The Nearest

12

“Surprise!” Reza called out from the far side of the visitor’s yard. He was holding a child in his arms.

Kate approached them warily. “Is that really him?” As soon as the words slipped out, she wished she could take them back, but if Reza heard them as more than a figure of speech he did nothing to show it. “He’s grown so much,” she added.

“Yeah. I’m fattening him up for sumo school.” He smiled and held Michael out toward her.

Kate hesitated, afraid that after so long he wouldn’t recognize her. But he gazed placidly into her face, and offered no protest when she took him in her arms.

They sat together on one of the benches.

“That beard’s getting out of control,” she told Reza.

“Ah, but you love it, don’t you?”

“It helps.” The neurologist had suggested this trick, and it seemed to be working. The new Reza reminded her of the old one, just enough to invoke memories of him without raising her expectations too high, while she built a new set of responses to the way he looked now. Sometimes it felt wrong when she kissed him, like some sick game with twins, but if she had to choose between the old Reza being dead to her forever, or reincarnated in this imperfect look-alike, she’d settle for transmigration into a doppelgänger with a beard.

She turned to Michael, and he reached up and put a hand on her face. “Who is the most beautiful boy?” she asked. “Can you guess who that is?” He smiled, a little smugly, as if he knew he was being flattered simply from her tone. That seemed new, but she could love what was new. Everything that mattered most in his life was yet to come.

Reza put an arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t flinch.

“The last scan showed no inflammation,” she said. “And there’s no more trace of the virus in my CSF. So maybe another week. They’re still cautious; some of the others have had flare-ups.”

“I’m glad they’re cautious,” he said. “But we can’t wait to have you home.”

Kate bent down and kissed Michael three times in rapid succession. He cooed with delight and tugged at her hair. Nobody could tell her what the future held, for her or the seventeen others. “Capgras syndrome” was just a name for a cluster of symptoms that had been seen in half a dozen different diseases; it was not the means to divine a prognosis. But even if her raw perceptions of people had forever lost their power to evoke the emotional history that had once fleshed out their meaning, her love for her family had not been lost. She just had to find detours around the barriers, and dig tunnels to the deeper truth.

“How’s your father been?” she asked Reza.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Kate was worried for a moment, but Reza didn’t seem upset.

“This worked for him, too.” He stroked his beard. “He’s out of that fucking desert prison, back in Isfahan in the seventies. I don’t look like his father, but I can pass for one of his uncles, and apparently they got on pretty well. I told him he was staying in a posh hotel where the staff all liked practicing their English for the tourists.”

Kate began crying, but when she saw the effect on Michael she forced herself to stop.

“It’s all right,” Reza said. “He’s happy now. Everything’s going to be all right.”