Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

He began sketching out a drawing of the brain. It occurred to Hope that doctors often turned to pens when they had very important news to share. It was as if they thought that their patients couldn’t possibly understand words, that only a drawing would do. And when a tumor is well drawn, it looks much less scary than the reality. It works with other illnesses too, she thought.

“The optical nerves meet at the chiasma,” he continued, pointing at his sketch. His attempt looked like a big drunken X. “This means that half of what the optical nerve tries to transmit is blurred. Your left eye is intact, but . . .”

“My cortex is exploding.”

“A part of it is.”

“How long?” Hope asked.

“There’s nothing to say that the blindness will worsen. It’s even possible that the drainage will be reabsorbed, and your vision will return to normal.”

“I was asking how long I have left.” Hope’s voice was so cool, so calm and collected, it turned Josh’s blood to ice.

“I don’t know.” Dr. Berger shook his head. He stared at his drawing.

“I need to tell you why I agreed to your operating on me without consulting any other specialist. Because your bedside manner sucks. You don’t sugarcoat things. You don’t waste time on niceties. So for you to tell me you don’t know . . . you must be very worried.”

Berger and Josh exchanged a glance, and the doctor realized he needed to be honest.

“The tumor has grown.”

“So what’s the good news?”

“Good?”

“It was just a way of thanking you for telling me the truth, even if it’s bad news. Don’t worry,” she added. “You don’t need to invent something good.”

“The good news is that the metastases haven’t spread to your other organs.”

“Awesome! They like it in my brain. It must be nice and warm there.”

“Maybe,” Berger conceded.

“How long until Bart hits my skin?”

“Bart?”

“That’s what we call her tumor,” Josh explained.

Dr. Berger nodded as if he understood.

“If we give the chemo another try, maybe another few months.”

“And if we don’t?”

“A few more weeks. I promise, we don’t know anything more than that. Every case, every person, is different. You can’t lose hope.”

“Oh really?” Hope smirked.

“Really.” Berger twirled his pen between his fingers.

He seemed to be struggling for inspiration for a new drawing, and so Hope thanked him and stood. As she crossed the room, she narrowly avoided banging into a chair.

“No, let me do it,” she said, brushing Josh off. “I need to get used to it. That’s just a matter of time too. I still have the fight in me.”

That night, she set about making an asparagus casserole, as if everything were normal, although she had to turn her head sideways to see what she was doing.

Josh laid out the plates, and when Hope slid the dish onto the middle of the table, she told him that she wanted to go to the cryotherapy center the next day. The time had come to get ready for the future.

Cryogenix’s managing director welcomed them into a meeting room that was as ostentatious as he was: a long, lacquered wooden table bracketed by thick leather armchairs, a marble floor, and walls adorned with paneling, where precious scientific articles were framed and hung, alongside diplomas and certificates. After expressing just how sorry he was about Hope’s current condition, and gushing over the wonders that cryotherapy had to offer society and people in Hope’s situation, he started explaining the process, and how neuropreservation worked.

When the time came, he started—but Hope interrupted him and asked him to call it what it was. When Hope’s life reached its end point, he continued, they would need to contact him as soon as possible. A team would be sent immediately to wherever Hope was dying.

As soon as a doctor signed her death certificate, the Cryogenix team would put her under cardiorespiratory assistance to restore her blood circulation and carry oxygen to the brain. Her body would be put on a bed of ice, and she would be transported to Cryogenix’s premises.

Then the second stage would begin. She would be injected with an anticoagulant, and then a vitrification liquid would be inserted to protect her cells. Once this second step was complete, Hope would be placed in a container, and her body temperature lowered to –196°C.

“And then it’s just a matter of optimism and time,” she snorted. “One thing I’m not quite getting, though. How can you reanimate what’s already dead? Let’s pretend it all works. Wouldn’t it be better for me to be frozen before my death, rather than after?”

“Miss, the law prohibits us from doing any such thing,” the managing director gasped, clearly outraged.

To reassure her, he told her that a number of experiments had shown that a rat’s cortical neurons had been fully preserved several hours after its death.

“We have good reason to believe that the place in the brain responsible for consciousness has a temporary postmortem resilience we can use.”

“Is there a bad reason to believe otherwise?” Hope asked.

The managing director looked at her. There was something both solemn and condescending about his air. He answered her with a question of his own.

“What’s the alternative?”

He ran them through the costs: $50,000, a sum that neither Josh nor she had. A sum they had no chance of getting, either.

Hope still wanted to see the facilities, though. After all, people choose their coffins, she reasoned, and funeral parlors let you see the room where the bodies are laid out.

The managing director showed them the operating room, and through a window, they glimpsed the warehouse where a hundred or so containers stood, with tubes full of liquid nitrogen running through them. Inside each container was a cryonically preserved person.

Two thousand people across the country were waiting in their chemical graves, waiting to be brought back to life someday, the managing director told them proudly.

Back outside, Hope suggested they go for ice cream. She was never at a loss for words, and Josh had