Revenant

Chapter 19

I frowned. "A what?"

"And this is probably where I'm going to muck things up, trying to describe it to you. Ah, it . . ." I could hear him frowning in consternation on the other side of the phone. Don't ask me how. "Miss Calvino, how would you go about explaining it?"

She pursed her lips and regarded me. "Joe, would you consider yourself to be an expert on death?"

"I have a passing familiarity with the concept," I said, dryly.

I received a patient smile in return.

"Could you describe it for me? A definition, if you will," she asked.

I frowned in thought briefly before answering. "An organism becomes damaged in a way it is unable to self-repair, depriving it of material necessary for it to maintain itself, eventually resulting in the irrecoverable loss of the immaterial mind, or 'Cartesian I' as some call it."

She gave me a quick nod of her head. "Better than most. So, let's assume the following scenario. A little girl swims in her family's pool without supervision. She goes under, and is found five minutes later at the bottom of the pool, cold, with no pulse, her lungs filled with water. Is she dead?"

"Ah yes," I heard Diavolo murmur.

Right to the tricky stuff. This felt a bit like a bar exam for professional killers.

The tone of it all reminded me rather uncomfortably of an organization I used to belong to.

"Not necessarily," I said, finally. "Lower temperatures slow down the core biological processes - the need for oxygen is reduced. If the heart is started up again, and air forced through the lungs, a drowning victim can be brought back from the brink of death."

"Is it merely 'the brink' of death?" she asked, eyebrow raised. "If nothing was done to save her, would she not have been considered dead the instant her lungs filled with water and her heart stopped?"

"Well, it takes a while for all of the biological functions to shut down, one leading to another in a sort of chain reaction. So the important ones were taken away - oxygen cycling and blood circulation, which meant that the brain was slowly dying from deprivation. Her mind hadn't exactly 'died' yet, because of the temperature."

"Indeed. So the mind is alive, meaning that the girl is not dead, despite the fact that her body is no longer functioning properly."

"Correct," I agreed. "Where exactly is this going?"

"Indulge me a few more moments, please. Now, what if the body continues to live, but the mind is gone? Say, the child's parents are able to resuscitate her, get the body working once more, but the higher functioning parts of her brain have gone for too long without oxygen. Is she dead?"

"Look, these are sort of the exceptions to the rule, alright? I mean, I guess what you're trying to do is get me to pin down exactly what constitutes death, and it's a fairly murky sort of thing as it is, especially if you're of the belief that there's a 'soul' or afterlife or whatever. There have been cases where a doctor pronounces a patient dead and sends them to the morgue, only to have them wake up twelve hours later, perfectly fine. The word is a technically imperfect measurement at best, with ninety-nine point nine-nine-etcetera percent accuracy." I furrowed my brow at her. "However, I'm fairly certain that even the point zero-zero-zero-one percent of cases had circumstances that, were doctors aware of them, would have explained why these specific people were able to avoid actually becoming dead."

"True, and that's because when it comes to science, biology, and physics, we still only know a small fraction of what there is to know out there," she agreed, nodding once more. "We do know more now than we used to. Nowadays, if someone is brought back to life after twelve hours of being presumed dead it's called a miracle. They go on a speaking tour, maybe appear on a daytime talk show. Five-hundred years ago, something like that happens to someone, they're labeled a witch and burned alive. As we know and understand more, our acceptance of the 'impossible' changes as well."