The Quick

My intuition told me that this was one of those rare gems that had something important to teach me, something fundamental about the nature of consciousness, and I felt the stirrings of excitement. What switch had been thrown in the lawyer’s brain, that illusion had become reality and reality illusion for him? If fate hadn’t intervened, it might have been that lawyer, rather than Patient DL, with whom my destiny was to become entangled. But Mezzanotte decreed otherwise. As I sat at my desk on that winter afternoon, poring over my papers, oblivious to the approaching storm, one of my assistants came into my office and handed me a note. It was unsigned, but I recognised the handwriting immediately. Without a word to my assistant, I put aside the lawyer’s file and walked out of the room.

The first snowflake fell as I turned into one of the narrow tunnels that led to the outside world and, just as I emerged into the city traffic, the blizzard broke. I hurried through the swirling air, groping my way along the familiar route, until the snowstorm began to subside and I found myself standing in front of the new institute, which towered above me like a beacon against the purple sky, its giant windows ablaze. When I entered I found myself at the centre of a swarming, excited crowd. A symposium seemed to have just broken up and young men and women were flinging themselves through the sprung doors of the lecture theatre and dispersing in all directions, as if in a hurry to put what they had just learned into effect.

I stopped a young man with starry, bespectacled eyes who told me I would find the professor in his office. He had excused himself from the lecture on the grounds that he was tied up with an important experiment. I took the lift to the top floor, nodded at the two secretaries whose desks flanked his door, and knocked. Hearing no response, at a signal from the senior of the two ladies, I opened the door slightly, put my head around it and caught my breath. Across a large expanse of blue carpet, the professor was seated behind his desk, his back to a window beyond which the whole city was laid out, sparkling. The river kinked just there, beneath him, a black hole in the centre of the picture which drew to its edges the densest part of the galaxy of light. The disembodied dome of the cathedral gleamed beyond his left shoulder, and cranes loomed over the landscape like ponderous dinosaurs, lit up by Christmas lights. He was beckoning to me with a long, slender finger, then carrying it to his lips to indicate that I should not speak.

I approached his desk and stood there, waiting for him to finish. I took the opportunity to observe him. He was, by then, in his mid-sixties. His curls had turned white and fanned back from his noble forehead in a crenellated shock, lending him an air of distinction that was accentuated by the ivory cravat. Since I had seen him last, new creases had scored his forehead and lines ran down from the corners of his eyes like guy ropes. They seemed to lend his now rather gaunt face a new mobility, as if a mask had been peeled away or melted. The eyes were as dark and soulful as ever. A number of rubber pads were attached to his forehead and temples, and from these sprouted plastic-coated wires. Around him, on the desk, were arranged various grey metal boxes covered with knobs, dials and colourful, blinking lights. The professor was staring intently at a computer monitor whose greenish light threw into sharp relief the deep fissures in his face.

After a few minutes, with a sigh of expended effort, he pushed the monitor round so that I could read the words that were written there: ‘Good afternoon, Sarah. I, Mezzanotte, invite you humbly, and through the medium of my slow cortical potentials, to immerse yourself once again in your work.’

It hadn’t escaped my notice that there was no keyboard on the desk, and for a moment I was confused. How had he magicked the words on to the screen? He watched me, a little smile playing about his lips. And then he opened his arms as if to embrace the grey boxes scattered around him. These, he informed me, represented the culmination of three years’ work. He had been following a hunch, and if it turned out to be correct, it would draw all the other threads of his scientific enquiry together; it would make sense of his life’s work. He considered it the greatest idea of his career; more important than his sleep experiments, and far more audacious. He had proved it in principle (here he nodded towards the screen), and now the time had come to test it in the real world – the task for which he had summoned me.

‘Here I am,’ I said, my pulse quickening. ‘Give me my instructions.’

At a sign from him I dragged a chair to the desk, sat down and rested my elbows on top of it. He lowered his head towards mine. And for the next hour, perhaps two, I listened in mounting awe as he explained the conception, gestation and birth of a revolutionary device – one he had developed secretly, and whose potential, he hinted, could not even be dreamed at.

3

At the top of the screen was a cartoon apple; at the bottom a pear. In between, travelling from left to right, a thread-thin waveform. It was spiky in places and somewhat irregular, but the overall motion was of a sort of languid undulation – hypnotic, potentially, if one watched it for long enough. This, the professor explained, was a readout of his slow cortical potentials, a form of brain activity about which very little was known, except that it seemed to arise spontaneously within the grey matter in the instant preceding any thought or action. Normally, one wasn’t aware of it. But it was possible, with hard work, to gain control over it; to wield it as an extra limb and make it do your will.

He asked me which fruit I preferred and I told him. ‘Now watch,’ he said, and like a whip the wave leapt up out of its resting place and lashed the apple-shaped icon, causing it to disappear. I glanced at his hands, which had remained neatly and conspicuously folded in his lap, and laughed. I asked him how long he had been practising.

‘Oh, a couple of months,’ he said, his cheeks glowing with pleasure and the mental effort of executing that trivial action. As he spoke, his large, elegant hands on which the veins stood out proud and blue acted out what he was telling me. ‘To begin with, I had to conjure up certain mental images to get the wave to move the way I wanted. I remembered a circus that came one summer to my grandmother’s village. I was the ringmaster, wielding my whip, and those…’ he wagged a disapproving finger at the icons on the screen, ‘… those were a couple of bolshie lions. Or I thought about the local farmer raising his rifle, waiting for the she-wolf to move into his sights, squeezing the trigger, bullseye! It was hard work, every evening I’d go home with a headache. But slowly, slowly it got easier. Now I manipulate that wave as easily as lifting my arm, or breathing. I don’t think about it. And these days, I hardly make any errors.’

In place of the fruit the letters A and B now appeared on the screen. Again I chose and this time, to show off his neural dexterity, Mezzanotte persuaded the wave to rise slowly and steadily towards the A, until it glanced off the foot of it, nudging it gently into oblivion.

‘What you have here,’ he went on, unnecessarily, since I had already grasped its significance, ‘is a simple method of communication.’ He pressed a button so that two banks of letters now appeared at the top and bottom of the screen. Each bank contained half the alphabet. ‘Each time I select a bank it halves, until I’m left with the letter I want. Gradually, by this method, I can construct a word.’

He added that what I was seeing was actually an early prototype. He had a more advanced model, into which he had built sophisticated features such as a dictionary, a thesaurus and a mode for predicting the word from the first few letters typed. My mind raced ahead. ‘So someone who has lost the power of speech, due to a stroke, say, or a road accident… motor neurone disease –’

‘– someone whose output pathways are irreparably damaged,’ Mezzanotte interrupted me, ‘assuming of course they have something to say, could bypass the inert tongue or larynx and communicate via these brainwaves. All she would need would be the equipment. No dutiful secretary sitting by the bed, trying to make sense of her nods and grunts. Just willpower, a little mental application and a computer.’

‘But Professor, it’s brilliant. How did you –’ I broke off, having just noticed his use of the feminine pronoun, and glanced at him. ‘You already have a volunteer?’

Gripping a bunch of wires with one hand, he tore the suction pads off his forehead with a series of loud pops, stood up and strode out into that sea of carpet, where he began to stride up and down. I twisted in my chair to keep him in my sights.

‘Once I’d shown the system could work, the next step was to find a subject,’ he was saying. ‘So I sat down to write out a list of my requirements. I discounted at a stroke all those whose insult has left them with some residual motor function, who can mumble or blink or point. That type of patient can make their basic needs understood, and rather like a Spanish speaker in Italy, it makes them lazy. They don’t need to bother with my wires and waves and bolshie lions, the thought of which will quite literally make their heads ache. No, the patient who puts the Mind-Reading Device through its paces must be completely paralysed. She must be unable to nod, to signal yes or no, food or water, pleasure or pain. She is mute, and utterly dependent on those who care for her. Nurses dress her, machines feed her. In fact, you might say she has lost all dignity. She must be a quick learner, ideally young. Above all, she must understand my instructions and appreciate the rewards her efforts will bring.’

I thought for a moment. ‘Paralysed, but her intellect intact… a prisoner…’

He crossed the room rapidly towards me, resting one hand on the back of my chair and narrowing his eyes as he looked down at me. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Sarah, how many patients fit that bill.’

I completed the thought: ‘And how few of them we ever hear about.’ Mezzanotte nodded, smiled, and resumed his seat behind the desk.

I had seen some of those patients, shut away in back bedrooms or, if the families had money, in care homes in dismal seaside resorts. There were more and more of them, kept alive by modern technology. For the most part they led pathetic lives, cared for by relatives who saw them as nothing but a nuisance. Those whose families still held out hope of a cure were rare indeed. When you found one, they were usually against all experimentation. They were afraid it would be too taxing for the patient, or raise false hopes.

The professor continued. He had been searching for a suitable subject for months, in vain, when he had received a letter. The woman who wrote it said she was at her wits’ end. Her daughter had been lying in hospital for a decade, without lifting a finger or uttering a word. The doctors had so far been unable to do anything for her, but she and her husband continued to hope for a cure, or at least a partial recovery. They were prepared to wait for as long as it took, but matters had been taken out of their hands when, a few months earlier, the girl’s husband had announced his intention to draw the family’s ordeal to a close, and end her life. This outcome the mother would resist ‘with her last breath’. She had written to Mezzanotte in desperation, on the strength of his reputation alone, to beg him to find a way to help her daughter before it was too late.

The ground had been prepared for me, he went on. A technician in the department had offered his services. The doctors at the hospital had been briefed, the nursing staff was standing by. The team was assembled, all except for one member, in many ways the most important. He paused for effect. ‘As I see it, you will be the hub of the wheel, and the rest of us the spokes. It will be your responsibility to oversee the patient’s training, to observe her responses and adjust the schedule accordingly. You will relay her needs to us and we’ll tweak the device to accommodate them. That way, it will develop in parallel with her. If everything goes according to plan, I predict that this young woman, who has not spoken for ten years, will be chattering away in a matter of months. Weeks, even.’

My heart was racing. With a pretence of nonchalance I got up and strolled towards the bookshelves that lined one wall to confront a row of thick tomes: a medical dictionary, Gray’s Anatomy, a slimmer volume written by the professor, entitled simply, Perchance to Dream. A patient who had been shut off from the world for a decade and to whom we might now restore the power of speech, I said to myself with a little tremor of excitement. If we gave a voice to her, what was to stop us doing the same for hundreds, perhaps thousands of others? What insights she could offer us. What potential there was for learning about the effects of paralysis on the brain, the rearrangements in its structure and function, the compensation, recruitment of previously redundant areas, changes in sensory function, personality, consciousness… the possibilities were endless. And yet, it seemed already as if the opportunity were slipping through my fingers. There was too much work for me at the hospital, and my assistants were not yet experienced enough to deal with the harder cases. I would never get permission to manage an intensive training routine such as this patient would undoubtedly need, especially if she was far away. At best, I envisaged a long return trip each day; at worst, I would have to find accommodation close to her, and that would mean requesting several months’ leave. But I hadn’t been in my post long enough to have earned a sabbatical. Was I really to be offered the most interesting case of my career to date, just as my duties became so onerous as to rule it out?

I heard a drawer open and close, and looked back at the professor, whose hands were now resting on a piece of paper. I sauntered back towards him. Playing for time, I asked him again who the patient was. DL, he called her, using the convention in the medical literature of referring to patients in single case studies by their initials alone. And having delivered this tiny morsel of information, as if it should be enough to satisfy me, he settled back in his chair, pressed his fingertips together and brought his quizzical gaze to rest on me. I lowered my eyes. It had never occurred to me that I would have to choose between the professor and the job I had always dreamed of. I felt torn between my loyalty to him, my desire to help him and to be a party to the glorious climax of his career, and my love of the job he had, to a certain extent, groomed me for.

‘Is she far away?’ I asked, quietly.

I heard him pick up the paper he had been guarding from my sight, and push it across the desk towards me. I raised my eyes and saw that it was a typed, formal letter of consent. From the two short paragraphs of text printed there, the name of our hospital leapt out at me. I blinked at it, barely understanding what it meant.

‘She’s been under your nose all this time,’ he said, and laughed.

4

It was dark when I stepped out into the street, but this time with nightfall. It must only recently have stopped snowing, though, because the snow had settled in an even layer over the pavement and was almost undisturbed by footprints. The night was cold, and a three-quarter moon shone crisply over the city. The people in the streets were uniformly muffled in coats and scarves.

I made my way back to the hospital, deep in thought over the professor’s new project, and it was only when I stood in the large entrance hall that I became fully aware of my surroundings. It was deserted just then, though echoing footsteps receded down one of the long corridors. And it was dark; it occurred to me that a couple of light bulbs must have blown. The globe lamps on the walls had been switched on, but they seemed to shine rather weakly and hardly to penetrate the polished black slate floor. The gloom deepened towards the centre of the space, where the signpost stood. But the signpost itself was bathed in the moonlight whose shafts entered via glass panels in the ceiling. All in all, it was a ghostly scene.

The clock above the corridor that led to the north wing showed six o’clock. I had intended to go straight up to the fifth floor and introduce myself, if that’s the right expression, to Patient DL. I hesitated. They would soon be serving supper on the wards. DL wouldn’t be eating, of course, since she received her nutrients through a tube that fed through her nose, down her oesophagus and into her stomach. But there would be activity on the ward, and perhaps the general commotion would distract someone with a potentially tenuous grip on reality. Better to go in the morning, I decided, when it was quiet and she had a good night’s sleep behind her. After ten years, one more night wouldn’t make any difference.

At that moment, a figure stepped out from behind the signpost and moved in a wide semicircle towards me. It seemed to walk on the balls of its feet, in a strange sort of dance, and I recognised Nestor. He often loitered around the entrance hall. He was employed by the university as a technician, though most people still thought of him as a porter, because that had been his job for many years. He had the porter’s inside knowledge of the hospital, and more. He knew every cracked pipe, every broken window latch, as well as which nurses were sleeping together and who among the registrars had played angel of death on the wards. People who worked there were afraid of him. Everyone knew that he liked his drink. But sometimes he disappeared for days at a time, and although people whispered about his absences, and his rumoured forays on to the upper floors at night, nobody dared question him openly.

The latest rumour was that he had been barred from the paediatric wing. I had no idea if it was true, but here was Nestor in front of me, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, asking if I would like to accompany him down to his room. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I asked, amused. He raised a hand to touch the rolled-up cigarette that was tucked behind his ear, smirked and said he was surprised Mezzanotte hadn’t explained. He had agreed to operate the Mind-Reading Device. The latest version of it was downstairs in his room, and he was under instructions to show it to me at my earliest convenience.

‘You?’ I asked, surprised. Puffing out his chest, he tapped it with a tar-stained forefinger. Perhaps I was still looking at him sceptically, because he glanced quickly over his shoulder, then brought his round, slightly greasy face close to mine and muttered that all the other technicians had refused. He wore his grey, wispy hair long on his neck. He was dressed neatly in grey flannels and a brown pullover, with a knitted green tie. It was hard to put an age on him, somewhere between forty and sixty, but there was something of the overgrown schoolboy about him. He wore a gold stud in his left ear, and around his right eye there were traces of a bruise. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

He danced off with the same bizarre gait, his bony rump high in the air, as if he were walking on hot coals. I followed him through an unmarked door that opened off the entrance hall, just to the right of the corridor that led to the north wing. We descended a flight of concrete steps and passed along a corridor lit by a single neon tube.

It was the first time I had been down to the basement. Stacked up on the floor along both sides of the corridor were hundreds of derelict computers, models five or six years old, some covered in old sheets, others in a thick layer of dust. Their keyboards had been thrown down haphazardly between them, and fraying wires stuck out in places. Some of the screens were shattered, as if someone had deliberately put a boot through them. Nestor mumbled something about skeletons. When I asked him what he had said, he stopped, turned to face the phalanx of defunct hardware, and announced that I was walking through the graveyard of a computer system that had once been installed in the hospital.

The idea, apparently, had been to transfer all the patients’ records on to an electronic database. Ours was to be the first paperless hospital in the country, and if it worked, others would follow. But the computer hard disks turned out to have a flaw in them. Records were irretrievably lost, referrals sent to the wrong department. There were actually empty beds in the hospital for the first time, a fact that was trumpeted in the newspapers until it became clear that the sick were still waiting to fill them, their names had merely been wiped from the computer’s memory. There were stories of patients dying of treatable tumours that had been diagnosed twelve months earlier, because their notes had gone astray.

I listened to all this in amazement. I wanted to know why the scandal hadn’t come to light. Nestor snickered. There were many things he could tell me about this hospital, he said. Nothing was quite as it seemed. For instance, had I heard about the geriatric ward that had been closed off due to a superbug infection? Ten beds decommissioned because two of the ‘inmates’, as he called them, had died. One of them only after he had been discharged and welcomed back into the bosom of his family. The rest of the occupants had been put into quarantine, since the infection, once contracted, did not respond to antibiotics. Naturally the administration wanted to avoid a panic. Nestor had seen for himself the locked door and discreet notice barring entrance to the ward. He could show me if I liked. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, and he turned down the corners of his mouth, as if to say, ‘Please yourself.’

We came to a door marked ‘W.E. Nestor. No Unauthorised Entry.’ He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked it, switching on the light inside. More electronic and mechanical equipment was stacked around the walls of the small, windowless room, and directly ahead of me, as I stood in the doorway, was a wooden chair in front of a folding card table. Above the card table, which was covered in green baize, torn in places, a small wooden cross was tacked to the wall. Grey boxes identical to the ones I had seen in Mezzanotte’s office were arranged on the table around a computer monitor, and hanging over one corner of the chair was a sort of outsized, rose-coloured swimming cap with a tail of wires sprouting from it. A sinister-looking object, like some instrument of psychic torture.

Nestor was telling me that he had adapted and improved the device; put some ‘finishing touches’ to it. The electrodes were now woven into this soft, plastic helmet so that you no longer had to attach the pads one by one. He nodded in the direction of the table, indicating that I should sit down, and I did so. Then he picked up the helmet and without further ado, levered it first over the plates at the top of my skull, then the jutting bones at the base of it, sending a shudder down my spine. I gritted my teeth as he adjusted the cap on the forehead and tucked the hair deftly beneath it at the nape. Gathering the tail of wires he swept it over my shoulder so that it lay heavily against my back and didn’t impede my movements. Then he stepped back, folded his arms over his chest and said, ‘There!’

‘Can we get on with it?’ I said, crossly, and with an injured look he leaned forward to switch on the computer monitor. As the screen resolved itself, I saw that the layout was still the same. At the top was an apple, at the bottom a pear. Equidistant between the two undulated a horizontal line. He switched off the lights and melted into the darkness behind me. Closing my eyes I conjured up a ringmaster, faceless, resplendent in red, the polish high on his leather belt and boots. Idly twirling the whip at his hip, so that it stirred up flurries of sawdust, he waited for the lions to settle. Against my closed eyelids, one of the beasts yawned and looked round, as if preparing to climb down off its box. The ringmaster raised his whip arm high above his head and, ‘Yah!’, cracked it in the air… The lion stared at him, frozen in flesh and time. I opened my eyes. The line flowed on, unperturbed. I repeated the exercise three or four times and the same thing happened each time, until in exasperation I turned to Nestor.