None of this was news to Pax. He’d spoken with Nancy and Murphy by phone a few times since the blackout had been lifted Friday morning and the news about Abdullah al-Ghazali had broken. But they seemed to need to go over it again, and because Pax was rocked by the sight of Bibi as pale and still as a corpse on a catafalque, he was glad they wanted to hold forth, giving him time to gather himself.
He had needed almost two and a half days to learn what had happened to Bibi, to get an emergency leave, and to fly first by military craft and then by a civilian airline halfway around the world, at last to come to the hospital by cab rather than delay long enough to arrange a rental car. This was 1:00 Sunday afternoon, the sky blue and clear beyond the window. She had been in a coma almost four days.
As Petronella finished changing the IV bag, she said, “I was on duty Wednesday evening. She wasn’t a complainer, so when she said she had a bad headache, I gave her the maximum allowable meds. Headaches, sometimes bad ones, come with this kind of cancer. That was shortly before seven o’clock. It’s been a strange case ever since.”
Looking up from Bibi, Pax said, “Strange? Strange how?”
“Strange everywhichway,” said Petronella. “First, they can’t find a cause. The glioma web isn’t so large that it’s putting enough pressure on the brain to induce a coma. Brain imaging doesn’t show any intracerebral hemorrhage. No hypoxia, no significant impairment of blood flow to any part of the brain. Liver or kidney failure would intoxicate the brain with poisons. But her liver and kidneys—they’re chugging right along. And it’s a profound coma. I mean, this girl is deep under, yet”—she gestured toward the five-wave readout on the illuminated screen of the electroencephalograph—“just look at her brain waves.”
Paxton looked, but he didn’t know what to make of what he saw.
“I’ll give it to you in a few bites,” the nurse said, “but it’s a whole lot more complex than this. The doctor should explain it to you—if he can. Your girl is exhibiting the wave patterns of someone who’s asleep and someone who’s awake at the same time. And they’re nothing like the wave patterns of anyone in a coma. She seems to be way under, in that deep place where she isn’t even dreaming—but look at her eyes. That’s REM sleep, dream sleep.”
Murphy sought reassurance anywhere he could get it. “I think it’s hopeful, how weird it is.”
“I don’t see how it’s hopeful,” Nancy disagreed. “I’m scared.”
Reaching across the raised bedrail, Pax took Bibi’s right hand in his. It was warm but as limp as if it were boneless.
“After I gave her the medicine for the headache,” Petronella revealed, “the last thing I said to her was, ‘I’ll keep checking on you.’ And I did. I thought she was just sleeping.”
As with the Peter Piper tongue-twister, Pax heard Bibi’s clear voice saying, Quick now, here, now…At the still point…Neither from nor towards…Where past and future are gathered.
He knew those weren’t her words, that she was quoting someone. Although he felt that he should recognize the source, he did not.
On first hearing her voice, he’d thought it must be an auditory hallucination. This time he knew it was nothing as simple as that, nothing for which he could fault either his hearing or imagination. But if he knew what it wasn’t, he didn’t yet understand what it was.
On the farther side of the bed, where Petronella had seconds earlier recalled the last thing she’d said to Bibi, the nurse turned her attention from Pax to her patient—and did something between a shocked recoil and a comic double take. It was one of those moments that sometimes caused Bibi to wonder aloud whether human reactions were these days what they had always been or if more than a century of movies had influenced our response to every stimulus, so that in the instant between the experience and our processing of it, we were unconsciously reminded of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, of how they had reacted in similar situations in films, tailoring our performances to resemble theirs, our natural human responses distorted.
Eyes wide, raising one hand to her breast, stunned by something that focused her intently on the left side of Bibi’s face, Petronella said, “What the blue blazes is this?”
On Bibi’s right, Pax could not see what was happening, but from the foot of the bed, Nancy saw, and Murphy saw, and they cried out.