"Montoya, sir."

"All right, Montoya. You will kindly escort Dr. Willet to my office."

With that, Saramaggio spun on his heels and walked out. Montoya cast a
beseeching look at Kate, and she nodded at him. He checked the directory
for the office number and led the way, but once they got to the floor,
he stopped, unsure. She showed him where it was, and he opened it with a
master key. The room was empty. Montoya gestured toward a chair, and
Kate sat in it, uncertain whether the security man was being a gentleman
or holding her hostage. They waited a good ten minutes for Saramaggio to
arrive-apparently, he had been inside Tyler's ward, casing it for
damage. Kate figured he'd been thorough and had taken his sweet time
about it.

217

He walked in and dismissed Montoya with a wave of his hand and sat
behind his desk, heaving a world-weary sigh. He was dressed in a green
knit sweater, khaki pants, and Timberland topsiders. It struck Kate that
she had never seen him in casual dress. A five o'clock shadow darkened
his jaw, his hair was mussed, and even his salt-and-pepper beard was
unkempt. The effect was unsettling; he looked like a businessman at a
convention who had just returned from a night on the town. Evidently, he
had been staying somewhere in the city and had been roused from bed,
probably by Nurse Beadham.

He cleared his throat portentously and looked down his nose at her, much
the way a teacher confronts a truant.

The thought crossed her mind: He's enjoying this. He's luxuriating in
his power. She resolved not to show a flicker of discomfort. Another
thought popped up, but she ignored it-for the moment.

"I suppose you know . . . ," he began slowly, measuring his words like
tablespoons of castor oil, "at least I expect you know-I can't imagine
otherwise-that what you have done here tonight is most serious, grave,
unheard-of. It is-in one word-simply scandalous."

That's two words, she thought. She looked up at him, waiting, and put on
an expectant expression, as if she were merely curious about what he
would say next. He didn't care for that at all. She played again with
her private thought.

"Proceeding against all instructions, under the cover of darkness,
invading the hospital at an ungodly hour ..."

He's making me sound like a World War IIsaboteur, she thought.

"... bringing with you an unauthorized party ..."

Unauthorized party, he's the boy's father, for Heaven's sake.

"... and who only knows what you had in mind, what your objective was ..."

Objective. . . . There's that war jargon again-

Saramaggio stopped cold, folded his hands upon the desk, and focused his
eyes on a spot above her head.

"I might as well ask you outright-and I advise you to think carefully
before answering. Were you or were you not, together with the patient's
father, planning to remove the patient from life support?"

Kate leapt forward in her chair. "What! Not at all. That's the craziest
thing I ever heard."

"Well-that's what it looks like from here. The father wanted to

218

pull the plug. You, having thrown away all pretense of professionalism,
took what you construed to be his side and decided to assist him in his
campaign. You know, you've fought us every step of the way. You
testified against us at the board. And when you lost fair and square,
when the decision went against you, you decided to ignore it. You
decided unilaterally to disregard the findings of your peers, your
superiors, and so you resolved to achieve your goal through underhanded
means. That goal, purely and simply, was to thwart our important
research work and our attempts to return this poor young man to a state
of health and normal functioning. Dr. Willet-do you realize how serious
this is?"

He sat back in his chair, his hands linked behind his head, a prosecutor
satisfied with his summation.

But clearly, he had one more iron in the fire, one final ace up his
sleeve. He was winding up to deliver the coup de grace. He was
preparing-and his mouth was already forming the words-to fire her.

He never got to it.

At that precise moment, Kate decided to unleash the thought that had
settled in her mind. She took command. She fixed him with her toughest
stare and said, "Dr. Saramaggio, I'm glad you're sitting down. Because
there's something you should know. I'm surprised you don't already know
it from your visit to the isolation ward."

In truth, she was more than surprised. She was aghast. How very typical
of him, she thought, that he would check the damage to the glass, the
chair, and everything else before checking on the status of his patient.

Saramaggio looked miffed, a trifle confused. His hands unlocked and
returned to their resting spot on the desk.

"What in hell's bells are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact that the operation has gone all wrong. The
boy, Tyler, is no longer in a coma; he's sunk to an even lower state
than that. He shows no signs of life whatsoever. He's not functioning on
his own; he's not doing anything. The computer is doing it all for him."

"What! That's impossible!"

"No, it's not. It's happened. The computer has seized total control of
his brain. There's nothing left of him but an inert body. That's why his
father got so upset."

219

"I don't believe you."

"Go see for yourself."

"That's exactly what I'm going to do."

"And if you find I'm right, there's only one possible course of action."

But Saramaggio, without another word, had already bounded out of his
chair and was halfway out the door, leaving Kate sitting across from an
empty desk.

Well, she thought to herself, no reason to stick around here. She left
Saramaggio's office. No security guard in sight. She decided to leave
her raincoat where it was, on the third floor, lest she run into Nurse
Battle-axe or his Malevolent Majesty, and she took an elevator down to
the lobby and stepped out into the rain.

There were no cabs on the streets, and so she had to walk the eight
blocks to the police station.

Saramaggio's hand was shaking as he dialed the number. He heard the
phone ringing-two, three, four times. He thought he could hear his own
heart pounding over the line, a tintinnabulation in his ears. The storm
of his own thoughts, maybe.

But how-how is it possible?

The whole grand experiment had gone haywire. The patient was lying there
just as she had said; the boy was in something worse than a vegetative
state. He had no EEG at all, no brain activity. He wasn't alive; he
wasn't dead. The computer had taken over everything, all of his
autonomic functions. Saramaggio had never seen anything like it.

Goddamn it-why doesn't he pick up?

Finally, on the ninth ring, there was the sound of the receiver being
picked up, some rustling and grunting in the background, and then
Cleaver's sluggish voice thick with sleep.

"Hullo."

Saramaggio didn't waste time with any niceties.

"Come right away. I need you. Please. Something's gone wrong."

A momentary pause while Cleaver pieced together who it was, what he
wanted. He quickly became alert. It hadn't escaped him that Saramaggio
had used the word "please." That was most unlike him.

220

"Where are you? What's gone wrong?"

"I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't be calling you, would I?"

The words were meant as sarcasm, but they couldn't camouflage a trill of
weakness, which Cleaver detected immediately. Something big was up-and
the more Cleaver thought about it, the more excited he got.

"So . . . tell me."

"I'm at the hospital. Something's gone wrong with the boy. He's totally
nonresponsive. The monitors show no signs of activity at all."

"So is he dead?"

"No, not really. It's hard to tell."

"But is he breathing? Is his heart pumping? Are his lungs working?"

"In a manner of speaking, but he's not doing it."

"What do you mean? Explain yourself."

"The master monitor is at one. The computer is doing everything. It's
almost as if. . . well, I don't know any other way to put it."

"Go ahead."

"It's almost as if his mind ..."

"As if his mind what?" Silently, Cleaver began to curse Saramaggio.

"As if his mind were gone, as if it had just disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"As if it had been sucked down the wires and into the machines."

"I'll be right there."

Saramaggio had no way of knowing it, but his particular way of putting
it plucked a deep, unforeseen chord in Cleaver, who jumped out of bed
and put his clothes on over his pajamas. He had never moved so fast in
his life. That's what happens when you hear something that might just
mean that your life's dream is on the road to being realized.

Cleaver got there in half an hour flat, despite the rain. He traversed
the nearly deserted hospital lobby, nodding to the receptionist, who was
half asleep, and tried to walk calmly, as if nothing had happened. He
took the elevator to the third floor, where he found Saramaggio pacing
back and forth, a pained expression upon his face.

221

From the moment Cleaver saw him, and saw his sagging shoulders, the
worry lines creasing his forehead, his stupid salt-and-pepper beard, he
knew that Saramaggio was scared.

Well, well, the great Saramaggio. It's times like this that test our
mettle. And I'm beginning to wonder if you've got what it takes.

The surgeon rushed over, a half-relieved, half-anxious look upon his
face that he tried to disguise.

"I'm glad you're here. What took you so long? I haven't touched
anything. I haven't told the nurses that something's wrong, but I think
that one over there, the big one-don't turn around, she's looking our
way-I think she suspects something."

He led Cleaver down the hall, talking. He told how Tyler's father had
come to the ward along with Dr. Willet and found that the machines-

"That woman! What was she doing here? I thought she was denied
authorization."

"Well, she was. But she didn't actually enter the ward. I mean, not the
inner room. She just went to the observation room."

"I don't care. She shouldn't have been here."

"I know-the lock was supposed to be changed. I guess it wasn't."

"You know what this means. She's got to be suspended-or better yet,
terminated."

Saramaggio told him about the incident with the chair.

"Well, there you are!" exclaimed Cleaver. "They must have disturbed
something, wrecked the equipment, altered it in some way. That would
explain the patient's deterioration."

"I don't think so," said Saramaggio. "She said that they saw the problem
before then. That it was when they saw it that the father went. . . got
so upset and threw the chair against the glass."

"But she would say that, wouldn't she? It's a perfect way to try to
cover her tracks and throw blame elsewhere."

"I don't know. ..."

They reached the ward. Cleaver took out his ID card and swiped it
through the slot on the wall; the door clicked, and they entered.
Cleaver's eyes moved quickly from machine to Tyler and back to machine;
he took in everything-the master monitor, the bank near the computer,
the nearly flat lines on the screens. The boy was suspended upside down
in the air with his white gown and his arms strapped to his sides. He
looked like an angel frozen in midflight.

222

Cleaver felt his heart pounding in his chest, his nerves tingling with
excitement. It was obvious that his condition had changed drastically.

Saramaggio broke the silence.

"Well, what do you think?" he asked.

Cleaver ignored him for some minutes, walking slowly behind the
observation glass. Then he used his pass to open the inner door and
switched on the button to turn the bed ever so slowly. The outer frame
rotated like a huge gyroscope until the bed faced upward and Tyler was
resting on his back. No longer was he straining against the straps, and
the sheets and bedclothes fell back upon him lightly. One wrist was bent
backward, caught in an odd position that emphasized his complete
helplessness. The effect was of someone struck down and gone-like a
corpse found upon a battlefield. And yet upon closer inspection, a
subtle difference emerged. Cleaver was able to spot it right away-the
body was flaccid, not rigid. The skin tone was waxen but still had tiny
splotches of red. Supine upon the bed, the boy might be in a profound
sleep. From a quick observation, there was no reason to doubt it: This
was a person whose mind had fled from his body but who was not
technically dead. An empty vessel that was still strong on the outside
and able to be filled once again-if only one could locate the precious
elixir of life.

Cleaver washed his hands, dried them, and touched Tyler's forehead. The
boy did not move. He poked Tyler's arm, and his finger left a white
circle that faded quickly-another sign of normality. He stroked his
cheeks, opened one eye and looked at the pupil and the white rim, and
felt the slow, steady, throbbing pulse in his neck. He opened his mouth
and examined his tongue. His temperature was a perfect 98.6.

A grim play upon an old joke tickled him: the operation was a success,
except that the patient didn't die.

He withdrew his hands, washed diem again out of habit, and turned to
Saramaggio, who was waiting in the observation antechamber.

"Let's go somewhere where we can talk," he said. "This is obviously
extremely serious. I wish you had called me sooner."

"But I just got here," Saramaggio protested. "I only found out about it
just now."

223

"Proper security might have avoided the whole problem." Cleaver didn't
really believe that-he was just amusing himself by being cruel.

The spacious room on the fifteenth floor was dark, and they kept it that
way at Cleaver's insistence. He hadn't wanted to confer in Saramaggio's
office because it was cramped and windowless, not right for the grand
proposition he was mulling over. At the same time, he felt a strange
need for darkness, not because he feared that his emotions could be read
upon his face, but because it suited his mood.

My, how the lights on the river are grand, he thought. Just like
diamonds scattered on a velvet blanket. Nothing like a little excitement
to unleash our poetic natures.

"What do you think you should do?" he asked Saramaggio. He emphasized
the "you."

The question was disingenuous. Cleaver was enjoying the moment. He
wanted to feel his rival sweat. He wanted him to hang twisting in the
wind, as that marvelous Watergate metaphor had put it.

Saramaggio hesitated.

"Well," he said finally, his voice none too confident. "We've got to
take action. We've got to pull the plug and end the whole thing. I was
just wondering how to do it, what to say."

"You mean what to tell the board?"

"Yes."

"Well, I can see how that's a problem for you. Especially since you were
so cocksure that the boy would remain in good shape until the
implantation procedure began."

Saramaggio remained quiet.

"Especially since you denied the father's demand that the boy be taken
off life support."

"I didn't deny it. The board denied it."

"Yes, well, you spoke out against it-rather eloquently, I thought."

"I didn't notice you saying anything at all."

"No, you're right there. This horse was yours to ride. I didn't want to
get in the way."

224

"I wish you had."

"Me, too," replied Cleaver. "That way I could have shouldered some of
the blame now."

Saramaggio squirmed in his seat. Cleaver couldn't see it, but he felt it.

"And then there's the problem of the woman," Cleaver continued-he never
called Kate by her proper name, not to mention her title. "What do you
think will happen when she tells the board what she's discovered?"

Saramaggio shrugged.

"Where is she, by the way?"

Saramaggio looked up into the dim light.

"I don't know. I left her in my office. I doubt... I don't think she's
still there."

"I'm sure she isn't. I wouldn't be surprised if she's gone off looking
for the boy's father. You say he was taken away by the police?"

"Yes."

"That's probably where she is. We may be able to use that."

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind. I'll handle everything. I might even be able to come up
with a plan that will get you off the hook."

"A plan?"

"Yes, but you have to do exactly what I say. And I don't want you asking
a whole lot of questions. I'm tired of your questions."

"Well, I don't want to do anything illegal. You're not contemplating
something like that-are you?"

"Saramaggio."

"Yes?"

"That's a question."

Cleaver rose, walked over to the doorway, and flicked on the lights. The
room seemed flooded with brightness that made Saramaggio feel even more
vulnerable. And Cleaver was being quiet again, which unnerved him even more.

"I just never thought this would happen," he said. "I don't understand it."

Cleaver ignored him. He was pacing around the room, then stopped, looked
at Saramaggio, and said, "For openers, you've got to deal with that
nurse. I need to get her off the floor for a good two hours."

225

"Two hours. What're you going to do?"

Cleaver stopped and looked at him.

"Saramaggio-I told you to stop that."

"What?"

"Another question. In fact, two of them. I guess you don't follow
instructions very well. I hope you're up to this."

Saramaggio decided to bite his tongue. He had already come this far; he
might as well see what kind of plan Cleaver could come up with. The man
was smart-maybe he did have something up his sleeve. There was always
the option of going to the board and admitting that the experimental
procedure had failed. How he hated that word: failure. The board would
insist that it be ended right away. Maybe they could do that on their
own, which is probably what Cleaver had in mind. That way there would be
no complicated explanations, no backtracking, no apologies.

He sighed.

He looked out at the river, a ribbon of blackness snaking its way
alongside the concrete banks of the island of Manhattan, and he felt his
heart plunge into utter despair.

How had it come to this?

Nurse Beadham was not in a good mood-far from it. First, it had been a
trying night, what with that man coming into the hospital and raising
such a ruckus-she had known there was something fishy about the way that
Dr. Willet had tried to slip by without signing in-and then the security
guard being called and the police arriving and everything else. Most
upsetting. And then Dr. Saramaggio coming in at this godforsaken hour,
and him pacing around so nervous-like, and finally that Dr. Cleaver
arriving-he gave her the creeps, the way he never looked you in the eye.
Always seemed like he was scheming.

She checked the clock. Another two hours till quitting time. She wished
it were here already.

At that precise moment, the elevator opened and who should step out?
Cleaver himself. She gave a start and almost felt as if she had conjured
him up from some dark sulfurous place.

226

He walked over, and she saw him glance at the nameplate pinned onto her
breast pocket, a white rectangle with the sunken letters a deep blue.

"Ah, Nurse Beadham," he said unctuously. "Has anyone informed you about
the tragic situation here?"

She shook her head no.

"Our young patient, sad to say, has taken a turn for the worse and is
now beyond our assistance. He has no hope of recovery. Dr. Saramaggio
tells me that this occurred while the father and Dr. Willet were here.
Apparently, they created some kind of disturbance, which triggered an
attack and precipitated the boy's sudden collapse. I take it you
witnessed this?"

He glanced over at the sign-in sheet while she nodded yes.

"Good. I'll need a full statement from you. You can go up to Dr.
Saramaggio's office to compose it-he's waiting for you there. But first,
I need you to go to the boy's isolation ward and mark down all of the
indicators. This is extremely important. Take your time, write down all
the numbers, and sign the sheet. Then go upstairs."

She hesitated.

"But who will take care of the floor? I can't leave my station until two
A.M."

"Don't be silly," he replied. "I'm here. If there are problems from any
of the patients, I know where to reach you."

"And what will you be doing?"

"If you must know, I will be withdrawing life support. It's all quite
legitimate. Dr. Saramaggio is phoning Dr. Brewster and other members of
the board right now."

She dawdled, uncertain.

"Get along now," he said, as if speaking to a child.

And she did what she was told.

Cleaver couldn't believe his luck. Alone at last, he made the necessary
calls over his cell phone-he didn't want any hospital record of them.
Then he checked the floor to make sure all was quiet, walking down the
corridor to the south wing and back and ending up at the isolation ward.
He used his card to gain entrance, the click of the lock sounding
unreasonably loud.

He felt calm. He knew what he was doing. Now if only Felix

227

came through. He wished he had more confidence in that young man.

He leaned up against die glass and found a nick about shoulder high. It
was probably there that Jessup had struck with the chair. Cleaver
allowed himself a moment of compassion for him-poor guy, he really had
been put through the wringer. Well, soon enough all that would end.

He looked through the glass at the boy. Even with the bandage around his
head, he looked handsome. And at peace. That was important-that he be at
peace, the outer shell from which life had been extracted, the empty
vessel still standing.

It was a historic moment. He almost wished someone were here to witness
it and to record it, a Boswell to his Johnson. The consummate man of
science, the innovator about to take the great leap into the uncharted
world, to "shift the paradigm" of received human wisdom, as that
philosopher Thomas Kuhn would put it.

What would Cybedon say if he were here?

But come-he was delaying.

Cleaver entered the inner room with a self-assured swipe of his card. He
opened a drawer under the computer and found what he needed, not much
really, just a simple connecting cord. He searched along the baseboards
for an outlet and couldn't find one.

Christ, wouldn't that be perfect? For want of a nail, the battle was lost.

He pried a machine two inches from the wall and peered behind it. Aha!
There it was! He shoved and pulled the machine, swiveling it from side
to side until it was six inches from the wall. He reached behind and
attached the cord to the phone outlet. Then he slipped the other end
into the computer and sat down in a chair to reflect.

It was hard to say what would happen. But he knew that the time had come
to take the big step, that the world required an anima-the quintessence
of human intelligence-to enter into that ether and glide through all
those mega-million bytes and make sense of it all and reconnect back.
Humans and machines, united at last.

He looked back at the boy. He appeared even more handsome in the glow of
the hospital light. Maybe he was looking at him and knowing, the
knowledge that he was going to be the first. . . .

Cleaver stood and turned to the computer. He hit the keyboard quickly
and typed in all the right codes without a moment's hesitation.

228

He stepped back. The machine was waiting, blinking obediently. Was it
crazy to think that it knew what was about to happen, that it too
desperately wanted it to happen?

Maybe someday we can ask it, he thought; maybe someday its feelings will
be known.

And that was the final thought Cleaver had before he made his climactic
move, before he leaned down and hit the Send button and sent Tyler's
anima-his mind, if you will-careering down the wires and out into the
infinity of cyberspace.

229 Ill

The Recovery

230

231

Scott paced around his cell for five hours, following a path that he
repeated over and over, as any caged animal will do. His was a circle
that brought him by the bars, then past a bunk, then back to the bars.
The routine of it allowed him to think, though the thoughts were as
repetitious as his movements. His pacing got on the nerves of his two
cellmates: a black Dominican with dreadlocks who had picked a fight in a
bar and gotten the worst of it, and a lanky young white man whose glazed
eyes told a tale of heroin use and who now slept stretched out on the floor.

"Hey, man, give it a rest," the Dominican shouted at one point.

Scott looked over at him without a word and then sat on the floor
leaning back against the bars. But a few minutes later, he was up on his
feet again, pacing. He couldn't help it. The Dominican had no more
protest in him, and soon he lay down on a steel cot hanging from the
wall, resting his head upon one arm like an innocent child.

"Man, you all fucked up," he said, shortly before falling asleep. He
snored, but Scott scarcely heard him.

Fucked up. That just about says it all.

Scott replayed the night in his mind. When he came to the scene on the
hospital floor and called up the image of Tyler lying there, attached to
the machines but without life, his chest moving like a bellows, his
heart pumping like a metronome, nothing happening of its own volition,
he closed his eyes and tried to shake it away. But it kept coming back,
and the only way to rid himself of it was to force himself to consider
what might happen next. Surely now, if they had any decency at all, they
would take Tyler off the machines and let him die. If not, he himself
would sue them and compel them to do it-he

232

would get the best lawyer in town, a killer lawyer, whatever the cost.
It was too late for any kind of death with dignity, but Scott had given
up on that long ago. What he wanted now was simply to put Tyler to rest
inside the ground, once and for all. That was it. Nothing else mattered.

The drink had left his system, forced away by adrenaline and anger. His
mouth had a taste of bile and his gullet burned, and he had bruises on
his wrist where the handcuffs had been, but he was thinking clearly. He
felt oddly calm. He was looking forward to taking them on-Saramaggio,
Brewster, the review board, the whole lot of them. He was eager to do
battle and the sooner, the better. But he had to get out of this place
first, and he would do whatever it took to accomplish that, even if it
meant swallowing his rage and hanging his head before a judge. Revenge
would come soon enough.

He began pacing more slowly, thinking. He should conserve his strength.
He looked around. The jail stank. He wondered if the heroin addict had
crapped in his pants. There was a toilet bowl without a seat in one
corner. The cell had bars on three sides and one brick wall peeling
white paint. Light came from two bare bulbs hidden behind a metal mesh.

He should try to get some rest. He walked over to the steel cot that was
unoccupied and sat down, dangling his legs over the side. They felt
cramped, tense.

The only other time he had been behind bars was on a week-long trip to
Somalia when had he photographed an old woman in a marketplace and
nearly created a riot. It had been one of his rare times outside the
country without Tyler-he'd left him at his mother-in-law's-and he'd
worried the whole time that the incarceration would delay his return.
Luckily, he had gotten out quickly, polished off the assignment in
another two days, and made it home on schedule.

His mother-in-law-it had been almost a year since they had seen her.
Scott and she had never gotten along, and, oddly enough, after Lydia's
death, she had seemed to lose interest in her grandchild. She moved into
a condo in Florida, sent dutiful checks decorated with marlins for
Tyler's birthday, dropped by during infrequent trips to New York to
catch some theater, and that was it. When Scott telephoned her about the
accident, she was horrified but she didn't come up.

"Hey, you. It's your lucky day."

233

It was a cop, meandering down the corridor and stopping in front of
their cell. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and lifted it to his
lips, blowing and slurping. He looked at Scott.

"Get up. Come get your stuff. You can go."

He balanced his coffee cup on a crossbar and opened the cell door. Scott
rushed over and walked through. The Dominican leapt up.

"Whoa. What's this? What's goin' on? Why he gettin' out? He got
privileges or somethin'? He got connections?"

The cop stared him down.

"That's right. He's got 'em and you don't, which means you'll be on the
next bus to Rikers."

"Aw, man. White cops is always lookin' after they own. Whole system's
fucked-up rotten."

"Maybe, but it can still catch scum like you."

"Man . . ." The Dominican slumped back on the cot and closed his eyes.
"Leastways lemme get some fuckin' sleep."

"Nighty-night." The cop made it sound like a threat.

Scott followed him, the cop's backside and belt with its massive array
of equipment-handcuffs and flashlight and radio and ticket book-swinging
slowly side to side. Only the gun was missing from the holster.

At the front desk was another cop with a large beer belly, who handed
over a manila folder with Scott's name on it. Inside were his belt,
wallet, and keys. He could see through a window that early-morning light
was breaking.

"So, am I being released on my own recognizance? Do I put up bail?"

"Naw, nothing like that. You can go. No charges. You just needed a night
to cool off. But don't go creating any more disturbances."

Scott shook his head. He would say anything to get out of there and
return to the hospital.

"And you might want to thank her."

At that moment, Scott felt a hand on his right arm, and he turned to
face Kate.

"She explained everything," the desk cop said. "Sounds rough."

He looked away, as if Scott had a disease.

Kate smiled and with her hand coaxed him to turn and move toward the
door. Her hair was tousled and her white silk blouse wrinkled.

234

"Have you been here all night?" he asked.

"No, in and out. They kept saying they couldn't make a decision until
the sergeant came back. There was some kind of trouble in East Harlem,
so he was away until just now. A nice guy, named Paganelli. He was the
one who said it was okay to release you."

"Thanks to you."

"When they heard the story, they were sympathetic. They just needed a
pretext-a doctor telling them it would be all right, that you weren't
some kind of nutcase."

"I'm not too sure about that."

Outside, the sun was bright and shining down upon them. It hurt his eyes.

"You don't look so hot," she said.

"Let's go to the hospital."

"I think you should go home first, change your clothes, shave, get a cup
of coffee."

She gestured toward him with one hand, and he looked down. His shirt was
torn, and on the front was a trickle of blood, dried to a deep brown.

"We've got a long day ahead of us, a lot of meetings, demands, fights,
who knows what. And frankly, you'll argue your case better if you look a
little more presentable."

"You sound more like a lawyer than a doctor."

She smiled and felt like saying something supportive. "Right now I'm
neither. I'm just a friend."

They reached the corner of Lexington. He raised his hand for a cab, and
when it stopped and he opened the door, he was surprised that she
slipped right in.

An hour later, they pulled up in front of the hospital. As soon as they
entered the lobby and saw the face on the receptionist, they knew that
something new had happened. She looked nervous and reached for a phone.

"Dr. Willet. Please-just a moment. Dr. Saramaggio has given instructions
for you to wait right here. I'll call him."

Scott was already moving toward the elevators.

235

"You do that," said Kate over her shoulder. "Tell him I'll be up on the
third floor."

She hurried after him and stepped in just as the doors were closing.
There were three other people inside, staring straight ahead. She looked
at Scott-it was easy to see that he was overwrought. He was facing
forward, his eyes narrow, his shoulders raised and his hands balled into
fists.

The elevator stopped on two, the doors opening with maddening slowness,
and a doctor in a white jacket entered and pressed a button and the
doors closed, again languidly. Scott pressed the third-floor button
three times, hard. No one spoke.

At three, Scott was out before the doors fully opened, and Kate was
right behind. They hurried to the nurses' station-again an odd look from
the nurse there, half shock, half worry-as they turned right, down the
corridor toward the special isolation ward. As soon as they came within
fifty feet, they saw that everything was different.

It was gone. The ward was no longer there.

The normally locked doors were wide open, and they could see clear
through to where, only a few hours ago, there had been the glass
partition of the observation room.

Scott ran the rest of the way down the corridor. Then he stopped and
walked slowly through the doors, as if in a dream, staring at the blank
walls around him, the empty outlets, the newly scrubbed floor. It
smelled of Lysol.

Scott turned, and Kate saw his face drawn in bewilderment and confusion.
He knew what had happened, and he looked as if he didn't know what to
feel-he both feared and desired it.

They heard footsteps behind them, Saramaggio hurrying up, his coat
flapping behind him. He appeared anxious and uncertain.

"I wanted to catch you first to tell you," he said, slightly out of
breath. "I'm sorry that you found out this way. You see, we had no
alternative. After what happened . . . after what you saw earlier today
. . . last night, we decided ..." He paused, took a breath, and plunged
ahead. "We had to take your son off life support. There was no reason to
continue. ..."

He looked at Scott, appealing. Scott took a step forward, and for a
moment Kate thought he was going to flatten Saramaggio. Instead, he
stared at him, his body shaking with fury.

236

"You goddamned, stupid, selfish ..."

He stopped. It looked as though he had gathered control of himself, but
no, he had not. He walked over to a wall and leaned against it with his
left hand and then heaved a deep sob and smashed his right fist into it.
In the small room, the noise was loud. He did it again and again until
the wall was dented and a thin rain of plaster fell out and formed a
tiny white volcanic mound on the floor.

Saramaggio stood frozen, and his head was bowed. Kate saw that tears
were silently streaming down his cheeks.

So he was human, after all.

"I'm sorry," he said finally, in a thin voice. "I wish there were
something I could do. I wish ... I wish we had never done this. I didn't
mean for it to end badly. I wanted to ... I wanted to save the life of
your son."

"You wanted to run your experiment on him. You didn't give a good
goddamn for him!"

Scott turned, still resting his left hand upon the wall, and glared at
the doctor.

Saramaggio took a deep breath and looked back. Slowly, he nodded.

"I guess there is some truth in that," he said. "Maybe you're right. I
did want to do the operation. I wanted it very much. I'd been preparing
so long, thinking about it, what it could mean ..."

He trailed off, waved his hand vaguely in the air, then covered his eyes.

Kate was surprised to see what happened next: His shoulders began
twitching and then heaving so violently that she thought he was having
some kind of attack. He was sobbing uncontrollably, from somewhere deep
inside, so that his upper body was actually flopping. When he took his
hands away, his eyes were blinking madly as the tears streamed out and
his face was contorted and squeezed into a pathetic red ball.

What followed was even more remarkable. Saramaggio walked toward Scott
and actually put his hands together as if he were praying.

"Please, I'm sorry," he blurted out. "Please, please forgive me."

And he continued to approach him until he was standing right in front of
him. He opened his arms as if to hug Scott, and he put his arms on his
shoulders and moved his hands around his back. But Scott stood there
erect, unmoving, his hands tight at his sides.

237

Saramaggio took a step backward and looked beseechingly at Scott, then
at the wall.

Kate felt a sudden rush of pity for this man who had let his dream carry
him off too far on a path he never should have taken. For a moment, she
thought of giving him comfort, telling him what he needed to hear-that
he had transgressed but could be forgiven, that his soul was not yet lost.

But she, too, just stood there, not moving. Things had gone too far.
Things had happened that never should have happened. Too much pain and
misery had been caused, and all so needlessly.

Scott had won his point. Saramaggio had been transformed by a night of
epiphany, and now he stood before them, a forlorn and abject figure. But
neither she nor Scott felt good about that.

Later that day there were meetings of the Board of Ethics, the
Institutional Review Board, and the hospital's governing board, forms to
fill out, the beginnings of inquiries-all the meaningless paperwork and
formalities of officialdom that a large institution turns to in time of
trauma.

Scott refused to be interviewed, and this was noted by an investigating
medical expert, who wrote in a box on the appropriate form that the
"nearest relative" was "uncooperative." All of those present during the
operations, including Kate, were debriefed for a comprehensive report
that would be issued in due course. New guidelines were to be drawn up
to cover similar situations; from the tone of the questions posed, Kate
was certain that they would end up being toothless. Brewster made a
point of expressing full support for his staff, including Saramaggio,
whose contrition surprised them all, and who requested and was granted
two weeks' leave. It seemed to be generally agreed that the areas of
stem cell cultivation and implantation and computer-assisted surgery
were fruitful to pursue, despite what everyone called "the recent tragedy."

Almost nothing was said about Scott and Kate's late-night visit to the
ward or about Kate's role in the whole business. Clearly, there would be
no overt reprisals against her, and the thought occurred to her that by
not pressing charges they might be buying her silence.

238

She couldn't imagine assisting Saramaggio in an operation again. They
might be willing to forget, but she wasn't.

Kate found Gully alone, sipping coffee in the surgeon's lounge, a small
room of easy chairs and mismatching tables and lamps on the fourth
floor. They talked and she soon found that she was unburdening herself.
Her doubts about Tyler's death did not find a sympathetic ear.

"What's so strange about it?" he said. "It was an experimental operation
to begin with. Everyone knew the risk of using computers to assist the boy."

"Assist! Spare me from that kind of assistance. Finish off is more like it."

"Now, don't be harsh."

"Why wasn't there a rigorous investigation of what actually happened?
Who knows why the damn thing failed? It looked like the computers
actually caused him to die."

"How can you say that? He would have died long before if they hadn't
kept him alive. Please don't get yourself all in a snit about this.
Please don't get into any more trouble. You were doing so well here and
we all like you so much."

Gully drank delicately from his cup.

Kate was hardly assuaged.

"I don't know-the whole thing seems wrong. I think the computers
malfunctioned in some way. They're responsible for his death-don't you see?"

But Gully just shrugged and turned away. His face looked pained, but his
gesture bespoke a rudeness that he wouldn't have displayed two weeks
before, she thought.

The funeral was held in the afternoon at a parlor on Amsterdam Avenue,
an assembly-line kind of place with three separate service rooms, so
that to enter the correct one, mourners had to read the replaceable
white letters on a black velvet bulletin board.

A surprisingly large crowd turned out, including most of Tyler's class
at Horace Mann. The service was short. Tyler's coffin was closed because
of the damage done to his head and face or, as the mortician had put it
in talking to Kate earlier, "restoration difficulties." The

239

casket was simple wood. Scott left the choice to Kate-in fact, he left
almost all the decisions to others. He was in an odd state, not dazed
but removed, as if his emotions had finally shut down.

Kate sat next to him during the service and couldn't help thinking of
the last occasion when she had sat next to him-the board meeting that
would determine Tyler's fate. So much had happened since then. It seemed
so long ago.

He had placed a wrapped package on the pew next to him. She watched the
others file in and noticed a large contingent of people her own age who
had an artistic look about them-Scott's fellow photographers, she
surmised. They looked at him with concern, and three or four of them
came over to whisper to him or put a hand on his shoulder. One leaned
down to hug him. There was a family of three, with a boy about Tyler's
age, sitting across the row from Scott. All three of them looked
stricken, especially the boy, dressed in a heavy black suit, who stared
ahead blankly, his cheeks flushed.

A handful of people came from the hospital. There were some nurses who
had attended to Tyler, seated all together, and Gully and another
surgeon. Brewster, looking solemn and official, chose a place halfway
back, close enough to be noticed but not so close as to intrude.
Saramaggio, who had appeared to be waiting for Scott in the entryway and
then had watched him pass by without uttering a word, sat in the back
row, clearly distraught. Cleaver was nowhere to be seen-no surprise
there, thought Kate.

One thing Scott did was choose the music. The first selection was the
Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," then Bob Dylan's
"Like a Rolling Stone," and finally Tom Petty's "Free Fallin' "-all
songs that had been meaningful to Tyler. He had heard them for years,
Scott told Kate, listening mindlessly to them along with his father and
then abruptly making them his own in that voracious way of adolescents.

There were only a few speakers. One was a teacher who talked of Tyler as
a student, the intelligence that crackled in his eyes, the humor and
curiosity and love of Latin and science and Greek mythology and biology
and learning for the sake of learning. "He loved life," the teacher
said. "He opened himself to it and wanted to drink deeply from its cup."
Another was a Cub Scout leader who said Tyler had tried
everything-canoeing, archery, photography, painting-hanging

240

back until he was ready and then jumping in and embracing them to the
fullest. In baseball, he had played left field, singing scraps of arias
during the dull moments and so acquiring the nickname "Figaro." At
night, sitting around the campfire, he had mesmerized the other children
with scary stories that seemed to spring from a bottomless, fecund
imagination.

Then Scott stood up to speak. His voice was shaky at first, but as he
went on, it gathered strength. He told stories of Tyler as a young boy
and as a man-child and then as an almost adult, story after story, and
by the end everyone there who knew him felt that he had been fully
rendered, and the few who did not know him believed they had missed an
extraordinary person. Finally, Scott spoke briefly about the accident,
and then he seemed to address the doctors and others who had cared for him.

"I've been thinking a lot in recent days about the operations he went
through, those that were necessary in an attempt to save his life and
those that he was subjected to for additional reasons, as well. The
difference, if there was one, was sometimes difficult to distinguish.
The ordeal was hard-perhaps hard for him and definitely hard for those
of us who loved him. I've had some tough words for doctors recently, and
I'm not going to take them back. But I would like them to know, everyone
who cared for Tyler, that I appreciate what they did and that I
understand it. It is not a bad thing to want to come up with a new
operation to lessen human suffering over the long run, even if in the
short run, it brings hardship and heartache to the individuals who first
undergo it. Please do not think that I do not recognize this fact, even
in the midst of my rage over the days he spent in the hospital and over
the final outcome."

He paused a moment, collected himself, and went on. "If Tyler's death
has contributed, even in some small way, to medical science, to an
understanding of how the brain works and how it can be helped to recover
from a deadly accident, then what happened to Tyler will not have been
as meaningless as it now appears. So whatever you do, please do not stop
your effort to advance the cause, despite what you may hear from me and
from others like me. And now that I have said this, what's on my mind, I
don't want to talk about it or think about it anymore."

He sat down, and music played once again, this time the final

241

chorus from Haydn's The Creation. Then he filed out, with Kate close
behind, onto the steps, where he absentmindedly accepted more hugs and
handshakes of commiseration. Kate noticed that the family of three hung
back a little before coming over. When they did, Scott put his arm
around the boy and said, "Johnny, I hope you know that this was not at
all your fault. You were smart and brave, and because of you, Tyler was
able to stay alive a little longer."

The boy looked grateful.

"Here," Scott said, "this is for you." He handed him the package.

The burial was held in Westport. Kate sat with Scott in the first car of
the cortege.

"What was in that package you gave that boy?" she asked.

"A koala bear. Tyler's. That was his best friend, Johnny."

She put her hand on his and they rode in silence for an hour and a half.
The graveside ceremony was mercifully brief. Tyler's grave was next to
Lydia's. Scott looked away as the coffin was lowered and then threw down
a small handful of dirt upon it, gently and reluctantly.

On the way back, as their car entered the city, the driver asked, "Where
would you like to go?"

Scott was still silent. He shook his head as if ridding it of a
loathsome thought, and looked at her.

"What do you feel like?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know. I just feel tired. I want to-you know what I want? I just
want to go someplace and sleep."

"I know just the place," she said, and she gave the driver the address.

When they arrived at her place, it was already early evening but still
light outside. The sidewalks were filled with people coming home from
work, men and women in light business wear, toting briefcases, walking
quickly with self-assurance. The late-summer air was electric, had that
sense that anything could happen.

She paid the cab. The elevator operator seemed to pick up the mood,
didn't say a word as they ascended to her floor. She unlocked the door
and tried to hold it open for him to walk through first, shifting her
foot against it, a moment of awkwardness.

He looked around but without really seeing, at her furniture, the prints
on the walls, the view out the window.

"Want a drink?" she asked.

He shook his head no.

242

"Want to sleep?"

He nodded his head yes.

She led the way to her bedroom, embarrassed at the mess-the tapes
stacked precariously next to the TV set, the open sewing box, the
magazines scattered about, a towel over a lamp neck, a pair of panties
resting on the back of a chair.

But he didn't seem to see any of it. He headed straight for the bed. She
left the room and closed the door behind her.

Then she read for hours, without really concentrating, and ordered in
Japanese food-enough for two, just in case. But he slept on.

Later, when it came time for her to sleep, she crept into the bedroom
and saw that he had left his jacket and shirt hanging on the back of a
chair and neatly folded his pants and put them on the seat. In the
bathroom, she changed into a cotton nightgown, brushed her teeth
quietly, and turned out the bathroom light before she opened the door
back to the bedroom.

Ever so carefully, she crossed to the other side of the bed and lifted
the sheet and slipped underneath, hovering on the edge of the mattress.
She could hear him next to her, breathing deeply, lost to sleep for the
first time in weeks. She lay awake for a while, listening to him, to the
regularity of his breathing, and she wished him peace from the bottom of
her heart.

243

Walking down Gansevoort Street, Scott faced the breeze blowing in from
the Hudson and felt a bite in the early September air. He lifted his
head up to it. The first stirrings of autumn- once his favorite season,
a time of sweet endings and crisp beginnings.

Not now. Now he was barely coping, trying to crawl out of the black
hole. September already. How quickly it had sneaked up on him. Time does
that-it's so cruel the way it continues in the rest of the world when
grief grinds our own clock to a halt. He felt that he had aged years
over the past summer.

His lips were dry. He wanted a drink, wanted it badly, but he would
resist, force himself to, as he had for almost two weeks now. He had had
his last one-forever, he vowed, because he had hit bottom. The binge
that had started a week after the funeral had been one for the books,
days upon days of steady drinking-double scotches, triple scotches,
going from bar to bar, finding the ones along the waterfront that stayed
open until dawn. Then staggering home, collapsing into bed, and
spiraling down into a deep sleep and waking up in the afternoon and
eating something-an egg, a sandwich-and starting off again with a couple
of beers. One morning, he awoke lying in the doorway of his building.
Later, when he poured orange juice his hand trembled so much he spilled it.

Kate had tried to help, but even she had given up, powerless before his
inner demons and outer fury. But now he would whip them.

He hadn't seen her for-how long?-not since he went on the wagon. He
barely remembered their last talk.

He turned into the art gallery, tucked away in the meat-packing

244

district, a chic address for those who liked to shop avant-garde among
loading docks where quartered carcasses and hacked joints were carried
by men in bloodstained white smocks.

Vickie was there, reading a magazine, and she smiled up at him, dark red
cropped hair cupping her face like slender fingers.

"You're early," she said.

"Got a lot to do."

"You've still got two days. The opening's not till six o'clock, so three
really."

"I know. But I'm behind."

"It looks finished."

"But it's not."

Scott entered the wide room to the rear.

He was behind. Over the past two weeks, he had gone through hundreds of
photos, sorting them, choosing them, cropping them, enlarging some,
discarding others. They had to be just right. They were sent out for
mounting and he still wasn't satisfied and chose others to substitute.
Then he had to hang them, leaving just enough space against the white
walls. And of course they had to be arranged in the proper order-they
had to tell a story. He was getting there, but still he wasn't quite
satisfied.

The exhibition had been Vickie's idea. A sometime girlfriend, their
romance had lapsed years ago by mutual consent and they had remained
close. She had made it big in the art market of the nineties and kept up
her downtown contacts. She'd wept at the funeral and, five days later
she'd dropped by his loft in the afternoon, waking him up. Leafing
through the photos of Tyler, she'd seen struck by a thunderbolt-or so
she said at the time. (Later, Scott was to wonder, Had she planned the
whole thing?) "You know what?" she proclaimed. "You've got such good
stuff here, you've got enough for an exhibition. How about it? Why don't
you show these photos of Tyler? I'll loan my gallery. It'll be a tribute
to him-think of it that way." Her enthusiasm had been infectious, but
Scott had been in no shape to catch it. He'd grunted something
noncommittal and said he would think about it. Nonetheless, the idea had
worked on him in his alcoholic stupor. He had kept returning to it in
moments of clarity, began conjuring it up, putting the photos on the
walls in his mind's eye, rearranging them, fixing the narrative. So
eventually he came to the

245

decision without ever making it-even now he couldn't pinpoint the exact
second he'd realized he wanted it more than anything in the world.

He would call the exhibit "A Boy's Life." It would begin with pictures
of Tyler as a baby and then follow him through all the years of growing
up, the arc of his brief existence. Assembling it had been a painful
backward journey for Scott, but he remained convinced that the
enterprise would be redeeming. There were so many outstanding
photos-maybe he could capture him, explain him to people who would never
know him, people like Kate and others, strangers. But at other times he
was discouraged. He thought of those millions of spontaneous moments
that went unrecorded by the camera, times when Tyler's face would open
in delight at some discovery or turn morose at some hidden thought.
Those unlooked-for moments of joy, contemplation, fear, boredom, anger,
petulance, love-those were the significant ones. That's when the thing
called life poked through so that others could see it and experience it.
And even those moments were little more than signifiers on the surface.
Because real life happened inside. Could he even pretend to come close
to documenting it? Make any sense out of it at all?

How presumptuous he was, he thought.

Scott sat at a large table stacked with prints. They were sorted in
manila folders by year, by camera, by theme, by season, by mood.

In his pocket was a roll of undeveloped film, the last roll he had
taken. They were pictures of Tyler in the hospital ward, shot through
the observation window on an afternoon when Scott had felt a sudden need
to record it-for what reason, he could not say. Should he throw it out?
Or should he develop it? Include it in the show, an accusatory coda? It
cut too deep-too personal, too intrusive. But what was the point of a
piece of work if it sidestepped ugly truth out of some high-minded sense
of dignity? And there was no dignity here, only the long lonely misery
of death.

He lit a cigarette. What would Tyler have wanted? Hard to say. He
remembered a discussion they'd once had when Tyler had read an article
by a writer whose daughter had contracted a dread disease. How could
someone do that? he had asked, looking up from the magazine at his
father. How could someone turn a horrible private experience into
something public-and for profit? Wasn't that obscene?

246

And yet scarcely a year later, he'd become a stickler for unflinching
truth when he'd begun nibbling at the edges of literature and admired
writers like Philip Roth and Frederick Exley who had the courage to turn
their own lives inside out and strip them bare for art.

Scott put the roll of film away in a drawer.

He began looking through the manila folders, going over the prints one
by one. They were from years ago, back when they lived in the old house
in Connecticut. There was Tyler as a toddler, squatting in knee-deep
water in Long Island Sound, the rocks hurting his feet, his face
contorted in crying. Never had any child looked so miserable. Scott
smiled as he remembered how, years later, Tyler would upbraid him for
taking that photo-"Why didn't you just come and rescue me?" he would
ask, joking. "What kind of parent were you?" Another shot of Tyler
standing on a porch-one which was long ago forgotten-and here he was
older, maybe four or five, naked as the day he was born and oblivious to
it, his penis falling naturally to one side, his right fist held across
his chest like a Roman emperor.

It was then that he came across a bunch of pictures in a folder that was
not labeled. They were puzzling, instantly familiar, though he couldn't
at first place where they had been taken-a dozen or so shots without
anyone in them. Yet they must have been important; why else would he
have shot them and gone to the trouble of developing them and saving
them all these years? He held one up, looked closely at it. There was a
wall, familiar wallpaper, a door jamb. It struck a distant chord-he knew
the pictures were for some reason important. Then the memory hit him
with a jolt. Of course. He had taken them inside Tyler's room, not long
after Lydia had died. The camera was angled up from Tyler's bed, at his
instruction, to frame the door. It was after that strange episode.

Scott thought back, the memories coming together. Tyler had received the
news of his mother's death quietly, seemingly with the forced stoicism
of childhood. And then, days later, he had made a confession of
something that bothered him and he'd talked about it for weeks
afterward-he'd insisted that he had seen her standing in his doorway at
the moment her plane crashed. He was scared of going to sleep, and so
his father had tried to convince him that nothing was there, that photos
would pick up any disturbance, even things

247

not seen by the human eye. For four or five nights, they'd taken the
pictures together, and of course, they showed nothing. They did not,
however, do the trick. Tyler was still anxious every night at bedtime.
And so his father would stay and tell him stories-about Jingo and the
house with the thousand rooms, and behind each and every door lay a new
adventure, sometimes funny, sometimes scary.

Scott had to stop. Enough for now. His stomach was churning, and he felt
the hole inside growing bigger. A ghost of desire passed through him,
but he shook it off. He had to be strong-he was not going to try to fill
that hole with alcohol. Not now, not ever.

He took Vickie out for a cup of coffee, wanting company. She talked, as
she always did, nonstop. Then she looked across the table at him and
said, "You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"

He smiled. The truth was, he hadn't. He had been thinking of someone else.

He spotted Kate at once coming out of the hospital-a gray suit,
honey-colored hair spilling onto her shoulders, pointed chin, a vigorous
stride. He realized, with a start, that she was good-looking- very
good-looking. He had known that before, but hadn't paid much attention
to it.

"Hi," she said, as soon as she saw him, her face spreading in a warm
smile. No recriminations.

"Thought I'd meet you after work. Doing anything?"

"Not right now."

He fell in beside her.

"I'm glad to see you," she said. "How're you doing?" She stepped back, a
bit theatrically, and looked him over top to bottom. "You look better
than the last time I saw you."

"I am better." He searched for the words. "I thought the time had come
to clean up my act."

"Good."

They walked by the East River along a promenade, cars whizzing by below,
the river choppy with tiny whitecaps.

She turned toward him and looked him in the eye.

"You know drinking will get you. Sooner or later, it'll kill you-

248

in your case, probably sooner. I'm your friend, but now I'm speaking as
a doctor."

"I know that. I've stopped-for good."

"Are you in a program?"

"You mean AA?"

She nodded. "I've seen it work-for lots of people," she said. "Some of
them so far gone you'd think they're beyond help."

"I tried it a couple of times before. I have a problem with the 'higher
being' part. But I've assimilated some of the concepts. One day at a
time, and all that."

"Still, the other people help. They support you. You need that."

"You're probably right."

"You should go again. Do it. Promise me you will."

He promised, and meant it-much to his own amazement.

They sat on a bench. Scott told her about the exhibition. She was
excited, seemed genuinely happy for him, and promised that she would be
there for the opening.

"I can't wait," she said.

Scott described the experience of sorting through all the pictures of
Tyler. He soon found that he was telling her about the photos of the
bedroom doorway, Tyler's insistence that his mother had appeared before
him at the moment of death, standing there and making a gesture with one
arm, a waving sort of motion that he couldn't interpret and couldn't
describe.

"I know it sounds strange," Scott said, "but I believe him-I mean he was
so certain that he saw her. And why would he make it up?"

"Maybe it was his mind playing tricks on him. Maybe it was somehow his
way of dealing with the loss-convincing himself that she loved him so
much that she had to come back and say good-bye."

"But if that's the case why wouldn't she do something loving, hug him or
something, instead of making some vague gesture that filled him with
fear whenever he talked about it?"

"I don't know," she replied.

"I tend to be a skeptic about supernatural things but this one . . . I'm
not sure-I think it happened. And another strange thing-when I had to go
in the next morning and tell him that his mother died, he seemed to know
it already. He didn't say that, but I could tell by the way he was acting."

249

Kate nodded vigorously.

"You know-this is going to sound crazy," she said. "But my mother
claimed to have a similar experience, the exact same kind of thing."

"What do you mean? Like what?"

"When her husband . . . my father . . . died in Vietnam. We lived on
this mountain in Washington-I think I told you that. It was way out in
the wilds. On the day he died, there was a wedding at our house. Our
house was a big old beautiful ramshackle kind of place, with a barn and
everything. It was poor, but we had land, about twenty acres, even a
small apple orchard. Down the road was a young couple, and they would
come up and do odd jobs for us every once in a while, help out with
hauling hay for the animals or babysitting me. I don't remember them all
that well. Anyway, it turned out they were just living together, they
had never gotten married, and one day they decided to, so my mom offered
our place.

"In our backyard we had a large sycamore tree transplanted from the
East, a beautiful thing, and they were married under that. A local
justice of the peace performed the ceremony. After the ceremony, after
the dinner when most of the people had left, as my mom was cleaning up,
she was washing a wineglass at the sink and suddenly she felt strange.
It came out of nowhere and it was a strong sensation, really powerful.
Later, she said it felt like she was dizzy. And she knew instantly that
something was wrong and that it was about him-my dad. She stepped
outside to catch her breath and went under that same tree and went to
sit down and just sank to the bottom of the trunk, and she knew right
then that he had been hurt. Just like that. She spoke to him over and
over-'Darling, what's wrong? What's wrong?'-but he didn't respond, not
at first. And then he appeared before her, no more than twenty feet
away, and he just looked at her, a long look-she said it must have
lasted a minute at least-and he didn't say anything but just looked.
Then he disappeared as quickly as he had come. And another thing-he was
wearing his uniform, and she had never even seen him in his uniform before.

"And two days later, a car came up to our mountaintop and a retired
colonel delivered the news, not looking her in the eye but looking down
at the dirt. I was hanging on her skirt behind her-I don't remember
that; she told me it later. The colonel said he wanted to talk to her
alone, so I was shooed indoors. Then he said that my dad

250

had died. He said at least he went quickly, no suffering. And she asked
the question: When did it happen? And he told her. After a few more
words, the colonel went away, and that night she took me in her arms and
rocked me and rocked me until I fell asleep. Then she carried me into
the bedroom and put me in bed and went to the kitchen table and pulled
out an atlas and did the calculations-the exact spot in the Mekong
Delta, the time difference, no daylight savings-and sure enough, it all
matched up perfectly."

Kate's gaze moved from the river to Scott. She saw that he was hanging
on her words.

"My mom wasn't superstitious. She was the last person to believe in that
kind of spiritual stuff-'mumbo jumbo,' she called it. But ever after,
she said that her husband had come to say good-bye just as he was dying.
And who's to say it's impossible? 'There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio.' So what if he was on the other side of the earth-if
there is such a thing as a spirit, then who's to say what it can do and
what it can't do, if it's willing, if the love is strong enough? And
there's a final chapter. Years later, when it came her time to die- a
long slow death from cancer-she saw him again near the very end. He
materialized at the foot of her bed and spoke to her, and she wasn't
afraid any longer."

Kate's words trailed off. She was feeling a little drained. She had
never told anyone that entire story before-it had been too close to her
heart-and when she looked down, she was surprised to see that she was
gripping Scott's hand. She couldn't say whether he had reached over to
take hers or she had reached over to take his.

She removed her hand to wipe her eyes, laughing a little at her
silliness for crying. She hadn't told the whole story, the part about
her mother dying alone in the nursing home without her daughter there or
the sparrow who'd lit on her head at the funeral.

Through the cigarette smoke, the chatter, and the bobbing heads of the
crowd, Vickie saw Scott and gave him a thumbs-up: The opening was going
well.

Inwardly, Scott blanched.

She was always one for a big party, he thought.

251

He knew he was being uncharitable, but couldn't help it. It was nice
that so many people had turned up. The gallery was packed with more than
half of the city's photographer community-though that was hardly the
proper word to describe such a disparate, querulous, and reflexively
antisocial group of people. Not that many invitations had been mailed
out, but word had gotten around.

Scott could have taken the turnout as a tribute to himself, a token of
the respect with which he was regarded. But he chose not to. Why put
such a positive spin on things when negativity is there to guide you?

Vickie worked her way over to him. She was holding her wineglass
unsteadily and spilled some on the floor, then pulled his head down as
if to whisper confidences in his ear.

"It's a smash," she said, so loudly that he recoiled.

He forced himself to smile.

She continued, speaking in a higher, squeaky register to get through. "A
lot of people have come up to me and asked if they can buy some. Why not?"

"Because they're not for sale."

"But why not?" she pressed on, giddy from the wine.

"Because I don't want to sell them-that's why."

"Oh, Scott. You're so down. Here-have a glass of wine."

He found a hole in the crowd and darted through it. He was sweating
profusely and felt stifled. There was nothing in the world he wanted
more right now than a glass of wine. But, thank God, so far at least he
had been able to quash that desire. He worked his way to the end of the
room, where four people were grouped around the final picture-a shot of
Tyler in the hospital ward. At the last minute, he had decided to
include it and had given it pride of place. The instant he'd put it up,
he was sorry, but then again he'd felt that it belonged there and
couldn't bring himself to remove it. Vickie had encouraged him to keep
it in the exhibition-but, of course, she would. It made for a powerful
climax.

He dreaded to hear what the group was saying, but couldn't resist and so
he moved closer. Two young men and two women-none of them known to him.

"Just horrible," said one of the women. "Really horrible. I heard it was
some kind of mountain-climbing accident."

252

The other woman chimed in: "How old was he? Fourteen or fifteen? Isn't
that young to be mountain climbing?"

"This picture gives me the creeps," said one of the men.

Scott made a break for it, pushing around the edges of the crowd to
reach the glass front door. He put his hand in the small of a man's back
and nudged him out of the way, none too gently. Finally, he came to the
door, lunged for the handle, and pushed it hard.

"Ow," came a sound from the other side.

He looked-there stood Kate, rubbing her nose.

He stepped outside.

"Don't go in there," he said.

"Why not?"

"Just don't."

"Don't be silly-I've come all this way to see it." She was still rubbing
her nose. "You might say I'm. sorry."

"For what?"

"Never mind, I'll recover. But let go of my arm."

She shook him off.

"I mean it-don't go in."

"You'll have to give me a good reason."

"Because I don't want you to see it. It doesn't work. The whole
idea-it's wrong. I never should have tried it."

"There's a big crowd-they look like they're enjoying it."

"Enjoying it. They're not supposed to enjoy it."

"Okay. So I used the wrong word. What I meant to say was your pictures
seem to be affecting those who view them. There-is that better?"

"Not much."

"What's the matter with you? You look strange."

"This whole thing was a mistake."

"How can you say that?"

"Because it's true. And if Tyler were alive and saw this, he'd be . ..
he'd be mortified."

"I don't think so. I mean, it's a way of presenting his life, who he was."

"Who he was. What do you know about it? You never met him."

"What's wrong with you? Why do you say that?"

"It's true. You came in at the end when he was no longer himself."

253

"Still, I feel I know him in some way, I've heard so much-"

"You didn't know him."

"No, but I almost feel I did."

His mind was on the bar inside, the hip-looking bartenders handing out
glasses of white and red wine to anyone. It would be so easy. . . . And
it was an opening; that's tough on anyone.

"I never should have included that last picture, the one in the hospital."

"You can take it down."

"It's too late. I should have just put up a shot of all the doctors, a
group picture, standing there, maybe in their surgical gowns-"

"Scott-c'mon."

"-smiling for the camera."

"Scott. . . don't say that."

"Why not?"

He stormed off down the street in the direction of the river. Halfway
down the block, he turned and looked back. She was standing there,
indecisive, one hand on the door. She didn't see him looking. He hurried on.

Then the door swung open. A couple came out and headed for a waiting
limousine, the woman's laughter carrying across the street in the
late-afternoon silence. With the open door beckoning, Kate looked down
the street at his retreating back and stepped inside.

254

It was close to midnight when Scott let himself into the gallery with
the small brass key Vickie had given him. The detritus from the crowd
was everywhere. Empty and half-filled plastic cups covered the tables
and windowsills, some containing waterlogged cigarette butts that opened
like rancid flowers. The smell of stale smoke hung in the air. A small
black purse had been left behind in one corner.

The fancier the crowd, the more piggish the litter, he thought.

He kept the lights low, and the photos all around him took on a ghostly
appearance in the half-light. He walked over to the last display wall
and gently lifted off the picture of Tyler in the hospital bed and
carried it under his arm into the workroom to the rear. He flipped the
light switch and was momentarily blinded by the glare of the overhead
lamps. He placed the photograph on the worktable and sat before it,
staring at it. It filled him with dread and anger, as it always did,
only more so this time, alone at night in a stifling room.

He felt unaccountably strange. He looked around, surveying the place,
checking out the shadows in the corners, over there behind the filing
cabinet, the dark reflection of his angular profile in the lone window
on the back wall.

A wave of anxiety swept over him. He had the feeling-absurd, he
knew-that someone else was there, watching him.

He tried to push the feeling away, to get on with the task at hand. He
turned the photograph facedown and gently pried open the stays at the
back, removing the cardboard backing, then the white beveled frame. He
lifted out the picture and turned it over to look at it. He felt a
shiver seize his back and move up into his shoulders.

There it was, the last photograph of his son-the white sheets,

255

255

the antiseptic bed, the small figure encased in white, wrapped up like a
mummy. Tyler's face-the face that Scott knew so well-was scrunched down
by the bandages into a grimace so that he was almost unrecognizable. He
scrutinized it, tried to look through the shadings and shadows. Were
those lines on his face lines of pain? Were the cheeks swollen by the
accident or the operation? Was his look so waxen because his body was
trying desperately to pump its life's blood up to the damaged brain? The
longer he looked, the more questions leapt up to plague him. Now, he
could almost hear in the background the cursed machines droning on and
on. He could hear them, the steady beat of electronic pulses that
mimicked life's rhythms.

What had ever possessed him to put this photograph up for thousands to
view? It made a mockery of the whole concept behind the exhibition-it
was not life, not a boy's life, but the exact opposite, the absence of
life, artificial life. His own brain was trying to purge this very same
image from his memory, and here he had plastered it on the wall as the
conclusion to his son's recorded life.

Again, free-floating anxiety gripped him. He was sweating madly. Maybe
he was being punished, was punishing himself, for bad faith. The lyrics
to a song popped into his head:

^Cause Ymfree . . . Free fallin'. . .

Where had he just heard it? My God, it was at Tyler's funeral- of course.

He picked up the photograph and held it with two hands and then very
carefully pulled it in two and ripped it down the center. He put the
pieces together and ripped them again and then made smaller piles,
ripping each one.

He imagined that he was listening for a scream, but of course he heard
none. So who was this other person here? A guilty conscience?

He tossed the pieces into a wastebasket, and as soon as they touched
bottom, he felt a strong urge to flee this suffocating place.

But first-one more thing to do.

The exhibition was on the gallery's Web site. He would have to go there
through the gallery's computer if he wanted to fully expunge that single
hateful image. He sat before the computer and switched it

256

on and waited for the screen to fill, and as he did, he stopped sweating
and began to feel strangely cold. What was going on? Have I fallen sick?
Why am I shivering like this?

The screen was ready. A desktop of swirling leaves, icons, a click to go
on-line. The machine demanded a password and he prepared to enter
Vickie's. His fingers were posed over the keyboard. And then, before he
touched a single key, there it was. His own password appeared all by itself.

It read, letter by letter:

JINGO

But how was that possible? I don't recall entering it into the computer.

Besides, passwords were not supposed to be displayed like that. And why
had it come up letter by letter, almost as if there was someone on the
other end, someone laboriously typing it in? On the other end of. . . what?

There must be a virus, he thought. Either that or the computer had
somehow lifted it from the last time he used it. He didn't like that at
all-these things are supposed to be inviolate. Maybe somehow some hacker
had gotten hold of it. Who knows what damage he could do? Scott started
thinking back over his files, what kinds of information were kept
there-financial information, e-mails, the usual sort of thing. Nothing
really personal, nothing that would mortify him if it got out. His life
was not interesting enough to have deep dark secrets, he thought
sardonically.

But then his ruminations came to a dead stop. Because the screen came
alive. His hands were nowhere near the keyboard-yet the words were
appearing on their own.

Again slowly, letter by letter, as if someone-somewhere-were pecking at
the keyboard. Is it going to be gibberish?

THE

He waited breathlessly as the words kept coming, the sentence took shape.

THE LITTL

257

And when it did, when the sentence was complete, he nearly jumped out of
his skin. Because it was far from meaningless.

THE LITTLE BOY FELT BORED.

No one else knows that-no one but Tyler and me. He must have told
someone. Someone has hacked into the computer. And they know our secret
. . . our secret way of talking. The story I told him every night.

It didn't stop there. The computer kept going, all on its own, picking
up a little speed now, until it had finished its message.

SO HE REACHED UNDER HIS BED AND THERE HE FOUND HIS MAGIC PEBBLE. HE
RUBBED IT AND SOMETHING VERY STRANGE HAPPENED.

Damn right it's strange, Scott thought. Strange and sick. But I'm going
to get to the bottom of it. And whoever is responsible is going to pay.

He switched off the computer without even clearing the screen. Then he
turned out the lights and stormed outside, so angry that he walked all
the way home. He took Comet outside and passed by a bar twice,
congratulating himself that he didn't go in, but worried because the
pull he felt was so strong.

Johnny's father was surprised to hear from Scott-surprised and a little
nervous because he hadn't expected a call and because they hadn't talked
since the funeral, a month ago.

The family was trying in its own way to pull itself together and patch
over the past. Johnny wouldn't talk about the accident. His mother and
his father had each tried to draw him out, to tell him that it wasn't
his fault, that he had done everything that could have been expected.
But their words just fell away like drops on a window-pane-nothing could
reach the boy. He'd constructed a shell around himself. After two weeks,
they'd taken him to a therapist, but the results were not much better.
Johnny had cried once, full out, the therapist reported, in describing
how Tyler had fallen and how he himself had tried to hurry down the
cliff to reach him but couldn't find him

258

at first. Then he had fallen silent and resolutely refused to talk about
it anymore.

"Why is it," the father asked the therapist after the last session,
"that children take so much guilt upon themselves? Why do they think
that bad things are their fault?"

The therapist had shrugged and had looked the father square in the eye
and replied, "And not just children."

And now here was Scott, calling and asking to speak to Johnny.

"Of course, I'll get him," said the father. But he lingered on the line.
"Tell me, how are you-how are you doing?" He felt foolish using such
ordinary words, the way you might talk to someone who had been out with
a toothache.

"Okay," replied Scott. "How's Johnny? I worry about him. He didn't look
very good the last time I saw him."

"No, he's not."

"Does he talk about it?"

"No, he doesn't. That's one of the problems. The bear you gave him was a
kind thought, though. It means a lot-he sleeps with it every night."
Still, he lingered. "Scott, can I ask-what do you want Johnny for?"

"I want to ask him something."

"What? If I may ask."

Scott paused, thinking, then said, "Well, a strange thing happened. When
I went to use a computer last night, my password jumped on the screen
without my doing anything, and then . . . other things appeared. Words
were written all by themselves, and some of them-look, this is hard to
explain. I know it sounds crazy."

"Go on."

"Well, one of the things that appeared was something that only Tyler and
I knew about, as far as I know, and so I want to know if maybe Tyler
told Johnny about it."

"What would that prove?"

"I don't know. But I need to know how this thing happened. Whether
there's a hacker or what."

"Do you think Johnny would be mixed up in something like that?"

"No, I don't. Not at all. I know he wouldn't be. But like I say, I need
to know what's happening, and I thought maybe he would have some idea
where to look."

259

"Ah . . . listen. Wait a minute."

Johnny's father covered the receiver with one hand. His wife was at his
side, having heard his end of the conversation, her eyebrows raised in
concern. He filled her in. Scott heard more muffled sounds, then the
father's voice, exasperated, speaking to her: "I know, I know."

He came back on the line.

"Well, we've talked it over, Sarah and me, and here's what we think. We
think we will definitely try to get an answer to your question. But
maybe it's better if we talk to him. I mean, I know it's nothing
compared to what you're going through, but this whole business has been
rough on him, too."

Scott said he understood and that he worried about Johnny. But he wanted
an answer; he had to have one. And the boy might tell his parents more
easily than he would tell him.

"Okay," he said. "Well, what you have to ask him about is a made-up
character . . . called Jingo. That's a boy that I used to tell Tyler
about for a good-night story, and every time the story began the same
way. What you have to ask is how the story began."

Johnny's father felt a rush of sympathy. "How it began?"

"Yes, that's all. And call me back-soon. I need to know this."

"Sure thing."

"And I hope Johnny's okay."

"Thanks."

They hung up.

Later that day, when Johnny's mother fixed him a lunch of tomato soup
and a bologna sandwich-his favorite-and put it before him, she gently
broached the subject. Had he by any chance heard of a made-up character
by the name of Jingo? A sort of nursery-room fairy-tale character? He
was dumbfounded-no, not at all. Why was she asking, he demanded, and she
replied, "Oh, no reason, really. Just curious," as if it were the most
natural question in the world.

Johnny's father called Scott back and told him. As he hung up the phone,
he turned to Sarah and shook his head sadly and said, "Lord, he's in a
bad way. Hearing things, seeing things. I wish there were something we
could do for him."

"But he's got to ask for help," she said. "He's got to reach out."

260

"Johnny didn't."

"That's different," she said, putting away a dish. "He's our son."

Scott went back to the art gallery that evening. Vickie was talking on
the phone when he entered. Cradling the receiver against her neck, she
pointed a well-manicured forefinger at him and rubbed the other one
against it, a cutesy-pie you've-been-a-naughty-boy gesture. She prattled
on while he waited and then hung up, gave a loud sigh, and proceeded to
upbraid him, halfheartedly, for walking out on his opening.

"One of the biggest shows of the year and you pick that moment to turn
into a sensitive artiste-you of all people. Christ, you used to shoot
slums, famine, wars. Now look at you-a few big spenders from the Upper
East Side and you turn tail."

He remained silent.

"If I could have sold your pictures, you'd be looking at a rich woman
right now. 'Course, you can always change your mind."

He shook his head.

"And I see you took down the last photo. Not smart. Leaves the whole
thing hanging. I just wish we could have talked about it first."

Then she noticed he was preoccupied. "And now-you're not listening to
me. Am I right or am I right?"

"I need to use your computer," was all he said.

She turned one wrist toward the back room, a diva's motion.

"Help yourself, Mr. Artiste."

The rear office looked exactly as it had the night before. The papers
were stacked in the same piles on the filing cabinet, and the ashtray
was overflowing with butts ringed in lipstick. The wastebasket still
held the shreds of the photo he had destroyed. And in the middle of the
desk, its keyboard extended, its screen dark and tilted upward as if in
eager expectation, sat the computer.

He circled around it once, sat down before it, and stood up again. He
approached the door and shouted out, "How much longer you going to be
here, anyway?"

"Not long," she said. She came to the door and leaned against the frame.
"Why? You planning on visiting some porno sites? Careful- that can be
traced, you know. I don't wanna be closed down."

261

He turned his head away.

"Art's one thing," she continued. "Porn's another."

He turned his back.

"Oh, well, I know when I'm not wanted. I was leaving anyway. Just take a
minute to gather my things."

Her high heels clacked against the wooden floor.

"Don't forget to lock up," she yelled.

He waited until the front door closed. Then he sat down again and braced
himself and stared at the blank, gray-brown screen. There was depth to
it, which he had not realized before-he could see his reflection. His
face staring back looked lean and haggard. His eyes were wells of
sorrow. He looked down and ran his fingers over the keys like a man
sitting down for the first time at a piano. He waited a while. Then he
leaned down and switched the computer on and sat back in the chair, far
away from it. He heard the humming sound of the machine booting up. He
squinted at the screen and waited some more while lights flashed and
incomprehensible numbers and letters marched across and then the
familiar desktop appeared, swirling leaves. It made him giddy to look at
them.

He felt an artery throbbing in his neck-he could hear it, too,
beat-beating inside his ears. The hairs on the back of his neck
bristled. He was beginning to sweat, just like last night, and thought
he was beginning to shiver, too, unless-unless he was imagining it.

He watched the screen carefully. He clicked the icon to go online. It
asked for his password. The cursor blinked.

Nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

He waited. Still blinking. How long should he wait?

Then it dawned on him, the thought that he hadn't wanted to entertain,
and he put it in the form of a question to himself so he could almost
hear himself speaking: What if it doesn't come again?

And he didn't know the answer. Another question posed itself: How would
I feel? Deep, deep relief, like the passing of a nightmare, or
disappointment? Why disappointment if he was fully convinced, as he had
told himself he was, that last night's occurrence had been nothing more
than a malicious prank? What else could it possibly be? He knew it was,
but still he was intrigued: Who out there could possibly have known
about their secret ritual?

262

Should he go on-line?

He did. A quick punch of his password-

JINGO

-and he was there.

Now what? He didn't know.

He waited some more and not knowing what else to do went to a browser
and then a search engine and began typing idly, or not so idly:

ONCE THERE WAS A LITTLE BOY WHO FELT BORED.

He hit enter. Nothing. He continued:

SO ONE DAY HE FELT UNDER HIS BED.

Enter.

Still nothing.

AND THERE HE FOUND A MAGIC PEBBLE.

Enter.

He waited for a long, long time. Until he felt foolish and confused and,
none the wiser, shut off the machine and the lights, locked the door,
and walked home.

Scott heard Comet barking even before the elevator came to a halt. He
felt guilty-he was leaving her alone far too long these days. On top of
that, he was sure the dog missed Tyler, who used to take her for long
walks through Chelsea Park and let her sleep on his bed.

Sure enough, he spotted a puddle as soon as he opened the door. She just
couldn't wait. Comet herself was in a state of high excitement.

263

She jumped up to greet him, placing her forepaws squarely on his rib
cage, and then backed off and leapt around the loft. He had never seen a
display like this-she was whining for joy-and it only made him feel even
guiltier.

"Okay, old girl, okay. Take it easy. I'll walk you in a minute," he said
as he ruffled the fur on the back of her neck, then rolled her over and
scratched the creamy pink flesh of her belly, causing her back leg to
dance in the air. She certainly was excited.

"There's just the two of us now," he added, out of nowhere.

He used paper towels to clean up the mess, which he put in a plastic
garbage bag. Rummaging under the sink for a replacement bag, he knocked
into some bottles-a sound he knew well. He rose up out of the squat and
leaned back against the sink for a while, thinking.

What the hell, he decided. Let's do it. And so he reached back down and
pulled out a bottle of J&B, then another, and a third that was
half-full. One after another, he poured the contents down the drain. The
familiar sour grainy smell went straight to his brain. He hoped he was
doing the right thing. He had been meaning to dispose of the stuff for a
while now, but something had always stopped him: the comforting
knowledge that the liquor was there if he really needed it. At the same
time its presence endowed him with a false sense of willpower-for being
able to refuse it when it was so close at hand. Either way, he figured,
he was still a slave to it. Better to be rid of it once and for all.

No regrets, he thought as the last of the brown liquid swirled out of
sight. He caught a view of his face in the small shaving mirror over the
sink-he looked okay, maybe a little ashen, a few more wrinkles, but
still himself, despite what he had been through. And he thought he
better say it out loud, so he did, looking right into his own eyes. "No
regrets."

Then he picked up the garbage bag and took Comet's green leather leash
off the hook by the door. Usually just the sight of it was enough to
send her spinning in circles, but this time she appeared confused and
continued to whine, her tail low.

"C'mon, old girl."

She sat in the elevator. His love for the dog was more intense now that
Tyler was gone. He didn't care to analyze it, but he knew that the
reason was that the dog was one of the few living connections to his son.

264

Together they went out into the night air, now unseasonably cold. Scott
tossed the garbage bag and the empty bottles into a trash can and walked
east on Twenty-eighth Street, passing the LIEBERMAN BROTHERS sign on the
old storefront. The sidewalks were empty except for a man and woman
strolling arm in arm across the street. He was glad it was not a man and
a young boy. Whenever he passed such a couple, the pain became so
palpable he could hardly bear it. Only that afternoon, he had walked by
a father and a boy holding hands, the boy babbling along and asking
questions quick from the hip-"Dad, how come things look different if I
open one eye and close the other real quick?" and "Why is that man
begging for money? Why isn't he at work?" Scott had felt like grabbing
the father by the arm, issuing dire warnings, frothing at the mouth like
the ancient mariner, saying, "By God, enjoy your blessing; every second
you spend is a treasure beyond belief."

Taxis slowed on Eighth Avenue-not for him, for a man across the street.
A person walking a dog rarely hailed a cab. He took the corner, then
back west on Twenty-seventh, facing the wind from the river, and then up
a block and east again to his own doorway. Again, in the elevator, Comet
seemed agitated. Once inside, she began whining again, so he fed her.
But she did not eat.

Scott's computer on the desk was still on from a letter he had been
writing earlier. For no particular reason, he sat before it and touched
a key, causing the screen saver to drop away and the white screen to
spring to life.

And then it began spelling words, all on its own, in that slow,
laborious fashion. And the words it spelled were

AT FIRST HE FELT HOT, AND THEN HE FELT COLD

A long pause. Longer still. Scott put his fingers on the keyboard, his
breath knocked out of him. He typed

And then he felt warm and then he felt cool.

He waited, confused, scared, not angry this time. The computer barely
skipped a beat in answering, the letters coming quicker now:

265

AND FINALLY HE FELT JUST RIGHT.

Scott panicked. He wasn't sure he knew the rest of the words. Maybe he
had to get them just right; maybe the spell would be broken. How was
this happening? How could any computer do this? He typed rapidly:

There was a big white mansion, and so Jingo went up the front steps and
opened the front door and stretching before him was a long corridor as
far as he could see . . .

He stopped and waited, breathless. Nothing happened. Maybe I got it
wrong. What happens if the words are wrong? Maybe I went on too long.

He felt he had broken an incantation, a summoning. And the longer he
waited without a response, the more he became convinced that he had done
something wrong and the more panicky he became. Should he type in a
question? Ask who was doing this-how it was happening?

But then-to his relief and to his horror-more words did begin to form
themselves, coming slowly, as if from a deep place, and when he read
them, he felt his heart being ripped from his chest.

DAD. HELP ME. HELP ME DAD

Scott leapt at the keyboard. He pounded the keys furiously.

Tyler, Son. Is that you???

There was no answer. He waited a long time, trying to silence the
pounding in his ears, trying to think. Should he try again-would that
disrupt the answer from-from wherever it was coming? He did try again.

Tyler, where are you???

And this time the answer came back even more slowly than before, each
letter taking five, ten seconds, so that before the word

266

was finished, he knew what it was going to say. And he knew that it
would be with him forever and that his life would never be the same.

The answer was a single word:

E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E

267

Saramaggio walked into the cafeteria at St. Cat's carrying his tray and
searched for someone friendly to sit with. He saw some people looking at
him and he half imagined that they were talking about him, or would be
as soon as he turned his back. He scanned the room almost desperately.

After taking so much time off, he was a bit nervous about being back,
and he was doubly nervous at the prospect of operating. He had once
heard a story about the men who walk across steel girders at
construction sites as the building grows-that they're fearless when they
rise from the ground to dizzying heights floor by floor, but let them be
out for three weeks and return to a building that's gone five or six
floors higher and they get the heebie-jeebies. He felt a bit like that now.

Following the harrowing night that Tyler had died, he needed the leave.
He had been heartened by what Tyler's father had said at the funeral-his
words about medical progress and the need to lessen human suffering over
the long run showed a spirit of magnanimity and forgiveness that almost
brought tears to his eyes. He felt that they were intended for him, and
he took them personally.

But he couldn't convince himself that he deserved them. Nor did they
lift a burden of guilt. For he was honest enough to admit that he had
plenty to feel guilty about. He had ignored the implications of Scott's
pain and pressed ahead with Tyler's operation, partly because he wanted
to advance the frontiers of medicine but also because he wanted to
further his own ambition. And he'd stepped across the line and across
the boundary of the Hippocratic oath when he'd put so much trust in
Cleaver's machines; a voice deep inside had told him that relying upon a
computer to direct the functioning of the

268

autonomic nervous system was so problematic that the odds against it
succeeding were daunting. He had always prided himself on the surgeon's
second sight, and this time he had disregarded it.

And there was more. He had shown bad judgment that night; he had folded
under pressure and done something whose implications he was only now
beginning to discern. One result was that he felt under Cleaver's thumb,
which was insupportable. He had always disliked him-everyone did-but
before, he had been able to accommodate the feeling by looking down on
him. Now, after their secret collusion, he had the impression that power
was slipping away into the other man's hands. Their relationship was
like a seesaw; and suddenly Cleaver was the one with both feet planted
on the ground, while Saramaggio's swung helplessly in the air.

After a week moping around his house in Greenwich, occasionally
meandering along the paths of the Audubon Center while the first leaves
of autumn toppled down around him, he'd decided to seek professional
help. He'd chosen a psychiatrist named Bill Swenson, whom he knew
socially but not too well. They belonged to the Round Hill Country Club
and nodded to each other on the golf course with a distant respect,
members at opposite ends of the medical fraternity.

Swenson agreed to see Saramaggio instantly-almost gleefully, Saramaggio
thought-and initially without fee, the not-quite-spelled-out
understanding (contained in the words "you'd do the same for me") being
that sometime in the future he might require surgery. The arrangement
broke down when it was clear that more sessions were required, and
Saramaggio extended his leave by adding on vacation time.

At the first session, the surgeon was guarded and silent much of the
time. Swenson told him that he was being hostile, and Saramaggio
replied, with only half a smile, that he was just acting normal. In
subsequent sessions, he was able for the most part to keep up the air of
defensive aloofness, though once or twice, in discussing Tyler, he felt
himself on the verge of tears.

One time, he fixed his eyes upon Swenson and asked, "Tell me, is it true
this notion of patient confidentiality?"

"What do you mean?" Swenson asked.

"If I told you that I had done something . . . unethical . . . maybe

269

even illegal, certainly enough to possibly lose the right to practice .
. . would you be honor-bound to keep it to yourself?"

"Of course. Provided that no one's life was at stake. Why do you ask?"

"I just wondered."

"Come, come. Something is troubling you."

And Saramaggio said that indeed something was, but he threw up a smoke
screen, saying that he was concerned that he could never operate again.
Dramatically, he held up his right hand to arm's length and rotated it
so that his slender fingers turned orbs in the air. When he voiced the
fear, there was enough hidden truth to it that Swenson bought it and
followed a red herring.

But in other ways Swenson was good-not for nothing could he afford a
home in Greenwich-and after several more weeks of intensive sessions,
and with the aid of little white pills, he pretty much had Saramaggio
back on his feet, though to the discerning eye the surgeon's old
confidence wasn't what it had been. And on the morning that Saramaggio
returned to St. Cat's, he actually nodded to doctors and even interns
when he passed them in the hallways.

Kate saw him enter the cafeteria and looked down at her tray, but to her
dismay, when she looked up, he was standing before her.

"Mind if I join you?"

She didn't see how she could say no, but she couldn't bring herself to
say yes, so she gave a half-nod, which he took as assent. At first they
didn't say anything, and then they engaged in awkward small talk. But
finally Kate, who had begun to soften toward him despite herself, found
that she was burning with curiosity. She fixed him with her piercing
eyes and said, "I don't mean to intrude-and please tell me if I am-but I
feel I should ask you something."

"Please, by all means," he said, not meeting her gaze.

"Are you . . . are you all right? You seem different since you've been
back."

"Different? How? I mean, in what way?"

"You seem-well, you seem less cocksure." She had deliberately chosen a
word that he might find insulting.

"I do," he replied quietly. It was a statement, not a question.

And that was all it took to get him going. Perhaps it was the

270

reaction of someone who had undergone a crash course in analysis, but he
actually talked about himself and his emotions. He said that it had been
hard for him to get over Tyler's death and that he even felt a certain
amount of guilt about it. He talked about the specter of depression-what
Churchill called "the black dog"-and how he, too, had his own black dog
that was tailing him. He even came close to admitting that he felt a
little worried about walking into the OR and picking up a scalpel.

Amazing, she thought-truly amazing. One brick is pulled out and the
whole wall comes tumbling down. And she felt she wanted to rebuild it,
though not as high or as impenetrable as before.

"You know," she said. "I think you made a mistake, a horrible mistake.
But what makes a difference is when someone can profit from the mistake,
when he can recognize it and learn from it, and that you're clearly
trying to do."

He looked at her directly.

"Well, that's true. Maybe a bit trite, but true."

And she went on to tell him that she thought his skill as a surgeon was
as good as anyone's she had seen, that he had a gift and owed it to
himself and others to put it back to work. There was one area, one major
area, where she thought him deficient, she said, and that was in
empathy. She quoted her mentor, A. B. Reinhardt, as saying, " 'A surgeon
who cannot imagine what it is like to undergo the horrors that he is
perpetrating upon another human being is neither a good surgeon nor a
good human being.' "

He nodded quietly.

"I don't mean to sound like a fortune cookie," she continued. "But I
believe it's true-empathy and compassion begin with our own suffering.
Only by knowing pain ourselves do we understand pain and learn how to
avoid giving it to others."

He took it in.

"Let me ask you something," he said. "The father, Tyler's father . . .
what's his name?"

"His name is Scott-and incidentally, you might begin your new leaf by
learning the names of your patient's relatives."

"I suppose you're right. Anyway, I was just wondering-how is he doing?"

She hadn't expected the question, and it threw her.

271

"I... I can't say for sure. I haven't seen him lately."

"Oh." He paused. "I thought-I thought the two of you were kind of, you
know, tight."

She blushed-and was ashamed of herself for it.

"Well, we are. I don't know. I just haven't seen him recently."

"Ah, I'm sorry."

She cast back to Scott's exhibition, to his strange behavior and how
deeply angry he had been, for no apparent reason. It had only been two
nights ago and she had tried to reach him the following morning, but he
hadn't called back. She had held off trying again. That was why she was
dancing around Saramaggio's question. She felt small and resolved to
call Scott again-right away.

They started talking about operating again, and she had the feeling that
Saramaggio was about to ask her to assist him. She wasn't sure, frankly,
whether she could bring herself to say yes, because she hadn't forgiven
him for the way he had treated her. In the new confessional atmosphere,
she was tempted to let him know. But at that moment, she caught him
frowning. He was peering over her shoulder toward the entrance of the
cafeteria. Turning around, she saw that Cleaver had come in and joined
the line, pushing his tray along the rails in a jaunty manner. Somehow,
his display of bravado struck her as even creepier than when he used to
skulk around.

It was the oddest thing, she thought: Why was everyone acting so out of
character?

She was walking toward her office-a plain windowless room that she'd
inherited as the newest surgeon-when her beeper rang. It displayed an
extension she didn't recognize. She dialed it from a wall phone.

"Dr. Willet, this is the receptionist-down in the lobby. Could you
please come here?" The woman's voice dropped to a confidential level.
"There's a man here asking for you. He knows you-or says he does."

"What's his name?" she asked. But she knew-or she hoped she did.

"Mr. Jessup. He says his son was a patient here. He's acting a bit... I
don't know-agitated."

272

"I'll be right there."

As she hurried to the elevator, she felt a frisson overtake her. It was
surprising, and so she indulged in a bout of self-examination: She was
willing to admit to a welter of feelings-gladness, relief, and worry all
together. Even a little excitement. She had tried hard not to think
about Scott over the past forty-eight hours, and as always in such
cases, the effort was its own worst enemy. Now that he had come to see
her, now that he was the one to make the first move, she could admit it.
She was even prepared to be magnanimous. No hard feelings. But what did
the receptionist mean-agitated} Was he drinking again?

As soon as she saw him, that particular worry dropped away. But another
replaced it. Scott was pacing in the ground floor atrium. He looked
high-strung and keyed-up, as if his system was addled by amphetamines.

When he saw her, he didn't smile.

"You've got to come with me," he said. "I'm going crazy-I don't know
what to do."

She knew from his tone that he wasn't talking about how much he had
missed her.

He put a hand under her arm and was trundling her toward the door.

"Wait a minute-I can't just walk out like this. I'm at work."

He stopped in his tracks, perplexed. He hadn't considered that.

She continued. "What if I have to operate?"

"Do you?"

"No."

"What if I have to see patients?"

"Do you?"

"No."

"Then let's go."

She relented. She really didn't have anything more to do at work. "Okay.
But let me get my coat."

"You don't need it. It's warm out."

"Okay."

"I've got a cab waiting."

He escorted her in double time and disappeared ahead of her, out the
revolving door.

273

"But you'll have to tell me where we're going," she shouted after him.
She meant to make it sound like an ultimatum, but it struck even her as
a modest demand. "I'm glad to see you, too, thank you very much," she
muttered, stepping into the spinning chamber.

The cabdriver was querulous, none too happy to have spent time idling at
curbside when he could have been out cruising for a new fare. Scott held
the door for her, got in quickly, and yelled his address through the
plastic partition.

"So that's where we're going," she said playfully, trying to lighten the
mood. "You're full of surprises."

He didn't want to play.

"Sorry," he said, staring out the window. "I should have told you."

He looked so preoccupied that she felt bad for teasing him.

"Scott. What's wrong? You seem really upset."

"I don't want to talk here," he said, tilting his chin at the driver,
who had cocked his head to the left in order to chatter nonstop into a
cell phone.

Great, she thought. He's turned paranoid.

"Really?" she said. "I don't think he's listening."

"Still . . . no, it's not that. It's that it sounds so incredible and so
strange that I'm afraid you won't believe me. I want to sit you down and
explain the whole thing and-maybe, hopefully-show you."

"Show me? What do you want to show me?"

But he didn't answer, instead turning away to look outside once more.
She settled back for the ride and also to save her spine-the cab had
begun hitting potholes as if its life depended on it.

She poked Scott on the thigh.

"Not even an inkling?" she ventured.

He glanced again at the driver, still jabbering in some conspiratorial
language.

"I think there's a chance, a good chance-I don't know how to explain it
really-but I think that maybe Tyler is still alive. At first I thought
it was some asshole playing a stupid joke, like maybe somebody from the
hospital board or something. But I don't think so anymore-or at least
I'm not sure."

She looked away and bit her lip and groaned inside. Oh, the poor, poor
man, she thought. He wants it so much to be true that his mind is
playing tricks on him.

274

Despite his promise to sit her down and calmly tell her everything at
length, Scott was so energized that he began spilling out his story
halfway up in the noisy elevator. He told her about the computer in the
gallery and how it had sent the signal of his own password to him and
then mysteriously answered him with responses that were secret, that
only Tyler knew. And then how his own computer had done the same thing
the next day and finally Tyler himself had sent a message-at least he
said he was Tyler-and had asked for help and was clearly in trouble.

She asked him for the exact words of the message, and he told her-he had
memorized the exchange perfectly.

Once inside the apartment, she requested coffee, playing for time while
she considered what to say. Before he got the coffeemaker ready, he
rushed over to his computer, stepping back from the desk to look at the
screen with an expectant air, the kind a pilgrim might make gazing upon
a venerated icon.

Then he went to grind the beans at the kitchen counter. She turned her
face to him, inviting him to continue.

"I don't know how to explain it," he said. "I've gone over it and over
it, as you might expect, and I can't even arrive at a theory. It doesn't
make sense-no matter how you look at it. The only explanation I can come
up with is that somehow, somewhere, Tyler is still alive-not only that,
but he's conscious and able to communicate with me, and he needs my help."

"Maybe, as you said, it's just some horrible stupid prank, somebody who
is incredibly malevolent or vindictive-"

"Of course, that makes sense. But I've racked my brains. Nobody I know
would do that. That would be pure evil. And besides, nobody-and I mean
absolutely nobody-knows about Jingo and the stories I told Tyler."

"Surely there is some kid, maybe somebody who slept over and heard the
stories."

"No, I never told them when he had a sleepover. It was our private
little ritual."

"Someone he could have told about it."

"No, I checked the only person he might have told. And anyway,

275

Tyler wouldn't have done that. Like I said, it was just something
between the two of us. That's what made it special and magical."

She marveled again, for the hundredth time, at what a good father he had
been, raising his son alone. Someday she would like someone like that to
be the father of her children.

He brought her the coffee. She sipped it, blew on it, and put the cup
down. Time to take a different tack.

"Scott, you know, if you step back from the situation, it's hard to
believe that Tyler could still be alive," she said gently. "We went to
the hospital that night, you and me together. Remember? We saw that his
vital signs had stopped. That's what angered you so-that he was . . .
virtually dead."

"We saw that he wasn't doing the breathing and he wasn't making his
heart pump. The machines were doing it. But it was getting done.
Technically, you'd have to say he was still alive. Virtually dead isn't
the same as being dead."

"But they took him off life support. And we know he couldn't survive that."

"They say they did. How do we know they really did?"

"Scott-there are all kinds of things you have to do in that situation, a
whole procedure. You fill out forms, you get another doctor's
verification. It's not something you can do just like that."

"And who was the second doctor? Answer me that."

"I don't know, but I know there was one."

"Can you find out who it was?"

"I guess so, but Scott, that won't prove anything."

"I don't trust that place or anyone in it." He looked at her and quickly
added: "Except you, of course-I trust you."

"I would hope so," she said, not even ruffled. But inside, her mind was
racing. "But we went to the funeral-you and me. We sat there together."

"Yes, but it was a closed coffin. The funeral home said the damage to
the head was so bad it couldn't be open. So I never actually saw him
there-I was too upset. I just took their word for it. I regret that now."

"So who would be buried there, if not him?"

"I have no idea. Like I say, I can't explain this."

His voice was beginning to get testy, but she felt that it was important
to press ahead with the tough questions.

276

"That means someone in the funeral home saw him, too, probably worked on
the body. Scott-this is too crazy. If there's some kind of wild plot-I
don't know, some kind of conspiracy-then they'd have to be in on it,
too. This is getting out of hand."

"I've thought of that. I've thought of everything you've said. But
believe me, if you saw what I saw, the message coming from that
machine"-he pointed to the computer-"then you wouldn't sound so sure of
yourself."

He was making it personal, drawing a line between them. She finished the
coffee and put the cup down with a definitive thump.

"All right, show me," she said.

He sat down before the computer, his face reflecting a ghostly glow from
the screen, and pecked at a few keys. He typed

JINGO He waited-and waited. Then he typed

Once there was a boy who felt bored. Minutes went by, five, then ten. He
hit the keys again:

Tyler

Nothing. Then he typed

Tyler Tyler Are you there? Speak to me .

During this time Kate had been walking around, looking out the windows
and reading whatever she came across-cover lines of old magazines,
messages left over on a bulletin board, cereal boxes.

"Why don't you stop that-all that pacing." Scott said. "It makes me
nervous."

She just looked at him.

"Sorry," he said. "You know, it doesn't always work like this-not right
away."

"How many times has it. . . worked?"

277

"Twice."

She looked at him again.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "Twice is not a lot. But each
time there's, you know, back and forth-a real exchange."

"I see."

She decided to change the subject and came upon a photo in a propped-up
silver frame on the kitchen table. It was of Scott, his wife, and Tyler,
taken many years ago, Scott wearing long hair that almost touched his
shoulders, Tyler flashing a toothy smile, a sweet boy looking serenely
content to be next to his parents, each with a hand resting on his
shoulder. They were standing in the doorway of a cottage by the sea
somewhere-the photo had a blue, washed-out quality-and the door frame
was white bordering upon weathered gray shingles. At their feet was a
smooth paving stone surrounded by sand, and above the door, now that she
looked more closely, was the carved figure of a whale.

But of course she was looking most closely at the woman. Her eyes were
so stunning-a deep rich brown like the center of the earth-and they
shone with intelligence and seemed to pull at your gaze so that it was
hard to look away. Her hair was dazzling, falling all over the place;
her nose was strong and forthright; and her mouth had a quizzical, sad
turn to it. She was the center, the maternal center, of the trio, and
she was certainly one of the most beautiful women Kate had ever seen.

All in all, there was something about the photo that was gripping and
moving to Kate, something in the glaze of the light, the threesome
standing and looking directly at the camera, a bravery in their posture,
the casualness of their love for one another-the knowledge that this
family was soon to be split by a lightning bolt. It almost took her
breath away. She clasped it and looked at it for a long time.

"Taken in Nantucket," Scott said.

Kate was still staring at it.

"Her name was Lydia," he said. "There, she was about twenty-seven. We'd
been married seven years. Tyler would be . . . let's see, about five. We
rented this little cottage-Tyler's room was no bigger than a closet. The
beds were lumpy; the walls were thin; sand everywhere. But it was right
smack on the ocean. You got up and walked across a sandy beach and fell
into the waves. We loved it."

278

"I think . . . there's something wonderful about this picture," she
said. She remembered it from the exhibition. She didn't tell him the
half of it; she didn't say that the photo filled her with a longing that
was almost bottomless.

"I like it, too," Scott said. "I carry one around."

He lifted a wallet out of his back pocket, slipped out a small photo,
and handed it to her. The picture lost some of its power in its reduced
version, but only some-she could still see Lydia's burning gaze, Tyler's
serenity, Scott's paterfamilias pride.

"Let's go out for a bit," she said abruptly. "I need some air." She
looked over at the computer, and added, "You know what they say: 'A
watched pot never boils.' "

They walked east to Broadway and then uptown to Times Square. The
sidewalks were crammed with humanity: travelers, dead-beats, hucksters,
businessmen, delivery boys, Africans selling women's purses laid out on
sheets spread upon the pavement, teenagers screaming up at the MTV
windows, middle-aged men looking for porno shops, tourists gawking at
the news zipper around the old Times building and the flashing lights of
the Nasdaq and Reuters signs.

Scott felt good in the midst of it, renewed as it all washed over him.
So many different people, running around in so many directions with so
many different destinations and destinies. He thought of a Humphrey
Bogart line from Casablanca, about the world being at war and the
troubles of two people not amounting to a hill of beans.

They walked and walked, all the way up Broadway to Lincoln Center, where
they sat on the rim of the fountain and talked. Then they crossed the
street to a sidewalk cafe and had cappuccino, and after that strolled
through Central Park.

It was almost dusk by the time they returned to West Twenty-eighth
Street. In the elevator up, they were quiet, both thinking about the
computer. But thinking different thoughts-Scott wondering if there would
be a message, wondering what it might say, and Kate worrying about
Scott, worrying about how to comfort him and help him over the
disappointment when he saw that there was none.

279

Once inside, they didn't have long to wait. For there it was, staring
out at them in black and white, the letters gleaming against the ghostly
background:

IT'S ME. TYLER. HELP ME

280

Scott paced back and forth in front of the Nineteenth Precinct on East
Sixty-seventh Street, trying to figure out what to say. He was also
attempting to screw up his courage and to calm down. He knew that his
demeanor in presenting the problem would count for a lot, because the
problem was out of the ordinary, to say the least. He had to be
straightforward and rational, a civic-minded parent bringing a complaint
over a possible crime-a serious crime, his son's disappearance. In other
words, he told himself, don't come across as a raving lunatic.

As he reached the corner of Lexington, he found that he was doing more
than mouthing the words, he was speaking them out loud. He realized this
when a woman pushing a stroller shot him a frightened look and gave him
a wide berth. Not a good start for someone trying to play down the
lunatic angle. He gathered his thoughts again, turned, climbed the steps
into the old red-stone-and-concrete station house, and went up to the
desk officer.

"Sergeant Paganelli here?" he asked. Somehow, in the blur of confusion
and anger on the night he'd been arrested-not arrested, detained-he'd
remembered the name of the sympathetic officer with the beer belly.

This desk cop had a beer belly, too, but there the resemblance ended. He
looked at Scott with a weary, jaded eye.

"Naw. Comes in the late shift."

Scott's question dropped the verb, and the cop's answer dropped the
pronoun. Not an auspicious beginning, he thought.

"So . . . what time does he come in?"

"He starts at six P.M."

281

"Okay, thanks."

He turned to go. The cop called after him.

"Can it wait?"

"Oh, yes."

Scott was at the door now.

"And who do you want to say called for him?"

"Nobody. I'll come back later and look for him."

"Suit yourself."

The law office of Klinger, Klinger, and Beaner occupied the second floor
of a squat modern building in depressed downtown Bridgeport. The members
and their longtime clients parked in a basement garage, pressed the
levered bar on a metal door, and took the cement staircase up the two
flights-not a particularly alluring entryway and certainly not befitting
one of the best law firms in Connecticut.

Steve Klinger was one of Scott's oldest friends, though their
professional lives were on such divergent paths they did not see one
another all that often. They had met twelve years ago, when Scott had
been assigned to do a magazine shoot on hotshot lawyers. He'd followed
Steve around for two days, and they'd gotten on. Steve was an amateur
photographer, and Scott gave him tips. Steve's father was a hefty man
with a cherubic halo of white wispy curls who smoked huge cigars, gave
big bear hugs, drove a Cadillac El Dorado, and was one of the wiliest
criminal defense attorneys in New England. He'd taken a special liking
to Scott and Lydia, and when Lydia died, the Klinger family had adopted
Scott and Tyler. They'd plied them with lox and bagels on Sundays,
propped Scott up with solace and single-malt scotch in the proper
proportions, and attended Tyler's school plays so he would have a large
rooting section. An ersatz extended family.

"Mind if I smoke?" Scott asked, sitting next to Steve on a couch in his
office. The walls were covered with plaques, degrees, and pictures. Over
Steve's shoulder, Scott saw a photo of Steve's father standing shoulder
to shoulder with Huey Newton, from the New Haven Black Panther trials of
the early seventies.

Steve, lean and intense, grimaced. Smoking wasn't allowed, and they
forced their secretaries to step outside, even in winter.

282

"For you-okay," he said, getting up to open a window. When he sat down
at his desk, he was facing a pile of papers.

"After we talked on the phone, I did some research on exhumation. I've
only requested one exhumation in my life, and someone else in the firm
actually handled it. So I'm no expert. I checked the law- it's section
19a-413 of the Connecticut general statutes, by the way."

Scott looked at him blankly. Steve added, "That's should you need it for
future reference."

"This is the only one I'm planning on," said Scott.

Steve went on.

"The statute empowers the chief medical examiner to exhume a body under
certain circumstances. Let's see . . ." Here he consulted a thick book
that lay open on his blotter. He hummed and muttered and read aloud in
an undercurrent so that only a few phrases could be deciphered: "... if
death occurs under circumstances warranting . . . a body is buried
without proper certification . . . the chief medical examiner notifies
the state's attorney . . . presents facts to the judge of superior
court. . . and so on etcetera etcetera."

He closed the book with a thud, a movement he must have performed in
front of hundreds of clients. It made Scott feel that there was a whole
new side to his friend that he didn't know at all.

"Scott-let me ask you this: I'm assuming that because of the nature of
the case ..." His words had an impersonal ring, and he had the grace to
pause and back up. "Sorry. I don't mean to go all technical on you. I
know how hard this is. What I mean is, Tyler was in the hospital for a
long time, and the procedure they put him through was highly
experimental-right?"

"Highly experimental. It had never been done before. On humans. And it
wasn't a procedure. It was an operation."

"Right. But what I'm getting at is we have to assume that they were
following normal protocol, and that would mean that in such
circumstances, since the operation was experimental, once a patient dies
they would do an autopsy. Do you know for sure if they did?"

"Yes, they did."

"Hmmm."

"Hmmm what?"

"Nothing really. It's just that autopsies used to be fairly common in
Connecticut, and now they're rare."

283

"So?"

"So that makes it a bit more difficult for our side. When a judge sees
an autopsy has been performed, he tends to stand up and take notice.
It's more suggestive that things are on the up and up."

"The up and up?"

"Yeah. In the sense that the body's been properly examined, and all that
rigmarole. The fact that it's already been examined makes it harder to
get an exhumation, assuming of course that the autopsy's in good order.
I guess you have no ... no reason to think it's not?"

"No."

Steve paused and rested his elbows on the desk and put the tips of his
fingers together. "See, the statute sets out five or six conditions
under which an exhumation can be ordered-a sudden or violent death,
suspicious circumstances, a death related to disease or while employed
or related to public health, that kind of thing."

"Suspicious circumstances. We've got that here-in spades."

"Ah, you mean that computer business you told me about? The messages?"

"Exactly."

"Well, it's not as straightforward as that. The suspicious
circumstances, as I read it, refers to the mode of death, not, you know-
things that happen afterward."

"How about the fact that maybe he's not dead at all-wouldn't you call
that suspicious?"

"Well, sure, but we're dealing with a court here-or at least a judge,
and he's got to be able to see it right in front of him. We've got to
get him to agree that it's suspicious, if you know what I mean."

"Damn it, Steve, whose side are you on here?"

"Yours, of course. Hold on, now. I'm just saying it's not so easy. I'm
not saying it's impossible-it's just not, you know, a pro forma thing.
To get an exhumation ordered by the court, you need one of these
conditions cited here-say, suspicious circumstances-and the absence of
an autopsy. And you have an autopsy, which makes it harder."

"Can you do it or not?"

Steve looked out the window again, then picked up a pen and started
writing on a long yellow legal pad.

"I think so. I can certainly try. What we have to go for here is the
possibility of mistaken identity."

284

"Mistaken identity?"

"Yes. We have to assert that someone else was buried in Tyler's place,
or at least that we have reason to believe that the identification of
Tyler was faulty in some respect. . . that it was incorrect or maybe not
sufficiently certain."

He made a list on the pad and handed it to Scott.

"I'll need this information, as best as you can get it. Oh, and what's
the name of that woman who worked at the hospital, the one who sat near
you during the funeral?"

"Kate Willet. She's a neurosurgeon there."

"Right." He wrote it down, then stood, seeming a little awkward now that
the business was out of the way.

"Well, I guess that does it," he said.

"Steve, do you think we'll be able to do this?"

"Yes. Eventually. I don't think a superior court judge is going to deny
an order for exhumation from the single living relative. But the problem
is, because of these things I was saying before, it's not going to leap
ahead on the judicial calendar."

"So, how long are we talking about?"

"I'll be honest. I don't think anything will happen before two, three
months."

"Months. I don't have that long. Christ, Steve, this is urgent.
Something really strange is going on. Tyler's out there somewhere and
I've got to find him. I don't know where else to start."

"I know, okay. I'll do whatever I can to speed it up."

"You've got to."

"We'll move as fast as we can on this."

Scott said good-bye and left quickly.

Steve looked after him as the door closed. Then he picked up the phone
and tried to reach Kate. He didn't know what he was going to say
exactly, other than to introduce himself as Scott's friend and tell her
that he thought Scott needed help of some kind, perhaps even a really
good therapist. He knew that she was a new acquaintance, but given her
position at the hospital he figured she might be able to recommend someone.

She didn't answer. Rather than leave a message, he thought he'd call
back later.

285

Kate waited until late afternoon, the slow period when few people were
about. She walked into the records division as if her visit were only
one of a series of chores.

The attendant was standing at a counter, filing microfilm. She looked up
and raised one eyebrow.

"I've got a bunch of stuff to get. Mind if I just go back there myself?"
Kate asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

The attendant frowned and went back to what she was doing, dismissing
her. For once, Kate was glad to receive a New York brush-off.

The files were meticulous up until 1985, when computerization had begun.
After that they were more scattershot. The rows extended back like
library stacks, fifty feet deep on either side of narrow aisles, the top
ones reachable only by small stepladders on wheels. Kate was relieved to
see that the most recent files-where she would be searching-were not the
ones closest to the counter.

She found the section with the J drawers and pulled out JAS-KAM. It
wasn't hard to find "Jessup, Tyler"-the folder was newer than those on
either side. Stapled to it was a message typed on pink paper that read:
"Do not give out. Notify Dr. Saramaggio of requests."

That was odd. She flipped through some of the other files to see if any
had similar notes attached. None did. She looked up and down the
aisle-no one was around. She pulled the file out and read through it
quickly. Much of it she was familiar with-the write-up of the operation,
the charts, the day-to-day records, minutes of the meetings of the
Executive Board and the Ethics Board. She was startled to find a paper
in her own writing, then remembered it-the form she had filled out that
very first day when Scott arrived on the helicopter with Tyler.

At the back she found what she was looking for. There was the
Certificate of Death, a simple straightforward piece of paper, innocuous
given the weight of its official character. The cause of death was
listed as "heart and respiratory failure" after "lengthy postoperative
decline." The time of death was listed as "approximately" midnight-
interesting. That would put it at the time that Scott and she were in
the ward. Why say it happened around midnight when he had probably been
dead sometime earlier? She looked at the signature and saw the wavy hand
of "Saramaggio." He'd signed in three separate places

286

as the presiding physician. Nothing out of the ordinary about that. Next
to the certificate was the autopsy report, which she read through
quickly. Again, there was nothing untoward; it seemed to be just another
inventory of another body's inability to carry on-specimens taken and
examined, body fluids analyzed, organs weighed. But there was one tidbit
of information that she hadn't expected. The second attending
physician-since two are required in unusual cases- was none other than
Cleaver. Cleaver. Of all people. What in the world was he doing there at
that hour? Why not simply ask the resident on duty to come by and sign
the report?

Kate heard footsteps, and so she quickly folded the file, slipped it
back, and closed the door. As she did so, the attendant stepped into the
row and stopped, looking at her quizzically. Kate looked back at her.
Best to stare her down, she thought. They held each other's gaze for a
full five seconds.

Finally, the attendant gave way.

"I thought you might require assistance," she said mildly.

"Not at all," replied Kate, keeping the advantage. "I'm perfectly
capable of doing it myself." She smiled. "But thank you."

It was Saramaggio's day off, and Kate's as well. She thought she'd take
advantage of the coincidence and catch him off guard by meeting him on
his native ground. It was unseasonably warm-even hot.

Scott insisted on driving her to Greenwich. They took the Mer-ritt
Parkway and drove for half an hour through the lush four-acre-minimum
estates of the "back country" north of the parkway before finding his
house, a handsome old white clapboard Colonial with green shutters. A
maid answered and told her that he was to be found at his yacht club,
Belle Haven.

It took them another forty minutes to find the place, a sailor's
paradise on the town's Gold Coast. It occupied the tip of a peninsula,
set around a snug little harbor. On the opposite side, huge stone and
Tudor mansions occupied high ground; their manicured lawns sloped gently
for several hundred feet and ended at the water's edge in stone walls,
and in whitewashed wooden piers that rose and fell with the tide. In
front of the club were red-clay tennis courts on which thin,

287

rich-looking women in tight white tennis shorts darted back and forth.
The thwacks of the balls were just about the only sounds-that and the
deep baritone of fat happy bumblebees plunging into the lilac blossoms.
In the back, a clipped green lawn led to an open deck from which bobbing
sailboats at anchor could be seen, and beyond them two small islands and
then the choppy gray waters of Long Island Sound.

Fifty feet from the clubhouse was a small beach and a fenced-off
swimming pool. In front of it, in a handsome line of a dozen or so
parked cars, was Saramaggio's black Ferrari.

"I'll wait for you here," said Scott, pulling over in the shade of a
small maple.

"Okay," she replied. "I hope I do better than you did with that policeman."

Scott had to smile. He had told her about the conversation he'd finally
had with Sergeant Paganelli at the Nineteenth Precinct. The cop's eyes
had grown wider and wider as Scott tried to explain that his officially
dead son was actually trapped or kidnapped somewhere and was sending SOS
messages by means of a computer. He was not entirely unsympathetic, and
he heard Scott out, but Scott could tell that other thoughts were
flickering behind his secretive cop mask. The final tip-off came when he
put an arm around Scott as he walked him to the door and recommended
that he calm down and maybe take some time off from work and go
someplace nice.

Kate walked through the open gate of the white fence, past a brick
bathhouse on the left. The place was not crowded. On the right was a
children's wading pool, where a boy and a girl, both wearing plastic
water wings, splashed each other and ran screaming to the safety of
their Latina nannies. Half a dozen teenagers cavorted in the main pool
under the bored eyes of a lifeguard, a high school girl in a one-piece
orange bathing suit and sunblock, who sat high on a wooden perch.

Kate spotted Saramaggio off by himself under a beach umbrella, lying on
a reclining chair that was facing the Sound. He had a bathing suit on. A
book lay upon his lap, but he seemed lost in thought, staring out to
sea. She felt strange, approaching him out of nowhere. But maybe the
element of surprise would favor her mission.

"Dr. Saramaggio, hello."

288

He took off his sunglasses and looked up at her, momentarily confused.
He couldn't place her for a half minute or so.

"Ehh, Dr. Willet? Kate Willet? What are you doing here?"

He blinked, large owl blinks, then looked around. He was trying to
figure it out. "Do you know someone . . ."

"No, no. I don't know anyone here. Just you. I came to talk to you."

"I see." He sat up, balancing himself uncertainly on one extended arm.
He had a belt of rolling flesh around his midriff, and she thought how
deft a dashing green surgeon's gown was at camouflaging flab. As he
stared at her, searching her face for some kind of answer, his manner
began to change. The change was something she felt rather than observed.
No longer surprised, he now seemed oddly reconciled. He didn't ask how
she had come or how she had managed to find him. It was as if these
questions dropped away before something more profound now that they were
together on the edge of the ocean.

They moved over to one side and sat at a metal table in the shade of an
umbrella. The sun was hot for September, and Kate began to feel it. The
armpits of her white blouse were damp.

"Would you like . . . ?" He gestured vaguely in the direction of the
bathing house where, she now saw, there was a snack bar. The smell of
frying oil carried even this far.

She wagged her head no.

"Dr. Saramaggio-"

"Leo. Please, call me Leo."

That was odd. He had never said that before. Why had he chosen such a
moment for informality? The more she looked at him, the more she became
convinced that it was not a polite concession. It was a gesture of
appeasement.

My God, she thought, he's nervous.

"Well," she said. "I've come to ask you some questions about Tyler's death."

He gave a slight sucking sound, an almost imperceptible intake of
breath. And then he nodded slowly.

"I don't see how I can help you." A half-second pause, then he added,
"What is it you wish to know?"

She noticed that he didn't challenge her, a subordinate, over the right
to pose questions. Best to start with the easy ones, she thought.

289

"A number of things, if I may. One is, just how did you determine that
he was dead, and how did you fix the time of death?"

"You were there. You saw it. In fact, if I'm not mistaken"-a hint of
sarcasm here-"you were the one who alerted me to it. Were you not?"

"Yes."

"So you saw that he was gone, that all of his vital signs had stopped
and that he was beyond resuscitation."

"Yes, but the computer was still carrying on. So how does one define
death in such a situation?"

"It is an unusual situation, I'll grant that. But I chose to determine
that it had occurred when all of the patient's vital signs had
stopped-those coming from the patient-so that he would clearly not be
able to survive a single moment once the computer was no longer helping
him."

"I contacted you after midnight. Why did you put down midnight as the
time of death?"

He stiffened. He looked out to sea, and she thought for a moment that he
would revert to the old Saramaggio, that he would stand up and demand to
know where she got off interrogating him and bellow for her to be thrown
out on her ear. But nothing of the sort occurred.

"It was a rough approximation. I put down midnight by extrapolation-I
thought that was about the time you were there and saw him and that
therefore that was the earliest known time he had ceased to exist."

He's good, she thought. In a court of law, he would make an unflappable
witness.

The lifeguard blew a whistle. It let out a screech that seemed to
violate the genteel surroundings.

"Parents' time," she yelled.

One of the teenagers groaned. Slowly and sullenly, they emerged from the
pool, hoisting their lean, tanned bodies up over the side. Their place
was taken by demure women in bathing caps, who stepped into the pool
gracefully and then swam the breaststroke, their heads moving like
stately vessels through the water.

For a minute or two, Saramaggio and Kate were silent. He was the first
to speak.

"So I take it you've seen the death certificate?"

"Yes."

290

Again, he looked away, out to sea-almost longingly, she decided.

"And the autopsy report," she added. "I noticed that Dr. Cleaver signed
the second signature. May I ask-why him? Why not just the duty resident?
What was he doing there at that hour?"

"I called him."

"You called him?"

"Yes. I thought he should come in, since half of this whole procedure
was his. He was the one who set up the computers, and he was the one who
should be there if anything went wrong."

"Went wrong?"

"Well, Dr. Willet, I assume you'll agree with me if I say that when a
patient dies, something can be presumed to have gone wrong."

Good, she thought. He's flying along in that old superior way now. It's
a good time to ask him the question I came here for.

"Dr. Saramaggio-sorry, Leo-did you actually perform the autopsy? Or did
someone else?"

He looked away quickly, but not quickly enough-for his eyes told the
story. He had been ambushed, and they'd replied for him before he had a
chance to censor them. No, they said, I didn't.

"Of course I did." Then he worked up a show of anger, halfheartedly. "Do
you mean to suggest that I would falsify a death certificate? Do you
know what the penalty for that would be?"

"I do. So I wanted to ask you more about it, how you did it, including
the abnormalities you found."

"Abnormalities?"

Now he looked worried.

"Yes."

He paused, finally replied, "I don't recall any abnormalities."

"Do you happen to recall the name of the aide who took the body away?"

"No."

"The attendant who was on duty in the morgue?"

"No."

"The time?"

"No. After midnight, that's all. You know, I was very upset by this
whole thing."

The admission was more than an admission of weakness, she thought. It
was an admission of guilt.

291

"On second thought," she said. "I think I would like a cup of coffee.
Would you mind getting me one?"

When he came back, a tall figure carrying the cup in a hunched-over way
that made him appear even older, she pretended that he had convinced her
and changed the subject. He was grateful for the pretense. He wasn't one
hundred percent certain that he had succeeded in quelling her doubts,
but with time he knew he could persuade himself.

The lifeguard blew the whistle again. She shouted, "Parents' time over,"
and the transfer that unfolded-adults stepping out of the pool, boys and
girls jumping in-struck Kate as some odd suburban ritual.

Meanwhile, she asked him a few idle questions about Cleaver, where he
worked when he wasn't at St. Cat's or Pinegrove, who he worked with-in
particular, his assistants in the mental asylum and the people who
helped him build the computers.

Saramaggio, relieved to be talking about something else, spoke freely.

Half an hour later, when she stepped outside and motioned to Scott to
pick her up, he thought he could tell by the tilt of her head that she
was pleased with herself.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"Yes."

292

Scott turned onto the George Washington Bridge and stole a glimpse at
the distant skyscrapers on the horizon to his left, shrouded in a haze.
From the bridge he used to spot the World Trade Center towers, and their
absence never ceased to stun him.

He turned toward Kate, who was looking ahead. The angular light from the
late-afternoon sun bathed her hair and made it gleam.

The rush hour slowed them. He moved into the right lane to take the
turnoff to the Palisades.

"Thank God that guy has such an unusual name," he said. "What is it again?"

"I've told you three times already. Quincy. Quincy Penderglass."

"Sounds like something out of Dickens, a bookstore clerk-not a computer
genius."

"Just be glad we got it at all."

Once they'd obtained the first name from Saramaggio, Kate had looked him
up in the hospital's database and found him under a subsection of the
affiliate's billing file for Pinegrove. Cleaver had been paying him a
monthly retainer of over three thousand dollars for unspecified computer
work. Kate guessed that the charge was padded. But in any case the file
contained his full name and home address.

They got lost in Englewood. Even when they found the right street, they
circled through the development twice because the ranch houses looked so
similar, distinguished mostly by the elaborateness of outdoor play sets
or the size of their raised garish blue swimming pools.

"That's got to be it," said Scott, pointing to a brick house with a
sagging gutter. "Jesus. What a mess."

293

"I think we can safely say they don't care too much about outward
appearances."

Scott parked across the street.

"We'll have to play this by ear," he said. "We've no idea if this guy
knows anything."

Halfway up the path of broken flagstones, they heard the throbbing beat
of techno-music from within. Scott knocked, but no one heard him. The
door was ajar, so he pushed it and it swung inward. The music was
blasting now, and they saw a young man, stripped to the waist, seated
before a speaker on a card table.

He looked up disinterestedly and pointed toward a hallway. They followed
it. At the far right was a closed door, and when they opened it and
their eyes adjusted to the dim light, they saw an extraordinary sight-a
man so fat that his body formed a perfect pyramid of blubber. He was
seated cross-legged on an imposing bed with raised sides and a wooden
canopy, all of it elaborately carved and lacquered in black and red.
Scott recognized it as a Chinese opium bed.

The man opened his eyes slowly-he appeared to have been meditating-and
gestured for them to sit down on wooden chairs that lined one wall. He,
too, did not seem surprised to see them. His face was wrinkled, and his
long hair was drawn back in a neady tied yellowish gray ponytail.

"Yes?" was all he said.

"We're looking for Quincy," said Scott.

"And who might you be?"

Scott and Kate introduced themselves, and then rose to shake his hand,
which was surprisingly strong inside all that flab.

"I am Cybedon. But of course I imagine you knew that."

"Not really," said Scott. "And who are you exactly?"

"The question is," he replied in a lugubrious basso, "who are you}-exactly?"

"We came looking for Quincy," Scott said, "because we hoped he could
help us."

"Please do sit," Cybedon said. "I hate to be a negligent host. Would you
like some beverage? They treat me well here, but the service is not all
that it might be."

"No, thank you," said Kate. "We're really here for some information."

294

"Please tell me in what way you had hoped Quincy might help you," he
said, smiling patronizingly.

Just like the caterpillar with the hookah on the mushroom, thought Kate.
And he probably makes about as much sense, too. She wondered how much
information Scott would give and was surprised when he settled back and
told him almost the whole story of Tyler, from his accident to the
operation and his death and finally the computer messages. She was even
more surprised that Cybedon didn't seem taken aback by the story.

"I see," he said, rocking his head slightly, which had the effect of
sending ripples down his body as if to spread it out even farther. "I
believe all of what you told me has an explanation."

She felt Scott stiffen.

Cybedon looked at Kate. "And you are . . . ?"

"A friend. And I'm a doctor, a neurosurgeon. I was part of the team that
did the operation."

"Ah." His eyebrows rose.

Scott was about to say something, but Kate placed a hand on his arm to
stop him.

"Please explain what you mean by an explanation," she said.

"Certainly. It would be my pleasure. But your occupation may make it
more difficult for you to understand what I'm about to say. You are
bound to have your own view of the human brain, and I hope it is not a
narrow one. I hope you do not agree with Francis Crick when he summed up
that view by saying, 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.' "

"I'm acquainted with his work, of course, but not with that particular
quotation."

"But do you agree?"

"I need more information before I disagree. But surely we're not here to-"

"Oh, our blessed scientists. Always so congenial and sentimental when it
comes to the theories of their colleagues. Always so loath to take on
the giants of our age, no matter how misguided they may be."

"Please," said Scott testily. "Get to the point."

"The point, Mr. Jessup, is that Mr. Crick and others like him adopt a
mechanistic view of the brain, which retards progress. We are on the
verge of some very important discoveries here, discoveries that

295

fall into that complicated area known as the mind-body problem, and from
what you tell me I would say that your son has become, willingly or not,
a pioneer."

"A pioneer?"

"Precisely."

"Goddamn it, explain what you mean," Scott said.

"Scott, please." Kate turned to Cybedon. "Tell me, does what you're
saying have something to do with computers?"

"Ah, the surgeon's knife hits the mark."

"Somehow the computers did something to Tyler."

"They didn't do anything to him. They provided him with an opportunity.
You see, all the computers did was to open a door-he was the one who
walked through it."

"So where is he?"

"He is in an entirely different realm than the one we inhabit."

"Where is it?"

"All around us, I believe. It is everywhere. Is it better or worse than
our own?-Who's to say?"

"Shit," said Scott.

"Wait," cautioned Kate. She turned back to Cybedon. "Can we see him?"

"See him? I doubt it. The question is, Can he see you? I tend to doubt
that also, though I admit I am less certain. You may, however, talk to him."

"Talk to him?" said Kate.

"Yes. Through the computer. As you tell me you already have."

"You mean he's in some halfway world and he can send us messages from
there and get our messages?" said Scott.

"Yes-in so many words."

"Let's back up a minute," said Scott. "Can you explain to us what's
going on-the whole thing, from the very beginning?"

Cybedon sighed, so deeply that his immense belly shook. "Where to start?"

"How about at the beginning?"

"But what is the beginning? This is but one more chapter in an ancient
and continuing narrative." He paused, then resumed. "What we are
witnessing is something that has long been a striving of mankind.
Forgive me, my dear," he said, turning to Kate. "I've never

296

been able to adopt that awkward expression-what is it? Humankind. It
sounds so odd to the ear." Kate nodded, hurrying him along.

"Philosophers and other such thinkers, epistemologists in particular,
have long wondered about the human mind, its capacity to know-things
that would seem to lie outside of its daily existence, even things
beyond its physical capability. A whole raft of experience comes to us
without explanation-dreams, intuition, the famous 'sixth sense,' our
spiritual beliefs. Have you ever known something, known it to be true
even though it did not appear to you through one of your five senses?"

Kate thought immediately of her mother and the vision she'd seen of her
husband. She said nothing, made no sign of assent.

"This knowledge might seem to be less certain by virtue of the fact that
its origin is obscure, but actually the opposite is true. We believe in
it more, and we do so because the source is not in the realm of our
everyday senses. It is liable to become a deeply held belief-like faith.
Faith in the existence of a higher being threads itself through much of
recorded history, from the Crusades, the Inquisition, the expulsion of
the Huguenots, and so on-a distressingly sad litany of events that are
epic in their violence. It continues down to today- Iran, Afghanistan,
the Middle East. I'm tempted to add Northern Ireland, but being part
Irish myself, I tend to think of the troubles, as they are so
euphemistically called, as sui generis."

He smiled. Kate sensed Scott's impatience and didn't smile back.

"So the question arises, How do we know these things? Since they are
known by the mind, it is natural to assume that it is the mind that does
the knowing-notice that I employ the word mind here, not the word
brain-in other words, at certain times the mind has a capacity to range
beyond the physical vessel that seemingly contains it. Especially, I
should add, at critical times, such as illness, states of extreme
emotion, and-it goes without saying-the most critical time of all, death.

"Some people are specialists in this netherworld. They are born with the
gift of higher insight, and we consequently look upon them as
guides-Socrates at the moment of drinking the hemlock, Christ on the
cross, Muhammad meditating in the caves outside of Mecca.

"Others, lesser mortals, attempt to train themselves to accomplish the
feat of leaving the body. This is done either through the

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repetition of some physical act, as by the whirling dervishes or shamans
or our modern equivalent, techno dancers, or through some meditative
state-witness Buddhist monks who can achieve a trancelike state for
weeks on end. A third avenue, of course-and again, it is a symptom of
our age-is artificial stimulants. Not for nothing are they referred to
as mind-expansion drugs.

"But these methods are unsatisfactory; the experiences are brief and
passing. No one-at least no one until now"-and here he looked
meaningfully at Scott-"has actually been able to enter this realm, to
enter and make his presence known. How could this be done? Only by the
mind itself, the pure mind, as it sheds that awkward troublesome vessel,
the body.

"In Latin America, you know, there is this saying that at the precise
moment of death, the body loses twenty-one grams. Twenty-one grams-that,
they say, is what life weighs. I myself do not believe this saying to be
literally true, but as a myth I find it psychologically compelling and
surprisingly revealing. For something is given up at death. The question
is, What? The ancients had a word for it-psyche. Today we call it the
soul. Some call it the anima."

"Please, please," said Scott. "Get to the point."

"I am, Mr. Jessup, I am getting to the point. I would like to take you
there with me, which is why I am favoring you with this lengthy
exposition. Shall I proceed?"

"Yes."

Cybedon looked at Kate.

"You know, of course, of the work done by the Danish research team that
studied three hundred and forty-four heart-attack survivors? It was
published in Lancet. More than one in ten experienced visions and lucid
thoughts after they were declared clinically dead. That makes sense when
you consider that your brain dies from the outside in. It shuts down
layer by layer, like an egg turning cold. Deep in your interior brain,
your primitive brain, is where your anima is located. Why wouldn't it be
the last to depart?"

"Sort of like a rat deserting a sinking ship," said Scott.

Cybedon ignored him.

"Imagine now if at the moment of death this quintessential
quality-whatever you want to call it-could find another route. If it
could find something to ease its passage into the ethereal realm, so to

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speak. Imagine that there is in place a system of wires and connections
capable of carrying electrical impulses deeply implanted in that part of
the brain where the anima exists, where the mind actually resides. In
short, imagine someone such as your son hooked up to computers who-"

"Are you telling me that the computer took the life out of him and put
it-wherever you call it, in another realm}"

"In effect, yes, though I find your wording less than felicitous. The
computer is a portal."

"And where is this so-called realm? What is it? Cyberspace? Are you
telling me that my son is in cyberspace?"

"No, Mr. Jessup. It is not cyberspace. Cyberspace is merely a term to
describe a man-made series of connections between systems of computers,
first through wires and then through space. This is altogether
different. It is clearly not man-made. It is eternal and it has always
been with us, like the space between molecules that we cannot see."

Cybedon looked directly at Scott, who returned his stare.

"Think of cyberspace as a medium of communication. That's all. It's like
an antenna that can pick up signals in the air and feed them to your
television set. Or sonar blips that travel across the ocean and record
the sounding of whales hundreds of miles away. It enables you to reach
him-and, more importantly, it enables him to reach you. It is that
two-way contact that represents the significant breakthrough.

"The wonder is not that Tyler"-the use of his son's first name struck
Scott like an electric shock-"has gone or that his consciousness has
entered into a world we cannot experience. The wonder is that he has
reached this world and succeeded in communicating back. That, one might
say, is computer feedback of the highest level."

"So what is this realm like?"

"Who knows? If you stand on the shore and merely look, you do not know
the ocean. It might consist of everyone who has ever lived, every deed
that has ever been done, every word that has ever been spoken. It might
be the same for all of us. Or it might be individualistic-it might
represent your own consciousness freed of the body, your pure
imagination, the very essence of what you are."

"Let me get this straight. You say he's gone. So what you're saying is
he's definitely dead-right?"

299

"No, I would never put it in those terms. I would say he has achieved
the mind-body split permanently. And that the situation is actually
quite the reverse: He-meaning his consciousness-has the opportunity to
achieve eternal life." Cybedon opened his hands, palms outward. "Though,
granted, we do not know what kind of life it is."

"And his body?"

"Well, that, regrettably for you, will deteriorate."

"So there's no return."

"No. At least not in our lifetimes."

"And after?"

"After, I expect that humans will devise a machine that can recapture
it. And then we will have achieved a quantum leap in evolution. It will
be like the first meeting of the sperm and the egg, and it will lead us
into a brave new world."

Cybedon folded his hands and blinked, almost as if he was sleepy. It was
clear that the interview-or, from his point of view, the audience-was over.

"Good luck," he said finally. "And do not be disheartened-on the contrary."

They left the room. Scott went into every room in the house. He turned
up only three people, including the young man who had greeted them with
such taciturn indifference, and none of them seemed to know anything
important. The elusive Quincy was not to be found.

They got in the car and began the trip back in silence, but soon Kate
turned to Scott and said, "What do you make of it all?"

"I can't say I buy it. Freed consciousness. Anima. The other realm. It's
all a bit too fantastic for my taste. But, I don't know-there was one
moment there when he was talking and what he said seemed to make sense.
What do you think?"

"I feel the same," she said. "I'm skeptical, but only halfway."

For the fact of the matter was that, for all the hardheaded science that
had been drilled into her, Kate was open to the belief that the world
was a complicated place that hid away its more profound truths. "There
are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. ..."

And Scott, too, was feeling unsure. He was beginning to think he was
like Cybedon's landlubber looking out over the ocean. Our igno-

300

ranee is so abysmally limitless, he said to himself, that we can't even
begin to imagine its depth.

As they crossed the river, the bridge towers were set afire by the
setting sun. The sky above was ribbed by clouds that seemed illuminated
from within, dramatic explosions of purples and pinks and oranges. It
was an unearthly sight, like the end of the world.

Cleaver was feeling frustrated-and rightfully so. After all, he had been
the one to dispatch the anima out there into the ether, and now the damn
thing was ignoring him. He simply couldn't make any contact with it at all.

He sat at the keyboard in Quincy's lab at Braintrust four floors above
the Bowery, alone, pounding the computer keys, hoping to blunder upon
something that might call up a response. He was desperate now, even
hitting tab and backspace and delete. He had already tried every
conceivable variation of JINGO, the password that Quincy had hijacked
from Scott Jessup's computer.

Nothing worked. The perverse little brat.

The windows were open, and he could hear the street sounds-a car
honking, a dog barking, if he listened closely, even heels clacking on
the concrete. A perfect, crisp autumn day outside, the kind that used to
fill him with bottomless melancholy at his New England prep school and
later at MIT. It used to make him feel that while he, the ever-faithful
drone, was working at his desk, others must be off having fun-riding
around in cars, heading out to Cape Cod for a final clambake on the
beach, piling up at a drive-in hamburger stand where the waitresses
floated over to the cars on roller skates-whatever it was that young
people did.

Quincy's dog was gone, on a walk at least-thank God for small favors.

He looked again at the screen. There had been only those tentative
messages, back and forth early on, enough for him to realize that the
great experiment had worked. But nothing since. And now Cybedon, who
hadn't had anything to do with it at all, who was lucky to have even
heard about it-that was all Quincy's fault-was taking it on as if it
were his own, talking about it,

301

expostulating about it, theorizing about it, almost as if he were the
creator.

Cleaver took his hands off the keyboard and sat back. He thought about
cyberspace, tried to conjure up what it must be like. Whenever he did,
he imagined it as some sort of vast organic network spreading around the
world like some science fiction creature or one of those underground
fungi you read about that spreads for miles under the earth, the world's
largest living creature. Sometimes he thought of it as a brain, a
sprawling global brain oozing gray matter like billowing banks of fog
and with sparks jumping across synapses like forest fires across rivers
and pulsating centers like underwater earthquakes.

He stopped short and wondered: If cyberspace is a brain or analogous to
a brain, does it organize itself according to a principle? Does it sort
itself out by organic function so that over time it breaks down into
different parts? Is it outlandish to think that all the reams of pure
data circulating out there might organize into some retrievable memory
storehouse or that all the viruses might congregate into some center of
malevolence, a center of aggression? Or that the antivirus systems that
try to keep the pathways open evolve into the command stations for
benevolent circulatory systems?

Is Tyler's consciousness zipping around through a funhouse hall of
mirrors now, or is it locked inside a chamber of horrors too gruesome to
be described?

Why does it refuse to communicate? Has it become diffuse, like a drop of
perfume in a barrel of water? Or can it summon up will and decide, like
a stubborn child, to hold its breath and not open its mouth?

Cleaver sighed. He wanted so much to know-not just in the abstract, but
to know from experience. He looked over at the TSR, the backup model,
sitting on a desk where Quincy had been working on it. It looked exactly
like the model he had delivered to the basement of Pinegrove, the one
Cleaver had been using on the patients.

The idea of trying it himself was-he had to admit it-tempting. Just
thinking about it set his heart racing so that he could hear his pulse
pounding in his ears. How easy it would be. Just set the dials and slip
onto the movable stretcher and disappear inside the cigar tube. In just
a few moments' time, he would understand what it's like to be out there,
to experience the departure from the body, the flight through space, the
mind soaring across the heavens.

302

But-and there's the rub-how about the return? And how to ensure that the
trip is accomplished within the mandatory seven minutes without a lab
assistant to pull him out? Overstaying his welcome would clearly be
catastrophic-he had seen what it had done to Benchloss. The memory of
the man's contorted features when he had been pulled out of the chamber
was vivid. He shuddered. No one who had looked upon such a sight would
willingly undertake the risk of duplicating the voyage. It wasn't so
much the end, but the passage to it that loomed as terrifying.

He couldn't say, though, that Benchloss's death had been totally
inconvenient. It had, in fact, been nothing short of fortuitous.

He heard Quincy's steps come up the stairs, then pause in front of the
door. The dog scratched at the base, and the door rattled. A jangling of
keys, a turn in the lock, and the mastiff bounded inside, shaking the
floorboards. Quincy followed him, staring none too happily at Cleaver.

"Christ. You still here? I thought you'd leave ages ago."

Cleaver ignored him and turned back to the keyboard.

"Still battering away at that machine, huh? Why don't you give it a
break-the damn thing's not going to answer you anymore anyway. You know,
I think it's pissed off at you. I think you're the last person it's
going to want to speak to."

The huge dog came over and smelled Cleaver's pant leg. It lifted its
head next to his shoulder, holding its ears down and its tail low- not a
friendly posture.

"Hey, will you call him off?"

"Take it easy. He can smell your fear. So can I, for that matter."

Cleaver tried to listen to see if he could hear a low growl without
putting his head too close.

"Don't move," commanded Quincy.

Cleaver froze.

"C'mon," he said. "This isn't funny. Get him out of here."

"No-I don't mean that. I mean don't hit the keys. For Christ's sake,
look up at the screen."

Cleaver did. And there in the center, he saw the following words being
formed, slowly but surely:

P-I-S-S O-F-F

303

Kate took the elevator to the hospital basement and walked briskly
toward the morgue along a corridor painted institutional green. She
detested the morgue. Everything about it grated on her-the churchlike
silence, the glare of the lights refracting off burnished metal, the
long body drawers that looked as innocuous as filing cabinets. Even the
sterility was bothersome, rigidly enforced for the benefit of the
living-as if it mattered as far as the corpses were concerned. As a
doctor, and particularly one whose operations took patients to the very
edge of life, she should be on friendlier terms with the place, she
knew. But she couldn't find it in her to try. To her, it represented
consummate failure, the apotheosis of death.

A young man was on duty. His hair was parted down the middle so that
forelocks hung down on either side, framing his forehead. He sat behind
a metal desk reading a book-she couldn't make out the title, but saw
that it was by Nabokov. He immediately lowered it and looked at her with
the air of bemusement and a hint of obstinacy that she recognized as a
prelude to flirtation.

"May I help you?" He gave a droll lilt to the question, like a customs
inspector hinting that he might be open to a bribe.

She gave her name, title, and department, which pushed him back a bit.
Then she said she wanted to check some information-the exact time that a
body had entered the morgue and the time it had left for the funeral home.

"I don't know," he said uncertainly. "Was it one of yours?"

"As a matter of fact, it was."

"Oh. Sorry. What's the name and date and approximate time of death, if
you have it?"

304

She told him, and he punched the name into a computer. He frowned.
Nothing was coming up. Then he checked the general register, scrolling
down. He stopped and touched the screen.

"I have him," he said. "He was admitted upstairs-whoa, nine weeks ago.
Is that right?" She nodded. "But I don't have him coming down here.
That's odd-I see a date of death here." He hit some more keys, checked
more files. "I've got nothing at all for him here. I'd have to say, it
looks like he never passed through here. That's strange. Maybe the
family insisted that he be taken somewhere else- that's the only way
he'd bypass this place."

She thanked him, prepared to go, but he seemed to want her to linger.

"Who signed the death certificate?" he asked.

"Dr. Saramaggio."

He smiled. "Oh, well, that could explain it-maybe he resurrected him."

"Tell me something." And now she gave a friendly smile in return. "If a
body is taken out, like to go to the funeral parlor, who is the last one
here to actually see it off?"

"That's easy. That time of night, it would be the night porter. The one
who works the rear exit. There's a way to check that, but you have to go
to the porters' office. It's at the other end of the basement."

Suddenly he had turned helpful.

"One more question, if I may."

"Certainly. You can have more than one."

"If there's an autopsy, it would be done down here, right? You wouldn't
do it anywhere else in the hospital."

"Unlikely. We've got all the equipment here, fluids and everything. Hey,
you're really investigating this. What's up? Suspect foul play?" His use
of the crime-novel expression was ironic. "Need any help? I used to read
Dick Tracy."

"No, thanks," she said. "This is more Mickey Spillane."

It wouldn't do to have this guy muddying the waters.

She left, feeling his eyes trail her from behind as she walked away.
Just for the hell of it, she gave an extra sway to her hips.

The porters' office in the bowels of the building wasn't easy to find.
It was at the end of a rabbit's warren of passageways with peeling

305

paint that led past furnaces and boilers and old storage rooms covered
in dust. At last she came to it, just before a flight of steps that led
to the rear exit. To one side of the doorway was an array of rusted
racks and an old time clock for punch cards. To the other, a coffee
machine that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in months. She stared at
the machine-a cup of coffee suddenly seemed appealing.

"Only if you're desperate," came a voice behind her. "That machine's
temperamental. Never know what's going to come out. It's liable to bite
you."

She turned and saw an elderly black man wearing neatly pressed trousers
and a sports jacket with an open-necked shirt. His dark neck was
wrinkled and his temples were gray, but he looked strong and spry.

"Oh, I'm looking for the porters' office."

"I'd say you've come to the right place. What can we do you for?"

"I'd like to know, if it's no trouble, if you can tell me who was on
duty on a certain night last month."

"Come on in." He motioned her to follow and turned and walked into the
office. It was a snug windowless box with a battered wooden desk lit by
a gooseneck lamp. On the wall was a calendar from an insurance company
showing a white-steepled church among rolling verdant Vermont hills, and
a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks. He offered her the only seat in the
room, but she refused, so they both remained standing.

"Last month, you say. If it wasn't a weekend, I don't even have to
check. That'd be me."

"Good, you're sure."

"Yeah. I've worked nights for years now. I like it better. Less hassles,
fewer people to bother you."

Having delivered his considered opinion, he waited, expectantly. So she
nodded. She understood.

"This is the night I was wondering about," she said, handing him a piece
of paper with Tyler's name and the date of his death written upon it.

"Let's see," he said. He sat down at the desk, put on a pair of glasses,
and from the desk drawer pulled out a notebook with a black-and-white
speckled cardboard cover. "It's old-fashioned," he said, thumbing
through the book and peering at her over the rim of the

306

glasses. "But I trust it more than those computers. Never hear of one of
these crashing."

He moved slowly. Waiting for him to find the answer, and trying to will
his thin bony fingers to fly through the pages, she realized how
overwrought she was. She was seized by anxiety-she could feel it, like a
hand tightening around her body, forcing her breathing into short
bursts, sending her blood racing, feeding alertness with a surge of
adrenaline. They were all textbook symptoms that she had studied to
boredom and back in med school.

Her meeting with the morgue attendant had unsettled her. If Tyler's
autopsy had not been performed according to proper procedures, it was a
serious violation of regulations-and at first blush, that seemed to be
the least of it. Outright falsification was a possibility, which was
even worse and could lead to dismissal and revocation of the hospital's
accreditation. The strangest part was that she couldn't say for certain
exactly what she wanted to happen. She didn't want to see the hospital
get into trouble, or Saramaggio either, for that matter, nor did she
want to be a party to questionable procedures, especially where Scott
and Tyler were concerned. She didn't really believe Tyler was alive, but
she'd feel better if she could prove categorically that he was not and
that the hospital had behaved correctly. But that would mean dashing
Scott's hopes; no matter what he said, she knew that deep down he was
clinging to the idea that his son had somehow survived.

"Let's see," the old man repeated, needlessly because he had already
found the page and had read it through once. He was going back for a
second read.

"No," he said. "I see nothing here about a funeral van. But there is a
notation here about a patient being removed, and now that I see it, I
remember it well. It was raining to beat all tarnation."

"A patient'?"

"Yep. It was that little boy that everyone was talking about, the one
who had that accident to his skull. He was being transferred to another
hospital-that's what they told me."

"Who?"

"The ones who took him. The driver and the assistant."

"Did they say which hospital?"

"No, come to think of it."

307

"What were they driving-a hearse?"

"No, an ambulance. Not from here, a private one."

"Do you know the company?"

"No."

"Could you describe it?"

"I guess. It was just an ordinary ambulance. White and red. I expect it
had the name on the side, but I'm afraid I didn't get a good look. If I
did, I don't remember. Like I said, it was raining something fierce."

"Was a doctor from the hospital there?"

"Not that I recall."

"So who authorized the transfer?"

"Now that you ask, I'm not so sure. Somebody called down. I think it was
a doctor, but now that I think back, I can't rightly say."

"Don't you keep records?"

"No, not on something like that."

She held her breath.

"Could it have been Dr. Saramaggio?"

"Hmm. No, I think I would have remembered that."

"Then who?"

"I just can't say."

"When you say you can't say, you mean you don't remember, right?"

"Right."

One name occurred to her, of course, but she wasn't sure she should
mention it. Cleaver hadn't been in to work for three days. She didn't
want to run any risk that he could be alerted, even inadvertently.

"Tell me more about the ambulance and the guys who took him away."

"Not much to tell. The ambulance was just a regular ambulance. The guys
were-well, I can't say they looked like CPR types. One had long hair-I
mean, really long. And the other was kind of scruffy-looking."

"Race?"

"White-both of them."

"Anything else?"

"Not that I can think of right now. I'm trying to cast my mind back."

308

"Okay. If you come up with anything, will you be sure to let me know?"

"Sure will."

She pulled out a card and also wrote her home number on it.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Sure. Go ahead."

"How come you're asking all these questions?"

She decided to play it straight with him. He had been straight with her,
as far as she could tell.

"Well, keep it between us, please, but that little boy-there was a
funeral service for him the morning after you saw him."

"No kidding." He shook his head and whistled. "Too bad. So young, too."

"Yep."

"Uh-huh. I guess he must've died somewhere else then."

"Why do you say that?"

" 'Cause he was alive when he left here."

"And how can you be sure?"

" 'Cause of the stanchion."

"The stanchion?"

"Yes. The one that held the IV drip. Plus, there were a lot of
machines-you know, life-sustaining equipment-attached to him. They were
real careful with it loading him in. Now he wouldn't be needing any IV
drip if he wasn't still alive-would he?"

She tried to keep her face blank.

"No, you're right about that."

"So that's why I say I guess he must've died somewhere else."

"I guess you're right about that, too."

"Uh-huh."

She worked her way back through the basement of the building, her mind
racing. She was so excited, she realized she had lost all track of time.
She checked her watch-my God, she had an operation to perform in half an
hour. She hurried upstairs and sat at her desk to collect herself. She
knew from experience that she performed best in the OR when she was able
to vacate her mind. That allowed her to achieve a thin shield of mental
detachment so that she could concentrate on the minute tasks at hand,
cutting the dura or slicing with a scalpel, and at the same time
visualize the whole operation so that she

309

could take the next step without even thinking about it. This was
impossible to do if her mind was somewhere else.

After a few minutes, she felt under control and went to change and wash
up. Her last thought before donning scrubs was that she shouldn't tell
Scott yet what she had discovered. She needed some more information
first. It wouldn't do to give him half the story.

Scott tossed in bed that night, victim of his worst nightmare. He had
had trouble falling asleep in the first place. It was unseasonably warm,
so he'd kept the windows to the loft open and had tried to read. He
couldn't concentrate, and at midnight turned out the light. Just as he
was about to drift off, a fight broke out on the street below. Two
drivers got out of their cars and circled each other like angry curs,
letting loose full-throated threats and curses. A neighbor on the third
floor across the street made everything worse by screaming at them and
finally throwing down a pot full of water, which caused the two to curse
him and yell even louder. They banged on the neighbor's front door.
Eventually, they jumped into the cars and pulled away, peeling rubber.
By then, Scott was wide-awake. He had tried reading some more and had
finally fallen off, to sleep fitfully, and after a short while he
tumbled into the nightmare.

It was one that he had had before, several times. And even though he was
semiconscious, on some level he seemed to know that it was familiar, and
this knowledge made him anticipate his fear and exacerbated it. He felt
as if the dreadful sequence of events was unfolding according to some
preordained scenario that he was powerless to stop.

He was young, about seven or eight, the age of awareness and
helplessness. He was in his pajamas in bed in a rambling old New England
house with a dozen connecting rooms downstairs and the same upstairs.
The two stories were connected by a single flight of creaky wooden steps
on one end, which was far from his bedroom. Down below, in the room
directly beneath him, was his mother. She was doing something that was
dangerous to him. Maybe she was drinking, maybe she was mixing chemicals
to make a bomb, maybe she was boiling water to scald him with-he didn't
know for certain.

310

But he had a plan. He would telephone the doctor, who would arrive and
make everything all right. Carefully, he dialed the numbers, one by one,
on an old rotary phone, releasing the dial each time slowly and softly
so that it would make no noise. Still, it sounded very loud to him. A
nurse answered and said she would get the doctor. After a long wait, the
doctor picked up the line, and Scott began talking, telling him about
the danger. But just then he heard a click, and he knew his mother had
picked up the extension downstairs. And she started talking, too,
sweetly, slowly, explaining to the doctor in a voice that struck him as
unreal that everything was fine, and then she said, "It's all right,
Doctor. There's nothing to worry-"

And she was going to say "about," but as she did, the sound exploded, as
if in an echo chamber, getting louder and louder until it was a piercing
scream. The phone fell to the floor with a smash, and he knew that she
had dropped it and that she was running to get him and that the doctor
couldn't get there in time. He heard the doors downstairs slamming open
one by one and the deadfall of running footsteps. And for a moment he
thought of trying to run down the stairs to the front door, but he
feared he would meet her halfway on the staircase, which scared him
beyond thinking about, so that he merely sunk lower and lower under the
blankets with only his head sticking out.

And soon enough the footsteps sounded different, a bit more distant, and
he knew she was coming up the stairs. And then they began getting louder
again, and more doors opened and closed. Before he knew it, she was in
front of his door, which flew open as if a great gust of wind had blown
it, and there, towering almost to the top of the frame, she turned
suddenly into a man with a maniacal grin holding high a meat cleaver
dripping with blood. He stepped forward, in one great leap was by the
bed, hoisting the cleaver above his head-

Scott awoke, shuddering, drenched in sweat, his heart bouncing in his
chest. He was gripping the blankets in terror. He knew instantly that he
had been dreaming, that he was okay and wasn't going to be killed. But
he had been so frightened that even though the terror began to subside
right away, his heart was still pounding minutes later and he was still
trembling so much that he looked at his hands and watched them-it was as
if they had minds of their own that he couldn't calm.

Before, when he had had the nightmare, he would get out of bed

311

and go straight to the liquor cabinet under the sink and pour himself a
stiff scotch, but now, of course, he could not do that. He got up and
walked around, feeling his heart return to normal, like an engine that
had nearly popped a gasket slowing down. He went to the windows and
looked down upon the deserted street. A street lamp sent a funnel of
light down onto the sidewalk, and fragments of glass sparkled back.

Here I am, he thought, thirty-six years old and still dreaming that same
nightmare. He remembered the time he had had it next to Lydia, how she'd
sat up and listened to him with her big eyes wide and then had held him
and talked to him. He'd told her how disturbed he was that he would
dream he was in danger from his mother, whom he loved, and Lydia said
she thought it was his reaction to his mother's alcoholism-and the fear
that she was out of control. She had promised-her eyes blazing-that
someday he would rid himself of it. He wondered about that. All these
years later, it still bothered him. The unconscious knows no time, a
friend of his had once told him, quoting Freud, he said.

For the hell of it-and also because he was wide-awake and feared going
back to sleep-he sat before his computer and jiggled the mouse to make
the screen saver dissolve. A message was waiting for him, and he knew
instantly that it was from Tyler. He held his breath and looked at the
words, then read them quickly, then slowly again and again. They were
mysterious.

DAD COME. TRY 199.6.2.5 "WORDSWORTH"

He waited a moment or two to see if there would be more, then tried
frantically to answer back, hitting keys quickly, looking for the words
that would unlock the mystery or just draw any kind of a response, keep
it going.

TYLER ARE U THERE?

He waited as long as he dared, then typed again:

TYLER WHAT DO U MEAN? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT IS WORDSWORTH? CAN U HEAR
ME . . . TYLER ARE U THERE ???

312

He typed more:

FOR GODS SAKE TYLER ANSWER

But there was no response on the screen, and he did not know what else
to try.

The next day, Kate checked in the Yellow Pages and found that there were
fourteen ambulance and ambulette services in Manhattan, over forty if
she counted the other boroughs. She went on the Internet and, one by
one, called up the Web sites of those that were posted. Most contained
photos of their vehicles. Whenever one cropped up that was red and
white, or anything close, she copied it and carried it down to show to
the porter. Each time, he solemnly examined it, looking at it from top
to bottom, then shook his head no. Several times he paused quite a while
before responding. In these cases, she feared that he wasn't really sure
and merely wanted to provide her with a definitive answer, so she made a
note of them. They would merit a follow-up call.

The companies that didn't have Web sites she telephoned directly. She
asked them to give a description of the ambulances. Sometimes they
complied; sometimes they became suspicious and hung up. Only three in
all would agree to look over their logs for the night in question, and
none of these came back with a report that they had gone to St.
Catherine's. A dozen others insisted that the information was confidential.

She was more than halfway through when Saramaggio came to her door and
stood there until she looked up. He told her to come to his office. How
strange that he didn't just telephone or that he didn't tell her what
was on his mind right then and there, she thought, trailing him through
the corridor. He walked ahead quickly, ducking his head slightly at each
doorway.

Once inside his office, he gestured toward the chair with an awkward
politeness and sat down behind his desk. He cleared his throat, avoided
looking into her eyes, played with a pencil on his blotter, and finally
asked how she was doing.

"Fine," she said. "Just fine."

313

"Good, good," he said, but he didn't sound as if he meant it. His
thoughts were elsewhere.

At last, he looked up at her and said, "Look, there's no point in
beating around the bush." She nodded her agreement. "Take a look at
this," he said, and he opened a drawer, pulled out a document, put it on
the desk, and spun it around so that she could read it.

It was some kind of complicated, four-page form that she had never seen
before, and at first she was baffled. But as she read on, she felt the
anger rising and her cheeks turning red.

"This is outrageous," she declared, turning to the last page.

"I admit, it's a bit difficult," he said.

"Difficult! It's an application for suspension. He's applying to have me
suspended! And what are the grounds? What conceivably are the grounds?"

Saramaggio avoided looking her in the eye.

"All that business with the boy," he replied. "You know, how you came in
with the father and then there was that unfortunate scene- mostly his
fault, I know, but you were there-"

"His fault. My God, you were there. You came right afterward. That boy
was gone. He was dead and his father just saw that he was dead-you'd
expect him to get upset. And after he'd tried so hard to get him taken
off life support and been refused-wait a minute. What are these words
here? Does this mean to suggest that we are responsible for his death,
that his father and I-"

"It doesn't say that in so many words, but yes, there is that
implication." He was looking at the wall now. "I mean, the two of you
were there, there was a huge ruckus-"

"Now, come on. That boy was dead when we got there. None of the
monitors, none of his monitors, showed any life whatsoever. That's what
upset Scott. You know that!"

"Well, that's what you say-"

"That's why we called you."

"Perhaps, yes, but you see, I arrived after it was all over, so how
could I reasonably attest that it didn't happen this way?"

"But who says that it did? Him? He doesn't even know. He wasn't there."

"Now don't get upset. This doesn't represent any definitive finding. All
this is at an early stage; everything will be looked into."

314

"Don't get upset-how the hell can you say that? You've got the nerve to
sit there and tell me I'm suspended for something I didn't even do. And
you know that I didn't do anything and you're not backing me up."

"We'll see. I'm not taking any sides at the moment."

"You're afraid of him. That's what's going on."

"I am not. He is, however, a senior doctor here, and he outranks you so
that we have to take what he says-"

"You signed that death certificate because he made you do it. And you
put down the wrong time of death to implicate us."

Saramaggio gasped. He looked as if the wind had been knocked out of him.

"And that's not all. You signed the autopsy, and you got him to sign it
or he got you to. And I don't think any autopsy was ever performed."

Saramaggio stood up. He pointed to the door.

"That's enough. Enough of your accusations. And enough of your snooping
around. Leave at once. And you are to consider yourself suspended until
further notice."

She left, slamming the door behind her. She was shaking with rage.

On the way back to her office, still trembling, she thought back over
the whole episode and to Saramaggio's cowardice and to Cleaver's
venality. And one thing that struck her as odd about the accusation was
its timing. Why had it been raised now and not weeks ago, when the
incident had happened? Why did they want her out of the way now? Was it
because she was on the right track?

315

By now Scott was familiar enough with the lobby of St. Catherine's to
avoid detection. He waited outside until a group of five young people
approached-they bore the jaunty aspect of residents- and as they went
through the revolving door, he followed. He stuck close to the pack,
keeping them between him and the receptionist, until he was past the
main desk. He turned the corner into the cul-de-sac of the elevator
bank, pushed the button, and stepped quickly into the car when it came.
Once on Kate's floor, he walked briskly to her office. The door was
closed. He knocked softly, and when there was no reply, tried the
handle. Locked.

Somehow he had not expected that. He looked quickly in both
directions-no one in sight. He walked down the hallway, trying each
doorknob like a hotel thief looking for a lucky break. He got one. Four
doors down, the handle turned and opened onto a small office, neatly
kept. He slipped inside and locked the door behind him. Thick medical
tomes lined two bookshelves, a stack of printed articles rose high over
a side table, and on the windowsill was a glazed plaster skull marked
off in regions of phrenology, a joke no doubt. And there smack in the
center of the desk was what he wanted-a computer.

He sat before it, pulled the chair closer, and switched it on. Out of
his pocket he pulled the piece of paper on which he had written the
numbers from Tyler. He had memorized them, but he wanted to avoid even
the dimmest possibility of mistake.

Now, he thought, comes the tricky part.

It had taken him a long time to decipher Tyler's message. He had gone
over and over it, parsing the few bits that were there in black and
white and looking for the key to unlock them. He'd tried approaching

316

it from his son's point of view, applying what he knew from his
instinctive love. Three words and some numbers-that's all there were. He
assumed that communication was difficult, that somehow it was an
exhaustive labor-that was the impression given when each letter came
onto the screen slowly, almost as if it was painful to call them up. And
why else was the message so short? It was clearly important- Tyler had
begged to be rescued-but he couldn't supply any more details or clues to
make finding him any easier. And there was something else that Scott
didn't care to linger on-the messages seemed to be getting shorter,
almost as if Tyler was disappearing out there somewhere. He had written,
"Dad come''' Not "Dad help." The previous message had used the word
help, so in that sense it was superfluous. But come was an active
imperative-a command, a supplication-and perhaps it was connected to the
second half of the message, to the numbers and then the mysterious
single name Wordsworth. He racked his memory, back over every
conversation they had had about literature and writing and reading; none
that he could recall centered on the English poet. Never, so far as he
could tell, had the name acquired any special significance in their
lives together. There was no one poem that Tyler loved, no quotation
that either of them recited, nothing. It was only when he became
convinced that the "nothing" was important, that no association provided
any linkage, that he was free to look for other explanations. Then he
looked upon the puzzle differently and thought that perhaps Wordsworth
was meaningful to someone else, that perhaps it was so meaningful that
it had been adopted as a template. Perhaps . . . Of course-maybe that
was it. A password! Somebody's computer password! And that might explain
the numbers-the basic address of a computer system. Now all he had to do
was to guess what system and-the trickiest part-the owner of that
password. A computer hacker could probably get the information, but he
had come up with a shortcut, a guess and nothing more; but it was a good
one, because suddenly everything was beginning to fall into place.

And now he had the chance to put his intuition to the test.

He signed on to the hospital's computer and punched in the numbers, a
combination that opened a secure subsystem. It responded with a flashing
user name text box, so he typed in

CLEAVER

317

Then it asked for his password, and he typed:

WORDSWORTH

Instantly, the screen nickered, an image dipped and tucked, and then
there were lines crossing horizontally, rapidly. He realized immediately
what they were from his endless hours sitting and watching Tyler in the
special ward. They were the tracings of a body's life functions. One
line shot up, fell down below zero almost as much, rebounded up half
again as much, and quivered off into a flat line and then repeated the
same sequence, over and over. It was an EKG. There were also the
squiggly lines of an EEG, the monitor of brain activity, and a third
line bouncing across the screen that represented blood pressure.

The lines were so regular that he imagined them to be familiar. He
thought-but could it be?-that he actually recognized them. They were so
invariant that they appeared to come, like Tyler's, from someone in a
coma. As he watched, he remembered hearing the leaden sounds from the
ward, the steady rasp of breath going in and out like a bellows. He
almost could hear the sound now. The more he watched the lines, the more
he became convinced that they were the lines from Tyler's monitors. Then
the screen flickered some more, and some kind of image seemed to be
trying to take shape. It came and went so quickly he couldn't make it
out. The lines reappeared, and as he watched they seemed to be
fluctuating, at first just a bit and then wildly.

Abruptly, the image cut in again and flickered, like a distant
television station trying to break through. The lines reappeared and
then disappeared again, and in their place the image materialized. He
looked-this time the reception was a little clearer and he could make
out shapes. There were long cylindrical objects of some kind running
from the top of the screen to the bottom, but it was difficult to say
what they were. He looked harder, squinted, stared. They seemed to
be-was that it?-some kind of pipes. Yes, they were definitely pipes,
like water or steam pipes in an old house-there was a connecting link
between two of them, an elbow joint. Long, wide pipes running up and
down the length of the screen. But what did it mean? The image
disappeared, reassembled itself a moment later-exactly the

318

same. There was no movement, no change. In an odd way, the experience
was like watching a video camera trained upon an inert, unchangeable
background. The monitor lines came back, and now they were moving
rapidly, almost violently. Even the heartbeat was pounding intensely. It
had mounted, had become tachycardia. Then suddenly he knew that he was
watching a message sent by Tyler. Somehow Tyler had been able to send
the electronic signatures of his own vital signs. The image returned,
sharper still. Scott tilted his head to one side. It almost looked ...
It could be a view from below. In fact that's what made the most sense,
the image of something looked at from underneath-pipes running across a
ceiling!

And at that moment, just as the image began flickering again and fading
away and the lines reappeared, the realization struck him like a blow on
the head and he believed he knew what the image was. He was-just maybe,
just conceivably-looking at something through Tyler's eyes. Tyler was
probably lying on his back somewhere and was still unable to move, but
somehow had managed to communicate through the computer and transmit the
image that fell into his field of vision. And that image was an
assortment of pipes, large pipes, the sort one would find in the
basement of a large building.

That was it! And now as the lines began waving wildly, almost
frantically, the image sputtered back and Scott saw something new: a
dark spot on the left side of the screen. It grew and at first looked
like a mushroom, and then it took shape. And as he stared, he could
scarcely believe his eyes-it was someone's head moving into the field,
seen from below. A man's head! There was his forehead and broad bald
dome and hair over the ears. Was it possible ... that a man was leaning
over Tyler? That would explain why the lines of the monitors were
fluctuating so excitedly, and-Scott dreaded to think-so fearfully. Scott
hit the print button, hoping to capture the image on paper.

No sooner had he done so than the dark shape withdrew and again the
picture of pipes came onto the screen. They were fainter now and turning
into indistinct shapes, and soon the monitor lines returned and they,
too, were fainter. They gradually faded away into nothingness. The
screen was blank. He couldn't bring an image back. He turned the machine
off and signed in again. The computer accepted his password, but there
was no connection this time. Nothing.

319

Scott felt like wailing at his powerlessness. His son was lying
somewhere, helpless, vulnerable, and probably terrified out of his wits.
He had had the presence of mind to send an SOS to his father, and what
could the father do? Nothing. Nothing for now, anyway- that is, not
until he was able to locate him. Then those holding him would learn what
he was capable of.

His concentration was so intense that he didn't hear the footsteps
coming up the hall, not even when they stopped before the door. A key
ring jangled, and a key turned the lock-then Scott looked up and
realized that someone was there.

Scott wasn't fazed. He sat back and crossed his arms and waited for the
door to open all the way. When it did, he was looking up at the opened
mouth of a slight man with cocoa-colored skin in a doctor's smock. The
man's eyes were ovals of surprise. He was, Scott realized, one of the
doctors who had operated on Tyler.

"What. . . ? What in the name of. . . ?"

"Yes?" said Scott calmly, for all the world as if it were his own office.

"You're Tyler's father . . . Mr. Jessup."

"Yes."

The man remained stupefied.

"I'm Gully. I was one of his surgeons. But what-may I ask-are you doing
in my office?"

"I came to visit," replied Scott quickly.

The man looked confused.

"Oh, I see. But how did you get in?"

"The door was unlocked."

"I see, yes. I don't always lock it, that's true."

"So there you are."

"And you came to visit me because ..."

"I want to talk."

"Most certainly. And about. . . ?"

"About anyone who had anything to do with Tyler's care. I would like to
know more about them all. Perhaps now that we've met, you might care to
join me for a cup of coffee? Right away."

Gully saw that he was desperate.

"Certainly, I should just pick up some papers."

"No, no time for that now. You could always come back for that."

320

"Well, if you like."

"I like."

And on the way out, as Scott turned Gully around and ushered him back
outside with one arm, he leaned over to the printer and scooped up the
page that was resting there. He glimpsed at it to make sure it had
reproduced.

It had. There was that same view of pipes in the background, looking a
little sharper on paper, and in the foreground, peering down, was the
dark shape of a head looking down, the features just barely
recognizable. It intruded into the picture like a thumbprint.

Kate set about cleaning her office. After all, she didn't know when she
would be coming back. Or-for that matter-if she would be coming back.

She hadn't been at St. Cat's long enough to accumulate much stuff, so
she used a single cardboard box that had come with a new laptop. She set
it on a chair and began filling it. First she put in a six-inch-tall
pile of medical records, which were mostly duplicates of current cases.
She felt she should keep them at home, just in case. It paid to be
safe-she had been badly shaken by the accusations against her, so
patently false and clearly intended to deflect blame. Now she would put
nothing past them. They might engage in a full-fledged campaign to smear
her.

She opened the lower desk drawers and piled in a few supplies, two
coffee cups, letters, an address book, odds and ends, computer disks,
and various memos on employee benefits and health plans. She pulled out
the top drawer and turned it upside down over the box. Out spilled
notes, paper clips, business cards, staples, coins, and a pack of mints.
She saw a wallet-sized photo of herself and Harry, taken at a restaurant
on Fisherman's Wharf, a hokey place but still one that she secretly
enjoyed. She held it close and stared at it. Poor, dear Harry. She
hadn't thought of him for weeks. And he hadn't called her either-the
ardor was probably dying down on his side, too. She felt a tug of
regret. The world was so safe when she was with him-safe but
predictable. Maybe that had been the problem. She put the picture in the
box.

321

Finally, she cleared off the top of her desk, hurriedly now, sweeping
everything into the box, including a framed portrait of her mother.

She carried the box to the other side of her desk, turned out the lights
with her elbow, and walked away, pulling the door closed behind her with
the tip of one shoe.

Far away down the hall, she saw Gully walking away and turning a corner
in the company of another man. From the back-for a moment there-she
thought he looked like Scott, but of course that was impossible. They
didn't even know each other.

Riding home in a taxi, the box propped up on the seat beside her, the
injustice of everything that had happened began to press in upon her.
Her hands were still trembling slightly, mostly with anger but also, she
knew, with a general surfeit of emotion. She found it hard to describe,
hard to put words to it. She had given up so much to come to New York
and work under Saramaggio. She had arrived in the big city like any
naive rube from the West Coast, wide-eyed and full of dreams, and
everything had gone wrong. From the very beginning, it hadn't clicked.
Then came the whole horrible episode with Tyler, and now she had
discovered that the hospital records faked his death and that he had
been alive when he left the hospital. What did that mean? Where could he
have been taken? Was it possible that he was still alive even now? How
could she help Scott find him? It was even more difficult now that she
was suspended. What a vindictive act. Cleaver was behind it. For some
reason, he was striking out, trying to wound her, and Saramaggio, the
lily-livered Milquetoast, was going along. They had already engineered
her suspension from the hospital. What could come next? Possibly charges
of unprofessional conduct-that could derail her career. And all on
fabricated grounds. Who at the hospital would come to her defense?

As the cab sped down Second Avenue, she looked out at the people
shopping, the deliverymen on bicycles, the young svelte women dressed to
kill. For the first time in a long while, she felt the New York
disease-loneliness. Maybe she wasn't as strong as she had believed;
maybe she couldn't make it here after all. Maybe she belonged among the
legions who had been lured by Frank Sinatra crooning the famous lyric
and who had failed and had to turn tail and head home, back to the small
towns. Funny-you never heard about them, only the conquering heroes.

322

She felt a sudden urge to telephone Scott. He needed to know what she
had discovered. And maybe at the same time, she thought, feeling guilty
for thinking about herself, he could also help her somehow; she needed
his strength to shore her up.

She paid the taxi. The elevator operator gallantly carried her box into
the elevator and smiled at her as he deposited it at the foot of her
door. Inside, she dropped the carton on her dining table, about to go to
the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, when something on top of the pile
caught her eye. It was a business card, white with raised blue letters,
that read

Frederick Butterworth

The Hospital Supply Corporation

Flushing, Queens NY

From ambulances to X-ray machines, If we don't have it, we know where to
get it.

She picked up the card, went to the phone, and dialed the number in the
lower right-hand corner.

Amazingly, he answered-no secretary, no voice mail, no answering
machine. She hadn't expected to get right through and didn't even have
time to prepare a spiel. She gave her name and reminded him where they
had met. At first he seemed to be casting about for the recollection,
but he had the good grace to pretend to remember. Then he clearly did.

"Oh yes," he said. "You're the surgeon. Wasn't that place something?
Gave me the creeps!"

They danced around like this for a while, and then she got to the point.

"Mr. Butterworth, I'd like your help with something."

"Just name it. I'm your man."

"Well, I notice on your card that you supply ambulances."

"That's right-ambulances to X-ray machines. Glad you still have it."

"Beg your pardon?"

323

"The card. I'm glad you still have it."

"Oh, yes. That's how I called you. In any case I thought that since you
supply ambulances-"

"We don't actually supply the ambulances ourselves, but we can place
your order for you. We operate as middlemen in the transaction."

"I see. Well, what I was wondering was, is there any kind of a directory
that would say what kind of ambulances various hospitals have-you know,
what models they are and what they look like?"

"You bet."

And so she told him what she was after: the name of every hospital and
company in the city whose ambulance had red and white markings. And he
said: "I can get that for you in a jiffy. Don't even have to call you back."

He was gone from the phone for a while, though, something like six or
seven minutes. And when he returned he said, "Got a pencil? There's
quite a list, I'm afraid. It's a popular combination."

"How many?"

"Seven."

He began to read out the names and she scribbled them down, but when he
got to one she knew he didn't have to go any further. She let him
finish, just for appearances. Then she thanked him very much and hung
up. He sounded sorry to hear her go.

Of course, she thought. It had been obvious all along and she should
have seen it right away. Perhaps, like Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined
Letter," it was simply too obvious, so much so that it had been overlooked.

She was suddenly certain of where the ambulance that had taken Tyler
away had gone on that rainy night.

Pinegrove.

Gully was surprised that Scott didn't want to have coffee in the
hospital cafeteria and instead insisted on going outside. He noticed
how, as they passed a nurses' station where Saramaggio was giving
instructions to an orderly, Scott walked on the other side of him, his
head bent as he carried on an animated conversation that didn't make

324

much sense. In fact, the man seemed so high-strung and excited that
Gully wondered if he was unbalanced.

In the elevator, he suddenly stopped talking altogether. He crossed the
lobby quickly, holding Gully by the elbow and squeezing so tightly it
almost hurt as he maneuvered him toward the door. The receptionist
seemed to be frowning at them as they passed.

And once outside, Gully's companion seemed to lose interest in coffee
altogether. Instead, he pulled the surgeon urgently to one side of the
hospital. He looked in both directions before he spoke.

"What in the world-where are we going?" asked Gully.

But Scott ignored the question, turning toward him with a fierce look in
his eyes and inquiring abrupdy, "Are you able to keep a secret?"

Gully thought before responding.

"Well, yes," he said. "But I don't see-"

"Promise me that you will."

Gully hesitated, confused.

"Promise," insisted Scott, with such urgency that Gully began nodding
rapidly and saying, "I will. I will. I do."

"Good. Now listen carefully. I am going to ask you a question, and I
want you to think long and hard about it and give me an answer. Right?"

"Yes. Yes." That time, Gully needed no prompting. And he had to admit
that his nervousness was beginning to give way to curiosity. What could
the man possibly want, and why was he so jittery about it?

"Okay. Here goes. I am going to show you a picture. It's a picture of
some pipes, and I want you to tell me if you've ever seen them before,
if they're familiar in any way."

"Right," Gully said uncertainly.

At that, Scott reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a folded
sheet of paper, carefully unfolded it, and held it up. Gully's eyes went
immediately to the foreground, to the dark head cut off at the mouth.

"Say, who is that? Isn't that-"

"Never mind who that is or isn't," cut in Scott abruptly. "Just look at
the pipes in the background. Have you ever seen them before?"

Gully looked at the picture, long and hard, as he had promised. Then he
shook his head no.

"Are you sure? Could they be right here? In the basement of St. Cat's?"

325

The man had such a pleading tone to his voice that Gully wanted to
satisfy him, but he could not.

"No, I don't think so. It's hard to say for certain, of course, but I've
been to the basement here, and I have to say, I don't recognize them."

"You've never seen them before-there or anywhere?"

"No, I'm almost sure I haven't."

Scott seemed crestfallen, so Gully added, "But you know, one set of
pipes looks pretty much like another. It's just that these seem really
old, decrepit. See how the paint is peeling off of them? At St. Cat's,
the facilities are a bit newer. I don't think we have anything like that
down there."

"Okay. Now this man in the foreground here-I think we both know who he is."

Gully nodded. All this was surpassingly strange, he thought. Where had
this man gotten this picture, and what significance did he think it carried?

"Now I want you to tell me-doctors sometimes work at a number of
hospitals, right?"

"Right."

"Well, does this particular guy work anywhere else?"

"Yes, he does."

"And where is that?"

"Pinegrove."

"Pinegrove. What's that?"

"It's a psychiatric hospital. It's for serious cases-an old place. Say,"
he added, catching the spirit of the interrogation, "it's really falling
down. It could have pipes like that."

"And where is it?"

"Not far at all. Just halfway across the river. On Roosevelt Island."

Scott was gone without another word.

Strange man, strange encounter, thought Gully, feeling a little relieved
that Scott had left, but also dissatisfied, since his curiosity was now
destined to remain unsatisfied. He watched him rushing up the avenue,
waving his arms frantically to flag down a taxi.

326

A crowd had gathered at the loading platform for the tramway to
Roosevelt Island by the time Scott arrived. It was the beginnings of the
rush-hour crunch, a mixed lot of professionals and UN diplomats, mostly
from Third World countries. Four handsome and dignified black-as-ebony
men were dressed in the flowing, brightly colored robes of West Africa.
Scott was breathless-the taxi had moved so slowly that he had finally
abandoned it and run the last three blocks-and he pushed his way to the
front, close enough to make sure he would be on the next car. One man in
a wrinkled blue linen suit seemed about to object, but one look at
Scott's urgent expression and he turned away.

The car arrived, slipping neatly into its berth and disgorging its
cargo, a fresh-looking crop of people dressed for a night on the town.
The doors opened, and the people around Scott surged forward. He moved
with the flow and found a place to stand near a window looking south. He
wanted to scout the place from the air and choose an isolated path that
would lead him to the lower tip of the island. The Queensboro Bridge,
next to the tramway line, cut the island in two. To the north was the
residential quarter, hulking rectangles of brown and red brick turning
gray in the twilight. To the south was a desolate area of scrawny growth
and three ancient clusters of concrete and stone-the medical buildings.
He knew Pinegrove was at the island's tip.

The doors closed, and the car took off with the stomach-lifting lurch of
a ski lift. It rose on its cable at a gentle angle but surprisingly
quickly. Scott looked around; the faces that crowded him were passive
and bored, masks of beaten-down commuters. Standing, holding

327

on to a bar and feeling a backpack press against his spine, he felt a
little wave of claustrophobia rising up. He beat it back by
concentrating on the view outside. The car reached a plateau, level and
moving fast. The bridge obstructed his view, but for a moment between
steel girders, he caught a distant glimpse of steep dark roofs rising up
over the treetops, the spires of Pinegrove, he was sure.

He tried to think. He had no strategy and had little time to come up
with one-other than to sneak into the place and search it thoroughly and
find his son. All he wanted was to rescue him, no matter what condition
he was in, and then to make sure that he got everything he needed, for
life, or for death, at long last-a death with whatever smidgeon of
dignity could still be mustered.

A tramway car leaving the island approached on the adjacent cable. Scott
looked in as it passed and saw that it was less than half full, a dozen
or so people sitting and standing. And then a particular visage crossed
his line of vision. He froze in place; he gripped the rail, unable to
move, as he stared at the figure. There he was, in the tramway going the
other way, sitting quietly, inconspicuously-the same hair around the
ears, the broad dome of a forehead, the sharp nose. Cleaver. There was
no mistaking him. He sat, looking idly ahead, almost as if he were
daydreaming, a stationary bust gliding along no more than twenty feet
away. The car moved on and Cleaver was gone, a fleeting vision in the
half-light whose afterimage burned in Scott's brain.

His heart pounded against his rib cage as if it wanted to break through.
He tried to think. What to do? Should he jump on the next car for the
return trip? Try to catch Cleaver and force him to admit what he had
done with his son? Force him to reveal where Tyler was and lead him to
him? Somehow, as Scott had played out the scenario in his mind, he had
imagined bursting in on Cleaver at Pinegrove, finding him there with
Tyler, and unraveling the whole plot-whatever it was-in one fell swoop.
He had been foolish-of course there was always the chance that the man
at the center of it all would be absent when he arrived.

His car moved on, began its downward slide. Maybe it was fortuitous that
Cleaver was leaving the island; maybe it would be easier to reconnoiter
and find out what was going on and locate Tyler. That was his goal, to
find him and save him. Everything else could wait- even revenge.

328

At the terminal, the crowd got off, moving painfully slowly and walking
in one direction. Scott broke away, taking a path that led the opposite
way. He had to restrain himself from running. The last thing he needed
was to attract attention to himself.

He crossed the island and took a walkway along the river's edge on the
Queens side. It was deserted. Amid the sounds of the waves lapping at
the rocks and the whining of cars over the bridge, he heard his own
footsteps. They sounded loud to him. The smell of the river, a bracing
combination of brine and fish, struck him full in the face. The sun was
sinking over the darkened tops of the buildings of Queens, casting
across the sky rays of orange and red that washed against the trees and
the mammoth bridge, making it look almost beautiful. Out of nowhere came
an unreal, irrelevant feeling: It was like a stage set.

He passed by a cluster of buildings whose windows were mostly dark and
continued walking south. After a few minutes, he came to a line of
bushes. He stopped behind them and peered through. He saw Pinegrove
looming above him, suddenly immense, an apparition out of a Gothic
nightmare with its vaulted windows, crenellated towers, and thick stone
walls. The only lights were on the lower three floors.

That makes my search easier, thought Scott. He rounded the bushes and
crossed a field of weeds that were so thick they tugged at his ankles.
In the open, he felt vulnerable, but he hurried and headed straight for
an arched doorway at the rear. He gained it and slipped quickly into its
shadow. He stopped to listen-nothing. He took two quick steps forward
and grasped the thick door handle, squeezing the brass tongue downward.
It would not budge-locked. He rattled the door gingerly, but it did not
give. He paused for a moment, then backed away and went to the right,
following the contours of the wall. He came to a window, chest high, and
looked in. It was dark.

He braced his arms upon the thick stone sill and hoisted himself up. He
scraped his knee against the rough-hewn rock, but barely noticed. He
stood and leaned against the window, curling his fingertips under the
wooden frame and straining to raise it. It wouldn't give. He cupped his
hands around his eyes and peered down. The lock was fastened.

He thought quickly but calmly. His mind was clear-no questions or
doubts, no hesitations. Time was fluid and moving slowly. He had

329

ample time to consider all options; he focused on each one like a beam
of light. He took off his shirt, bundled it around his right hand, and
smashed a pane halfway up. The sound of the splintering glass striking
the floor inside was enough to make him pause, but only for a second.
Balancing easily, he listened for half a moment to see if someone was
coming. No one was.

He reached in to turn the lock and raised the window, which shuddered. A
triangle of glass in the smashed pane leaned inward in slow motion, then
fell to the floor and broke. Quickly, he ducked under the sash and
stepped inside and leapt to the floor, landing on the slippery shards.
He donned his shirt and looked around-a supply office of some sort, in
disarray. No one there. He moved quietly across the floor to the closed
door, put one ear against it, and listened. A strange sound met his ear,
a muffled burbling, rising and falling. After a few moments, it almost
stopped, then started up again. He listened. Voices, many of them. But
they sounded strange-a Tower of Babel, many conversations going on
simultaneously.

He put one hand on the doorknob and turned slowly. The mechanism was old
and gave way slowly, grudgingly. He pushed. The door would not budge. He
pulled it, and it seemed to thrust toward him as if some force were
impelling it backward. Light flowed in along with a blast of sounds that
were unaccountably cacophonous. He realized what they were-men talking
to themselves, some in affectless monotones, others in whispers, some
angry, others giddy. He leaned his head in and looked down the length of
the ward. The sight was striking. The long room was lined on both sides
with beds of white-painted metal frames whose sheets were in disarray,
showing blue-and-gray striped mattresses. Lying upon them, standing in
between, walking on the floor were patients in T-shirts and dressing
gowns. A handful were wearing only pajama bottoms-their bodies thin or
revoltingly fat, pale as candle wax-and one man was naked, his penis
hanging to one side. In the middle of the ward, now that he looked more
closely, a group walked up and down more or less in line; they carried
themselves with a sense of ritual, like an Italian village out for the
evening promenade, except of course that some were babbling and others
were as impassive as zombies.

He held his breath and stepped into the room and was relieved to find
that his presence didn't suddenly rock the place. No alarms

330

sounded to bring attendants running. One man nearby, twisting a curl of
his hair around a forefinger and discoursing to a wall as if before an
audience of ignoramuses, fell silent to examine him with a modicum of
interest.

Scott looked up and down the ward. He could see no uniforms, no one in
charge. He took a deep breath and stepped out between the beds to join
the march. Now two or three men were looking at him, and one of these
began to whine like a wounded dog and another to utter a high-pitched
keening sound. He stared at Scott and kept keening, and soon the line
was breaking up, men before him turning to look and those behind
retreating to their beds. They melted away around him. Two men started
shoving each other, and soon the noise level rose steadily, as if a hand
were turning a knob to ratchet up the volume. Scott hurried past a man
who lay curled up on the floor covering his head. The noise was so loud
now that Scott was sure it could be heard throughout the building. He
ran flat out for the doors of the ward.

Just as he reached them, he looked through their windows and saw two men
in light blue uniforms hurrying toward them. He couldn't tell if they'd
seen him, but he darted quickly to the right and hid beside the door,
his back to the wall. The doors flew open and the attendants hurried in
and now the commotion rose to a crescendo. The patients fell away like a
flock of pigeons and seemed to forget about Scott. The attendants walked
to the center of the room to separate the two fighting men, who were
locked in each other's arms and rolling on the floor, and Scott stole
through the swinging doors. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the
attendants each pick up a man. He hurried down the corridor, and behind
him, as the doors swung open and closed and open again, he heard the
pandemonium rising and falling like waves on a nearby shore.

He came to an open office. Inside was the sound of canned laughter-a
television set tuned to a stand-up comic who pulled the mike toward his
gaping mouth. On a table, tabloid newspapers were scattered about and
smoke rose from a large glass ashtray. The smell of marijuana hung in
the air.

He passed by, moving quickly now, his eyes scanning everything before
him, looking for movement, searching out the door he needed. He found it
at the end of the corridor, a thick door with a

331

tiny diamond-shaped window. He opened it and stepped inside. The
staircase was dimly lit. He went down.

The stairs turned a corner and he took them quickly, his caution
overcome by the sense that he was closing in on his objective. At the
bottom was another door, and he opened it and slipped into a basement
corridor. It was wide and newly painted, an antiseptic white, which
fueled his anticipation further. He looked at the ceiling, and there he
saw something that shot into his eyes like arrows and sent a wave of
heat through him-pipes. They lined the ceiling, thick ones coated with
layers of peeling paint-exactly like those in the image that had been
burned into his brain.

He was there. He was close.

A noise came to him, and he listened closely. A humming, a throbbing. It
seemed to emanate from a doorway off to the right. He moved like a
shadow down the corridor, his footsteps soft as a hunter's, and he
reached the doorway. He looked in-a blaze of light, machines, a curtain
of clear plastic hanging down. And there, just beyond the plastic,
slightly distorted by it, a bed, and lying upon the bed, immobile under
a heap of white sheets, a figure, a familiar figure.

Tyler.

Scott froze. He had wished it, imagined it, dreamed of it for some time.
But now that he was actually confronted with it, he realized that he
hadn't ever truly believed it-the shattering possibility, now a reality
that would determine everything to follow in his life, that his son was
alive. Still alive. There, see, his chest moved up and down; he is
breathing.

But with the help of machines.

The hated machines. There they were, to one side, humming and ticking
and showing their work in pulsing lines that skipped across the round
screens.

And there was something else. He saw it immediately, through a window
that gave onto an adjacent room. Movement.

A person.

A man was standing there, a notebook in his hand, looking back at Scott,
his mouth open in amazement.

332

Kate had tried to call Scott and had left two messages on his answering
machine within ten minutes. Finally she decided to go there, riding up
in the by-now-familiar freight elevator. She knocked on the door. No
answer, but she could hear Comet inside, whining and sniffing at the
threshold. She tried the door, and as always it was open, so she went
inside.

The place was its usual mess. She had learned to read the pattern within
it, accustomed as she was by now to Scott's habits, which she had
registered with a sharp eye and sharper memory. She fed Comet, who was
grateful for company and even more grateful for the can of food, and she
snooped. Scott's bed had been slept in, a cup of coffee partially drunk,
the remains of a lunch-judging from the crumbs it looked to have been a
sandwich-but nothing since. Then she noticed that the computer was on, a
screen saver of a Kandinsky painting shimmering. She struck a key. The
saver dissolved, but the screen was blank.

Something about the apartment-maybe it was the half-drunk cup of coffee,
maybe Comet scratching to go out, which indicated that she hadn't been
walked, maybe something else she couldn't put her finger on-suggested
that Scott had left quickly. It had the feel of a place abandoned
precipitously. But where had he gone? Would he be away long?

She walked Comet, returned, and then resolved not to wait for Scott any
longer. She had to go to Pinegrove alone. Maybe she could discover
something that would shed light on what had happened to Tyler, if indeed
that ambulance had taken him there.

The decrepit asylum had upset her the very first time she'd seen it,
months ago now, when the bus had carried her and the others to the
depressing tour of its run-down ward. She thought back to Cleaver's
brief question-and-answer session and the parade of patients. From the
first, she'd been appalled by the institution he ran- it represented
everything in the field that she detested, a merciless place that shut
its people away like a tomb. But she'd had no idea then of what had
become an article of faith for her now-how truly monstrous Cleaver was.

Kate sat at the desk and wrote a quick note to Scott, telling him where
she was going. Then she put down a second bowl of water for Comet,
patted her, and opened the door, turning back for a last look

333

around. Once again, she spotted that photograph of Scott, Tyler, and
Lydia in Nantucket, the one that had filled her with such yearning when
she first saw it, the three of them so happy and innocent, unaware of
what the future had in store for them. She was glad the photo had
captured them that way and frozen them forever in time and space, and
gladder still that, for Scott's exhibition, it had been digitized and
put on the gallery's Web site for the whole world to see. She closed the
door firmly and stepped into the creaking elevator, trying not to think
about the place to which she was going.

Cleaver pressed the button beside the panel that read BRAINTRUST and
waited impatiently for the front door to click open. Quincy's little
joke name for his enterprise had never struck him as amusing, but now it
had acquired an ironic thrust-the man's brain was anything but
trustworthy. It had led him down a blind alley. Now everything was going
from bad to worse.

He hurried up the three flights, not pausing at the landings. His heart
was racing, and he felt a telltale arrow on the left side of his chest
that he tried not to think about. It dug in below the breastbone and
twisted. He placed the fingers of his right hand upon it and pressed
down and continued climbing. That's all he needed now-a heart attack.

When he opened the door, the mastiff was there to greet him, sniffing up
and down his pant leg and then leaning his muzzle back and to one side,
the attack posture. The tendons on the dog's neck stood out like ropes.
Quincy looked up from his workbench, but didn't call him off.

"Hey, c'mon," complained Cleaver.

"He does that with uninvited guests."

The conversation calmed the mastiff, who walked away, turned a small
circle, and lay down in a corner.

"I've come for your help," said Cleaver.

"Nothing new in that."

"But this is serious, really serious."

"It always is."

"Damn it-listen to me."

334

"My, my, strong language for you--fucking strong language."

Cleaver walked over and stood behind him. Quincy was attaching a chip to
a circuit board, twisting it in the grip of needle-nose pliers. He was
taking his sweet time. The back of his neck had little hairs of downy
blond. Cleaver had another sudden rush of dislike for the young man-so
arrogant, so smart, so vulgar. The neck looked fragile, and he imagined
an injury to it, blood spurting from a severed artery, nerve ends
looping down like exposed wires.

Quincy finished his task, stood up, and stretched.

"So what's the emergency?" he asked.

"It's Tyler."

As soon as the name escaped, Cleaver realized how odd it sounded. He had
never put the name to it before, to the anima that he had unleashed. The
more independent it became, the more rebellious it acted, the more it
had come to seem like its human progenitor.

Quincy picked up on it.

"What's he doing now?"

Cleaver felt his heart, pounding away with little nails sticking into
it. Why wouldn't the pain go away?

"It's like some kind of virus. It's in my computer, not all the time. It
comes and goes. But when it's there, everything is knocked out. I can't
do anything."

The words had come out in a rush.

Quincy peered at him closely for the first time.

"You know, I don't mean to say anything-but you don't look so hot. In
fact, you look fucked over."

Cleaver just nodded. He didn't tell him the truth-that he had been
getting almost no sleep, because when he did he had horrible nightmares.
Things came at him, horrible things, that belonged to a world he never
could have imagined.

Quincy didn't admit that he was worried about the project, too.

"Look, if it's a virus, we can fix it up. I've got all kinds of defenses
you've never even heard of, a whole fucking arsenal."

He gestured toward a chair. "Now sit down and take a load off. Let me
just finish this. Then we'll tackle your little problem."

Cleaver did sit, and he did feel a load shifting. He was not weak, not a
sniveler. He was a scientist, a pathfinder, one of the tough breed that
didn't shirk from what had to be done. To hell with the

335

nightmares and the doubts and all the rest of it. What was that bromide?
Being courageous did not mean not feeling fear-it meant feeling fear and
yet pushing on. How true that was. To hell with what he was feeling. He
would do what he had to do. Finish this thing that he had started and
that meant so much. Quincy was right-it was an occasion for strong
language. Damn strong. Fucking strong.

He felt a little thrill as he mouthed the word, once so illicit. He was
not a fucking weakling. He was not that little boy standing in the snow
in Massachusetts, having heard the news from his mother, waiting for his
aching brain to explode. A little boy. Afraid of his father.

The fucking snow.

His fucking father.

336

Scott looked at Felix in the room next door and took his measure
correctly-some sort of lab assistant, he deduced. And standing there
startled, open-mouthed and clutching a clipboard to his chest as if it
were some sort of shield, the man didn't appear to be someone to reckon
with. Scott waved to throw him off balance, the way some bigwig taking a
tour might wave-see, I belong here, just passing through, pay me no
mind. He had no idea how rigorous the security was, but he hadn't seen
any evidence of it so far.

He lifted his eyes away and turned them on his son. Tyler was lying
completely immobile, just as he had during those interminable weeks in
the hospital. His bed was made up with light green sheets that looked
crisp and clean and offset his lifeless body. An IV drip fed into his
right arm, the soft underflesh of which was already blackened from an
army of needles. There appeared to be no change whatsoever in his
condition-he was still comatose.

But alive.

Scott could see the top sheet rising and falling almost imperceptibly.
He could barely stand to look. Emotions flooded in on him from all
sides-the relief, a father's relief, that his son was still alive, fed
by the thought that if the body was still functioning, then maybe
somehow he could be rescued and be made whole again. And contradicting
that relief came the opposite thought, the realization that the body was
not really alive by any meaningful definition of life-which in turn gave
way to a deep sorrow that his boy had not been allowed to die in peace.

To one side sat the bank of machines, throbbing away, doing their work
all too well, dispatching meager commands in the form of

337

electronic pulses to keep the pathetic shell of flesh and bone going.
Tyler's bandaged head rested upon a pillow, and his eyes were open,
though they had a glazed aspect. Looking up, Scott could see that
Tyler's line of vision took in the thick pipes on the ceiling above.
They were the same pipes as the ones in the picture. Looking down, he
could see where Cleaver had stood to lean over him, perhaps to check the
bandage. The thought infuriated him-that sadist masquerading as a
doctor, the wolf wearing the gowns of a protector. Once again, Scott
felt a white heat coursing through his veins like a spiky additive to
his blood-pure rage, the kind that is assured, vengeful, careless.

But then another thought took shape, one that carried a glint of hope
and that up to now he had not dared let himself give in to. Someone had
sent him the password, Wordsworth, that had unlocked the image in
Cleaver's directory and led him to this place. Who could have done it?
And someone had sent him a message saying, "Dad. Help me." Was it so
inconceivable then that Tyler was there, somewhere, even though his body
gave no evidence of him? Or more properly that his spirit, the guiding
spark of his intellect, some remnant of him was floating out there, as
Cybedon had said? And if that was true, if that spirit was in a sense
intact, would it be possible for it to be recaptured and reunited with
the body?

He looked again at the man across the way, who appeared flustered,
uncertain about what to do. Scott walked with a measured deliberateness
into the corridor and from there into the room. The light was bright and
seemed to shoot straight into his eyes, but he forced his mouth into an
odd half-smile. Felix's lips began to curl as if he were about to speak,
to formulate the question for which his brain was vainly
searching-something no doubt concerning the identity of this man who
approached with such brazen self-confidence that, well, surely he must
belong here.

Scott thrust out his right hand and, reflexively, Felix followed suit,
proffering his own right hand. Scott grabbed it and held hard, then
shook it and continued squeezing it until Felix's eyes widened and a
dollop of alarm began to show in the pupils. The idea seemed to be
sinking in that the person locking his hand in a viselike embrace might
not belong there after all. Of course, he didn't realize that right then
that person would like nothing more than to bash his head open on the
bedstand.

338

"My name is Jessup," said Scott, still not releasing the hand. "And I
think the time has come for us to have a talk."

He led Felix to a chair and pressed him down, so that he sat upon it
roughly. He continued.

"You-what's your name?"

"Felix."

"Okay, Felix. What do you do here?" He was speaking as if to a
recalcitrant child.

"I'm an assistant, a lab assistant."

"Who do you work for?"

"Cleaver. Dr. Cleaver."

"Very good."

Scott released his hold and stepped back. Quickly, his eyes cased the
room. A pane of thick glass separated them from Tyler's hospital bed. To
one side were medical cabinets, a stainless steel table. Close by was a
wall, and lying the length of it, dominating everything else, was a
large device with a cylinder that could fit a human being. It looked
something like an MRI machine, and it contained a stretcher that rested
on a track and was crowned with some sort of odd-looking helmet that had
two concave metal ovals like eye sockets. Nearby, attached to it, was a
computer.

What the hell is that?

He resumed the interrogation.

"Is Dr. Cleaver here now?"

"No, he's gone. He left about half an hour ago."

That the scared imbecile was volunteering extra information was a good
sign. He was proving cooperative.

"And do you know where he went?"

"No, I don't. He didn't say."

"I see."

Scott pulled up a chair and sat directly across from the assistant. He
reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to
Felix, who shook his head no, and lit up, inhaling deeply. He dropped
the match onto the floor.

"Now, Felix," he began. "Suppose we start with this."

Felix looked up at him, ready to please. Scott gave a nod of his head in
the direction of the large window glass and the bed with the motionless
figure on the other side. He tried to hold his voice

339

steady. "Why don't you tell me exactly what my son is doing here?"

Kate's cab began to slow down on Third Avenue around Twenty-eighth
Street, and by the time they reached Thirty-second Street, it was
crawling. Hemmed in behind a sheet of bulletproof plastic, she felt
waves of anxiety sweep over her.

"What's wrong?" she barked at the driver.

An elderly Russian who looked as if he bore the weight of the world on
his stooped head, he half turned and shrugged.

"Who knows? Maybe someone in town, a big shot. Maybe an accident."

He leaned down to his right, picked up a Thermos, and poured himself a
cup of steaming coffee. He took a sip, then turned back to stare out the
windshield, unconcerned.

She suddenly felt a sense of urgency.

"But I'm in a hurry. Isn't there any other way?"

He didn't even turn this time.

"Lady, you want to get to Roosevelt Island, there's only one way. I take
the Queensboro and double back. If I go up to the Triborough, it's twice
as long. My advice, maybe try some other time."

She felt about in her purse for her cell phone. She pressed the
automatic dial for Scott's loft. It rang and rang-exactly what she had
expected. Who else to call? The police-that sergeant, Paganelli? Don't
be absurd-what do you expect, you'll babble something about ambulances
and colors and missing patients and he'll drop everything and pick you
up in a police car and take you to Pinegrove and arrest Cleaver? Fat
chance. Saramaggio? Don't be a fool. He's the guy who fired you. Not
fired, suspended. Big difference. For all you know, he could be in on
it-whatever it is. And even if he's not, do you expect him to believe
you, of all people? Who else is there? No one.

She realized, with a pang, that she had never felt so utterly,
overwhelmingly alone.

Her pulse began to race and her palms were sweaty. She felt
claustrophobic in the cab, no room for her feet, the windows closed. She
opened one.

340

Then she gave herself a lecture, one of her mother's lectures. In a time
of crisis, breathe deeply, not once but two, three, four times. Calm
down and think clearly. Envision what it is that you want to do and then
do it. No nonsense, no delay, no self-pity. That's for the weak ones,
not those of us from icy Greenland.

She checked the meter, reached into her purse, and found a five-dollar
bill, which she tossed onto the driver's seat.

"Keep the change," she said, getting out. He shrugged and took another
sip of coffee.

She walked two blocks and ducked into the subway at Thirty-fourth. She
could get out at Fifty-ninth, walk east two blocks, and take the tramway.

Already, outside, walking purposefully, doing something, she felt
better. Her mother always knew what to do to get out of a jam.

Scott finished the cigarette by the time Felix finished his story. The
narrative had been disjointed but short and concise-in point of fact,
the lab assistant didn't appear to know all that much, beyond the fact
that Tyler was "a very special patient," in Cleaver's words, and that
the doctor appeared to be willing to bend every rule in the book to keep
him alive. He said this in the naive expectation that Scott might be
gratified to hear it.

Felix did admit to his own complicity in bringing Tyler from St.
Catherine's. He described how he had gotten a late-night call from
Cleaver, how he and a friend had come to Pinegrove to pick up the
ambulance and had worn doctors' coats as Cleaver had instructed.

"That didn't strike you as strange? Rushing over in the dead of night?
Taking him from a hospital that was better equipped to care for him?"

Felix shrugged, stupidly. In fact, it had bothered him at the time-and
for those very same reasons, though he had tried not to think too much
about it.

"No. I had no reason to think anything was wrong. A lot of strange
things go on around here."

"Like what?"

Felix told him about the experiments, the old man who was dying

341 and the woman who had claimed to see him at the precise moment of
death, even though they were separated by the full length of a hospital
corridor. He explained Cleaver's theory about anima, the seat of the
soul, and his belief that it resided in a particular region of the brain
where it could be recorded and measured like any other electrical activity.

"And how about that?" asked Scott, gesturing toward the machine and
lighting up another cigarette. "What's that?"

Felix turned around to look at it, as if he had no idea what Scott was
talking about. But his answer, stiff in tone, suggested that he had been
waiting for the question.

"It's a TSR."

"And . . . ?"

"That stands for transcranial stimulator-receiver. It's called that
because it interacts with the brain both ways-it can stimulate it to
send messages in and receive the messages coming out."

He turned back to face Scott, as if the subject were closed.

"And what's it used for? I see it's made for humans. Did you use it on
people?"

The look on Felix's face told him that he had hit it right.

"Patients?" Scott asked, barely credulous.

Again, he knew. He had hit the target, and what a target it was. He
could scarcely believe the depths he was plumbing, the monstrous things
that Cleaver was capable of. He took a drag on the cigarette, calmly, as
if the conversation were about the most natural thing in the world.

Felix hesitated, as if he had been presented with a dilemma, and when he
spoke, the words came spilling out as if he had finally reached a decision.

"Yes, we used it on patients. Dr. Cleaver said it was for the
advancement of human knowledge, that someday the world would look back
on what we were doing and see it for what it really was. Something
important, something brave. And he said the patients wouldn't really
know the difference anyway, because so many of them were in such bad
shape. And he said it wouldn't hurt them, and in any case he got consent
forms from them so it was all perfectly legal."

"I see. And tell me, Felix, did the machine work? Were there ever any
problems?"

342

"It worked."

It didn't escape Scott's attention that Felix had only answered the
first of his two questions-the man didn't seem to want to talk about the
problems-but he decided to let the matter lapse for now. Because a new
and stirring idea had begun to take control of him, and there wasn't any
room left over for anything else.

Again, he pulled down the curtain of a cool exterior to disguise his
thoughts.

"Did you ever work the machine, Felix? Did you ever, say, use it on
someone while Dr. Cleaver wasn't here?"

"No."

"But you know how to do it, right? I mean, you assisted him, you were
here when he did it."

The reply was a grudging yes.

Scott began pacing around the room, smoking as he walked. He was picking
up speed, like a locomotive heading around a downhill curve.

"Now, Felix, the way I look at it-and I hate to be the one to tell
you-but the way I see it, you're in way over your head. You're in a lot
of trouble. Experimenting on patients, using human beings as guinea
pigs. I wonder what that would come under in the criminal
statutes-aggravated assault, at the very least. And that's assuming that
none of the patients you were experimenting on were permanently injured,
but who knows? Negligent manslaughter, maybe, or conspiracy to commit
homicide-a clever prosecutor can twist a lot of things, you know. A case
like this, it's bound to become political, the mayor gets involved,
maybe even the governor. I'd say you're looking at a lot of time behind
bars once this goes to the DA, and behind bars is a place where a guy
like you isn't going to do too well." He looked into Felix's eyes,
casually, as if it didn't really matter to him. "I guess you've heard
the stories-I don't have to tell you."

Sitting on the chair, hardly moving, Felix looked as if he were going to
be sick. His face was stricken, drained of blood. Scott had known what
would get to him. And he wasn't planting any ideas that the poor sucker
hadn't already had on his own. He was just stirring up the pot a little.

"You get my meaning?"

343

343

Felix nodded and looked at him, a pathetic begging look. As if he were a
helpless child. It didn't begin to generate any sympathy from Scott.

"I'm kind of torn," he continued. "I'm duty-bound to hand you over to
the authorities. On the other hand, that's my son over there, and I can
tell-I can see by the kind of guy you are-that you took care of him. You
were kind to him. Right?"

Felix shook his head emphatically.

"Yes," he said. "I was. I did everything for him. I didn't want him to
suffer at all."

"Good. I'm grateful, and that reminds me. You said Dr. Cleaver knew how
to measure the-what did you call it?-the anima. I assume you can measure
it only when it's moving from one place to another. Right?"

"Yes."

"And maybe when it moves from inside the body to outside the body. Right?"

"Yes."

"And did Dr. Cleaver do that to my son-move it outside his body?"

Felix didn't know how to answer.

"Don't worry. I'm just asking," Scott said.

"I don't know."

"You sure?"

"Yes. But I think ... I know, judging from the things we did, the
measurements we took . . . that that had happened, yes."

"And what were you doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, were you trying to get it back?"

Felix paused to think, and he thought so long he seemed to be trying to
come up with a truthful answer.

"I'm not sure, because Dr. Cleaver didn't really tell me what was behind
a lot of it, but no, I don't think so. I think he wasn't so much trying
to get it back as he was trying to, you know, control it."

Scott took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it to the floor, and
stepped on it.

"I see," he said. "And so this machine-I take it that you used it to
send people out to the same place where my son is, wherever that is."

Felix nodded yes uncertainly.

344

Scott walked over to the machine and looked at it, moving the stretcher
up and down with one hand.

"What are these things?" He pointed to the eye caps.

"They fit under your eyelids and go over your eyes. That's the way some
of the messages are sent in, by electrical impulses that travel through
the main optic nerve. That leads right into the brain."

Scott touched the helmet.

"And this picks up the impulses inside?"

"Yes."

Scott pointed to the timer.

"And this?"

"To tell how long you've been inside."

"Why is there a mark here?"

"That's the seven-minute marker. You can't stay in any longer than seven
minutes."

"Because . . ."

"Because the computer can't handle any more than that. You stay in for
longer than seven minutes and it crashes. Your brain cooks and you die."

"You know that for sure?"

"For sure."

"Felix, something tells me you may be guilty of more than assault."

Felix didn't answer and looked away instead.

"But don't worry, your secret's safe with me. Provided . . ."

"Provided?"

"You do exactly what I tell you."

There was a long silence while Scott crossed the room and looked down at
a computer screen. He pulled a chair close and sat in front of it,
sliding a keyboard out from underneath, then searching for a switch and
turning it on.

Finally, Felix spoke up, in a little boy's voice.

"And what is it you want me to do?" he asked.

"I think you know already, Felix. Come, you're not as stupid as you look."

Scott was taking his time. Once the screen was lit, he put in a
password, and then he began carefully tapping at the keys, typing out a
message.

345

"What do you think I want you to do?" Scott asked. Felix spoke slowly,
as if he was reluctant to say the words. "I think you want me to use the
machine. I think you want me to send you out there."

Scott looked up at him and smiled for the first time.

"See-I told you. You're not so stupid after all."

He sent the message, stood up, and walked over to the machine.

Cleaver had signed on and was waiting for the computer to boot up when
he felt restless sitting in the hard-backed chair. The ache on the left
side of his chest had not gone away-in fact, it had gotten worse. It now
felt like shards of glass sticking up through his breastbone from
somewhere deep inside his rib cage. But sitting down hadn't helped. It
just made him feel confined.

He stood up and walked around the small room. From the corner, where it
was curled up in a large mass of gray fur, the mastiff lifted his head
and watched him warily.

Cleaver felt a compulsion to talk. Maybe that would shift his mind from
the pain, make it go away.

"I don't get it," he said. "I mean, at first it was okay. I almost felt
I could control it. I couldn't make it do whatever I wanted, but it
wasn't like this-now the thing seems to be against me. It wrecks
everything. I swear it's gotten into my system and ruined my records."

Quincy stopped his work long enough to look up at Cleaver.

"I notice you say it" he said. "I would have thought you'd be saying
him. A moment ago, you called it Tyler."

"Well, yes, but that was a slip of the tongue. I still find it a little
hard to think of a human intelligence out there. Much less one that's
rooting through my files. I mean, with all of cyberspace to roam through."

"But it's not just cyberspace, remember. It's a whole other universe, a
netherworld of electrical charges or whatnot crammed full of a lot of
things, including everyone who ever died. At least that was your theory,
as far as I remember. And don't forget-you were the one who put him out
there."

346

"I know that," Cleaver replied weakly.

"And you're the one who's actually observed the departure of the
anima-or whatever the hell you call it-from that old man. And its
reappearance before the old lady-right?"

"Yes."

"And you're the one who's been sending the goddamned mental patients
into outer space with your fucking machine-my fucking machine, actually."

"Yes-well, not exactly outer space. More like inner space."

"Whatever. And you're the one who's keeping that poor fucking boy on
life support just so you'll have some control over what happens to his
mind."

"What of it?"

"What of it is this. What I'm saying is, who are you of all people to be
raising doubts at this point?"

Cleaver took his point. But he wanted to keep the conversation going. It
was beginning to work-he hadn't paid any attention to his heart for the
past several minutes. Though this very thought made him conscious of the
ache once again.

His voice assumed an unctuous, self-inflated tone.

"I suppose it's because I'm a scientist. I demand proof, rigorous proof,
before I'm willing to subscribe to something that I cannot see with my
own eyes. Even if it's something that confirms my own theory and
something that I long to be true with all my heart."

The dog rose abruptly and started pacing about nervously.

Quincy called him, and when the dog refused to obey, he sighed and put
down the pair of pliers. He stood up, scraping the chair legs against
the wooden floor, and walked over to see what was bothering the animal.

As he did so, he passed by the computer screen. He looked at it and
whistled.

"Holy shit," he said, a tone of genuine wonder.

Cleaver stopped in his tracks, suddenly nervous.

"What is it?"

"You better come see this."

Cleaver rushed over to the desk, forgetting for a moment about the sharp
pounding in his chest.

There on the screen was written:

347

TYLER. I'M COMING. DAD

They were both silent for a moment. Finally, Quincy spoke.

"What do you make of it?"

"A message. From his father. To him."

"Obviously. But from where? How'd he get into the system? How's he gonna
come for him, as he says?"

For once, Cleaver was far ahead of Quincy. But he didn't feel like
explaining everything-that he had deduced that with the help of that
woman Tyler's father knew more or less everything about the experiment,
that he had somehow learned the password, that he had gone to his
basement laboratory in Pinegrove to try to contact his son, at the site
Cleaver had used and that he was about to embark on a journey inside the
TSR, probably with Felix's help.

Cleaver didn't want to explain all this because his own mind was already
racing ahead down a twisting path. It was a path that was strewn with
obstacles and dangers, but it was also one, he admitted to himself as he
looked over at the machine, that he had been contemplating for some time.

348

Reclining on the stretcher, Scott felt the cold of the metal railing on
his shoulders even through his shirt. He lifted his hands and placed
them outside, resting them on the sides of the machine. His fingers slid
along the glistening surface. He soon felt a gloss of moisture-which
was, he realized, his own sweat. It was one more clue to just how
frightened he was-frightened of sliding into the machine and the
claustrophobia of being confined inside the metal cocoon. And then, of
course, there was that other fear that underlay everything else and that
he didn't even want to think about, of what might happen to him once his
mind was extracted from his body and sent out there into the ether.

He shook it off. In this situation, lying here on the machine and about
to enter it, soon to be strapped down and helpless, fear was a useless
emotion. And it could only distract him from his mission.

His hands. Where should he place them? Folded calmly across his belly
like a corpse in a coffin? That seemed natural.

What was it called, anyway-this place out there? A parallel universe?
Mind space? Purgatory-was that it?-the repository of lost souls made
famous by poets and seers? He would soon find out just how good they
were at divination.

Felix was not good at providing instructions, which did not imbue Scott
with confidence. The man was a bungler, that much was clear, and it made
everything much more threatening. What would happen if Felix did
something wrong, tripped the wrong lever, set the wrong dial? Then Scott
would never travel to the right place; he would never find Tyler and
reach him and bring him back-or if not bring him back, then at least be
with him and comfort him, wherever he was.

349

Scott felt the sides of the helmet against his temples. It didn't fit
easily. Felix was trying to pull it on, and his fingers were trembling.
Scott lifted his hands to the top of the helmet and gave it a vigorous
downward tug. It fell neatly into place, like a football helmet, snug
against his ears, in the front reaching just above his eyebrows. It
carried an odd smell, like a mixture of leather and a tang of some sort
of chemicals spilled onto a sheet of metal.

Now Felix was trying to place the eye caps. He pinched the upper lid of
Scott's right eye and lifted it, his hand still shaking. It turned the
world into a blur, but Scott could see the dark metallic square
approaching his eyeball.

"Let me do it," Scott said, brushing his hands away.

He hadn't meant to be abrupt. On one level he was aware of a concern
that he had tried to suppress-that in a few minutes' time he would be at
the mercy of this frightened lab assistant whom he had just threatened
with jail-but there was no other alternative. Only Felix knew how to
operate the machine. Still, Scott felt a sense of urgency, and he
couldn't allow any delay.

Carefully, he squeezed his eyelash and lifted it, using the other hand
to lower the metal contact until it touched his eyeball. It set off a
miniature fireball and then darts of red that pierced the darkness. He
placed the bottom lid over the metal and he felt the cap expand,
covering his eyeball as tightly as an eggcup and sending off another
shower of yellow and red sparks that shot across his closed eye like
meteors.

In panic, he opened his other eye. Felix was leaning over, peering down,
his mouth drawn tight in concentration-Scott could see the dark ovals of
his nostrils and even the tiny hairs inside guarding the passages. He
smelled his breath-stale, heavy, hot.

"Let's do the other one," Scott said. He gave the directive, which was
hardly necessary, to give himself the feeling that he was in control.
But his words sounded shaky.

Again, he lifted his eyelid, felt the metal encroach upon his eyeball
and expand to cover it and saw the vivid colors-yellows, reds, even, he
thought, greens. Now all the world was dark. His arms were strapped to
his sides by a thick belt that Felix tightened.

Scott lay there on the stretcher-isolated, alone, exposed, and trapped.
He felt as defenseless as a newborn wrapped in a blanket.

350

He heard Felix moving about, worrying the machine. He wished he would
talk, tell him what he was doing and what was going on. At one point, he
even thought he heard him humming under his breath. Then he realized it
was a noise from the machine.

He heard Felix's footsteps approaching. The lab assistant was standing
over him.

"Okay," Felix said. "Here we go."

The stretcher began to move upward, and he knew he was entering the
gaping mouth of the machine-he knew it because the sounds of the room
suddenly flattened out as if they were coming from far away and he heard
the whirl of small sounds echoing in the chamber. His skin tightened in
the dead air. He was in a wind tunnel without wind.

"I think it's best if you don't move at all," Felix said. Scott could
tell that he was speaking loudly but the words sounded far away, as if
he were on a distant hilltop.

"Here goes!"

And suddenly there was a grinding noise that filled his ears, and it
seemed to fill his eyes, too, for waves of colors came at him, feeding
an illusion that he was the one moving, not they, and that he was
gaining speed and heading out through space almost like a rocket ship.
He thought he felt the chamber shudder, and the sensation that he was
traveling was palpable-it seemed real because it was real.

And as he left the world behind, heading for a tunnel that twisted
before him like the funnel of a tornado or maybe the inside of a
hornet's nest, since it was that same gray fibrous texture, he heard a
sound from the earthbound world. A familiar ringing sound. And he just
had the time and presence of mind to have one final reflexive thought as
he headed for the opening of the tunnel, which allowed him to identify
the sound outside the machine-it was the ringing of a telephone.

Then a series of shocks smashed into his eyeballs. They jolted him
coming out of nowhere, but they didn't hurt. All he saw were balls of
light. They turned into waves that seemed to come crashing in upon him,
and each pounding wave left behind a void of total darkness. The waves
gathered force until a giant wave came cascading toward him and broke
apart and separated into fragments like colors of a kaleidoscope. The
colors streamed into him and through him and past him.

351

351

They looked like multicolored meteors of burning rock with tails of
yellow and green and orange. Oddly, even when they seemed to be shooting
straight through his body, he couldn't feel them.

Quincy's confusion began to lift like a dissipating fog as he sat at his
worktable and watched Cleaver. The man seemed filled with new vigor-he
appeared to know what he was about, and for the first time in a long
time, Quincy felt a kind of respect for him. Maybe it's no accident that
he's a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough, Quincy thought-he's got
the balls for it, and he seems to know what he's doing.

Cleaver was punching numbers on a phone-he knew them by heart, and he
hit each one with a deliberate intensity.

He waited with the receiver to his ear, then when the connection took,
started right in without so much as a hello.

Quincy could hear only his end of the conversation.

"Is he there?" Slight pause. "You know very well who I mean."

A pause.

"I figured as much. Where is he right now?"

Cleaver's eyebrows went up-it was hard to tell whether in surprise or a
kind of fettered joy.

"Aha!" he said. He repeated the phrase several times and began pacing in
a small circle, as wide as the phone cord would allow. Each time he came
around, Quincy could read more excitement in his face.

"And is he in there right now?"

Another pause.

"And how many minutes?"

A short one this time.

"Bravo." The word reserved for opera divas sounded funny addressed to a
lab technician, but it was followed by a flood of words that made
everything fall into place.

"Here's what you do," said Cleaver. "Simplest thing in the world. You're
familiar with the timer-just reach right up there and turn off the
override. Let it keep going. He won't even know."

Quincy couldn't believe what he was hearing. Cleaver was quiet, but only
for a moment.

352

"Look, you don't know that. It's not the same as Benchloss. He wants to
go out there, he wants to find his kid, you're just giving him more
time. I know what I'm talking about, and I'm giving you a direct order.
I want you to do it and that's that."

Then came the longest pause of all.

"Right," said Cleaver, and then he hung up with an air of self-satisfaction.

"It pays to have a trustworthy lab assistant," he said.

"Did I just hear what I think I heard?" said Quincy.

"You didn't hear a thing," said Cleaver, taking off his jacket and
hanging it on the back of a chair. "And you're not going to see what
you're about to see."

He walked over to the TSR machine and touched it gently on top.

"You've never used this one, have you?" he asked.

Quincy shook his head no. He had to admit he felt a little tremor of
excitement building up somewhere in his gut.

"I bet you've been dying to. Who knows? Play your cards right and maybe
you will. Like right now."

Cleaver smiled an odd lopsided smile, and Quincy was impressed all over
again. He's really going to do it, he thought. I've got to hand it to
the guy. He's not afraid to experiment on himself-and to bet the whole
farm on a single shot.

At first, Scott felt giddy from the lights and bright colors streaming
past. And the noise-it was like being inside a beer barrel rattling down
the highway.

He tried to damp down his fear. No sooner had he begun to feel that he
could conquer it through an exertion of will than something happened
that eclipsed everything and removed the idea of fear altogether.

It happened like a bolt of lightning, or maybe a clap of thunder, except
that there was no noise, no flash of light. It was a lifting of
himself-a lifting and an unfolding so that he felt he was being turned
inside out. And as his interior was turning outward, it rose up; a fog
descended upon him or he rose to meet it, like a mountain drifting

353

upward until it disappears in the clouds. And then he had the sensation
that he was expanding, and soon he was breaking into particles, hundreds
of them, thousands, that began to separate and move gradually apart in
slow motion, spreading out horizontally, moving everywhere and covering
everything like a fine mist, moving farther and farther and yet not
diluting, so that they reached the farthest corners of the horizon in
all directions. They didn't stop, but kept spreading until they
encircled the world, and then they rose up into the atmosphere and outer
space and through the coldness until they finally reached the stars and
even moved past them, picking up speed. And that was what he had seen
just a moment ago-the bright lights moving past him, the colors of comet
tails. Still drifting, spreading out, alone in darkness.

Where would I find him? Where would he go?

He was lying in bed, or maybe it was Tyler who was in the bed and he,
Scott, was telling him the bedtime story. He couldn't tell the
difference between them; the boundaries had dissolved-he was watching
the scene from close up, maybe the doorway, and yet he was inside it at
the same time. The wallpaper-he recognized it, horses. Or were they
monsters?

Suddenly something irritated him, burned and blistered his skin. He
turned and tossed and still it was there beneath him eating into his
back so that he reached down and felt it and held it, something hard in
his hand.

A pebble.

He rubbed it.

He heard his own voice, soothing, soft, comforting, as it had once
sounded when he told the nightly story, and as he heard the familiar
words, he seemed to enter into the story, living it even as he told it:

And then something very strange happened. At first he felt hot, and then
he felt cold. And then he felt warm and then he felt cool. And finally
he felt just right.

And suddenly, the mansion rose up before him, grander even than he had
envisioned, its antebellum facade centered upon four smooth, tall
Corinthian columns extending skyward. Its white skin gleamed with a rosy
hue, as if reflecting a setting sun. The steps were taller,

354

too, six of them, so tall that to mount them he needed to use his hands.
He looked around. Behind him, porch boards creaked. A hanging
swing-where had that come from?-waved gently in the breeze. No one in it.

But Tyler might be here inside. He felt that with a sudden surge of
certainty. Surely the mansion, conjured up together at every bedtime,
belonged to both of them, to both of their imaginations.

He placed his hand on the thick brass door handle, and even without
turning, the door flew open as if someone from the inside had given it a
tug and then whisked away. It was dark inside, and as he glanced
backward over his shoulder, he saw that it was dark outside now also,
purplish dark with no trace of the sun, and the trees, darkened
evergreens, swayed violently in the wind.

Only the stars were out-Orion.

He stepped inside. Candles flickered in sconces to light his way, so
that he could look up the corridor. There on both sides, stretching as
far as he could see, was door after door after door. Moving slowly down
the corridor, gliding really, he came to the first door, looked at it,
then passed it by in favor of the next and passed by that one, too.

He stood before the third door and placed his hand upon the handle, and
as he turned it, he knew, with a mixture of anticipation and dread, that
he had chosen the correct one. It opened effortlessly, as if someone
inside was pulling it.

Kate approached Pinegrove with her heart racing, and she shuddered as
she looked up at it. The building that had so depressed her on that
first visit looked scary in the evening. Most of its windows were
darkened, the steep roof disappeared into blackness, and the doorway was
half hidden in shadows. Charles Addams himself couldn't have drawn a
bleaker picture.

She had been in too much of a hurry to plot out a strategy and had no
idea what she would do if she encountered Cleaver-confront him probably
and insist that he tell her what had happened to Tyler. She didn't have
much ammunition, only the fact that an ambulance from Pinegrove had
taken him away from St. Cat's. Yet she would

355

355

have to demand an explanation without revealing where she had gotten her
information or the porter would get in trouble. It was not, she
realized, a foolproof plan-it was hardly a plan at all.

Well, she would just have to improvise. Her mother had always told her
that she was quick on her feet; now she would find out if she had been
right.

She marched up the stairs to the front door. It was sure to be locked.
To the right was a doorbell, but she could hardly ring it; it would be
difficult to present her case forcefully while standing on the threshold
like an Avon saleswoman. And what if she asked for Cleaver and he wasn't
there?

She placed one hand on the heavy handle and was about to give it a shove
when abruptly the door moved toward her, almost knocking her down. She
regained her footing and moved backward with it, pressed almost against
the wall, and held on to the handle for a moment. She heard footsteps
coming out and treading down the stairs, and peering around the door,
she saw the back of a woman walking away into the dusk. She held on to
the door handle until she disappeared, then stepped around quickly and
entered the building.

She found herself in the same dreary reception area she remembered. The
floor was made of tiny hexagonal tiles, but so many were cracked and
missing that the mosaic design-some sort of harbor scene-was hard to
make out. She looked around nervously. The stairway ahead was empty, and
so were the dimly lit corridors leading off to both sides. She
remembered that the main offices were to the right and made her way down
that corridor, her tread falling quietly upon the floor. She thought she
could hear murmurs and sounds of protest coming from the end of the
other corridor-the noise, she guessed, of patients being bedded down for
the night. It was early, she thought, to be putting them to sleep-the
attendants probably just wanted them out of the way.

She came to the administrator's office, which was darkened. She peered
through the frosted glass on the door and saw the dim outlines of desks
and chairs inside. She moved on. Next door was an office that had a
single word stenciled in large block letters on the window glass:
RECORDS. That was the one she wanted to enter: If Tyler had been
transferred here, then surely there would be a file on him.

She held the doorknob and gave it a turn. Locked, as she had

356

feared. She rattled the door softly and found that there was no give.
She turned and retraced her steps, coming back to the main lobby
Cautiously she took the other corridor. Now the noise from the ward
sounded louder, an uproar. The patients had clearly been disturbed by
something. Maybe the attendants were there-for her that could be a
stroke of luck. Sure enough, she came to the nurses' station and found
it unoccupied. She looked around furtively-a desk, newspapers, a
television set turned on. The smell of marijuana hung in the air. She
opened a drawer in the desk and found what she wanted-a ring with five
keys. She slipped it into her pocket and stole back down the corridor,
through the front lobby, and stood before the records room. When she
tried the third key, she felt it turn smoothly as the bolt retracted,
and with barely a click the lock unfastened and the door slipped open.
Success! Glancing up and down the corridor, she entered stealthily and
left the door open a crack behind her.

She had to wait several long minutes until her eyes adjusted to the
dark. Then, by the light filtering in from the hall, she spotted the
filing cabinets lined against one wall. But the room was too dark to be
able to sort through them and read the contents. A green-domed desk lamp
stood upon a bulky wooden desk nearby, and she groped until she found a
switch on the base and turned it. A sharp funnel of light cut through
the room. She took a wastebasket, turned it upside down, and leaned it
against the lamp, which directed the glare into a circle on the floor
and sent a soft glow over the rest. The room felt almost cozy.

The filing drawers were marked alphabetically in scrawled fountain pen.
She followed the letters until she came to H-M, then grabbed the handle
and pulled. The folders inside gave off a musty smell and dust rose up.
There were separators on rusty rails and manila folders written in the
same penned hand. Her heart sank-she could see right away that none of
the folders appeared new. And none of them bore Tyler's last name. She
thumbed through several times just to be sure. She would have to look
elsewhere.

She closed the drawer and sat down at the desk, her back to the door,
pulling open the drawers and rummaging through the contents. Everything
was coated in a thin layer of dust, and there was nothing beyond the
usual sort of contents: pencils, paper clips, old sets of keys, a pad
with a rubber stamp, index cards, stationery, and other office
paraphernalia. She had just opened the second drawer and was lifting out
a file of

357

correspondence when she heard something behind her, a little tick like
the sound of a door hinge or a high heel upon the floor. She froze.

A voice behind her blustered in confusion.

"What. . . ? Who . . . ? Who are you? What are you doing?"

It was-she noted with a stab of relief-a woman's voice. She turned
slowly, both to collect herself and to avoid a sudden movement that
could rattle whoever was standing there. She had perhaps ten seconds to
come up with a plausible story. Ten seconds-hell, ten minutes wouldn't
be enough, she realized.

The woman was young and broad-shouldered, with her hair cut in a bob,
not at all the kind of person Kate expected to find here.

They stared at each other for several heartbeats.

"I'm Dr. Willet," said Kate, speaking slowly. She didn't have time to
say more.

"I've heard of you," put in the young woman.

Kate was surprised.

"You have? How come?"

"I work for Dr. Cleaver."

Kate bristled at the name and wondered if the woman had noticed. She
gave a vague wave of her hand and said, "I was just looking around." And
as she gave emphasis to the explanation by actually looking around-and
saw the woman glance at the wastepaper basket on top of the lamp-she
realized how absurd it was.

"Look, ah-by the way, what's your name?"

"Felicity. Felicity Barrington."

Giving both names made her sound suddenly like a young girl trying to
please but she didn't act that way.

"Felicity." Kate pronounced the name roundly and with assurance, seeking
the upper hand. "I might as well level with you."

The woman walked over to the desk, retrieved the wastebasket, and placed
it on the floor-revealing herself in the rush of light to be quite
handsome-and then pulled up a chair and sat down herself, not far away.
It seemed to be a gesture of intimacy that Kate found encouraging.

"Yes," she said. "Go ahead."

"Well," continued Kate. "I don't have to tell you-or maybe I do-that
some odd things have been going on here. And I think your Dr. Cleaver is
at the center of it."

358

"My Dr. Cleaver. He's hardly my Dr. Cleaver."

Kate was stunned.

"Then I take it you don't like him."

"Like him? He's an asshole. Does that answer your question?"

She couldn't believe her good fortune.

"Yes, Felicity, I think it does."

And with very little prompting, Felicity poured out almost everything
she knew, which was quite a bit-how Cleaver had used patients to conduct
experiments, had imported a special machine to disembody their minds,
how one patient had even died in the midst of it. She talked about his
crackpot theories, his work habits, even his insomnia. And especially
about how obnoxious he was.

"Plus he treats me like a doormat," she said finally, at the end of her
recitation. Then she looked Kate in the eye and asked a question of her own.

"I guess you want to get him because he got you fired, huh?"

"No, not exactly. I mean, yes, I would like to get him, but that's not
the only reason. You see, I'm trying to help a friend, someone whose son
had a horrible accident and was in critical condition and was virtually
dead. And I think a couple of weeks ago, his body was taken out of St.
Cat's and maybe brought here."

Kate gave Felicity a hopeful look, wondering if she might know anything.

She did.

"You mean Tyler," she said quickly. "He's here-right downstairs in the
basement."

359

How he got there, he didn't know. The door opened, that much he
remembered. Then came a darkness, and a slipping into a kind of a void
or maybe a tunnel and here he was. The day, time, year, season-none of
that he knew. And none of that mattered. The world he was in was timeless.

But Scott knew where he was, and that frightened him, frightened him
deeply. He was in bed-his old bed-flat on his back, helpless. Was he a
child again? An adolescent? He couldn't say, but it didn't matter, for
in any case the world about him made him feel like a child, defenseless
and insignificant. Everything around him appeared large and threatening,
inanimate objects like his chest of drawers and the white curtains
blowing into the room. They were sinister. And all of them-it seemed
exaggerated to think it, but he felt it with a certitude that was
alarming-were conspiring against him.

The subconscious mind, he had once heard, knows no time. But wait! Maybe
recollecting that thought meant he wasn't a child-it was, after all, the
kind of thought only an adult would have. Subconscious mind-that's not
even a concept a child could grasp. Maybe then he was a grown-up-not a
grown-up, an adult.

But then why do I feel so helpless?

And what bed was this that he was in, felt like he was strapped down
into? Was it that same bed long ago where he lay up all night, waiting
for the soul-shattering sound of his mother's scream and her rasping
breath, holding the cold spoon that he would use to pry apart her teeth?
He looked around warily. The room was dim, hard to see through the
glaze. The objects were more like shapes-it was impossible to bring them
into focus. He tried squinting his eyes. Still no

360

good. They seemed to be in the correct place, the furniture, the dark
rectangles of pictures stuck to the walls. There was the bookcase loaded
with comics, the old record player that he turned on to blare
Tchaikovsky and Beethoven so loud that all thinking was drowned out. But
they were indistinct, large dark blots against a gray background.

Long ago, so long ago that he wished he could forget it but could not,
when he was fourteen, Scott's mother had stopped drinking abruptly.
Scott hadn't known this at the time, or if he had, he didn't register
it. All he knew was that she took to her bed in the room next to his.
She could barely move. Her toe was broken from a fall down the stairs,
and a dirty plaster cast covered her foot, open at the top. A pin had
been driven through her middle toe to hold it in suspension, attached to
two metal uprights like a goalpost. The toe was black and swollen. It
had gotten infected.

It was raining ice outside, a freak storm that covered everything in a
slick reflective sheen. It was magical and yet frightening, ominous. The
trees crackled and snapped when they waved in the gusts of wind, and
their branches tapped and scraped against the window glass like wizened
fingers. Roads were frozen rivers, unnavigable.

Scott was downstairs when he heard his mother cry out. It was a long,
low moan of pain and fear that mounted to the upper registers and died
out into a whine. Something hit the floor, a body. He ran to her room
and found her sprawled on the wooden boards in her nightgown, thrashing
about wildly, the heavy foot cast pounding upon the floor keeping beat
to her convulsions. Her head flew from side to side, her hair
electrified, her limbs jerking and flopping. A trail of saliva fell
across her cheek. He ran downstairs to phone the doctor, the rings
taking forever. Finally, she answered, a severe woman who told him to
look outside. He raised his head and saw the ice beating down-no
ambulance could possibly get through, she said-and she carefully
instructed him: He was to hold a spoon to her mouth downward so that she
would not swallow her tongue. That could bring death. He ran back
upstairs and now she was quiet, lying there confused, her eyes large,
looking at him as if she didn't know him, wondering where she was and
what had happened.

She had three more seizures that night, each preceded by that

361

361

low, anguished cry and followed by those long moments of oblivion in
which she asked him where she was and who he was. The next morning rain
had washed away the ice. He fixed himself breakfast and went off to
school and when he returned at 4 P.M., she was gone. Later, the doctor
called to say she was in the hospital. Four days afterward, she came
home again, her eyes now open-he hadn't seen them so open for months-and
her toe treated.

When he thought back to it, there was one convulsion that stuck in his
memory. When he rushed in, the dog was barking at her, then sank his
teeth into her nightgown and tugged at it fiercely so that Scott had to
knock him away. He kicked it-hard against the ribs. The dog ran away
whining and when he approached it later under the couch, it growled. He
returned to his room and lay there in bed, holding the spoon, his eyes
open in the dark, listening. He played Tchaikovsky on the old record
player, at first soft, then louder, then very loud.

And now he saw himself there, a small pathetic figure lost in the big
bed in the darkness and the billowing music. He could look down at
himself, his younger self. He didn't feel pity-only, once again, the
fear. Fear at what was happening and what might happen. Plus an emotion
that he could not name that seemed to be a mixture of repulsion and
incredulity-and this is perhaps what saved him, for it imposed a
distance and made him able to stand aside and watch what was going on
with a remarkable detachment.

And he had to ask himself: Lying there with the spoon in his hand and
waiting and listening to the loud music, had he really hurried in to
attend to her during each episode? Maybe one time he could have answered
that. But by now he had forgotten-if indeed he had ever known.

He heard her again, or thought he heard her, but come to think about it,
that was impossible, since she was downstairs, far away in the old
rambling house. A sound wouldn't carry all the way from down there. A
dozen rooms at least separated them. But he knew she was there; he could
feel it. The knowledge filled him with fear that immobilized him. He lay
there in bed unable to move, his mind racing, his blood burning
throughout his body. She wouldn't come for him, would she? She wouldn't
harm him-would she? Her own son? His chest knotted up-he knew she would.

362

She will.

He picked up the phone and called the doctor. A nurse answered and went
to find him, a long time. What was taking so long? Scott could not
speak. Finally, he heard the doctor's voice, a strange, slighdy accented
English, from distant Europe, he had been told. The doctor at last!

"Hello? Hello?"

Scott found his voice. He began to blurt it out, all of it, what was
happening, his fear, the danger. Then he heard it: the click. The
receiver rising through the air, a rustling. She was on the extension.
Her voice came on the line, loud and close, so reasonable, so comforting.

"Doctor, there's nothing to worry about, nothing at all. I'm fine. My
son has been having these horrible nightmares, these horrible thoughts.
But I wouldn't hurt him. I wouldn't hurt anyone."

He could hear the doctor taking it in, cooing his understanding. He
believes her!

She continued.

"You see, Doctor, I'm perfectly fineeeee-"

Her voice screeched up, a long, anguished cry with a hint of laughter to
it, rising higher and higher, pounding back as if in an echo chamber.

Then she hung up.

Then she started coming after him, room by room, opening the doors and
closing them. And he could hear her-feel her-coming closer. Her tread
upon the stairs, moving more quickly, a moment of silence as she crossed
another room, then another door opening and closing. And another. Loud
now. Close.

There was nothing for it; he could not shrink away in bed. He would have
to go to the door, to meet her head-on, to stand up to her. It was the
only way he could hope to do what he had come to do. He summoned his
courage-all of it. For he would need all of it.

Slowly he tossed away the blankets and swung his legs down and got out
of bed. He stood and walked carefully to the door, leaning against it.
He touched it, feeling her on the other side, imagining her there and
almost seeing the flash of something steel in her hand, the cleaver,
pointing downward, ready to rise up.

He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it and yanked the door open.

363

363

Felicity led the way as she and Kate rushed down the staircase. Halfway
to the basement, Kate heard her gasp in surprise: footsteps, someone
coming up.

"What? Where are you going?" she heard Felicity ask.

She saw now that she was talking to a tall young man wearing a lab
assistant's coat. He looked flustered.

"Nowhere-nothing," he sputtered. "I was just leaving."

"Well, maybe you should stay," Felicity said. "We may need you."

"Can't," he replied quickly. And as he hurried up the steps, he looked
into Kate's eyes frantically, then brushed past her so hard she was
pushed against the banister. She felt like tackling him, but his air of
urgency made her want even more to find Tyler.

Something was wrong.

She raced past Felicity, opened the door, and stepped into the corridor.
What she saw made her stop dead in her tracks. She could scarcely
believe it.

There was Tyler, lying in bed just as he had been in St. Cat's. He
appeared very much the same. She looked at the monitors and the
computer, and she read them quickly with her doctor's eye-not much had
changed. He was in a coma, but clearly he was still alive- or still not
fully dead. The machines were doing all the work. Her heart went out to
him-all this time, weeks now, locked in his own private limbo. As the
thought took hold, her heart filled a second time, this time with anger
at Cleaver. What a savage he was to do such a thing.

She felt something on her elbow. It was Felicity, touching her lightly,
guiding her toward the open door of another room, and as she crossed the
threshold she stared in disbelief.

For there was a large machine, something like an MRI, and as she
approached, she saw the feet of a person who was in it. She went close
and looked inside and saw a man strapped down with a grotesque helmet
covering his head and two round devices on his eyes.

In an instant, she knew who it was. She also knew that he was in danger.

She spun around, toward Felicity.

"What is this?" she demanded.

364

"It's called a TSR, a transcranial stimulator-receiver. It's a way to
reach the mind and stimulate it and also, you know, allow it to move-to
move outside the body."

Kate stared in disbelief. But in an instant, it all made sense. She knew
why Scott was there-that he, like her, had found this place and learned
about the machine and now had gone to try to find his son, or his son's
mind-spirit, to bring it back to the body. He must have come only a
short while ago.

She stared for some time, astonished-astonished that there was such a
machine, not that Scott would use it. He would do anything for his son.
She looked at his features, what she could see of his face below the
goggles. His mouth was twisted down and his jaw clenched, in pain or
perhaps in fear. His body, though strapped tightly, seemed to be
twitching. She stared until with a force of will she got hold of herself
and tried to think what to do. Clearly that young man who had run away
had set the machine running. And just as clearly, they would have to
figure out how to control it.

She looked up at Felicity again.

"Do you know how to run this thing?"

Felicity, who was also staring at Scott, looked at her with wide eyes.

"Sort of. I've seen them do it, Dr. Cleaver and that guy who ran away,
Felix. I've looked in and watched them when they've done it on patients.
But I can't say I really know how to do it."

"Is it complicated?"

Felicity looked nervous.

"I can't say for sure," she said.

"Well-I guess we're about to find out."

"What if we do it wrong?"

"He's in there already. So we have to help him anyway-if only to get him
out."

"That's true."

Kate stepped over to the control panel and looked at the array of dials
and knobs and screens. The image of Scott's face inside was still in her
mind.

365

Cleaver felt no fear, only excitement. Fear was something that he had
discarded as soon as he decided to enter the machine-it was a useless
emotion. Fortitude, strength, and curiosity-those were the desired
companions for a scientist about to journey into the unknown.

Quincy had strapped him in and helped insert the pathfinders over the
eyes, a little too eagerly for Cleaver's money. Lying there on the
stretcher, he wondered what would happen if something went wrong, what
it would feel like, whether it would hurt. And how would Quincy take
it-would he help him if he emerged half-dead or a raving lunatic? He
worried because he was convinced that his young colleague cared little
for him. Only three things would probably matter to Quincy-how to fix
the machine, how to get rid of the body, and how to get paid.

But these thoughts were doing no good. Cleaver didn't want to depart on
such a negative note, so he gestured to Quincy to come close and asked
him to lean down and managed to raise his hand high enough, even
strapped to his side, to find his cuff and hold it in his fingers. But
then he didn't know what to say.

He tried to think of something noteworthy, a proclamation for history,
not something so clearly cooked up in advance as "One small step for
man, one giant leap for mankind." Something genuine, spontaneous.
Trouble was, nothing spontaneous occurred to him-it never did during the
truly important moments.

"So," he said, "you'll be sure to watch for the seven-minute mark?"

"Yes."

"I don't want to come out overcooked. Ha ha."

"Ha ha."

There was, he thought, a slur of irony to Quincy's rejoinder. But there
was nothing for it; he could think of nothing else to say.

"Right," he said, letting go of the young man's cuff.

"Right," came the reply.

Cleaver felt the stretcher slide upward and the mouth of the machine
engulf him. Then soon he heard the noise of it starting up. He was
alarmed that it was so loud; it hadn't sounded that way on the outside.
Abruptly, he realized he was experiencing his body in a way he hadn't
before. He could feel almost every part of it-his leg, his thigh, his
shoulder, the skin on the back of his hand, the hair on his

366

forearm. What a miracle it was, the human body-how the fingers could
grip in unison, the muscles contract to raise a leg, how the blood
vessels retreated deep inside the skin in times of cold and the sweat
glands poured out water to cool it in times of heat. What craftsmanship!
What architecture! Why had he never noticed all the tiny intricacies,
their ingenuity? Only now that he was about to leave it did he
appreciate it, did he pay it any mind. Typical, he thought. And out of
nowhere the lyric of an old song flashed through his mind: "You don't
miss your water till your well runs dry."

What kind of thought is that to be having? At this moment of all
moments, can't I think of something profound, can V / control my mind?

And then, almost as if to prove the point, his mind thought of something
that he never would have wanted to, not in a million years. It was the
image of the boy Tyler, of his anima, bouncing around in space without
respite, like some Flying Dutchman, never settling down, never coming
home again. What if that happened to him? What if he never came home
again? It was, suddenly, a dreadful thought. Why would the mind suddenly
toss it up like that, unless the mind was perverse? Maybe that was the
explanation. Maybe it was the body-only the body-that was our one true
loyal friend. Then why leave it behind?

But stop-the event was happening. Now his body was doing something else,
or his mind was-it was hard to tell which. Part of him was staying
behind, down below-it must be his body-and another part was lifting and
moving up, slowly and then gradually faster and faster still, like a
rocket shooting toward a star. He felt stars shooting at him, light
coming right into his eyeballs, so powerful it hurt, smashing right into
his brain. It came in waves, over and over, more and more powerful.

And then suddenly it stopped.

He was floating aimlessly in space, an astronaut untethered. Spinning
round like a leaf in a stream. Mothership Earth was retreating in the
distance, though he couldn't see it, only feel it. Then his balance
righted itself, and now he wasn't sure where he was. He tried to look
down but could not-he couldn't see if his body was there. And as he
looked up, he saw darkness slowly lifting, dark figures slowly moving,
as in a dream. He tried to focus, but the figures remained indistinct
shadows. The light was hazy, heavy with particles, as if he were looking

367

through a cheesecloth. In fact, he was hot, scorching hot. Had the
rocket landed on the sun? Maybe that was it. He was on the surface of an
alien burning planet or a desert somewhere, and yes, there was a
sandstorm coming at him, obscuring his vision, clogging his pores. That
would explain it, the inability to see, the figures moving slowly as if
weighed down, the sense of oppression from the sun's rays. Somewhere in
the Sahara. A caravan of camels, a market in Timbuktu.

But no, he was mistaken. There were no camels, no sandstorms, and those
vague figures-he could actually see through them. And he was not feeling
hot, not at all. Quite the opposite-he was feeling cold, freezing cold.
He pulled himself tight into a bundle. Something went into his eyes, on
his nose. That was not sand flying through the air-that was snow. He was
in a wintry storm. Not Timbuktu-but where?

Cyberia?

His mind laughed at the pun, giggled hysterically. Hysterically because
now he was frightened-he knew where he wasn't, but not where he was. His
vision cleared somewhat, like a curtain melting away, and he began to
recognize some of those shadowy figures in the snowstorm. And he knew
where he was. He saw himself, standing ankle-deep outside the dormitory,
feeling the dizziness all over again, preparing to faint at the news of
his father's death.

When Scott yanked the door open, he was amazed to find that there was no
ogre on the other side. His mother was not there in her scraggly
nightgown, her hair hanging in wet strands on her forehead. There was no
cleaver in her hand.

There was nothingness.

His pulse quieted and he took a deep breath, then stepped forward. He
was standing in a corridor painted in luminous white. From one end shone
a bright light, and the reflection bounced off the walls in a shower of
white rays and hurt his eyes. He looked down-it was hard even to see his
own feet-but he could tell by some internal gyroscope that he was tall,
fully grown, an adult. He looked again at the walls, and there
stretching before him, as far as he could see, was door after door after
door.

368

Behind one of them, he knew, was Tyler. But which one?

He had to hurry. He could sense somewhere-he could hear it, maybe-a
clock ticking, telling him that time was running out. How could that be
in this timeless world?

Which door should I open?

He paused before one, then passed it by for another, then went to a
third and a fourth. At the fifth one, he turned the knob, and as he did
so, he regretted the choice and wished he could change it, for a dark
fog seemed to come from inside. It quickly coated everything around him
and blotted out the white light until he was lost in a thick haze. From
within he could hear a soft sound, a mumbling or moaning, and once he
stepped inside it got louder, though it was still so indistinct he could
not place it. Then he looked hard, and suddenly he could make out dim
figures moving slowly, as if they were floating, will-o'-the-wisps,
slipping through the layers of fog like ghosts.

Souls cast adrift. Psyche, the Greek word for "breath," also means
"soul," he remembered from a long-distant class in ancient literature.
The soul and the spark of life are one and the same. How odd to be
thinking of that now, except that something in the look and carriage of
these spectral figures reminded him of classic myths-Orpheus crossing
the river Styx to visit the forbidding underworld in search of his
beloved Eurydice.

They took no notice of him, though now they passed close by, so close
that he could reach out and touch them if he wanted. He did not because
he quickly saw that he could see through them, which filled him with
horror. And he noticed for the first time that there were dozens of
them, more than that-scores, hundreds, as far as he could see in all
directions.

If he was in hell, where was his Virgil, or his Beatrice?

And indeed, materializing out of the fog, one figure stood out from all
the rest; and of them all, she alone appeared to see him. She looked
directly at him, and he felt that look like an arrow in his heart,
because he knew her well and on one level had been sure he would find
her here and maybe even had been looking for her as much as for Tyler.

There was no question about it-it was she, his long-lost Lydia. Her
beautiful features were the same-the long nose and high forehead and
almond eyes and perfectly sculpted chin-except that they

369

seemed frozen. Even as she looked at him and showed with a dip of her
head that she recognized him in turn, they formed a mask, so that he
felt a coldness seize him.

She held out her hand, and he took it and it was cold, as cold as ice on
tree branches. She turned, still holding his hand, and led him-and he
had no choice but to follow her meekly, even though he knew in his heart
that the destination she was leading him toward was his ruin.

370

Again, Kate bent over the entrance to the machine and craned her neck to
peer into the chamber where Scott was imprisoned. She tried again to
read his expression, which was all but impossible, because his eyes were
covered and she was looking at him from below. Still, she feared she
could see signs of distress-his cheeks were drawn and his teeth were
clenched so tight she could see his jaw muscles bulging.

She did not know what to do. Should she try to extract him from the
machine, rescue him from wherever his mind had gone? Or should she let
him continue the voyage he'd embarked on to save his son? Which was more
dangerous-interrupting him halfway or permitting his mind to travel as
far as it wanted? What if his mind went so far away it never returned?

She backed away and looked at the array of machines. There was a timer
there-she hadn't noticed that before. How could she have missed it?

She read the clock: three minutes and ten seconds.

The second hand was sweeping down, moving quickly.

"Why is that there?" she asked.

Felicity gave her a blank look, followed her eyes to the clock, and
frowned. Clearly she didn't know.

"Is there some kind of limit?" Kate asked.

"Maybe. I don't know. I was never here for the whole thing. All I know
is when I saw Dr. Cleaver run it, he always seemed to be in a rush. He
was always barking out orders to Felix. You know, do this, do that,
hurry up."

"But did they set the clock? Was there a timer? An alarm?
Anything-anything at all?"

371

371

"I just don't know."

Felicity was getting upset, and her anxiety was contagious.

"Do you know how to stop it?" asked Kate. "How to get him out?"

"Sort of. I think we do it all in reverse-that's basically it."

Kate felt her confidence in the woman ebbing fast.

She looked again at the clock: three minutes and forty seconds.

Kate walked back over to the machine, rested one hand upon it, and then
leaned over to reach deep into the chamber. She felt the strap tying
Scott down and followed it to one side, where his hand was. She took his
hand in her own and squeezed it tightly.

She doubted that he could even feel it, wherever he was. But maybe he
could, and just maybe, she thought, it would make him feel a little less
alone. For the moment, that was all she could think of to do.

Scott followed Lydia. Her hand was weightless, no more than a cloud of
smoke in his, but somehow he could feel it or he imagined he could feel
it, and that was enough to guide him through the layers of haze. He was
feeling numb now, and weightless himself as he followed her.

The terrain changed so quickly he could not keep up with it. One minute
it was hot, the next cold, and so on, until he couldn't tell the difference.

They came at last to a small door, and she motioned to him with a
graceful sweep of the arm to enter it. He crouched, then crawled, and
the door opened noiselessly before him. He went inside and stood up. He
was in a room of brilliant white-white marble floor, white tiled walls,
white plaster ceiling. It shone as bright as a birthing star, so bright
he could hardly see. Slowly, his eyes accustomed themselves and he began
to make out something in the corner, a long rectangular object,
something familiar. Something important.

He stared at it, focusing his dilated pupils, scarcely daring to believe.

But it was-it was he!

Tyler!

Moving slowly, carefully, as if he were approaching a mirage that

372

might slip away at any moment into a puff of nothingness, Scott walked
toward his son. He felt he was moving effortlessly but slowly, as if in
a dream. Finally, he reached the bed and he stood over him and looked
down at him, lying there motionless. Tyler's head was bandaged; a drip
from a stanchion entered his arm. But his eyes were open, wide with
fright, and he could move them about. He cast them up at Scott, and the
fright lessened and a slow small smile traced itself upon his lips and
he seemed suddenly to relax and to breathe out in relief.

When Scott saw this, he could not restrain himself. He lay down next to
Tyler and pulled him close and covered him by wrapping his arms around
him. He pulled the needles out of his arm and hugged him so tightly that
he could feel the boy's heart beating upon his own chest, beating
rapidly but steadily. And he realized that the heart was beating in
perfect synchronicity with his own. He put his head next to the boy's,
and he could feel the pulse there through the bandage, beating out from
his temple, so he leaned back and took the bandage off, unwrapping it
like a ribbon, and placed his own head next to Tyler's. He imagined he
could actually feel what was going on in there, and maybe he wasn't
imagining it, because soon he believed he was even thinking the same
thoughts.

They looked up out at the total whiteness around them, a blizzard of
small white particles that filled the room like bits of ash floating in
space. It was almost painful to see, a thick white curtain that fell
before them and seemed to seal them off from everything else.

Almost everything. For there in one corner the particles had accumulated
and were turning gray and then forming themselves into a long shape,
long and tall and dark. They stared harder and the shape transformed
itself into a solid rectangle standing on its sides. A frame of wood
appeared around the edges and then turned into a door jamb, and right in
the center was what he had known would be there-a large wooden door.

And as he looked, knowing and fearing that it would happen, the door
opened. He pulled the blanket up under his chin like a bib and sank down
lower so that his eyes were peering just over the edge. And still he
stared, and what he saw standing there in the doorway, now looking full
in flesh and bone and hair was Lydia. She was wearing a gray suit. And
she was looking down at him with an intense expression--

373 -it seemed to be a mixture of love and pain. The lower portion of
her face was covered in shadow. And as she stood there in the doorway,
she shifted a bit to one side and slowly raised her right arm. Her
fingers were extended, moving. Was she trying to signal something? Was
she waving good-bye to him? Or was she motioning to him to follow her?

All at once, he thought he knew. So the two of them together, as one,
began to rise. It was time to go, to follow, to see where she would lead.

Cleaver collapsed in the snow and stared up through the flakes that fell
on him like bits of ash. He felt nothing sitting there, absolutely
nothing-neither fear nor foreboding nor cold nor suffocation, only
tired. Very tired, beyond exhaustion.

He wanted to rest his head on the snowbank, to sleep for just a moment,
not long, nothing more. And so he began to nod a bit, then caught
himself and raised his head suddenly, for on some level he knew that to
do that-to give in-was dangerous, very dangerous. And yet he felt so
very sleepy.

No longer did he feel cold, just numb. He couldn't feel his limbs at
all-he tried to move them and could not; they were so heavy they felt
like they were tied to his sides. And once again he began to nod and
then to lean forward with his upper body. He could sleep, just a bit.
Then he would awaken, refreshed, and then he would get up and walk some
more. But not now.

Slowly his body began to fall to one side, like a tree in the forest. He
thought of breaking his fall, but he could not, and his head struck the
snow hard, hard enough to rouse him for a moment, so that he was aware,
briefly, of the danger. He opened his eyes.

I should not be doing this. I cannot fall asleep here.

But it was, admittedly, restful to just lie here like this, comfortable.
What harm was there in a little sleep? It wasn't even that cold. He
closed his eyes again and began to drift in the swirling snow.

And then he heard footsteps. Footsteps! Someone come to rescue him!

He knew who it was, the only person it could be. Who else would

374

search for him out here in the dangerous snow? So he opened his eyes and
tried to raise an arm to signal where he was, but could not. It did not
matter; the footsteps were coming toward him. His father would find him.
His father would save him. He would not die here alone.

My father.

And the footsteps stopped right before him. Two feet in front of his
face. He summoned up his last reserve of strength and turned his head
and looked up. And before he could see, he felt himself being raised up,
roughly, back to a sitting position. And he opened his eyes and looked
at the face now directly before him.

Not his father, no.

Not my father.

Instead, the face that he saw staring back at him with more than a hint
of hatred belonged to Benchloss.

He thought vaguely, as if in a dream, How did he get here? What is he
doing here? And then, looking up, he saw that Benchloss was doing
something: He was reaching down to his midriff, and he unbuckled his
belt buckle with his long, slender fingers. And lifting his hand to one
side like a preacher in a pulpit pointing the way to damnation, he
pulled the belt through the rings of his pants so quickly that it seemed
to make a hissing sound, like the sound of a whiplash or the devil
breathing. He raised his hand over his head, twirling the belt around
like a lasso, and brought it down with all of his might. Cleaver tried
to protect his face, but he found he couldn't lift his hands, which were
stuck to his sides. He felt the belt bite into his cheek; he looked up
and saw that it was about to land again, and this time it ripped into
the left side of his chest and pulled away, taking some skin with it,
and it fell on him again and again, everywhere, on every part of his
body, until he felt that all of his flesh had been torn away and he was
nothing but a poor sagging skeleton. Then Benchloss leaned down and held
him a moment and finally let him go. He sank back into the snow.

Benchloss, of all people.

He felt sleep come crawling in upon him. He fell back deeply into the
snow, cutting through it like a smoldering ember, so deeply it covered
him over in no time, and he saw just as he disappeared under a tunnel of
whiteness that above him it was snowing. The snow fell everywhere on
everything. It was like looking through a pair of long white binoculars,
everything far away and small. Soon he felt a huge

375

375

weight upon his chest, holding him down and robbing him of breath. He
also felt numb and then not even that, nothing at all, and the weight
lifted, so that the sensation was as if he were floating upward. He was
going to become a part of everything there, everything that ever
existed, including the snow falling in tiny flakes everywhere. Ah-well,
time has come to sleep the long, long sleep.

Kate was beginning to get frantic now. She didn't know what to do, how
to run the infernal machine, whether she should try to get Scott out of
there. She looked again at him-his face seemed to have calmed somewhat,
as far as she could tell. She drew back and looked up at the clock: four
minutes and twelve seconds. The second hand seemed to be speeding around.

She sat down at the computer keyboard.

"Does this thing work?" she asked, shooting Felicity a quick look. The
woman appeared to be caught off guard by the question, gave back a
questioning look. Kate ignored her and hit the space bar. The screen
came to life and she hit the keys quickly, one after another:

SCOTT YOU OK?

She waited a moment, unsure whether she should type more. Should she
wait or not?

What should I do?

And abruptly she thought of Scott's exhibition and the Web site, and on
impulse she connected to the message board. She saw at once that he had
not replied. Instead, she saw something else there, one of the photos
from the collection. Slowly-ever so slowly-it materialized on the
screen, coming in pixilated blotches that took recognizable shape and
formed the photo that she remembered: there was the gray shingled
fisherman's cottage, the three figures, the small boy in the center with
a hand from each parent resting on a shoulder, his beautiful blazing
toothy smile, and on the doorway above them the carved figure of a whale.

More keys and another click of the mouse. No reply. She signed off.

376

The clock read five minutes and fifty seconds. What should she do?

As he moved effortlessly toward Lydia standing in the portal, Scott
heard his name. Someone was calling to him sonorously,
breathlessly-SCOTT-and the same beautiful voice wanted to know if he was
all right. He stopped for a moment, unsure how to respond, for the voice
seemed to be coming from behind. He turned-no one was there. And as he
turned back, he saw that Lydia seemed to be beckoning him onward, now
with some urgency. He wasn't sure if he should go or not. That voice had
stopped him, had raised doubts. He looked down at Tyler, holding his
hand. The boy was leaning ahead, straining to pull him forward toward
the darkened portal where Lydia was waiting. Scott took another step
ahead, then another.

But as he approached he felt himself getting weaker-it was harder to
walk, and he felt faint. Lydia seemed to be moving back, disappearing.
It was harder to see her, not easier. She was retreating into the
shadows beyond the doorway, still motioning with her hand, but now it
was clear that she was not beckoning. She was waving him back, urgently,
pointing to a small white door that had appeared.

He didn't know what to do. He was losing her, but it was dangerous to
follow her.

So he turned to Tyler and pointed him toward the small white door. He
saw a look of bewilderment on his beloved face, but he gestured to him
clearly: He must go through the white door. His son sadly obeyed, and
Scott waited until he was safely gone. Then he turned again to follow
Lydia into a long white tunnel with a blinding light, and he heard a
loud roaring sound, as if the room behind him was collapsing and
everything was being sucked out through the door with him.

Kate heard a sound inside the machine and she saw that Scott was
struggling, straining against the straps. His mouth was opened wide as
if to scream, but instead he groaned slightly, a long low sound that

377

frightened her because it seemed to come from somewhere else, some deep
cavernous place.

She snapped upright and turned toward Felicity.

"That's it, turn it off!" she commanded. "Let's get him out of there."

She looked at the clock. Six minutes and forty-five seconds.

But then she heard another sound, one she could hardly believe. It came
from Tyler's room, a break in the steady drone and whine of the monitors
that had become so monotonous they hardly noticed it. She looked over.
The machines were registering a new kind of activity, as if they had
encountered resistance, sudden swells and whitecaps in what had been a
mirror-calm lake.

She rushed over to him. He's dying, she thought. And a surge of
hopelessness overwhelmed her-Scott had done so much to try to save him,
had risked so much and gone into some unknown netherworld to try to
bring him back or at least let him die with some finality, and now that
something like that was occurring, and Tyler was finally letting go, she
felt nothing but despair. She realized that she had not known how much
faith she had invested in Tyler's resurrection.

Then she looked more closely. The machines that were failing were those
connected directly to the computer. And the others, the ones monitoring
Tyler's direct brain activity, were coughing into life. She looked at
the boy lying on the bed, searching for some sign, some confirmation,
and sure enough: One side of his face was moving a bit now; his lips
were pulling back, like a waxen dummy that cracks alive. One eyelid was
twitching a bit, then the other. She looked at his chest-it was rising
and falling on its own, inhaling and exhaling more deeply than before.
An arm moved slightly, the fingers of a hand contracting and then opening.

"My God," exclaimed Felicity, who was standing beside her, staring at
the boy. "I think he's . . . It's a miracle-but I think he's doing that
on his own. I think he's coming out of his coma."

For Kate, to see the boy coming alive was unfathomable; she realized
with a jolt that for all she had known and thought and felt about him,
he had never been a living person for her.

And then, from behind them, they heard yet another sound: A sob, a
gasp-it was hard to tell what it was. But the TSR machine looked odd.
All its lights were on, burning as if it had shorted out

378

somehow, and the computer screen spewed out an unending trail of garbled
nonsense.

Kate glanced at the clock: seven minutes and thirty-five seconds.

She ran over to look at Scott. His face was drawn, impassive, drained,
and his body was immobile. She reached in to touch a hand: It was limp,
the fingers still warm but lifeless.

The clock: eight minutes.

She called Felicity over and they pulled the stretcher down and quickly
detached Scott from the machine, lifting off the helmet. Kate saw
something that she didn't want to think about-as she removed the eye
contacts, carefully spreading the lids to pull out the concave metal
cups, Scott's eyes looked odd, the pupils wide and still. And as she
released the lids, his eyeballs turned up so that she could see only the
whites.

She raised him to a sitting position and hooked her arms around his
chest and Felicity took his legs, and together they lifted him off the
stretcher and lugged him to a metal table. She took his pulse-so
frightened that her fingers trembled-and for the first time all her
doctorly instincts abandoned her. Is there a pulse or not? She couldn't
tell, and she was worried-time was going by.

She looked up at Felicity.

"Do you know CPR?" she asked, her voice trembling with urgency as she
began pumping his chest.

Felicity nodded. "Yes, yes," she said.

"Good. I want you to use it. But first, help me get this table over
there." She pointed to the control panel, then lifted one end of the
table while Felicity grabbed the other. Scott's weight made it so hard
to move that they couldn't talk until it was in place.

"But why?" asked Felicity.

"Because there's something you have to do at the same time."

And with that, Kate lay down in the stretcher and pulled down the helmet
and fitted on the eye contacts. The metal felt unexpectedly hot against
the flesh of her eye.

"But what're you doing? I don't get it," said Felicity.

"Reset the machine," ordered Kate.

She pulled up the stretcher herself so that she went into the machine.
Her next words echoed back to her from inside it: "If he could go get
Tyler, maybe I can go get him.

379

"And whatever you do, once I'm out there, keep working on him," she added.

The wait seemed endless to her, but eventually she felt something
happen: an odd sensation that began in her eyes, the flash of lights and
heat going straight into her brain. Then came what looked like a shower
of meteors and comets with long tails coming straight at her, so that
she would have ducked if she could have moved her head inside the
helmet. And finally she felt a lifting, the sensation that everything
about her was moving upward, until she realized that she was the one
moving upward, or at least a part of her was, moving up and out and then
spreading out horizontally so that it seemed to take in every part of
the world.

And she wasn't frightened. She didn't feel alone-she felt that her
mother was somewhere there near her and even her father, which was
strange because she hadn't ever known him. But she felt him there, too,
somewhere in the background, a presence of him.

She could no longer think. She was a space voyager strapped in for the
ride, not knowing where the rocket might take her, what she would see,
where she would end up. She tried to close her eyes, but could not.
Colors, flashing lights all around, the sense of movement, rapid speed.

And she opened her eyes, and she did see her mother. Her mother was
smiling at her, the way she always had when she was young; she was not
angry with her. Then her mother faded out and the lights stopped and
everything cleared, like a fog lifting, and she thought she saw
something she recognized.

A beach, the sound of surf, the feel of sand on the feet. Blue sky
overhead, a perfect day with the sun blazing down-it was hard to see in
its blurring rays. But the perspective shifted, like a movie camera
swinging to one side, and there it was, exactly as she had pictured it,
only even more beautiful.

A simple, gray-shingled fisherman's cottage. Its windows were dark;
roses crept up a trellis; the roof overhanging slightly cast a shadow
upon the wall. Below, a large paving stone on which stood three figures,
facing frontward and smiling, their arms dangled over each other-man,
woman, and child. A trinity-solid, strong, vigilant, unbreakable. Above
them, where she knew it would be, the carving of a whale.

380

But who were they? She blinked. Her own mother and father standing on
either side, herself in the middle, loved, secure? Scott and Lydia and
Tyler? She couldn't tell. The faces were darkened.

She approached and stood before them and reached out with one hand. The
man moved and took her hand. She felt faint, falling backward, and
blacked out.

Scott was at the end of the tunnel. The light burning ahead was so
bright it seemed to coat him with its warmth, to obliterate him in its
embrace. He reached for Lydia's hand and grasped it. She shook her head.
He stopped for a moment, afraid to go forward. The light was beckoning,
but he did not want to answer its call without even knowing why.

Lydia turned slowly, gracefully. Her face was expressionless, but as he
looked he thought he could read sadness there, a moment before she
tilted her head up and turned back again and let his hand go and drifted
toward the light. Should I follow? he wondered.

And then he felt another hand from behind, taking hold of his- in a firm
clasp, a clasp that seemed to say in its willful strength: I won't let
you go.

Felicity did as she was told. She kept applying CPR, pumping air into
Scott's lungs, lifting his arms to let it out, long after she felt there
was any hope. She did it with all the strength she could muster, even
when her arms began to ache and pessimism slowed down the rhythm of her
movements.

Imagine, then, her surprise when the inert body below suddenly
responded, as if the engine had been kick-started: a small cough, a roll
of the head, blood vessels throbbing on the temples. He lay there for
some time, breathing on his own, while she stepped back to look at the
miracle she had wrought.

She felt proud of herself. She had never brought anyone back from the
dead before.

Then she remembered Kate. And she quickly geared down the

381

381

machine and reached over to pull the stretcher out. She carefully
removed the eye contacts and then lifted off the helmet.

It took a while for Kate to come around, almost as if she had been in a
deep, deep sleep, except that as she began to surface, she had a broad
smile playing upon her face.

382

Saramaggio caught Scott's eyes and gave him a long hard stare. That in
itself was a major advance. For several weeks after Scott had returned
from what he called "the land of the dead," the neurosurgeon could
barely bring himself to look at him. That's how ashamed he was of his
role in the whole affair.

But this was different. This was work, important work. It was crucial
that Scott understand the import of what he was saying. And for that,
there was no way around it-Saramaggio had to meet his look head-on and
drill the lesson into him. Otherwise, he had told himself, he simply
would refuse to operate.

"You understand," he said, leaning across the desk in his office, "we
have no idea what he'll be like. And when I say no idea, that's exactly
what I mean. No one's ever undergone anything like this. He'll be
different-that's all we know. How different, different in what way-we
can't even begin to predict.

"So if somehow you're harboring the hope that we'll be able to return
Tyler to you, and bring back the little boy you loved so much exactly as
he was . . . well, give it up. Please give it up."

He picked up a pencil and drummed the eraser on his desk pad.

"Do you understand?" he asked finally.

Scott nodded yes and gave a little half-smile. He was amazed, as was
everyone, at the transformation in Saramaggio. Gone was the arrogant,
obnoxious careerist. In his place was a good, practiced, and even at
times compassionate healer. Kate had joked that the man had undergone a
"personality transplant." So profound was the change that most people
believed it would likely last. The hospital bookie was laying two-to-one
odds.

383

"There are some good indications," Saramaggio continued. He had to be
careful here, guarded in his optimism, because he didn't want to fan the
flames of false hope. "The stem cells are doing well- they've thrived in
the colony, so that we have more than enough for implantation. And as
far as we can tell, they're healthy. And so is Tyler-as you know."

That part was true and it never ceased to amaze him. Four weeks after
returning from wherever he had been-a coma if you wanted to be a
stickler, or limbo, the netherworld, some kind of alternate universe if
you were given to mystical tendencies-the boy had markedly improved. He
was able to move in bed a bit and focus his eyes and even give signs of
comprehension. Rehabilitation was going to be lengthy and demanding.

"So do you understand what's at stake in this operation?" Saramaggio
asked again, being careful not to use the word procedure.

"Yes, I do," Scott replied, sounding strangely formal, like someone
taking a wedding vow. And he did understand, too. He knew that he would
probably not have Tyler back the way he was before. But he wanted him
back so badly that he would accept even a small piece of him. He would
accept him-and be grateful for it.

Saramaggio showed him to the door and put an arm around his shoulders.
Scott felt the arm tighten in a kind of hug, the most the man could do
under the circumstances.

"I guess I better suit up," the surgeon said. He smiled at Scott, but
the smile was drawn a little too tight. He was nervous.

"You know where to go," he added, and Scott said yes, he did. Scott gave
the man's hand a squeeze-not too hard, he told himself reflexively, he
has to operate-and walked out. He took the stairs to the waiting room.

It was fortunate, he thought on the way, that Saramaggio was able to
keep his medical license and even to avoid prosecution. Only
testimonials by the hospital higher-ups and by Scott and Kate and almost
everyone else concerned had convinced the prosecutor not to press
criminal charges. Instead, he had struck a private deal to perform
community service, an obligation that he fulfilled by working weekends
in a clinic in Greenwich-one that was not too far from a golf course. Oh
well, thought Scott, smiling, you can't expect everything to change.

384 Felix had not been so lucky. He'd pleaded guilty to several charges,
including negligent manslaughter and conspiracy to commit negligent
manslaughter-the indictment would have been stronger had there only been
witnesses to the death of Benchloss in the Pine-grove basement-and
received a ten-year sentence and was shipped to a prison upstate. Had
the case gone to trial, he would have fared even worse: Four days after
he hobbled off in ankle bracelets and handcuffs, the police went to the
cemetery where Tyler had supposedly been buried and dug up his coffin.
There was a body inside, all right, but some quick supposition and a
check of the records revealed it to belong to none other than Benchloss
himself. Sergeant Paganelli was red-faced.

Quincy, ever the fast talker, escaped prosecution by the skin of his
teeth. All he had done, he explained, was to construct the TSRs, not use
them to experiment on patients in a mental asylum. For that- and for all
the other sins-Cleaver was deemed responsible. Everyone agreed that
Cleaver was guilty dead to rights. But precious little could be done
about it, because he wasn't in any shape to stand trial, and he wasn't
likely to be for the foreseeable future. His condition had been
observable right away, seconds after Quincy had pulled him from the
machine. His face was inert, frozen in some kind of grimace. His arms
were wrapped around his chest, as if he were cold or hugging himself to
ward off some horror. He could move, if he had to, but he didn't seem to
want to. In fact, although he was alive, he acted for all intents and
purposes as if he had died during his foray into the unknown. Now a
patient at Pinegrove, he was the one with the most bizarre of all
symptoms. Disheveled and babbling, he was stone-quiet for long periods,
periods that were growing, and he had to be restrained much of the time.
He was kept inside a straitjacket because otherwise he would rip at his
skin with his nails, seemingly convinced that worms were crawling all
over him. He also believed he could smell his own flesh rotting. How
odd, Pinegrove trustees recounted, that the institution should see two
people within a year that had Co-tard's syndrome, and that one should
have been the person in charge of treating the other.

Scott came to the waiting room. No one else was there. There were those
same innocuous paintings on the wall, the battered coffee table, the
magazines whose covers were creased with a hundred handlings. 385

It gave him a jolt to see it again, but this time he rapidly adapted and
didn't feel so alone in his nervousness. This was true even though Kate
wasn't with him. She had wanted to be but he had insisted otherwise-he
wanted her in there, in the operating room, to take care of Tyler. Only
in her did he have total confidence. She alone would know what to do if
things went wrong, what would be best for Tyler.

Kate, too, had been changed by her voyage into the unknown. She had told
Scott about how she had treated her mother at the end of her illness and
had admitted how guilty she had felt. But the guilt seemed to have gone
away, and in its place were nothing but the good memories. She could
look at a sparrow and see it for what it was- without thinking of the
bird that had lit on her head at her mother's funeral.

As he paced around the waiting room, Scott was strangely sanguine. It
wasn't deja vu. It wasn't that he was so certain that Tyler would emerge
whole and unscathed from the operation. He simply felt different, almost
fatalistic, as he had ever since he came out of the machine and
recovered from his time there. It was hard to describe. When people
asked him-as they invariably did-he found himself describing the meteors
that bombarded him and the tunnel of light, and he spoke vaguely about
believing he saw Tyler. Except, of course, when he and Kate talked it
over. After all, the two of them were going to spend the rest of their
lives together, no matter what happened.

So to her, he told the truth-that the voyage had been immeasurably more
profound, that he and Tyler had traveled together across some Rubicon to
the outer limits of the spiritual world and there discovered the spark
of creation, and that in that fire from wherever it was-hell or heaven,
he couldn't say-their two souls had been fused together. Immutably and
forever. So if he didn't have Tyler now, all of him, he knew that he
would-sometime, somewhere.

And Kate believed him, and knew that she would be there with them, too.

Still, he paced around the room expectantly.

Scott waited for hours; then heard the door, and turned to see Kate
entering the room, her face flushed, and after her, Saramaggio.

They walked toward him, and Scott turned fully to greet them, his
breathing suddenly calm, his arms by his side.

Waiting.

386 Acknowledgments

A number of people helped in the preparation of this book. Among those I
would like to thank personally are the following:

Jason Carmel, Howard Hughes Medical Student Fellow at the W. M. Keck
Center, Rutgers University, for invaluable research into surgery for
epilepsy, the transplantation of stem cells, and a highly theoretical
computer system for brain life support.

My nephew, Dr. Daniel Lieberman, neurosurgeon at Neurological Surgeons
in Phoenix, Arizona, and research associate professor at Arizona State
University, for letting me observe him perform brain surgery and for
then wielding an editorial scalpel on my manuscript.

Matt Stallcup, of the University of Southern California, for his fine
summary of the work of Stuart Kauffman, and Mr. Kauffman, a visionary
thinker, for permission to use his concept of "the adjacent possible."

Dr. Nick Barbaro and staff in the neurosurgery department at the
University of California, San Francisco, for their hospitality, which I
have poorly repaid by reference to an unnamed and completely fictitious
egomaniacal surgeon there.

The Foundation for American Communications for inviting me to a
conference on Covering Biotech Advances, where I gathered valuable
material from papers by Dr. David Cooper of the Transplantation Biology
Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital East, and John D.
Gearhart of the Department of OBGYN at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Donald Reis, who until his death was director of the Weill Cornell
Medical College's laboratory of neurobiology at New York Hospital, for a
discussion in which he offered the observation that the fastest route
into the brain is through the optic nerve.

Dr. Alex Berenstein of Beth Israel for sharing his enthusiasm and
information on everything from stem cells to neurosurgery, and his
partner, Dr. Fred Epstein, who performed flawless spinal surgery upon me
several years ago and who is now

387

showing courage and resilience during his own rehabilitation after a
serious accident.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. for sharing his expertise on rock climbing,
thankfully done on the ground.

Neil Nyren at Penguin Putnam for his incomparable editing skills and
Kathy Robbins, my agent, for her support and insights.

My daughters, Kyra Darnton Grann, for valuable suggestions, and Liza
Darn-ton, for scrupulous, substantive, and line-by-line editing; and
Jamie, my model son.

And above all, to my wife, Nina, for her endless hours of work and, not
incidentally, her inspiration, love, wit, wisdom, and adventure-making
companionship.

388

389 About the Author

John Darn ton is the bestseUing author ofNeanderthal and The Experiment.
He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose thirty-plus-year
career as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent has taken him
all over the world. Currently the Cultural News Editor of The New York
Times, he lives in Manhattan with his wife, Nina.