The Crystal Child (8 page)

“Maybe you should.  What if you’re dealing with symbols that mean something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.  I’m not a geneticist.”

“Well, I am.  And I know how to read nucleotides, which code for physical inheritance.”

“What if it all means something else besides just body parts and chemicals?”

Forrester rubbed at his eyes impatiently. “Sorry.  Outside my area.”

Despite Forrester’s obvious aggravation, Aaron was not ready to drop the argument.  “Wasn’t genetics once outside the area of biology?  Nobody paid any attention to Mendel for years and years.  Nobody thought biology could be reduced to numbers.”

“So?”

“So maybe the difference between a great biologist and a mediocre biologist is being willing to think outside your area.”

Forrester sank back in his chair like a fighter who was punched out.  “Look,” he said, “let’s call it quits for today.  You read a bit more and see if you can come up with a few questions I can answer.”  Later, when he was alone with Julia, he let her know how exasperated he felt.

She said, “Peel away all the premature aging, and he turns out to be slightly brilliant.  I thought I’d let you find out for yourself, the way I did.”

“Who’s been tutoring him?  You?”

“Are you joking?  How could I tutor him to ask questions like that? He’s self-taught.”

She was smiling with pride, but Forrester took it for mischief.  He studied her with a severe look.  “This is a gag, right?  Something the two of you cooked up.  A put-down for molecular medicine.”

Julia was jarred by the accusation.  “You know I don’t play games like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Forrester said, but he still looked suspicious.  “I guess I get riled when …”  He stopped there, as if he could not think of the next word. 
When, what?

Julia tried to guess.  “When a collection of chromosomes sits up in its chair and talks back.”

Forrester raised his hand to wave her off.  “Please, let’s not go there.”

At times, when Forrester seemed to be teasing Julia about the difference between his medicine and hers, he could sound fanatically smug.  “In another generation,” he once told her, “doctors are going to descend to about the level of drugstore pharmacists.  You’ll scrape a few tissue samples from your patient, send them in to the lab, we’ll extract the guy’s genome, analyze it, and send you back all the healthy genes and stem cells you need. Your patient can go home and grow a new set of organs and limbs, even anticipate diseases years ahead of time.  Of course,” he added with a smirk, “there’ll always be emergency room stuff — broken bones, gunshot wounds, battered wives — to keep the MDs busy.”  He might be right about that; still she always came away from such exchanges wishing she could pierce his stuffy self-confidence, if only a little.  Now Aaron was doing that for her, challenging Forrester in ways that sometimes left him stymied.  Though she did her best to conceal it, Julia took a secret satisfaction in this vicarious tit for tat. It encouraged her to hit back.

“Do you know who you remind me of?” she asked one day after Aaron had left them together. “Those Jehovah’s Witnesses who pin you down at the front door and try to sell you on the Bible.”

“Thanks so much,” Forrester said.  “Maybe you’d like to slam the door in my face.”

“No, not at all.  I know you’re trying to help, but I think we’re losing touch with people.”

“Or getting in touch with them where it matters most,” Forrester answered.  “Where would we be if Vesalius hadn’t been daring enough to slit the body open for investigation?  The church thought that was a sin.  Suppose somebody told you cutting into the heart or liver was against God’s will.  You’d call that superstitious, right?  Well, we’re just going deeper, into the stuff the organs are made of.”

Forrester had already made a major contribution to what he called “going deeper.” He had created a clever laboratory virus that was able to deliver portions of DNA to strategically located cells.  The cells would then multiply in the body, producing healthy tissue to replace the damage done by disease. In humans, the technique had already worked as a way of replacing clogged arteries with new ones.   Forrester’s viruses were the obedient servants of a new microscopic surgery.  One day, he predicted, one of his viruses might smell out the DNA that produced senescence and replace it with ageless cells. “We’re going to be able to prescribe a healthy body prenatally,” he boasted. “Some day the most important things we can do for people will all get done in the womb. When we get around to re-engineering the fetus, we’ll be putting doctors out of business before their patients are born.  The world may never see another disposable diaper.  Perfect babies, born toilet-trained.”

As grateful as Julia was for all that Forrester did to keep her abreast of the latest research in gene therapy, his style of medicine had always repelled her — and now more than ever as she observed him in his increasingly contentious sessions with Aaron.  For Julia there had never been any question but that she would become a conventional physician, a healer who needed to know her troubled patients face to face, to solace their anxiety, assuage their fears. Warmth mattered in her practice, so did rapport and morale.  Touching mattered, the feel of living flesh responding to the pressure of a handshake, a hug, a diagnostic probe.  She appreciated how much a glance or a word might do to give hope or induce despair. She could not imagine regarding her patients as anything less than the flesh and blood human beings she saw before her in the consulting room, troubled souls who came to her wanting their affliction to be acknowledged.

If there was one redeeming aspect to what might otherwise seem to be plain insensitivity on Forrester’s part, it was a memory she kept from their days at Johns Hopkins, a candid confession he made to her one night during their residency many years before.  The sort of admission that pillow talk can draw out.  By now he had no doubt forgotten it; at the time he had regarded it as a shameful sign of weakness.  “I can’t stand the suffering,” he had told her.  “That’s the long and short of it.  I can’t put up with the pain and the mess.  Don’t tell anyone, but I break out in a sweat when I have to draw blood.  If I’m going to be a doctor, it will have to be at a distance.”  He had never revealed as much to anyone else.  Julia sympathized, but in her eyes leaving the mess and the pain behind meant leaving patients behind.

Julia never had a good answer to Forrester’s claims.  She was willing to admire and agree, but how remote and impersonal it seemed to her.  And who could be trusted with such awesome powers, who was to say what human perfection is?  She and Forrester had bantered to a polite impasse on these matters many times.  But for Aaron the issues were new and provocative. He found no reason to be tactful.  Every time Forrester visited, he grew more pugnacious.  “Why do you call it ‘junk’?”  he wanted to know.

“Because DNA that doesn’t code for anything is useless.  It’s junk.”

“But our cells are full of supposedly useless DNA. There must be some reason why it’s just stayed there for millions of years.”

“No, there doesn’t have to be a reason.  Nature is extravagant, and she doesn’t always clean up after herself.  Junk DNA is detritus that got encased in the cell.  It does no good, but it does no harm either.  So it lingers on.  Evolution is filled with excess like that.”

“How can you be sure it isn’t really a code that you’re not smart enough to read?”

“That’s a remote possibility, I’ll grant you.  But for the time being, we think it’s just nonsense.  Sometimes we call it nonsense-DNA.”

Aaron paused, as if Forrester had dropped a significant remark.  “Nonsense.  Sure.  If I wanted to keep something a secret, I’d make it look like nonsense.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.  Who’s keeping secrets from us?”

“Maybe not growing old is something special.  If I knew the secret of never growing old, I’d keep it to myself.”

“Why?”

“Because what if all the wrong people got the benefit and never got old?”

“That’s an odd thing to worry about.  Scientists don’t think that way.”

“Well, maybe you should.  Maybe you’re fooling around with secrets you’re not supposed to know.  If it was up to me, I’d make sure you didn’t find out.”

Exasperated, Forrester resorted to an intimidating tone. “You know, I can get samples without your cooperation.”

“Sure you can.  You can wait outside the bathroom and fish one out of the toilet when I’m finished.”

Forrester should have seen that Aaron was becoming agitated.  Perhaps he did, but he pressed on more abrasively.  “All I need is a single strand of your hair.”

“And how will you get that?  Are you going to yank it out of my head.” Aaron stepped away from Forrester as if he were about to be attacked.  Glancing at Julia, he said, “Maybe you can hold me down while he scalps me.”

Julia hastened to soothe his anxiety.  “Please, Aaron.  Nobody is going to force you to do anything.”

“He is,” Aaron said, pointing an accusing finger at Forrester.

Forrester did his best to back off.  “I don’t have to scalp you.  I could get a hair from the bed you sleep in.”

“How will you know it’s my hair?  Maybe you’d get a hair from one of the attendants, or from Julia.  She comes to say goodnight.”

“I’d know the difference.”

“Sure you would.  But is that the way you want to write this up?  Do you want to admit you didn’t get your samples from a willing subject?  That your research is based on theft?”

Forrester glared at the boy. “We have your blood tests.”

“ ‘We’?  Who’s ‘we’?  Julia has my blood work.  What if I tell her not to give it to you?  That’s my right, isn’t it?  My body, my property.  Anyway, you know I’m displaying changes.  That’s what you’re trying to explain. What good will an old sample do you?”

Forrester took a deep breath and blew it out.  “All right, what are you after, Aaron?  What is it you want me to do?”

“If you want a piece of my body so badly, you’ll have to pay a price.”

“You want to charge me to take a scraping?”

“Not money.  Talk.  I want you to teach me.  Then you can have my permission — maybe.”

“Teach you what?”

“Answer my questions.  I want to understand about myself.”

“All right, all right,” Forrester said, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender.  “We’ll do it your way.”  He made the concession, but with no clear idea what he was agreeing to.  Later, alone with Julia, he said, “Your
wunderkind
is teasing me, isn’t he?  He’s mocking my science.”

Julia tried to put in a good word for the boy, reminding Forrester that he was dealing with an exceptional person.  “Surely you appreciate his intelligence,” she said.

“Of course I do.  I can see the kid’s brilliant.  He’s also an annoying little snot.”

“That’s not fair,” Julia insisted.  “You know what he’s been through.  He’s spent most of his life staring death in the face.  Imagine what it’s like to be a little kid inside the body of a dying, old man.”

“I do try, Julia.  But tender loving care has never been my strong suit.  If the boy’s all that bright, why can’t he cooperate with me?  He must know he’s a physical phenomenon.  All I’m trying to do is standard genetics, the only way I know to find out what makes him tick.”

“And he has some reason for resisting you. We won’t find out by bullying him.”

Forrester threw up his hands.  “Just help me work with him.  I’ll be as tactful as I can be.”

***

Kevin Forrester is a royal pain in the ass.  I have no idea why Julia wants him around.  He’s impossibly smug.  And worse than that, completely wrong-headed.  Sure, he’s the expert — the expert in being wrong.  I can’t say why he’s wrong … I just know he is.  I know it like an axiom, namely, you can’t connect from the chemistry of genes to the whole, real person.  To
me.
 There’s a gap here.  Forrester is working in the wrong direction.  Up from the chemicals instead of down from the mind, the soul, the … whatever.  Working up, working down … I get so confused when I try to make sense of …  Of what?  Of myself?  What am I?  What am I
now?
  What has she made of me?  I’m here, I’m healthy, I’m getting stronger and smarter.  But my body doesn’t fit.  Like wearing children’s clothes.

I try to tell them, but Kevin and I don’t speak the same language.  He thinks I’m just what my genes made me.  But that can’t be right.  Where do these dreams come from?  Cronos and the marble city, the crystal bridge, and the beautiful shining boy with a face shaped of glass.  Whenever Kevin comes to see me, I feel threatened.  He wants to make something out of me that I’m not.  I want Julia to make him go away. 
He’s the enemy, Julia.  Can’t you see?
  Why can’t she see?  Are they sleeping together?  That’s probably it.  The two of them talk about me in bed.  She’s a tease and a tart.  Aren’t you, Princess Alyssa?  She practically undressed in front of me.   She knew I was watching.  She wanted me to see.  I can’t trust any of them.

***

“I’ve been reading about negative pleiotropy,” Aaron said — “the new Aaron,” as Julia called him, no longer the wasting little boy.  It was nine months since he had returned from his coma.  Now when she came to him, she expected to find him awake and alert, waiting to show off for her.  Usually he came up with something he had read, a problem, an issue.  Today, negative pleiotropy.  He mispronounced the phrase, but Julia let that pass. He was clearly trying to sound competent beyond his years.  Lately he had been throwing off a number of mangled medical terms he picked up from books he found around the clinic.  His intellectual ambition was growing by the week.  “I don’t much like that idea,” he added.

“Oh?  Why not?” Julia asked, playing along with his effort while she checked his vitals.  The usual routine, not that she expected to find anything surprising.  All his functions checked out the same: high-level health.

“It’s crummy logic.”

“Tell me about it, Professor Science.”  She asked, at the same time ransacking her own memory.  What did she remember about negative pleiotropy?  It was one way evolutionary biologists accounted for aging.  The theory taught that living things age because nature stops caring about them.  Creatures are designed by the invisible hand of evolution solely for the purpose of reproduction. Everything we have that contributes to our survival centers on the baby-making years.  Reproduction diverts all the energy it can gather into creating the next generation of competitive progeny.  But after that, after the woman’s womb goes dry and male sexuality goes limp, Mother Nature signs off on us.  She could care less how vulnerable we become to disease and disability. She lets us run down because we have served our purpose — or rather her purpose.  At that point we simply run out of survival power the way a car runs out of gas.  Our early life has given us nothing to survive on, unless by the occasional genetic accident.  We age, we weaken, we die.  Our only remaining task is to give our bones back to the Earth.