27

The first thing he learned how to move was his right thumb. It wasn't a fluke, either. It was something that William Cozzano worked on constantly from the first moment that he came awake after the implantation.

Within a day, he was able to make the thumb jerk spasmodically from time to time. By the time they loaded him on the plane and flew him back to Tuscola, two days after the implantation, he was able to jerk it whenever he wanted to.

Then he learned how to move it both ways, straightening the thumb and then curling it into the palm of his hand. Once he got that down, he repeated it several thousand times, sixteen hours a day, until they gave him sedatives to make him sleep. Eight hours later he would wake up and begin exercising his thumb again.

For the first few days, neither Mary Catherine nor anyone else could figure out why he was concentrating on the thumb. They had assumed that he would want to work on his speech skills. And he did, from time to time; within a week after the operation, it was possible to watch him playing with muscle in his face. The underside of his jaw throbbed in and out as he moved his tongue around inside his mouth, and his lips began to move, on both sides, jerkily at first and then smoothly. Within five days he had learned to pucker up so that he could give Mary Catherine a kiss when she bent down to offer her cheek.

But the whole time he was doing these things, his thumb was active. It became a subject of concern among Cozzano's therapy team - the half-dozen physical therapists, neurologists, and computer people who had moved into some of the unused bedrooms in the Tuscola house to monitor the Governor's recovery. They had meetings about that thumb. Worried about whether the movement was voluntary or involuntary, discussed the idea of taping it down so it wouldn't get worn out and arthritic over time.

It all became clear the first time they put a remote control into his hand. By that time, his fingers had developed enough co­ordination to wrap around the underside of the remote and hold it in place, giving that thumb, now highly coordinated, the freedom to roam around on its top surface, punching buttons. Changing channels. Moving the volume up and down. Activating the VCR to tape certain programs, then playing them back later.

They decided to give him a test. They arranged a dinner party on a Thursday evening at seven o'clock, knowing that it would interfere with Cozzano's favorite TV show, a satirical cartoon. He passed that test with flying colors; without any hints or prompting from the therapy team, he used his thumb to program his VCR.

"He still knows how to do it," said the head computer person, Peter (Zeldo) Zeldovich. He was awed. "I mean, I wrote half of the Calyx operating system. But I can't program a VCR."

"His memory seems pretty good," Mary Catherine said. She had driven down from Chicago to attend the dinner, then snuck up to the hallway outside the master bedroom to see Dad rewind the videotape and play back his favourite program.

The other bedrooms had been turned into a high-tech wonder­land. Zeldo filled Mary Catherine's old bedroom with computers and James's with communications gear. Mom's sewing room was full of medical stuff. The two guest bedrooms were set up with bunk beds and mattresses on the floor so that the nurses and therapists could alternate between sleeping and working without leaving the house.

Everything that Dad did now - every tiny motion of his thumb, every twitch of his lips - had huge informational ramifications that Zeldo could plot and graph on his computer screens. Thousands of connections had now grown into place between Dad's neurons and the biochip, and hundreds of new ones were still being made every day. All of the impulses passing from his brain outward into his body and back passed through these connections, and could be monitored by the biochip. Even when Dad was sleeping, it amounted to an overwhelming flow of information, like all the telephone calls being made into or out of Manhattan at a given time.

There was no way to understand all of it. No way to keep track. The best that Zeldo could do was keep a running tab on what was happening, building up a statistical database, maybe get some sense of which connections were being used for the thumb and which for the left eyebrow. Still, it was fascinating to watch.

That all of these things worked was no news. The chip had worked in the baboons and it had worked in Mohinder Singh, after all. The real question on their minds was: how much damage had the strokes done to other parts of Cozzano's mind, for example, memory, personality, cognitive skills?

The fact that he still wanted to watch the same TV show, still thought it was funny, and still knew how to program his VCR answered several questions. It was good news on all fronts.

But mostly Cozzano watched the news and public affairs pro­grams about the presidential campaign. They would pin the latest newspapers and magazines up on a reading stand in front of his face and he would pore over them, his eyes flicking back and forth between the coverage on the televisions and the printed page.

Only then - after he had got control of the TV channels and had caught up on the newspapers - only then did he start working on speech.

They set an ambitious schedule for him, worrying that they might stress him out and overwork him, and he left that schedule in the dust. First thing in the morning, the physical therapists came in, at first helping him move his limbs, later, when he got the hang of that, running him through exercises. Then the speech therapist came in and got him to put his tongue and lips in certain positions, got him to make certain sounds, and then to string those sounds together into syllables and words. Following an afternoon nap, the physical therapists would come back in and work on the parts of his body that they had missed in the morning. During the evenings he could relax, watch TV, read.

He exercised his speech during physical therapy and he exercised his body during speech therapy. He also exercised both of them while he was pretending to take his afternoon nap, and then he exercised them all evening long when he was supposed to be taking it easy. He even woke up in the middle of the night and exercised.

Getting up out of the wheelchair was an ambitious goal that he wouldn't attempt for a few weeks. In the meantime there were a few things he couldn't do for himself, such as going to the toilet, taking baths, carrying in wood for the fireplace, and swapping tapes in and out of the VCR. Nurses, aides, and family members had to do these things for him.

Almost two weeks after the implant, Mary Catherine came down for another visit. She had been doing so much driving that they had gone to the trouble of leasing a car, a brand-new Acura luxury sedan, so that she could make the trip in comfort and safety. The evening she arrived, she had a conversation with Dad.

"Vee... Cee...rrr," he said.

"VCR. You want me to do something with the VCR?"

"Yes."

"Okay. What do you want me to do?"

Dad aimed the remote shakily toward the TV cabinet and hit the EJECT button. The VCR spat out a tape.

"You want me to take this out?"

"Yes."

"You want me to put a different tape in?"

"Yes."

The TV cabinet had a shelf along the top with a few dozen videotapes in it, mostly old family tapes or favourite movies. Mary Catherine began running her finger along the line of tapes.

"New!" Dad blurted.

"You want a new tape?"

"Blank."

"You want a blank tape."

"Yes."

Mary Catherine rummaged around in the cabinet until she found a six-pack of fresh blank videocassettes. Dad always bought them half a dozen at a time at Wal-Mart. He always bought everything in vast, bulk quantities, dirt cheap, in huge drafty warehouse like stores out in the middle of the prairie.