She let herself take a drink.
“The majority opinion would say that in most stages of coma, our sensory apparatus is shut down. Some sort of trauma causes the brain to turn off most of the higher functions. The patient exists in a state of profound unconsciousness.”
He was listening but he was also thinking of Danny pre-accident. Flashing back to their last Saturday, the day of the accident. Thinking of his son, for some reason, propped up on a booster seat in the barber’s chair, getting his hair cut. The barber was trying to ask him what he thought of the Indians this year, but Danny wouldn’t answer. The boy just stared across the short distance between himself and Sweeney, his head looking so small above the tent of a blue nylon sheet that covered his body.
“What I’m saying is that the patient’s brain is no longer receiving information along the sense pathways. So the patient is sent into a void. He’s in a black hole. I know this is hard but it’s necessary.”
He mimicked Alice’s actions, brought his drink to his lips and let a little brandy into his mouth. He heard her words and he understood them. He nodded to acknowledge this understanding. But he was thinking of Danny in a barber’s chair.
“The average neurologist would tell you that soon after he arrives in that void, that black hole, the average coma patient becomes a vegetable. They lose any vestige of sentience.”
There was nothing special about this trip to the barber’s. There was nothing, no incident good or bad, that should have impressed such a vivid memory. But there it was, as clear, in this moment, as the woman lecturing before him. Danny, his mouth set in a manner that could turn, at any instant, into a smile or a frown, as flakes of his fine, soft hair floated down around him to rest on his nose and on the blue sheet.
“But there are two things wrong with this notion. The first is that there’s no such thing as an average coma patient. And the second is that no neurologist that I know of has ever visited that black hole. So what they’re telling us is conjecture.”
Father and son never broke eye contact throughout the duration of the haircut. At points, Sweeney felt as if Danny were trying to tell him something. But mostly, in the midst of this mundane Saturday morning, this common and forgettable trip to the barbershop, he felt there was a moment of unexplained and binding love, radiating back and forth between the two of them.
Alice took another sip, looked across the room at the fireplace, then back at Sweeney.
“Everything that my father and I have discovered over the course of our careers tells us that those doctors have no right to their conjectures. The brain is a stunningly versatile organ. And the mind is an entity that we understand only in the most infantile ways.”
And then the haircut was over and Barber Ray spun Danny in the chair, broke their eye contact. But only for an instant because Danny found Dad again in the mirror, watched his father rise and come forward to stand behind his son. He watched his father place a hand on the nylon sheet — Sweeney could feel it now, cool and silky against his skin — and barely squeeze the bony shoulder beneath. And Barber Ray was brushing off the cuttings, the small feathers of kid hair, as he asked Danny how he liked the haircut. And Danny said, “Good”—just the one word and not very loud. But he continued to stare at his father in the mirror. To look at the face, the eyes. As if to say, I dreamed of you before I knew you.
“What I believe, and what my father believes, is that if you shut down all sensory information to the brain, you do, in fact, separate the patient from our universe. From consensual reality, I’ll call it. And maybe there is a period of passage through a void. A black hole. But I don’t believe the patient’s mind, their consciousness, dies. I don’t believe they reside permanently in the void.”
Her last words pulled him loose from the memory and he said, “Then where do they reside?”
“I think,” she said, “they construct another reality. Another universe. One that doesn’t need the prompts of touch and taste and smell and sight and sound.”
“And what,” he asked, “do they build that universe out of?”
“Who knows? I don’t know. To say I do would be worse than arrogant. It would be a lie. But I can guess that, whatever the building materials, the comatose universe is entirely alien to our own.”
Sweeney got up without being asked, moved to the fireplace, sat down on the floor and started to rearrange the logs.
“It’s an interesting theory,” he said. “But how does it help Danny? How do I get him back into my universe?”
“I want to answer your question,” she said, “with another question. But it’s a hard one for you to hear.”
She got up from the couch and joined him, but left her shoes under the coffee table. She sat down on her heels and he watched her skirt ride up her thighs.
“I’m guessing,” he said, “that I’ve withstood worse.”
“How do you know,” she said, “that he wants to come back?”
He lit a match, held it beneath a piece of kindling, and watched strands of wood start to glow. “He wants to come back,” he said, “because he wants to be with me. Because his father loves him more than his own life.”
“And he knows that?”
It seemed like a test, so even though he felt the anger coming on, he tried to keep ahead of it.
“He knows that, yes.”
She didn’t respond, just opened her eyes a little wider. It made her face lose a good deal of its beauty and he shook out the match just before it burned his finger. Then he lit another.
“He knows because before the accident I showed him every day. And since the accident, I’ve stayed next to him as much as I could and I’ve told him that I love him.”
“There’s a good chance,” Alice said, “that he doesn’t hear you.”
He felt himself slip a bit, felt the defensiveness pushing its way into his voice. He said, “He hears me,” and felt her shrug even though he didn’t see her shoulders move.
“He’s stage six,” she said. “I’m not saying it isn’t possible. But it isn’t probable.”
“Danny hears me when I talk to him.”
“Do you think I’m being cruel?”
“You’re being,” Sweeney said, pausing, “a doctor.”
“I’m preparing you,” she said. “You’re going to be invited to the first team assessment soon. It can be a difficult experience for the families.”
“I’ll cope.”
She finished her drink and said, “I’m not so sure. You’re functioning under some really debilitating stress. That takes its toll on everyone over time.”
“I’ve spent a year being patronized by the best neurologists in Ohio,” he said. “I’ll handle the meeting.”
In a week, he hoped, he’d be back in Cleveland, visiting Danny at the St. Joseph every day, working third shift at a Wonder Drug or an independent. Taking his medication and waiting for it to build up in his system. Waiting for the drug to accumulate enough power in his brain to numb down the rage and the fear.
“I’ll help you out,” Alice said, “as best I can. In spite of what I’ve said, I think Danny’s a promising candidate for waking.”
“Let’s say the rest of the team agrees with you. What happens then?”
“Danny would be put in the RAT program.”
He stared at her.
“Radical Arousal Therapies,” she said. “We’ve gotten approval recently to start using a new battery of drugs and procedures. If Danny’s recommended for the program, I’ll go over all of them with you.”
“And if he’s not recommended?” he asked because he thought she’d expect it.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s wait and see what happens at the assessment.”