Kitabı oku: «Fall or, Dodge in Hell», sayfa 3
“Pill Hill,” which loomed above downtown, had long ago been seeded with several hospitals that had done nothing but grow and consolidate as the city had developed into a horn of plenty, morbidity-wise. The few spaces not claimed by the hospitals themselves had sprouted medical buildings, twenty and thirty stories high, all interconnected by skybridges and tunnels. That combined with mergers and consolidations had turned the hill into a fully interlocked, mile-wide, three-dimensional maze entirely devoted to health care. It was well served by mass transit. Richard could have taken the bus right to the entrance of the clinic. Instead he decided on the spur of the moment to get off several blocks early and enjoy a stroll down Cherry Street. The neighborhood was old by local standards, with mature maples that had presumably been imported by settlers who wanted it to look like the leafy towns of the northeastern and midwestern United States. The autumn color was peaking. His earlier musings had caused him to wonder, again just in an idle and non-gloomy way, how many more times in his life he would see the leaves turn. Twenty or thirty? Not a superlarge number. One of the Furious Muses was pointing out to him that the smallness of this figure should drive him to appreciate the beauty more than he was doing. That didn’t seem to work, but he had to admit that the glorious colors were made even more impressive by the current Pompitus Bombasticus selection.
What pathways in the brain, he wondered, connected these patterns of sound to pleasure? And were they intrinsic to the working of the mind or just an accident of evolution? Or to ask the same question another way, if there was an afterlife, either old-school analog or newfangled digital—if we lived on as spirits or were reconstituted as digital simulations of our own brains—would we still like music?
It hadn’t exactly rained, but the walk was wet anyway, with moisture that had condensed from the atmosphere. Red leaves were plastered to it, as if the place had been overrun by patriotic Canadians. The ones underfoot had gone a little dark, but when he gazed down the length of Cherry Street, the trees lining it had a Canadian-flag purity and intensity of redness no less than that of the traffic lights suspended above major intersections.
Corvallis Kawasaki had told him that there was a word for this: “quale.” The subjective experience of (for example) redness. Or of music, or of a tarte tatin. Neurologists and philosophers both wrote of qualia, tried to puzzle out what they were exactly, how you got them, whether they were intrinsic to consciousness. Did the ants feeding on a puddle of spilled soda experience its sweetness? Or were they too simple for that and only responding programmatically? The infrared sensor on an elevator door did not experience qualia of people stepping through its beam; it was just a dumb switch. Where on the evolutionary ladder did the brain stop being a glorified elevator door sensor and begin to experience qualia? Before or after ants? Or was it the case that an individual ant was too simple to experience qualia but a whole swarm of them collectively did?
All of these lofty considerations aside, Richard enjoyed qualia to a degree that bordered on the sexual. He had ruined more than one first date by reacting to a swallow of wine or a bite of steak in a manner that the woman across the table seemed to find a little creepy. A few years earlier, he had passed through a sort of prolonged near-death experience during which he’d had way too much time to think about this. He had even drawn up a list of good ones, as if cataloging them would lead to mastery, or at least understanding:
The black sheen of an old cast-iron griddle, its oily smell when heated.
The pucker in the back of a man’s powder-blue dress shirt.
The smell of a cedar plank fractured along a grain line.
Sparks of sunlight reflecting from waves.
The shape of the letter P.
Finding your exact location on a map.
Shortening your stride as you approached a curb.
Moving around in a house—walls you can’t pass through, doors you can.
Remaining upright. Balance. Standing on one foot.
Bubbles on the bottom of a pan getting ready to boil.
Having an appetite.
Just having been hit on the nose.
The opening strains of “Comfortably Numb.”
So much for the poet in him; the tech magnate idly wondered about all of the processing power that was being consumed by his brain, even in its most idle moments, simply taking in qualia and organizing them into a coherent story about the world and his place in it.
He snatched a particularly brilliant red maple leaf right out of the air and let it plaster its wet anatomy to the palm of his hand. He looked at it the way he might’ve as a kid looking at just such a leaf on a farm in Iowa. An observer at a distance would assume he was looking at his phone. There was something almost sinister about its symmetry, which was far from perfect and yet obvious and undeniable. Dark veins forked away from its spine. On its back surface, they stood out, like girders under a roof. On the front, each vein was a channel grooved into the red flesh, draining it like a system of rills and creeks and rivers, or feeding it like capillaries in an organ. It was a little triumph of spatial organization, like the state of Iowa, replicated millions of times along the length of Cherry Street and about to become mulch in the gutter. He decided to spare this one such an ignominious fate and slipped it into his bag. Later he would show it to Sophia.
He became aware of being looked at. A boy of perhaps twelve was walking up Cherry Street. He had recognized Richard and was approaching, to the mild consternation of his adult minder—presumably his father. On his left forearm he wore a newfangled plastic splint, the kind that made the wearer look like a bionic superwarrior instead of a damaged gimp. And indeed the music of Pompitus Bombasticus made his final approach to Richard seem like the triumphal entry of a hero into Valhalla. With his good hand the kid was fishing his phone out. He would want to take a selfie with Richard so that he could post it and achieve, at least for a few hours, the Miasma’s equivalent of Valhalla-like glory. Richard obligingly pulled the phones from his head and let them encircle his neck. He shook the boy’s hand—this was awkward because of the splint and the phone. Followed at a seemly interval by the adult, the two of them walked side by side for half a block. The boy was a heavy player of T’Rain. He was smart and appealing, with well-formed and completely reasonable ideas on how to make the game even better. They drew to a halt in front of the entrance to the clinic. The kid’s monologue continued, Richard paying attention and nodding, until the father, sensing the nature of Richard’s errand, intervened and directed the boy to wind it up. The boy had, while talking, got his phone configured to take a selfie, which he now did. He was narrating as he did so and Dodge understood that he was not taking a still photo but a snippet of video, more difficult to counterfeit and thus, when posted, more cred enhancing. He shook the kid’s hand and exchanged nods with the dad: Over to you. The kid had got a mildly stricken look on his face; it had occurred to him that Richard Forthrast might be sick.
That’s what medicine was to kids: an acute response to disease. When you got older you understood it was more like brushing your teeth: a system of highly evolved strategies for preempting bad things that could happen to you if you took no preventive measures. Part of him wanted to explain this to the kid, to assuage his little pang of anxiety, but the conversation had gone on long enough and was over now. He went into the building musing on the weird role that his society had picked out for him as a guy who had built, or caused to be built, an imaginary world.
No expense had been spared on the interior design front to make the building seem as little as possible like what it really was. They had even eschewed a traditional matter-based directory in favor of a touch screen. Dodge employed this to remind himself which floor his appointment was on. The thing read like an electronic compendium of maladies. To browse it was to be grateful for all of the things that had not yet gone wrong with his body and his mind. Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell. And for each of those there was a different, exquisitely evolved medical sub-subspecialty. He almost felt that he was failing this stupendous industry by not being sick in any interesting way. For today’s procedure was utterly routine, a thing done a thousand times a day. He found his destination on the screen and walked to the correct elevator bank, casting a glance toward the entrance to the parking garage just in case C-plus might happen to show up. But this did not happen and so he had the elevator to himself at first. His clinic was on a high floor. En route, people with various impairments got on and off. Either they were lost or else they were being transferred between cooperating sub-subspecialists. For the most part they were oddly cheerful. Beyond a certain point it was all just kicking through wreckage.
A prominent sign on the check-in counter at the clinic read, PATIENTS: DO NOT EAT OR DRINK ANYTHING BEFORE YOUR SURGERY. But it gave no instructions as to what you should do if it was already too late, and so Richard socked it away in the same round file as the cancer warning signs that were posted on every single flat surface in the state of California. The nurse who was checking him in asked whether he had anyone lined up to take him home. Richard pulled out his phone, shingled with texts from Corvallis Kawasaki complaining of traffic delays, and held it up as a sort of affidavit that his ride would be here long before he was needed. On went the inevitable plastic bracelet. They led him back and had him change into the obligatory gown. An unseemly fuss was made over his wallet, phone, and other valuables, for which they wanted it understood they could not be responsible. Dodge once again scented lawyers with too much time on their hands. He heard C-plus’s voice outside, and thought of calling out a greeting, but didn’t really want to be seen or communicated with in the bracelet and gown—these made him seem sick, which he wasn’t. The pace of preparations was accelerating almost exponentially. Dodge got a clear sense of the proceduralist doctor as a cash cow of such fiscal immensity that his time and movements had to be scheduled and accounted for as carefully as an airline did with each 737. Dodge’s slot was next. They invited him onto a gurney and wheeled him into the procedure environment. An IV was started and taped to his arm. Sensors were clamped to his fingertips and Velcroed around his bicep; machines came alive to him and began to display information about his vitals. He knew where this was going. They were about to render him unconscious with amazing pharmaceuticals. In a minute, Atropos would snip the thread of his consciousness and he would, for all practical purposes, be dead. But when the procedure was finished Clotho would resume spinning his thread and he would come back to life as if it had never happened. It was weird stuff from that deeper and older stratum of myth, pre-Greek, pre-Norse, definitely nothing he would share with Sophia later, when he showed up at her house with the books.
A man came in, presumably the doctor since he didn’t introduce himself and seemed to expect that Richard would know who he was. He mentioned that he had a character in T’Rain and began to ask questions about a certain technicality in the rules of the game. Richard was already getting a little foggy, but he understood that this wasn’t a real conversation. The doctor just wanted to know when the patient had lost consciousness. They must have injected the drug into his IV line. New qualia: a mask over his nose, cold dry gas flooding his nostrils, a hiss. Atropos snipped his thread.
3
Corvallis Kawasaki had, in a funny way, been looking forward to the day’s activities, or lack thereof. His job was to show up in the waiting room of a certain medical specialist, wait for Dodge to come out all groggy, get him into a car, and then take him to some combination of movie and lunch. Compared to what he normally did for a living, it was simple. It was also physical. Not as physical as skiing or welding, but much more physical than his job, which consisted of moving pixels around on screens in certain ways that were projected to be highly lucrative.
There was some professional guilt entailed in taking the day off. He assuaged it in the waiting room by opening up his laptop, connecting to the building’s guest network, establishing a secure link to his company’s network, and writing a number of emails. These were all more or less calculated to hurl tasks into colleagues’ laps, which he reckoned might keep them off balance long enough that they wouldn’t miss him while he was taking in some kind of stupid action movie with Dodge. As he always did while working, he went into a sort of flow state that must have lasted for about half an hour. At the beginning of it he was conscious of his surroundings: patients biding their time, receptionists checking people in, medical personnel in scrubs striding to and fro on their sensible shoes. And, just for a moment, Dodge’s voice heard dimly from the back, making a crack as he was wheeled to the procedure room. Nothing that needed concern him at the moment. Into the universe of email he went, and abided for a time.
He was vaguely aware that people were, all of a sudden, distressed about something. This almost pulled him out of his reverie. But he knew that, whatever was going on, there was nothing he could do about it. People got stressed out at work all the time. It was not his problem.
He did raise his head and look when the front door of the office suite was punched open by a team of three firemen. Waiting for them was a woman in scrubs. She had made eye contact with the firemen before they even reached the door. As they burst in, she turned on her heel and ran into the back, and they understood that they should follow her. They were carrying not axes and hoses, but large boxes emblazoned with red crosses.
The initial reaction of Corvallis was, some would say, curiously detached and unemotional. Evidently, someone in the back of this medical practice had been taken ill. Perhaps an elderly doctor had suffered a heart attack, or something. One would think that a medical practice, sited in a building full, from top to bottom, of medical offices, in a neighborhood entirely given over to the medical industry, would have some special procedure to follow in such a case. But, if Corvallis Kawasaki understood correctly what he was seeing, this was not the case. When there was a problem, the people here dialed 911, just like anyone else. The call was routed to the nearest fire station and the EMTs were dispatched. This was mildly surprising, but the technology executive in him found it actually to be quite reasonable and, in a way, comforting. The EMTs in the fire stations were the best at what they did, the quickest to respond. The system was working.
Now that his focus on the screen of his laptop had been broken, he sat up straight and began to take in further details. A woman in pink scrubs was standing where he could see her, hands clasped together in front of pursed lips, staring down a hallway. Her eyes began to glisten. The EMTs were firing off tight bursts of words. The receptionists had stopped doing their work entirely and were just sitting frozen at their workstations, gripping the edges of their desks, like officers on the bridge of a starship getting ready to be hit by photon torpedoes. The voices of the EMTs became louder and clearer. While continuing to do their work, they were, it seemed, wheeling the patient out of a room, down the hallway, toward the exit. The woman in pink scrubs sprang out of the way. One of the receptionists, who had a better angle than Corvallis, scrambled up, ran across the lobby to the door, and hauled it open.
The EMTs wheeled Richard Forthrast out on a gurney and maneuvered him at reckless speed out the door and in the direction of the elevator bank. He was only visible to Corvallis for one, perhaps two seconds, and so it took a little while for Corvallis to process what he had seen. Richard was shirtless, the open-back hospital gown stripped away from him, and electrodes had been stuck to his torso. A tube had been inserted between his teeth and, presumably, down into his windpipe. One of the EMTs was holding a sort of rubber bag, squeezing it in a slow steady rhythm to force air into Richard’s chest.
Corvallis Kawasaki’s first, absurd instinct was to pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Richard’s number. Because what was going on here was obviously weird, obviously a crisis. On both of these counts it was very much a Richard sort of problem. For much of his postcollege life, Corvallis had been in the comfortable habit of knowing that any such matter could automatically be handed off to Dodge, who would be not merely willing but eager to take it on. Why, Dodge would be offended if weird crises were not instantly dumped into his lap. This was now at odds with the intellectual awareness that Dodge was dying or dead.
He closed his laptop, slid it into his bag, stood up, and followed a debris trail of medical wrappers to the elevator lobby, which he reached just in time to glimpse Richard’s gray face and wired-up torso as a pair of doors glided shut on it. He punched the “down” button and waited for the next lift in a very odd state of mind. Nothing was certain yet. Word had not yet gone out on what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Corporation 9592’s stock had not begun to slide. Standing there alone in that lobby, he could convince himself that he had just imagined it, suffered a kind of waking nightmare. If Dodge was about to die, should the world not have been crumbling all about him? Should the streets not have been full of wailing gamers? And yet the elevator lobby was just an elevator lobby, changeless as the stars.
When he reached the ground floor he was able to follow a trail of shocked bystanders—security guards, incoming patients, scrub-wearing medics waiting in line for their lattes—to an exit of the building just in time to see an ambulance peel out. A moment later it turned on its lights and its siren.
Corvallis broke into a run. He was able to keep pace with the ambulance for about a block as it negotiated some turns, slowing to honk in righteous fury at a dim-witted motorist, then cutting across six lanes of traffic. Presently it went around a corner and disappeared from view behind a vast hospital, but Corvallis was able to track it by sound, and compare those findings with red signs pointing the way to EMERGENCY. Dodge’s ambulance ride had been all of about three blocks long. They could almost have rolled him there on the gurney.
Corvallis resisted an urge to just run out into traffic, the way characters did in movies. He whacked buttons and waited in law-abiding fashion for pedestrian signals, then ran when he could. He reached the emergency room perhaps sixty seconds after the ambulance had pulled in. Dodge had already been wheeled in past the reception barrier. Here the receptionists were shielded behind thick walls of glass, like inner-city liquor store clerks, and watched over by ceiling-mounted cameras in black glass bubbles, as well as an actual human security guard who seemed a little distracted by what had just blown by him. Corvallis found himself on the outside of the glass barricade, sharing a waiting room with a Hispanic construction worker who had damaged his left hand and a stocky black woman who was texting. The nurse behind the glass wall asked Corvallis whether she could help him. He sensed that she was sizing him up, putting her training to use as she evaluated him for signs of trauma or mental illness. He was wearing khaki trousers and an old T-shirt with a black raincoat. He approached the glass wall and explained that he was with the man who had just been wheeled in from the ambulance.
He didn’t make it past the barrier. It was some kind of policy issue regarding Corvallis’s actual relationship to the patient. He and Richard had not come in together. Richard had not formally designated Corvallis as his wingman. Corvallis could have been anyone. For all they knew, he was a mentally ill person who had just followed the ambulance in. Or perhaps Richard and Corvallis were lovers, and it was a domestic violence situation. The nurse at the front desk had no way of knowing. She had made some remark about “next of kin.” This shut him up and sent him to the nearest waiting room chair. Partly because it was a disturbing turn of phrase and partly because, yes, of course, that was his highest responsibility at this moment: to get in touch with Zula Forthrast and let her know that she needed to come to the hospital.
She was there twenty minutes later, breathing hard. She had simply run from her condo, which was less than a mile away in the adjoining hilltop neighborhood. She worked part-time now, mostly from home, which was within walking distance of Sophia’s preschool. The Forthrast family had adopted her, at the age of seven, from an orphanage in Eritrea, and raised her in a farm town in Iowa. Her adoptive mother had died in an accident and she had become a ward of the whole extended family. Corvallis wasn’t certain who her parents were according to the letter of the law, but she’d become very close to her uncle Richard. Corvallis saw her running down the sidewalk, puffs of steam coming from her mouth. To have come here on foot was an unusual choice, but just the sort of calculation that Zula would make; the distance was such that she could cover it this way faster than it would take to summon an Uber. She slowed to a fast walk as she approached the building. The glass doors opened for her automatically. She was wearing a sweater and jeans and toting the knapsack she often used in lieu of a purse; she hadn’t bothered with a hat or a raincoat. Her uncontained hair had drawn humidity from the air and was a bedewed, corkscrewy glory. As she came in she recognized Corvallis, who had stood up. She took a step in his direction before correcting her course to the nurses’ station. “Zula Forthrast,” she announced, reaching for her wallet. “Here to see my uncle Richard Forthrast.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. “I was told he was here.” And only then did she look up and meet Corvallis’s eye. She looked alert and interested. After some of the things she had lived through, nothing much could make her distraught. Not that she didn’t have feelings, but she’d learned how to wall them off. The events of a few years ago had thrust her into the public spotlight for a while, forced her to develop the knack that all famous people had of maintaining a certain persona while exposed to the gaze of strangers. It was serving her well now. She had a kind of distracted air about her, and Corvallis couldn’t tell whether she was dazed by the news or being wry. How many things could go wrong in her life?
“Nothing is simple with my uncle, huh?” she said.
“Nope” was the best Corvallis could come up with.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
“It’s pretty bad, huh?” she said. Giving him permission.
“I kinda got the sense that it was super bad,” he admitted.
She nodded and blinked.
The nurse informed them that Richard had already been transferred to the ICU and gave them an idea of how to find it.
Corvallis and Zula went down the suggested hallway, found some elevators, and began to navigate the three-dimensional labyrinth of the hospital. Other patients or medical staff were always getting in between them, and so they didn’t try to talk. Zula sent a couple of text messages, then tilted her head back to trap some tears in the pouches of her eyes.
Finally they got to the entrance of the intensive care unit. “Here we go,” Zula said.
“Is there anything—” Corvallis began, but she strode ahead of him and approached the nurse at the front desk. “Zula Forthrast,” she said. “Next of kin of Richard Forthrast, who I think was just brought up here. Is there anyone who can give us the rundown? We have no information whatsoever yet about his condition.”
They found themselves sitting in a small office that, Corvallis guessed, had been placed here specifically for conversations of this type. Modern sofas formed a right-angled U around a coffee table with flowers in a vase. Kleenex boxes competed for space with Purell dispensers. Takeout menus for local restaurants were neatly arranged in a binder; the Wi-Fi password was handwritten on the inevitable Post-it note. A big window afforded a rain-spotted view down the hill to the central business district, white sky above it and gray sea below.
A perfunctory knock on the door preceded the entrance of a scrub-wearing man in his forties. Asian-American, heavy-framed eyeglasses chosen to fit a square face. He introduced himself as Dr. Trinh and invited everyone to make themselves comfortable on the available seating.
“He suffered an unusual complication during the procedure that caused him to stop breathing. The staff were unable to correct the situation. By the time the emergency medical technicians were able to arrive on the scene and insert a breathing tube, his heart had stopped. They had difficulty restarting it. Currently he is on a ventilator. That means that a machine is breathing for him.”
“He’s not capable of breathing for himself?” Zula asked.
“We don’t think so.”
“That means his brain is badly damaged, right?”
“We are observing a complete lack of brain function. In my estimation, he is not coming back. I’m sorry to have to give you this news. But I need to ask you whether your uncle had a living will. Did he ever make a statement as to how he wanted to be treated in the event he ended up on life support?”
Corvallis interrupted the long silence that followed by saying, “I can work on that.”
He knew in his heart that he was taking the coward’s way out. He suspected that Zula knew it too. Her task was a nightmare: to contact all of the other family members and to tell them what was going on while holding it all together for Sophia. And, possibly, to make an executive decision to pull the plug on the man who was the closest thing she had to a father. Merely being in proximity to someone going through all of that was enough to put Corvallis into a cold sweat.
Tracking down a legal document seemed light duty.
Zula nodded and spared him a little smile. “Thank you, C-plus.” She looked at Dr. Trinh. “I would like to see him, if that is okay.”
In the college town that was his namesake, Corvallis had been raised by a father who was clearly on the autism spectrum and a mother who was within spitting distance of it. He was an only child. The household was stable and drama-free. They read books and played board games. Emotional matters were outsourced to relatives, who were all rather far away. From time to time Mom or Dad would be called upon to offer support to a relative or a family member in distress, which they generally did by wiring money, solving a logistical problem, or making a donation to an apposite charity. They didn’t go to church, which—never mind what you actually believed, or didn’t—inoculated children with a steady low-level exposure to christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him. Since then the condition had only become more pronounced.
This lack of surefootedness extended to simple matters such as talking to strangers on the telephone and complimenting female friends on their new haircuts—two things, among many, that he would cross the street to avoid doing. The mere thought of all the telephone calls that Zula was about to have to make, the crying, the hugging, the writing of notes, tear-soaked airport pickups, long wrenching heart-to-hearts with third cousins twice removed—merely being in proximity to it, with no real expectations or responsibilities at all, was nearly enough to send Corvallis into a panic attack.
But there was always a way out. Corvallis’s dad was the designated photographer at family reunions. He was not a hugger, but he did a dynamite job of taking pictures of people hugging; no hug could escape the sleepless gaze of his bleeding-edge Nikon. Corvallis was enormously relieved now to have a specific task in which expressing emotions was not merely unnecessary but actually somewhat counterproductive. He opened his laptop. He figured out how to get on the hospital’s guest Wi-Fi network. He forced himself to ignore all of the email that had piled up during the hour or so since he had last checked it and went to the website for Argenbright Vail. This was a Seattle-based law firm with branches in San Jose and a few other centers of the tech economy. Formerly a small, white-shoe sort of practice, it had, during the decades since Microsoft had taken root in this area, grown to the point where it now had something like a thousand lawyers. Argenbright Vail had helped Dodge form Corporation 9592, accepting payment in the form of an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and had represented both him personally and his company ever since. Corvallis didn’t know whether Dodge even had a will, or, if he did, where it might be found, but this was an obvious place to start looking.
