The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 65

Tests.

More tests.

Three weeks in and out of labs and hospitals in California.

Scans, chemicals, swabs, injections.

I tried talking to Byron, but couldn’t get anything from her. She couldn’t remember building a relationship with me, and so she couldn’t trust. So we idled along in quiet, business-like efficiency, ticking points off her list while she watched and re-watched recordings of our talks, annotated and updated observations and thoughts. Some thin impressions began to form in her mind, but they were, as she said, like memories of watching a play. She saw Romeo die and Juliet swoon, but it was not her lips the poison kissed, her heart that broke. She was a witness to events that contained her, not party.

On the fourth week we spent together, she slipped away for a few hours to have an fMRI on her own brain, looking for long-term damage caused by my presence. I didn’t think she’d find any, and the next day she was back at the breakfast table, as calm and composed as anything. Science, I suspected, wasn’t giving her the answers she was looking for.

On the fifth week, the doctors gave me LSD.

It wasn’t called LSD, but the effects were roughly the same. They plugged me into a dozen electrodes and sat me back in a comfortable chair, and for the first time in my life, I tasted blue, and smelt the sound of Byron’s voice, and dreamed while waking of what dreams would come, and swallowed time, swallowed the past and the future both, swallowed all the oxygen from the air and was absolutely fine until I found that I was having a panic attack and couldn’t breathe, sobbing for breath, unable to stop crying, gasping, heaving, a pain in my chest which I knew was going to kill me, going to die for this, for Byron, for Perfection, until the doctor gave me something to calm me down and when I woke, Byron simply said, “We still couldn’t remember you, I’m afraid.”

I watched footage recorded of the event later. The trip had lasted, for my money, less than ten minutes, but on the tape three hours go by in which doctors, nurses and students at the clinic all enter and leave, enter and leave, and each time Byron asks, “Have you seen this patient before?” and they all shake their heads, every one of them, and exit with an apologetic smile.

“Maybe a different mechanism,” suggested Byron as she drove us back to the hotel. “Maybe something electrical.”

She snuck out early that night, while she thought I was sleeping off the day’s medicine, for another one of her backstreet meetings with contacts and servants. I wondered where she got her money from, if she was worth robbing, thought about following her, decided against it.

“Perhaps something else?” she said, the day a doctor suggested electroconvulsive therapy, but she was watching me from the corner of her eye, waiting to see how far I’d go.

Misnomers: electroshock therapy. Made famous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as punishment, patients reduced to drooling slabs. Some risk; not much. Commonly administered bilaterally, with currents somewhere in the 800 milliamp range, an ECT machine pulls less electrical juice than a PC, and carries roughly the same risks to a patient as a general anaesthetic. However, relapses occur frequently, often six months or so after initial treatment, and there are concerns as to long-term memory loss and damage to cognition that may result from what is essentially an unknown mechanism for inducing a grand mal seizure.

“Unless you want to try…?” Byron continued, softly, watching me, waiting to see where my thoughts fell.

Was it worth it? Six months of being remembered, maybe more, for the price of a bit of my memory, the ability to use a spoon? Six months of strangers being friends, of acquaintances knowing my name, six months of being loved, of being held, of being known?

It was worth it, of course, but when they showed me the room where it would happen, little more than a dentist’s studio, a chair, oxygen mask, needles, a machine, and told me the statistics — 100,000 people in the USA have this every year, nothing to be afraid of — I remembered Gracie, my baby sister, measles aged four, the seizures when her fever hit 42°, holding my hand, Force be with you always — and I ran from the room and had to stand outside in the corridor, counting the dots on the green and white speckled tiles beneath my feet, while Byron stood with one hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. We’ll find another way.”

On the sixth week, they tried transcranial magnetic stimulation. The two researchers who administered it said, “Count up to ten.”

One, two, four, five, seven, eight…

“I can’t seem to say…” I said, and couldn’t find what it was I was missing.

They chuckled. “Yeah,” they exclaimed. “We know!”

There seemed no medical purpose in electromagnetically altering the part of my brain that could count to ten, but they enjoyed the exercise and I felt no pain as they ran their wand across the top of my skull, variously triggering the taste of fizzy orange juice, the memory of a concert I’d attended in Rome, the sound of the sea, the inability to recite the alphabet and at one point, a mild giggling fit that continued for a minute after they’d turned the wand off.

What they couldn’t do, it appeared, was make me memorable, and the next day when we went back they held the wand over my skull again and said, “Count up to ten!” and found it exactly as funny as it had been the day before.

At night, Byron said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?”

We were eating barbecued ribs, pulling meat off bone, discarding the sucked grey remnants into a big bowl between us, like Vikings at a feast.

“You asked me that yesterday,” I said.

“I’m sorry — I didn’t realise.”

“We went to the hospital.”

“No, I was meeting a— Ah, but you were there too, of course. Apologies.”

The next morning she said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?”

I said, “I’ve gotta pee,” and when I came back she said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?” and I looked first at her, then at her phone recording our conversation, and said, “Yes. But no.”

She made a note, and didn’t ask again.

The day they sat me down to discuss deep brain simulation, I realised that I had stopped listening within a matter of minutes. I smiled and nodded and stared at nothing much, and when Byron said, “Do you want to have this conversation another time?” I smiled, stood up from my chair and walked away without a word.

One day I fell asleep in the MRI chamber. Didn’t think it was possible, but it happened.

And three days after that, I dozed off while they were trying more transcranial stimulation, but that was normal, they said.

And when I woke, I had a splitting headache, which ibuprofen didn’t even dent.