“Oliver? Will you please try to sing a song now?” When you still refused, Dr. Ginsberg began to sing for you. “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…”
Over Dr. Ginsberg’s singing, the magnets hummed their own penetrating tone. Your twitching eyes turned the neutral arch of the machine above you into a beige smear. It took great focus not to sing along, and yet you kept your attention on your ghost’s legs, pumping and pumping.
“Oliver?”
Like your father and your brother, you had always been fascinated by that which cannot be seen: buried worlds and Spooky Action, the mysterious effects of Dark Energy and the mind-bending math of cosmic strings. Those intimations of a secret force behind the forces we can see. And could it have been only a coincidence that a boy like yourself was chosen to bridge the invisible distance between one world and the next? Maybe so. Maybe it was only coincidence. And yet, you had told yourself that you would make a reason out of what had happened, that yours would be a tremendous story of survival, when at last you told it. An interdimensional epic to outdo even the survivalist books you loved most, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s ordeal in the Antarctic, Saint-Exupéry’s crash landing in the desert of Libya. But you saw now that no story, if you told it long enough, was ever a story of survival. Survival was not a story you could tell. Survival was the telling, and that was the burden and the gift of the living.
“Oliver.” Dr. Ginsberg’s voice grew weaker in the speakers. “Please. Just please try to sing yourself a song. How about a different one? Twinkle, twinkle, little star—”
You knew that you hadn’t moved your legs in nine years and 314 days, and also that you would never move them again. You knew, also, that you would never tell your story, just as you knew Rebekkah had never loved you as you had loved her, just as you knew you could never be equal to what Ma’s love required of you, just as you understood that all your memories were likely just that: not some lost universe, only days that had passed and would never come back. But you didn’t let those facts trip you up now. You let yourself follow your family’s example. Your mother, her conversations with an imagined voice. Your brother, reading to you the story he had tried to write on your behalf. Your father, the parallel dimensions of his best hopes. Your town, its last prayer for an answer. That belief, that refusal of the meaninglessness of events, that idea that maybe, after all, your story meant something more than a long series of luckless days, that there really was a reason for it, beyond all logical reason. After all, what was it but those ten years you had endured that had at last delivered your family to the truth and so also delivered you to this day when you could set them all free? As Dr. Ginsberg still tried to cajole you to sing a no, you instead imagined that you were back, once more, at Bliss Township School, the bass line beating through the walls. Rebekkah and her fellow performers were still down the hall, buttoning up their costumes. And this time, when Hector Espina arrived, you would run quickly enough to get there first. Yes.
After a long while, Ma’s voice replaced Dr. Ginsberg’s in the speaker.
“Oliver? Please. Just give us a sign? Just tell us what you want?” But, in the examination room, your mother had already asked it. The same question that she had considered every day of the last years. The question that had made her glad, in a way she never let herself consider directly, that you had not been able to answer. Are you ready?
And still you were sprinting, faster and faster.
Listen. There will be those who will say that, on that day in El Paso, you did not even say yes, that what your family watched on the computer monitors was only a brain’s mysterious malfunction. After all, more failed tests followed that first exam in the fMRI. After your family was led out of the room, you were shown patterns, played tones, spoken to, prodded gently, subjected to other brain scans. “The only apparent response, all day long,” Dr. Ginsberg told your family in her office that evening, “was just there, in the motor cortex. But we did discover some abnormalities and damaged regions. The frontal lobes, that’s where higher-level thought comes from, it’s most troubling of all. Twenty percent reduction in mass, almost no activity in those areas. It’s incredible that as much of his brain has survived as it did. But I’m very, very sorry to tell you that the Oliver you knew, he just isn’t with us anymore. I’m so, so sorry that you’d gotten your hopes up for this.”
But your family didn’t care what Dr. Ginsberg told them. They knew what they had witnessed there, on the other side of the glass. Yes, you had said, and for once in her life, even your mother had silenced her crazed hope, and heard you. Yes, your way to ask your family to let you go and also to make the end as painless as possible. Minimally conscious: you won that label in a marathon of imagined running, and the rest was a matter of paperwork.
Still, there will be those who say that your replies to Dr. Ginsberg don’t mean anything about what you actually wanted. That you have not truly understood a word or spoken for yourself since the night of November fifteenth. That this whole story of you amounts only to imagination, or something worse. A fiction, a hoax, an intrusion, a desecration, guesswork from scant facts, the ideomotor effect spun out over hundreds of pages. That your brother, at last writing this book, telling your family’s story as you might tell it now from your place outside of time, has no right to tell it in the way he has. That the voice he still hears is not your voice at all. There will be a great many who do not believe these words, even now. And yet, after so many years spent slipping into the infinite worlds of better memories, you also know that sort of belief is not something you can force anyone into, by argument alone. We all have to decide for ourselves what we believe.
“Okay,” your mother told you through the speakers that day in El Paso. “Okay.” And still you just kept running, leaping over the land that was cracking open between you.
“Everything in the entire cosmos,” your father had once said, “begins where it ends, in a single spot of brightness.” And it was then, as you flung yourself from the faltering ground, that the energy Dr. Ginsberg traced on her machines flared explosively inside you. That brightness ripped the lining from your clothes, the substance from your skin, sent all your buttons flying. So terrific was the explosion that this time when your buttons flew they shot in a different direction. After years of backward tossings, for once your precious tabs soared on ahead of you. They whistled through the atmosphere like the opposite of the bullets Hector Espina fired, projectiles that did not end stories but opened them. Your buttons burst forth, into a different kind of universe, one where you would be nowhere but also everywhere. And already you were chasing after them, into the future.