The Face[脸]
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TWO WINDOWS PRESENTED A SOLVENT SKY and a city dissolving in drips, drizzles, and vapors.
Most of the large records room at Our Lady of Angels was divided into aisles by tall banks of filing cabinets. Near the windows lay a more open area with four work stations, and people were busy at two.
Dr. O’Brien settled at one of the unused stations and switched on the computer. Ethan pulled up a chair beside him.
Inserting a DVD into the computer, the physician said, “Mr. Whistler began to experience difficulty breathing three days ago. He needed to be put on a ventilator, and he was moved into the intensive care unit.”
When the DVD was accessed, WHISTLER, DUNCAN EUGENE appeared on the screen with Dunny’s patient number and other vital information that had been collected by the admissions office.
“While he was in the ICU,” O’Brien continued, “his respiration, heartbeat, and brain function were continuously monitored and sent by telemetry to the unit nurses’ station. That’s always been standard procedure.” He used the mouse to click on a series of icons and numbered choices. “The rest is relatively new. The system digitally records data collected by the electronic monitoring devices during the patient’s entire stay in the ICU. For later review.”
[359] Ethan figured they kept a digital record as evidence to defend against frivolous lawsuits.
“Here’s Whistler’s EEG when first admitted to the ICU at four-twenty P.M. last Friday.”
An unseen stylus drew a continuous line left to right across an endlessly scrolling graph.
“These are the brain’s electrical impulses as measured in microvolts,” O’Brien continued.
A monotonous series of peaks and valleys depicted Dunny’s brain activity. The peaks were low and wide; the valleys were comparatively steep and narrow.
“Delta waves are the typical pattern of normal sleep,” O’Brien explained. “These are delta waves but not those associated with an ordinary night’s rest. These peaks are broader and much lower than common delta waves, with a smoother oscillation into and out of the troughs. The electrical impulses are few in number, attenuated, weak. This is Whistler in a deep coma. Okay. Now let’s fast-forward to the evening of the day before his death.”
“Sunday night.”
“Yes.”
On the screen, as hours of monitoring flew past in a minute, the uncommon delta waves blurred and jumped slightly, but only slightly because the variation from wave to wave was minuscule. An hour of compressed data, viewed in seconds, closely resembled any minute of the same data studied in real time.
Indeed, the sameness of the patterns was so remarkable that Ethan would not have realized how many hours—days—of data were streaming by if there hadn’t been a time display on the screen.
“The event occurred at one minute before midnight, Sunday,” O’Brien said.
He clicked back to real-time display, and the fast-forwarding stopped at 11:23:22, Sunday night. He speeded the data again in two quick spurts, until he reached 11:58:09.
[360] “Less than a minute now.”
Ethan found himself leaning forward in his chair.
Shatters of rain clattered against the windowpanes, as though the wind, in wounded anger, had spat out broken teeth.
One of the people at the other work stations had left the room.
The remaining woman murmured into her phone. Her voice was soft, singsong, slightly spooky, as might be the voices that left messages on the answering machine that served Line 24.
“Here,” said Dr. O’Brien.
At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.
“These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.”
“What stimulus?” Ethan asked.
“Something he sees, hears, feels.”
“External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma?”
“This isn’t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.”
“And it’s a machine malfunction?”
“A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But ...”
“You disagree.”
O’Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. “Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. First ... when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he’d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.”
“Could he have been dreaming?” Ethan asked.
O’Brien shook his head emphatically. “The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.”
The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The [361] peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.
“The nurse summoned a doctor,” O’Brien said. “That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.”
“And you said ‘disturbed.’ ”
The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.
“At some points you might accurately say he appears ‘disturbed,’ at others ‘excited,’ and in this passage you’re watching now, I’d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.”
“Terrified?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Nightmare?” Ethan suggested.
“A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they’re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.”
O’Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes’ worth in a few seconds.
When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, “This looks the same ... yet different.”
“These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightened, although the terror may have declined here to high anxiety.”
The serpent-voiced wind, singing in a language of hiss-shriek-moan, and the claw-tap of rain on window glass seemed to be the perfect music to accompany the jagged images on the screen.
[362] “Although the overall pattern remains one of conscious anxiety,” Dr. O’Brien continued, “within it are these irregular subsets of higher spikes, each followed by a subset of lower spikes.”
He pointed at the screen, calling examples to Ethan’s attention.
“I see them,” Ethan said. “What do they mean?”
“They’re indicative of conversation.”
“Conversation? He’s talking to himself?”
“First of all, he isn’t talking aloud to anyone, not even to himself, so we shouldn’t be seeing these patterns.”
“I understand. I think.”
“But what these represent is not arguable. During the subsets of higher spikes, the subject should be speaking. During the subsets of lower spikes, he should be listening. A subject having a bit of mental give-and-take with himself, even when he’s awake, produces no such subsets. After all, for one thing, when you’re talking to yourself, conducting a little interior debate—”
“Technically, you’re always talking,” Ethan said. “You’re both sides of the debate. You’re never really listening.”
“Exactly. These subsets are indicative of conscious conversation between this individual and another person.”
“What other person?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s in a coma.”
“Yes.”
Frowning, Ethan said, “Then how is he talking to anyone? By telepathy?”
“Do we believe in telepathy?” O’Brien asked.
“I don’t.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why couldn’t this be a malfunctioning machine?” Ethan wondered.
O’Brien accelerated the data flow until the brain-wave patterns disappeared from the screen, replaced by the words DATA INTERRUPT.
[363] “They took Whistler off the EEG, the one they thought must be malfunctioning,” the doctor said. “They connected him to a different machine. The switchover took six minutes.”
He fast-forwarded through the gap, until the patterns appeared once more.
“They look the same on the new machine,” Ethan said.
“Yeah, they are. Beta waves representing consciousness, lots of anxiety, and with subsets suggesting vigorous conversation.”
“A second malfunctioning machine?”
“There’s one holdout who still thinks so. Not me. These wave patterns ran nineteen minutes on the first EEG, apparently for six minutes between hookups, and then thirty-one minutes on the second machine. Fifty-six minutes total before they abruptly stopped.”
“How do you explain it?” Ethan asked.
Instead of answering him, O’Brien worked the keyboard, calling up a second display of data, which appeared above the first: another moving white line on the blue background, spiking from left to right. In this case, all the spikes were above the base line, none below.
“This is Whistler’s respiration synchronized with the brain-wave data,” O’Brien said. “Each spike is an inhalation. Exhalation takes place between spikes.”
“Very regular.”
“Very. Because the ventilator is breathing for him.”
The physician tapped the keys again, and a third display shared the screen with the first two.
“This is heart function. Standard three-phase action. Diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole. Slow but not too slow. Weak but not too weak. Slight irregularities, but nothing dangerous. Now look here at the brain waves.”
The beta waves were doing the earthquake jitterbug once more.
Ethan said, “He’s terrified again.”
“In my opinion, yes. Yet there’s no change in heart function. It’s the same slow, somewhat weak beat with tolerable irregularities, [364] exactly his deep-coma pattern ever since he was first admitted to the hospital almost three months ago. He’s in a state of terror ... yet his heart is calm.”
“The heart’s calm because he’s comatose. Right?”
“Wrong. Even in a profound coma, Mr. Truman, there isn’t this complete disconnect between the mind and body. When you’re having a nightmare, the terror is imagined, not real, but heart function is affected just the same. The heart races during a nightmare.”
For a moment, Ethan studied the violently jumping beta waves and compared them to the slow, steady heartbeat. “After fifty-six minutes of this, his brain activity returned to the long, slow delta waves?”
“That’s right. Until he died the next morning.”
“So if it’s not two machines malfunctioning, how do you explain all of this, Doctor?”
“I don’t. I can’t. You asked me if there was anything unusual in the patient’s file. Specifically, something ... uncanny.”
“Yes, but—”
“I don’t have a dictionary handy, but I believe uncanny means something not normal, something extraordinary, something that can’t be explained. I can only tell you what happened, Mr. Truman, not a damn thing about why.”
Tongues of rain licked the windows.
With snuffle, growl, and keening petition, the wolfish wind begged entry.
Across the fabled city rolled a low protracted rumble.
Ethan and O’Brien looked toward the windows, and Ethan supposed that the physician, too, had envisioned a terrorist attack somewhere, women and babies murdered by the fascistic Islamic radicals who fed on wickedness and crawled the modern world with demon determination.
They listened to the sound slowly fade, and finally Dr. O’Brien said with relief, “Thunder.”
[365] “Thunder,” Ethan agreed.
Thunder and lightning were not common to storms in southern California. This peal, in place of bomb blast, suggested a turbulent day ahead.
Beta waves, as jagged as lightning, struck repeatedly across the computer screen.
Comatose, Dunny had experienced a terrifying encounter that had occurred neither in this world nor in the land of dreams, but in some realm mysterious. He had engaged in a conversation without spoken words, as if he’d breathed in a ghost that had traveled to his lungs and thence into his arteries, by blood from heart to brain, there to haunt him in the shadowy rooms of his mind for fifty-six minutes.
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