Come Out Tonight (26 page)

“Sure.
 
Hi, Ryan,” I said, putting out my hand and taking a few steps across the room.
 

Ryan wheeled toward me, something like distrust in his eyes.
 
“Oh, hi, Henry.”
 
He put his hand out, and we shook hands, just for show.
 
Sherry, clueless as to what had happened in the last six months, smiled.

“Think I’ll get a coke,” I said, making for the door.
 
I walked out and down the hall to the commissary, bought the coke and made my way back soundlessly.
 
A few feet away from the doorway, I stopped.
 
If I didn’t breathe, I’d just be able to make out their voices.

“So the whole thing is pretty much a blank?” I heard Ryan saying.

“Yeah,” Sherry said.
 

“Anything about who attacked you?”

Sherry must have shook her head.

“You remember our research?”

“Our research?”
 
There was a pause.
 
“Yeah.
 
Somnolux.”

“Well, Somnolux has been going gangbusters.
 
Especially now that we have a whole new population of patients who have to take it for life!”
 
He laughed, then stopped.
 
“Oops,” he said.
 
“I didn’t mean...”

“S’okay,” I heard Sherry say.

“No problems at all with Somnolux,” Ryan piped up a minute later, the suggestion of a question in his voice.
 
He sounded like he was trying to size up what she remembered from back then.
 
“You remember how we bitched over not getting a percentage of it?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Sherry mumbled.
  
“Seems so long ago.”

“Does it?” he said.
 
There was a long pause.
 
I imagined him fondling her hand, or her face.
 
Half of me wanted to go charging in to break it up in there.
 
“I’m so sorry...so sorry this happened to you.”

“Why, Ryan?
 
It’s not your fault.”

“It’s...You really don’t remember a thing about it?
  
Not even the side effects?
  
The...dissociative disorders?”

“Why do you...keep asking me that?
 
If I remembered, I would tell you...”

I could swear I heard him exhale in relief.
 
Or maybe it was my imagination.
 
Then he went on to describe the newest research: what receptors Somnolux was turning on in the brain and how it was doing it; Vandenberg’s studies on who wakes up and who doesn’t.
 
Whether those patients who woke up were never really PVS.
 
Maybe they were really minimally conscious in the first place.
 

“I don’t...” Sherry was saying, but Ryan wasn’t listening.
 
Bastard, I said to myself.
 
Why the hell is he lecturing her on vegetative patients, when that’s what she is?

“There was one study in
Europe
,” Ryan was saying. “They took a real-time MRI of one woman’s brain, while they told her to pretend she was playing tennis. The woman was totally vegetative, unresponsive, not moving a muscle, but her brain lit up like a Christmas tree.
 
Her speech areas lit up, her motor, pre-motor, the whole shebang, just like the conscious volunteers.
 
The MRI showed her playing tennis in her brain!
 
I mean, that’s a woman who’s going to wake up!”
 

He laughed, as if he had just told a funny story.
  

“I don’t understand, Ryan.”

Pause.
 
“Well, see, if she was actually following the instructions, she must have been slightly conscious in the first place.
  
Otherwise...”

“Oh, okay.
 
I guess I’m not quick like I used to be.”

“No, no,” Ryan was saying.
 
“You’re just tired.”

“No, Ryan.
 
I’m not quick like I used to be.
  
I used to be so smart, but now people say things to me, and sometimes I don’t know what they’re saying.”
 
She wiped away a tear that trickled down her face.
 
“I don’t think I’m ever going be smart again.”
  
Then Sherry began to cry: not just a tear here or there, but a full torrent, crying her heart out.
  
That’s it, I said to myself.
 
I’m going in.

“Machine was out,” I said, striding into the room with the can of pop in my hand.
  
“Had to go to the other side of the building for a goddamned coke.”

Both of them looked up:
 
Sherry’s face, all pale, wet and sad; Ryan’s, scared and guilty as hell. Having reduced her to this, he couldn’t stand to look at what he’d wrought.
 
He gave Sherry a peck on the cheek and ran out the door.
  
Good riddance to him.
 
I sat down on her bed and held her in my arms until she fell asleep.
 
   

*
   
*
   
*

Ryan came a few more times, but his devotion obviously petered out after he and his bosses assured themselves that Sherry posed no more threat to them.
 
What a knockout! They’d managed to knock her out without really knocking her off.
  
Instead, they must have transferred their paranoia to me.
 
More than once, on the subway going to the nursing home, I caught a glimpse of the guy in the brown suit and glasses, turned away as if he were reading the subway map, or spying on me through the window of the adjoining car.
 
As many times as I managed to shake him, he was there again when I turned around.
 
Whatever.
 
It didn’t stop me from going.

On one Thursday morning visit, Sherry was up and sitting in her chair, eating breakfast, her spoon turned sideways in her fist and oatmeal on her face.
 
She gave me a big sad smile.
 
“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, yourself,” I said, wiping off the oatmeal with a napkin.

“What will we do with me?” she asked after a minute.

“What do you mean?

“Will they ever let me leave?”

I didn’t know what to say.
 
Her arms and legs weren’t what they used to be.
 
She had trouble putting a spoon to her lips.
 
She couldn’t really walk.
 
How could she leave?
 
“When you’re better,” I said.
     

“When will I be better?”

“You need therapy, Sherry.
 
So you can feed yourself.
 
Take care of yourself.”

“Can’t I come live with you?”

I remembered when all I wanted was for her to come live with me, when Sherry wouldn’t hear of it; but now our relationship seemed to have been turned on its head.
 
How could I take care of her?
 
I pictured her passed out in the street or face down in the tub, if she didn’t time her pills just right.
 
“What would you do with your own apartment?” I asked.

“Do I still have that?” she asked.

“Yeah.”
  
Her apartment was still sitting there, rent barely paid by the dwindling balance in her bank account.
 
“What should I do with it?”

“Get rid of it,” she said.
 

“And what should I do with all your clothes?
 
Your furniture?”

“Oh, those.”
 
She sat, mulling it over.
 
“Couldn’t we bring them to your place?” she asked.

“I don’t have the room, Sherry.” She looked disappointed.
 
“What about your parents’ house?” I asked.

Sherry’s parents lived in
California
.
 
She never talked about them much.
 
From what I could gather, nothing she could do was ever good enough for her father.
 
Hey, if I had invented the biggest sleep drug on the market, my parents would be busting a gut telling all the neighbors.
 
I mean, what kind of parents aren’t proud of their kids?
  
Anyway, I gave up trying to figure them out.
 
Her parents had been back once to see her when she was in the hospital, once when she woke up.
 
What can I tell you?
 
They weren’t on good terms.
 

“Forget it,” Sherry said, turning away.
 
“Forget it.”

“No, no,” I said.
 
“I’ll take care of it.”

Just then a small lady dressed in white materialized at the doorway.
 
“Time for your therapy,” she announced, and took over.
 
She got Sherry up from the chair and in no time had her making her way in little baby steps across the room.
 
I figured I was a third wheel, so I walked out of the room and down the hallway to the nurse’s station.
 
One of the doctors was standing behind the station, making notes.
 

“Can I talk to you about Sherry Pollack?” I asked.

The name obviously rang bells; his eyes lit up.
 
“Absolutely!
 
Just a second while I finish up here.”
 
He unlatched the swing door below the counter and motioned for me to come back and sit down on an empty stool.

“Your wife is a famous case, Mr. Pollack,” the doctor said, after he had finished typing a few things into the computer.

“Henry Jackman,” I said.
 
“Sherry’s my girlfriend.
 
And I need to know her prospects.
 
Will Sherry ever be able to live on her own?”

“Slow down,” he laughed.
 
“Your girlfriend just woke up from a persistent vegetative state.
  
A couple of months ago, no one would have given a fig for her chances of doing that.
  
We’re plowing new ground here.”

“Yeah, well, but can you say if she’ll get any better?”

He looked me in the eye, deciding how to pitch this.
 
“I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said.
 
“But it would help if we knew what’s causing Sherry’s vegetative state.”

“You don’t know?” I shot back.

He sighed.
   
“It’s a high wire act - consciousness.
 
When a dog barks, we see its jaws open at the same time as we hear the bark.
 
We take it for granted, but the brain has to do some fancy processing just to achieve the effect of that barking dog.”

“I guess,” I said.
 
All I wanted to know was if she’d get better, not how to deconstruct a barking dog.

“How the brain does it,” the doctor went on, “is by connecting all the neurons that fire on the same beat.
  
Whatever happens at a single instant makes up one pulse of consciousness.
 
Clearly, if the neurons are out of sync, that moment will never come together.”

“You’re saying Sherry’s outta sync?”

“Without a doubt, Mr. Jackman.
 
Normally, when a person is awake, a small group of nerve cells in the thalamus triggers a gamma wave in the cortex, which travels back to the thalamus, locking all the neurons to the same beat. Now, without the wave...”

“But will she recover?” I asked, impatient with all this theory.

“If the trigger neurons recover, so does the patient.”

“So, when will Sherry’s neurons recover?” I wanted to know.

He stared at me as if he were figuring all the angles on how best to handle a dumb and postal boyfriend.
 
Then, I figure he must have decided; because he suddenly smiled and turned back to the computer.
  
“Let me show you the two sets of MRI’s we gave your girlfriend.
 
Before and after Somnolux,” he said, typing a few keystrokes.
 
The screen changed from a blinking screen saver to something else.
 
I could hardly make out what: a couple of small clouds of light in a pitch-black sky.
 
The doctor waved at the dark expanse on the screen.
 
“Notice that the before brain scans are black: no activity in large areas, including the thalamus.”
 

I shivered.
 
“Is it dead?”

“Ah, that’s the thing,” the doctor said, typing some more.
 
The image changed a few more times, till he found what he was looking for.
 
The screen refreshed itself, splashes of orange, yellow, blue painting over the black.
 

A low whistle escaped my lips.

“After Somnolux,” he said, looking up.
 
“The same areas begin to light up with activity.
 
Instead of putting vegetative patients to sleep, Somnolux opens up large dormant areas of the brain and makes them function again.”