The Crystal Child (3 page)

She said, “Well, what do you think time is?”

I wasn’t sure I should tell her what I thought, but she asked very nicely again, so I told her.  I said, “I think time is a disease, like a virus.  I don’t think the world was made to have time in it.  But time sort of snuck in through a crack or something.  And that was bad, because time makes things rot and decay and die.  I think it’s a dirty trick that got played on the world.”  Then I asked her if she’d like to hear one of my big ideas.  And she said yes.  So I told her.  “I’ll bet there are worlds where there isn’t any time, where things go on forever and don’t even grow old because they’re made of something time can’t get into.”

Beth said, “I can’t even imagine that.”

I said, “That’s because time is like what water is for a fish.  A fish can’t imagine someplace where there’s no water because it doesn’t even know it’s in the water.  That’s how it is with time.  We’re so used to it, we don’t even know it’s there.”

Beth said, “That’s a very big idea for a little boy.”

I said. “I think people should live outside of time, above it sort of.”  I knew I wasn’t making myself clear, I don’t have the words.  But I went on anyway because Beth was frowning now like she was puzzled.  So I said, “I think time is some lower element of the universe and we should all be looking for ways to make it stop and go away.  I have nightmares about time.”  I never even told my mother that or Dr. Stein.  She said, “What kind of nightmares?”

I said, “That time is sort of like a vampire that sucks your life away. I dream it comes for me at night and bites at my throat and drinks my blood.”

Then Beth was making a worried face.  I said, “I know Dr. Stein doesn’t see it that way.  She says time is just the way it is in the world. Just natural.  In fact, she says there’s time in our bodies — sort of like clocks that can keep track of our heart and stomach and everything.  There are little clocks in our cells keeping track of how old we are.”

Beth said, “Yes, that’s true.  Biological clocks.”

I said, “Well then, my biological clock must be running as fast as it can go. And I hate that.  I wish the brightness would make that stop inside me like it makes everything stop in the world.”

Beth was looking more and more worried. She said, “What do you mean by brightness?”

I said, “That’s hard to tell about.  It’s just sometimes there and it keeps me safe.”  But I knew she wouldn’t understand.  Nobody understands about the brightness.  She reached over and hugged me close.  I liked that.  It made me feel safe. I thought: this is how Beth will hold me when I die. Even if there’s nobody else here, she’ll be here.  I hugged her back real hard.  I told her that I have a lot of thoughts about time but I don’t know how to say them.  I said, “But I know I’m right!  Time is the devil.”

***

Beneath his wasting surface, Aaron was proving to be a bright child.  A quick battery of tests Julia gave him set his IQ at a level well beyond his years, high enough to merit scholarships and academic awards, had he the energy to pursue an education.  Even that was hardly an accurate estimate.  He took the tests suffering from fatigue and severe eyestrain.  His sight was failing so rapidly there was no way to keep his glasses up to date.  That was actually a peculiar feature of Aaron’s case; progerics did not usually suffer from poor eye-sight.  Though the problem was a burden to him, it gave Julia some reason to believe Aaron’s disease was different and so might run a different course.  Talk about grasping at straws — was she trying to find hope in Aaron’s weakening eyesight?

A better test of his intellect, Julia believed, was his performance at board games.  She liked to say she started at the top.  Cerebral calisthenics, as she called it.  She worked from a theory based more on intuition than hard data.  Thinking — hard thinking — rejuvenates.  There are mental reserves that defend against degeneration.  Thinking, especially laying plans and making up strategies, stimulates the dorsolateral cortex.  Some researchers believed activating that part of the brain wakes up the immune system.  Holding off senility with crossword puzzles and calculus, Keats and Shakespeare sounded far-fetched, but Julia liked the idea.  She delighted in seeing Aaron beat her at the first ten games of Snakes and Ladders they played, and even more so when he grew bored with the game and asked for something more stimulating, “something where it isn’t all just luck.”

So she stocked Aaron’s bedroom with games of skill — crosswords, mazes, jigsaw puzzles  —  then went on to brain teasers, checkers, chess, anything that grabbed Aaron’s attention and coaxed his intelligence into action.  He learned fast, chess especially.  He might have made an impressive player, but his game had an odd twist to it.  He played as if the goal of the game was to get his pieces into his opponent’s last row.  In the midst of a well-played game, he would begin developing convoluted strategies for getting his knight or bishop as far across the board as possible, even if it cost him a more valuable piece.  Julia corrected him several times.  “You’re supposed to capture my king,” she explained.  “You don’t have to get all the way across to do that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Aaron said, but in a tone that implied he disliked that rule.  When he played rationally, he managed to beat Julia every time.  But, as if he were out to reinvent the game, he would forget about checkmating the king in favor of pushing across the board. That was why checkers made more sense to him.  In checkers, getting across the board to have your piece crowned was exactly the right thing to do.  Aaron let out a little peep of triumph each time he managed to reach Julia’s last file.  “He made it!  Put a crown on him!” he would command, clapping his hands gleefully.  Beating Julia at checkers was a cinch for him.  He was more than willing to spend hours at the board playing until he grew drowsy with fatigue.

More games, Julia’s instinct told her.  And she knew where to find them.

***

“What does he know about using a computer?” Alex asked.

“Not much, probably nothing,” Julia answered. “He’s spent most of his life in medical facilities.  I doubt he has much hand-eye coordination.”

Alex was Julia’s fourteen-year-old.  Tall for his age and athletic of build, he might have excelled at sports.  But to his parents’ dismay, what preoccupied him most at mid-stream adolescence were games that seemed to require no more agility than it took to finger an X-box.  Alex had become an incipient computer hacker, an addict at the video terminal.  Julia never missed an opportunity to tell him he was wasting his intelligence, but her disapproval seemed to have no effect.  Now, here she was offering Alex the chance to put his skill to good use.  As she expected, he grabbed at the opportunity.

“How smart is he?” Alex asked.

“Very. He beats me at chess.”

“Yeah, but you’re a push-over.”

“Oh, am I?  Thanks so much.”

“Well, girls and chess … ”

“Hey, mister!  I taught you, didn’t I?”

“But even I beat you and I’m lousy.”

“Mothers are supposed to let their sons win.  It gives them manly pride.  Didn’t you know?”

Alex went wide-eyed with surprise.  “Hey, really?  You let me win?”

“Just until you developed some confidence.  You’re better than you think.”  He smiled with relief.  “Of course,” Julia added, “I might just be telling you that to protect the male ego I’ve spent so much time nourishing.”

Alex, more puzzled than reassured, nevertheless agreed to turn his mother’s query into a serious consultation.  He brought Julia a handful of carefully selected disks and a Nintendo game player.  “These are pretty simple — for eight or nine-year olds.  That’s just to get him started.  After that, he can go on to Magic — The Gathering.  You know, God games.”

“Explain, please.”

“Dungeons and dragons stuff where you have to create whole worlds.  That could keep him busy for the rest of his life.  You can pace him along until you find his level.  Who knows?  Maybe he can even make some big bucks at it.  That’d build up his male ego, right?”

Julia took time to study the games.  She sampled several of those Alex called God games — role-playing games that combined problem-solving with tale-telling. “These have stories,” he told her. “But they may be too grown-up for him.”

“Too grown-up?  This?” Julia asked.  The scene they were watching showed an evil magician transforming a planet into an icy wasteland.  The art was not much better than a standard comic book.

“Well, yeah.  Because it gets, you know, ‘sexy.’ ”

She fixed him with a look of motherly disapproval that he knew better than to take seriously.  “How do you mean sexy?”

Alex was groping.  “Well, there are girls … women, I mean.  They can also be warriors, but sometimes, I mean some of them, they sort of don’t wear too much. They wear just only like, well, straps.  And sometimes they lure the guys in the story, and like that.”

“ ‘Lure’? Meaning exactly what?”

“You know.  Turn them on like.”

Julia made a pretense of being shocked.  “You mean my son Alex has been hanging out in his room with alluring women who wear just only straps?  Tsk-tsk.  Well, I’d better look into this.  I wouldn’t want you exposed to anything that was anatomically incorrect.”

***

Today I met Alex.  Alex is Dr. Stein’s son. He’s fourteen, almost fifteen.  It made me sad to meet Alex.  He’s nice, but he reminds me that I’ll never look like him.  He’s healthy and strong.  He plays basketball and track.  I think girls would say he was good-looking.  I could tell he felt sorry for me and he made me feel sorry for myself.  I could see him looking at me as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

Alex came to help me with games.  That’s one of Dr. Stein’s big ideas.  Mental attitude.  She thinks if I keep busy playing games, that will slow down the aging.  She says other doctors don’t believe that, but she does.  I think the other doctors are right.  How can playing games make sickness go away?  Unless maybe some of the electricity from your brain leaks into your cells or something like that and gives them a sort of charge.  Could that be true?

Alex brought me a bunch of games you can play on the computer.  I’m not too good on the computer.  I have trouble making the mouse go where I want it.  Also it’s hard to read.  Some of the games are about aiming and shooting and making points.  I’m really lousy at those.  Others are trickier, you have to solve problems and work out strategies like in chess.  I like those better.  I’m good at chess and also at games like chess.  I played three games of chess with Alex and won every time.  “Hey, you’re good,” he said.  He was surprised, maybe because he couldn’t believe anybody as sick as me could still have a brain.

The games I like best of all are those where you create worlds and play roles.  They let you imagine you’re somebody else in another place, a magical place where you can make the rules.  I like imagining I’m not me, a little sick guy. The one I like best is called HyperionQuest.  At first I played the game with Alex, who said I was very good at it, way beyond my age level.  Now I play with Dr. Stein who likes the game a lot — but she doesn’t want me to let anybody know.   It has so many characters and kingdoms and situations I’ll bet you could play it for the rest of your life.  Even if you had a very long life.  It all happens in a galaxy called Hyperion where there are sorcerers and cyberknights and dragon ships and like that.  Also there are girls who don’t wear very much, but Dr. Stein doesn’t think that’s so bad.  “Just don’t believe everything you see on the screen,” she said.

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “Because that’s not quite the way real females look.”

I said, “Oh.”  What I was wondering was when she thought I was ever going to find out what real females look like.  I guess she sort of read my thoughts because she gave me a quick hug and said, “That’s nothing we have to worry about now.”

***

Julia was loath to praise anything digital to her computer-addicted son, but she was secretly delighted to learn that some remnant of fantasy and magic survived in Alex’s life. Even more, she was grateful that he had shared that remnant with her.  She told herself the time she spent at the computer was research for Aaron’s benefit, but in truth the game took her back to the fairy-tale world she had loved as a child.  It was a tawdry, animated version of the fantasy literature she had read obsessively when she was a girl.  Imaginary beings had dominated her mind then, tales of King Arthur, the Tolkien stories, the chronicles of Narnia, the Andrew Lang fairy tales.  In her preschool years, she would report encounters with elves and trolls as if they had really happened.  Her mother had indulged her in these imaginary adventures, encouraging her to write stories of her own.  She did — long, rambling romances about daring heros and nefarious villains and damsels in distress.  Eventually, the serious study of medicine had swept all this from her mind, but now for the first time in many years, she realized how much of her child’s imagination had survived.

As she played along with Aaron, she found the game’s fascination growing steadily stronger; through the day it tugged at her mind, sometimes becoming an unwelcome distraction.  She often found herself rehearsing a gambit, perfecting a role. 
Careful!
she warned herself.  What would her patients say if they knew Dr. Stein was preoccupied with plotting her escape from a dungeon in a galaxy far, far away?  Nevertheless, she was spending more time than she could afford in her busy schedule furtively consorting with time-warped wizards and laser-wielding warriors. HyperionQuest connected so strongly with Julia’s long-forgotten, girlish fantasies that she often found herself reluctant to switch off.  One night she played beyond midnight, losing track of the time as she pursued the game’s fiendish dark lord to the ends of the universe.  She was beginning to understand something about the addictive capacity of these amusements.   The fantasies don’t fade away; they simply get buried by adult banalities.

***

Dr. Stein is getting better and better at HyperionQuest.  She has a neat character worked out.  She’s Alyssa the exiled Princess of TransSaturn.  I’m Sir Sharmer, her loyal defender.  We always solve problems together.  But some times it doesn’t work out like we planned.  Today, we were challenged by Cronos, the Time Lord, and Thor, God of war.  I had to make a choice.  Thor offered me a magic battle-axe that could slay a hundred foes at a stroke.  But Cronos offered me a thousand years of life.  Dr. Stein said, “Wait, it could be a trap!” But she didn’t warn me fast enough. Before she could stop me, I clicked on the thousand years of life.  And what happened was I started to get old right away.  I started just wasting away.  And there was this hourglass in the background that started running out of sand.  I think Dr. Stein wanted to switch off, but then a question popped up on the screen.  It said: “Princess Alyssa, are you willing to take a ten-point risk to save Sir Sharmer from his deadly fate? You have fifteen seconds to make your choice.”  A ten-point risk is the highest level of danger.  It’s for the most impossible tasks that can lead to death or disaster.  But even so, Dr. Stein clicked on “yes.”