Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  Peggy sat up. Lilly was standing in the water looking out over the lake. “Lilly,” Peggy called.

  But she didn’t turn, too preoccupied with some ducks floating nearby.

  “Lilly!”

  Still no response. Now she was playing deaf just to drag out the day. But they had to get back.

  Peggy got up and headed down to the water. “Hey, young lady!”

  But she still did not turn around.

  Now Peggy was getting angry. The initial chill of the water shocked her in place. She would never understand how kids could just bound down the sand and plunge into such freezing water. It must have something to do with their metabolism.

  She was five feet from her daughter. “Hey, you!” As she said those words, a chill passed through Peggy.

  The girl turned. It was not Lilly.

  Similar yellow one-piece suit. Same sandy brown hair. Same length. Same body size, though she did seem a little taller, her legs a little longer—but Peggy had dismissed that for not having seen her daughter in a swimsuit since last summer.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  The girl just shrugged, then waded to shore.

  Peggy looked down the beach. No sign of Lilly. No other yellow suit.

  She left the water, looking up and down the beach. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the girl in the yellow suit head toward the parking lot. As Peggy spun around trying to spot Lilly, it passed through her mind that the resemblance of the girl to her daughter from the rear was amazing. Before she bolted down the beach, Peggy caught the girl looking over her shoulder at her. For one instant, Peggy felt something pass between them. Something dark and jagged.

  The next instant Peggy was jogging down the beach the other way, scanning the people on the blankets and in the water, and shouting out her daughter’s name.

  Oh, God!

  In a matter of seconds she was running, her head snapping from side to side.

  “Lilly. LILLY.”

  When Peggy ran out of beach, she shot to the lifeguard stand.

  She could barely get the words out: “M-my daughter’s missing.”

  23

  “Enhancement?” Martin said. “Sounds like some kind of religious experience.”

  As Rachel had expected, he was completely dismissive of the idea.

  It was the next evening, and they were in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher. They had just finished eating, and Dylan was upstairs taking a bath.

  Still Rachel kept her voice low. She had related Sheila’s claim about the Nova Children’s Center. “She says they can improve a child’s IQ by fifty percent or more.”

  His eyebrows shot up like a polygraph needle. “What? That’s impossible!”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”

  Martin had an intelligent angular face—one that was capable of authority. He was not always right, but never uncertain. At the moment, his eyes narrowed cleverly, his mouth spread into a smirk, and his eyebrows arched the way they did when he was about to make a pronouncement. It was a look that annoyed her for its condescension. “Look, Rachel, you’re born with two numbers: your Social Security number and your IQ. And neither can be changed.”

  “They also once declared the earth was flat.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t be so damn pigheaded.” Frustration was tightening her chest.

  “Unless these enhancement people have come up with some brand-new science, I don’t buy it. You’re born as smart as you’ll ever be. Yeah, maybe you could add a couple points on a test, but intelligence is basically fixed.”

  “Keep your voice down,” she said in a scraping whisper. She closed the French doors so their voices wouldn’t carry upstairs. “I want to look into it.”

  “Fine, but keep in mind that Sheila loves to impress. She’s always dropping names and telling secrets. She rents a place on Martha’s Vineyard and leads you to believe she’s drinking buddies with Diane Sawyer and Alan Dershowitz. Not to mention how much so-and-so paid for their house.”

  “So, what’s your point?”

  “My point is that Sheila MacPhearson embellishes the truth. She exaggerates. Remember what she said when she showed us this house? That it was the childhood home of a ‘famous movie director.’ Her exact words. For days I had thought Steven Spielberg grew up here. Then we find out it’s some guy who did a music video for MTV.”

  “So you’re saying that Sheila is lying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t believe they’ve got some procedure that can turn your average Jack and Jill into a Stephen Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant.”

  “Well, I’m going to look into it.”

  “Suit yourself, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  She hated his absolutist manner. It was something he used on his workers to bring them to their knees, but she resented when he brought it home. It was obnoxious and failed to intimidate her. She also hated the possibility that he was right. That out of desperation she was chasing white rabbits on some offhanded remark by good-hearted Sheila MacPhearson.

  Martin must have read the turn of her mind because he instantly softened. “Honey, more than anybody else you should know how these things don’t work. We tried every gimmick in the books and then some. It’s all a myth: It can’t be done—not in the first three years or the next or the next. That’s all a pipe dream of die-hard liberals who want to believe they can make poor inner city kids intellectually equal to children of white affluent suburbanites: How to flatten the bell curve. But it doesn’t work. The human brain is a Pentium chip made of meat: It’s got all the circuit potential it’s ever going to have.”

  There’s a hole in our son’s brain, a voice in her head whispered. A gap. Missing circuitry. A deficiency in his left hemisphere. And I put it there for better sex.

  Every other minute of the day she had thought about telling him, of finally spewing the vomit from her soul; but she really didn’t know if she could live with the consequence. She really didn’t believe that Martin could ever forgive her. He was like that—he held grudges. And what greater grudge than that against the woman who had ruined his only child? Even if in time, she could work up the nerve to confess—fortified by the fact that at the time she was young, foolish, and unaware of the risks—the proper punishment would be to watch Dylan grow up impaired, her secret festering within her the rest of her life.

  “I see no harm in looking into it.”

  Martin nodded. “By the way, did she say what the enhancement procedure actually is?”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “But she said it works wonders,” he muttered sarcastically. “I’m just wondering: If they’ve got some kind of procedure to make you smarter, how come the world doesn’t know about it? How come Peter Jennings and The Boston Globe haven’t gotten the scoop on it? And how come there aren’t IQ jack-up centers in every hospital and clinic in the country?”

  Martin was no fool. If she protested too much, he would wonder at her desperation. “Martin, I really don’t know,” she said, trying to sound neutral. But she was struggling between anger at his patronizing manner and her own transparency. He was right: She knew nothing about the procedure or those behind it. She wasn’t even sure where the place was located. “Forget it. Forget I ever brought it up,” she said.

  “But you did. And what bothers me is how come you’re so wide-eyed about some foolish claim about boosting our son’s intelligence?”

  For a long moment she just stared blankly at him, not being able to summon an answer. She felt the press of tears but pushed them down. “Because I’m feeling desperate. Because it makes me sick to think what he’s going to go through. Because … oh, nothing. Nothing!”

  “Nothing,” he repeated. “Well, the only enhancement we need around here is our love life.”

  Rachel slammed the dishwasher closed. She was not going to respond. He knew that she just didn’t feel like having sex, that she was going through a down spell.
r />   Suddenly the French doors flew open and Dylan walked in. He had his pajamas on, but the shirt was on backward and inside out, the label under his chin. In his hand was a big zoo picture book.

  “Daddy, can you read me ‘bout the aminals … I mean anminals … I mean anlimals?”

  Rachel burst into tears and left the room.

  24

  “If you keep this up, you’re going to starve.”

  Vera glared at him. Travis didn’t like Vera. She wasn’t warm or kind like his mom, and she had hard flat eyes like a catfish.

  Yesterday when he had stopped eating and talking, she called in Phillip to help. (Travis vaguely remembered him as the man who carried him out of the seaplane that first night.) They had wanted him to eat so he could be healthy for “the tests”—whatever those were. He wondered if they were like the ones he took in January for the SchoolSmart scholarship.

  Phillip’s was the only other face that Travis had laid eyes on here. And it was a scary face—a pale, tight, unsmiling stone with gray eyes that poked you when they stared. Vera had called him in to make Travis take his pills. He could still feel Phillip grip the lower half of his face in that big meaty hand and squeeze until Travis’s mouth opened. Then Phillip tossed in the pills and squirted water down his throat with a plastic squeeze bottle and clamped his mouth shut so he had to swallow or choke.

  While Vera circled him, Travis sat still in the beanbag chair looking blankly across the room at the TV His eyes did not follow her, nor did he answer her.

  He had stopped asking for his mother. He had stopped asking when he was going home. Most of the day, all he would do was stare at the television, losing himself in the mindless flickering of colors and squealy voices.

  Beside him was a cardboard tray with a sandwich, a cup of carrots, pudding, and a carton of milk, now warm. There had been a Snickers bar, which he had pocketed. The rest he hadn’t touched, and it had been sitting there for several hours.

  Vera brought the tray over and handed him the sandwich wedge. It was peanut butter and grape jelly. She wagged it under his nose, but he turned his head away. She pressed it closer until it pressed onto his lips. He turned his head even farther away.

  “I just talked to your mother on the telephone.”

  Travis’s head twitched, and he glanced tentatively at the woman.

  “She asked about you and said to tell you that you had to eat your food or she would be sad.”

  Slowly he looked at the woman.

  She raised the sandwich to his mouth again. “She said that she missed you, so does Beauregard. But if you eat and get your strength back you can go home.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Vera looked at him, shocked at the first words he had spoken in two days. “I’m not lying. I just got off the phone with her, I’m telling you. She called to see how you were doing on the tests. But if you don’t eat, you can’t take them which means you can’t go home.”

  “His name isn’t Beauregard.”

  She stared at him with those small dead catfish eyes. “Look, I made a mistake,” she said. “So what’s his name?”

  “Bo Jangle.”

  “That’s what I meant. I knew it was Bo something.” She pressed the sandwich closer. “You going to take a little bite for Mom and Bo Jangle?”

  That wasn’t his name either, and he turned his face away without answering.

  Yesterday he had cried. Vera had wanted him to take his pills again, but when he refused, she said that his mother would be upset. It was the first time they had mentioned his mother. He didn’t want to cry, but he could not help it. And while he did so, the woman stood and watched him. She had lied to him then, too, he was certain. She didn’t know his mother. Just like she hadn’t just talked to her on the phone.

  Vera got up and tossed the sandwich. “Well, you’re going to have your test on an empty stomach, I guess.” She went out and returned a few minutes later with Phillip who carried a tray with a cloth over it.

  “Hey, Travis,” he said, as if they were friends. “We just want to run a little test on you, okay? You’re going to do this lying down, okay?”

  Phillip led him to the bed and told him to sit at the edge. He handed him a piece of paper on a clipboard and a pencil. “I’d like you to write your name for me—first and last name.”

  Travis sat on his bed. He thought about not responding, but he recalled Phillip’s hand on his jaw yesterday and wrote his name, thinking this was a dumb test.

  “Good, now I want you to take the pencil with your left hand and do the same.”

  It was much harder with his left hand, but he struggled, making a real mess of it. When he was finished, he handed the clipboard back to Phillip, who looked pleased.

  Then they made him lie on the bed. Vera then said, “I want you to count backward from twenty for me.”

  Travis did not respond.

  “If you do, Phillip will take you outside. Promise.”

  He didn’t believe them, but they would keep it up until he did. So he counted backward from twenty in a soft voice.

  Vera then rubbed his neck with alcohol, a smell he knew from when his mother cleaned out a cut knee. She then rubbed some other stuff on the same spot. “This is to numb the skin so you won’t feel anything. But you have to lie perfectly still, you got that?”

  He nodded, but suddenly he felt scared by the way they were hanging over him, with Phillip tightly holding down his hands. “Close your eyes, kid,” he said.

  Travis hesitated for a few moments, then closed his eyes, but not all the way. Out of the crack he saw Vera stick a hypodermic needle in the right side of his neck and press it all the way. Instantly he jumped, but Phillip held him down.

  His neck suddenly felt hot inside all the way up his head. But after a little while, he felt nothing.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Vera said. “Okay, keep your eyes open and count backward from twenty again.”

  He didn’t know what they gave him, but he counted backward as she asked. Then they asked him to recite his address, his mother’s and dog’s name, and where he went to school. He did all of that. Then Vera held up a picture book with butterflies and asked him to identify the pictures. Then to read a few first lines of writing. He did that also. And when it wasn’t loud enough, they made him do it again.

  Phillip smiled. “You’re doing good, kid.”

  “You have big yellow teeth,” Travis heard himself say.

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Vera snickered.

  “More like out of a vial of truth serum,” he said.

  “Like my dog’s,” Travis continued.

  “Fuck off, kid.”

  “And you’ve got a big mole on your face.”

  “Okay, Travis, you did good,” Vera said. “Close your eyes for a few minutes and rest.”

  He closed his eyes and thought about his mother and home and Bo. Phillip did have teeth like his. And the mole looked like a bug had crawled out of his mouth.

  Travis began to feel sleepy when he felt another needle jab on the left side of his neck. He let out a startled yelp, and the same hot pressure flowed up his neck and across his face, this time on the left side.

  “Travis, again, I want you to count for me, backward from twenty.”

  Travis heard the woman’s words but did not understand.

  “Travis, count backward from twenty.”

  Still he did not understand.

  “Travis, tell me your name,” the man said.

  Travis could not answer. He knew they were talking to him, he heard the words, but he did not know what the sounds meant. But he remembered that he once understood them. But not now. How strange.

  The woman held up a book. “Travis, read me the title on the cover.”

  Travis did not understand.

  Phillip picked up the small glass jar on the tray. “Amazing stuff, sodium amythal,” he said. Then he looked at Travis, “You haven’t got a clue, kid, but you just passed the Wada test. We fir
st put the right half of your brain asleep to see what the other half would do. Then we put the other side of your brain to sleep to see what you’d do, which is nothing.” He tapped the other side of his head. “You passed the first test, kid: You’re a left-brainer.” He looked at his watch. “And in about three more minutes, you’ll be back to normal.”

  And they left.

  25

  The Nova Children’s Center building was a handsome redbrick neo-Gothic structure with turrets and large windows that had been reencased. A converted old schoolhouse, it was set back from the road and surrounded by a sweeping lawn, in the middle of which sat a hundred-year-old beech tree ablaze with purple leaves. The place looked solid, established, and full of promise. Their eleven o’clock appointment was with a Dr. Denise Samson.

  Rachel and Dylan drove around to the parking lot in the rear beside a playground and picnic area. The visitors’ section was full of shiny upscale cars. This was not your typical learning clinic. And she had known several.

  As they rounded the front, they heard children laughing and teachers talking. Through the windows, she could see young kids in chairs and adults working with them. In another room, children were at computer terminals.

  “Is this my new school, Mom?”

  How do you answer that? she thought. “It might be, if we like it.”

  She wasn’t sure he understood, and he didn’t pursue it, captivated by the playground apparatus.

  In spite of its early twentieth-century vintage, the building’s interior had been redone in bright modern, tasteful decor. A directory hung in the foyer. The only names she recognized were Denise Samson and Lucius Malenko. The receptionist said that Dr. Samson was expecting her and would be out in a moment. Meanwhile, Dylan headed for a small computer terminal with a video game, while Rachel sat and filled out a medical questionnaire asking the basics, including how she heard about the Nova Children’s Center. She entered Sheila MacPhearson’s name.

  When she was finished, she picked up one of the glossy Nova brochures on the table. There were photos of the administration and staff, of students being instructed by specialists.