The Terminal Experiment

  “Three months ago,” she said, her voice small. “I’ve been trying to work up the courage to tell you. I—I didn’t think I could. I tried twice before, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  Peter said nothing. There was no appropriate reaction, no way to deal with it. Nothing. An abyss.

  “I—I thought about killing myself,” Cathy said after a very long pause, her voice attenuated like a predawn wind. “Not poison or slitting my wrists, though—nothing that would look like suicide.” She met his eyes briefly. “A car accident. I was going to ram into a wall. That way, you’d still love me. You’d never know what I’d done, and … and you’d remember me with love. I tried. I was all ready to do that, but, when it finally came down to it, I swerved the car.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m a coward,” she said at last.

  Silence. Peter tried to make sense of it all. There was no point in asking if she was going to go with Hans. Hans didn’t want a relationship, not a real relationship, not with Cathy or any woman. Hans. Fucking Hans.

  “How could you get involved with Hans? Hans of all people?” asked Peter. “You know what he is.”

  She looked at the ceiling. “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”

  “I’ve always tried to be a good husband,” said Peter. “You know that. I’ve been supportive in every way possible. We talk about everything. There’s no communication problem, no way you can say I don’t listen to you.”

  Her voice took on an edge for the first time. “Did you know I’ve been crying myself to sleep for months?”

  They had a pair of bedside fans that they used as white-noise generators, drowning out the sounds of traffic from outside, as well as each other’s occasional snoring. “There’s no way I could have known that,” he said. He’d occasionally noticed her shuddering next to him as he fell to sleep. Half conscious, he’d idly thought she’d been masturbating; he kept that thought to himself.

  “I’ve got to think about this,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure what I want to do.”

  She nodded.

  Peter threw his head back, let out a long, ragged sigh. “Christ, I have to rewrite the entire last six months in my mind. That vacation we took in New Orleans. That was after you and Hans—And that time we borrowed Sarkar’s cottage for the weekend. That was after, too. It’s all different now. All of it. Every mental picture from that time, every happy moment—fake, tainted.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Cathy, very softly.

  “Sorry?” Peter’s voice was ice. “You might have been sorry if it had happened just once. But three times? Three fucking times?”

  Her lips were trembling. “I am sorry.”

  Peter sighed again. “I’m going to call Sarkar and see if he’s free for dinner.”

  Cathy was silent.

  “I don’t want you along. I want to talk to him alone. I’ve got to sort things out.”

  She nodded.

  CHAPTER 5

  Peter had known Sarkar Muhammed since they’d both been teenagers. They’d lived on the same street, although Sarkar had gone to a private school. They had perhaps seemed unlikely prospects for friendship. Sarkar was heavily involved in athletics. Peter was on his school’s yearbook and newspaper staffs. Sarkar was devoutly Muslim. Peter wasn’t devoutly anything. But they’d hit it off shortly after Sarkar’s family moved into the neighborhood. Their senses of humor were similar, they both liked to read Agatha Christie, and they were both experts at Star Trek trivia. Also, of course, Peter didn’t drink, and that made Sarkar happy. Although Sarkar would eat in licensed restaurants, he avoided whenever possible sitting at a table with someone who was imbibing alcohol.

  Sarkar had gone to the University of Waterloo to study computer science. Peter had studied biomedical engineering at U of T. They’d kept in touch all through university, swapping email letters over the Internet. After a brief stint in Vancouver, Sarkar had ended up back in Toronto, running his own high-tech startup firm doing expert-systems design. Although Sarkar was married and had three children, Peter and he often dined out together, just the two of them.

  Incongruously, dinner was always at Sonny Gotlieb’s, a deli at Bathurst and Lawrence, in the heart of Toronto’s Jewish district. Peter couldn’t stand Pakistani cuisine, despite Sarkar’s valiant efforts to broaden his palate, and Sarkar had to eat where he could get food that adhered to Islamic dietary laws— something which most Kosher fare managed to do admirably. And so the two of them sat in their usual booth, surrounded by zaydes and bubbehs chatting away in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian.

  After they had ordered, Sarkar asked Peter what was new. “Not much,” said Peter, his tone guarded. “What about you?”

  Sarkar spoke for a couple of minutes about a contract his company had received to do expert systems for the New Democratic Party of Ontario. They’d only been in power once, in the early 1990s, but were always hoping to make a comeback. Before Canadian socialist governments disappeared completely from living memory, they wanted to capture the knowledge of party members who had actually been in power back then.

  Peter half listened to this. Ordinarily, he found Sarkar’s work fascinating, but tonight his mind was a million kilometers away. The waiter returned with a pitcher of Diet Coke for them, and a basket of assorted bagels.

  Peter wanted to tell Sarkar about what had happened with Cathy. He opened his mouth a couple of times to say something, but always lost his nerve before the words got out. What would Sarkar think of him if he knew? What would he think of Cathy? He thought at first that he wasn’t telling Sarkar because of his religion; Sarkar’s family was prominent in the Toronto Muslim community and Peter knew that they still practiced arranged marriages. But that wasn’t it. He simply couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud to anyone— anyone—about what had happened.

  Although he wasn’t really hungry, Peter took a poppy-seed bagel from the basket and spread a little jam on it.

  “How is Catherine?” Sarkar asked, helping himself to a rye bagel.

  Peter took advantage of having his mouth full to buy a few seconds to think. Finally, he said, “Fine. She’s fine.”

  Sarkar nodded, accepting that.

  A little later Sarkar asked, “How’s the second weekend in September sound for our trip up north?”

  For six years now, Peter and Sarkar had been going away for a weekend of camping in the Kawarthas. “I—I’ll have to get back to you about that,” said Peter.

  Sarkar helped himself to another bagel. “Okay.”

  Peter loved those camping weekends. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsperson, but he enjoyed seeing the stars. He’d never really agreed to an annual excursion, but with Sarkar anything done twice instantly became an inviolable tradition.

  Getting away would be good, thought Peter. Very good.

  But—

  He couldn’t go.

  Not this year. Maybe not ever.

  He couldn’t leave Cathy alone.

  He couldn’t, because he couldn’t be sure that she would in fact be alone.

  Dammit. God damn it.

  “I’ll have to get back to you,” Peter said again.

  Sarkar smiled. “You said that.”

  Peter realized the whole evening would be a disaster if he didn’t get his mind on something else. “How’s that new brain scanner my company built for you working out?” Peter asked.

  “Great. It’s going to really simplify our neural-net studies. Wonderful machine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Peter. “I’ve been working on refining it, trying to get a higher level of resolution.”

  “The current resolution is more than adequate for the kind of work I do,” said Sarkar. “Why would you want more?”

  “Remember when I was doing my practicum at U of T? I told you about that transplant donor who woke up on the operating table?”

  “Oh, yes.” Sarkar shivered. “You know my religion is suspicious of transplants. We feel the body should be returned to the Earth whole. Stories l
ike that make me believe that even more.”

  “Well, I still have nightmares about it. But I think I’m finally going to be able to put that demon to rest.”

  “Oh?”

  “That scanner we developed for your work was just a first-stage unit. I really wanted to develop a—a superEEG, if you will, that can detect any electrical activity at all in the brain.”

  “Ah,” said Sarkar, his eyebrows lifting, “so you can tell when someone is really dead?”

  “Precisely.”

  The server arrived with their main courses. Peter had a stack of Montreal smoked meat and rye bread, accompanied by a little carousel rack of various mustards and a side order of latkes—what Sarkar referred to as Peter’s heart-attack kit. Sarkar had gefilte fish.

  “That’s right,” said Peter. “I’ve been poking at this for years now, but I’ve finally had the breakthrough I needed. Signal-to-noise-ratio problems were killing me, but while scanning the net I found some algorithms created for radio astronomy that finally let me solve the problem. I’ve now got a working prototype superEEG.”

  Sarkar put down his fork. “So you can see the last neural gasp, so to speak?”

  “Exactly. You know how a standard EEG works: each of the brain’s billions of neurons is constantly receiving excitatory synaptic input, inhibitory input, or a combination of the two, right? The result is a constantly fluctuating membrane potential for each neuron. EEGs measure that potential.”

  Sarkar nodded.

  “But in a standard EEG, the sensor wires are much bigger in diameter than individual neurons. So, rather than measuring the membrane potential of any one neuron, they measure the combined potential for all the neurons in the part of the brain beneath the wire.”

  “Right,” said Sarkar.

  “Well, that coarseness is the source of the problem. If only one neuron, or a few dozen or even a few hundred are reacting to synaptic input, the voltage will be orders of magnitude below what an EEG can read. Even though the EEG shows a flat line, brain activity— and therefore life—may still be continuing.”

  “A crisp problem,” said Sarkar. “Crisp” was his favorite word; he used it to mean anything from well-defined to delicate to appealing to complex. “So you say you’ve found the solution?”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Instead of the small number of wires used by a standard EEG, my superEEG uses over one billion nanotech sensors. Each sensor is as tiny as an individual neuron. The sensors blanket the skull, like a bathing cap. Unlike a standard EEG, which picks up the combined signal of all the neurons in a given area, these sensors are highly directional and pick up only the membrane potential from neurons directly beneath them.” Peter held up a hand. “Of course, a straight line drawn through the brain will intersect thousands of neurons, but by cross-referencing the signals from all the sensors, I can isolate the individual electrical activity of each and every neuron in the entire brain.”

  Sarkar ate another fish ball. “I see why you were having signal-to-noise problems.”

  “Exactly. But I’ve solved that now. With this equipment, I should be able to detect any electrical activity at all in the brain, even if it’s just one lone neuron firing.”

  Sarkar looked impressed. “Have you tried it yet?”

  Peter sighed. “On animals, yes. A few large dogs— I haven’t been able to make the scanning equipment small enough to use on a rat or rabbit yet.”

  “So does this superEEG actually do what you want? Does it show the exact, crisp moment of actual death— the ultimate cessation of brain electrical activity?”

  Peter sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve got gigabytes of recordings of Labrador retriever brain waves now, but I can’t get a permit to put any of them to sleep.” He spread some more mustard on his meat. “The only way to test it properly will be with a dying human being.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Peter knocked, then quietly entered the private room in the chronic-care facility. A frail woman about ninety years old was sitting up, the bed’s back raised to a forty-five degree angle. Two IV bags of clear liquid hung on poles beside her bed. A tiny TV was mounted on a swing arm at the bed’s right.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fennell,” Peter said softly.

  “Hello, young man,” said the woman, her voice thin and hoarse. “Are you a doctor?”

  “No—at least, not a medical doctor. I’m an engineer.”

  “Where’s your train?”

  “Not that kind of engineer. I’m—”

  “I was kidding, son.”

  “Sorry. Dr. Chong said you had a good attitude.”

  She shrugged amiably, the movement of her shoulders taking in the hospital room, the drip bags, and more. “I try.”

  Peter looked around. No flowers. No get-well cards. It seemed Mrs. Fennell was all alone in the world. He wondered how she could be so cheerful. “I, ah, have a favor to ask you,” he said. “I need your help with an experiment.”

  Her voice was like dry leaves crumbling. “What kind of experiment?”

  “It won’t hurt at all. I’d simply like you to wear a special piece of headgear that has a series of tiny electrodes in it.”

  Leaves crumbled in a way that might have been a chuckle. Mrs. Fennell indicated the tubes going into her arm. “A couple more connections won’t hurt I guess. How long do you want me to wear this?”

  “Until, ah, until—”

  “Until I die, is that it?”

  Peter felt his cheeks grow flush. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What are the electrodes for?”

  “My company makes biomedical monitoring equipment. We’ve developed a prototype for a new hypersensitive electroencephalogram. Do you know what an EEG is?”

  “A brain-wave monitor.” Mrs. Fennell’s face seemed to be immobile; Chong had said she’d suffered a series of small strokes. But her eyes smiled. “You don’t spend as much time in hospitals as I have without picking up something.”

  Peter chuckled. “This special brain-wave monitor is a lot more discerning than the standard ones they’ve got here. I’d like to record, well …”

  “You’d like to record my death, is that it?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “You’re not. Why do you want to record my death?”

  “Well, you see, right now, there’s no one-hundred-percent accurate way of determining when the brain has permanently ceased to function. This new device should be able to indicate the exact moment of death.”

  “Why should anyone care about that? I have no relatives.”

  “Well, in many cases bodies are kept on life support simply because we don’t know whether the person is really dead or not. I’m trying to come up with a definition for death that isn’t just legal but is actual—an unequivocal test that can prove whether someone is dead or alive.”

  “And how will this help people?” she said. Her tone made it clear that to her this was what mattered most.

  “It’ll help with organ transplants,” Peter said.

  She cocked her head. “No one would want my organs.”

  Peter smiled. “Perhaps not, but someday my equipment may ensure that we don’t accidentally take organs from people who aren’t yet truly dead. It’ll also be useful in emergency rooms and at accident scenes, to make sure attempts to save a patient aren’t halted too soon.”

  Mrs. Fennell digested this for a moment, then: “You don’t really need my permission, do you? You could have just had the equipment hooked up. Just say it was for routine tests. Half the time they don’t explain what they’re doing anyway.”

  Peter nodded. “I suppose that’s true. But I thought it would be polite to ask.”

  Mrs. Fennell’s eyes smiled again. “You’re a very nice young man, Doctor … ?”

  “Hobson. But, please, call me Peter.”

  “Peter.” Her eyes crinkled. “I’ve been here for months, and not one of the doctors has volunteered that I could call them by their first name. They’ve
prodded every part of my body, but they still think keeping emotional distance is part of their job.” She paused. “I like you, Peter.”

  Peter smiled. “And I like you, Mrs. Fennell.”

  She did manage an unequivocal laugh this time. “Call me Peggy.” She paused, and reflection further creased her wrinkled face. “You know, that’s the only time I’ve heard my own first name since I was admitted here. So, Peter, are you really interested in what happens at the moment of death?”

  “Yes, Peggy, I am.”

  “Then why don’t you have a seat, make yourself comfortable, and I’ll tell you.” She lowered her voice. “You see, I’ve already died once before.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She had seemed so lucid …

  “Don’t look at me like that, Peter. I’m not insane. Sit down. Go ahead, sit. I’ll tell you what happened.” Peter cocked his head slightly, noncommittal, and found a vinyl-covered chair. He pulled it close to the bed.

  “It happened forty years ago,” said Mrs. Fennell, turning her crab-apple head to face Peter. “I’d recently been diagnosed with diabetes. I was insulin-dependent, but hadn’t yet realized how careful I had to be. My husband Kevin had gone shopping. I’d had my morning insulin injection, but hadn’t eaten yet. The phone rang. It was a woman I knew who nattered on endlessly, or so it seemed. I found myself sweating and getting a headache, but I didn’t want to say anything. I realized my heart was pounding and my arm was trembling and my vision was blurring. I was about to say something to the woman, to beg off and go get something to eat when, all of a sudden, I collapsed. I was having an insulin reaction. Hypoglycemia.”

  Although her face was impassive, deadened by strokes, her voice became increasingly animated. “Suddenly,” she said, “I found myself outside of my body. I could see myself as if from above, lying there on the kitchen floor. I kept rising higher and higher until everything sort of collapsed into a tunnel, a long, spiraling tunnel. And at the end of this tunnel, there was a beautiful, pure, bright white light. It was very bright, but it didn’t hurt at all to look at it. This feeling of calm, of peace, came over me. It was absolutely wonderful, an unconditional acceptance, a feeling of love. I found myself moving toward the light.”