Interference Page 2

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Strokes tend to be hemispheric. They impact one side of the body or one part of the body. We’re not seeing any evidence of that right now. Our biggest concern at the moment is that his oxygen levels were very low when he first got here. It’s possible he’s still suffering the effects of that.”

  “Low oxygen levels . . . that means, what, brain damage?”

  “It’s too early to say.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  The panic had been building up from deep inside me, volcano-like, for a while by that point. And I was now battling with everything I had to keep it down where it belonged.

  “Until he wakes up and we can assess his functioning—or until we can safely sedate him and give him an MRI—we’re pretty much in the dark.”

  “An MRI? And what . . . what would be the purpose of that?”

  “We could determine if there had been any structural damage to his brain or if there might be something else going on.”

  “Something else like what?”

  He bowed his head a little bit and mumbled something indistinct.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I demanded.

  The panic was now getting dangerously close to spurting out. It took all my resolve to keep the lid on it.

  Dr. Reiner looked up like it pained him to have to repeat himself.

  “It might be a tumor.”

  “A tumor,” I echoed.

  “If it’s not a stroke, and it’s not a heart attack, a tumor is a strong possibility, yes.”

  My body began shaking. I felt myself swaying from side to side.

  “Mrs. Bronik, I don’t want to scare you, but right now we’re just glad your husband is alive,” Reiner said. “Until we have a chance to run more tests, anything else I might say would be speculation. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”

  Once I realized he had nothing else useful to tell me, and I could stop concentrating so damn hard on just having to hear him, the eruption came. I was suddenly on my knees, doubled over, sobbing.

  The fall knocked out one of my hearing aids, but I could still hear the pathetic series of primal moans emanating from my diaphragm and forcing their way out of my throat.

  Matt was the smartest person I had ever met. And second place wasn’t close. I could barely process the notion that there might be something wrong with his extraordinary, beautiful brain.

  My thoughts immediately turned to Morgan. How would he turn out with a deaf mother and a brain-damaged, tumor-ridden father—or, dear lord, no father at all? What would that do to him? Didn’t he need at least one fully functioning parent?

  All spouses develop roles. In our marriage, Matt was the vibrant one, a basketball nut who could play two hours of pickup hoops and still have the energy to roughhouse with Morgan. I was the broken one, the medical ne’er-do-well who went to the audiologist with hope and came home with heartbreak.

  But even though I had never said this out loud, I had always felt like there was a larger purpose to my suffering. I was the repository for our family’s entire share of crappy luck. I had taken the whole load of it so Matt and Morgan could go forth into the world happy, strong, and healthy.

  That was why this shouldn’t have been happening.

  All our crappy luck was supposed to have been used up already.

  Dr. Reiner was gone by the time I pulled myself together. I only managed to do so out of some sense that I needed to stay clearheaded for Matt.

  And Morgan. He would be getting off the bus from school soon. I texted my sister, Aimee, who lived in nearby Quechee, Vermont. Three years older than me, she was divorced, self-employed, and childless—in other words, the perfect aunt. She texted back that she would drop everything to help, like she always did.

  Around three o’clock, I was finally permitted to enter Matt’s room. He had a tube running into him just below his collarbone. A variety of medical devices—monitors and whatnot—surrounded him, and even my lousy ears could make out the steady beep that represented his heart rate. There was a ventilator, but the mask was hanging on the hook, not strapped to Matt’s face.

  He was breathing on his own, his chest rising and sinking rhythmically.

  His eyes were closed.

  In some ways, he looked like he normally did. Matt kept what little hair he had shaved to a stubble, a concession to his male-pattern baldness. His graying beard was neatly tended, as usual.

  It was around the eyes where his appearance was shocking. They were sunken, like he had abruptly aged from thirty-nine to sixty-nine.

  A nurse who was holding a computer tablet looked up at me and said something. I was so fixated on Matt I wasn’t really looking at her until the end. I thought the last word she said was moment.

  I’ll just be a moment.

  Would you like a moment?

  Something like that.

  “Thank you,” I said, hoping it was the right response.

  She spent a few more seconds consulting her tablet, then nodded at me, making room for me to approach the bedside.

  Matt was wearing this mesh vest that wrapped around his body twice and was strapped to the bed rails in several spots—to restrain him, I supposed. One of his arms was by his side. The other was folded on top of him. It looked so sinewy strong it seemed hard to believe the person attached couldn’t make it move if he wanted to.

  His legs were covered by a thin white hospital blanket. His ankles were bound by these two fuzzy cuffs that had also been attached to the bed rails.

  There was no chair by the bed, so I just stood at his side.

  “Matty, it’s me, baby,” I said.

  The only answer was the metronomic beeping.

  I grabbed his hand, the one that was down at his side. I had been expecting maybe it would feel stiff or cold, but it was pliant, alive, and very warm—warmer than mine.

  “I love you, Matty. We’re going to get through this. You’re going to be fine. Just fine. And I’m going to be with you every step of the way, okay?”

  The nurse had walked away, perhaps not wanting to be a part of this private exchange.

  “We’re going to figure out what’s going on. And it’s going to be . . .”

  I stopped, not knowing how to finish the sentence. I didn’t know what the hell it was going to be.

  “The main thing is I love you. And Morgan loves you. And . . .”

  I was faltering, but I forced myself to keep going.

  “A triangle is the strongest shape in nature. You always say that. You, me, and Morgan. We’re the triangle, and we’re—”

  Suddenly Matt was trying to sit up. His teeth were clamped against his lower lip. Spit sputtered out of his mouth. As soon as he encountered the vest and the straps that were restraining him, he began moaning in frustration and straining against them, turning a terrifying shade of crimson.

  He was having another seizure.

  “Matty, Matt honey, you’ve got to relax,” I said. “It’s me. We’re in the hospital. You’re—”

  A guttural noise—something that sounded like “Iwann-iwann-iwann-iwann”—came pouring out of him. His efforts to overcome the straps only intensified. The veins on both sides of his neck popped like tiny snakes. I seriously thought he was going to rupture something. Matt had this penchant for doing sit-ups, push-ups, and burpees when he felt like getting his blood moving, and they had created a powerful body that did not tolerate being tied down.

  An alarm bell started clanging. The nurse had returned.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, dimly aware the question had come out as a shriek.

  I couldn’t hear her reply, but I said, “Can’t you do something?”

  A doctor had come rushing in, half shoving me aside. I put my hand on Matt’s shoulder, just to keep some part of me in contact with him.

  “Matty, you have to calm down,” I implored. “You’re going to hurt yourself. I’m here. I’m here. I’m going to take care of you. I
t’s okay, it’s—”

  I stopped.

  Hearing is something of a specialty of mine, even if I’m not very good at it. And therefore, something in me knew: Matt couldn’t hear me right now.

  He was trapped in a world even more silent than mine.

  Here, but not here.

  Any talking I did at this point was strictly for my own benefit, which struck me as especially pointless.

  Instead, I closed my eyes.

  I am a member of that vast, indistinct, perpetually confused congregation of the spiritually nonreligious. Which is to say I believe in something; I just can’t tell you what.

  On some core level, I know there is something bigger than me out there, something I feel when I stand on top of a mountain, or gaze up at the stars, or look into my child’s eyes, something that has long moved humanity to search for metaphysical answers.

  At the same time, I know what my husband has told me about the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos and about the extraordinarily high mathematical likelihood that other intelligent life must exist.

  Given those truths, it seemed self-centered to believe that the Bigger Something would be too terribly concerned about the trifling affairs of one member of one tiny species, scrambling around one rocky planet, rotating around one unremarkable star somewhere out toward the edge of one insignificant galaxy.

  Therefore, I am ordinarily skeptical about the efficacy of prayer.

  Maybe it’s because so many of mine have gone unanswered.

  But at the moment I had nowhere else to turn.

  As Matt bucked and thrashed, I screwed my eyes shut.

  And I prayed.

  I prayed harder than I ever had in my whole life.

  CHAPTER 4

  I didn’t leave Matt’s bedside, nor release my grip on him, for the entire next hour.

  That was why I had such a good view of the tiny changes taking place in him.

  His eyes, in the rare moments they opened, were no longer quite as unfocused as they had been. They would actually look at me, even if the stare was still blank.

  His hand, which had been resting on his chest, moved in a way that, to me, seemed intentional.

  His facial expressions changed too. Like a computer inside of him had rebooted.

  Then his eyes opened. And he looked right at me.

  “I must have died,” he croaked weakly. “Because you sure look like an angel.”

  I immediately burst into tears.

  Whatever had happened, he was Matt again.

  I hadn’t lost him.

  “Oh, Matty,” was the first thing I managed to choke out.

  It didn’t get much more articulate for a while after that.

  Eventually, both for my benefit and for the doctors’—who were as mystified by his sudden recovery as anyone—Matt recounted what he could remember.

  He’d woken up early, like usual, and had his normal breakfast: two granola bars and an apple, which he ate during his drive to Dartmouth. Once there, he went immediately to his lab and got to work.

  Reiner asked what that entailed. Matt said, “Playing with lasers”—which was the flippant description he used in social settings when he didn’t really want to get into it. Reiner just let it go, so Matt continued with his narrative.

  He worked until nine, when he had his meeting with Sean Plottner, which took place in the lab.

  Plottner left by ten, and Matt didn’t have to teach until eleven, so he went back to work. He was deep in it when he said a strange feeling came over him. One moment he was normal. And then suddenly he was hit by something overwhelming—yet weightless and invisible—that knocked him out.

  From there, his memory fragmented into wispy strands and bits of fabric that he couldn’t begin to piece together into any kind of whole tapestry.

  He remembered straining against the strap that held him down. And the anxious face of an EMT peering down at him. And that someone was, at some point, pinching his chest with what felt like a giant set of tweezers—probably when he had the tube inserted.

  But, like a dream whose details he was struggling to recall, he couldn’t put any of what had happened in logical order.

  The rest we pieced together by talking with the worried physics department colleagues who started calling to check in.

  When Matt didn’t show up for his eleven o’clock class, one of the students alerted Beppe Valentino of Matt’s absence. Beppe and David Dafashy, another physics professor, started looking for him while Sheena Aiyagari, Matt’s postdoc, went to his classroom in case he showed up there.

  It was David who found Matt, still in his lab, unresponsive, stooped over in a zombielike state. They called an ambulance.

  And now? He was exhausted from his labors against the restraints, and his skull was being hammered by what he described as “a tequila headache times fifty.”

  But, otherwise, it was like nothing had happened to him. His vitals were normal. His body seemed to be functioning fine again.

  He ate some dinner—the doctors wanted him to regain some strength and also make sure he could metabolize food without a problem—then they started running tests.

  A lot of tests. Ones they had done before. Ones they hadn’t.

  There was a full lab workup, including a tox screen, followed by an alphabet soup of machine scans: CT, EEG, MRI, MRA.

  When a nurse confirmed they intended to keep Matt overnight, I ran back home to tuck in Morgan and thank Aimee for coming to our rescue, then returned to the hospital. They had moved Matt out of the ICU and into the neurology wing.

  We passed the night sleeping fitfully, with the usual interruptions from the medical industrial complex that can make a hospital the worst place ever to actually get better.

  One by one, as test results came back the next morning and into the afternoon, the doctors began ruling out possibilities.

  It wasn’t a heart attack. His heart was structurally perfect, and thumping along fine.

  It wasn’t a tumor. The MRI came back clean.

  It wasn’t botulism. Or any other common critter.

  It wasn’t poisoning, at least none that showed up on the tox screen.

  Brain damage was also no longer being discussed.

  A stroke was still a possibility, but a distant one. The only culprit that hadn’t been completely ruled out was a transient ischemic attack—a TIA, as it’s known. TIAs can apparently be difficult to diagnose, because the small blood clots that cause them are long gone by the time doctors go to look for them.

  Except Matt was awfully young for a TIA and didn’t have any of the risk factors that led to one. Plus, TIAs usually lasted minutes, not hours.

  Around three o’clock the next afternoon, Dr. Reiner came into the room, having just consulted with the cardiologist.

  “I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but there’s nothing wrong with you,” he announced. “Or at least nothing we can find. If I hadn’t seen you nearly dead yesterday, I would say you’re the healthiest thirty-nine-year-old in New Hampshire.”

  “So, basically, the lights went out yesterday and now they’re back on,” Matt said.

  “Pretty much,” Reiner said.

  “Must not have paid my electricity bill.”

  “More like a storm came and knocked out your service, which was then restored,” Reiner said.

  They were tossing about these metaphors in such a jocular way, like all the dire potential diagnoses had been a big joke, like the uncertainty and ambiguity left behind were not at all troubling.

  I was trying not to let it infuriate me.

  “Doesn’t it all strike you as,” I started, groped around for a way to conclude my sentence, then concluded with a meek, “a little strange?”

  “Disorders of consciousness are a strange thing,” Reiner said. “If you’re having trouble walking, we look at your legs. If you’re having trouble breathing, we look at your lungs. But where do we look when you’re having trouble with your consciousness? Where
is consciousness located? Can we stick a needle in it? What causes someone to go unconscious? What makes them wake back up? We’re not really sure.

  “As just one example, we don’t actually understand why anesthesia works. We know certain drugs bind to certain receptors, sure, but that doesn’t explain the totality of what happens when someone zonks out for surgery. Nor does it explain why some people can later recount things that were said in the operating theater while they were supposedly under. The mechanism behind general anesthesia simply isn’t understood all that well. I’m afraid what happened to your husband yesterday falls into the same category. Something caused his brain to check out for a while. And then it recovered. Call it a medical mystery or a medical miracle. Either term works for me.”

  Matt smiled. “Doctor, we have a saying where I come from: You can put wings on a pig, but that don’t make it an eagle.”

  Reiner grinned back. “I’m not sure I—”

  “Mysteries are for novelists and miracles are for preachers,” Matt said. “I’m a scientist. I believe the causes for things are natural, not supernatural. Something happened to me, even if it didn’t show up in all those tests you gave me. You must have a hypothesis that doesn’t involve divine intervention. One scientist to another, just give me your best guess as to what’s going on here.”

  “Okay,” Reiner said, taking in a deep breath and then letting it go. “My best guess—and this is really only a guess—is that we could be looking at some kind of conversion disorder.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s neurosis where corporal symptoms appear without any apparent somatic or physical basis, so we say the mental condition is ‘converting’ itself into physical form. It’s possible this could result in this kind of fugue state, where you’re able to shuffle around but not interact meaningfully with the outside world. We’ve seen instances where a conversion disorder can cause blindness, paralysis, all kinds of things.”

  “In other words, you think I’m crazy,” Matt said, still smiling.

  “Crazy or just incredibly stressed by something,” Reiner said. “Think of it like when someone gets some truly terrible news—the death of a loved one, something traumatic. They hear the news and they faint. That’s a conversion disorder. The brain doesn’t know what to do with a mental shock, and so it shuts things down for a little while, just to give itself a chance to work things out. Have you been under a lot of stress?”