The Sleep Experiment Page 20
“Jee-zeus!” Roger Henn said. “And I gotta work in this shit. So the Chinese girl’s gone, huh?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Wallis said. “Her mother is sick—in Seoul. Penny returned to Korea to be with her.”
“Sick as in dying sick? That’s a real shame. Real shame. Didya bang her?”
Dr. Wallis blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Didya bang her before she left?”
“No, I did not. She was one of my students.”
“I’m just asking, ’cause, word is, you don’t have any problem with the ladies.”
“That’s the word, huh?” Wallis said, wondering who the security guard was networking with to gather such information. “Anyway, Rodge, I have to get back to work. A few details to tidy up before Guru and I hit the town.”
“Sure, no problem. Wish I wasn’t stuck here working, else I’d join ya. You and me, we could clean up, you know what I’m saying? I’ve had some luck with the divorced crowd myself. Seems they’re not so picky once they got kids and wrinkles.”
“You’d be right up their alley, Rodge. Just don’t take no for an answer.”
“Don’t take no, I hear ya. By the way, doc, what exactly is the experiment you’re wrapping up anyway? You’ve never told me nothing about it.”
“And so it must remain that way for now, my friend. But I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it soon enough.”
◆◆◆
Brook eyed one of the tubular steel chairs at the kitchen table. She picked it up, carried it to the front of the room, and launched it through the viewing window amidst a shower of shattering glass.
The assistant, Guru, appeared on the other side of the now paneless window.
“What are you doing!” he cried. “You cannot do this! Stop!”
Brook went to the nearest bed, removed the neatly made (and likely unused) duvet, and wrapped it around her right arm. She returned to the window and used her now-padded arm to clear the jagged triangles of glass jutting up from the frame.
“Stop this!” Guru said, waving his hands above his head as if this act alone would dissuade her.
“Get out of the way!” she said, tossing the duvet over the horizontal strip along the bottom of the frame.
“Stop!” Guru said, seizing the duvet and trying to pull it clear.
“Don’t!” she said, grabbing her side of cover. “Let go of it!”
“You cannot do this!”
They played tug of war for a few seconds until she released her grip. With no counteracting force to offset his pulling, Guru flew onto his butt.
Go! she thought. Now’s your chance!
Planting her hands on the windowsill—ignoring the sharp bites in her palms from small, unseen pieces of glass—Brook leapt over it as if it were a pommel horse and rushed toward the door.
◆◆◆
Inside Tolman Hall, Dr. Wallis shook as much rainwater from his beard and clothes as he could, then he went to the basement. When he heard Guru yelling, he broke into a run. He threw open the door to the observation room—and collided into Brook.
She bounced off him, stumbling backward a few steps.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.
“You are back!” Guru exclaimed. He was sprawled on the floor several feet away, his expression one of immeasurable relief. “She was about to escape!”
Brook pointed her finger at Wallis. “Get out of my way, Roy,” she said, her words sounding mushed and slow. The pink bruise on her right jaw had swollen and turned an angry red. Her expression resembled that of a cornered beast: wary yet dangerous.
“I can’t do that right now, Brook.”
“Let me go!” she screamed, spittle flying from her mouth.
“I will, Brook, of course, I will,” he reassured her. “But not until the experiment has concluded.”
Her body was stiff yet at the ready, as if she were considering charging past him. Her breathing came in labored heaves. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t like what that silence implied. If she believed he had it in him to kill her, she would never keep quiet for him, ever.
“Do what, Brook?” he repeated, smiling.
“Holding me here,” she said, seeming to intuit his thinking and changing the narrative. “You don’t have to hold me here. I’m not going to…tell anybody anything.”
“You already mentioned going to the police.”
“As an option. But if that’s not…what you think should be done, then…let’s talk.”
“This isn’t the time to talk, Brook.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed our friend Chad in the other room, but he’s not in the best of health. I’m not sure how much time he has left, and I really need to get a look inside his head before he expires.”
“Roy! Please!”
“After, Brook. We’ll talk after. I need to help Chad right now. Now go back into the sleep laboratory.
“No.”
Dr. Wallis stepped toward her. “Let’s not repeat what happened earlier,” he said meaningfully.
Her eyes went to his clenched fists—and the fight seemed to leave her. Shoulders sagging, she turned and entered the sleep laboratory.
“Block the door,” Wallis instructed Guru, then followed her into the room, closing the door behind him.
Brook stood in the kitchen.
“Back of the room,” he told her.
“I’m not going to go anywhere—”
“Back of the fucking room, Brook. Now.”
She went to the back of the room, her stride sure if not defiant. He watched her until she reached the far wall. Then he crossed the room to where Chad was seated on the floor facing the same corner he’d been facing for the past twenty-four hours.
Dr. Wallis’ pulse had quickened, and he could feel sweat slicking the palms of his hands. What he was about to attempt was anything but guaranteed to succeed. He had the advantage, certainly. Chad was blind. Nevertheless, as soon as the needle pierced the Australian’s skin, the advantage would be lost. Which meant Wallis would have to inject him quickly, then put space between them until the paralytic drug took effect.
You screw this up, man, you’re going to have someone with the strength of a gorilla bashing in your skull.
I won’t screw it up.
Dr. Wallis stopped behind Chad. From his left jacket pocket, he produced a syringe he’d collected from his lab, and from his right jacket pocket, a vial of Vecuronium. Both the metal band around the top of the vial and the over-seal read: “Warning: Paralyzing Agent.”
Holding the syringe in his hand like a pencil, the needle pointing upward, he pulled back the plunger. He plugged the needle into the rubber top of the vial and depressed the plunger, filling the vial with air to prevent a vacuum from forming. He turned the vial upside-down, then pulled the plunger as far back as it would go, thinking, Going to be one big dose, Chad, my man. One doozy of a dose, in fact.
Under normal circumstances—say a doctor prepping a patient for surgery—he or she would inject the drug into the patient intravenously. Dr. Wallis clearly did not have the luxury of this option. Instead, he would inject the drug straight into Chad’s spinal column. This would destroy the nerve cells along his spine and induce permanent paralysis—which, of course, was exactly what Wallis wanted.
Crouching, Wallis judged where Chad’s spinal cord would be beneath the sweatshirt, counted to three in his head, then jabbed the needle and depressed the plunger.
Chad shot to his feet, caterwauling in unholy rage.
Dr. Wallis scuttled away, preparing himself for any eventuality. Chad flared his arms blindly, lurching at unseen assailants, the hoodie slipping free of his head. Then, spinning in a circle like a dog trying to catch its tail, he unsuccessfully probed for the needle protruding from his back.
He soon slowed, then stumbled. He dropped to his knees, then his side. He stopped moving completely.
<
br /> That’s when Brook began to scream.
◆◆◆
“What did you do to him? Look at his face! What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do that!” Dr. Wallis told her. “He did it to himself!”
“He doesn’t have a face!”
“Brook! Listen to me! I didn’t do that—”
“It’s doesn’t matter. It was your drugs that did that.”
She sank to her butt, dropped her head into her lap, and sobbed.
Trying his best to ignore her, Wallis wheeled the cart with the EEG machine next to where Chad had fallen. He rolled the Australian onto his back and slid the electrode headband over the pulpy mess that was his forehead. He clicked on the amplifier, which boosted the electrical signals produced by the millions of nerve cells in Chad’s brain, then pulled up a chair to study the wave patterns appearing on the monitor.
◆◆◆
Guru was speaking via the intercom, asking if everything was all right. Dr. Wallis had no idea how long he had been staring unmoving at the monitor, but he was no longer seeing the data on the screen. He was thinking about all the wonderful ways in which his life was about to forever change.
“Professor, can you hear me?”
Dr. Wallis snapped back to the moment, feeling as giddy as a boy on Christmas morning. “Guru, my beautiful friend, get your butt in here!” he said with a huge smile.
Brook, he noticed, had raised her head from her lap in curiosity at the sudden commotion.
“It’s over, Brook,” he told her, his smile growing. “We did it.”
“What are you talking about, Roy?”
The door opened and Guru entered.
“Get over here, brother.”
Guru looked apprehensively at Brook.
“She’s not going to go anywhere,” Wallis told him. “She’s going to want to hear what I have to say. I mean it. She’s really going to want to hear what I have to say.” He opened his arms wide. “So get on over here and give me a hug.”
Guru frowned. “Professor?”
“Jesus Christ, man!” Wallis went to the Indian and lifted him off the ground in a bear hug, turning in a circle while laughing. When he set Guru down, he rubbed the Indian’s bald head affectionately. “You stayed with me, man. You. Stayed. With. Me.” He slapped Guru on the shoulder, perhaps with too much gusto, because Guru nearly fell over.
“What’s going on, Roy?” Brook asked.
“Neuroscience 101,” Dr. Wallis said, slipping easily into lecture mode. “Our brain cells—aka neurons—communicate with each other via electrical signals and are always active, even when we’re asleep, and it’s this communication that’s at the root of all our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Essentially, what you think of as ‘consciousness’ is actually an ever-changing concert of electrical impulses. Brook’s brain, mine, Guru’s, they all have about one hundred billion of these neurons. An EEG”—he waved at the equipment on the cart—“tracks this neural activity. Picture yourself dropping a pebble into the middle of a still pond and the ripples it would make on the water. Now picture the pebble as a neuron and the pond as the surface of the brain and the ripples as brainwaves. You with me, Brook?”
She nodded.
“Good, now listen up, both of you, because this is the important stuff. Instead of dropping a single pebble into the pond, imagine yourself dropping an entire handful. You’d get a whole lot of overlapping ripples. This is similar to what happens when you have multiple neurons firing off synchronized electrical pulses: you get a whole lot of overlapping brainwaves. An EEG detects these brainwaves and divides them into different bandwidths measured in Hertz. Slow delta bands are less than 4 Hz. Theta bands are anywhere between 4 to 8 Hz. Alpha bands range from 8 to 12 Hz. Beta bands, the most abundant during our normal state of waking, are between 14 and 30 Hz, and gamma bands, the fastest, are between 30 and 80 Hz. Together the brainwaves, or bandwidths, create our continuous spectrum of consciousness, always reacting and changing according to what we’re doing and feeling. When slower ones dominate, we feel tired and sluggish. When higher ones dominate, we feel hyper-alert. So all those funny lines that appeared on that computer screen during Chad’s EEG? They’re his brainwaves, his consciousness. And much as a fortune teller reads tea leaves to gain insight into the natural world, I read these bandwidths to gain insight into Chad’s mind.”
“And…?” Guru asked eagerly.
“After I filtered out all of the artifacts and extraneous information, I discovered an entire spectrum of…shadow…brainwaves, I suppose you might call them, although they all possessed different amplitudes and frequencies than the originals.”
Guru and Brook stared at him like deer caught in headlights.
“Shadow brainwaves!” he repeated, doing his damnedest to keep his composure despite the high he was riding.
“I have no idea what that means,” Brook said.
“It means, my lovely, lovely darling,” Dr. Wallis said, grinning wider than ever, “that residing within Chad’s brain are two distinct consciousnesses.”
◆◆◆
“Impossible!” Guru blurted immediately.
“No, it is not, my good man. The proof is in the pudding, right over there on that computer.”
“Two consciousnesses?” Brook said. “You mean like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”
“Not at all,” Wallis said. “I’m not talking about a common dissociative identity disorder. There are literally two distinct consciousnesses inside him. Two people in one. Or, given what I suspect to be at the root of our beings, one person and one demon.”
Brook shot to her feet. “What are you talking about, Roy? This is ridiculous!”
“Don’t be so quick to judge, my darling, when there is still so much you have yet to understand.”
Wallis explained.
◆◆◆
He repeated to her everything he’d told Guru the day before. The mice with the mutated genes that led to the development of the stimulant gas. The significance of micro-sleep, or the lack thereof, and how absolute sleep deprivation turned the mice into murderous cannibals. And ultimately his theory that all biological lifeforms are born with madness inside them, kept in check only by instinct and sleep.
Brook interrupted him about a thousand times, but when he finally got it all out, her skepticism had been replaced with studious contemplation. Even better news, she no longer appeared as though she were in fear of her life. In fact, he began to wonder if he could win her over after all.
“Let me get this straight, Roy,” she said now. “You mentioned demon earlier. That’s the word you used. One person, one demon inside that young man. Are you suggesting this…madness…inside us is a demon?”
“A demon. The devil. Hell itself. Whatever tickles your fancy. They’re all suitable metaphors for, yes, the madness within us, which I believe to be responsible for the evil we perform.”
She looked at Chad, then quickly looked away again, the tone of her skin draining to the color of winter. “And it was this madness that caused him to do that to himself—”
Wallis’ eyes bulged.
◆◆◆
Chad was sitting up.
Which, given the dosage of Vecuronium that Dr. Wallis had injected into him—into his spinal column no less—should have been very much impossible.
Wallis withdrew another syringe and vial from his jacket pocket and filled the syringe even as he crossed the room. As he approached Chad, he slowed to a stealthy walk, knowing the Australian still had his hearing. Very quietly, he crouched in front of Chad, waving his hand before the young man’s ruined face. The Australian didn’t react.
Dr. Wallis wasn’t going to take any chances this time.
He hovered the needle directly before the Australian’s heart.
“No!” Brook cried—too late.
Wallis had already plunged the needle into Chad’s heart. He inhaled sharply—a terrible dry and rattling sound—but did little else. Then he slu
mped backward and lay still.
“You said this was over, Roy!” Brook cried. “You said—”
“It should have been over, Brook. I gave him ten times the regular dose of that drug directly into his spine. It should have…” He didn’t finish this sentence for fear of alienating her further, but he thought, It should have paralyzed every muscle in his body, even those used for breathing, which in the absence of ventilatory support, would have led to asphyxiation.
“It should have what, Roy?”
“Nothing.”
“It should have killed him?”
“Look at him, Brook!” he snapped. “You think he was going to survive regardless? You think he would have wanted to survive?”
She turned her back to him, and to hell if she wasn’t crying again.
Dr. Wallis stood and went to the door.
“Where are you going, professor?” Guru asked him.
“To turn off the gas.”
◆◆◆
When Dr. Roy Wallis returned to the sleep laboratory after shutting off the stimulant gas, he said, “It’s over now, Brook. For good.”
She wiped tears from her eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“Okay?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What does ‘okay’ mean?”
“It means…I’m okay with…everything.”
Dr. Wallis studied her closely. He couldn’t decide whether she was speaking honestly or only telling him what he wanted to hear. Probably the latter.
“So what do you think we should do now?” he asked her.
“I think… What do you want to do?”
“Guru and I had plans to go out and celebrate. Right, buddy?”
Guru nodded with reticence.
“Celebrate,” Brook repeated.
“I know what you’re thinking, Brook. How could we celebrate when we have two dead bodies on our hands?”
“Your experiment has been a great success, Roy. It will no doubt change the world, or how we perceive the world. But, yes, you’re right. There are two dead people down here.” Her voice choked on the words dead people, yet she pressed on. “We can’t ignore that fact. The police won’t ignore that fact either, despite the experiment’s success. But you and your assistant have plans to celebrate?”