Evan’s mother spoke: “He doesn’t know about clocks, or left or right. I tried to teach him—I mean, we all tried to teach him.…” Her voice trailed off.
The man stepped from his computer and bent to look into the tube at the boy. “If this gear was moving like this,” he said, pointing and turning a circle with his finger, “then which direction would this gear way over here move?”
“Up,” Evan said, pointing along the gear’s outside edge, indicating a clockwise rotation.
The man smiled. “So it would.”
The next series of images were more complex, but Evan’s answers were just as immediate and just as correct. He didn’t have to think about it.
“Let’s try something different now,” the man finally said.
It started easy enough. Strange new shapes appeared on the screen. They weren’t gears, exactly, but they had spikes and grooves and jutting angles that let them fit together the way gears do. The man bent near the tube again and showed him how by manipulating a control ball near his hand, Evan could change the images on the screen. He could move them.
“These are three-dimensional puzzles, Evan,” the man said. “Your teachers tell us that you are very good at puzzles. Is that true?”
“I’m pretty good,” Evan said, but he’d never seen puzzles like this before.
He experimented, moving one image toward another, turning it so their grooves lined up. The images merged, and a chime sounded.
“Good job, Evan,” the man said, and walked back to his computer. “Now we’ll try some harder ones.”
New, complex shapes appeared on the screen. Evan had to rotate each one completely to get a good look, because all the sides were different. He moved them together. He found where they fit. The machine chimed.
“Good, Evan.”
The solutions came easily. The complexity of the spatial configurations pulled him in, focused him to a fine point of concentration. Something was happening in his head; he felt it, as if some hidden green part of him was warming in the sunshine. The world around him retreated, became remote, irrelevant.
He no longer noticed the tube, or the computer, or the room with its four white walls and four white coats. There were only the puzzles, one after another, in a blur of shapes he manipulated with the controls at his fingertips.
He worked puzzle after puzzle, listening for the chime when he got them right.
Then the screen was empty, jarringly empty, all at once. It took him a moment to come back to himself enough to speak.
“More,” he said.
“There are no more, Evan,” the man said. “You’ve solved them all.”
Evan glanced out of the tube, but the white coats weren’t looking at him. They stared at their computer terminal.
The man with a tie was the first to look up from the glowing screen. He wore an expression Evan had never seen pointed at him before. Evan’s stomach turned to ice.
HOSPITALS ALWAYS stank. There was something strange and sickly about the air in the building, and the breeze coming through the screen window hardly improved it. Evan could smell the garbage that lay heaped in the alley several floors below. Still, he moved closer to the window, pretending interest in the view because looking out the window was easier than looking at his mother. She sat at the big, glossy table. She was crying, though she did it silently—one of the tricks she’d picked up during her time with her last boyfriend.
They’d been in this room for a while now, waiting.
When the door finally opened, Evan flinched. Three men walked in. He’d never seen any of them before, but their coats were dark, and all of them wore ties. It was bad. Men with ties always meant something bad. Evan’s mother sat up quickly and wiped the corners of her eyes with a napkin she kept in her purse.
The men smiled at Evan and shook his mother’s hand in turns, introducing themselves. The one who called himself Walden got right to the point. “Evan’s tests were abnormal,” he said.
He was a big man with a face like a square block, and he wore little wire glasses perched across his nose. Evan hadn’t seen anyone with glasses like that in a long time; he tried not to stare.
“Where’s the doctor?” Evan’s mother asked.
“Evan’s case has been transferred to me.”
“But they told me Dr. Martin was going to be Evan’s doctor. I thought that’s why they brought him in.”
“Dr. Martin himself felt that Evan’s case required