Spark: A Novel

  Thirty-four days after my revelation on Sixth Avenue, the phone rang. I assumed that it was either a bill collector or the elderly woman who kept insisting that she was my mother. The bill collectors made threats. My mother cried. It was all the same to me. Instead, it was a voice that I hadn’t heard for several weeks. A woman’s voice with bright energy.

  “Hello, Mr. Davis! This is Sandy Shapiro from Marian Community Hospital. Something has come up and we need to talk. Would you please call me at—”

  I picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Oh, there you are! I didn’t know if you were still living in New York City. So how are you, Mr. Davis? I realize that you’re no longer a patient at the hospital, but I do feel some responsibility for those patients who weren’t completely healed. You are definitely in that category.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.…”

  “No! Wait! I have to tell you something. Do you remember your psychiatrist, Dr. Tollner? Well, he wrote a description of your case and put it up on a Web site for physicians and scientists studying severe brain injuries. Of course, he didn’t use your name and gave only a few personal details, but he did include some of your computer drawings. I don’t know why … maybe it was the drawings … but the article is generating a lot of comments.”

  “And I’m supposed to read this?”

  “You can if you want to, but that’s not why I’m calling. This morning Dr. Tollner received an e-mail from Dr. Morris Noland, the neurologist who runs the Ettinger Clinic in Southern California. The clinic is for patients with severe psychological disorders.”

  “My medical insurance company is about to sue me, Mrs. Shapiro. They’re not going to let me go to a private clinic.”

  “Oh, but that’s the wonderful thing! Dr. Noland said that there would be no charge for thirty days of treatment. He’s never dealt with Cotard’s syndrome, but he thinks he can help you.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Well, that’s where I might beg to differ with you. Both your mother and your fiancée, Miss Patterson, informed me that you no longer communicate with them. Yesterday, I called Miss Colby, the human resources manager at InterFace. She said that you came back to work two months ago, sat in your cubicle for a few hours, then left and never came back.”

  “I didn’t like it there.”

  “Well, of course not! You weren’t really healed at our hospital. Returning to your previous life was probably difficult for you. That’s why you need to get some help. The Ettinger Clinic is world famous. It’s sponsored by the software billionaire Terry Ettinger. And it’s free for certain patients. Absolutely no cost. The clinic will even pay for your plane ticket to California.”

  My Spark bounced around inside my skull as I tried to come up with a response. The only relevant fact was this: I didn’t want to be sitting in this room.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes to what, Mr. Davis?”

  “I’ll go to California.”

  The following day, when a taxi arrived to take me to the airport, I emerged from my apartment looking like a hermit who had been sealed up in a cave. I had a scraggly beard and my hair touched my collar. My fingernails were long, yellowish, and slightly curved.

  And I smelled. Or, more exactly, my smell bothered others. The clinic had paid for a business-class ticket but, ten minutes after the plane took off, the businessman sitting next to me stood up and walked over to the cabin attendant to complain. There was whispered conversation with a great deal of glancing in my direction, and then two different cabin attendants asked me questions while they sniffed. The businessman was immediately sent up to first class and I remained alone and untouched in my solitary seat.

  I had run out of ComPlete, but drank bottled water and two cups of clear apple juice during the flight. Apparently, this was not enough nourishment for my Shell. When the plane landed in Los Angeles, my legs collapsed and I had to sit back down again. The cabin attendant called for a wheelchair and an airline employee pushed me through the terminal to the baggage area.

  A young man who looked like a weight lifter held up a cardboard sign with my name on it. “Are you Mr. Davis?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Ricky Almendarez from the Ettinger Clinic. I’m supposed to drive you up to Ojai, but you look pretty wasted. You wanna go to a hospital or something?”

  “No. Get your car and bring it up to the curb.”

  I slid into the front seat of Ricky’s sedan and he turned onto the San Diego Freeway. Thousands of other cars were traveling north and red brake lights flowed up the Sepulveda Pass. Peering out the window, I saw streets and parking lots with more cars. All Human Units disappeared within my mind and the city became a Kingdom of Cars; the large, shiny creatures maneuvered around each other, squatting and growling, then surging forward in packs.

  Traffic began to thin out when we followed the 101 Freeway to the coast. The Pacific Ocean was on the left side of the car and on the right were eroded cliffs that looked like massive fingers clutching the earth.

  I heard a whirring sound as the electric window glided downward. “Just a little ventilation,” Ricky explained. “I hope that’s okay, Mr. Davis. I’m not trying to be negative, but you kinda smell.”

  The Ettinger Clinic was in a coastal valley filled with orange and avocado groves; this dark green mass of vegetation shivered and swayed whenever winds blew in from the ocean. I didn’t see any walls or fences. Ornamental gardens surrounded a dozen buildings designed in the Spanish mission style with red-tile roofs, wrought-iron doorknobs, and thick walls painted white.

  When we reached the parking lot, Ricky put on G-MID eyeglasses and slipped a headset onto his left ear. During their shift at the clinic, the staff were either hearing instructions from Dr. Noland or reporting on patient activities. Everything they saw was transmitted from their G-MIDs to a cloud server.

  My room had white walls, a ceiling fan, and an adobe tile floor. One bed. One desk. One chair. After we entered, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  “Do you eat anything?” Ricky asked.

  “ComPlete.”

  “Complete what? I don’t understand.”

  “ComPlete.”

  Ricky repeated the word into his headset and nodded. “Okay. No sweat. Dr. Noland knows what you’re talking about.” He walked over to the bed and tried to take off my shoes.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one touches me. Leave me alone.”

  Ricky left the room and returned that evening with a case of ComPlete. I drank one bottle in front of him, and then the night nurse switched on the overhead light every two hours and watched me drink four more bottles before dawn.

  I was strong enough to get out of bed when Ricky returned to my room. “I know that you don’t want to be touched,” he said. “But I’m in charge of cleaning you up.”

  Ricky told me to remove my clothes and sit on a plastic chair in the middle of the room. Then he plugged in an electric clipper and handed it to me. The clipper made a buzzing sound as I pushed it back and forth across my skull. “Left … farther left … you missed a spot,” he said as clumps of dirty hair drifted down to the floor.

  After my head was completely shaven and my nails were clipped, the plastic chair was placed in the shower stall and Ricky scrubbed me with a long-handled brush. I returned to the room, sat on the edge of the bed, and inspected my fragile Shell. I could see my ribs and the outline of my leg and arm bones. The skeleton that had been hidden within me was beginning to emerge.

  “Get dressed,” Ricky said, and placed some clothes on the bed. A white T-shirt. Slippers. And a blue tracksuit.

  “Do you have a list of instructions?” I asked. “If so, I want to see them.”

  Ricky laughed. “I don’t need a list. Dr. Noland’s been watching you from the day you arrived here. Noland doesn’t see everything that happens to every patient, but he always knows what’s going on. He can access everything
we see or switch over to the closed-circuit cameras mounted on the walls.”

  Knowing that I was being watched, I felt more substantial, more real. Ricky left for a few minutes and returned wearing surgical gloves. He was carrying two plastic bands; the yellow one was about an inch wide, the red one much larger and heavier. “See the gloves? My skin won’t touch your skin. Just pretend that I’m a nubot.”

  He knelt before me and snapped on the ankle band, then stood and fastened the yellow band onto my left wrist. “This is a tracking device. If you wander away and get lost, we’ll know where you are in about five seconds.”

  Talking to the invisible Dr. Noland with his headset, Ricky strolled out of the room. Exhausted, I lay back on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling fan. It felt like the doctor was still there watching me—watching everyone.

  During my first three days at the clinic, I had to take a series of tests. For one hour in the morning and a second hour every afternoon, I sat alone in a room and watched video clips on a monitor screen. The videos showed the entire spectrum of human activity: a mother holding a newborn baby, children playing hopscotch, a wedding couple dancing a waltz, a man jumping from a burning skyscraper, an African woman being beaten to death by a mob, an American soldier returning home to a happy golden retriever, and three men wearing ski masks who recited prayers as they used a dull knife to saw off a prisoner’s head.

  While I watched the videos, an infrared sensor monitored my pulse and body temperature and an eye scanner measured my pupillary response. Ricky explained that the data was sent to the clinic’s computer and analyzed by a software program called “Sigmund.”

  “Everything we do here is based on data,” Ricky explained. “That means you don’t have to lie around on a couch while some shrink asks you about your mommy. Dr. Noland says that all language—everything we say—is just an approximation of reality. You can’t lie to these machines, so don’t waste your time trying.”

  Five days after I had arrived at the clinic, I was finally invited to meet Dr. Noland. Wearing my wrist and ankle cuffs and the blue tracksuit, I followed a path to a large house that had been built to resemble a mission church with a bell tower. The walls of the ground-floor area were decorated with silk-screen paintings created from photographs. There were close-up images of a man’s eyes, his bare feet, and his left ear, but I couldn’t find a portrait that showed the entire figure.

  “Is that Dr. Noland?” I asked a secretary.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do all the paintings show Dr. Noland?”

  “No-no. It’s Terry Ettinger … the man who funds our clinic.”

  I sat on a bench for twenty minutes, and then was allowed into the office. Dr. Noland was sitting behind a desk staring at a wall-mounted video screen that was divided into boxes. Each box showed live video from the staff’s G-MIDs and the stationary surveillance cameras. Although we were miles from the beach, the doctor wore flip-flop sandals, shorts, and a silk Hawaiian shirt. There were flowering orchids and potted rubber plants in the corners of the room and a framed photograph on one wall of a surfer entering the curl of a wave.

  “Morning, Jake! I’m Morris Noland. Have you been comfortable here? Everything all right? Let’s take a look at your room.”

  Noland typed a command on his keyboard and the wall screen displayed an image of my room. As we both watched, a woman from housecleaning entered with a sponge mop, a bucket full of supplies, and some towels.

  “In the next thirty seconds she’ll reach into the bucket, take out disinfectant spray, and begin to clean your toilet. We’ve discovered that people are more relaxed and efficient if they clean each room in precisely the same way.”

  “You see everything.”

  Noland laughed. “Not everything, but enough to know what’s going on. These days I’m trying to improve our system here so it all works automatically. The surveillance feed from your room is sent to a behavior analysis program that was first developed for use in prisons. Our data supplements what we learned from your evaluation.”

  “All I did was watch videos.”

  “Yeah, well … each individual reacts strongly to particular images, while others don’t affect them at all. I have your file right here.”

  Noland typed a command and studied several bar graphs. “Got to admit … it’s an interesting profile. You seem to be capable of only three emotions: boredom, curiosity, and disgust. I realize that you’ve had a severe neurological injury, but your brain is still working and you display certain base-level responses. Obviously, you can walk and talk and scratch yourself. If you saw a car speeding toward us, you would instinctively jump out of the way. The human brain is an incredible machine. It’s adaptive, and capable of generating new cells. But that’s not the issue here.”

  The doctor stood up and slapped his flip-flop sandals over to a coffee table and some rattan furniture. “Come over here, Jake. Make yourself comfortable. I’d offer you coffee or some herbal tea, but all you drink is that sole-source nutrition.”

  I sat on the couch and watched Noland pry a shell off a pistachio, flip the nut up in the air, and catch it in his mouth. “So you’re dead,” he said slowly. I liked the fact that this wasn’t a question, but a fact. “I guess the first thing you need to know is … that’s okay with me.”

  “Cogito, ergo sum.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what Dr. Rose and Dr. Rutherford told me. I think, therefore—”

  “Hey … sorry … don’t want to cut you off here, but I don’t really care what you think. Here at the clinic, we don’t waste time asking patients about their thoughts and their feelings and their messed-up childhoods. Do you have dreams? Well, good for you. I don’t want to hear them. You got fantasies? Keep them to yourself. Bottom line is this: I’m interested in what my patients do, how they act.”

  Another pistachio nut was flung up in the air, optimistically high. With a quick jerk of his head, Noland caught it in his mouth.

  “When I first meet a patient, I usually tell them a little bit about Terry Ettinger. He’s the chairman of our foundation and the man who pays the bills. When Terry was a kid, his parents were told that he had some kind of autism spectrum disorder. Terry was highly intelligent but physically clumsy. He couldn’t make friends and didn’t like to talk to people. His parents were worried because he analyzed everything he did … like brushing his teeth … and broke it into small details.” Noland smiled. “In other words, he was perfectly designed to be a brilliant software developer. As you probably know, Terry’s visual-recognition program is used by just about every nubot in the world, and of course that’s earned him a pile of cash.”

  “Why did he start the clinic?” I asked.

  “So what is Terry going to do with all his money? Date beautiful women? No, because then he’d have to touch them. He’s not going to build a big house because he’s happiest in a windowless room. And he’s not donating money to some charity because he doesn’t give a damn about other people. Terry isn’t alone in feeling this way. The nubot software community is basically an autistic culture.”

  “Isn’t this clinic a charity?”

  “I guess it is. In a way. But it’s actually an expression of Terry’s philosophy. His strongest emotion is that he still hates all the psychiatrists and psychologists who treated him when he was a kid. Basically, he thinks that psychotherapy is a load of crap.”

  “And you’re a neurologist. Not a therapist.”

  “That’s right. Eight years ago, I was doing research in the lab, modifying the cerebral cortex of baboons. Anyway … Terry’s big idea is that most conscious thought is simply an attempt to claim ‘authorship’ for a choice that has already been made. And there’s some fairly substantial evidence that this is true. The physiologist Benjamin Libet showed that our unconscious brain is the initiator of certain acts about a half second before our conscious mind realizes what is going on. Additional research has confirmed Libet’s conclusions. These experi
ments suggest the possibility that our thoughts are just an ongoing attempt to explain what we’ve already decided.”

  “What does any of this have to do with my treatment at your clinic?”

  “Like a lot of people with mental problems, you think that you’re different. But no one can truly step out of the system. Humans are self-replicating organic machines that obey the laws of physics, react to stimuli and need, and function according to programs hardwired into our brains.”

  “My body is just a Shell,” I explained. “But my Spark is a particle of light that can—”

  “Stop. Just stop.” Dr. Noland held up one hand like a traffic cop. “I don’t want to hear about some crazy system you’ve invented to explain the world.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “I’ve studied your hospital file and I think that you’re the kind of patient we can help here at the clinic. Today I’m going to give you some rules and the staff will train you to follow them. If you obey the rules, you can think that you’re dead and still be functional in New York City.”

  “What kind of rules?”

  “Based on my preliminary observations, I’ve come up with a basic list.” Noland retrieved a sheet of paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read this.”

  DR. NOLAND’S RULES

  1. If necessary, tell people that you don’t want to be touched.

  2. Wash your body once a day.

  3. Cut your hair and clip your nails once a month.

  4. Your body must consume a minimum of two thousand calories a day.

  5. Always remember: dead people must act alive.

  I looked up and saw that the doctor was smiling at me. “Any questions?” he asked.

  “It sounds pretty simple.”

  “I agree! Although a New York psychoanalyst with a couch might argue with me. I know that your brain generates thoughts, Jacob. So does mine. We can’t shut it off. The entire staff here at the clinic acknowledges all the crazy ideas bouncing around in our heads. We call these thoughts ‘static’ or ‘ECAs’—which is short for ‘extraneous cognitive activity.’ Through a system of reward and punishment we encourage our patients to ignore the static and display positive, functional behavior. Autism experts came up with the label ‘HFA’—‘high-functioning autism’—to describe people like Terry Ettinger. So I kind of took that basic concept and came up with the term ‘HFH’—‘high-functioning humanness.’ That’s everyone’s goal, but some of us need a little extra help.”