The Magic Bullet

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Taylor,” she said softly. He hit a key and then turned.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Don’t you think you will ever get along with him?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Whom, but who’s checking? If you mean that Neanderthal who sleeps in your room and burps like a sick motorcycle every morning when he wakes up…”

  “He doesn’t burp every morning,” she said laughing.

  “You mean that’s you I hear through the wall?”

  “What else do you hear through that wall, Taylor?” she asked quickly, her eyes small.

  “Nothing,” he said and turned back to the computer. “Nothing worth hearing,” he muttered under his breath.

  “You better get to bed early. We have to get up early to go to the hospital.”

  “I’ll be up before you,” he said and she knew he would.

  Warren came home late and didn’t get up early because he was between jobs. A contractor’s life was erratic to say the least. Sometimes he worked for months, six days a week, and then he wouldn’t have anything for months. Warren was somewhat more ambitious than most construction workers she knew, however. He liked having money in his pocket and driving a good, late-model automobile. He was a sharp dresser, too, and always up on the styles. When they went out, he liked to splurge, take her to the fanciest restaurants and order the most expensive meals and wines. He had rich tastes and had educated himself when it came to the finer things. Actually, that was what impressed her about him and what made her believe that eventually Taylor and he would get along. That and his terrific body.

  The man was carved of stone. His stomach was flat and hard, and when she reached around and grabbed those buttocks, it actually sent a second surge of excitement through her body, driving her to another series of orgasms. She also liked the way Warren made love. It was obviously part of his ego trip to be sure the woman was satisfied. He wanted to hear her cry for mercy. Sometimes she did moan for real, but most of the time, she moaned To make him happy.

  After breakfast, Demi and Taylor drove to the hospital. They entered and were directed to the hematology department. Taylor walked in like a trouper, and when the nurse asked him if he had ever given blood before, he shrugged and said, “Sure. There’s a vampire living next door.”

  That set the scene.

  “Actually, he’s never done it,” Demi said. “But I bet he knows all about it,” she added proudly.

  When the donation was completed, they gave him some juice and had him rest for a while. He was up and eager to go sooner than they expected, however. Demi drove him to school and then kissed him good-bye.

  “You did a wonderful thing today, Taylor. I’m very proud of you.”

  Taylor smiled and brushed back his shock of hair. He started away and then turned back.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “What now, Taylor?” she said, preparing herself to hear him say something sad about Jodi.

  “I wasn’t kidding back there.”

  “What do you mean? Kidding about what?”

  “We do have a vampire living next door,” he said. “But Warren doesn’t have to worry. They feed on human blood only.”

  “Taylor, stop.”

  He walked off. When he was gone, she laughed and drove off to work.

  And that was how it started. A simple act of human compassion and charity, a gift of giving that helped everyone feel a little better about a horrible thing.

  Some time after four in the afternoon the following day, just after Demi had started on her last customer of the day, Kiki called her to the phone, a look of annoyance in his face.

  “If it wasn’t your sister, I would tell her to call back,” he said. “I don’t like it when my customers are interrupted. Everyone’s time is important. We don’t want our customers thinking we don’t respect them.”

  “Give me a break. I don’t get many personal calls here, Kiki. You know that, and you know what’s happening in my family,” she said, wanting to add, “you damn dandy.” But she didn’t.

  Her hand was trembling as she took the receiver. It was going to be bad news. She knew it. She expected it. But that never made it any easier. She took a deep breath, whispered her mother’s name and said, “Lois?”

  “Demi.” She was crying so hard, it was hard to hear her. “Demi.”

  “What is it, Lois?” she asked, her hand on her heart, which felt like it would pound its way out of her chest. Her legs felt like they were turning into jelly. She really believed she was about to faint.

  “It’s Jodi.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She felt the tears coming.

  “No…she’s…completely better,” Lois said.

  “What?” Demi shook her head as if her ears weren’t working correctly. “What are you saying, Lois?”

  “Jodi. She went into a remission so quickly and so completely, the doctor is stupefied.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No one does. They’ve tested her twice. They can’t find any evidence of the cancer. You should see her. She’s eating everything in sight, and she wants to go home. Demi, it’s a miracle!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Allan Parker had chosen to specialize in oncology like a man bent on vengeance. Just at the start of his second year of medical school, his father called him to tell him his mother had been diagnosed with a malignant breast tumor. A radical mastectomy was performed, but the cancer cells had traveled to her pancreas and liver. It was only a matter of months.

  Allan’s mother never saw him receive his diploma, nor was she there to celebrate when he was offered a position at the U.S.C. Medical Center. He interned and began to study under Dr. Thornton Carver, a world-renowned oncologist and surgeon, and quickly became his most promising prodigy. No young doctor had ever shown Carver more dedication, more determination. Allan’s intensity not only impressed Dr. Carver, it actually frightened him a bit. He wasn’t sure whether Allan Parker was an overachiever or simply a man obsessed.

  Although Allan stood a little over six feet tall, maintained a trim figure, and was strikingly handsome in a mature way; even though he was only in his late twenties, he had few romantic involvements with women during the period he studied under Thornton Carver. Carver was convinced Allan wasn’t gay; it was more like he was asexual most of the time. If, during one of those rare occasions, he did date and start to become involved with someone, he always seemed to have a built-in shutoff valve that caused him to abruptly end the relationship.

  Once, when they discussed it briefly over coffee, Allan confessed he didn’t want anything or anyone distracting him. A relationship, especially a marriage and a family, would certainly do just that.

  “A wife, children, require and deserve at least half your energy and attention. I’m not willing to commit to that right now.”

  “Well, I would humbly suggest I’m a fairly successful doctor and have a family, Allan,” Thornton told him.

  “I respect that, Doctor Carver. It’s just not for me at the moment.”

  If anyone else had told him to his face that his life wasn’t enough for them, Thornton Carver would have taken offense, but he was continually intrigued by his prodigy. He sat back, smiling, and softly asked, “What do you expect to accomplish, Allan?”

  “I expect to find a cure for cancer,” he replied nonchalantly, as if the answer couldn’t be more obvious. It had the sound of a juvenile’s dream, but there was nothing in Allan’s face that suggested it was a fantasy. He was damn serious. “I expect to discover the magic bullet.”

  He was indeed spending every spare waking hour either reading about other cancer researchers or doing his own research.

  “Everything tells us that this just isn’t going to be one bullet, Allan. You know that some cancers act completely different from others, that some patients who contract lung cancer or colon cancer, melanomas, sarcomas react differently,” Dr. Carver said.

  “There’s a com
mon thread to it all, some starting point, something that initiates the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells.”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “The Wake Forest work with cancer-resistant mice strongly suggests the possibility that we are all constantly getting cancer, one cell at a time, but our immune systems detect and kill them.”

  “I understand that, Allan, however…”

  “If we can just pin down why and understand our own immune system much better, we could unlock the box that contains the secrets we need,” Allan insisted. “Even you have concluded that unexpected spontaneous remissions aren’t simply explained away by claiming incorrect diagnoses.”

  Carver nodded. Who knows, he thought, maybe this young man will make a significant discovery someday. He was certainly relentless. He lived alone in a modest Los Angeles apartment, choosing the location and the apartment simply on the basis of its proximity to work. His friends, if you could categorize them as such, were only people he met at work and people with whom he could discuss or share his labor. Most of them eventually backed away because he simply exhausted them. No matter what the movie or play was that they saw together, he found a way to bring their work into it. If they went to dinner, he talked about the significance of food, the research on nutrition. The same result followed attendance at a concert, the discussion of a new novel, even a walk in the park. Something always led him back to his topic, his work.

  “You remind me of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick” Gloria Alford told him over cocktails one night. The twenty-four-year-old woman in accounting had dated him twice before, each time waiting for him to ease up and enjoy what they were doing together, to truly enjoy each other.

  “Oh? How so?” he asked.

  “A white whale bit off his leg and gave him his only reason to live: revenge.”

  He nodded. She meant it as a negative, but he just saw it as an objective, true observation. It turned out to be their last date—a mutual conclusion.

  Oddly enough, even though Allan was a man fully concentrating on the science and devoted to the research, he was not a doctor with a poor bedside manner. He truly empathized with his patients, especially older women. They felt and believed he was in this with them, that their battle was his personal battle. They swore by him; they had faith in him.

  “You’ve got to focus all your mental energies and power on this cancer,” he told them, “and think of it as the enemy within. Nothing else should involve your attention. Chant slogans of hate. Will it dead. Hate it!” he advised, with such enthusiasm that they worked to please him more than to please themselves.

  After his internship, he had remained at U.S.C. Medical Center as an associate of Dr. Carver’s, but whenever Allan lost a patient, he took it far too personally for Thornton Carver, who chastised him continually.

  “It’s good to give your patients the sense that you care about them, that you see them as people and not as objects, but if you mourn every one of them, you’ll burn yourself out, Allan. It will eventually affect your work,” Carver advised.

  There wasn’t a man Allan respected more than Dr. Carver, but this was one bit of wisdom Allan refused to accept.

  “When I mourn them, I grow stronger,” he replied. Carver nodded. Incredibly enough, there was evidence of that. During the days following the loss of one of his patients, Allan was always at it longer, harder. One of Carver’s interns nicknamed Allan “Doctor Sisyphus,” and the name caught on. Sisyphus was the mythological king of Corinth whom Zeus punished for disrespect. He was condemned to push a boulder up the side of a pit eternally. It always rolled back down the hill before he could get it out, but he never gave up trying. After a while, his punishment, his tragedy, became his sole purpose for living. Was that true for Allan Parker as well?

  Eventually, Allan did hang onto one friend, Joe Weber, another one of the young physicians who studied under Thornton Carver. Joe was a five-foot-seven, stout, dark-haired, but blue-eyed man who was somewhat in awe of Allan. He admired him for his dedication and wondered if he was lacking in that area himself, for, unlike Allan, he was very interested in women and good times and could easily put the work aside and party all weekend.

  However, Joe was an excellent student and a fine physician. Thornton was proud of him and strongly recommended him when the Desert Cancer Group in Palm Springs interviewed him for a position. They hired him; he met the daughter of a patient the following year, and four months later, got married. Eleven months afterward, they had their first child and bought their first house. Joe was living about as normal a life as an oncologist could in an age when cancer, in one form or another, appeared to be the plague of the century.

  Meanwhile back in Los Angeles, Allan, now in his mid-thirties, remained unmarried, unattached Doctor Sisyphus. He maintained his good looks and trim figure and was at the top of everyone’s “Most Eligible Bachelors” list. New interns assumed he was some sort of genius who had already been practicing far longer than anyone else his age. He was odd, but a genius. They saw that he spent as much time in research as he did in the practice of medicine. It seemed he never slept. Was he human?

  Despite other romantic opportunities, Allan Parker continued to ride alone, a medical bounty hunter in pursuit of the world’s most detested, abhorrent villain. He never shied away from a confrontation with the disease. He moved through the rows of terminally ill like a battlefront medic, angry at his inability to stop the dying, furious at a world that would permit it to go on, raging at the enemy, and remaining more determined, more willing to sacrifice, waiting for his precious magic bullet to reveal itself.

  So when Joe Weber called him late in the morning one day to report on an unexplainable, spontaneous remission of a child suffering with leukemia, Allan resembled someone who thought he had been chosen to hear a divine revelation.

  “She was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia nine months ago. She went into remission but relapsed only a month afterward.”

  “You did a bone marrow transplant?” Allan asked.

  “Yes. Ineffective. During the past month or so, I was trying to keep her comfortable, stop the bleeding and infections with platelet transfusions. The condition degenerated. Frankly, I was looking at a few weeks at the most.”

  “Uh-huh,” Allan said, gritting his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fist. He had just lost a leukemia patient who was only in his mid-thirties. He had been diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. Present statistics showed that there were only about two new cases of it diagnosed per 100,000 people in the United States each year, and he had one of the cases. To him it seemed as if the monster taunted him, brought his most cherished victims to Allan’s doorstep.

  “Two days ago, the girl’s cousin donated platelets. I wanted to try some white blood cells to fight her infections as well. She wasn’t responding to the antibiotic protocols,” Joe continued. “I transfused them immediately that morning. I thought I detected some improvement in her, so I ran the tests immediately. Her white cell count was way up of course, but the numbers made no sense. It was almost as if…they cloned themselves. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the result. The next day, by two o’clock, her white and red cells were normal, as were her platelets. But here’s the big news, Allan. There was no evidence of blasts in her bone marrow. Not a single immature white blood cell. She was full of energy, had an appetite, and looked like she could get right off the bed and walk out. I don’t know how to explain this.”

  “You transferred white cells, too?” Allan asked to be sure he heard it all correctly.

  “Yes. I’ve concluded all other therapies, Allan. I lost all hope of prolonging this child’s life. The leukemia was raging.”

  Allan sat up.

  “And now she’s in complete remission?”

  “A healthier, happier little girl you’ve never seen. Appetite, energy. I feel like a fool keeping her in the hospital. You believe in miracles?”

  “Not in the religious sense,” Allan replied. “
How old is the girl’s cousin?”

  “Fifteen. We were raking the area for donors and finally decided to include him with his parental permission. Everyone’s nervous about blood transfusions these days as it is, but his blood is O/Rh negative, close as they come to a universal donor.”

  “You know that there have been some isolated cases of spontaneous remission with this type of cancer,” Allan said.

  “Yeah, but none of the cases I’ve read about were this far along. I’m talking days away from the Grim Reaper,” Joe said, lowered his voice, and added, “maybe even hours.”

  Joe’s obvious amazement impressed him. He had come to hate false promises and leads that led to nowhere, however, and practiced a healthy skepticism.

  “Can you get the boy in again, get a sample of his blood?”

  “I suppose. Do you really think it was the cause?”

  “From what you’re telling me, it’s the most logical place to look,” Allan said.

  “What am I going to look for?” Joe asked. “Do you know about something new?”

  Allan considered and looked at his schedule. “I’ll take a ride out there. I want to examine the girl, so don’t release her.”

  “That might be hard considering her condition at the moment, but okay. And?”

  “And then we’ll see,” Allan said cryptically. He checked his watch. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Get at least twenty cc’s from the boy,” he said.

  “Great. You’ll stay with us. Toby’s always asking why you never come down, and you’ll be surprised at how the girls have grown.”

  “Thanks,” Allan said.