John Saul - Brain Child

“Nothing,” Alex repeated. “Nothing happened to me, and he’s not trying to prove anything.”

Bloch shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe nothing happened, but I’ll bet you thought something was happening. Want to tell me about it?”

Alex’s eyes finally shifted to the lab technician. “Don’t you know?”

“You think Torres tells me anything?” Peter countered. “I know we’re stimulating your brain. But what it’s all about, I don’t know.”

“But that is what it’s about,” Alex said quietly. “It’s about what gets into my brain, and how my brain reacts.” Then his expression twisted into a strange smile. “Except that it’s not my brain anymore, is it?” When Peter Bloch made no answer, Alex answered his own question.

“It’s not my brain anymore. Ever since I woke up from the operation, it’s been Dr. Torres’s brain.”

Raymond Torres wordlessly took Alex’s test reports from Peter Bloch’s hands and began flipping through them. He frowned slightly, then the frown deepened into a scowl.

“You must have made a mistake,” he said finally, tossing the thin sheaf of papers onto the desk as he faced his head technician. “None of these results make any sense at all. These are what you’d get from a brain that was awake, not asleep.”

“Then there’s no mistake,” Bloch replied, his face set into a mask of forced unconcern, As always when dealing with Raymond Torres, he would have preferred to roll the test results up tight and shove them down the man’s arrogant throat. But the money was too good and the work too light to throw it away over something as trivial as his dislike of his employer, who, he noticed, was now glowering at him.

“What do you mean, no mistake? Are you telling me that Alex Lonsdale was awake during this?”

Peter Bloch felt as if the floor had just tilted. “Of course he was,” he said as forcefully as he could, though he was suddenly certain he knew exactly what had happened. “You wrote the order yourself.”

“Indeed I did,” Torres replied. “And I have a copy of it right here.” He opened his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of pink paper, which he silently handed to Bloch. There, near the bottom of the page, were the words: “Anesthesia: SPTL.”

Once more, Peter pictured Alex Lonsdale, his face impassive, sitting thumbing through a catalog.

And watching him.

How long had he been there? Apparently, long enough.

“I thought … I thought it was highly unusual, sir,” he mumbled.

“Unusual?” Torres demanded, his voice crackling with harsh sarcasm. “You thought it was unusual to put a patient out with Sodium Pentothal while inducing hallucinations in his brain?”

“No, sir,” the technician muttered, thoroughly cowed. “I thought it was unusual not to. I should … well, I should have called.”

Torres was fairly trembling with rage now. “What, exactly, are you talking about?”

Exactly three minutes and twenty-two seconds later, when Bloch had returned to his office, Torres knew. His eyes fixed on the altered anesthesia prescription for several long seconds, then shifted slowly to the technician.

“And you didn’t think you ought to call me about this?” he asked, his voice deceptively low.

“I … well, the kid told me a long time ago he wanted to take the test without the Pentothal. I thought he’d finally talked you into letting him try.”

Raymond Torres rose to his feet, and leaned across the desk so that his face was close to Peter Bloch’s. When he spoke, he made no attempt to keep his fury under control. “Talked me into it?” he shouted. “We never even discussed such a thing! Do you have any idea of exactly what goes on in those tests?”

“Yes, sir,” Peter Bloch managed.

“Yes, sir,” Torres mimicked, his tone icy. “We deliberately induce pain, Mr. Bloch. We induce physical pain, and mental pain, and of the worst sort. The only thing that makes it tolerable at all is that the patient is unconscious. Without the anesthetic, we are at risk of driving a patient insane.”

“He’s … he seems to be all right,” Bloch stammered, but Torres froze him with a look.

“And perhaps he is,” Torres agreed. “But if he is, it is only because the boy has no emotions. Or, as you have so inelegantly put it in the past, because he’s a ‘zombie.’ ”

Bloch flinched, but stood his ground. “I was going to shut it off,” he insisted. “I was watching him carefully, and if it looked like it was getting too bad, I was going to shut it off in spite of your orders.”

“Not good enough,” Torres replied. “If you had any questions about those orders, you should have called me immediately. You didn’t. Well, perhaps you will do this: go to your lab and begin packing anything that is personally yours. Then you will wait there for a security guard to come and escort you out of the building. Your check will be sent to you. Is that clear?”

“Sir—”

“Is that clear?” Torres repeated, his voice rising to drown out the other man.

“Yes, sir,” Bloch whispered. A moment later he was gone, and Raymond Torres seated himself once more, then waited until his breathing had returned to its normal rhythm before picking up the sheaf of test results.

Perhaps, he reflected, it will be all right after all. The boy hadn’t cracked under the battering his brain had absorbed. With any luck at all, Alex’s brain had been so busy dealing with the chaos of stimulation that he hadn’t consciously noticed what else had been happening.

Or had he?

“But he didn’t say what was wrong, did he?” Marsh asked. He folded his napkin precisely — a gesture Ellen immediately recognized as a sign that his mind was irrevocably made up — and placed it on the table next to his coffee cup.

“That’s why he wants Alex back,” Ellen said for the third time. Why, she wondered, couldn’t Marsh understand that there was nothing sinister in Raymond’s wanting Alex to come back to the Institute for a few days? “Besides,” she went on, “if he thought it was anything serious, he wouldn’t have let Alex come home with me this afternoon. He could have just kept him there.”

“And I would have had an injunction by tomorrow morning,” Marsh pointed out. “Which I’m sure he knows. In spite of that release, I’m still his father, and unless he tells us the details of the surgery, and tells us exactly what he thinks has gone wrong, Alex doesn’t go back there again.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, and though Ellen wanted to argue with him further, she knew it was useless. She would just have to do what she knew was best for Alex, and deal with Marsh after she’d done it. As Marsh left the dining room, she began clearing the dishes from the table and loading them into the dishwasher.

Marsh found Alex in his room. He was at his desk, one of Marsh’s medical texts in front of him, opened to the anatomy of the human brain, while one of the white rats poked inquisitively around among the clutter that surrounded the book.

“Anything I can help you with?”

Alex looked up. “I don’t think so.”

“Try me,” Marsh challenged. When Alex still hesitated, he picked up the rat and scratched it around its ears. The little animal wriggled with pleasure. “Mind telling me what you’re going to use to dissect this little fellow’s brain with?”

Alex’s eyes met his father’s. “How did you know?”

“I may not be a genius,” Marsh replied, “but last night you told me that considering the damage that was done to your brain, you ought to be dead. Now I find you studying the anatomy of the brain, and white rats are not exactly unheard of as subjects for dissection.”