The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  “When did she do this?”

  “Always. All the time. Just—all day long. And…” She looked away, looked back. “And at night, also.”

  Ruben stared at her. There is a universe, somewhere, in which everything fits together, and everything makes sense. For a blurry instant Ruben glimpsed it, and then it swam away.

  He managed to eke out a few more details. Packages came and went. The light was on in her room, all night, every night. It seemed like she never slept. Whatever she was doing, she was obsessed; she couldn’t stop; whatever this idea was, this project, she was its prisoner.

  And Ruben knew what it was. Of course he did. The night man had told him what it was.

  Theresa Pileggi had been in her room—burrowed, buried herself—trying to do what he had been trying to do, trying to get where he had been trying to get.

  I’ve been trying for ten years, Dennis had said. To get to where that kid got by banging his head on a fucking bench.

  Ruben was there in his dad’s office, scared out of his fucking mind, and he was here in this snowbound Indianapolis kitchen and he could see the night man, that was him there leering from the family portrait, the night man as Douglas Pileggi, the night man staring out from inside the dead man’s eyes.

  Theresa Pileggi had been holed up in her room, trying to solve the riddle. Trying to get empty. Become a vessel.

  Ruben took a steadying breath. He looked down at his tea, then up again.

  “But you don’t remember when she left to go to Los Angeles?”

  “November. Before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to do a nice Thanksgiving.” She was trying to smile; Ruben could see the effort in her eyes. “The funny thing is…”

  “Yes?”

  “I know that she was there, that she ended up in California, but…” She let the sentence die, shook her head a little, and spoke brightly. “I am so sorry, but I have forgotten your name.”

  “Ruben.”

  She nodded. “Ruben. Yes. Well, it’s very odd, Ruben. But she didn’t go to Los Angeles.”

  “Oh.” He sat up straight. “Did she tell you she was going somewhere else?”

  “No, no. She didn’t say anything, one way or the other. She just—emerged one day, fully dressed, she had her shoes on, and I was so happy. I embraced her. We hugged. I was so happy. But she had a suitcase. She was going. Just as abruptly as she had come.”

  “Where, Mrs. Pileggi, where did she say she was going?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. She didn’t say anything. The truth is she…she…” Her face was changing. She was pale. She breathed heavily, in and out, and her eyes became hazy. “I’m sorry. Your name one more time.”

  “It’s Ruben.”

  “Ruben, Ruben, Ruben.” She laughed, high and flutey. “Ruben, she didn’t say one word to me the whole time she was here.”

  “Do you mean, for ten years?”

  She nodded, hummingbird rapid, and then Ruben jumped up because Mrs. Pileggi was sliding down out of her chair, her body rubbery and flat, and Ruben caught her by the armpits and eased her back up.

  “Are you OK, ma’am?”

  “I am, yes. Yes, I’m just fine.” She glanced over her shoulder, at the snow coming in constant marching rows against the windows.

  Ruben meanwhile imagining Theresa, for a decade, while the world turned and turned, Theresa buried in her bedroom, pacing in tight circles, Theresa not eating, Theresa moaning—Ruben trying and failing to imagine it—Theresa captured in there, pacing the four walls of her childhood life, a captive animal, caught inside of madness, this thing grinding her down and down.

  The Rabbi stayed focused. Mrs. Pileggi was talking.

  “Oh, but this is what I wanted to show you. As I said, she never told me why she was going, or where. But I did find, on her desk…”

  She fiddled with the plastic snap-top lid, and the box creaked open. Ruben looked warily inside.

  “The letters were gone,” she said. “These are just the envelopes.”

  Ruben stared at them. A dozen; maybe fifteen.

  All of them, he saw at once, had the same canceled postmark.

  Ruben stood up. Mrs. Pileggi reached for his arm and took it.

  “You promised, now. Anything you find out, you’ll let me know?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Just—anything at all.”

  “Yes.”

  She stood up, too. Her chin was raised and her gaze steady and her mouth firm, and her agony was so transparent that Ruben moved to embrace her. Holding Theresa’s mother, he could feel how substantial his own body had become: the weight of his upper body, the strength of his arms and back, the solidity of his torso as her frail ribs pressed against his own. She was hollow, he thought; she was virtually weightless.

  “Oh,” said Ruben finally, as he put his shoes back on, seated on the low bench they had by the front door. The last thing. “Did your daughter, when she left, did she have a weapon?”

  “No. What kind of weapon? No.”

  “Are you sure? You did say your husband was a hunter. I wondered if she had taken one of his guns.”

  “No,” she said flatly, and then again: “No. My husband—Douglas—he did keep guns in the house. But when he died, I disposed of them all.”

  Ruben opened the door. The winter weather that had seemed so miserable before felt like freedom. He wanted to run through the snow, back to the airport.

  “Do you have children, Mr. Shenk?” asked Mrs. Pileggi.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, her hand on the knob. “Well, there’s still time. Plenty of time.”

  Ruben did wonder, sometimes, about his parents.

  Not Marilyn and Jay, whose fates he knew very well, but his real parents, what people call birth parents.

  He pictured them sometimes, not as living people but as a static image, posing unsmiling in front of their home, Asian smallholders in modest Western dress, staring stoically into the camera.

  His was a fanciful image, which Ruben had constructed in his mind, out of nothing. He had never had any communication from his biological parents, nor seen any photographs. He had never written a letter to the adoption agency his parents had employed, nor asked his dad to do so on his behalf.

  And yet the biological parents did appear, now and then, in odd moments like this one. He shut the door of the Meridian Street house and walked back out into the snow, stepping carefully in his sneakers across the flagstones slick with ice.

  The cabdriver had given him his number. He needed to get back to the airport.

  January 5, 2010

  1.

  Wesley walked the length of the dance hall, very slow. He reached the ornate and enormous doors at the far end, and then he turned and came back toward the bandstand. Arms at his sides, facing forward, eyes fixed.

  Dr. Theresa Pileggi walked beside him. She muttered to herself, making tiny notations in a thick spiral-bound notebook. She walked exactly at his pace down the parquet floor, one step for each of his. She seemed to be counting as Wesley walked; counting steps or counting seconds.

  “Yes,” she said to herself, after some unexplained interval. “Interesting.” She added something to the notebook, writing furiously, letting him get slightly ahead of her, and then hastened to catch up.

  The rest of them watched from the bandstand: Richard with his arms folded across his chest, Beth clutching him nervously, Jay Shenk with his hands thrust in his pockets, bobbling on his heels, uneasy. Jay was watching them watching Wesley, and he could see that when Beth was looking at her son she was, as always, looking for signs of life: her eyes bored into her boy, crawling over him, desperate still to find something. Some flicker of a person inside the walking doll.

  But there was nothing there. Wesley’s eyes stared straight ahead. His feet moved mechanically. He reached the bandstand, Pileggi just beside and behind him, and she made a curious birdlike cluck as she watched him pivot and go back.

 
“Look, lady—” said Rich, and Beth said, “Hush,” and Jay sighed, exhaling his anxiety, and the slow parade of Wesley and Pileggi moved back toward the doors.

  First Dr. Pileggi had looked the child over for a half an hour: pulse, blood pressure, a scraping from the tongue; eyes and ears. For each ministration Wesley would stop, wait with infinite, automatic patience, submitting without protest to her attention. Then she moved aside and let him go, let him walk, while she followed, taking notes.

  This peculiar examination was taking place inside a detail-perfect re-creation of the Hollywood Palladium as it had been in 1954. The famous dance hall had been built from scratch on a half-acre of private land out here in Burbank, intended as the climactic location of a nostalgic romantic comedy that had lost its financing. And now it had become a hideout for Wesley Keener, the fugitive miracle, with three armed guards patrolling the perimeter and a nurse living full-time in the fake barroom behind the stage, where the movie lovers were supposed to have shared a secret kiss.

  “Oh my God, this is fucking perfect,” Beth had declared when Ebbers walked them through the setup. Then she’d asked “Can we afford it?” and Richard had said “Nope” and here they were anyway. The rest of the family was in a spot nearby, an anonymous townhome on a Burbank side street, close enough to check on Wesley every day.

  Wesley walked across the patterned dance floor, against the grain of the check pattern of the floor tile, between the rounded columns and beneath the curving balcony, back and forth from the stage.

  Pileggi dropped her pen and crouched to get it, and then awkwardly lurched back to her feet, caught up with Wesley, and kept writing.

  “Christ,” said Rich, while Jay grimaced.

  This was his expert witness?

  For this Jay was paying not only the medium-high hourly rate that Dr. Pileggi was insisting on, but her gas back and forth to Riverside, for fuck’s sake, and compensation for the courses she wasn’t teaching this semester because she’d taken a leave to work on the case; plus he had agreed to put her up in LA County if and when they went to trial—and he’d no choice but to agree. He’d made a mistake. He’d been sure this case was going to settle, and it hadn’t, and there was no time for anyone else. All his chips were on odd little Dr. Pileggi, on her notebook full of scribblings and the theory she claimed to have.

  Pileggi was in a beige pantsuit, and maybe it was the same one she’d been in when he had seen her lecturing at UC Riverside, or maybe she had a closet full of the same number, plus a dozen pairs of the same cheap flats. If it were up to Shenk, she would be doing her inspection of the patient far from the eyes of his parents. Bringing his expert witness, especially this one, into contact with the Keeners—she with her semiautistic professorial intensity and the pair of them like two open pits of grief—felt like a mistake; it felt fraught, somehow, even dangerous. But what choice did he have? If she was going to be his expert she had to examine the patient, and Beth was not about to let Wesley be examined in her absence. So here they were, Beth watching Wesley while Pileggi walked along beside him, scribbling away with the stub of a pencil.

  But Richard—Richard was staring at Jay, and Jay could feel what he was thinking. Who the fuck was this lady?

  “OK,” called Pileggi abruptly from way on the far end of the dance floor, standing there writing one last thing while Wesley walked back toward them. “I was right.”

  “Right about what?” said Rich.

  Her voice echoed back through the vast empty room. “About everything.”

  “Dr. Pileggi?” called Shenk. “Why don’t you come a little closer and we’ll talk.”

  They gathered in the center of the room. They were each sitting in one of the metal folding chairs—jarringly anachronistic in the dance hall—that Shenk had found in a storage space beneath the stage.

  “To begin with, my hypothesis was correct, regarding the etiology of his condition.” Pileggi spoke intently, but quietly, as if to herself. It was one of several habits, Shenk knew, he would have to train her out of before putting her on the stand.

  “What is etiology?” said Beth, looking to Shenk. “I don’t know what etiology means.”

  “It just means cause,” murmured Jay. “It means explanation.” The word-choice stuff; he’d have to work on that, too. “What Dr. Pileggi is saying is that the hospital has been deceitful about what happened.”

  “Not deceitful, necessarily,” said Pileggi. “More likely they just don’t understand.”

  “And you do?” said Rich.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Rich’s tone was thick with skepticism, Pileggi’s scornful in return. Beth leaned in close.

  “So?” said Beth. “So tell us. What?”

  Pileggi furrowed her brow, nodded at her notes. “What this patient has contracted is a prion disease.”

  Not patient, thought Shenk. Don’t call him “this patient.” He beamed Pileggi the message with his eyes, but Pileggi wasn’t looking at Shenk. She was focused on Wesley. He looked exactly the same as when Shenk had first seen him, in room 906, through a scrum of curious doctors, more than a year ago. He had not grown. No new fuzz had appeared on his cheeks. His hair was the same length, despite not having been cut. He was the same.

  “At some point in his life, he ingested or was otherwise infected with a prion protein. The prion was dormant, however, and would have remained so except for the surgical intervention, which triggered a catastrophic neurological event, leading directly to the patient’s current state.”

  Not patient, thought Shenk. Child. Boy. Person. The patient was a boy; the boy had a name.

  “The resulting condition is a highly specific form of neurodegenerative disorder. Though exceptionally unusual, it is nevertheless identifiable, to scientists familiar with the symptomatology, as Syndrome K.”

  “What is that?” said Beth. She looked from Pileggi to Shenk, then back to Pileggi. “What is Syndrome K?”

  “You said he got infected?” said Rich. “Like a—like a cold, or what?”

  “No,” said Pileggi flatly, with a cool hint of irritated sarcasm. “Not like a cold.”

  Her contempt for this question, for Rich’s layman ignorance, was plain: she literally rolled her eyes. Rich glared at her with undisguised disgust.

  Please, thought Shenk. Please.

  While Pileggi continued in her galloping, ungainly matter, Shenk kept his eyes on the Keeners. Now Beth, now Rich. Hoping to conjure by his broad empathy a force field to protect them from Pileggi’s bluntness. He saw how they were reacting to words like catastrophic. He saw how Beth jumped; how even steadfast Rich shivered within his skin. Take it easy, he thought as loudly as he could, in the direction of oblivious Pileggi. Take it slow.

  The Keeners needed to hear all this, but they needed to get each piece of this nightmare individually, so it didn’t overwhelm them, swamp their systems with the toxicity of distress. Beth already was at the very edge. You could see it in the red of her eyes. Rich, too, looked exhausted, his hair disheveled, his beard wild and untrimmed.

  As for Shenk himself, he was grappling with the fact that soon—mere weeks now, a matter of swift-disappearing days—he would have to put this woman on the stand. He would need her, somehow, to win the hearts of a jury.

  “A prion is a transmissible pathogenic agent, and it causes damage to a certain category of brain proteins,” Pileggi said. “The pathogen is most often undetected and can then lie dormant for years, or, in many if not most cases, forever.”

  “And Wes has that? How did he get it?” said Beth, franticness rising in her voice. “When?”

  Shenk, watching the roller-coaster rise and fall of Beth’s reactions, kept up his steady telepathic urging to his expert witness: Go slow. Be cool.

  “We will probably never know when or how,” said Pileggi. And then, abruptly: “Do you eat meat?”

  Rich growled. “Why does that matter?”

  “It may or it may not,” said Pileggi. “Unlike with some other p
rion diseases, Syndrome K’s means of transmission has not yet been conclusively identified. This is the first actual case I have encountered.”

  Jay’s mouth dropped open. “Wait,” he said. “Are you serious? The first?”

  She nodded. “Up till now it has been entirely theoretical.”

  Rich was staring at Jay; Jay could feel him staring.

  “But it shares certain traits with the pathogen that causes something called bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rich muttered. Beth had her hands in her hair. “Isn’t that—wait—Wesley has mad cow disease?”

  “Syndrome K is not mad cow disease. But it is contracted from a prion similar to that which causes BSE. The prion, once activated, ravages the patient’s brain, with catastrophic effects on all its functional centers, including the prefrontal cortex.”

  “So, what?” said Rich. “It’s like he’s had a lobotomy?”

  “Oh no,” Pileggi said flatly. “It’s worse.”

  Shenk cringed, held up both hands, let’s take a second here, but Pileggi kept going.

  “In a lobotomy the prefrontal cortex is substantially or wholly removed in order to stop the progress of a malignancy, with the predictable side effect of dulling or even eliminating aspects of personality. In the case of a rapid aggressive neurodegenerative illness like Syndrome K, it is not only the prefrontal cortex, but also the hippocampus, the amygdala, and various other key functional areas, which have not been removed but gravely damaged, or…or anesthetized, somehow. Draining him not only of his quote-unquote personality but also the feelings of pain, of emotional attachment, of memory. Everything.”

  Beth’s eyes had shut. Jay could not imagine what she was feeling. He could not imagine. Richard growled.

  “So why’s he fucking walking around, then?” he said. “If he’s all gone. Huh? If his brain is all zeroed out, like you’re saying. Why’s he walking around like he’s looking for his fucking car keys?”