A Cage of Butterflies Read Online Free PDF Page B

observation-booth.
    Unapproachable. Inscrutable. Sometimes, she had the creepy feeling that they could see out, see right into her deepest soul, but she couldn’t get in. Each little face was like a barrier, a mirror which reflected her own failure. Her own frustrations.
    Yet she loved them, and that was the really strange thing. It was difficult, nearly impossible, to maintain a professional detachment. They were vulnerable; in need of protection. Threatened …
    Where did these feelings come from? Not from the Babies themselves, surely? They remained behind that invisible wall, looking out, unaffected by the incessant observation, the growing files of data; by Larsen’s obsession. Untouched and unreactive.
    Perhaps it was something inside herself. A kind of professional blindspot. Something that responded to them at an instinctive, non-rational level. She remembered something Erik had said —
    â€œThey are special. I can’t explain it. It’s like a warm feeling I get when I’m in the room with any of them. I guess … you could call it love. They can’t give. They just sit there in that little world of theirs, as if I’m not even there, and yet … I can’t help it. I want to be the one to break through. They’re … important. I can’t forget them when I leave the complex. I want to protect them …”
    I can’t help it … I want to protect them.
    Susan stood up and slid her feet into the slippers on the floor by the bed.
    Erik’s words had echoed the same feeling she was struggling with herself. None of the other staff had mentioned such feelings aloud, but she had seen a telling look on one or two of the faces captured on the videos she had reviewed. Even Larsen, cold as he invariably was, had given them the pet-name which everyone now used. “The Babies”. Had they touched a chord even in him?
    She moved to the kitchenette, switched on the electric jug, and looked at the clock on the wall above the bench.
    Two-fifteen. Great way to spend a night!
    Crossing to the desk, she picked up one of the files. It was labelled RICARDO MUNOZ (26/9/82)
    Inside was a sheaf of maybe fifty or sixty sheets: observational data, most of it repetitious; but Susan was concentrating on the first two sheets. The background summary, which she had read already more times than she cared to remember. It was the summary which Richard had prepared not long before he died.
    D.O.B. 26 September 1982 (Eastgarden Maternity Hosp.)
    Medical History. Full immunisation programme. No unusual symptoms pre-1985. Normal childhood illnesses (measles, chicken-pox). Normal physical, motor, social and verbal development.
    6 May 1985. Severe febrile convulsions – no apparent cause. Hospitalised, Westmead Hospital. Fever controlled. Discharged 8 May.
    May-August 1985. Apparent onset of autism. Little reaction to physical stimuli. (See attached report from Dr Lytton, Paediatrician) …
    And on it went. You could pick up the file of any one of the Babies and the pattern was identical. A perfectly normal child, who some time in the third year of its existence developed a life-threatening fever. All five had survived the ordeal, but had emerged from it different. Cut off from their families, their world. The Babies.
    The files showed that they developed physically at a rate far slower than other children; that their body-temperature was between one and three degrees below normal; that even their heart-rate was slower – as if their whole metabolism had slowed to a crawl.
    But their minds.
    Somewhere, buried among the files and observations in each of the folders, were the EEG readings, the long sheets of grid paper, with a series of lines, traced by moving pens, which measured the electrical activity inside a subject’s brain. It was here that the real difference lay.
    If the Babies’ slow physical development was remarkable, their level of brain activity was