The Fifth Harmonic (27 page)

In my throat I find the tumor. This is not the cartoonish Captain Carcinoma of my teonancatl dream. No lumpish megalomaniacal cyclops with a booming voice, this is the real thing—a megalopolis of cellular chaos where matted sheets of deformed cells with bizarre
nuclei wail a mindless atonal cacophony as they grow, swell, divide . . . grow, swell, divide in rapid cycles of mitotic madness—and it is so much more frightening than Captain Carcinoma.

Here it is . . . here is the mass of mutated cells that is slowly choking off my life. But where is the frenzied immune activity I'd seen in my leg? All activity here is the malignancy's. My defenders, my phagocytes and antibodies, hurry past, rushing no doubt to my injured leg, utterly oblivious to the monster that is devouring their world from under them.

Blind hatred explodes within me and I surrender to it. I yearn for a weapon so I can attack the tumor. I see a sudden flash of light and one of the tines—the fire tine—appears before me, alive with tongues of flame. The sight of it startles me. What am I supposed to do with it?

And then I know. I grab it and leap upon the tumor, tearing at the membranes of its cells, ripping them open, spilling their contents, rending cell after cell until I am awash in cytoplasm.

I stop, exhausted, surveying the carnage I have wrought . . . and it is negligible. I've barely scratched the surface.

I watch the surviving cells, the oblivious
masses
of remaining cells continue their mad, headlong race of division and multiplication as if nothing has happened.

A head-on assault obviously won't work. Nor can I replace the protective Rb and p53 proteins missing from each tumor cell. At one point, months ago perhaps, I could have made a preemptive strike when the malignancy was small and annihilated it. But now . . . now it is huge, its cells numbering in the billions, and it has colonized farflung reaches of my body.

I am doomed unless I find a way to alert my immune system.

Desperate, I flow to one of the lymph nodes in my neck. Here is where the first skirmishes took place. The alarm should have gone out from here to the rest of my body—
Mutiny! Mutiny!

But I see no signs of a struggle; instead an insidious fifth-column invasion has taken place. The tumor cells have quietly infiltrated the node and taken up residence, all the while continuing the wild division begun by their parent, and have crowded out most of the original occupants. Though the lymph node fairly bulges at its seams with malignant
cells, the few remaining defender cells remain oblivious to them.

As I watch the tumor cells divide, I want to scream at my defenders to wake up and attack. Chew up the bastards and spit them out!

Maybe if I set an example. I still have the fire tine, so I thrust it into the chaotic nucleus of the nearest tumor cell just as it is preparing to divide. I use it to slash at the DNA . . . but the mitosis continues unabated.

I back away, defeated, discouraged. Frustration claws at me as the one cell becomes two. I stand helpless, crying out for a solution. What damn good is this new level of awareness, this vaunted Fifth Harmonic if I can't—?

Sudden movement catches my attention. A formerly idle white blood cell suddenly darts past me and leaps on one of the new tumor cells. It quickly engulfs it, then moves on to the other. I watch, stunned, as it devours the second.

What just happened?

I find another malignant cell preparing to divide and I use the tine again to slash at its nucleus. I watch closely this time as it divides and I notice a mark on the membranes of the new cells . . . an irregularly shaped scarlike defect.

And suddenly another white cell is there, engulfing the pair of new tumor cells.

It must be the scar . . . the defenders see the membrane defect as an alien attribute—a mark of Cain—and attack the cell as an outsider.

And now I see the other white cells stirring, alerted that something is up. Their membranes ripple as they scramble to readiness. They pause, then begin a frontal assault on the other tumor cells in the node—the
unmarked
cells. Some message has been passed . . . a marginally aberrant protein in the tumor membranes that previously has been allowed to pass is now designated as foreign.

The slaughter begins. The malignant cells have no defenses— they've survived this long only by their ability to pass as normal cells. Now that they've been unmasked, they're sitting ducks.

But even this is not enough. The tumor is too vast and widespread at this point. My immune system is weakened and disorganized, decimated by the months the cancer has had free rein to run wild through my body. Given enough time and a sufficient supply of
nutrients, the system might be able to rebuild itself and conquer the tumor, but it has neither. Dehydration and malnutrition favor the greedy malignancy.

Demoralized and disheartened, I move away. If I could destroy the primary tumor mass, I could relieve the pressure against my esophagus. I could drink again. I could eat real food. I could build up my nutritional reserves and buy time for my defense forces. I could give this monster a run for its money.

But how?

I return to the primary site where the cancer was born. I stand on its border, in the teeming, burgeoning suburbs that constrict my esophagus and abut my trachea, and I glare at the blazing heart of its center city.

If only it had a true heart. Or a brain. A life center I could strike at and destroy. But a tumor is the soul of polycentrism—each individual cell is a potential new tumor.

I decide to travel to its malignant center anyway, to see where the end of my life began. The surest path there is along the tangle of new blood vessels the cancer has created to feed itself. I start to follow—

And then stop, my mind suddenly awhirl with possibilities.

New blood vessels . . . angiogenesis. A successful tumor has a knack for stimulating existing blood vessels to form new branches and send them its way to feed its growing cell population. A cancer can break all sorts of rules but it cannot get around the necessity of a steady blood supply to survive. No tissue, normal or malignant, can grow or even exist without that.

This one is no exception.

And here I am, watching my own pulsing arteries pump a continuous stream of blood into the tumor mass, feeding it. Can I do something about that? The tumor is already starving me—a little turnabout would be more than fair play.

But how? Find that tine and slash the arteries?

No . . . I want to kill the tumor, not me.

Block the arteries, maybe?

Again—how?

Can I narrow them? I can sure as hell try.

I start small. I concentrate on a nearby arteriole, willing the
smooth muscle cells within its wall—
my
cells—to contract, constricting the lumen. And as I watch, I see a section of its tubular length shrink, reducing its inner diameter by a third, then a half, then all the way down to ninety percent. With only ten percent of the original flow moving through, the blood cells crowd against each other. I stimulate the sludging platelets to adhere, triggering a clot.

Done! The arteriole is plugged. Nothing flows through it now. Exaltation surges through me like electric fire.

The blood behind the blockage backs up to the nearest proximal branch and shunts away to down that channel. Keeping the first vessel constricted, I move to the next one, constricting and clotting its lumen exactly as I did the first. I keep moving, spreading my influence from vessel to vessel, tackling bigger and bigger arteries, systematically shutting down the tumor's life lines, cutting off its oxygen, strangling the filthy rotten bastard tissue.

The tumor begins screaming for more blood, for new vasculature to replace the suddenly defective infrastructure. But I allow no new vessels to form. I haven't been able to block every arteriole, but I'm throttling large areas of the mass, causing them to change color, turning them a mottled blue gray as those cells choke for oxygen. The tumor cannot move, but I can almost see it writhing in agony, and that only spurs me to clamp down harder on its blood supply. I scream like a madman.

Thought you had the playing field all to yourself, didn't you? Figured you had a lock on this, right? Well listen up, you slimy bastard! I want my life back. I'M in charge now, and you—you're fucking DEAD!!

The rational part of me knows that the tumor is not an entity, that it has no will, and can't hear me, but the rest of me that wants vengeance is in control now, and I'm Ulysses home from Troy, royally pissed and cleaning house. I'm wild, I'm crazed, I've been helpless so long before this monster that I'm out of control.

And then, at last, it begins. The tumor cells begin to lyse. That's a fancy scientific term for explosive cellular death. But I can't be objective here. If I had feet I'd dance. I watch with ecstatic glee as the membranes rupture and spew their contents into the intercellular spaces. Huge matted sheets of malignant cells leak and shrivel and
die. The main body of the tumor begins to wither. And still I maintain my murderous stranglehold, clamping down until the bulk of its cells lie in ruin.

My own strength is waning, and finally I release control and let bloodflow resume to the area. White cells flood the region to begin mopping up the necrotic debris.

My vision blurs, the images waver. I see a flash and suddenly I am back on the plateau, bathed in sweat, lying on my side, coughing, retching, gagging. I spit foul-tasting tissue onto the stone. In the growing light it looks red . . . bloody. That couldn't be part of Captain Carcinoma, could it?

I look around. I'm still in the center of the circular depression, but the moon is gone, the stars are fading, and the sky is glowing toward the east.

What just happened? How long have I been here? I know I feel different, transformed, but I am even weaker than before.

My mouth fills with salty fluid. I swallow convulsively and—

Swallow? Did I just swallow?

“Will?”

I turn and see Maya hurrying across the plateau toward me. She's dressed in the long traditional huipil that covers her from neck to ankles, but even in the dim light she looks absolutely wonderful.

I try to sit up but I haven't the strength. I can't even speak.

She carries a container and as she drops to her knees beside me she holds it toward my lips.

“Can you?” she says in a voice thick with emotions—I hear hope and fear at war in those two words.

I open my mouth and she pours in a few drops of the milky mix that has sustained me these past few days. It tastes wonderful and I swallow it.

I swallow it!

I look up at her and nod. “More, please?”

And my voice, though still hoarse, is clearer—the pressure on my laryngeal nerve has eased!

Maya begins to sob as she pours more milk into my mouth. I can barely swallow it, not because of pain or constriction, but because I'm crying too. I get it down, though—I'm too ravenous and thirsty to let anything halt the flow of this marvelous nectar of the goddess—and
between sobs she feeds me more, sip after sip until—

“That is enough for now,” Maya says. “Too much will make you sick.”

I nod. I want to upend the jug over my face but I know she's right.

“What happened?” I say.

“You tell me.”

As I tell her about falling into my body, seeing my cells and manipulating my life processes, she begins nodding, then grinning, and her smile widens and widens until finally, when I tell her about strangling the major portion of my tumor at its primary site, she clutches my hands, throws back her head, and laughs.

“Yes! Oh, yes, Will!” she shouts with tears running down her cheeks. “You have done it. You have found the Fifth Harmonic!”

Had I? I'm not sure. Something wonderful and transforming has happened . . . something that finally deserves that misused, beatento-death word,
incredible
. But what?

“Is it the sound I heard inside of me?”

“No, no,” she says. “The Fifth Harmonic is not a sound, it is a state of being, a state of complete harmony with your body and your self. It is the new level of awareness and consciousness I have been telling you about.”

“But I thought they were just words,” I say. “I never dreamed . . . I mean, I was conscious down to the cellular level. No, even further— to the molecular level.”

“Not was—
are
.”

“You mean, tonight wasn't just a one-shot deal?”

“Oh, no. Once you achieve the Fifth Harmonic, it is yours forever.”

“I can go back in? Any time I want? Because that tumor's not finished, not by a long shot.”

“Yes, any time you wish. You will have to go back again and again to root out all the metastases, but wait until you are stronger. You have no reserves right now.”

Already I feel stronger. I sit up and experience a rush of vertigo, but the world stops spinning after a few seconds—the world, but not my brain. I close my eyes and try to sort through what has happened, try to make sense of it.

So easy to write off the night's experiences as a dream, that the only altered states of awareness and consciousness I've experienced
are a very elaborate set of hallucinations. And yet . . .

I prod my throat with my fingers . . . the knotted masses of the lymph nodes are still there, but they're undeniably smaller.

And then there's the fact that I can swallow now, and my voice is coming back.

I can act like an idiot and say I'm still hallucinating, or I can simply . . .

Accept.

“But why did you have to be so mysterious all along?” I say. “Why didn't you tell me this was what I was after?”

She gives me a wry grin. “And how would Cecil have reacted?”

Good point. Excellent point. Cecil would have run screaming back to Westchester. Even now, parts of me are falling all over themselves trying to find scientific explanations for what has happened.

I catch sight of the tines, still sitting in their notches at the four corners of the world.

“The tines,” I say, reaching out and clutching the fire tine, remembering how it placed the mark of Cain on a couple of the cancer cells. “They did it.”