He moves jerkily, tightly wound energy making it hard for him to sit still. At last, he plops himself down cross-legged on his mattress and folds back the pages of the journal in his hands. He reads aloud: “Brownstein’s team at University College London have demonstrated effective use of a specialized MRI to directly modulate gamma wave activity. They’ve identified three key activation points thought to provide strong neurological correlates of consciousness, suggesting that consciousness may continue to exist in patients previously considered unconscious, albeit in a form that is not able to interact with the outside world. They describe this state as Disconnected Consciousness.
“In one case, the team successfully manipulated the cytoelectric activity of a patient in a persistent vegetative state, fine-tuning their network stability at a subcellular level to restore them to wakefulness. The team hopes that this will one day become a significant new treatment for certain classes of coma patient.”
“So?” I say.
“Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“Disconnected consciousness. That’s us! Which means there’s a cure; they can bring us back.”
I take the journal and read it again. “It’s a research paper,” I say. “It’ll take years to get approved as a treatment, you know that.”
Chiu shakes his head. “Not if we go there and find this machine.”
I glance at Farah but I can’t read her expression.
“Go there?”
“To London,” Chiu says. “University College London.”
“How are we supposed to do that? We’re passed out somewhere in the ordinary world. You’re in the hospital. I’m probably still on the street.”
“We go there in this world,” Chiu explains.
A weak, unconvincing laugh escapes my lips. Is it possible I saw this coming? The sense of dread that followed me back here, is this what it was about?
“We can’t go to London,” I say. “There’s no trains or buses, we don’t have a car.”
“We’ll walk.”
“You’re not serious,” I say. “You want to walk to London?”
“It’s not too far,” Chiu insists.
Panic flutters in my chest. He’s serious. I wish Farah would say something, tell him how ridiculous he’s being. I think about how awful it felt in the day room, the windows exposed to that unthinking sky, and try to imagine what it would be like to try to walk all the way to London.
“There’s something wrong with the outside, you know that,” I say. I gesture at the walls around us. “You’re sleeping in the only windowless room in the building and now you think we’re going to walk to London?”
Chiu stares defiantly at me. “We’ll be OK.”
“And what do you think you’re going to do when you get there? There’s no electricity in this world. You can’t use an MRI without electricity.”
A flicker of doubt crosses Chiu’s face. “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”
I shake my head. “It’s not happening, Chiu.” I don’t like being mean to him but I want to squash this idea before it goes too far.
I imagine Farah’s already had this argument with him but she wanted him to hear it from me. I watch Chiu’s face tighten with disappointment and I start to feel sorry for him. It’s easy to forget how young he is. He wraps it up in reading science journals and being ridiculously clever, but inside he’s just a scared little boy who misses his parents.
“You’re going to be OK,” I say, more softly. “We all are. The doctors are taking care of us. They said you’re going to recover, remember? You could wake up at any moment.”
Chiu is silent for a moment, then he says: “What if they’re wrong?”
FIFTEEN
I offer Chiu a game of chess to make up for being mean and afterwards we all play Uno, but none of us are in the mood. Talk of going outside has shaken me. I’ve become attached to our safe little hideaway in the library.
Stuck here just like I was stuck at home.
Later, Chiu announces that he’s going to the day room to look for more games. After he’s gone, I expect Farah to bawl me out for being so hard on him, but she says nothing. Instead, she carries on reading her book, which she found that morning in the tiny fiction section of the library. I lie on my mattress, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember what happened on the morning of my seizure. I picture our little house with the dining table in the kitchen. But there’s nothing to anchor the memory to that particular morning, all my mornings are alike and washing into each other.
“Listen … about Chiu’s idea—” Farah says.
I sit up on my elbow and turn to her. “I should have been gentler with him, I’m sorry.”
“I think we should go.”
I stare at her for a second. “You’re not serious.”
“I am.”
“How? It’s, like, a hundred miles to London.”
“Ninety-two,” Farah says, matter-of-factly. “Walking will take a week. Ten days tops. Chiu found a map in the patient library. I checked: we can follow the A5 all the way down and cross over the M25—”
“Wait, wait, stop.”
