Notes from a Coma Read online

  As a piece of salesmanship it was masterful.§ The following day’s editorials missed the point completely, spilled ink agonising over ethics and safety and failed to see the real motives behind the whole thing. Or so JJ informed me.

  “They’ve missed the point,” he said, smiling and tapping the paper. “Kevin has blinded them. PR firms will study this in years to come, a textbook example of misdirection—how to tell the truth and sidetrack people at the same time.”

  “It sounds crazy, the whole thing.”

  “Even the timing was brilliant,” JJ marvelled. “Nine o’clock at night, early enough to gather a few thoughts together but no time to sift through the info and reset today’s editions with real analysis. That’s why we have all this useless agonising about safety and ethics. Kevin handed that to them on a plate, that’s why he spelled it out in such detail.”

  “But that is the real issue, talk about walking blind—who knows what might happen to those volunteers.”

  “It’s a smokescreen, Sarah, all that information … It’s a done deal also. By the time people grasp what’s really at issue here those volunteers will be on the broad of their backs sucking three square meals a day through their IVs.”

  “So what is the issue?”

  “This is a quid pro quo. Think about it. Stumbling over the Nice Treaty, shuffling our feet over tax harmonisation, environmental legislation on the long finger, neutrality, an economic policy looking towards Boston rather than Berlin … What’s at stake here is not just the future of penal incarceration but our bona fides as good EU citizens.”

  “And we need their approval that badly?”

  “Kevin is looking at the bigger picture. This project will be carried out before the eyes of the world, a gallery of expectant nations looking on, fingers crossed that the whole thing comes up trumps and that souls can be racked and stacked in prison ICUs, atoning at half the price of five-star hotel accommodation.”

  “There’ll be outcry.”

  “Only to begin with, some liberal hand-wringing and agonising but Kevin’s betting on the people’s short attention span and desire for a quiet life.”

  “I can’t see it making economic sense—all the technology, the manpower, its ridiculous.”‖

  JJ laughed and waved the paper. “I don’t know about that; nothing is as ridiculous as the present system. The only prison system in Europe with more warders than prisoners, two-thirds of its entire budget spent on salaries and overtime, no rehab programmes … anything has to be an improvement on that. But it’s not just about budgets, Sarah. It’s about knowledge also—the meeting of minds, the exchange of ideas—the big flaw within the concept of punitive incarceration. Prisons are criminogenic and our prisons are institutes of higher learning. You go in knowing how to steal a Volkswagen Golf and come out knowing how to rip off a BMW. But you’re not going to be able to learn much when you’re out cold trying to raise a delta wave.”

  “That’s as brutish a rationale as I’ve ever come across.”

  “That’s why Kevin’s appealed to our vanity: an opportunity to show that we have the courage and expertise to guide this cutting-edge experiment. What Kevin wants to show is that we’ve moved on from the days of the Celtic Tiger. We’re not just a nation of mobile-phone salesmen or telesales spooks or production-line ops. We’ve left that potty training behind us—we’re out there now with a shiny piece of R&D all our own. We have the brains, we have the funding, all we need is a lab rat.”

  “These are real people, JJ. Who knows what might happen to them.”

  “I don’t know. Is a person in a coma a person? Is it meaningful to talk in any way about a subject with no consciousness?” He laid the paper on the table.

  “Don’t start that guff, JJ, splitting hairs.”

  “You’re right; what’s needed here are men of action not philosophers.”

  “Tough, that rules you out so. Anyway, you’re not a criminal.”

  “That’s just it. The Irish volunteer has to be an innocent, no criminal record needed—in fact, a criminal record will put you clean out of the running. They need a control, an innocent in good health who establishes a baseline condition. An exemplar so to speak. Fair play to Kevin—even within a coma he’s managed to stake out the high moral ground for the Paddy.”

  “All this enthusiasm, where has your guilt gone all of a sudden?—I’ve heard enough about it these past two years.”

  “I’ve told you before I’m not guilty of anything; I’m just guilty, that’s all.”

  “And now you can walk away from it just like that.”

  “All I’m saying is … three months on the flat of your back, full bed and board …”

  “Don’t even think about it, JJ.”

  He looked into the distance. “My point exactly, Sarah, there is nothing to think about.”

  And I knew then he was going to go for it and nothing I or anyone else could say would stand in his way.

  * Three weeks into the project, Nielsen/NetRatings confirmed that “coma” overtook “sex” as the entry of choice in the nation’s Web search engines. Only once before has this ever happened—during the second Iraqi conflict when “war” became the dominant search tag. What does this signify? What promises are being held out to us here? What exactly do we find so desirable? Why do we keep coming back here, day after day, night after night, to flick through the pages of this twenty-four-hour upskirt?

  † The weather in the hold is a simulation. Feeding off a continuous stream of data from the Carnsore weather station the full-spectrum light waxes and wanes through the moods of a day two degrees south of these latitudes. The delay in the transmission has the simulation lagging ten seconds behind the real thing. Save for Spenco boots and loincloths the subjects sleep naked. The lumens fall on their skin, duping their cellular chemistry into the ceaseless synthesising of vitamin D—like hothouse skinflowers. They breathe on under the unblinking gaze of registering monitors, within the vigilance of resuscitative machines.

  ‡ In the second year of his administration and seven months after the fall of the Conducator, the leader of the free world set his hand to designating the coming decade the “Decade of the Brain.” The resulting House Joint Resolution 174 ushered in a decade of funding and research comparable to that prompted by the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act.

  Scrying with advanced neuro-imaging techniques and with various meat to mental dependence theories as working hypotheses, a generation of neuro specialists turned inward to map a universe of such depth and complexity that by comparison the probings of the various Apollo missions were but local tourism. Somewhere within the clints and grikes of this new world glittered the real prize: consciousness. One result of the congressional imprimatur was a shift in the balance of funding and prestige from cardiac and oncological research to neurology in clinical institutes. Neurologic facilities became the holy of holies within the clinical research community. Theoreticians of all persuasions crossed disciplines into a delicate nexus of technological probing and pure conjecture, a place of infinitesimal margins and staggering magnitudes, a knotty realm where connections dissolved before they were fully traced and gave way to ever more vertiginous speculation.

  What at first glance appeared a heroic scientific enterprise had, in fact, its origins in an economic imperative. Fearing the rising cost of neurogenetic diseases, degenerative disorders, strokes, autism, depression and head traumae across an ageing population, heads of industry and insurance companies lobbied Congress for a federal and multi-disciplinary investigation of the brain and, as an afterthought, the very nature of consciousness itself. The whole project was predicated on suspicion of the individual as a potential economic liability. This rationale turns on its head the Conducator’s economic reasoning which earmarked a whole generation of neonates as fiscal assets whose life mission would be to drive up economic production and help redress the national debt.

  § Worries that the experiment would become a penal conduit wh
ich sped a criminal under-class straight from sentencing into a state sponsored oblivion were seized upon by many commentators. If coma were to become a sentencing option would there not be the likelihood that it would draw the bulk of its participants from the ranks of under-class offenders? Could any judiciary be trusted with such an option? Wasn’t this a blatant attempt by the state to cull, however temporarily, a whole class of offenders and wash its hands of all educational and rehabilitative responsibilities? Were we now looking towards the day when the ranks of hoodied recidivists would be thinned out so that a better class of white collar offender would have the run of our prison institutions …? Furthermore, it was argued, that with no binding terms within the experiments constitution, the degree to which faith in its democratic draw was vested in a governing moral calculus was worrying, to say the least. Could it be relied upon to keep the whole thing honest? Was it not worrying that this very calculus was grounded in the same bloodless over-realm in which the project itself had its origins?

  ‖ Somewhere there’s a formula justifying all this … Fixed as part of the greater national index in some ideational realm within the here and now, a place where abstracts like guilt and atonement are assigned certain values and reckoned as a percentage of all public spending … And this being an age of numeracy we’ve watched the coefficients become serial offenders, outstripping population growth and available resources, gaining on that siren-ringing cut-off point where cost analysis has drawn a line and said this far and no further. Fast-forward from a time when the lingua franca of national well-being gladdened us as a stream of stats issuing from government departments and research bodies, we now find all indicators flatlining, a general refusal to respond to the old stimuli. The conclusions are obvious: the old options are exhausted.

  ANTHONY O’MALLEY

  I picked the letter up inside the door and saw his name on it; then I saw the Department of Justice stamp in the right-hand corner. My first thought was what the hell has he been up to now? … As far as I could remember JJ had never received anything other than a polling card from the government. He was at the table, eating a bite of breakfast when I handed it to him. He read it at arm’s length, chewing a piece of bread, then folded it back into its crease and handed it to me without a word or expression on his face.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Tell me this is the wrong address, JJ,” I said, a moment later. “The wrong man, the wrong house.”

  He just sat there looking at me with this blank look on his face.

  I threw up my hands. “Mother of Jesus. Are you fucking crazy …?”

  We had it out hammer and tongs then, one of the worst rows we’ve ever had. I had thought that these kinds of arguments were behind us, that we had moved beyond them into some sort of man-to-man understanding of each other. But then this crops up, of all the frigging things.

  Of course I lost the head straight off.

  “Do you have any fucking idea what the hell you are letting yourself in for with this?”

  Of course I was roaring now and knew even as I heard myself that if I kept it up this would be the end of the conversation. Keeping my wits about me was what was needed now—a clear head and a sharp wit. I had to meet him on his own ground if I was going to make any headway.

  “Well?” I said, waving the letter in the air. “Well?”

  He leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples. I could sense one of his speeches coming on. But he just shook his head.

  “If you’re going to start ranting and raving we’re not going to get anywhere with this. Of course I don’t know what I am letting myself in for. That’s the nature of the whole thing.”

  “For the love of Christ, JJ, think about this …”

  I spread the letter out on the table and took a step back from it. The government seal, the green harp at the top of the page—that was the bit I couldn’t get over. How could an official document, a government document, land on a person’s doorstep with news like this, news that might just as well have come from another world. Had everyone gone off their heads?

  “… JJ, let’s consider this. You’re only out of hospital a few months. You’ve got the all-clear and now you want to go and sign up for this fucking thing.”

  He said nothing, just sat there knowing full well that I would talk myself out if I went on long enough. And of course he was giving me every chance and, true to form, I took it.

  “What the hell do you think you’re going to do with yourself for those three months—count sheep?”*

  He looked me square in the eye. “Nothing I say will make you understand this. I don’t have the words for it myself much less anyone else.” He drew his hand across his face. “These thoughts,” he said after a pause, “these dreams, this constant mind-racing and mindrot … now this ghost. It just wears me down. A break from myself, that’s what I need. Just to take myself off somewhere and forget myself for a while.”

  It made no sense to me; it made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now either. This idea of forgetting himself … someone as smart as JJ trying to forget himself … and after all he’d been through … There was something here that flummoxed me but I hadn’t the turn of mind to put my finger on it. Keep to what you know I told myself—or at least what you think you know.

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. I needed something solid under me.

  “JJ, when people are down in themselves they don’t go signing up for this sort of thing. People take up hobbies, they go on holidays, they do other things … But this …” I stabbed a finger at the letter. “JJ, you’ve spent the whole of these last ten months recovering, trying to find your way back to yourself and now you want to do this. Throwing away all you’ve worked for—all we’ve worked for, I might add.”

  That surprised me—it was out of me before I could check it and I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth. This sense of having a claim over him just because of my part in his recovery … A mean sort of feeling you never know you have until someone threatens it. Of course he picked up on it straight away.

  “Don’t start that,” he said. “This is not a question of ownership.” He smoothed out the form and pushed it across the table to me. “Your signature, this is where your name goes. Next of kin.” He drew his finger along the bottom of it.

  If ever I had a serious mind to stand in his way then this is the moment when I should have done it. This is where I could have quit the room and put a stop to everything. But of course no more than JJ himself I could never walk away from an argument either. Sometimes I think this fondness for a scrap is one of those things I’ve given him, this hunger to see every argument through to the last word, this wish to be the last man standing. I know that that’s my way; is now and always has been. And then sometimes I think it’s something we took from each other …

  “My next of kin. You have to sign this release.”

  His tone of voice—it was like he was asking me to sign for a bill of goods and expected no problem, just sitting there with no expression on his face, the cup and plate on the table before him.

  “And I suppose I’m the last to hear about this?”

  “The only other one who knows is Sarah.”

  “And she’s going along with this as well, this whole fucking—”

  “—She’s not thrilled but she’s not ranting or raving either.”

  He motioned to the form once more, tapped his finger on it.

  I shook my head.

  He was calm, with the quiet look of a man who’d already won the argument. He was giving me the impression that I had slipped up somewhere along the way and that it was only a matter of him bringing me back through my own words and having him show me the flaw in them. But when he spoke it was nothing like what I’d expected and it was probably the only other question I could have answered no to.

  “Have I ever asked you for anything before?” he said.

  * At 2:23 A.M. on the morning of the twenty-third of August a sp
ectacular anomaly occurred across the transmitted EEGs of all five subjects. In a sudden leap beyond the phase and amplitude of their coma signatures each patient appeared to achieve a brief period of full consciousness. Staggered at three-second intervals the alpha waves of Luftig, Jorda, Perec and Callanan lasted a full seventeen seconds before full unconsciousness resumed. Trailing twelve seconds behind this serial cluster JJ O’Malley registered a full ten-second alpha wave. Comparisons between the transmitted data and the secure data within the Somnos ICU revealed that the anomaly could only be the work of external hackers. An immediate investigation traced the signal to a cybernetic project within the MediaLab research institute in Dublin; sampled EEGs of a dog and four sheep had been spliced into the ongoing cursive of each patient’s coma, the effect in this case being of a pure-bred collie herding a small flock of black-faced mountain hoggets through the featureless topography of a five-man coma. Refusing to acknowledge the joke, a project spokesman drily confirmed that while telemetry would remain online all transmission would henceforth be secured within military-grade encryption codes. Proceedings to bring charges of virtual trespass against the hackers are still ongoing.

  KEVIN BARRET TD

  The morning of the press conference he was standing at reception with a small bag at his feet and a bottle of water in his hands.

  “JJ … you’re on your own?”

  “Kevin … yes, I thought it would be better to keep it simple. No reason to get anyone involved at this time.”

  “Yes, keep it simple.” I motioned to the big man beside me. “JJ, this is Detective Sergeant Dermot Melia. He’s my security but I’m handing him over to you for the next two days.”

  JJ held out his hand. “Security?”

  “Just for these two days, you’re public property now, JJ, we have to look after you. Let’s sit down for a minute.”

  We moved to two armchairs inside the windows. The mid-morning crowds passed by outside. JJ stretched out his legs and drank from his bottle. He looked pale.