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an unusual set of symptoms. Dr. Hernández and I agree that it could be something similar to an acute depression.”
    “My brother is depressed?” I asked, shocked.
    “No, not exactly, Mr. Queralt…,” he clarified, looking at the psychiatrist out of the corner of his eye. “You see, your brother presents a very confusing profile of two pathologies that do not usually occur at the same time in one patient.”
    “On the one hand,” Dr. Hernández, who was badly hiding his excitement at having such a strange case on his hands, interjected for the first time, “he seems to suffer from what the medical literature calls Cotard delusion. This syndrome was diagnosed for the first time in 1788 in France. Individuals who suffer from it believe irrefutably that they are dead and they insist, sometimes even violently, on being shrouded and buried. They don’t feel their bodies, they don’t respond to external stimuli, their gazes become opaque and vacant, their bodies go completely limp…. Basically, they are alive because we know they’re alive, but they react as if they really were dead.”
    Ona began to cry silently without being able to control her sobs and Dani, scared, turned toward me looking for support, but when he saw me so serious he burst into tears as well. If Jabba and Proxi didn’t get here soon to pick him up, this was going to end badly.
    Since the boy’s crying got in the way of the conversation Ona, trying to calm herself, stood up and began pacing back and forth to comfort Dani. At the table, none of us said anything. At last, after several interminable minutes, my nephew stopped crying and seemed to go to sleep.
    “It’s very late for him,” my sister-in-law whispered, carefully returning to her seat. “He should have been asleep a while ago and he hasn’t even had dinner.”
    I crossed my hands on the table and leaned toward the doctors. “All right, Dr. Hernández,” I said, “and what solution is there for this Cotard delusion or whatever you call it?”
    “Sir, solution, solution…! I recommend hospitalization and the administration of psychopharmaceuticals and the prognosis, with medication, tends to be good although I won’t lie to you, in almost all cases there are relapses.”
    “The most recent studies on Cotard delusion,” observed Dr. Llor, who seemed to want to contribute his neurological two cents, “show that this syndrome tends to be associated with a certain kind of cerebral lesion located in the left temporal lobe.”
    “Does that mean that he’s hit his head?” Ona asked, alarmed.
    “No, not at all,” replied the neurologist. “What I’m trying to say is that even if there is notrauma, there are one or various parts of the brain that do not react as they should or at least as they are expected to. The human brain is made of many distinct parts that all have their respective functions: some control movement, others make calculations, others process feelings, etc. To do so, these sectors use small electrical charges and very specialized chemical agents. All it takes is one slight change in one of these agents to completely change the way an area of the brain works and with it the way a person thinks, feels, or behaves. In the case of Cotard delusion, CT scans show that there’s a change in the activity of the left temporal lobe…here.” He accompanied the word with a gesture, resting his hand behind his left ear, not very high or very low and not very far back.
    “Sort of like a computer with a broken circuit?”
    The two doctors wrinkled their foreheads in unison, unpleasantly surprised by the example.
    “Yes, okay…,” Dr. Hernández admitted. “These days it’s very common to compare the human brain to a computer because both function, shall we say, in a similar way. But they are not the same: A computer doesn’t have self awareness or emotions. This is the grave mistake that neurology is leading us toward.” Llor didn’t even blink. “In psychiatry,