“Pretty much.”
“Jesus. So what does that make me? Debra Fucking Morgan? Too much the loving sister to see what her brother really was?”
“I’m not—no one is judging. I just thought you should know.” She said nothing, so I went on. “And at least he isn’t one anymore. He genuinely cares about you.”
“Now,” said Kayla bitterly.
“And let’s hope he stays that way. But, look, you know the Hare Checklist as well as I do. Did he, y’know, have lots of girlfriends?”
“You’ve only seen him now, after wasting away for almost twenty years,” she replied, nodding. “I’m his sister, and even I knew how hot he was.”
“Promiscuity,” I said softly. “Strings of meaningless relationships. And you said he was into extreme sports: that’s need for stimulation. You also said he was a brick when your father was fighting cancer; I’m betting he kept it together even at the funeral, right?”
“And you’re saying that’s evidence of shallow affect?”
I couldn’t shrug lying down, but I lifted my eyebrows. “Classic trait.”
“I—” But she didn’t finish whatever thought she’d started.
“I’m so sorry, honey. But remember, he’s fine, now.”
She rolled on her side, facing away from me; I was afraid she was angry, but then she said, “Hold me.”
I did, nestling into the curve of her back, spooning her tightly. I didn’t know what to say, and so I just held her, and we lay there, waiting for sleep to take us.
27
After Jim had returned to Winnipeg, Kayla decided to come clean with the staff at Tommy Douglas Long-Term Care. “And so,” she said, “if there are other patients here who have no consciousness at all, I might be able to help them.”
Nathan Amsterdam, the medical chief of staff, was fifty-something, with blond hair swept back from his forehead, hollow cheeks, and a long, thin face. “It’s incredible,” he said. “But, you know, you really should have told us in advance what you were planning to do. If something had gone wrong…”
“He’s my brother; the court gave me power of attorney ages ago. I authorized it—and it worked.”
“Still, if it’d had some deleterious effect—”
“It didn’t. It cured him.”
He was quiet for a time, then: “Well, what’s done is done.”
“So far,” said Kayla. “But I want to do it again. Is there anyone else here whose condition is similar to what my brother was in? A score of just three on the Glasgow scale? I want to help, if I can.”
“I’d have to check with our legal counsel…”
“For pity’s sake, Dr. Amsterdam, you’re not going to bury a miracle in red tape, are you?”
Amsterdam’s office walls were lined with cherry-wood bookcases; he sat behind a matching desk. “Off the record, we have four—no, five—patients with locked-in syndrome, and a dozen or so in minimally conscious states. But with no signs at all of consciousness or awareness?” He frowned, and the concavities of his cheeks deepened. “There’s one. Been in a coma since a car accident, oh, five or six years ago. Her husband is almost as dutiful as you—comes in every other Wednesday night to sit with her.”
“Can you put me in touch with him?”
Amsterdam’s head moved left and right. “No. But I can ask him if he wants to get in touch with you.”
I was standing before fifty or so students. My ringer was off; I was famous for chastising students when their phones rang while I was trying to teach. But I did have the phone on the lectern, face-up, so I could keep an eye on the time in a way that was less obvious than looking at my watch. There was no clock at the back of the room although there was one behind me: the students got to see the hour evaporate, but the professor didn’t.
The little tablet vibrated and the display briefly lit up, showing the time—11:14 A.M.—and the automatic notification I’d set, and forgotten, at the beginning of the triaclass="underline" Google Alert—“Devin Becker verdict.” I violated my own rule, picked up the phone, and looked at my inbox. The headline for the article said: Savannah Prison ringleader sentenced to death. The source beneath it was MSNBC.com, although doubtless if I did a search, there’d be dozens of stories already, and hundreds by the end of the day.
And then, I guess, I just stood there, mouth agape, while all those eyes looked at me. I heard someone cough, someone else typing, another person knock a pen to the floor. But I kept staring at the message. I wanted to click through to the report and watch the video, then and there, but—
“Professor Marchuk?” said a woman from near the front of the hall. I blinked, looked up, but said nothing.
“Sir?” said the same person. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that, and so I just composed myself and pressed on with the lecture. “Watson, you see, was the quintessential behaviorist. He felt that people were simple stimulus-response machines that could be trained any way you wished through reward and punishment. He once said, ‘Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything…’”
Kayla got a call from the husband of the woman in the coma, and she immediately drove the hour out of the city to his farm. Dale Hawkins was perhaps sixty years old, with a shock of graying hair and a full, matching beard. Although he was wearing a plaid work shirt, he had an intricate tattoo of vines and leaves terminating on the back of his left hand; Kayla assumed it was a full sleeve. On one wall of his living room he had three framed photos of his wife. She had a broad face and brown hair.
“I miss her so much,” Dale said. “I miss her every day.”
“I know,” said Kayla. There was a rough-hewn wooden coffee table between them, but she reached across it and took his hand. “I know exactly what you’re going through. My brother was in a coma, too, and this technique helped him.” She got her tablet and streamed the video Jim had made of Travis waking up. Dale watched, transfixed.
“And your brother, he’s all right in the head?” asked Dale, once the video was over. “He’s the same as before?”
And that was the question she’d been wrestling with. “No,” she said. “Honestly? He’s different. Better, but different. And your wife might come back different, too—and, I have to tell you, not necessarily better.”
They talked some more while Dale looked at the photos of his wife, and Kayla looked at them, too. She had different expressions in each one: a smile, a look of thoughtful contemplation, her features set in determination. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. The words Kayla had memorized in high school came back to her. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
“Okay,” Dale said at last. “Let’s give it a try.”
I came into my living room—you had to go down a couple of steps to get to it, all Mary Tyler Moore–like—and sat on the couch, facing the TV. I fumbled around looking for the correct one of the four remote controls, activated the set, selected the web browser, went to CBC.ca, and there it was, the second story under “International News.”
“After deliberating for six days,” said a tall female reporter I’d never seen before, “the jury in the Devin Becker case handed down a death sentence. Under Georgia law, when a jury unanimously recommends the death penalty, which it did here, the judge has no option but to impose it. Becker sat emotionless in court as the jury forewoman read the verdict…”