by Project Itoh
Most of them would probably make a full recovery, of course. But I didn’t know about my mother yet.
The black homing beacon crept on and slid underneath one of the sets of curtains, so I parted them and went through.
I saw a morass of tubes and monitors. The tubes that plugged into my mother’s body were there to pump in life-giving nanomachines to make up for whichever of her internal organs had given out. Her normally luxuriant hair had been completely shaved off, and the gash in her head was sewn up, stapled, and covered in hemostatic pads dripping with blood. There were also a number of places on her shaved skull where somebody—a doctor, probably—had written notes in shorthand, presumably to indicate where to aim the electromagnetic waves that would guide the nanomachines to their destinations inside her skull. I was reminded of Post-Its on a refrigerator door or of the clutter at Williams’s house that was punctuated with week-old memos to self: Don’t forget to pick up the groceries. A whole corner of his kitchen was dedicated to such notes. And then there were those police procedurals on TV, with the detective’s desk in organized chaos …
Yes, I was reminded of all of these by the jottings on my mother’s shiny head, which now looked liked a bizarre modern version of those old phrenological models.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there in front of my mother. At some point I heard a gentle voice—Captain Clavis Shepherd?—and I turned around to see who had spoken.
The man introduced himself as my mother’s attending physician.
I asked about my mother.
She had multiple fractures and extensive subcutaneous bleeding. Many of her internal organs had been damaged to the point of impaired function. Nothing, though, that the technology couldn’t keep stable. Her life was not in immediate danger.
I didn’t press him on his precise definition of “life.” What “life” currently meant for my mother as she lay there, on her side, oblivious to the world.
“Is she conscious?” I asked, and I noticed the doctor’s lips tightening. At the time, I read the doctor’s expression as a sign that I should give up all hope for that, but looking back on it now I realize that I was subtly wrong on that count. His troubled expression was probably more that of a specialist trying to search for the right words with which to explain the nuances of a difficult and complicated situation to a layman. A situation I was somewhat familiar with as a specialist in my own field. What to do when friends or family—or even desk jockeys within your own organization—asked you for a yes or no answer when there were only shades of gray. For every subtle and complicated question, there was an answer that was perfectly simple, straightforward, and wrong.
“Unfortunately, that’s not an easy question to answer,” the doctor eventually said. “Your mother suffered from severe blunt-force trauma directly to her head, resulting in what is known medically as a cerebral contusion. She has a comparatively small area damaged on the side that was hit, but the damage on the other side is much more extensive, with multiple microhemorrhages deep inside her brain.”
“I don’t understand—on the other side?”
“If you can forgive a somewhat insensitive analogy, it’s a bit like hitting a billiard ball with a cue. The area you hit is quite small, but when the ball then hits the cushion on the other side there’s a lot of force absorbed. When the brain is hit in this manner, it has nowhere to go except into the hard skull wall on the other side …”
A billiard match inside my mother’s skull but with a cue ball as soft as marshmallows.
The doctor went on to explain that, as a result of the trauma, the part of my mother’s brain around her neocortex was severely damaged. She had lost her respiratory function entirely, although that could be artificially maintained with the machines.
“Mr. Shepherd. We’re able to isolate the different functions of the cerebral cortex into separate compartments. Modules, if you will. And we can confirm that many of your mother’s cerebral cortex modules are still alive. We can even positively identify which ones. But …” The doctor hesitated.
“But?”
“Well, medical science just doesn’t have any frame of reference to help us determine which and how many modules need to be alive before we can describe the person as being meaningfully ‘conscious.’ In the same way that medical science can’t describe what it’s like to be dead.”
My mother’s house. The house that had once been my home.
The house was in a quiet corner of Georgetown, not too far from the Exorcist Steps, named after the old movie. The steps had always been covered in graffiti, sometimes of a pretty creative variety. Once, around the time I was in high school, someone covered the whole surface of the steps with display paint and projected an image of Father Karras tumbling to his doom, looped over and over. The incident was briefly on the network news, I remember.
I opened the door. The place smelled of my mother. Her life. Her air.
“Anybody home?” I found myself muttering under my breath, out of habit. The house had always been a place of words. Now silence prevailed.
I started walking around the place that should have been my own home. I felt like a detective looking for evidence, or even a thief. My own room was still there, kept in place. I ran a finger across the surface of my old desk. There was hardly any dust. The room had been cleaned regularly.
Eyes, I thought to myself.
This house was a pair of eyes. My mother’s eyes, watching over me to make sure I didn’t suddenly disappear like my father. I grew up under the gaze of those eyes. Even when Mom was out of the house and I was in the living room on my own, on the network, I still always felt something over my shoulder.
My mother had been an expert at tracing my movements. Nothing escaped her—it was uncanny. What candy bar I’d been eating, which of my friends I’d been secretly hanging out with—there was always something in the house that would give me away and land me in trouble.
I sat down on my bed, the bed that had once been mine. She would have made an excellent tracker, I thought to myself, and almost burst into laughter at the thought.
This had been my mother’s world.
The world of a hundred eyes focused on a single objective: to make sure a person would never disappear.
At some point that world became stifling, suffocating. That was why I joined the army and signed up for Special Forces. Well, you got what you wanted, didn’t you, Clavis Shepherd? Plenty of danger, more dead bodies than you could shake a stick at. And you’re not dead yet! You’ve even lost a comrade—admittedly due to suicide rather than in the field, but hey, it still counts. You’re the real deal. What more could you want from life?
I forced myself to stop thinking. I was afraid of where it would lead me.
I went into the kitchen. It, too, was clean and orderly. Not a single magnet or memo on the refrigerator door, a fact I found eerie.
My mother didn’t like photographs. There were no framed pictures in the living room. It occurred to me that I had never seen a single photo of my father. There probably wasn’t a photo anywhere in the entire house—not of my father, not of my mother, not of me.
I wondered if there would be anything on Mom’s server space. If I were to log in, would I have found us all there, safely preserved and easily accessible?
The wallpaper was still the same as when I was a kid. It had yellowed a little with age, but remained neat and clean. I tapped a wall with my fingertips to bring up an access port. I tried to see if I could log into my mother’s account, but—obviously—I was asked for authentication, which I couldn’t provide.
Was Mom’s life recorded here in minute detail? If I were to summon up her Life Graph and order the computer to edit it into a biography, would there be a clue at the end as to what she would have wanted me to do with her now?
And then I realized how much I was focusing on physical records.
Logs. Life Graphs. Rather than worry about these external documents of Mom’s life, shouldn’t I have been thin
king about the internal ones? My mother as she was inside myself, as I remembered her? And then I realized that my motive in coming to this house—to try and somehow figure out the right thing to do—was no more than procrastination. More than that—I was evading the truth.
The truth that I had no idea what my mother would have wanted.
My job was to read the psychological profiles of my targets. The NSA or the National Counterterrorism Center handed over their logs, and I read them so as to make accurate predictions regarding the likely movements and behavior of the target I was assigned to kill. And yet here I was, utterly unable to guess what my own mother would have wanted.
Even if I had been able to access my mother’s logs at that point, there wasn’t a lot I would have been able to do with the unedited raw data, and even if some program had been able to collate it into a narrative, I doubt it would have been of much use to me at this juncture. And yet I wanted those records desperately. Not because I needed a basis for my decision, but because I couldn’t bear to acknowledge that I couldn’t even make that decision on my own.
I was starting to panic. I needed to sit down. I collapsed onto the sofa.
I did love my mother. I was sure of that much.
But I was terrified. What if I also hated her? I was mortified by the possibility that there was a part of me that was repulsed by this woman who had struggled so hard to raise me, this single mother who had given me so much.
I thought of the constant gaze that had followed me around in this house. From the other side of the room. From the kitchen. The eyes that were always there, trailing me, glued to my back long after the meal was over and I had retired to my room.
I was constantly being watched. Incessantly.
I felt a flashback—of what it was like when I was a kid. In the hall, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the shower. Mom’s gaze was always there, penetrating. Through this gap, that crevice, from this angle. I could still visualize all the sight lines in the house. My mother wasn’t overprotective—she never coddled me. If anything, her parenting style could have been described as almost laissez-faire. I got up to the usual share of kid’s tricks, and in most ways my childhood could have been described as normal, unexceptional. The only thing that marked me as being in any way different from the other kids was the vague feeling I had that my mother’s gaze was always on the back of my head.
The house. The house where my father disappeared from this world.
The house of my mother’s gaze.
It was comforting to be watched over, and then it was suffocatingly oppressive. Two sides of the same coin.
I knew at that moment I couldn’t stay the night there. I had to leave.
Later that day I found a small motel and checked in. I told the doctor that my mother wasn’t the sort of person to have prepared a will.
The doctor laid it out for me. “If your mother gave no instructions for her terminal care, and given that she was not religious, the choice falls to you. You are going to have to decide whether or not to continue her life-support treatment.”
I spent a day on the ward with my mother, staring at her face, quietly, agonizingly trying to work out the answer. What would Mom do? What would Mom want me to do?
That was when I asked if my mother was in pain, and the doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain but whether she was still able to feel pain. Furthermore, the doctor explained, it wasn’t clear to him where the precise line was where we couldn’t continue referring to my mother as “her” or “she.”
How many of the cerebral cortex modules that determined a person’s personality and consciousness needed to remain intact for you to refer to them as the same person? What “she” would have wanted? We had no way of vicariously experiencing my mother’s current mental state. So the question “Is she in pain?” was inadequate on so many levels. Did “she” still remain “she” in a meaningful sense? Could the nerve receptors that remained alive in her brain receive pain stimulus? Did “she” experience that stimulus in the form of pain as we know it?
The doctor was up front with me: he didn’t have the answers to any of these questions.
“Isn’t there someone who can decide for me?” I asked. I’m sure I was sobbing.
I was afraid. I had no idea what this doctor was trying to do. How could I make such an important decision when it was such a gray area?
It wasn’t the doctor’s fault, of course. We were now in the realm of philosophy, not medicine. And yet, frustratingly, modern technological developments were all useless when it came to the realm of philosophy. Technology could analyze and dissect human beings so well, but philosophy just didn’t want to know.
And I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to decide. I realized this might have seemed selfish—hypocritical, even—given the number of people I’d sent to their deaths. But when it comes to someone close, someone you love, you lose your mind. No one tells you of the huge, ambiguous gulf between the lands of the living and the dead. I longed for the days when we had that simple, black-and-white phrase: “brain dead.”
I returned to the motel, where I cried some more. I cried for the world that had gone past the point of no return in creating this awful ambiguity between life and death. I cried in terror. I cried at the prospect of having to decide, on the sheer harshness and cruelty of my position. I cried so much I felt nauseated. I fell prostrate on the bed, crying until I needed to run to the bathroom to dry-heave my guts out, and all that emerged was saliva and more tears.
At the end of the night I had decided what to do.
However difficult the question, when it came down to it there were only two alternatives, and I had to pick one of them.
I barely even skimmed over the letter of consent to terminate treatment.
I gave my consent where consent was needed, and my mother’s life support was switched off. The doctor asked me how I felt and offered the services of a recommended counselor. Yep, sure enough, it was the counselors again. Marriage on the rocks? About to head into battle? Relative just died? Counseling was the panacea, it seemed.
“No thanks. But I appreciate the offer.”
Basically, I was worn out.
I realized this at the funeral service. I’d worn myself out thinking about all the details, and that was why I’d been able to make my decision. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have still been at the hospital, sitting with Mom and her life-support systems, still turning over the options in my head.
At the time I had convinced myself that I was thinking of Mom’s best interests when I pulled the plug. When I pressed my fingerprint down on the device to give my consent, I believed that Mom wouldn’t have wanted a grim half-existence, that she would have wanted to be either alive or dead, one way or another, and that if she had been alive she would have been in terrible pain.
But, as the doctor had said, there was no way for me to know whether she was in pain. After all, she was no more than a thin remnant of her former self, and it wasn’t even clear whether the new “she” could feel pain.
Then there was that atmosphere. The oppressive feeling of my mother’s gaze that was reignited inside me when I visited the house.
Had I really arrived at my decision by considering my mother’s best interests? I searched deep inside myself, and by the time the funeral service was over I could no longer convince myself that I had.
From that moment onward I’d been plagued by the subconscious belief that I killed my own mother.
5
During the entire time it took for me to tell my story—minus the direct references to the army and my work, of course—I think I must have taken four sips of my beer. I don’t think Lucia’s glass touched her lips the entire time.
“Well, for what it’s worth I think you did the right thing. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not a sinner, unlike me,” she finally said.
I was ready to explode. It was a mistake to have sought partial release by
confiding a watered-down version of my story to a civilian. There was a huge part of me that wanted to spit it all out—the deaths I had caused in the line of duty, my own “sins” as Lucia would have said—but I had to remain professional to the end. And it was killing me.
Because I had killed Mom.
Because I had killed the brigadier general.
Because I had killed the troops on patrol.
Because I had left the people in the village to their certain deaths.
Don’t forgive me, Lucia. The burden of guilt I carry with me is larger than you can even imagine. I’ve killed so many people, and soon I’m going to kill your former lover. So don’t grant me your pardon. If you were to pardon me … I don’t know what I’d do.
“That’s good of you to say. It makes me feel a little better,” I replied, subduing my bursting heart, turning it to stone. See? I could still give any answer I needed to give, any answer I wanted. After all, that’s how I dealt with the hundreds of innocents I left to their fate; that’s how I could kill children when they had their guns pointed at me; that’s how I could cope with seeing the girl with the glistening brains sprouting from the back of her head and the youth with the slippery guts spilling from his lifeless body.
“I’m not just saying that to comfort you, Mr. Bishop. You knew how much it was going to hurt you when you made your decision. You knew, even as you gave your order to terminate treatment, that you were never going to be able to forgive yourself. You knew, and still you went ahead with it, because you knew it was best for your mother that way. That’s not a sin. You were doing it for your mother’s sake.”
“Was I really?” I asked.
“Humans aren’t so bad, really. We’re not designed to go to hell. People like us—we’re predisposed to be basically good, not evil.”
