Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  “That’s n-n-not important.” He pretended the two boys weren’t there. “Look, we h-have to talk.” According to her schedule she had a forty-minute lunch break before her next class.

  “I have a conference with one of my teachers. I can’t.” She made no effort to introduce Brendan to the others, and he was grateful.

  “It’s very important,” Brendan insisted. He had not foreseen a conference lunch. Or maybe she was just making that up.

  She looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. Call me later.”

  He had promised Richard to take him for his doctor’s appointment in two hours. “I can’t. We have t-t-to talk now. Just two minutes.”

  “Hey, man, she said she’s got a conference,” the taller boy said, trying to puff up. He was a smooth-faced kid who looked like the poster boy for Junior Brooks Brothers. He was dressed in beige chinos and a stiff blue oxford shirt. The other Nicole drone, a black kid with wireless glasses, had on the same chinos but a white golf shirt. “What part of no don’t you understand?”

  “Now there’s an original expression,” Brendan said. “D-d-did you read that in A Hundred Best Comebacks?”

  The kid looked baffled, but before he could respond, Nicole said, “Forget it, I know him.”

  “You sure?” asked the taller boy, eyeing Brendan as if he were toxic waste.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

  “Good luck,” the black kid said to her, probably referring to her conference. Then he glanced at Brendan’s baggy jeans and black T-shirt with the multicolored tie-dyed starburst on the front. “Nice threads,” he sneered.

  “Up your J. Crew b-bunghole.” As soon as the words were out he felt a surprising flicker of pleasure.

  “Cut the shit, both of you,” Nicole said.

  As the boys moved away, one of them said, “Speaking of the devil.”

  Coming down the path was an older man in a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.

  Nicole’s face went to autolight: “Hi, Mr. Kaminsky.” She beamed at him as he approached. “I’ll be right there.”

  The man scowled at Nicole. “You know where I’ll be.” He did not look pleased. As he walked away, he glanced at Brendan, and recognition seemed to flit across his face, but he continued down the path toward the next building.

  It was the bushy-haired guy in the diner. And the one she had shacked up with that same night.

  “I’ll catch you later,” she said to the other boys, dismissing them. As they walked away, she looked at Brendan blankly.

  “Your teacher,” he said, barely able to hide his dismay.

  “So?”

  “Nothing.” But he could tell that she remembered Brendan seeing them holding hands at Angie’s. She had no idea, of course, what he had seen through her window.

  “Okay, make it fast.”

  “I had a dream the other night. It was c-c-crazy, but I was in a hospital bed.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “So?”

  “I had never been in a hospital before, at least I d-don’t remember.”

  Nicole checked her watch. “You’ve got twenty seconds.”

  “M-Mr. Nisha was there. He said I had to be a good boy and take my medicine. It was crazy, and I don’t know what or who he was—just that image floating and ‘Mr. Nisha wants you to be happy’ stuff. I don’t understand. Also, there were other kids there, too.”

  Nicole continued to stare at him blankly. “I’ve got an A hanging on this conference, and if I’m late, he gets pissed and takes off, and I’m screwed out of a four-oh. I’m not going to lose that because you had some stupid dream.” She started away.

  “Okay, but just one question,” he pleaded, chasing after her.

  “Later,” she snapped. “At the club party.”

  Dells was sponsoring a Scholar’s Night Saturday for caddy scholarship winners and the publication of Vanessa Watts’s book. Brendan was scheduled to serve hors d’œuvres.

  Brendan moved in front of her. “Please, j-just one question.”

  “What?” Her otherwise remote, expressionless face suddenly tightened like a fist.

  “Did you ever go to a hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Nicole, think!” he said, running after her.

  “I said no.”

  “Never?”

  “NO.”

  “You sure?”

  Suddenly she stopped. “Get out of my way.” Her voice hit a nail.

  He caught her arm. “Can I look at the top of your head, please?” He moved his hands to part the hair on her crown.

  “Get out of here.” And she whacked his hand.

  “Do you have any scars on your head?”

  She did not answer him and ran down the path to the cafeteria. Before entering, she stopped in her tracks. With an almost robotic movement, she turned and looked back at him for a long moment. Then she ran into the building.

  Brendan followed her. The cafeteria entrance was toward the rear. He stuck his head in. Because most upperclassmen had left for the summer, the place was only partly filled with students.

  In the rear of the room he spotted Nicole and Mr. Kaminsky at a table by themselves. They were not eating, but talking heatedly. After a few minutes, Nicole slipped him a package. He looked in and slipped out the contents, inspected it then put it back in the envelope, dumped it into his briefcase, and left.

  She followed him with her eyes until they landed on Brendan just a moment before he slipped out of view.

  Instantly, he disappeared out a side door, leaving her wondering if he had noticed that she had given Kaminsky a videocassette.

  29

  Travis could tell time, of course. But he had no idea what hour of day it was or what day of the week—or how many days he had been in this room. Everything was a big bright blur. But he figured it was two days since the needle test, because his neck didn’t hurt anymore—yesterday it was like bee stings.

  Today was another test day, but no needle this time, Vera said. He also knew that if he didn’t cooperate, they’d send him back to his room and turn off the lights for hours. That was the one punishment he couldn’t take. Total blackness in that locked room. The first time they did that he screamed and cried until he thought he would die. In fact, he knew he would rather die than go through that again.

  Vera came in with Phillip. Although Travis could walk, they put him in a wheelchair and snapped a harness on him like a seat belt so he couldn’t get up.

  For the first time they brought him outside the room.

  He was in a long dimly lit corridor with pipes overhead. On either side of the corridor were windows with shades drawn down from the outside. The only sounds were from television sets. There must have been a set in each room all playing the same stuff because the sound followed him as they pushed him down the hall.

  At the end of the corridor, they turned left into a room full of shiny metal equipment and computer terminals. They wheeled him to a table near a computer with some electronic equipment attached to it.

  “Don’t be afraid, this isn’t going to hurt,” Vera said. “We’re just going to look at pictures of your brain.”

  Travis’s heart pounded. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the looks of those machines and another man sitting in the dark rear of the room at another computer terminal.

  Phillip pulled up a chair in front of him. “Listen, kid, this is going to be a piece of cake. You’re not going to feel anything, it’s not going to hurt. just answer a few questions and do a few puzzles. That’s it. It’ll be fun, okay?”

  Travis nodded.

  “It’s just a simple test. Vera’s going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give the answers. Got that? So, be a good boy.” Phillip stared at him hard, and Travis heard: Or else I’m going to take you back to your room and turn off the lights.

  Vera came over and put gobs of jelly stuff on his head and rubbed it into his scalp through his hair. It didn’t smell bad, but it felt yucky. She
told him it would wash right out. Phillip then fitted onto his head a tight black rubbery cap. It had lots of red wires attached like snakes. Those Phillip connected to the machine and the computer. He pulled the cap tightly over Travis’s eyebrows and fastened it across his chin so that only his face was exposed. Then he taped some wires on Travis’s cheeks and the space above his eyebrows.

  Travis sat still at the table, listening to the faint hum of the machine.

  When they were set, Phillip joined the other man at the computer in the back, and Vera sat at the machine. “Just relax and answer the questions,” she began. “Some of the questions will be easy, some will be hard. But the important thing is that you try the best you can. Okay? Because the better you do, the sooner you go home.”

  Travis looked at her blankly.

  As if reading his mind, she said, “Yeah, for real. You do real good on these and you can go back to your mom.”

  He didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance. “Okay.”

  She set the small clock down beside her and opened the booklet she had. “How many states in the United States?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Good.”

  “How many days in two weeks?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Name me six types of trees.”

  “Um … Pine, oak, birch, beech, magnolia, orange.”

  Vera nodded and scratched in her book.

  She asked several easy questions like that, then said they were going to switch to different kinds of questions. “While training for a marathon, Jack ran fifty-two miles in four days, how many miles per day did he average in this period?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Excellent.”

  After a few more like that, the questions got harder. “Now I’m going to say some letters, and you repeat them after me. T-R-S-M.”

  “T-R-S-M.”

  “Good.”

  “Do the same with these: P-G-1-C-R-W.”

  “P-G-I-C-R-W.”

  “M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”

  “M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”

  Vera nodded. “Good,” she said. “Now give me the letters in the backwards: Y-L-X-F-R-W.”

  “W-R-F-X-L-Y.”

  “Do the same with these: X-D-E-W-Q-A-F.”

  “F-A-Q-W-E-D-X.”

  Vera whispered, “Jesus!”

  Then she did the same, adding one more letter each time, until he repeated a ten-letter series backward. He could tell he got them right because Vera’s face lit up as she marked down the score and checked the computer monitor.

  “Okay, now I’m going to read you a sentence, and I want you to repeat it exactly as I read it. Okay? Good: ‘Janet, who lives on Brown Street, got for her birthday a dollhouse with green shutters and a red roof.’”

  “‘Janet, who lives on Brown Street, got for her birthday a dollhouse with green shutters and a red roof.’”

  This went on for almost an hour until he was tired and wanted to rest.

  When the testing was over, Vera said, “You’re a very bright little guy.”

  “Can I go home now?”

  “Soon,” Vera said. She disconnected all the wires on his cap, removed it, and wiped his head with a towel. His scalp was sweaty from the cap and sticky with the jelly. “For the time being, we’re going to take you outside.”

  “But you said I could go home.”

  She didn’t answer, just nodded Phillip over.

  They pushed him out of the test room and down the corridor to a staircase at the end where Phillip and the other man lifted the wheelchair and carried him up to the top. Vera then pushed him through a series of rooms to an outside deck.

  The shock of the bright sky made him wince. It felt good to be in the warm open air. There were tall pine trees all around. In the distance he could see a lake sparkling in the sunlight. It must have been late morning.

  But what caught his attention was the sound of children. To the far right he spotted a small playground with climbing structures and a slide with kids on it. Nearby a woman watched them.

  Two of the children had white bandages on their heads.

  One of them was on the grass dancing with someone.

  At first he thought it was another kid dressed up in some kind of costume. But when the girl spun around, Travis realized that she was attached to a life-sized doll—that the thing’s feet and hands were strapped to the girl’s shoes and hands, and that she was laughing and chanting something, although the words weren’t right.

  It took Travis a moment to make out the doll, but when the kid turned into a shaft of sunlight he could see that it was a big blue stuffed elephant with a wide grin and human hands. The same stupid creature they had painted on the walls of his room. And in the puppet-show video they played.

  And in a singsongy voice, the woman chanted: “Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha.”

  30

  Greg met Joe Steiner at the Quarterdeck, a popular bar and restaurant in Falmouth center. Sitting with Joe was another man introduced as Lou Fournier, a neurologist from Cape Cod Medical Center.

  “I think Lou might be able to give you a little more insight about your skull cases,” Joe had said. Greg didn’t have to be at work until seven, so they met at five-thirty. Joe knew Greg had been put on night shifts. He also was beginning to suspect that Greg might be on to something odd, although he didn’t know what. And that suspicion was why they were meeting.

  Fournier was a man in his sixties with a round broad expressive face that made you think of Jonathan Winters. According to Joe, he had been chief neurologist in a hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, but had gone into semiretirement on the Cape. Joe had shown Fournier the photos of both sets of remains and the diagrams of the anonymous Essex Medical Center patient.

  They ordered some beers. “I don’t know what I have,” Greg said. “It might all be a grand coincidence.”

  “What does your instinct tell you?” Fournier asked.

  “That the odds are against coincidence, that there’s some pattern, some connection.”

  “I’m not sure, either,” Fournier said. “But I’d say your instinct is right on.” He laid the two skull photos side by side with the drawing of the Essex patient. “On the Sagamore Boy, you’ve got twenty-two holes all on the left side of the skull. On the Dixon boy, you’ve got nineteen holes on the left side of the skull. On this kid from the Essex Medical Center, his X rays show eighteen holes on the left side. I think Dr. Budd is correct: The areas seem to map out interconnected circuits of the cerebral cortex that’s associated with intelligence and memory.”

  Using his finger to illustrate, he continued. “This area here is the frontal lobe, or prefrontal cortex, and is important for planning behavior, attention, and memory. This other cluster is over the parietal lobe and is part of the ‘association cortex,’ known as Wernicke’s area.”

  “Wernicke’s area?”

  “Yes, the area of the brain associated with language and the complex functions of understanding. People with damage to this area suffer aphasia—they lose their ability to comprehend the meaning of words and can’t produce meaningful sentences.”

  “What about these other holes?” Greg asked, pointing to seven around the ear area.

  “That’s even more interesting,” Fournier said. “These cover what’s called Broca’s area, which is associated with the analysis of syntax and speech production. If someone experiences damage in the Broca’s area, they lose their ability to speak.”

  “So you’re saying the holes cover the entire language center of the brain.”

  “Yes, but it’s important to note that these same areas make important connections with many other areas of the brain involved with thinking abilities, conceptual skills, and memory.”

  Greg nodded and sipped his beer.

  “What do you know about this Essex patient?” Fournier asked Greg.

  “Almost nothing—a male teenager from somepl
ace on the North Shore, but that’s it.”

  “Then you don’t know his handedness—whether he’s a righty or lefty.”

  “No.”

  “How about the Dixon boy?” He picked up the Dixon photo.

  Greg thought for a moment. Grady’s first baseball glove. “Right-handed.”

  Fournier nodded. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. But why is that important?”

  “I’m not sure, but more than ninety-five percent of right-handed males have language localization in the left hemisphere. Left-handers are bilateral, that is, they have language centers on both the right and left sides of the brain.”

  “But the kid never had any kind of brain operation, his parents said. And I saw his medical records, and his pediatrician confirms.”

  “I understand, but these holes are not random, so somebody did something to him. And these others.”

  “Like what?”

  Fournier took a sip of his beer. “These holes I’d say were made by stereotaxic drilling. It’s an alternative to removing large sections of the skull to reach target areas of the brain—a pinpoint-drilling procedure to remove lesions, abscesses, or tumorous tissue. Or to implant electrodes or radioactive seeds for killing tumors.

  “The sheer number suggests mass intercranial lesions or multiple tumors—except the likelihood of survival for young kids is nil. Even with the most precise 3-D imaging, a surgeon can get lost trying to determine where a tumor ends and normal brain tissue begins. And in these areas, that means damage to important neurocircuitry, which could result in serious physical and emotional problems. So I’d rule out any orthodox neurological operation.

  “The other possibility is radioactive seeding. But that’s not likely, either.” Fournier picked up the schematic of the Essex patient again. “This is what throws me the most. If this kid underwent extensive stereotaxic surgery, he’s either a walking miracle or he’s walking brain-dead.”

  “The nurse said that he looked perfectly healthy and that he has a remarkable memory,” Greg said.

  “Then something else is going on.”

  “Like what?”

  Fournier shook his head. “Some kind of exotic experiment, but nothing I’ve seen before,” Fournier said. Then he added, “But if these two kids are dead, and this one is walking around, you might want to look him up, because he’s making medical history.”