12.21 (2 page)

“Other than that.”

“Hell of a nice day out there.”

“How’s your lady?”

“Electrifying, thanks.”

Stanton headed for the door. “If we’re still here, I’ll see you tomorrow, Monster.”

After Stanton downed his Black Gold outside, he and Dogma continued south. A century ago, miles of canals snaked through the streets of Venice, tobacco magnate Abbot Kinney’s re-creation of the famed Italian city. Now virtually all of the waterways where gondoliers once ferried residents were paved over and covered with steroid-fueled gyms, greasy-food stands, and novelty T-shirt shops.

Stanton had ruefully watched a rash of “Mayan apocalypse” graffiti and trinkets pop up all over Venice in recent weeks, vendors taking advantage of all the hype. He’d been raised Catholic but hadn’t been in a church in years. If people wanted to seek their destiny or believe in some ancient clock, they could go right ahead; he’d stick to testable hypotheses and the scientific method.

Fortunately, it seemed not everyone in Venice believed December 21 would bring the end of the world; red and green lights also decorated the boardwalk too, just in case the crackpots had it wrong. Yuletide was a strange time in L.A. Few transplants understood how to celebrate the
holidays at seventy degrees, but Stanton loved the contrast—Santa hats on rollerbladers, suntan lotion in stockings, surfboards festooned with antlers. A ride along the beach on Christmas was as spiritual as he got these days.

Ten minutes later, he and the dog reached the northern tip of Marina del Rey. They made their way past the old lighthouse and the sailboats and souped-up fishing vessels bobbing quietly in the harbor. Stanton let Dogma off his leash, and the dog bounded ahead while Stanton trotted behind, listening for music. The woman they were here to see surrounded herself with jazz at all times, and when you heard Bill Evans’s piano or Miles’s trumpet over the other noises of the waterfront, she wasn’t far. For most of the last decade, Nina Countner had been the woman in Stanton’s life. While there had been a few others in the three years since they’d split, none had been more than a substitute for her.

Stanton trailed Dogma onto the dock of the marina and caught the mournful sound of a saxophone in the distance. The dog had arrived at the tip of the south jetty above Nina’s massive dual-engine McGray, twenty-two pristine feet of metal and wood, squeezed into the last slip at the end of the dock.

Nina crouched beside Dogma, already rubbing his belly. “You guys found me.”

“In an actual marina for a change,” said Stanton.

He kissed her on the cheek and breathed her in. Despite spending most of her time at sea, Nina always managed to smell like rosewater. Stanton stepped back to look at her. She had a dimpled chin and striking green eyes, but her nose was a little crooked, and her mouth was small. To Stanton, it was all just right.

“You ever going to let me get you a real slip?” he asked.

Nina gave him a look. He’d offered to rent her a permanent boat slip so many times, hoping it would lure her back to shore more often, but she’d never accepted, and he knew she probably never would. Her freelance magazine assignments hardly provided a steady income, so she’d mastered the art of finding open slips, out-of-sight beaches, and off-the-radar docks that few others knew about.

“How’s the experiment coming?” Nina asked as Stanton followed her onto the boat.
Plan A
’s deck was simply appointed, just two folding seats, a collection of loose CDs strewn around the skipper’s chair, and bowls for Dogma’s water and food.

“More results this morning,” he told her. “Should be interesting.”

She took the captain’s seat. “You look tired.”

He wondered if it was the encroaching tide of age she was seeing on his face, crow’s-feet beneath his rimless glasses. But Stanton had slept a full seven hours last night. Rare for him. “I feel fine.”

“The lawsuit’s all over? For good?”

“It’s been over for weeks. Let’s celebrate. Got some champagne in my fridge.”

“Skipper and I are headed to Catalina,” Nina said. She flipped the gauges and switches that Stanton had never bothered to really master, firing up the boat’s GPS and electrical system.

The faint outline of Catalina Island was just visible through the marine layer. “What if I came with you?” he asked.

“While you waited patiently for results from the center? Please, Gabe.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

Nina walked up, cupped his chin in her hand. “I’m not your ex-wife for nothing.”

The decision had been hers, but Stanton blamed himself, and part of him had never given up on a future for them together. During the three years they were married, his work took him out of the country for months at a time, while she escaped to the ocean, where her heart had always been. He’d let her drift away, and it seemed like she was happiest that way—sailing solo.

A container ship sounded its horn in the distance, sending Dogma into a frenzy. He barked repeatedly at the noise before proceeding to chase his own tail.

“I’ll bring him back tomorrow night,” Nina said.

“Stay for dinner,” Stanton told her. “I’ll cook whatever you want.”

Nina eyed him. “How will your girlfriend feel about us having dinner?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“What happened to what’s-her-name? The mathematician.”

“We went on four dates.”

“And?”

“I had to go see a man about a horse.”

“Come on.”

“Seriously. I had to check out a horse in England they thought might have scrapie, and she told me I wasn’t fully committed to her.”

“Was she right?”

“We went on four dates. So, are we on for dinner tomorrow?”

Nina fired up
Plan A
’s engine as Stanton hopped onto the dock to collect his bike. “Get a decent bottle of wine,” she called back as she unmoored, leaving him once again in her wake. “Then we’ll see.…”

THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL’S
Prion Center in Boyle Heights had been Stanton’s professional home for nearly ten years. When he moved west to become its first director, the center had occupied only one small lab in a mobile trailer at Los Angeles County & USC Medical Center. Now it spanned the entire sixth floor of the LAC & USC main hospital building, the same building that for more than three decades had served as the exterior for the soap opera
General Hospital
.

Stanton headed through the double doors into what his postdocs often referred to as his “lair.” One of them had strung Christmas lights around the main area, and Stanton flipped them on along with the halogens, casting green and red across the microscope benches stretching across the lab. After dropping his bag in his office, Stanton threw on a mask and gloves and headed for the back. This was the first morning they’d be able to collect results in an experiment his team had been working on for weeks, and he was very eager for them.

The center’s “Animal Room” was nearly the length of a basketball
court and contained computerized inventory stalls, touch-screen data-recording centers, and electronic vivisection and autopsy stations. Stanton made his way toward the first of twelve cages shelved on the south wall and peered inside. The cage contained two animals: a two-foot-long black-and-orange coral snake and a small gray mouse. At first glance it looked like the most natural thing in the world: a snake waiting for the right moment to feed on its prey. But in reality something unnatural was happening inside this cage.

The mouse was nonchalantly poking the snake’s head with its nose. Even when the snake hissed, the mouse continued to nudge it carelessly—it didn’t run to the corner of the cage or try to escape. The mouse was as unafraid of the snake as it would have been of another mouse. The first time Stanton saw this behavior, he and his team at the Prion Center erupted in cheers. Using genetic engineering, they’d removed a set of tiny proteins called “prions” from the surface membrane of the mouse’s brain cells. They’d succeded in their strange experiment, disrupting the natural order in the mouse’s brain and eradicating its innate fear of the snake. It was a crucial step toward understanding the deadly proteins that had been Stanton’s life’s work.

Prions occur in all normal animal brains, including those of humans, yet after decades of research, neither he nor anyone else understood why they existed. Some of Stanton’s colleagues believed prion proteins were involved in memory or were important in the formation of bone marrow. No one knew for sure.

Most of the time, these prions sat benignly on neuron cells in the brain. But in rare cases, these proteins could become “sick” and multiply. Like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, prion diseases destroyed healthy tissue and replaced it with useless plaques, squeezing out the normal function of the brain. But there was one key, terrifying difference: While Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were strictly genetic diseases, certain prion diseases could be passed through contaminated meat. In the mid-1980s, mutated prions from sick cows in England got into the local food supply through tainted beef, and the entire world became familiar with a prion infection. Mad cow disease killed two hundred thousand cattle in Europe
and then spread to humans. First patients had difficulty walking and shook uncontrollably, then they lost their memories and the ability to identify friends and family. Brain death soon followed.

Early in his career, Stanton had become one of the world’s experts on mad cow, and when the CDC founded the National Prion Center, he was the natural choice to head it. Back then it had seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was thrilled to make the move to California; never before had there been a dedicated research center for the study of prions and prion diseases in the United States. With Stanton’s leadership, the center was created to diagnose, study, and eventually fight the most mysterious infectious agents on earth.

Only it never happened. By the end of the decade, the beef industry had launched a successful campaign to show that just one person living in the United States had ever been diagnosed with mad cow. Grants for Stanton’s lab became smaller, and, with fewer cases in England as well, the public quickly lost interest. The worst part was they still couldn’t cure a single prion disease; years of testing various drugs and other therapies had produced one false hope after the next. Yet Stanton had always been as stubborn as he was optimistic and had never given up on the possibility that answers were just one experiment away.

Moving on to the next animal cage, he found another snake and another tiny mouse merely bored by its predator. Through this experiment, Stanton and his team were exploring a role for prions in controlling “innate instincts,” including fear. Mice didn’t have to be taught to be afraid of the rustling of the grass signaling a predator’s approach—terror was programmed into their genes. But after their prions were genetically “knocked out” in an earlier experiment, the mice began acting aggressively and irrationally. So Stanton and his staff started directly testing the effects of deleting prions on the animals’ most fundamental fears.

Stanton’s cellphone vibrated in the pocket of his white coat. “Hello?”

“Is this Dr. Stanton?” It was a female voice he didn’t recognize, but it had to be a doctor or a nurse; only a health professional wouldn’t apologize first for calling before eight in the morning.

“What can I do for you?”

“My name’s Michaela Thane,” she said. “Third-year resident at East L.A. Presbyterian Hospital. CDC gave me your number. We believe we have a case of prion disease here.”

Stanton smiled, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and said,
“Okay,”
as he moved on to the third animal cage. Inside, another mouse pawed its predator’s tail. The snake seemed almost befuddled by this reversal of nature.

“ ‘Okay?’ ” Thane asked. “That’s it?”

“Send over the samples to my office and my team will look at them,” he said. “A Dr. Davies will call you back with the results.”

“Which will be when? A week? Maybe I wasn’t being clear, Doctor. Sometimes I talk too fast for people. We think we have a case of
prion
disease here.”

“I understand that’s what you believe,” Stanton said. “What about the genetic tests? Have they come back?”

“No, but—”

“Listen, Dr.… Thane? We get thousands of calls a year,” Stanton interrupted, “and only a handful turn out to be prion disease. If the genetic tests are positive, call us back.”

“Doctor, the symptoms are highly consistent with a diagnosis of—”

“Let me guess. Your patient is having trouble walking.”

“No.”

“Memory loss?”

“We don’t know.”

Stanton tapped on the glass of one of the cages, curious to see if either of the animals would react. Neither acknowledged him. “Then what’s your presumptive symptom, Doctor?” he asked Thane.

“Dementia and hallucinations, erratic behavior, tremor, and sweating. And a terrible case of insomnia.”

“Insomnia?”

“We thought it was alcohol withdrawal when he was admitted,” Thane said. “But there was no folate deficiency to indicate alcoholism, so I ran more tests, and I believe it could be fatal familial insomnia.”

Now she had Stanton’s attention.

“When was he admitted?”

“Three days ago.”

FFI was a strange and rapidly progressing condition that arose because of a mutated gene. Passed down from parent to child, it was one of the few prion diseases that was strictly genetic. Stanton had seen half a dozen cases in his career. Most FFI patients first came in for medical attention because they were sweating constantly and having trouble falling asleep at night. Within months, their insomnia was total. Patients became impotent, experienced panic attacks, had difficulty walking. Caught between a hallucinatory waking state and panic-inducing alertness, nearly all FFI patients died after a few weeks of total sleeplessness, and there was nothing Stanton or any other doctor could do to help them.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he told Thane. “Worldwide incidence of FFI is one in thirty-three million.”

“What else could cause complete insomnia?” Thane asked.