The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  “I’m getting up,” he told Ben.

  “Toilet’s just behind us,” Ben said.

  Cixin didn’t need a toilet, he needed to run. Space between the rows of seat was narrow but he barreled down it, waving his arms. A boy a few years older walked in the opposite direction—on Cixin’s aisle! The boy didn’t step aside. Cixin shoved him away and kept running. The boy staggered up and started after Cixin but was stopped by a shout in Chinese from a man seated nearby. Cixin ran the length of the aisle, cut across the plane, ran back down a different aisle, where Ben grabbed him by the arm.

  “Sit, Cixin. Sit. You can’t run in here.”

  “Why? Will they throw me off?” This was funny—they were on a plane!—and Cixin laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. A man in a blue uniform moved purposefully toward them. Cixin stopped laughing—what if it was a soldier with a hidden gun? He cowered into his seat and tried to make himself very small.

  The maybe-soldier and Cousin Ben talked softly. Ben sat down and shook a yellow pill from a plastic bottle. “Take this with your bottled water.”

  “That’s not my once-a-week!” The once-a-week, for reasons Cixin didn’t understand, had to be left behind at Auntie’s. Too risky for Customs, Ben said, especially for me. Which made no sense because Ben didn’t take the once-a-week, only Cixin did.

  “No, it’s not your once-a-week,” Ben said, “but take it anyway. Now!”

  Cixin recognized anger. Ben might have a gun, too. In the videos, all Americans had guns. He took the pill, tapped on the window, kicked the back of the seat until the woman in it turned around and said something sharply in Chinese.

  Cixin wasn’t clear on what it was. A slow languor had fallen over the plane. Then sleep slid into him as softly as the fog by the river, as calmly as something . . . something right at the edge of memory . . . a pine tree and a gray boulder and . . .

  He slept.

  Another airport. Stumbling through it half awake. Shouting, people surging, a wait in a locked room . . . maybe it was a dream. Ben’s face tired and white as old snow. Then another plane, or maybe not . . . yes. Another plane. More sleep. When he woke truly and for real, he lay in a small room with blue walls and red cloth at the windows, four stacked houses up into the sky, in San Diego, America.

  Cixin ran. Waves pounded the shore, the wind whistled hard—whoosh! whoosh!—and sand blew against his bare legs, his pumping arms, his face. He laughed and swallowed sand. He ran.

  Ben waited where the deserted beach met the parking lot, the hood of his jacket pulled up, his face red and angry. “Cixin! Get in the car!”

  Cixin, exhausted and dripping and happy—as happy as he ever got here—climbed into the front seat of Ben’s Saab. Rain pounded the windshield. Ben shouted, “You ran away from your tutor again!”

  Cixin nodded. His tutor was stupid. The man had been telling him that rainstorms like this were rare and due to the Earth getting hotter. But with his own body Cixin had experienced many rainstorms, every summer of his life, and they all were hot. So he ran away from the stupid tutor, and from the even stupider girl who was supposed to come take care of him after the tutor left and before Ben came home from work. He ran the seven streets from Ben’s house-in-the-sky to the beach because the beach was the only place in America that he liked. And because he wanted to run in the rain.

  “You can’t just leave the condo by yourself,” Ben said. “And I pay that tutor to bring you up to speed before school starts in September, even though—you can’t just go down to the beach during a typhoon! And I had to leave the lab in the middle of—”

  There was more, but Cixin didn’t listen. He’d only been in America ten days but already he knew that Ben wouldn’t beat him. Still, Ben was very angry, and Ben was good to him, and Ben had showed him the wonderful beach in the first place. So Cixin hung his head and studied the sand stuck to his knees, but he didn’t actually listen. That much was not necessary.

  “—adjust your dosage,” Ben finished. Cixin said nothing, respectfully. Ben sighed and started the car, his silly red hair stuck to his head.

  When they were nearly back at the houses-stacked-in-the-sky, Cixin said, “You look sick, Cousin Ben.”

  “I’m fine,” Ben said shortly.

  “You don’t eat.”

  “I eat enough. But, Cixin, you’re driving me crazy.”

  “Yes.” It seemed polite to agree. “But you don’t eat and you look sick and sad. Are you sad?”

  Ben glanced over, rain dripping off his collar. “You surprise me sometimes, buddy.”

  That was not a polite answer. Cixin scowled and stared out the window at the “typhoon” and tapped his sandy sneaker on the sodden floor of the car. He wanted to run again.

  And Ben was too sad.

  In the “condo,” instead of the stupid tutor, a woman sat on the sofa. How did she get in? A robber! Cixin rushed to the phone, shouting, “911! 911!” Ben had taught him that. Robbers—how exciting!

  But Ben called, “It’s all right, Cixin.” His voice sounded so strange that Cixin stopped his mad dash and, curious, looked at him.

  “Renata,” Ben said thickly.

  “I couldn’t stay away after all,” the woman said, and then they were hugging. Cixin turned away, embarrassed. Chinese people did not behave like that. And the woman was ugly, too tall and too pale, like a slug. Not pretty like Xiao. The way Ben was holding her . . . Cixin hated the woman already. She was evil. She was not necessary.

  He rushed into his room and slammed the door.

  But at dinnertime the woman was still there. She tried to talk to Cixin, who refused to talk back.

  “Answer Renata,” Ben said, his voice dangerously quiet.

  “What did you say?” Cixin made his voice high and silly, to insult her.

  “I asked if you found any sand dollars on the beach.”

  He looked at her then. “Dollars made of sand?”

  “No. They’re the shells of ocean creatures. Here.” She put something on the table beside his plate. “I found this one last week. I’ll bet you can’t find one bigger than this.”

  “Yes! I can!” Cixin shouted. “I’m going now!”

  “No, you’re not,” Ben said, pulling him back into his chair. But Ben was smiling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll all go.”

  “And if we go in the evening and if the clouds have lifted, there should be something interesting to see in the sky,” Renata said. “But I won’t tell you what, Cixin. It’s a surprise.”

  Cixin couldn’t wait until Saturday evening. He woke very early. Ben and Renata were still asleep in Ben’s bed—she must be a whore even if she wasn’t as ugly as he thought at first—and here it was morning. A little morning, pale gray in a corner of the sky. The rainstorm was all gone.

  He dressed, slipped out of the house-in-the-sky, and ran to the beach. No one was there. The air was calm now and the water had stopped pounding and something strange was happening to the sky over the water. Ribbons of color—green, white, green—waved in the sky like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts! Frightened, Cixin turned his back, facing the part of the sky where the sun would come up and chase the ghosts away. But then he couldn’t see the water. He turned back and ran and ran along the cool sand. To his left, in San Diego, sirens started to sound. Cixin ignored them.

  Finally, exhausted, he plopped down. The sun was up now and the sky ghosts gone. Nobody else came out on the beach. Cixin watched the nearest tiny waves kissing the sand.

  Something happened.

  A soft, calm feeling stole through him, calm as the water. He didn’t even want to run anymore. He sat cross-legged, half hidden by a sand drift, dreamily watching the ocean, and all at once he was the ocean. Was the sand, was the sky, was the whole universe and they were him.

  Cixin. Come. Cixin.

  Voices, everywhere and nowhere, but Cixin didn’t have to answer because they already knew the answer. They were him and he was them.

  Peace. Belong
ing. Everything. Time and no time.

  And then Ben was forcing open his mouth, putting in something that melted on his tongue, and it all went away.

  But this time memory lingered. It had happened. It was real.

  Eight: Ben

  “I’d dropped the dosage to try to mitigate the side effects,” Ben said. He ran his hand through his filthy hair. Cixin lay asleep in his room, sunburned and exhausted. God only knew how long he’d been gone before Ben found his empty bed.

  Renata pulled her eyes from CNN. The solar flare, the largest ever recorded and much more powerful than anticipated, had played havoc with radio communications from Denver to Beijing. Two planes had crashed. The aurora borealis was visible as far south as Cuba. Renata said, “Ben, you can’t go on fiddling with his dosage and giving him sleeping pills when you get it wrong. You’re not even an M.D., and yet you’re playing God with that child’s life!”

  “And what do you think I should do?” Ben shouted. It was a relief to shout, even as he feared driving her away again. “Should I let him go catatonic? You didn’t see him two years ago in China—I did! He’d been in a vegetative state for two days and he would have died if I hadn’t found him! Is that what you think should happen?”

  “No. You should get him medical help. You wouldn’t have to say anything about the genemods or—”

  “The hell I wouldn’t! What happens when they ask me what meds Cixin takes? If I didn’t tell them, he could die. If I do, I go to jail. And how long do you think it would take a medical team to find drug traces in his body? Inhibitors have a long half-life. And even if I explain everything, and if I’m believed, what happens to Cixin then? He’s not even on my medical insurance until the adoption is final! So he’d be warehoused, catatonic, in some horrifying state hospital, and I’d be standing trial. Is that what you want?”

  “No. Wait. I don’t know.” She wasn’t yelling at him now; her voice held sorrow and compassion. CNN announced that a total of 312 people had died in the two air disasters. “But, sweetheart, the situation as it stands isn’t good for you or Cixin, either. What are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? He just isn’t anything like a normal—Cixin!”

  The boy stood in the doorway, his shock of black hair stiff from salt air, his eyes puffy from sleep. He suddenly looked much older.

  “Ben—what does the once-a-week do to me?”

  Renata drew a long breath.

  “It’s complicated,” Ben said finally.

  “I need to know.”

  Cixin wasn’t fidgeting, or yelling, or running. Something had happened on the beach, something besides sunburn and dehydration. Ben’s tired mind stabbed around for a way to explain things to a nearly illiterate eleven-year-old. Nothing occurred to him.

  Renata switched off the television and said quietly, “Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

  “Butt out, Renata!”

  “No. And don’t you ever try to bully me. You’ll lose.”

  He had already lost. Shooting a single furious glance at her, Ben turned to Cixin. “You have a . . . a sickness. A rare disease. If you don’t take the once-a-week, you will die like your mother said, but first you go all stiff and empty. Like this.” Ben, feeling like a fool, sat on the rug and made his body rigid and his face blank.

  “Empty?”

  “Yes. No thoughts, nothing. No Cixin. That’s how you were on the beach, like that for a long time, which is why you’re so sunburned.” And maybe more than sunburned. A big solar flare came with a proton storm, and those could cause long-term biochemical damage. Ben couldn’t cope with that just now, not on top of everything else. “Do you understand, Cixin? You went empty. Like a . . . a Coke can all drunk up.”

  “Empty,” Cixin repeated. All at once he smiled, a smile so enigmatic and complicated that Ben was startled. Then the boy went back into his room and closed the door.

  “Spooky,” Ben said inadequately. He struggled up from the rug. “How do you think he took it?”

  “I don’t know.” Renata seemed as disconcerted as Ben. “I only know what I would be thinking if I were him.”

  “What would you be thinking?” All at once he desperately wanted to know.

  “I would be wondering who I really was. Wondering where the pills ended and I, Cixin, began.”

  “He’s eleven,” Ben said scornfully. Scorn was a relief. “He doesn’t have sophisticated thoughts like that.”

  September. Cixin started school, the oldest kid in the fourth grade. Fortunately, he was small enough to sort of fit in and large enough to not be picked on by his classmates. He could not read at grade level, could not concentrate on his worksheets, could not sit still during lessons. After one week, his teacher called Ben to school for an “instructional team meeting.” The team recommended Special Ed.

  After two weeks, Cixin had another episode of catatonia. Again Ben found him at the beach, sitting half in the water, motionless amid frolicking children and splashing teens and sunbathing adults. A small boy with a sand pail said conversationally, “That kid dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” Ben snapped. Wearily he forced a dose of inhibitor onto Cixin’s tongue. It melted, and he came to and stared at Ben from dark, enigmatic eyes that slowly turned resentful.

  “Go away, Ben.”

  “I can’t, damn it!”

  Cixin said, “You don’t understand.”

  In his khakis and loafers—the school had called him at work to report Cixin’s absence—Ben lowered himself to sit on the wet sand. The blue Pacific rolled in, frothy at the whitecaps and serene beyond. The sun shone brightly. Ben said, “Make me understand.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try. Why do you do it, Cixin? What happens when you go empty?”

  “It’s not empty.”

  “Then what is it?” He willed himself to patience. This was a child, after all.

  Cixin took a long time answering. Finally he said, “I see. Everything.”

  “What kind of everything?”

  “Everything. And it talks to me.”

  Ben went as still as Cixin had been. He hadn’t even realized . . . hadn’t even thought of that. He’d thought of neurotransmitter ratios, neural architecture plasticity, blood flow changes, synaptic miscues. And somehow he’d missed this. It talks to me.

  Cixin leapt up. “I’m not going back to Special Ed!” he yelled and raced away down the sand, his school papers streaming out of the unzipped backpack flapping on his skinny shoulders.

  “Temporal lobe epilepsy?” Renata said doubtfully. “But . . . he doesn’t have seizures?”

  “It’s not grand mal,” Ben said. They sat in Grogan’s. Ben had drugged Cixin again with Dozarin, hating himself for doing it but needing, beyond all reason, to escape his apartment for a few hours. “With petit mal, seizures can go completely unnoticed. And obviously it’s not the only aberration going on in his brain, but I think it’s a factor.”

  “But . . . if he’s hearing voices, isn’t that more likely to be schizophrenia or something like that?”

  “I’m no doctor, as you’re constantly telling me, but temporal-lobe epilepsy is a very well documented source of religious transports. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard of Bingen, maybe even Saul on the road to Damascus.”

  “But why does your inhibitor work on him at all? Isn’t epilepsy a thing about electrical firing of—”

  “I don’t know why it works!” Ben said. He drained his gin and tonic and set the glass, harder than necessary, onto the table between them. “Don’t you get it, Renata? I don’t know anything except that I’m reaching the end of my rope!”

  “I can see that,” Renata said. “Have you considered that Cixin might be telling the truth?’

  “Of course he’s ‘telling the truth,’ as he experiences it. Temporal-lobe seizures can produce visual and auditory hallucinations that seem completely real.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  Renata fidd
led with the rim of her glass. “Maybe the voices Cixin hears are real.”

  Ben stared at her. You think you know someone . . . “Renata, you teach science. Since when do you dabble in mysticism?”

  “Since always. I just don’t advertise it to everybody.”

  That hurt. “I’m hardly ‘everybody.’ Or at least I thought I wasn’t.”

  “You’re taking it wrong. I just meant that I haven’t closed the door on the possibility of other worlds besides this one, other levels of being. Spirits, aliens, gods and angels, parallel universes that bleed through . . . I don’t know. But there’s never been a human society, ever, that didn’t believe in some sort of mystery beyond the veil.”

  He didn’t know anymore who she was. Ben motioned to the waiter for another gin and tonic. When his thoughts were at least partly collected, he said, “You can’t—”

  “What I can or cannot do doesn’t matter. The point is, what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to have an implant inserted under Cixin’s skin that will deliver the correct dose of inhibitor automatically.”

  “Really.” Her tone was dangerous. “And who will perform this surgery? You?”

  “Of course not. It can be done in Mexico.”

  “Do you know what you’re saying, Ben? You’re piling one criminal offense on top of another, and you’re treating that boy like a lab rat.”

  “He’s sick and I’m trying to make him better!” God, why wouldn’t she understand?

  “Are you going to at least explain all that to him?”

  “No. He wouldn’t understand.”

  She finished her wine, stood, and looked down at him with the fearlessness he both admired and disliked in her. The light from behind the bar glinted on her glasses. “Tell Cixin what you’re going to do. Or I will.”