Free The Nirvana Plague by Gary Glass Page B

course. You should familiarize yourself with them before we get started in the morning.”
    “All right. But what made you disagree with the panel’s conclusions? What made you think they’d got it wrong?”
    “A gut feeling. The gut feeling you get when you talk to these people that’s there’s something broken there. You know what I mean.”
    “The other doctors on the panel interviewed them too, didn’t they? Did any of them agree with you?”
    “Let’s just say no one else was willing to go out on that limb with me.”
    “And what if your hunch turns out to be wrong and the politically unpalatable conclusion is right?”
    “Let’s just say that Chicken Little never made general.”

    Karen found Roger east of the garden, near the observatory. He was standing perfectly still, looking up at the old observatory’s silver dome. Students passing on the sidewalk gave him a wide berth. But swarms of pigeons milled about his feet, strutting and cooing.
    She waded through the pigeons to him and touched his elbow. She felt the hard cast on his arm inside the baggy coat. She’d bought the oversized coat for him at a used clothing store near campus, the day she brought him home from the hospital, three weeks ago.
    “Roger!” she said. Out of breath, she had almost no voice.
    He looked down at her. “Karen.”
    “Where is your phone?”
    He smiled. “My phone.” There was no question mark in his tone.
    “Did you drop your phone?”
    “Well…”
    She waved her hands to shoo the pigeons. They fluttered heavily away in all directions, revealing the discarded phone on the pavement. Turning back to Roger, she found him staring up at the dome again. She shoved his phone into his pocket, and he looked at her again and smiled again. “What are you looking at up there?” she said.
    “It’s a signal,” he said.
    “What is?” She looked up. It was a brilliant day, and the sunlight glinting off the silver hemisphere was too bright to look at directly.
    “It’s a beacon,” he said.
    “A beacon.”
    “Like a mirror.”
    “Yes, I know what a beacon is.” But she didn’t see how a beacon was like a mirror.
    Roger kept watching the dome, as if it might be about to open.
    “When I was a kid,” Karen said. “In Terre Haute, there was this little school called Beacon Hill. It was a special school for retarded kids. It was really just a big old white house someone had converted into a private school. Beacon Hill School. So, among us normal kids, if you wanted to really insult somebody you called them a ‘beacon’.”
    Roger showed no reaction, just stood there watching the dome.
    “You know, there was also a psychiatric hospital in Terre Haute called ‘Katherine Hamilton’s’. So everyone called it ‘Crazy Kate’s.’ And if you wanted to call another kid crazy, you’d call them ‘Kate.’ Beacon meant idiot. Kate meant crazy. We were vicious little trolls.”
    Roger looked down at her. In a different tone he said, “Don’t feel bad.”
    And somehow she felt he understood about the secret wish. “OK,” she said, ashamed. “Now, let’s go home.”
    The pigeons had scattered only a few yards away, and were already cautiously waddling back, closing in around them.
    “Were you feeding the birds?”
    He was watching the dome again. “No. They like to come around.”
    “You mean, to come round you?”
    “Everything flows toward its comfort. Mmm.”
    She liked that. “Is that Aristotle?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, still studying the dome. “Comfort is the name for the way things go.”
    That was how he talked now, since three weeks. Not like before. The old aggressive impatience had vanished. She had called it “the burn.” The burn of his thoughts, consuming his mind, slowly and inexorably metabolizing the crystalline brilliance of his personality into an ash heap. Now the burn was gone. Now there was just this weird charm and a kind of deep innocence — not like a child’s bland