The Waning Age Read online

  “Huh,” I said.

  “This is one of the reasons I’ve focused so much of my research budget on studying people with acute affect disorders. The people you know as ‘Fish.’ Most researchers think they are ‘poor reasoners’—that is, they are too simpleminded to follow society’s guidelines—and I’ve seen a dozen studies claiming to prove it: that they don’t perform as well on IQ tests; that they don’t respond rationally to stressors; that their brains, postmortem, are different from normal brains in ways that indicate a shrunken intellect. I disagree. I think their extreme behavior has something to do with empathy. While their behavior seems radically un-empathic, I think when they hurt people over and over again, these are actually desperate attempts—desperate biological attempts—to feel empathy. To feel what the other person feels.”

  I was interested, damn him. And I was already several steps ahead. I knew where he was going with this. Yes, Cal was a special kid. Yes, he was very empathic. He was so empathic I had to argue with him not to give his lunch away. He was so empathic he got teary at the sight of lobsters in a lobster tank. He was so empathic he spent most of his energy wondering and thinking and worrying about other people—not just me and Cass and Tabby and Joey, but every single person we knew and every single person we glimpsed on the street. He was like an ever-burning, everlasting lightbulb of empathy.

  I frowned. “Okay,” I said. “That sounds plausible. I buy it.”

  “You see where I’m going. What if the solution lay in the problem?” Glout asked eagerly. “What if empathy was not just the doorway to affect decline, but also the doorway to affect recovery?”

  “Could be.”

  “Then the problem would be this: if we understand empathy to mean the ability to feel what someone else is feeling, how do we provoke empathy in people who cannot feel?”

  Abruptly, I realized that I didn’t care about this. I didn’t care about fixing the problem or reversing affect decline. This was not my problem. I was having a conversation with a loony old skeleton who probably had Cal locked in a room, jabbed full of needles. Glout was giving me the runaround. I took a shortcut.

  “You think Cal is not fading because he is so empathic. I get it. But I’m not a freshman in neuropsych at Caltech, so you can skip the rest of the lecture.”

  “Actually, I teach at Stanford.”

  Typical. “Whatever. I’m not really interested. And Cal is not a rat from the sewer or a chunk of algae. You don’t get to experiment on him just because you have a fantasy about saving the world. I want to know if he’s here and if he’s okay. And I want to know why he’s here.”

  Glout nodded, a little deflated that I’d derailed his lesson plan. He studied me. “I can’t tell you where Calvino is, but I can confirm that he’s okay.”

  “What about a little proof of life or something, pal? Can I see him? Can I talk to him?”

  Glout’s eyes went sad, and I couldn’t tell if it was real. “Lo siento, Natalia. No.”

  “Can you tell me why he’s here? Were his test results with Dr. Baylor off the charts or something?”

  Glout pondered for a moment. “All I can tell you is that the directive I received on this came from the very top.”

  He made it sound like Cal had been awarded a medal. “I’m impressed,” I said, not sounding it. “Regardless of how he got here, he’s my brother. Whatever form we signed at school, I’m sure it doesn’t give RealCorp permission to keep Cal forever. I’m going to ask nicely. Please hand him over.”

  Glout deliberated for a while. He let out a long, low exhalation. “I was afraid of this.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “That you wouldn’t know.” He sighed again. “I do have permission.”

  I blinked. “Show me the form Cass and Tabby signed.”

  Glout shook his head. “The form isn’t the issue. For reasons all of you understand better than I do, the Lawsons did not actually adopt Cal when your mother died last year.”

  That chilled me. How did he know all this? Where was this going?

  He didn’t seem to relish the pause. He was just working his way up to the next part. “A foster parent is not the same as an adoptive parent. And Cal was adopted two days ago. By RealCorp.”

  I felt the floor tip. My hand swung out for the counter nearest me, and as Glout reached toward me, quicker than I would have thought his skeleton arms were capable of, something flashed through his face that I hadn’t seen in an adult face for ages, if ever. But I saw it often enough in Cal’s face. Eyebrow heads raised, upper eyelids slanting, lips pressed together.

  Glout felt sorry for me.

  It took me a little while to steady myself. “It’s shock,” Glout said quietly. “We think of it as an emotion, but it’s a biological response. That’s one we managed not to get rid of.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I finally said, finding my voice. “Instincts. I got the damn textbook.”

  Glout grimaced. “The book they give you in high school is a little reductionist. It doesn’t really talk about all other instincts that we still have. Or explain that modern science doesn’t understand them. Or that all of modern science is a social construct. Like religion. Or magic.”

  He was trying to talk me through it. I could hear him even though there was still a roaring in my ears. I wanted it to go away. “You must take empathy,” I observed, trying to move the conversation out of my head.

  His grimace faded to a gentle smile. “I should have clarified that. Even though I believe empathy is the key to affect decline, it’s not what we call an ‘emotion.’ It’s an approach to emotions. Comparable, say, to repressing or expressing emotions. A thing you do with emotions, not an emotion itself.” He watched me carefully. “But I do take a combination of synaffs that mimics pity. It’s not quite the same thing. Not the same thing at all,” he admitted. “It doesn’t really work to pity someone when they’re angry. Or happy.” He gave a little sigh.

  “Can a corporation be an adoptive parent?” I asked.

  Glout nodded. “It can. Same legal rights as individuals. But I misspoke. It’s still easier and faster for the adopting agent to be an individual. The person in question in this case is RealCorp’s chief executive officer, Tanner Philbrick. The same one who recommended I look at Cal’s results.”

  Tanner Philbrick, I said in my head. The words didn’t make much sense. I didn’t understand how some person I’d never heard of had the motivation, let alone the right, to adopt Cal. How was that possible? I guess the shock was taking a little longer than I thought. I felt nauseated.

  I took a deep breath and looked closely at Glout, who was watching me in turn. He looked a bit concerned, but he was concerned on my behalf; he wasn’t in the least concerned about what I was going to do next. Maybe he was right.

  “Can you help me?” I asked him.

  Glout’s concern deepened. “Yes and no. I can’t hand Cal over to you. Apart from the fact that I think he’s got something important going on in his brain, and we need to understand it, Cal is here legally. I’d be assisting in an abduction if I put him in your hands.”

  I was still feeling nauseated. I waited for Glout to tell me the “yes” part.

  “But I can assure you that Cal is doing fine, and I can promise to keep you updated.”

  That didn’t make much sense to me. “Updated on what? You won’t even tell me where he is.”

  Glout looked apologetic. “I mean I can keep you posted on how he’s doing.” Something on one of the screen decals caught his eye. “Ah,” he said. “I see Kathy has gotten wind of this. She’s on her way now with a couple of the big guys.”

  I had no desire for a rematch with Kathy and her cashmere. “Can you send me a photo? A text from him? Can you tell him that I came?”

  Glout’s eyebrows knotted. “Here,” he said, scribbling on a corner of the spiral-bound notebook. “This
is my office phone. I will answer whenever I can. And I will tell you how he’s doing. Promise.”

  It was all he would give me. A lousy phone number.

  13

  CALVINO

  oct-11

  7:05 p.m.

  calvinopio:

  Essay: What keeps the world working in the absence of emotions? By Calvino Peña

  This is what is called a leading question. The answer is rules. I have answered this many times in school, Dr. Glout. Rules keep the world working. Rules are the only way adults without emotions can still get through life. Rules protect us from each other. Rules are the best. Hooray for rules.

  This is true to some extent. There need to be laws against murder and theft and terrible things like that. But what you don’t realize is that rules do not actually replace emotions. They are a form of emotion. It comes from an emotion to want to protect people’s lives. You might call it an idea, but it is also an emotion. The idea alone would not stand a chance.

  The other thing about rules is that they all come from one very overwhelming emotion which is fear. If society did not have fear then it would have no problem with everyone just being murdered left and right. It is fear of that type of world and fear of it happening to oneself that creates rules in the first place.

  This is what I mean about invisible emotions. They are there, but they are so quiet that adults seem to not hear them. But they still act based on them. Imagine you were in a room and it was very noisy. You could hear traffic and people talking in the next room and the furnace clanking. It was so noisy that you did not realize that in the background was a very, very quiet music that was extremely sad. Or how about this, not music but a very, very quiet voice whispering to you. You were not aware of the voice because of the noise in the room, but it was still whispering. “Look out the window. Look out the window. Look out the window.” Over and over again. After a while, for some reason, you would just want to look out the window and you would have no idea why.

  That is how it works with emotions in adults. The voice is very quiet, but it is still whispering in the crowded, noisy room: “you are lonely, you are lonely, you are lonely.” And that person, what do you know, doesn’t want to be alone.

  That’s it, I don’t have anything more to write, Dr. Glout. You said this would be the last one.

  hglt: Last one for today! So I did. Thanks for this response, Calvino! This is a very creative way of explaining what you observe as affect. What you’re describing is called “subliminal” stimulus. It’s a very interesting theory.

  calvinopio: It’s not a theory. I have seen it.

  hglt: Can you give me an example?

  calvinopio: I’m really tired. Can I please come out of here for just a little while?

  hglt: Maybe tomorrow. Could you give me an example of the subliminal messaging you were talking about?

  calvinopio: If I do can I come out?

  hglt: Sorry, I’m trying to keep things calm in there for you, and having people go in and out wouldn’t help.

  calvinopio: Sorry?? If you are sorry, then you would help me.

  hglt: You’re good at catching these. It’s a figure of speech!

  calvinopio: I would like to go home now.

  hglt: It’s important that we finish this test.

  Calvino?

  Hello, Calvino?

  Okay. Good night, Calvino. Try to get some rest. Talk to you in the morning.

  14

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 11—EVENING

  When you’re a child in a world of faded grown-ups, grown-ups are confounding. Rational is not always reasonable. It might be rational to skip a kid’s birthday when you barely have money for groceries, but that doesn’t make it right. And to a child, most of the things grown-ups do are like that. Rational. But not right. I see it all the time in Cal’s eyes, when he looks at me, at Cass and Tabby: he’s waiting, wondering. How on earth are they going to explain this one? And I remember feeling it myself. That sense that grown-ups followed a logic that was inscrutable and often damaging. They could never be made to see.

  When Cal was two and I was nine, Mom had pneumonia. She checked in to a hospital and didn’t come home for a week. She hadn’t said good-bye, and she wouldn’t let us visit. It was rational, because she was contagious and too sick to take care of us. But it was also brutal. It felt like she’d abandoned us in the wilderness. I remember holding Cal in my lap at night, soothing him to sleep, waiting for his breathing to slow down so that I could cry, and cry, and cry. I would cry until my eyes were swollen and I was hiccuping and Cal was squirming against me. She was never coming back. She had turned her back on us. She had never loved us to begin with. Why? Why? Why? The pain was indescribable, and it was only one week.

  I didn’t want Cal to feel abandoned.

  I wanted to spend the rest of the day trolling the corridors of RealCorp, banging on doors until I found him. I wanted to set up camp in Glout’s office and hound his every move until he gave me a clue.

  Despite the bad odds, I even spent some seconds debating the more extreme possibilities: knocking Glout to the floor, taking him hostage, demanding they release Cal. But the plan had a few flaws, not least of which was the legal angle Glout had explained to me. One benefit of feeling next to nothing is long-term planning, and I could see that abducting Cal, as the law would see it, could have serious drawbacks for our future together.

  I settled for asking Glout very solemnly to take care of my brother. He said he would. I didn’t say “I’ll be back,” but Glout was smart enough to figure out what my leaving without a fight really meant.

  It just meant I was taking the fight elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home I thought about the next step, and I had a lot of ideas, most of them about as useful as the empty ID badge holder that was banging against my leg. As a measure of how distracted I was leaving RealCorp, I hadn’t even thought to ask the security guards what had happened to the three Fish. That seemed like a lifetime ago.

  I managed to hit rush hour. The trolley was full, the BART was full, and I walked home through downtown Oakland in my janitor’s uniform with the rest of the laboring classes, tired and spent and all of us a little older than we had been that morning. Under the freeway near Lakeshore, three cops were cleaning up what looked like the remnants of a Fishing spree. They had paperwork and water hoses and sawdust. The pink water ran beside the edge of the curb, gurgling along to the storm drain.

  When I got home, Joey was standing in his open doorway. He looked me over. “I tried calling you,” he said.

  I waved him into our apartment as I unlocked the door. I told him about Cal. Joey sat down on the tweedy sofa and stared at the casement windows. While he stared, I had time to eat three pieces of toast and take a shower. I’ve seen it many times, and maybe that was what had happened to me at Glout’s lab: when something big happens, in the absence of emotion, you feel a long pause, like all the wind has been knocked out of you. Or maybe like you’ve been dropped in the ocean and you don’t see land. You know it’s there somewhere. But you have no idea where. And so you swim and swim, trying to find it.

  I pulled on black pants and a sweater and came out of the bathroom to check on Joey. He hadn’t found the shore, but he was clinging to some driftwood. When I came in, he stood up and put his arms around me. It’s funny how nice that felt. Joey can be very expressive with his hugs. This one said, “What happened is beyond my comprehension but I am going to help you fix it. Starting now.” He stepped back and looked at me.

  “When are Cass and Tabby getting home?”

  He looked at his watch. “About an hour, depending on traffic.”

  “Knock on my door when they get back? I need a quick shut-eye.”

  “Sure.”

  He headed out, closing the door behind
him, and I pulled out the bed and fell on it facedown. The darkness of the pillow made a familiar void, and I sank forward without resistance.

  * * *

  —

  I woke to knocking followed by footsteps on the creaky floorboards. Tabby was standing next to my bed, and the room was bright. “What time is it?” I mumbled.

  “Eight. In the morning. We came in last night but you were out cold. So cold that Cass checked your vitals.”

  I sat up with effort and realized that Tabby was handing me a cup of coffee. Then she walked back to the doorway and hollered through it. “She’s awake.”

  Cass and Joey filed into the room while I sipped coffee. Tabby and Cass sat on the tweed sofa, and Joey eased gingerly onto the wooden rocker—it had broken more than once before. They watched me sip. “I’m guessing you already talked to June?” I asked Cass.

  June was Cass’s friend who worked in downtown Oakland as an overextended and underappreciated public defender. She was the only person with any legal training the four of us knew. Cass nodded. “She called back this morning after checking the database records to say it’s true. The paperwork is legitimate.”

  “I looked up this guy Glout,” Joey said. We turned to him. “Seems to be exactly who he says he is. He did his PhD at Stanford and lectures there. He’s been at RealCorp for more than thirty years. The only thing interesting I can find about him is that he was fired from another company, Emotive, before the RealCorp gig.”