Perfect killer

CHAPTER 26

As I made my way out of the stairwell on the fourth floor and down the polished linoleum-tiled corridor, Sonia Braverman, all of four foot eleven, and maybe a hundred pounds on a heavy day, stepped out of the break room in front of me. She wore one of those dark faux-silk dresses with the tiny, light print and the matching belt that women of a certain era like so much. Sonia served as my office manager, as she had for many previous directors of Neurosurgery. She was way past retirement age, but I didn't mind the annual bureaucratic torture trial to keep her there. Sonia looked at me for several moments before the recognition dawned in her eyes.

"Dr. Stone! Just look at you!" She scanned me up and down more thoroughly than an MRI. "Oy!" For her, that syllable had about a hundred shades of meaning. I understood about seventy-seven of those meanings and was all too familiar with this particular one. I was busted.

"For a brilliant man you have no sense at all, not a bit." Sonia's voice carried a high-pitched timbre, something like that of a songbird raised in Queens. "Look at you! Getting shot at and having your boat sink out from under you? Oy! You know what that does to the people who care about you? My hiatial hernia flared up with the television news this morning, and you know what that does to me. This dangling from heli copters, you have got to stop! And walking around with a loaded gun and boating around at all hours of the night and dragging in here for work looking like a derelict and smelling twice as bad." She finally paused.

"Just look at you!" She shook her head. "What I am going to do with you I do not know. You will never live to be an alter kocker if you keep on like this!"

Sonia herded me toward my office.

"Your face is all sleepy. And that ear!" Then Sonia shifted her voice from surrogate Jewish mother to efficient scheduler and office boss.

"You have a busy day already. In addition to your appointments this morning, you promised to lecture to that visiting group of postdocs from Toronto, and your friend at Pacific Hills has a conflict with your usual weekly appointment and needs to do this afternoon instead. I've cleared your schedule already for that."

The mention of Camilla's extended-care facility northwest of Malibu took my breath away as I realized that I had thought of her so seldom in the past twelve hours, mostly not at all. I had once believed that our souls had touched and that we represented something eternal.

In the six years since the accident, I had danced around the naivete of that belief, uncomfortable with its significance and unwilling to let it go. And while the orbits of my life had become eccentric over the years since-drawing me nearer to her at some times and farther at others-she maintained her gravitational hold on my heart and kept my emotions circling around her.

"Let's get you some sleep," Sonia said. "I'll reschedule your morning appointments and cancel the lecture."

I shook my head as I walked through the reception area. "Only the morning. I'll be okay after a couple hours sleep."

She tsked her partial approval as I shuffled through my office toward the door to a small room I called home when I worked late at the lab. I stopped with one hand on the doorknob.

"Can you make sure I am up by eleven?"

"We'll see."

"Yes, ma'am." I turned around and went through the door, closing it softly behind me.

I sagged onto the folding cot and fell asleep with my clothes on.

In the gray half-world we transit before sleep takes us, I thought about Camilla and who she was, who I was, and how Jasmine threatened that.

It struck me then that we can never be who we are because the actual moment of being in the present is an infinitely small moment sandwiched between the constantly shifting memories of who we have been and the thoughts and fantasies of who we will be. My research, and that of many others, indicated that consciousness perceives events in the world about one-fifth of a second after they have actually happened. That means any time we think of the present, we are already looking at the past. The reality we perceive never coincides with the reality that exists.

Who we are is never the same from instant to instant because the present we perceive is continually reshaped by the past. Thus our hopes and dreams for the future propel us through an illusory present to a fourth state of time: our state of being that is simultaneously neither past nor present nor future and yet all of those combined. It had something to do with space-time, which made me wonder if that had anything to do with the soul and where Camilla's mind lived.

Camilla had no future in this world; no one had ever recovered from her level of profound brain injuries. While she occupied a physical presence in the present that I perceived, her brain showed no indication of consciousness or directed neurological activity above the brain stem, which indicated she lacked a present of her own.

I often worried if an internal life played in her head beyond our scientific ability to detect it. Physicians not so long ago lacked the instruments to detect brain waves, which made me realize that merely because we failed to detect something did not prove its absence. I fell deeply asleep then, wondering what this meant. And whether it meant any damn thing at all.