Ted Kosmatka - The Games

Evan glanced out of the tube, but the white coats weren’t looking at him. They stared at their computer terminal.

The man with a tie was the first to look up from the glowing screen. He wore an expression Evan had never seen pointed at him before. Evan’s stomach turned to ice.

HOSPITALS ALWAYS stank. There was something strange and sickly about the air in the building, and the breeze coming through the screen window hardly improved it. Evan could smell the garbage that lay heaped in the alley several floors below. Still, he moved closer to the window, pretending interest in the view because looking out the window was easier than looking at his mother. She sat at the big, glossy table. She was crying, though she did it silently—one of the tricks she’d picked up during her time with her last boyfriend.

They’d been in this room for a while now, waiting.

When the door finally opened, Evan flinched. Three men walked in. He’d never seen any of them before, but their coats were dark, and all of them wore ties. It was bad. Men with ties always meant something bad. Evan’s mother sat up quickly and wiped the corners of her eyes with a napkin she kept in her purse.

The men smiled at Evan and shook his mother’s hand in turns, introducing themselves. The one who called himself Walden got right to the point. “Evan’s tests were abnormal,” he said.

He was a big man with a face like a square block, and he wore little wire glasses perched across his nose. Evan hadn’t seen anyone with glasses like that in a long time; he tried not to stare.

“Where’s the doctor?” Evan’s mother asked.

“Evan’s case has been transferred to me.”

“But they told me Dr. Martin was going to be Evan’s doctor. I thought that’s why they brought him in.”

“Dr. Martin himself felt that Evan’s case required special attention that he could not provide.”

“But I thought he was supposed to be a specialist.”

“Oh, I assure you that he is. But we all feel Evan’s case requires … a more systematized process of inquiry.”

Evan’s mother stared at the man. “The teacher died, didn’t he?”

“Tim Jacobs? No, he’ll survive.”

“Then I want to leave.”

“Miss Chandler, we feel—”

“Right now, with my son, I want to leave.”

“It’s not as simple as that anymore.” He pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. Instead, he stepped his foot on the seat and leaned an arm casually across his extended knee. He towered over the sitting woman. “The man didn’t die, but he’s still having some motor coordination problems. We’re not sure how your son managed to access the game’s protocols the way he did. Those VR tutorials are hardwired and aren’t meant to be altered from the inside.”

“There must have been a glitch.”

“There was no glitch. Your son did something. He changed something. A man almost died because of that.”

“It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” His mother’s voice was soft.

“I hear that teacher was hard on Evan. I hear he mocked him in front of other students.”

His mother was silent.

“Miss Chandler, we’re very concerned about Evan.” The man who called himself Walden finally sank into the chair he’d been using as a footrest, and now his two silent companions pulled out chairs and sat. Walden laced his hands together in front of him on the table. “He’s a special child with special needs.”

He waited for Evan’s mother to respond, and when she didn’t, he continued. “We’ve tested many children here at these facilities in the last seven years. Many children. And we’ve never come across anyone with your son’s particular mixture of gifts and disabilities.”

“Gifts?” His mother’s voice was harsh. “You call what happened a gift?”

“It could be. We need time to do more tests. Your son appears to have a very unusual form of synesthesia in addition to several other neurological abnormalities.”

“Syna-what?”

“An abnormal cross-activation between brain regions. Often caused by structural malformations in the fusiform gyrus, but to be honest, in Evan’s case, we’re not sure. Some individuals conflate colors with shapes, or experience smells with certain sounds. But Evan’s situation is more complex than that. His perception of numbers is somehow involved.”

“But he doesn’t understand numbers.”

“He tested off the scale for numbers utility.”

“He knows what numbers look like, and he can tell you the name of a number if you write it, but numbers don’t mean anything to him.”

“On some level, they do.”

“He can’t even tell you when one number is bigger than another. They’re just words to him.”

“Those spatial puzzles he solved were more than just puzzles. Some of them were also tricks. Some of them would have required complex calculus to solve correctly.”

“Calculus? He can’t count to twenty.”

“Something in him can. Individuals with one form of synesthesia are often found to have another. We’re not sure how Evan does what he does. And in that VR game, we’re not even sure what it is that he did, let alone how. Evan needs special attention. He’s going to need a special school.”

“He’s already in a special school,” she said, but her voice was resigned.

“Yes, I’ve looked over his records. Miss Chandler, I have the authority to alter his public tracking. There is no reason why your boy should end up mopping floors somewhere.”

“You can change his track? You can do that?”

The man nodded. “I have the authority.”

“But why, after what happened?”

“Because we’ve never seen another boy like him. We’re going to have to make up a new track. The Evan Chandler track. And to be honest, we’re not really sure where it leads just yet.”

EVAN’S MOTHER was hysterical the day they came for him. The sedatives quieted her as soft-voiced men lowered her to the seedy couch. The boy’s things were packed into a crate, and her drug-fuzzied mind found preoccupation in that for a moment.

Ten years old, and everything he owned fit into a single white box. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was, and two men in dark suits carried the box away between them.

She saw the faces of her neighbors in the open doorway, and she knew they assumed this was an arrest, or just another eviction. It was common. Their feral eyes shuffled through her possessions—the worn couch, her two plastic chairs, the small wooden coffee table with its wobbly leg—scouting for something to grab once the authorities were gone and her things were pushed out into the street.

“I don’t see why he has to leave,” she said. It was a plea.

“It is better for the boy this way,” one of them, a blond woman, said. “We can better nurture his talents if we control the environment. You’ll be able to visit as often as you’d like.”

Evan’s mother wiped the tears from her eyes and struggled unsteadily to her feet. There was no fighting it. A part of her had known that for a while now, since before what happened to Mr. Jacobs, even. Evan was different. It was always going to come to this; the world would take him, one way or the other.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

It was an hour’s drive across the city. In the van, Evan’s mother rocked him until the vehicle finally pulled to rest before a building surrounded by playgrounds. The group filed out. Children shouted and played in the distance while one boy stood gazing up at a flagpole. Evan’s mother stared. That will be Evan, she knew. Strange even here. Odd among the odd.

She bent and kissed her son. “My special boy,” she said, and squeezed him until a female agent tugged at the child’s hand. Evan looked back and waved goodbye.