Brain Child Page 0,40
shrugged. “Curious, I guess.”
Torres placed his pen on the desk and leaned back in his chair. “If I were you, I think I’d be excited. You’re finally going home after three months—it seems to me that should be exciting.”
“Except I’m not really going home, am I?” Alex asked, his voice as expressionless as his eyes. “I mean, Mom and Dad have moved, so I’ll be going to a house I’ve never lived in before.”
“Do you wish you were going back to the house you grew up in?”
Alex hesitated, then shook his head. “I guess it doesn’t matter where I go, since I don’t remember the old house anyway.”
“You don’t have any feelings about it at all?”
“No.” Alex uttered the single word with no expression whatsoever.
And that, Torres silently reminded himself, was the crux of the matter. Alex had no feelings, no emotions. That was not to say that Alex’s recovery had not been remarkable; indeed, it was very little short of miraculous. The boy could walk and talk, see, hear, and touch. But he seemed not to be able to feel at all.
Even the news that he was being released from the Institute had elicited no emotional response from him. Rather, he’d accepted the news with the same detachment with which he now accepted everything. And that, Torres knew, was the one factor that kept the medical world from viewing the operation as a complete success.
“What about going back to La Paloma?” Torres pressed.
Alex shifted in his chair and started to cross his legs. On the second try, his left ankle came to rest on his right knee.
“I … I guess I wonder what it will be like,” he finally said. “I keep wondering if I’ll recognize anything, or if it’s all going to be like it was when I first woke up.”
“You’ve remembered a lot since then,” Torres replied.
Alex shrugged indifferently. “But I keep wondering if I really remember anything, or if I’m just learning things all over again.”
“Not possible,” Torres stated flatly. “It has to be recovery—nobody could learn things as fast as you have. And don’t forget that when you first woke up, you spoke. You hadn’t forgotten language.”
“There were a lot of words I didn’t understand,” Alex reminded him. “And sometimes there still are.” He stood up and took a shaky step, paused, then took another.
“Take it easy, Alex,” Torres told him. “Don’t demand too much of yourself. It’s all going to take time. And speaking of time, I think we’d better get started.” He waited while Alex swiveled his chair around so both of them were facing the screen that had been set up in a corner of the large office. When Alex was ready, Torres switched off the lights. A picture flashed on the screen.
“What is it?” Torres asked.
Alex didn’t hesitate so much as a second. “An amoeba.”
“Right. When did you take biology?”
“Last year. It was Mr. Landry’s class.”
“Can you tell me what Mr. Landry looked like?”
Alex thought a minute, but nothing came. “No.”
“All right. What about your grade?”
“An A. But that was easy—I always got A’s in science.”
Torres said nothing, and changed the slide.
“That’s the Mona Lisa,” Alex said promptly. “Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Good enough. Is there another name for it?”
“La Gioconda.”
The pictures changed again and again, and each time Alex correctly identified the image on the screen. Finally the slide show ended, and Torres turned the lights back on. “Well? What do you think?”
Alex shrugged. “I could have learned most of that stuff since I’ve been here,” he said. “All I’ve been doing is reading.”
“What about your grades? Did you read them here, too?”
“No. But Mom told me. I don’t really remember much of anything about any of my classes. Just names of teachers and that kind of thing. But I don’t see anything. Know what I mean?”
Torres nodded, and rifled through some of his notes. “Having problems visualizing things? No mental images?”
Alex nodded.
“But you don’t have problems visualizing things you’ve seen since the accident?”
“No. That’s easy. And sometimes, when I see something, it seems familiar, but I can’t quite put it together. Then, when someone tells me what it is, it’s almost like I remember it, but not quite. It’s hard to describe.”
“Sort of like déjà vu?”
Alex knit his brows, then shook his head. “Isn’t that where you think what’s happening now has happened before?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s not like that at all.” Alex searched his mind, trying to find the right words to describe the strange sensations he had sometimes. “They’re like half-memories,” he