by Neil Clarke
“Ready?” Dr. Liu said.
“Ready.” I braced myself, but nothing happened. I didn’t feel nothing at all. But at the screen Jenny went, “Aaaaaaaahhh.”
“What?” I said.
“It works,” Dr. Chung said quietly. “We are getting a good picture of optrode response.”
On the screen was a bunch of wavy lines, with a lot of clicking noises.
That went on for a long bit: me sitting in the chair feeling nothing, Dr. Chung turning lights on and off in my head that I didn’t see, lines and numbers on the computer, and lots of long discussions with words I didn’t understand. Maybe some of them were Chinese. And then, just when I was getting antsy and bored both at the same time, something happened. Another press of the punchpad and all at once I saw the room. Not like I saw it afore—I mean I really saw it. Every little thing was clear and bright and separate and itself: the hard edge of the computer screen, the way the overhead light made a shadow in the corner, a tiny brown stain on the hem of Jenny’s white coat—everything. The room was like Reverend Baxter said the world looked right when God created it: fresh and new and shining. I could feel my mouth drop open and my eyes get wide.
“What?” Dr. Chung said. “What is it, Ludie?”
I told him. He did something with the switch in his hand and all the fresh clearness went away. “Oh! Bring it back!”
“Hyperawareness,” Dr. Liu said. “The opsins could be over-expressing?”
“Not that quickly,” Dr. Chung said. “But—”
“Bring it back!” I almost shouted it.
He did. But after a minute it was almost too much. Too bright, too clear, too strange. And then it got clearer and brighter, so that it almost blinded me and I couldn’t see and everything was wrong and—
It all stopped. Dr. Chung had pressed some switch. And then I wanted it back.
“Not yet, Ludie,” he said. He sounded worried. “You were injected with multiple opsins, you know, each responding to a different wavelength of light. We’re going to try a different one. Would you stand up, please? Good . . . now walk toward me.”
I did, and he did something with his switch, and all at once I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The computer started clicking loud as a plague of locusts.
Jenny said, “Pronounced inhibitory motor response.”
I said, “Stop!”
Then I could move again and I was pounding on Dr. Chung with my fists. “You said you warn’t going to control me! You said!”
He grabbed my wrists and held them; he was stronger than he looked. “I didn’t know that would happen, Ludie. This is all new, you know. Nobody wants to control you.”
“You just did, you bastard!”
“I did not know the inhibitory neurons would fire that strongly. Truly, I did not.”
Jenny said something in Chinese.
“No,” Dr. Chung said sharply to her.
“I’m done here,” I said.
“Yes, that’s enough for a first session,” Dr. Liu said. Which warn’t what I meant. I meant I was going home.
But I didn’t. Instead I went to my room in the clinic, got into bed, and slept a little. Not long, not real hard, but enough to calm me down. Then I got up and found Dr. Chung in his office.
If he was glad to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead he handed me an envelope. “This came for you in the mail.”
Inside was a single page torn from the Sears catalogue, a page with kids’ coats on the top and enough white space at the bottom for Dinah to print THANK U. So she got the money I been sending her from my pay. Where did she tell Bobby the warm clothes come from, the coats and stuff for Lewis, Arianna, Timmy, Cody, Bonnie Jean? No, that was stupid—Bobby was too far gone to notice even if the kids ran around buck naked.
I turned on Dr. Chung. “Did you give me this right now so’s I’d stay?”
“Ludie, how could I know what was in your envelope? I still don’t know.”
“You know sure enough what’s in my head!”
“I know there are abnormal FFI prions, which we hope to arrest. I know, too, that there is valuable information about how the brain works.”
“You told me afore that you can’t get them prions out of my head!”
“We cannot, no. What we hope is to disrupt the formation of any more. For your sake, as much as ours.”
“I don’t believe that crap!”
Only I wanted to believe it.
“Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal. I stay and you do your experiments, but the minute I tell you to stop something, you do it.” It was lame bluster, and he knew it.
“Yes. I already did so, you know. You told me to stop the inhibition of motor activity, and I did.”
“And another thing. I want a pass-out, after all.”
He blinked. “You want—”
“I want you to write out in words I can understand just what you’re doing to me. So’s I can study on it afore we do it again.”
Dr. Chung smiled. “I will be glad to do that, Ludie.”
I flounced out of there, knowing I hadn’t told him the whole truth. I wanted to keep sending money to Dinah, yes. I wanted him to not freeze me no more, yes. I wanted a pass-out paper, yes. But I also wanted that shining clearness back, that thing Jenny had called hyper-awareness. I wanted it enough to go on risking my brain.
If that’s really what I was doing.
Ludie—you have Fatal Familial Insomnia. Inside a part of your brain called the thalamus, some proteins called prions are folding up wrong. The wrongly folded proteins are making other proteins also fold wrong. These are sticking together in clumps and interfering with what cells are supposed to do. The main thing thalamus cells are supposed to do is process communications among different parts of the brain. The thalamus is like a switchboard, except that it also changes the communications in ways we are trying to learn about. Things which the thalamus communicates with the rest of the brain about include: moving the body, thinking, seeing, making decisions, memory formation and retrieval, and sleeping. When you get a lot of sticky, misfolded proteins in the thalamus, you can’t go into deep sleep, or move properly, or think clearly. You get hallucinations and insomnia and sometimes seizures.
We are trying to do three things: (1) Stop your brain making more misfolded prions, even if we can’t get rid of the ones that are already there. We are trying to do this by interfering with the making of a protein that the prions use to fold wrong. Unhappily, the only way we will know if this happens is if your symptoms do not get worse. (2) Your brain works partly by sending electrical signals between cells. We are trying to map how these go, called “neural pathways.” (3) We want to find out more about what the special algae (opsins) we put in your brain can do. They release different chemicals when we put different laser lights down the cable. We want to know the results of each different thing we do, to aid science.
Well, Dr. Chung wrote good, even though I didn’t know what a “switchboard” might be.
I thought of Mama, her brain full of these misfolded proteins, gummed up like a drain full of grease and hair. And Bobby’s brain, even worse. Mine, too, soon?
It was dark outside by the time I finished reading that damn paper over and over and over. Everybody’d gone home from the clinic except the night nurse, a skinny rabbitty-looking girl named Susannah. I knowed that she was mountain-born the minute I laid eyes on her, and that somehow she’d got out, and I’d tried not to have nothing to do with her. But now I marched out to where she was reading a magazine in the lobby and said, “Call Dr. Chung. Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Never you mind. Just call him.”
“It’s ten o’clock at—”
“I know what time it is. Call him.”
She did, and he came. I said, “We’re going to work now. Now, not in the morning. Them proteins are folding in me right this second, aren’t they? You call Jenny and Dr. Liu if you really need them. We’re going to work all night. Afore I change my
mind.”
He looked at me hard. Funny how when you know a person long enough, even a strange and ugly person, they don’t look so bad no more.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s work.”
We worked all night. We worked all week. We worked another week, then another. And I didn’t get no worse. No better, but no worse. What I got was scared.
Nobody ought to be able to do those things to somebody else’s brain, using nothing except little bits of light.
Dr. Chung froze me again while I was walking around.
Dr. Liu said, “Filtering signals is an important thalamic function, and any change in filtering may give rise to physiological effects.”
Dr. Chung made the “hyperawareness” come back, even stronger.
Jenny said, “Interfering with action potentials on cell membranes changes the way cells process information.”
Dr. Chung made me remember things from when I was really little—Mama singing to me. Shawn and me wrestling. Granmama telling me troll stories while I sat on her knee. Bobby teaching me to fish. The memories were so sharp, they felt like they was slicing into my brain. Good memories but too razored, making my mind bleed.
Dr. Liu said, “Are the opsins in the anterior nuclei over-expressing? That could cause problems.”
Dr. Chung did something that made me stutter so’s I couldn’t get a word out whole no matter how much I tried.
Jenny said, “Neural timing—even the shift of a few milliseconds can reverse the effect of the signal on the rest of the nervous system. Not good.”
I didn’t think any of it was good. But I warn’t going to say anything in front of that Jenny; I waited until I got Dr. Chung alone.
“I got to ask you something.”
“Of course, Ludie.” He had just finished checking on my heart and blood pressure and all that. “Are you pleased by the way the study is going? You say your FFI symptoms aren’t any worse, and with the usual rapid progression of the disease in your family, that may mean genuine progress.”
“I’m happy about that, yeah, if it goes on like now. But I got a different question. I been reading in that book you gave me, how the brain is and isn’t like a computer.” The book was hard going, but interesting.
“Yes?” He looked really caught on what I was saying. For the first time, I wondered what his wife was like. Was she pretty?
“A computer works on teeny switches that have two settings, on and off, and that’s how it knows things.”
“A binary code, yes.”
“Well, those laser switches on the bundle of optic cables you put in my head—they’re off and on, too. Could you make my head into a computer? And put information into it, like into a computer—information that warn’t there afore?”
Dr. Chung stood. He breathed deep. I saw the second he decided not to lie to me. “Not now, not with what we know at present, which isn’t nearly enough. But potentially, far down the road and with the right connections to the cortex, it’s not inconceivable.”
Which was a fancy way of saying yes.
“Good night,” I said abruptly and went into my room.
“Ludie—”
But I didn’t have nothing more to say to him. In bed, though, I used the tablet he loaned me—that’s what I been reading the book on—to get the Internet and find Dr. Chung. I got a lot of hits. One place I found a picture of him with his wife. She was pretty, all right, and refined-looking. Smart. He had his arm around her.
Sleep was even harder that night than usual. Then, the next day, it all happened.
We were in the testing room, and my hyperawareness was back. Everything was clear as mountain spring water, as sharp as a skinning knife. I kept rising up on my tip-toes, just from sheer energy. It didn’t feel bad. Dr. Chung watched me real hard, with a little frown.
“Do you want a break, Ludie?”
“No. Bring it on.”
“Hippocampal connection test 48,” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung’s hand moved on his punchpad. The computer started clicking louder and louder. The door burst open and Bobby charged in, waving a knife and screaming.
“Whore! Whore!” He plunged the knife into Jenny and blood spurted out of her in huge, foaming gushes. I shouted and tried to throw myself in front of Dr. Chung, but Bobby got him next. Dr. Liu had vanished. Bobby turned on me and he warn’t Bobby no more but a troll from Granmama’s stories, a troll with Bobby’s face, and Bonnie Jean hung mangled and bloody from his teeth. I hit out at the troll and his red eyes bored into me and his knife raised and—
I lay on the floor, Dr. Chung holding me down, Jenny doubled over in pain, and the computer screen laying beside me.
“Ludie—”
“What did you do?” I screamed. “What did you do to me? What did I do?” I broke free of him, or he let me up. “What?”
“You had a delusional episode,” Dr. Chung said, steady but pale, watching me like I was the Bobby-troll. And I was. I had hit Jenny and knocked over the computer, only it was—
“Don’t you touch me!”
“All right,” Dr. Chung said quietly, “I won’t.” Dr. Liu was picking up the computer, which was still clicking like a crazy thing. Mrs. Cully and a nurse stood in the doorway. Jenny gasped and wheezed. “You had a delusional episode, Ludie. Perhaps because of the FFI, perhaps—”
“It was you, and you know it was you! You done it to me! You said you wouldn’t control my brain and now you—” I pulled at the optrode sticking up from my skull, but of course it didn’t budge. “You can’t do that to me! You can’t!”
“We don’t know what the—”
“You don’t know nothing! And I’m done with the lot of you!” It all came together in me then, all the strangeness of what they was doing and the fear for my family and them throwing me out and the lovely hyperawareness gone when the switch went off and Dr. Chung’s pretty wife—all of it.
I didn’t listen to nothing else they said. I walked straight out of that clinic, my legs shaking, without even grabbing my coat. And there was Shawn pulling up in Jimmy Barton’s truck, getting out and looking at me with winter in his face. “Bobby’s dead,” he said. “He killed himself.”
I said, “I know.”
The funeral was a week later—it took that long for the coroner to get done fussing with Bobby’s body. It was election day, and Ratface Rollins lost, along with the whole Libertarian party.
The November wind blew cold and raw. Mama was too bad off to go to the graveyard. But Shawn brought her at the service where she sat muttering, even through the church choir singing her favorite, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I don’t know if she even knew what was going on; for sure she didn’t recognize me. It warn’t be long afore she’d be as bad as Bobby, or in a coma like Aunt Carol Ames. Granmama recognized me, of course, but she didn’t say nothing when I came into the trailer, or when I stayed there, sleeping in my old bed with Patty and Bonnie Jean, or when I cleaned up the place a bit and cooked a stew with groceries from my clinic money. Granmama didn’t thank me, but I didn’t expect that. She was grieving Bobby. And she was Granmama.
Dinah kept to her room, her kids pretty much in there with her day and night.
I kept a hat on, over my part-shaved head. Not the red knit hat Dr. Chung gave me, which I wadded up and threw in the creek. In the trailer I wore Bobby’s old baseball cap, and at the funeral I wore a black straw hat that Mama had when I was little.
“‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . . ’” Reverend Baxter did funerals old-fashioned. Bobby’s casket was lowered into the hole in the churchyard. The last of the maple leaves blew down and skittered across the grass.
Dinah came forward, hanging onto Shawn, and tossed her flower into the grave. Then Granmama, then me, then Patty. The littlest kids, Lewis and Arianna and Timothy and Cody, were in relatives’ arms. The last to throw her flower was Bonnie Jean, and that’s when I saw it.
Bonnie Jean wore an old coat of Patty�
�s, too big for her, so’s the hem brushed the ground. When she stood by the grave that hem was shaking like aspen leaves. Her face had froze, and the pupils of her eyes were so wide it looked like she was on something. She warn’t. And it warn’t just the fear and grief of a ten-year-old at a funeral, neither.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . ”
Neighbors brought cakes and covered dishes to the trailer. Nobody didn’t stay long ’cause they knew we didn’t want them to. Dinah went back into her room with her two kids, Mama was muttering beside the stove, Shawn sat smoking and drinking Bud. I told Patty to watch Timmy and Cody and I took Bonnie Jean into our bedroom.
“How long since you slept through the whole night?”
She was scared enough to give me lip. “I sleep. You been right there next to me!”
“How long, Bonnie Jean?”
“I don’t got to tell you nothing! You’re a whore, sleeping with them Chinese and letting them do bad things to you—Bobby said!”
“How long?”
She looked like she was going to cry, but instead she snatched Bobby’s baseball hat off my head. It seemed to me that my optrode burned like a forest fire, though of course it didn’t. Bonnie Jean stared at it and spat, “Chink Frankenstein!”
Probably she didn’t even know what the words meant, just heard them at school. Or at home.
Then she started to cry, and I picked her up in my arms and sat with her on the edge of the bed, and she let me. All at once I saw that the bed was covered with the Fence Rail quilt Dinah had been making for the women’s co-op. She’d put it on my bed instead.
I held Bonnie Jean while she cried. She told me it had been two weeks since she couldn’t sleep right and at the graveyard was her second panic attack—what she called “the scared shakes.” She was ten years old, and she carried the gene Granmama and God-knows-who-else had passed on without being affected themselves. Insomnia and panic attacks and phobias. Then hallucinations and more panic attacks and shrinking away to hardly no weight at all. Then dementia or coma or Bobby’s way out. Ten years old. While I was nineteen and I hadn’t even felt her restless beside me in the long cold night.