“You don’t need to be tied down for a pulmonary mycosis,” Lauren said.
“I’ll explain everything,” Mei-lin said. “Just do it, please, before I change my mind.”
“Change your mind? You’re freaking me out, here, Mei. You’re not in any danger of—”
Mei-lin ignored her, using her right hand to strap her left to the rail. “Neil?” she said. “Please?”
“Oh, for heavens’ sake,” Lauren said. She tied the strap around Meilin’s other hand. “Now will you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Ankles, too,” Mei-lin said.
When Lauren had reluctantly complied, Mei-lin gave her a quick summary of what she had inhaled and what the symptoms were likely to be.
“Give me a consent form,” she said. “I don’t want to be taken off of this until I’ve had a full course of treatment, no matter what I tell you, no matter how I beg or threaten to sue, you hear me? A full course.”
Lauren, still suspicious but rattled by her vehemence, agreed.
“Find someone who can study the spores we collected,” Mei-lin said to me. “The best option for ending this thing is to find a cure.”
“You should do it,” I said, but she dismissed me with an annoyed gesture.
“I’m compromised. I can’t study it; you could never believe what I told you. I can’t even advise you, because I might steer you wrong.”
“The antifungals,” I said, indicating the IV. “If they work, then you’ll be back on your feet…”
She shook her head. “The one constant with fungal infections is how easily they can come back. That’s why we tell people to take the medication for years. People think it’s gone because they’ve felt fine for months, and they stop taking the pills. Next thing you know, they’re back in the ER, and the infection’s twice as bad as it was the first time around.
“Fungus is remarkably similar to us, biologically—much more so than plants or bacteria. It makes them great sources for pharmaceuticals, but it also makes it hard to devise drugs to attack them without also attacking healthy human cells. Often, antifungals will simply halt the growth of the fungus, not eradicate it. Which is why it’s so easy for them to come back.”
She paused for a fit of coughing. When she caught her breath again, there were tears in her eyes. “You can’t trust me anymore,” she said. “Yes, I hope this course of treatment will cure me. Yes, I hope I’ll be up and about in a few days and in full control of my own mind. But even if I am, you won’t know for sure. The best thing you can do for me is to find someone who can continue this research without me.”
I nodded. I felt bad leaving her, though I expected she had friends in the hospital who would see that she was well cared for. I took one last look at her, arms and legs tied down at her own request, and felt a surge of admiration. “I won’t give up,” I said. “I won’t stop fighting this until I’ve found a way through.”
“Get moving, then,” she said. “I’ll still be here when you get back.”
Lauren caught me on my way out of the ER. “Is this for real?”
“It is,” I said. “Everything she told you, about how this organism works, is true. Don’t take her off that medication.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “That dosage is high. Like, really high. I would never give a patient her size that much.”
“I guess she wants to be really, really sure she kills it.”
“She might just kill herself instead.”
I looked her in the eyes. “Trust her,” I said. “Don’t change the dosage, and don’t stop the treatment. No matter what she tells you.”
Lauren held my gaze for a beat. “Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. I can do that.”
CHAPTER 24
I wanted to get back to Fort Meade, but I couldn’t leave the hospital without first visiting my father. I found my way to the orthopedic floor, and from there to his room. It seemed a mirror of the room I’d just left, with my father strapped to the bed instead of Mei-lin. He was asleep, but my mother still stood next to him, in practically the same place as when I’d left them that morning.
I circled the bed and gave her a hug. “How’s he been?”
“Calm,” she said. “Mostly lucid.”
“But?” I prompted.
“He says he’s sorry about attacking Dr. Chu. But I don’t think he really is. It comes across more like a ploy, like he’s trying to get me to sympathize with him, so I’ll untie him or let down my guard.” She took a deep breath, then let it out with a little hitch. “I think it’s getting more of a hold on him.”
I watched his chest gently rise and fall. “We have to keep our hopes up. This is just a new kind of sickness, one we don’t understand well yet.”
“It’s so strange to have him back.” She turned away and faced the window. “He talks to me as if these last three years never happened. He remembers details about our engagement, our marriage, about you and Paul and Julia being born. He sits there and reminisces with me, and I don’t know how to feel about it. I mourned him already. A year ago, I would have given anything for him to have a conversation like that. But now? I don’t know. I can’t even tell if he’s really the same man.”
“He is,” I said. “Despite everything, no matter what has damaged him physically, that’s still the man you married. Behind the Alzheimer’s, behind this new infection, there’s still the core essence of who he is. That’s always been there, whether we can see it or not.”
Mom wrapped her arms around herself. “That’s just wishful thinking, Neil. I’m sorry, but it is. What you call ‘me’ is just a pattern made of neurons and synapses and electrical impulses. When the pattern changes so much that there’s no continuity with what came before, then you can still call it ‘me’ if you want, but it’s not the same person. The old pattern is gone.”
“Not true,” I said. “The pattern changes all the time, for everybody. I’m not the same person I was when I was two years old, but it was still me. I’m not a new person every moment, just because I change. The two-year-old me thought completely differently, made different decisions, believed different things—I can’t even remember what I did or thought then. But that little Neil was still me, and I’m still him. Dad might have experiences that change him, even drastically, even so much that he doesn’t remember what came before. But it’s still him.” My voice caught a little. “That’s still Dad.”
A ragged cough brought my attention down to the bed. Dad was awake, and he looked confused. His gaze darted around the room, as if he didn’t know where he was. When he saw me, his eyes flew open wide, and his jaw clenched. He body turned rigid, and his hands slapped erratically on the metal rails.
“Hey, Dad, it’s me, Neil,” I said, afraid he didn’t recognize me.
“I know who you are. You shouldn’t be here. Go away.”
I sat on the rolling stool next to his bed. “What do you mean? Of course I should be here. I’ll come every day, until you’re well again.” I tried to take his hand to calm him, but he pushed me away impatiently.
“Where’s Paul? He was just here.”
I whirled to face Mom. “Paul was here?”
“No,” she said. “He’s confused. You saw him on the television, Charles, remember?”
My dad scowled. “When is he going to get here?”
I felt an irrational surge of the old jealousy at my dad’s preference for Paul, but I pushed it down. “I don’t know where Paul is,” I said. “But I’m here.”
“You’re here,” he echoed. “You think you’re my only real son, eh?” The muscles in his neck stood out, and his tapping on the rail grew louder and more chaotic.