Part 4 (2/2)
My dad's gone and you'll never catch up with him. He's in the Middle f.u.c.king East and if you think you...
He'd said it to scare them. So they'd know his dad wasn't like some tour guide who herded people around on vacation. He was a mean m.o.f.o who could take on the Middle East, alone. But why had he said it? Why why why...
The room was dim and the floor was hard. That was okay-he wanted it that way, preferred the hard floor to the creaking bed. The hard floor forced him to stay alert, kept him thinking.
What was he going to do? The men-the human hot dog and the brick with acne and the Mickey Mouse rapper-had told him the consequences of not keeping his mouth shut. Of trying to tell anybody at all. They'd been specific and elaborate. We'll demonstrate on your dog. Then we'll do it to your mom.
He squeezed his eyes closed and put his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the memory.
Whiskey was okay for now. Seth heard the dog in the kitchen, lapping water from the bowl. But Whiskey wasn't safe, and neither was Seth's mom. The men had Seth where they wanted him. And they could get to him without warning, at any moment.
The wire fist tightened around his stomach and then grabbed his throat. He had to do something. He had to figure a way out. But how? He was trapped.
Neurologist Rick Simioni found Jo in the hospital hallway. His face was a beacon of alarm.
”Was I right?” Jo said.
”Anterograde amnesia. Unquestionably.”
Simioni's dress s.h.i.+rt and lab coat were swan white. He smoothed his tie. ”Kanan knows who he is. Remembers everything about himself, his life, and the world, right up till the beginning of the flight today.”
”Then?” Jo said.
”Blank.”
Mild amnesia was common following a head injury. But it was often limited and transient-as patients improve, so could their memories. Not, however, in Ian Kanan's case.
”Nothing new sinks in?” Jo said.
”It hits, sticks for a while, and slides off. His brain receives new information but isn't absorbing it.”
”How long can he retain information before he forgets it?”
”Five, six minutes.”
”What happens?”
”He doesn't lose consciousness. Doesn't have a seizure-EEG shows no ictal patterns. But if his attention wanders for very long, all the information he's gathered simply evaporates.”
”Short-term memory loss,” Jo said.
”His vision, hearing, and speech are perfect. You tested him and noticed no muscle weakness...”
”He was post-ictal with a Glasgow Coma Score of eleven. He'd suffered one partial complex seizure, one grand mal.”
The news was grim. Short-term memory loss-anterograde amnesia-didn't mean you forgot things for a short while. It meant you couldn't form new memories. And it was both a symptom and a result of catastrophic brain injury.
”What's causing it?”
”You need to see the MRI,” Simioni said.
In the radiology suite, light boxes hummed on the walls. A PET scan glowed on a cinema-display computer screen, somebody's lungs and liver imaged as Timothy Leary might have hallucinated them, rendered in crimson, cobalt, and screaming yellow.
By contrast, the black-and-white MRI scan of Kanan's brain looked dull. And devastating.
The radiologist was a precise man from Hyderabad named Chakrabarti who had little hair and expressed less emotion. He acknowledged Jo with an economical nod.
Jo approached the screen and examined the cross-sectional slice of Ian Kanan's head. Slowly, quietly, she said, ”What is that?”
Chakrabarti touched the image with his index finger. ”A lesion.”
”Of the medial temporal lobes. I see. What's that?”
Deep within Kanan's brain, where the gray matter of the medial temporal lobes should have been, was a dark fuzzy s.p.a.ce.
”There's more on the next cross section,” Chakrabarti said.
”More sounds bad,” Jo said.
”It is.” He typed on the keyboard. ”Mr. Kanan had difficulty staying still in the scanner. He was quite agitated. He would lie calmly for a minute, then forget where he was and try to climb out, yelling, 'What the h.e.l.l is this?'”
”Like his brain kept resetting to Start?” Jo said.
”Groundhog Day,” Simioni said.
Chakrabarti brought up a new image. Simioni took a breath. Jo felt a flicker of nausea.
Kanan's medial temporal lobes seemed to be etched with black strands. It looked as though somebody had scratched lines in the image with a rusty needle.
”Those... tendrils-are they causing the memory loss?” Jo said.
Simioni pointed with a pen. ”The medial temporal lobe, and particularly the hippocampus, is the part of the brain that encodes facts and events into memory. So I'd say yes.”
”What is it?”
Chakrabarti said, ”I don't know. It's not a bleed. Does he remember suffering head trauma?”
”He says no,” Jo said. ”Is that viral? Bacterial?”
The two men stared at the screen but had no answers. Simioni said, ”Have you reached his wife?”
”No answer. Left messages,” Jo said.
They stared some more. Simioni turned. ”Let's tell him.”
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