Page 35 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

W here am I? Sasha wondered.

She felt a familiar tingling rise up through her body, light and pleasant, like having champagne bubbles in her veins. When she emerged from an epileptic seizure, Sasha often felt like her brain was a computer rebooting, starting from scratch, loading software bit by bit.

Instinctively, she began her usual post-seizure ritual. “Postictal focus,” as Dr. Gessner called the strategy, was a way of reconnecting with the present reality by forcing the mind to conjure the most recent memory it could recall.

This morning I was making tea, Sasha remembered, conjuring the smell of the hibiscus, the morning light sifting through her kitchen windows, and the soft mewing of her two Siamese cats as they rubbed against her calves, eager for breakfast. Slowly, as her brain gained traction, she tried to remember what she had done after feeding her cats, but those memories were blank, refusing to surface.

Interictal memory impairment, as it was known, was quite common among epileptics and presented as periods of blackout memory loss, sometimes spanning many hours, as if the brain had simply forgotten to record whatever was happening.

For some epileptics, memory impairment was more debilitating than seizures, but Sasha had chosen simply to accept it. At times she wondered if it might even be a blessing.

There are parts of my past I’d rather not recall.

When Sasha was growing up in Russia, other schoolchildren mocked her seizures, giving her a lurid nickname— вибратор —which meant “vibrator.” Her parents took her to specialists, but the answers were always the same. “There is no cure. Sasha will die with seizures…but not of them.”

But I want to die, Sasha often thought.

The moments of tranquility she felt immediately following the seizures, while magical in some ways, were outweighed by the emotional pain and physical injuries these episodes brought to her life.

Doctors eventually diagnosed Sasha with chronic syncope and acute mental illness and suggested she be institutionalized.

The best her parents could do was a psikhushka —a dilapidated government mental institution located in the middle of nowhere near Russia’s western border.

On her tenth birthday, her parents left her there and never visited again.

Sasha had cried for weeks in her tiny room.

Her seizures occurred several times a day, and staff members would forcefully restrain her with no show of compassion.

The meals they provided were meager, but the medications they provided were copious.

By the time she was a teenager, Sasha lived a life of heavy sedation and loneliness.

For more than a decade, she lived this way, forgotten and alone.

Her only lasting escapes from reality were the American movies that played nonstop in the common room across the hall.

Romantic comedies were her favorite, and Sasha often dreamed of falling in love in New York City.

One day I will see America, she promised herself, sensing sometimes that her dream of going to America was the only thing keeping her going.

And then even that dream was shattered.

Sasha was assigned a new nighttime attendant—a pitiless nurse named Malvina—who amused herself in the desolate hours by withholding Sasha’s seizure medications and then watching her spasmodic episodes like a circus sideshow before beating her.

For weeks, Malvina abused Sasha physically, mentally, and perhaps in other ways that Sasha’s mind blocked.

One morning, after barely surviving one of Malvina’s more brutal and traumatic attacks, Sasha was crying in bed when three staff members burst in and dragged her down the hall to the common room.

“Priznavaysya!” they shouted at her. Confess!

At Sasha’s feet, on the floor of the common room, lay Malvina’s lifeless body, her head twisted almost entirely backward.

It wasn’t me, Sasha insisted, but the staff had already determined she was guilty. Not wanting to lose any government sponsorship money, they reported Malvina’s death as an unfortunate accident on a slippery floor and locked Sasha in solitary confinement as punishment.

Alone in the darkness, Sasha often wondered who might have killed the nurse. There were other patients here who suffered seizures, and it was possible Malvina had taunted the wrong person. Or maybe, Sasha fantasized, someone killed Malvina to protect me. The idea made her feel less alone somehow.

After two weeks in solitary, Sasha was dragged out, put into a straitjacket, and informed she had a visitor. Sasha had never had a visitor, not even her parents. They left me here to die.

The person in the waiting area was a stranger—a small woman with jet-black hair, expensive clothing, and a stern face. She had an air of authority. The woman immediately reprimanded the orderlies, demanding they remove Sasha’s straitjacket, which, to her amazement, they did.

“Zví?ata,” she muttered, shooing them away. Animals.

Sasha squinted her eyes, having not seen daylight for weeks. “Kто ты?” she asked in Russian. Who are you?

“Can you speak Czech?” the woman asked.

Sasha shook her head.

“Any English?”

“Some,” Sasha said. “I watch American television.”

“Me too,” the woman whispered, almost conspiratorially. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Sasha simply stared.

“My name is Dr. Brigita Gessner,” the woman said. “I’m here to help you. I’m a neurosurgeon from Europe.”

“Doctors can’t help me,” Sasha said quickly.

“I’m sorry for that. It’s only because they don’t understand your condition.”

“I have insanity and seizures.”

The woman emphatically shook her head. “No, Sasha, you are perfectly sane. You have a condition known as TLE—temporal lobe epilepsy—which is the cause of your seizures. It’s entirely curable. I have a facility in Prague, and I’d like to take you there.”

“To fix me?” she said, skeptical.

“You’re not broken, my dear. Your brain just has occasional electrical storms. But I can help you control those. I’ve treated many TLE patients just like you, with superb results—including a young man named Dmitri from this very institution.”

Dmitri? Sasha was familiar with the tall, striking man, but she had not seen him in a while. I wondered where he went! “You cured Dmitri?”

“I did indeed. And he has already returned home in Russia.”

Sasha wanted desperately to believe what Dr. Gessner was saying, but it all seemed far too good to be true. “I don’t…have any money.”

“The treatment is free, Sasha,” the woman said. “And quite simple.”

The doctor quickly explained a procedure that involved implanting a small chip in Sasha’s skull.

If Sasha felt a seizure coming on, she could activate the chip by rubbing a small magnetic wand on her head, which caused the chip to generate electric pulses that interrupted the onset of the seizure…

halting the episode before it even began.

“Is that…really possible?” Sasha said, on the verge of tears.

“It is! It’s called a responsive neurostimulation chip. I invented it.”

“But why…would you help me ?!”

Dr. Gessner reached across the table and took her hand. “Sasha, I’ve been very fortunate in my life. The truth is that helping you is beneficial to me as well. It makes me feel good to help people who need it. If I can save someone’s life, why wouldn’t I do it?”

Sasha wanted to jump up and embrace this woman, but she was afraid to believe her. In her lifetime, she had rarely received the gift of kindness. “But…what if they won’t let me out of here?!”

“Oh, they’d better, ” Gessner said sharply. “I paid them a small fortune to release you.”

Four days later, Sasha awoke in a hospital bed in Prague, groggy from anesthesia and pain medication, but very much alive.

When Gessner told her the procedure had been a success, Sasha’s emotions surged wildly and, as often occurred, triggered the stirrings of an oncoming seizure.

Gessner calmly produced the magnetic wand and rubbed it on the top of Sasha’s head.

Miraculously, Sasha felt the seizure evaporate.

It felt to her like a sneeze that never materialized.

She was incredulous.

In the days that followed, Dr. Gessner observed her closely and fine-tuned the device for maximum efficiency.

It worked perfectly, and Sasha realized she might never have another seizure again.

She even wondered if someday she might miss the tranquility and ethereal bliss that accompanied the post-seizure haze, but it seemed a tiny price to pay for the luxury of functioning in the real world.

One afternoon, as they were running through diagnostic tests, Brigita Gessner casually said, “I’m not sure what your future plans are, Sasha, but I need to hire a lab intern, and frankly you’d be an ideal candidate.”

“Me?” Sasha thought she must have been joking.

“Why not you ? You’ve basically spent your entire life in a medical facility.”

“As a patient !” Sasha said, laughing. “Not a doctor!”

“True,” Gessner said, “but you’re an intelligent woman. I’m not asking you to become a doctor or do brain surgery. I’m talking about office paperwork, disinfecting equipment, that sort of thing. Best of all, if you’re working at my lab, we might be able to make improvements in your condition.”

“Improvements? I feel perfect!”

“Really? No more memory loss and blackout periods?”

“Oh…” Sasha said. “There are still those.”

She and Gessner shared a laugh, but in reality, Sasha had indeed forgotten. Her memory had always had blank spots, and she’d just gotten used to it.

“Interictal memory impairment,” Gessner said, “is extremely common in all my TLE patients. I’ve got a few ideas for how we might start to make headway on IMI…that is, if you’ll let me look at your brain from time to time.”

“Of course, but—”

“I have a small apartment in town that I bought for my mother, but she’s been gone awhile, and I’ve never gotten around to selling it. You can stay there as long as you like. It’s furnished, but if you don’t like the style, we can—”

“I love the style,” Sasha burst, on the verge of tears.

That had been two years ago, and Sasha had never left.

She was now twenty-eight years old, and her modest salary and the free rent were sufficient to support herself, which was a dream come true.

Over time, she progressed from cleaning and doing paperwork to assisting Dr. Gessner in her research and learning how to run the basic imaging equipment.

Brigita scanned Sasha’s brain regularly to monitor progress of her ongoing treatment, which included IV nutritional supplements and brain-training exercises in the virtual reality chair.

Sometimes, as a treat, Gessner let Sasha watch VR travel immersions—the Eiffel Tower, the Great Barrier Reef, and her favorite escape, Manhattan.

She loved floating over all those skyscrapers or winding through Central Park. Someday, I hope to see it for real…

“Sasha?” A deep voice resonated directly above her. “Are you okay?”

The voice sounded close, pulling her back to the present.

“Sasha?” it repeated.

The warmth of Sasha’s afterglow began dissolving…and then, without warning, a surge of bitter sadness crashed over her like a wave.

She now remembered everything.

Brigita is dead.

My one true friend.

Her eyes jolted open, and she found herself looking up at the handsome but kind face of the man who was still cradling her head.

He smiled gently at her and whispered, “Welcome back.”