Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  “They have some off-site location. But they’ll fill you in.”

  “And you have no regrets?”

  “Regrets? Uh-uh. No way.”

  Sheila shook her head a little too much and could not hold on to Rachel’s stare.

  “Nor did Harry,” Sheila added.

  From what Rachel knew, her late husband was something of an intellect, a great reader and a man who became a chief engineer at Raytheon. He had died a year ago, so she couldn’t get his input. That was unfortunate because Rachel could sense something forced in Sheila’s manner—overwrought confidence.

  “Does Lucinda know she’s been enhanced?”

  “God, no! And there’s no reason. In fact, the doctor says that it’s best they don’t know. Besides, she was sedated the whole time and remembers absolutely nothing.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “The operation? A few hours, I guess. They kept her a couple days in recovery, which she slept through, and when she came home she didn’t have a clue. Not even a headache. And when the hair grew back, she stopped asking about the boo-boos.”

  “Amazing,” Rachel said. And yet, all she could think of were the countless and dark unknowns. “What about the fact that it’s not legal?”

  Sheila rolled her eyes. “Legal-schmegal. Forty years ago abortions weren’t legal, but that didn’t stop people from getting them. It’s just that enhancement isn’t very PC, if you know what I mean.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Stuff like that gets out, it could cause class warfare.” She chuckled nervously at her own glibness.

  “But that’s a legitimate ethical concern,” Rachel said. “It’s just one more advantage the rich have over the poor.” And that bothered her. If this was the miracle it appeared to be, then it opened a Pandora’s box of social woes, not the least of which was the fact that it ran counter to everything democracy stood for and to Rachel’s fundamental beliefs in social justice and equality. A secret privileged thing that was tantamount to intellectual apartheid.

  “First, enhancement does work. And second, you’re looking at it the wrong way, hon. This is for your son. For his future. That’s where your priorities are. You’re talking about making life better for him, right? Right. Which means if you can afford it, you have a moral obligation to do it. It’s for your one-and-only kid, and that’s what counts, period! In a sense, it’s good for society too, because—who knows?—Dylan may grow up to be a great scientist or doctor. He may even be president someday. Or better still, another Bill Gates.”

  “And what about this Dr. Malenko? What do you know about him?”

  “Talk about brilliant! The man’s a world-class neuroscientist—a pillar of the community, a member of every civic group. He’s on the board of Mass General Hospital and the Lahey Clinic. A member of the Brain Surgeon’s Society or whatever. What can I say: He’s the cream of the crop, is all.”

  Rachel listened and nodded, and took a sip of her coffee. Outside two greenskeepers were leaning against the pickup truck and laughing over some joke. One of them, a man in his fifties, probably had done manual labor most of his life and lived with his wife and kids in one of the humbler towns in the area, or maybe New Hampshire. He couldn’t be earning more than thirty thousand a year. She wondered about his life. She wondered if he was happy being who he was.

  “Another thing is the fee. When we asked, he just said it was expensive.”

  Sheila’s eyebrows arched. “It is expensive. But you’re making an investment like nothing else in life. You’re buying genius for your son. His enhancement could mean the difference between a so-so life and a great one.

  “Think about that and about how much you’ll save in pain, missed opportunities, humiliation, and the rejection your child would suffer—not to mention costs for tutors, therapists, special schools—including Nova Children’s Center—SAT prep courses, et cetera. Or imagine the emotional payback when your kid wins a science fair, or writes the class skit, or is editor of the school newspaper, makes the honor roll, the National Honor Society. Or he graduates at the top of his class at Harvard only to start working at seventy-five thousand dollars a year at the tender age of twenty-two, or younger since he’ll probably skip grades. How do you put a price tag on all that? You can’t. Honey, if you can afford it, then you owe it to him. You owe it to him.”

  Inside the playroom, Miss Jean was wrapping up the hour. Lucinda made a wave through the one-way window at Sheila. She couldn’t see her, of course, but she knew she was there. She knew it was a one-way window. Behind her Dylan watched in puzzlement as she waved at a mirror.

  They got up to leave. “Do you know other enhanced kids?”

  “There aren’t many in the area, but I know a couple.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Sheila suddenly seemed torn. “Well, you may know of them.”

  “Such as?”

  “Look, I’m not supposed to tell,” Sheila whispered. “I mean, everything is très confidential, especially the identity of the children, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sheila, if we’re going to consider this, I want to meet other children and talk to the parents.”

  Rachel could see her struggling but Sheila was not someone who could sit on a secret.

  “Julian Watts,” she whispered.

  “You mean Vanessa’s son, the boy who wrote a book on mazes?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s like megasmart and talented. I don’t know his case history, but his mother, Vanessa, is this superstar scholar and the father, Brad, he’s an architect. And Julian was born … challenged.”

  “We got an invitation to her book party at the club.” A fancy invitation had arrived the other day for a double-header Scholarship Banquet next Saturday night celebrating both caddy scholarship winners and Vanessa Watts’s publication of her new book on George Orwell. Rachel had met Vanessa in passing at the club, although she didn’t know her. Nor her son. “How do we go about meeting them?”

  Sheila leaned forward into her conspiratorial huddle again. “Let me first explain that these kids don’t know they’re enhanced, know what I mean? It’s just not a good thing if they think they were made special. I mean their ego, and stuff. So you can’t really talk to them about, you know, before and after.”

  “How could they not know they had a brain operation?”

  “I’m telling you they don’t. They’ve got this amnesia drug the doctors use—something called ‘ketamine’ or ‘katamine.’ Whatever, it’s used for trauma cases, and whatnot, but it works like magic. They just don’t remember anything including how they were once, you know … different.”

  “What about follow-up visits? Dr. Malenko said he checks up on their progress.”

  “They only need to be seen two or three times until things level off, which is about a year or so,” Sheila said. “But it’s the same thing. They go in, he gives them the ketamine/katamine stuff. They get checked up and are sent on their way, and they don’t remember a thing. It’s incredible.”

  “So these kids don’t even know about other enhanced kids.”

  “Not a clue.”

  Through the window Rachel could see Dylan put on his backpack. “I’d like to talk with the Wattses and meet Julian.”

  “I’ll have to check, but I’m sure it can be arranged.”

  As they walked outside to meet the kids, Sheila stopped. “I think you’re making the right decision for him.”

  “But we haven’t made a decision yet.”

  “Well, I mean you’re thinking about something that will make all the difference. I mean, I know, believe me. It’s like she got over multiple sclerosis or blindness or something.”

  They walked into the sunlight. It was bright and warm, and the grass and leaves on the trees seemed to glow. Other mothers were waiting in the shade of the huge elm chatting among themselves.

  “You know,” Sheila said as they walked outside, “there was this poll I read about the other day. You know, one of those factoid things
you see on CNN? Well, they did a national survey of a few thousand people. They asked a simple question: ‘If there was one thing that you could change about yourself what would it be?’ The choices were to be better looking, younger, taller, nicer, less selfish, more outgoing et cetera. Even wealthier. You know what over eighty percent of the respondents said they wished?”

  “What?”

  “They said they wished they were smarter.”

  Sheila walked away to greet Lucinda who stood like a statue waiting. Behind her Dylan burst out of the door with the others. “Hi, honey,” Rachel said as she stooped to catch Dylan. He gave her a big hug.

  “Mom, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I know all the days of the week.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Monday, Tuesday, Wegsday, Fursday, Somesday.”

  In the distance, Lucinda walked toward the green Jaguar holding Sheila’s hand in her left and a laptop in her right.

  33

  “D-d-did they love each other?”

  “Of course they loved each other,” Richard growled. “What the hell kind of a question is that? They were crazy about each other.”

  “I was j-just wondering.”

  “You must remember them.”

  “Kind of.”

  “And if they were alive today, they’d want your ass back in school.”

  They had been through this countless times since he quit last year, and Richard looked for every opportunity to nag him about it.

  Brendan continued driving without comment, hoping that Richard would just run out of steam. They were coming back from Richard’s men’s club where he’d spend the afternoons playing cards with some of the other Barton old-timers.

  “Why don’t you go back in the fall, for cryin’ out loud?” he asked. “You’re not going to get anywhere waiting tables. You’re too damn smart for that. I don’t want to see you waste your life.”

  “I d-d-don’t like school.”

  “You didn’t give it a try. I almost never saw you crack open a book, except all that poetry stuff.”

  Brendan didn’t respond.

  “You finish school, go to college, and get yourself a degree like all the other kids. Your parents did. Jeez, if they were still alive they’d kill me for letting you quit. You should do it for their sake, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “M-maybe.” Brendan’s mother had been a defense lawyer and his father was a librarian. And, as Richard often reminded him, they were “education-minded” people.

  “Otherwise, you’re gonna end up like me, working with your hands and killing yourself for every buck you make.” He held up his hands, now knobbed and bent with arthritis.

  “But you liked being a plumber.”

  Richard humpfed. “Yeah, I did. But tell that to my joints and lower lumbar.” He rolled his head the way he did when the arthritis in his neck flared up. Richard once said that he had lived most of his life without pain—it had been saved for the end.

  Brendan turned down Main Street of Barton. To the right was Angie’s Diner. For a second, he felt his head throb. “Was she pretty?”

  “Who?”

  “My m-mother.”

  “How could you not remember? She was beautiful.” There was a catch in his voice. Richard was Brendan’s mother’s father. “She looked like her mother.”

  Brendan gave him a side-glance. Richard was crying. He had not seen Richard cry since his wife, Betty, died some years ago. He envied Richard, because Brendan could not recall ever crying. Maybe it was the medication his doctor had him on. Or maybe he was just dead. “I remember her,” he said.

  “You should with your memory, for cryin’ out loud.”

  But the truth was that Brendan only recalled his parents during the last few years of their lives. Before that—before he was seven—he drew a near blank, including nothing of his earlier years; yet he could recite most of what he had read or seen and could recall great sweeps of recent experiences in uncannily vivid details. It was as if his life before age seven didn’t exist.

  “I w-w-wish I’d known them better.”

  Richard nodded and wiped his eyes.

  I wish I could cry like you, Brendan thought. If I took your medicine away and let you die, would I cry like that? Would I?

  (God! Do I have to think murder to feel human?)

  They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Brendan asked, “When you were in the war, did you ever kill anyone?”

  Richard gave him his wincing scowl. “Why the hell you want to know that?”

  “I’m just w-w-wondering.” Richard once told him he had spent weeks in Okinawa.

  “Yeah, I killed some people. Why, you thinking of killing somebody?”

  “I’m just w-w-wondering how it made you feel afterward.”

  “They were Japs, and it was war. It was what I was supposed to do.”

  “Later on, after the war, did it b-b-bother you when you thought about it? That they were human beings you’d killed?”

  “No, because I didn’t think about it. Just as they didn’t think of all my twenty-year-old buddies they killed as human beings.” Richard’s voice cracked again. “Jeez, can we change the subject?”

  The thrum of the wheels filled the silence. Then Brendan asked, “Were you scared of dying?”

  “Of course I was scared. We all were. What do you think? We were kids, for cryin’ out loud. We had our whole lives ahead of us.”

  “What about now?”

  Richard humpfed. “I’m seventy-nine, Brendy. That’s a lot of mileage. I’m ready to get off the bus, but I’m not scared. Not at all. Why you asking?”

  “Just curious.”

  Richard humpfed. “But there’s a few things I want to see get done before I go. Like seeing you getting your ass back in school and going to college. Don’t give me that look. You’re a talented kid—I just don’t want to see you waste your life. That’s the promise I made to your mom, and that’s what I want to take to my grave with me.”

  Brendan’s eye fell on the Christopher medal on the dashboard. “D-do you believe in God?”

  “What are you doing, writing my obituary or something?”

  “J-j-just curious.”

  “Yeah, I believe in God.” Richard winced and rolled his head again. Then he chuckled. “But I’m not sure He believes in me.”

  Brendan turned down their street, thinking that he might actually miss Richard.

  Richard wiped his nose on his handkerchief as they approached the house. “You know, there are a couple boxes of their stuff downstairs in the cellar you might want to go through,” Richard said. “A lot of old papers and things. Maybe even some old photographs. I don’t know what’s in there. Your grandmother had packed them away, but you might want to look. It’ll be good for you.”

  Brendan pulled the truck into the driveway and helped Richard into the house. While the old man settled in his La-Z Boy with the newspaper, Brendan went down to the cellar.

  The place was a mess. Beside the workbench was an old lawnmower engine on a mount which Brendan had taken apart to rewire. He liked working with machines. Just for the challenge of it, he would disassemble clocks or old motors until he had a heap of parts, then reassemble them from memory. He never missed.

  He moved to the very back of the cellar and opened the small storage room which sat under a window through which, in years past, a chute would be lowered to fill the area with coal. Now it was stacked with boxes and old storage chests.

  On top lay Richard’s shotgun in its imitation-leather sheath. They had used it for skeet shooting when Brendan was younger. He zipped it open and studied the weapon. It was a Remington classic twelve-gauge pump action piece with contoured vent rib barrels and twin bead sights. It had been fashioned of polished blue steel and American walnut. The wood had lost most of its gloss and the barrel badly needed polishing. But it was still a handsome weapon. As he felt the heft, scenes of skeet and trap shooti
ng with Richard flickered though Brendan’s mind. And the nights when he contemplated blowing his own head off.

  He put the gun away and went through the boxes.

  Many contained baby effects—clothes, shoes, a set of Beatrix Potter baby dishes and cups. There were also some of Brendan’s early school- and artwork. The drawings were very primitive, stick-figured people and houses barely recognizable. The schoolwork was also unimpressive. He recalled none of it.

  After several minutes, he located a carton with papers and photographs. His mother apparently was something of a photographer because she had put together albums chronicling Brendan from his earliest days as an infant up to five years of age. The photographs mostly in color, a few black-and-whites, were arranged chronologically and dated. Brendan spent nearly an hour going through them page by page.

  Although he recognized himself and his parents from other photographs upstairs, it was like looking at somebody else’s history. None of the locales, toddler clothes, toys, or even images of his parents seemed to connect to him—none triggered a cascade of recollection. Nor a nostalgic glugging of his throat.

  Behind the other storage boxes was a metal strongbox—the only metal container and the only one that was sealed with a lock. The box was heavy and not just from the metal. He had no idea where the key was, of course; but that was no problem since the lock was cheap hardware-store fare. He got some wires and a jackknife from the workbench and popped it open in a matter of moments.

  The contents were mostly papers in folders and manila envelopes. There were various medical reports and letters.

  One particular folder caught his attention. Inside was a generic medical form for Children’s Hospital Office of Neurology. It had been filled out just after his ninth birthday but for some reason never submitted. The front listed Brendan’s name, address, date of birth, et cetera. On the reverse side was a long checklist of various ailments including several lines at the bottom asking simply for “Other.” The form had been filled out and signed at the bottom by his mother. Brendan stared at the list. She had checked off several boxes including Headaches, Sleep disorders, Depression, Nightmares, and Mood swings. In the margin she had written in: “hears voices” and “verbal outbursts—Tourette syndrome?”