The Crystal Child (36 page)

***

So hard to stay in touch.  The strain is growing too great.  It depletes me.  More and more, I feel as if I’m struggling to communicate in a language I learned in childhood and then forgot.  I have to fight to find every word.  It tires me to turn back to that life, that world.  Poor Kevin!  He must feel mangled.  He came here expecting to rule the roost.  Did he think Peter would be a push-over?  Or me — the “boy,” the “kid”?  I’m sure he believes I was playing tricks.  He must think I’m as much of a rogue as Peter.  So easy to dismiss the unusual.  Call it a trick, a stunt, a hoax.  Pity.  He would make an excellent student if he could simply unbend.  I could show him, show them all the buried life.  But perhaps it’s too much for them to witness.

And yet it’s so obvious.  That life doesn’t want to be wasted, cast aside, condemned to death and despair.  They must see that, a glimmer of it.  Under all the debris, the mountains of failure, the brightness survives.  Buried but still there.  That’s what it means to be reborn.  And reborn.  And reborn.  The impulse is what matters, not the vehicle it rides.

But I’m not free yet.  I’m still wrapped in the chains of time. Cronos is still hauling me after him, pausing along the way to give me a beating, making me hurt and crippled.  Somewhere up ahead is the prison camp he is taking me to — a death camp.  On the way there, I suffer his brutality.  
Move on
, I cry.  I plead for the moment to pass, but it won’t.  The beating continues.  This is time the killer, time the devil, forcing age and death upon us.  What we call “life” is the part of us that time has caught and mauled.  Time is what slows us the way a predator wounds its prey before it comes in for the kill. The deadly hunter catches those who are slowest.

“He wants you to come with him, doesn’t he?” Aaron asked when Julia returned from sending Forrester on his way.

“Yes.”

“He still loves you, you know — at least in so far as he can love anyone.”

Julia shook her head wearily as if this was too much for her to take in.  “How can you tell that?”

“I notice you don’t deny it.”

“No, it’s true.  But it doesn’t mean anything.”

Aaron came to sit beside her.  He took her hands in his.  “Yes, it does mean something quite important.  You may need someone to turn to.  It can’t be DeLeon.  That was the main reason I was willing to see Kevin — and to give him the specimen.  I’d like to keep him connected with you.”

“Why should I need him?”

“There are things about my condition that may become complicated.”

“Yes?  What?”

“I never know what comes next.  I only know there’s something coming.  Or rather forming inside me.  These things that seem so strange about me, they’re stored up in me, waiting to be chosen for use.  I’m like a projectile shot into the darkness, traveling at the speed of light.  I’m somewhere in the future, in a world where these capacities would be normal, our way of meeting still unforeseen conditions.  O, Julia, Julia, we don’t know our natural depth.  There’s so much waiting inside us, a bottomless reservoir.  Think of it.  Once all the fish in the deep ocean were blind.  They never saw light.  But they held the possibility of sight.  When they found their way to light, eyes emerged.  It’s like that.”

“But that took eons of time,” she said. “Changes like that can’t simply explode into existence.”

“Then tell me, what’s the limit to the power of mutation?  We couldn’t explain life on Earth without mutations.  And whenever they occur, they’re something magical. A rabbit out of the hat.  Watch now.”  He got up and walked across the room to the curtains that covered the windows.  Reaching up, he drew them slowly apart letting a bright shaft of sunlight strike through.  Then turning, he stood in the glowing beam and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, letting it drop to the floor.  Then he removed his trousers and underclothes.  Julia, astonished, rose from her chair to gaze at him.  What she saw was not a naked body but a human form that was shaped of light.  The luminescence that enveloped him dazzled the eye.  Julia wondered how long it had been since she last saw him in the light.  She realized it was months.  And in that time, all the while they met in the late night or in darkened rooms, this transformation had been taking place, his flesh growing steadily more ethereal.

She approached him and asked, “May I?”  He held out a hand for her to examine.  What she felt was decidedly flesh, soft and yielding, but unnaturally cool.  Holding his hand against the light from the window, she could see through to the bone and sinew.  But even these were translucent.  Where was his substance?   At last she gazed into his face, turning him toward the window.  What she saw was a silver-liquid mask, but it could smile with amusement at her reaction.

“There have been changes,” the mask said, its muscles moving as it spoke.  “More rapidly each day.  I’m accelerating — like something that’s broken free of gravity.”

Julia, studying him, found herself caught between conflicting perceptions.  What was this figure she saw standing before her?  Breath-taking beauty or grotesque monstrosity?  If Aaron were a work of art, an inert statue, he would be resplendent.  But that this form should walk and talk, should live was almost a horror.

He led her to the sofa and sat beside her.  He asked, “Do you remember that game we used to play?  HyperionQuest.”

“Yes.”

“There was a cave, if you recall.  It was presented as a trap, but there was a way out — something that had to do with a magical scepter, I can’t remember what.  But I do remember that we found our way out — or rather
through
.”

“Too long ago for me, Aaron.”

“Remember how the cave looked?  Dark and narrow — like a tunnel that became smaller and smaller as you went along.  But if you looked closely, there was a pixel of light up ahead.  If you used your scepter in the right way, the little dot of light got larger, until it became an opening into another world.  Something like that has happened to me.  Not visually, but in my mind.  I’ve been working my way down a tunnel into some undiscovered world.  Please, stay with me, Princess Alyssa.”

***

From the moment she opened her eyes, Julia could tell she was being watched.  Though the bedroom was dark, she knew someone was there, someone standing over her in the night.  She remembered closeness, breathing.  She turned suddenly to look across the room and at once saw the figure that was sitting at the foot of her bed.  “Aaron?” she whispered.

“You won’t take him from me,” Sylvana whispered in a tone that was at once pleading and threatening.  “You and your friend, Dr. Forrester.”

Julia knew what she meant but needed time to retrieve her thoughts from sleep. “Take who?” she asked, pulling herself up to a sitting position.

“You know.  I realize you are like a mother to him, his second mother.  I know I can never replace you in his heart.  But he must not leave here.  He is my life.”  Julia could hear tears in her voice, but Sylvana was doing all she could to sound coldly determined.  “I need him. More than you I need him..”

Julia could not make out Sylvana’s face from where she sat.  Glancing out the window, she realized that there was now a faint hint of moonlight through the clouds.  She judged it was a few hours past midnight.  She said, “But Aaron doesn’t need any of us.  Can’t you tell that?  If he has any needs at all, none of us can meet them.”

“He needs you to keep him alive.  He has said so.”

“That’s not true.  Whatever I could do for him is in the past.”

“You are his doctor, his healer.”

“I’ve told you, I’m no longer a doctor.  In any case, I don’t think he was saved by anything I did.”

“He loves you, I know that.”

She paused before she confessed.  “I wish that were true.”

“Yes, it is true.”

“No, Sylvana, it isn’t.  Aaron is beyond love.”

Sylvana edged closer on the bed.  She reached out to touch Julia’s arm.  “That is not so.  He is filled with love, it flows from him.  I can feel it.  All through this house, I can feel it.”  Then, almost desperately she added, “But I need only a little of this love.  Truly.  I will share him with you.  We will be his women.  You can be first in his life.  But leave room for me, I beg you.”

“Have you been with him?” Julia asked with an objective curiosity. “I mean — have you made love with him?”

Sylvana’s voice became defensive.  “Not like you.  Not that way.  I would not dare.”

“He and I were intimate only once.  Do you understand that?  Only once.  I hardly knew what I was doing.   It was as if I was drunk.  But never here, not since I arrived.”

Sylvana was silent for a long while. “I have been with him through the night,” she said at last.  “He has permitted this.  That I may sit by his side.”

“Why does that matter to you?” Julia asked.  She might have asked the same question of herself.

“Because … because he is the truth.”   She gave the answer with a childlike simplicity, and yet it seemed exactly right to Julia.

“What do you mean by that?” Julia asked.

“When I was a child, every night I prayed that one day God would grant me a miracle in my life.  I have waited all these years. I have not lived a good life, pleasing in the eyes of God.  But now it has come, the miracle, mercifully before I die.  I have seen with my own eyes.”

Julia was wide-awake now, suddenly excited.  “What have you seen?”

“That there is no death.”

Julia felt her heart racing.  “How can you say that? Has Aaron told you that?”

“By his whole life he tells me.  You have seen.  His beauty, his youth.  This will never end.”

“But that may be true only for him.  And we can’t be sure.  He may change again as he did before.”

“No!”  The word burst from her, a small, harsh squeal. Sylvana made it clear she would hear no more.  She rose and stood rigidly beside the bed.  “How can you not believe?  You who mothered him, a divine child?”

“I knew him as a sick boy.  I know how quickly he can change.”

“Does not your heart tell you?  He was resurrected by your power.”

How much could she tell this strange and troubled woman?  There were things waiting to be said.  “Yes, I think he’s miraculous.” She blurted the words out.  “That only means I have no explanation for what he has become. He speaks of it as discovering the buried life.  I have no idea what that means.   But, Sylvana, you must understand, it could all pass.  Aaron might change in other ways that would be lethal.”

“If you try to take him away, you and your scientist friend, I will stop you.  Peter will stop you.”

“Are you saying we’re prisoners?”

“I will stop you.”

“If Aaron tells you he wants to leave, will you try to keep him here?  I can’t believe that, Sylvana.  You have no right to do that.”

“Right? This has nothing to do with rights.  Do not take this child from me.  I warn you.”

Her words were swallowed up in tears.  She turned away and wept with a shrill little girl’s whine.

Julia reached to place her arms around Sylvana’s trembling shoulders. The woman crumpled into her arms, hungry for comfort.  “Sylvana, Sylvana, Aaron is beyond us.  He’s part of something so vast, so incomprehensible.  We’re on the fringe of his world, like little planets out there on the edge of the galaxy.  We’re tiny and ephemeral.  We’ll burn out and turn to cinders.  But he will go on, traveling farther and farther away.  I know he will.  We will never know the brightness.”

No, that was not true.  She could not mention it to Sylvana; she had not told anybody.  But she knew she had glimpsed a fleeting glimmer of Aaron’s world.  That night when she transgressed, when she cast her life away to become his lover, then, while she labored to draw pleasure from him, as if in a flash of lightning, she had seen beyond the sad clutter of life that held her captive, the trivial ambitions, the pointless distractions.  She had caught sight of something ahead of her, summoning her, making her race to catch up as she had raced to keep up with the faun in the forest that night when Aaron kissed her.  She had exhausted herself, as she had in the past with other lovers, racing to wrench delight from that other body, struggling toward climax, aching to have it.  But now she knew, the joy she wanted, the only pleasure she could have, was the merest shadow of what Aaron had found.  That was why there was always disappointment afterwards, a sense of despondency, as if the body had not given enough.  She had seen just that much, a distant reflection.  It was desperation that drove desire, the brute sense that
more
lies somewhere ahead, on the far side of the moment, a place where time, the killer, the devil, is left behind.

She could think of no way to explain what she knew to the woman who was huddled in her arms.  She could not bring herself to say,
Your love is futile, it is too small, too entangled with death
.   Sylvana, for all her sophistication, was a simple woman, still bound to the faith of her childhood.  She wore religious medallions and carried a rosary, she crossed herself at every mention of death or disaster.  There was only one thought in her mind.  “You healed him,” she said through her tears.  “I beg you, please, do not take him from me.”  She rushed away, leaving the door open behind her.

It was happening again.  Waking from a sound sleep, knowing she was needed.  Was it Aaron?  She lay still, holding her breath, waiting.  The tension of the rescuer was knotting her muscles, making her ready to spring from the bed.  There was a phone in the room, but it did not ring.  Instead there was a soft tapping at her door.  Perhaps she had heard it in her sleep. She drew on a robe, quickly padded barefoot to the door, and opened it.  Outside in the darkened corridor stood a small girl holding a flashlight.  It was Serena, the cook’s daughter, wearing her nightgown.  Julia knew the girl; she had been teaching her English, a new word every morning when she brought breakfast.  Serena was often used to run errands around the house, but never at this hour.  “Come, come,” the girl said in her best English.  “The doctor.  Come.”

There was no point in asking why; Serena would revert to more Spanish than Julia could follow.  She told the girl to wait and went back for her slippers.  What time was it?  The bedside clock said just short of two in the morning.  Taking a flashlight of her own, Julia followed the girl, who scampered away down the stairs ahead of her, dodging in and out of the shadows.  At night, Tlaloc went nearly dark, the empty rooms and halls lit by infrequent lamps or not at all.  A few more turns and Julia realized she was being taken to Dr. Horvath’s dispensary, a small but well-equipped emergency room on the first lower level.  Outside the door she came upon Sylvana and her masseur both dressed in night clothes.  When Sylvana saw Julia, she rushed to meet her.  “He is such a foolish man,” she cried, an echo of hysteria in her voice.

“Who is?” Julia asked.  “What’s happened?”

Sylvana led her to the door of the dispensary and escorted her in.  Inside, a pale and exhausted Dr. Horvath was working over DeLeon who sat slumped in a chair, too weak to get to his feet, but flailing in all directions.   Sylvana’s physical trainer was doing his best to restrain him. Turning at the sound of Julia’s voice, Horvath said, “So sorry to disturb you.  He is being difficult.”  Julia could tell from across the room that DeLeon was seriously drunk.

“Difficult?”  DeLeon howled.  “Because I refuse to be manhandled?”

“He does not like to be attended by Sylvana’s people,” Horvath explained.  “But I could not lift him myself.”  “Sylvana’s people” meant the trainer, the masseur, the yoga master — the young men on the premises who had apparently been summoned to get DeLeon under control.  This had happened before when DeLeon had drunk himself into a stupor and each time, when muscle was applied to the problem, there had been an angry scene.  This time things looked more serious.  Horvath was struggling to connect a reluctant DeLeon to an EKG machine.  “Perhaps you can help me?” he asked with an embarrassed smile as he sought to hold DeLeon steady.

“I don’t need this,” DeLeon roared as he tore off the sensors.  He stood, took a few steps toward the door, fell heavily against a counter, and slid awkwardly to the floor.

“Maybe it would be best if he just passed out,” Julia said, reaching for an arm-band to take DeLeon’s blood pressure.

“I have already done that,” Horvath told her.  “224 over 98.’

“Oh, my,” Julia said.  “Are we out to break the record here?”  She wrapped DeLeon’s arm again and pumped away.  “185 over 94.  Very bad, but lower.”  While DeLeon sat grousing drunkenly to himself, Horvath filled her in.

“As you know, he has been fasting.  One month, no food, almost no water.”  This much Julia knew.  DeLeon’s bi-yearly fast had been announced to one and all as if it were a primetime news event.  For days now she had seen him dragging around Tlaloc, looking on the brink of collapse.  Reportedly, he spent most of each day meditating or sleeping.  “Today the fast ended,” Horvath went on.  “At midnight.  So he wakes the cook and orders his favorite ranch-hand breakfast.  Steak, eggs, sausage, potatoes, onions, hot salsa.  And of course he begins to drink.  This has been his pattern for as long as I have known him.  Totally reckless.  Perhaps once he was young enough to take the strain. But now, as you see …”

“He told me his heart was in great condition,” Julia said as she assisted Horvath in setting up the EKG.  She noted a nitroglycerine inhaler on the bedside tray.

“Ah, how he lies!  He refuses to face the truth.  He has suffered two heart attacks since I have been here.  During his fast, he suspends his medications.  Unfortunately he is not a very compliant patient.”

Sylvana was still standing in the door, her face a tense blend of worry and displeasure.  The cook, looking sheepish and no less worried for making the breakfast, stood behind Sylvana with her hands on little wide-eyed Serena’s shoulders.  “He is all right?” Sylvana asked.

Julia turned to her, a wave of rage rising inside her.  Why was she being asked to treat this childishly irresponsible man?   “No, he isn’t all right.  He’s a sick man, and I don’t mean simply physically sick.  He’s a self-indulgent fool.  He believes all the lies he tells his clients.  He’s a dangerous quack and he is his own worst victim.”

From behind her DeLeon roared.  “I heard that.  I heard every ugly, slanderous word.  Make that woman go away.  Ungrateful cunt!  Make them all go away.  What are they staring at?”  On his feet, wobbling precariously, DeLeon fixed Julia with a hate-filled stare.  “I’ll outlive you, Dr. Miracle.  Outlive you and your cute, little paramour.  Aaron the immortal.  I’ll have the little freak stuffed and frozen.  The eighth wonder of the world.  I’ll have his secret.  I’ll be there waiting.”  Having delivered his bitter oration, DeLeon once again collapsed.  Horvath bent over him to feel for his pulse.  Julia was on the point of leaving when he appealed to her.  “Dr. Stein, please.  I am feeling rather depleted.”  She could see the weariness in his wraith-like face.  The man was not up to struggling with DeLeon.  In another moment there might be two people in the room needing resuscitation.  “May I ask you to stay with him, only until he is out of danger?” Horvath asked.  “I really must rest.  I will return, I promise.”

How many times had she told them — all of them — that she was no longer a doctor?  And yet professional conscience, still there and as despotically alert as ever, held her where she stood.  She could not walk away from a man who might be fatally ill.  She nodded and sent Horvath on his way.

She sat by the sleeping DeLeon’s side for another two hours, nodding off and blinking awake, keeping the kind of watch she remembered from her days at the clinic.  And from her time at Stockton, where she was often ordered to sit with critical cases through the night.  Some of them had been as obnoxious and abusive as DeLeon.  Toward dawn, the frightened cook brought her coffee and some rolls, then stood begging forgiveness for making the breakfast that had laid her employer out.  “Not your fault,” Julia explained and sent her away.  When DeLeon seemed at last out of danger, she summoned Sylvana’s trainer, a large, powerfully-built American who managed to wrestle DeLeon’s dead weight on to a gurney and then used the house elevator to wheel him to his bedroom.  Along the way, the young man remarked, “I never saw anybody chug-a-lug Scotch like the doctor.  He gets real nasty when he’s bombed.”  In his bed, sleeping off his binge, DeLeon remained red-faced and breathing heavily.

A little after six in the morning, Horvath reappeared, still looking terminally weary.  He bent over DeLeon examining this and that, then dropped into a chair beside Julia  “I must thank you,” Horvath said.  “He has gotten beyond my control.”

“I knew he was a fool,” Julia said.  “But I didn’t think he was self-destructive.”

“Yes, he is foolish,” Horvath agreed.  “Headstrong, reckless, vain.  We have worked together almost twenty years, and each year he becomes more imprudent, more zealous.  But he is also one of the most courageous men I have met.”

“I wonder what you could possibly mean by that,” Julia said, infusing her words with a dismissive skepticism he could not miss.

“I mean he is a man committed to taking on the great challenge.”

“Which is?”

“Immortality, Doctor.  What else matters finally?  Oh, yes, he is also a charlatan.  Or shall I say nine-tenths a charlatan.  But what can one expect?  The temptation is so great, dealing as he does with so many people who wish to be deceived, needy people fleeing age, fearing death.  Yes, he yields to the temptation.  Nine-tenths a charlatan, but there is that one redeeming tenth.”

“I’m afraid I have a hard time seeing that,” Julia said, rising to leave.

Horvath’s face, colorless and slack, might have been a death mask. But suddenly it came alive as if he had been pricked with a needle.  “
Why do we put up with it
?”  He put the question fiercely, with a clear sense of outrage.  He had turned intensely serious, his teeth clenched.  “Can you answer that?”

“I don’t understand,” Julia answered, bewildered at this unexpected change of tone.  “Why do we put up with
what?”

“Death, of course.  Have all your years of study given you an answer? 
Why do we go to our death so obediently?
  Like lambs to the slaughter.  They say that is how prisoners in the death camps marched to the gas chambers — like sleepwalkers.  But why?  From where does such resignation arise?”

Julia assumed a defensive smile as she shrugged the question off.  “What choice do we have, Doctor?”

For the first time since she had known him, Horvath’s eyes flashed beneath their heavy lids.  His hands curled into fists.  “To fight!  For all we are worth.  Death is the greatest injustice of all.  Death is tyranny, oppression, humiliation, outrage all in one.  It strips us of everything.  It mocks our greatest achievements.  People hunger for immortality, yet they bow down to worship the gods that cheat them of that very blessing.  They accept death as fate.  ‘Thy will be done.’  But surely any god that deprives us of eternity is the worst despot.  Until we admit that, we will never rise up and fight back.”

Though Horvath tried to keep his voice level, there was a barely controlled excitement in his words that made Julia uneasy.  She stood up and moved behind the chair she had been sitting in as if to shield herself.  “Doctor, this is crazy talk.  I don’t know what you mean.”

His eyes were still fixed on her, an accusing stare.  “I can’t believe you have never felt this,” he said, a faintly mocking tone in his voice now.  “That life should go on and on.  That even at a hundred we die before our time.  This has never made you angry?”

“No.  Not angry.  Sad perhaps.  What would be the point of anger?”  But even as she said the words, she recalled the times she had resented the resignation she saw coming over her dying patients.  True, she had wanted them to fight back, if only for a few more years.  She had flared inwardly with the same sense of … well, yes, injustice.  But she had never imagined phrasing her grief or her anger as Horvath did.

“Ah, that is where you go wrong,” Horvath said.  “Sorrow is surrender, it is acquiescence.  Anger is resistance.”

“But what sense does it make to resist mortality?” she asked.  She had wanted the question to come out sounding rhetorical, but there was an unexpected sincerity in Horvath’s remarks that made her uncertain how to respond.  Did he believe what he was saying?

“Peter would tell you, if you would hear him.  He would tell you: we should have declared all-out war on death centuries ago, at the dawn of human consciousness.  Then, when something new had come into existence: the dearest child of the life force. A species that could foresee its own demise.  That was light breaking in on the darkness, the first glimmer.  That we are mortal — the one great fact no other creature can foresee.  We should have declared that nothing differentiates us from the lower orders of life more than this — that we can see death for the enemy he is, that we have the need of more — more life.  Instead we have settled for pious self-deception.  Dreams of an after life, or reincarnation, or peace everlasting.  Fairy tales.  And what is it to believe in fairy tales?  It is surrender.  And so we continue to age and grow sick and die.”

“And you don’t believe this is inevitable?”

Horvath spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment.  “Why do we assume it is?  What if there is a remedy?  An herb, an elixir, a ritual.”  He bent closer as if he were about to impart a secret.  “Did you know that in Ghuen in the north of India, there are Buddhist adepts that practice self-desiccation.  In a state of trance they live for years
without water
.  There are reports that some have survived in a form of living mummification beyond two-hundred years.”

“But who would want to live in that condition — even if it were possible?”

“I assure you we have these reports on good authority.  They attest to the hidden potential of our organism, a capacity for life that is there waiting to be tapped.  And if that much is possible, why not more?  All that is lacking is the will to resist.  If we had said ‘no!’ to death at the beginning, we would have been seeking for the mechanism of immortality all along.  But, you see, we have been taught that we are up against the inevitable.”

Julia found herself caught between fascination and disbelief.  She could not deny Horvath’s sincerity, but everything he said was absurd.  “ ‘Taught’ by whom?  By what?”

As if she were asking him to add two and two, Horvath shrugged.  “By Thanatos.  You have heard of the death instinct?  The dark god.  Your medicine, Doctor, is too timid.  It plays for small gains.  But the Immortalist Method seeks victory.  Like the poet, we say, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ ”

“You make this sound so ideological,” Julia said, frowning to show her perplexity.

“And why not?  It is the one cause that unites us all.  The right to life, yes?”

“I’m sure you’re quite sincere,” Julia said.  “But I’d say you’re pursuing a lost cause.”

“You believe so?  But we have more weapons to fight with than ever before.  We know where death hides in the organism, we know how it degrades us, wears us down, strikes at our most vulnerable parts.  And now, now we have this remarkable child.  Perhaps there have been others like him, but they were seen as freaks.  Perhaps they were killed.  But we can respect his gift, study it, learn what he can teach us.”