About a mile northwest of my hotel, Highway 82 crossed a wide stretch of railroad tracks. Moments later, I turned right on Strong Avenue and caught sight of the hospital in which I had been born. According to Mama, lightning from a passing thunderstorm had hit the building pretty near to the time I had been born.
The hospital was a pale yellow brick affair towering over the street and the green, green levee that ran behind it along the Yazoo River. Suddenly, I looked through a sevenyear-old's eyes at my grandmother, Mamie, the Judge's wife, lying in one of the hospital's darkened rooms under a plastic oxygen tent that looked pieced together from dry-cleaner suit bags. A cerebral hemorrhage had nailed her like a stroke of lightning and sent her there to drift out of our lives for a terminal day or so. Mamie slept so peacefully to my young eyes.
This vision washed over me like muddy floodwaters from a breached levee. Something like this happened every time I visited Mississippi, home no matter how long I lived elsewhere. I shook my head and tried to focus on my mission. I decided to start with the emergency room, which always had sharp people able to deal with the unexpected- such as some California doctor coming and asking to use their computer system. I put the truck in gear and pulled into sparse eastbound traffic.
As I neared the emergency room entrance, I spotted a prominent sign at the road's edge for Giles Claiborne, M.D., and the past lurched in front of me again. Claiborne had to be as old as the hills because he had been my family physician in Itta Bena not long after Uncle Doc had died. Uncle Doc was the husband of Mamie's sister and took care of everyone regardless of color or their ability to pay. I remembered shots, stitches, and the back entrance that led to a separate waiting room for Negroes Only. I do remember getting entirely unsatisfactory answers about this from Al Thompson and Mama.
As I parked next to Claiborne's office, my cell phone rang.
"Where you at, boy?" I recognized Rex's voice.
"Greenwood. Camilla's in a really bad way. I'm at the hospital seeing if there's a way to have them pull up her scans"
"Y'mama said a prayer for her every damned day. I'da said some myself, but God'n me, we don't get along."
I wanted to laugh, but Camilla's shadow chilled my heart.
"Okay, look. I've been doing some checking," Rex said. "Nothing for sure. I just wanted to say you better watch your back. I-"
My phone beeped a "no service" tone. I tried to call Rex back, but got nothing. "Nuts." I got out and made my way into the clinic. A young woman with intensely dark skin in a white uniform sat behind the receptionist's desk and gave me a smile filled with brilliant, even teeth set in gums the color of blueberries. I introduced myself and asked for Dr. Claiborne.
"Across the street in the little broom closet he calls an office," she said. "I'll call him"
As soon as she finished punching in the numbers, she looked up at me. "You one of his old patients?"
"I think maybe his father's." I smiled. "A long time ago!"
She gave me a warm laugh and shook her head. "Dr. Claiborne has three daughters, no sons."
The surprise played across my face.
"He retired once, back when my mother worked for him. It didn't take so-" She stopped to leave a voice mail to tell Dr. Claiborne about me, then she drew me a map to his office.
I thanked her took the map, and hurried across the street, where a uniformed security officer directed me straight on back. I passed through a set of double doors guarded by another security officer and followed the hand-drawn map's zigzag along the fluorescent-lighted, tiled corridor to the first landmark, a lighted sign for radiology. Across the hall sat an unmarked wooden door with louvered vents in the lower panel. I stopped by the door and raised my hand to knock when it opened, leaving me to stare straight into the timeworn face of Dr. Giles Claiborne.
The wrinkled familiarity of the past froze me for another instant. I figured he must be at least eighty-five, but his cool, glacial blue eyes lit up his face and made him appear decades younger. Claiborne stood imperially straight and unbent by time and crowned with a full shock of white hair.
He wore a cotton broadcloth shirt with a weave as fine as silk and a three-letter script monogram instead of a pocket. A gold collar bar made sure the knot in his silk, regimental stripe tie remained perfect. His khakis had knife creases, where mine resembled tired aluminum foil someone had tried to press into respectability. His knife creases broke perfectly above stylishly comfortable and obviously expensive burnished leather loafers.
My old feelings of social insecurity rebounded with a vengeance. Even though I had been wellborn into a family with a distinguished Mississippi heritage, I had come along at a time when the family fortunes had slipped away in a latter-day Faulknerian crisis that had left too many of my relatives clinging to nothing more substantial than ancestral bloodlines. As a result, I had grown up uneasily among the privileged classes from the planter culture of the Delta and, later, the moneyed movers of Jackson. I had always felt from those classes but never of them. I tried to belong to those classes as a child, but never found a comfort level with their patrician attitudes and their casual, nonreflective acceptance of superior entitlement granted by the natural order of things. I'm sure that played no small role in my ultimate rebellion and rejection of my heritage.
Despite my professional and financial achievements, I had never completely exorcised my desire to be accepted by them. I didn't understand that flaw, but it played a major role in my avoidance of my home state and most of those with whom I had grown up. Clearly, I had rejected this culture but had not escaped it.
"Bradford! What an unanticipated pleasure!" Giles Claiborne extended his hand. I took his powerful, warm grip. It subtracted yet more years from my perception of him and made me feel almost like his child patient again.
"Dr. Claiborne," I managed as I returned his handshake.
"Please call me Clay. You're an accomplished physician yourself now; I've run across your papers in the literature any number of times now, and I have to confess, a lot of what you have written sails right over the head of this old country doctor." His broad, self-deprecating smile further rattled my emotional equilibrium. "Of course… Clay."
"Well, then, come on in." He motioned me into a small, windowless room overstuffed with an Oriental rug, dark mahogany furnishings, and all the professionally decorated accoutrements that went with the look.
Broom closet indeed. I saw from a quick glance at the walls that he was on the hospital board and had been for a several decades.
"Here." He motioned me in the direction of his desk, to an armchair upholstered in burgundy leather and studded with brass. "Have a seat." He closed the door and followed me, settling his tall, lanky frame into an identical chair facing me.
Claiborne gave me an intense silent stare that made me feel like a patient again.
Then he leaned closer to me, studied my face, then sat back in his own leather-upholstered chair.
"Lordy, Bradford, you do have the Judge's eyes," he said finally "You have that look that… demeanor he had which made people do what he told them to, made them instantly believe he was right about most anything." He nodded to himself as he continued to fix my face with his gaze. "Call it charisma or presence if you like, but it clearly made him such a successful lawyer and a political force that lives on today."
Given the Judge's political leanings and the ways he enforced his power, I did not want to say "Thank you," so I nodded and asked, "You really think so?"
I knew my noncommittal, equivocal response fell right in with how good people could stand by and let evil things like segregation happen. I reminded myself, I had not come to refight the Civil War, but to find a way to look at my comatose wife's brain scans. "Lordy," Claiborne said again. "Why, I remember the last time I saw you, you were about this high." He raised his left hand about three or four feet off the floor. I caught the gold Piaget on his wrist. "Yes, yes," he mused to himself. "That would have been about the time you were in the first grade and we were giving everybody Salk vaccines. I remember one other time your mama brought you in bleeding like a stuck hog where you had stepped on some glass barefoot." His eyes went distant for a moment and I sensed he was watching some version of the same memory in my own head where I'd played in tall grass down by Riverside Drive near Eddie Stanton's house, I thought for sure I had been bitten by a water moccasin and was going to die right there.
"Your mama had a cute little Nash Rambler and you lived in the Judge's house then. Lordy, your mama sure was proud of you." His face went blank for a moment and showed me his professionally sympathetic gaze. "I sure mourned her passing." He nodded again, then returned to studying my face.
"Yes, yes, you certainly do have the Judge's eyes." Then he laughed. "Fortunately for you, you don't have his hairline." He combed his aristocratic fingers through his white thatch. The Judge had been cue-ball bald.
Claiborne mined this particular historical vein for another eternal ten minutes before finally asking me what had brought me into his office. "Got just the thing." I followed Claiborne to the radiology department.
"We've got a terrific system allowing us to send digitized X-rays and scans down to the medical school in Jackson for consultation, or Ocshners or anywhere else for that matter."
I followed him through the waiting room, smiling and nodding politely as he introduced me in glowing terms as a local boy made good, all the while letting everybody know I was the Judge's grandson and he had been my physician. Somehow that seemed to matter, and once again it astounded me how eagerly people here allowed their lives to be shaped by dead men.
We made our way to the back corner of a long, claustrophobic supply closet, where we found a young man in a white coat intently tapping at a keyboard. A giant, highresolution, flat-panel plasma screen dominated the room.
Claiborne cleared his throat. "Tyrone?"
The young man turned toward us.
"Tyrone Freedman, this is Dr. Stone. He's one of my old patients, but he's from
California now." Claiborne said nothing about the Judge this time.
When Freedman stood up and shook my hand, I tried not to look at a ragged scar that puckered its way from the corner of his left eye and made it across his temple before disappearing into his hair above his ear.
"Tyrone here is a surgical resident from the University Medical School, a local boy who proves Valley State can produce more than famous NFL stars. He wants to be a trauma surgeon." Claiborne paused. "We have plenty of practice for him unfortunately." "Pleased to meet you," I said
"Likewise," the young man said.
"Dr Stone wants to know if we can help him view some scans from back in
California."
A smile broadened Freedman's face. "Of course we can."
"Tyrone's something of a computer genius," Claiborne said. "He was actually a programmer before premed."
Freedman nodded.
"Well, that's beyond this old country doctor," Claiborne said as he sidled his way out of the confined space. "Tyrone, you take good care of Dr. Stone so he'll have nice things to say about us when he gets back to Los Angeles."
Tyrone turned to me, "Okay, Dr. — "
"Please call me Brad."
The young man gave me an odd raised-eyebrow look, then nodded. "All right, uh,
Brad. Let's get down to it. What site do we head to first?"
"Head to http://ConsciousnessStudies.org — three s's in the middle-and click on the private data link."
Instants later, my Web site appeared. Tyrone brought up the account entry box when he clicked on the data link.
"My user name is bstone, password, jambalaya."
"Those are way too obvious," Tyrone said. "I mean, my apologies, but anybody who wants into your private data would be deterred by like… seconds."
"You're right," I said as the scan files began downloading.
"You want me to change it for you?"
"Let's wait."
Tyrone shook his head. "What do you want first, the MRIs, the PET, or the EEG?" "Let's do the EEG."
If you want privacy, I can show you what to do and leave."
I thought about this for a moment. "I can walk you through things if you're interested,"
"Wow? Really?" He turned and looked up at me. The scar presented itself again.
He caught my glance.
"Drive-by shooting," he said casually. "My own damn fault. I fell in with some older gang members, hacked bank accounts and school grades for them. When the police caught me, the trails all led to the gang. I needed to be zeroed out… fourteen years old and sitting on my uncle's front porch in Balance Due when it happened."
Balance Due had been the black section of Itta Bena. I had been a small child the last time I'd visited there, but I still remembered the smell of raw sewage, which raised sulfurous bubbles in the stagnant, scum-carpeted ditches alongside muddy, unpaved roads lined with weathered wood shacks, rusted corrugated metal roofs, and wood-fire smoke coming out of battered tin stovepipes.
"Killed my uncle and aunt," Tyrone said. "Left me with this souvenir." He swept his index finger casually across the scar. "Made me want to be a trauma surgeon." "I thought drive-bys were a big-city thing."
He shook his head and returned to the keyboard and display, talking as he worked.
"Every small town in the Delta has got its Crips and Bloods, or a bunch of drug-thug wannabes who are half as smart and twice as dangerous." He paused. "That's why I live way out in the country, at the end of a dirt road." He nodded to himself.
"What happened to the people who shot you?"
"Dead," Tyrone said without emotion. "They crossed somebody. Somebody zeroed them out. End of story."
An instant later the EEG appeared on the screen.
"Okay, that's the new one," I said. "Can you display the reference file for comparison?"
An instant later, we had the two files on-screen.
"The reference EEG's been consistent for almost six years, consistent with a persistent vegetative state in this subject, a forty-four-year-old female suffering from profound brain damage resulting from a motor vehicle accident." It felt odd to describe
Camilla in the dry, impersonal language of grand rounds, but it focused my objectivity and made me reach deeper for details than I might otherwise have.
"Okay, you can see the new EEG from yesterday differs significantly, indicating a substantial increase in higher brain function."
"How do you know it's higher brain function from looking at this and not brain stem or something else?"
"Good question." I traced the jagged-line patterns with the cursor. "Notice the P15 peak absent on one side and markedly prolonged in latency on the other." He nodded.
"And here, BAEPs show neither wave IV nor V on either side."
"Meaning?"
"I have an idea, but let's see what the scans tell us," I said uneasily. An increase in higher brain might mean an end to her coma.
"Why would things be the same for six years, then suddenly change?" Tyrone asked. "I thought once you got this far into PVS, nothing ever improved." I recalled my last conversation with Flowers.
"Well, the patient recently suffered from a severe, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection resulting in temperature spikes over one hundred and five degrees. Sustained high fever can dramatically affect the brain."
Tyrone nodded. "PET or MRI now?"
"MRI."
I grew increasingly uncomfortable as we went through the MRI and, later, PET scans.
"It looks familiar, the pattern here," I told Freedman when we had gone over the scans for the third time.
When I finally recognized the pattern, the significance hit me like a hammer. "Oh, Jesus," I whispered. Freedman turned in his chair, his face full of startled concern. I grabbed the back of the chair for support.