A tiny voice inside my head asks: What about the other stuff that prompted this whole Google search in the first place? The memories that I can’t place? The nightmares?
But all I tell Jane is, “Nope. Nothing comes to mind. Honestly, Jane, I think this cellular memory theory is . . . not serious science.” It can’t be.
She crosses her arms.
“What about this lady who can paint now? How do you explain that?”
I gesture toward the computer screen. “Just because Janet here took an art class and thinks she painted a really good sunflower doesn’t mean she inherited a lifetime of fine-arts experience. What’s happening with her is probably more like the placebo effect.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes in drug trials, they give a control group a placebo, like sugar pills, so they can compare the results against the ones from the group that’s taking the real thing. But the people in the control group don’t know they’re not getting the actual drug and, even though they’re not, there are cases where some experience improvements in their symptoms anyway. It’s the belief that they are taking something that could help them that seems to have an effect.”
“So I don’t get it,” says Jane. “What does the placebo effect have to do with this heart transplant story?”
I’m in full-on class presentation mode now.
“Once this lady heard that her donor was a professional artist, it made her believe that her own painting skills were way better than they probably are. Maybe she even painted with more confidence as a result, which meant her paintings really were better. Placebo effect. Get it?”
“Yeah, okay,” Jane says. “But there are some other really wild stories here. Not just the painting one. You should totally read them!”
Maybe I will later, when I can focus and think. “How about we get back to your math?” I say.
“Ugh, do we have to?” Jane pretends that she’s banging her head on the desk in front of her.
“Do you want to graduate, or what?”
She raises her head.
“Well, my mom says I can’t use her car until I do, so yes.”
I click out of the cellular memory forum. My dad is probably right: searching for health advice on the internet is a terrible idea.
It’s late, and I’m staring up at the wood beams on my bedroom ceiling, unable to sleep. Unable to shake the thoughts that have been circling around and around in my mind. It all started before the beach, didn’t it? Before the tunnel dream. Even before the memory gaps, or whatever they are. Because what I didn’t tell Jane today is that the first weird thing to happen was right after the transplant, in the hospital. When I saw the crying man.
At first I thought he was one of the doctors or nurses who kept flitting in and out of my room to change an IV bag, make a note on my chart, or adjust one of the many machines humming and beeping all around me. But he wasn’t wearing scrubs, a white jacket, or anything that identified him as official hospital personnel. Plus, his demeanor stood out from that of the usual staff (detached and professional for most of the doctors — or trying-too-hard cheerful for most of the nurses). He was slumped in a chair next to my bed, his face resting in his hands.
He stayed there for a while, but since I was still on the ventilator, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t ask him who he was. He didn’t speak either — just wept quietly, and then slipped like a shadow out the door.
Once I was free of the ventilator and a bit less drugged up, I asked my parents who he was.
“Nobody but family is allowed in the ICU,” my dad said. “Are you sure it wasn’t one of the nurses?”
I told him I was sure.
“A dream, maybe?” suggested my mom. “Dr. Ahmadi said the anesthesia might make you feel kind of funky for a while.”
“No,” I insisted. “He was real. I know he was real.”
I tried to sit up but was nearly knocked senseless by a heavyweight boxing punch of pain.
My dad jumped up from his chair, a look of panic on his face. My easygoing, goofball dad, terrified that I would come apart at the seams right before his eyes.
And admittedly, I did feel a bit stitched together in that moment, as the line of black sutures tightened across my chest. Maybe I was coming apart.
I lowered myself back against the pillows, hoping that would be enough to calm him down. “He was real,” I repeated, no longer so sure myself.
My mom went out to check the visitor’s log at the front desk.
Security was called.
And not long after, a tight-lipped hospital administrator, accompanied by a man in an official-looking uniform, showed up in my room. The administrator, her hair pulled back into a tidy bun, introduced me to Mr. Platt, the hospital’s head of security, who proceeded to ask a bunch of questions.
“What did he look like?”
“He was tall, kind of muscular.” My throat was raw from being intubated, so I had to whisper.
“Eyes?”
I realized as he was questioning me that I never got a good look at his face.
“I don’t remember.”
“Hair color?”
“Not sure. It was buzzed . . . close to his scalp.”
I could tell this was starting to sound suspiciously vague to him.
“What was he wearing?”
Mr. Platt seemed bored, in fact, like this wasn’t the first time he’d been called on to humor an ICU patient riding too high on pain pills.
“Jeans. And a black puffer jacket. I think.”
Had there been a tattoo on his neck?
“Did he say anything?”
“No. He just cried.” I added, “It was sort of like he was mourning my death.”
“Okay.” My dad stood up. “That’s enough.”
Mr. Platt excused himself to talk to the nurses who had been on that shift, both of whom I could see through the windows of my fishbowl room shaking their heads no.
The mystery man was never identified. My meds were adjusted, and my parents spent the night. But there’s a feeling that I remember having about him for weeks afterward — one that I didn’t tell my parents or Mr. Platt or anyone else. Even though I knew I’d never seen him before and wasn’t even entirely sure if he was real or not, there was something about him that felt . . . familiar.
Now, as I lie here not sleeping, not able to stop thinking about tunnels and blood and crashing motorcycles and the crying man, all I can hear is the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of this unfamiliar heart. It’s like that creepy Edgar Allan Poe story, the one we all read in ninth-grade English, only this heart is not buried under the floorboards; it’s buried in my own chest, and I can’t get away from it no matter what I do or where I go.
I look at the clock on my nightstand. It’s 2:15 a.m.
Answers. I like to have answers.
Tossing my duvet off, I get out of bed and retrieve my laptop from my desk. I climb back under my covers, power it up, and type two words into my browser’s search bar: Cellular memory.
First, I find a few definitions and explanations via a variety of sources ranging from Wikipedia to publications that I’ve never heard of to one piece in Scientific American that cites some UCLA study on the neurons of sea slugs. Apparently, it suggested that long-term memories could be stored in neurons and then re-formed even when the synapses between neurons were destroyed. I’m not 100 percent sure how that might relate to a transplanted heart. But most of the stuff I’m finding goes like this: