The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  “There are automatic functions,” said Pileggi firmly, following Wesley with her eyes as he circled the room. “In the body. This is what is left.”

  “Yeah,” said Rich, scowling, refusing to accept this high-tower horseshit. “But what about the other automatic functions? Huh? He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t shit. He isn’t growing, for fuck’s sake. Explain all of that.”

  “I can’t,” she said calmly. She stared at Richard, unbowed, unafraid. “Not yet.”

  “He looked at me,” said Beth suddenly.

  “Oh, don’t—” Rich started, and Beth said “No, I’m going to tell her.” She reached across and clutched Pileggi’s hand, and Pileggi pulled it away, as if assaulted. “It was about a month ago.”

  “I am sure you are mistaken,” said Pileggi coolly.

  “No, no,” said Beth. “I was with him, we were at this hotel, in Marina del Rey. And he looked at me. He was trying to say something. He—”

  “That’s not possible,” said Pileggi.

  “All right,” said Shenk. “I mean—”

  “Don’t tell her it’s not possible.” Rich, who a second earlier had dismissed Beth in the same way, was now offended on her behalf. “She’s not an idiot. She knows what she saw.”

  Beth’s hand was at her mouth; her breath was stopped. Rich’s eyes were narrowed and some dark rage was building in his chest; Shenk could see it rising. Wesley’s circuit took him past the group, just at that moment, and he passed in silence like a traveling ghost.

  Maybe this would be a good moment, Shenk thought, to mention the glowing. Oh, and also, Dr. Pileggi, just something else for your notebook: at the time of the accident a friend of his saw him glow like a lightbulb, but only for a second. Does that factor into the diagnosis at all?

  He didn’t say that. Instead he played the moment’s necessary role, sliding between Pileggi and Beth to defuse the tension.

  “Now, listen, this is—I’m sure she didn’t mean to imply that anybody was crazy. Right, Dr. Pileggi?”

  The doctor shrugged, and Jay stared at her until she allowed it. “Of course I did not.”

  “OK?” said Shenk. “Great. Oh—sorry—”

  His phone was ringing, comically loud. Shenk slipped it out, flicked it to SILENT and risked a glance at the screen.

  Ah, great. Of course.

  He had been calling Mayorski Litigation Financing for a week, trying to get one of those bloodsuckers on the phone, and of course they would call back now, when he was deep in the muck.

  He didn’t love turning to litigation financiers, anyway, these shylocks who forwarded money against a settlement, as long as they felt like they had a decent shot at collecting. Creeps and usurers, these people, and who needs ’em?

  He needed them, of course. At this point, he needed them pretty badly. As the case hurtled toward opening argument, he was out of options, from a financial perspective. He had put Darla on furlough; he’d stopped making his lease payments for his office above the doughnut shop; he was strategically trading calls with the polite finance folks at Ruben’s shmancy school; and he was straight-up dodging the calls from Wells Fargo on his mortgage.

  The phone buzzed again.

  “Hey, sorry, everyone,” he began, thinking maybe he could get away for a few minutes. “But uh…”

  Richard was standing now, aiming an alarming finger at Pileggi.

  “Look, lady,” he demanded, and Shenk slipped his phone back in his pocket. He’d have to call back.

  “You said he got this thing, this pathogen, whatever it is. You said he’s had it a long time—a long time, and all that time he was fine. So what happened?”

  “Ah,” said Pileggi, and looked at Rich carefully, as if seeing him for the first time. “Good question. The simple answer is that the surgical intervention activated the prion where it had been nestled inside the brain fluid, and it began to replicate.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” said Rich, and Shenk said “I think what Dr. Pileggi is suggesting—” and Pileggi said “Not suggesting,” and Rich said “No, I get it. I fucking get it. The doctors. They—what? They woke it up.”

  “Yes.” Pileggi nodded once, sharply. “During a surgical intervention, the body reacts to the trauma by flooding the brain with cortisol. What appears to have happened in this case is that this cortisol activated the long-dormant prion, with disastrous results.”

  All three of them, then, Rich and Jay and Pileggi, turned their eyes to Wesley, trailing past, staring his empty stare. Beth got up to walk beside him.

  Beth walked with Wesley, who was not Wesley, who would never be Wesley again. They walked through the white columns and past the long, sleek nightclub bar. Beth walked with one hand very gently on the small of Wesley’s back.

  Wesley saw nothing. His arms fixed in place, his legs moving under their own control.

  Richard had been pierced by what Pileggi had said. Shenk could read it on his face. Under the bristle of his beard; in the cast of his eyes; the man was churning with understanding.

  “So they did this,” he said. “They did it. The doctors.”

  “Yes,” said Shenk. “Correct.”

  He had been waiting for this moment, he realized, the whole time. From the day the Keeners came into the offices of Shenk & Partners on Palms Boulevard, he had been waiting for Richard Keener to choose a side. To realize that a lawyer was different from a doctor, that a monolithic insurance company was different from a hustling sweetheart shyster with a mortgage and a teenager at home. To understand that not all strangers were conniving outsiders, part of a system engineered for your destruction.

  It was simple. It was simple after all. They did this.

  “You’re saying if these people hadn’t operated,” said Rich, looking past Pileggi to Wesley, pointing at him with his big hand, “then he’d be fine?”

  “Not fine. He would have had a concussion,” said Pileggi. “He might have had mild brain damage. Maybe. But not this.”

  Not this.

  “What we now understand,” Shenk told Richard, and raised his voice so Beth could hear him, too, “is that there was negligence on the part of the doctors who worked on Wesley that day. They were reckless, and their recklessness…” Shenk raised his hands, and let them drop. He looked at Wesley, walking past. “Their recklessness had consequences. We just have to make sure a jury understands that.”

  Rich lit a cigarette, sent an angry jet of smoke up toward the vaulted dome of the ceiling. In Shenk’s pocket, the buzz of the voicemail showing up.

  “I have a question,” said Beth. She brushed her hand across Wes’s back as she came back to the group. “With this Syndrome—sorry, what letter was it?”

  “K,” said Jay, and Pileggi nodded.

  “Is it always permanent? Or—I mean—will he ever come back? At all?”

  Pileggi opened her mouth and then closed it. She was going to say no. Shenk could tell—she was going to say no, just like that, and snuff out the candle keeping Beth Keener going, turn off hope like a light.

  She was going to say it, but she had seen Shenk, had caught at last his warning look. She looked down, adjusted her expression, and then looked up again and smiled, softly, at Beth Keener.

  “We don’t know. This condition is very rare, and there may be cases we don’t know of. So I can’t say yes, and I can’t say no.” She flicked a look at Shenk, glowing with relief. “And finally can I add that I am so sorry for what you are going through.” Pileggi lowered her head, shook it just a little bit. “I am just so sorry.”

  Whether Pileggi was really feeling sorrow for the suffering Keeners, or whether she was choosing in this moment to present a simulacrum of feeling, didn’t matter.

  For Judge Andrew Cates, for the twelve good folk and true who would form the Keener jury, he only needed her to perform a person, and now he saw that she could do it.

  Good, Shenk told Pileggi, mind to mind, Good going, and smiled, and she, for a split second, returned the smi
le, and they held each other’s gaze, kindness to kindness.

  And then she said, “Should I send my invoices directly to your office, or do you use an outside accounting firm to handle payables?”

  “Tell you what,” he said, and put a hand on her arm. “Let’s talk about that later.”

  2.

  Ruben, outside the doors of the fake Palladium, was holding himself very still.

  He was so close.

  Their expert witness needed to take a look at the boy, and so the Keeners had told Shenk where to bring her, and now here they were. In this very odd and very secret location.

  Wesley was protected, of course. He was under guard. There were three security guys, burly men in polo shirts, posted around the premises. None had said hello or acknowledged Ruben in any way, this teenager standing completely still outside the door, as if he were not a person but a statue adorning the entrance.

  Ruben had the card in his pocket. He had been carrying it around since the night man slipped it to him. He had told himself a hundred times to throw it away but he had not done so. Instead he had transferred it, every day, to a pocket of the next day’s pants. The card was tattered at its edges, beginning to separate from itself at the corners. Every day he had almost thrown it away, but then didn’t.

  If you find out, though, you’ll tell me, the night man had said, and now he had found out. All Ruben would have to do now was find a second to call. Just dial the number on the card. He could describe the route: the 405 to the 101, get off at Vineland, a service road and then another one.

  Of course he wouldn’t do that. How could he? The card was in his pocket, flat and hot. Ruben listened to the hummingbird of his heart.

  “Hey,” said Evelyn, and Ruben gasped, surprised, and she looked at him with a thin, curious smile. “You OK, dude?”

  She said the word dude with a small spin on it, like it was a new thing she was trying out: calling people dude.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine. Hi. How are you?”

  “I’m OK. They’re in there,” she said, pointing past Ruben at the Palladium’s majestic exterior.

  “I know.” And then, for some reason, he said something simple and true. “I’m really glad to see you again.”

  “Cool,” said Evelyn. “Me too.” Her smile broadened and sweetened, acknowledging his awkwardness, acknowledging the unspoken mutual affection that had been its context, forgiving him for his boldness. All of it at once. He could have kissed her. They were framed by the closed brass doors of the ballroom. They were surrounded by incongruous Burbank scrubland, the rutted service road, the colors of grass and tan. He wanted to kiss her.

  “How are you handling everything?”

  “OK, I guess. It’s weird. The way we’re living and all, all the moving around. And my mom is all—I don’t know.” Evelyn shrugged. “It’s weird.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah.”

  A crow swooped in from some errand, arranged itself on a branch above them. Ruben thought he could hear, from inside the dance hall, the low murmur of the adults talking. The building was fake, after all. It was pressboard and drywall. None of it was real.

  “Hey. I got my ears pierced,” said Evie. “When I turned thirteen. I was always scared before, I don’t know why.”

  “Oh. Whoa. That’s cool.”

  He stepped into her orbit, admired the tiny gold dots, smelled whatever it was she put in her hair, and then felt his heart unlock and swing open like a gate. He thought again to kiss her, felt his heart rattle violently at the prospect, but what he did instead was tell her his saddest secret.

  “I don’t know when my birthday is.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ruben had never discussed this fact with anyone outside of his family before. It was a closely held Shenk secret, although when he was little and had kiddie birthday parties every year, they would make a fun joke of it: Ruben and his dad had the same birthday! It’s Shenk Day! But he had been adopted in infancy, and the Tình Yêu Quý Giá Orphanage in Saigon kept no reliable records. Marilyn had also liked to light a candle on the anniversary of the day their plane had landed and they’d stepped off with baby Ruben in their arms—the day he had been “born a Shenk,” as she liked to say—but in truth they would never know. There was knowledge in the world that was simply unavailable, and among that body of knowledge was the true fact of what day Ruben had been born.

  “That’s actually kind of cool,” Evelyn said approvingly. “You could pick it. Maybe Christmas.”

  “Well,” he said, frowning. “We’re Jewish.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Totally. Sorry. But you know what Christmas is, right?”

  He took a second to see if she was kidding, and saw she was, and said, “I think I’ve heard of it, yeah,” and she laughed.

  There was actually a girl now Ruben sort of liked, in his driver’s ed class, named Stacy Leighton. He had thought she had no interest in him, because historically most girls did not, but two weeks ago she had been waiting in the side-door hallway when he came out of the gym, after wrestling, and he had the impression she’d been waiting to see him. Although when he said “Hi,” she just sort of laughed and said “Oh, hi” in a funny voice and rushed away.

  The crow, summoned back to the sky by whatever secret language speaks to birds, fluttered and flapped and departed. Evelyn Keener was basically different in all ways from Stacy Leighton. She was different from everybody. She was looking at him carefully now. She was thinking him over, somehow, and Ruben had a sense of being inspected. He liked it. Carefully, cautiously, he allowed himself to be inspected. He stood up straight. He opened himself up to Evelyn’s curiosity like turning toward the sun.

  “What is that?” she asked him suddenly, and he realized with horror that in his right hand was a tattered scrap of thin cardstock. The business card, sweaty from his palm. Why had he taken it out? What—

  Rubie came the hot secret whisper of the night man, Rubie-boobie—

  “Oh,” he said. “Nothing. It’s—it’s not anything.”

  Not anything my ass, hissed the voice, buzzing in an insect circle around his heart.

  And what if it was true? What if there is a good and golden world, hidden, waiting, and he could help to bring it through? Behind Ruben was the dance hall; inside the dance hall was Wesley; inside of Wesley was some cosmic future, some better way of being, and all they had to do was set it free.

  Ruben jammed the card back in his pocket, as far as it would go. Here was Evelyn, after all, together with him in this moment, with the distant call of winter birds, and the sunlight filtering through the leafless branches, the Hollywood Palladium pretending to be behind them, and this world right here, the actual lived-in world, was actually pretty great.

  “So,” said Evie suddenly. “This is going to sound: insane.”

  She said it quietly, almost to herself, and twisted her face to one side, a small gesture of defiant sincerity.

  “OK,” said Ruben softly.

  He looked at her. She looked at the ground.

  “There’s this dance. At my school. Later in the semester. Just for the graduating eighth graders, and—and, like, their guests.”

  “Oh,” Ruben said again, and his entire insides dissolved and re-formed and dissolved again, sand castles wasted by the tides and rebuilt, over and again in fast motion. He was so powerfully moved by what she had said that he hadn’t said anything in return, which he realized only when Evelyn scowled and said “Forget it.”

  “No. I—I mean—I…it’s…” Ruben was trying to find individual words from the swim of the air. “I would—no, yeah. Yes. I’d be happy to do that. To take you. To go. To the—”

  Now she was staring at him.

  If the crow were watching; if it had circled up to the next branch and taken a position of advantage, it might in that moment have assumed the two of them were statues, mutually agape, frozen in their adolescent inabili
ty to complete a sentence.

  “I mean: yes. Is what I’m saying. Sure. That sounds fun.”

  “OK,” she said. “Cool.”

  “Cool.”

  In a perfect world the adults would have come out of the Palladium just then, rescued Ruben from the emotional and hormonal crosscurrents that were tenderizing him like a fillet. But the moment did not end. Rescue did not emerge. The muttering voices continued from under the door. He knew the way that his dad would drive his voice up in pitch to change the dynamic, to signal that a meeting was at its end—Well, listen, thanks, everyone, for being here…—and he heard none of that, not yet.

  He would have liked to reach out and hold Evelyn’s hand. Not so much for himself, but for her, because if she was anything like him this had cost her something; the effort of asking, the pain of reaching out across the divide that separates people from people. It had to have been hard. And she was like him. In some way he couldn’t quite figure out, she was a lot like him.

  “Hey, can I tell you something else?” he said. “I’m doing wrestling.”

  Ruben was not sure why he was telling her this. It just seemed like what they were doing, exchanging small pieces of information. Evelyn seemed stunned.

  “Wesley wrestles,” she said. Obviously, as both of them knew, he wasn’t doing that anymore.

  “Yeah, no,” said Ruben, “I know. I uh…”

  He couldn’t explain it. It had just been an impulse, on the way out of school that day: Coach Marsden feeling his arm, like a piece of meat, nodding approvingly, ushering him into it. But Ruben was turning out to be surprisingly OK at wrestling; his win-loss record was not terrible, three meets in. He still had a ways to go, Coach told him, but he was genuinely enjoying the struggle. He liked incremental improvement: of agility, of muscle mass, of tactics. He liked the raw rub of the mat on his knees, he liked the bruising and the strain. He liked how you got better and better but never good. Never good enough.

  He was worried now that Evelyn would be angry. He decided that if she rescinded the invitation to the dance, he would apologize. He would never wrestle again. But she just murmured “huh,” and then “cool” and then there was a quiet moment between them. Both of them turning it over, what it meant. A wrestler taken from the world, and another put in.