Chapter 5: The Forbidden Experiment
1059 Words
“Candy,” he called to her gently. “This is Jason. Are you all right Candy? You’ve had a bad dream. I’ll wait for you to come to me. I won’t go in the room until you come outside.”
Jason sat down on the floor in front of her door and waited. He prayed the security guys wouldn’t have to come and take her back to the secure room. It was in the special building where they’d placed her after Candy was found in the wild.
He waited a good fifteen minutes by his watch. Candy unrolled herself and looked in his direction. This was a good sign, but the crisis hadn’t past. She was still in the area between sleep/awake. She might not realize it wasn’t real and merely a dream. Jason talked with her in the past about dreams and how they couldn’t hurt her. It was one of those things he wasn’t certain she understood.
At least she still had some clothes on this time. Candy had a bad tendency in the past to strip them off when she became irritated. Even after they’d explained to her the importance of being clothed around people. She could revert at any time. Dr. Klein warned everyone not to upset her for this reason.
Another fifteen minutes went past. Jason watched as Candy’s face emerged from behind her arms. She looked at him with her brown eyes. Jason saw horror behind them, the kind of expression he’d witnessed in war atrocity films. She would come around; he had to give her time. As he sat there, Candy crawled across the floor and stopped when she reached the doorframe. Jason could see her lower lip tremble. As much concern he felt for her, Jason had to remember she’d survived in the forest on her own for years. Candy wouldn’t hesitate to defend herself if she felt threatened.
Candy emerged from the room and crawled over to him. She sat down an inch away from where Jason sat and faced him. Jason fought every human instinct he had inside that told him to hug her. He wanted to absorb her pain and suffering inside himself, but there was no way this could every take place. He remembered the stories of volunteer workers killed because they came too close to a refugee from some war-torn part of the world. Just because you wanted to heal someone didn’t mean they would appreciate it. Or even understand.
“It was bad, Jason,” she told him. “Very bad. I was alone with it and…and…” She couldn’t tell him. Her level of language comprehension still wasn’t at the stage where she could tell him what happened to her in the distant past.
He waited a full hour until she was calm. There was any number of medications he could give to Candy for sleep, but Jason made the decision not to administer any of them. Major and the others might dress him down later for this, but he felt Candy needed to function without psychotherapeutic drugs.
She stood up and walked over to her kitchen table. As Jason watched, Candy sat down and dropped her head. He stood up, poured her a cup of water and took it to her. He slid it in front of the small woman and she took it from him. Candy drank it down and looked across at Jason. The horror in her eyes lowered in intensity, but it was still there.
“Should I leave, Jason?” she asked him. “Everyone is so good to me here. I don’t know how it will be when I’m outside. What happens when you are no longer around to take care of me?” She stood up and walked back to her bedroom.
In another ten minutes, Candy was fast asleep in her bed. Jason walked into the room and checked on her, careful not to make any physical contact. He reached out and touched the frame of her bed. With care, Jason swung the frame a bit so that it rocked her on the chains where it was suspended from the ceiling. He didn’t know if it made any difference, but he suspected it would.
She slept for the next four hours. Jason sent the security cart away and slept on her couch until the duty aide came by to check on her when the sun was up.
“It’s called ‘The Forbidden Experiment’,” Dr. Klein told him the next day. “There were cases of children deprived from language to see if they would speak on there on since the dawn of history. I know of one story of an Egyptian Pharaoh who tried it. Supposedly, a Holy Roman Emperor tried it too. In addition, there are those cases of neglected children raised in captivity. Candy would fit into the last category.”
“But why would someone do such a thing to a child?” Jason asked him. “I’ve read about those cases too. Never understood why.”
“Who knows? The Holy Roman Emperor wanted to see if a child deprived of language would speak Greek or Hebrew. I don’t think he ever did find out. Of course, most of these cases have little documentation. So we don’t really know what happens. The current theory is that there is a period of language development in a person’s mental development. If it’s not nurtured, the person will never be able to speak properly.”
“Then how do you explain Candy?” Jason asked him. He had a difficult time with focus after last night’s episode with Candy.
“I don’t,” Klein replied from behind his desk. “We don’t know enough about the conditions in which she was raised to draw any conclusions. Until we find the person guilty for her condition, we won’t know a thing about how she came to be.”
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