God pins me with his two-colored gaze, as if until this point I had been unreal to him, a simple offshoot of C7, and am now becoming real. His cool eye becomes warmer, then he gives a slow nod. “Exactly, Samuel,” he says softly. “The brain is a church built of thoughts.”

He abruptly flicks the lights back on and is once again a blond Viking with the forehead and shoulders of a bull. “Okay, you’re wondering if your father’s going to die, right?” Nothing holds any fear for God, not even the toughest questions.

He picks up a marker and draws a big black dot on a whiteboard. “This is ‘waking,’ okay?” He writes Awake next to the black dot and draws five concentric circles radiating out from it. At the edges, above, below, and on both sides of the largest circle, he writes the word Death. Inside the circles, from central to outermost, from the black dot, he writes Numb, Asleep/Dreaming, Unconscious, Coma, and Brain-Dead. The marker squeaks on the board.

“There are a variety of forms of life on the margins of death,” God explains. Tapping the area marked “Coma,” he takes a different pen, a red one this time, and draws three lines. “Deep, medium, and light coma. But it is in these areas, Sam, closer to the core,” says Saul, shading in the rings marked “Asleep/Dreaming” and “Unconscious,” “much closer to being awake, that your father is presently living. Do you see? Closer to life than to death. Do you understand?”

I nod. Has God noticed that he describes unconscious and coma as places rather than states?

Dr. Saul tosses the markers casually onto the table.

“A word of advice,” he barks as he leaves the room. “Use toothpaste instead of sand next time.”

ON MY WAY to take the lift back down to the second floor, I run through all the things I want to tell my father today. Maybe I’ll mention Saul’s model. The disc world.

I wonder if you dream beyond the sleep zone, and if a medically induced coma is similar to a true coma or not. And if you know that you’re in a coma. I don’t know I’m dreaming when I dream. Is being in a coma like being alive, except that you don’t know you’re alive? Like in The Matrix?

In recent days I’ve had an occasional impression that I can feel my father. There was something restless about him, as if—and these are thoughts I will never reveal to Scott—he was searching for the path leading back to reality through a maze of darkness and fear. I now know that might be the case. If waking and sleeping and coma aren’t states but places, then my father is currently on a journey between those places. Or worlds. Or zones that get darker and darker, the closer they are to death.