Clade (4 page)

FOUR

For Anthea, stepping into the playroom is like disappearing down a rabbit hole. Reality takes a right turn, and none of the standard laws governing the behavior of the universe apply.

Located on the ground floor of Global Upreach’s downtown office, the playroom has no windows. It’s hermetically sealed from distractions. When a child enters the playroom, he or she is surrounded by a mind-numbing array of toys and art supplies. There are stuffed animals, dolls, costumes and jewelry, board games, a sand box, clay and sculpture putty, watercolors, oil paints, a light pen and pad. There are also a number of virtual games for those kids who are stubbornly nontactile. Something for everyone. In other words, the room is basically an industrial-strength fun zone where kids are free to do whatever they want.

As long as no one gets hurt.

That’s the only rule. Other than that, it’s carte blanche. Freedom of behavior is critical to the success of the playroom. Ideally, the kids who end up there should not feel inhibited in any way. Part of Anthea’s job is to make them feel safe and comfortable, to get them to open up and express themselves without reservation. Most of the time that’s easier said than done. Anthea deals with kids who—as a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest skill—have discovered the hard way that it’s not in their best interest to trust. Trust is not a favorable adaptive strategy. In fact, trust is a good way to get hurt or killed. It is one of those dangers to be avoided at all costs, no different than a saber-toothed tiger or a falling rock.

At least Anthea knows what it’s like, has stood in their shoes. The kids can sense that she’s one of them, as if their shared history has a unique smell. That makes it a little easier to connect.

Of course, more than just simple play goes on here. The toys that a child selects and the
way
the child plays with those toys are carefully observed and recorded. These choices reveal deep psychological inner workings, the orchestrated machination of synapses that give rise to various emotions, attitudes, and conduct. The second part of Anthea’s job is to glean insight into what makes a child tick so that she can make an assessment and write an evaluation. Once an evaluation is made, a specific course of treatment can be determined. Depending on the severity and type of problem—e.g., Did Wooly the Mammoth’s trunk get torn off and used as a surrogate penis to thrash Betty the Butterfly for being an overly affectionate mother?—treatment can be anything from a foster-to-adopt home to a more controlled program of deep psychological counseling or even chemical rewiring.

Anthea gets to work late, fifteen minutes before her first scheduled session of the day. Malina was late picking up Josué, and so Anthea is running behind schedule as well. Plus, she’s got Rigo in the back of her mind, weighing her down. He was super sweet last night—too sweet. Like he was being extra attentive to her out of guilt. She believes his story about visiting his mother—she could smell the familiar fragrance of incense and candles on him—but not for as long as he said. There was another smell, too. One she couldn’t identify but is pretty sure came from another woman.

As soon as Anthea walks through the door her supervisor, Tissa, wants her to see a new kid. Which means she has to spend a couple of minutes parsing background material. She barely has time to prepare—put Rigo out of her mind and put on her play face.

“His name is Ibrahim,” Tissa says, downloading the file to Anthea’s IA. “He was brought in last night.”

“Where was he found?” The information is in the file, but Anthea likes to discuss preliminaries in advance. For her, the emotional response to a situation contains more information than the raw data that describes it.

Tissa leads her down the hall, in the direction of the group home section of the building. “He was picked up at a pod transfer station over in Los Gatos, as part of a gang sweep.”

“Which gang?”

“The Necrofeels. But he’s not wearing any of their graffitics.”

No tattoos then, or scarification. “A new member?” Anthea asks.

Tissa shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll see when you meet with him.”

“What’s this about clade incompatibilities and antipher treatment?” Anthea asks, scanning the boy’s med file.

“When he got here he had some minor muscle spasms and loss of gross motor skills. He was given a broad-spectrum antipher. That seemed to help, but we’re still trying to clade him.”

“Still?”

“His clade-profile is nonstandard. I mean, some of it’s standard. But a lot of it’s not.”

“Meaning what?”

Tissa shrugs, unwilling to speculate. She stops outside a door to one of the private rooms. The word
room
is a euphemism. In actuality, it’s a glorified holding cell—Alcatraz that’s been visited by an interior decorator with extensive work experience in an insane asylum. This means that the room has a lot of sponge surfaces and nonbreakable amenities. The toilet, sink, faucet, bed frame and chairs are all foam; the walls, floor, ceiling and door are gelfoam-padded lichen. The sheets are tissue. Flimsy as toilet paper, they couldn’t support the weight of even the most emaciated eight-year-old bent on hanging or choking himself.

Tissa puts a hand on Anthea’s arm—“Good luck”—and then turns to go. Not the kind of parting gesture that inspires confidence.

Anthea straightens her shoulders, raps lightly on the soft door. Knocks again, then says, “Ibrahim? My name is Anthea. Can I come in? I just want to talk to you a little. Okay?”

Still no response. She queries her IA, Doug, for a current biomed readout, including REM and alpha wave activity. The name Doug is a joke, a morose double entendre. Her IA chose it because information agents spend most of their time digging for data. So the pun is a jab, an expression of deep psychological pain, not all that different than a pet airing deep psychological wounds by chewing on the furniture or soiling the carpet.

Anthea squints at the readouts. “Is he awake?”

“Up and atom,” Doug says, borrowing a line from an old twentieth-century animated cartoon. That’s one of the tics with her IA. It seems to take perverse pleasure in dredging up obscure facts that are more annoying than useful.

Anthea chooses not to dignify the pun with a response. Child psychology—if she doesn’t encourage the IA maybe it will stop. The problem is, Doug has defined its personal relationship with her in terms of snide remarks, a contest of flip witticisms and disguised barbs that isn’t always productive and can sometimes be a real pain in the ass.

“Can he hear me?” She keeps her voice to a whisper even though the door is as sound absorbent as a diaper.

“Would you like to take a look, Ant Thea?”

“Please.” Ironic that both Josué and her IA came up with similar mispronunciations of her name. Never mind that one is intentional and the other is not. It does give her valuable insight into the IA, however, tells her something about its mood at any given time.

A colorful slice of neocortex appears on her eyescreens. Overlaid on the wall, it displays a transient pattern of electrical activity reminiscent of a lightning storm in gray clouds.

“Can I take a look at him?”

“Yes, master. Your wish is my command.”

The walls of the room are infested with bitcams. It takes several seconds for them to sync up and get a bead on their target. The image rasterizes slowly, its grainy bitmap edges smoothing into recognizable patterns.

He’s pacing the room, dressed in sky blue sprayon pajamas. She watches him prod the walls, tug at the bed, and poke the toilet, restless as a trapped animal. For an eight-year-old, he’s small, shorter and lighter even than Josué. He has a bony triangular face, wide cheekbones tapering down to a sharp chin. Hard to spec what his background is. Latasian, maybe. His eyes are puffy and heavy lidded, almond brown under close-cropped hair that reminds her of the fire-blackened dandelion fuzz. Subcutaneous lesions, the size and color of liver spots, mottle his arms and neck. His skin is a taut membrane tented over a frame of toothpick-thin bones. It looks as if he hasn’t eaten for years. He could be a premillennial poster child for starving children in Africa. The only thing missing are the flies.

“I know you can hear me, Ibrahim.”

He gnaws on his lower lip with yellowish, uneven teeth, staunch in his refusal to speak while he continues to inspect the room, as if searching for a way out.

Anthea’s an old hand at the silent treatment. Undeterred, she forges ahead. “You want to come out and play?” she says, as if they’re next-door neighbors, out of school for the summer.

No answer.

“I want to help you,” Anthea says, “be your friend. But if you won’t talk to me, I can’t do that.”

Nothing.

“I’m not a doctor. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I know a place we can go where no one will bother us.”

The silence stretches. Of course, she can enter the room at will. But it’s important to be invited in. The decision has to be his. He has to believe he’s in control and that his wishes are being respected.

“Listen,” Anthea says. “It’s your choice, totally up to you. I’ll just hang here until you’re ready.”

“Go away,” he says. “Hang yourself someplace else.”

Finally, an opening.

“Where would you like me to go, Ibrahim?”

He shrugs.

This catches her off guard—takes her so much by surprise that it feels like a non sequitur. Usually, kids say something like “To hell,” or the poetic equivalent. It takes a moment to recoup.

“Where would
you
like to go?” she asks.

He sits on the end of the bed, rests his chin in his hands the way she did when her mother incarcerated her in their ap.

“You got any coffee?” he says.

“Coffee?”

“Yeah. Black, with nothing else in it. Except maybe nic, if you can get it.”

“I’ll have to check,” she says. Caffeine/nicotine might be contraindicated with whatever medication he’s been prescribed.

He nods, takes her response as a no. “What about tunes?” he says. “You got a download I can stream?”

“What do you like?”

“Razz. Afrapan. Bachata.” He shrugs, conveys the feeling that it’s really not all that important. “Whatever.”

She was hoping his preferences in music might give her some indication of where he’s from. But the list is pretty diverse, eclectic. It doesn’t tell her much. Time to try a direct frontal assault.

“You were trying to pod somewhere on the train,” she says. “Where were you going?”

Another silence. But this one has an air of thoughtfulness instead of open hostility or suspicion. She listens to his breath, the reverberation of his pulse clanging in his veins like water surging through rigid pipes.

“If you help me, I’ll help you,” she says. Tit for tat. It’s the type of negotiation that kids in his situation— i.e., alone, homeless, and hungry—are usually familiar with, having never experienced charity.

“What do you want?” Willing to bargain.

Here’s where things get tricky. It has to be something that he specs as self-serving on her part—e.g., sex, money, drugs—but is really in his best interest.

“I want to play a game,” she says. Game, in street kid parlance, generally meaning something illegal, immoral, or both.

“What kind of game?”

“I’ll show you.”

“If I play, you’ll let me go?”

“When you’re healthy enough.” Lots of latitude there, especially when his state of mind is added to the equation.

Another moment of silent introspection while he weighs the pros and cons of her offer. “Okay.”

He’s mastered the art of practiced nonchalance, has a real flare for it. Tough and savvy, he’s not nearly as combative as most of the
tígueres
she deals with. His indolence has a certain savoir faire that she finds refreshing, if not downright charming.

Careful, girl, she warns herself. Don’t even go there.

When the door doesn’t open after several beats, she says, “You going to let me in or not?”

Only then does he stand up, sidle over to the door, and unlock it. Still, the door remains closed. She has to pull it open herself.

“My name’s Anthea,” she says.

He stands in front of her, looks her up and down with an appraising eye. Critical. “Great,” he says. “Just my luck.”

“What?”

“You’re even more anorexic than me.” He shakes his head, sympathetic. “And I thought I was messed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Nothing.” He tilts his head to one side, cocks an eye at her. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Older than you think.”

“Me, too.” He winks, a face-scrunching Don Juan leer that is more comical than lewd.

“I can see that.” Not only is he a flirt but an articulate one. A
boca
who can flimflam with the best of them. She hates to see what he’ll be like in a few years—say at the age of fourteen or fifteen—assuming he makes it that long. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go.”

For someone who’s mostly skin and bones, he’s got a surprising amount of energy. He hasn’t been beaten down, his pride and self-respect thrashed. He’s infused with a restless, feral curiosity that engages everything, including her. Most of it’s false bravado, applied like makeup to hide the underlying scars and bruises. But not all. When he steps into the playroom, his eyes light up, spark with a mixture of wonder and disbelief. For a second, she gets a momentary view of him as a little boy. Then, just as quickly, the fleeting glimpse fades, goes back into hiding.

His lips purse. “So, what game do you want to play?”

“You pick,” she says.

He makes a big drama of debating what to do. His eyes narrow and his forehead wrinkles. Finally, after much deliberation, he goes over to a small maglev track. The track is capable of accomodating up to six players. Each car floats above a single magnetic filament, a rail to which it is initially assigned. Ibrahim fiddles with a joystick, moving one car slowly around the track, which is smart enough to assess his ability and operate the other cars at approximately the same speed and skill level. Anthea stands off to one side and watches as unobtrusively as she can, letting him do his thing. It’s against the rules to take part in a game unless he specifically asks her. Allowing him not to involve her is one way of letting him take control of the situation. She’s had lots of sessions where kids shut her out completely because they needed to exercise that power over an adult. It’s not unusual for a kid to take shit out on her—use her as an emotional or physical punching bag.