The Crystal Child (7 page)

“Okay, but I want you to send me more samples.  Maybe there’s an error somewhere.  I hope not, but changes of this importance should be checked several times over.”

Julia agreed to send more samples, but she knew there was no error.  She was seeing other changes in Aaron’s lab work.  His EKG was showing numbers very near to normal. His liver function was improving and he was excreting a healthy level of hyaluronic acid.  Julia also began to notice physical improvements in his stamina, his breathing, his skin turgor. All of these would have impressed another physician as objective indications of recovery.  But none struck her so dramatically as the one big change that had set in since he awoke from his coma.  Nothing physical. A single word. 
Julia.

One morning, as if he had always done so, Aaron called her “Julia.”  “Do you have the Halverstam book, Julia?” he asked.

She did.  She handed it to him, studying him closely.  It was the first time he had not called her “doctor.”  As much as the name, his voice struck her.  It had been changing steadily.  It was no longer the soft, wheezy murmur she knew from the past.  His tone was distinctly stronger, more forceful, “older” in those respects, yet youthful in its ring.  She noted the change and then waited.  He used the name again and then again.  “Doctor Stein” had dropped out of his vocabulary.

A week later she came upon him reading without his glasses.  When she mentioned it, he smiled and nodded.  “My eyes seem to have improved.”

“Why are you calling me ‘Julia’?” she asked.

“Am I? I guess I am.  Is that okay?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, after all the time we’ve worked together, it seems natural enough.”

Worked together
was also new.  Up until then, she had been “taking care” of him.  She preferred “worked together.”  She preferred “Julia.”  But the casual confidence with which he announced their new relationship was jarring.  It was as if another person were wearing Aaron’s skin like a suit of clothes.  Inside was an assertive, often combative young man who now began to emerge more and more rapidly.  A very new relationship was arising between them, some different set of assumptions they would have to adjust to.  Or rather Julia would have to adjust.  Aaron, wholly absorbed in his new life, showed no signs of making any concessions.

***

It started coming back to me a few days ago — Friday night.  All these images raining in.  Not in order, just a jumble — like a mixed up jigsaw puzzle.  The bridge, the boy, the old man … then it started running backwards, like rewinding.   I was in the game again.  Not looking at it, but
in
it like one of the characters.  When I woke from the coma, my mind was blank.  Everything that happened from the time Julia came to say good-night and the moment I awoke in intensive care with her at my side had simply been deleted.  But now I remember this:

I was some place that looked like a scene from HyperionQuest.   A place of castles and enchanted forests and unearthly beings, but now in three dimensions and looking so very real.  I had entered the courtyard of a palace that stood high as the clouds, a vast citadel of sparkling granite and bright marble, the sun reflecting off it.  There was nobody there except me, waiting.  I waited and waited, my eyes fixed on the gate that opened into the castle.  Above the gate there was the face of a clock that had no hands and whose numerals I could not read.  I had come on a mission, but I couldn’t remember what it was.  I was tired and thirsty; I could feel my heart beating to an irregular rhythm.  Every muscle in my body ached, but still I waited.

Then the gate opened and a man appeared descending a long staircase.  He was tall and strong.  He was wearing a hood, but I could see a cold, hard face beneath it.  He walked up to me, his expression dark with disapproval.  “Look at yourself,” he said.  He held up his hand.  The palm of his hand shone like a mirror.  I saw an old man in the mirror, so old he was barely able to stand.  This was
me
!  It was Aaron Lacey come to the end of his days.  I turned my eyes away.  There was a woman standing beside the man; my mother I assumed, though she looked far younger than I did.  But when I looked closer, I saw it was Julia.  I asked Julia who the man was.  She looked embarrassed to have to tell me.  She said, “He is Cronos, your true father.  And this is his palace.”

Then it came back to me. In the game, Cronos, Lord of Time, once offered me a thousand years of life.  And I knew, this is what would have happened if Julia had not found a way to save me.  I would live many centuries, getting older and older, until I couldn’t get any older, until my life had to stop.  That made me afraid.  And as fear came over me, I remembered my mission.  I had come to ask if there was some way to save myself.  I said to my mythical father, “If I am the son of a god, then I should never have to die.”

Cronos said, “But you are part mortal. Your mother is a human.  Unless you can purge away your mortality, it is your fate to die when your time comes.  And that time is here.”

I said, “For the sake of what is divine in me, tell me if there is a way to turn back and be young again.”

Cronos studied me long and hard and said at last, “There is a way, and because you are my son, I will tell you what it is.  But the risk is very great.  Are you willing to make this choice?”

I said, “Yes.”  I remember that Cronos looked at me with pity, but I was sure he also admired me.  He made me feel like a warrior who is going into battle with no hope of returning.

He led me outside the gates of the city and gestured out across a deep gorge.  The gorge was crossed by a bridge that seemed to be made of glass.  I couldn’t see the far end of the bridge because at a certain distance it vanished into a bank of dark clouds.  Cronos said, “Your true youth lies waiting at the far end of this bridge.  If you have the courage, follow where it leads.”

I wasn’t sure the bridge would hold my weight, but I stepped out carefully.  The bridge held, but by the time I’d gone several steps, my breath began to fail and my body became too heavy to move.  Still I summoned up the strength to continue.  And soon I was standing where the dark clouds began.  One more step and I wouldn’t be able to see where I was going or where I’d come from.  One step, two steps, three steps.  I was growing dizzy, I was losing my footing.  For a moment, I went blank.  One more step, and all of a sudden I was through to the other side of the cloud; the darkness was gone like a curtain that had been pulled aside.  And then the tiredness went away.  My mind cleared as if a fog had been blown away and every thought stood out like a jewel.  I could breathe without wheezing and my heart was beating strong.  I looked at my hands and saw they were no longer blue and wrinkled.  And then, ahead of me, I saw what was on the other side of the gorge.  A land that was shining and warm, with trees in flower, like something an artist might paint — a picture of paradise, but without color.  The light was too strong to permit color.  Instead everything was glowing silver.  It was so beautiful, I began to run toward it as fast as I could.  I could run!  I felt life coming back to me in every limb.

And where the bridge ended, I could make out a figure, somebody waiting for me.  A boy.  A boy who was so beautiful that he might have been a girl.  He had long silver hair and his eyes were piercing bright.  He said nothing, but I knew he wanted me to come to him.  The boy was radiating love.  I could feel his love, like waves coming at me, surrounding me.  
He
was safety,
he
was shelter.  I moved closer; the boy moved too, as if he were my image in a mirror.  And then we were close enough to touch.  But before I could reach him, I felt myself falling.  The bridge was shattering into pieces beneath me.  I was sinking into the void.

Just then, the boy reached for me and caught me.  My hand was in his, firmly gripped.  He was strong as a giant, holding me above the chasm.

“Who sent you?” he asked.  His voice wasn’t that of a child, but of an adult who assumed he had the right to command.

I said, “My father.”

“Who is your father?” he asked.

“Cronos, the Lord of time,” I answered. I was growing afraid.  Below me the chasm yawned.  Did he intend to drop me?

“Do you know why he sent you here to cross this fragile bridge?” the boy asked.

“To purge away my mortality so that I may regain my youth once again,” I said.

“Not so,” the boy answered, his voice swelling into a shout, his face filled with anger.  “Cronos has deceived you.  Cronos can give you nothing but age.  Another year and another.  And with each year you will approach closer to death.  This is because Cronos is beholden to time and cannot see beyond it.  For every year he gives you, he takes away a thousand.  And the price he exacts for that year is that you should become a withered thing, so burdened with suffering that life becomes unbearable.  Cronos promises you life, but he has sent you to meet your death.  You have been deceived, like all your kind.”

“Then I am doomed,” I cried.

“Not so,” the boy almost roared.  “I can save you, and only I.  I will reveal the deepest secrets of the gods, the one way to truly purge away your mortality.  I will show you the life that outlasts time.  Will you hear me?”

As he held me, I gazed into his face and saw that it was mine, but fashioned as if from glass.  “Yes,” I said.

“Then listen closely,” he said.  “You wish to regain your youth. But what you know of youth is merely what you remember of your childhood.  That is the illusion of youth, or rather its remote reflection. But
true youth does not lie behind you.  It lies ahead.  Do not seek to return. Go forward.
  I will lead you along that path if you will follow me.”

“But why has Cronos deceived me?” I asked.

“Because he knows you are time’s enemy,” the boy said.  “Therefore, Cronos wants you dead.”

“But Cronos is my father,” I answered.

“Yes.  And you were born to kill your father.”  He must have seen the horror in my face.  “Do you understand?” he asked.  “You must kill time.  Do you agree to take up this task?”

I knew if I refused, he would let me fall.  “Yes,” I said.  “I agree.”

“Swear!” he said.  I tried, but I couldn’t form the words.  Then I felt his grip loosening as if he were ready to let me fall.  “Unless you swear, I cannot save you.”

“I swear,” I shouted.

“Swear that are willing to be taken.”

I started to say that I did not understand, but fearing I’d lose his grip, I cried, “Yes, I swear.”  And at once he pulled me to him and embraced me.  In that moment, everything became the brightness.

And then I woke up.  I was hurting everywhere.  My skin burned, my head was whirling.  Julia was there at my side.  She was sleeping in her chair. I was struggling to sit up, trying to get free of all the damned tubes that were stuck in me.  That’s when I began to feel angry, so angry I was burning.  I heard myself shouting, “You told me I was getting better.  Why am I back in the hospital?”  She reached to hold me, but I slapped her away.  I said, “You told me I was going to be healthy.  You lied to me.”

Before she could say a word, the room was filled with doctors and nurses. They were telling to me to cooperate, but I kept struggling against them.  I remember saying, “What’s the point?  What’s the God-damned point?”

With each passing day, Aaron insisted on taking a larger role in his own care.  At first it was simply a matter of greater cooperation, he following Julia’s lead, taking orders, doing as he was told.  But gradually, as they moved into their second year together, passive cooperation gave way to impatient participation. Aaron was eagerly in search of answers, often asking for more than Julia could provide.  Again and again he confronted her with ideas of his own, some of them plainly bizarre, some showing startling insight.  He was reading voraciously, at first struggling with the books she gave him, asking for help at every other word, every chemical formula as he picked his way through at his own slow pace.  She did her best to answer the questions he asked, but she warned him, “You really can’t learn chemistry like that.”  A month later, it seemed he was indeed learning chemistry like that — by way of great intuitive leaps.  Once when he corrected something she said about a particular protein repair process, she asked, “We never talked about fibromodulin did we?”

“No,” he answered, “but once you know about the other proteins in that group, you can generalize.”

Most strikingly, Aaron was challenging her to explain and justify what she did.  How long did she intend to keep him on a low-fat diet?  Why had she changed his dose of HGH?  Could she show him the effect in his blood test? And when she could not, he told her he would not take more.  “I think we should just stop that.  There’s no reliable literature proving it’s effective.”  By the end of their eighteenth month together, Aaron was reading his own blood tests and making critical comments. Julia, a great believer in making patients her partners, welcomed Aaron’s growing initiative.  But she couldn’t ignore the fact that he was participating at a level well beyond his years.

“You are aware, aren’t you, Aaron, that you’re becoming precocious on me?  Where is all this coming from?  Let’s see if you’re smart enough to give me a good answer to that one.”

He thought a moment.  “I guess, underneath all the wrinkles, I’m pretty smart. Or maybe just desperate.”

But now even the wrinkles were beginning to vanish.  Aaron was clearly shedding years as his improvement accelerated even more rapidly than aging had overcome him.  His parents commented on it to Julia after every visit, but hesitated to mention the change to Aaron, fearing the alteration might not be permanent.  At last one day Julia asked, “Do you ever look in the mirror?”

Aaron might have asked “what mirror.”  The last time he had used a mirror, he had asked her to remove it from his room.  “I don’t like what I see,” he had said.  Julia was used to that response.  Many of her older patients dreaded the face that looked back at them from the mirror.

“I don’t think you have to worry about that much longer.”  She held a mirror out before him. He flinched, then gazed.  “Like what you see?” she asked.

His eyes grew wide with amazement.  “What’s happening?”  He was almost afraid to ask.

“Good things are happening.”

He looked into the mirror again.  For the first time Julia could recall, he did not wince.  He studied his face carefully, drawing his fingers over his once dry and wrinkled cheeks and brow, then running his hand across his head to feel the stubbly growth that was beginning there.  Was this
his
face — smooth, glowing, well-shaped?   He looked at Julia, the question unspoken, but there in his eyes. “You’re right,” he said.  “There’s an improvement. But I’m still not going to win any beauty contests.”

“Give me some more time,” she answered. “I’m working on it.”

***

Soon, as Aaron’s transformation seemed to accelerate, the changes that were coming over him became the talk of the clinic, though usually in hushed tones, as if nobody wanted to admit how dazzled they were by the boy’s extraordinary appearance, lest they break  the spell.  Aaron rapidly became the Center’s most attractive patient, especially — Julia could not help but notice — among the women on her staff, all of whom were openly competing with one another to bring his medication, administer physical therapy, serve his meals, even make his bed.  When it came to Aaron’s daily treatment, they all yielded to Julia, of course — but they were always eager to offer her the favor of looking in on Aaron if she might be too busy.  Some coined cloying pet names for him — “honey,” “good looking,” “Prince Charming.”  “Well, don’t you look yummy this morning,” Chloe Frisch, the clinic’s cardiologist, remarked one morning as she checked Aaron over.  Julia wondered if she was alone in noticing Aaron’s discomfort with such overly affectionate attention.  She should not have to remind her colleagues of something as basic as good professional conduct.  But when she did, they resented her correction.  “Come on!  He’s just a kid,” one of her nurses replied defensively.  “Why shouldn’t we let him know he’s become a heart throb?”  For that matter, even some male staff members showed an unusual interest in Julia’s wonder boy and were more than willing to help with his care.  Hal Prentiss, who was gay, and Tom McMahon, who was not, never failed to comment on Aaron’s good looks.  “When we get finished with him,” McMahon commented at a staff meeting, “let’s just ship him off to Hollywood.”

None of this was welcome to Aaron.  He complained to Julia.  “I’d appreciate more time to myself,” he told her.  “I have people hanging on me all day.”

“It’s just that they’re so pleased with the progress you’re making,” she assured him.  But she knew as well as he that he was being treated like a different kind of freak.

***

Something’s wrong.  Don’t know what.  I’m not going to tell Julia.  People will start fussing, running more idiotic tests, poking and prodding.   As it is I can’t get any privacy.  I’m sick of that.  I’m know it’s not physical.  I feel stronger than ever before, able to do some aerobic walking, able to stay awake through the day.  Can’t they all see the change?  Why do they still treat me like a sick little kid?

But there’s something … it’s the way I see things, like double vision.  Nothing looks real.  I see
through
things.  I see landscapes that aren’t there, forests and mountains that remind me of HyperionQuest.  I see creatures, glowing things that seem sculpted out of water, moving there, waiting for me.  If I’m not careful, I bump into tables, chairs.  Everything’s like reflections in a cloudy mirror.  I have a hard time reading.  Sometimes the words scramble away on the page like little bugs.  And all I’ve got to do here is read.  It’s the only way I can screen myself off and be left alone.  But sometimes the letters on the page fade away into a script I can’t read.

I don’t belong here with all these old, dying people.  It’s like living in a morgue.  Walking corpses in all the rooms.  Makes me feel nauseated.  I’d ask to go home tomorrow, but my parents are no better.  Whenever they come, they talk to me as if I were simple-minded.  They want to keep me dependent.  They want to dominate me.  I dread the day I have to go live with them.  I won’t!  I’ll find some way to live my own life.

Julia’s getting worse and worse.  Every time I mention some little problem, she gives me her stupid, worried look.  As if she can’t believe I don’t need her.  I never realized how suffocating her pity can be.  I don’t want her pity. Nor her condescension.  She comes around asking if I want to play that game.  She can’t give up being Princess Alyssa, can’t give up the chance to mess around with Sir Sharmer.  I think she misses the digital kissing.  Or maybe she’d like to do some digital fucking.  What a pathetic case she is.  Dried up, frigid.  Probably can’t get it on with Mr. Stein, so she comes around looking for love and kisses from me.

Maybe I’m not being fair.  I don’t care about being fair!!!  Who was ever fair with me?  I want to get out of this graveyard, I want to get out of this body!  This isn’t my body.  This is Aaron Lacey’s body.  Old, old, old Aaron Lacey.  I’m drowning in here, can’t she tell?

***

“What does what’s-his-name have to say about me?”

“What’s-his-name?”

“Kevin whatever.  What does he think about me?”

It was the first time he had inquired about Forrester’s role in his treatment.  Julia answered, “His name is Kevin Forrester, as you well know.  He thinks there’s been an important development.”

Aaron laughed.  “I’ll bet he does.  I’ll bet he thinks I’m going to win him a Nobel Prize.”

He had been meeting with Forrester for four months now, more than enough time to know the man’s name.  Their sessions began shortly after Forrester began paying attention to Aaron’s extraordinary genetic changes.  They had met once, twice, and then regularly every week.  The meetings had been strangely tense, especially on Aaron’s side.  The boy rarely talked, but put on a moody demeanor.  If he answered questions at all, it was reluctantly and curtly.  There seemed to be some difference of opinion as to who was doing a favor for whom.

“Look,” Forrester said at last, “if you don’t want to answer me, just say so.  I can work from the samples if I have to.”

“I’d like to know what you’re up to?” Aaron answered, pulling a sulky, suspicious face.

“Up to?”  Forrester repeated.  “What I’m ‘up to’ is helping to cure you.”

“Are you?  I thought Julia had already done that.”

“Julia doesn’t know what she may have done.  Her work needs to be translated into science.”

“If what you’re translating is my body, I’d like to be in on it.”

“Oh?  How do you want to do that?”

“Teach me your language.  Teach me genetics.”

Forrester turned away, trying to hide a wry smile.  “That might take a while.”

“We could start with books.  Bring me things to read.”

Forrester found the request ludicrous.  “Sorry, but the stuff I have is pretty advanced chemistry.”

“I don’t have that much else to do with my time around here,” Aaron answered.

At their next meeting, Forrester brought books.  He chose advanced texts, as if to challenge Aaron’s presumption.   At first he found it amusing to see a child struggling to master biochemistry.  But soon amusement gave way to frank astonishment.  Forrester had been willing, at most, to offer the boy an introduction to basic genetics, only to discover that the questions Aaron raised showed a remarkably sophisticated grasp of the material.  After a few more meetings, he found himself neither astonished nor amused, but simply annoyed.  Aaron was beginning to probe into areas that were more and more oblique, sometimes with an impish aggressiveness.  “I don’t see why you call it a ‘code’ anyway,” he remarked one day, querying Forrester’s use of the commonplace phrase “genetic code.”

“That’s pretty obvious,” Forrester answered.  “Your genes are written in a chemical language that has to be deciphered.  That’s a code, something that stands for something else.”  He took out a pen and scrawled a line of letters.  “You see this string of chemical bases here?  It prints out as ATGCCGATAGCT … and so on.  We happen to know that sequence codes for …”

Aaron interrupted. “… beta galactosyltransferase.  It helps with making allelic transcripts, right?”

Forrester looked up, visibly impressed.  He had deliberately chosen a tough one, doing his best to override Aaron’s questions with weighty expertise.  But, although he stumbled in pronouncing the name, the boy had identified the gene correctly.  “Yes, that’s right.”  He shot a quick glance at Julia who was sitting behind Aaron.  Her hand was at her mouth, trying to conceal a smile.  Catching Forrester’s eye, she mouthed
Sorry.

“But what I mean,” Aaron went on, showing his irritation,  “is how does a code differ from a symbol?”

Forrester decided to proceed with caution.  “Tell me what you have in mind.”

“All right. A code is a one-for-one substitution.  One coded element replaced by a deciphered element.  A code has to be simple and unequivocal or it won’t serve.  But a symbol is more complex.  It’s like, say, the flag or the cross.  Things like that don’t have any one meaning.  They’re, well, fuzzier.”

“True,” Forrester agreed. “That’s because they’re cultural.  Something man-made.”

“Aren’t, codes man-made?”

“Not all of them.  Nucleotides are a natural code and a lot older than culture.”

“But that’s only because you’ve decided to see them as a code.  You’re using the term metaphorically, but you aren’t aware that you are.   Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that a code is a pretty unlikely thing to find in nature?  The only true codes we know are works of intelligence.  But I don’t think you want to say chemicals are intelligent.  So where does this code come from?”

“Okay,” Forrester said, deciding to press the issue.  “Can there be music without intelligence?  How about a wind chime?  The wind is governed by pure chance.  No way to predict when it will blow or from what direction.  But when it does blow, we have music, don’t we?”

Aaron took the proposition seriously.  “Yes, but only because somebody decided on the notes the chime would sound.  If you hung a bunch of pots and pans in the wind, you’d just get random noise.  And that’s what you’d get if you just mixed up a bunch of chemicals and left them to become a living being.  Noise.  Chaos.  Nothing. You wouldn’t get a code.”

Forrester unloaded a weary sigh.  “All right, let me admit that when it comes to origins, biology draws a blank.  We don’t know how DNA got started.  We don’t know which came first, nucleic acids or proteins or how the one could make life without the other.  Maybe that’s what science is: the systematic avoidance of ultimate questions.  But that’s how we gain real knowledge.”

Aaron displayed a triumphant grin.  “So you admit that genes might just as well be symbols, except I guess symbols are a lot harder to understand.  Symbols can mean lots of different things.  Like the cross.  It probably has as many meanings as there are people who believe in Jesus.”

“That’s the trouble with symbols,” Forrester answered abruptly, as if he were moving to checkmate.  “You can’t make mathematics out of them.  Unless, of course, you’re talking about symbolic logic — which I gather you aren’t.   Anyway, biologists don’t get into issues like that.  That’s why we get things done. We don’t waste time on vague philosophical questions.”