The Lucky Ones(90)

“Fairwood called me,” Dr. Capello said in answer to her silence. “They said someone came to see Antonio today. I knew it had to be you. You must be pretty upset.”

“They called you?”

“I asked them to,” he said. “I like to keep tabs on the poor boy. Michael said Tony had a seizure while you were there today.”

“He did,” she said. “It was...awful.”

“Kid was dealt a bad hand at birth,” Dr. Capello said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t change his cards.”

“You aren’t playing cards,” Allison said. “You’re playing with kids and their lives.”

“It wasn’t playing, doll face. It was my job.”

Now was Allison’s chance to ask the question she’d come back here to ask.

“What did you do to your children?”

Dr. Capello didn’t answer. He shuffled across the floor to a chair and sat down in it, hard and heavy. He looked sick and he looked tired. He looked just like what he was—dying. He took a few moments to catch his breath and then began speaking.

“There was a girl,” Dr. Capello began. “A French girl. We studied her in med school. She had epilepsy. No drug could silence her seizures, no treatment could quiet her suffering. Day in and day out she suffered without hope. And then a surgeon proposed a rather radical treatment. Her seizures were seated in her hippocampus. Perhaps if he removed it, it would end her seizing. Of course, there was a great risk to this surgery. The hippocampus is also the seat of empathy, of inhibition, of memory. You can’t just cut something like that out of someone’s brain without consequences. But the girl was desperate. It was this or death by seizure. They performed the operation. She lived. Everyone held their breath to see what sort of person she would be once the organ of empathy was cut out of her brain. Would she be a zombie? A psychopath? Would it have been all for nothing? And then the most wonderful thing happened.”

“What?” Allison asked, swept into the story despite herself.

“She stopped seizing. That they expected. What they didn’t expect was that she developed hyperempathy.”

“Hyperempathy?”

“Yes, it’s a condition wherein a person overidentifies with the feelings of another. Hyperempaths are so sensitive to other people’s moods and feelings they can seem almost psychic. It’s the brain, you see. We call it neuroplasticity. A big word that simply means the brain has extraordinary powers of healing itself. Especially in children. Whole hemispheres of the brain can be removed and people can not only survive but thrive as the remaining hemisphere of the brain quickly takes over the job of the lost hemisphere. My God, Allison, it’s like magic to see something like that happen. Keep the moon. Keep the ocean. Keep outer space, I don’t want it. It’s the brain that’s the true undiscovered country.”

“And you explored it,” she said.

“I did indeed. Inspiration is a terrifying thing. Hits you like lightning and you’re never the same again. I read that case study about the French girl thirty years ago and had the idea that this was it, this was the cure the world was waiting for. It’s the common denominator among all psychopaths—the lack of empathy. And here was a way to create empathy, hyperempathy even, in a human brain. Remove part of the hippocampus. It’ll shock the brain into rewiring itself. We already knew thanks to Phineas Gage that if you damaged the brain you could damage the personality. Well, it turns out if you sculpt the brain, you can sculpt the personality. Like Deacon with his glass, that was me with the brain. A sculptor. Dr. Jarvik created artificial hearts. I sculpt artificial souls.”

“This sounds insane, you know,” Allison said. He waved his hand in disgust.

“It sounds insane to break a child’s jaw, doesn’t? Sounds awful. But we do it all the time. If a child is born with an overbite, you break the jaw, you reset it and you let it heal correctly. That’s all I did. I broke the brain, reset it, let it heal. And I’m not the first to do it, kid. It’s called psychosurgery, and it’s been around for decades. In the 1970s, a procedure was perfected in Japan to treat aggression. Cut out part of the amygdala—the seat of aggression—and violent people become less violent. My procedure simply went a step further. Or two.”

“Or three?” Allison asked.

“Or three,” he said.

“What did you do to these kids?” she asked again.

“I called it ‘the Ragdoll Project.’ A little joke. My mother kept Ragdolls until she died. Best cats there are.”

“Because they’re so tame they can’t even protect themselves?”

“What’s wrong with being tame?”

“That’s really what you did, isn’t it? You ‘tamed’ violent kids?”

“Not any old violent kids. Psychopathic kids,” Dr. Capello said. “I found children who fit the criteria. I operated on them. The end.”

“No,” Allison said, shaking her head. “Not the end. Not even close to the end. You didn’t always cure them, and that’s only the beginning. Now tell me the rest. Kendra’s on a dozen drugs and almost never leaves her house. Antonio’s a wreck. Oliver’s dead. You want to explain that to me?”

“What’s to explain? It’s experimental surgery. It’s the risk we take.”