Second Sight (6 page)

Attached to Sherry’s head were a profusion of colorful electrodes, each connected to tubes that snaked their way into somber-looking machines. The gurney was stainless steel and felt cold through her flimsy gown. She had the sense she was in a station, about to depart on some futuristic trip. A trip she would be taking alone.

She remembered their last afternoon together. They had made love for an hour and then sat in the sunroom, taking in the last rays of the day. Brian had told her he was sorry that he wouldn’t be around for her tests, that he couldn’t postpone his deployment. Sherry had said she understood. That she knew it could be weeks before she heard from him again. What she didn’t say was what she feared most. That the tests would find something and that she wouldn’t be the same person when he returned.

Sherry grieved now that he was gone, but the time apart would do them both good. She couldn’t risk becoming a burden on him. He would be hurt now, but in the end, she knew, it was what was best for him.

The light flashes from the migraines had been getting worse, not better. She was also beginning to see colors, bright purples, reds, and orange. Ophthalmic migraines were common, Dr. Salix told her, and many people reported shapes and colors similar to what she was seeing. It was caused by blood vessel spasms behind the eye. People who suffered cortical or cerebral blindness, as Sherry did, might still be candidates for migraines, because it was whole-brain injury, not just damage to the occipital lobes, that prevented her from seeing. In other words, it takes all components of the brain to see, and whole-brain changes that might have altered the order of delicate nerve systems might also permit vision behind the cornea.

Sherry was convinced she was reacting to the radiation she’d absorbed. The only question for her right now was whether or not she was the same person she had been before New Mexico. What effect did this radiation have on an EEG of her brain and thus her ability to read memories of the dead?

“We want to perform some tests before we get started,” Dr. Salix said, looking down at her.

Getting started meant bringing in the cadavers.

“You remember the strobe? You’ve done this before. We’re going to move the machine over you and see how your brain perceives the light.”

Sherry nodded.

“If you sense something, if you feel anything—pain, nausea—I want you to signal me by raising a hand. Otherwise, lie still and I’ll let you know when we’re done. Are you ready?”

She nodded and wheels squeaked as a machine was rolled into place.

Something snapped in the hollow-sounding room—a switch, she thought. She felt a vibration and then it was as if there was pressure against her eyes, but she saw no light.

She heard a metallic noise behind her; someone was moving to her left.

“It’s on?” she asked, but was quickly countered with a
shhhhh.

“Just your hand, Sherry. Look, don’t listen.”

She wanted so badly to see something, a glimmer of light, anything. She needed an answer for what was happening to her. And if she couldn’t give them an explanation by seeing lights, she just wanted to return to the state she had been in all these years. Blind.

The switch snapped off and the machine was wheeled away.

She could feel warm tears streaking down the sides of her cheeks. “I didn’t see anything.”

Someone laid a hand on her shoulder. “Which is not important,” Salix said. “We’re bringing in the first of the bodies now. Once we get her alongside you, I’ll need your right hand. Are you doing okay?”

Sherry nodded.

Someone dabbed her cheeks until they were dry.

This part was familiar. More than two decades familiar. Her very first experience with a corpse had been as a child. A roommate in the orphanage in Philadelphia had swallowed a lethal dose of rat poison. It took years to understand what she had seen in that moment holding the dead girl’s hand. Years more to accept that it was going to happen every time she touched the dead. That it was now a part of herself.

She wasn’t the only skeptic during those early years and she certainly wouldn’t be the last. How did you accept that you are a freak of nature? Or, as Mr. Brigham, her best friend and neighbor, liked to say, a very special human being?

Well, there was special and there was
special.
Could someone, much less she—a blind woman who had retrograde amnesia due to a childhood head injury—really exhibit aptitude for reading people’s minds? In time it became impossible for the
medical community to ignore what she appeared to be doing. They wanted to have their own look at this freak from Philadelphia. Then came the psychologists and neurologists, and on it went until a young biologist from the University of Calgary in Alberta suggested she wasn’t clairvoyant at all. He believed instead that electrical anomalies in her damaged brain somehow enabled her to connect with the dead person’s central nervous system through the profusion of skin cell receptors in the human hand. Her brain then used the deceased person’s neurological wiring to reach their short-term memory located in the frontal cortex. She was actually seeing the last visually encoded memories of what the deceased person had been thinking about in their final seconds of life.

Once she got past the macabre sensation of holding hands with the dead, Sherry found fulfillment in what she was doing. Helping murder victims find their killer. Setting straight someone’s last moments in life. Locating missing persons. Helping find artifacts that might have been lost to antiquity. She had seen images that would lead investigators to crime scenes. She had a purpose in life—perhaps even a responsibility.

But it wasn’t always easy.

Sherry’s mind recorded the collage of human memories that assailed her when she was touching a hand, including countless seemingly mundane events in a person’s life, not important to anyone else, but special enough for them to remember in those precious few seconds before death. Residual memory, Sherry called it. Everything that happened before the power went off and the brain recorded its last thought. They had become her memories now as well, those remnants of a life: a particularly beautiful sunrise, a smile on an old woman’s face, a child’s teddy bear, a grandfather’s cane. Memories were both God’s gift and God’s punishment, it seemed. You didn’t want to live with them and you didn’t want to live without them.

The gurneys were pushed together. Sherry’s hand was lifted
and laid next to the cadaver. She found the fingers quickly, a small hand, delicate. There wasn’t anything to be done after that. Sometimes the response was immediate; sometimes she drifted into it like a dream. It had never taken more than a few seconds and even now she saw…
the lights in a child’s bedroom, no, it was a ward, some kind of a hospital ward, and it had bright colors and murals painted on the walls.

Parents were sitting with their children on the floor. Shelves and boxes and baskets in the corners were filled with plush toys and games and books and videos. Nurses wore pink and blue and yellow scrubs with a hodgepodge of prints that included stars and moons and nursery rhyme characters. There was an ice cream cart in the hall outside the door. There was a girl in the bed next to her and her head was shaved and she was playing a video game in her lap.

She saw a nurse leaning to pick up a Popsicle stick next to her bed and she reached out to touch her, but her arm was too short, her fingers too weak to stretch. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. She felt as if she were trapped inside her body, capable of understanding but not of getting anyone’s attention.

She wanted that girl in the bed next to her to turn and look at her, to see that something was wrong. She moved her eyes toward the ceiling, and then the wall and the window and to the bathroom door before going back to the girl.

Right there, just a foot away, the red button on the call harness. She only had to mash it with her thumb and nurses would come running.

She felt odd, as if someone had hold of her arms and legs and now they were pulling her inside of herself, folding her up like a piece of luggage, and with every minute that passed she was recessing deeper and deeper within, until the clown lamp began to dim and the girl in the bed next door faded to black.

Sherry let the hand go and sighed.

“You had an event?”

Sherry nodded, a tear streaking the corner of one eye.

She hated the labels people tossed around so casually over the years. Yes, she’d had an “event.”
Is everybody happy with that? Just another dead girl, yeah. Just another event.

“Did you see anything different?” Salix asked her. “Vision, quality of vision, anything we haven’t talked about before?”

Sherry shook her head. “What about you?” she retorted.

Salix grunted loudly and moved to Sherry’s shoulder. “You know I won’t look at the EEGs for a few more days, Sherry. I want to compare your brain’s activity against some of your earliest base examples. This is really important.”

Salix had been working with Sherry for years. He knew not to treat her like a patient, but then again he didn’t know what else to do but study her tests.

“We’re looking for velocity changes, Sherry. Changes in the speed at which your cells release neurotransmitters. Perhaps even chemical changes in the hippocampus; I can’t determine much until I have it all in front of me. We’ll know more later.”

“What if the results are different from before?”

He laughed softly. “I can’t really say it will tell us anything new,” he said. “You know that, but be patient.” He patted her hand. “Let me do my job and be patient. We’ll do one more cadaver today and talk about where to go from here.”

She nodded grimly. It was all just a crapshoot, she knew. They didn’t know what they were looking for, and even if they found something, they wouldn’t know what to do about it. And she couldn’t blame them. She was no different from the twelve thousand epileptics in Philadelphia who, for reasons beyond the ken of science, had electrical storms in their brains. It wasn’t a matter of matching up the color-coded wires and then everything was all right again. No one had an owner’s manual for the brain.

A few minutes later, a second gurney was wheeled into the room. She heard the wheels pivot into position and then it was
pushed alongside hers. There was a moment of activity as the nurses and assistants reset something on the equipment wired to Sherry’s brain. Then someone pulled back the sheet over the cadaver and she got a whiff of decay.

She thought about that machine in New Mexico just then. How stupid those people had been to steal a radiological machine and start prying apart interior canisters. Stupid or just woefully ignorant. She could imagine that poor child, now in the morgue, eating bread from a table dusted with radioactive powder. Breathing it into her lungs as she lay in her filthy bed. She’d heard they found the mother and father inside the trailer, both dead in the living room. The son was found in the desert, miles away, behind the wheel of his pickup truck. There was an X burnt into the skin of his forearm.

And then there were two Indians who had been at the table. They’d carried a capful of the blue powder back to the reservation and showed it to the children. Twelve more—some in the public school—came down with the flu in a week. Everyone who touched the men’s clothing was infected.

In the end the incident claimed fourteen lives. Twenty-eight others survived with undetermined prognoses.

Salix took her hand and quickly bridged it to the next gurney, placed it gently across the cadaver’s hand.

It was a man’s hand, the skin was slack—
did the room temperature suddenly rise
? He was an older man, she thought, seventies, perhaps eighties. The fingers were long but the hand itself was narrow, infirm as if the muscles had atrophied. Whoever he was, his hands had not been active for some time.

She closed her own hand around it and then her eyelids, aware of the wire harnesses pressing against her shoulder….

She was in a room with white walls, a projector behind a hole in a wall was showing a grainy video of a child running naked between two thatch-covered huts; three dark-skinned women wearing cone straw hats were sitting nearby under the shade of a palm tree.
One of them was stirring something in a bowl. Another’s hands appeared to be flailing in animated conversation.

Suddenly the child stopped and pointed at the sky. A moment later there was a blinding white light. The child stood in perfect silence, as if the world had suddenly come to a halt. The women and the child turned black against the white background, as if you were looking at a negative of the image. Then a hurricane-like wind obliterated everything with sand and debris. When the wind was gone there was no village, no child, no women, no tree, nothing but flames that licked the bare earth.

He was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. There was a gun in front of him within reach. He looked at the door and then at the dusty light coming from the projector through the hole. He turned and saw a dirt road on the wall. He was looking over the hood of an open-top jeep. There was a woman on the road in front of him, young, she was wearing a khaki-green uniform with Red Cross patches on the sleeves. Her shoes were missing. Her legs were spread wide and staked open, her arms held out from her sides as if on a cross. A hand grenade was pinched between her teeth, a string tied to the handle and the handle to the neck of a water buffalo standing over her. The jeep stopped, the buffalo stepped away, and she could see hands waving in front of the lens, gesturing for the animal to stay still. The buffalo shook its big head and snorted, went down on its front knees as if to pray, and then sprang sideways, leaping into a gallop. The string came taut and a red mist replaced the medical corps woman’s face.

A bead of perspiration ran down Sherry’s cheek; she could feel sweat forming on her scalp, itching under the hair.
God, it’s warm.

There was a metal box at the far end of the table, slits for air vents on top and a round white gauge at left front. There was black mesh cloth covering two cones facing him. They appeared at times to be vibrating. He turned his head to look at the door. “Can’t…on, can’t…on.”
Sherry started to say it out loud, “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”
Someone was looking at him through a glass ob
servation window in the door, a man with a white hat, and there was smoke rising around his face, distorting his features. He was smoking a pipe.