“How do you feel?” the technician asked. His name was Peter Bloch, but other than that, Alex didn’t know much about him. Nor, for that matter, was he curious to know anything about him. To Alex, Peter was simply one more part of the Institute.
“Okay,” he said. Then: “How come I always see and hear things just before I wake up?”
Peter frowned. “What kind of things?”
“I don’t know. It’s like a flickering I can’t quite see, and there’s a sort of squeaky, rasping sound.”
Peter began disconnecting the monitors from the tiny wires that emerged, almost like hairs, from the metal plate that had replaced part of Alex’s left parietal bone, and the scalp that had been drawn across to cover it. “What about pain?”
“No. There’s no pain.”
“Anything at all? Do you feel anything, or smell anything? Taste anything?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not sure,” Peter told him. “I know that during the tests, some of these electrodes are constantly stimulating your brain, then measuring its responses. That’s why we have to put you to sleep. We’re giving your brain artificial stimuli, and if you were awake, it could be pretty unpleasant. You might feel like we’d burned your hand, or cut your arm, or you might smell or taste something pretty awful. It sounds like you’re just waking up too early, and responding to visual and otic stimuli — seeing and hearing things that aren’t there at all.”
Alex got up from the table and pulled his shirt on, then sat still, waiting for the last of the anesthesia to wear off. “Shall I tell Dr. Torres about it?”
Peter Bloch shrugged. “If you want. I’ll make a note of it, and tomorrow we’ll hold off on flushing you out with oxygen for a few more minutes.”
“That’s okay,” Alex replied. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Peter offered him an uncertain grin. “Does anything ever bother you?”
Alex thought a moment, then shook his head. “No.” He tucked in his shirt and carefully put his feet on the floor, then took his cane in his right hand and began making his slow way to the door.
Peter Bloch watched him go, and his grin faded away. He began closing up the lab, shutting down the equipment that had been in use almost constantly over the last three months. For himself, he was glad Alex Lonsdale was going home. The work load, since Alex had arrived, had been nearly intolerable, and Torres had never let up on the staff for a moment.
Besides, Peter realized as he took off his lab jacket and hunched into his favorite khaki windbreaker, he didn’t like Alex Lonsdale.
True, what Torres had accomplished with Alex would probably make some kind of medical history, but Peter wasn’t impressed. To him, it didn’t matter how well Alex was doing.
The kid was a zombie.
Marsh drove north out of Palo Alto, staying on Middlefield Road until he came to La Paloma Drive, where he turned left to start up into the hills. Every few minutes he glanced over at Alex, who sat impassively in the passenger seat next to him, while from the back seat Ellen kept up a steady stream of chatter:
“Do you remember what’s just around the next curve? We’re almost to La Paloma, and things will start looking familiar to you.”
Alex pictured the map he’d studied. “The county park,” he said. “Hillside Park.”
“You remember!” Ellen exclaimed.
“It was on the map Dr. Torres gave me,” Alex corrected her. They came around the bend in the road, and Marsh slowed the car. “Stop,” Alex suddenly said.
Marsh braked the car, and followed Alex’s gaze. In the distance, there was a group of children playing on a swing set, while two teenage boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth.
“What is it, Alex?” Marsh asked.
Alex’s eyes seemed to be fixed on the children on the swings.
“I always wanted to do that when I was little,” he said.
Marsh chuckled. “You not only wanted to, you nearly drove us crazy.” His voice took on a singsong tone as he mimicked a child’s voice. “ ‘More! More! Don’t want to go home. Want to swing!’ That’s why I finally hung one in the backyard at the old house. It was either that or spend every free minute I had bringing you out here.”
Alex turned and gazed at his father, his eyes steady. “I don’t remember that at all,” he said.
In the rearview mirror, Marsh saw Ellen’s worried eyes, and wondered if either of them would be able to stand seeing their son’s memory wiped clean of every experience they had all shared. “Do you want to swing now?” he asked.
Alex hesitated, then shook his head. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Maybe I’ll remember our house when I see it.”
They drove into La Paloma, and Alex began examining the town he’d lived in all his life. But it was as if he’d never seen it before. Nothing was familiar, nothing he saw triggered any memories.
And then they came to the Square.
Marsh bore right to follow the traffic pattern three-quarters of the way around before turning right once again into Hacienda Drive. Alex’s eyes, he noted, were no longer staring out toward the front of the car. Instead, he was leaning forward slightly, so he could look across Marsh’s chest and see into the Square.
“Remembering something?” he asked quietly.
“The tree …” Alex said. “There’s something about the tree.” As he stared at the giant oak that dominated the Square, Alex was certain it looked familiar. And yet, something was wrong. The tree looked right, but nothing else did.
“The chain,” he said softly. “I don’t remember the chain, or the grass.”
In the back seat, Ellen nodded, sure she understood what was happening. “It hasn’t been there a long time,” she said. “When you were little, the tree was there, but there wasn’t anything around it.”
“A rope,” Alex suddenly said. “There was a rope.”
Ellen’s heart began to pound. “Yes! There was a rope with a tire on it! You and your friends used to play on it when you were little!”
But the image that had flashed into Alex’s mind wasn’t of a tire at all.
It was the image of a man, and the man had been hanging at the end of the rope.
He wondered if he ought to tell his parents what he’d remembered, but decided he’d better not. The image was too strange, and if he talked about it, his parents might think he, too, was strange.
For some reason — a reason he didn’t understand — it was important that people not think he was strange.
Marsh pulled into the driveway, and Alex gazed at the house.
And suddenly he remembered it.
But it, like the oak tree, didn’t look quite right either. He stared at the house for a long time.
From the driveway, all he could see was a long expanse of white stucco, broken at regular intervals by deeply recessed windows, each framed with a pair of heavy shutters. There were two stories, topped by a gently sloping red tile roof, and on the north side there was a garden, enclosed by walls which were entirely covered with vines.
It was the vines that were wrong. The garden wall, like the house itself, should be plain white stucco, with decorative tiles implanted in it every six feet or so. And the vines should be small, and climbing on trellises.
He sat still, trying to remember what the inside looked like, but no matter how he searched his memory, there was nothing.
He stared at the chimney that rose from the roof. If there was a chimney, there was a fireplace. He tried to picture a fireplace, but the only one he could visualize was the one in the lobby of the Institute.
He got out of the car, and with his parents following behind him, approached the house. When he came to the wide steps leading up to the garden gate, he felt his father’s hand on his elbow.