Next: A Novel (43 page)

They passed people in bathrobes, women mostly, chatting and laughing, but nobody really looked at them. They walked on through another garden area, and then he heard a voice say, “I say, do you need help with your homework?”

He was so startled he stopped. He looked up.

It was a bird. A sort of gray-colored bird.

“Are you a friend of Evan?” the bird said.

“No,” he said.

“You’re the same size as he is. What’s eleven take away nine?”

Jamie was so surprised, he just stared.

“Let’s go, dear,” Dolly said. “It’s just a bird.”

“Justa bird !” the bird said. “Who are you calling abird ?”

“You really talk a lot,” Jamie said.

“And you don’t,” the bird said. “Who are these people? Why are they holding you?”

“We’re not holding him,” Dolly said.

“You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?” the bird said.

“Ah Christ,” Vasco said.

“Ah Christ,” the bird said, exactly duplicating his voice. “What’s your name?”

“Let’s get going,” Vasco said.

“My name is Jamie,” Jamie said.

“Hello, Jamie. I’m Gerard,” the bird said.

“Hello, Gerard.”

“All right,” Vasco said. “Let’s get a move on here.”

“That depends on who’s in the saddle,” Gerard said.

“Dolly,” Vasco said, “we have to keep to our schedule.”

“Well, a boy’s best friend is his mother,” the bird said, in an odd voice.

“Do you know my mother?” Jamie said.

“No, son,” Dolly said. “He doesn’t. He’s just saying things he’s already heard before.”

“Your story didn’t sound quite right,” Gerard said. And in a different voice: “Oh, that’s too bad, you got a better one?”

But now the grown-ups were pushing Jamie forward. He didn’t think he could stay longer, and he didn’t want to make a scene. “Bye, Gerard,” he said.

“Bye, Jamie.”

They walked on for a while. Jamie said, “He was funny.”

“Yes he was, dear,” Dolly said, keeping her hand firmly on his shoulder.

Coming into the gardens, Alex first passed the swimming pool area. It was the quietest swimming pool she had ever seen—no splashing, no noise. People lay in the sun like corpses.

There was a cabinet stacked with towels and bathrobes. Alex took a bathrobe and draped it over her shoulder, covering the towel-wrapped shotgun.

“How do you know these things?” Henry said, watching her. He was nervous. Walking with her while she carried that gun, and knowing she intended to use it. He didn’t know if the bearded guy was armed, but chances were that he was.

“Law school,” she said, laughing.

Dave walked a couple of steps behind them. Henry turned and said, “Keep up, Dave.”

“Okay…”

They rounded a corner, passed beneath an adobe archway, came into another secluded garden.

The air here was cool, and the path shaded. A little brook ran alongside the path.

They heard a voice say, “Mellow greetings, ukie dukie.”

Henry looked up. “What was that?”

“Me.”

Henry said, “It’s a bird.”

“Excuse me,” the bird said, “my name is Gerard.”

Alex said, “Oh, a talking parrot.”

The parrot said, “My name is Jamie. Hello, Jamie, I’m Gerard. Hello, Gerard.”

Alex froze, stared. “That’s Jamie!”

“Do you know my mother?” the bird said, sounding exactly like Jamie’s voice.

“Jamie!” Alex started to shout in the garden. “Jamie!Jamie! ”

And in the distance, she heard, “Mom!”

Dave took off, running forward. Henry looked at Alex, who stood very still. She dropped the towel and the robe to the ground and methodically loaded the shotgun. She pulled the action bar back and forward, making achung chung! sound. Then she turned to Henry.

“Let’s go.” She was very cool. The gun was cradled in her arm. “You may want to walk behind me.”

“Uh, okay.”

She started walking. “Jamie!”

“Mom!”

She walked faster.

They couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the back door to the surgicenter—maybe three, four good paces, no more than that—when the whole thing started.

And Vasco Borden was pissed. His trusted assistant just melting right before his eyes. The kid cries “Mom!” and she lets go of him. She just stands there. Like she was stunned.

“Hold on to him, damn it,” he said. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mom! Mom!”

Exactly what I was worried about, he thought. He had an eight-year-old kid screaming for his mother, and all these women in bathrobes walking around. If they weren’t looking at him and the kid before, they sure as hell were now—pointing and talking. Vasco appeared completely out of place, six-four and bearded, dressed entirely in black, with a black cowboy hat he had to pull down low because his damn ear had been bitten off. He knew he looked like a bad guy in a bad cowboy movie. His woman wasn’t helping; she wasn’t soothing the kid or leading him forward, and any minute he knew that kid would turn and bolt.

Vasco needed to get control here. He started to reach for his gun, but now more women were coming out of rooms on all sides—hell, a whole damn yoga class was emptying into the garden to look, to see why some kid was hollering for his mother.

And there he was, the man in black.

He was screwed.

“Dolly,” he snapped, “goddamn it, pull yourself together. We have to take this young man into the surgicenter here—”

Vasco never finished the sentence, because a dark shape came streaking toward him, leapt into the air, swung from a tree branch about eight feet high, and—right about the time he realized it was that black kid again, that hairy kid, the one that bit off his ear—the black kid slammed into him, hard as a big rock smashing him full on the chest, and Vasco stumbled backward over some rose bushes and went down on his ass, legs up in the air.

And that was it.

The kid bolted, shrieking for his mom. And Dolly suddenly starts acting like she doesn’t know him, and he’s cut and scratched, dragging himself out of the rose bushes with no help from her.

Can’t work up any dignity getting up to your feet with your ass full of thorns. And there’s at least a hundred people watching him. And any minute, security guards.

And the black monkey-looking kid is gone. Can’t see him anywhere.

Vasco realizes that he’s got to get out of there. It’s finished; it’s a fucking disaster. Dolly is still frozen like the fucking Statue of Liberty, so he starts pushing her, yelling at her to get moving, that they have to leave. All the other women in the garden start booing and hissing. Some old broad in a leotard screams, “Testosterone poisoning!” And the others are yelling, “Leave her alone!” “Creep!” “Abuser!” He wants to yell back, “She works for me!” but of course, she doesn’t anymore. She’s dazed and bewildered. And by now the leotard broads are screaming for the police.

So it’s only going to get worse.

Dolly is so slow; she might be sleepwalking. Vasco has to get out. He pushes past her, moving through the garden at a half-trot, his only thought now to get away, get out of this place. In the next garden he sees the kid standing with some guy, and in front of the two of them he sees the broad Alex, and she’s holding a fucking sawed-off twelve-gauge like she knows how to use it—

hand on the stock, hand on the action—and she says, “If I ever see your face again, I’ll blow it off, asshole.”

Vasco doesn’t answer, just keeps moving past her, and the next thing he knows, there’s a fucking explosion, and ahead of him the bushes along the path just blast away in a green cloud of fluttering petals and leaves and dirt. So of course he stops. Right there. And he turns, slowly, keeping his hands away from his body.

She says, “Did you fucking hear what I said to you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. Always polite to a lady with a gun. Especially if she’s upset. Now the crowd is huge; they’re three or four deep, chattering like birds, craning to get a look at what is happening. But this broad’s not going to let it go.

She yells at him: “What’d I say to you?”

“You said if you saw me again, you’d kill me.”

“That’s right,” she says. “And I will. You touch me or my son again, and I will fucking kill you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. He feels the red rushing into his face. Anger, humiliation, rage.

“You can go now,” she says, moving the barrel ever so slightly. She knows what she is doing. A lawyer who goes to the shooting range. The worst kind.

Vasco nods and moves off, quickly as he can. He wants to get away from her, and out of sight of all those women. It’s like some nightmare, all these women in robes watching him eat shit. In a moment, he’s practically running. Back to the Hummer, away from this place.

That’s when he saw the black kid, the one who looked like an ape. In fact, he was an ape, Vasco was sure of it, watching the kid move. An ape dressed like a kid. But he was still an ape. The ape was circling around the garden. Just seeing that ape made Vasco’s head throb where his ear once was. Without a conscious thought, he pulled out his pistol and started firing. He didn’t expect to hit the little fucker at this distance, but he needed to do something. And sure enough, the ape ran, scrambled, went behind a wall, and disappeared.

Vasco followed him. It was the damn ladies’ room. But nobody was around. The lights in the bathroom were off. He could see the pool, off to his right, but nobody was there now. So nobody was in the bathroom, except for the ape. He held his gun and moved forward.

Chung chung!

He froze. He knew the sound of a double-action pump. You never went in a room after you heard that sound. He waited.

“Do you feel lucky, punk? Do you?” It was a raspy voice, sounded familiar.

He stood there in the doorway to the women’s bathroom, angry and afraid, until he began to feel very foolish and very exposed. “Ah, screw it,” he said, and he turned and went back to his car.

He didn’t care about the fucking ape kid, anyway.

From behind him a voice said, “My, my. Such a lot of guns around town, and so few brains.”

He spun, looked back. But all he saw was that bird, flapping its wings as it stood on the door leading to the bathroom. He couldn’t tell where the voice had come from.

Vasco hurried to his Hummer. Already he was thinking what he would tell the law firm and the BioGen people. Fact was, it just didn’t work out. The woman was armed, she was tipped off, someone had told her in advance. Nothing Vasco could do about that. He was good at his job, but he couldn’t work miracles. The problem lay with whoever tipped her off. Before you blame me, take a look at yourself. They had a problem inside their organization.

Anyhow, something like that.

CH088

Adam Winklerlay in the hospital bed, frail and weak. He was bald and pale. His bony hand gripped Josh’s. “Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t your fault. I was trying to kill myself anyway. It would have happened, no matter what. The time you gave me—you did me a big favor. Look at me. I don’t want you blaming yourself.”

Josh couldn’t speak. His eyes were filled with tears.

“Promise me you won’t blame yourself.”

Josh nodded.

“Liar.” Adam gave a weak smile. “How’s your lawsuit?”

“Okay,” Josh said. “Some people in New York say we gave their mother Alzheimer’s. Actually, we gave her water.”

“You going to win?”

“Oh sure.”

Adam sighed. “Liar.” His hand relaxed. “You take care, bro.” And he closed his eyes.

Josh panicked, wiped his tears away. But Adam was still breathing. He was sleeping, very peacefully.

CH089

The Oxnard judge coughed in the chilly air as he handed the ruling to the assembled attorneys.

Alex Burnet was there, along with Bob Koch and Albert Rodriguez.

“As you can see,” he said, “I have ruled that BioGen’s ownership of Mr. Burnet’s cells does not entitle them to take these cells from any individual, living or dead, including Mr. Burnet himself.

Certainly the cells cannot be taken from members of his immediate or extended family. Any contrary ruling would conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, forbidding slavery.

“Within the context of my ruling, I observe that this situation has arisen out of confusion from prior court rulings as to what constitutes ownership in a biological context. First is the notion that material removed from the body is ‘waste’ or ‘lost material,’ which is therefore unimportant to the person from whom it was removed. This view is false. If one considers a stillborn fetus, for example, even though it has left the mother’s body, we can well intuit that either the mother or other relatives might feel a strong attachment to the fetus, and wish to control its disposition, whether in burial, cremation, or to provide tissues for research or to help others. The notion that the hospital or the doctor may dispose of the fetus as they wish, merely because it is outside the body and therefore is ‘waste’ material, is clearly unreasonable and inhuman. A similar logic applies to Mr. Burnet’s cells. Even though they are removed from his body, he will rightly feel that they are still his. This is a natural and common human feeling. The feeling will not go away simply because the courts rule according to some other legal concept shoehorned in by analogy.

You cannot banish human feelings by legal fiat. Yet this is precisely what the courts have tried to do.

“Some courts have decided tissue cases by considering the tissues to be trash. Some courts have considered the tissues to be research material akin to books in a library. Some courts consider the tissues to be abandoned property that can be disposed of automatically under certain circumstances, as rental lockers can be opened after a certain time and the contents of those lockers sold. Some courts have attempted to balance competing claims and have concluded that the claims of society to research trump the claims of the individual to ownership.

“Each of these analogies runs up against the stubborn fact of human nature. Our bodies are our individual property. In a sense, bodily ownership is the most fundamental kind of ownership we know. It is the core experience of our being. If the courts fail to acknowledge this fundamental notion, their rulings will be invalid, however correct they may seem within the logic of law.