Daryl Gregory - Second Person, Present Tense

If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.

– Shun Ryu Suzuki

I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.

– Emo Phillips

When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl’s parents. He isn’t happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. “And here she is,” he says, like a game show host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private, encouraging wink.

The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in our previous visits, he is almost frowning, struggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother, though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It’s way over the top.

“Oh, Therese,” she says. “Are you ready to come home?”

Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking for her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.

My hand is still on the door handle. “Do I have a choice?” On paper I’m only seventeen years old. I have no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.

Therese’s mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She’s a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.

As usual, whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a soap opera and no one’s given me my lines. I look directly at Dr. S, and his face is frozen into that professional smile. Several times over the past year he’s convinced them to let me stay longer, but they’re not listening anymore. They’re my legal guardians, and they have Other Plans. Dr. S looks away from me, rubs the side of his nose.

“That’s what I thought,” I say.

The father scowls. The mother bursts into fresh tears, and she cries all the way out of the building. Dr. Subramaniam watches from the entrance as we drive away, his hands in his pockets. I’ve never been so angry with him in my life-all two years of it.

The name of the drug is Zen, or Zombie, or just Z. Thanks to Dr. S I have a pretty good idea of how it killed Therese.

“Flick your eyes to the left,” he told me one afternoon. “Now glance to the right. Did you see the room blur as your eyes moved?” He waited until I did it again. “No blur. No one sees it.”

This is the kind of thing that gets brain doctors hot and bothered. Not only could no one see the blur, their brains edited it out completely. Skipped over it-left view, then right view, with nothing between-then fiddled with the person’s time sense so that it didn’t even seem missing.

The scientists figured out that the brain was editing out shit all the time. They wired up patients and told them to lift one of their fingers, move it any time they wanted. Each time, the brain started the signal traveling toward the finger up to 120 milliseconds before the patient consciously decided to move it. Dr. S said you could see the brain warming up right before the patient consciously thought, now.

This is weird, but it gets weirder the longer you think about it. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The conscious mind-the “I” that’s thinking, hey, I’m thirsty, I’ll reach for that cold cup of water-hasn’t really decided anything. The signal to start moving your hand has already traveled halfway down your arm by the time you even realize you are thirsty. Thought is an afterthought. By the way, the brain says, we’ve decided to move your arm, so please have the thought to move it.

The gap is normally 120 milliseconds, max. Zen extends this minutes. Hours.

If you run into somebody who’s on Zen, you won’t notice much. The person’s brain is still making decisions, and the body still follows orders. You can talk to the them, and they can talk to you. You can tell each other jokes, go out for hamburgers, do homework, have sex.

But the person isn’t conscious. There is no “I” there. You might as well be talking to a computer. And two people on Zen-“you” and “I”-are just puppets talking to puppets.

It’s a little girl’s room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and window sills, shoulder to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hair brushes and bottles of nail polish. Pin-ups from Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league gymnastics medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled “I Promise . . .” exhorting Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who she’d been, who she was supposed to become.

I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread-they’ve been re-sewn, maybe more than once.

Therese’s father sets down the pitifully small bag that contains everything I’ve taken from the hospital: toiletries, a couple of changes of clothes, and five of Dr. S’s books. “I guess old Boo Bear was waiting for you,” he says.

“Boo W. Bear.”

“Yes, Boo W!” It pleases him that I know this. As if it proves anything. “You know, your mother dusted this room every week. She never doubted that you’d come back.”

I have never been here, and she is not coming back, but already I’m tired of correcting pronouns. “Well, that was nice,” I say.

“She’s had a tough time of it. She knew people were talking, probably holding her responsible-both of us, really. And she was worried about them saying things about you. She couldn’t stand them thinking that you were a wild girl.”

“Them?”

He blinks. “The Church.”

Ah. The Church. The term carried so many feelings and connotations for Therese that months ago I stopped trying to sort them out. The Church was the red-brick building of the Davenport Church of Christ, shafts of dusty light through rows of tall, glazed windows shaped like gravestones. The Church was God and the Holy Ghost (but not Jesus-he was personal, separate somehow). Mostly, though, it was the congregation, dozens and dozens of people who’d known her since before she was born. They loved her, they watched out for her, and they evaluated her every step. It was like having a hundred overprotective parents.

I almost laugh. “The Church thinks Therese was wild?”

He scowls, but whether because I’ve insulted the Church or because I keep referring to his daughter by name, I’m not sure. “Of course not. It’s just that you caused a lot of worry.” His voice has assumed a sober tone that’s probably never failed to unnerve his daughter. “You know, the Church prayed for you every week.”

“They did?” I do know Therese well enough to be sure this would have mortified her. She was a pray-er, not a pray-ee.

Therese’s father watches my face for the bloom of shame, maybe a few tears. From contrition it should have been one small step to confession. It’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.