‘Yes.
‘Very fine. We begin. Dr. Brown?’
‘All ready.’
‘Excellent. Johnny, I ask you to see a table. On this table there is an orange.’
Johnny thought about it. He saw a small card-table with folding steel legs. Resting on it, a little off-center, was a large orange with the word SUNKIST stamped on its pocky skin.
‘Good,’ Weizak said.
‘Can that gadget see my orange?’
‘Nuh … well, yes; in a symbolic way it can. The machine is tracing your brainwaves. We are searching for blocks, Johnny. Areas of impairment. Possible indications of continuing intercranial pressure. Now I ask you to shush with the questions.’
‘All right.’
‘Now I ask you to see a television. It is on, but not receiving a station.’
Johnny saw the TV that was in his apartment – had been in his apartment. The screen was bright gray with snow. The tips of the rabbit ears were wrapped with tinfoil for better reception.
‘Good.’
The series went on. For the eleventh item Weizak said, ‘Now I ask you to see a picnic table on the left side of a green lawn.’
Johnny thought about it, and in his mind he saw a lawn chair. He frowned.
‘Something wrong?’ Weizak asked.
‘No, not at all,’ Johnny said. He thought harder. Picnics. Weiners, a charcoal brazier …
associate, dammit, associate. How hard can it be to see a picnic table in your mind, you’ve only seen a thousand of them in your life; associate your way to it. Plastic spoons and forks, paper plates, his father in a chef’s hat, holding a long fork in one hand and wearing an apron with a motto printed across it in tipsy letters, THE COOK NEEDS A DRINK. His father making burgers and then they would all go sit at the -Ah, here it came! Johnny smiled, and then the smile faded. This time the image in his mind was of a hammock. ‘Shit!’
‘No picnic table?’
‘It’s the weirdest thing. I can’t quite … seem to think of it. I mean, I know what it is, but I can’t see it in my mind. Is that weird, or is that weird?’
‘Never mind. Try this one: a globe of the world, sitting on the hood of a pickup truck.’
That one was easy.
On the nineteenth item, a rowboat lying at the foot of a street sign (who thinks these things up? Johnny wondered), it happened again. It was frustrating. He saw a beachball lying beside a gravestone. He concentrated harder and saw a turnpike overpass. Weizak soothed him, and a few moments later the wires were removed from his head and eyelids.
‘Why couldn’t I see those things?’ he asked, his eyes moving from Weizak to Brown.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Hard to say with any real certainty,’ Brown said. ‘It may be a kind of spot amnesia. Or it may be that the accident destroyed a small portion of your brain – and I mean a really microscopic bit. We don’t really know what the problem is, but it’s pretty obvious that you’ve lost a number of trace memories. We happened to strike two. You’ll probably come across more.’
Weizak said abruptly, ‘You sustained a head injury when you were a child, yes?’
Johnny looked at him doubtfully.
‘There is an old scar,’ Weizak said. ‘There is a theory, Johnny, backed by a good deal of statistical research…’
‘Research that is nowhere near complete,’ Brown said, almost primly.
‘That is true. But this theory supposes that the people who tend to recover from long-term coma are people who have sustained some sort of brain injury at a previous time… it is as though the brain has made some adaptation as the result of the first injury that allows it to survive the second.’
‘It’s not proven,’ Brown said. He seemed to disapprove of Weizak even bringing it up.
‘The scar is there,’ Weizak said. ‘Can you not remember what happened to you, Johnny? I would guess you must have blacked out. Did you fall down the stairs? A bicycle accident, perhaps? The Scar says this happened to a young boy.’
Johnny thought hard, then shook his head. ‘Have you asked my mom and dad?’