The night after that first hospital visit I talked to Scott via Skype while my mother had quiet sex with her husband, Steve. Scared of having another nightmare, my brother, Malcolm, was desperate to sleep in my room. As he fell asleep it was as if his spirit were walking down a long flight of stone steps into the dark. I could hear his footsteps, but unlike my father he was close, very close to the surface, and I could still sense his presence.

I told Scott that my father was “away.” Scott was sitting on the toilet. The McMillans have more toilets in their mansion than my mother Marie-France’s terraced house has rooms. We live in Putney, Scott in Westminster. If Putney’s Swatch, Westminster’s Rolex.

We searched for “traumatic brain injury,” “artificial coma,” and “cerebral cortex” on Google, or rather Scott did while I stared into the darkness, listening to the tapping of his fingers and to Malcolm’s deep breathing. I thought about the scoobie and how I couldn’t get through to my father under his thick fluffy duvet of anesthetics.

“Wow, Michael Schumacher was put into an artificial coma after a traumatic brain injury,” Scott lectured. “If the person doesn’t die straightaway, then—”

“Shut up.” If he didn’t say it aloud, then it couldn’t happen. It simply mustn’t happen. Not now. Not like this.

“Of course you don’t want to hear it, but you have to. Or do you want to let them lie to you? They always lie to us—at first because we’re children, then later because we’re no longer children.” Scott took a deep breath. “Now, listen to Brainman here. The cerebral cortex is the site of our personality. If it tears, you become either a vegetable or wildly aggressive. One day your dad might wake up and be so aggressive that he runs amok. Or kills himself. Or you. Or thinks he’s someone else. Some people come back and can do inexplicable things.”

“What kind of things?”

“You know, see auras, speak Tibetan, or hear thoughts.”

I didn’t tell him that I’m sometimes capable of two of those three things.

He resumed his typing and mumbled, “Aha, you have to hold his hand. If he squeezes your hand, he’s still there.”

Malcolm turned over in my bed with a sigh. I could feel his presence very clearly, even though he was sleeping and dreaming. My father, on the other hand . . . My father was somewhere beyond dreams.

“Where else might he be?” I asked Scott.

“This is crazy,” he whispers instead of answering me. “I’ve stumbled across a self-help forum for people who’ve met God or someone while they were in a coma.”

“What do you mean, ‘or someone’? Who? Elvis?”