"Jean-Paul is not a mutant," said Mme Martin firmly. "He's too old. It would have manifested itself by now."
It was three in the morning, and Joel had been up since seven. He felt like someone had injected bleach into his joints. "It's unusual to manifest this late, yes. But your son ran half a mile in less than a second."
M. Martin closed his eyes, and his wife crumpled her napkin in her fist.
"What were the results of the DNA test?" Mme Martin asked.
"You won't get them until Monday. When you do—and you know what the result will be—you'll need to take Jean-Paul to the Clermont Building on Rue de Bleury to get his CRIM card. There's a fee of eighty dollars plus a fifty dollar fee for a background check." This was a practiced spiel; Joel was usually the one who talked to frightened and confused parents. He looked human, he was soft-spoken, he was white and male. Only his Englishness made him suspect, to some.
"That's a pretty stiff price for something compulsory," M. Martin grumbled. "What happens to people who can't pay it?"
"If they attract any attention, they get taken away and put in Mile End, sir. And nobody comes to bail them out."
He flushed. "I suppose you want compensation for that?"
"No, sir, I don't." Joel did, very badly, but extracting money from these people was the wrong move. Jean-Paul needed mutants to make a good impression tonight. Besides, it really was a gift, even if they couldn't easily afford to give it. They were Catholic Workers.
An awkward silence followed, and then Mme Martin said, more quietly, "Can I see him?"
"He's in the common room. Through that door there."
M. Martin stayed behind at the kitchen table, turning his cup around and staring at his hands. The cup was still full so Joel couldn't break the silence by offering to fill it. He filled his own, but the caffeine wasn't doing anything for him.
"What are we supposed to do, exactly?" M. Martin asked, making it sound like a rhetorical question. "How are we supposed to protect ourselves? Or do you just tear down the system to leave us with nothing?"
Joel had to suppress a yawn. "I don't know what you mean, sir."
"The CRIM cards, the safety centres, all this business. You want us to do away with them, but then how are we supposed to live with that kind of threat?"
"I never said I wanted to get rid of them," said Joel. "But I don't know. If I had any ideas I guess I'd run for Parliament or something. There's always mutants policing mutants—groups like the X-Men in the States."
"We've seen the X-Men mess up before," M. Martin said. "They didn't do so well with your father, did they?"
"They didn't bring him back alive, if that's what you mean," said Joel. His voice was calm, and in fact, he had no anger left in him, no grief or violence. He felt curiously weightless, clear, and empty.
M. Martin looked tight around the eyes, squinting as if the room were full of smoke. "McCree wasn't the only one killed. That's—what we have to think about. Do mutants cause more problems than they solve?"
"Maybe."
M. Martin narrowed his eyes and shook his head, and then got up to join his wife in the other room. Joel wondered if it was better to pursue the matter or let him go; he decided there wasn't any reason to push. What was there to say, anyway? Joel didn't have any answers. He wondered what Professor Xavier would have said.
The Martins took Jean-Paul home without any more fanfare or fuss, and Joel turned the downstairs lights off. In the darkened house, he slipped once again into the Aphanes, only to find that he could still see in that unnerving multi-dimensional vision. The darkness was still there, but he also perceived where the furniture was, where the carpet was rucked up on the stairs, where the lightswitch was on the wall. It was accurate, as he saw when he became physical again to turn on the hall light: he wasn't simply hallucinating. Hallucinations weren't like that anyway, at least in his experience. One time, during a bad medication reaction at St Rita's, he had hallucinated that his skin was coming off in great sheets, like toilet paper from a roll, and he was absolutely unable to disbelieve in it. Even the impulse to doubt never came to him. No dreamlike feeling. It was real, that was the horror. There was blood on the cafeteria table, how could other people not see it? Who could deny something so obvious? Even after he awoke from the haze of the anti-psychotics, the terror of losing his skin had stayed with him.
But this he could doubt.
On the second floor, he saw that Jeanne-Marie's light was still on. He knocked cautiously on the door, and waited for her muffled, "Come in."
She was sitting still on the end of the bed, wearing her nightgown, her bare toes curled up tight on the rug. Her fists, too, were balled up in her lap, but otherwise she seemed calm, blank. She looked up at him silently.
"Were you having trouble sleeping?" he asked, not knowing why he had come in here or what he wanted her to reveal.
"Sort of. Yes."
"I hope we weren't keeping you awake downstairs? With all the ruckus tonight, I mean."
She shook her head. Joel took a few steps into the room, still hanging back from her a safe distance so that she wouldn't feel intimidated. "Uh—this might not be the right time, but when I was at the school the other day Madame DuPont said, said you had some issues. She didn't elaborate much. But if you want to talk to a counsellor or something, I can set that up, no problem."
"I'm not crazy," she said flatly.
"Okay." Joel turned to leave, resolving to attack this sometime when he had more than two molecules of serotonin to rub together.
"I'm not. Madame hates me. She's hated me for a long time," Jeanne-Marie insisted.
He paused. "Why does she hate you?"
"Because—something happened. When my powers manifested. It's not because I'm a mutant," she said, looking down at her bare feet. "It was just...I guess that's all you need to know. She hates me."
"What happened?" Joel asked. He had learned over the years that if he stood very still and asked very quietly, sometimes kids would say what they didn't want to say.
"I was thirteen. And...you were there, at the school. You saw what it's like."
"Yeah. A little."
"So I wasn't—I didn't want to—"
She wouldn't look up at him, and her fingers kept clenching and unclenching around nothing. Joel suddenly saw something in her that was, mysteriously, like himself. He sat down in the desk chair, and waited for her to find the words.
"I know it's wrong, I knew then too, but I just couldn't anymore, I couldn't stand it. I went to the window..."
Now Joel understood. All he could say was, "My God."
"I know, I know." She was crying now. "I know it was wrong, you don't need to—"
"No, no, really, I didn't mean it like that. Trust me. I tried it too. Twice."
Jeanne-Marie wiped her face with a tissue from the nightstand. "Okay. Well. It didn't work. I didn't fall. I could fly. They didn't tell us about mutants at Madame DuPont's, and we didn't hear about them any other way. We didn't watch TV, and I was too young for newspapers. But I knew that the saints could fly, some of them. Teresa of Avila could."
"And Christina the Astonishing." Joel smiled. "They named the mutant girls' psych hospital in Ottawa after her."
"And lots of other saints did things like that too. Not just the mystics and the crazies. Anyway. I told Madame DuPont that a miracle had happened. I should have known better. She—she said I was blaspheming."
"You were just confused."
She shook her head. "You can't talk Madame out of a punishment. She doesn't change her mind. You must have noticed that?"
"I suspected. What did she do to you?"
Jeanne-Marie shrugged. "I don't want to go into details."
Neither did Joel, truth be told. He was bleary-eyed and knew his health was too fragile to pull an all-nighter doing amateur psychotherapy. "Maybe we can talk about this tomorrow."
Joel woke up on the bathroom floor the next morning, a dull pain in the back of his head and a sharp one in his shoulder. He was lying in a pool of urine, and for a long few moments he couldn't quite put together why that might be. Hadn't been drinking; he rarely drank. He remembered going to bed, collapsing into physicality inches above the mattress, but had no recollection of getting up. The sun was glaring through the southern-exposure window in the bathroom, so it was at least eleven now.
He rolled over, noting with despair that the bath mat was soaked with piss. And it hadn't even broken his fall much. He didn't trust himself to stand up in the shower, so he ran a bath. A searing pain flared in his side whenever he moved—had he broken a rib? Big plum-dark bruises on his right side, and when he pressed them he winced. As the tub was filling, he sat with his back against the wall and tried to will away the throbbing in his head.
Under the sound of the rushing water, he could hear Paul listening to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC radio. The aria was familiar, one of Paul's favourites, but Joel couldn't place it. Songs of people who had the luxury of leaving dying words, a big finish instead of a dumb mistake. Libre elle est née, et libre elle mourra! A good way to go. But this wasn't Carmen, it was something Italian. Joel could almost make out the words...
You're tired.
It was a familiar feeling, a tickle against his mind. Always reminded him of the dentist, for some reason. What?
You're tired and you're sick. You need help.
Who are you? Vicky was the only mutant with psi-powers in the house, and she couldn't broadcast. Mars might...God, it was hard to think...no, Mars had the prickly feeling. This voice was smooth, lulling.
Nobody's talking to you, McCree. You're losing it again.
I'm not.
Post-ictal psychosis. Happens all the time. Not that you're a pillar of strength to begin with.
Something about this wasn't right, it was implausible, but Paul was banging on the door and the overflow gasket on the tub was gurgling.
A blank moment. Then Paul was bent over Joel, lifting his chin gently. "Are you back yet?"
Joel managed a groan, and Paul helped him up.
"I'm still all fucking piss-soaked, let me have a bath."
"You'll drown."
"I will not."
Paul was green-gold flecked with violet, like a stubborn bruise. "Lie down while I call Dr Stein and find out."
So Joel lay on a pile of towels on the bed, remembering that he'd wanted to talk to Jeanne-Marie today. And update the chore schedule to keep Prawn busy. Both tasks seemed impossible. For awhile he watched a black crow as it shuffled its feet on a branch outside the window, and the crow looked back at him.
He dreamed he was on a tiny coracle, rowing across the ocean under a grey sky. Going east, but the waves kept pushing him back towards the scratchy map coast of Vineland. There were no islands and there was nothing in the water.
A hand on his shoulder, a warm hand. Paul. "Hey. Dr Stein called back. She wants you to come in to the hospital."
Joel managed to sit up. "How come?"
"She says she's worried about your Klonopin and she doesn't want to wait until after Christmas break to see you in the office. And she wants to do the referral for the experimental guy in Repentigny."
"Christ." He rubbed his eyes. "Okay, can you drive me?"
"No, you'll have to walk. Of course I'm fucking driving you."
Paul had spent enough time in hospitals as a child to know how to get out of the ER waiting room and onto the top of the triage list. Throw up and you get immediate attention. Claim chest pains. Faint. But clearly seizures were a pretty fast ticket to service too.
Joel blanked out twice in the car, or so Paul thought—it wasn't easy to separate absence seizures from typical McCree-patented spacefaring, although sometimes there was a telltale movement of the jaw, a mechanical blinking. No, not mechanical. Somewhere in an uncomfortable region between robotic and animal-like. Obviously the mind was gone, but it was harder to pinpoint the moment when the body went out of control.
They went to Jewish General, where Dr Stein had privileges, and they were still at the registry desk when Joel went white and whispered, "Bees, bees."
Bees, bells, and motorcycles were all bad news. "He's going to have another one," Paul told the nurse.
They loaded Joel on a gurney and trucked him away from the frightened onlookers in the waiting room. Paul followed, because no one had told him to stay behind. He could never watch the grand mal seizures, they were too horrible, but after a few minutes he noticed the same thing the nurses did.
"It's not stopping."
"We know," one said shortly. They were already wheeling him towards an examination room. Paul trotted to keep up, and the nurse said, "Are you a family member?"
"I'm his brother," Paul said immediately.
She seemed to buy it, or (more likely) she was too busy to care. They let him stay.
Joel liked to call Paul a hypochondriac because he read all the patient information sheets that came with his prescriptions and kept the Merck manual in the bathroom. Paul wasn't a hypochondriac; he had a file full of diagnoses, but that wasn't one of them. He liked medicine and he liked being informed. And in emergencies, he could keep himself occupied by imagining all the dire things that could be going wrong.
The room smelled of adrenaline, pungent like vinegar. A doctor had arrived, a handsome young Indian with a sleek shaved head and beautiful cheekbones. Paul hated himself for noticing. Nobody should be excessively beautiful in times of crisis. Too distracting. He prayed, because he thought Joel would want that. A superstitious string of Hail Marys, the words running together.
Dr Stein arrived as the handsome Indian doctor was attempting to give Joel a needle. Paul liked gory horror movies and shooter games, but he knew he'd have to close his eyes if there was going to be real blood on the floor. "Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâces..."
"Shoot," said the Indian doctor mildly.
"Get him on his side and give him an IM injection of lorazepam."
"Isn't that—"
"Better than making a bigger mess of that vein."
"...le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni..."
"And why not diazepam?"
"Poorly absorbed through muscle tissue, plus the need for repeated injections...?"
"Very good."
"...maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort..."
"There we go."
The irregular thumping of Joel's elbows against the gurney eased, and Paul let himself open his eyes. Blood had spattered the handsome doctor's lab coat. Joel looked slightly blue in the face, but he was lying still and soon opened his eyes, probably because a phlebotomist was fastening her tourniquet around his arm.
"Hi there," Dr Stein said to him, in the bluff tone that doctors love. "You know where you are?"
"Hospital."
"Smart lad." She turned to Paul. "Did we miss a dose of Klonopin?"
"Took it last night," Joel muttered, eyes falling shut as the phlebotomist took her needles and bottles away.
"We had some circumstances last night. We weren't off to a regular start this morning," Paul said.
She led him out into the hall with a hand on his back. "Every day, twice a day. Same times. Even an hour will make a difference. Joel's mutation makes drugs in that family zap right through his metabolism, so the half-life is very unforgiving. I'll remind him again when he's not zoned out on Ativan, but you can remind him too. Stress and lack of sleep do a number on his system. This is why I'm so eager to set something up with Dr Gervais in Repentigny."
Paul nodded dumbly. The people passing through the corridor were staring at him, and now that the immediate crisis was over he was seized with a desire to get away. Strong feelings made him fluoresce very brightly, flashes of sour yellow and lime green skating over his hands. He put them in his pockets.
"He'll be asleep for awhile," said Dr Stein. "You can go home and rest for an hour or two, if you want. We'll run bloodwork and do an EEG, for all the good it'll do us. Besides that, all we can do is make sure he takes the Klonopin like clockwork. Eight hours of sleep a night is the absolute minimum, and have him try staying in his invisible state for at least half an hour a day. More, if possible."
"Are you keeping him overnight?"
"We'll see. Neurology's crowded right now, but I'll get him in if he needs it."
She left, and Paul went outside to the car, where he called Ottawa from Joel's cell phone. The conversation was short—Mrs McCree sounded like she was in a hurry to get somewhere.
"He won't want me to come see him, so there's not much I can do," she said. "Just make sure he eats, all right? Bring him food, if you have to."
"I will."
"I'm glad you're there. Thank you for telling me," she said before hanging up.
Polite. The McCrees had always been polite, even the towering Senator, whom Paul had met at St Rita's once or twice. They struggled and suffered, but always under that shell of good taste. They followed the rules and did their duty, which was more than Paul's own family had done. Paul could almost sympathise with frightened parents who turned on kids like Prawn and Sabine, who could actually do damage, but mutations could hardly get more harmless than Paul's.
He missed them, which was the worst part. Even his mother, who had stayed loyal for so long, wasn't returning his calls anymore. He wondered how his sisters were doing, if Amelie had got married yet. The world's going crazy, he thought. Like Germany in the 30s. We're losing it.
Paul started the car, and got as far as Rue Légaré before he felt like he was drowning. The snow was ashes. Death was leaking through from the houses, from the side streets, from the sewers. He would be swept up in the swell and lost, he would be thrown against the rocks and crushed. He made an abrupt and illegal U-turn, drove back into the hospital parking lot, and took the bus home. He was still shaking as he got off on Prince Arthur and walked down Rue Sainte Famille towards home.
Joel woke up alone, sore and fuzzy-headed. He was in a ward with five other men, all old and motionless, drooling in their sleep. The sitter, a large black woman, sat with a crossword puzzle book at the far end of the room. It was almost midnight, frost on the windows hiding the lights of the city from view, and the ward was cold. He smelled feces and hoped they weren't his.
A covered tray sat at the end of the bed, but on the table there was a small white bakery box and a card. The card was apparently from Steph, not from Paul: she (he?) was always careless with cards and picked whichever one had an appealing picture. This one was a little girl's birthday card with a Persian kitten on it, and Steph had scratched out the printed inside message. Get well, Saint Joel. Steph, Paul, Sabine, Vicky, King Prawn, and Jeanne-Marie.
Joel didn't open the bakery box, having no appetite. He sat up, and the sitter looked up from her puzzle. "I'm okay."
A catheter poked out of the back of his left hand, but he wasn't connected to an IV line. He didn't embarrass himself by falling on his face on the way to the bathroom with his bag, although his coordination was off and he missed the doorknob the first time. He changed out of the hospital gown and into the track pants and t-shirt Paul had packed for him, then wandered out into the bright hallway.
He'd been intending to go find a drink machine, just for something to do, but he stopped when he saw a policewoman sitting right outside his ward. She was blonde and slender, and she looked up at him sharply. "You're awake."
"Me?" he said, still stupid from the drugs but aware that something was wrong. "What—I haven't done anything."
She smiled. "Of course not. I only want to talk to you. We would have met this morning if you hadn't fallen ill. I'm Corporal Anne McKenzie, RCMP."
He shook her hand. "Uh—can this wait till tomorrow?"
"Sooner is better in my business. You're feeling well enough to come talk to me for a while, aren't you? It shouldn't take half an hour, if all goes well."
She led him down the hall to the elevator. As they were going down, she said quietly, "You've got nothing to be afraid of. I'm a mutant myself, you know."
"You followed me into the hospital. I think I have something to be nervous about."
"Oh, don't flatter yourself. We're at JGH for something else, but it's a lucky bonus that you're here at the same time. Sometimes everything comes together. It makes you believe in a higher power, doesn't it?"
Joel shrugged, not willing to dignify that with an answer. Corporal McKenzie led him into a small sitting room on the day surgery wing, and gestured for him to take a seat. She took a Dictaphone from her briefcase and pressed record, setting it on the coffee table.
"Now! Last night, Mr McCree, you and your...partner bailed four mutants out of Mile End Safety Centre. Those mutants were witnesses to the incident on Victoria Avenue, and we will need to talk to them."
"You'll have to ask them, not me."
"Yes, but they're in your house. When it comes to mutants in St John of God House, the metro police have noticed that you're very—shall we say—defensive?"
"What does that mean?" Joel hired lawyers for accused mutants, when he could. His uncle Martin was a criminal lawyer who occasionally did pro bono work for the mutant community in the city, but most of the time Joel had to pay from his own pocket. Even one case a year was enough to make things tight in the house.
Once, of course, a kid had skinned out the back of the house and claimed sanctuary in Saint-Sulpice when the police were looking for him. The standoff only lasted two days, after the bishop, Père Maurice, and Joel himself ran interference between the kid and the police. Probably McKenzie was referring to that incident, although it had happened years ago and Joel had been warned off letting something like it happen again at Saint-Sulpice.
"We're only giving you fair warning that we'll be coming. We hope you'll be cooperative."
"You had a chance to talk to them while they were in safety. Why didn't you?"
She sighed. "Procedure doesn't work that way. Safety and lockup aren't the same thing. Anyway, I didn't come here to discuss that with you—I'm just giving you a heads-up out of respect. Because we do respect the work that you do."
"Right." Joel didn't like the idea of the Mounties paying any attention at all to St John of God House. She couldn't touch him, but the others were vulnerable.
"I'm here to make you an offer, Joel. I believe that Jérôme Brazeau made you a similar offer five years ago, and you were unwilling to take it, but we're hoping that time has changed your feelings on the subject. The RCMP has a new associated body which we're calling Department H, at least until we get a supply budget and have to come up with something to put on the letterhead." She grinned. "Joke."
"Uh-huh."
"You've dealt with the X-Men before—Department H is simply a government-operated version of the same. We're hoping that the department will be effective enough that we can phase out the CRIM cards and the safety centres. We would be very interested in using you—your talents—in an intelligence capacity. You wouldn't be asked to perform any duties involving combat; we know that Catholic Workers believe in nonviolence."
At first Joel was too stunned to respond, although after a moment he realised he was also furious, for reasons he couldn't figure out. "No."
She wasn't perturbed. "Why not? How can we sweeten the deal for you?"
"You can't. I'm not going to work for an organisation that uses violence."
"You wouldn't be—"
"But somebody would. Right?"
She sat back on the couch, arms folded. "How exactly do you propose that police work be done, then?"
"Gandhi thought it could be done without violence. If people really wanted peace." He knew it was an irritating answer, but he wasn't up to discussing philosophy of law when he had gallons of Ativan in his bloodstream.
"Think about this, Joel." He wasn't Mr McCree anymore. "Having the right police intelligence can save lives. Having Department H work will mean the end of the safety centres—we can have groups of mutants all across the country working to protect ordinary people, human and mutant alike. I'm no pacifist, but that sounds like a better way to get to your nonviolent society than just sitting there and allowing the arrests of innocent mutants."
Joel said nothing.
"It's best to be moderate, don't you think?"
"Look, what—what exactly would you want me to do?" He wasn't weakening, he was just asking. That was all.
Corporal McKenzie smiled. "Gather information. That's all. You can dictate the terms of your contract if you want. We know you're trying to get into Holy Orders and that might take precedence. That's fine with us. I'm Catholic myself."
Joel felt himself dissolve into partial visibility. He was beyond nervous. "I don't like this," he murmured.
"You don't have to take my word for it. Niko Putkonen is working for us in Ottawa. I can give you a number where you can reach her."
"Niko's okay?"
"Of course."
"Okay. Yes. Get me in touch with her, I mean."
McKenzie got a card from her briefcase and wrote on the back of it, then handed it to Joel. "Dial in that extension. We use codenames, so ask for Freezeframe. You'll be added to the list of acceptable callers."
"Freezeframe? You're serious?" The headaches were back; he was going to have to get something from the nurses to get back to sleep. "What even makes you think you can use me? I'm a messed up pacifist with a neurological disorder. Don't you have any able-bodied mutants to recruit?"
"We do. We've already spoken to Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, for instance. And we're quite interested in Francis Dudley."
"Jesus Christ, you're recruiting Prawn? He's not even Canadian!"
She shrugged. "That can be fixed."
Where to start? "This is insanity."
McKenzie bristled, for the first time. "No, this is a visionary project that might reverse the effects of the legal battles mutants have lost over the years. If you'd rather not participate in our fight, fine. We've made our offer, and anything you care to demand—we're ready to negotiate. Department H has a lot of funding at its disposal, for now, but if we don't produce some results soon we risk losing everything. We need mutants. Canada needs mutants."
He wanted to tell her not to sell him a national pride guilt trip, but he couldn't help thinking that she had a point. "Can I think about it? I want to talk to my confessor."
"Absolutely." She had perfect teeth, a model's smile. "You can call me any time at that number I gave you. My codename is Snowbird—no jokes! I hope you make the right decision."
She swept out, and Joel waited a few moments before going fully into the Aphanes and following her. He felt a little guilty about it; way back when his powers had first manifested, his father took him aside and read him the story of the Ring of Gyges from Plato. Even then, before he'd had a chance to think about what he could do, Joel had felt obscurely ashamed of himself.
McKenzie took the elevator back up to the neurology floor, and Joel followed after the car on its metal cables. She got off and marched past the nurses' station to another ward, where two more policemen were waiting.
"I spoke to McCree," she said. "He's reluctant. But he didn't say no."
One of the other Mounties nodded. "That's good. Hudson'll be glad if we can get some more feet on the ground. The kid here's awake, by the way."
"Thanks."
McKenzie went into the ward, where a skinny teenage girl was reading in bed under the dim light of her bedside lamp. Her head was bandaged, part of her long brown hair shaved off, and underneath the dressing Joel could see the ragged edges of the wound, the sutures as fine as the doctors could make them. When she saw McKenzie, she flinched and dropped her magazine.
"Hey, relax, Bridget."
"I never meant to hurt anybody," the girl whispered. "You have to believe me, I didn't know."
"Of course I believe you. You're not stupid. Why would you wreck two police cars and four blocks of a city street? All you got out of it was a bad concussion. Nobody blames you for the accident."
"Really?"
"Really. We just want to tell you about a group of people who can help you learn to control your powers. Control them, and use them to help others."
The girl, Bridget, rubbed the back of her neck. Again, she said, "Really?"
"Yes."
"But I killed three cops. I killed people, Jesus..."
"It's all right, it's all right." Corporal McKenzie gave the girl a hug. "We all understand. You didn't do anything wrong."
Bridget sobbed in the corporal's arms, and Joel felt too embarrassed to stay there watching them. He ghosted out of the ward and found an empty stretch of hallway, where he became physical again and walked back to his room. Like Bridget, he wore the bright yellow hospital wristband that designated him as a mutant, but there was still no need to alarm the ward sitter more than necessary.
Polyclinique Ste-Claire was a small glass-fronted building in Westmount, with security guards, futuristic track lighting, and hexagonal reception desks to make the place look important. Like you were getting something for your money. Joel didn't approve of private clinics as a matter of principle, and now here he was sitting in one, staring at an issue of Maclean's and trying not to feel guilty.
Dr Stein had authorised his release from the hospital yesterday morning, and told him with palpable excitement about Dr Gervais. "You're incredibly lucky—he had a cancellation on Monday the twenty-second, so you'll get to see him before his Christmas break. I really have a good feeling about this, Joel. I think it'll help you a lot."
Joel hoped it would; this morning another tonic-clonic seizure had struck in with its aura of bells and bees. He had time to get to bed, and was even lucky enough not to shit himself, but now his temples and forehead were throbbing and he felt hungover. He was almost late to the appointment.
The post-ictal haze combined with the woolly mental effects of the Klonopin made it hard to pay attention to anything, but something was bothering Joel about the security guard. The man looked far too...serious? Something. Joel took a minute or two to work out what the problem was: he was armed. There were several lumps on his belt, but one of them was almost certainly a holster.
Why? A private ambulatory clinic—was security even necessary at all? The two other patients in the waiting room were much like Joel: underfed, weary-looking, spaced out. You didn't get violent psychos in an outpatient setting, generally, and even then there was no need to shoot anybody.
The answer came to him a few minutes later, when he felt a familiar tickle against his mind, the sort of accidental elbow-bump of an inexperienced telepath that was common at Dr Xavier's. Of course, of course, the mutant thing. Dangerous mutants, arm your security guards and check their identity papers. Joel looked up from his magazine, trying to guess which of the waiting patients was the telepath. One was a girl with long, greasy blonde hair and shadowed eyes, while the other was a boy his own age, listening to an iPod and sweating profusely. Probably the girl. Joel wondered if he could go into the Aphanes fast enough to dodge a bullet.
The nurse called him into a small, undecorated examination room. No desk, file cabinet, or shelves; only a paper-covered table, a sink, formica cabinets. Joel was surprised, since he'd only come in for a consultation and had been expecting an office visit. He wondered if he was supposed to take his pants off.
Better not to, he decided. The nurse hadn't said to. But maybe she assumed he knew. Or maybe she'd told him and he'd forgotten. A hospital gown sat folded on the exam table—did that mean something? The decision seemed of utmost importance. Joel stood frozen in the middle of the examination room, unable to focus on any reasons in favour of putting on the hospital gown. There were some, he knew, and some potential cons were floating out in space as well. He was thinking of mustard jars for some reason. A mustard jar and a relish jar, one occluding the other like planets. Pay attention. No, I am. Sit down.
Dr Gervais appeared at last, a vigorous young guy in a turtleneck who looked a bit like Thom Yorke, minus the lazy eye. He also had a fucking soulpatch, which made Joel dislike him immediately. Despite his name, he was English.
"Joel? I'm Mark, pleased to meet you. So Margo Stein sent you over, eh? Looks like you've tried the whole chemistry set."
"Just about. The Klonopin worked for awhile. I'm not sure it's doing much anymore."
"Aha. Well, we'll see if the secret weapon will work on you, shall we? Do you mind getting undressed for me?"
After an abbreviated version of the usual neurological examination, Dr Gervais asked Joel about his powers. "Do you ever lose control of them?"
"Almost never, anymore."
He nodded. "What about when you do? What kind of thing triggers it?"
"If I'm really upset. And even then, I don't fall under for days and days like I used to."
"Could you?"
"Sorry?"
"Could you stay invisible that long? Without eating or sleeping?" Dr Gervais blinked rapidly when he got excited, and Joel softened towards him a little. He liked doctors who got excited.
"I'm pretty sick when I get back, but yeah."
"That's so neat." He made a note. "Okay, so you're apparently building up a tolerance to the Klonopin, which was your stopgap anti-convulsant, yeah? We don't like to use that class of drugs as a long-term measure, just doesn't work well. There's addiction issues, the tolerance thing, and the side effects make you pretty dozy, don't they? We need something that will work without turning you into a zombie. I assume Margo's talked to you about what we do at Neurocherche?"
"She said you were doing a clinical trial for some epilepsy treatment. A nerve stimulator or something."
"Or something. Yes. My group is running a phase III trial on a neurostimulator designed for mutants. You appear to be a good candidate for it—so far it's worked really well on mutants with psi and molecular powers, for reasons that aren't well-understood. It's very low risk, just the usual concerns around surgery..."
He went on, talking about percentages of patients who responded, about the treatment's additional effectiveness on depression, about how the risk of permanent damage was minimal. "We implant the stimulator just below your collarbone, under the skin, and the wires follow the vagus nerve in the neck. We also put another implant inside the skull, and we follow up with a drug treatment that has excellent effects on mutants. Even patients who continue to have seizures, the memory loss and confusion afterwards is reduced to almost nothing."
Joel had read most of this stuff already; Dr Stein had given him stacks of literature to read, including articles from medical journals that were way over his head. Even Paul hadn't had much luck making sense of them, but the abstracts suggested that Dr Gervais's work really was getting results from mutants with depression and epilepsy.
"It's so difficult doing any studies on mutants," said Dr Gervais, rolling his eyes. "You've no idea. Every other patient has a weird metabolism, and I see tons of kids from all across the country who want in on this study. And ethically, because we're talking about invasive surgery, I can only accept the ones who have a good chance of responding—physical mutants just don't benefit from our technology. And physical mutants are most likely to suffer from refractive depression! The VNS might work for them, but not Neurocherche's combo therapy. I wish we could help more people, but...what can you do?"
"I know."
"So what do you think? Don't feel like you have to answer right away."
Despite his soulpatch, Dr Gervais had won Joel over. "I want the surgery."
"Excellent! I'd like to do a few tests at Neurocherche, mainly for my own curiosity. An MRI, an EEG, some assorted pen and paper tests, a psi-scan. Probably run to about seven, eight hundred. Insurance should cover some of those costs, so I assume that's not a problem financially?"
Yes, I'm living in voluntary poverty (in theory, anyway) and am not supposed to be spending vast amounts of money on health care that most people in the province couldn't afford. That was the right answer, but Joel said, "No, it's fine."
"Beauty. How soon can you get up to Repentigny after Christmas? I wish we could do tests in the city, but we really need our own lab. The clinic here isn't good enough."
"Anytime. The twenty-seventh."
Dr Gervais filled out an appointment card and handed it to him. "Any more questions?"
Surely there were some, but he couldn't think of any. Nothing beyond a wordless—no, fear, it was fear. And he wasn't Paul; his fears so rarely panned out to anything. Have faith, the graffiti at St Rita's had said. Just relax.
Notes: Yes, I have taken hella liberties with Snowbird's character, in order to maintain some amount of realism. The medical stuff may be rife with errors, but this is the best a biology-challenged philosophy student could do with Google and a few books from the health sciences library. VNS therapy is real.