“We don’t know how a coma patient feels either, Sam. We can presume that he feels something, and that’s what the scans show too.” Dr. Saul points to the printouts. “Some of my colleagues believe that in a coma the brain is assailed by all the same words and images and emotions that flood it when the person is awake and completely relaxed. One group is convinced that the limbic system and the reptilian brain take over, safeguarding a minimal amount of stand-in brain function. Then there are the engineers. They regard everything we feel and think—love, hate, worry, songs by the Rolling Stones—as electronic chatter between our synapses and think that the soul is nothing but a fairy tale. For them, a coma is like a power cut to the system.”

Sam taps his trembling forefinger on the cross again. “Can he see the dead from there?”

Dr. Saul doesn’t hesitate for a second this time. “No,” he replies. “Your father was clinically dead, Sam. Patients who have been reanimated often tell me that they’ve seen what awaits them on the other side, and their accounts are all pretty similar: tunnels of light, a floating sensation, voices, waiting relatives, relaxation . . . But . . .”—here Dr. Saul screws up his eyes—“. . . we have explanations for the majority of those sensations and experiences. The lights at the end of the tunnel can be explained by loss of vision during a physical collapse. The feeling of flying or floating above one’s own body is a typical symptom when the brain area responsible for equilibrium and balance fails. The dissolution of the boundary with one’s own body is also due to the failure of—”

“I think we’ve got the message,” I say, interrupting him. Sam dug his nails into his chair while Dr. Saul was overwhelming us with this torrent of specialist knowledge. The information is of no use to Samuel. He wants something else, hope maybe, and knowledge doesn’t bring hope. “You believe in your statistics and you reject everything else.”

“I don’t believe in anything at all, Mrs. Tomlin. Not in statistics, not in experts, and incidentally, in case it reassures you, I don’t believe for a second that I know all there is to know.”

“That really is hugely reassuring.”

He shrugs. “What do you want to hear? Near-death experiences? Angels, God, rebirth? Or whether people in a coma leave their bodies and travel through time and space? What can I tell you? I’m a neurosurgeon! We simply don’t know if Henri Skinner can see anything or not, where he is at the moment, or what he feels. All we have is our scans, and they don’t even show us if he can hear, see, feel, or smell.”