Transmission
That was probably the only good thing about what was wrong with him: the symptoms were invisible. It was also the scary thing in a way. There was this thing killing him, and if people didn’t know about it already, they would never find out. He could just sit there and no one would ever—
Kevin felt the vision coming, rising up through him like a kind of pressure building through his body. There was the rush of dizziness, the feeling of the world swimming away as he connected with something… else. He started to stand to ask if he could be excused, but by then, it was already too late. He felt his legs giving way and he collapsed.
He was looking at the same landscapes he remembered from before, the sky the wrong shade, the trees too twisted. He was watching the fire sweep through it, blinding and bright, seeming to come from everywhere at once. He’d seen all of that before. Now, though, there was a new element: a faint pulse that seemed to repeat at regular intervals, precise as a ticking clock.
Some part of Kevin knew a clock was what it had to be, just as he knew by instinct that it was counting down to something, not just marking the time. The pulses had the sense of getting subtly more intense, as if building up to some far-off crescendo. There was a word in a language he shouldn’t have understood, but he did understand it.
“Wait.”
Kevin wanted to ask what he was supposed to be waiting for, or how long, or why. He didn’t, though, partly because he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to ask, and partly because almost as suddenly as the moment had come, it passed, leaving Kevin rising up from darkness to find himself lying on the floor of the classroom, Ms. Kapinski standing over him.
“Just lie still a moment, Kevin,” she said. “I’ve sent for the school medic. Hal will be here in a minute.”
Kevin sat up in spite of her instructions, because he’d come to know what this felt like by now.
“I’m fine,” he assured her.
“I think we should let Hal be the judge of that.”
Hal was a big, round former paramedic who served to make sure that the students of St. Brendan’s School came through whatever medical emergencies they suffered. Sometimes, Kevin suspected that they did it because the thought of the medic’s idea of care made them ignore the worst of injuries.
“I saw things,” Kevin managed. “There was a planet, and a burning sun, and a kind of message… like a countdown.”
In the movies, someone would have insisted on contacting somebody important. They would have recognized the message for what it was. There would have been meetings, and investigations. Someone would have done something about it. Outside of the movies, Kevin was just a thirteen-year-old boy, and Ms. Kapinski looked at him with a mixture of pity and mild bewilderment.
“Well, I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s probably normal to see all kinds of things if you’re having this sort of… episode.”
Around them, Kevin could hear the muttering from the others in his class. None of it made him feel better.
“…just fell down and started twitching…”
“…I heard he was sick, I hope you can’t catch it…”
“…Kevin thinks he sees planets…”
The last one was the one that hurt. It made it sound as though he were going crazy. Kevin wasn’t going crazy. At least, he didn’t think he was.
Despite his best attempts to insist that he was fine, Kevin still had to go with Hal when the medic came. Had to sit in the medic’s office while he shone lights in Kevin’s eyes and asked questions about a condition so rare he obviously had no more clue than Kevin did what was going on.
“The principal wanted to see us once I was sure you were okay,” he said. “Do you feel up to walking to his office, or should we ask him to come here?”
“I can walk,” Kevin said. “I’m fine.”
“If you say so,” Hal said.
They made their way to the principal’s office, and Kevin almost wasn’t surprised to find that his mother was there. Of course they would have called her in for a medical emergency, of course she would be there if he collapsed, but that wasn’t good, not when she was supposed to be at work.
“Kevin, are you okay?” his mother asked as soon as he arrived, turning to him and drawing him into a hug. “What happened?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Kevin said.
“Ms. McKenzie, I’m sure we wouldn’t have called you in if it weren’t serious,” the principal said. “Kevin collapsed.”
“I’m fine now,” Kevin insisted.
It didn’t seem to make any difference how many times he said that, though.
“Plus,” the principal said, “it seems that he was pretty confused when he came around. He was talking about… well, other planets.”
“Planets,” Kevin’s mother repeated. Her voice was flat when she said that.
“Ms. Kapinski says it disrupted her class quite a bit,” the principal said. He sighed. “I’m wondering if maybe Kevin might be better off staying at home for a while.”
He said it without looking at Kevin. There was a decision being made there, and although Kevin was at the heart of it, it was clear he didn’t actually get a say.
“I don’t want to miss school,” Kevin said, looking at his mother. Surely she wouldn’t want him to either.
“I think what we have to ask,” the principal said, “is if, at this point, school is really the best thing Kevin can be doing with the time he has.”
It was probably intended to be a kind way of putting it, but all it did was remind Kevin of what the doctor had said. Six months to live. It didn’t seem like enough time for anything, let alone to have a life in. Six months’ worth of seconds, each one ticking away in a steady beat that matched the countdown in his head.
“You’re saying that there’s no point to my son being in school because he’ll be dead soon anyway?” his mother snapped back. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, of course not,” the principal said, hurriedly, raising his hands to placate her.
“That’s what it sounds like you’re saying,” Kevin’s mother said. “It sounds as though you’re freaked out by my son’s illness as much as the kids here.”
“I’m saying that it’s going to be hard to teach Kevin as this gets worse,” the principal said. “We’ll try, but… don’t you want to make the most of the time you have left?”
He said that in a gentle tone that still managed to cut right to Kevin’s heart. He was saying exactly what his mother had thought, just in gentler words. The worst part was that he was right. Kevin wasn’t going to live long enough to go to college, or get a job, or do anything that he might need school to prepare for, so why bother being there.
“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm.
That seemed to be enough of an argument to convince his mother, and just that told Kevin how serious this all was. On any other occasion, he would have expected her to fight. Now it seemed that the fight had been sucked out of her.
They went out to the car in silence. Kevin looked back at the school. The thought hit him that he probably wouldn’t be coming back. He hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.
“I’m sorry they called you at work,” Kevin said as they sat in the car. He could feel the tension there. His mom didn’t turn the engine on, just sat.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just… it was getting easy to pretend that nothing was wrong.” She sounded so sad then, so deeply hurt. Kevin had gotten used to the expression that meant she was trying to keep from crying. She wasn’t succeeding.
“Are you okay, Kevin?” she asked, even though by then, he was the one holding onto her, as tightly as he could.
“I’m… I wish I didn’t have to leave school,” Kevin said. He’d never thought he would hear himself say that. He’d never thought that anyone would say that.
“We could go back in,” his mother said. “I could tell the principal that I’m going to bring you back here tomorrow, and every day after that, until…”
She broke off.
“Until it gets too bad,” Kevin said. He screwed his eyes tightly shut. “I think maybe it’s already too bad, Mom.”
He heard her hit the dashboard, the dull thud echoing around the car.
“I know,” she said. “I know and I hate it. I hate this disease that’s taking my little boy from me.”
She cried again for a little while. In spite of his attempts to stay strong, Kevin did too. It seemed to take a long time before his mother was calm enough to say anything else.
“They said you saw… planets, Kevin?” she asked.
“I saw it,” Kevin said. How could he explain what it was like? How real it was?
His mother looked over, and now Kevin had the sense of her struggling for the right words to say. Struggling to be comforting and firm and calm, all at the same time. “You get that this isn’t real, right, honey? It’s just… it’s just the disease.”
Kevin knew that he ought to understand it, but…
“It doesn’t feel like that,” Kevin said.
“I know it doesn’t,” his mother said. “And I hate that, because it’s just a reminder that my little boy is slipping away. All of this, I wish I could make it go away.”
Kevin didn’t know what to say to that. He wished it would go away too.
“It feels real,” Kevin said, even so.
His mother was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice had the brittle, barely holding it together quality that only arrived since the diagnosis, but now had become far too familiar.
“Maybe… maybe it’s time we took you to see that psychologist.”
CHAPTER THREE
Dr. Linda Yalestrom’s office wasn’t anywhere near as medical looking as all the others Kevin had been in recently. It was her home, for one thing, in Berkeley, with the university close enough that it seemed to back up her credentials as surely as the certificates that were neatly framed on the wall.
The rest of it looked like the kind of home office Kevin expected from TV, with soft furnishings obviously relegated here after some previous move, a desk where clutter had crept in from the rest of the house, and a few potted plants that seemed to be biding their time, ready to take over.
Kevin found himself liking Dr. Yalestrom. She was a short, dark-haired woman in her fifties, whose clothes were brightly patterned and about as far from medical scrubs as it was possible to get. Kevin suspected that might be the point, if she spent a lot of time working with people who had received the worst news possible from doctors already.
“Come sit down, Kevin,” she said with a smile, gesturing to a broad red couch that was well worn with years of people sitting on it. “Ms. McKenzie, why don’t you give us a while? I want Kevin to feel that he can say anything he needs to say. My assistant will get you some coffee.”
His mother nodded. “I’ll be right outside.”
Kevin went to sit on the couch, which turned out to be exactly as comfortable as it appeared. He looked around the room at pictures of fishing trips and vacations. It took him a while to realize something important.
“You’re not in any of the photos in here,” he said.
Dr. Yalestrom smiled at that. “Most of my clients never notice. The truth is, a lot of these are places I always wanted to go, or places I heard were interesting. I put them out because young men like you spend a lot of time staring around the room, doing anything but talk to me, and I figure you should at least have something to look at.”
It seemed a bit like cheating to Kevin.
“If you work with people who are dying a lot,” he said, “why do you have pictures of places you always wanted to go? Why put it off, when you’ve seen…”
“When I’ve seen how quickly it can all end?” Dr. Yalestrom asked, gently.
Kevin nodded.
“Maybe because of the wonderful human ability to know that and still procrastinate. Or maybe I have been to some of these places, and the reason I’m not in the pictures is just that I think one of me staring down at people is quite enough.”
Kevin wasn’t sure if those were good reasons or not. They didn’t seem like enough, somehow.
“Where would you go, Kevin?” Dr. Yalestrom asked. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“Well, think about it. You don’t have to let me know right away.”
Kevin shook his head. It was strange, talking to an adult this way. Generally, when you were thirteen, conversations came down to questions or instructions. With the possible exception of his mom, who was at work a lot of the time anyway, adults weren’t really interested in what someone his age had to say.
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I mean, I never really thought I’d get to go anywhere.” He tried to think about places he might like to go, but it was hard to come up with anywhere, especially now that he only had a few months to do it. “I feel as though, wherever I think of, what’s the point? I’ll be dead pretty soon.”
“What do you think the point is?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.
Kevin did his best to think of a reason. “I guess… because pretty soon is not the same thing as now?”
The psychologist nodded. “I think that’s a good way to put it. So, is there anything that you would like to do in the pretty soon, Kevin?”
Kevin thought about it. “I guess… I guess I should tell Luna what’s happening.”
“And who’s Luna?”
“She’s my friend,” Kevin said. “We don’t go to the same school anymore, so she hasn’t seen me collapse or anything, and I haven’t called in a few days, but…”
“But you should tell her,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t healthy to push away your friends when things get bad, Kevin. Not even to protect them.”
Kevin swallowed back a denial, because it was kind of what he was doing. He didn’t want to inflict this on Luna, didn’t want to hurt her with the news of what was going to happen. It was part of the reason he hadn’t called her in so long.
“What else?” Dr. Yalestrom said. “Let’s try places again. If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
Kevin tried to pick among all the places in the room, but the truth was that there was only one landscape that kept springing into his head, with colors no normal camera could capture.
“It would sound stupid,” he said.
“There’s nothing wrong with sounding stupid,” Dr. Yalestrom assured him. “I’ll tell you a secret. People often think that everyone else but them is special. They think that other people must be cleverer, or braver, or better, because only they can see the parts of themselves that aren’t those things. They worry that everyone else says the right thing, and they sound stupid. It’s not true though.”
Even so, Kevin sat there for several seconds, examining the upholstery of the couch in detail. “I… I see places. One place. I guess it’s the reason that I had to come here.”
Dr. Yalestrom smiled. “You’re here because an illness like yours can create a lot of odd effects, Kevin. I’m here to help you cope with them, without them dominating your life. Would you like to tell me more about the things you see?”
Again, Kevin made a detailed examination of the couch, learning its topography, picking at a tiny speck of lint sticking up from the rest. Dr. Yalestrom was silent while he did it; the kind of silence that felt as though it was sucking words up out of him, giving them a space to fall into.
“I see a place where nothing is quite the same as here. The colors are wrong, the animals and the plants are different,” Kevin said. “I see it destroyed… at least, I think I do. There’s fire and heat, a bright flash. There’s a set of numbers. And there’s something that feels like a countdown.”
“Why does it feel like a countdown?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.
Kevin shrugged. “I’m not sure. Because the pulses are getting closer together, I guess?”
The psychologist nodded, then went over to her desk. She came back with paper and pencils.
“How are you at art?” she asked. “No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter if this is a great work of art or not. I just want you to try to draw what you see, so that I can get a sense of what it’s like. Don’t pay too much attention to it, just draw. Can you do that for me, Kevin?”
Kevin shrugged. “I’ll try.”
He took the pencils and paper, trying to bring the landscape that he’d seen to mind, trying to remember every detail of it. It was hard to do, because although the numbers stayed in his head, it felt as though he had to dive down deep into himself to pull up the images. They were below the surface, and to get at them, Kevin had to pull back into himself, concentrating on nothing else, letting the pencil flow over the paper almost automatically…
“Okay, Kevin,” she said, taking the pad away before Kevin could get a good look at what he’d drawn. “Let’s see what you’ve…”
He saw the look of shock that crossed her face, so brief that it almost wasn’t there. It was there though, and Kevin had to wonder what it would take to shock someone who heard stories about people dying every day.
“What is it?” Kevin asked. “What did I draw?”
“You don’t know?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.
“I was trying not to think too much,” Kevin said. “Did I do something wrong?”
Dr. Yalestrom shook her head. “No, Kevin, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
She held out Kevin’s drawing. “Would you like to take a look at what you produced? Perhaps it will help you to understand things.”
She held it out folded, in just the tips of her fingers, as if she didn’t want to touch it more than necessary. That made Kevin worry just a little. What could he have drawn that would make an adult react like that? He took it, unfolding it.
A drawing of a spaceship sat there, only “drawing” probably wasn’t the right word for it. This was more like a blueprint, complete in every detail, which seemed impossible in the time Kevin had to draw. He’d never even seen this before, but here it was, on the page, looking giant and flat, like a city perched on a disk. There were smaller disks around it, like worker bees around a queen.
The detail meant that there was something neat, almost clinical, about the way it was drawn, but there was more to it than that. There was something about the geometry of it that was just… wrong, somehow, seeming to have depths and angles to it that shouldn’t have been possible to capture just in a sketch like this.
“But this…” Kevin didn’t know what to say. Didn’t this prove what was happening? Did anyone think he could have just made something like this up?
Apparently, Dr. Yalestrom wasn’t convinced though. She took back the picture, folding it carefully as though she didn’t want to have to look at it. Kevin suspected that the strangeness of it was too much for her.
“I think it’s important that we talk about the things you’re seeing,” she said. “Do you think those things are real?”
Kevin hesitated. “I’m… not sure. They feel real, but a lot of people now have told me that they can’t be.”
“It makes sense,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “What you’re feeling is very common.”
“It is?” What he was experiencing didn’t feel very common at all. “I thought that my illness was rare.”
Dr. Yalestrom moved over to her desk, placing Kevin’s drawing in a file. She picked up a tablet and started to make notes. “Is it important that other people shouldn’t experience what you’re experiencing, Kevin?”
“No, it’s not that,” Kevin said. “It was just that Dr. Markham said that this disease only affects a few people.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Yalestrom agreed. “But I see a lot of people who experience hallucinations of some kind for other reasons.”
“You think I’m going crazy,” Kevin guessed. Everyone else seemed to. Even his mom, presumably, since she’d been the one to bring him here after he’d started talking about them. He didn’t feel like he was going crazy, though.
“That’s not a word I like to use here,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “I think that often, the behavior that we label crazy is there for a good reason. It’s just that often, those reasons only make sense to the person concerned. People will do things to protect themselves from situations that are too difficult to handle, which seem to be… unusual.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing with these visions?” Kevin asked. He shook his head. “They’re real. I’m not making them up.”
“Can I tell you what I think, Kevin? I think a part of you might be attached to these ‘visions’ because it’s helping you to think that your illness might be happening for some kind of greater good. I think that maybe these ‘visions’ are actually you trying to make sense of your illness. The imagery in them… there’s a strange place that isn’t like the normal world. Could that represent the way things have changed?”
“I guess,” Kevin said. He wasn’t convinced. The things he’d seen weren’t about some world where he didn’t have his disease. They were about a place he didn’t understand at all.
“Then you have the sense of impending doom with fire and light,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “The sense of things coming to an end. You even have a countdown, complete with numbers.”
The numbers weren’t a part of the countdown; that was just the slow pulsing, growing faster bit by bit. Kevin suspected that he wasn’t going to convince her of that now. When adults had decided what the truth of something was, he wasn’t going to be able to change their minds.
“So what can I do?” Kevin asked. “If you think they aren’t real, shouldn’t I want to get rid of them?”
“Do you want to get rid of them?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.
Kevin thought about that. “I don’t know. I think they might be important, but I didn’t ask for them.”
“The same way that you didn’t ask to be diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “Maybe those two things are linked, Kevin.”
Kevin had already been thinking that his visions were linked to the disease in some way. That maybe it had changed his brain enough to be receptive to the visions. He didn’t think that was what the psychiatrist meant, though.
“So what can I do?” Kevin asked again.
“There are things you can do, not to make them go away, but at least to be able to cope.”
“Such as?” Kevin asked. He had to admit to a moment of hope at the thought. He didn’t want all of this going around and around in his head. He hadn’t asked to be the one receiving messages that no one else understood, and that just made him look crazy when he spoke about them.
“You can try to find things to distract yourself from the hallucinations when they come,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “You can try reminding yourself that it isn’t real. If you’re in doubt, find ways to check. Maybe ask someone else if they’re seeing the same thing. Remember, it’s okay to see whatever you see, but how you react to it is up to you.”
Kevin guessed he could remember all that. Even so, it did nothing to quiet the faint pulse of the countdown, thrumming in the background, getting faster a little at a time.
“And I think you need to tell the people who don’t know,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “It isn’t fair to them to keep them in the dark about this.”
She was right.
And there was one person he needed to let know more than anyone else.
Luna.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So,” Luna said, as she and Kevin made their way along one of the paths of the Lafayette Reservoir Recreation Area, dodging around the tourists and the families enjoying their day out, “why have you been avoiding me?”
Trust Luna to get straight to the point. It was one of the things Kevin liked about her. Not that he liked her liked her. People always seemed to assume that. They thought because she was pretty, and blonde, and probably cheerleader material if she didn’t think all that was stupid, that of course they would be boyfriend and girlfriend. They just assumed that it was how the world worked.
They weren’t together. Luna was his best friend. The person he spent the most time with, outside of school. Probably the one person in the world he could talk to about absolutely anything.
Except, it turned out, this.
“I haven’t been…” Kevin trailed off in the face of Luna’s stare. She was good at stares. Kevin suspected that she probably practiced. He’d seen everyone from bullies to rude store owners back down rather than have her stare at them any longer. Faced with that stare, it was impossible to lie to her. “All right, I have, but it’s hard, Luna. I have something… well, something I don’t know how to tell you.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Luna said. She found an abandoned soda can and kicked it down the path, flicking it from foot to foot with the kind of skill that came from doing it far too often. “I mean, how bad can it be? Are you moving away? Are you changing schools again?”