‘Gabrielle!’ he exclaimed. He took her hand and kissed it, then turned to look down at Hoffmann. ‘So you have brought me a genuine patient for a change?’
Gabrielle said, ‘This is my husband, Alexander Hoffmann. Alex – this is Fabian Tallon, the duty technician. You remember Fabian? I’ve told you all about him.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Hoffmann. He looked up at the young man. Tallon had large dark liquid eyes, a wide mouth, very white teeth and a couple of days’ growth of dark beard. His shirt was unbuttoned more than it needed to be, drawing attention to his broad chest, his rugby player’s chest. Suddenly Hoffmann wondered if Gabrielle might be having an affair with him. He tried to push the idea out of his head, but it refused to go. It was years since he had felt a pang of jealousy; he had forgotten how almost exquisite the sharpness could be. Looking from one to the other he said, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for Gabrielle.’
‘It’s been a pleasure, Alex. Now let’s see what we can do for you.’ He pushed the bed as easily as if it were a supermarket trolley, through the control area and into the room containing the CAT scanner. ‘Stand up, please.’
Once again Hoffmann surrendered mechanically to the procedure. His overcoat and spectacles were taken from him. He was told to sit on the edge of the couch that formed part of the machine. The dressing was removed from his head. He was instructed to lie on his back on the couch, his head pointing towards the scanner. Tallon adjusted the neck rest. ‘This will take less than a minute,’ he said, and disappeared. The door sighed shut behind him. Hoffmann raised his head slightly. He was alone. Beyond his bare feet, through the thick glass window at the far end of the room, he could see Gabrielle watching him. Tallon joined her. They said something to one another that he could not hear. There was a clatter, and then Tallon’s voice came loudly over a loudspeaker.
‘Lie back, Alex. Try to keep as still as possible.’
Hoffmann did as ordered. There was a hum and the couch began to slide backwards through the wide drum of the scanner. It happened twice: once briefly, to get a fix; the second time more slowly, to collect the images. He stared at the white plastic casing as he passed beneath it. It was like being subjected to some radioactive car wash. The couch stopped and reversed itself and Hoffmann imagined his brain being sprayed by a brilliant, cleansing light, from which nothing could hide – all impurities exposed and obliterated in a hiss of burning matter.
The loudspeaker clicked on and briefly he heard the sound of Gabrielle’s voice dying away in the background. It seemed to him – could this be right? – that she had been whispering. Tallon said, ‘Thank you, Alex. It’s all over. Stay where you are. I’ll come and get you.’ He resumed his conversation with Gabrielle. ‘But you see-’ The sound cut out.
Hoffmann lay there for what seemed a long while: plenty of time, at any rate, to consider how easy it would have been for Gabrielle to have had an affair over the past few months. There were the long hours she had spent at the hospital collecting the images she needed for her work; and then there were the even longer days and nights he had been away at his office, developing VIXAL. What was there to anchor a couple in a marriage after more than seven years if there were no children to exert some gravitational pull? Suddenly he experienced yet another long- forgotten sensation: the delicious, childish pain of self-pity. To his horror, he realised he was starting to cry.
‘Are you okay, Alex?’ Tallon’s face loomed above the couch, handsome, concerned, insufferable.
‘No problem.’
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ Hoffmann wiped his eyes quickly on the sleeve of his dressing gown and put his spectacles back on. The rational part of his mind recognised that these sudden lurches in mood were likely to be symptoms of head trauma, but that did not make them any less real. He refused to get back on to the wheeled bed. He swung his legs off the couch, took a few deep breaths, and by the time he walked into the other room had regained control of himself.
‘Alex,’ said Gabrielle, ‘this is the radiologist, Dr Dufort.’
She indicated a tiny woman with close-cropped grey hair who was seated at a computer screen. Dufort turned and gave him a perfunctory nod over her narrow shoulder, then resumed her examination of the scan results.
‘Is that me?’ asked Hoffmann, staring at the screen.
‘It is, monsieur.’ She did not turn round.
Hoffmann contemplated his brain with detachment, indeed disappointment. The black-and-white image on the screen could have been anything – a section of coral reef being filmed by a remote underwater camera, a view of the lunar surface, the face of a monkey. Its messiness, its lack of form or beauty, depressed him. Surely we can do better than this, he thought. This cannot be the end product. This must be merely a stage in evolution, and our human task is to prepare the way for whatever comes next, just as gas created organic matter. Artificial intelligence, or autonomous machine reasoning as he preferred to call it – AMR – had been a preoccupation of his for more than fifteen years. Silly people, encouraged by journalists, thought the aim was to replicate the human mind, and to produce a digitalised version of ourselves. But really, why would one bother to imitate anything so vulnerable and unreliable, or with such built-in obsolescence: a central processing unit that could be utterly destroyed because some ancillary mechanical part – the heart, say, or the liver – suffered a temporary interruption? It was like losing a Cray supercomputer and all of its memory files because a plug needed changing.
The radiologist tilted the brain on its axis from top to bottom and it seemed to nod at him, a greeting from outer space. She rotated it. She twisted it from side to side.
‘No evidence of fracture,’ she said, ‘and no swelling, which is the most important thing. But what is this, I wonder?’
The skull bone showed up like a reverse image of a walnut shell. A white line of variable thickness encased the spongy grey matter of the brain. She zoomed in. The image widened, blurred and finally dissolved into a pale grey supernova. Hoffmann leaned forward for a closer look.
‘There,’ said Dufort, touching the screen with a bitten-down, ringless finger. ‘You see these pinpoints of whiteness? These bright stars? These are tiny haemorrhages in the brain tissue.’
Gabrielle said, ‘Is that serious?’
‘No, not necessarily. It’s probably what one would expect to see from an injury of this type. You know, the brain ricochets when the head is struck with sufficient force. There is bound to be a little bleeding. It seems to have stopped.’ She raised her spectacles and leaned in very close to the screen, like a jeweller inspecting a precious stone. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I would like to do another test.’
Hoffmann had so often imagined this moment – the vast and impersonal hospital, the abnormal test result, the coolly delivered medical verdict, the first step on the irreversible descent to helplessness and death – that it took him a moment to realise this was not another of his hypochondriac fantasies.
‘What sort of test?’ he asked.
‘I would like to use MRI for a second look. It gives a much clearer image of soft tissue. It should tell us whether this is a pre-existing condition or not.’
A pre-existing condition…
‘How long will that take?’
‘The test itself does not take long. It’s a question of when a scanner is free.’ She called up a new file and clicked through it. ‘We should be able to get on to a machine at noon, provided there isn’t an emergency.’
Gabrielle said, ‘Isn’t this an emergency?’
‘No, no, there isn’t any immediate danger.’
‘In that case, I’d rather leave it,’ said Hoffmann.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Have the test. You might as well.’
‘I don’t want the test.’
‘You’re being ridiculous-’
‘ I said I don’t want the goddamned test! ’
There was a moment of shocked silence.
‘We know you’re upset, Alex,’ said Tallon quietly, ‘but there’s no need to talk to Gabrielle like that.’
‘Don’t you tell me how to talk to my wife!’ He put his hand to his brow. His fingers were very cold. His throat was dry. He had to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. He swallowed before he spoke again. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want it. There are important things I need to do today.’
‘ Monsieur,’ said Dufort firmly, ‘all patients who have been knocked unconscious for as long as you were are kept here in the hospital for at least twenty-four hours, for observation.’
