The Home

by Scott Nicholson

  The gimmick got old fast. The morning had dawned overcast, and Freeman had felt the weight of the sky on him even before rolling out of bed. Getting dressed was an effort, even with Isaac making his goofy narcolepsy face by squinting his eyes and blowing a raspberry snore. Freeman was going from In-Between to the Gray Zone and was probably on the elevator bottoming out at Pitch Black Basement.

  Blame the brain chemicals. The shrinks said his mood swings were all the fault of serotonin, which didn't seem to regulate itself inside his head. Love and chocolate, they said, both gave you the same kind of high. He didn't know about love, but he knew a chocolate bar was pretty valuable inside a group home.

  He'd never heard of either of those giving you the ability to read minds; unless you counted Mom, who seemed to know everything Dad said before he said it, and reminded Dad of it constantly. Maybe that's why Mom was dead and Freeman was sitting under a shrink's magnifying glass. While Dad was bouncing around in a rubber room somewhere.

  But that line of thought was not going to do anything to help fight the depression that was coming on. No matter which textbook the psychiatrist showed you, there was no escaping the idea that depression was your own fault, that you should somehow be able to just "make yourself happy." That was a snake-eating-its-own-tail argument, because you then felt sorry for yourself because you couldn't fix what was wrong. Guilty by reason of self-awareness.

  "Why blame yourself?" he said aloud. A small air vent in the ceiling undoubtedly held a microphone. These guys were pretty smart, up on all the mental espionage tactics. No doubt the Trust had a mole in here somewhere. Maybe they could open a drive-through therapy business. Pull your car up to the window, blather out a list of symptoms, and receive a paper slip as you paid your bill.

  The slip could contain Chinese fortune-cookie platitudes, like "All the truth you need lies within," or "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." You could even sell French fries on the side, or maybe an add-water baptism or instant communion "Who else is there to blame, Freeman?"

  Freeman's eyes twitched again, though this time involuntarily. The amplified voice had no doubt come from the face behind the mirror. Freeman wished he were on an up, so he could triptrap the hidden person and nip the brain drain in the bud.

  "I don't blame my own face," Freeman said.

  "Excuse me?" came the male voice.

  "I was just thinking that whoever's talking must be watching me from behind the two-way mirror. Because I'm certainly not talking to myself."

  "Disassociative personality disorder is not on your diagnostic axis."

  The voice was metallic and clinical, and the transfer through electronics and speakers kept it from being trustworthy. Not that Freeman would have trusted it anyway.

  "I've never been shrunk except face-to-face," he said.

  "You've never been treated by me before, either. That's obvious, since you still have problems."

  "You're quite sure of yourself, aren't you?"

  "Success breeds confidence, Mr. Mills. That's one of the things you'll learn in our sessions together, while we're on the road to healing."

  "Therapy is a two-way street." Freeman wasn't going to let this bug watcher off easy.

  "Just beware the exit ramps."

  "Not only are you too chickenshit to meet your clients face-up, your extended metaphors are pretty lame."

  The room grew silent as the microphone switched off. Freeman made funny faces in the mirror while waiting. The Clint Eastwood squint worked well in the regular population, but you had to give the shrinks a little something extra. Maybe go over the top like Pacino in Scar-face or Keifer Sutherland in practically anything.

  Soon the voice came again. "Are you ready to talk about it?"

  It.

  Freeman hated that word, at least when said by somebody who always capitalized It. And It only meant one thing in Freeman's sessions: the long scar on his wrist. Now, with depression sinking in and the shrink trying this new tack, Freeman almost told all about It.

  About Dad and the blowtorch, or Dad and the ground glass, or Dad and the electricity, or Dad the evil fucking troll who fried Freeman's brain until it worked like a cell phone and anybody could beep their stupid messages into it anytime they wanted.

  Yeah, goddammit, I got somebody to blame. Now that you mention it.

  But before he could speak, as his lungs froze and his stomach clenched like a fist around the beige breakfast waffles, the voice was replaced by Bondurant's.

  "We're waiting, Freeman."

  "No, I don't want to talk about it." Bad enough for one brain drainer to pick at your skull, but when you were double-teamed "Freeman, this is Robert Brooks. I'm a friend."

  Yet another voice. Another "friend." This was turning into a joke. Shrunken by committee. Did these clowns honestly think they were going to catch Freeman off-guard, grill him as if they were TV cops, keep hitting him with new lines of questioning until his spirit broke?

  "How can you be a friend if I've never met you before?" Freeman asked.

  "We're here to help," said Brooks.

  A brief argument flared in the background as Brooks forgot to switch off the microphone. Bondurant was telling somebody that Freeman was a kleptomaniac who should have his fingers held over the flames of hell.

  The first voice that questioned him said, "Freeman, I'm Dr. Kracowski. We've arranged a little demonstration for a couple of our supporters. All you have to do is relax."

  Relax. Freeman took a breath that tasted of mint ice.

  "What I'm going to do will only hurt for a moment, and then you're going to feel better," said the faceless Kracowski. "Your depression will fade and you'll feel elated and energetic."

  "How did you know I was depressed?"

  "Because I'm trained to observe, Freeman. Because I listen. Because I care."

  "What's this business about it only hurting for a moment?"

  If there was any answer, he didn't hear, because- zzzzijff-his ears clanged and orange light streaked behind his eyes. The bones of his head tumbled like gravel in a clothes dryer. Hot wires jabbed into his spine and his intestines tangled into knots. A scream came from somewhere. Blood was sweet in his mouth.

  Freeman stared at his reflection, scarcely able to recognize the boy in the mirror: the pain had written ugly years on his face, peeled back his lips, caused his head to tremble and his jaws to clench. Worse, he found himself unable to read his own mind. He fought for breath and waited for the wave of agony to crest.

  For the briefest of moments, his reflection had that same stretched grin that Dad had worn just before ordering Freeman to visit his mother in the bathroom.

  Like father, like son.

  Pacino in The Devil's Advocate.

  Eastwood in High Plains Drifter.

  De Niro in Cape Fear.

  It was the kind of grin that killed.

  FOURTEEN

  Richard Kracowski tapped a couple of keys, even though all the functions were programmed into the computer and ran automatically. Moving his fingers and studying the screen gave a bit of flair to the presentation. To a scientist, the cause and effect were plenty enough to satisfy; with these board members and McDonald in attendance, though, Kracowski felt the need to resort to some showy sleight of hand.

  In Thirteen, the subject was recovering from the thun-derburst that Kracowski's fields had just shot into his skull and soul. The boy's tremors faded, and a smile crawled among the slack features of his face. Kracowski had longed to see how this particular specimen would react to the treatment. Even for someone who had pushed the limits in both directions, Kracowski knew that this boy represented a paradigmatic leap in his research.

  "What did you just do?" Robert Brooks said. Brooks was moist, his thick glasses misted by the humidity of his own skin. He covered the smell of sweat with a cologne so intense that Kracowski almost wished the man smoked cigarettes instead.

  But Brooks was a key player, one of the money men, a fat indus
trialist who made a fortune in hosiery production. Brooks's factories had once been located in the Piedmont, but he'd moved the operation to Mexico to take even greater advantage of the labor pool. He'd left hundreds of Americans jobless, taken a large tax write-off for the abandoned property, and had increased his personal wealth fourfold. Yet Brooks fancied himself a humanitarian because he chipped in twenty thousand dollars a year to Wendover.

  Kracowski despised such men, and McKaye was of the same stripe: well dressed, milky, and of the belief that money bestowed virtuosity. The doctor had an immediate distrust of anyone who used a first initial in his name. That's why he avoided the politics of fundraising and left the handshaking to Bondurant. Kracowski put on the show, Bondurant sold the tickets.

  And McDonald? The man stood quietly apart, a faint smile the only crack on the stolid face. Physically, he was as blunt as a toad and his head sat on his shoulders as if pressed into clay. His dark eyes seemed to soak light from the room, and the colors of the computerized charts reflected off McDonald's forehead.

  Kracowski let Brooks's question linger for a few moments more, tapping the keyboard as the printer spat its data and the zip drive backed up the programming. The computer drives were encased in a ceramic-and-lead-lined box, and a counter electrostatic field had been created to protect the drives from the erasing capabilities of stray magnetism.

  "I still have to hone a few details, but soon you'll be reading about it in the Journal of Psychology,"? Kracowski said.

  "It's been very successful in early clinical trials," Bondurant cut in. "We'll all be proud to have it associated with the good name of Wendover Home. And, of course, associated with you gentlemen as well."

  The boy on the other side of the mirror gazed at them, unseeing.

  Brooks tugged at his tie, his jowls straining against the tightness of his collar. "That didn't look entirely healthy to me. What do you call this business again?"

  Kracowski swallowed a sigh. "Synaptic Synergy Therapy. The principles are very simple. The brain operates on a series of electrical impulses and relays. You're no doubt aware of electroconvulsive therapy, which was popular in the middle of the last century."

  "Shock treatment, you mean? Like in that Jack Nicholson movie, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest?"

  "Hollywood and the mental health field are both built on illusion, Mr. Brooks. Electroshock still has supporters, and its effectiveness in treating some cases of depression is well documented. Some patients report short-term memory loss and depersonalization. Of course, the treatment can be taken to extremes, as happened in the 'Deep Sleep' controversy in Australia, where patients in drug-induced comas were given multiple and frequent shocks over the course of several weeks."

  "That was legal?" McKaye asked.

  "An acceptable risk. On the bright side, of the sixty percent who survived Deep Sleep, nearly a third escaped without permanent brain damage."

  "That doesn't sound like smart money," McKaye said.

  "The true test of any experiment is the outcome." Kracowski leaned back from the computer monitor and let the others see the numbers and various formulae scrolling across the screen. He knew it meant nothing to them, yet it conferred power to him. The witch doctors of the twenty-first century needed fast processing speeds and obscenely large hard drives.

  "I'm feeling very much better," said the boy in Thirteen.

  "Praise the Lord," Bondurant said.

  "It's really a basic procedure," Kracowski said, before Bondurant could finish turning science into a miracle.

  The doctor tapped some keys, brought up a three-dimensional model of the boy's brain, and zoomed the image until various folds and crenulations could be seen. "The brain contains a hundred billion neurons. Each neuron communicates with ten thousand others through connections called synapses, which relay a series of electrical events that in turn create chemical changes in the brain. The number of possible combinations of neurotransmitter connections is greater than the number of atoms in the universe."

  Kracowski paused in his lecture. The men's eyes had glazed over, except for McDonald's, which gleamed with an unhealthy hunger. "Simply put," Kracowski said "the brain is a universe unto itself."

  Beyond the mirror, the subject was studying the ceiling. Freeman wouldn't be able to see the giant electromagnetic field generators that hung above the tiles, nor could he know that the bed he was sitting on was wired to deliver small voltage doses. A PET scanner was built into the base of the cot, highly advanced equipment hidden by a dull sheet metal grid. In the basement, superconducting magnets were sealed inside tanks of liquid nitrogen, which were themselves sealed inside tanks of liquid helium.

  Kracowski had spent years designing his treatment rooms, each with slightly different specifications. Thirteen was the best of them, but Eighteen wasn't bad. Still, until McDonald and the Trust had moved in with some serious support and technology, as well as the exorbitantly expensive liquid forms of the gases, SST had been little more than a theory. Now it was the tool that would take quantum mechanics into the human mind. Quantum psychology.

  "Didn't Dr. Kenneth Mills have a similar theory?" McDonald said. The others seemed to notice McDonald for the first time, with Bondurant wearing an expression of dislike. McDonald winked at Kracowski, knowing he'd lobbed him a softball over the heart of the plate.

  "Mills had some primitive notions along these lines," Kracowski said. "But his research was too incomprehensible and random."

  "As far as you know," McDonald said. "Professional jealousy, perhaps?"

  Kracowski spoke to Brooks and McKaye. "SST sends electric currents to the brain, while at the same time realigning the impaired electromagnetic fields, or EMF, that govern emotion," Kracowski told the group. "Recent research has shown that magnetism can increase blood flow. This treatment sends a carefully controlled set of wavelengths into the patient's brain, all operating at nonionizing radiation levels. You may have read about the alleged link between electromagnetic fields and alien visitation?"

  McKaye started to protest, but Kracowski held up a hand. "No, I don't believe in aliens, Mr. McKaye. But true believers say that's why people can't remember being kidnapped and taken away, because of the intense EMF. And there are suggested links between EMF and cancer caused by exposure to cell phones or from living near high-voltage power lines. The research has been limited so far, and mostly designed to absolve the communications and utilities industries. There's so much we don't understand, but my work is showing the positive potential of appropriately harnessing the fields. If the brain is a universe, all I'm doing is putting the planetary orbits in order."

  Bondurant nodded and said to McKaye, "From a religious perspective, he's restoring these children's faith in themselves, so that they might be worthy of the Lord. It's just another of His mysterious ways. Isn't that right, Doctor?"

  "It's all harmony." Kracowski grimaced and looked at his computer. The boy's magnetic resonance scan was flickering, a disco lamp of green, red, and magenta.

  Brooks pointed to the screen. "What in the devil is that?"

  The boy's cerebral cortex was displaying an anomalous reading. Kracowski checked the EEG. The graph twitched upward in a rapid-cycling peak, as if the circuits of the boy's brain had fused together and his synapses were overloading. The boy was having a seizure.

  "That's impossible," Kracowski said.

  In Thirteen, Freeman trembled, his teeth clenched, and his eyes rolled up inside his skull. His head flopped, knocking against the thin mattress so hard that Kracowski could hear it through the microphone.

  "What's going on?" Brooks shouted.

  "Better call an ambulance," McKaye said. McDonald said nothing, folded his arms, and watched the boy.

  Kracowski met Bondurant's look of panic with a concerned but calm smile. "That won't be necessary, gentlemen. It's only part of the procedure. This boy's fields must be in particular disharmony to cause such distress."

  "Is he breathing?" Brooks asked, straining to
peer through the glass.

  The boy twitched and writhed. Kracowski was relieved to note that the boy's tongue protruded between his lips, so at least he wasn't suffocating himself. The doctor clicked up another screen and checked the data. The treatment should be winding down now, a current in millivolts running through the boy's skin and bones. The electromagnetic pulses were running in a programmed and syncopated sequence, massaging the boy's emotional trouble spots.

  "What's his diagnosis?" Kracowski asked Bondurant, even though he was familiar with the case file. He simply wanted Bondurant to run down the laundry list in order to make the resultant healing even more impressive.

  "Rapid-cycle manic depression," Bondurant said. "Suicidal tendencies, kleptomania, antisocial behavior, cyclothymia, possible mild schizophrenia. Plus, he's an unrepentant little sinner."

  "See, gentlemen? This boy is very troubled. The deeper the disease, the harsher the cure must be."

  Brooks and McKaye stared at the epileptic boy. Brooks said under his breath, "If he dies-“

  "I never let them die," Kracowski said, managing to convince even himself.

  Soon Freeman Mills would be properly aligned, if he lived long enough. McDonald would have his weapon and Kracowski would have his glory. Kracowski would succeed where Dr. Kenneth Mills and all his predecessors had failed.

  "Doctor," McDonald said. "I think these gentlemen have seen enough. Why don't you revive the boy?"

  Bondurant's glasses had fogged from the heat of the laboratory.

  "Let it finish," Kracowski said. He looked through the two-way mirror. Freeman thrashed beneath the restraints, his muscles twitching. There must have been some trick of reflection, because for the briefest of moments, Kracowski saw the boy standing at the glass, pressing his palms outward, his mouth open in a voiceless scream. Kracowski blinked and the illusion passed.

  The boy was passive now, his jerks subsiding. Kracowski looked at the separate monitors, checked the EEG and the MRI scans. The boy's heart was working steadily, blood flow to the brain normal, pulse up a bit but stable. He was alive.