Quantum Night

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 trial: 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…”

Soon they were showing footage of the jurors exiting the courthouse. I recognized them, but I’d never heard any of them speak until now. They cut to the heavyset black woman, a bouquet of microphones each sporting a different logo in front of her. She said, “The defense tried to say he had no choice in what he did. Hooey. Guy knew what he was doin’, and he did it. We all answerable to the Lord for our actions.”

It was all there in that woman’s statement—a woman I’d only known as Juror 8, but I’d now seen identified by the text on-screen as Helen Brine. Devin Becker was quite possibly going to die by lethal injection because I’d failed to deliver the goods. The reporter went on: “Under Georgia law, a verdict of first-degree murder can be found in cases where murder involves torture. The original case against Becker had hinged on the state establishing that his maltreatment of the prisoner before drowning him amounted to torture; clearly, the jurors here bought that argument.”

The newscast automatically moved on to the next story, this one being presented by an anchor I did recognize, Ian Hanomansing. “Continuing with news from south of the border, in the wake of further deaths in Texas…”

I groped for the remote, turned off the set, lay back on the couch, and looked up at the white ceiling, the little spikes of its stippled surface hanging down like ten thousand swords of Damocles.