Race Across the Sky (15 page)

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W
hen Caleb came downstairs at five a.m., there were bottles everywhere.

The house reeked of beer. Large bottles of Belhaven lay like unfinished books on the floor. Two mostly empty big bottles of Beam stood by an open Monopoly set. The old boom box was still on, its green light fluttering like the heart monitor of a dying man.

Three light-bearded kids wearing T-shirts were asleep on the floor. Caleb recognized one as a regular from the Rocking Horse; the others he'd never seen before. He walked to the kitchen and was pleased to find it tidy. As Happy Trails did not stock food, there had been nothing for the party to raid. He carefully opened the glass containers of amaranth, faro, spelt, buckwheat, barley, blue cornmeal, and wheat germ, took a measuring spoon from the drawer, and began sifting them into a large cast iron pot filled with soy milk.

From upstairs came the creak of floorboards. John, he guessed. The older John became, the more his energy seemed to concentrate in these earliest of hours. Anyone who was assigned to prepare breakfast encountered John's help bringing out bowls, replacing the grains, wiping down the countertop.

Then a sudden sound surprised him. Just beside the front door, the door to Mack's room creaked open. Caleb stepped back into the shadows by the kitchen door. Rae, her hair loose from its familiar ponytail, closed the door behind her. Her full mouth was frowning, and her head hung limply from her shoulders. Her eyes seemed to be carrying black weights.

Caleb watched her move straight to the stairs and take them quickly.

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At noon, he left O'Neil's for his midday break and jogged steadily away from the shops.

Halloween themes had taken over the town. Orange and black banners hung from the streetlights advertising the upcoming parade, blocks of hay had been stacked along Broadway, and handmade posters for pumpkin coffees and beers hung in windows.

On Arapahoe he pivoted past the high school and took a quick turn down Nineteenth, a small street speckled with short trees and older single-story homes. By the doorway of a small apartment complex on Goss, he stopped and waited until June emerged, carrying her plastic bucket of supplies. She wore a soft turquoise fleece jacket and white running shoes, and when she saw him she skipped over the pavement and hugged him. They had arranged this assignation with a whispered word during the group run the day before. He kissed her, she left her bucket and jacket in the doorway, and they started jogging west. Beside him she felt tiny but steadfast.

Soon they were out executing a good pace toward Flagstaff. They seemed to be struggling messily with the process of synching footsteps and heartbeats. Eventually, through a subtle progression, they found a rhythm and moved into a vast meadow.

“So, I really need to talk to you.”

Caleb glanced at her and nodded.

She hesitated. “I'm worried.”

“About Lily? Look, we . . .”

“About you.”

He was surprised to see the look in her eyes.

“You asked your brother for help, and it's been three months . . .”

“Three and a half,” he mumbled.

“I haven't seen my family in six years. They've never even met Lily. But I know if I asked them for help, they would be there. If they blew me off? I'd be crushed. Caleb, are you crushed?”

He smiled, looking out at the gray road, and the rolling green and brown brush. “I disappeared from Shane's life a long time ago. Why should he jump just because I ask him to?”

“But he came out here, so we thought . . .”

“He must have seen something he didn't like.”

“It's the way we live, or maybe Mack freaked him out. Or maybe me.”

“I doubt that.”

“I just, I wanted to tell you . . . I could see that he loves you.”

Caleb felt that reach him with surprising force.

She touched his arm. “Ever since the Hardrock, I've been realizing how vulnerable we are on these mountains. I don't want you to be distracted, by Shane, or us.”

“I didn't fall at Hardrock because of you, or my brother,” he lied. “I fell because the trail was muddy.”

“Rae's been against Yosemite from the start. Maybe she's right?”

“She's right for herself. Not for me. I'm not going to fall again.”

“What are your parents like?”

Caleb hesitated. He wanted to just pound the blacktop of Baseline until they reached Flagstaff; they were almost near the preserve, and he longed for quiet.

“My dad's a lawyer, very rational.” For no reason he could fathom he added, “He has a mustache.”

“Well, you need to be very rational to have a mustache,” June offered brightly. “You have to trim it just right every day.”

Caleb's laugh echoed through the hills. “He used to take me out running with him, when I was eight, nine. We went so far.”

“You must have had some great talks.”

“We never talked”—Caleb wiped his nose—“when we ran.”

They were offered an opportunity to plunge into backcountry along a single track trail. It was more humid, and insects swirled around them in spirals. He took her hand and dashed past buckeyes as thin as they were, their bark in undulating shades from milk chocolate to stout. A moose drank in a creek, steam pouring from its wide nostrils.

June gripped his hand and they ran faster, leaping over branches, lost in the world. When they were far from any path or tail, he pulled her into him and kissed her.

He had gone ten years without touching anyone alone. Even after these months with June, the rawness of it felt alive. She reached for his shorts, and they fell onto the ground. She whispered into his ear.

“Please.”

He looked down at her wide eyes. He supposed it was the most erotic word he could imagine.

Afterward he stared through the branches at the open sky. Regardless of whether he ever heard from Shane again, he understood that this life which he had built for a decade was finished now. There seemed to be no way back to its isolation and purity. Separating from it was going to be as traumatic, he knew, as anything he had ever experienced.

They followed along the black hardtop of Baseline back to the city and picked up June's things. After Caleb jogged back to O'Neil's, June walked through town, back to the park, and down toward the base of South Boulder Peak. A joyful peace settled inside her. The old wood house seemed to greet her from its clearing, the slabs of wood experienced and confident as grandparents. She retrieved her daughter from her housemates and took her out back into the field's fallen leaves.

“I love you. I love you,” she kissed into Lily's hot neck, spinning her around. “I love our life.”

June reveled in the distant music from the house, the singing juncos and pipits on the branches. Maybe it was a good thing that Shane had not gotten back to them. Secretly she felt relieved to not have to leave here; she didn't think she could ever live in any other place again.

Touching her forehead to Lily's, they both smiled spontaneously, as if they had been sharing the exact same thought.

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W
hen his cell phone rang, Shane was feeding the baby. He reached across the kitchen counter and fumbled with it. His heart skipped when he heard Prajuk's high-pitched voice.

“I am in the Marina. Can you meet me?”

Shane went to tell Janelle, who was in the kitchen pumping milk. The breast pump, which Shane had anticipated with curiosity, had proven to be disconcerting; he preferred not to see it in action.

Janelle saw the look on his face and arched her eyebrows.

“Quick work thing,” he explained.

“We're going to my parents' at ten.”

“I just need an hour.” His face brightened. “I'll take Nicholas.”

The bounty of a morning alone lit Janelle's eyes like a hit of meth. Shane put together a balmy bottle and stuffed it, along with a pack of wipes and a diaper, into his shorts' pockets. Then he lifted the warm boy into a Baby Bjorn.

Outside, other parents, pushing awkward strollers, large coffees spilling from their cup holders, initiated an empathetic eye contact with him. But Shane's empathy lay with the babies. This is our time to be loved without inhibition, he wanted to tell them, and it does not last very long. Future spouses and children might love them, but would they kiss away saliva from their chins? Would they tell them in the gentlest of voices that they were perfect? Across the street he saw a heavyset, middle-aged man in a stained green sweater. Someone, Shane thought, had cradled him once, kissed his sleeping cheeks. We may be loved, but we are never loved this way again.

Beyond the green grounds of Fort Mason wisps of sails moored to the piers floated as seagulls in the sky. Ahead, a girls' soccer game was in effect. Ten shrieking eight-year-olds in white and pale blue uniforms, ten Chinese girls in yellow and red. The American parents held steel coffee mugs; the Chinese favored styrofoam. They sat, as always, on opposite ends of the field. Shane noticed Prajuk on an old bench, in running shorts and maroon Adidas, his thin legs extended, ankles crossed.

“You live around here?” Shane asked, sitting beside him.

“No. I run here on weekends sometimes. This is your little guy?”

“Nicholas.”

Looking at the baby's face, Prajuk could see mostly Chinese features. Caucasian genes, he thought not for the first time, are the most easily overwhelmed in all of human history.

Prajuk saw every living being in terms of its genealogy. Genes, to him, were a diabolical puzzle in which one had to discover each piece, and was never shown the picture he was trying to complete. That his work led to the saving of lives was a good thing, but it was not what woke him up in the morning; the magic to Prajuk was the unveiling of life's blueprints, the piecing together of this puzzle. And so thinking about Shane's infant with alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency, Prajuk was moved less by the image of a baby struggling to breathe than by the notion of solving for another piece. Diseases were Easter eggs to him; he detested leaving one that he had spotted uncollected.

When Prajuk spoke, he stared straight ahead at the soccer game. “Do you know what a mast cell is, Shane?”

“I don't, no.”

“Mast cells are like skunks in the lungs. Touch them, and they release a chemical spray that causes an acute inflammatory response. This thing is a good defense against viruses. But in asthmatics, IgE antibodies float around the bloodstream and bind to their mast cells, making them spray constantly. Like riding a skunk. The inflammatory response is constant. We give asthmatics steroids, which force the lungs to contract. They neuter the response, but they do nothing to stop the IgE antibodies from binding to the mast cells. So the body is initiating one action, and the steroids are fighting it. This is traumatic for the body, as you can imagine, like pressing on your gas pedal and brake pedal at the same time. The enzyme protein we found, this thing teaches the antibodies to stop attaching themselves to mast cells in the first place. This is why it will revolutionize asthma treatment.”

Shane recalled something Janelle had explained to him years ago, while they were slightly stoned on hydroponic: the only solution to disease is to teach the body to heal itself, the way you teach a child to solve problems himself.

“That's Airifan,” Shane guessed.

“Airifan would not help infants with alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency, because their problem is not mast cells. But this enzyme also switches on the gene that instructs the liver to produce alpha-one antitrypsin. In a different formulation, however, it would reverse the problem. It is just a matter of producing it.”

“What kind of a matter,” Shane asked quietly, “is that?”

“I put this thing, this protein, in a vector. If you help me in the lab, I can come after work and maybe do a few runs a week. I can make two milligrams of a new formulation, a treatment, each run. This baby, she will need thirty to fifty milligrams to have enough for ninety years of life.”

Shane was speechless. He waited tensely for Prajuk to go on.

“You understand this thing is a fireable offense. A career-ending offense.”

“No one would know,” Shane whispered.

“What about the baby's mother? And your brother? They could never tell anyone they have this drug.”

“They won't. They're not the blogging type. I'll explain it all to them.”

In front of them a pigtailed girl of Irish descent blocked a goal and a cheer rose from the sidelines.

“This thing cannot be done at work. You would need to find a lab.”

“A lab. Sure.”

“Purchase a Promega kit. Rent water baths, a centrifuge, an incubator. I will give you a list. I will come by with the vector. This will take your nights.”

Shane glanced down at Nicholas. “That's okay.”

“I would need a postdoc.” Prajuk coughed and spit something phlegmy onto the grass. “Also, we will need to build a mouse.”

“A mouse?”

“A knockout mouse. We knock one of its genes out through breeding, so it is nonfunctioning. And we use it for testing. This thing will take some time to deliver.”

“How much time would all this take?”

“A month or two to set up. Three, four months, once we start.”

Against his chest, Nicholas squirmed uncomfortably. Shane reached into his pocket for the bottle, which Nicholas was now somehow able to gasp with one small hand, like a hipster chugging a forty.

Prajuk turned and caught his eye intensely. “Can you live with this, Shane?”

“With saving this baby's life? Yes, absolutely.”

“With not telling the parents of other very sick babies that you have a treatment for their disease?”

Shane caught his breath. He recognized this question immediately as the thing he had been ducking.

“Because this is the situation. There are ten thousand people with alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency. Many of them are also infants. But I can only produce enough treatment for this girl. There will be no mass production. If you think that you would post about this on some message board and start a frenzy in that community, then we cannot proceed.”

Shane's chest constricted painfully, and he shifted.

“See, now you are in the position in which Anthony finds himself every day. Anthony must bypass a community of ten thousand people to try to save a million. You must bypass ten thousand people to try to save one.”

“Uh-huh,” Shane said.

“You and the baby's parents would also need to understand the risk of harm.”

“I thought there are no side effects?”

“We do not have the time or money for ten years of trials. I am certain that it is safe, because this protein underwent intensive trials as part of the Airifan studies. But there is always an opportunity for surprise when it comes to the body. It is a small percentage, but the opportunity for toxicity exists.”

“I'll talk to them about all of this.”

“One last thing. If I participate in this, you can no longer think about applying for an orphan grant.”

“Why?”

“A grant application makes this a matter of record, and I will not participate in it.”

“That's how I was going to fund it.”

“I assume you have lobbyists to speed up grant approval at the NIH? I hope you have a better plan than that.”

Nervously Shane asked, “If I paid for it myself, how much would it cost?”

“Renting a lab, and the equipment? Ten, maybe fifteen thousand.” He raised his eyes. “The mouse is more expensive.”

“Start to finish.”

“Maybe a hundred thousand dollars.”

Shane felt fevered. In front of them a determined young Chinese girl kicked a soccer ball into the goal, and parents erupted on the sidelines. Above, the sky was as azure as God must have first planned it.

Shane squeezed his son's small hand. The saltwater swelled the air until he thought that it might burst.