Stay Awake (8 page)

The television had been turned off for a while now, its gray face blank and neutral.
If there was consciousness
, he thought; if there was consciousness, even if there was some rudimentary consciousness, the head would be asleep, under anesthesia. It would not be aware of the moment in which the blood supply stopped, the oxygen cut off, the brain cells began to shut down.

The room was dark but he could see something trembling on the ceiling. A piece of light, a reflection, quivering like a leaf on the surface of a pond. He moved his fingers, then his toes. He could feel the screws that held the halo crown to his skull, and he knew that once his condition had stabilized he would have to begin rehabilitation; that would have to be discussed at some point, once the situation with Rosalie was resolved.

His life had started out pleasantly enough. He and his sister growing up uneventfully in a suburb of Chicago, moving dutifully through elementary school and middle school and high school and college and finding jobs not far from their parents, who had then died abruptly when Zach and Monica were in their early twenties. Their father, a heart attack in his car, in the parking lot outside of the little strip-mall office where he’d had a dentistry
practice. Their mother, about six months later, in the same car, sitting in the garage of their old childhood house with the engine running.

It was not something he liked to think about. “You should get a little therapy,” Monica had said. “I’ve found it very helpful, just to talk about my feelings, and sort of put everything in perspective,” and he agreed that it sounded like it would be a good idea and he’d visited a mental-health professional who had given him some medication, temporary medication, which had basically been enough. Shortly thereafter he had met Amber and they had fallen in love and gotten married and his life had moved back onto the track; they had their honeymoon in Scotland and they’d bought a house and two cars, and they’d worked fastidiously to pay off their student loans and mortgage and tried to save a little for the future.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future
. He had read that somewhere, but it came to him like a voice speaking from the back of his mind, and he shuddered. The titanium pins that held his halo traction in place, the pins that had been drilled into the skull above his ears, felt like they’d loosened a little. It was as if he could sense them twisting and untwisting.

He fingered a buzzer that would call a nurse to help him, but didn’t press it. What did he need help for? He could feel the nipple of the button beneath his thumb.

He was remembering an article he had read on the Internet about the transplantation of heads. In 1970, Dr. Robert White first successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto
another monkey’s body. It lived for several days, paralyzed from the neck down but aware. Eating. Following people with its eyes. Sometimes trying to bite.

He came alert abruptly and the nurse was leaning over him. She looked surprised, drew back abruptly.

“Mr. Dixon,” she said, and adjusted her nurse’s hat, which looked a little like a paper boat. “Mr. Dixon,” she breathed, and he felt the pinch of an injection. “You shouldn’t be up at this hour,” she murmured, and then she began to hum to him. An old lullaby he thought he remembered, the whispered words barely audible, coming as if from a great distance.

… while the moon … drifts in the skies … stay awake … don’t close … your … eyes.…

And then suddenly morning sun was streaming into the room. The morning, and Amber appeared, backlit against the window with a rind of light around her.

“Is—?” Zach heard himself whisper. “Dead?”

It was the first thing that he thought of, the first word that his lips formed. He couldn’t see her expression, but he felt fairly certain. “Dead?” he whispered, and she came forward and bent down and the features of her face came into focus.

“No,” Amber said. Her face was pinched and her eyes were lit and fierce, in the way of a marathon runner, or an all-night gambler. Her lips drew back and she showed her teeth but it was too exhausted and intense to be a smile. “She’s alive,” Amber said. “She made it through. She—”

He watched as her eyes scoped along the edges of his traction, the halo crown and the metal bars that ran past his ears and attached
to the vest at his shoulders; the web of rope and pulleys that held his legs suspended—as if she had noticed for the first time.

“It’s not—as they expected,” she said at last.

Rosalie’s condition was described as
serious but stable
.

After the surgery, she had been given barbiturates, which put her into a beneficial pharmacologically induced coma. Over the course of several days, she would be slowly weaned from the drugs, and this, it was hoped, would help to reestablish normal blood flow. Her heart was accustomed to beating faster to pump out more blood for the second head, and now it had to learn to pump more slowly. Otherwise, she was likely to have heart failure. In her bassinet in intensive care, you could see the scar that ran along the top of her head, the seam over which skin had been folded over and closed. Zach had not actually seen Rosalie since the operation, but Amber had brought photos for him to look at. One of the pictures had been taken by a photographer for the Associated Press, and had gone out over the wire service to news outlets across the world. It was probably the most flattering of the photographs. In it, Rosalie appeared to be sleeping blissfully, her eyelashes like little feathers.

The doctors were said to be
cautiously optimistic
. At the same time, they reported to the media, “Rosalie’s survival of the operation was a big achievement in itself.”

“I’ll just have to take everything one step at a time,” Amber told him as she sat there by his bedside. “Get through one thing and then worry about the next thing. Right? Isn’t that the way life goes?”

“Yes,” he said. He was elevated into a sitting position, and Amber was spooning small cubes of gelatin into his mouth. Occasionally she would wipe his lip with a napkin. “That’s right,” he said, though he didn’t like it that she said “I” instead of “we.”

“We’ll get through it,” he said. His voice croaky, tiny. “We’ll …”

Behind Amber, the nurse poked her head into the room from the doorway and peered in. Checking, he guessed, to see if Amber was still there. He watched as the nurse paused and observed them for a moment, then withdrew.

“I know that it’s going to be touch-and-go for the next few months,” Amber was saying. “For the next few years, probably. It might be premature to say anything, but I just feel like …”

“I know,” Zach said. “I know what you mean. I haven’t even had time to think much about my own situation. I imagine I’ll have to start rehab soon, and then I’ll eventually be able to help more, instead of just—”

“Mmm,” Amber said. Her eyes rested distractedly upon his hand, and he made an effort to flex his fingers. “Mmm,” she said. “Yes, well …”

“—instead of just lying here.”

“Everything will be fine,” she said, and gave him a firm, noncommittal stare. “Why can’t it all be fine? I mean, it’s a miracle she lived through the surgery and we should just be grateful for that, and then whatever else happens … we don’t have any control over that.…”

“Right,” Zach said. “Of course.” He watched as she put the spoon down on the tray, next to the empty gelatin container.

They were silent. They were both looking forward—momentarily,
looking forward very cautiously—thinking about the possibility of life together with a living child. Zach was aware that they were probably considering some of the same images in their minds.

For example, Rosalie walking for the first time. Rosalie’s uncertain feet, her arms held out, Rosalie wearing one of those bell-shaped dresses that little girls wear. Or, for example, Rosalie starting kindergarten. Her hair would be long enough to cover the scar on her scalp—it wouldn’t even be noticeable—and she would carry a lunch box and backpack and there would be certain cartoon characters that she liked, certain favorite books and songs. She would have her own personality at that point.

They were still silent. Of course it was bad luck to say any of these things, probably bad luck even to think about them.

Amber tapped her knuckle against the fiberglass vest across his chest. It was a weary but gently playful gesture, Zach thought. Partly, it was meant to bring good luck, like knocking on wood. Partly it meant: I can’t really think of anything else to say at the moment. “Well,” she said. “I guess—”

“Sure,” he said. “You better get going.”

They both tried out a smile, experimentally. But it felt a little dangerous to be smiling, and they stopped almost at once. As if their greedy sense of hope might be spotted—and punished?!—by some stern Higher Power.

After Amber left, Zach lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling.
It will be okay
, he thought. It was all going to be fine. He tried again to picture them—himself, Amber, baby Rosalie—in the future. Standing in the backyard, beside the tree with the old
swing. All three of them smiling. He could see it as if someone had taken a photograph.

He would undergo rehabilitation, and eventually, after a struggle, he would walk again. Perhaps there would always be a limp, he thought.

And even if his body didn’t ever start to work again, at least his brain continued on. Right? He still had his mind, and really wasn’t the flesh just a container, a shell that you inhabited?

Back when he was spending his nights on the Internet, he had come across a long article about astral projection. According to some philosophies, the self existed outside of the physical body. There were many religions that believed the soul could lift away, a noncorporeal version of your mind could rise up from the tether of muscle and skin and bone and blood and float off on its own.

Its own journey.

People who experienced astral travel reported that it seemed to happen from a vantage point such as high in the sky looking down. Astral travel was frequently reported by people who had near-death experiences, in which they could view themselves from above, watching themselves as hospital staff worked on their bodies. Frederik van Eeden presented one of the first studies of out-of-body dreams to the Society of Psychical Research in 1913, and he described a “silver thread” that connected his projected self to his sleeping physical form.

“In these lucid dreams,” van Eeden wrote, “the reintegration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect
awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition.”

Zach didn’t know whether he believed in this or not, but he thought that there must be—well,
something
—

There was a snail track of sweat moving down the back of his neck, leaving an insistent itch in its wake.

Outside the window, in the parking lot, there was a female clown holding a bouquet of blue and pink helium balloons, each with a cartoon face printed on it. He watched as the woman stood there, flipping through a small notebook. The balloons were revolving upon the axis of their strings, the smiling faces slowly rotating, facing his window and then turning away in a slow circle.

Zach was aware of the sound of a small voice calling to him, a sound in the back of his mind, and then another trickle down the back of his neck, an odd feeling in his hair, like the ticklish legs of an insect. Movement.

Why do people
, he thought. He was thinking of something that Amber had asked him once, right after the baby was born.

Why do people want to have babies?
she had said, her eyes upon him heavily.
What does a baby have that we want from it?

Well, he had said. It’s … it’s part of life. It’s …

She had been going through a kind of depression, postpartum depression, he thought, she wasn’t herself—and they were driving along the interstate; he was behind the wheel and there was that feeling you have when the car is just an extension of your body, when you are at least partially a machine and your movements are also the automobile’s movements and he was
both listening and not listening; part of him was talking to her and part of him was watching the road, steering.

All the babies in the world
, she was saying.
All the babies that need homes and we had to create another one. It’s greedy, isn’t it? Avaricious and acquisitive. We had to have a baby of our own, right? No one else’s—it’s got to be ours, only ours. Isn’t that what it is?

No, he said. No, of course not. There’s nothing … avaricious … about it. It’s about being in love … and you want to … create something that no one else can create, right? And … it’s biological. It’s normal to want to have a baby.

Is it?
she said, and she looked at him for a long moment and he could feel it but he was also watching the traffic. He didn’t want to look her in the eyes, in any case.

Then she seemed to lose herself in thought—perhaps to forget what she had been talking about, or dismiss it, or else it vanished along with the majority of her depression after she got some prescriptions. In any case, they never spoke of it again.

But he had thought of it, later, considered it from time to time over the ensuing months as the drama of their deformed baby had played itself out, and now he found himself remembering it once again.

Why do people want babies?
he thought, and of course there were the usual things. Urges.

You want a child because it is a piece of yourself that will live on after you are dead. That is one answer.

You want a child because it is a specific kind of love, a specific kind of experience of love that you feel certain can’t be replicated in any other way. The way your parents loved or failed to love you, for example.

You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.