John Saul - Brain Child

Alex shrugged. “Curious, I guess.”

Torres placed his pen on the desk and leaned back in his chair. “If I were you, I think I’d be excited. You’re finally going home after three months — it seems to me that should be exciting.”

“Except I’m not really going home, am I?” Alex asked, his voice as expressionless as his eyes. “I mean, Mom and Dad have moved, so I’ll be going to a house I’ve never lived in before.”

“Do you wish you were going back to the house you grew up in?”

Alex hesitated, then shook his head. “I guess it doesn’t matter where I go, since I don’t remember the old house anyway.”

“You don’t have any feelings about it at all?”

“No.” Alex uttered the single word with no expression whatsoever.

And that, Torres silently reminded himself, was the crux of the matter. Alex had no feelings, no emotions. That was not to say that Alex’s recovery had not been remarkable; indeed, it was very little short of miraculous. The boy could walk and talk, see, hear, and touch. But he seemed not to be able to feel at all.

Even the news that he was being released from the Institute had elicited no emotional response from him. Rather, he’d accepted the news with the same detachment with which he now accepted everything. And that, Torres knew, was the one factor that kept the medical world from viewing the operation as a complete success.

“What about going back to La Paloma?” Torres pressed.

Alex shifted in his chair and started to cross his legs. On the second try, his left ankle came to rest on his right knee.

“I … I guess I wonder what it will be like,” he finally said. “I keep wondering if I’ll recognize anything, or if it’s all going to be like it was when I first woke up.”

“You’ve remembered a lot since then,” Torres replied.

Alex shrugged indifferently. “But I keep wondering if I really remember anything, or if I’m just learning things all over again.”

“Not possible,” Torres stated flatly. “It has to be recovery — nobody could learn things as fast as you have. And don’t forget that when you first woke up, you spoke. You hadn’t forgotten language.”

“There were a lot of words I didn’t understand,” Alex reminded him. “And sometimes there still are.” He stood up and took a shaky step, paused, then took another.

“Take it easy, Alex,” Torres told him. “Don’t demand too much of yourself. It’s all going to take time. And speaking of time, I think we’d better get started.” He waited while Alex swiveled his chair around so both of them were facing the screen that had been set up in a corner of the large office. When Alex was ready, Torres switched off the lights. A picture flashed on the screen.

“What is it?” Torres asked.

Alex didn’t hesitate so much as a second. “An amoeba.”

“Right. When did you take biology?”

“Last year. It was Mr. Landry’s class.”

“Can you tell me what Mr. Landry looked like?”

Alex thought a minute, but nothing came. “No.”

“All right. What about your grade?”

“An A. But that was easy — I always got A’s in science.”

Torres said nothing, and changed the slide.

“That’s the Mona Lisa,” Alex said promptly. “Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Good enough. Is there another name for it?”

“ La Gioconda.”

The pictures changed again and again, and each time Alex correctly identified the image on the screen. Finally the slide show ended, and Torres turned the lights back on. “Well? What do you think?”

Alex shrugged. “I could have learned most of that stuff since I’ve been here,” he said. “All I’ve been doing is reading.”

“What about your grades? Did you read them here, too?”

“No. But Mom told me. I don’t really remember much of anything about any of my classes. Just names of teachers and that kind of thing. But I don’t see anything. Know what I mean?”

Torres nodded, and rifled through some of his notes. “Having problems visualizing things? No mental images?”

Alex nodded.

“But you don’t have problems visualizing things you’ve seen since the accident?”

“No. That’s easy. And sometimes, when I see something, it seems familiar, but I can’t quite put it together. Then, when someone tells me what it is, it’s almost like I remember it, but not quite. It’s hard to describe.”

“Sort of like déjà vu?”

Alex knit his brows, then shook his head. “Isn’t that where you think what’s happening now has happened before?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s not like that at all.” Alex searched his mind, trying to find the right words to describe the strange sensations he had sometimes. “They’re like half-memories,” he finally said. “It’s like sometimes I see something, and I think I remember it, but I really don’t.”

“But that’s just it,” Torres told him. “I think you do remember, but your brain isn’t healed yet. You’ve had a lot of damage to your brain, Alex. I was able to put it back together again, but I couldn’t do it perfectly. So there are a lot of connections that aren’t there yet. It’s as though part of your brain knows where the data it’s looking for are stored, but can’t get there. But it doesn’t stop trying, and sometimes — and I think this will happen more and more — it finds a new route, and gets what it’s after. But it’s a little different. Not the data itself — just the way you remember it. I think you’ll have more and more of those half-memories over the next few months. In time, as your brain finds and establishes new paths through itself, it’ll happen less and less. And eventually, everything left in your mind after the accident will become accessible again.” A buzzer sounded. Torres picked up the phone and spoke for a moment, then hung up. “Your parents are here,” he told Alex. “Why don’t you go over to the lab, and I’ll have a talk with them? And when you’re done, that’s it. We check you out, and you only have to come back for a couple of hours a day.”

Alex got to his feet and started toward the door in the shambling gait that, most of the time, got him where he wanted to go. He was still unsteady, but he hadn’t actually lost his footing for a week, and each day he was doing better. Still, he wasn’t allowed to attempt stairs without someone there to help him, and he used a cane whenever he wanted to go more than a few yards. But it was coming back to him.

The door opened just before Alex got to it, and his parents stepped inside. He stopped short, leaning his weight on the cane, and bent his head to kiss his mother’s cheek as she gave him a hug. Then he shook his father’s hand, and started out of the office.

“Alex?” Ellen asked. “Where are you going?”

“My tests, Mom,” Alex replied, his voice flat. “Then we can go home, I guess.” He turned away, and shambled out of the room. Ellen, her brows furrowed, watched him go, then stood perfectly still for several long moments. When at last she spoke, she still faced the door.

“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stand this, Raymond,” she said, her voice trembling. “He isn’t changing, is he? He doesn’t really care if he goes home or not.”

“Sit down, Ellen.” Torres gestured the Lonsdales toward the sofa, but remained standing himself, preferring to roam the room while he brought them up to date on Alex’s progress.

“So that’s it,” he finished thirty mintues later. “Physically and intellectually, he’s doing better than we could possibly have hoped for.”

“But still no emotions,” Ellen said, her voice dull. Then she sighed, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to learn not to expect miracles, don’t I?”