“I think he found it in a medical book. He says it fit his symptoms. He can’t have it since neither you nor his father did. But those symptoms might be typical of something else, maybe of several something elses. And I’d think that it would be a very good idea to find out what because Mark was not well when I saw him.”
“You mean the shaking and the sweat.”
“I mean the inability to remember anything and the blackouts, or what might be blackouts, and the problem he has with reading.”
“Mark has a problem with reading? My Mark?”
“He says he reads a page and when he gets to the end of it he has no idea what it says.”
“For God’s sake,” Liz said, “the kid could read before he was three.”
At the other side of the room, the door slid open, and the South Asian doctor came in, a small, rigidly formal, very young man in a white coat. Gregor tried to read the name on his identification tag, but could only make out the last one, which was spelled “Niazi.” He had no idea how to pronounce it and an uncomfortable tendency to misread it when he saw it as “Nazi.”
Liz left Mark’s side and crossed the room with her hand held out. “Doctor, thank you so much for coming. I’m very sorry to be so insistent, but I don’t know what’s going on, you see, and I’m his mother.”
Dr. Niazi took Liz’s hand and shook it. “There is no difficulty,” he said, just as formal in expression as in looks. “You have an understandable concern, and I am about to go off duty now in any case. If you could come down the hall to the conference room where we could talk? Your son is sleeping, but he is not unconscious.”
“All right,” Liz said. “I’d like to have Mr. Demarkian here come with us.”
“Of course,” Dr. Niazi said. “And the gentleman in the waiting room? Should he be asked to come, too?”
“No,” Liz said.
If Dr. Niazi found this strange, he didn’t indicate it. He went back to the door and held it open while Liz and Gregor walked out. Then he motioned them farther down the hall in the direction away from the nurses’ station and the waitingroom. Moments later he was ushering them into a small room almost entirely occupied by a square conference table and its attendant chairs, each chair upholstered in a nubbly fabric that was hideously, relentlessly purple.
Dr. Niazi motioned for them to sit down. Liz sat in the chair nearest the door. Gregor sat beside her. Dr. Niazi sat at what could arguably have been called the head of the table and put down a thin manila folder Gregor hadn’t noticed he was carrying.
“So,” Dr. Niazi said, “the first of what I have to say is to reassure. Your son is not in danger. He will not die. He will not have permanent brain damage or damage to his organs. I should not be so confident so soon, but I am confident. I have had a chance to speak to him. He is normal.”
“He spoke?” Gregor said.
“For a few moments after we had pumped his stomach and given him some water to drink. He is not in a coma. He is not incoherent. We have given him a very mild sedative to help him sleep.”
Liz took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “then there are the obvious questions. What happened to him? Why did he go into convulsions? Was he using drugs?”
Dr. Niazi shot her an odd look. Gregor caught it, but he didn’t think Liz did. “Was he using drugs?” Gregor asked. “Everybody at the school seems to assume so.”
“Yes, we do understand that that is always an issue with adolescents,” Dr. Niazi said. “But I can say with some certainty that this is not the case here. We have tested for several drugs, including marijuana, a few forms of amphetamines, heroin, cocaine.”
“Some of those leave the body fairly quickly and without a trace,” Gregor said.
“This is true, but they do not leave the body in an hour or two, and it was less than an hour before we took his blood. There were no signs of drugs. We still have out some tests that take longer to read, but I do not expect to find positive results there either.”
“But,” Liz said.
Dr. Niazi nodded. “Yes, I do know. But. I spoke to Mr. Demarkian here and to several other people when the boy was admitted, and based on some things they said I did a test for caffeine toxicity. You know what caffeine is? It is in—”
“Coffee,” Liz said. “Drinking coffee could give him convulsions?”
“No,” Dr. Niazi said. “Sensitivity to caffeine varies among people, but even for those especially sensitive to it it does not cause convulsions or death from the amounts found in drinks, no matter how much the patient drinks. You must understand this. Most people eliminate caffeine very quickly. Some small group of people retain it much longer, and there is a tendency then for the caffeine to build up in the system and to cause symptoms, difficulty concentrating, difficulty sitting still, high levels of anxiety.”