Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  The whistle of the teapot snapped Sheila back into the moment.

  She poured the hot water into the porcelain pot from Lucinda’s own tea set and then added the cocoa and stirred. She then dumped the extra hot water down the drain.

  A faint foul odor rose up.

  Sheila let the cold water run for several seconds. But it was still there—a sharp little curlicue of rot rising out of the hole. She ran the hot water for maybe a full minute. That only made it worse. She reached under the sink and turned on the disposal with the water running. There was that rattle sound as if something were stuck inside, something that wouldn’t break up. Then the disposal shut itself off. It would be several minutes before it could be reset. Sometimes Lucinda accidentally let the plastic cap of an orange-juice carton slip down or a spoon.

  For a protracted moment, Sheila looked down at the opening with the black rubber splashguard. Although she had warned Lucinda never ever to do this, Sheila pushed her hand through. Her fingers touched the smooth rounded blades. Blades that under power could grind meat and bones to pulp.

  She felt something that had not been completely ground to pulp—some— thing hard and rounded by the blades and snagged in a mat of wet fibers. What felt like the stringy cellulose stuff that made up celery stalks and banana skins—or maybe lemon peels that just hadn’t gone through. And the hard thing was probably a piece of plastic spoon—like what Lucinda was using outside for the ice cream. Of course, Lucinda knew hard objects didn’t go down the drain. But as brilliant as she was, she was still only seven—just barely. Still played with dolls. In fact, she was out there talking up a blue streak with Tabitha and the others.

  Sheila slowly pulled her hand out of the garbage disposal drain.

  In her fingers was a piece of curved white bone in a wet tangle of fibrous brownish muck and long thick strings of orange hairs. The thing stank of decay.

  Sheila stared at it without shock. She did not scream, she only gagged reflexively. Then she dumped the awful finds into paper towels and flushed them down the toilet. She washed her hands and looked in the mirror. She barely recognized her own face.

  Dr. Malenko said it had nothing to do with it. That it only affected her intelligence. That her makeup otherwise was as it would have been.

  He promised. No change. Just smarter.

  She shook away the thoughts and headed back into the kitchen. In a vague trancelike state, she stirred a little more milk into the porcelain server. The set was Sheila’s birthday gift—an eight-piece collection in porcelain and hand-painted with birds and flowers. It had cost her over four hundred dollars—expensive, but exquisite. Besides, Malenko would be paying her the finder’s fee soon. Fifty thousand dollars.

  She placed the pot of chocolate on the tray along with the chocolate-chip cookies she had baked earlier. For a brief spell, Sheila paused at the rear door to take in the scene of her daughter sitting outside.

  Harry would have said you’re in a state of denial, she thought. That our daughter is a little monster.

  Lucinda was sitting at her table with her back to the house under the magnolia.

  Not so! And Harry was dead.

  Her guests looked on as Lucinda regaled them nonstop. Sheila couldn’t hear Lucinda’s words because her portable CD player was blaring music. Her Disney album—“A Very Merry Unbirthday to You” from Alice in Wonderland.

  She’s brilliant. IQ 150. Superior intelligence range.

  Incandescent mind.

  Sheila took a deep breath and stepped outside with the tray of cookies and hot chocolate.

  The air was clear and keen. She crossed the brick walk onto the spread of lawn that connected their splendid little greenworld to the vast, manicured carpet of yardgrass that rolled from neighborhood to neighborhood all the way across the vast green continent.

  The closer she got, the clearer Lucinda’s voice. She was fully animated, demonstrating something with her hands. Meanwhile, the music was bubbling out of the player like champagne.

  An absolutely magical scene, Sheila thought.

  The table had been set for eight, seven places occupied by stuffed animals. Lucinda’s favorite sat to her right: a big old Dumbo they had bought last year at Disney World—a doll that had jumped out at her the moment she laid eyes on it. Sheila still recalled how Lucinda had frozen in place—unmoved by all the Mickeys, Minnies, and other stuffed cartoon characters—as if seeing an apparition.

  Sheila moved within a few feet of her daughter’s back. She looked like a peony in her pink dress. The music continued playing, and Lucinda was chattering away to her guests, giving instructions.

  For a moment Sheila thought she would drop the tray. But some instant reflex caught her, stunning her in place.

  Sitting on the table in front of her was Rachel’s Miss Tabitha doll in pink. Sheila’s first thought was that her daughter had fashioned a punk hairdo for Tabitha. But then it came horridly clear.

  With a pair of scissors, Lucinda had cut all the hair off the doll down to its rubbery skull, and with Sheila’s new chrome wine-bottle opener, she had methodically corkscrewed holes into its skull through which she had stuck colored cocktail toothpicks.

  “Lucinda … Wha-wha … ?”

  Lucinda turned. Her face was an implacable blank. “Oh, how splendid. Mommy brought the chocolate and the cookies. Miss Tabitha is going to be delighted. Aren’t you, Tabitha?”

  Then, before Sheila could say something, Lucinda’s voice became some squeaky alien thing: “Yes, I am because it’s my birthday, too.”

  “Lucinda … why did you … ?” Then something around the doll’s neck stopped her cold. “What’s that black thing?”

  “Oh, it’s Tabitha’s boa,” Lucinda proclaimed. “It’s just like yours, Mommy.”

  Sheila reached for it, but her hand froze. It was the kitten’s tail. She could see the white bone cut at the end. Lucinda had colored the fur black with her markers, though the orange still showed at the roots.

  “I made it, but it doesn’t fit right,” Lucinda said, and she took the thing in her hand and bent it into a circle—the cracking sounds sending barbs of horror through Sheila. “That’s better,” Lucinda said, fitting it in place.

  Sheila tried to catch her breath, but before she did, Lucinda shot her a look of wide-eyed pride. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up. So is Miss Tabitha. Aren’t you, Tabitha?”

  “Yes, I am,” Tabitha replied. “I’m going to be an anesthesiologist. What kind of doctor do you want to be?”

  “Lucinda, what—” Sheila began.

  But Lucinda cut her off. “Mother, please don’t interrupt.” Then she turned to Tabitha again. “I want to be a surgeon, because I would like to see the insides of people’s bodies, especially their heads.” Lucinda pushed another pick into Tabitha’s crown. “Did you know that the average adult brain weighs approximately three pounds and an elephant’s brain weighs thirteen pounds?”

  “I didn’t know that. How much does my brain weigh?”

  “You’re just a newborn, so yours weighs less than a pound, but it’s going to grow very, very fast.” And she stuck in another pick just above the eyebrow.

  “That tickles,” Tabitha squealed. “But it’s okay because I’m going to be a smart little girl just like you.”

  “And make tons of money, right, Mommy? RIGHT?”

  39

  Lucius Malenko slid open the glass doors on the balcony and let the cool Atlantic breeze flush over him.

  From his perch on the granite cliffs a few miles below Portsmouth, the glittering blue filled his vision. In the gauzy distance, sailing vessels made their way toward the harbor past the small humps of Big Frog and Little Frog Islands. It was a million-dollar view. Or, more exactly, four million, bought and paid for by the upper end of the bell curve.

  Malenko took in a cool deep breath of assurance that he had it all—a home by the sea, a remote country estate in the woods, and a fifteenth-century villa in Tuscany where in three wee
ks he would relax for a month. He had nearly every mode of transportation. On the walls behind him hung original seascape oils by Marshall Johnson, Thomas Birch, and Winslow Homer. Atop pedestals and on shelves sat various objets d’art from his foreign travels. Lighting up the computer monitor in the adjacent room were his investments showing cumulative capital valuations of over forty million dollars. What he called his “Smart Money portfolio”—pun intended.

  His was the good life, to use the hoary old American expression—a life that was far beyond the meager earnings of a consulting senior neurologist working two days a week at Nova—and a life that was light-years beyond where he had come from in the Ukraine.

  As he stood on the balcony sipping his morning coffee, with the sultry ocean air combing through his hair and the warm sun on his face, he recalled the dark and twisted road that had led him here from the dismal, concrete-poured flats of the Kiev State Research Center of Neurosurgery.

  It was the early 1970s, and he had headed up a project with the long-range goal of alleviating the effects of certain human neurological afflictions. The radically new approach involved the transplantation of healthy animal brain tissue into like regions in other animals with various neurological defects. The theory was that primitive rat or monkey brain cells could “reseed” those areas of nerve degeneration and take their cues from existing brain matter to mature into the needed cell types. This way, human neurological diseases—including multiple sclerosis, strokes, or multi-infarct dementia—might eventually be treated by neurotransplantation.

  But in the early stages of his research, Malenko made a series of astounding side discoveries. He had located areas of the cortex and hippocampus that affect memory and cognitive performance and which energize other brain systems. When he treated those areas in a control group of newborn mice with a dopamine-protein mix that promoted neuron connections, he discovered that their long-term memory was superior to that of untreated mice. Not only did they run their mazes faster, but also they could speed through complicated new structures as if radar-guided.

  An even greater surprise came when he injected a cocktail of growth factors and neural tissue from one maze-whiz mouse into that of an untreated cousin. The injected cells did not produce a glob of cells in one place in the brain. Instead, they migrated to underdeveloped areas of the brain. Remarkably, the recipient mice ended up solving complicated maze problems, shooting through the structures instead of blindly poking their way. He repeated his experiment several times using different control groups until he was absolutely certain of his results: The enhanced neurological circuitry had been passed from harvest to host animals. He had transplanted high-intelligence animal brain matter into the skulls of dim-witted cousins and produced a smarter mouse.

  Over the ensuing months, he all but abandoned the Parkinson’s project and moved his experimentation to rhesus monkeys with the similarly amazing results. Once the word got out that his lab had boosted animal intelligence, the Soviet government stepped in to raise the sights.

  As always, the interest was purely political. For years, the government had been concerned over the “brain drain” of homegrown scientists to other countries as well as the precipitous drop-off in the number of young people interested in science and mathematics. While blaming the “techno-lag” on the corrupting influence of Western culture, it was clear that the Soviet Union was losing its competitive edge in the world. And for the Defense Ministry, technical inferiority would surely accelerate the decline of the republic’s world status and internal solidarity. That could not be. So, in desperation to salvage the country’s intellectual viability, the Malenko Procedure was given top secret priority. People would be made smarter.

  The project had first struck him as foolishly naïve—another scheme of a few old-fart Cold War—niks who measured scientific progress in terms of how to beat the Americans. Two decades earlier, like-minded KGB idiots squandered millions of rubles to finance research in ESP with the dream of creating telepathic superspies. There was no limit to their creative fantasies.

  But as the social theoreticians worked on him, pounding him with the bleak statistics on Soviet society, scales seemed to melt from Lucius Malenko’s eyes: Stupid people were toxic to the Soviet system. They were responsible for three-quarters of the crime, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, higher teenage pregnancies, and diseases. And they produced children destined to create more of the same ad infinitum. Intelligence was the panacea. And he possibly possessed the magic elixir.

  Of course, the step from rhesus macaques to the top of the Great Chain of Being was forbidding. The first problem was the lack of human neural cells. At the time, there had been some success in grafting brain tissue from aborted fetuses into adults with Parkinson’s disease. Although there was no shortage of aborted embryos, there were fundamental unknowns such as which regions of the fetal brain to extract from. With pea-sized mouse brains, the challenge was minimal. But human intelligence was a matter of memory and the retrieval of that memory, and those connections ranged globally throughout the brain. He tried extracts from numerous loci, but after four agonizing years of experimentation, he concluded that fetal grafts lacked environmental adaptability and, thus, were ineffective in enhancing human intelligence. Three years later, that failure led him to the needed breakthrough.

  Unfortunately, the Soviet Union was in the throes of collapse. So Malenko found himself playing “beat the clock” with perhaps the most extraordinary discovery in the medical world—if not in all of science: a project on par with the splitting of the uranium atom, the discovery of the DNA molecule, and the first moon landing. There he was, a modern-day Paracelsus, converting base materials to gold—only to watch his lab close down.

  But all was not lost. A year later, in 1987, he was granted a work visa to the U.S., whose government, hampered by the tenets of democracy, would not approve of his project—at least not publicly. Secretly recruited by a clandestine cell of the National Security Agency, he was eventually given full-citizen status. In exchange, Dr. Lucius Malenko labored to perfect human enhancement—a project that lasted two years until the agency closed him down, claiming the risk factor was too high. Three subjects had died.

  In the intervening years, he worked his way up from research assistant in neurology at the Commonwealth Medical Center in Boston to chief surgeon until his eye failed him.

  Ironically, he had discovered the keys to the kingdom, unlocking one of nature’s great black boxes—human intelligence—and, except for a handful of people in the world, nobody had a clue, including his colleagues at Nova Children’s Center. He was simply mild-mannered Dr. M. who came in twice a week to consult with his patients.

  What they did not know was that he had moved his kingdom underground, which was fine since Lucius Malenko was beyond the need for recognition. Years of clandestine Soviet research had conditioned his ego to darkness. Besides, nothing about enhancement was fit for public consumption. So he did his public persona thing, while on the side he quietly played Shiva.

  The telephone rang, bringing him back to the moment. It was Vera asking about the Whitman case.

  “We’re still working on that, but it’s moving in the right direction.”

  “Good. By the way, this last one is on yellow.”

  As usual, Vera was being discreet in her word choice. What she meant was that little Lilly Bellingham was being readied for preop. “I’ll be up tomorrow,” he said. “There are a few things that need to be attended to on this end first.”

  “Of course,” she said. “And I assume the package arrived.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “I’m sorry I’ll miss all the fun.”

  “Likewise, but I’m sure we’ll hear about it.”

  40

  Brendan felt ridiculous in the tuxedo and white shirt that was required of the wait staff on party nights—like some exotic partridge. He moved through the crowd with trays of fancy dips and canapes.

  Nicole DaFoe was
there with her parents, looking void of affect as usual. She was wearing an ice-white dress with white high heels. It was the first time Brendan had seen her dressed up.

  “Would you like some hors d’oeuvres, Ms. DaFoe?” he whispered. “We have m-m-mushroom caps stuffed with dog vomit and road pizza on a stick. The yellow dip is p-pus, and the brown sauce is—”

  “You’re not funny,” Nicole said under her breath. She took a mushroom cap and popped it into her mouth. “Too bad you’re not in school, or you’d have gotten one of these scholarships. You’re poor.”

  Brendan’s mind flooded with comebacks, but he did not respond. She started away. “Congratulations, by the way,” he said.

  She snapped her head toward him. “What for?”

  She was playing coy. It was in the local newspaper. “I guess you got your A in history.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You won the Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship Award. F-first in your class. A perfect four-oh. You aced out Amy Tran.” Amy got honorable mention in the story, which ran with pictures including one with Nicole shaking hands with her history teacher, Michael Kaminsky. Amy’s photo was separate, and he recognized her as the girl in the field-trip photo on Nicole’s wall. The one with the holes in her eyes.

  Nicole studied Brendan’s face as if trying to gauge his attitude. Then she said simply, “Thanks.” She started away, then stopped. “What time do you get off?”

  “Eleven. Why?”

  “Come to my place. I want to show you something. My parents are going to friends’ house after this. I’ll let you in the back way.”

  Brendan could not read her expression. “What’s up?”

  “Just be there.”

  Yes, mein Führer, a voice inside said. “Okay.”