Smoke and Mirrors (15 page)

These patients were not like people with dual identity or multi-personalities or any of that sort of thing. They just had an amplified sense of what most people experienced. In the old days, that voice in your head may have been called a “conscience.” Or some could have thought it was God.

Julian Jaynes, that other expert on brain activity, had concluded that our primitive ancestors were incapable of having this internal debate of trying to sort out what is real and what is imagined. As we evolved, we learned to sort things into two distinct categories of internal (imagined) and external (real world). We also began to have “conversations in our heads.” We had discussions, arguments, parliamentary debates, polemical altercations, and ultimately intellectual and moral mud-wrestling going on up there. Or at least I did.

But I had never met my other self face to face.

He was rather calm and composed in the failing flashlight. For a right-brain creation, he seemed to have a handle on a very physical problem that involved problem solving.

The light went dead, and he spoke my name in a voice like the voice you hear when you first tape-record yourself.
That doesn't sound like me
, you say. But that is probably what you really sound like outside your own head.

Did I still think I was dreaming? I believe so. It was all a little surreal. Scary and interesting at the same time. (Like the first time I watched
The Matrix.
) The me who was not smiling, however, was considering when this dream was going to end. We were still in the damn well, and usually in a dream you flit about from one place to another. That same me was becoming fearful that I might not ever leave this strange place. I didn't want to stay at the bottom of a freaking well for the rest of my life, and I didn't know if my parents knew the right doctors who could throw down a rope.

My other self said it this way. “Simon, we have a problem here and basically only one solution. Where would you like to go?”

My left-brain me, ever so logical, suggested, “Up.”

“Good. So we need a creative solution.”

“I was hoping that's where you'd come in.”

“You trust me then?”

“I've always trusted you,” I said.

“Okay,” my twin said. “The rocks are too slippery to climb, but if we lean into each other, back to back, and brace our feet against opposite walls, we can do it.”

It seemed like a crackpot idea. “Can't I just will myself to wake?”

“It doesn't work that way,” he said.

And so, back to back, Siamese twinned, with the hamstrings of our legs tight and straining against the wall, we ascended towards the waiting arms of Queen Cassiopeia.

I woke up with a sore back and a charley horse cramp in my leg, not knowing if I had reached the surface. I wasn't even totally sure if the vivid well of my dreams had been on planet earth.

My dream had prompted only one immediate decision. I would not go to school today. My mom was already off to the front lines of the real estate wars when the phone started to ring. I could see from the call minder it was my father calling from his office. I did not want to have that conversation. So I let it ring. He could leave a message. I had detected over the years, as the tensions mounted between us all, that we communicated better with each other by leaving messages on various machines and services. I think we could have held the family together if there was always a buffer of technology between us. It usually just involved stating
the basics: who, what, where, and when. And we would leave out how and why.

Lydia had told me once that I was destined to do great things in the line of “communications.” She interpreted this to mean that I could be an anchor man on a TV news show, a diplomat who could stop wars between warring nations, possibly even the first human to communicate with aliens already living undetected amongst us. Or maybe I'd just be a guy who hooked up cable to your house so you could get all the sports channels.

Back here on earth I was never a great conversationalist. As Lydia would say, it wasn't my “time” yet.

Alone in the kitchen drinking a cup of instant coffee (three sugars, lots of milk) I thought I might just spend the day reading the backs of cereal boxes. I was that motivated. But the newspaper was sitting on the table. In it was absolutely nothing of a metaphysical or occult nature, indicating to me that the whole day would be a great disappointment. I could see the forests of gloom already growing in the hallways, the vines of foul thoughts lacing up through the floorboards.

The newspaper reminded me of the unconscious Trina, a girl I did not know and had never met. I thought we had something in common. Boy in a well, girl in a coma. At the very least I wanted to find out what she looked like.

Riding a public bus involves being stared at. The eyes pinned me with various labels.
Dope addict. Runaway. Purse snatcher. Car thief. Pervert. Generic deviant
. You didn't have to be telepathic on a bus to know who thought what about you.

Fortunately for me, I was only going to Ridgefield, a mere twenty-minute ride west on Highway 17. I got off near the Wal-Mart and walked to the public library. The woman behind the desk there saw me coming and immediately sized me up as a hormone-crazed youth who wanted to use the public Internet access for pornography. She was surprised when I asked her if there was a collection of Ridgefield High yearbooks in the library.

“Over near the fire extinguisher,” she said and pointed. I sat down beneath a portrait of Queen Elizabeth side by side with one of the presidents of the United States, an odd combo placed there as if the two were married. If so, I would have guessed it was an unsatisfactory union from the look on the queen's face. The president, meanwhile, had that familiar glazed-over look suggesting he was there but not there, as if his real thoughts were on a favoured golf game from a decade earlier, or maybe it was a look that said, “My mind has been taken over by the grey, almond-eyed ones from Tau Ceti.”

I found last year's edition of Ridgefield High's oddly named yearbook.
The Shield
had a Roman shield on the
cover and the motto “Prepared and vigilant” embossed in vinyl. Inside were all those smiling faces as if the photographer had waved a magic wand and made the students stupidly happy, as if the entire student body was this one gigantic mob of blissful teenagers headed on the bright yellow brick road towards beatific adulthood. It occurred to me that there are many kinds of lies in the world and a school yearbook is one of them.

I was not prepared for what was to be revealed to me as I turned the pages heading towards Trina's picture. The yearbook was a monument to alphabetical arrangement and the As the Bs had no surprises — pimply-faced boys and girls with last year's hairstyles. And every student was listed with his or her first, middle, and last names. That is often not a kind manoeuvre on the part of the yearbook committee, or it was perpetrated as a joke, since some of us go through life trying to ignore the fact we have middle names. Mine is Archibald, a memento to my father's grandfather, who was a miserly man who beat his son, my grandfather, until young grandpop ran away to work in lumber camp. I could hear the litany of three-part names being read at the future high school graduation by a cheerless principal, satisfied that another crop of youthful minds were about to move on. But I was not at all prepared for what I would find in the Cs.

I found her. She too was smiling. Trina Connolly. Or, as the book revealed, Trina Andrea Connolly.

With my finger holding the page, I closed the book and took a deep breath. I felt my heart race. The librarian was staring at me. I counted to ten and opened the book again.
Trina Andrea Connolly
. She looked younger, but it was unmistakably her.

I dreaded the thought of entering a hospital. My memories of my own hospital days were not my fondest. How much could I trust my own instincts on this? In some ways, it seemed clear that I was
supposed
to go to her. But maybe it was already too late. Maybe she was too far gone. So many weeks unconscious and possibly her parents were at the point of letting her go, pulling the plug on life support. Or was
that
part of why Andrea had revealed herself to me? Was I supposed to be the one to release her?

I made the mistake of entering the hospital by way of the emergency entrance and I walked in just as five car accident victims were being rushed past me. A child was screaming for her mother and blood was flowing out of her mouth. A woman, possibly the girl's mother, had a massive head wound and was unmoving, possibly dead. A man, conscious and bleeding over the eye, was strapped down and shouting something incomprehensible.

Everyone else sitting in the emergency room had a look of anguish on his or her face as this parade of human
misery passed. Everyone except for a boy of eleven or twelve who sat alone, smiling. I remembered that boy's face so clearly. It was Ozzie. The Ozzie I had known. I took two steps towards him but stopped. He saw me and stared intently, stopped smiling. I was thinking that I must be mistaken. This was not Ozzie, could not be. He began to say something. At least his lips moved, and I thought he was saying my name, but I could not hear him. I would go no closer. I turned and walked away.

The one person I was certain I could not trust to be cool on this mission was the boy walking nervously through the hospital trying to discover the location of Andrea/Trina. Whenever I passed nurses or doctors, however, I pretended to be walking purposefully.

By the elevator, I found an extremely helpful diagram of the entire building. Third floor: Intensive Care, ICU. A coma needed intensive care. The door opened and I stepped in. I pushed 3. Two doctors had charts in their hands just like on TV but they were talking about basketball, about who would win a game tonight in Seattle.

I stepped out of the elevator into the hallway and discovered I was where I wanted to be. ICU. A quick flashback of my own hospital experience didn't help. It was the smell of disinfectant in the air, the cold buzzing of fluorescent lights, the sound of hard-soled shoes on the linoleum floors. It triggered an interior shouting match between logic and intuition. Logic told me to
take a deep breath, decide this was not something I should be involved in, not anything I could handle.

Intuition (if that was the other debater) kept my feet moving forward. Right brain wins. There were ten rooms. Most had open doors. I didn't want to appear to be searching or lost or in any way conspicuous. I chose door number eight. A woman, a very old woman with tubes up her nose, lay there with eyes wide open staring straight at me as if she were expecting me. Her eyes were a piercing blue and she had great blue veins prominent on her forehead. She had only a few threads of grey-silver hair and the bones of her skull seemed ready to split open the pale skin.

Looking straight at me she held up one hand and crooked a finger. I somehow decided that what she was doing was pointing, pointing to the next room. I nodded.

I moved quickly to the neighbouring room, number six. The sound of beeping monitors. A curtain around the bed. I walked into the room and then entered the closed private space inside the curtained sanctuary.

A girl lying on her back. Motionless. A plastic mask fitted over her mouth and nose. A machine by the bed allowing her, or forcing her, to breathe. Pale skin. Eyes closed. Logic must have taken the stairs instead of the elevator and just then caught up with me here, telling me clearly and loudly:
This is not her
.

But I did not leave.

I looked up at the ceiling to clear my thoughts then back at her. I was convinced this was not the Andrea who had appeared to me. Not the girl from the yearbook.

But what would all those months in a coma do to a person?

On the night table was a photograph: a family. Mother, father, son, daughter. Outside, standing by a blossoming apple tree. The girl in the photo was most certainly Andrea. Radiant, alive. The great photographic lie of a beautiful young woman about to have the happiest of lives.

Before me, a living corpse. And now I had an overwhelming stone of sadness in my chest. The well of despair seemed to be opening up in front of me again. To stay there one more minute would mean walking the rim of that pit as it begged me to fall in.

There were voices in the room now. Hushed tones of adults talking.

When the curtains were pulled back, Andrea's parents saw this boy they had never seen before leaning over their daughter, then flinching back with a shocked look on his face.

The father spoke first. “What are you doing here?”

I tried to speak but nothing came out. I tried to frame the words in the air in front of me.

“Who are you?” the mother asked, her voice quavering with accusation in the way she pronounced the first word.

“I came to see Andrea,” I finally blurted out.

“Andrea?” She looked puzzled.

I nodded.

“No one calls her Andrea anymore.”

“Trina,” I said, correcting myself. “I came to see Trina. I'm a friend.”

Her mother studied my face. “You still call her by her middle name, her childhood name. No one has called her Andrea for a long time. From the time she was small.” It was a kind of a question, I suppose. She wanted to know why. Everyone else knew her as Trina.

“She liked it when I called her Andrea,” I said.

“I'm sorry I startled you.”

Andrea's father cleared his throat, dropping his guard. “It's just that, well, all of her other friends have stopped coming.”

“They've given up,” Andrea's mother said, dropping her head so she was looking at the floor.

“Why didn't you come to visit before this?” her father asked.

“I didn't know about her until I read the story in the paper.”

“You're not from Ridgefield.”

“No. I'm from Stockton. I'm Simon. Andrea ... Trina, was a friend of a friend.”