Sitting at one of the monitors was someone I recognized.
Gamine face, intense eyes, dangling earrings, and a double pierce on
the right ear. The tawny bob had grown out to a shoulderlength
wedge.
A line of white collar showed over a navy-blue crewneck.
When had I last seen her? Three years or so’ Making her twenty.
I wondered if she’d gotten her Ph.D. yet.
She was tapping the keys rapidly, bringing data to the screen.
As I neared I saw that the text was in German. The word neuropeptid’
kept popping out.
“Hi, Jennifer.”
She spun around. Alex!” Big smile. She gave me a kiss on the cheek
and got off her stool.
“Is it Dr. Leavitt yet?” I said.
“ThisJune,” she said. “Wrapping up my dissertation.”
“Congratulations. Neuroanatomy?”
“Neurochemistry-much more practical, right?”
“Still planning on going to med school?”
“Next fall. Stanford.”
“Psychiatry?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe something a bit more concrete. No
offense. I’m going to take my time and see what appeals tome.”
“Well, there’s certainly no hurry-what are you, twelve years old?”
“Twenty! I’ll be twenty-one next month.”
A veritable crone.”
“Weren’t you young, too, when you finished?”
“Not that young. I was shaving.
She laughed again. “It’s great to see you. Hear from Jamey at all?”
“I got a postcard at Christmas. From New Hampshire. He’s renting a
farm there. Writing poetry.”
“Is he . . all right?”
“He’s better. There was no return address on the card and he wasn’t
listed. So I called the psychiatrist who treated him up in Carmel and
she said he’d been maintaining pretty well on medication. Apparently
he’s got someone to take care of him. One of the nurses who worked
with him up there.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said. “Poor guy. He had so much going for
and against him.”
“Good way to put it. Have you had any contact with the other people in
the group?”
The group. Project t6o. As in IQ. Accelerated academics for kids
with genius intellects. A grand experiment; one of its members ended
up accused of serial murder. I’d gotten involved, taken a joyride into
hatred and corruption. is at Harvard law and working for a judge,
Felicia’s studying math at Columbia, and David dropped out of U. of
Chicago med school after one semester and became a commodities
trader.
In the pits. He always was kind of an eighties guy. Anyway, the
projects defunct-Dr. Flowers didn’t renew the grant.”
“Health problems?”
“That was part of it. And of course the publicity about Jamey didn’t
help. She moved to Hawaii. I think she wanted to minimize her
stress-because of the M.S.”
Catching up with the past for the second time today, I realized how
many loose ends I’d let dangle.
“So,” she said, “what brings you here?”
“Looking up some case material.”
Anything interesting?”
“Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Familiar with it?”
“I’ve heard of Munchausen people abusing their bodies to fake disease,
right? But what’s the proxy part?”
“People faking disease in their children.”
“Well, that’s’ certainly hideous. What kinds of illnesses?”
Almost anything. The most common symptoms are breathing problems,
bleeding disorders, fevers, infections, pseudoseizures.”
“By proxy,” she said. “The word is unnerving-so calculated, like some
sort of business deal. Are you actually working with a family like
that?”
“I’m evaluating a family to see if that’s what’s going on. It’s still
in the differential diagnosis stage. I have some preliminary
references, thought I’d review the literature.”
She smiled. “Card-file, or have you become computer-friendly?”
“Computer. If the screen talks English.”
“Do you have a faculty account for SAP?”
“No. What’s that?”
“Search and Print.” New system. Journals on file-complete texts
scanned and entered. You can actually call up entire articles and have
them printed. Faculty only, if you’re willing to pay. My chairman got
me a temporary lectureship and an account of my own. He expects me to
publish my results and put his name on it. Unfortunately, foreign
journals haven’t been entered into the system yet, so I’ve got to
locate those the old-fashioned way.”
She pointed to the screen. “The master tongue. Don’t you just love
these sixty-letter words and umlauts? The grammar’s nuts, but my