Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Strokes were generally not a major health problem in India. The classic stroke patient was a fat old smoker and though may people smoked in India, few people were fat and many did not have the opportunity to get old. Fortunately, from the point of view of research, any time you got nearly a billion people living and working in conditions not notable for safety, you did not have to rely on strokes in order to see a broad and deep spectrum of brain damage.

  On his initial inspection of Building 2, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a fascinating assortment of unfortunates who had been combed from the slums. It seemed that Mr. Salvador had some sort of connection with the Lady Wilburdon Foundation, a British charity group that operated free clinics and hospitals all over India. Mr. Salvador had exploited this connection, recruiting medical students from all over the country as brain damage talent scouts who would scan incoming cases and let him know of any promising prospects. In addition to the two whose brains had already been sampled, Dr. Radhakrishnan saw a man who had had a brick dropped on his head in a construction site. A soldier shot through the brain during ethnic violence in Srinagar. A lunch delivery boy from Delhi who had been thrown off his motorcycle rickshaw in a collision with a lorry. A street kid from Bombay who, in trying to do a second-story job on an old colonial structure, had slipped and fallen twelve feet; a spike on the wrought-iron fence had entered his open mouth, passed up through his palate, and impaled his brain.

  Even by Western standards, the care these patients were receiving was fairly generous. The building was no architectural gem, but it was clean and well maintained. It was not lavishly appointed with hightech equipment, but it was well-staffed with attentive nurses and nursing students who were clearly doing all they could to see to the patients’ individual needs. And none of these patients was paying a single rupee. Most of them had no rupees to begin with.

  Building 1 had its own generators, a pair of brand-new Honda portable units delivering a hundred and twenty volts of all-American sixty-cycle power. The juice was filtered and con­ditioned through an uninterruptible power supply and then routed through shiny, freshly installed conduit to be a generous number of galvanized steel junction boxes, bolted to the barracks walls every couple of meters, studded with American-style three-prong outlets. All of this had been setup so that Zeldo and his ilk could fly straight in from California, drop their whores off at the Imperial, and plug their computer and other more arcane devices straight into the wall without having to deal with the awful culture shock of incom­patible plugs and voltages. More to the point, the Honda generators would not flicker, spike, brown out, and back out as the Delhi grid was apt to. No precious data would be lost to unpredictable Third World influences.

  Zeldo and a couple of other slangy pizza-eating beards from America had laid claim to one end of Building 1 and set up their own little outpost of heavy metal music and novelty foam-rubber sledgehammers for pounding on their workstations when they got frustrated. They had even erected a sign: PACIFIC NETWARE-ASIAN HEADQUARTERS. On his way in, Dr. Radhakrishnan had noted the presence of a freshly installed satellite dish, and he could not help but suppose that they were connected to that.

  Mr. Salvador had his own little nook at the other end of the building, as far away from the foam rubber sledgehammers as he could get. He was not in at the moment, but Dr. Radhakrishnan knew Mr. Salvador’s style when he saw it: a heavy antique desk, comfortably scuffed, an electric shoe polisher, and every communications device known to science.

  The intervening space was all at Dr. Radhakrishnan’s disposal. At this point it was all new, empty desks and new, empty filing cabinets. A few people had already moved in. Supposedly, Toyoda was on his way in from Elton and might have already arrived. There were also a few promising Indian graduate students whom Mr. Salvador had managed to recruit away from their positions in America and Europe, and there were signs that some of these people had already arrived, claimed desks, and gotten down to work.

  At the moment there was nothing for Dr. Radhakrishnan to do except sit down with a big stack of medical records that had been assembled on the head cases in Building 2, and sort through them, looking for patients with the right sort of brain damage.

  A couple of hours after Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived, a patient named Mohinder Singh was brought in. He was a lorry driver from Himachal Pradesh, way up north in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had been driving down a mountain road with a bundle of half-inch pipe lashed to the back of his lorry. The pipes were apparently of different lengths; some stuck out farther than others. His brakes had gone out and he had gone off the road and slammed into something. The bundle of pipes had shot forward. The longest one had come in through the back window of the truck, struck him just behind the ear, passed all the way through his head, and emerged through one of the eyeballs. A nearby road crew had used a hacksaw to cut off most of the pipe, leaving only the portion that was stuck through his head, and he had been evacuated to a nearby Lady Wilburdon Charities clinic where he had been noticed by one of the talent scouts.

  He did not look very promising at first. It seemed likely that the pipe had smashed things around quite a bit inside there and bruised large portions of the brain. But Dr. Radhakrishnan had not gotten to where he was by being hasty and superficial. He shipped Singh down the road to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences for a series of head scans.

  AIIMS was India’s foremost medical research institute and it was only a couple of minutes away from the Barracks along the Delhi Ring Road. They would be able to take some excellent pictures of Mr. Singh’s brain with the equipment they had there. And, in a stroke of luck, the chunk of pipe that was still embedded in Mr. Singh’s head was made out of copper, a nonmagnetic substance; they would be able to run him through an NMR scanner without turning it into a projectile.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was stunned to learn that the pipe had gone through his head almost three days previously. He must have beer in great pain, but he refused to acknowledge it. From the head down he was well-nourished and in perfect health. This was one patient who was not going to go into shock every time they put a needle in his arm.

  When Singh came back from AIIMS with a stack of films and scans piled on his chest, Dr. Radhakrishnan was pleasantly sur­prised. The pipe was thin-walled, cut off fresh and sharp on the end that had gone through Singh’s head. As best as Dr. Radhakrishnan could tell from trying to interpret the images, it had sliced its way through the soft, gelatinous brain tissue, rather than shoving it around and bruising it. It had acted almost like a core sampler.

  Once the pipe was taken out and some of the mess cleaned up, assuming that Singh did not get infected, which was simply a question of antibiotics, he was going to be an ideal candidate for therapy.

  “Not a whiner,” Mr. Salvador said, when he came by later to inspect. “Robust. Positive attitude, as far as I can tell. Willing to try just about anything. He reminds me of the chap in the States.”

  “What chap?”

  “Whom you heard on the tape. Whose scans you looked at.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  A thrilling sensation suddenly washed over Dr. Radhakrishnan’s body. A wave of adrenaline seemed to be rushing through his circulatory system like a chemical tsunami. He opened his eyes a little wider and blinked a few times as though he had just stepped out into bright warm sunlight after a long winter in Elton, New

  Mexico, and his body rocked from side to side just a little bit, its stance and balance changing as he stood up straighter, breathed a little deeper. The jet lag vanished. He looked around him, suddenly taking in the room with the frighteningly intense glare of a raptor soaring on a mountain thermal. His hands tingled, almost as if the saw and the drill were already there, buzzing away, slicing heedlessly through bone, penetrating into the core of some other human being.

  Mr. Salvador could take his Gyrfalcon jet and his cars and his institutes and his hotel suites. He could take them all back to America. It wouldn’t matter. This was the feeling that Dr. Rad
hakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar lived for.

  All of the nurses and orderlies in this part of the barracks had risen uncertainly to their feet. “What are you waiting for!?” he snapped.

  “This poor man has a pipe through his head! Let’s get it out.”

  13

  “I’m going to be real straight with you,” Mel said.

  “Somehow I’m not surprised,” Mary Catherine said. They were sitting together at a corner table in an old-fashioned family-type Italian restaurant. The restaurant was across the street and down the block from the hospital where Mary Catherine had spent most of the last four years. When families of stricken patients had to eat, they gathered around the big circular tables here and glumly plunged their forks into deep, steaming dishes of lasagna, like surgeons around an operating table.

  “You dad is not a happy camper right now,” Mel continued. “And it’s going to get worse in a week or two, when we have to come out and tell the public that he has suffered a stroke. I don’t know how he’s going to react.”

  She slapped her menu down on the table and stopped even pretending to read it. “Enough, enough,” she said. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Your dad would rather die than live the way he is now,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine kept looking and listening for a few seconds, until she finally realized that this was all there was to it. If Mel had been talking about anyone else, “he would rather die” would have been a figure of speech. But not with Dad. She could just imagine him, sitting down there in Tuscola, making the executive decision that it was time to die, and then formulating his plan. “That’s enough,” she said. “That’s all you have to say.” Then she closed her eyes and silently let tears run down her face for a half a minute or so.

  She opened her eyes, rubbed her face with her napkin, blinked away the last tears. Mel was sitting with his hands folded together, patiently waiting for her to finish. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a hefty waitress loitering with her pad and pen. The help here knew how to deal with grief. The waitress was trying to figure out -when it was okay to approach the table.

  “Okay, I’m ready to order,” Mary Catherine said, louder than she had intended.

  The waitress approached. Mel hurriedly snatched up his menu and began to scan it; he wasn’t ready. Watching him, Mary Catherine suddenly felt a lot of affection for good old Mel, trying to pick out an entree, any entree, because Mary Catherine was ready to order.

  “I’ll have the fettucine with pesto and a club soda,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Some kind of baked noodle thing without any meat,” Mel said. “Lasagna? Manicotti?” the waitress said. But Mel could not be bothered with details; he didn’t hear her. “And a glass of white,” he said, “You want a drink, Mary Catherine?”

  “No thanks, I’m working,” she said. Finally the knot went out of her throat and she felt better. She took a couple of deep breaths. “All clear,” she said.

  “You’re handling it well,” Mel said. “You’re doing a good job of this.”

  “I suppose he has a little plan all worked out.” “Yeah. The den. Sometime when there’s no kids out in front of the house, I would guess.”

  “He’ll probably use the big shotgun from Vietnam, right?” Mel shrugged. “Beats me. I’m. not privy to all his decisions.” “You know, James and I always used to get into trouble when Patricia was babysitting us as a kid. And Mom and Dad would come home and be just shocked.” Mary Catherine laughed out loud, blowing off tension. “Because Patricia was such a nice girl and why were we being so mean to her?” Mel laughed. “So now I’ll have to go home and give Dad a hard time for wanting to shoot himself while Patricia’s babysitting him.” She heaved a big sigh, trying to throw off the aching feeling in her ribs. “But it’s really hard to talk to him when he’s in that - that whole situation he’s in now.”

  “See, he’s acutely aware of that. And that’s why he made this decision.”

  “So why are you here?” she said. “Is this an official message from Dad?” Mel snorted. “You kidding? He’d kill me if he knew I was telling you this.”

  “Oh. I thought I was being given one last chance to go down and talk to him before he did it.”

  “No way. I think I caught him in the act. Lining up his shot,” Mel said. “Now he’s too embarrassed to actually do it for a while.”

  “Well … of course I want him to live. But I have to admit killing himself now would be a lot more true to his nature.”

  “Absolutely,” Mel said. “And it would give him a chance to get in a last dig at Patricia, which is incentive enough.” Mary Catherine laughed. “But he’s not gonna do it,” Mel said.

  “Why not?” It was unusual to think of Dad making up his mind to do something, and then holding back.

  “There’s one possibility we are investigating. A new therapy that might bring him back to where he was.”

  “I haven’t heard of any such thing,” Mary Catherine said. Mel set his briefcase up on the table and snapped it open. He pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Mary Catherine.

  Inside was a stack of a dozen or so research papers, mostly reprints from technical journals. On top was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of a rakishly modern, hightech structure on a bluff above the ocean. “What is this place?”

  “The Radhakrishnan Institute. They do heavy-duty neurological research. Those papers describe some of the work they’ve been doing.”

  Mary Catherine set the photograph aside and began to flip through the research papers.

  “I thought you might be interested in seeing some of that stuff. It’s all gibberish to me,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine frowned. “I’m familiar with these papers. I’ve seen them. All in the last three years.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the stuff described here is all fairly basic research. I mean, in this one here, they’re talking about a technique to grow baboon brain cells in vitro and then reimplant them in the baboon’s brain.”

  “So?”

  “So the date on the paper is three months ago. Which means it was probably written sometime last year.”

  “So?” Mel would continue to asking this question until hell froze over or he understood what she was getting at.

  “So, it’s like these guys just invented the wheel last year, and now they’re claiming that they can make a car.”

  “You’re saying it’s a hell of a stretch between putting some new cells into a baboon’s head, and fixing your dad.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How long would it take to cover that ground?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s never been done before. But I would think it would take at least five or ten years, if everything went well.”

  “Why would they-”

  “They’re neurosurgeons, Mel. Neurosurgeons are the ultimate macho shitheads of the medical world. Nobody can stand them. Their solution to everything is cold steel. But they can never really do anything.”

  “What do you mean? Cutting a hole in a guy’s brain seems like doing a hell of a lot.”

  “But there’s no cure for most neuro problems. They can chop out a tumor or a hematoma. But they can’t really cure the important problems, and, because they are macho shitheads, that drives them crazy. Clearly, that’s the motivation behind this research. And the inflated claims.”

  Mel pondered this one for a while.

  Mary Catherine sipped on her club soda and watched Mel ponder it. As usual, it seemed that his affair had a lot of dimensions that he wasn’t telling her about. A gray winter light was shining in through the window, bringing all of the wrinkles in Mel’s face into high relief, and suddenly the look on his face seemed frighteningly intense to her. “This is a tough one,” he finally said, shaking his head. “Too much emotional shit getting in the way. Can’t think straight.”

  “What are you thinking, Mel?”

  Mel shook his head. “Five or ten years. See, I
haven’t really talked to anyone yet. All I get is feelers. These feelers are so subtle I can’t even tell if they are really there. Like this here” - he pointed to the photograph and the papers - “came in the guise of a fund-raising mailing. They wanted to now if your dad wanted to contribute to this thing. But it’s no coincidence. I know that for damn sure.”

  “Have they offered to fix Dad’s brain, or not?”

  “Absolutely not, and you can bet they never will,” Mel said. “They will wait for us to ask them. That way, if it goes wrong, it was our idea. But from the way they are acting, you would think that they were ready to put him under the knife tomorrow.”

  “So here is the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” Mary Catherine said. “Does Dad believe that these people can fix him up? Does he believe it enough to keep him from killing himself?”

  “For now, definitely. He won’t do it today, or tomorrow. But…” Mel stopped in midsentence.

  “But if I blab my big mouth and say that this is highly speculative and might be five or ten years down the road, that’s different,” Mary Catherine said.

  “I don’t like to put this pressure on you,” Mel said, “but yeah, I think you have a point there.” He reached across the table, grabbed the photograph, and held it up. “This keeps him alive. It’s his hope. It’s all he has right now.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel gave her a penetrating look. “How is it good?”

  She was taken aback by the question. “It keeps him alive, like you said. And even if it does take five or ten years before this surgery can be performed, we can keep his hope alive until then. And then, maybe someday, we’ll have him back.”