The Crystal Child by Theodore Roszak Read Free Book Online Page A

say.  Hold me.
    One night, after she checked to see if he was asleep, she turned off the lights and moved to the other side of the room.  Ready to leave for the day, she had brought a change of clothes with her, a fresh blouse, a skirt to replace the slacks she wore at the clinic.  In the far corner, she removed her smock and the clothes she had worn through the day.  In his bed, Aaron was not asleep.  By the dim light from the window, he could see her making the quick change.  He could see her bared back, crossed by her brassiere straps.  Turn , he was saying to himself.  Turn , though he knew he should not want that.  He was just a kid; she was his doctor.  There was a memory that was blending with what he saw.  Before he came to the clinic, he had once had a sitter, a college girl who minded him a few days each week.  Sal was her name, a pleasant young woman and very pretty Aaron thought.  One day, he caught sight of Sal as she was changing clothes in the bathroom.  He saw her bare to the waist.  When she noticed him peeking in at the door, she hitched her bra on, and covered up quickly. “Well,” she said, with a small embarrassed smile, “I’ll bet that’s your first lesson in sex education.”  He had not known what she meant by that, but he remembered how excited he had been in that brief moment.  A wave of heat passed through him, a delicious euphoria.  He felt that way now, watching Julia in the darkened room.
    Was this what it meant to love somebody, he wondered.  To want them close, to want their skin against yours?  But love was for grown-up people.  It led to holding and kissing — like in HyperionQuest where, more than once now, he and Julia had embraced and kissed in their roles as the princess and her knight, their digital surrogates.  Why was he feeling like that?  Why was he wanting something he could never have?  Perhaps because he would never grow up to be an adult, to have a girl friend, to kiss the way grown-up people did.  He wanted this feeling that he could never have.  Wanted it, craved it, knowing that it was wrong in every possible way.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Three
    It was not the first time it had happened.  Julia woke to find her hand on the phone before she had consciously registered a ring.  She believed it was a capacity doctors developed over the years, a form of second sight that tells them they are needed.  She waited.  And then the phone beneath her hand rang.
    “It’s Aaron,” the voice on the other end of the line said.  It was Hal Prentiss, the doctor on duty that night at the clinic. “I think it’s a stroke.  We’re getting him to the ER.”  Abrupt and to the point, the way worried doctors communicate.
    An hour later Julia was at Aaron’s side in the emergency room at Mount Zion.  The boy lay in a coma, his vital signs barely registering.  Doctors were treating him for stroke, though Aaron’s EKG did not confirm that diagnosis.  “We’re moving him into intensive care,” the physician in charge told her. “We have him scheduled for a CAT scan and other tests.”  He did not look hopeful.
    “How was he when you put him to bed?” Hal Prentiss asked.
    “He was fine,”  Julia said.  “There was even some improvement over the last few days.”
    “About 2 AM he rang for the nurse,” Prentiss told her.  “When she got to him, he was comatose.  We got him through that, but then his vitals dropped like off the edge of a cliff.  We stabilized him, but he hasn’t come round.”
    Prentiss had brought Aaron’s file with her.  The ER doctor skimmed through it.  “Never dealt with a case of progeria before,” he said.  “This is one sick little boy.”
    “He actually seemed to be making progress over the past few months,” Julia said.  But the ER doctor looked even more doubtful.
    “I’ve had a few elderly patients who finished like this,” he said.  “They simply collapse all over at once like the wonderful