“Kubla Khan,” he said. “That’s a good dream poem. Maybe it’ll give you good dreams.”
“‘In Xanadu,’” she began, “‘did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree...’”
She was almost asleep, one second from it, when she felt something hard, something that tasted of plastic being shoved into her mouth between her lips. She felt something cold on either side of her forehead. And then a shock tore through her, a shock like lightning had struck her. It lifted her into the air and ripped a hole into her brain.
And after that...nothing.
The next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital in Astoria. The first face she saw was her great-aunt Frankie’s. She was a tall thin lady with long white hair tied up in a bun. Her dark eyes sort of reminded Allison of her mom. Allison liked her immediately.
“What are you doing here?” Allison asked, after her aunt Frankie introduced herself.
Aunt Frankie answered very simply, “Little girl, I’m getting you the hell out of here.”
*
Allison pulled into the long driveway to the house, parked and went inside. She went quietly, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Where Deacon and Thora were she didn’t know, but she glimpsed Roland standing on the deck, staring out at the water. Praying? Maybe. She wanted to talk to him more than anything but she couldn’t trust herself yet. Or him.
She went right up to the third floor. Part of her wanted to confront Dr. Capello but she didn’t know what to say to him. She needed proof, first of all. She needed proof that what she remembered was true.
Outside Dr. Capello’s bedroom door she paused and listened. Allison heard nothing. She peeked in and saw the room was dark. He must be sound asleep. It was late, past eleven, but Allison knew she wouldn’t sleep for a very long time.
She went to the attic door. It was unlocked. She turned on the light and walked up the wooden stairs, going as slowly as she could. She didn’t want a creaking footfall to telegraph to the entire house where she was and what she was doing. She made it up without a sound, no sound but her own shallow, panting breaths.
Allison knew what she was looking for, and she even had a good idea where to find it. She walked to the south wall, to the row of display cases where Dr. Capello kept his collection. She pulled down one white sheet and peered through the glass front doors. She saw bone drills and assorted ivory-handled scalpels, a metal mouth stretcher, a copper syringe and a sterling-silver catheter. But not what was she looking for. She pulled down the second white sheet on the second glass case and searched it top to bottom. Nothing again. Allison was starting to panic now. Any second Roland would come up and ask her what she was doing and why she was doing it, and she didn’t have a good answer. She ripped the sheet off the third and final case and scanned all the contents.
Nothing.
She stood up and rested her head against the top of the case. It had to be here. Had to be.
“Where the hell are you?” she said to herself.
“Tell me what you’re looking for,” Dr. Capello said, “and I’ll tell you where to find it.”
Chapter 25
Allison spun around and saw Dr. Capello in his blue bathrobe standing at the top of the stairs.
“Fairwood called me,” Dr. Capello said in answer to her silence. “They said someone came to see Antonio today. I knew it had to be you. You must be pretty upset.”
“They called you?”
“I asked them to,” he said. “I like to keep tabs on the poor boy. Michael said Tony had a seizure while you were there today.”
“He did,” she said. “It was...awful.”
“Kid was dealt a bad hand at birth,” Dr. Capello said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t change his cards.”
“You aren’t playing cards,” Allison said. “You’re playing with kids and their lives.”
“It wasn’t playing, doll face. It was my job.”
Now was Allison’s chance to ask the question she’d come back here to ask.
“What did you do to your children?”
Dr. Capello didn’t answer. He shuffled across the floor to a chair and sat down in it, hard and heavy. He looked sick and he looked tired. He looked just like what he was—dying. He took a few moments to catch his breath and then began speaking.
“There was a girl,” Dr. Capello began. “A French girl. We studied her in med school. She had epilepsy. No drug could silence her seizures, no treatment could quiet her suffering. Day in and day out she suffered without hope. And then a surgeon proposed a rather radical treatment. Her seizures were seated in her hippocampus. Perhaps if he removed it, it would end her seizing. Of course, there was a great risk to this surgery. The hippocampus is also the seat of empathy, of inhibition, of memory. You can’t just cut something like that out of someone’s brain without consequences. But the girl was desperate. It was this or death by seizure. They performed the operation. She lived. Everyone held their breath to see what sort of person she would be once the organ of empathy was cut out of her brain. Would she be a zombie? A psychopath? Would it have been all for nothing? And then the most wonderful thing happened.”
“What?” Allison asked, swept into the story despite herself.
“She stopped seizing. That they expected. What they didn’t expect was that she developed hyperempathy.”
“Hyperempathy?”
“Yes, it’s a condition wherein a person overidentifies with the feelings of another. Hyperempaths are so sensitive to other people’s moods and feelings they can seem almost psychic. It’s the brain, you see. We call it neuroplasticity. A big word that simply means the brain has extraordinary powers of healing itself. Especially in children. Whole hemispheres of the brain can be removed and people can not only survive but thrive as the remaining hemisphere of the brain quickly takes over the job of the lost hemisphere. My God, Allison, it’s like magic to see something like that happen. Keep the moon. Keep the ocean. Keep outer space, I don’t want it. It’s the brain that’s the true undiscovered country.”
“And you explored it,” she said.
“I did indeed. Inspiration is a terrifying thing. Hits you like lightning and you’re never the same again. I read that case study about the French girl thirty years ago and had the idea that this was it, this was the cure the world was waiting for. It’s the common denominator among all psychopaths—the lack of empathy. And here was a way to create empathy, hyperempathy even, in a human brain. Remove part of the hippocampus. It’ll shock the brain into rewiring itself. We already knew thanks to Phineas Gage that if you damaged the brain you could damage the personality. Well, it turns out if you sculpt the brain, you can sculpt the personality. Like Deacon with his glass, that was me with the brain. A sculptor. Dr. Jarvik created artificial hearts. I sculpt artificial souls.”
“This sounds insane, you know,” Allison said. He waved his hand in disgust.
“It sounds insane to break a child’s jaw, doesn’t? Sounds awful. But we do it all the time. If a child is born with an overbite, you break the jaw, you reset it and you let it heal correctly. That’s all I did. I broke the brain, reset it, let it heal. And I’m not the first to do it, kid. It’s called psychosurgery, and it’s been around for decades. In the 1970s, a procedure was perfected in Japan to treat aggression. Cut out part of the amygdala—the seat of aggression—and violent people become less violent. My procedure simply went a step further. Or two.”
“Or three?” Allison asked.
“Or three,” he said.
“What did you do to these kids?” she asked again.
“I called it ‘the Ragdoll Project.’ A little joke. My mother kept Ragdolls until she died. Best cats there are.”
“Because they’re so tame they can’t even protect themselves?”
“What’s wrong with being tame?”
“That’s really what you did, isn’t it? You ‘tamed’ violent kids?”