CHAPTER THIRTY
THERAPY
The next day, Naz arrived at Dr. Gwen’s office eager and as usual, skeptical. He clearly had his doubts but was looking for some clarity in the murky existence he came to know as his life. He trusted Dr. Gwen and believed in Meri, so he figured he had nothing to lose and—at the very least this should be fun.
One of Dr. Gwen’s colleagues, Dr. Vladimir Gradanco, was there to assist. He was a polite middle-aged gentleman, with thick glasses and an accent that reminded Naz of one of those foreign actors on TV. Dr. Gwen positioned Naz directly across from Dr. Gradanco so the two of them would be face-to-face.
“Naz, have you ever noticed a keen or otherwise unique ability in yourself to discern the validity of information given by an individual solely through observation of their optical irregularities?” Dr. Gwen asked.
“English, Doc,” joked Naz. He knew what she was asking, but thought it an odd question.
“Have you ever been able to tell if someone was lying … or telling the truth simply by looking into their eyes?”
“Ooooh …,” Naz said in a spooky voice. “The eyes are the windows to the soul, Doc.”
“An old English proverb … and I’m serious, Naz.”
“You’re starting to sound like Meri.”
“Well?”
Naz thought about how he knew what Ham would do that day in tryouts and how he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Dill and Denali were telling the truth just the day before, but still answered, “No.”
“Dr. Gradanco and I have formulated one hundred questions and organized them into ten sets of ten. Dr. Gradanco has already taken a polygraph test answering the questions, sometimes lying and sometimes telling the truth. The polygraph machine proved to be eighty-five percent accurate. I have a hunch, Naz … that you can do better. Now, I’ll ask him those same questions while you study only his eyes and judge whether or not he is telling the truth.”
“You mean a lie detector test?” Naz laughed.
“Yes.”
“Are you serious, Doc?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life, Naz. Are you ready or not?”
“I’ll play along.”
Dr. Gwen enthusiastically picked up a stack of cards on the table next to her and began. “How old are you?” she asked her colleague.
“49,” answered Dr. Gradanco, stone-faced.
“True?” Naz shrugged.
“Are you married?” Continued Dr. Gwen.
“Yes,” Dr. Gradanco responded again.
“Umm … true?”
“What is your wife’s name?”
“Nastassja.”
“False,” Naz responded with a sarcastic tone and expression.
On the first ten questions, Naz got exactly half right.
“Fifty percent, Doc, not bad, huh?” Naz knew the odds, that he could get around fifty percent correct every time without even trying; anyone could. Fifty percent was no feat at all.
Dr. Gwen implored Naz to take the experiment seriously or he was just wasting everyone’s time, and Naz maintained he was. Naz performed slightly better on the next ten questions, scoring sixty percent accuracy. Dr. Gwen grew more and more impatient and frustrated with each set, as did Naz. By the end of the fifth set, Naz was down to forty percent accuracy.
“The problem is, you’re guessing,” she snapped.
“True story,” he retorted. “What else am I supposed to do? I don’t know what I’m looking for. Do you? What am I looking for?”
“I don’t know, a slight dilation or retraction in his pupils … a flicker or twitch … anything. Wait.” She stood up and started pacing. She only had five sets of questions left. If they had to start over it would render the experiment useless and the test would have been in vain. Naz was getting the feeling she was absolutely sure about her hunch. “What am I missing?” she asked.
Starting to feel guilty, Naz asked, “You actually believe I can do this, Dr. Gwen?”
“I do … with all my heart … but you …” She had a glimmer. “But you don’t.” She realized. “That’s it … belief, the one variable … the only variable your father—”
“My father.”
“Yes,” she paused, “your father, Naz.”
“What about my father?”
“Naz, coming into your service was no accident or coincidence; I sought you out.”
“No problem, I don’t believe in coincidence anyway … now, what about my father? Did you know him?” Naz asked again, his voice low, cold, and impatient.
“Alright, I didn’t actually know your father. I only met him once. He was giving a talk at Harvard University. I stood up and asked a question and he shook my hand.” She reminisced. “Your father was probably the most brilliant man on the planet, Naz. Shortly after that speech, he left the university … became a recluse … I guess.”
“How come you’re just now telling me all this?”
“There was nothing to tell.”
“I beg to differ … more,”
Dr. Gwen went on to tell Naz what happened that night over thirteen years ago at Harvard, about a little girl named Darla who rode a tricycle through an obstacle course on stage in complete darkness. Naz remembered what he had recently discovered about himself in the woods at International Academy a few weeks before. She spoke of how Cory thrilled the audience that night with masterful illusions of sight and sound. She told Naz how Cory introduced Camille to the audience as his all, his everything.
Naz pulled the Wikipedia page out of his pocket again to look at his father, and for the first time he imagined his parents together. After more than two years of loyalty in the no-cry zone, his eyes began to betray him as tears pooled at their bottoms.
She told him the little she knew about the research and experiments Cory was conducting and how the cornerstone of his work was a variable called belief. She told Naz how things got out of hand that night when a jealous scientist, university administration, and an environmental group who did not understand the far-reaching implications of Cory’s work caused a riot and things ended badly.
“Your father was truly brilliant. I can only assume he went on with his work somehow … somewhere … with you,” she looked at him intently, “after that night.”
“Yeah … with his only son … the ultimate lab rat.” Naz turned to wipe the tears that almost narrowly escaped his embarrassed eyes.
“Oh, stop it! You should never speak in anger of your father. In the few moments I knew him, I discovered he was the most passionate man I’d ever met. Naz, things probably didn’t work out the way anyone planned or hoped they would … they never do. But I’d bet my life and everything that I own that your father has given you a gift … a gift that others would kill for … a gift worth dying for, even.”
“What do you mean?” He sniffed.
“Well, again, I don’t know much, but I have it on good authority that you were not just thrown from that car, but thrown by your father in an effort to save you. He was supposedly being chased.”
“Chased … by who?”
“No one knows.”
“Somebody knows.”
“He ended up eventually taking his own life and destroying any information related to his research in the process. So you see, you are all that’s left.”
“What about my memory loss?”
“My guess … also by design … a failsafe your father somehow constructed on your behalf.”
“And now what?”
“Now we slowly put the pieces back together … together.”
He looked at Dr. Gwen and knew in an instant she was telling the truth.
“Now, I may not have your gift, Naz, but something tells me you’ve done this before. Shall we proceed?”
“What do you want me to do?” Naz wiped his eyes.
“Believe, Naz … believe.”
Still highly emotional, Naz focused on Dr. Gradanco, but not just his eyes … everything. He remembered what too
k place at tryouts that day with Ham and in the Hallway with Dill and Denali.
Anxiously, Dr. Gwen grabbed the next set of cards and started again. “How many children do you have?”
“One,” answered Dr. Gradanco, even more robot-like than before.
“True.” Naz focused.
“How many languages do you speak?” continued Dr. Gwen.
“Three.”
“Also true.” Naz smiled
With every question Naz’s response time grew shorter.
“What college did you attend?” asked Dr. Gwen excitedly.
“Cambridge.”
“He’s lying,” responded Naz confidently.
“What did you have for dinner last night?”
“Not true.” Naz laughed.
“Sp-spaghetti,” stammered Dr. Gradanco, amazed.
“Let him answer first, Naz.” Dr. Gwen smiled as she clumsily tried to split her time between taking notes and reading the cards.
With each set he became more resolute, scoring one hundred percent accuracy on the next fifty questions. He finished with and exhilarated exhale as if he had forfeited breathing for the entire process. During the test it was Dr. Gwen who looked surprised and awestruck, as Naz’s answers were almost instantaneous, sometimes bordering on precognition. He was confident with no hesitation in his responses, but after it was all over he was dumbfounded. He sat again in disbelief—could I really possess such an ability?
“Dr. Gwen, that test I took last year, what kind of test was it?
“An IQ test.” She wrote away in her notebook. “IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It basically measures how smart you are relative to rest of the population on the planet.”
“How’d I do?”
“You scored one-sixty-five.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that you are a genius, like your father before you … but with a twist.” Dr. Gwen never looked up from her notebook.
Naz sat for moment and pondered the implications of Dr. Gwen’s startling revelations. “What’s next?” he asked, exhilarated.
“Dream research … tomorrow,”
“Tomorrow … Awww …” Naz looked at the clock. Where had the time gone? It was time to go to work.
While running his errands for the merchants, Naz kept his head buried in Meri’s library book. He knew she would have to return it soon and wondered if there was anything he could divine from its pages. But it read like mumbo-jumbo to him. Dr. Gwen said that all of his father’s work had disappeared with him—what could that work be? Meri didn’t disturb him in his reading when he picked her up; she had apparently checked out a new book.
“Let me see it,” Naz said.
“Why? It’s only for us believers.”
“Come on.”
“Fine.” She conceded a little too easily as she put the book in his face. It read:
Mental Molecular Manipulation (M3): Falsehood or Phenomena
By Dallaz Whitney
He turned his attention back to reading without his usual skeptic’s gesture. She asked him about the test. He told her nothing came of it. She didn’t believe him, and he knew it. He wanted to tell her about what he and Dr. Gwen discovered, but he knew there would be no end to her questions, so he canned the subject in his mind for another time. They agreed to walk and read together in silence.
That night Naz stayed up reading Meri’s book per Dr. Gwen’s directions. Optimally, she wanted him to stay up all night, her rationale being, he would come in the next day for their experiment sleep deprived. To Naz, it was like knocking out two birds with one stone: he was following Dr. Gwen’s directions and finishing Meri’s book, which was becoming a bit more interesting.
On the way to Meri’s bus stop that next morning, Naz was in a stupor, barely able to pay attention to his surroundings, much less Meri going on about the new book she was reading.
When he arrived at Dr. Gwen’s office, he was good and ready to fall asleep. Dr. Gwen introduced Naz to a young lady named Tommi who had her hair shaved on one side, pink and moussed to a six-inch point on top, and dyed black down past her shoulders on the other side. She wore black mascara and fingernail polish and wore a black T-shirt with words “Live Long and Prosper” printed on the back. Her counterpart, whom Dr. Gwen introduced as Jordan, was a young man who wore a pair of faded jeans and gray sweatshirt with M.I.T. in big, bold letters on the front.
Dr. Gwen had transformed the already comfortable space into something even cozier. The thick curtains were drawn, effectively muting out the rising sun completely, and there was a strange hypnotic light emanating from the lamp in the corner that Naz couldn’t quite explain. The La-Z-Boy chair was fully reclined, and Naz couldn’t wait to melt between its plush arms. Dr. Gwen had breakfast delivered, and Naz wasted no time digging into the pancakes, eggs, bacon, and sausage set before him.
As Naz alternated between the glass of orange juice and the glass of milk on his tray, he watched the two computer geeks as they wired several touch screens and rectangular cases in two separate places: one directly next to him and the other several feet away, next to a statuesque Dr. Gwen. She stood next to her leather chair with one arm crossed at her waist supporting her elbow, her index finger tapping the side of her glasses nervously. She observed in her trademark burgundy pantsuit and running shoes, apparently too excited to sit down. Naz didn’t know whether to feel like a king or a man having his last meal on death row, so he lighted somewhere in between. As he finished eating, he vaguely remembered Dr. Gwen taking the ravaged tray from him and one of the geeks placing tiny putty-like objects on the sides of his head and forehead before he fell asleep.
As Naz’s eyes slowly opened and came into focus he saw—what he always thought were, but never asked—the portraits and pictures of famous psychiatrists hanging on the walls. To his right, Dr. Gwen sat motionless on the leather sofa, reading something. Next to her, Jordan was focused on several screens that lit his face a green hue. Tommi was standing next to Naz and promptly alerted the other two of his return to consciousness.
The disappointment on Dr. Gwen’s face was clear and the geeks confirmed what was already evident: there were no dreams and no movement. As Naz looked around the room he noticed what appeared to be motion sensors on every wall and he became acutely aware that Dr. Gwen’s expectations far exceeded that of Naz sleepwalking.
“Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing. We try again tomorrow.”
“What are you looking for Doc?” asked Naz.
“Something … anything … Naz, are you familiar with lucid dreaming?”
“You mean where you know you’re dreaming?”
“Yes, that’s it, Naz. Listen, for the rest of the day, I want you to focus on one thing, and one thing only. I want you to obsess about it. While you’re running your errands, while you’re talking to Meri, whatever you’re doing, keep “it” in your thoughts.”
“But what?”
“That’s up to you. It should be easy.” She smiled, pulling a thick envelope made of light green parchment with a crest of the emerald green and the Old English style letters, I & A from her briefcase and handing it to him. It was Meri’s official acceptance letter from International Academy.
He blushed, knowing she was on to him about D. “How well did Meri do on the test?”
“Open it.”
He looked into her eyes for a moment and smiled. He didn’t have to open it. “Wow, that good, huh?”
“Naz, these gifts that you possess are not to be abused or taken lightly. Be careful how you use them,” she said, knowing he had read her.
“Sorry, Doc. I will.”
When he looked up at the clock, he couldn’t believe it was time to go to work again. He had slept nearly six hours: a deep sleep. Doctor Gwen reminded Naz before he left to find a focus and stick to it all day long. She also told him he didn’t have to stay up all night this time; it wasn’t important that he come in sleep deprived. She hypothesized that sleep d
eprivation may have affected his ability to dream. He may have just been too tired and his sleep too deep. She instructed him to stay up late this time like kids his age usually did and come in sleepy, like he probably did in school. Naz knew she was being sarcastic but serious.
It was easy for Naz to follow Dr. Gwen’s one directive for the day as he ran his errands. The dream experiment was a bomb and he was beginning to accept that he had some ability to detect something in others, albeit reluctantly. All there was left to think about was D. He sent her a text.
Watcha doin?
A half-hour later she sent back:
Jus got outta science we disected a frog ewww
He sent back:
Excellent save me a drumstick
A half-hour later she responded:
Disgusting lol wat chu doin?
She wants to know what I’m doing. His heart fluttered again. He responded:
Readin
Naz didn’t want D to know he had been suspended. She’ll think I’m still in school. He justified to himself, he wasn’t lying to her; he was reading—reading her text messages. He guessed she was texting him between classes, figured it was his turn to sound anxious and show her just how serious he was. He sent:
Wut takes u so long 2 respond…
Hoping he hadn’t pushed his luck, he waited on edge for her response, which was immediate.
Im textn btwn classes some of us cant play bball…or chess
Naz smiled, catching the obvious glint of sarcasm in her text. Chess, she knows about that, too? His smile transformed into a grin, and he responded:
I told u we dont get special treatment
She responded:
Wutever…
It went on like this for the rest of the day. They had a lot in common: a lot of secrets, and things they didn’t want to text about. It felt safe but powerful to Naz. He was beginning to feel connected to D in a techno-cyber way. At the very least they were becoming friends. But he still dreaded actually calling her; he didn’t know if he could talk to her on the fly that way. Texting was easy; he could think out his responses ahead of time. He knew even the sound of her voice alone would rattle him, paralyze his mental faculties.
IA_B.O.S.S. Page 11
