“You take this seriously, Gonzalo,” Mom whispered to me as we plodded down the corridor after him. “This is costing me a lot of money.” She had actually had to break into her savings, what little she had, in order to fund this visit.
“I know, Mom,” I recited. “I will.”
The doctor shut the door behind us. His room was kitted out with a desk and computer, two chairs, and a bed on which to examine patients. He gestured for us to sit down and took his own place at the desk.
There were wrinkles in his face and nearly-blue bags under his eyes. His complexion was pale. ‘Dr Alistair Black’ read his name badge.
“So, young man,” he said wearily. “What seems to be the problem?”
I pondered. On the one hand, I was worried about what might happen if I disclosed my superpowers; I might be taken away by men in white coats or locked up by the CIA for being a danger to society. On the other hand, it was really scary having powers and not knowing where they had come from; maybe a doctor would be able to tell me what was happening to me and advise me on the best course of action? I couldn’t decide.
In the end, Mom chose for me.
“He thinks he’s become invincible!” she blurted out when I didn’t say anything for a few moments. “He thinks he is special, that he has been given these ‘powers’.” Mom’s voice climbed in pitch. “He got in a fight with a bully a few weeks ago and ever since then he’s been acting unusually, getting into trouble at school and saying these strange things...”
“I don’t just think I’m invincible, Mom,” I said at once, caution forgotten, unable to hold myself back. “I am invincible! And super strong!” I turned my attention to the doctor. The words came out in one big sentence and my chest shook as I spoke. “It all started when I was being beaten up by this football player two and half weeks ago, you see, and his punches didn’t hurt me at all, in fact he got hurt, and then I threw a phone into a wall and it smashed, and I tried to hurt myself with a knife, but it didn’t work, and I even put this hand through a window”—I held up my hand—“but it didn’t hurt at all, so you see I must have developed powers of invincibility and super strength...”
I blinked a couple of times. I hadn’t been planning on disclosing everything straight away, but Mom had forced my hand by jumping straight to the point with the doctor. I supposed that I was, as it turned out, quite frightened by my powers and that I wanted a professional to reassure me about what was happening.
I expected the doctor to express shock, or surprise, or at the least react in some kind of significant way to this enormous, earth-shattering news I was sharing with him.
Instead, he put a hand to his mouth to stifle a yawn, turned to his computer screen, clicked a few times and started typing absentmindedly.
All he said was “Mm-hm. And tell me, Mr Lopez, how long has this been going on?”
Why wasn’t he taking me seriously? He wasn’t even paying proper attention to what I was saying. “I told you how long it’s been going on! Two and a half weeks, since I got in a fight with a kid at school!”
“Mm.” He pressed a few keys, paused a moment, read something. Then, not even bothering to look up from his computer screen, he said “And would you say that this feeling of invincibility is a constant thing, or that it comes and goes episodically?
“It’s not just a feeling,” I said, and ground my teeth. “It’s real. It’s what’s happening to me.”
“Constant, then.” His fingers fluttered again; another pause. This time he did look up from the screen, but only to look over my head at Mom. “And has this feeling of invincibility been accompanied by any other delusions?” he asked her. He spoke to her completely differently, in a much more serious tone.
“I’m not delusional, you moron!” I said, for once my anger getting the better of me and boiling over out of my mouth.
“Gonzalo!” scolded my mother. “Don’t be so rude! I did not raise you to speak like that!”
“He’s not taking me seriously, Mom!” I shot back. “You shouldn’t have brought me here! I knew this was a waste of money!”
The doctor leant forward, putting his elbows on his knees, shut his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Please, let’s all remain calm.” Now, at last, he gave me his attention—or at least some of it. “Mr Lopez,” he said, “adolescence is often an extremely difficult time. Your body is going through lots of unusual and alarming changes. Your hormones are doing all sorts of strange things with your brain chemistry. And social dynamics among your peer group can be very tricky. Especially if you have the misfortune of being bullied, which I’m afraid to say is sadly very common. As a result, it can be the case that teenagers, particularly young men for some reason, can develop various coping mechanisms, including inventing fantasies, to try to deal with their problems and get attention. I know it may be hard for you to hear, but I don’t want to patronise you, and in the long run your admitting this will be the best first step to addressing your problems.”
I let out a long sigh and looked at the floor. He didn’t believe me at all. The carpet had some coffee stains hiding in it, but otherwise it was a faded, bland blue-green colour, a kind of teal. A boring, uninteresting, unremarkable carpet that would just be walked over its whole life and would never be noticed for being anything special.
No.
“Give me your ophthalmoscope,” I said.
The doctor did a double take. Now he did seem surprised; his little speech hadn’t had its intended effect. “That’s a long word,” he said. “I’m impressed that you know it.”
“I read it in a book,” I said, then added in my mind, you quack. I’m not the poor delusional crybaby you think I am. I’m in advanced science class at school. I could go into medicine when I leave if we had more money. I have a date with Ali Carter. And I have superpowers.
“Give me your ophthalmoscope,” I repeated.
“Now why would I do that?”
“I’m not going to damage it,” I lied, “I just want to ask you something about it.”
One of Dr Black’s eyebrows crept up. “Ok, you can see it...for a moment.” I had piqued his curiosity enough to humour me, or at least to think he was humouring me. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out an opthalmoscope, an eye and ear examining instrument, to show me.
It had a metal handle about a handbreadth long painted to look like tortoiseshell, a funnel-shaped part at the top for sticking in patients’ orifices, a little bulb-light built inside this and an eyehole on the other side for peering into people’s maladies. Maybe he had been given it as a gift. That made what I was about to do a little harder, but I needed to show him the truth somehow.
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“Here you go,” he said. “What would you like to ask? Would you like to know how it works?”
I took the ophthalmoscope from him carefully, held it in two hands, one at either end, and snapped it cleanly in half: Crack.
“There,” I said before he had a chance to react, putting the two parts of the ophthalmoscope, which now mirrored each other like jigsaw pieces along two jagged lines of snapped metal, on his desk. “Could I do that if I wasn’t super strong?”
Dr Black’s eyebrows nearly leapt off his forehead and his eyes stretched wide as he stared at the ophthalmoscope, for the first time showing some authentic signs of life. Now I really had his attention.
Mom put her hand to her mouth. “Gonzalo!” she said. “I’m sorry, Dr Black. You see, it’s like I told you on the phone, he’s out of control.”
I frowned and shot her a betrayed look. So there had been clandestine phone calls without my knowledge prior to our arrival here—how disappointing. But that didn’t matter now. I had shown the doctor what was really going on.
For a moment he just stayed like that, looking down at the two pieces of the ophthalmoscope in his hands. Then: “That was a very expensive instrument. How did you do that?”
“I told you: I have super strength.” I said. “I broke it as easily as you would break a cookie.”
“Can you put it back together for me, please?”
“It doesn’t work like that. That would be super repairing skills. I have super strength.” For a doctor, he wasn’t very smart.
“Ah. I was quite fond of that ophthalmoscope…”
“I’m sorry, but I needed some way of showing you that I’m not delusional.”
He put the pieces of the ophthalmoscope on his desk. Now he turned to face me and spoke urgently. “What else can you do, Gonzalo?” He almost sounded excited.
Finally, acceptance. Or at least the beginning of it.
“Well, like I said, as well as having super strength, I’m also invincible. What’s the best way to show you that…? Here, look.”
I took up one half of the snapped ophthalmoscope and rolled up the sleeve of my shirt.
“Gonzalo, don’t!” said Mom.
I turned over my arm so that the partially lighter, more spongy, fleshy side of it was exposed, and then jammed the jagged, broken end of the instrument into it several times. Where it should have drawn blood, or stuck in me, or at least left some kind of mark or bruise, absolutely nothing happened.
“See,” I explained to the doctor, “nothing hurts me. It’s fine, Mom. I’m ok.”
What little colour there had been left in Dr Black’s face drained out of it completely, leaving him looking as white as a Klu Klux Klan leadership contest. “And what...what else can you do this with?” he whispered.
“I’ve done it with pens, pencils, forks, knives, everything...I even tried banging my head on the wall once after I had a bad fight with Mom.” (At this Mom let out a little whimper.) “Ever since my fight with Bill Jackson, nothing can hurt me.”
“Astonishing...” said Dr Black. He must be convinced now. At least he was talking to me like he was.
I changed tack, and a quiver of vulnerability crept into my voice. “What’s happening to me, Dr Black?” Now that he finally understood, I wanted to know what was going on.
The doctor took a moment to speak. “I’m not entirely sure…” he said slowly, as if he had forgotten how to talk and was remembering. “The important thing is to stay calm…” He patted his trouser pockets all of a sudden, like he was trying to find something, then stood up and hurried over to a bookshelf in the corner of his office. “I know. There’ll be something that could help you somewhere in here…” He began rifling through the bookcase, taking out books, opening them, shutting them, casting them aside. “No, that’s not it…” he mumbled. Mom and I looked at each other, our brows creasing. “Ah, here we go!” he said.
He had found a book—not a printed book, a black notebook, with a lock on it sealing it shut. He took a set of keys out of his pocket and located a little silver one. He unlocked the book and opened it to a series of dishevelled pages covered in untidy black writing. He thumbed through it making grunting noises until he seemed to find what he was looking for and stopped on a page, running his finger down as he scanned it, his mouth moving wordlessly. This page looked from where I sat like a computer print-out—like someone had printed out a document and then glued it into the notebook. What on earth was it?
Dr Black clicked his tongue. “Yes, that’s right...that’s what I need to do…” he said, more to himself than to us. “I’ll make a report right away...then the proper process will have been followed…”
“What are you looking at there?” I asked.
He turned back to us, a renewed confidence shining from his eyes. “Right,” he said, ignoring my question completely. “Like I said, the important thing is not to panic.” His whole demeanour had changed. He had gone from moving slowly, showing no signs of interest whatsoever in our conversation, to looking as twitchy and agitated as I felt, speaking quickly and nodding vigorously in between sentences. “Everything’s going to be fine. I will make a report to the relevant authority about the phenomena you have been experiencing, Gonzalo. They will be in touch with you soon, over the phone, or perhaps by house visit. All you need to do is to go home and wait for the phone call. The important thing is just to stay calm, and wait, until then—oh, and it is very important that you do not use your powers again before th—”
“What authority?” I interrupted him.
“Excuse me?”
Mom took over from me. “You said that you would report Gonzalo’s experiences to the relevant ‘authority’. What authority do you mean?”
Dr Black bobbed his head to one side. “Why, the government of course! I’ll be reporting these phenomena to the relevant department of the federal government. There’s a procedure I have to follow.”
My heart leapt ten storeys. “The government? Why do they need to know about what’s happened to me?”
Dr Black sat back down in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Gonzalo...you’ve...you’ve clearly developed some remarkable abilities.” He took the same tone as when he had given me the speech about adolescence, only now his subject matter had completely changed. “You should see what has happened to you as a...gift. Although we don’t know exactly why, this sort of thing does happen from time to time, in extremely rare cases which aren’t publicised of course. For that reason, there’s a government department that’s been set up to deal with people who have gifts like you do. You will have a choice now about how to use your gift. If you choose to use it for the greater good, which I strongly recommend that you do, then this government department will take you in, help you develop it, and take care of your education. They will—”
“Education?” I interrupted him. “You mean they’ll pay for my college tuition?”
Dr Black blinked. He looked down at the notebook for a moment. “I believe that is the arrangement, yes. They will tutor you at their organisation, and then pay for you to attend college while they continue to train you for…” He put a hand to his mouth, touching his thin lips with his fingers. “But I’ve already said too much. The important thing is to remain calm, go home, wait for the phone call, and don’t use your powers again or reveal them to anybody else. Can you do that for me? That’s as much as I can do for you.”
I considered his prescription. Doubts lurked in the pit of my stomach. Could I trust him? What was this ‘government department’ he was talking about? This was all so surreal. At the same time, it was a relief to have told another person about my powers, other than Ali and my Mom, and a medical professional no less. If there really was a government department that helped people like me who developed supernatural powers, I needed the support. Maybe they would even want to recruit me as a...no, it was too soon to start thinking like that. And…college tuition.
“I can do that,” I said carefully, testing out each word on my tongue as I said it. I could always change my mind later, I thought. All he was asking me to do was to go home and wait for a phone call. That wasn’t too difficult. And I could always decide not to answer the phone when it rang. And I didn’t have to do whatever the person on the other end of the line asked me to do, even if I did pick up.
“Well done, Gonzalo,” said my Mom, her hand pressed flat against her sternum.
“Well done,” echoed Dr Black, giving us a wan smile. “Good. That’s settled then.” He stood up, signalling the end of the appointment. “Of course,” he added to my Mom as we moved towards the door, “if there are any other sudden developments or you don’t get the call within, say, a week, do make another appointment and come back to see me again.”
“Thank you, Doctor Black,” said Mom, nodding gratefully as we made to leave the room. “Yalla, Gonzalo.” (That means ‘let’s go’.)
“Actually,” said the doctor, “Miss Stein, if you wouldn’t mind, could we have a quick word in private while Gonzalo waits outside?”
I screwed my face up at that, but Mom said “Yes, absolutely. Go on Gonzalo, wait out there for me. I won’t be long. Will I?”
“Just a moment or two,” said Dr Black.
I didn’t have time to protest before he shut the door behind me.