The Fountain of Age (25 page)

But this time memory lingered. It had happened. It was real.

Eight: Ben

“I’d dropped the dosage to try to mitigate the side effects,” Ben said. He ran his hand through his filthy hair. Cixin lay asleep in his room, sunburned and exhausted. God only knew how long he’d been gone before Ben found his empty bed.

Renata pulled her eyes from CNN. The solar flare, the largest ever recorded and much more powerful than anticipated, had played havoc with radio communications from Denver to Beijing. Two planes had crashed. The aurora borealis was visible as far south as Cuba. Renata said, “Ben, you can’t go on fiddling with his dosage and giving him sleeping pills when you get it wrong. You’re not even an M.D., and yet you’re playing God with that child’s life!”

“And what do you think I should do?” Ben shouted. It was a relief to shout, even as he feared driving her away again. “Should I let him go catatonic? You didn’t see him two years ago in China—I did! He’d been in a vegetative state for two days and he would have died if I hadn’t found him! Is that what you think should happen?”

“No. You should get him medical help. You wouldn’t have to say anything about the genemods or—”

“The hell I wouldn’t! What happens when they ask me what meds Cixin takes? If I didn’t tell them, he could die. If I do, I go to jail. And how long do you think it would take a medical team to find drug traces in his body? Inhibitors have a long half-life. And even if I explain everything, and if I’m believed, what happens to Cixin then? He’s not even on my medical insurance until the adoption is final! So he’d be warehoused, catatonic, in some horrifying state hospital, and I’d be standing trial. Is that what you want?”

“No. Wait. I don’t know.” She wasn’t yelling at him now; her voice held sorrow and compassion. CNN announced that a total of 312 people had died in the two air disasters. “But, sweetheart, the situation as it stands isn’t good for you or Cixin, either. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? He just isn’t anything like a normal—Cixin!”

The boy stood in the doorway, his shock of black hair stiff from salt air, his eyes puffy from sleep. He suddenly looked much older.

“Ben—what does the once-a-week do to me?”

Renata drew a long breath.

“It’s complicated,” Ben said finally.

“I need to know.”

Cixin wasn’t fidgeting, or yelling, or running. Something had happened on the beach, something besides sunburn and dehydration. Ben’s tired mind stabbed around for a way to explain things to a nearly illiterate eleven-year-old. Nothing occurred to him.

Renata switched off the television and said quietly, “Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

“Butt out, Renata!”

“No. And don’t you ever try to bully me. You’ll lose.”

He had already lost. Shooting a single furious glance at her, Ben turned to Cixin. “You have a . . . a sickness. A rare disease. If you don’t take the once-a-week, you will die like your mother said, but first you go all stiff and empty. Like this.” Ben, feeling like a fool, sat on the rug and made his body rigid and his face blank.

“Empty?”

“Yes. No thoughts, nothing. No
Cixin
. That’s how you were on the beach, like that for a long time, which is why you’re so sunburned.” And maybe more than sunburned. A big solar flare came with a proton storm, and those could cause long-term biochemical damage. Ben couldn’t cope with that just now, not on top of everything else. “Do you understand, Cixin? You went empty. Like a . . . a Coke can all drunk up.”

“Empty,” Cixin repeated. All at once he smiled, a smile so enigmatic and complicated that Ben was startled. Then the boy went back into his room and closed the door.

“Spooky,” Ben said inadequately. He struggled up from the rug. “How do you think he took it?”

“I don’t know.” Renata seemed as disconcerted as Ben. “I only know what I would be thinking if I were him.”

“What would you be thinking?” All at once he desperately wanted to know.

“I would be wondering who I really was. Wondering where the pills ended and I, Cixin, began.”

“He’s eleven,” Ben said scornfully. Scorn was a relief. “He doesn’t have sophisticated thoughts like that.”

September. Cixin started school, the oldest kid in the fourth grade. Fortunately, he was small enough to sort of fit in and large enough to not be picked on by his classmates. He could not read at grade level, could not concentrate on his worksheets, could not sit still during lessons. After one week, his teacher called Ben to school for an “instructional team meeting.” The team recommended Special Ed.

After two weeks, Cixin had another episode of catatonia. Again Ben found him at the beach, sitting half in the water, motionless amid frolicking children and splashing teens and sunbathing adults. A small boy with a sand pail said conversationally, “That kid dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Ben snapped. Wearily he forced a dose of inhibitor onto Cixin’s tongue. It melted, and he came to and stared at Ben from dark, enigmatic eyes that slowly turned resentful.

“Go away, Ben.”

“I can’t, damn it!”

Cixin said, “You don’t understand.”

In his khakis and loafers—the school had called him at work to report Cixin’s absence—Ben lowered himself to sit on the wet sand. The blue Pacific rolled in, frothy at the whitecaps and serene beyond. The sun shone brightly. Ben said, “Make me understand.”

“I can’t.”

“Try. Why do you do it, Cixin? What happens when you go empty?”

“It’s not empty.”

“Then what is it?” He willed himself to patience. This was a child, after all.

Cixin took a long time answering. Finally he said, “I see. Everything.”

“What kind of everything?”

“
Everything
. And it talks to me.”

Ben went as still as Cixin had been. He hadn’t even realized . . . hadn’t even
thought
of that. He’d thought of neurotransmitter ratios, neural architecture plasticity, blood flow changes, synaptic miscues. And somehow he’d missed this.
It talks to me
.

Cixin leapt up. “I’m not going back to Special Ed!” he yelled and raced away down the sand, his school papers streaming out of the unzipped backpack flapping on his skinny shoulders.

“Temporal lobe epilepsy?” Renata said doubtfully. “But . . . he doesn’t have seizures?”

“It’s not
grand mal
,” Ben said. They sat in Grogan’s. Ben had drugged Cixin again with Dozarin, hating himself for doing it but needing, beyond all reason, to escape his apartment for a few hours. “With
petit mal
, seizures can go completely unnoticed. And obviously it’s not the only aberration going on in his brain, but I think it’s a factor.”

“But . . . if he’s hearing voices, isn’t that more likely to be schizophrenia or something like that?”

“I’m no doctor, as you’re constantly telling me, but temporal-lobe epilepsy is a very well documented source of religious transports. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard of Bingen, maybe even Saul on the road to Damascus.”

“But why does your inhibitor work on him at all? Isn’t epilepsy a thing about electrical firing of—”

“I don’t know why it works!” Ben said. He drained his gin and tonic and set the glass, harder than necessary, onto the table between them. “Don’t you get it, Renata? I don’t know anything except that I’m reaching the end of my rope!”

“I can see that,” Renata said. “Have you considered that Cixin might be telling the truth?’

“Of course he’s ‘telling the truth,’ as he experiences it. Temporal-lobe seizures can produce visual and auditory hallucinations that seem completely real.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Renata fiddled with the rim of her glass. “Maybe the voices Cixin hears
are
real.”

Ben stared at her.
You think you know someone
. . . “Renata, you teach science. Since when do you dabble in mysticism?”

“Since always. I just don’t advertise it to everybody.”

That hurt. “I’m hardly ‘everybody.’ Or at least I thought I wasn’t.”

“You’re taking it wrong. I just meant that I haven’t closed the door on the possibility of other worlds besides this one, other levels of being. Spirits, aliens, gods and angels, parallel universes that bleed through . . . I don’t know. But there’s never been a human society, ever, that didn’t believe in some sort of mystery beyond the veil.”

He didn’t know anymore who she was. Ben motioned to the waiter for another gin and tonic. When his thoughts were at least partly collected, he said, “You can’t—”

“What I can or cannot do doesn’t matter. The point is, what are
you
going to do now?”

“I’m going to have an implant inserted under Cixin’s skin that will deliver the correct dose of inhibitor automatically.”

“Really.” Her tone was dangerous. “And who will perform this surgery? You?”

“Of course not. It can be done in Mexico.”

“Do you know what you’re saying, Ben? You’re piling one criminal offense on top of another, and you’re treating that boy like a lab rat.”

“He’s sick and I’m trying to make him better!” God, why wouldn’t she understand?

“Are you going to at least explain all that to him?”

“No. He wouldn’t understand.”

She finished her wine, stood, and looked down at him with the fearlessness he both admired and disliked in her. The light from behind the bar glinted on her glasses. “Tell Cixin what you’re going to do. Or I will.”

“It’s none of your business! I’m his guardian!”

“You’ve made it my business. And even if you were fully his legal guardian—which you’re not, yet—you’re not being his friend. Not until you can consider his mind as well as his brain.”

“There’s no difference, Renata,”

“The hell there isn’t. Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

He took a day to think about it, a day during which he was furious with Renata, and longed for her, and addressed angry arguments to her in his mind. Then, reluctantly, he left work in the middle of the afternoon (his boss was beginning to grumble about all the absences) to pick up Cixin at school.

Cixin wasn’t there.

Nine: Cixin

The voices came to him as he colored a map of the neighborhood around his school. All week they’d been working on maps, which wasn’t as stupid as the other schoolwork. Cixin sat at his desk and vigorously wielded crayons. Playground, 7-Eleven, houses, maglev stop, school building. North, west, legend to tell what the little drawings were. Blue, red, green . . .

Cixin
.

He froze, his hand holding the green crayon suspended above his desk.

Cixin
.

The voice was faint—but it was there. He looked wildly around the room. He knew the room was there, the other kids were there, he was there. In this school room, not on the beach, and not in that other place where even the beach disappeared and he could feel the Earth and sky breathe. So how could he be hearing . . .