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- Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Her body is intact, but her brain is dead. I have essentially the opposite problem. Eighteen-year-old Rosa is on the verge of the greatest change of her life. Her nerve disease is slowly killing her so when a doctor from Boston chooses her as a candidate for an experimental brain transplant, she and her family move from London in search of a miracle. Sylvia - a girl from Massachusetts - is brain dead after having fallen into a frozen lake and her parents have agreed to donate her body to give Rosa a new life. It's Rosa's only chance of life but as the operation draws near she obsesses over the idea of what it will feel like to be a real life Frankenstein. The operation is followed by months of rehabilitation. Longing to escape the confines of the hospital, Rosa escapes to the hospital park, where she meets Joe. As they start to fall in love Rosa is haunted by the idea that he doesn't see her for who she is. When Joe offers to drive her anywhere she needs, they head towards the frozen lake. Can Rosa find closure, and figure out who she really is?
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Contents
For Jakob and Lucas
While some institutions mentioned in the story are genuine, the characters involved are wholly imaginary.
1
‘What really matters is who you are on the inside, not the outside.’ If someone tells you this, you know it means one of two things. T hey don’t think you’re that good-looking, either. Or they’re worried you might be falling for the fiction of fashion-magazine cover girls and starting to believe that all that matters in life is the skinniness of your legs or the poutiness of your lips. My legs are pretty skinny, in fact. What I can see of them. Which isn’t much, given that I can move little below the neck, and that I’m looking at myself not in a mirror but a window.
It’s a plate-glass window that reaches from the vinyl flooring to the ceiling, and it was the first significant thing that I noticed about this room – so different from my bedroom in my dark, terraced London home. T he second thing: no British channels on the TV, apart from BBC America. Third: no mirrors. New health-and-safety guidelines, according to Jane, the sturdy, sweet-faced nurse who showed me around.
“Bollocks,” I whispered, not that quietly, but quietly enough that she couldn’t be absolutely certain of what I said. I knew exactly why they didn’t want me to look at myself. What I didn’t understand was why she didn’t just tell me. It’s not as though I’m unused to significantly harder truths.
“I’ll be your mirror,” Dad said. And I knew he would, in a way. Unlike Mum, he’s never been much good at hiding his emotions. Every tiny deterioration in my physical condition has been reflected step by inevitable step in his sad, brown eyes. As a metaphorical mirror, he’s exceptional. As an actual mirror, not so much.
“I need to know,” I told Dr. Leon Monzales, “that everything you tell me will be the truth – or what you honestly believe is the truth.”
The first time the chief surgeon came to visit me here in my room was the afternoon I arrived in Boston. Monzales has a daytime-soap doctor’s voice. Husky, with a Mexican accent. He has a daytime-soap doctor’s face and body, too. I’ve seen enough daytime TV these past few years to be pretty damn sure of my judgment on this. Broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with wavy dark hair, brushed back.
I was in my voice-activated chair over by the chest of drawers, on which Mum had laid out a few things she seemed to think would make the place feel more like home – or at least a little less like a modified-five-star-hotel-room prelude to a slasher movie. A stuffed squirrel with a faded Minnie Mouse sticker on its tail – my first soft toy. A silver-plated candle in my favorite citrus-woody scent. And a photograph that used to be on the bookcase by my bed: a picture I took of Mum and Dad and my brother, Elliot, standing in spring sunshine by the Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey.
Dr. Monzales was on an oatmeal-colored, regular-person’s upholstered chair. His shirtsleeves were neatly rolled up, his muscular hands resting in his lap. Judging by his posture, we could have been discussing summer vacation plans, or whether nuts make or break a chocolate brownie, rather than the imminent end of my life as I know it.
“Why are there no mirrors in my room?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, I can see how that might seem a little bit strange.”
“It doesn’t seem strange. You don’t want me to look at myself.”
“I … we … I don’t have a policy on that. Our psychological team felt that perhaps it might help with the adjustment.”
“The nurse – Jane – told me it’s because of new health-and-safety guidelines.”
Monzales successfully combined an expression of surprise with one that suggested of course she did. “There’s more than physical health and safety to think about, Rosa.”
“My mind is OK.”
“I know that,” he said.
“You can leave my mind to me.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Rosa. Do you want mirrors in your room?”
I was on the point of saying yes – mostly, I realized, because I was irritated by the nurse. But did I really? At home, I avoid mirrors. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still half remember myself as I used to be.
“The psychological healing process, as well as the physical, you know… Perhaps it will be easier this way,” Monzales said.
“Will I really be healed?” I asked him.
He hunched forward, palms spread, like a saint in a painting offering a blessing. “Of course, that is what we’ve all planned for so assiduously.”
But is it possible? A broken bone can be healed. A gash can be healed. But me? Is the surgery he is planning something that could legitimately be described as an attempt to heal? Not exactly. Try to be precise, Rosa. (When I talk to myself, I often hear Mum’s voice in there, too.)
Anyway, this is a deviation, but a little explanation, at least, for why, three full weeks after that conversation about mirrors and healing, I’m sitting as close as I can to the vast window that separates my brightly lit hospital room from the darkened sky.
Three weeks.
It’s March 15. 5:48 p.m.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 16, I will be wheeled away for the presurgery meds, then obliterating anesthesia.
I have less than eleven hours left.
Focus.
I peer at the window, and I see…
My legs. Beneath the black cotton trousers, they’re emaciated. My shapeless waist.
My acceptable bust. Though a lot of good that does me.
My face? It’s hard. And I don’t mean because I’m looking in a window.
I’ll have to take this in steps.
Below my room, running the length of this wing and separating it from Boston Harbor, is the hospital’s narrow park. A couple of kids are out there, straining against their puffer jackets as they put the finishing touches on a lopsided snowman with what looks to be the plastic sheath of a hypodermic for a nose.
A man is watching. Beside him is a woman, her long dark hair loose around her shoulders. Even from here, three stories up, I can see that she’s looking not at the kids but at a boy about my age who’s over on one of the benches near the statue of Pan. I can’t tell if the benches are inscribed with the names of dead patients who loved the view or felt at peace in this park, but I expect they are. I’ve been in enough hospitals by now.
The boy’s wearing a heavy coat, but his slim body is contracted from the cold – or something, anyway, because his arms are tight against his sides and his gaze is fixed on the ground. His breath comes in clouds. It merges with the mist that’s drifting in from the harbor. He raises his head. I’m caught. My heart freezes. He’s looking right at me. Then he jumps from the bench and strides away.
Beyond the park, the lights of tourist boats out on the harbor and the city skyscrapers are twinkling away. I see the flash of planes taking off from Logan International Airport, soaring up and right across my field of view. I try to resist the impulse to wish myself on board one of them.
At last, I rein in my focus. And I see me.
My pulse jerks. Leaps. Jerks, like a corrupted download. The reflection is far from perfect. My sharp nose and small chin are captured clearly, but my gray-white skin blends with the sand-colored wall behind me. My brown eyes appear black, and my dark blond hair fades into a hazy nothingness. In this window reflection, I seem – I don’t know how else to describe it – spectral. It’s appropriate, I suppose. I – me, the only me I’ve ever known – already I look as insubstantial as a ghost.
Full-on panic shunts into my chest. I drop my gaze to the parts of me I can affirm to be real. My useless knees. My wasted thighs. My so-wasted breasts. My awkward hands. After a face, the part of the body a transplant recipient has the most trouble learning to live with is a hand.
I have chunky knuckles and flat nails. On the first knuckle of my right middle finger is a thin white scar, left by a splash of boiling caramel from when I made Halloween toffee apples with Mum when I was eight. My left hand is palm-side up on my lap. I see the familiar wishbone pattern of veins around the base of my thumb and forefinger, and the pulse in my inner wrist. Here the skin is thin. So thin, in fact, it seems to be fading, as though somehow it knows what’s about to happen. Tomorrow, it will be gone. That scar, too. My pulse, too.
Another thwack of panic rocks my chest.
Then another.
I can’t look at myself anymore. “Lights off!” I instruct the room.
The bulbs dim and my reflection fractures.
My runaway heart loses pace, just a little.
Breathe, I tell myself. Count to seven in. Eleven out. Seven in—
The door to my room clicks open.
“Rosa?”
It’s Mum. I don’t respond. I’m not sure I can.
“Sweetheart?”
I still feel frozen. But I don’t want to make her anymore worried than she is already. So I force my right hand to nudge the controls, and my chair swivels around.
She’s in a white doctor’s coat. A few strands of poodle-curly black hair have escaped her bun and are loose around her face. As she comes into the room, she smiles. It’s a creditable attempt. Somehow, she even manages to rope in her eyes. But behind the smile, I can see she’s terrified. I don’t blame her. I’m terrified myself. I want to tell her it’s OK, she doesn’t have to smile. But I’ve never been able to talk to her like that. To tell her my heartfelt truths.
“Why are the lights off? Were you sleeping?” she says.
Sleeping? Is she kidding? Before I can confirm that, no, I was not sleeping – that sleep has never seemed more remote than it does at this moment – Dad shuffles in behind her, his gray hair ruffled, his beard untidy, his habitual woolen V-neck sweater creased. “Rosa? You OK?” he asks. “Why are the lights off?”
“I thought I’d better let my eyes down gently,” I tell him.
They asked the same question, but he isn’t trying to smile, and it’s easier to talk to someone who hasn’t decided her daughter’s life is in her hands. Highly skilled hands, perhaps, and Dr. Monzales, not Mum, will be leading the operation. But still.
Back when Mum was working to get me from London to Boston, to the Dixon-Dudley Memorial Hospital, and the only surgical unit she thought capable of what she’d decided was my last remaining option other than death (which, it turned out, was not an option as far as she was concerned), it probably all made sense to her.
Now D-Day is upon us. Or judgment day. Or whatever you want to call it.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Mum says quietly.
She walks over to the bed a little unsteadily, despite a body toned by thirty laps in the pool each morning and sensible, dark brown shoes. She sits on the edge, close enough that she can touch me. She takes my hand. Her flat-nailed, chunky-knuckled thumb brushes the toffee-apple scar. I wonder if she remembers. “Dr. Monzales will be here in a minute.”
I nod. This is scheduled. Still, something about the confirmation sends another rush of stress hormones through my body. You’d think it would have given up by now, wouldn’t you? No point in gearing up for fight or flight when neither is remotely possible.
“One last formal run-through of the procedure, so you can complete your informed consent.” Mum’s voice is tight.
“Sign my life away, you mean.”
“Sign up for life,” she says, and obviously realizes how idiotic that sounds. She shakes her head. “Rosa…” She hesitates. In those arctic blue eyes, the polar opposite of mine, I read guilt. Uncertainty. Fear. And I feel bad.
“It is going to be OK,” Dad says. He comes to sit on the other side of me, and he brings with him such a familiar scent: the cord of his dark gray trousers and coffee. It confuses me for a moment. It’s a smell from home, and this place – this new high-tech hospital room, with its invisible monitoring and control systems, its plastic floor and artificial orchids in a waterless vase on the desk – could not be more different.
“Remember all the times we’ve talked about this,” Dad says. “Doctors are taught to be cautious, but they wouldn’t attempt something like this if they weren’t certain they could do it. They will save your life. You know that.”
“…Yeah.” (I don’t.)
“It’ll take time,” Mum says, “but you’re going to make it through this, and ultimately, Rosa, that’s all that matters.”
Make it through. She means the surgery. But, really, will I? Dr. Monzales has put my chance of waking up from the operation at 90 percent. Not perfect odds, but a lot better than the absolute zero I’d be facing otherwise.
Dad shoots Mum a glance. She squeezes my hand. I watch the action, rather than feel it. “Rosa, I want to tell you—”
“Tell her what?”
Mum and Dad look around. It’s Elliot, my brother. He pushes the door wide and walks in.
Elliot is two years older than me. He’s tallish, darkish, and handsome – if you think handsome is gaunt, with narrow shoulders, oversize pale blue eyes, and patchy brown facial hair. Evidently some girls do, because despite being in America for only three weeks, he’s already managed to hook up with an elfin-faced, hourglass-figured documentary filmmaker (I’ve seen her Instagram pictures) four years older than him, who lives in Brooklyn. Not only that, he’s been to visit her. Twice. He’s taken to walking about with the latest New Yorker sticking out of the pocket of his Belstaff jacket and tweeting obscene answers to the weekly cartoon caption competition to his inexplicably exploding band of followers.
Elliot is everything Dad routinely criticizes him for. Vain. Lazy. Overconfident. Hedonistic. But if I have to have a brother – and there are downsides – I’d rather it were him than anybody else on this planet.
Mum and Dad watch him uncertainly, afraid he’s going to say something inappropriate. I don’t know why they’re uncertain. It’s basically inevitable.
“Tell her what?” Elliot says again. He mimes sudden understanding. “Oh! She’s flat-chested. Sorry, Rosa. Maybe they can transplant your tits. They can do that, can’t they, Mum?”
Mum turns ash-white. Dad stares at Elliot in obvious disbelief that he – responsible, sincere, earnest Dad – could have spawned somebody like him. Frankly, I share it. But the completely moronic comment makes me smile. Which Elliot knew would happen. Which is why he said it. See? Downsides. Who wants their brother talking about their tits? But rather him than anybody else on this planet.
“I wanted to tell you something Dr. Monzales told me this morning,” Mum says. “That the mood among the entire team is so positive. Everybody is perfectly ready, he says.”
Elliot isn’t listening. He pulls the New Yorker from his pocket, flicks to the back, and holds it up at the caption competition. A middle-aged naked man is climbing in through the window of an apartment. A middle-aged, frumpy-looking woman is on the sofa (fully clothed). She’s staring up from her book in surprise. God, this cartoon was made for Elliot. He clears his throat, but there’s a knock on my open door, and the next voice I hear is not his.
“Ah … Doctor Marchant. And Doctor Marchant.”
Dr. Monzales strides into the room with a folder, nodding at Mum, then at Dad, who is not a medical doctor – he’s a lecturer in botany. He closes the door and shoots a cautious glance at Elliot but his expression, his attitude, his aura is so serious, even Elliot is silenced.
After pulling the desk chair over to me, Dr. Monzales sits and fixes his intense gaze on my face. “Rosa, I need to go through the details one last time. Since you are eighteen now, we require your signature to proceed with the surgery. But more importantly, for me, I need to know that deep down, you are still in full agreement. That you haven’t changed your mind? That you’re positively sure you want to proceed?”
If I’m positively sure? The seconds scramble. Time is rushing. I force it to stop. Because after all the conversations, the logistical planning, the screening tests, the evaluations, the probing, the reports, the warnings, and the delays as Dr. Monzales asked for more time to perfect the surgical plans, this is it.
I glance at Mum. She rockets up the stiffness scale. If she’s not careful, she’ll shatter.
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
While Mum deflates with relief, Dr. Monzales seems to expand. He’s always appeared confident and in control, but I’ve never been quite so aware of the gravity in gravitas before. He’s like a human black hole. As he reads from a document in the folder, outlining one final time in graphic detail exactly what the surgery will entail – I know far more about the action of skull saws and silicon nanoknives than could ever be considered desirable – and what he plans to do to encourage the melding of the new me, I’m pulled closer, and closer, until I’ve passed the event horizon and there’s no going back.
The morning after I arrived in Boston, I downloaded Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I’d read it in paperback a couple of years before. Liked it. Given it an eye-level position on the bookshelf by my bed. Who knew then I’d have to live it? Now I know seven or eight long passages by heart. One, from chapter five, feels like it’s burned into my brain.
The ‘creature’ opens its eyes for the first time…
I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
At 4:30 a.m. tomorrow, two nurses will come for me. I will be wheeled to the anteroom of an operating theater, be injected with a sedative, and have an IV fitted to a vein in my right arm. Through the line, I’ll be infused with propofol. Within a minute of this anesthetic entering my bloodstream, I will be out cold. My skull will then be broken open, and my brain will be transplanted into the skull of a girl whose own brain will very recently have been removed.
Right now, she is in a coma. Her body is intact, but her brain is dead.
I have essentially the opposite problem.
We’re two halves of a person. But together, I wonder – and I can’t get this thought out of my head; it’s stuck there tighter than the catchiest tune – what will I be? What will I become? If I fall in love or strike a person, will she be doing the loving or hitting, or me? If I sleep with someone without her consent, could it classify as abuse?
Philosophers have debated the nature of identity for centuries. If only all the eminent ancient minds who’d pondered these questions could be in Boston right now. Surely they’d never have dreamed their thought experiments could ever become real. And yet that’s what’s about to happen. And of all the people in the world, it’s going to happen to me. And of all the things I could be thinking about at this moment – all the tests of the mind–body disconnect and the fundamental questions concerning the philosophy of identity – I find myself focusing on sex. How disappointed they would be!
2
Dr. Monzales has left, and Elliot is talking.
There was a silence and he had to fill it.
He’s slouched on the desk chair, his long body awkwardly arranged, telling us about his plans for a trip to New York, to meet Aula the documentary filmmaker at an illegal pop-up restaurant inside a condemned Manhattan water tower. “They bring in these top chefs,” he’s saying.
“Elliot. Seriously. Shut up.”
He stares at me. Sits up a little. Rubs a hand across his face.
And I feel bad, because what do you talk about on a night like this?
Nine and a half hours to go. And there’s nothing left that I want to discuss.
“Turn on TV,” I instruct the room.
Mum tenses. She glances at Dad, as though expecting him to make some kind of reasoned objection. But maybe Dad is as exhausted and out of alternatives as I am, because he only pushes me into a better position for viewing the screen.
I watch as a tiny woman in a glittering pink leotard spins on the spot. She leaps and is caught by a vaguely familiar older man wearing what looks like a matador’s cape.
“You had one like that,” Elliot says.
“Not quite so many sequins,” I point out.
I’d be surprised he remembers, but a photo of me wearing it, one satin-shoed foot up on a barre, did once hang above the radiator in the hall. (When I was ten, I took it down myself, because I knew no one else would. I didn’t throw it away. I just put it in a kitchen drawer, where it became buried by the general detritus of life.) Yeah, I used to like dancing. No, it isn’t something I want to watch.
“BBC America,” I say.
The channel changes, and as I kind of hoped – not a wild hope, in all honesty, because BBC America is pretty reliable on this score – a Top Gear rerun is showing. An old one, from before Jeremy Clarkson hit that producer and everything changed.
Elliot turns to me. “You complete cock.”
Reflexively, Mum says, “Elliot!”
But it’s not an insult. Well, Elliot doesn’t mean it as one. It’s a term of abuse the presenter James May is particularly fond of. He’s always calling one of the others a “complete cock”. Now it’s a kind of in-joke between Elliot and me.
The truth is, I have zero interest in the latest cars, or boyish escapades in cars. Dad loves Top Gear. Strange, maybe, for someone who loves trees, but there you go. I grew up with it. Next to being with my family, it’s the closest I can get to home here in America.
Tonight, it’s one of the specials. They’re driving off on the hunt for the true source of the Nile. Hammond leaps about in kidlike excitement while Clarkson bellows melodramatic instructions, and I feel myself start to relax.
I have Mum, Dad, Elliot, and Top Gear. It will no doubt seem inexplicable to any normal eighteen-year-old girl, but I can’t help thinking there could be far worse ways to spend what could be the last night of my life, and certainly the last night of my life as I’ve known it.
Next time I wake up, it’ll be to go to surgery. The time after that, it will be in someone else’s body…
*
Before any of us signed even the initial papers, Dr. Bailey, the hospital’s chief psychologist, sent a report recommending that while it would be helpful for me to learn a few fundamental facts about the donor, the procedure should be essentially anonymous.
He wrote:
Experience with face transplantation, in particular, suggests that detailed knowledge about the donor is detrimental to recovery. Recipients tend to focus on the dead person’s identity rather than their own.
This report arrived a couple of weeks after I first met Dr. Monzales, at our home in London.
The four of us (Elliot was at a lecture) were sitting around the table in our cluttered kitchen with mugs of tea. Dad, who doesn’t notice this kind of thing, gave Dr. Monzales my favorite, the one with the skateboarding cat on it, a parrot perched on its head. The incongruousness of that mug in his hand made everything seem even more surreal. Weirder than anything I could have dreamed up.
Mum is a brain surgeon. Her specialty is implanting electrodes to treat Parkinson’s disease. Before Dr. Monzales arrived, Mum told me only that she’d met him many times at conferences, he was based in Boston, he was in London for a meeting, and he might have an idea of how to help me.
“It is a radical idea,” she said, after a moment. “But I really think we should hear him out.”
“So perhaps you have heard my name or you have looked me up?” Dr. Monzales said. He sipped over the parrot’s head. “Maybe you have heard about the first human head transplant, in China?”
I nodded in answer to the second question, not the first. Of course I’d heard about it. It had been all over the Internet and TV. I glanced hard at Mum. Was this his “idea” of how to help me?
“I was joint lead surgeon on the procedure,” he went on. “I have left my co-surgeon to the limelight. I don’t care so much for attention. I prefer to focus on the work. And some work that has not yet been made public –” he lowered his voice a little – “is my development of an alternative with colleagues at Harvard Medical School.”
His gaze intense, he said, “Rosa, the animal trials we have been obliged to perform show that brain transplantation can work spectacularly well. The recovery time is long – a few months, not weeks, as there are many new nerve pathways to be created. But the main advantage for a person, compared with a full head transplant, will be the absence of major neck scarring. A typical physical appearance – the scars hidden by hair, no obvious sign of major surgery. I believe this is the way to go, especially for people in your kind of circumstance, of your kind of age. When your mother approached me, and I heard about your case, I thought, Yes, perhaps you will be an excellent first candidate.”
“Are you serious?” I asked him.
“About your suitability?”
“About putting my brain into someone else’s body!”
“Look at the long evolution of transplantation,” he said, his palms spread. “Consider what was once so controversial but now is routine, or close. The liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the eyes, the heart, the face – and so why not the brain? I am very, deeply serious.”
I looked again at Mum. She nodded. “I believe it is achievable.”
Dad was sitting next to me. He put his hand over mine.
“Not that this is the major concern in your mind,” Dr. Monzales went on, “but you would not need to worry about the cost. The hospital has received some very large endowments. Everyone there is eager to pioneer new treatments to save children’s lives. A treatment like this would be revolutionary.”
Maybe Dad read my mind. “I know it sounds crazy, Rosa, and it’ll take time for you to even get your head around the idea, but perhaps it’s worth thinking about?”
Dr. Monzales nodded. “Of course, you will need plenty of time to think, to talk. Our chief psychologist can be in touch, to talk everything through, and if you would like, he has material he has prepared that he could send to you to read. If it is any reassurance, I have, I think, the same understanding of how outlandish the idea sounds but also the same certainty of success as when NASA sent astronauts to the Moon. It would be a giant leap for you into your own future, Rosa. And it would give hope to so many.”
“…You are serious,” I said.
My head felt thick, my thoughts blurry. I’m not sure if I was disgusted or excited or afraid of hoping again.
Maybe all of the above.
After he left, Mum and Dad came back to sit on either side of me.
“In the end, it will be your choice,” Mum said, and I think she was trying to believe she meant it. “If you eventually decide you don’t want to do this, that’s OK.” But I could see in her eyes, as well as in Dad’s, that only something other than certain death would be “OK”.
And so, after a lot of conversations with Mum and Dad, Dr. Bailey, and Elliot (“I’ll take a year out of uni, Rosa”; “Maybe I can even do a semester out there on American literature”; “I’ll come to Boston, Mum and Dad’ll have an apartment – I’ll be there with you.”), six weeks later, Dr. Monzales appeared on Mum’s laptop screen with news of a potential donor.
This time, Elliot was there, too. We were all huddled at the table, watching him on Skype.
“Apologies that I cannot be there in person, Rosa. But I wanted to discuss this with you as quickly as possible. There is no easy way for you to hear this information. So, let me simply lay it out. This is what I can tell you: she is American. She is eighteen. She has loving parents. She was happy. Tragically for her and her family, an accident has left her in an irreversible coma.”
“What kind of accident?” I asked him.
“All I can tell you is that it was a near-drowning, and there was no prolonged pain. And that her parents have undergone counseling. And they are willing to give their consent to the surgery. I know Dr. Bailey has recommended only a very limited exchange of personal details, and the girl’s parents agree – in fact, they have requested anonymity. So I’m afraid that is all I can tell you about her, except for her first name: Sylvia. And also, we have a picture. If you would like to see it. If it’s all too much now, I can show you another time.”
“I’d like to see it,” I said, my throat tight.
He looked down, at his desk, I guess. A rustling sound came through the speakers. My heart like a ball of molten metal, I waited. Then he lifted a photograph up to the camera.
I stared at a girl with wide-set, deep brown eyes, olive skin, thick, wavy dark hair to her shoulders, and dimples in her cheeks. Pretty. Normal-pretty. Prettier than me. Nice – if that’s something you can tell from a photograph. She was sitting on a sofa, in jeans and a black T-shirt. Around her neck was a heart-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain. Who gave her the necklace? I wondered. Her boyfriend? Her mum, on her last birthday? The last birthday she’d ever know.
Tears flooded my eyes. I had to sit there, helpless, while Mum jumped up to find a tissue.
Dad wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Elliot pulled his chair closer. The color had drained from his face.
From the screen, Dr. Monzales said quietly, “If you make the final decision to proceed, there will be many tears, Rosa. Of fear, I am sure. Uncertainty. Frustration, in the rehabilitation. But in the end, I believe, of joy. For Sylvia, unfortunately, there is no hope of recovery. But it need not be like that for you.”
*
On the TV in my hospital room, the night before the surgery, Clarkson, Hammond, and May huddle over a battered map – they’re still searching for the “true” source of the Nile – and Elliot drags his chair over to mine.
Eyes on the screen, he says to me, “Greggs vanilla slices.”
A smile flickers on my mouth as I say, “Ginsters chicken and mushroom slices.”
“Cheryl Cole’s flowery bottom.”
I think for a moment. “The stained bottom of a mug accustomed to Yorkshire Tea.”
“The B and Q bank holiday bonanza!”
“The M and S ten-pound deal.”
Mum says, “What are you talking about?”
Elliot looks at her. “Home.”
“The Palace of Westminster,” she says after a moment.
He shakes his head. “As usual, you’re totally missing the point.”
I shush them. Clarkson and May are scrambling across an arid landscape – I’m not sure what happened to Hammond – and Dad reaches for my hand. I can’t consciously feel pain or pressure, heat or cold. But there’s an unconscious part of me that feels Dad’s hand. Suddenly, I’m more tired than I can ever remember.
My eyes close.
I jerk them open.
They close.
I never find out whether Clarkson or May finds the true source of the Nile, because here, now, in my hospital room, I fall asleep.
*
When I wake up, I’m on my back.
Panic hits. My heart pounds. Skips. Shudders.
The digital clock on the desk shows 4:16 a.m. The six flicks to a seven. The air is filled with an intense, sweet scent: lemons. Someone lit my candle.
Mum is gone. Dad and Elliot are asleep on their chairs. I can’t reach them. The TV is off. I have less than half an hour of consciousness left. And then? The panic turns bitter.
Somehow, Elliot must sense this, because he stirs. He pulls himself up straight. “You awake?”
“Yeah,” I breathe.
I hear the hum of the room, the hidden electronics, see the tiny green flash of the smoke alarm set into the ceiling. My senses strain, flailing desperately for something to hold on to.
And Elliot, who in so many ways is so different from me, says, “When people say what matters is what’s on the inside, not the outside, they’re right. You know that.”
“I think that’s probably officially the first time someone’s ever said that to a person who’s about to have no outside,” I tell him.
“You’ll have an outside. It’ll be different. But you will still be you. Irritatingly, you still won’t think my cartoon captions are funny.”
“Irritatingly, you will still be a dick.”
“And if I had the body of David Beckham – who, incidentally, I have a lot of respect for – I’d still be a dick. And I’d still love you. And I’d still be about to tell you my caption for that cartoon of that man climbing through the window—”
“Please don’t.”
“Point proved.”
“What point is that?” I ask him.
“Switch off the lights and I’m still me, and you’re still you. If you don’t like what it’s like afterward, we’ll go and live somewhere dark and just be us, the same as we’ve always been. Except you’ll be able to walk and you won’t be about to die.”
I’m going to cry.
I don’t want to cry.
“Somewhere dark?”
“Yeah.”
I swallow. “Like a crypt?”
“Like a house with the lights off, with very thick curtains.” Believe it or not, he sounds serious.
“There are prison cells in China they call the dark cells,” I tell him. “They’re so small you have to crawl into them. After a few years, your hair turns white.”
“I could live with white hair.”
“Elliot—”
“No, listen. I mean it, Rosa.”
“You’d live in the dark with me?”
“You don’t change who someone is by turning off the lights.”
There’s a knock on the door. It opens. Elliot blinks.
Though I don’t look at the two silhouettes, I sense their presence. I’m still focusing on Elliot. His T-shirt is crumpled, his hair is a mess, but his eyes tell me none of that matters.
“So that caption?” I breathe.
His gaze doesn’t flicker. Not even now, as Dad jerks awake and two figures in green smocks and loose green pants bustle in. It’s Jane – her brown hair clipped back, the tiny crucifix around her neck gleaming – and her plump colleague, Drema. They pad toward me, saying words I don’t hear.
“I’ll tell you when you wake up. Give you something to live for.” He grins.
3
April 22.
Imagine being conscious but hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, tasting nothing, touching nothing, having the awareness of being awake but unable to move or sense a single thing – and then, every few seconds, or minutes or hours, because you have no sense of time, a wild explosion of light rocks your mind. The silence and the stillness are absolute. Then a grenade fires through what someone else might call my soul. Am I alive? Perhaps I’m on the point of death.
May 8.
A hum. It’s all I’m aware of. I can’t see anything. I can’t touch, taste, or move anything. But I can detect that vibration, and somehow I know it’s external to me. I can sense something. And I realize: I’m thinking about the hum. I’m thinking half-normal thoughts in undeniably normal words. I am alive. I am alive.
Dr. Monzales told me it would take time for my brain to connect with my new body, and my experiences during that process would be very difficult to predict.
Explanation A: That is what’s happening right now, and gradually it’ll get better.
Explanation B: I’ve survived the operation but my brain was injured. I have a degree of consciousness, but a permanent inability to move or communicate.
Either way, they’ll know that something’s going on in my head, because they had the world’s most sophisticated brain scanners all lined up to use on me. They’ll see activity in parts of the brain used for thinking, not just breathing and sleeping.
Which means Dad will be crying. Mum probably will be crying. Elliot? I have no idea what Elliot will be doing. I wish I could see him. Right now. I really wish I could see his face.
May 25.
A whining. It sounds like an insect, only it’s higher-pitched, and it’s … yes, it’s changing. The pitch is changing. And I feel something. Pins and needles all along my left arm. My arm. I just thought: my arm. But can I read anything into that? Does my brain know what it’s sensing? Did I really just feel something in my arm? High up. Near my shoulder. The exact spot where they were going to attach one of the electrodes for the brain-stimulating therapy. Am I dreaming?
June 7.
A voice. Low. Slow. I can’t make out words. Dad’s? No. I feel a trembling where my body should be. I can’t pinpoint it. Could be legs, or torso. Could be purely imaginary. The voice, though – I know that voice. Elliot? No. Dr. Monzales? No. It’s British. No – ha! But I can’t make out the words. What’s Jeremy Clarkson saying?
June 9.
There’s a flare going on and then off in front of my eyes. Bright white, then black. Bright white, then black. If it’s real. It could be my mind hallucinating to escape the darkness, my equivalent of a desert traveler’s mirage. But if I’m sensing the position of eyes, does that mean something?
June 14.
A scent: sweet, fresh. Familiar. My candle?
A voice: “I don’t know if you can … me, so I’m not going to … yet. When … wake up, Rosa, I’ll tell … Come on.”
That was Elliot. That was Elliot.
June 22.
“You remember that time I took you swimming at the King Edward baths? You must have been three. You’d only been in pools on holiday before. It was the first time I ever took you swimming in England. We got in there and you said, ‘Swimming pools live outside!’ And afterward all the mums had bananas and healthy stuff for their kids, and I had nothing and you were starving so we went to the closest place, which was a fish and chip shop, and it was getting dark, and you said, ‘The streetlights are on. We’re going down the road to a café and I want sausages and chips and ice cream.’ And I knew you were thinking of that book – the one about the tiger who came to tea. He drank all Daddy’s beer and I changed the words so Daddy wasn’t watching a fight on TV. He was watching a documentary on giant redwoods— Oh, but that was the other book – the one about the cat—”
“Da…?”
“Rosa? Rosa! Rosa!”
4
The first face I see with anything like clarity is Drema’s – though only her suddenly crazily wide eyes, then Dad’s after she runs off and calls him in. Then Mum’s. She cries. Even Elliot cries. I watch the tears run down behind the fabric of their masks, worn, I know, to help protect my immunocompromised body from infection.
“Rosa,” Elliot says, “you can see me?”
“Yeah…” Though it comes out more like “yuh”.
He says something, but I don’t hear him. The voice wasn’t mine. My voice wasn’t mine.
The first time I truly fear for my life is on June 29.
I’m in a different room, still hotel-like, beige with a window-wall, but bigger, so that everything I need can be brought to me.
I’m looking at that photo of Mum, Dad, and Elliot by Whitby Abbey and wondering what they’ll do with old family photos that include me, when my vision clouds. The room starts bleeping and nurses burst in. Later – I have no idea how much later – Dr. Monzales is beside my bed. “We have changed your medication, Rosa. Please, try to rest now. I am convinced you will be fine.”
The first time I move one of my new limbs is on July 16.
I’m dressed in new black leggings and a new loose blue top, chosen from a wardrobe full of presents from Elliot and Mum, as well as things that I’ve ordered online, ignoring Mum’s advice but listening to Elliot’s. Well, some of it.
“No, no skinny jeans, Rosa!”
“…OK.”
“That jersey jumpsuit!”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I wouldn’t joke with you about something this serious, Rosa.”
“In whose life exactly is the question of a jersey jumpsuit serious?”
He shook his head mock sadly. “Rosa Marchant, you have some really tough priority-reassessment work ahead.”
So – I’m in new black leggings and a loose blue top, and my physical therapist comes in. She’s grinning an excited smile that I can properly see, now that the immediate high-risk infection period has passed, and the masks have been ditched.
She straps me into something they call the exoskeleton. It’s a robotic, battery-powered frame that walks for you. It moves my new limbs while I watch, helping my brain gradually remember what to do. Eventually she reduces the input from the motors – and my right leg twitches.
The first meal I eat by myself – moving my hand, with a little help from Dad putting the spoon to my mouth – is tomato soup. Memories rush back. Being seven or eight, coming back chapped-lipped and starving from the park, asking Dad to open a can of Heinz. The taste is incredible.
