Transmission Read online

  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 de
tail, 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?”

  Maybe she caught something in his expression, because she fell silent for a few seconds. There was something fragile about that silence, as if both of them were tiptoeing to avoid breaking it. Even so, they had to. They couldn’t just walk like this forever.

  “Something bad then?” she said, sending the can into a trash container with a final flick of her foot.

  Kevin nodded. Bad was one word for it.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad,” he said. “The reservoir?”

  The reservoir was the place they both went when they wanted to sit down and talk about things. They’d talked about Billy Hames liking Luna when they were nine, and about Kevin’s cat, Tiger, dying when they were ten. None of it seemed like a good preparation for this. He wasn’t a cat.

  They made their way down to the edge of the water, looking out at the trees on the far side, the people with their canoes and their paddle boats on the reservoir. Compared to some of the places they went, this was nice. People assumed Kevin was the kid from t
he wrong side of town leading Luna astray, but she was the one with the knack for squeezing past fences and clambering up derelict buildings, leaving Kevin to follow if he could. Here, there was none of that, just the water and the trees.

  “What is it?” Luna asked. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. Kevin didn’t feel like doing the same. Right then, he wanted to run, to hide. Anything to keep from telling her the truth. It felt as though, the longer he could keep from telling Luna, the longer it wasn’t really real.

  “Kevin?” Luna said. “You’re worrying me now. Look, if you don’t tell me what it is, then I’m going to call your mom and find out that way.”

  “No, don’t do that,” Kevin said quickly. “I’m not sure… Mom isn’t handling this well.”

  Luna was looking more worried by the moment. “What’s wrong? Is she sick? Are you sick?”

  Kevin nodded at the last one. “I’m sick,” he said. He put his hand on Luna’s shoulder. “I have something called leukodystrophy. I’m dying, Luna.”

  He knew he’d said it too quickly. Something like that, there should be a whole big explanation, a proper build-up, but honestly, that was the part of it that mattered.

  She stared at him, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. “No, you can’t be, that’s…”

  She hugged him then, tight enough that Kevin could barely breathe.

  “Tell me it’s a joke. Tell me it’s not real.”

  “I wish it weren’t,” Kevin said. He wished that more than anything right then.

  Luna pulled back, and Kevin could see her screwing her features tight with the effort of not crying. Normally, Luna was good at not crying about things. Now, though, he could see it taking everything she had.

  “This… how long?” she asked.

  “They said maybe six months,” Kevin said.

  “And that was days ago, so it’s less now,” Luna shot back. “And you’ve been having to cope with it on your own, and…” She faded into silence as the sheer enormity of it obviously hit her.

  Kevin could see her looking out at the people on the reservoir, watching them with their small boats and their quick forays into the water. They seemed so happy there. She stared at them as if they were the part she couldn’t believe, not the illness.