GRAY MATTER (16 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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“
I
f you keep this up, you’re going to starve.”
Vera glared at him. Travis didn’t like Vera. She wasn’t warm or kind like his mom, and she had hard flat eyes like a catfish.
Yesterday when he had stopped eating and talking, she called in Phillip to help. (Travis vaguely remembered him as the man who carried him out of the seaplane that first night.) They had wanted him to eat so he could be healthy for “the tests”—whatever those were. He wondered if they were like the ones he took in January for the SchoolSmart scholarship.
Phillip’s was the only other face that Travis had laid eyes on here. And it was a scary face—a pale, tight, unsmiling stone with gray eyes that poked you when they stared. Vera had called him in to make Travis take his pills. He could still feel Phillip grip the lower half of his face in that big meaty hand and squeeze until Travis’s mouth opened. Then Phillip tossed in the pills and squirted water down his throat with a plastic squeeze bottle and clamped his mouth shut so he had to swallow or choke.
While Vera circled him, Travis sat still in the beanbag chair looking blankly across the room at the TV His eyes did not follow her, nor did he answer her.
He had stopped asking for his mother. He had stopped asking when he was going home. Most of the day, all he would do was stare at the television, losing himself in the mindless flickering of colors and squealy voices.
Beside him was a cardboard tray with a sandwich, a cup of carrots, pudding, and a carton of milk, now warm. There had been a Snickers bar, which
he had pocketed. The rest he hadn’t touched, and it had been sitting there for several hours.
Vera brought the tray over and handed him the sandwich wedge. It was peanut butter and grape jelly. She wagged it under his nose, but he turned his head away. She pressed it closer until it pressed onto his lips. He turned his head even farther away.
“I just talked to your mother on the telephone.”
Travis’s head twitched, and he glanced tentatively at the woman.
“She asked about you and said to tell you that you had to eat your food or she would be sad.”
Slowly he looked at the woman.
She raised the sandwich to his mouth again. “She said that she missed you, so does Beauregard. But if you eat and get your strength back you can go home.”
“You’re lying.”
Vera looked at him, shocked at the first words he had spoken in two days. “I’m not lying. I just got off the phone with her, I’m telling you. She called to see how you were doing on the tests. But if you don’t eat, you can’t take them which means you can’t go home.”
“His name isn’t Beauregard.”
She stared at him with those small dead catfish eyes. “Look, I made a mistake,” she said. “So what’s his name?”
“Bo Jangle.”
“That’s what I meant. I knew it was Bo something.” She pressed the sandwich closer. “You going to take a little bite for Mom and Bo Jangle?”
That wasn’t his name either, and he turned his face away without answering.
Yesterday he had cried. Vera had wanted him to take his pills again, but when he refused, she said that his mother would be upset. It was the first time they had mentioned his mother. He didn’t want to cry, but he could not help it. And while he did so, the woman stood and watched him. She had lied to him then, too, he was certain. She didn’t know his mother. Just like she hadn’t just talked to her on the phone.
Vera got up and tossed the sandwich. “Well, you’re going to have your test on an empty stomach, I guess.” She went out and returned a few minutes later with Phillip who carried a tray with a cloth over it.
“Hey, Travis,” he said, as if they were friends. “We just want to run a little test on you, okay? You’re going to do this lying down, okay?”
Phillip led him to the bed and told him to sit at the edge. He handed him a piece of paper on a clipboard and a pencil. “I’d like you to write your name for me—first and last name.”
Travis sat on his bed. He thought about not responding, but he recalled Phillip’s hand on his jaw yesterday and wrote his name, thinking this was a dumb test.
“Good, now I want you to take the pencil with your left hand and do the same.”
It was much harder with his left hand, but he struggled, making a real mess of it. When he was finished, he handed the clipboard back to Phillip, who looked pleased.
Then they made him lie on the bed. Vera then said, “I want you to count backward from twenty for me.”
Travis did not respond.
“If you do, Phillip will take you outside. Promise.”
He didn’t believe them, but they would keep it up until he did. So he counted backward from twenty in a soft voice.
Vera then rubbed his neck with alcohol, a smell he knew from when his mother cleaned out a cut knee. She then rubbed some other stuff on the same spot. “This is to numb the skin so you won’t feel anything. But you have to lie perfectly still, you got that?”
He nodded, but suddenly he felt scared by the way they were hanging over him, with Phillip tightly holding down his hands. “Close your eyes, kid,” he said.
Travis hesitated for a few moments, then closed his eyes, but not all the way. Out of the crack he saw Vera stick a hypodermic needle in the right side of his neck and press it all the way. Instantly he jumped, but Phillip held him down.
His neck suddenly felt hot inside all the way up his head. But after a little while, he felt nothing.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Vera said. “Okay, keep your eyes open and count backward from twenty again.”
He didn’t know what they gave him, but he counted backward as she asked. Then they asked him to recite his address, his mother’s and dog’s name, and where he went to school. He did all of that. Then Vera held up a
picture book with butterflies and asked him to identify the pictures. Then to read a few first lines of writing. He did that also. And when it wasn’t loud enough, they made him do it again.
Phillip smiled. “You’re doing good, kid.”
“You have big yellow teeth,” Travis heard himself say.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Vera snickered.
“More like out of a vial of truth serum,” he said.
“Like my dog’s,” Travis continued.
“Fuck off, kid.”
“And you’ve got a big mole on your face.”
“Okay, Travis, you did good,” Vera said. “Close your eyes for a few minutes and rest.”
He closed his eyes and thought about his mother and home and Bo. Phillip did have teeth like his. And the mole looked like a bug had crawled out of his mouth.
Travis began to feel sleepy when he felt another needle jab on the left side of his neck. He let out a startled yelp, and the same hot pressure flowed up his neck and across his face, this time on the left side.
“Travis, again, I want you to count for me, backward from twenty.”
Travis heard the woman’s words but did not understand.
“Travis, count backward from twenty.”
Still he did not understand.
“Travis, tell me your name,” the man said.
Travis could not answer. He knew they were talking to him, he heard the words, but he did not know what the sounds meant. But he remembered that he once understood them. But not now. How strange.
The woman held up a book. “Travis, read me the title on the cover.”
Travis did not understand.
Phillip picked up the small glass jar on the tray. “Amazing stuff, sodium amythal,” he said. Then he looked at Travis, “You haven’t got a clue, kid, but you just passed the Wada test. We first put the right half of your brain asleep to see what the other half would do. Then we put the other side of your brain to sleep to see what you’d do, which is nothing.” He tapped the other side of his head. “You passed the first test, kid: You’re a left-brainer.” He looked at his watch. “And in about three more minutes, you’ll be back to normal.”
And they left.
T
he Nova Children’s Center building was a handsome redbrick neo-Gothic structure with turrets and large windows that had been reencased. A converted old schoolhouse, it was set back from the road and surrounded by a sweeping lawn, in the middle of which sat a hundred-year-old beech tree ablaze with purple leaves. The place looked solid, established, and full of promise. Their eleven o’clock appointment was with a Dr. Denise Samson.
Rachel and Dylan drove around to the parking lot in the rear beside a playground and picnic area. The visitors’ section was full of shiny upscale cars. This was not your typical learning clinic. And she had known several.
As they rounded the front, they heard children laughing and teachers talking. Through the windows, she could see young kids in chairs and adults working with them. In another room, children were at computer terminals.
“Is this my new school, Mom?”
How do you answer that?
she thought. “It might be, if we like it.”
She wasn’t sure he understood, and he didn’t pursue it, captivated by the playground apparatus.
In spite of its early twentieth-century vintage, the building’s interior had been redone in bright modern, tasteful decor. A directory hung in the foyer. The only names she recognized were Denise Samson and Lucius Malenko. The receptionist said that Dr. Samson was expecting her and would be out in a moment. Meanwhile, Dylan headed for a small computer terminal with a video game, while Rachel sat and filled out a medical questionnaire asking
the basics, including how she heard about the Nova Children’s Center. She entered Sheila MacPhearson’s name.
When she was finished, she picked up one of the glossy Nova brochures on the table. There were photos of the administration and staff, of students being instructed by specialists.
Inside was a note to parents:
If your child exhibits some of the following,
NOVA CHILDREN’S CENTER
is a solution:
Poor reading comprehension
Slow reading
Spelling problems
Poor math skills
Low self-confidence and self-esteem
Poor handwriting, printing
Delayed language skills
Memory problems …
This list was a relentless description of Dylan. She read on:
What Can Be Done?
The NOVA CHILDREN’S CENTER
provides help for dyslexia and other learning challenges. We offer a variety of diagnostic testing to identify the problems
…
The brochure went on to describe how the center offered individualized learning programs for each child, all instruction given one-on-one. In bold was the statement: “Ninety percent of NCC students average one year or more improvement for every NCC semester.” This was probably the
enhancement
that Sheila meant.
Rachel flipped through the pages. They recommended from two to five sessions a week lasting from twenty-four to thirty-six weeks per year. There was a multistep assessment procedure that was essential to define the problem areas. Another few pages were dedicated to testimonials of success by parents, teachers, and former students:
When Diana first arrived at Nova Children’s Center, she could read words at her second-grade level, but she couldn’t comprehend the content. She had difficulty connecting to language she read
or language she heard. Words seemed to go in one ear and out the other. People thought she was not trying, and she had been labeled a “motivation” or “attention” problem.
The report went on to explain the cause of Diana’s problem with language comprehension. Then there was an explanation of how the Nova Children’s Center approach improved language comprehension, reasoning, critical thinking, and language expression skills. At the end of that discussion, again in bold, was the claim that “most of the children at NCC gained one to three years in language comprehension in just four weeks on intensive treatment.”
Rachel let that sink in.
He can be fixed.
Maybe that was what Sheila had meant.
A photo gallery of the staff was included at the end of the brochure. Nearly every one had a Ph.D. after their name.
The chief neurologist and one of the directors of the center was an avuncular-looking gray-haired man named Lucius Malenko. He had both a M.D. and Ph.D. after his name.
In the photo, Dr. Denise Samson was a handsome-looking woman about thirty-five to forty with pulled-back dark hair and heavy dark-framed glasses.
“Mrs. Whitman?”
Rachel looked up.
It was Dr. Samson herself. She was a tall, statuesque woman with auburn hair tied into a thick bun behind her head. She was even more attractive in person. “And this must be Dylan.”
“Hi,” Dylan said, glancing up from the computer. On the screen were funny little creature heads that you could eliminate by shooting blips of light from a spaceship. Dr. Samson showed Dylan how to do it then walked Rachel to a small conference room beyond a glass partition so that they could talk while viewing Dylan.
“As I said on the phone, this is a multidimensional assessment to help determine Dylan’s various cognitive abilities—his information-processing strengths, problem-solving style, and problem areas. Since his problem areas seem to be language-based, we’ll assess his oral language—phonics, word associations, sentence formulation, and the like. Then we’ll do some visual/auditory diagnoses.” She sounded as if she were reading.
Because the assessments were long and tiring for a child, they would be spread over two days. Tomorrow would also include functional MRI scans.
“After the assessments are in, we’ll put together an individualized instructional program for him with one of our specialists.”
Rachel listened as the woman continued. When she was finished, Rachel said, “I’m wondering if I might also speak to Dr. Malenko.”
“Dr. Malenko?” Dr. Samson seemed surprised.
“I have some questions of a neurological nature that I’d like to ask him.”
There was a pregnant pause. “I’m sure I can answer most of your questions, Mrs. Whitman.”
“I have no doubt, but a friend recommended that I speak with him before we decide on a program. So I’d like to set up an appointment.”
“I see. Then you can check with Marie out front.”
Rachel could sense the woman’s irritation, but at the moment she didn’t care.
Rachel made the appointment for Thursday, and gave Dylan a kiss, telling him she was going to be right here in the waiting room. Dr. Samson then led him down the hall to the test rooms. He went willingly, looking back once to check that Rachel was still there.

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