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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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Malenko’s eyes flared. “‘TNT for dynamite sex. Get off with a bang.’”
The old catch phrases for the
stuff.
“And I suppose your husband doesn’t know that either—which is why you’re here.”
Rachel knew that under ordinary circumstances she would have dismissed
Malenko’s unctuously manipulative manner and got up and left. But she suddenly felt a preternatural numbness from all the grief and guilt that had wracked her soul for the last weeks and just didn’t care about his obtuseness. Perhaps it was just the relief of getting it all out—like lancing a boil. “I’ve mentally crippled my son,” she said softly. “I just don’t want him to suffer. I don’t want him to go through life feeling inadequate and inferior.”
“And that is why you’ve not told him.”
She nodded.
“Probably a good reason.” Malenko moved back to his desk chair and sat down. “I’d like to meet your husband.”
“I don’t want him to know.”
“Telling him is your business, not mine, Mrs. Whitman. But I think we all should meet again to weigh the options.”
Weigh the
options?
She looked up. “Are you saying there’s something that can be done?”
“I’m saying simply that we should meet again.” He glanced at his watch then closed Dylan’s folder and dropped it on a pile of others with a conclusive snap. “What kind of work is your husband in?” The discussion was over.
If he had some experimental procedure in mind, he wasn’t talking. Yet Rachel felt a flicker of promise. “Recruitment. Martin’s in the recruitment business.”
“Ah, you mean a head hunter.”
“Yes, for the high-tech industry.”
Malenko nodded in approval. “So he matches up eggheads with egghead companies.”
“Something like that.”
“Very good. Is it his own business?”
“Yes.”
“And business is good, no doubt?”
She nodded. She felt emotionally drained. “Mmmm.”
Malenko smiled, probably because it suggested that they could afford their pricey services. Then he picked up Dylan’s folder. “I will look these over more closely,” he said. “Let me suggest we meet next week, and with your husband. About the MRI, I will explain that you came in here on referral from a local friend, and we had a scan done as a matter of protocol.”
He was saying that she could lie, and he’d swear to it. “Thank you.”
“You can make an appointment with Marie. Good day.”
Rachel left the building, torn between renewed hope and the overpowering desire to drive home and fall into a long dreamless sleep.
Through the window, Lucius Malenko watched Mrs. Rachel Whitman cross the parking lot to her car, a gold Nissan Maxima. Not a Jaguar or BMW, but also not a Ford Escort. He watched her pull out to the road that would lead back to her perfect little seaview home on the perfect little hill surrounded by perfectly nurtured horticulture.
He had seen her likes by the dozens over the years: yuppies, suburbies, and middle-aged country-club parents of different ethnicities and races—all driven by guilt and vanity and all devotees of the new American religion of self-improvement. From birth and even before, they were obsessed with rearing the supertot. They put toy computers in their children’s cribs. They sent them to bed with Mozart and bilingual CDs. They muscled their way into the best preschools. Infertile couples advertised for egg donors in the Yale Daily News. Others doled out thousand of dollars for the sperm of Nobel laureates. Some had even consulted geneticists, hoping that they could locate a “smart” gene to be stimulated. There is none, of course, nor any known cluster or combination, but that didn’t prevent people from spending small fortunes. It was all so amazing and amusing.
“Nobody wants to be normal anymore,” he said aloud.
As Mrs. Rachel Whitman drove away, a new silver BMW 530 two-door pulled into the slot just vacated by her. It was Mrs. Vanessa Watts, coming in to consult about her Julian’s behavior problems. Years ago, she had come in just like this Rachel Whitman, gnarled with despair that her youngster was distracted all the time, unfocused, a slow learner, and that he had scored in the fortieth percentile on his math aptitude and fifty-five on the verbal. She was likewise desperate to know what could be done to boost his ranks, otherwise he would never get into Cornell where his father had gone or even into Littleton State where, after some unpleasantness regarding a paper on Jonathan Swift, she eventually earned a doctorate in English literature. And that just could not be—not her Julian. No way. It was unacceptable, and they would do
anything, pay anything
to make him a brighter bulb.
He watched Vanessa Watts cross the lot to the front entrance as she had on several occasions to come up and complain that they had succeeded too
well—that her Julian was too absorbed in his studies, in his projects, that he had become antisocial: that his filament was all too brilliant.
Never satisfied, these bastards. Especially this one—Professor Loose Cannon. And now she was here with her ultimatum. Fortunately, he had one of his own.
He picked up the phone and dialed Sheila MacPhearson.
B
rendan found Nicole in her ballet class in a building off Bloomfield Prep’s central quad. She was with seven other girls and an instructor in a dance room with mirrors and bars.
Through the glass door, Nicole was dressed in white tights. Her shoulders were bare, giving her long-neck Modigliani proportions. She looked like a swan. They were going through motions called out by a woman instructor dressed in a jogging outfit.
Because it was the last day of classes, the place was empty, so Brendan watched without being discovered. Nicole was perched with one leg up on the bar in line with the other girls. In the reflecting mirror, they looked like twin rows of exotic roosting birds, their faces in a numbed tensity. Suddenly the instructor said something, and they went into leg-flashing exercises. Nicole was second in line at the mirror, her long legs kicking out with elegant precision as if spring-loaded. From a CD player flowed the sweet violin strains of
Swan Lake
. The instructor shouted something, and on cue Nicole broke into her solo, going through complex leaps and pirouettes across the room. Brendan was amazed to see how totally involved she was in the movement, and so precise and athletic. Her teeth were clenched, muscles bunched up for each vault, her shoulders and face aspic’d with sweat, those muscular semaphore legs moving with effortless grace as she flashed around the room. She was a diva in the making.
When the instructor turned off the music and announced class was
over, Brendan left the building and waited for her behind some trees in the quadrangle.
Several minutes later, he saw her with two boys coming down the walk toward him. She had changed and was heading for the cafeteria.
“What are you doing here?” Nicole said when he stepped out from behind a tree.
“I have to t-talk to you.”
“How did you find me?”
“That’s n-n-not important.” He pretended the two boys weren’t there. “Look, we h-have to talk.” According to her schedule she had a forty-minute lunch break before her next class.
“I have a conference with one of my teachers. I can’t.” She made no effort to introduce Brendan to the others, and he was grateful.
“It’s very important,” Brendan insisted. He had not foreseen a conference lunch. Or maybe she was just making that up.
She looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. Call me later.”
He had promised Richard to take him for his doctor’s appointment in two hours. “I can’t. We have t-t-to talk now. Just two minutes.”
“Hey, man, she said she’s got a conference,” the taller boy said, trying to puff up. He was a smooth-faced kid who looked like the poster boy for Junior Brooks Brothers. He was dressed in beige chinos and a stiff blue oxford shirt. The other Nicole drone, a black kid with wireless glasses, had on the same chinos but a white golf shirt. “What part of no don’t you understand?”
“Now there’s an original expression,” Brendan said. “D-d-did you read that in
A Hundred Best
Comebacks?”
The kid looked baffled, but before he could respond, Nicole said, “Forget it, I know him.”
“You sure?” asked the taller boy, eyeing Brendan as if he were toxic waste.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“Good luck,” the black kid said to her, probably referring to her conference. Then he glanced at Brendan’s baggy jeans and black T-shirt with the multicolored tie-dyed starburst on the front. “Nice threads,” he sneered.
“Up your J. Crew b-bunghole.” As soon as the words were out he felt a surprising flicker of pleasure.
“Cut the shit, both of you,” Nicole said.
As the boys moved away, one of them said, “Speaking of the devil.”
Coming down the path was an older man in a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.
Nicole’s face went to autolight: “Hi, Mr. Kaminsky.” She beamed at him as he approached. “I’ll be right there.”
The man scowled at Nicole. “You know where I’ll be.” He did not look pleased. As he walked away, he glanced at Brendan, and recognition seemed to flit across his face, but he continued down the path toward the next building.
It was the bushy-haired guy in the diner. And the one she had shacked up with that same night.
“I’ll catch you later,” she said to the other boys, dismissing them. As they walked away, she looked at Brendan blankly.
“Your teacher,” he said, barely able to hide his dismay.
“So?”
“Nothing.” But he could tell that she remembered Brendan seeing them holding hands at Angie’s. She had no idea, of course, what he had seen through her window.
“Okay, make it fast.”
“I had a dream the other night. It was c-c-crazy, but I was in a hospital bed.”
She looked at him incredulously. “So?”
“I had never been in a hospital before, at least I d-don’t remember.”
Nicole checked her watch. “You’ve got twenty seconds.”
“M-Mr. Nisha was there. He said I had to be a good boy and take my medicine. It was crazy, and I don’t know what or who he was—just that image floating and ‘Mr. Nisha wants you to be happy’ stuff. I don’t understand. Also, there were other kids there, too.”
Nicole continued to stare at him blankly. “I’ve got an A hanging on this conference, and if I’m late, he gets pissed and takes off, and I’m screwed out of a four-oh. I’m not going to lose that because you had some stupid dream.” She started away.
“Okay, but just one question,” he pleaded, chasing after her.
“Later,” she snapped. “At the club party.”
Dells was sponsoring a Scholar’s Night Saturday for caddy scholarship winners and the publication of Vanessa Watts’s book. Brendan was scheduled to serve hors d’œuvres.
Brendan moved in front of her. “Please, j-just one question.”
“What?” Her otherwise remote, expressionless face suddenly tightened like a fist.
“Did you ever go to a hospital?”
“No.”
“Nicole, think!” he said, running after her.
“I said no.”
“Never?”
“NO.”
“You sure?”
Suddenly she stopped. “Get out of my
way.”
Her voice hit a nail.
He caught her arm. “Can I look at the top of your head, please?” He moved his hands to part the hair on her crown.
“Get out of here.” And she whacked his hand.
“Do you have any scars on your head?”
She did not answer him and ran down the path to the cafeteria. Before entering, she stopped in her tracks. With an almost robotic movement, she turned and looked back at him for a long moment. Then she ran into the building.
Brendan followed her. The cafeteria entrance was toward the rear. He stuck his head in. Because most upperclassmen had left for the summer, the place was only partly filled with students.
In the rear of the room he spotted Nicole and Mr. Kaminsky at a table by themselves. They were not eating, but talking heatedly. After a few minutes, Nicole slipped him a package. He looked in and slipped out the contents, inspected it then put it back in the envelope, dumped it into his briefcase, and left.
She followed him with her eyes until they landed on Brendan just a moment before he slipped out of view.
Instantly, he disappeared out a side door, leaving her wondering if he had noticed that she had given Kaminsky a videocassette.
T
ravis could tell time, of course. But he had no idea what hour of day it was or what day of the week—or how many days he had been in this room. Everything was a big bright blur. But he figured it was two days since the needle test, because his neck didn’t hurt anymore—yesterday it was like bee stings.
Today was another test day, but no needle this time, Vera said. He also knew that if he didn’t cooperate, they’d send him back to his room and turn off the lights for hours. That was the one punishment he couldn’t take. Total blackness in that locked room. The first time they did that he screamed and cried until he thought he would die. In fact, he knew he would rather die than go through that again.
Vera came in with Phillip. Although Travis could walk, they put him in a wheelchair and snapped a harness on him like a seat belt so he couldn’t get up.
For the first time they brought him outside the room.
He was in a long dimly lit corridor with pipes overhead. On either side of the corridor were windows with shades drawn down from the outside. The only sounds were from television sets. There must have been a set in each room all playing the same stuff because the sound followed him as they pushed him down the hall.
At the end of the corridor, they turned left into a room full of shiny metal equipment and computer terminals. They wheeled him to a table near a computer with some electronic equipment attached to it.
“Don’t be afraid, this isn’t going to hurt,” Vera said. “We’re just going to look at pictures of your brain.”
Travis’s heart pounded. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the looks of those machines and another man sitting in the dark rear of the room at another computer terminal.
Phillip pulled up a chair in front of him. “Listen, kid, this is going to be a piece of cake. You’re not going to feel anything, it’s not going to hurt. just answer a few questions and do a few puzzles. That’s it. It’ll be fun, okay?”
Travis nodded.
“It’s just a simple test. Vera’s going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give the answers. Got that? So, be a good boy.” Phillip stared at him hard, and Travis heard:
Or else
I’m
going to take you back to your room and
turn
off
the
lights.
Vera came over and put gobs of jelly stuff on his head and rubbed it into his scalp through his hair. It didn’t smell bad, but it felt yucky. She told him it would wash right out. Phillip then fitted onto his head a tight black rubbery cap. It had lots of red wires attached like snakes. Those Phillip connected to the machine and the computer. He pulled the cap tightly over Travis’s eyebrows and fastened it across his chin so that only his face was exposed. Then he taped some wires on Travis’s cheeks and the space above his eyebrows.
Travis sat still at the table, listening to the faint hum of the machine.
When they were set, Phillip joined the other man at the computer in the back, and Vera sat at the machine. “Just relax and answer the questions,” she began. “Some of the questions will be easy, some will be hard. But the important thing is that you try the best you can. Okay? Because the better you do, the sooner you go home.”
Travis looked at her blankly.
As if reading his mind, she said, “Yeah, for real. You do real good on these and you can go back to your mom.”
He didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance. “Okay.”
She set the small clock down beside her and opened the booklet she had. “How many states in the United States?”
“Fifty.”
“Good.”
“How many days in two weeks?”
“Fourteen.”
“Name me six types of trees.”
“Um … Pine, oak, birch, beech, magnolia, orange.”
Vera nodded and scratched in her book.
She asked several easy questions like that, then said they were going to switch to different kinds of questions. “While training for a marathon, Jack ran fifty-two miles in four days, how many miles per day did he average in this period?”
“Thirteen.”
“Excellent.”
After a few more like that, the questions got harder. “Now I’m going to say some letters, and you repeat them after me.
T-R-S-M.”
“T-R-S-M.”
“Good.”
“Do the same with these:
P-G-1-C-R-W.”
“P-G-I-C-R-W.”
“M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”
“M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”
Vera nodded. “Good,” she said. “Now give me the letters in the backwards:
Y-L-X-F-R-W.”
“W-R-F-X-L-Y.”
“Do the same with these:
X-D-E-W-Q-A-F.”
“F-A-Q-W-E-D-X.”
Vera whispered, “Jesus!”
Then she did the same, adding one more letter each time, until he repeated a ten-letter series backward. He could tell he got them right because Vera’s face lit up as she marked down the score and checked the computer monitor.
“Okay, now I’m going to read you a sentence, and I want you to repeat it exactly as I read it. Okay? Good: ‘
Janet,
who
lives
on Brown Street, got for her birthday a
dollhouse
with green
shutters
and a red
roof.’
”
“‘Janet,
who
lives
on Brown Street, got for her birthday a
dollhouse
with green
shutters
and a red
roof.’”
This went on for almost an hour until he was tired and wanted to rest.
When the testing was over, Vera said, “You’re a very bright little guy.”
“Can I go home now?”
“Soon,” Vera said. She disconnected all the wires on his cap, removed it, and wiped his head with a towel. His scalp was sweaty from the cap and sticky with the jelly. “For the time being, we’re going to take you outside.”
“But you said I could go home.”
She didn’t answer, just nodded Phillip over.
They pushed him out of the test room and down the corridor to a staircase at the end where Phillip and the other man lifted the wheelchair and carried him up to the top. Vera then pushed him through a series of rooms to an outside deck.
The shock of the bright sky made him wince. It felt good to be in the warm open air. There were tall pine trees all around. In the distance he could see a lake sparkling in the sunlight. It must have been late morning.
But what caught his attention was the sound of children. To the far right he spotted a small playground with climbing structures and a slide with kids on it. Nearby a woman watched them.
Two of the children had white bandages on their heads.
One of them was on the grass dancing with someone.
At first he thought it was another kid dressed up in some kind of costume. But when the girl spun around, Travis realized that she was attached to a life-sized doll—that the thing’s feet and hands were strapped to the girl’s shoes and hands, and that she was laughing and chanting something, although the words weren’t right.
It took Travis a moment to make out the doll, but when the kid turned into a shaft of sunlight he could see that it was a big blue stuffed elephant with a wide grin and human hands. The same stupid creature they had painted on the walls of his room. And in the puppet-show video they played.
And in a singsongy voice, the woman chanted: “Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha.”

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