Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  ‘Eureka!’ he cried. Despite the fact that Everton had made innumerable discoveries he’d never shouted ‘Eureka’ before. He wondered if corny exclamations were another symptom of his tumour.

  Having isolated the shark genes that produced the proteins that attacked brain cancer cells, he knew he could go the next step and create a form of therapy that would save his life. Naturally he wanted to share his wonderful discovery with someone and the one person he most wanted to tell was his darling wife. He could imagine the look of sheer joy and relief on her face when he told her the good news. He picked up the phone and immediately dropped it back on its cradle. Why imagine the look on her face when he could witness it? He checked his watch. It was only two thirty in the afternoon. What the heck? Even a brilliant scientist deserved an early mark occasionally. He raced out of his lab and into his car.

  Often when people have exciting news to tell, they drive like maniacs. Everton did the opposite. Having just saved his life, he didn’t want to lose it in a head-on with a Mack truck. It was just after three when he pulled into the driveway of his home. He tried to park in his garage but there was a strange car occupying his place. He figured it belonged to his wife’s hairdresser, beautician, personal trainer, personal astrologer, tai chi instructor or interior decorator. He let himself in quietly so that he could surprise her, tiptoed into the lounge, the library, the home theatre, the solarium and the games room before tiptoeing upstairs. He figured if she wasn’t downstairs, she’d be in their bedroom having her nails done. He tiptoed up to the door and gently pushed it open. He was about to shout out ‘Surprise!’ but the word jammed in his throat.

  He was wrong. His precious wife wasn’t having her nails done.

  Or her hair.

  Or her make-up.

  Oh, no.

  Everton quietly pulled the door closed in a state of stunned disbelief. His wonderful, precious, devoted wife was in bed with Al. Al — in her bed, his bed, their bed. On this momentous day, when he and Francine should be celebrating the prospect of his reprieve, tears flooded his eyes. He snuck out the front door, managing to avoid being spotted by the maid, the cook or the gardener, and quietly drove back to his lab.

  Everton was hurt. No, not hurt so much as devastated. But overwhelming everything was a numbing sense of disbelief. After all, he thought he’d been the perfect husband by providing his wife with everything she could ever want. He’d thought they were the perfect couple, a complementary match of her beauty with his brains. He couldn’t even begin to imagine why Francine could possibly be unhappy with him or why she’d allow Al into her bed. Unless . . .

  Unless she was distraught at the prospect of losing him and had turned to Al for comfort. Maybe she was more terrified by the prospect of living alone than she’d let on. Maybe she’d begun planning for life after his demise. Yes, he thought, that was the probable explanation. After all, they’d been so close. Francine couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of her life in an empty house, or indeed several empty houses. But couldn’t she have waited? In four months he would either have found a cure or be dead. Four months didn’t seem long to wait before planning the next phase of her life. It saddened and angered Everton to think that his illness had driven his wife to take such drastic action. He decided there and then that he couldn’t leave her, that he’d never leave her. He reached the lab determined to rescue his wife from Al’s clutches. He was determined to turn his discovery into a cure.

  Later that night when Everton returned home and told his wife about his discovery, she burst into tears. Everton’s big mistake was in thinking they were tears of joy, that they were grounded in feelings of relief that she wouldn’t have to face the rest of her life without him.

  ‘I’ll turn my discovery into a cure,’ he said soothingly. ‘Trust me. I promise I’ll never leave you.’

  Francine cried even harder.

  The following day, when Everton told his oncologist what he intended to do, the doctor was outraged.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ he shrieked.‘Not without proper trials. Not without testing for side effects. Not without formal approval.’

  ‘I haven’t got time for any of that,’ said Everton.

  ‘But what if you’re successful?’ said the oncologist. ‘You’ll make us all look like fools.’

  It took the promise of a lot of money and endless assurances that no one would know of his involvement before the oncologist agreed to help by harvesting Everton’s brain cells and injecting them back into the tumour once they’d been modified with shark genes. But first Everton had to work out exactly which parts of which white-shark genes were implicated in his cure, and how to use them to modify his own DNA. The task looked formidable. He thought about the problems ahead of him while the oncologist drilled a tiny hole in his skull to draw off some brain cells. That night Everton fitted so badly his darling wife made him sleep in the guestroom.

  Everton’s biggest fear was that he’d left his run too late, that the trembling and the fitting would become so bad that he’d no longer be able to work. In desperation, he involved his senior lab staff in the project without telling them exactly what he was trying to do. (After all, it was unethical, illegal and could get them thrown out of the profession.) He also took short cuts he’d never normally countenance. He took whole sections of great-white DNA because he didn’t have time to isolate precisely which part of the genes he needed. He did a lot of this to a lot of genes. He took risks no scientist in their right mind would ever entertain. But Everton was hardly in his right mind and the short cuts offered his only chance of salvation.

  Each night when he finally dragged himself home from the lab, he found Francine waiting anxiously for him.

  ‘How’d you go today?’ she’d ask.

  ‘Better than expected,’ he’d say. His reply was always the same because he didn’t want to upset her.‘Don’t worry,Angel heart, I’ll keep my promise. I’ll never leave you.’

  It always touched him deeply that Francine would then cry herself to sleep.

  After four weeks, the oncologist injected Everton’s modified brain cells directly into the tumour and into the surrounding brain tissue. At that time, Everton had less than three months to live. He went to bed hoping that he’d wake up to evidence that his gene therapy was working, but woke instead to a blinding headache, fever and nausea. Even Francine was moved by his distress. She wanted to send him to hospital, though privately she thought a hospice would be more appropriate. She was convinced Everton’s sickness was the beginning of the end for him.

  To Francine’s dismay, the headaches, fever and nausea went away after five days. Their cessation marked the end of what she’d hoped was her new beginning. Everton rose from his bed to shower feeling weak but optimistic.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll order you some breakfast,’ said Francine through gritted teeth.‘What would you like?’

  ‘Sashimi,’ said Everton.

  Two days later Everton felt well enough to take a limo to the oncologist’s private rooms for a second shot of modified brain cells.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’ said the oncologist.

  ‘As sure as anyone can be when there’s no other option,’ said Everton.

  ‘Do you think it’s working?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How is the trembling?’

  Trembling? Everton looked at his hands. Through the headaches and fever he’d forgotten about his hands trembling. He held them out in front of him. Both were as steady as a rock.

  ‘Coincidence,’ said the oncologist.‘What about the fits?’

  Fits? Everton tried to remember when he’d last fitted. He couldn’t be sure whether or not he’d fitted while the fever raged but he knew for a fact that he’d suffered no fits since the fever broke.

  ‘Temporary relief,’ said the oncologist dismissively. He pressed the plunger on the syringe and fired another few million modified brain cells into Everto
n’s tumour.

  For the next three days Everton lay in bed racked by headaches and fever. On the fourth day he woke up hungry and ordered steak tartare. Poor Francine didn’t know what was going on. She’d had her hopes raised once more only to see them dashed. Her spring wedding was beginning to look decidedly shaky.

  Three days later Everton had the last of his injections and suffered only twenty-four hours of headaches and fever. He ordered seared tuna for breakfast and, after circling the plate a few times, attacked it.

  Everton grew stronger with each passing day on a diet of sashimi, barely seared tuna and salmon, and steak tartare. It reached a point where Francine contrived to dine out as much as possible because she couldn’t stand watching him eat. It wasn’t just the fact that most of the food he ate was raw, it was the way he ate it. Where once he had been uninterested in food and hardly picked at it, he now wolfed it down. Great quantities of it. She put the change down to his tumour but that explanation lacked conviction. Cancer patients were supposed to lose their appetite, not discover it. Other things began to annoy her, too. One night she shook him awake.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said sleepily.

  ‘You’re flapping!’ she said. ‘How can I sleep with you flapping all night long?’

  ‘Flapping?’ said Everton.

  ‘Well, whatever it is you’re doing.’

  ‘I’m not aware of doing anything.’

  ‘You’re flapping,’ said Francine.‘That’s the only word I can think of that fits.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Everton, ‘I’ll try not to flap.’ He rolled over onto his back.

  The following morning Francine found him searching through his drawers for a swimming costume.

  ‘But you never go swimming,’ she said. They kept their pool heated all year round but Francine was the only one who ever swam in it.

  ‘I need the exercise,’ said Everton.

  ‘Why?’ said Francine. She couldn’t figure out why anyone who was scheduled to die in eight weeks would bother doing exercise. What good was a beautiful body when you were about to be cremated? Besides, cancer patients were supposed to grow weaker not stronger. It was so typical of Everton that he did everything the wrong way around.

  ‘What harm can it do?’ said Everton.

  Francine wanted to examine that thought further in case Everton was hinting at suicide, but she was running late for her yoga class.

  Everton found a swimming costume, slipped a bathrobe on over the top, grabbed a towel and headed down to the pool. He’d sat around it many times but had never been tempted in, not even when it was insufferably hot. Swimming simply wasn’t his thing. But on this autumn morning the water looked utterly irresistible.

  He dived in. Until then he didn’t even know he could dive. He surfaced and began to butterfly-stroke his way to the opposite end. This amazed Everton. Until that moment, he hadn’t even been aware that he knew how to do the butterfly. But what astonished him most was the power of his kick. He kicked like a dolphin, his whole body rippling like a sine wave. And he had another surprise in store. As he ducked to make his turn he discovered he could swim faster underwater than he could on the surface. He felt himself able to glide like the space shuttle and cover the length of the pool without apparent effort. This thrilled him as much as any scientific discovery he’d ever made. He decided to see how many lengths of the twenty-five-metre pool he could do on a single breath. He did seven. Seven! One hundred and seventy-five metres on a single breath.

  As soon as he was dry, Everton rang the oncologist. He wanted to share the discovery of his astonishing talent. He was euphoric.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ said the oncologist.

  He put Everton through a series of CT and MRI scans, looked at the results and shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Your tumour has disappeared,’ he said. ‘Gone, vanished. I can’t find a trace of it.’

  ‘Has it metastasised?’ asked Everton. ‘Did it spread to any other parts of my body before it disappeared?’

  ‘There is no evidence of metastasis.’

  ‘That’s fabulous news!’ said Everton. ‘That means my therapy has worked. It means I’m cured. It means I’m not going to die! Francine will be overjoyed. I can’t wait to tell her.’

  ‘Maybe you should wait,’ cautioned the oncologist.‘I want to do more tests. I want to check your chemistry and make a closer examination of your brain before either of us start talking about a cure.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ said Everton. What were another few days if the delay brought unequivocal confirmation of his cure?

  ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ asked the oncologist.

  ‘Got any saltwater?’ said Everton.

  New commissions rolled in but Everton ignored them. He couldn’t get his head around them. He’d faced death and rediscovered life, and along the way realised what a joy it could be. He stayed home and swam, even managing ten lengths of the pool on a single breath. Five weeks from his scheduled death he looked fitter and stronger than he had at any other time in his life.

  ‘What’s going on?’ demanded Al when Francine met him for lunch.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Francine.‘Maybe, just maybe . . .’

  ‘Maybe what?’ said Al.

  ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Francine.

  ‘What?’ said Al.

  ‘Just maybe he’s found a cure. Maybe he’s not going to die after all.’

  ‘The selfish bastard!’ said Al.

  ‘Everton, you’d better come in.’

  ‘Why?’ said Everton.

  ‘I’ve got your test results back,’ said the oncologist.

  ‘On my way,’ said Everton. It worried him that the oncologist didn’t sound at all excited. There again, Everton consoled himself, the oncologist hadn’t sounded excited when he’d discovered that the tumour had disappeared. He put it down to professional jealousy and took a limo to the clinic.

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ said the oncologist.

  Everton sat.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘The good news is your tumour has not only shrunk but gone altogether.’

  ‘That’s great news,’ said Everton.

  ‘Wait,’ said the oncologist.‘The bad news is your brain has started to shrink as well.’

  ‘What?’ said Everton.

  ‘Your brain, it’s shrinking.’

  ‘Shrinking?’

  ‘Quite rapidly,’ said the oncologist. He overlapped the scan of Everton’s brain when the tumour had first been diagnosed with the scan he’d done when the tumour had first disappeared. The brain shrinkage was obvious. When he overlapped the follow-up scan the shrinkage was even more obvious.

  ‘Tell me,’ said the oncologist. ‘Exactly how big is the brain of a great white shark?’

  Everton lay perfectly still on the bottom of the pool. If he lay perfectly still he could remain there for up to ten minutes without having to surface for breath. But time was irrelevant to him as he could no longer measure it or even grasp the concept. Language, imagination and thought also eluded him. He still made discoveries but they weren’t the kind people got excited about or which generated royalties. For Everton, every journey around the pool was a voyage of discovery. His memory had abandoned him too.

  As Everton’s brain had shrunk, his cerebrum — the centre of intellectual thought and conscious activity — had closed down. The remaining part of his brain was fully occupied with autonomic functions like heartbeat and respiration, sensory perception like seeing and feeling, and registering things like hunger and pain, hot and cold. Everton didn’t know who he was or what he was. He was only dimly aware that he was.

  ‘What are we going to do with him?’ asked Al, as he gazed down into the pool.‘Can’t we send him away somewhere?’

  ‘He’s still my husband,’ said Francine.‘And, for all his faults, he was as loyal as any man could be. He promised he’d never leave me. Helping him keep his promise is
the least I can do.’

  She tossed a handful of raw tuna and salmon pieces into the pool and watched as her husband rose slowly to investigate them.

  The Ripple Strip

  Aubrey listened with a mixture of awe, envy and dismay as the young woman presented her paper on The Final Frontier: the structural and physiological adaptations of fish at extreme depths. The auditorium was packed. Every seat was occupied and the overflow perched cheek to cheek on the aisle stairs. Aubrey hadn’t seen anything like it since he’d presented his paper on Variations in Jaw Bones: a key determinant in the classification of fish, some twelve years earlier. He sighed. Twelve years. Had it really been that long? That was when he’d been a luminary, a world authority, much praised and sought after for his work in settling long-standing disputes among ichthyologists about which fish belonged to which class, sub-class, order, superorder and so on. Since then his system of classification had been largely superseded as the science of ichthyology had moved on, propelled forward at an ever-increasing rate by a new generation of bright young brains, of which the young woman speaking was but one example.

  Aubrey suddenly felt old. When he’d chosen his career he’d been so certain that it afforded security for life. He’d been the first of a new breed, a brilliant young man intruding into a world of grey-beards and lifetime tenure. But everything had changed and, unwittingly, he had been one of the agents of change. The young woman was a consequence of this change.

  Her audience sat enthralled as she concisely, logically and confidently presented her discoveries, providing the first comprehensive look at, and understanding of, life ten thousand metres below the surface of the ocean. Her work was brilliant, she was brilliant, and Aubrey was no less enthralled even though each slide and each well-researched observation drove another nail into the coffin of his career. At the relatively young age of forty-two, he found himself treading water and in danger of sinking. His position as senior lecturer in zoology, specialising in ichthyology and herpetology, was under review.