I feel a shiver run down my spine. “No.”
“Well, you can literally see the damage. But there’s hundreds of reports of patients with dementia who can suddenly remember and think clearly and communicate just before they die. Even though their brains are destroyed. It’s called terminal lucidity, and there’s no medical explanation for it. That’s why some neurologists think that there might be another reason for NDEs other than messed-up brain function. Most people think that the cerebral cortex makes us conscious, but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s just a filter, and during an NDE, the brain lets the reins go a little bit?”
“Expanded consciousness,” I say. “Like a drug trip.”
“Except not,” Eric replies. “Because it’s way more accurate and detailed.”
Could it be true? Could the mind work, even when the brain doesn’t? “So if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, where does it come from?”
He laughs. “Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be working for Poland Spring.”
“So, this is what you do now? Armchair neuroscience?”
“Yeah,” Eric says, “when I’m not doing an interview. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to talk to someone about this who doesn’t think I’m a whack job.”
“Then why do them?”
“So I can find her,” he says flatly.
“You think your wife is real.”
“I know she is,” he corrects. “And so is my little girl. Sometimes I can hear her laughing, and I turn around, but she’s never there.”
“Have you been to Kentwood?”
“Twice,” Eric says. “And I’ll go back again, when we don’t have to quarantine anymore. Don’t you want to find them? The guy and his daughter?”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’d have to be ready to accept the consequences of that.”
He’s lost a fiancée; he understands. “Before my accident, I was Catholic.”
“I read that.”
“I never even met anyone Muslim. I wasn’t aware there was a mosque in my town. But there are things I just know now, part of me, like my skin or my bones.” He pauses. “Did you know that the Sunni believe in Adam and Eve?”
“No,” I say politely.
“With a few differences. According to the Quran, God already knew before he created Adam that he’d put him and his offspring on earth. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a plan. But when Adam and Eve were banished, they were put on opposite ends of the earth. They had to find each other again. And they did, on Mount Ararat.”
I think I like that version better—it’s less about shame, and more about destiny.
“Don’t you feel guilty?” I ask. “Missing a person everyone else thinks you invented? When all around us, because of the virus, people are losing someone they love? Someone real, someone they’ll never see again?”
Eric is quiet for a moment. “What if that’s what people are saying to him, now, about you?”
Kitomi tells me that someone has made an offer on the penthouse. A Chinese businessman, although neither of us can imagine why someone from China would want to come to a country where the president refers to the virus as the Wuhan flu. “When would you move?” I ask.
She looks at me, her hands resting lightly on the railing that borders the reservoir trail. “Two weeks,” she says.
“That’s fast.”
Kitomi smiles. “Is it? I’ve been waiting thirty-five years, really.” We watch a flock of starlings take flight. “How disappointed would you be if I decided not to auction the Toulouse-Lautrec?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t work for Sotheby’s, remember.”
“If I don’t consign it,” she asks, “will you ever work there again?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But you shouldn’t make a decision based on me.”
She nods. “Maybe I will have the only ranch in Montana with a Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“You do you,” I say, grinning.
For a moment I just hold on to this: the wonder that I am walking at dawn with a pop culture icon, as if we are friends. Maybe we are. Stranger things have happened.
Stranger things have happened to me.
Kitomi tilts up her head, so that she is looking at me from under the rims of her purple glasses. “Why do you love art?”
“Well,” I say, “every picture tells a story, and it’s a window into the mind of the—”