‘Chip Runner’ by Robert Silverberg

He was fifteen and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separately — they were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companies — and separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-grey and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were grey too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.
 
The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His IQ was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasn’t anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.

“So you’re planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me,” I began. The usual let’s-build-a-relationship procedure.

He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. “Is that your standard opening? ‘Tell me all about your favourite hobby, my boy’? If you don’t mind, I’d rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. You’re supposed to ask me about my eating habits.”

It amazed me to see him trying to take control of the session this way within the first thirty seconds. I marvelled at how different he was from most of the others, the poor sad wispy creatures who force me to fish for every word.
 
“Actually, I do enjoy talking about the latest developments in the world of computers, too,” I said, still working hard at being genial.
 
“But my guess is you don’t talk about them very often, or you wouldn’t call it ‘the hardware end’. Or ‘the computer industry’. We don’t use mundo phrases like those anymore.” His high thin voice sizzled with barely suppressed rage. “Come on, doctor. Let’s get right down to it. You think I’m anorexic, don’t you?”
 
“Well —”
 
“I know about anorexia. It’s a mental disease of girls, a vanity thing. They starve themselves because they want to look beautiful, and they can’t bring themselves to realize that they’re not too fat. Vanity isn’t the issue for me. And I’m not a girl, doctor. Even you ought to be able to see that right away.”
 
 “Timothy —”
 
“I want to let you know right out front that I don’t have an eating disorder and I don’t belong in a shrink’s office. I know exactly what I’m doing all the time. The only reason I came today is to get my mother off my back, because she’s taken it into her head that I’m trying to starve myself to death. She said I had to come here and see you. So I’m here. All right?”