by Nancy Kress
Ben glanced over, rain dripping off his collar. “You surprise me sometimes, buddy.”
That was not a polite answer. Cixin scowled and stared out the window at the “typhoon” and tapped his sandy sneaker on the sodden floor of the car. He wanted to run again.
And Ben was too sad.
In the “condo,” instead of the stupid tutor, a woman sat on the sofa. How did she get in? A robber! Cixin rushed to the phone, shouting, “911! 911!” Ben had taught him that. Robbers—how exciting!
But Ben called, “It’s all right, Cixin.” His voice sounded so strange that Cixin stopped his mad dash and, curious, looked at him.
“Renata,” Ben said thickly.
“I couldn’t stay away after all,” the woman said, and then they were hugging. Cixin turned away, embarrassed. Chinese people did not behave like that. And the woman was ugly, too tall and too pale, like a slug. Not pretty like Xiao. The way Ben was holding her . . . Cixin hated the woman already. She was evil. She was not necessary.
He rushed into his room and slammed the door.
But at dinnertime the woman was still there. She tried to talk to Cixin, who refused to talk back.
“Answer Renata,” Ben said, his voice dangerously quiet.
“What did you say?” Cixin made his voice high and silly, to insult her.
“I asked if you found any sand dollars on the beach.”
He looked at her then. “Dollars made of sand?”
“No. They’re the shells of ocean creatures. Here.” She put something on the table beside his plate. “I found this one last week. I’ll bet you can’t find one bigger than this.”
“Yes! I can!” Cixin shouted. “I’m going now!”
“No, you’re not,” Ben said, pulling him back into his chair. But Ben was smiling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll all go.”
“And if we go in the evening and if the clouds have lifted, there should be something interesting to see in the sky,” Renata said. “But I won’t tell you what, Cixin. It’s a surprise.”
Cixin couldn’t wait until Saturday evening. He woke very early. Ben and Renata were still asleep in Ben’s bed—she must be a whore even if she wasn’t as ugly as he thought at first—and here it was morning. A little morning, pale gray in a corner of the sky. The rainstorm was all gone.
He dressed, slipped out of the house-in-the-sky, and ran to the beach. No one was there. The air was calm now and the water had stopped pounding and something strange was happening to the sky over the water. Ribbons of color—green, white, green—waved in the sky like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts! Frightened, Cixin turned his back, facing the part of the sky where the sun would come up and chase the ghosts away. But then he couldn’t see the water. He turned back and ran and ran along the cool sand. To his left, in San Diego, sirens started to sound. Cixin ignored them.
Finally, exhausted, he plopped down. The sun was up now and the sky ghosts gone. Nobody else came out on the beach. Cixin watched the nearest tiny waves kissing the sand.
Something happened.
A soft, calm feeling stole through him, calm as the water. He didn’t even want to run anymore. He sat cross-legged, half hidden by a sand drift, dreamily watching the ocean, and all at once he was the ocean. Was the sand, was the sky, was the whole universe and they were him.
Cixin. Come. Cixin.
Voices, everywhere and nowhere, but Cixin didn’t have to answer because they already knew the answer. They were him and he was them.
Peace. Belonging. Everything. Time and no time.
And then Ben was forcing open his mouth, putting in something that melted on his tongue, and it all went away.
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 olde
st 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 . . .
Cix . . . in . . .
“Where are you?” he cried.
“I’m right here,” the teacher’s aide said. She hurried to Cixin’s desk and put a hand on his shoulder.
Cixin . . .
“Come back!” He jumped up, scattering the crayons and knocking away the teacher’s hand.
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” she said soothingly. “I’m right here, dear. What do you need?”
Standing, he could see out the classroom window to the parking lot. Ben’s white car pulled in and parked.
Ben was coming for him. Cixin didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew. Ben didn’t like the voices. Ben was very smart and very American and he knew how to do things, get things, make things happen. Ben was coming for Cixin and Ben was going to make the voices go away forever.
Cixin’s mind raced. Ben would have to pass front-door security, go to the school office, get a pass, come down the hall . . . . Cixin didn’t hesitate. He ran.
“Cixin!” his teacher called. The other children began shouting. The aide tried to grab Cixin but he twisted away, ran out of the room and down the hall, zigged left, dashed toward the door to t
he playground. The school doors were locked from the outside but not the inside; Cixin burst through and kept running. Across the playground, over the fence, behind houses to the street . . . run, fen noon nan hi . . .
Eventually he had to stop, panting hard, leaning over with his hands on his knees. The houses here were small and didn’t go up into the sky like Ben’s house. Beyond were stores and eating houses and a gas station. Cixin walked behind a place with the good smell of pizza coming from it. Except for the beach, pizza was the best thing about America. Back here no one in a white car could see him. There was a big metal box with an opening high up.
Climbing on a broken chair, Cixin peered inside the big metal box. Some garbage, not much, and a bad smell, not too bad. He hauled himself up and tumbled inside. The garbage included a lot of pizza boxes, some with half-eaten pizzas inside. And no one could find him.
Many things were clear to him now. Ben saying to Renata, “I’ll have to adjust the dosage. He’s growing.” The way to hear the voices, to go to that other place where he saw everything and breathed with the sky, was by having no once-a-week, and by waiting until the one he took before wasn’t in his head anymore. Ben had made him swallow the last once-a-week last Wednesday. This was Tuesday, and already the voices, faint, were there.
He curled up in a corner of the Dumpster to wait.
Ten: Ben
He looked everywhere, the beach first. The day was warm and the sands choked with people who didn’t have to be at work, as well as teenagers who probably should have been in school, but no Cixin. Ben raced back to the apartment: nothing. He called the school again, which advised him to call the police. Instead he called Renata’s cell; she had no classes Tuesday afternoon.
“I’m very worried about—”
“How did you hear so fast?” she demanded.
“What?”
“You’re inside, aren’t you? Was the TV on at the lab? If there’s a basement in your building go there but stay away from the power connections and make sure you can get out easily if there’s a fire. We put the bulletin out on campus, but who knows how many won’t hear it—twenty minutes! God!”