A doctor had come rushing in, half shoving me aside. I put my hand on Matt’s shoulder, just to keep some part of me in contact with him.
“Matty, you have to calm down,” I implored. “You’re going to hurt yourself. I’m here. I’m here. I’m going to take care of you. It’s okay, it’s—”
I stopped.
Hearing is something of a specialty of mine, even if I’m not very good at it. And therefore, something in me knew: Matt couldn’t hear me right now.
He was trapped in a world even more silent than mine.
Here, but not here.
Any talking I did at this point was strictly for my own benefit, which struck me as especially pointless.
Instead, I closed my eyes.
I am a member of that vast, indistinct, perpetually confused congregation of the spiritually nonreligious. Which is to say I believe in something; I just can’t tell you what.
On some core level, I know there is something bigger than me out there, something I feel when I stand on top of a mountain, or gaze up at the stars, or look into my child’s eyes, something that has long moved humanity to search for metaphysical answers.
At the same time, I know what my husband has told me about the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos and about the extraordinarily high mathematical likelihood that other intelligent life must exist.
Given those truths, it seemed self-centered to believe that the Bigger Something would be too terribly concerned about the trifling affairs of one member of one tiny species, scrambling around one rocky planet, rotating around one unremarkable star somewhere out toward the edge of one insignificant galaxy.
Therefore, I am ordinarily skeptical about the efficacy of prayer.
Maybe it’s because so many of mine have gone unanswered.
But at the moment I had nowhere else to turn.
As Matt bucked and thrashed, I screwed my eyes shut.
And I prayed.
I prayed harder than I ever had in my whole life.
CHAPTER 4
I didn’t leave Matt’s bedside, nor release my grip on him, for the entire next hour.
That was why I had such a good view of the tiny changes taking place in him.
His eyes, in the rare moments they opened, were no longer quite as unfocused as they had been. They would actually look at me, even if the stare was still blank.
His hand, which had been resting on his chest, moved in a way that, to me, seemed intentional.
His facial expressions changed too. Like a computer inside of him had rebooted.
Then his eyes opened. And he looked right at me.
“I must have died,” he croaked weakly. “Because you sure look like an angel.”
I immediately burst into tears.
Whatever had happened, he was Matt again.
I hadn’t lost him.
“Oh, Matty,” was the first thing I managed to choke out.
It didn’t get much more articulate for a while after that.
Eventually, both for my benefit and for the doctors’—who were as mystified by his sudden recovery as anyone—Matt recounted what he could remember.
He’d woken up early, like usual, and had his normal breakfast: two granola bars and an apple, which he ate during his drive to Dartmouth. Once there, he went immediately to his lab and got to work.
Reiner asked what that entailed. Matt said, “Playing with lasers”—which was the flippant description he used in social settings when he didn’t really want to get into it. Reiner just let it go, so Matt continued with his narrative.
He worked until nine, when he had his meeting with Sean Plottner, which took place in the lab.
Plottner left by ten, and Matt didn’t have to teach until eleven, so he went back to work. He was deep in it when he said a strange feeling came over him. One moment he was normal. And then suddenly he was hit by something overwhelming—yet weightless and invisible—that knocked him out.
From there, his memory fragmented into wispy strands and bits of fabric that he couldn’t begin to piece together into any kind of whole tapestry.
He remembered straining against the strap that held him down. And the anxious face of an EMT peering down at him. And that someone was, at some point, pinching his chest with what felt like a giant set of tweezers—probably when he had the tube inserted.
But, like a dream whose details he was struggling to recall, he couldn’t put any of what had happened in logical order.
The rest we pieced together by talking with the worried physics department colleagues who started calling to check in.
When Matt didn’t show up for his eleven o’clock class, one of the students alerted Beppe Valentino of Matt’s absence. Beppe and David Dafashy, another physics professor, started looking for him while Sheena Aiyagari, Matt’s postdoc, went to his classroom in case he showed up there.
It was David who found Matt, still in his lab, unresponsive, stooped over in a zombielike state. They called an ambulance.
And now? He was exhausted from his labors against the restraints, and his skull was being hammered by what he described as “a tequila headache times fifty.”
But, otherwise, it was like nothing had happened to him. His vitals were normal. His body seemed to be functioning fine again.
He ate some dinner—the doctors wanted him to regain some strength and also make sure he could metabolize food without a problem—then they started running tests.
A lot of tests. Ones they had done before. Ones they hadn’t.
There was a full lab workup, including a tox screen, followed by an alphabet soup of machine scans: CT, EEG, MRI, MRA.
When a nurse confirmed they intended to keep Matt overnight, I ran back home to tuck in Morgan and thank Aimee for coming to our rescue, then returned to the hospital. They had moved Matt out of the ICU and into the neurology wing.
We passed the night sleeping fitfully, with the usual interruptions from the medical industrial complex that can make a hospital the worst place ever to actually get better.
One by one, as test results came back the next morning and into the afternoon, the doctors began ruling out possibilities.
It wasn’t a heart attack. His heart was structurally perfect, and thumping along fine.
It wasn’t a tumor. The MRI came back clean.
It wasn’t botulism. Or any other common critter.
It wasn’t poisoning, at least none that showed up on the tox screen.
Brain damage was also no longer being discussed.
A stroke was still a possibility, but a distant one. The only culprit that hadn’t been completely ruled out was a transient ischemic attack—a TIA, as it’s known. TIAs can apparently be difficult to diagnose, because the small blood clots that cause them are long gone by the time doctors go to look for them.
Except Matt was awfully young for a TIA and didn’t have any of the risk factors that led to one. Plus, TIAs usually lasted minutes, not hours.
Around three o’clock the next afternoon, Dr. Reiner came into the room, having just consulted with the cardiologist.
“I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but there’s nothing wrong with you,” he announced. “Or at least nothing we can find. If I hadn’t seen you nearly dead yesterday, I would say you’re the healthiest thirty-nine-year-old in New Hampshire.”
“So, basically, the lights went out yesterday and now they’re back on,” Matt said.