The Face

24.
        “Here,” said Dr. O’Brien.
        At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.
        “These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.”
        “What stimulus?” Ethan asked.
        “Something he sees, hears, feels.”
        “External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma?”
        “This isn’t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.”
        “And it’s a machine malfunction?”
        “A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But…”
        “You disagree.”
        O’Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. “Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. First… when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he’d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.”
        “Could he have been dreaming?” Ethan asked.
        O’Brien shook his head emphatically. “The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.”
        The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The [361] peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.
        “The nurse summoned a doctor,” O’Brien said. “That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.”
        “And you said ‘disturbed.’ ”
        The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.
        “At some points you might accurately say he appears ‘disturbed,’ at others ‘excited,’ and in this passage you’re watching now, I’d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.”
        “Terrified?”
        “Thoroughly.”
        “Nightmare?” Ethan suggested.
        “A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they’re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.”
        O’Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes’ worth in a few seconds.
        When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, “This looks the same… yet different.”
        “These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightened, although the terror may have declined here to high anxiety.”
        The serpent-voiced wind, singing in a language of hiss-shriek-moan, and the claw-tap of rain on window glass seemed to be the perfect music to accompany the jagged images on the screen.
        [362] “Although the overall pattern remains one of conscious anxiety,” Dr. O’Brien continued, “within it are these irregular subsets of higher spikes, each followed by a subset of lower spikes.”
        He pointed at the screen, calling examples to Ethan’s attention.
        “I see them,” Ethan said. “What do they mean?”
        “They’re indicative of conversation.”
        “Conversation? He’s talking to himself?”
        “First of all, he isn’t talking aloud to anyone, not even to himself, so we shouldn’t be seeing these patterns.”
        “I understand. I think.”
        “But what these represent is not arguable. During the subsets of higher spikes, the subject should be speaking. During the subsets of lower spikes, he should be listening. A subject having a bit of mental give-and-take with himself, even when he’s awake, produces no such subsets. After all, for one thing, when you’re talking to yourself, conducting a little interior debate-”
        “Technically, you’re always talking,” Ethan said. “You’re both sides of the debate. You’re never really listening.”
        “Exactly. These subsets are indicative of conscious