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The exhaust of a late-winter thaw piping through. It's time: air suffused with fresh compost and drying radiator fluid. Little spasmodic jerks of warmth. Unborn buds restless beneath a frosted earth. The smell of approaching allergies and their corresponding meds. A great decrystallization.
A week has passed since Theo delivered me to the hospital. The first three days were something of a customized hell. A breathless, smudged-out series of waits punctuated by apoplectic whumps from the furnace churning in the basement and intermittent doctors' rounds ― a whirl of checklisted adjustments and obligatory questions. In and out. Every detail seemed a cruel mockery: the cramped treatment room with its crooked, mounted television and girly wallpaper; the wrist-pinching ID bracet; the paper towel-textured gowns that only tie from the back, requiring a Houdini-like ambidexterity I hopelessly lacked; the trays of re-microwaved pork-patties and soggy carrot sticks whose olfactory memory makes me seethe with nausea.
All very grim.
Mercifully, on the fourth day I was moved to a different facility, a recovery ward in quiet Buford County. It's restful here. Patients wheeling about in the sun-lit foyer or simply perched in repose. A sense of monastic timelessness permeates the old manor, the aged brick, the cloisterlike halls, the arched doorways. Through my window you can see a handsome quadrangle of snow-flecked forestry gleaming in the evenings with a clamshell-pink varnish. Soon it will be Spring.
Theo has been spent nearly all his time here with me, the angel. Mostly he just sits and reads, occasionally gives me little hand massages. Other times he lets me school him in elementary neurobiology, which, I've learned, is really the only thing I know how to talk about. He's hopelessly bad at the techy stuff ― nothing sticks. We both agree he should be studying philosophy or something where you don't have to do any actual work.
Of the few items that manage to remain in his head for very long, most of them are confirmations or denials of various neurocentric factoids he'd accumulated over the years. Yes, it's true that the human brain is the most complexly organized form of matter in the known universe ― a typical brain contains over one-hundred-billion nerve cells, each promiscuously converging with thousands of others. No, it's false that we only use 10% of our potential brain power ― this was a rumor propagated by self-help charlatans as a tool to attract consumers into buying "memory enhancement" products. Yes, amnesia, multiple-personality syndrome and hysterical blindness are real phenomena. No, it is not possible to bend spoons or stimulate plant growth through remote prayer.
"Huh," he says, because it is good to know these things, and nods.
One thing Theo seems to find infinitely amusing during these little tutorials is the frequency of gardening references. For instance, an infant is born with an abundance of connections in her brain ― too many, in fact, to handle maintaining a coherent picture of the world. What happens over the first few months is a process called "pruning," wherein the baby's neurons trim themselves to custom fit the sights and sounds from outside. Then there's "sprouting." Learning and the formation of memories trigger the growth of new connections between neurons. The cells extend their arms to other cells to form novel synapses.
"That's happening right now," Theo says, taking my hand in his. "Connections sprouting."
Another thing that seems to be sprouting is something within me, a prolonged state of awareness, an interleaving of perspective between the moments of my days. I now see that since my father's death ― or what I believed to be his death ― I've been living in a kind of listless purgatorium, trance-like, a Sleepwalker of my own kind. My life had become a life skimmed, full blocks of text unread, unconsidered. Thumbed through and tossed. How quickly events whoosh into periphery and dissolve like a cyanotype! Now became Then with increasing speed and fervor. No wonder I was trying to distill the coordinates of consciousness; I identified more with machines than with human beings. Or perhaps even more with my dying father, his existence nibbled and gnawed to the frey.
But I am neither dying nor dead.
This is my revelation. That we, the living, are conscious in a way nothing else can be. I could program 0s and 1s into a computer ad infinitum to work out the exact functions of the digestive system, but it would never be able to digest; likewise, even if there were a single algorithim underlying all of consciouness, no software could ever itself be aware, because computations are descriptive, not causal.
The whole point of a program is that it can be assembled with anything ― vaccum tubes, punch-cards, bits, tinkertoys, whatever. Programs don't know and don't care what they're made of. They exist in precisely the manner that numbers do ― whether you count apples or fingers or pebbles on an abacus, they are performing the same symbolic function. But consciousness is not an abstraction of some other thing ― it is the thing, and it makes no more sense to explain love or desire to a computer than it does to describe the color red to a blind person. What I'm saying is that anything that does not have a uterus cannot understand the feeling of wanting a child the same way ― it's untranslateable.
Today I am 31 years old and this is one of the things I know.
Another is that I am not a genius; I do not need to be. The fact that Einstein's brain is preserved in a vat does not retroactively make the life he lived a less miserable one. Also, I am flawed; indeed, teeming with contradictions. I sometimes forget to recycle and in fact sometimes deliberately choose not to for no reason. I harbor erotic feelings for boys of questionable age. I sometimes drink way too much gin, and continue to drink even after the point where I tell myself, enough and despite the fact that I love my beautiful little cortex and want the best for the old girl and there are only so many nerve cells and each time I do it I kill more and more. I am manifestly vain; there is no end to my primping and preening and yeah okay I know this ain't a crime but enough is enough. My heart double-times with fear when I am alone in elevators with men of darker complexion than my own. I read fashion magazines while believing them to be injurious to the collective esteem of womankind. And I am so very wasteful ― look at me with the paper towels and the bathwater.
But watch me dance! See the electric crossweave of synaptic pulses, oscillations too grand to be imagined. If Freewill is an illusion ― and it is ― then I will not allow myself to be twice deceived. No; inertia, that petulant bedfellow, that feral phantom, will not get the better of me. I will tear into the future and unroll in loops. I will grasp and tug. I will probe and palpate. I will dig and furrow without surcease. And I will find my father.
For now, though, I lay low.
Tonight, the air is rich with February. Through the window, crimson thunderheads stream into a dell of silver trees.
Another irony: only now that I know my father may be alive do I feel ready to accept his death. Indeed, I have never felt so close to him. Can feel him guiding me. Could it be that one can absorb another ― learn so intimately the patterns of thought and action, the rubato rhythms of speech, the folds and smalls of character ― that he be reborn, recreated in one's breast? Is this how souls, finally, achieve transcendence? Through the skein of memory in others?