Brain Child

by John Saul

  “But there’s more to it than that. For Christ’s sake, Ellen. Don’t you even see Alex anymore? He’s like a machine! He doesn’t feel anything. Not for anyone or anything. He’s … well, in some ways he’s just like your precious Raymond Torres. And it’s not changing.”

  Ellen’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. Though she knew that what she was about to say would only widen the chasm between them, she didn’t try to hold the words back. “So that’s what it’s all about! I knew it! I knew when this whole thing started that it had nothing to do with the release. It’s Raymond, isn’t it? In the end, it all comes down to the same thing. You’re jealous, Marsh. He did what you couldn’t do, and you can’t stand it.”

  Marsh stood silently for a moment, then nodded briefly. “It started out that way,” he admitted, moving away from the fireplace to flop into his favorite easy chair. “I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. But something’s wrong, Ellen. The more I think about it, the less I understand it. How is it possible that Alex could have made such a phenomenal recovery intellectually, and physically, and show no progress at all emotionally?”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation—” Ellen began.

  “Oh, there is!” Marsh interrupted. He rose to his feet again and began nervously pacing the room. “And it’s all in the records that Torres won’t let us see.”

  Ellen sighed and stood up. “This is getting us nowhere. All we’re doing is going in circles. I’m sure Raymond has his reasons for keeping the records closed, and I’m sure they’re valid. As for the rest of it—the terms of the release …” She hesitated, then plunged on. “Well, I’m afraid that’s a problem you’re going to have to deal with yourself.”

  “You mean you can accept those terms?” Marsh asked, his voice heavy with disbelief.

  Ellen nodded. “I’m sure they’re there to protect Alex, and I’m sure Raymond will explain them to me. In fact, he started to the other day.”

  “The other day?” Marsh asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “I talked to him,” Ellen replied. “When you were going to pull Alex out of school and send him down to Stanford, I talked to Raymond about it. I was … well, I was afraid you might ignore his advice. At any rate, he assured me that I had nothing to worry about. He said … well, he said that if you tried to do something, he could deal with you.”

  Marsh felt dazed. “Deal with me? He actually said that?”

  Ellen nodded, but said nothing.

  “And that didn’t faze you at all, that as far as he’s concerned, I’m simply someone to be dealt with?”

  Ellen was silent for several long seconds. “No,” she said at last. “In fact, it made me feel relieved.”

  The words struck Marsh with the force of a physical blow. He sank back into his chair as Ellen rose and quietly left the room.

  Alex had long since stopped listening to the argument that was going on downstairs, tuning out his parents’ voices as he immersed himself in the book he’d picked up at the library after he left Jake’s.

  When he’d come in for the second time, Arlette Pringle had immediately turned to the locked case, but Alex had stopped her.

  “I need some medical books,” he’d told her.

  “Medical books? But doesn’t your father have any?”

  “I need new ones,” Alex went on. “I need something about the brain.”

  “The human brain?”

  Alex nodded. “Do you have anything?”

  Arlette Pringle removed her glasses and thoughtfully chewed on an earpiece while she ran over the library’s medical collection in her mind. “Not much that’s really technical,” she said at last. “But there’s one new one we just got in.” She rose from her desk and went to the small shelf labeled “Current Nonfiction.”

  “Here it is. The Brain. Think that’s specialized enough for you?”

  Alex thumbed through the book, nodding. “I think so,” he replied. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Can I check this out?”

  Arlette led him back to the desk and showed him the process of checking out a book. “If this doesn’t seem familiar,” she said dryly, “I can tell you why. You were never much of a one for books.”

  “Then I guess that’s something different about me, too,” Alex replied, thinking: And maybe the reason why is in here.

  Since dinner, while his parents had been arguing, he’d scanned the entire book, and reread Chapter 7, the chapter dealing with learning and memory, two more times. And the more he read, the more puzzled he became.

  From what he’d read, what was happening to him seemed to be impossible.

  He was about to begin the chapter for the third time, sure that he must have missed something, when there was a soft tap at the door. A second later his mother stuck her head in.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, Mom.” He glanced up from the book. “You and Dad still fighting?”

  Ellen studied her son carefully, searching for any sign that the angry words she and Marsh had just exchanged might have upset Alex, but his expression was as bland as always, and his question had been asked in the same tone he might have used had he been interested in the time of day. “No,” she said. “But it wasn’t really a fight, honey. We were just discussing Dr. Torres, that’s all.”

  Alex frowned thoughtfully; then: “Dad doesn’t like him, does he?”

  “No,” Ellen agreed, “he doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you keep getting better.”

  “But what if I’m not getting better?”

  Ellen stepped into the room and closed Alex’s door behind her, then came to sit on the end of the bed. “But you are getting better.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course you are. You’re starting to remember things, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex replied. “Sometimes I think I am, but the memories don’t always make sense. It’s like … I remember things that I couldn’t possibly remember.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Alex tried to explain some of the things that had happened, but carefully made no mention of the voices that sometimes whispered inside his head. He wouldn’t mention those until he understood them. Ellen listened carefully as he talked, and when he was done, she smiled reassuringly.

  “But it’s all very simple. Obviously you saw the book before.”

  “Miss Pringle says I didn’t.”

  “Arlette Pringle’s memory isn’t as good as she likes people to think it is,” Ellen replied. “And anyway, even if you didn’t ever see that copy of the book, you certainly might have seen it somewhere else. At your grandparents’, for instance.”

  “My grandparents? But I don’t even remember them. How could I remember something I saw at their house, without remembering them or their house either?”

  “We’ll ask Dr. Torres. But it seems to me that your memory must be coming back, even if it’s just scraps. Instead of worrying about what you’re remembering, I think you ought to be trying to remember more.” For the first time her eyes fell on the book Alex had been reading, and she picked it up, studying the immensely enlarged brain cell on the cover for a moment. “Why are you reading this?”

  “I thought maybe if I knew more about the brain, I might be able to figure out what’s happening to me,” Alex replied.

  “And are you?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m going to have to do a lot more studying.”

  Ellen put the book down and took Alex’s hands. Though he made no response, neither did he immediately draw away from her. “Honey, the only thing that matters is that you’re getting better. It doesn’t matter why or how. Don’t you see that?”

  Alex shook his head. “The thing is, I’m not sure I am getting better, and I want to know. It just seems … well, I just think it’s important that I know what’s happening in my brain.”

  Ellen squeezed his hands, then let them go and stood up. “Well, I’m not going to tell you not to study, and Lord knows your
father won’t either. But don’t stay up all night, okay?” Alex nodded and picked up his-book. When Ellen leaned down to kiss him good night, he returned the gesture.

  But as his mother left the room, Alex wondered why she always kissed him, and what she felt when she did. For his own part, he felt nothing.…

  Marsh was still in his easy chair, staring morosely into the cold fireplace, when Alex came into the living room an hour later. “Dad?”

  Marsh looked up, blinking tiredly. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  “I’ve been studying, but I need to talk to you. I’ve been reading about the brain,” Alex began, “and there’s some things I don’t understand.”

  “So you thought you’d ask the family doctor?” He gestured toward the sofa. “I’m not sure I can help you, but I’ll try. What’s the problem?”

  “I need to know how bad the damage was to my brain,” Alex said. Then he shook his head. “No, that’s not really it. I guess what I need to know is how deep the damage went. I’m not too worried about the cortex itself. I think that’s all right.”

  The tiredness suddenly drained out of Marsh as he stared at Alex. “You think that’s all right?” he echoed. “After reading for a couple of hours, you think the cortex is all right?”

  Alex nodded, and if his father’s skeptical tone affected him at all, he gave no sign. “It seems as though there must have been damage a lot deeper, but there are some things that don’t seem to make any sense.”

  “For instance?” Marsh asked.

  “The amygdala,” Alex said, and Marsh stared at him. He searched his mind, and eventually associated the word with a small almond-shaped organ deep within the brain, nearly surrounded by the hippocampus. If he’d ever known its exact function, he’d long since forgotten.

  “I know where it is,” he said. “But what about it?”

  “It seems like mine must have been damaged, but I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  Marsh leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “I’m not following you,” he said. “Why do you say the amygdala must have been injured?”

  “Well, according to this book, what’s been happening to me seems like it must be associated with the amygdala. I don’t seem to have any emotions, and we know what happened to my memory. But now I’m starting to remember things, except that the way I remember them isn’t the way they are, but the way they used to be.”

  Marsh nodded, though he wasn’t exactly sure where Alex was going. “All right. And what do you think that means?”

  “Well, it seems that I’m having imaginary memories. I’m remembering things that I couldn’t remember.”

  “Maybe,” Marsh cautioned him. “Or maybe your memories are just twisted a bit.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Alex said. “But I don’t think so. I keep remembering things as they were long before I was even born, so I must only be imagining that I’m remembering them.”

  “And what does that have to do with the amygdala?”

  “Well, it says in the book I read that the amygdala may be the part of the brain that mediates rearrangement of memory images, and that seems to be what’s happening to me. As though the images are getting rearranged, and then coming out as real memories when they’re not.”

  Marsh’s brows arched skeptically. “And it seems to me as though you’re jumping to a pretty farfetched conclusion.”

  “But there’s something else,” Alex went on. “According to this book, the amygdala also handles emotional memories. And I don’t have any of those at all. No emotions, and no memories of emotions.”

  With a force of will, Marsh kept his expression impassive. “Go on.”

  Alex shrugged. “That’s it. Given the combination of no emotions or memories of emotions, and the imaginary memories, the conclusion is that my amygdala must have been damaged.”

  “If you read that book right, and if its information is correct—which is a big if, considering how little is actually known about the brain—then I suppose your conclusion is probably right.”

  “Then I should be dead,” Alex stated.

  Marsh said nothing, knowing all too well that what his son was positing was absolutely true.

  “It’s too deep,” Alex went on, his voice as steady as if he were discussing the weather. “In order to damage the amygdala, practically everything else would have to be destroyed first: the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the hippocampus, the corpus callosum, the cingulate gyrus, and probably the thalamus and the pineal gland too. Dad, if all that happened to me, I should be dead, or at least a vegetable. I shouldn’t be conscious, let alone walking, talking, seeing, hearing, and everything else I’m doing.”

  Marsh nodded, but still said nothing. Again, everything Alex had said was true.

  “I want to know what happened, Dad. I want to know how badly my brain was damaged, and how Dr. Torres fixed it. And I want to know why part of my brain is doing so well, and other parts aren’t working at all.”

  Marsh leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes for a moment as he tried to decide what to say to his son. At last, though, he made his decision. Alex might as well know the truth. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “In fact, I got curious about the same things, and today I tried to pull your records out of our computer. They aren’t there anymore. Dr. Torres has all the information pertaining to what happened to you in his own files, and for some reason he doesn’t want me or anyone else to see it.”

  Now it was Alex who fell silent as he turned his father’s words over in his mind. When he finally spoke, his eyes met his father’s squarely. “It means something’s wrong, doesn’t it?”

  Marsh kept his voice deliberately neutral. “Your mother doesn’t think so. She thinks everything is fine, and Torres is simply protecting the privacy of his records.”

  Alex shook his head. “If that’s what she thinks, then she’s wrong.”

  “Or maybe we’re wrong,” Marsh suggested. He kept his eyes on Alex, searching for any sort of emotional reaction from the boy. So far, there was none. Alex was only shaking his head.

  “No, we’re not wrong. If I’m alive, then what’s happening to me shouldn’t be happening. And I am alive. So something’s wrong, and I have to find out what.”

  “We have to find out,” Marsh said softly. He rose to his feet and went to put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Alex?” he said quietly. The boy looked up at him. “Alex, are you scared?”

  Alex was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’m not scared. I’m just curious.”

  “Well, I’m scared,” Marsh admitted.

  “Then you’re lucky,” Alex said quietly. “I keep wishing I was scared, not just curious … I wish I was terrified.”

  Alex sat alone in his first class the next morning. He had known something was wrong from the moment he had stopped by the Cochrans’ to walk to school with Lisa, and discovered that she had already left. It was Kim who had told him.

  “She thinks you’re crazy,” the little girl had said, gazing up at Alex with her large and trusting blue eyes. “She says she doesn’t want to go out with you anymore. But she’s dumb.” And then Carol Cochran had appeared, and sent Kim back into the house.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” she told him. “She’ll get over it. It’s just that you scared her yesterday when you told her you thought whoever killed Marty Lewis was still loose.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare her,” Alex said. “All she did was ask me if I thought Mr. Lewis did it, and I said I didn’t.”

  “I know what you said,” Carol sighed. “And I’m sure Lisa will get over it. But this morning she just wanted to go to school by herself. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Alex had replied. He’d said good-bye to Lisa’s mother, then continued on his way to school. But he wasn’t surprised when no one spoke to him, and he wasn’t surprised when the classroom fell silent when he came in.

  Nor was he surprised to see that there was no empty seat next to Lisa. />
  He wasn’t surprised, but neither was he hurt.

  He simply made up his mind that in the future he would be more careful what he said to people, so they wouldn’t think he was crazy.

  He listened to the first few words of the teacher’s history lecture, but then tuned him out, as he had tuned his parents out the night before. All the material the teacher was talking about was in the textbook, and Alex had read it three days earlier.

  The entire contents of the history text were now imprinted on his memory. If he’d been asked to, he could have written the book down word for word.

  Besides, what concerned Alex that morning was not the history text, but the book about the brain that he had borrowed from the library. In his mind he began going over the problem he had discussed with his father the night before, looking for the answer. Somewhere, he was certain, he had made a mistake. Either he had misread the book, or the book was wrong.

  Or there was a third possibility, and it was that third possibility that he spent the rest of the day considering.

  The idea came to him late in the afternoon.

  His last class had been a study hall, and he’d decided not to bother with it. Instead, he’d wandered around the campus, trying once more to find something that jogged one of his dormant memories to life. But it was useless. Nothing jarred his memory, and more and more, everything he saw was now familiar. Each day, there was less and less in La Paloma that he had not refamiliarized himself with.

  He was wandering through the science wing when someone called his name. He stopped and glanced through the open door of one of the labs. At the desk, he recognized Paul Landry.

  “Hello, Mr. Landry.”

  “Come on in, Alex.”

  Alex stepped into the lab and glanced around.

  “Recognize any of it?” Landry asked. Alex hesitated, then shook his head. “Not even that?”

  Landry was pointing toward a wooden box with a glass top covering a table near the blackboard. “What is it?” Alex asked.