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“It would only distress him to try to explain things now,” Hendricks said. “He couldn’t possibly understand.”
Tom found his voice again, though it didn’t sound like his own. “You — do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done?” He held himself still with great effort; he wanted to strangle this person who had destroyed his friend.
“Yes. He’s really doing well.” Hendricks sounded indecently happy with herself. “Last week he couldn’t do what he’s doing now.”
Doing well. Sitting there copying block patterns was not Tom’s definition of doing well. Not when he remembered Lou’s startling abilities. “But… but pattern analysis and pattern generation was his special gift—”
“There have been profound changes in the structure of his brain,” Dr. Hendricks said. “Changes are still going on. It’s as if his brain reversed in age, became an infant brain again in some ways. Great plasticity, great adaptive ability.”
Her smug tone grated on him; she clearly had no doubts about what she had done. “How long is this going to take?” he asked.
Hendricks did not shrug, but the pause might have been one. “We do not know. We thought — we hoped, perhaps I should say — that with the combination of genetic and nanotechnology, with accelerated neural growth, the recovery phase would be shorter, more like that seen in the animal model. The human brain is, however, immeasurably more complex—”
“You should have known that going in,” Tom said. He didn’t care that his tone was accusatory. He wondered how the others were doing, tried to remember how many there’d been. Only two other men had been in the room, working with other therapists. Were the others all right or not? He didn’t even know their names.
“Yes.” Her mild acceptance irritated him even more.
“What were you thinking—”
“To help. Only to help. Look—” She pointed at the window and Tom looked.
The man with Lou’s face — but not his expression — set aside the completed pattern and looked up with a smile to the therapist across the table. She spoke — Tom could not hear the words through the glass, but he could see Lou’s reaction, a relaxed laugh and a slight shake of the head. It was so unlike Lou, so strangely normal, that Tom felt his breath come short.
“His social interactions are already more normal. He’s easily motivated by social cues; he enjoys being with people. A very pleasant personality, even though still infantile at this point. His sensory processing seems to have normalized; his preferred range of temperatures, textures, flavors, and so on is now within normal limits. His language use improves daily. We’ve been lowering the doses of anxiolytics as function improves.”
“But his memories—”
“No way to tell yet. Our experience with restoring lost memories in the psychotic population suggests that both the techniques we’ll be using work to a degree. We made multisensory recordings, you know, and those will be reinserted. For the present we’ve blocked access with a specific biochemical agent — proprietary, so don’t even ask — which we’ll be filtering out in the next few weeks. We want to be sure we have a completely stable substrate of sensory processing and integration before we do that.”
“So you don’t know if you’ll be able to give him back his previous life?”
“No, but we’re certainly hopeful. And he won’t be worse off than someone who loses memory through trauma.” What they’d done to Lou could be called trauma, Tom thought. Hendricks went on. “After all, people can adapt and live independently without any memory of their past, as long as they can relearn necessary daily living and community living skills.”
“What about cognitive?” Tom managed to say in a level voice. “He seems pretty impaired right now, and he was near genius level before.”
“Hardly that, I think,” Dr. Hendricks said. “According to our tests, he was safely above average, so even if he lost ten or twenty points, it wasn’t going to put his ability to live independently in jeopardy. But he wasn’t a genius, by any means.” The prim certainty in her voice, the cool dismissal of the Lou he had known, seemed worse than deliberate cruelty.
“Did you know him — or any of them — before?” Tom asked.
“No, of course not. I met them once, but it would have been inappropriate for me to know them personally. I have their test results, and the interviews and memory recordings are all held by the rehab team psychologists.”
“He was an extraordinary man,” Tom said. He looked at her face and saw nothing but pride in what she was doing and impatience at having been interrupted. “I hope he will be again.”
“He will, at least, not be autistic,” she said, as if that justified everything else.
Tom opened his mouth to say autistic wasn’t that bad and shut it again. No use arguing with someone like her, at least not here and now, and it was too late for Lou anyway. She was Lou’s best hope of recovery — the thought made him shiver involuntarily.
“You should come back when he’s better,” Dr. Hendricks said. “Then you can better appreciate what we’ve accomplished. We’ll call you.” His stomach churned at the thought, but he owed Lou that much.
Outside, Tom zipped up his coat and pulled on his gloves. Did Lou even know it was winter? He had seen no exterior windows anywhere in the unit. The gray afternoon, closing in to dark, with dirty slush underfoot, matched his mood.
He cursed medical research all the way home.
I am sitting at a table, facing a stranger, a woman in a white coat. I have the feeling that I have been here a long time, but I do not know why. It is like thinking about something else while driving and suddenly being ten miles down the road without knowing what really happened between.
It is like waking up from a daze. I am not sure where I am or what I am supposed to be doing.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I must’ve lost track for a moment. Could you say that again?”
She looks at me, puzzled; then her eyes widen slightly.
“Lou? Do you feel okay?”
“I feel fine,” I say. “Maybe a little foggy…”
“Do you know who you are?”
“Of course,” I say. “I’m Lou Arrendale.” I don’t know why she thinks I wouldn’t know my own name.
“Do you know where you are?” she asks.
I look around. She has a white coat; the room looks vaguely like a clinic or school. I’m not really sure.
“Not exactly,” I say. “Some kind of clinic?”
“Yes,” she says. “Do you know what day it is?”
I suddenly realize that I don’t know what day it is. There is a calendar on the wall, and a big clock, but although the month on display is February, that does not feel right. The last I remember is something in the fall.
“I don’t,” I say. I am begi
“You had brain surgery,” she says. “Do you remember anything about it?”
I don’t. There is a dense fog when I try to think about it, dark and heavy. I reach up to feel my head. It does not hurt. I do not feel any scars. My hair feels like hair.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Scared,” I say. “I want to know what happened.”
I have been standing and walking, they tell me, for a couple of weeks, going where I am told, sitting where I am told. Now I am aware of that; I remember yesterday, though the days before are fuzzy.
In the afternoons, I have physical therapy. I was in bed for weeks, not able to walk, and that made me weak. Now I am getting stronger.
It’s boring, walking up and down the gym. There’s a set of steps with a railing, to practice going up and down steps, but that is soon boring, too. Missy, my physical therapist, suggests that we play a ball game. I don’t remember how to play, but she hands me a ball and asks me to throw it to her. She is sitting only a few feet away. I toss her the ball, and she tosses it back. It’s easy. I back up and toss the ball again. That’s easy, too. She shows me a target that will chime if I hit it. It is easy to hit from ten feet away; at twenty feet I miss a few times, then hit it every time.