“Please sit down! We wish to perform the trial under controlled circumstances!” Dr. Banerjee herself had jumped to her feet as if to physically restrain him—funny thought, since she weighed less than half of what Laks did. His lack of balance had not prevented him from working out on weight machines to gain back the muscle mass he’d lost during the months of lying unconscious.
Her colleagues, though, looked very pleased. They high-fived each other. One of them took a picture.
“Can you do this?” Laks asked. He lifted one foot off the floor so that he was balanced on one leg. Then he closed his eyes. “Count,” he said.
One of them began: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . .”
When the count reached thirty, he opened his eyes. Rock solid. No flailing of arms or hopping around.
“I cannot,” Dr. Banerjee admitted. “Few can.”
During the half minute he’d been standing on one leg with eyes closed, that “Laks” thing had been sinking in. It jogged a memory—a recent one. He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window of his suite. This was on something like the thirtieth floor of the building, so it had a fantastic view out over a sunlit cityscape
consisting mostly of new office buildings ranging in height from five to fifty stories. Some were emblazoned with logos and funny words that he took to be the names of companies. The place was called Cyberabad. It was part of a much larger and older city called Hyderabad. These were all details he had picked up in fragments strewn among conversations he barely remembered, scattered across the last several weeks; but it was all coming into focus. It was beginning to “take,” to borrow Dr. Banerjee’s expression.
Dr. Banerjee inhaled sharply as Laks approached the window. She must be afraid that he was going to trip over his feet and smash through it. But he wouldn’t. His sense of where he was could not have been more perfect. He even knew that he was gazing along an azimuth of about 325 degrees with respect to magnetic north.
Below, and across the street, was a building perhaps ten stories high. Its flat roof was fifty-seven meters below him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. The roof had a pea-gravel surface, sort of gray brown on the average. But someone had gone up there with white paint and rolled out the words “GET WELL SOON LAKS!” in letters several meters high. Strewn all around that was brownish vegetable matter flecked here and there with muted colors: flowers that had adorned the big white words but that had wilted and withered. Thousands of individual bouquets. Literally tons of old dead flowers.
His view of Cyberabad was cut off as the curtain was yanked across the window by one of Dr. Banerjee’s flankers. “Sorry,” he said. “The days of drones hovering outside your window are thankfully gone. But still, if anyone recognized you, social media would go ballistic. And we don’t want expectations getting out of hand.”
Laks stood there for a few moments absorbing that. This phrase “social media” was, on one level, new to his ears. Or the sensor pods screwed into the temporal bone ridges behind his ears that did what ears did, only better. And yet he could feel it lighting up big networks of connections in his head.
During the months he had lain flat on his back in the dark, trying not to be sick from vertigo, sometimes the sun would come
out from behind clouds. Even through the blackout curtains next to his hospital bed, he could sense that it had done so. Not so much because of light leaking round the edges as because of the vague omnidirectional warmth radiating through the dark fabric. This was a little like that. On the dark side of the neurological curtain was Laks, trying to work out what “social media” denoted. On the other side was a large portion of his brain. And yet the curtain had a few moth-holes in it. Through those, he glimpsed clear images: a freckle-faced woman with a camera. The snowy top of a mountain. A Chinese man with a stick.
“Run it by me one more time,” he said to the curtain-snapper. He knew he’d seen the guy before. He didn’t wear scrubs or a lab coat. More a T-shirt and jeans kind of chap. Ponytail. Name tag “Kadar.” Rhymed with “radar.” Right now Kadar had an uncertain look on his face, which for him was unusual. He wasn’t sure he understood Laks’s question.
So Laks clarified: “Something happened to my brain.”
The guy exhaled. As if to say How many times are we going to have to go over this? He broke eye contact. His gaze wandered over to a counter in one corner of the room where a microwave and a coffee maker had been provided for the use of Laks and the many people who came to his suite to have these weird conversations with him. Beneath the counter was a small fridge, and atop it were a fruit plate and a basket of snacks. A thought occurred to Kadar and he strode over to it.