by Jim Shepard
IX
Salad Tongs
The BSL-4 cube had windows to allow workers inside to look across the atrium at the BSL-2 labs, and vice versa, so at any point during their sessions Branislav not only had the Zoom option on his monitor but could also look over and see Aleq’s entire room and Jeannine as well. She waved.
Through the next window over, he could see a technician weighing mice. Jeannine had informed him, when giving him a much more comprehensive tour of the facility than he required, that the animal procedure and holding rooms were next to the patient rooms down the main hallway, and featured not only HEPA-filtered cages but MRIs for noninvasive means of tracking whatever pathogenesis might be going on.
Both Hank and Emily were dubious about how much could be accomplished with a tablet screen in terms of getting through to someone, especially a traumatized child, but as Hank put it, so what? They weren’t social workers or psychologists.
“I would think it’d be hard enough face-to-face,” Hank had added in their initial meeting when Jeannine had been showing Branislav around.
It was like giving someone a hug with salad tongs, Branislav had agreed, having done his share of it. He wasn’t a big fan of telehealth, but it was here to stay.
The translator sat beside him and there was a half-second delay with the earpiece, which didn’t help matters. They’d told him the Wi-Fi was likely to be problematic sometimes as well, but so far it seemed okay.
Once the video feed was on and they were both centered in each other’s view, Jeannine did the introductions, and Branislav said hello. Aleq didn’t answer. When the boy finally spoke, Branislav could hear the despair in his voice before the translation even came through. It turned out he was asking about the burial of his friend and relatives. Jeannine reassured him that all of that had taken place as she’d promised, and while Branislav waited, she showed him some photos as proof. He asked where his grandparents and friend had been put in the cemetery, and she showed him some additional photos from farther away and pointed out the locations. He asked if his parents had been put nearby and she pointed out their graves as well.
He asked to hold the tablet, and Jeannine handed it over, and waited while he studied the pictures. The tablet was covered with a clear plastic and would stay in the room. After what she apparently estimated to be a sufficient amount of time, she introduced Branislav again, and clicked the Zoom window to make it the primary one. Branislav said hello again and told Aleq that he was here to answer any questions, and that he worked with kids to help them feel better about whatever was making them sad or scared.
Aleq didn’t respond, but Branislav hadn’t thought he would. Then the boy pulled the earpiece from his ear and tossed it on the bed, and let the tablet drop, and Branislav found himself looking up at the overhead lights. Through the window he could see Aleq lying back, and Jeannine leaning over him, maybe putting the earpiece back in his ear.
“It’s always the first appointment of the day,” Branislav murmured.
Aleq came back onscreen, so Jeannine must have righted the tablet.
“Show him the box,” Branislav told her. He’d given her a box of toys to take in with her, and she brought it over to Aleq and held the tablet while he peered inside. After a minute he pulled out some kind of action hero in a blue superhero outfit. It had a lever on its back that made its arm punch and leg kick, and he started the arm punching and the leg kicking and kept both going while Jeannine explained to him that she and Branislav just wanted to talk with him for a little while, and to see if he had questions they could help him with.
“Show him the hourglass,” Branislav told her, and she dug the plastic hourglass from a board game out of the box and held it in front of the boy. Branislav told her to flip it over and then told Aleq that when all the sand had gone to the bottom they’d be finished talking for today.
Aleq seemed uninterested in the hourglass and instead said something slowly to Jeannine, like he wanted to make sure she caught every word. “He says to thank you for what you did about burying everybody,” the translator told them.
Jeannine seemed momentarily at a loss, and Branislav told her to move the tablet’s camera lens even closer to Aleq. He instructed her to move the lens around right up next to Aleq’s face, and then down his body. The boy shied backward a little and Branislav said, “Um-hmmmm: I see,” like the Wise Doctor who’d discovered the problem, and even Aleq picked up on his tone and gave him back the trace of a smile after the translator finished.
“Do you have any questions?” Branislav asked him, but Aleq closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Branislav asked if he was tired, but got no answer. They waited each other out for a few minutes, and Branislav looked over into the room through the window, and even from that distance he could see Jeannine giving him a look meant to communicate Well, do something. After another five minutes, he told her to put a blanket over Aleq. She pulled one up to the boy’s chin. On the screen he watched Aleq breathe. He told Jeannine to tell him when the sand ran out. After another eight minutes, she told him it had.
“All right, that’s it for today,” he said.
“We’re finished?” she asked.
“For today,” he told her.
“You gotta be kidding me,” she said.
“It’s his trip,” Branislav told her. “I’m just the witness.”
“This is kind of urgent, what we’re trying to find out,” she said.
“There’s a limit to how much you can rush this,” he said. “And maybe we should cut him a little slack. He’s just been looking at his parents’ graves.”
Afterward they ran into Hank in the atrium café.
“How’d it go?” Hank asked.
Jeannine held her hand out for Branislav to speak.
“Fine,” he told Hank. “I thought he did exactly what he needed to do.”
“That’s good to hear,” Hank said. And then, after a pause, he asked, “What was it he needed to do?”
Again Jeannine held out her hand to Branislav, and he smiled and said, “You know. Rest. Recharge. Begin that whole process of starting to sound things out with us.”
“Ah,” Hank said. And then he looked at them both, and let it go at that.
Failure to Thrive
Branislav agreed by text to review their first session that night in her apartment. When he got there she asked if he wanted some wine and he said no, and she asked if he wanted some tea and he said no to that, too.
She thought about pouring a little wine for herself and then closed the refrigerator door. “Well, let’s get down to it, then,” she said, and sat at her kitchen island.
“Did you pick this place?” he asked, sitting opposite her and looking around. He was wearing the same plain V-neck white T-shirt he’d been wearing that afternoon.
“You get assigned a place,” she told him. He pulled some notebooks and his phone out of a saddlebag she remembered, and then leaned forward on the countertop with both hands, like he was about to get to his feet again, but, given his expression, he was apparently just stretching. He wasn’t that big, but he somehow always gave the impression of being barrel-chested.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
He walked her through his observations. The first was that Aleq had eye tics, and Branislav thought they were from stress.
“I hadn’t noticed that,” she said, and then hated herself when she registered his reaction. Given their history, he probably thought she should have that phrase on a sign around her neck.
When she felt the silence grow awkward enough, she couldn’t stop herself from adding, “So why’d you give up so easily this morning?”
He regarded her from across the counter and then said that a lot of the time it was about being willing to have enough patience to allow the child to make his own sense out of the situations that might be over
whelming to him.
“So it’s about waiting the kid out?” she asked.
Who knew what Aleq had seen, or lived through, Branislav told her. She’d given him the outline, but imagine the particulars. “I mean, I’ve seen what it does to kids just to be removed and placed,” he said. That was what they called it when someone had to be taken out of their home: “removed and placed.” “Imagine what it must be like to watch your whole home wiped out,” he added. “And then on top of that to wonder if maybe you were responsible.”
“I’ve told him that he shouldn’t think it was his fault,” she said. “That he may not have infected anyone.” How much truth did somebody in his position need, anyhow? she added.
“I usually haven’t regretted telling kids the truth,” Branislav told her.
“He’s really just been barely holding it together,” Jeannine said.
With a lot of the smaller kids, the diagnosis that got somebody like himself pulled in was failure to thrive, Branislav told her. Aleq reminded him of one of those kids.
Aleq had been doing a little better lately, Jeannine reported. He’d answered a few questions during one or two sessions but then he had clammed up again.
It was about getting him to trust, Branislav said, by showing him certain things about the way they were willing to be with him.
“What kind of things?” Jeannine asked. “What have you shown him?”
He looked at her as if to say, You were there this morning. “That I’ll wait for him to signal a willingness to interact before I’ll push any harder. That I’ll play a part in whatever story he does decide to begin. And that I’m willing to start in the dark.”
She made a noise. It probably sounded impatient.
“He’ll start answering when he’s ready,” Branislav finally said.
“Or else he won’t,” she told him back.
“Or else he won’t,” he agreed.
“So I guess we just have to have faith,” she told him.
“A mother once told me that I was going to help her kid, and that she could see it,” he said. “I remember I told her that I was glad she could. Because I sure couldn’t.”
“So should I have any reason for optimism?” she asked.
“When I was Aleq’s age I was so shy when I got called on in school, I got through it by counting the seconds until the teacher moved on to somebody else. I just ignored what I was being asked and stared straight ahead and counted. At one point they brought my parents in, because they thought I was having seizures or something.”
“So you may be uniquely suited to drawing Aleq out, is the idea here,” she ventured.
He shrugged. They were trying to build a little bit of intimacy as quickly as they could, he explained, and for that they’d need the boy to feel both like he had some privacy, and that he was safe. “And good luck with both of those where he is,” he added.
“The problem is, I’m not sure we can wait for him to be cured of everything he’s dealing with,” Jeannine told him.
“And we can’t wait because…?” Branislav asked.
“If there’s another line of transmission—another group of people infected with something else—there could be an entire other population that needs to be contained. In that case every hour would count,” Jeannine said.
“Well, that explains that,” Branislav answered, making a face at her impatience. “But only hams get cured. And who knows what kind of ground this kid has already gained, and lost.
“I’m sorry I can’t provide any guarantees,” he added, when he saw her expression.
“No, I know,” she said. She blew out a huge breath.
“Sometimes it works out,” he told her. He stood and packed everything up. “And sometimes you just pick up your paycheck and go home.”
Another Turn at the Piñata
The next morning Aleq held his action figure up and made welcoming kicking and punching moves with its legs and arms when Jeannine came through the door.
“Hello to you too,” she told him. “He seems in a good mood today,” she remarked to Branislav.
“Another turn at the piñata,” he told her.
She put her gloved hand to her suit helmet as if she could press the earpiece to her ear. “What kind of joke is that?” she said.
“Professional humor,” he apologized.
“Don’t translate that, Elias,” she told the translator.
“I wouldn’t even know how,” the translator told her.
“Turn the hourglass over where he can see it,” Branislav told Jeannine. She found it and turned it over while Aleq watched, and then brought the tablet over and activated the Zoom link.
“How did you hurt your lip?” Branislav asked him.
Aleq waited out the translation and then answered. The translator said, “He says he hit it.”
“How did you hit it?” Branislav wanted to know. Aleq didn’t answer.
Aleq said something else and the translator said, “He says today you should cover him up.”
“What does he mean? With the blanket?” Branislav wanted to know. The translator asked Aleq and then said yes, so Jeannine got the blanket from the foot of the bed and covered him with it. Aleq arranged the action figure so he was just peeking over the covers.
“Give him the animal crackers,” Branislav told Jeannine, and she opened the little box she’d brought in with her and passed it to Aleq. He further arranged the action figure under the covers and took the box of cookies and pulled out a bear and looked at it. On the screen, Branislav rooted around in his box, and found a bear as well. He bit the nose off and held the rest in front of him. “Now it’s a bear without a nose,” he said, and the translator translated.
Aleq waited out the translation and then bit the nose off his.
Branislav took another small bite, and said that now it was a bear without a head. Aleq did the same. Branislav took another bite, and said that now it was a bear without a butt. When the translator translated, Aleq laughed, and Jeannine thought, I’ve never heard him laugh. Branislav ate the last piece and showed his empty hands and exclaimed, “Now there’s no bear!” and Aleq after the translation laughed again, and did the same.
Aleq asked if he could go to the bathroom. There was a little bathroom in the room. They said sure, and he got out of bed and crossed to it and closed the door behind him. When he returned, he climbed back into bed and pointed to the tablet and said something to Branislav and the translator said, “He says he’s been watching snowboarding videos.”
“Which ones has he liked?” Branislav asked, and Aleq described three. It was by far the longest Jeannine had ever heard him speak. When he finally finished, there was something else he clearly wanted to say, and after he added it, the translator said, “He wants to know if he can get a hat like the one he saw in the third video.”
“I think he can,” Branislav said, as if to everyone.
Jeannine could see how pleased the boy was with the answer, even if he didn’t smile, and thought it was possible that she could see him trying to come to terms with the idea that maybe this was his life now.
Branislav asked him two more questions about the videos, and Aleq answered the first, and then pointed at the hourglass, where the sand had run out.
“Fair enough. Tell him we’ll see him tomorrow,” Branislav said, and Jeannine again had to fight back her impatience while she watched the exchange before she headed out of the room.
Another Turn at the Piñata
She invited Branislav over that night for some frozen tacos she’d managed to find, and he said he couldn’t make it, so after she’d made the tacos and eaten two and put the rest away, she sat in her empty living room for a while, and then went over to the hotel where they were putting him up.
“Who would�
�ve guessed it would be you?” he said after he’d opened the door and swung it wide so she could enter. A basketball game was on the television. He gestured to the sofa in front of it and put the game on mute.
He offered her a beer, and she said sure.
“Are games still going on?” she asked after he’d brought it over and handed it to her. “They’re still playing games?”
“No. This isn’t live,” he told her. “They’re showing old ones.”
They watched a few turnovers, and then a scramble for a loose ball.
“I’d never heard him laugh before,” she said. “However many days we’ve been together, I’d never heard him laugh.”
“He probably didn’t have a lot to laugh about,” Branislav guessed.
“I think he really likes you,” she said. “You know: as much as I can tell anything.”
He made a face as if to agree with her.
“It feels like he’s doing some healing,” she said, almost to herself. “And that’s on you.”
He reminded her about the way, in this kind of work, healing was supposed to be two-sided.
She cracked her beer and sipped it. He waited her out, the way he’d waited out Aleq.
“He just looks like some part of him is waiting for all those lost people to come back, even though he knows they’re not coming back,” he told her. He took a slug of his beer, and held the can in front of him rather than putting it down.
“How are you doing?” she finally asked.
“I seem to be functioning pretty well,” he said. “Sometimes I take my own advice.”
She nodded, like that was a strategy of which she approved. “I was a little worried after I asked you here, because there are all these ways in which the kid reminds me of Mirko,” she said.
