Brain Child (28 page)

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.

“Take a look. You don’t remember it at all?”

Alex gazed at the crude construction. “Should I?”

“You built it,” Landry said. “Last year. It was your project, and you finished it just before the accident.”

Alex walked over to examine the plywood construction. It was a simple maze, but apparently he’d made each piece separately, so that the maze could be easily and quickly changed into a myriad of different patterns. “What was I doing?”

“Figure it out,” Landry challenged. “From what Eisenberg tells me, it shouldn’t take you more than a minute.”

Alex glanced at his watch, then went back to the box. At one end was a runway leading to a cage containing three rats, and at the other was a food dispenser. Built into the front of the box was a timer. Forty-five seconds later, Alex nodded. “It must have been a retraining project. I must have wanted to be able to time the rate at which the rats learned each new configuration of the maze. But it looks pretty simpleminded.”

“That’s not what you thought last year. You thought it was pretty sophisticated.”

Alex shrugged disinterestedly, then lifted the gate that allowed the rats to run into the maze. One by one, with no mistakes, they made their way directly to the food and began eating. “How come it’s still here?”

Landry shrugged. “I guess I just thought you might want it. And since I was teaching summer school this year, it wasn’t any trouble to keep it.”

It was then, as he watched the rats, that the idea suddenly came into Alex’s mind. “What about the rats?” he asked. “Are they mine too?”

When Landry nodded, Alex removed the glass and picked up one of the large white rats. It wriggled for a
moment, then relaxed when Alex put it back in its cage. A minute later, the other two had joined the first. “Can I take them home?” Alex asked.

“Just the rats? What about the box?”

“I don’t need it,” Alex replied. “It doesn’t look like it’s worth anything. But I’ll take the rats home.”

Landry hesitated. “Mind telling me why?”

“I have an idea,” Alex said. “I want to try an experiment with them, that’s all.”

There was something in Alex’s tone that struck Landry as strange, and then he realized what it was. There was nothing about Alex of his former openness and eagerness to please. Now he was cold, and, though he hated to use the word, arrogant.

“It’s fine with me,” he finally said. “Like I said, they’re your rats. But if you don’t want the box, leave it there. You may think it’s pretty simpleminded—which, incidentally, it is—but it still demonstrates a few things. I’ve been using it for my class.” He grinned. “And I’ve also been telling my kids that this project would have earned the brilliant Alex Lonsdale a genuine C-minus. Even last year, you could have done better work than that, Alex.”

“Maybe so,” Alex replied, picking up the rat cage and heading toward the door. “And maybe I would have, if you’d been a better teacher.”

Then he was gone, and Paul Landry was left alone, trying to reconcile the Alex he’d just talked to with the Alex he’d known the year before. He couldn’t, for there was simply no comparison. The Alex he’d known last year had disappeared without a trace. In his place was someone else, and Landry was grateful that whoever he was, he wasn’t in his class this year. Before he left that day, he took Alex’s project and threw it into the dumpster.

The kitchen door slammed, and despite herself, Ellen jumped. “Alex?” she called. “Is that you? Do you know what time it—” And then, as Alex came into the living room, she fell silent, her eyes fixed on the cage he held in his right hand. “What on earth have you got there?”

“Rats,” Alex told her. “The ones from my science project last year. Mr. Landry still had them.”

Ellen eyed the little creatures with revulsion. “You’re not going to keep them, are you?”

“I’ve figured out an experiment,” Alex told her. “They’ll be gone in a couple of days.”

“Good. Now, let’s go, or we’ll be late. In fact,” she added, her eyes moving to the clock, “we already are. And you know how Dr. Torres feels about punctuality.”

Alex started toward the stairs. “Dad and I aren’t sure I ought to keep going to Dr. Torres.”

Ellen, in the midst of struggling into a light coat, froze. “Alex, what are you talking about?”

Alex’s face remained impassive as he regarded her.
“Dad and I had a talk last night, and we think maybe something’s wrong with me.”

“I don’t understand,” Ellen breathed, although she was afraid she understood all too well. She and Marsh had barely spoken to each other this morning, and today he had, for the first time in her memory, failed to call her even once. And now, apparently, he was going to use Alex as a pawn in their battle. Except that she wasn’t going to tolerate it, particularly when she knew that in the end, the loser would not be her, but Alex himself.

“I’ve been doing some reading,” she heard Alex saying.

“Stop!” Ellen said, her voice sharper than she’d intended. “I don’t care what you’ve been reading, and I don’t care what your father and you have decided. You’re still a patient of Raymond Torres’s, and you have an appointment for this afternoon, which you’re going to keep, whether you want to or not.”

Alex hesitated only a split second before he nodded. “Can I at least take this up to my room?” he asked, raising the cage.

“No. Leave it outside on the patio.”