CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (24 page)

“Track.”

“What?”

“Are you listening?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed the rest of my wine. “Something about your hair. I’m starving, any chance those ribs would be ready by now?”

Hortensia hurdled the box of junk she had collected from all her old painting supplies and dropped it at my feet. “Hell, Track. I don’t know why I even bothered making you dinner.”

“What? Wait—” No use. She’d already run out of the room, pouting. I heaved the box and took it outside to the trashcan. The night was nippy and a few stars were out, dimmed by the grin of a crescent moon. A warm, yellow halo blanketed the jagged horizon of roofs. The streets were quiet, save for the usual droning of the freeway in the distance. A bicycle squeaked its way along the sidewalk; a TV blinked muted pictures from a window next door; a child cried and a parent hushed her.

Random images of ordinary lives.

Why can’t you have a normal life, Ulysses?

Because I’m
not
normal, Ma
.

Hortensia crouched by the oven, checking on the ribs. I waited until she dropped the pan on the stove, then brushed her hair to the side and kissed the back of her neck.

“You weren’t listening,” she scolded, softly this time.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, Hort.”

She passed me her glass. “Intoxicate me, then. I might rant more, but then I won’t mind if you’re not listening.”

I poured the wine, and then helped her set the table. She transferred the ribs onto a serving dish. The aroma of the braised meat made my stomach growl.

“What about sending ‘Chimeras’ for the show?”

After I told her Watanabe had finally come up with a diagnosis for me—epigentic chimera—she decided to title “Chimeras” the painting she had dedicated to me.

“Only if you change the title,” I said. 

“Aw… I
love
the title!”

I looked out the window above the sink. It framed a square of pitch black, a well of light scooped out in the middle by an arching streetlight. A jogger slid out of the darkness and looked up. For a fraction of a second our eyes met, then the night swallowed her again, a frame of my life retained on her retinas for a moment longer and soon forgotten.
Not worth remembering… Does my life look normal when gazing from far away?
 

Half way through dinner Hortensia pursed her lips, put her fork and knife down, and frowned as if she had completely given up on me. “What kind of nutcases are you dealing with this time?”

“The rich and spoiled.”

“Ooh. Spicy.”

“Yes, that too,” I added, thinking of Dan Horowitz’s comments back at the cemetery, and the conversation I had with Oscar Guerra.

“Anybody crazy and handsome enough to model for me? I just fired the last one. I couldn’t take the smell of joint on his breath.”

“No, another kind of crazy. These people want everything perfect in their life, even when things are supposed to go wrong.”

“Supposed to?”

I nodded, absent-mindedly. We call them mistakes, when in fact they’re explorations: the search for new paths in the rugged landscape called life.
There is no evolution without change
.

“And why do you consider them crazy? Just because they wanted perfect genes?”

I winced. “You don’t think they are?”

Hortensia refilled my glass. “You’re funny sometimes, Track. Of all people, shouldn’t you understand best? Something switched in your DNA, and your doctor told you the changes are hereditary.”

I swished wine in my mouth and then swallowed. “For a few generations only. Because the
actual
genes didn’t change, it’s not like—”

“So then suppose there was a way to fix your genes. No matter how crazy the cure sounded, wouldn’t you want to try it? Wouldn’t you want to jump on that one chance to have a
normal
life?”

I stared at the purple-red shade of the wine in my glass, tiny bubbles clinging to the surface. The
normality
I longed for on nights like that one. The ordinary lives I stared at as if looking out from a window, as if separated from me by a screen, shouting at me,
This is what you’ll never be, Ulysses
. If given the opportunity, wouldn’t I want another chance?

CHAPTER 28

____________

Wednesday, October 22

I checked my cell phone: everything was quiet from the Glass House. Satish was booked all day in court. I decided to take a low-key day and catch up on a few overdue reports. I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of sport shorts, and went jogging. The sun was rising and the air brisk.

I love the chilliness of Southern California mornings. During the day, temperatures in the valley can rise to ninety degrees, and yet mornings are almost always crisp. The strips of lawn by the sidewalks smell of dew. Whiffs of slowly brazing wood logs creep out of the chimneys and waft down the streets. Sycamores, turned yellow overnight, surprise the eye with wavering brightness. The sounds are hushed: a garage door opens, lets a small car whir out, and then closes again. A crow caws from the top of a telephone pole and then stops, as though baffled by its own voice. Announced by a gargling hiss, a sprinkler goes off. The lawn welcomes the moisture releasing a nippy fragrance of wet soil.

My feet bounced along the sidewalk in consecutive thumps. My lungs pumped air in rhythmical whooshes. A dozen kids whose cancers did not respond to therapy, at least one of them linked to Chromo. A couple poured their anxieties for the child they wanted to conceive into a search for perfection. A religious woman accused Chromo of “playing God” and harming innocent lives. The same woman ended up dead, after being lured over the promise of unspecified data.

Damn it.
Yes, justice is indeed imperfect, Hannah. Still, you have choices in life, and murder shouldn’t be one of them. Jennifer Huxley chose to fight.
I know what you expected to find in the cryogenic tank, Jen. I just have to prove it
.

I stopped to catch my breath, and the phone in my arm pouch buzzed. I flipped it open.

“Did I wake you up?” Diane’s voice was scratchy, her words pasted.

“No.”

She hesitated for a second, then drew a deep breath. I imagined her fingers as they pulled a strand of hair away from her face, still warm from bed. “I had a rough night. I told Jim I had enough of him.”

I pressed the phone against my ear and said nothing. She didn’t like it.

“Are you going to say something? It would be nice if I weren’t just talking to myself.”

I agreed. She sighed again. “What time are you coming? There’s something I need to show you.”

*  *  *

“Diane, what the hell are you doing?”

She startled. “I’m crossing the street.”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her back on the sidewalk. Going fifteen miles over the speed limit, a truck driver swooshed by showing a dexterous use of his middle finger. His honk trailed off,
soon covered by the jingling of the wind chimes hanging from a nearby shop.

“Hell, Diane, this is L.A., not Boston! Didn’t your parents teach you to look out for cars when you cross the street?”

“No.” Diane’s voice slipped into high-pitched indignation. “They taught me to look out for pedestrians when I drive.”

Nice utopian view of traffic and other related matters in life
. “It might work at cattle crossings where you grew up. It doesn’t work in L.A.” I was still clutching her arm, squeezing in fact. I let go and stared at the packed sidewalk. North Broadway was a colorful patchwork of striped awnings and store signs covered in elegant ideographs. The usual odors of L.A. streets—sweat, urine, gas exhaust—mingled with the wafts of the merchandise in the store windows: fruits and vegetables laid out for everybody to touch and smell; dried fish and birds hanging from the ceilings; ginger, cloves, anise, and fennel, sold in large jute sacks.

“Why Boston?”

“You could buy a house if you ticketed all the jaywalkers in Boston on any given day. Why did we come to Chinatown?”

Diane smiled. “Because I know a place where they serve the best dim sum you’ll ever eat.”

“As long as there’s enough meat. I’m a carnivore.”

“Relax. You’ll love it.”

She was already walking away, her gait confident as she jostled the eclectic crowds around us. Faces from different worlds emerged through the folds of an urban landscape: a genderless figure, standing still behind a shop window; a feminine oval, as white and flawless as a porcelain mask, peeking through the sheer curtain of a restaurant; young men walking briskly, their spiked hair and puffed chests a bold statement of past puberty, though their cheeks so smooth they had yet to see a razor.

I wasn’t relaxed. My hunch had proven wrong. I was irritated. “You’re sure you did the analyses correctly?”

“Yes. The answer hasn’t changed from five minutes ago: whoever drank from the beer can you handed over for DNA analysis didn’t leave his precious stuff in Huxley’s car.”

“Damn it.”

She sent me a sideways glance. “Why are you still thinking about it?”

“I hate to be wrong.”

My nose is never wrong. I rely on it. The beer can carried
his
smell.

Diane froze in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at me, her face hung somewhere in between bewilderment and resentment. “And by what chauvinistic and dick-waving principle should you never be wrong, Track? Or is it a woman telling you so that throws off your testosterone levels?”

I winced. A carillon chimed its hypnotic tune from a shop crammed with knickknacks, souvenirs, and a rainbow of wind spinners and cheap plastic gadgets. A hideous face standing by the door grinned at me for no reason. I stared back at Diane and didn’t reply. Yes, I could be plain wrong and let it go. Something told me otherwise, though.

Diane ran the analyses, Ulysses. She’s hiding something.

If she is, she’ll get me the assassin. It’s just a matter of time.

She averted her eyes and resumed walking. “Sorry, you probably meant it as a joke and I overreacted. I had a rough night, I think I told you already.”

“Yes, you did.”

We turned into a narrow street. “If it’s of any consolation, the two DNA strains could be related.”

“In what way?”

“Cousins. Maybe even brothers. There’s a high chance of them sharing the same father. I only looked at the Y chromosome, so I can’t speak for the mother.” Without looking at me, she disappeared behind a glass door out of which wafted warm aromas of simmering onions, sesame, and fermented spices. The hall was large and crowded. Waiters circled the tables pushing around carts. A petite woman in a purple Chinese blouse and black slacks came to offer us a wide smile and an incomprehensible welcome. She
motioned to a table where a stiff looking waiter was flipping plates as if they were Frisbees. The waiter bowed, the lady bowed, Diane sat down and asked for an iced tea.

At the opposite corner, a fish tank mumbled soothing sounds. All around the walls, white scrolls of paper depicted young women dancing and bathing along a yellow riverbed.

I hung my jacket at the back of the chair, ordered a Corona, and sat down. “Tell me again what you found out about those genes in the Chromo virus.” Diane had spent the night at the lab. She blamed it on insomnia. “What do you think they’re for?”

She crossed her arms on the table. There was a dark smear of tiredness beneath her eyes. It didn’t make the spice in her scent any less enticing. “It’s not easy to explain.”

“Try me. I can take scientific jargon. I just can’t overdose on it.”

She didn’t smile. Scientists get so serious when they talk science. “As we age our cells’ replicative capacity diminishes. In a child, cells undergo from twenty-five to thirty cellular divisions before they die. In a senior, those division cycles get down to three, possibly four. It’s how our body ages: there’s less turn over in cell population.”

“Skin sags, you lose muscle tone and get wrinkles,” I said.

“Basically, yes. Have you ever wondered though, what tells the cells they’ve reached the end of their replicative cycle? How do they know when they’re supposed to die?”

I took the napkin and unfolded it on my lap. “I’ve been losing sleep over that question, Diane.”

She served me a scornful look, with a side of condescending tone. The first cart docked at our table and delivered a plate of shrimp toast and sesame boa. We took one each, did some acrobatics with the chopsticks and chewed.

“Each time a cell undergoes a division, the chromosome ends in the DNA shorten a bit. It’s a natural phenomenon and it doesn’t have consequences because that part of the chromosome is non-coding—it doesn’t carry information. When the ends get too short, the cell dies. It’s all part of the aging process. Now, the counterpart of that is an enzyme called telomerase. It prevents the chromosome ends from degrading, and it’s believed to increase the cell’s replicative capacity. The theory behind it is that by preserving the chromosome ends one can allow the cells to replicate more and lengthen the span of human life.”

The next cart delivered pot stickers, shrimp shaomai, and rice noodles. “You mean a person would age at a slower rate?” Diane nodded. “So the genes you found in those viruses would make a person stay young?”

“Possibly.”

I stabbed a pot sticker with the chopsticks. No wonder Medford and company loved cavorting with Hollywood people. If I were after the Holy Grail of eternal youth, who else would be my best paying clients?

“There’s a problem, though. The chromosome ends are
supposed
to shorten. It’s the cell’s biological clock. When you mess up with it, you risk making the cell replicate an abnormal number of times.”

“Abnormal in what way?”

“A cell that never dies is a cancer cell. It becomes a tumor.”

I stopped chewing. For a moment, I think I even stopped breathing. The hall fell silent. Or maybe the silence was inside me. My heart thumped and yet my lungs kept quiet and still
. A cell that never dies is a cancer cell
. The Greeks already knew. The myth of Prometheus was their lesson, and yet here we were, thousands of years later, making the same mistakes all over again.

“Why risk it if the process can lead to cancer?”

“They claim they solved the glitch.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

Diane wiped her mouth, reached for her purse and produced a paper, which she slid across the table. “Them,” she said, pressing her index finger on the cover page. “I found it in the Chromo web archives. It never got published in a scientific journal. It’s listed under ‘drafts.’”

I pushed aside a steaming tray, turned the paper towards me and read the title printed at the top: “Germ line gene therapy, a new
approach through viral vectors.” Below, were the abstract and authors’ names, both familiar: M.J. Conrad and A.S. Troy. “The son of a— He lied to us!”

“Who did?”

“Troy! He said he never worked on genetics with Conrad.”

“You know him?”

“Of course. He was one of Conrad’s most brilliant students. The two worked together for a number of years, but, from what he told us, never on genetics.”

Satish and I had interviewed him right after Conrad’s murder. He’d told us how only later in his career the professor had switched to genetics.

Diane stared at her watch. “We have an appointment with him at four o’clock. There are quite a few things I mean to ask him.”

Our drinks materialized at our table and a pensive Diane swirled the straw into her glass, making the ice clink. “Do you think White and Kelson knew what they were doing when they entrusted Chromo with the conception of their child?”

I shook my head, my eyes skimming the paper in front of me. “They overdid it.”

“Yeah, but can you blame them? This was going to be their only child, and Chromo deceived them with the delusion of a genetically perfect daughter. I was an only child too, and not particularly healthy growing up. My parents never talked about my birth mother, but I bet I was a crack baby: always small, sickly and fragile. Every time I landed at the hospital—the usual breathing complications over the flu, or a febrile seizure, or an ear infection—my parents went through hell. They had gone through so much to have a daughter, and fate kept threatening them to take me away. In the end they got lucky. I made it. Kelson and White didn’t get lucky.”

Only child and adopted, I pondered. Hard to imagine her small and fragile. Her shirt curved around her chest sinking and rising like the cantabile of a Vivaldi concerto. A row of tiny buttons descended from her bosom down to her stomach, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to undo them one by one.

Say something Ulysses, damn it
!

“Where did you grow up?”

“In Ohio. By the railroad.”

Unusual answer, it made me smile. “
Bytherailroad
, Ohio? Never heard of that town!”

She laughed. “I grew up in the country. Our house was surrounded by corn and sunflower fields. The railroad bordered our property.”

Sunflowers—that’s what she smelled of. I could see it in her scent. The hours spent in the fields outside, basking in the sun, chasing a dog maybe, or pedaling over a rusty bike. Her mother would come out, hang the sheets to dry, and she’d run back and forth below the line with her arms spread open, inhaling the sun and the wind the fabric had captured in its billows.