Interface

“What is this place?”

  “The Radhakrishnan Institute. They do heavy-duty neurological research. Those papers describe some of the work they’ve been doing.”

  Mary Catherine set the photograph aside and began to flip through the research papers.

  “I thought you might be interested in seeing some of that stuff. It’s all gibberish to me,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine frowned. “I’m familiar with these papers. I’ve seen them. All in the last three years.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the stuff described here is all fairly basic research. I mean, in this one here, they’re talking about a technique to grow baboon brain cells in vitro and then reimplant them in the baboon’s brain.”

  “So?”

  “So the date on the paper is three months ago. Which means it was probably written sometime last year.”

  “So?” Mel would continue asking this question until hell froze over or he understood what she was getting at.

  “So, it’s like these guys just invented the wheel last year, and now they’re claiming that they can make a car.”

  “You’re saying it’s a hell of a stretch between putting some new cells into a baboon’s head, and fixing your dad.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How long would it take to cover that ground?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s never been done before. But I would think it would take at least five or ten years, if everything went well.”

  “Why would they—”

  “They’re neurosurgeons, Mel. Neurosurgeons are the ultimate macho shitheads of the medical world. Nobody can stand them. Their solution to everything is cold steel. But they can never really do anything.”

  “What do you mean? Cutting a hole in a guy’s brain seems like doing a hell of a lot.”

  “But there’s no cure for most neuro problems. They can chop out a tumor or a hematoma. But they can’t really cure the important problems, and, because they are macho shitheads, that drives them crazy. Clearly, that’s the motivation behind this research. And the inflated claims.”

  Mel pondered this one for a while.

  Mary Catherine sipped on her club soda and watched Mel ponder it. As usual, it seemed that this affair had a lot of dimensions that he wasn’t telling her about. A gray winter light was shining in through the window, bringing all of the wrinkles in Mel’s face into high relief, and suddenly the look on his face seemed frighteningly intense to her. “This is a tough one,” he finally said, shaking his head. “Too much emotional shit getting in the way. Can’t think straight.”

  “What are you thinking, Mel?”

  Mel shook his head. “Five or ten years. See, I haven’t really talked to anyone yet. All I get is feelers. These feelers are so subtle I can’t even tell if they are really there. Like this here”—he pointed to the photograph and the papers—“came in the guise of a fund-raising mailing. They wanted to know if your dad wanted to contribute to this thing. But it’s no coincidence. I know that for damn sure.”

  “Have they offered to fix Dad’s brain, or not?”

  “Absolutely not, and you can bet they never will,” Mel said. “They will wait for us to ask them. That way, if it goes wrong, it was our idea. But from the way they are acting, you would think that they were ready to put him under the knife tomorrow.”

  “So here is the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” Mary Catherine said. “Does Dad believe that these people can fix him up? Does he believe it enough to keep him from killing himself?”

  “For now, definitely. He won’t do it today, or tomorrow. But . . .” Mel stopped in midsentence.

  “But if I blab my big mouth and say that this is highly speculative and might be five or ten years down the road, that’s different,” Mary Catherine said.

  “I don’t like to put this pressure on you,” Mel said, “but yeah, I think you have a point there.” He reached across the table, grabbed the photograph, and held it up. “This keeps him alive. It’s his hope. It’s all he has right now.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel gave her a penetrating look. “How is it good?”

  She was taken aback by the question. “It keeps him alive, like you said. And even if it does take five or ten years before this surgery can be performed, we can keep his hope alive until then. And then, maybe someday, we’ll have him back.”

  Mel stared at her morosely. “Shit. You’ve got it too.”

  “Got what?”

  “That same look on your face as Willy had when I told him about this.” Mel slapped the picture facedown on the table, broke eye contact, looked out the window, started rubbing his chin.

  “What are you thinking about?” she prompted him after a few minutes.

  “Same thing as ever. Power,” Mel said. “Power and how it works.” He heaved a big sigh. “The power that some unheard-of thing called the Radhakrishnan Institute is suddenly wielding over the Cozzanos.” He heaved another big sigh. “And over me.”

  “Your emotions getting in the way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get a detached opinion, then.”

  “That’s a good idea. I should talk to Sipes down there at the U.”

  “Don’t. Sipes is a big-time researcher in these fields.”

  “So he’s a good guy to talk to, right?”

  “Not necessarily. That means he has theories of his own. Theories that may compete with Radhakrishnan’s.”

  “Good point. Very devious thinking by your standards,” Mel said with cautious admiration. “Why don’t you go check it out yourself?”

  Mary Catherine was startled. She blushed slightly. “I thought the idea was to be objective,” she said.

  “Objective is nice. It’s a cute idea,” Mel said, “but there’s nothing like family, is there?”

  “Well—”

  “Suppose we did find some supposedly objective doctor to check this Radhakrishnan thing out for us. Would you really take his word for it?”

  “No,” she admitted, “I’d want to go and see this thing for myself, before Dad went under the knife.”

  “Done. I’ll hire you, on an hourly basis, as a medical consultant for Cozzano Charities,” Mel said. “Your job will be to investigate the medical qualifications of research programs that we are considering donating to. And right now we are considering a donation to the Radhakrishnan Institute.”

  “Mel, I’m a resident. I can’t take time off.”

  “That,” Mel said, “is a political problem between Cozzano Charities and the director of your fine hospital. And I have been known to involve myself in politics from time to time.”

  fourteen

  DURING THE wintry depths of his depression, his seasonal affective disorder in Elton, New Mexico, Dr. Radhakrishnan would have settled for any kind of surgery at all. He would sit in his house, looking out the windows into the dim blue light, which would sift down from the sky like a gradual snowfall, and watch the neighbors’ dogs sniff and dig into snowbanks, and wonder how one went about getting one’s hands on a dog, and whether it was technically illegal to do brain surgery on one, just for practice. Now that he was back in the saddle, though, he was starting to get picky.

  In this phase of the project, they were working on Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger, not their real names. The samples of brain tissue that had been overnight-expressed to Dr. Radhakrishnan in Elton had belonged to these two men.

  It was not entirely clear what their real names were. Both of the patients were in the category of found objects. Neither one was neurologically equipped to identify himself, and if either of them had been in the habit of carrying identification, it had been removed by other persons before they had come under the purview of the authorities. Before Dr. Radhakrishnan arrived to impose some sense of decorum on the Barracks, the Americans (naturally) had come up with these names. Like everything else that bubbled up over the rim of the icky cultural stewpot of America, the names were pervasive and sticky
and could not be scrubbed off once applied. Actually, for a while they had referred to Mr. Scatflinger as Mr. Shitpitcher, but this was completely unacceptable—the nurses could not even bring themselves to say it—and so Dr. Radhakrishnan had changed it.

  Mr. Easyrider had been run over by a motorcycle. They could not be positive about this, since there were no witnesses to the event, but the motorcycle track running over the side of his head provided telling circumstantial evidence. The resulting trauma had caused a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is to say that a blood vessel had burst inside his head and bled internally, killing part of the brain.

  Mr. Scatflinger, née Shitpitcher, had been employed in heaving cow manure onto a trailer. The trailer had tipped, an avalanche had taken place, and his legs had been underneath it. There were major broken bones. A fat embolism formed at the site of one of these breaks, passed up into his heart, and then apparently crossed over from one side of his heart to the other through a small congenital hole. From there it was pumped straight up his carotid artery into his brain where it caused a massive stroke. This was known as a paradoxical embolism.

  If Dr. Radhakrishnan were to take certain doctrines of his religion absolutely literally, he would not be allowed to have any contact with either Mr. Easyrider or Mr. Scatflinger. Yet today he was going to carve great holes in their skulls and implant fresh biochips. Of course he was wearing gloves, so technically speaking he wasn’t coming into contact with them. But this was a technicality.

  Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that was invented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap and believed that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle—that is, any of the major religions—ran into little dilemmas like this on a regular basis. The Christians practiced ritual cannibalism. Whenever he flew between the West and India there was always at least one Muslim on the plane who had to get out the in-flight magazine, check out the route map on the back page, triangulate against the position of the sun, and try to figure out in which direction Mecca lay. And when the ambulance had brought a Chiricahua Apache in to the Elton State University hospitals with a severe brain bleed that needed emergency surgery, Dr. Radhakrishnan had not had time to consult all of the religious authorities in order to figure out whether Hinduism allowed him to touch an Apache. He just gloved up and dove in there. At a certain point one had to just shrug, stop looking over one’s shoulder theologically, and get on with life. Perhaps in some later life, at some more mystical plane of existence, Dr. Radhakrishnan would find out whether or not he had broken any cosmic rules by touching an Apache in New Mexico, or by touching Messrs. Easyrider and Scatflinger here in Delhi. In the meantime, like everyone else, he had to translate the arcane precepts of his ancient religion into a somewhat looser and vaguer set of rules called ethics, or values.

  “I am waiting for the biochips,” he said into the telephone. “Waiting and waiting and waiting.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, or what passed for silence. Indian telephones had a sort of organic quality. Not the sterile silence of American fiber-optic linkups. On one of these phones, one felt that one was plugged in to the electromagnetic fabric of the entire universe; the phone system just one huge antenna picking up emanations from other telephones, television and radio stations, power lines, automobile ignition systems, quasars in deep space, and stirring them together into a thick sonic curry. This is what Dr. Radhakrishnan listened to while he was waiting for Zeldo to come up with another excuse for not being ready.

  “There’s just one more bug that we really ought to get rid of,” Zeldo said. “Twenty of the best guys in the business are going over this code line by line.”

  “Twenty? You only have four people there!”

  “Most of the work is being done in California. Over a satellite link,” Zeldo said.

  “Well,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “while your team is sipping espresso in Marin County, my team is standing in a hallway here at AIIMS with two brain-damaged patients on gurneys, waiting.”

  A long silence, the sonic curry poured forth from the telephone. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Zeldo said. “It’s not quite ready.”

  “Did you hear about the programmer’s wife?” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “She is still a virgin. Her husband just sits on the edge of the bed every night and tells her how great it’s going to be.”

  Zeldo did not laugh. Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to get that tingly feeling in his hands.

  He stuck his head out of the office and looked down the hallway. Mr. Scatflinger was lying on the gurney, quiescent, his head freshly shaved, blue lines drawn on his scalp like the rhumb lines of an ancient navigator.

  “Can you or can you not reprogram this thing remotely, after implantation?”

  “We can modify the software. That’s how we’re programming it as we speak. It’s sitting in the culture tank and we’re talking to it over the radio.”

  “It’s finished.”

  “No.”

  “Put the culture tank into the truck and get it over here now. That is an order.”

  The chip consisted of a silicon part—the part that Zeldo was responsible for—surrounded by an inert teflon shell, connected on either end to brain cells that had been grown in a tank in Seattle. The only way to keep those brain cells alive was to supply them with oxygen and nutrients. The biochip sat in a tank full of a carefully pH-balanced, temperature-regulated, oxygenated chemical solution that Zeldo and the other Americans referred to as “chicken soup.” The soup gave the brain cells everything they needed to stay alive, except for intellectual stimulation. The chip was only a couple of centimeters long in its entirety and so the tank itself wasn’t that large, just a few liters in size. But it was attached to a variety of machines to keep it properly balanced and regulated, so the apparatus as a whole ended up being roughly the size of a vending machine. It rolled around on oversized rubber wheels, and it had enough built-in backup battery power so that it could be unplugged from the wall for up to half an hour. All of this portability was needed, for the time being, because of the far-flung nature of this enterprise. The chips had first been incarnated in Seattle, placed into this tank, and then rolled on board a specially chartered GODS jet, where the support systems had drawn power from the airplane’s generators. From the Indira Gandhi International Airport, the whole mess had been transported to the Barracks for debugging. Now it had to be shipped down the road to AIIMS for the actual surgical procedure. Each time it was trundled from one place to another it had to survive on battery power for a few minutes.

  Zeldo and his cohorts referred to the apparatus as the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They hauled it around in the back of a truck. The truck poked its way slowly down the Delhi Ring Road, pulled off into the parking lots of AIIMS, and backed up to a loading dock. The back door flew open and there were Zeldo and his hackers, surrounding the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all blinking lights and bubbling tubes.

  There was an interval of half an hour or so, during which the patients were prepared for surgery, the operating room people got scrubbed and gloved, and Zeldo and his crew got the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari transferred across the hospital to the operating theater, leapfrogging from one power outlet to the next, down hallways and up elevators. Then Dr. Radhakrishnan just had to perform a couple of operations.

  It was strange, and possibly ludicrous, to be doing both Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger at the same time. Each operation was a major event in itself. But there were many strange and ludicrous things about the way the Radhakrishnan Institute was currently functioning. As they went over the plans for this day, they had all shared a creepy, unspoken feeling that they were extending themselves years beyond where they really ought to be, and that many things might go wrong.

  The operations were conceptually simple. Incisions were made along the lines that had been drawn on the patients’ shaven heads. Flaps of scalp were peeled back and the bleeding was cauterized or clamped off. When the actual sku
ll was exposed, Dr. Radhakrishnan cut through it with a bone saw.

  A polygon of skull, a trap door of sorts, was cut into the side of the head and saved for later use. Still, the brain itself was not exposed; they looked through the hole at a tough inner membrane, the brain’s final layer of protection. When this was flapped out of the way, they were looking at actual brain matter.

  “It was a debacle. I am personally ashamed. I will never do anything like that again. The level of incompetence makes me physically ill. I may shoot myself,” Dr. Radhakrishnan was saying.

  “Have a drink,” Mr. Salvador said. This was easy to arrange because they were sitting in the bar of the Imperial.

  “When I am tense I bite my lip. Today I think I have swallowed half of my own blood supply.”

  “Think of it as opening day for a new business venture,” Mr. Salvador said. “It’s always a debacle.”

  “Even debacle does not do justice to this day,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “It was an apocalypse.”

  Mr. Salvador shrugged. “That’s why we make mistakes, so we can learn from them.”

  “One gets very impatient, doing research for years and years. The pace is so gradual. After a while you say, ‘I wish I could just get on with it and put one of these things into a human brain and see what happens.’ But this business today reminds me of why we take years and years to get ready for these things.”

  “The patients are both alive. All’s well that ends well.”

  A waiter came by and gave Dr. Radhakrishnan another drink. Mr. Salvador tossed some rupees onto the table. “Why don’t you take that with you?” he said. “I have something to show you.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go for a spin.”

  The former site of the Ashok Theatre had been surrounded by a barricade twenty feet high. In places it consisted of chain-link fence with tarps stretched across it. In places it was pieced together with scraps of wood. In and of itself the fence was a considerable investment; the materials that went into it could have housed thousands.