Читать книгу The Quick - Laura Spinney - Страница 5

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At the top of the screen was a cartoon apple; at the bottom a pear. In between, travelling from left to right, a thread-thin waveform. It was spiky in places and somewhat irregular, but the overall motion was of a sort of languid undulation – hypnotic, potentially, if one watched it for long enough. This, the professor explained, was a readout of his slow cortical potentials, a form of brain activity about which very little was known, except that it seemed to arise spontaneously within the grey matter in the instant preceding any thought or action. Normally, one wasn’t aware of it. But it was possible, with hard work, to gain control over it; to wield it as an extra limb and make it do your will.

He asked me which fruit I preferred and I told him. ‘Now watch,’ he said, and like a whip the wave leapt up out of its resting place and lashed the apple-shaped icon, causing it to disappear. I glanced at his hands, which had remained neatly and conspicuously folded in his lap, and laughed. I asked him how long he had been practising.

‘Oh, a couple of months,’ he said, his cheeks glowing with pleasure and the mental effort of executing that trivial action. As he spoke, his large, elegant hands on which the veins stood out proud and blue acted out what he was telling me. ‘To begin with, I had to conjure up certain mental images to get the wave to move the way I wanted. I remembered a circus that came one summer to my grandmother’s village. I was the ringmaster, wielding my whip, and those…’ he wagged a disapproving finger at the icons on the screen, ‘… those were a couple of bolshie lions. Or I thought about the local farmer raising his rifle, waiting for the she-wolf to move into his sights, squeezing the trigger, bullseye! It was hard work, every evening I’d go home with a headache. But slowly, slowly it got easier. Now I manipulate that wave as easily as lifting my arm, or breathing. I don’t think about it. And these days, I hardly make any errors.’

In place of the fruit the letters A and B now appeared on the screen. Again I chose and this time, to show off his neural dexterity, Mezzanotte persuaded the wave to rise slowly and steadily towards the A, until it glanced off the foot of it, nudging it gently into oblivion.

‘What you have here,’ he went on, unnecessarily, since I had already grasped its significance, ‘is a simple method of communication.’ He pressed a button so that two banks of letters now appeared at the top and bottom of the screen. Each bank contained half the alphabet. ‘Each time I select a bank it halves, until I’m left with the letter I want. Gradually, by this method, I can construct a word.’

He added that what I was seeing was actually an early prototype. He had a more advanced model, into which he had built sophisticated features such as a dictionary, a thesaurus and a mode for predicting the word from the first few letters typed. My mind raced ahead. ‘So someone who has lost the power of speech, due to a stroke, say, or a road accident… motor neurone disease –’

‘– someone whose output pathways are irreparably damaged,’ Mezzanotte interrupted me, ‘assuming of course they have something to say, could bypass the inert tongue or larynx and communicate via these brainwaves. All she would need would be the equipment. No dutiful secretary sitting by the bed, trying to make sense of her nods and grunts. Just willpower, a little mental application and a computer.’

‘But Professor, it’s brilliant. How did you –’ I broke off, having just noticed his use of the feminine pronoun, and glanced at him. ‘You already have a volunteer?’

Gripping a bunch of wires with one hand, he tore the suction pads off his forehead with a series of loud pops, stood up and strode out into that sea of carpet, where he began to stride up and down. I twisted in my chair to keep him in my sights.

‘Once I’d shown the system could work, the next step was to find a subject,’ he was saying. ‘So I sat down to write out a list of my requirements. I discounted at a stroke all those whose insult has left them with some residual motor function, who can mumble or blink or point. That type of patient can make their basic needs understood, and rather like a Spanish speaker in Italy, it makes them lazy. They don’t need to bother with my wires and waves and bolshie lions, the thought of which will quite literally make their heads ache. No, the patient who puts the Mind-Reading Device through its paces must be completely paralysed. She must be unable to nod, to signal yes or no, food or water, pleasure or pain. She is mute, and utterly dependent on those who care for her. Nurses dress her, machines feed her. In fact, you might say she has lost all dignity. She must be a quick learner, ideally young. Above all, she must understand my instructions and appreciate the rewards her efforts will bring.’

I thought for a moment. ‘Paralysed, but her intellect intact… a prisoner…’

He crossed the room rapidly towards me, resting one hand on the back of my chair and narrowing his eyes as he looked down at me. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Sarah, how many patients fit that bill.’

I completed the thought: ‘And how few of them we ever hear about.’ Mezzanotte nodded, smiled, and resumed his seat behind the desk.

I had seen some of those patients, shut away in back bedrooms or, if the families had money, in care homes in dismal seaside resorts. There were more and more of them, kept alive by modern technology. For the most part they led pathetic lives, cared for by relatives who saw them as nothing but a nuisance. Those whose families still held out hope of a cure were rare indeed. When you found one, they were usually against all experimentation. They were afraid it would be too taxing for the patient, or raise false hopes.

The professor continued. He had been searching for a suitable subject for months, in vain, when he had received a letter. The woman who wrote it said she was at her wits’ end. Her daughter had been lying in hospital for a decade, without lifting a finger or uttering a word. The doctors had so far been unable to do anything for her, but she and her husband continued to hope for a cure, or at least a partial recovery. They were prepared to wait for as long as it took, but matters had been taken out of their hands when, a few months earlier, the girl’s husband had announced his intention to draw the family’s ordeal to a close, and end her life. This outcome the mother would resist ‘with her last breath’. She had written to Mezzanotte in desperation, on the strength of his reputation alone, to beg him to find a way to help her daughter before it was too late.

The ground had been prepared for me, he went on. A technician in the department had offered his services. The doctors at the hospital had been briefed, the nursing staff was standing by. The team was assembled, all except for one member, in many ways the most important. He paused for effect. ‘As I see it, you will be the hub of the wheel, and the rest of us the spokes. It will be your responsibility to oversee the patient’s training, to observe her responses and adjust the schedule accordingly. You will relay her needs to us and we’ll tweak the device to accommodate them. That way, it will develop in parallel with her. If everything goes according to plan, I predict that this young woman, who has not spoken for ten years, will be chattering away in a matter of months. Weeks, even.’

My heart was racing. With a pretence of nonchalance I got up and strolled towards the bookshelves that lined one wall to confront a row of thick tomes: a medical dictionary, Gray’s Anatomy, a slimmer volume written by the professor, entitled simply, Perchance to Dream. A patient who had been shut off from the world for a decade and to whom we might now restore the power of speech, I said to myself with a little tremor of excitement. If we gave a voice to her, what was to stop us doing the same for hundreds, perhaps thousands of others? What insights she could offer us. What potential there was for learning about the effects of paralysis on the brain, the rearrangements in its structure and function, the compensation, recruitment of previously redundant areas, changes in sensory function, personality, consciousness… the possibilities were endless. And yet, it seemed already as if the opportunity were slipping through my fingers. There was too much work for me at the hospital, and my assistants were not yet experienced enough to deal with the harder cases. I would never get permission to manage an intensive training routine such as this patient would undoubtedly need, especially if she was far away. At best, I envisaged a long return trip each day; at worst, I would have to find accommodation close to her, and that would mean requesting several months’ leave. But I hadn’t been in my post long enough to have earned a sabbatical. Was I really to be offered the most interesting case of my career to date, just as my duties became so onerous as to rule it out?

I heard a drawer open and close, and looked back at the professor, whose hands were now resting on a piece of paper. I sauntered back towards him. Playing for time, I asked him again who the patient was. DL, he called her, using the convention in the medical literature of referring to patients in single case studies by their initials alone. And having delivered this tiny morsel of information, as if it should be enough to satisfy me, he settled back in his chair, pressed his fingertips together and brought his quizzical gaze to rest on me. I lowered my eyes. It had never occurred to me that I would have to choose between the professor and the job I had always dreamed of. I felt torn between my loyalty to him, my desire to help him and to be a party to the glorious climax of his career, and my love of the job he had, to a certain extent, groomed me for.

‘Is she far away?’ I asked, quietly.

I heard him pick up the paper he had been guarding from my sight, and push it across the desk towards me. I raised my eyes and saw that it was a typed, formal letter of consent. From the two short paragraphs of text printed there, the name of our hospital leapt out at me. I blinked at it, barely understanding what it meant.

‘She’s been under your nose all this time,’ he said, and laughed.