by Karen Haber
He stared at me, speechless. Then he shook his head. “Can’t do it. I just can’t.”
“Rick, I’ve got a terrible feeling about all this.”
“I know, Brother. And you’re probably right. But I still can’t do it.”
“Fine.” I was suddenly angry again. Didn’t the fool know what he was doing? “Then go ahead and make your own mess, Rick. It’s not my problem.”
“Hey, come on, Julian. Don’t be that way. Don’t be angry. You know I trust your judgment. Even when I decide to ignore it.” He smiled his crooked smile at me and once again I was reminded of our biological father.
I waved my hands in defeat. “So Alanna’ll stay?”
He nodded.
“What about Better World?”
“She says she wants to be a part of it.”
“What about her money?”
“Are you suggesting I’m manipulating her for Narlydda’s loot?”
“Just probing the possibility.”
“Save it for the lab, Julian. Alanna’s money is her own.”
“Okay, so she moves in here and starts working for B.W. What about the staff? Betty?”
“They’ll all love her.”
“What about Betty? She seemed pretty jealous of her prerogatives.”
“Are you kidding? She’ll love Lanna once she gets to know her. It’ll be somebody else for her to mother. Somebody who’s close to me.”
“And Mom? She might not love this quite so much.”
“If she comes out to New Mexico and makes trouble I’ll send her off on a field trip. Maybe let her open a branch of Better World in Nepal.”
“I see you’ve got it all figured out.”
Rick hesitated and a look of helpless confusion, perhaps even self-loathing, contorted his features. His eyes, when they met mine, were pained, pleading for an answer, for an absolution that I couldn’t provide.
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s not right. I don’t want to hurt Alanna again. I always thought I was dangerous to people I really cared about.”
I touched his shoulder gently. “Intimacy can sometimes seem dangerous. But that doesn’t mean you carry some sort of curse, Rick.”
“No?” The last traces of easy confidence fell away from him and I saw just how singular he was, how alone and terribly, terribly different even from me, his twin. “You know what I am, Julian. Maybe I’ve been kidding myself, trying to deny it. I thought that if only I help people, try to make things better, use all these strange skills in beneficial ways, maybe I can live among real people.” He paused. “I don’t want to go back to the desert!”
His desperate cry echoed in the room, tore at my heart. And—God help me—I put my arms around him as he sobbed, hugged him, and gave him my benediction in a choked murmur. “You don’t have to go back. You can stay. It’s all right, Rick. Alanna will be with you. It’ll be all right.”
He clung to me, and I to him, two drowning men—Rick, at least, knew it, I think. But I was busy treading water, theorizing and improvising.
Rick squeezed my arm and sat back against the wall. His eyes were clear. He seemed restored, calm and confident once again. “It seems as though everything is falling into place. Thanks, little brother.” He grinned rather sheepishly. “Guess I’ll let you sleep.” And he blurred, became a smoky outline against the wall, and was gone.
Two days after I had this dream, I learned from Joachim Metzger that Alanna had indeed moved in with Rick and I knew that she had won the first round.
7
months went by, months in which Rick was seen meeting with world leaders, intervening in hunger riots in Brazil, holding a world peace meeting in Beijing, and capturing stray satellites falling from decaying orbits over New Zealand. Everywhere he touched down he left behind the busy seeds of Better World: eager staffers who opened foreign offices and drew excited new members into the fold.
The vidnews called him a man of wonder and “The Marvelous Mutant.” The U.S. Government classified him as a resource but also kept an eye on him. Fan clubs sprang up all over the planet for Rick, the Desert Prophet. Every organized religion raised its collective fist against Better World. Rick was discussed, debated, cursed, and acclaimed. Meanwhile, my brother saved thousands of lives and helped cure thousands of people. But, occasionally, he misfired.
Despite Rick’s reported last-minute intervention in a bullet train crash in Japan, hundreds of lives were lost. I saw pictures of Rick after that crash—he looked as though he had not slept in weeks, his skin was so gray it was almost putty-colored, and he seemed deeply, deeply dispirited by his failure.
Then there was the tsunami snafu. Rick did manage to divert the tidal wave that had threatened to wash out most of the populated areas of Maui. Unfortunately, he lost control of the wave and it hit part of the Big Island instead. I’m certain that Better World’s legal staff put in a lot of overtime dealing with the lawsuits from island developers and survivors of those killed.
For a while that fall we didn’t hear a peep out of Better World, until the Mars Colony rescue mission. To give Rick credit, seventy-five percent of the vaccine serum that he teleported did arrive intact. Not enough to save every colonist, but as NASA officials pointed out, without Rick’s efforts they all would have died. No conventional rescue mission would have reached the red planet in time. Nevertheless, I wondered why the entire shipment had not made it. Was Rick overreaching even his own unique abilities?
Abruptly, I came to feel that I had overreached mine.
The chirping of my screen awakened me at two A.M. Out of bed, quickly, quickly, I snatched up the keypad, my skin prickling with goose bumps in the cold November air.
Who was it? Mother? Father? Agonizing fantasies of compound family tragedies cut through sleep-fog and brought me to full wakefulness. Stop speculating, Doctor, and find out.
“This is Dr. Akimura.”
The mechanical voice of the answering service vibrated from the speaker. “Doctor, the emergency room at Mass. General is trying to reach you.”
“Put me through to them. Priority channel.”
Gwendolyn Smith, a third-year intern in the psychiatric ward, appeared onscreen. Her blond hair was pulled back into a severe bun that emphasized the sharpness of her features. Her gray eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion and overwork. “Dr. Akimura? One of yours was brought in about an hour ago.”
“Who?”
“Thomas Wyndham. Overdose.”
“What’d he take?”
“What didn’t he?”
I pulled on my pants. “How bad?”
“He’s holding, but I don’t know if I can keep him stabilized. Maybe you’ve got some better tricks up your sleeve.” She wiped sweat from her brow as I shivered in the cold air and buttoned my shirt. “Just between us, Doctor, if I were you, I’d get down here as soon as possible.”
“Thanks. I’m on my way.”
I flagged down a cab and as we raced toward the hospital. I mentally reviewed Wyndham’s file. Seventh-generation scion of an old, formerly moneyed Bostonian family with genetic ties to early Massachusetts settlers. He had an obsessive/compulsive personality disorder complicated by bouts of incapacitating depression. Medication and deep relaxation techniques had provided some relief but Wyndham had been quite jittery lately. Not so jittery as to indicate trouble, or so I’d thought.
No personal history of suicidal attempts. Schizophrenic aunt, father’s sister. Maternal grandfather who had hanged himself. The usual narcissistically involved mother and remote father. Not a great family lineup but not so terrible either: I’d danced around the rim of many a family snakepit that would have made the Wyndhams look positively benign by comparison.
The E.R. at Mass. General was flooded with cold blue fluorescent light. It played hell with optic nerves accustomed to the yellow-green glare of nighttime Boston, and I blinked heavily before I glanced around the room. The usual post-midnight assortment greeted me: gunshot victim bleeding th
rough his bandages as he lay, unconscious, on the gurney, woman with wildly spiked blue hair fighting against her restraints and biting at unseen assailants, heavy-set man with florid complexion clutching his left arm and chest as he moaned, teenage girl in ripped bodysuit, her face scratched, staring with dull eyes at her bandaged hand.
Dr. Smith was bending over a young man whose right arm was partially severed at the shoulder. She looked up and over at me as I approached, nodded toward the adjoining room, and turned back to her patient.
Thomas Wyndham lay upon a cot in the far corner of the ward. His eyes were open but unresponsive to light. He’d mixed a witches’ brew of antidepressants and stimulants and injected it. Gwen Smith had attempted to isolate each drug but had finally resorted to massive transfusions in an effort to cleanse Wyndham’s blood of all the contaminants. He was still hooked up to the umbilicus of the blood bag.
Good red life spilled into him through the clear tube in his left arm as bad dreams drained out through the other hand. But he remained inert, unresponsive. The brain wasn’t dead but he appeared to be in shock.
Much as I dreaded it, I decided to attempt direct telepathic stimulation: it was a technique that mutant healers reserved only for grave situations. This qualified.
I settled in a chair next to the bed and closed my eyes, concentrating. His defenses were few and weakened by the drugs. I penetrated his subconscious easily, navigating the eddies and twists in his mental currents as I looked for reasons and solutions.
Why? Thomas, why did you try to kill yourself?
Whywhywhywhy—
My own mindspeech came back at me in mocking echo.
I tried again. Thomas, it’s Dr. Akimura. I want to help you. Please, help me to help you. What happened? Tell me what happened to you since I saw you last Tuesday.
The subconscious mind is not a direct mechanism. Often, I’d thought of it as a storehouse for consciousness: a spare memory kept here, an odd segue over there, the taste of old pennies and tang of salt air from a seaside vacation twenty years in the past stored in the corner next to a stray erotic image of a woman’s leg.
Several renowned psychoanalysts would have us believe that these bits and pieces are maddening clues to the puzzle of self, who one is—and was. Perhaps. But I’ve often thought they are nothing more than debris: misleading fragments that mean less than we know. Crossed wires and missed connections. The human mind is a notorious packrat: nothing ever gets thrown away. My preference was to stay out of the subconscious, both mine and everybody else’s, whenever possible. I didn’t care for stumbling around in a dark attic—or basement—looking for the light switch.
Unfortunately, Thomas Wyndham’s conscious mind was not available to me. As I plunged down into the strata of his subconscious I hoped to quickly find my way and bring him around.
To facilitate the process I projected a template, framing the subconscious within a physically familiar context. I was in a spacious walk-in closet lined with sleek cupboards and drawers. There were meticulously lettered labels over each of the drawers in alphabetical and chronological order: Christmas 2059, Law School, Lost Socks. I traced them until I came upon the section marked June 2064. Grasped the knob and pulled.
The drawer opened. Within it were files, hundreds of them, one for each day. I flipped through them, coming finally to last Tuesday.
Inside that particular file were Wyndham’s memories of our counseling session. Odd to see myself through a patient’s eyes: kindly, compassionate Doc Akimura, listening carefully, perhaps even wisely. Thomas thought I was well meaning but perhaps a bit pedantic. He was probably right. I hurried through our session, through his dinner later that evening, and through the next several days. Uneventful. Thomas was coping, managing at his programming job, maintaining a long-term relationship with his lover, nothing out of the ordinary here.
I scanned through Wyndham’s memories of the past week: a thrashing, gasping copulation, a game of squash, budget meetings at work, an appointment with his accountant. Nothing. I couldn’t find any clues to what had precipitated this crisis. All I gathered was a deepening sense of despair, gloom casting a gray wash over everything. If only I could have checked his endocrine levels and each minute adjustment in his brain chemistry over the past six days. But the mind keeps some secrets to itself.
I glanced around the cabinet of Wyndham’s subconsciousness one more time and gratefully disengaged. The closet vanished. I was sitting next to Wyndham’s cot in the emergency room annex.
Wyndham’s fluid levels were balancing out. A mechnurse came in, green strobes flashing, and turned off the transfusion equipment. I double-checked his chart on the wall-screen: he had been given enough stimulants to jumpstart an elephant. Why wasn’t he responding?
As I watched, Wyndham’s breathing slowed. His life-support scanners flashed a yellow warning. I saw that his autonomic nervous system was critically depressed. The man was dying. But there was no reason for it. No reason at all. The overdose had been caught in time.
I grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing mental contact again, and caught a powerful sense impression of passivity—even eagerness. I struggled frantically to drag him back. But even as I held him and grappled for his life essence he faded until I was forced to flee his mind or risk being taken with him.
Wyndham died in my arms. Smiling.
The mechnurse returned to the bedside. “Cause of death?” it asked in a grinding mechanical voice.
“Despair.” For a moment I tasted old pennies again.
“That designation does not register in my glossary.”
“Overdose.” I touched the still face once and backed away. There were papers to be filled out, notifications to be made. I didn’t leave the hospital until well after five. The sun was just rising and the tube was starting to fill with early commuters. I ignored them, intent on my own private failure. For I knew I had failed Thomas Wyndham. He had wanted to die and nothing I had done had changed that. What’s more, I felt instinctively that had my brother been at Wyndham’s side, the patient would have survived. Rick didn’t look for reasons, consult case histories, nor indulge in monitoring bodily fluid levels. He healed. And he was better at it than I was. Much better.
As penance for Wyndham I accepted a substitute shift at the hospital, midnight to dawn in the emergency room. Halfway through I took a break in the cafeteria, hoping for coffee.
“Dr. A.” Victor Sanchez, the day chef, greeted me as he unsealed his sweater. “What are you doing here? It’s four in the morning.”
“Atoning.” I raised my cup of coffee. “Cheers.”
“Whatever you say.” Sanchez walked deeper into the kitchen, muttering. “Crazy doctors here are as bad as the patients sometimes.”
I finished the coffee and swung out of the webseat back to my feet. “Vic, let me ask you something.”
“Yeah?” Sanchez peered around the kitchen door. His hands were covered with flour.
“Did you see the latest healing on the vid?”
“That guy from New Mexico? I saw a tape of it.”
“What did you think?”
“Think? Doc, he’s great stuff. My mother would have loved him. She always believed in faith healing.”
“And how about you? What do you think of it?”
Sanchez shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s like, he’s a good man. I can tell that. I’m Catholic—although I haven’t been to church since Easter, don’t call the pope—and to me this guy seems like something straight out of the Old Testament.” He smiled. “A mutant messiah? I don’t know. It’s okay with me. We need help from somebody, I figure. Listen, I got to get back to the baking, Doc. Come in at six and I’ll have fresh bread for you.”
I threw my empty cup into the recycler and returned to the E.R. The next couple of hours were quiet—a shame, really. I had almost hoped for a collapsed bridge, a tube derailment, or some other big, messy calamity. Something to distract me from the echo of Sanchez’s words in my head: mutant me
ssiah. Mutant messiah. Mutant messiah.
When I got home I took a stiff dose of narcolyne. That silenced just about everything for a brief eight hours.
At three-thirty in the afternoon the phone rang. I surfaced from fathoms of drugged sleep, disoriented and barely functional. Missed the screen switch on my first try, nearly knocked the screen over on my second but at least I managed to turn the damned thing on.
“Hello?” My voice was thick, coated with dust.
“We need to meet.” It was Joachim Metzger. “Can you come to Philadelphia? I have to attend to Eastern Mutant Council business and I’ll be out here all this week.”
“I’m not really up to seeing actual people. Will a screen conference do?”
He frowned at what he must have mistaken for levity on my part. “I don’t think so, Julian. Several important people have been in touch with me concerning mutant opposition to Better World. They would like to join forces. What we have to discuss is of the greatest importance, absolutely crucial to our efforts. And I don’t trust security fields on screens as much as I do a total room shield.”
“I assume these are important nonmutant-type people?”
“Of course.”
“Joachim, I don’t know how comfortable I really feel about locking arms with nonmutants against my brother.”
“What choice do we have? Alanna has managed to sway a considerable number of mutants over to Rick’s side. She’s been holding meetings on his behalf for any mutants who are interested in Better World and her efforts are beginning to pay off. Frankly, I’m afraid we’re losing ground. If we want to maintain and improve our position, then it’s crucial for us to join with others.”
“Just who are these others?”
“I’m not at liberty to say over the screen.”
I was in no mood for his cloak-and-dagger maneuvers. “All right, Metzger. All right. I’ll meet you. Just tell me where and when.”
The Eastern Mutant Council convened in an old brownstone building in the heart of Philadelphia. The main auditorium was an overly air-conditioned room decorated in the faded post-modernism of the previous century. Gilded columns rose almost to the ceiling but stopped about two feet short. They were topped by cubes of thick gray metal out of which sprang curving shapes recalling the wrought-iron balustrades and railings of the French Quarter in New Orleans. These, in turn, fused with the ceiling in between pink and gray protrusions that might have once held light fixtures.
