Spark: A Novel (27 page)

After my head was completely shaven and my nails were clipped, the plastic chair was placed in the shower stall and Ricky scrubbed me with a long-handled brush. I returned to the room, sat on the
edge of the bed, and inspected my fragile Shell. I could see my ribs and the outline of my leg and arm bones. The skeleton that had been hidden within me was beginning to emerge.

“Get dressed,” Ricky said, and placed some clothes on the bed. A white T-shirt. Slippers. And a blue tracksuit.

“Do you have a list of instructions?” I asked. “If so, I want to see them.”

Ricky laughed. “I don’t need a list. Dr. Noland’s been watching you from the day you arrived here. Noland doesn’t see everything that happens to every patient, but he always knows what’s going on. He can access everything we see or switch over to the closed-circuit cameras mounted on the walls.”

Knowing that I was being watched, I felt more substantial, more
real.
Ricky left for a few minutes and returned wearing surgical gloves. He was carrying two plastic bands; the yellow one was about an inch wide, the red one much larger and heavier. “See the gloves? My skin won’t touch your skin. Just pretend that I’m a nubot.”

He knelt before me and snapped on the ankle band, then stood and fastened the yellow band onto my left wrist. “This is a tracking device. If you wander away and get lost, we’ll know where you are in about five seconds.”

Talking to the invisible Dr. Noland with his headset, Ricky strolled out of the room. Exhausted, I lay back on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling fan. It felt like the doctor was still there watching me—watching everyone.

During my first three days at the clinic, I had to take a series of tests. For one hour in the morning and a second hour every afternoon, I sat alone in a room and watched video clips on a monitor screen. The videos showed the entire spectrum of human activity: a mother holding a newborn baby, children playing hopscotch, a wedding couple dancing a waltz, a man jumping from a burning skyscraper, an African woman being beaten to death by a mob, an American
soldier returning home to a happy golden retriever, and three men wearing ski masks who recited prayers as they used a dull knife to saw off a prisoner’s head.

While I watched the videos, an infrared sensor monitored my pulse and body temperature and an eye scanner measured my pupillary response. Ricky explained that the data was sent to the clinic’s computer and analyzed by a software program called “Sigmund.”

“Everything we do here is based on data,” Ricky explained. “That means you don’t have to lie around on a couch while some shrink asks you about your mommy. Dr. Noland says that all language—everything we say—is just an approximation of reality. You can’t lie to these machines, so don’t waste your time trying.”

Five days after I had arrived at the clinic, I was finally invited to meet Dr. Noland. Wearing my wrist and ankle cuffs and the blue tracksuit, I followed a path to a large house that had been built to resemble a mission church with a bell tower. The walls of the ground-floor area were decorated with silk-screen paintings created from photographs. There were close-up images of a man’s eyes, his bare feet, and his left ear, but I couldn’t find a portrait that showed the entire figure.

“Is that Dr. Noland?” I asked a secretary.

“What do you mean?”

“Do all the paintings show Dr. Noland?”

“No-no. It’s Terry Ettinger … the man who funds our clinic.”

I sat on a bench for twenty minutes, and then was allowed into the office. Dr. Noland was sitting behind a desk staring at a wall-mounted video screen that was divided into boxes. Each box showed live video from the staff’s G-MIDs and the stationary surveillance cameras. Although we were miles from the beach, the doctor wore flip-flop sandals, shorts, and a silk Hawaiian shirt. There were flowering orchids and potted rubber plants in the corners of the room and a framed photograph on one wall of a surfer entering the curl of a wave.

“Morning, Jake! I’m Morris Noland. Have you been comfortable here? Everything all right? Let’s take a look at your room.”

Noland typed a command on his keyboard and the wall screen displayed an image of my room. As we both watched, a woman from housecleaning entered with a sponge mop, a bucket full of supplies, and some towels.

“In the next thirty seconds she’ll reach into the bucket, take out disinfectant spray, and begin to clean your toilet. We’ve discovered that people are more relaxed and efficient if they clean each room in precisely the same way.”

“You see everything.”

Noland laughed. “Not everything, but enough to know what’s going on. These days I’m trying to improve our system here so it all works automatically. The surveillance feed from your room is sent to a behavior analysis program that was first developed for use in prisons. Our data supplements what we learned from your evaluation.”

“All I did was watch videos.”

“Yeah, well … each individual reacts strongly to particular images, while others don’t affect them at all. I have your file right here.”

Noland typed a command and studied several bar graphs. “Got to admit … it’s an interesting profile. You seem to be capable of only three emotions: boredom, curiosity, and disgust. I realize that you’ve had a severe neurological injury, but your brain is still working and you display certain base-level responses. Obviously, you can walk and talk and scratch yourself. If you saw a car speeding toward us, you would instinctively jump out of the way. The human brain is an incredible machine. It’s adaptive, and capable of generating new cells. But that’s not the issue here.”

The doctor stood up and slapped his flip-flop sandals over to a coffee table and some rattan furniture. “Come over here, Jake. Make yourself comfortable. I’d offer you coffee or some herbal tea, but all you drink is that sole-source nutrition.”

I sat on the couch and watched Noland pry a shell off a pistachio, flip the nut up in the air, and catch it in his mouth. “So you’re dead,” he said slowly. I liked the fact that this wasn’t a question, but
a fact. “I guess the first thing you need to know is … that’s okay with me.”

“Cogito, ergo sum.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what Dr. Rose and Dr. Rutherford told me. I think, therefore—”

“Hey … sorry … don’t want to cut you off here, but I don’t really care what you think. Here at the clinic, we don’t waste time asking patients about their thoughts and their feelings and their messed-up childhoods. Do you have dreams? Well, good for you. I don’t want to hear them. You got fantasies? Keep them to yourself. Bottom line is this: I’m interested in what my patients
do,
how they
act.
”

Another pistachio nut was flung up in the air, optimistically high. With a quick jerk of his head, Noland caught it in his mouth.

“When I first meet a patient, I usually tell them a little bit about Terry Ettinger. He’s the chairman of our foundation and the man who pays the bills. When Terry was a kid, his parents were told that he had some kind of autism spectrum disorder. Terry was highly intelligent but physically clumsy. He couldn’t make friends and didn’t like to talk to people. His parents were worried because he analyzed everything he did … like brushing his teeth … and broke it into small details.” Noland smiled. “In other words, he was perfectly designed to be a brilliant software developer. As you probably know, Terry’s visual-recognition program is used by just about every nubot in the world, and of course that’s earned him a pile of cash.”

“Why did he start the clinic?” I asked.

“So what is Terry going to do with all his money? Date beautiful women? No, because then he’d have to touch them. He’s not going to build a big house because he’s happiest in a windowless room. And he’s not donating money to some charity because he doesn’t give a damn about other people. Terry isn’t alone in feeling this way. The nubot software community is basically an autistic culture.”

“Isn’t this clinic a charity?”

“I guess it is. In a way. But it’s actually an expression of Terry’s
philosophy. His strongest emotion is that he still hates all the psychiatrists and psychologists who treated him when he was a kid. Basically, he thinks that psychotherapy is a load of crap.”

“And you’re a neurologist. Not a therapist.”

“That’s right. Eight years ago, I was doing research in the lab, modifying the cerebral cortex of baboons. Anyway … Terry’s big idea is that most conscious thought is simply an attempt to claim ‘authorship’ for a choice that has already been made. And there’s some fairly substantial evidence that this is true. The physiologist Benjamin Libet showed that our unconscious brain is the initiator of certain acts about a half second before our conscious mind realizes what is going on. Additional research has confirmed Libet’s conclusions. These experiments suggest the possibility that our thoughts are just an ongoing attempt to explain what we’ve already decided.”

“What does any of this have to do with my treatment at your clinic?”

“Like a lot of people with mental problems, you think that you’re different. But no one can truly step out of the system. Humans are self-replicating organic machines that obey the laws of physics, react to stimuli and need, and function according to programs hardwired into our brains.”

“My body is just a Shell,” I explained. “But my Spark is a particle of light that can—”

“Stop. Just stop.” Dr. Noland held up one hand like a traffic cop. “I don’t want to hear about some crazy system you’ve invented to explain the world.”

“So why am I here?”

“I’ve studied your hospital file and I think that you’re the kind of patient we can help here at the clinic. Today I’m going to give you some rules and the staff will train you to follow them. If you obey the rules, you can think that you’re dead and still be functional in New York City.”

“What kind of rules?”

“Based on my preliminary observations, I’ve come up with a basic list.” Noland retrieved a sheet of paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read this.”

DR. NOLAND’S RULES

I looked up and saw that the doctor was smiling at me. “Any questions?” he asked.

“It sounds pretty simple.”

“I agree! Although a New York psychoanalyst with a couch might argue with me. I know that your brain generates thoughts, Jacob. So does mine. We can’t shut it off. The entire staff here at the clinic acknowledges all the crazy ideas bouncing around in our heads. We call these thoughts ‘static’ or ‘ECAs’—which is short for ‘extraneous cognitive activity.’ Through a system of reward and punishment we encourage our patients to ignore the static and display positive, functional behavior. Autism experts came up with the label ‘HFA’—‘high-functioning autism’—to describe people like Terry Ettinger. So I kind of took that basic concept and came up with the term ‘HFH’—‘high-functioning humanness.’ That’s everyone’s goal, but some of us need a little extra help.”

There was a moment of silence while Noland smiled at me. All this occurred before I had scanned and downloaded the face images to my phone. I couldn’t interpret the smile’s meaning.

“What’s the reward?” I asked.

“Here at the clinic? Whatever makes you happy … within limits. What about a box of cupcakes? Use of the Internet? A day at the beach? A porno movie?”

“And what’s the punishment?”

“Oh, right. You don’t know about that.”

Dr. Noland picked up what looked like a TV remote control. I glanced over at the wall screen. “Are you dead, Jacob?”

“My Spark exists inside a—”

Before I could finish the sentence, Noland pushed a button and the ankle cuff delivered an electric shock. It took my Shell a few seconds to recover. When I looked up, Dr. Noland was still grinning at me.

“Are you dead, Jacob?”

I stayed silent.

Noland grinned and reached for the bowl of pistachios. “Good. Very good. That’s a start.”