I asked if my mother was in pain.
The doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain, but whether she was still able to feel pain.
I thought of the corpse of the girl who’d had her cranium split open by the rifle round, the body of the boy who’d had his guts blown out from behind, the villagers roasted like so many chickens, and the dead body of the ex-brigadier general who had fashioned all these atrocities.
The accident happened three days before my return to Washington from the death and destruction of central Asia. I didn’t panic when Colonel Rockwell told me the news; I felt a strange calm as I headed toward the hospital.
It had been an old-school Cadillac that had run over my mother—a real piece of junk that had never been retrofitted with modern safety devices. A throwback to the twentieth century. It was pink. It almost seemed hilarious. Except that at some stage, I would have to face the fact that it wasn’t a joke. Mom really was run over by a Hollywood cliché pink Cadillac. To round out the joke, the driver had been a textbook drunk who’d had no interest in installing the sort of automated soundness-of-mind checker that now came standard on modern vehicles. How else would the pink Caddy have had the freedom to lunge onto the sidewalk where my mother was walking, taking her out along with the booze-addled driver and a couple of other pedestrians for good measure?
Putting aside the absurdity of the fact that such a car was somehow still considered roadworthy in this day and age, the end result was that the pink Cadillac finally came to a stop only when its momentum was killed by its smashing into the flank of another car across the way that had been minding its own business at a traffic light. The pink Caddy’s momentum wasn’t the only thing killed at that point: the driver’s drink-sodden life was snuffed out instantly.
My mother died too. Her lungs had stopped moving by the time the ambulances arrived, and although she had been put on a respirator, she was pronounced DOA at the hospital.
But then she was brought back to life. The hospital had the right equipment and performed the correct medical procedures. Mom was given the same treatment as we were after being wounded in battle: the processes of her internal organs were suspended, nanomachines stopped her internal hemorrhaging, and finally her heart started beating again.
She came back to life for a reason: so that she could force me to decide her fate. To punish me for joining the army.
It was none other than my own mother now treading that fine line between life and death. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to rush to the hospital—I felt no sense of urgency, no compulsion to hurry. Thanks to my occupation, everyday life was so saturated with the color of death that I was now inured to it. My inoculation had started even before I joined the Forces, of course, what with my father disappearing one day when I was young, and thanks to my friend who died of cancer as a kid. So was I now supposed to wallow in the luxury of fretting about whether another person close to me was going to die?
I walked. During the whole length of the journey from my lodgings to the plane to Washington, then to the cab ride to the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I started running. My heart was full of sadness, but it was of a chronic sort rather than acute—not so much a response to this latest tragedy, but a world-weariness at my preconceptions about the painful nature of life being reconfirmed. Nothing surprised me anymore. Such was the way of the world.
It was summer. I stepped out of the August sun into the crisp air of the hospital reception area and signed in. It was only when the receptionist asked me if I wanted to upload a hospital guide for my alternative reality contacts that I realized I had left my ARs at home. At no point at the airport or in the taxi had I even noticed I was missing them. I told the receptionist I didn’t have my ARs in, so she activated the hospital beacon so that I would be led automatically to my destination. A black beacon appeared on the floor, swimming across the pressurized floor pads like a goldfish in a bowl, leading me toward the ICU. The hospital floor looked almost like a work of art.
I walked along the hospital corridor, guided by the slow-moving black beacon as it crept through the wards and public spaces. Each of these were clearly marked to distinguish them. A faint dreamlike aroma was pervading my senses.
Without the beacon I would never have been able to find my destination, but with its help it wasn’t too long before I arrived at the ICU. I was given antiseptic whites to change into before crossing the threshold into the unit via a set of sliding double doors. Inside the ward, beds were cordoned off via transparent curtains, and beyond them were the patients, many of whom looked as though they were not much longer for this world.
Most of them would probably make a full recovery, of course. But I didn’t know about my mother yet.
The black homing beacon crept on and slid underneath one of the sets of curtains, so I parted them and went through.
I saw a morass of tubes and monitors. The tubes that plugged into my mother’s body were there to pump in life-giving nanomachines to make up for whichever of her internal organs had given out. Her normally luxuriant hair had been completely shaved off, and the gash in her head was sewn up, stapled, and covered in hemostatic pads dripping with blood. There were also a number of places on her shaved skull where somebody—a doctor, probably—had written notes in shorthand, presumably to indicate where to aim the electromagnetic waves that would guide the nanomachines to their destinations inside her skull. I was reminded of Post-Its on a refrigerator door or of the clutter at Williams’s house that was punctuated with week-old memos to self: Don’t forget to pick up the groceries. A whole corner of his kitchen was dedicated to such notes. And then there were those police procedurals on TV, with the detective’s desk in organized chaos …
Yes, I was reminded of all of these by the jottings on my mother’s shiny head, which now looked liked a bizarre modern version of those old phrenological models.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there in front of my mother. At some point I heard a gentle voice—Captain Clavis Shepherd?—and I turned around to see who had spoken.
The man introduced himself as my mother’s attending physician.
I asked about my mother.
She had multiple fractures and extensive subcutaneous bleeding. Many of her internal organs had been damaged to the point of impaired function. Nothing, though, that the technology couldn’t keep stable. Her life was not in immediate danger.
I didn’t press him on his precise definition of “life.” What “life” currently meant for my mother as she lay there, on her side, oblivious to the world.
“Is she conscious?” I asked, and I noticed the doctor’s lips tightening. At the time, I read the doctor’s expression as a sign that I should give up all hope for that, but looking back on it now I realize that I was subtly wrong on that count. His troubled expression was probably more that of a specialist trying to search for the right words with which to explain the nuances of a difficult and complicated situation to a layman. A situation I was somewhat familiar with as a specialist in my own field. What to do when friends or family—or even desk jockeys within your own organization—asked you for a yes or no answer when there were only shades of gray. For every subtle and complicated question, there was an answer that was perfectly simple, straightforward, and wrong.
“Unfortunately, that’s not an easy question to answer,” the doctor eventually said. “Your mother suffered from severe blunt-force trauma directly to her head, resulting in what is known medically as a cerebral contusion. She has a comparatively small area damaged on the side that was hit, but the damage on the other side is much more extensive, with multiple microhemorrhages deep inside her brain.”
“I don’t understand—on the other side?”
“If you can forgive a somewhat insensitive analogy, it’s a bit like hitting a billiard ball with a cue. The area you hit is quite small, but when the ball then hits the cushion on the other side there’s a lot of force absorbed. When the brain is hit in this manner, it has nowhere to go except into the hard skull wall on the other side …”
A billiard match inside my mother’s skull but with a cue ball as soft as marshmallows.
The doctor went on to explain that, as a result of the trauma, the part of my mother’s brain around her neocortex was severely damaged. She had lost her respiratory function entirely, although that could be artificially maintained with the machines.
“Mr. Shepherd. We’re able to isolate the different functions of the cerebral cortex into separate compartments. Modules, if you will. And we can confirm that many of your mother’s cerebral cortex modules are still alive. We can even positively identify which ones. But …” The doctor hesitated.
“But?”
“Well, medical science just doesn’t have any frame of reference to help us determine which and how many modules need to be alive before we can describe the person as being meaningfully ‘conscious.’ In the same way that medical science can’t describe what it’s like to be dead.”
My mother’s house. The house that had once been my home.
The house was in a quiet corner of Georgetown, not too far from the Exorcist Steps, named after the old movie. The steps had always been covered in graffiti, sometimes of a pretty creative variety. Once, around the time I was in high school, someone covered the whole surface of the steps with display paint and projected an image of Father Karras tumbling to his doom, looped over and over. The incident was briefly on the network news, I remember.
I opened the door. The place smelled of my mother. Her life. Her air.
“Anybody home?” I found myself muttering under my breath, out of habit. The house had always been a place of words. Now silence prevailed.
I started walking around the place that should have been my own home. I felt like a detective looking for evidence, or even a thief. My own room was still there, kept in place. I ran a finger across the surface of my old desk. There was hardly any dust. The room had been cleaned regularly.
Eyes, I thought to myself.