Робин Кук - Mutation

Victor tried to see around Colleen. He spotted a man sitting in the chair next to her desk, hunched over, holding his head.

“What’s the problem?” Victor whispered.

“Something about his son,” Colleen said. “I think something has happened to the boy and he wants to take some time off.”

Victor felt perspiration appear in the palms of his hands and a constriction in his throat. “Send him in,” he managed.

He couldn’t help but feel a twinge of empathy, having gone through the same extraordinary measures to get a child himself. The thought that something might now be wrong with the Hobbs boy revived all of his apprehensions concerning VJ.

“Maurice...” Hobbs began, but he had to stop while he choked back tears. “My boy was about to turn three. You never met him. He was such a joy. The center of our life. He was a genius.”

“What happened?” Victor asked, almost afraid to hear.

“He died!” Hobbs said with sudden anger breaking through his sadness.

Victor swallowed hard. His throat was as dry as sandpaper. “An accident?” he asked.

Hobbs shook his head. “They don’t know exactly what happened. It started with a seizure. When we got him to the Children’s Hospital, they decided he had edema of the brain: brain swelling. There was nothing they could do. He never regained consciousness. Then his heart stopped.”

A heavy silence hung over the office. Finally, Hobbs said, “I’d like to take some time off.”

“Of course,” said Victor.

Hobbs slowly got up and went out.

Victor sat staring after him for a good ten minutes. For once the last place in the world he wanted to go was the lab.

The small alarm on Marsha’s desk went off, signaling the end of the fifty-minute session with Jasper Lewis, an angry fifteen-year-old boy with a smudge of whiskers along his chin line. He was slouched in the chair opposite Marsha’s, acting bored. The fact of the matter was that the kid was heading for real trouble.

“What we haven’t discussed yet is your hospitalization,” Marsha said. She had the boy’s file open on her lap.

Jasper hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward Marsha’s desk. “I thought that bell means the session is over.”

“It means it is almost over,” Marsha said. “How do you feel about your three months in the hospital now that you are back home?” Marsha’s impression was that the boy had benefited from the hospital’s structured environment, but she wanted to learn his opinion.

“It was okay,” Jasper said.

“Just okay?” asked Marsha encouragingly. It was so tough to draw this boy out.

“It was like fine,” Jasper said, shrugging. “You know, no big deal.”

Obviously it was going to take a bit more effort to extract the boy’s opinion, and Marsha made a note of reminder to herself in the margin of the boy’s file. She’d start the next session with that issue. Marsha closed the file and made eye contact with Jasper. “It’s been good to see you,” Marsha said. “See you next week.”

“Sure,” Jasper said, avoiding Marsha’s eyes as he got up and awkwardly left the room.

Marsha went back to her desk to dictate her notes. Flipping open the chart, she looked at her preadmission summary. Jasper had had a conduct disorder since early childhood. Once he hit age eighteen, the diagnosis would change to an antisocial personality disorder. On top of that, he also had what appeared to Marsha as a schizoid personality disorder.

Reviewing the salient features of the boy’s history, Marsha noted the frequent lying, the fights at school, the record of truancy, the vindictive behavior and fantasies. Her eye stopped at the statement: cannot experience affection or show emotion. She suddenly pictured VJ pulling away from her embrace, looking at her coldly, his blue eyes frigid as mountain lakes. She forced her eyes back down on the chart. Chooses solitary activities, does not desire close relationships, has no close friends.

Marsha’s pulse quickened. Was she reading a summary of her own son? With trepidation, she reread the review of Jasper’s personality. There were a number of uncomfortable correlations. She was happy when her train of thought was interrupted by her nurse and secretary, Jean Colbert, a prim and proper New Englander with auburn hair. As she looked up, her eye caught a sentence that she had underlined in red: Jasper was essentially reared by an aunt, since his mother worked two jobs to support the family.

“You ready for your next patient?” Jean asked.

Marsha took a deep breath. “Remember those articles I saved on day care and its psychological effects?” she asked.

“Sure do,” Jean said. “I filed them in the storage room.”

“How about pulling them for me,” Marsha said, trying to mask her concern.

“Sure,” Jean said. She paused, then asked: “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Marsha said, picking up the next chart. As she scanned her recent notes, twelve-year-old Nancy Traverse slunk into the room and tried to disappear into one of the chairs. She pulled her head low into her shoulders like a turtle.

Marsha moved over to the therapy area, taking the seat opposite Nancy. She tried to remember where the girl had left off at the previous visit, describing her forays into sex.

The session began and dragged on. Marsha tried to concentrate, but fears for VJ floated at the back of her mind along with guilt for having worked when he had been little. Not that he’d ever minded when she’d left. But as Marsha well knew, that in itself could be a symptom of psychopathology.

After Hobbs left, Victor tried to busy himself with correspondence, partly to avoid the lab, partly to take his mind off the terrible news that Hobbs had told him. But his thoughts soon drifted back to the circumstances of the boy’s death. Edema of the brain, meaning acute brain swelling, had been the immediate cause. But what could have been the cause of the edema? He wished Hobbs had been able to give him more details. It was the lack of a specific diagnosis that fed Victor’s fears.

“Damn!” Victor yelled as he slammed his open palm on the top of his desk. He stood up abruptly and stared out the window. He had a good view of the clock tower from his office. The hands had been frozen in the distant past at quarter past two.

“I should have known better!” Victor said to himself, pounding his right fist into his left palm with enough strength to make them both tingle. The Hobbs child’s death brought back all the concern Victor had had for VJ — concern he had finally put to rest. While Marsha fretted over the boy’s psychological state, Victor’s worries had more to do with the boy’s physical being. When VJ’s IQ dropped, then stabilized at what was still an exceptional level, Victor had felt terror. It had taken years for him to overcome his fear and relax. But the Hobbs boy’s sudden death raised his fears again. Victor was particularly concerned since the parallels between VJ and the Hobbs boy did not stop with their conception. Victor understood that, like VJ, the Hobbs boy was something of a child prodigy. Victor had been keeping surreptitious tabs on the child’s progress. He was curious to see if the boy would suffer as precipitous a drop in IQ as VJ had. But now, Victor only wanted to learn the circumstances of the child’s tragic death.

Victor went to his computer terminal and cleared the screen. He called up his personal file on Baby Hobbs. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, he just thought that if he scanned the data, some explanation for the child’s death might occur to him. The screen stayed dark past the usual access time. Confused, Victor hit the Execute button again. Answering him, the word SEARCHING blinked in the screen’s lower-right-hand corner. Then, to Victor’s surprise, the computer told him there was no such file.