Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I gave my faithful transcript. I told them about his face, his mouth, his eyes, his clawed hand. I told them about the sound he had made, syllables beyond guessing. I told about the doctor's hedge. Dr. Ressler listened for physiological signs, Todd for any scrap that might spell forgiveness. Would it have happened without his mistake? Unanswerable, but we gave the rest of the night over to it. I couldn't think of sleep, and so sat up the remaining hours with them. In the morning I went directly to the branch, as I had before after long nights in circumstances that would never arise again.

I spent the day combing our modest collection, reading everything I could find on brain damage. I learned that a third of a million Americans suffer cerebral vascular accidents each year. I learned that the word derived from the stroke of God's hand. I learned that Jimmy's injury would unfold in its own way, a way research could not fix.

I found a text on the subject, reasonably up-to-date, although the pace of the field consigned all texts to the pyre every two years. The chapter on stroke recovery was a rationalist's nightmare: people who could see a sofa, walk around it, and give its name, but couldn't say how the thing was used. People who had no trouble explicating "Jack kissed Jill" but who were hopelessly gutted by "Jill was kissed by Jack." People whose right hemispheres didn't know what their lefts were doing. People in every other way intact, day after day unable to recognize their own spouses' faces.

Some accounts went beyond science fiction. I read of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad man who had a three-foot rod blasted through his head. He lived for twelve years, intelligence unimpaired, capable of speech, memory, and reason, but with no emotional control. I read of a woman whose one hand tried to strangle her unless fought off by her other. I read of people who could not recall anything from before their accident or who could not learn anything after. I read of a concert pianist who could play the most complex concerti from memory yet who could not point to middle C.

There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia, loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing, and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything a person possessed could be taken away. I read of people who could grasp numerals but not numbers, who could define the word "pig" but couldn't recognize one, who could write complex ideas but couldn't make out what they'd written. There were patterns too bizarre to warrant names: the sixty-seven-year-old stricken into thirteen years of fastidious silence only to be awakened at age eighty by a train whistle's sixth-chord that launched him into a popular tune from the year of his wedding, a half century before. Minds reduced to a vacant stare worked their way back into replicas of their former state. Massive paralytics rose up and walked, showing no trace other than a shuffle or droop of one eyelid. Others, only grazed by God's swipe, lived for years masking incapacities they themselves failed to suspect. I grabbed at every slight ray of optimism. Children's brains could rewire, recover from blows that would wipe out mature adults. Jimmy's gentleness might indicate a saving persistence of child's wiring. Recovery was above normal in left-handed people, and higher still in lefties who had been forced into the right-hander's world. I'd seen Jimmy type, lift, carry, write, and wave hundreds of times, but I could not for life remember with which hand.

I was so high-strung that I even found, hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits from a well-placed lesion. Violent personalities woke from apoplexy as loving as a newborn. Pasteur's massive stroke altered his work for the better. Dostoyevsky's visionary power followed from lifelong epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing except that no one could predict injury's outcome. No one knew much about the brain at all, let alone Jimmy's. The hierarchy had too many subsystems for the loss of any piece to be understood. My only question — would it still be Jimmy inside the destroyed case? — dissolved in qualified statistics. By evening I found myself guiltily hoping for the kinder, comprehensive solution.

I went back to MOL after work. Todd stood in the computer room, source of the catastrophe, scrutinizing my face as if, at panel edge, overlooked by everyone, he might find some hint of horror's miracle waiting to flame. Nothing I could report helped. My friends had news of their own, a wrinkle more pressing than Jimmy's prognosis. The hospital DP operatives — Todd's and Ressler's opposites at that immense institution — processing Jimmy's numbers, revealed that his coverage had not yet been reinstated.

"His mother called."

"How is she?"

Todd shrugged nervously; care had to be rationed, focused to a point. "She's either the emblem of strength or doesn't realize what's happened. She says the hospital needs proof of alternate ability to pay."

The man I'd seen the night before would need feeding, clothing, changing, constant surveillance, and a year of slow, expensive therapy that might come to nothing. An after-tremor could surface with the next clock tick. The hospital staff discovered the billing irregularity and served notice in under forty-eight hours: thus health science, the keepers of the human spark, in the Information Age.

Disaster (continued)

A part of Jimmy's brain had dissolved in the hemorrhage faster than a sugar cube in coffee. His was near one extreme of a spectrum of tissue failure. At the other, the best anyone gets away with is a steady evaporation beginning in late teens, racking up thousands of neurons a day, making every aspect of experience — cheerful revisionism notwithstanding — continuously harder to master and easier to miss.

Ten billion switches, by conservative estimate, are each wired to five thousand others, regulated by neurotransmitters and neuropeptides whose scores of enzyme dialects control a chaos of simultaneous translation conveying desire, fear, torture, pleasure. No sooner does the switchboard wire itself to survive the world of experience than it begins to dismantle. It flashes out in a violent short or disintegrates imperceptibly. All that varies is the tempo.

I have until now faulted words, blamed the messenger of mangled news for keeping me from my answer. I should instead be prostrate with gratitude that words can mean anything at all, given the nature of the receiver. The thing is jerry-rigged, carrying around in its own triple fossil a walkie-talkie wrapped around a shrew-screech encasing a lizard's intuition. Absurd paste-up: gothic chancel tacked onto Romanesque crypt fronted by rococo nave. The wonder lies in its comprehending anything, its ability to work its supreme invention, the shaky symbol set.

Word into synapse is even more approximate than substance into word. The brain, in the subtle dozen hours when it reaches its zenith, already wades through a dissipation that leaves it searching without success for those three syllables beginning with an "F" about which everything has been rubbed out except the certainty that they sat at the lower right corner of an even-numbered page. The word was "forfeiture." The word was "filigree." The word was "forgetting."

A hundred trillion synaptic bits, each capable of threshold effects, compressed into a kilo and a half, split into two lumps connected by 250 million cables. Twin-view parallax resolves the field into multiple dimensions. The most complex entity ever thrown together, an organ vastly more complex than the plan that assembled it, locally violates the Second Law. Every brain extends itself with a ten-thousand-item template, puts together continuous unprecedented messages for no other reason than to model in miniature everything that exists and half that doesn't. Five billion living brains, a hundred billion already dead, each sickeningly bound into a net surpassed only by the single thing they are bent on weaving.