Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I was two days in Johnson Memorial and two more in a bed at the clinic, and every single one of them I worried about Shawn. Nobody came to see me. I thought Patty might, or maybe even Dinah if Bobby’d a let her, but they didn’t. Well, Patty was only twelve, still pretty young to come alone. So I watched TV and I talked with Dr. Chung, who didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do.

  “Don’t you got to see patients?”

  “I’m not an M.D., Ludie. Dr. Liu mostly sees the patients.”

  “How come Blaine got so many Chinese doctors? Aren’t Americans working on optogenetics?”

  “Of course they are. Liu Bo and I became friends at the university and so applied for this grant together.”

  “And you brought Jenny.”

  “She is Bo’s fiancé.”

  “Oh. She warn’t—there he is, the bastard!”

  President Rollins was on TV, giving a campaign speech. Red and blue balloons sailed up behind him. My hands curled into fists. Dr. Chung watched me, and I realized—stupid me!—that of course he was working. He was observing me, the lab rat.

  He said, “Why do you hate the president so?”

  “He stopped the government checks and the food stamps. It’s ’cause of him and his Libbies that most of Blaine is back to eating squirrels.”

  Dr. Chung looked at the TV like it was the most fascinating thing in the world, but I knew his attention was really on me. “But under the Libertarians, aren’t your taxes lower?”

  I snorted. “Five percent of nothing isn’t less to pay than fifteen percent of nothing.”

  “I thought the number of jobs in the coal mines had increased.”

  “If you can get one. My kin can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t tell him why not. Bobby and Uncle Ted and maybe even now Shawn—they can’t none of them pass a drug screen. So I snapped, “You defending Ratface Rollins?”

  “Certainly not. He has drastically and tragically cut funding for basic research.”

  “But here you all are.” I waved my arm to take in the room and the machines hooked up to me and the desk in the lobby where Mrs. Cully was doing something on a computer. I was still floating.

  “Barely,” Dr. Chung said. “This study is funded as part of a grant now four years old and up for renewal. If—” He stopped and looked—for just a minute, and the first time ever—a little confused. He didn’t know why he was telling me so much. I didn’t know, either. My excuse was the pain drugs.

  I said, “If Ratface wins, you lose the money for this clinic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? I mean, why this one specially?”

  He chewed on his bottom lip, something else I didn’t see him do afore. I thought he warn’t going to say any more, but then he did. “The study so far has produced no publishable results. The population affected is small. We obtained the current grant just before President Rollins came into office and all but abolished both the FDA and research money. If the Libertarians are re-elected, it’s unlikely our grant will be renewed.”

  “Isn’t there someplace else to get the money?”

  “Not that we have found so far.”

  Mrs. Cully called to him then and he left. I sat thinking about what he said. It was like a curtain lifted on one corner, and behind that curtain was a place just as dog-eat-dog as Blaine. Bobby scrambled to dig coal from the side of the highway, and these doctors scrambled to dig money out of the government. Dinah worked hard to make it okay that Bobby hit her (“It ain’t him, it’s the fucking sickness!”), and Dr. Chung worked hard to convince the government it was a good idea to put a bunch of algae and a light switch in my skull. Then I thought about how much I liked him telling me all that, and about the bandages coming off and the real experiment starting tomorrow, and about lunch coming soon. And then I didn’t think about nothing because Bobby burst into the clinic with his .22.

  “Where is she? Where’s my fucking sister?”

  “Bobby!”

  He didn’t hear me, or he couldn’t. I scrambled out of bed but I was still hooked up to a bunch of machines. I yanked the wires. Soothing voices in the lobby but I couldn’t make out no words.

  The .22 fired, sounding like a mine explosion.

  “Bobby!”

  Oh sweet Jesus, no—

  But he hadn’t hit nobody. Mrs. Cully crouched on the floor behind her counter. The bullet hole in the wall warn’t anywhere near her or Dr. Chung, who stood facing Bobby and talking some soothers that there was no way Bobby was going to hear. He was wild-eyed like Dad had been near the end, and I knew he hadn’t slept in days and he was seeing things that warn’t there. “Bobby—”

  “You whore!” He fired again and this time the bullet whizzed past Dr. Chung’s ear and hit the backside of Mrs. Cully’s computer. Bobby swung the rifle toward me. I stood stock still, but Dr. Chung started forward to grab the barrel. That would get Bobby’s attention and he would—God no no . . .

  But afore I could yell again, the clinic door burst open and Shawn grabbed Bobby from behind. Bobby shouted something, I couldn’t tell what, and they fought. Shawn didn’t have his whole manhood growth yet, but he didn’t have Bobby’s way-gone sickness yet, neither. Shawn got the rifle away from Bobby and Bobby on the ground. Shawn kicked him in the head and Bobby started to sob.

  I picked up the rifle and held it behind me. Dr. Chung bent over Bobby. By this time the lobby was jammed with people, two nurses and Dr. Liu and Jenny and Pete Lawler, who must a been in a examining room. All this happened so fast that Shawn was just preparing to kick Bobby again when I grabbed his arm. “Don’t!”

  Shawn scowled at the bandage on my head. “He’s going to get us all put behind bars. Just the same, he ain’t wrong. You’re coming home with me.”

  The breath went out of me. I warn’t ready for this. “No, Shawn. I’m not.”

  “You come home with me or you don’t never come home again. Granmama says.”

  “I’m not going. They’re going to help me here, and they can help you, too! You don’t need to get like Bobby, like Dad was—”

  He shook off my arm. And just like that, I lost him. The Connors men don’t hardly never change their minds once they make them up. And soon Shawn wouldn’t even have a mind. Seven months from the first sleeplessness to death.

  Shawn yanked Bobby to his feet. Bobby was quiet now, bleeding from his head where Shawn kicked him. Dr. Liu started to say, “We must—” but Dr. Chung put a hand on his arm and he shut up. Shawn held out his other hand to me, his face like stone, and I handed him Bobby’s gun. Then they were gone, the truck Shawn borrowed or stole roaring away up the mountain.

  Dr. Chung knew better than to say anything to me. I looked at the busted computer and wondered how much it cost, and if they would take it out of my pay. Then I went back into my room, closed the door, and got into bed. I would a given anything, right up to my own life, if I could a slept then. But I knew I wouldn’t. Not now, not tonight, not—it felt like at that minute—ever again. And by spring, Shawn would be like Bobby. And so would I.

  “You need a pass-out,” I said to Dr. Chung.

  He paused in his poking at my head. “A what?”

  “When Bonnie Jean got a fish at a pet store once, they gave her a pass-out paper, TAKING CARE OF YOUR GOLDFISH. To tell her how to do for the fish—not that she done it. You need a pass-out, TAKING CARE OF YOUR BRAIN ALGAE.”

  Dr. Chung laughed. When he did that, his eyes almost disappeared, but by now I liked that. Nobody else never thought I was funny, even if my funning now was just a cover for nerves. Dr. Liu, at the computer, didn’t laugh, and neither did Jenny. I still didn’t like her eyes.

  I sat on a chair, just a regular chair, with my head bandage off and the shaved patch on my head feeling too bare. All my fingers could feel with a tiny bit of something hard poking above my skull: the end of the fiber-optic implant. Truth was, I didn’t need a pass-out paper. I knew what was going to happen because Dr. Chung explain
ed it, as many times as I wanted, till I really understood. The punchpad in his hand controlled what my “optrode” did. He could send blue or yellow laser light down it, which would make my new algae release tiny particles that turned on and off some cells in my brain. I’d seen the videos of mice, with long cables coming from their skulls, made to run in circles, or stop staggering around drunk-like, or even remember mazes quicker.

  Last night I asked Dr. Chung, “You can control me now, can’t you?”

  “I have no wish to control you.”

  “But you could.”

  “No one will control you.”

  I’d laughed then, too, but it tasted like lemons in my mouth.

  “Ready?” Dr. Liu said.

  “Ready.” I braced myself, but nothing happened. I didn’t feel nothing at all. But at the screen Jenny went, “Aaaaaaaahhh.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It works,” Dr. Chung said quietly. “We are getting a good picture of optrode response.”

  On the screen was a bunch of wavy lines, with a lot of clicking noises.

  That went on for a long bit: me sitting in the chair feeling nothing, Dr. Chung turning lights on and off in my head that I didn’t see, lines and numbers on the computer, and lots of long discussions with words I didn’t understand. Maybe some of them were Chinese. And then, just when I was getting antsy and bored both at the same time, something happened. Another press of the punchpad and all at once I saw the room. Not like I saw it afore—I mean I really saw it. Every little thing was clear and bright and separate and itself: the hard edge of the computer screen, the way the overhead light made a shadow in the corner, a tiny brown stain on the hem of Jenny’s white coat—everything. The room was like Reverend Baxter said the world looked right when God created it: fresh and new and shining. I could feel my mouth drop open and my eyes get wide.

  “What?” Dr. Chung said. “What is it, Ludie?”

  I told him. He did something with the switch in his hand and all the fresh clearness went away. “Oh! Bring it back!”

  “Hyperawareness,” Dr. Liu said. “The opsins could be over-expressing?”

  “Not that quickly,” Dr. Chung said. “But—”

  “Bring it back!” I almost shouted it.

  He did. But after a minute it was almost too much. Too bright, too clear, too strange. And then it got clearer and brighter, so that it almost blinded me and I couldn’t see and everything was wrong and—

  It all stopped. Dr. Chung had pressed some switch. And then I wanted it back.

  “Not yet, Ludie,” he said. He sounded worried. “You were injected with multiple opsins, you know, each responding to a different wavelength of light. We’re going to try a different one. Would you stand up, please? Good . . . now walk toward me.”

  I did, and he did something with his switch, and all at once I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The computer started clicking loud as a plague of locusts.

  Jenny said, “Pronounced inhibitory motor response.”

  I said, “Stop!”

  Then I could move again and I was pounding on Dr. Chung with my fists. “You said you warn’t going to control me! You said!”

  He grabbed my wrists and held them; he was stronger than he looked. “I didn’t know that would happen, Ludie. This is all new, you know. Nobody wants to control you.”

  “You just did, you bastard!”

  “I did not know the inhibitory neurons would fire that strongly. Truly, I did not.”

  Jenny said something in Chinese.

  “No,” Dr. Chung said sharply to her.

  “I’m done here,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s enough for a first session,” Dr. Liu said. Which warn’t what I meant. I meant I was going home.

  But I didn’t. Instead I went to my room in the clinic, got into bed, and slept a little. Not long, not real hard, but enough to calm me down. Then I got up and found Dr. Chung in his office.

  If he was glad to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead he handed me an envelope. “This came for you in the mail.”

  Inside was a single page torn from the Sears catalogue, a page with kids’ coats on the top and enough white space at the bottom for Dinah to print THANK U. So she got the money I been sending her from my pay. Where did she tell Bobby the warm clothes come from, the coats and stuff for Lewis, Arianna, Timmy, Cody, Bonnie Jean? No, that was stupid—Bobby was too far gone to notice even if the kids ran around buck naked.

  I turned on Dr. Chung. “Did you give me this right now so’s I’d stay?”

  “Ludie, how could I know what was in your envelope? I still don’t know.”

  “You know sure enough what’s in my head!”

  “I know there are abnormal FFI prions, which we hope to arrest. I know, too, that there is valuable information about how the brain works.”

  “You told me afore that you can’t get them prions out of my head!”

  “We cannot, no. What we hope is to disrupt the formation of any more. For your sake, as much as ours.”

  “I don’t believe that crap!”

  Only I wanted to believe it.

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal. I stay and you do your experiments, but the minute I tell you to stop something, you do it.” It was lame bluster, and he knew it.

  “Yes. I already did so, you know. You told me to stop the inhibition of motor activity, and I did.”

  “And another thing. I want a pass-out, after all.”

  He blinked. “You want—”

  “I want you to write out in words I can understand just what you’re doing to me. So’s I can study on it afore we do it again.”

  Dr. Chung smiled. “I will be glad to do that, Ludie.”

  I flounced out of there, knowing I hadn’t told him the whole truth. I wanted to keep sending money to Dinah, yes. I wanted him to not freeze me no more, yes. I wanted a pass-out paper, yes. But I also wanted that shining clearness back, that thing Jenny had called hyper-awareness. I wanted it enough to go on risking my brain.

  If that’s really what I was doing.

  Ludie—you have Fatal Familial Insomnia. Inside a part of your brain called the thalamus, some proteins called prions are folding up wrong. The wrongly folded proteins are making other proteins also fold wrong. These are sticking together in clumps and interfering with what cells are supposed to do. The main thing thalamus cells are supposed to do is process communications among different parts of the brain. The thalamus is like a switchboard, except that it also changes the communications in ways we are trying to learn about. Things which the thalamus communicates with the rest of the brain about include: moving the body, thinking, seeing, making decisions, memory formation and retrieval, and sleeping. When you get a lot of sticky, misfolded proteins in the thalamus, you can’t go into deep sleep, or move properly, or think clearly. You get hallucinations and insomnia and sometimes seizures.

  We are trying to do three things: (1) Stop your brain making more misfolded prions, even if we can’t get rid of the ones that are already there. We are trying to do this by interfering with the making of a protein that the prions use to fold wrong. Unhappily, the only way we will know if this happens is if your symptoms do not get worse. (2) Your brain works partly by sending electrical signals between cells. We are trying to map how these go, called “neural pathways.” (3) We want to find out more about what the special algae (opsins) we put in your brain can do. They release different chemicals when we put different laser lights down the cable. We want to know the results of each different thing we do, to aid science

  Well, Dr. Chung wrote good, even though I didn’t know what a “switchboard” might be.

  I thought of Mama, her brain full of these misfolded proteins, gummed up like a drain full of grease and hair. And Bobby’s brain, even worse. Mine, too, soon?

  It was dark outside by the time I finished reading that damn paper over and over and over. Everybody’d gone home from the clinic except the night nurse, a skinny rabbitty-looking gir
l named Susannah. I knowed that she was mountain-born the minute I laid eyes on her, and that somehow she’d got out, and I’d tried not to have nothing to do with her. But now I marched out to where she was reading a magazine in the lobby and said, “Call Dr. Chung. Now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Never you mind. Just call him.”

  “It’s ten o’clock at—”

  “I know what time it is. Call him.”

  She did, and he came. I said, “We’re going to work now. Now, not in the morning. Them proteins are folding in me right this second, aren’t they? You call Jenny and Dr. Liu if you really need them. We’re going to work all night. Afore I change my mind.”

  He looked at me hard. Funny how when you know a person long enough, even a strange and ugly person, they don’t look so bad no more.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s work.”

  We worked all night. We worked all week. We worked another week, then another. And I didn’t get no worse. No better, but no worse. What I got was scared.

  Nobody ought to be able to do those things to somebody else’s brain, using nothing except little bits of light.

  Dr. Chung froze me again while I was walking around.

  Dr. Liu said, “Filtering signals is an important thalamic function, and any change in filtering may give rise to physiological effects.”

  Dr. Chung made the “hyperawareness” come back, even stronger.

  Jenny said, “Interfering with action potentials on cell membranes changes the way cells process information.”

  Dr. Chung made me remember things from when I was really little—Mama singing to me. Shawn and me wrestling. Granmama telling me troll stories while I sat on her knee. Bobby teaching me to fish. The memories were so sharp, they felt like they was slicing into my brain. Good memories but too razored, making my mind bleed.

  Dr. Liu said, “Are the opsins in the anterior nuclei over-expressing? That could cause problems.”

  Dr. Chung did something that made me stutter so’s I couldn’t get a word out whole no matter how much I tried.