IS IAN STILL IN THERE?

People in a vegetative state may be far more conscious than was once thought.

- SARAH ZHANG

Inside the truck, the bodies of three teenage boys hurled forward, each with terrible velocity.

One boy died instantly; a second was found alive outside the car. The third boy, Ian Berg, remained pinned in the driver's seat, a bruise blooming on the right side of his forehead. He had smacked it hard-much harder than one might have guessed from the bruise alone-which caused the soft mass of his brain to slam against the rigid confines of his skull. Where brain met bone, brain gave way. The matter of his mind stretched and twisted, tore and burst.

When the jaws of life freed him from the wreckage, Ian was still alive, but unconscious. "Please don't die. Please don't die.

Please don't die," his mother, Eve Baer, pleaded over him at the hospital. She imagined throwing a golden lasso around his foot to keep him from floating away.

And Ian didn't die. After 17 days in a coma, he finally opened his eyes, but they flicked wildly around the room, unable to sync or track. He could not speak. He could not control his limbs.

The severe brain injury he'd suffered, doctors said, had put him in a vegetative state. He was alive, but assumed to be cognitively gone-devoid of thought, of feeling, of consciousness.

Eve hated that term, vegetative-an "unhuman-type classification," she thought. If you had asked her then, in 1986, she would have said she expected her 17-year-old son to fully recover. Ian had been handsome, popular, in love with a new girlfriend-the kind of golden boy upon whom fortune smiles. At school, he was known as the kid who greeted everyone, teachers included, with a hug. He and his two friends in the car belonged to a tight-knit group of seniors. But on the day he would have graduated that June, Ian was still lying in a hospital bed, his big achievement being that he'd finally made a bowel movement.