The Girl Who Chases the Wind
Chapter 9: Ambiguity
Feldon stopped there and only spoke about the cases and miracles he wanted to show me before lunch.
I had a better sense of him. I wouldn’t have to fluff up his tragedy. It was right there, if I believed him. And, despite critical and cynical voices churning inside me since this tissue business, I did. He didn’t want anyone else to experience the terrible things he had. He ravenously wanted to save everyone and fix their problems. I could easily see how, in at least a case or two, he could’ve gone to the synthetic limit and that resulted in Mari’s artificial legs.
It may have all been a fiction, but it was one that relaxed me at that moment. He offered me some scrubs to wear. I had to politely decline despite the fact I figured I could pull off a male form with them on. It was too much of a risk. I got a blue lab coat instead.
I expected this morning’s cases would come from the same wing of the ranch as before. To my surprise, Feldon produced a key card and led me into areas I’d never been. To my mild disappointment, it was more like an ICU instead of a realm of mad medical experiments.
The nurses were more plentiful, and the air smelled different. The first patient didn’t seem that bad and would be moved out of the “special care” section as soon as a day or two. He was black and old enough to have salted gray hair cropped close to his head. As soon as we came in, he clutched Dr. Feldon’s hand. It looked like he was about to kiss it.
I noticed that he didn’t talk to the patient but instead picked up a series of flashcards. One was a picture of himself which he paired with a smiling face and a finger pointing to the patient with his own picture. It was a bizarre way of communicating but I soon figured out why. He wasn’t able to communicate in words.
But the pictures they used were extensive. He even had a little screen on the side of his bed which allowed him to select and highlight a series of photos. There were a couple for pain management, restroom needs, water, hunger, and even one for boredom. He highlighted that one several times.
I found myself a little bit lost as Feldon fluidly flipped through several different combinations of pictures which reminded me a little of sign language and some pictographic languages I’d seen before. I tried to keep at the edge of the proceedings, but the man noticed me and selected a series of photos. The two of them shared a series of images. I tensed up when I saw a women’s restroom symbol but, apparently, he also had problems distinguishing men from women because of the words involved.
I noticed Feldon gave me a long look. It was enough to make me nervous. I spread out my coat, so it didn’t cling to me. I was offered a series of pictures to communicate with. I read through the major ones until I got to “Hello”.
I felt like an infant trying to communicate with an adult as he zoomed through photos with complicated syntax. There was some confusion due to the ambiguity of the visual symbols.
“Why are you here?”
Feldon translated that for me.
I settled on the newspaper and the pencil along with someone speaking before a crowd. He frowned but soon figured out what I meant.
“Spread good knowledge.” With that, he also gave his full consent to my presence.
I assured him, with a few friendly pictures, that was my intent. Our session was cut short by a nurse who came in to give him a treatment. He was turned and an armadillo version of that anteater probe was laid across his head, its slender tongues hanging down like ivory noodles.
Feldon took this time to tell me a bit more about his case file.
Apparently, this was the high watermark for his recovery, as he noted, “When he first came here, there was no effort or ability to communicate. It was connected to a severe case of meningitis. He would’ve otherwise been resigned to life-long hospice care. His family worked hard to get him in here. He’s been here for about a month.”
I folded my arms and asked, “About how much of his brain is made of Memetic Crystalline?”
Feldon told me, “He had extensive brain damage. Now I told you it can be very hard to repair a brain because it is so much of what makes a person. But other times so much is gone you have to just try and see where it goes.”
He held a hand out to me and asked, his voice hush and his smile lean and low, “What would you say defines a person? Is it the flesh? What about replacements? New organs? Where do we cross our Ship of Theseus threshold?”
I had a ready answer, “When there’s nothing left of the brain.”
With an easy nod, he offered, “It would seem to be. But what about our friend from decades ago with a hole in his brain? What about Memetic Crystalline rerouting? Bit by bit, slowly and surely…can we not replace everything? What then? If a person thinks they are the same person, are they really the same person?”
I folded my arms and sent back, “No. But then neither is anyone. The brain develops, it changes. The brain as a child becomes something new as an adult. And so on. We’re never the same. We just think we are.”
Feldon raised his dense eyebrows to me and said no more. I turned away. After a while, he cleared his throat and elaborated on some of the patient’s early condition. I saw another miraculous conversion of a person who some might consider a vegetable in years past returned to life. It all made me wonder what about Edgar from yesterday meant his progress was so slow. I wanted to talk to him again.
But I was Feldon’s guest and it was his tour to take me on. I didn’t mind the hospital, I never did. I’d done a piece on the way old county hospitals still weren’t able to provide adequate care, even with heavy subsidies. Those hospitals were barely turn-of-the-century in their quality, dens of bedsores and painkillers. Worst of all, I could taste the dust on my tongue when I went into rooms to interview patients. No matter how technically clean, it was like a parasite that clung to you as you roamed those cave-like halls. I took long showers after that job, my last medical piece for some time.
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At the ranch, I could imagine those parasites gobbled up, as though by the anteater device. Light blasted in but didn’t overwhelm. Space made it feel more like a grandiose home than an off-white prison. And the dusty bane, despite the desert all around, didn’t even present itself when I was outside in the parking lot. Rather than the assaulting press of predatory dust, it was tamed here, as gentle as potting soil. Even on the track where it spread everywhere, I didn’t feel it overwhelmingly, even on the wind.
No dirt to be found. And yet, I still tensed my shoulders as we finished up with this patient and I was led to the next.
In the deepest wing was the isolation ward to keep infections in or out. Some cases involved prions, those tricky little forms of life which weren’t even alive at all. I gave a shudder as we looked through one particular observation window and he explained a case file to me. The man behind the windows lay in bed, resting.
“Such a thing would’ve been unimaginable for this man. Fatal insomnia. No sleep. No dreams. No hope for a cure as the disease ate what there was of his brain.”
I stood there quietly as he gave the short version of the treatment plan from designer antibodies to Memetic Crystalline carrying retroviral genetic rewrites.
With a sigh, Dr. Feldon admitted, “It took six days to finally get him to sleep. He was an extreme case. I honestly would not have given him good chances at the stage he was in. It will be a long recovery for him, but he will recover.”
He didn’t clarify if that would be a full recovery. These cases were still miraculous to me but they almost made my nose tickle a little. A place where it almost seemed death couldn't touch. With that tickle, I had to ask, “The girl from Finland…I guess that happens a lot…cases from around the world come here.”
Feldon leaned his head instead of shrugging. “When there are no other options or a doctor friendly to us recommends them. Even then, they have to get to us.”
I pressed my lips together and asked, “Those cases where it’s extreme. Where you wouldn’t give good chances…how often do the chances fall against their favor?”
Turning from the window, Feldon told me, “I don’t dwell on that. Each time someone comes, we do all we can. We look at it as one-hundred percent we must save them, no matter how I feel. Everyone has a chance. If you want the clinical numbers though…I can probably find a receptionist to provide them.”
I narrowed my eyes and persisted, “I think you know the exact number. It’s your ranch. You keep track.”
Feldon waved a hand and told me, “If a doctor, any doctor, tried to keep track of the exact number then they would never stop their imagination. What if that number could be lower? What if no one had to die? It’s impossible. The admission for life is that you must leave one day. Some sooner than others.”
Those words left a prickly sensation around my ears. They were the kinds of words tailor-made for a direct quote in an article. Ah, yes…the article. My notepad was somewhere in my bag along with my recorders. I could draw up a bit about what I gathered of Feldon’s past and connect it to a quote like that. I could broadly paint him as an alpha male vainly seeking control of life itself through medicine. Plenty of stories out there like that.
I could match up the loss of his wife with a life-long mission to make sure no one felt the same sort of pain. He did name the entire project for her but he didn’t seem over weighed by her death to the point it seemed a driving force. But then he did have a careful persona I saw on the first day which had begun to peel back. Maybe intentionally.
The more I saw of his great works, the more I was curious about the man than the miracles he provided to the world.
After the isolation ward, we returned to the children. The newest arrived with their hair lost or shaven, like horrors from century-old black-and-white photos of archaic medicine. One particular little girl named Lucy drew Feldon to crouch beside her bed with an expression between wonder and sorrow. The little girl smiled, her head swaddled in a bright pink cloth. Underneath, patches of pale blond hair like chick feathers poked through.
Lucy held her hands in her lap and told us, “I had my birthday. I’m six now!” I found myself crouching as well. Her pale-olive eyes looked far older than six, ringed underneath with the suggestion of a shadow. She felt like a feisty lady eleven times her age sealed in a small body. Lucy counted off all the people who came to her party and celebrated the mint cake and all the balloons hopping along the ceiling like a swarm of plastic bunnies.
As a racing afterthought, she added, “And Lily! She came too! For the cake…” She added the last like a badly-kept secret and asked, “When my hair grows back, can it be pink…like how Lily’s is red?”
There was no question in my mind about which Lily she meant. Feldon didn’t even admit to a glance my way as he promised, “I’m sure the nurses will be able to do that…if your parents say it is okay.”
We didn’t stay long with Lucy but I learned she liked old superhero movies, watching the stars, swimming, reading about huge buildings, and sunflowers. I dusted off my notepad and expressed the entire life of Lucy in a handful of words. I tracked back to those before, sleeping restfully and speaking without speaking before tapping my pen on the word ‘Mari’.
Cautiously, I asked Feldon, “What are Lucy’s prospects?” I knew that the choice of Lucy was manipulative, along with all the others today.
He waited to finish with a few quick notes on the chart in front of Lucy’s door before explaining, “If I didn’t mention, everything on paper gets a digital copy. I just can’t give up the indulgence of real paper…” He gave a half-gesture to my notepad.
When he was done, he cleared his throat and told me, “Even at the better children’s hospitals in the world, her tumors would’ve been challenging. They put down roots worst than weeds. Even here, we can’t assure anything. She’s doing well enough right now to plan on being seven next year. She won’t have to stay more than another week. And I’ll make sure she leaves with pink hair.”
Despite my concerns and reservations, I couldn’t resist a smile.