Out of big-sister protectiveness, Wendy let it pass. “Even if I wanted to get pregnant,” she continued as if nothing had happened, “Chris isn’t around long enough to get down to business.”
“Even big-time scientists have to go to bed on occasion.” Jenny took Wendy’s arm and headed for the door. “You have to be understanding. He’s brilliant, and one day they’ll give him a Nobel Prize for his cancer drug.”
Because it was all so secret, Wendy could not tell her about his real research. Nor could she explain how obscene she found it.
Nobel Prize: If only his aspirations were so modest,
Wendy thought and turned off the lights.
Quentin’s stomach leaked acid when he heard the voice.
Vince Lucas didn’t have to explain why he had called. The $2.5 million for the apricot pits was supposed to have been wired to a Bahamian bank by November 1, and here it was the middle of December—two extensions later—and the next payment of equal amount was due in six months.
He had explained to Antoine his problems collecting debts from European jobbers. But the real reason was that Quentin was buying time for Chris Bacon to synthesize the toxogen. All else was in place—the chemical patent, fabulous clinical results, the marketing strategies. And with Ronald Reagan’s help, FDA approval was just around the corner. All that was left was a commercially viable yield and he could pay what he owed and be out from under Antoine Ducharme, his Consortium, and his lousy apricots which were costing them nearly thirty dollars per pit—a rate which would make the toxogen astronomically expensive.
But that hadn’t happened because Bacon said he needed more time—months more. The fucking golden boy with the youngest Ph.D. from M.I.T. in decades, and he couldn’t come up with a decent yield!
What nearly stopped Quentin’s heart was that Vince Lucas was in town. His message was brief: Meet him at nine that evening in the parking lot of Concord’s Emerson Hospital which was a few miles from the lab. No mention of money or deadlines. But it would not be a social call. Nor was it like being indebted to legitimate creditors or the IRS. Quentin was beholden to men whose penalty for duplicity was execution.
But they couldn’t do that to him, he assured himself. They needed him because he was the only link to the money. Ross knew nothing about
Antoine. His sole concern was that his company not be ruled by the whims of Nature—invasion by some apricot-loving caterpillar or a tropical hurricane. If anything happened to Quentin, all deals were off.
Quentin’s eyes drifted to the photo on the far wall—the 1932 Eureka football team with Ross standing behind Ronald Reagan who had signed it, “Win one for the Gipper.” Two weeks ago, Quentin had pushed Ross to fly to Washington to get Reagan to expedite FDA testing. Ross first refused to exploit his friendship, but Quentin reminded him that Reagan prided himself on helping his friends. It was people like Ross who had put him in the White House—raising millions to support Nancy’s White House decorations including all the fancy china.
Ross had conceded, but he lacked the Darwinian edge. He was not the opportunist Quentin was. Just as well he was retiring soon. He had become soft. He was an obstacle to progress.
A little before nine Quentin pulled his Mercedes into a slot under a lamp post. Only a handful of cars sat in the lot. A solitary ambulance was parked by the emergency room, its lights turned off. Christmas lights in a few upper windows gave the scene a comforting glow. To ease his nerves, he found a station playing Christmas carols. At about nine fifteen, midway through “Here Comes Santa Claus,” Vince Lucas rolled up beside Quentin’s Mercedes. He nodded for Quentin to get into his car. Quentin went over to the passenger door and opened it hesitantly.
“You’re letting the heat out,” Vince said.
His heart jogging, Quentin got in and closed the door. “Good to see you, Vince,” he chirped and offered his hand like an old business colleague. Vince was wearing leather gloves but did not remove them, nor did he take Quentin’s hand.
“Bullshit,” Vince said. “It’s not good to see me,” and peeled onto the road.
Quentin’s chest tightened. This was not going to be a good night. The car turned onto Route 2 then cut up a side street toward Concord center.
“Where’re we going?” Quentin tried to affect an easy manner.
“For a ride.”
“Uh-huh.” After a long silence, Quentin said, “Look, Vince, I know why you’re here. I explained to Antoine that I need until the turn of the year. There’s money coming in from Switzerland. It’s just taking more time than expected.”
Vince still said nothing. From Concord they crossed into Lincoln not far from Quentin’s neighborhood. Houses along the way were lit up with Christmas lights. Quentin tried again. “Vince, we’re businessmen. We’ve got a contractual arrangement which I intend to fulfill, but these things happen around the end of the year, and Antoine knows all that. You’ll get the money—”
Vince pulled the car over with a jerk. To Quentin’s horror, they had stopped in front of his own house. The Christmas was tree visible through the family room window. The upper floor was dark except for the master bedroom where Margaret was in bed reading or watching television.
“Now, we talk,” Vince said, turning in his seat to face Quentin. His face was half in shadows, making his teeth flash white as he spoke. “Antoine Ducharme is two thousand miles from here. The last time you talked, he gave you an extension until December first, twelve days ago. You missed it, which makes you
my
responsibility now. And I don’t do extensions.”
“Look, Vince, please … It’s all the red tape with money transfers. I swear on my life.”
“Your life doesn’t have weight.” He pointed to the dark upper corner of the house. “Just behind that ‘TotFinder’ sticker is a pretty pink bedroom with a pretty pink bed where your pretty pink daughter Robyn is asleep.” Before Quentin could ask, Vince handed him three photographs, all of Robyn: at her bedroom window that morning, being dropped off at school, at recess.
“Listen, Vince—” he began.
Vince clamped his gloved hand on Quentin’s jaw. “No, you listen.” He pressed his face so close that Quentin could smell garlic on his breath from his dinner. In a feather-smooth voice he said, “You have until Friday. Understand ? The day after tomorrow. If you renege again I look bad, and that I can’t live with. Neither can your daughter.” He squeezed so hard Quentin’s jaw felt crushed. “Two days. Two-point-five million dollars. Plus another two hundred thousand visitation fee which you’ll wire to another account. The number’s on the back.” And he stuffed one of his business cards into Quentin’s pocket.
Quentin started to protest, but thought better. He grunted that he understood, and Vince snapped his face away. In dead silence they drove back to the Emerson, as Quentin massaged his jaw and wondered how to manipulate Darby funds, thinking how his daughter’s life hung in the balance.
“This is me here,” Quentin said as they rolled by his Mercedes. But they continued all the way to the emergency room. “But I’m back there.”
When Vince stopped the car, he extended his gloved hand. Quentin took it, gratified that it would end with a gesture of civility. Except that Vince didn’t let go. Instead, his other hand closed over Quentin’s.
“This is closer.”
“I don’t follow.”
Still holding Quentin’s hand, Vince said, “You’re going to need to see a doctor.”
“What?”
Vince then clamped one hand onto his index finger and bent it all the way back until it broke at the joint with a sickening crack. Quentin jolted in place with a hectoring scream which Vince instantly caught in his glove. Pain jagged through Quentin like a bolt of lightning, searing nerve endings from his hand to his crown and through his genitals to the soles of his feet.
While Quentin yelled and squirmed in his seat, Vince kept his viselike grip on Quentin’s mouth. For several minutes he held him until the cries subsided to whimpers.
Quentin’s hand had swollen to twice its size, while his finger hung at a crazy angle like a dead root.
Vince then opened the passenger door, and in the same silky voice he said, “The next time it will be your daughter’s neck.”
And he shoved him out and drove off.
The morning after Jenny and Abigail returned home, Wendy stood naked before the full-length mirror and felt her heart slump. She looked all of forty-two. In her younger days she was a slender size six, and 112 pounds. Now she was two sizes and fifteen pounds heavier. Her waist and thighs were getting that thick puddingly look. Crows’ feet were starting to spread around her eyes and mouth, and the smiles lines were becoming permanently etched.
Worse still, she could see herself as an old woman: a hunched and wrinkled thing with flabby skin, thinning hair, teeth chipped and gray, creasing eyes, a neck sunken into the widow’s hunch of osteoporosis, her legs whitened sticks road-mapped with varicose veins, her hands patched and knobbed. It was the image of her mother staring back at her, a woman who had died of breast cancer at sixty-eight yet who looked fifteen years older because of a crippling stroke. The image was jolting.
While she had come to accept the grim inevitability, it was no less shocking to apprehend it in her own face. What Chris had dubbed the death gene—that nasty little DNA switch that never failed to click on the long slide to the grave.
But, damn it!
Wendy told herself,
Jenny was right: Forty-two is still young
. And she was still healthy. What benefit was there to waste the good years left wringing her hands over mortality? No, she couldn’t reverse gravity or cellular decay, but she could at least slow the progress.
“The wine is sweet whenever you drink it.”
Chris’s phrase hummed in her mind.
Feeling a surge, she put on her running suit and sneakers. A few minutes later she was pounding the pavement around Mystic Lake and debating with herself.
You’re forty-two years old. Twenty years from now you’ll be sixty-two. In thirty years, seventy-two
. It didn’t make sense, not at her age.
But why not? And why not her?
She splashed through shafts of sunlight, thinking that the choices she made now would determine how she lived out the rest of her life: Her grief from Ricky’s death would never leave her, but it was time to end the habit of mourning.
Half-consciously she rubbed her hand across her breast as she jogged along. As Jenny said, women over forty had babies all the time.
It was her visit that had done it—seeing Jenny’s unequivocal joy. And hearing a baby in the house again—sounds that took her back to happier days. Jenny had given Wendy a pair of earrings, but the real birthday gift was leaving Wendy yearning for the same joy and feeling almost startled into the hope of it. Why not? She was still healthy.
“The wine is sweet whenever you drink it.”
Yes!
she told herself. YES! And she glided down the path thinking of baby names.
That night Chris peered through the eyepiece of his microscope and saw the landscape of eternity. And it took his breath away.
He was looking at the cells of his own body—cells that contained all the information that made him Christopher Bacon. Cells that should be turning bright blue, dying under his eye—but were thriving.
Eight weeks ago, he had scraped off some flesh from the inside of his cheek. He liquefied the sample and divided it into equal batches, one treated with nutrients—growth factors, hormones, vitamins, insulin, and a lot of
other stuff—that sped up replication, collapsing the remaining life of his own forty-two-year-old cells into two weeks. The other he treated with the same nutrients plus tabulone. Within twenty-four hours the surface of each dish was covered with newly replicated cells. From those batches he made subcultures. He kept that up for four weeks until the untreated cells stopped subdividing and died. Meanwhile, the tabulonetreated cells continued to thrive. Two months later they were still replicating. If he had kept that up, he would have produced endless tons of his own cells.
The realization was staggering: The cells of his own flesh were reproducing indefinitely.
That could only mean that human death was not programmed in the genes but the result of a program of cell divisions—a finite process that climaxed in the eventual breakdown of cell walls. In other words, we lived as long as our cells kept replicating. But why did they stop at fifty?
He did not understand the genetics, but it confirmed his suspicion that aging had no clear evolutionary purpose. Traditional textbook reasoning about making room for the next generation made no sense since most animals never made it to old age. They were eaten by predators or died from disease. There was no reason for natural selection to genetically favor demise, Chris told himself. No purpose served.
His eye fell on the wall clock as the second hand made its circuit. Like all his clocks and watches, it was set ten minutes fast, a silly little habit to allow himself to pretend that it wasn’t as late as it was—that he had a few more minutes free of charge.
While the radio played softly in the background, Chris watched the clock move inexorably around its course.