“Not really. I was too—awake?”
Eve nodded. It had been like that for her, too, in those three days since the test. As if Professor Nickell’s fMRI had located also some inexhaustible new form of energy. Even now, unfocused with sleeplessness, she could plug back into it, the great wattage that morning still generated.
“Oliver,” Eve had been saying into the microphone they had let her speak into, likely just to humor her. “Can you hear me? Oliver? It’s Ma. I need you to focus now, they need you to focus. Can you do that for me?” Her pep talk was awkward at first, but escalating in its natural conviction.
Professor Nickell and his lazy-eyed underlings had been seated in front of their screens and gizmotic panels, dully performing their routine, but as for Eve? Even still, even then, she knew what every mother knows: despite whatever evidence, she knew her kid was different than the rest. And then? It was not as if anyone gasped or startled or even made much of a sound. But as she clutched Jed’s arm and hunched over the microphone, it was unmistakable. Some power was building in the room, in the way she read once that static electricity accumulates on the ground where lightning is about to strike. “Oliver?”
One of the technicians, a goateed, potbellied guy, pulled away from his station and pressed the greenish crescent of a fingernail against the glass of the screen that showed her son’s brain, the image wholly unlike the black-and-white printouts from that MRI Oliver had undergone years before. Eve could see the cerebral folds and crevices, neural activity lighting up the gray matter in real time. Professor Nickell and the other technician went silent then, and though after all her online research bouts, Eve’s knowledge of human neurology may still have only qualified as amateur, she knew what she was looking at. She believed she knew. Just a human brain, lit up and pulsing with thought. “Oh, God,” Professor Nickell said, turning to the Lovings as he considered this little window opened onto the cell where the prisoner had languished, all but forgotten. “Oh, no,” Professor Nickell added.
“Oliver,” Eve had continued into the coffee-scented microphone, trying to hold her voice steady, trying not to sob. “Oliver, brave boy, I always knew,” she said—or something like that, because then she sort of lost track of herself. She flushed, cold fire spreading across her skin. And just then it somehow seemed to Eve that Oliver would complete the transformation. As if the effect of that machine on his body would work like a mother bird beaking at the hatchling’s shell. As if Oliver might, right then, beat at the fragile eggshell his body had become, split right out of it, spread his wings. Though, of course, Oliver just lay there, beyond the window divider, shuddering as ever. But the beautiful bird was still beating its wings in the Technicolor display on the monitors, and in the three days that followed, Eve tried to accept it as miracle enough.
“The important thing to do here,” Nickell had told Eve and Jed in an unscheduled post-test meeting back in Dr. Rumble’s office, “is not to rush to any conclusions at all. We just can’t know anything, not yet. For example, it’s true, the structure is remarkably intact. Remarkable, truly, the kind of activity that we’re seeing now. But we do also see some substantial degradation to the frontal cortex, dimness in the parietal. We’re just doing brain measurements here, we aren’t equipped to do any sort of cognitive assessment. Consciousness, it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. There are degrees, and that’s what we need to figure out now.”
It seemed deliberately symbolic that as Professor Nickell delivered this opinion he occupied the armchair typically filled by Frank Rumble, the nice chesterfield by the sofa. Dr. Rumble, relegated to his distant desk, raised and lowered the slide of his bolo tie. “Degrees, right,” Dr. Rumble lamely interjected. “And likely a very small degree. I really don’t think we should be getting hopes up.”
“I wouldn’t say small and I wouldn’t say large,” Professor Nickell said. “I would say that we need to do some more extensive assessments here.”
“So Oliver was what? Just misdiagnosed?” Eve asked. “Or did something change?”
“Hard to say if anything changed, though that is certainly possible. Dr. Rumble here showed me the old fMRI results, from nearly ten years back. I think we can see some of the activity I’m seeing clearly now, even back then. But the machines were cruder in those days, and it’s hard to know for sure.”
“I don’t understand this then,” Eve told Dr. Rumble. “You told me he was gone, Frank. Just his reptile brain, you said.”
Dr. Rumble emitted a long sigh. “The fact is, we still just don’t know.”
Eve had to fold her hands to keep from choking the doctor with his ridiculous necktie. Incompetence! Did she actually say the word? The evil of your incompetence! And yet, even then Eve knew the true nature of the combustion happening in her chest: years ago, even Frank Rumble had brought up the idea of a second opinion, though in his dismissive, pandering tone. But Eve had never been able to bring herself to insist on other hospitals, other tests.
“Anyway,” Professor Nickell added, “I’ve already put in a call to a neuroscientist in El Paso, a brilliant woman called Marissa Ginsberg, an expert with cases like these. Dr. Ginsberg, she’s got a whole litany of tests she does, to assess just how conscious, how aware, a patient like Oliver might be. More brain scans, EEGs, a whole slew of stimulus tests. We’ve scheduled Oliver a long examination with her eight weeks from tomorrow, if you’ll agree.”
“Eight weeks?” Eve asked.
“It’s a wait, I know it,” the professor said. “Apparently, with Oliver’s insurance plan, it’s going to take that long for all the paperwork to go through.”
“It’s more than a wait,” Eve said. “It’s a travesty.” And yet Eve was too overcome with hope even to maintain an appropriate rage for the negligent doctor pouting behind his desk. She understood that even this long-fretted-over test had not proven anything conclusively. But she couldn’t help it; her hope was all that kept the blood moving through her veins.
“So what does all this even mean?” Charlie asked in the passenger seat now, after she filled him in on the basic details. “What do we do with these facts now? Eight weeks until the next test. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”
“We celebrate. We celebrate this incredible news.”