TWO WINDOWS PRESENTED A SOLVENT SKY and a city dissolving in drips, drizzles, and vapors.
Most of the large records room at Our Lady of Angels was divided into aisles by tall banks of filing cabinets. Near the windows lay a more open area with four work stations, and people were busy at two.
Dr. O’Brien settled at one of the unused stations and switched on the computer. Ethan pulled up a chair beside him.
Inserting a DVD into the computer, the physician said, “Mr. Whistler began to experience difficulty breathing three days ago. He needed to be put on a ventilator, and he was moved into the intensive care unit.”
When the DVD was accessed, WHISTLER, DUNCAN EUGENE appeared on the screen with Dunny’s patient number and other vital information that had been collected by the admissions office.
“While he was in the ICU,” O’Brien continued, “his respiration, heartbeat, and brain function were continuously monitored and sent by telemetry to the unit nurses’ station. That’s always been standard procedure.” He used the mouse to click on a series of icons and numbered choices. “The rest is relatively new. The system digitally records data collected by the electronic monitoring devices during the patient’s entire stay in the ICU. For later review.”
[359] Ethan figured they kept a digital record as evidence to defend against frivolous lawsuits.
“Here’s Whistler’s EEG when first admitted to the ICU at four-twenty P.M. last Friday.”
An unseen stylus drew a continuous line left to right across an endlessly scrolling graph.
“These are the brain’s electrical impulses as measured in microvolts,” O’Brien continued.
A monotonous series of peaks and valleys depicted Dunny’s brain activity. The peaks were low and wide; the valleys were comparatively steep and narrow.
“Delta waves are the typical pattern of normal sleep,” O’Brien explained. “These are delta waves but not those associated with an ordinary night’s rest. These peaks are broader and much lower than common delta waves, with a smoother oscillation into and out of the troughs. The electrical impulses are few in number, attenuated, weak. This is Whistler in a deep coma. Okay. Now let’s fast-forward to the evening of the day before his death.”
“Sunday night.”
“Yes.”
On the screen, as hours of monitoring flew past in a minute, the uncommon delta waves blurred and jumped slightly, but only slightly because the variation from wave to wave was minuscule. An hour of compressed data, viewed in seconds, closely resembled any minute of the same data studied in real time.
Indeed, the sameness of the patterns was so remarkable that Ethan would not have realized how many hours—days—of data were streaming by if there hadn’t been a time display on the screen.
“The event occurred at one minute before midnight, Sunday,” O’Brien said.
He clicked back to real-time display, and the fast-forwarding stopped at 11:23:22, Sunday night. He speeded the data again in two quick spurts, until he reached 11:58:09.
[360] “Less than a minute now.”
Ethan found himself leaning forward in his chair.
Shatters of rain clattered against the windowpanes, as though the wind, in wounded anger, had spat out broken teeth.
One of the people at the other work stations had left the room.
The remaining woman murmured into her phone. Her voice was soft, singsong, slightly spooky, as might be the voices that left messages on the answering machine that served Line 24.
“Here,” said Dr. O’Brien.
At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.
“These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.”
“What stimulus?” Ethan asked.
“Something he sees, hears, feels.”
“External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma?”
“This isn’t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.”
“And it’s a machine malfunction?”
“A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But ...”
“You disagree.”
O’Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. “Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. First ... when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he’d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.”
“Could he have been dreaming?” Ethan asked.
O’Brien shook his head emphatically. “The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.”
The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The [361] peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.
“The nurse summoned a doctor,” O’Brien said. “That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.”
“And you said ‘disturbed.’ ”
The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.
“At some points you might accurately say he appears ‘disturbed,’ at others ‘excited,’ and in this passage you’re watching now, I’d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.”
“Terrified?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Nightmare?” Ethan suggested.
“A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they’re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.”
O’Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes’ worth in a few seconds.
When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, “This looks the same ... yet different.”
“These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightene............