Alex frowned thoughtfully; then: “Dad doesn’t like him, does he?”
“No,” Ellen agreed, “he doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you keep getting better.”
“But what if I’m not getting better?”
Ellen stepped into the room and closed Alex’s door behind her, then came to sit on the end of the bed. “But you are getting better.”
“Am I?”
“Of course you are. You’re starting to remember things, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Alex replied. “Sometimes I think I am, but the memories don’t always make sense. It’s like … I remember things that I couldn’t possibly remember.”
“What do you mean?”
Alex tried to explain some of the things that had happened, but carefully made no mention of the voices that sometimes whispered inside his head. He wouldn’t mention those until he understood them. Ellen listened carefully as he talked, and when he was done, she smiled reassuringly.
“But it’s all very simple. Obviously you saw the book before.”
“Miss Pringle says I didn’t.”
“Arlette Pringle’s memory isn’t as good as she likes people to think it is,” Ellen replied. “And anyway, even if you didn’t ever see that copy of the book, you certainly might have seen it somewhere else. At your grandparents’, for instance.”
“My grandparents? But I don’t even remember them. How could I remember something I saw at their house, without remembering them or their house either?”
“We’ll ask Dr. Torres. But it seems to me that your memory must be coming back, even if it’s just scraps. Instead of worrying about what you’re remembering, I think you ought to be trying to remember more.” For the first time her eyes fell on the book Alex had been reading, and she picked it up, studying the immensely enlarged brain cell on the cover for a moment. “Why are you reading this?”
“I thought maybe if I knew more about the brain, I might be able to figure out what’s happening to me,” Alex replied.
“And are you?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to have to do a lot more studying.”
Ellen put the book down and took Alex’s hands. Though he made no response, neither did he immediately draw away from her. “Honey, the only thing that matters is that you’re getting better. It doesn’t matter why or how. Don’t you see that?”
Alex shook his head. “The thing is, I’m not sure I am getting better, and I want to know. It just seems … well, I just think it’s important that I know what’s happening in my brain.”
Ellen squeezed his hands, then let them go and stood up. “Well, I’m not going to tell you not to study, and Lord knows your father won’t either. But don’t stay up all night, okay?” Alex nodded and picked up his-book. When Ellen leaned down to kiss him good night, he returned the gesture.
But as his mother left the room, Alex wondered why she always kissed him, and what she felt when she did. For his own part, he felt nothing.…
Marsh was still in his easy chair, staring morosely into the cold fireplace, when Alex came into the living room an hour later. “Dad?”
Marsh looked up, blinking tiredly. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”
“I’ve been studying, but I need to talk to you. I’ve been reading about the brain,” Alex began, “and there’s some things I don’t understand.”
“So you thought you’d ask the family doctor?” He gestured toward the sofa. “I’m not sure I can help you, but I’ll try. What’s the problem?”
“I need to know how bad the damage was to my brain,” Alex said. Then he shook his head. “No, that’s not really it. I guess what I need to know is how deep the damage went. I’m not too worried about the cortex itself. I think that’s all right.”
The tiredness suddenly drained out of Marsh as he stared at Alex. “You think that’s all right?” he echoed. “After reading for a couple of hours, you think the cortex is all right?”
Alex nodded, and if his father’s skeptical tone affected him at all, he gave no sign. “It seems as though there must have been damage a lot deeper, but there are some things that don’t seem to make any sense.”
“For instance?” Marsh asked.
“The amygdala,” Alex said, and Marsh stared at him. He searched his mind, and eventually associated the word with a small almond-shaped organ deep within the brain, nearly surrounded by the hippocampus. If he’d ever known its exact function, he’d long since forgotten.
“I know where it is,” he said. “But what about it?”
“It seems like mine must have been damaged, but I don’t see how that’s possible.”
Marsh leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “I’m not following you,” he said. “Why do you say the amygdala must have been injured?”
“Well, according to this book, what’s been happening to me seems like it must be associated with the amygdala. I don’t seem to have any emotions, and we know what happened to my memory. But now I’m starting to remember things, except that the way I remember them isn’t the way they are, but the way they used to be.”
Marsh nodded, though he wasn’t exactly sure where Alex was going. “All right. And what do you think that means?”
“Well, it seems that I’m having imaginary memories. I’m remembering things that I couldn’t remember.”
“Maybe,” Marsh cautioned him. “Or maybe your memories are just twisted a bit.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Alex said. “But I don’t think so. I keep remembering things as they were long before I was even born, so I must only be imagining that I’m remembering them.”
“And what does that have to do with the amygdala?”
“Well, it says in the book I read that the amygdala may be the part of the brain that mediates rearrangement of memory images, and that seems to be what’s happening to me. As though the images are getting rearranged, and then coming out as real memories when they’re not.”
Marsh’s brows arched skeptically. “And it seems to me as though you’re jumping to a pretty farfetched conclusion.”
“But there’s something else,” Alex went on. “According to this book, the amygdala also handles emotional memories. And I don’t have any of those at all. No emotions, and no memories of emotions.”
With a force of will, Marsh kept his expression impassive. “Go on.”
Alex shrugged. “That’s it. Given the combination of no emotions or memories of emotions, and the imaginary memories, the conclusion is that my amygdala must have been damaged.”
“If you read that book right, and if its information is correct — which is a big if, considering how little is actually known about the brain — then I suppose your conclusion is probably right.”
“Then I should be dead,” Alex stated.
Marsh said nothing, knowing all too well that what his son was positing was absolutely true.
“It’s too deep,” Alex went on, his voice as steady as if he were discussing the weather. “In order to damage the amygdala, practically everything else would have to be destroyed first: the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the hippocampus, the corpus callosum, the cingulate gyrus, and probably the thalamus and the pineal gland too. Dad, if all that happened to me, I should be dead, or at least a vegetable. I shouldn’t be conscious, let alone walking, talking, seeing, hearing, and everything else I’m doing.”
Marsh nodded, but still said nothing. Again, everything Alex had said was true.
“I want to know what happened, Dad. I want to know how badly my brain was damaged, and how Dr. Torres fixed it. And I want to know why part of my brain is doing so well, and other parts aren’t working at all.”