Chapter 8: Thursday’s Rage
Thursday, August 17, Mass General Hospital, Morning
Ted sat in the visitor’s chair, rubbing his lower back, kneading the muscles that had grown tense while he slept.
Anya woke to the rising sun and realized her left hand wouldn’t move.
She stared at it lying against the sheet. Tried to send the command: curl fingers, lift thumb, anything. The intention was clear in her mind. The neural signal fired. But somewhere between thought and action, the connection failed. Nothing happened. The hand lay there like a foreign object attached to her arm.
Steal phenomenon. The tangled vessels were hoarding blood, starving her motor cortex. It had begun.
She reached for her notebook with her right hand, trying to capture a thought before it slipped away. The pencil trembled in her grip. She pressed harder, started writing. The pencil fell, clattered to the floor, rolled under the bed.
“Fuck.”
She gritted her teeth. Reached for another pencil. This one fell before she could even grip it properly.
Ted leaned forward in the chair. “Morning. How are you—” He saw her face. Touched her arm.
“My hand is paralyzed.” Her voice came out through clenched teeth. “My god damned left hand doesn’t work.”
He moved to pick up the fallen pencils.
“I don’t need your help. I need my fucking hand to work.”
“We can prop it differently, maybe get an occupational therapist—”
“Stop!” She grabbed the notebook with her right hand and hurled it across the room. Pages fluttered through the air, cascaded to the floor like leaves. “Stop trying to fix me!”
“I’m just trying to—”
“To what? Solve the unsolvable? Make this okay?” She was shouting now. The morning nurses would hear. She didn’t care. “Fifty years of being me, Ted. Fifty years building this mind, and I get a couple of weeks to preserve it. Shitty weeks while my body fails piece by piece!”
“Anya—”
“I should be in the lab right now analyzing data. Running simulations. Not lying here watching my body shut down!” She grabbed the water pitcher with her right hand. It shook too badly to throw. She set it down hard. Water sloshed out. “This is shit!”
Ted reached for her. She shoved him away with her functioning arm. Harder than she meant to. He stumbled back a step, caught himself on the visitor’s chair.
“Don’t try to comfort me. Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay.” Her breath came fast now, ragged. “It’s not okay. I’m dying because some blood vessels decided to tangle when I was born. There’s no meaning in it. No purpose. Just stupid biological cruelty.”
Ted stood motionless. His jaw worked, but no words came. Then he turned and left.
The door clicked shut. Anya sat alone in the sudden silence. The spilled water dripped steadily onto the floor. Her notebook pages lay scattered, equations half-finished, thoughts interrupted. She stared at them with her one working hand clenched in a fist.
She hated him for leaving. Hated herself for driving him away. Hated the pages on the floor she couldn’t pick up with her useless left hand.
Five minutes passed. Her breathing steadied. The rage burned itself out, leaving only exhaustion and the sour taste of shame.
The door opened. Ted entered carrying two fresh cups of coffee, setting them on the bedside table carefully, avoiding the spilled water. His eyes were red-rimmed.
“You’re right,” he said. “This sucks. All of it.”
“The worst.” She exhaled. Her body relaxed slightly.
“Remember when Samuelson got the MacArthur for work you’d done three years earlier?”
“That pompous ass.” A bitter laugh escaped. “At least he’s not getting my brain patterns.”
Ted pulled the visitor’s chair closer. Sat down heavily. They didn’t speak for several minutes. The anger had left them both stripped of pretense. He’d walked the hospital corridors trying to find words that wouldn’t sound like platitudes. He’d found none. Sometimes there were no words. Finally Anya held out her good hand. Ted took it.
Time compressed to hospital rhythms: vital checks, medication rounds, the steady drip of IV fluids.
An hour later, a nurse had cleaned up the spilled water and retrieved the scattered notebook pages. Anya picked at the hospital lunch. Rubbery chicken, overcooked vegetables. She managed a few bites with her right hand. Ted sat beside her, his own meal untouched.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “About what we’re doing. The preservation.”
Ted looked up.
“Part of me is jealous.” She met his eyes. “Of whatever might emerge. You’ll move on with some echo of me. Some digital ghost that has my patterns but not my failing body. My mind without my dying flesh.”
“That’s not—”
“Let me finish.” She squeezed his hand. “You might love it because it thinks like me. You’ll find comfort in its familiar responses. It’ll probably be smarter than me. Nicer to you, maybe. And I’ll be dead, unable to compete with my own perfected shadow.”
Ted was quiet for a long moment. Outside, an ambulance siren wailed past. Faded.
“Maybe holding onto something that processes like you is the only way I won’t fall apart,” he said finally.
“You’d fall in love with it because it reminds you of me.”
“Probably.” He smiled awkwardly.
“You need to get out more, Ted.” She laughed. First time since morning. The sound felt foreign in her throat.
“I don’t know how to lose you.” His voice rough. “If there’s even a chance that something of you persists...”
She studied his face. The exhaustion around his eyes. The way he held himself still, as if movement might break something. “Then this is my gift to you,” she said. “I know you need something to hold onto. Whatever emerges from those patterns, you can love it without guilt. Without wondering if I’d be jealous or angry. I’m giving you permission now, while I’m still me, while I can still think clearly enough to mean it.”
“Anya—”
“Love it completely, if you can. Or let it go if you need to. But don’t hold back because of me.”
Ted moved to the bed carefully, navigating IV lines and EVD tubing. Held her. She leaned into him, feeling his warmth, his solidity, the familiar smell of his sweat mixed with hospital antiseptic.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“No.” She pressed her face against his shoulder. “But you’re stuck with me. At least for a few more days.”
The kiss started gentle. Became desperate. Full of apology and need and the awful knowledge that these moments were numbered.
Anya pulled back. “The door.”
Ted locked it. Pulled the privacy curtain. Turned down the monitor volume, though the nurses would notice the heart rate spike eventually. Neither of them cared.
They hadn’t made love since before the diagnosis. Afraid of her fragility, the equipment, the setting. None of that mattered now.
Ted helped her shift in the narrow bed, careful of the drainage tube. Their bodies remembered each other even as hers failed. She couldn’t use her left arm; he held it gently against her side. Her left leg was weak. He supported the weight. It was awkward, difficult, necessary.
Afterwards they lay tangled together. IVs twisted around them. Monitors slightly askew. The bed was too small for both of them but neither moved.
Anya traced his face with her good hand. Deliberately, slowly. Committing the moment to memory. The way his beard felt under her fingers. The small scar above his eyebrow from a childhood fall. The crow’s feet that deepened when he smiled. Details she’d seen ten thousand times but needed to preserve now.
“I want to remember this,” she said. Her voice clear, steady. “Your weight next to me. The way you breathe when you’re almost asleep. The terrible hospital soap smell mixing with your natural scent. I want to preserve this moment with perfect fidelity.”
“We’re going to get in trouble for this.”
“What are they going to do, kill me?” She laughed at her own dark joke. Then started crying. Not from confusion or fear. From the cruelty of still thinking so clearly, feeling so much, while her brain prepared to die.
Ted held her while she cried. Not trying to fix it. Just there.
Evening brought clarity.
They’d repositioned her properly in the bed. Reconnected the monitors, the steady beep resuming, marking time. Ted sat in the visitor’s chair, holding her good hand across the small distance between them.
The light outside had faded to dusk. Boston settling into night. Somewhere below, people were leaving work, heading home, making dinner plans. Normal life continuing.
“I’m going to die.” Anya said it as fact, not question. “Soon. Days, not weeks.”
She stroked his hand with her fingertips. The movement deliberate, controlled. Her right hand still worked perfectly. Her mind still sharp as ever. Just her body failing around her.
“I want to go with open eyes, Ted. No more pretending this is about the science.” She looked at him. “This is about us not being ready to let go. About me not wanting to stop thinking. About you not wanting to lose me entirely.”
“I’ll never be ready.”
“I know. Neither will I.” She looked toward the window. The sky deepening to purple, then black. “But I want these last days to be real. My mind is still mine. Still fully me. I want to use it while I have it.”
“Tomorrow’s scan...”
“Tomorrow we capture what we can. But tonight, can we just be?”
Ted leaned forward. Kissed her forehead. She kissed his cheek, tasted salt. Tears she hadn’t realized he was crying.