“Yes, there are fascinating structural changes to the brain…”
Eve lost the thread of the professor’s lecture, but she didn’t need to listen. A diligent researcher like herself could not have failed to read about this new sort of fMRI, showing neural activity at microscopic levels, and she of course knew all about how brains of vegetative-state patients were known to shrivel from inactivity. In the first months after, among the many EEGs and reflex tests, Oliver had undergone a few rounds on an earlier form of such a machine, all of which, according to Oliver’s weathered chief physician, showed Oliver’s brain’s activity reduced to its core, its cerebellum, its so-called reptilian brain, a dim bulb of dendritic light just above his spinal cord that kept his heart beating, his lungs breathing. When Dr. Rumble shined flashlights into Oliver’s eyes, they did not dilate properly; when Dr. Rumble rubbed his sternum, Oliver did not lift a hand to bat him away. “Anything? Anything different?” Eve had begged Dr. Rumble many times.
“To tell you the truth, I have to admit I’m just doing these tests for your sake. This charade probably isn’t good for anyone.”
“Charade? Are you serious?”
“Of course,” Dr. Rumble had told her, “you are entitled to another opinion if you’d like. There’s a brain center out in El Paso I could refer you to, but I should tell you the place ain’t cheap.”
But why, really, had Eve not insisted? It was true she couldn’t afford it, but of course that was not the reason. The true, unspeakable reason: as Oliver spent months and then years untested, Eve developed a kind of private faith around the lack of quality medical assessment, a faith that spread from that inextinguishable word miracle. As if, as long as she could believe that the structure were still intact, it somehow, miraculously, might be capable of life. A new fMRI, Eve understood, might at last force her to see what the doctors saw when they looked at Oliver. Not a trapped and pleading intelligence, not Oliver’s eyes searching, in that fast, flitting way they moved, for an escape from his neurofibral thickets. Only a decimated nervous system, misfiring.
Still, Eve had told herself countless times that soon she would insist Oliver undergo testing on the new sorts of brain scans she had read about, the ones that could offer a far more detailed image of neural activity than the clunky, outdated model that their humble little county hospital had employed. Next month, she’d tell herself, sometimes going so far as to write the date into her calendar when she would make the phone call. And yet, the next month came and went, and always there were so many reasons to put it off just another month longer: Oliver had come down with a case of pneumonia, she worried about transferring him in the outrageous summer heat, she had too much of her own copyediting work to get done, her finances were at a particularly dire moment. She put it off and put it off, until her putting it off became its own kind of superstition, a ritual in her life. The longer she delayed that second opinion, the more dire its potential outcomes, the more she could not bear to schedule it.
But at last, almost ten years after, sitting there with Dr. Rumble and his visitor from Princeton, the faith around which she had arranged her years had come to its end. Ten years: that number repeated itself now like a second pulse in her temples. “Eve,” Dr. Rumble said after Professor Nickell, glowing with his own informativeness, completed his lecture. “I think this is an opportunity we’d be foolish to refuse. There might not be much we can do for Oliver now, but if the professor here could help at least understand others like him—well, why would we say no?”
Because that last hope is all that’s left, Eve did not say. “I suppose you’re right,” she said instead, and Dr. Rumble looked relieved, dabbing his goatee with the back of his hand.
“The thing is,” Professor Nickell added, “we’ll need your husband to agree, too.” Eve wrote down Jed’s phone number on the back of Nickell’s business card.
“I’ll leave that part up to you,” she said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Crockett State Assisted Care Facility was a two-floor stucco cube beyond the dust and gore of insect death polluting Eve’s windshield. The repository of her thoughts, labors, hopes, godless prayers looked almost comically diminished from that distance. An outpost on Mars. And her son lived in an outpost of the outpost, the only head trauma patient currently in residence, the balance of the unit’s patients afflicted with garden-variety cognitive impairments, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy, aneurysms and strokes. Oliver was the facility’s youngest resident by forty years at least. A few times a week, an ambulance came to cart one of the geriatrics to emergency care in Alpine or Marathon.
But today, parked just beyond the side door, was another kind of vehicle, one that loomed much larger than its humble RV dimensions: Professor Nickell’s truck, tricked out like one of those mobile blood donation centers, which displayed, in a flourish of corporate logo design, the words PRINCETON MIND-BRAIN CENTER. When Eve reached to unbuckle the seat belt, her back distress blew its buckshot, strafing her from pelvis to shoulder blade.
And now, just before undertaking the arduous work of climbing out of Goliath, Eve paused to let a certain presence pass by, not ten feet in front of her windshield. Margot Strout, in her new bouffant and floral-themed blazer, a golden cross swinging from her neck, pretended not to notice Eve sitting there in her car, as Margot worked her thighs in an awkward scamper.
Margot Strout—the speech pathologist who visited Crockett State three times a week, to help the stroke and dementia cases produce a few words for visiting family and caregivers—was considered something of a saint in that fluorescent-grim institution. She was a blast of excoriating sunshine, a Jesus-loving lady who wore her makeup in operatic proportions, her piney perfume like some chemical weapon attack, her hair teased up to the heavens. According to the story Eve had heard the woman relate many times, Margot had once been the single mother of a baby girl, Cora, who was born with severe birth defects. Cora’s mental impairment had kept her from speaking before she died at the age of four, and to the facility’s workers, visitors, and Eve herself, Margot had gone on and on about her “calling,” about “giving a voice back to the voiceless.”