Next: A Novel (10 page)

“Fuck you! Fuck him! Fuck all of you! No fucking test! ”

And she stood up, grabbed her purse, and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

There was a moment of silence. Sindler said, “Let the record show that at three forty-five p.m.

the witness left the room, thus ending the deposition.”

He began to put his papers into his briefcase.

Whitey Wilson said, “I’ve never heard of this, Barry. What’s genetic testing got to do with child custody?”

“That’s what the tests are intended to find out,” Sindler said. “This is a new procedure, but I think you’ll find it’s the coming thing.” He snapped his briefcase shut, shook Whitey’s limp hand, and left the office.

CH012

Josh Winkler closed the door to his office and started toward the cafeteria when his phone rang.

It was his mother. She was being pleasant, always a danger sign. “Josh, dear, I want you to tell me, what have you done to your brother?”

“What do you mean, done to him? I haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen him in two weeks, since I picked him up from jail.”

“Adam had his arraignment today,” she said. “And Charles was there, representing him.”

“Uh-huh…” Waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And?”

“Adam came to court on time, in a clean shirt and tie, clean suit, hair cut, even his shoes polished. He pleaded guilty, asked to be put in a drug program, said he had not used in two weeks, said he had gotten a job—”

“What?”

“Yes, he’s got a job, apparently as a limo driver for his old company. Been working there steadily for the last two weeks. Charles says he’s gained weight—”

“I don’t believe this,” Josh said.

“I know,” she said. “Charles didn’t either, but he swears it’s all true. Adam’s like a new man.

He’s acquired a newfound maturity. It’s like he suddenly grew up. It’s a miracle, don’t you think? Joshua? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” he said, after a pause.

“Isn’t it a miracle?”

“Yes, Mom. A miracle.”

“I called Adam. He has a cell phone now, and he answered right away. And he says you did something to help him. What did you do?”

“Nothing, Mom. We just had a talk.”

“He said you gave him some genetic thing. An inhaler.”

Oh Jesus, he thought. There are rules against this kind of thing .Serious rules . Human experimentation without formal application, meetings of the approvals board, following the federal guidelines. Josh would be fired in an instant. “No, Mom, I think he must be misremembering. He was pretty whacked out at the time.”

“He said there was a spray.”

“No, Mom.”

“He inhaled some mouse spray.”

“No, Mom.”

“He said he did.”

“No, Mom.”

“Well, don’t be so defensive,” she said. “I thought you would be pleased. I mean, you’re always looking for new drugs, Joshua. Big commercial applications. I mean, what if this spray gets people off drugs? What if it breaks their addiction?”

Joshua was shaking his head. “Mom, really, nothing happened.”

“Okay, fine, you don’t want to tell me the truth, I get it. Was it something experimental? Is that what your spray is?”

“Mom—”

“Because the thing is, Josh, I told Lois Graham about it because her Eric dropped out of USC.

He’s on crack or smack or—”

“Mom—”

“And she wants to try this spray on him.”

Oh Jesus. “Mom, you can’t talk about this.”

“And Helen Stern, her daughter is on sleeping pills; she crashed her car; they’re talking about putting her baby in foster care. And Helen wants—”

“Mom, please! You can’t talk about it anymore !”

“Are you crazy? I have to talk about it,” she said. “You gave me my son back. It’s a miracle.

Don’t you realize, Joshua? You have performed a miracle. The whole world is going to talk about what you have done—whether you like it or not.”

He was beginning to sweat, to feel dizzy, but suddenly his vision became clear and calm. The whole world is going to talk about it.

Of course, that was true. If you could get people off drugs? It would be the most valuable pharmaceutical in the last decade. Everybody would want it. And what if it did more? Could it cure obsessive-compulsive disorders? Could it cure attention-deficit disorders? The maturity gene had behavioral effects. They already knew that. Adam sniffing that aerosol was a gift from God.

And his next thought was: What’s the state of the patent application on ACMPD 3N7?

He decided to skip lunch and head back to the office.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Josh.”

“I need your help.”

“Of course, dear. Anything.”

“I need you to do something for me and not to talk about it to anyone, ever.”

“Well, that’s difficult—”

“Yes or no, Mom.”

“Well, all right, dear.”

“You said that Lois Graham’s son is on smack, and dropped out of college?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“Apparently,” she said, “he’s downtown in some godawful flophouse off campus—”

“Do you know where?”

“No, but Lois went to see him. She told me it was squalid. It’s on East Thirty-eighth, some old frame house with faded blue shutters. Eight or nine addicts are there sleeping on the floor, but I can call Lois and ask her—”

“No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything, Mom.”

“But you said you needed my help—”

“That’s for later, Mom. For now, everything is fine. I’ll call you in a day or so.”

He scribbled on a pad:

Eric Graham

E 38th Street

Frame hse blue shutters

He reached for his car keys.

Rachel Allen, who worked in the dispensary, said, “You still haven’t signed back in one oxygen canister from two weeks ago, Josh. Or the virus vial that was with it.” The company measured remaining virus in returned vials, as a way of keeping a rough track of dosages to the rats.

“Yes,” he said, “I know, uh, I keep forgetting.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in my car.”

“In your car? Josh, that’s a contagious retrovirus.”

“Yeah, for mice.”

“Even so. It must remain in a negative-pressure laboratory environment at all times.” Rachel was a stickler for the rules. Nobody really paid attention to her.

“I know, Rach,” he said, “but I had a family emergency. I had to get my brother”—he dropped his voice—“out of jail.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

He hesitated. “Armed robbery.”

“Really.”

“Liquor store. Mom is crushed. Anyway, I’ll bring the canister back to you. Meanwhile, can I have one more?”

“We only sign out one at a time.”

“I need one more now. Please? I’m under a lot of pressure.”

Light rain was falling. The streets were slick with oil and shimmered in rainbow patterns.

Beneath low, angry clouds, he drove down East Thirty-eighth Street. It was an old section of town, bypassed by modern rebuilding farther north. Here houses built in the 1920s and 1930s were still standing. Josh drove past several wood-frame houses, in various states of disrepair.

One had a blue door. None had blue shutters.

He ended up in the warehouse district, the street lined with loading docks. He turned around and headed back. He drove as slowly as he could, and finally he saw the house. It was not actually on Thirty-eighth but on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Alameda, tucked back behind high weeds and ratty bushes. An old mattress streaked with rust lay on the sidewalk in front of the house.

There was a truck tire on the front lawn. A battered VW bus was pulled up to the curb.

Josh parked across the street. He watched the house. And waited.

CH013

The coffin rose into sunlight. It looked the same as it had when buried a week earlier, except for the clumps of dirt that dropped from the underside.

“This is all so undignified,” Emily Weller said. She stood stiffly at the graveside, accompanied by her son, Tom, and her daughter Rachel. Of course, Lisa was not there. She was thecause of all this, but she could not be bothered to see what she had done to her poor father.

The coffin swung slowly in the air as the graveside workers guided it to the far side of the pit under the direction of the hospital pathologist, a nervous little man named Marty Roberts. He should be nervous, Emily thought, if he was the one who had given the blood to Lisa without anybody’s permission.

“What happens now?” Emily said, turning to her son. Tom was twenty-six, dressed in a sharp suit and tie. He had a master’s degree in microbiology and worked for a big biotech company in Los Angeles. Tom had turned out good, as had her daughter Rachel. Rachel was a senior at USC, studying business administration. “Will they take Jack’s blood here?”

“Oh, they’ll take more than blood,” Tom said.

Emily said, “What do you mean?”

“You see,” Tom said, “for a genetic test like this, where there is a dispute, they ordinarily take tissues from several organ systems.”

“I didn’t realize,” Emily said, frowning. She felt her heart pounding, thumping in her chest. She hated that feeling. Soon there was a squeezing feeling in her throat. It was painful. She bit her lip.

“You all right, Mom?”

“I should have taken my anxiety pills.”

Rachel said, “Will this take long?”

“No,” Tom said, “it should be only a few minutes. The pathologist will open the casket, to confirm the identity of the body. Then he’ll take it back to the hospital to remove the tissues for genetic analysis. He’ll return the body for reburial tomorrow or the next day.”

“Tomorrow or the next day?” Emily said. She sniffled, wiped her eyes. “You mean we have to come back here? We have to bury Jack again? This is all so…so…”

“I know, Mom.” He patted her arm. “I’m sorry. But there is no other way. You see, they have to check for something called a chimera—”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said, waving her hand. “I won’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, Mom.” He put his arm around her shoulder.

In ancient mythology, chimeras were monsters composed of different animal parts. The original Chimera had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. Some chimeras were part human, like the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and the head of a woman.

But true human chimeras—meaning people with two sets of DNA—had been discovered only recently. A woman needing a kidney transplant had tested her own children as possible donors, only to discover that they did not share her DNA. She was told the children weren’t hers, and was asked to prove she had actually given birth to them. A lawsuit ensued. After considerable study, doctors realized that her body contained two different strands of DNA. In her ovaries, they found eggs with two kinds of DNA. The skin cells of her abdomen had her children’s DNA. The skin of her shoulders did not. She was a mosaic. In every organ of her body.

It turned out that the woman had originally been one of a pair of fraternal twins, but early in development, her sister’s embryo had fused with hers. So she was now literally herself and her own twin.

More than fifty chimeras had since been reported. Scientists now suspected that chimerism was not as rare as they had once thought. Certainly, whenever there was a difficult question of paternity, chimerism had to be considered. It was possible that Lisa’s father might be a chimera.

But to determine that, they would need tissues from every organ of his body, and preferably from several different places on each organ.

That was why Dr. Roberts was required to take so many tissue samples, and why it would have to be done at the hospital, not at the grave site.

Dr. Roberts raised the lid and turned to the family on the opposite side of the grave. “Would one of you make the identification, please?”

“I will,” Tom said. He walked around the grave and looked into the coffin. His father appeared surprisingly unchanged, except the skin was much grayer, a dark gray now, and the limbs seemed to have shrunk, to have lost mass, especially the legs inside the trousers.

In a formal voice, the pathologist said, “Is this your father, John J. Weller?”

“Yes. He is, yes.”

“All right. Thank you.”

Tom said, “Dr. Roberts, I know you have your procedures, but…if there is any way you can take the tissues here…so my mother doesn’t have to go through another day and another burial…”

“I’m sorry,” Marty Roberts said. “My actions are governed by state law. We’re required to take the body to the hospital for examination.”

“If you could…just this once…bend…”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could.”

Tom nodded and walked back to his mother and sister.

His mother said, “What was all that about?”

“Just asking a question.”

Tom looked back and saw that Dr. Roberts was now bent over, his body half inside the casket.

Abruptly the pathologist rose up. He walked over to speak in Tom’s ear, so no one else could hear. “Mr. Weller, perhaps we should spare your family’s feelings. If we can keep this between us…”

“Of course. Then you’ll…?”

“Yes, we’ll do everything here. It should take only a few moments. Let me get my kit.” He hurried off to a nearby SUV.

Emily bit her lip. “What’s he doing?”

“I asked him to do all the tests here, Mom.”

“And he said yes? Thank you, dear,” she said, and kissed her son. “Will he do all the tests that he would do at the hospital?”

“No, but it should be enough to answer your questions.”

Twenty minutes later, the tissue samples had been taken and placed in a series of glass tubes.

The tubes were placed in slots in a metal refrigeration case. The casket was returned to the grave, disappearing into shadow.

“Come on,” Emily Weller said to her children, “let’s get out of here. I need a damn drink.”

As they drove away, she said to Tom, “I’m sorry you had to do that. Was Jack’s poor body very decayed, dear?”

“No,” Tom said. “Not much, no.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Emily said. “That’s very good.”

CH014

Marty Roberts was sweating by the time he got back to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Because of what he had done at the cemetery, he could lose his license, no problem. One of those gravediggers could pick up the phone and call the county. The county could wonder why Marty had broken protocol, especially with a lawsuit pending. When you take tissues in the field, you risk contamination. Everybody knew that. So the county might start wondering why Marty Roberts would risk that. And before long, they might be wondering…