The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [5]
“How do you feel?” the nurse asked.
The invisible translator took his time as the girl considered the question. “Dad says it will make things better,” she said finally. “He says school will be easier. He says I’ll be able to read for hours.”
“Do you like to read?”
With exasperation, Canada said, “I wish I liked it.”
The nurse had a son with the same disorder. Not nearly as bad—her son had never tried to burn their house down—but she was familiar with the symptoms. “Do you have to reread stuff again and again?”
A pause. “It’s like I’m reading and suddenly I realize I haven’t been thinking about what I’ve been reading and I have to go back two pages and start over.”
“That happens to all of us, dear. But hopefully not for you so much anymore.”
“Hopefully.” She lifted the sheet and let it settle over her thin legs, circulating the germs and antiseptics to dogfight in the hospital air. “Do you know what it’s like?”
“I have some idea,” the nurse said. “Then again, no, I suppose not really.”
The girl pointed her remote at the television mounted on the wall. She clicked through the short menu of stations provided to the hospital until she landed on a twenty-four-hour news network. “That’s what it was like. It was like somebody else had the remote to my brain and they kept changing the channel before I wanted them to.”
The nurse turned to a cabinet and removed a small black box about the size and shape of a man’s wallet. It had buttons on it like a calculator, and an LCD screen like a digital watch. “Has the doctor shown you this?”
“Turns out there really is a remote to my brain, huh?” Canada smiled, but there wasn’t much joy in it.
“Don’t worry, dear. It’s not like the average Joe can just walk into RadioShack and buy one,” the nurse said. “Dr. Falcone turned your device on this afternoon, but she said you might not feel the difference until we transition you off your meds.”
“Dad says it’s going to make me a brand-new person. A better person.”
The nurse nodded. This girl still believed what grown-ups told her. But then Canada’s face twisted into a serious pucker, as if she had swallowed something large and sour. “The government won’t be able to tell what I’m thinking, will they?”
“Hmm? What? The government? What are you talking about?”
“This boy at school, Dennis. He says neurostimulators are part of a government plot. That they were invented by the Pentagon. That they’ll be able to tell where I am all the time. Like a tracking device or something—wherever you go, they can always find you. And that they have computers that will know what I’m thinking.”
The nurse leaned on the bed with her palms. “That boy is being silly, dear. No one can know what another person is thinking.” She touched the girl on the sternum. “Besides, I happen to think the smartest people do their best thinking not up there, but in here.”
The girl nodded and then her eyes froze in the blue aura of the television. The nurse turned her head upward. The volume was low, but the news anchor’s image had been replaced by an old picture of Canada’s wildly maned father in tails. A caption next to the photo announced “Oscar-Winning Composer Slain; Attorney Wounded.” A pair of years five decades apart and separated by a dash materialized under Solomon Gold’s face.
The girl’s scream shot into the empty corridor beyond the open door, and when the sound bounced around the floor and returned, it seemed even louder than it had coming from her throat.
The night nurse lunged for the television, which was suspended from the ceiling. She stumbled over an empty chair and slapped the face of the TV with her hand, somehow breaking off the old power switch while the anchor continued to report on the still-sketchy details of Solomon Gold’s death. Good Lord, why wouldn