The Crystal Child (4 page)

Then the screen message said, “There is a magical potion that will restore Sir Sharmer’s youth.  Will you, without asking the price, choose to administer the potion?”

And Dr. Stein clicked “yes.”

And right away a servant of Cronos appeared to offer Sir Sharmer the potion.  I didn’t know if I should drink it.  I wondered what would happen to Princess Alyssa if I did. But Dr. Stein said, “Drink it!”  She looked very worried for me as if this wasn’t just a game.  So I did, and just like that Sir Sharmer’s youthful beauty returned.  But at the same time there was this scroll that was for Princess Alyssa, and it said, “The price you must pay for the magic potion is the forfeit of your title, your riches, and your high station among the rulers of the Hyperion empire.  You are henceforth a beggar until you find the path that leads back to your lost glory.”  And there was Princess Alyssa in rags and crying.  And I felt so sorry for what I did.  So I said, “Don’t worry. We’ll find our way back.”

And Dr. Stein said, “I’m sure we will.”

And then there was another message.  It said, “Alyssa, what reward do you claim from Sir Sharmer for having saved his life?”  On the menu on screen there were three choices. 1. The magic ring of Kyros, which is one of the game’s magical kingdoms.  2. A time-warp shortcut to the Diamond galaxy.  3. A kiss.  I didn’t want Dr. Stein to know, but I hoped she would choose the kiss.  And as if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “Let’s choose the kiss, shall we?” And then she moved the arrow to the box marked
A Kiss
and clicked.  And on the screen Princess Alyssa and Sir Sharmer kissed.  And there was all this nice music and colored lights.   And the kiss went on and on until the screen got all bright and blurry and the kissing just faded in the light.  I said, “That’s sort of like the brightness.”

She said, “What is?”

I said, “The way it looks, how everything melts in the light.”

***

“He took to it right away,” Julia reported to Alex.  “He’s already collected enough emerald medallions to gain admittance to the Lemurian Region.”

“Where’s that?”

“Why it’s just beyond the dominion of the Tressorian knights.  I guess you haven’t gotten that far,” she answered, giving him a sly wink.  “The best sign is he’s getting bored with the junior level of the game.”

“Why is that good?”

“Boredom is a sure sign of either ignorance or intelligence.  In his case, it isn’t ignorance.”

But there was one game, that never bored Aaron. It was called
Kong
, among the most basic of the games Alex had given her.  Though it struck Julia as particularly banal, Aaron often played it over and again almost obsessively for hours at a time.  Kong was a gorilla, the pixelated replica of King Kong.  He was supposed to leap from building to building across an ever-shifting city skyline.  The object of the game was to calculate the speed he needed in order to take a flying leap off one building and reach the next.  Solving the math could be tricky, especially if the player set himself a short deadline for making the calculations.  If Kong ran too slowly, he would fall short and wind up splattered on the streets below.  If he ran too fast, he would overleap the next tower and suffer the same fate.  Julia watched as Aaron struggled to read the numbers on the screen —  distance, weight, wind resistance —  and worked clumsily with the on-screen calculator.  After several weeks, she noticed that he was doing much of the math in his head, not troubling to bring up the calculator.  Each time he managed to guess the right speed, he was absolutely gleeful.  “Look, look! He made it,” he would cry, and then run the game again. It was the same excitement he displayed when he managed to get one of his checkers across the board.

“Why do you like this one so much?” Julia asked.

“I don’t know.  I want to see him make it across. I like the way that feels.”

***

“What’s that?” Aaron asked one night as Beth Soames was arranging his covers for the night.  He was pointing to a pendant she wore.  She wore it all the time, tucked into her blouse.  Sometimes it slipped out of her collar, but Aaron, with his dim eyesight, could never bring it into focus.

“It’s a snowflake,” Beth said, holding it closer for him to see.  “Well, not a real snowflake.  It’s a pattern taken from a snowflake.”  She let the light fall across it.  The delicate silver tracery sparkled, casting a darting reflection on the wall beside Aaron’s bed.

“Is it diamonds?” he asked.

“Oh, hardly,” Beth said.  “It’s not worth much, actually.  My mother gave it to me.”

“She’s dead?”

“Well, what would you think?  Here I am ninety years old.  But she did pretty well, Mama did. She made it to 105.”

Aaron was fingering the bright little object.  It was eight sided with a delicate webbing between the prongs.  “Where did your mother get it?” he asked.

“Well, believe it or not, she got it from her mother.  But that’s as far back as it goes.”  After he had inspected it for a while, Beth said, “Mama used to say that every soul starts out as a snowflake.  We fall to Earth out of the sky and become whatever we become.  No two snowflakes are the same, you know.  There must be jillions and zillions of snowflakes, but each one is unique.  Mama would say, ‘and everyone of us ought to be unique.’ I don’t know where she got that from, but it always sounded good to me.  Ever since then, when I think of the soul, I see it as a snowflake right here, next to the heart.”

Aaron pondered the idea.  “But snowflakes melt.  They don’t last.  They don’t turn into people.”

Beth laughed.  “You’re being much too literal, my boy.  It’s just a story is all.  But I like thinking of myself as a snowflake.  And, you know, Aaron, in time, we all do melt.  In a sense.”

Before she left his side, he asked, “What’s ‘literal’ ?  What’s being ‘too literal’ mean?”

She came back to stroke her hand across his brow.  “Ah, well, let’s see.  It means when you try to make words mean just one thing so you can’t, well, bend them and play with them a little bit the way poets do.  Like if I say I’ve eaten enough to burst, that doesn’t mean I’m really going to burst, does it?   Or if I say the moon is a pearl or flowers have faces, that’s not what I really mean, is it?”

“So it’s sort of like, when people say I’m old, that’s not because I’m actually old.”

“Well, yes, sort of like that.”

“So if maybe people weren’t so literal, I wouldn’t be so old.

***

For the next four months, Julia worked with Aaron assiduously, investing more time and thought than she had devoted to any patient before him.  More than the medical challenge he represented, something called out in him for attention, an odd combination of innocence and intensity that she felt impelled to save.  She had known the feeling before, though it was nothing a doctor would openly admit.  There are patients who matter more, often for indefinable reasons.  Perhaps it is their humor or their charm, perhaps some talent that needs to be preserved for the world.  The choice is not a stated preference consciously held; no system of medical ethics could sanction such choices.  It is rather an awareness of how painful it would be never to see this person again.  Julia relished the childish exuberance Aaron had awakened in her, the air of make-believe that surrounded their meetings.  Whether it was the games they played together or the books he told her about, a sense of childish enchantment pervaded the time she spent with him.  And along with it, the tragic sweetness of a child clinging fiercely to life.  She was working at an impossible task, but with an inexplicable conviction that her efforts were not in vain.  She felt she was a healer in the oldest meaning of the word, a sorceress seeking to break an evil spell that required more of her than technical knowledge.

The six month trial period that Julia had negotiated with the Laceys came and passed. When it was done, she was able to report enough progress to persuade the parents to move to the San Francisco Bay Area.  She was asking them to take a great gamble.  Aaron was nowhere in sight of recovery; all she could offer them was proof that he was improving in a number of ways that promised a longer life span.  His weight was up and his blood pressure down.  His bones were taking on bulk and strength.  His urine tests were showing a steady increase in hyaluronic acid, one of the key factors in progeria. “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Julia said.  “I think we’re adding a year or two to his life.  If we continue, who knows?  We may add more.  Aaron might make it to twenty.  If that’s worth something to you, then let me keep working with him.”  Once again the question of cost came up, but Julia waved the issue aside with emphatic impatience, letting the Laceys know that she had no intention of letting money interfere with Aaron’s treatment. “I’m certain I’ll receive a foundation grant to support my work with Aaron.”  Her answer was not exactly true.  She had put out feelers to several of her funders, so far with no result.

Still, she persevered.  Each day, like an enchantress who had brewed a magic potion, she served Aaron his special medication, carefully watching for improvements of any kind.  She brought him the constants she used with all the patients in the clinic: mega-vitamins, selenium and the amino acid L-arginine.  She was also giving him small amounts of deprenyl, which seemed to prevent memory loss.  Lately, she had been trying ginseng and melatonin in a cocktail of her own invention. As the weeks passed, she made her way in rapid succession through injected or imbibed mixtures of testosterone, pycnogenol, choline, phenylalanine. She gave each a few week’s time to take effect. If there was no sign of change, she passed on to anything she had heard of that was not known to be harmful in low doses.  Echinacea, shark’s cartilage, cat’s claw, goldenseal.  There were times when the nutritional lab at her clinic resembled a veritable witch’s kitchen of bizarre concoctions.  As the ingredients she mixed became more quaint and colorful, she sometimes let herself entertain the secret hope that something among them might prove to be as potent as the herbs and essences Merlin had used at Arthur’s court.

Working with Aaron, she made each new brew seem like the elixir they had been seeking all along.  Who could say?  Perhaps the placebo effect had some role to play in his treatment.  She made the mixtures she prescribed sound as exotic as she could, often associating them with the potions that figured prominently in his games. He was outgrowing such fantasy, but seemed willing to play along as if he recognized that a bit of showmanship helped keep Julia’s hopes alive as well as his own.

Lifting Aaron’s spirits was not always easy.  Through their first several months together, the boy often lost heart.  Sometimes his vitality would wilt before Julia’s eyes.  Bone-weary by mid-day, he longed to give up and sleep.  Then the only thing that refreshed him again were a few winning games of Kong. “See! He made it,” Aaron would cheer in a tiny wheezy voice as his leaping ape balanced on the building-top. “He got across, he got across.” In her notes, Julia now called Aaron’s unaccountable fascination the Kong Effect. “The game has a marked beneficial influence upon his morale,” she wrote.  Then she added three question marks.

***

Something awful.  I found out from Dr. Stein that Beth died last night.  She was sick a long time and then she died.  It was her heart.  I was sorry that she died.  Beth was one of Dr. Stein’s best helpers,  She was here at the clinic for a long time.  I’m going to miss her.  She was my best person for talking to.  She let me say whatever I wanted, all the things I think about and worry about.  She let me tell her what I think about time and about dreams and about why I was born this way.  Later I heard Dr. Stein talking to Dr. Prentiss.  She was all broken up and crying.  I heard her say, “Why did she have to go like that?  Why did she just give up?”  That seemed to matter to her, but I don’t understand why.  What difference does it make how you die?  You’re just going to be dead anyway.  I wish I could think of some way to help Dr. Stein get over it.  Would she cry like that for me?  I wouldn’t want her to.

Yesterday when Dr. Stein came to say good night like she does,  she gave me that necklace Beth wore, the silver snowflake.  She said Beth wanted me to have that for good luck.  I could hardly believe Beth would do that, but Dr. Stein said Beth didn’t have anybody else to leave it to.  I’m not sure what to do with it, though, since boys don’t wear necklaces.  But I think Beth had a good idea there, that maybe the soul is a snowflake that doesn’t melt.

***

Beth Soames had been with Julia since the clinic opened eleven years before.  Until she was forced into retirement, she was one of those dedicated teachers who regarded education as a religious calling.  After she left the schools, she went on volunteering to teach children and the elderly.  That was how she and Julia met.  Beth volunteered to work at Julia’s clinic where she at once became the backbone of Julia’s elder educational work.  She was a bright-eyed woman of remarkable energy, the first on the job in the morning and the last to leave at night.  Julia came to think of her as “my number-one pal.” Over a period of years, it became Beth’s special task — nobody could remember quite how it came about — to keep the death watch over the terminally ill.  If any of Julia’s patients passed away in the night or over a week-end, Beth’s was the last face many of them would see at their side.  At the age of ninety-two she was still being called a “tough old bird.”  Beth was in the habit of assigning herself limits that she would later wave aside.  “When I get too old to cut my own toe-nails … when I get too old to boil a kettle of water … when I get to old to sit myself on the potty … then I’ll throw in the towel.”  But she carried on nonetheless.  She fought her way on from the cane, to the walker, to the wheel chair.

And then, quite suddenly, her will began to flag.  At that point, Julia took her into the clinic as a patient, pledging to give her exhaustive care.  She was too dear a co-worker to merit less than everything Julia could offer.  For another several weeks, through crisis after crisis, Julia kept Beth going far beyond the point where other physicians might have said they had done all they could.  “Don’t worry,” Julia told her a dozen times. “I’m going to pull you through.”  Cheered on by Julia, Beth responded with marvelous resiliency, until one day she simply gave up, as if somebody had reached inside and turned off the light.  That day she smiled back at Julia through weary eyes, reached to pat her cheek, and said, “Please don’t bother, my dear. We’re both working too hard at this, don’t you think?  I’ve had a good long run for my money.”  After that she became less and less compliant and a few weeks later died without a sign of struggle.