And I, in some weird paradox, hadn’t felt so alive in months.
16
“GOD, THOSE KIDS,” BROOKE MURMURED as we wove our way between granite headstones back to the car. We’d just sat through the eulogies, watched four caskets being lowered into four holes. Big ones for Murph and his wife; depressingly small ones for the two kids.
The kids, I thought.
In my life, I have had the misfortune of seeing children die; you don’t do two years in the backcountry of a nearly failed sub-Saharan state and not see that. AIDS, malaria, sleeping sickness. I spent years railing and screaming at disease; it is my life’s work. I am far too familiar with the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse. Ultimately, he is a frustrating opponent. He is an abstraction. Raging against him is like raging against poverty or war or the moon: it’s futile. Best to put your nose to the grindstone, pick your battle—HIV, flu, TB—and win the ones you can. Still, though, I rage.
It should not have been a shock to me how furious I became when listening to the eulogies for this family, but it was. What killed these two kids was not abstract. What killed them had a face. It was someone who could be blamed and who should be punished. Someone who could bleed.
When we reached the car, Brooke hugged me and murmured: “Grieve for them. This is the time for that.”
She should have known me better by now.
The next few days came and went, creeping by, as time does for those who are out of work, friendless, depressed, who mark the hours by watching the sun crawl across the sky. I checked my e-mail. I checked voicemail. I was concerned only about one communication, really. A little missive from some generic HR functionary at Tetra Biologics. I didn’t care to be contacted by anyone else. I didn’t want Tetra to be scooped.
As it was, Tetra was scooped, by a bunch of landlords and a policy center at Berkeley, the California Emerging Infections Program. The co-director of the program tried to set up an interview with me for later that week. I put her off with some malarkey about a conference in Florida. I should have thought twice about that—she was an infectious disease doc, after all, and knew about all the conferences. I said it had something to do with hedge funds.
A day later, I finally got what I was waiting for: the call from Tetra. The HR woman said that my résumé looked very interesting and they’d like to bring me in to talk. Would tomorrow be all right? Sure, I said. You move fast, I said. We sure do, she said.
After the call, I walked a few blocks to a florist, picked up a bouquet of flowers for Brooke. Irises, her favorite. I hoped they would somehow say what I had such a difficult time articulating. Come to think of it, I probably had a hard time articulating things because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to articulate.
Back at her apartment, I put the flowers in water and decided to take a run. Though the rest of my life was falling into disrepair, I’d somehow managed to keep up my workout schedule. Brooke had forgotten her iPod at home; I strapped the thing on and left the house.
Left or right? Life’s big questions. I glanced up and down the block. About fifty yards away, on my right, a black SUV was parked. Someone was behind the wheel. Had I seen the vehicle on the trip to the florist? Maybe, but my nerves jangled a little. I turned to the right and ran toward the SUV.
I didn’t get a good look inside. As I started to run, the SUV—a big Lincoln Navigator—rolled into the road and roared past me. Inside, a man was talking on a cell phone. I slowed and looked back, not able to see the plates. The Navigator braked at the stop sign at the end of the block, and eased a right turn.
Probably just a real estate agent on a house call, I thought. Probably just that.
17
“GODDAMN IT, NATE!”
I played around with the salad—some arugula-walnut creation of Brooke’s—and kept my eyes on the plate. The irises sat in a vase between us. “It’s a job,” I said.
“It’s not a job,” said the salad’s creator. “You think I’m an idiot?”
“I didn’t have to tell you.”
Truth is, I didn’t really mind keeping it from her. But I let slip that I had two interviews over the next week. Brooke pressed, of course, about where they were. I didn’t want to give her a bald-faced lie, so I’d blurted it out. Moron.
“They probably need people now more than ever,” I said. “Seems like their employees just keep dropping like flies.”
“Stop the damned joking, okay? For once, just stop the damned jokes.”
“Fucking language, Dr. Michaels.”
Now, that wasn’t really a joke—not one of my better ones, anyway—but Brooke sure as hell didn’t like it. She tossed her fork onto her plate—“I really can’t take this anymore”—and violently ripped off a piece of bread. “Don’t you have any respect—any respect at all—for me? For us? I’m at work and I’m worrying about you and I’m thinking there’s no way in hell you’re staying away from that detective and from fucking Tetra Biologics. But then I say: ‘Brooke, stop being so suspicious. Nate loves you. He wouldn’t—’”
“I do love you.”
She leveled a stare at me that could flatten a city. “—Nate loves you. He wouldn’t disrespect you like that.”
There was a long silence. I said, “I guess you know me pretty well, don’t you?”
“I guess I do,” she snapped. “You’re such a little boy, Nathaniel. ‘Oh my life is confusing now. I really can’t figure out what I want.’” She was mocking me. “‘But look! My ex–best friend in the world got himself murdered. Why don’t I run around and try to figure out what happened? Why don’t I shut Brooke out? She was just a tiny part of my life anyway.’” She shot a very unkind look at me. “Try to make an adult decision for once, Nate. Act your age and think about what really matters just this one time.”
Okay, I admit that last sentence, the one about acting my age, changed things. It pissed me off.
I took one last bite of the salad, set down my fork with what I hoped was a strong-silent-type deliberation, and stood up.
“You don’t really care too much about people, do you?” she spat. “The sick ones, sure, the dead ones. But people—living, breathing people you actually have to negotiate with—how much do you care for them? Tell me, how much did you really give a damn about Paul Murphy before he got himself murdered?”
From the living room, I grabbed the bag with my toiletries, the duffel with wardrobe basics, the garment bag—I did have an interview, after all—and my laptop bag. With all that crap, I must have looked like a tinker going to market. Wished that I could have exited with just my attitude and a razor.
Brooke never moved from the table; she had a good enough view from where she was.
“Mature, Nate. Just take off. Just leave.”
And so I did.
All the stuff went into the back of the Corolla. Trunk slammed. Door opened violently. Don’t know who I was performing for. The block was quiet. No people, no movement. A few cars parked along the side of the road, but no one in them. The only sound was the swishing of vehicles on the Central Expressway a hundred yards away.
Brooke might have been overreacting—and that little boy shtick was unfair—but I understood where she was coming from. Truly. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, right? Paul Murphy was my friend, right?
I made a big deal of walking wide circles around the car, so anyone at all interested would know I was making my exit. One last look into the little house with good light, one last long look down the block.
And that’s when I saw it, far up the street, in a shadow between the pools of light cast by the streetlights. Black SUV.
I walked toward it a few steps, couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. Then I raised my arms, extended the middle finger on each hand.
Come and get me, you pricks.
18
THOUGH OTHER PARTS OF THE country boast about their biotech—Boston, Philly, the DC–Baltimore corridor—none of them came close to the Bay Area in terms of sheer de
nsity and number. There are nearly 1,500 biotechs in the U.S. The Bay Area has over 800 of them.
The region was blessed with a collection of world-class universities—UCSF, Berkeley, my old haunt—an aggressive venture-capital culture, and great weather. Many of the industry’s graybeards were conceived and birthed here, given names that sounded like they came out of some awkward sci-fi–Greek mythology hybrid: Genentech, Chiron, Affymetrix, Scios. And though the companies had spread through the region like bacterial colonies on an agar plate, South San Francisco was the heart of it all.
Tetra Biologics had managed to score choice real estate in South San Francisco, a mile or so from Genentech, the great patriarch of the lot. Genentech periodically had very good years. When it did, investors took the cue; the money spigots tended to open from the big institutional funds and from the VCs down in the Valley. When it had a bad year—well, no one ever said biotech was an easy business.
Tetra’s building turned out to be a shock of white girders and aquamarine glass. Its shape was like the bow of an ocean liner, chopped off somewhere around the shuffleboard courts, the rest of the ship, I assumed, having sunk to the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Consistent with the maritime vibe, steam poured from two large vents at the top of its six floors and refugee seagulls clustered in a corner of the parking lot.
It was about ten-thirty, a half hour before my interview. A terrible night’s sleep in a terrible motel along Highway 101 meant that I didn’t have a plan, and I hoped that sitting in the parking lot would clear my thoughts. No such luck. Every time I found my train of thought, Brooke would walk in and derail me. Useless.
I quit the parking lot, figuring that some time inside Tetra might give me a better idea of its layout. I walked through a sea of sun-blasted cars, toward the place where, a week before, Paul Murphy had been punching his time clock. My heart thumped more than it should have as I passed under a glass-and-steel canopy that bathed the walkway underneath it with a weird oceanic light.
My shoes clacked across the polished granite floor of the atrium. Inlaid into the granite in brass was the Latin phrase nosce te ipsum. My education may not have been Ivy League, but I did recognize the words: Know thyself. The same words had been chiseled over the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi. They were recycled centuries later in the frontispiece of a book by the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, recycled again in early-twenty-first-century California. These Tetra guys were lucky copyright laws didn’t extend to wise old sayings.
I introduced myself to a security guard perched behind a high-concept metal desk, told him I was here to see Francine Hartman. He took my Georgia driver’s license, gave me the once-over, called someone. After a few grunts, he hung up the phone and pointed to a computer at the periphery of the atrium.
“She’ll be down in a few minutes. You can sign in there. Fill out the NDA and you’ll get your visitor’s badge.”
At the computer, I typed in some personal information—name, organization, Social Security number, genetic code—and up popped Tetra’s Non-Disclosure Agreement. These things were mandatory for any tech company, and life sciences companies were among the most skittish about their intellectual property.
I read through the form, peppered with words like “confidential” and “proprietary,” “injunction,” and “arbitration.” If you read these things closely—and I didn’t anymore—you might start to worry about spending twenty years in the clink if you accidentally disclosed some trade secret like, say, the color of the bathrooms.
I hit “Agree” at the bottom of the form. From a printer below the computer, an ID badge was born. I peeled the ID from its backing and stuck it on my jacket. Thus identified, my civil rights curtailed, I found a seat.
Francine Hartman didn’t appear, and after nine minutes my ass began to ache on the hard marble bench. I adjusted and readjusted and got so involved in my posterior discomfort that I didn’t notice the woman walking toward me, watching me grind my butt into the marble like a hemorrhoidal chimp.
“Dr. McCormick?”
I looked up and saw a primate female, about thirty-five, too stylish to be anyone but Human Resources or Marketing. Francine Hartman. She introduced herself; I shot to my feet and shook her hand.
“Those benches, they certainly need a little padding, don’t they?”
I felt my face go red.
As we walked through the glass doors to the elevators, Francie, as she insisted she be called, brought me up to speed on Tetra Biologics. She spun the humdrum corporate line on the trip to the sixth floor. Nothing more than I’d already gotten from the website, I thought, as the doors opened.
The area was carpeted, which immediately signaled to me that not too much science was conducted on floor six. You don’t carry trays of cell cultures over carpet. If you drop them, the cells really are a bugger to tweeze out of the fibers.
This floor was obviously the provenance of the corporate guys, the suits, the parasites on the backs of good scientists like Paul Murphy. Okay, I might be doing a little demonizing and romanticizing, but I know where my loyalties lie.
Francie pointed down the hallway. “That’s where all the head honchos are. We’re down here.”
“Dustin Alberts is still CEO?”
“Last I checked. You do your homework, Dr. McCormick.”
If that was doing my homework, then the bar for entry to Tetra was, indeed, very low. I said, “I always do my homework. Ever since third grade, when Mrs. Dunn gave me detention—”
I stopped myself when I realized Francie was not paying attention.
We continued down the corridor. Along one wall were the offices with windows. Along the other, offices with walls. Many of the spaces seemed unoccupied.
Francie led me to her office, which, I noticed, had windows.
She sat. I sat. She handed me Tetra’s press kit, a glossy folder emblazoned with the company’s logo.
“Your schedule for the day is in there. You’ll meet with Dan Missoula and Alexandra Rodriguez from our antivirals division.”
Francie leaned back in her expensive chair, prattling on about Tetra, giving me a good glimpse of the high contrast between her bleached choppers and her too-tanned skin. She wore a black blouse, opened one button too far, exposing more nut-brown epidermis. As a former public health official, I wondered if I should have a talk with her about the dangers of sun exposure.
She sprayed the press packet verbatim, not giving me much new information.
“And how old is the antiviral division?” I interrupted.
“Oh, relatively new. Three to four years. We just got through Phase 2 with the product, and we’re going into Phase 3 sometime soon. That”—she stabbed a manicured fingernail at me—“is why we need a new Medical Director.”
“What is the product?”
“Very good question, Dr. McCormick. Direct. I like the pizzazz. Dr. Missoula and Dr. Rodriguez will fill you in more, but it’s called Multavirin. It was one of Getra’s”—a big multinational pharmaceutical company—“orphan drugs and which we licensed a while back. It seems to have some efficacy against hepatitis C.”
Orphan drugs are the cast-offs, the ones that don’t make business sense anymore for mammoth companies interested mostly in billion-dollar molecules.
“Just like ribavirin,” I said, “cor—”
“Enough!” She splayed her fingers in front of her face and wiggled them around like she’d just been attacked by bats. She began to laugh like an orangutan. “Stop! I’m at my limit! I came from Yahoo! three months ago and just learned that transcriptase isn’t chat software.”
Well, that was a good one. We both laughed—har har har—about it. God, this woman was wired. Maybe I didn’t need to talk about skin cancer, but about caffeine toxicity.
Francie continued on about some of the other products in the pipeline: a diabetes drug, one for cancer of the gut. It struck me that Murph must have been managing the cancer drug.
Surprisingly, Francie said something i
nteresting.
“But what I’m most excited about is something called Regenetine.” She must have seen my eyebrows jump, because she said, “Uh-huh. Regenetine. Not wild about the name, but that’s what Marketing stuck us with. It’s some recombinant something or other.”
“That’s your wound-healing product?”
Francie looked at me with a deer-in-the-headlights glaze, those bleached teeth shining back at me like the face of a glacier. “I saw it on your website,” I explained.
“Right. Of course. Wound-healing. Yes.”
“Wow,” I said. “That sounds pretty…cool.”
“Very cool, Dr. McCormick. Very cool. Regenetine might be our blockbuster.”
“Congratulations.”
“Well, thank you. We’re hopeful, but we don’t want to be too hopeful. Like they tell me: a snowball has a better chance in you-know-where than a drug getting approval from the FDA. Things are going well, though. Knock on wood.”
She rapped on her head three times, blazed those choppers again, and stood. I didn’t. Instead, I said, “I have—had—a friend who worked here. Said it was a terrific place to be—”
“It is.”
“—which is why I’m here. Paul Murphy?”
Her smile faltered. “Oh, God, you were a friend of Dr. Murphy’s?”
“I knew him from grad school.”
“How awful…”
“I was wondering if you knew who his friends were, here. It was a long time since we were close, and I wanted to connect…” I trailed off.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know him—didn’t know him—well. Maybe you should ask Dr. Missoula. Or Dr. Rodriguez. God, it’s been a rough week. It’s been really hard for us here. His poor little ones…” She looked at her watch. “Oh! How time flies. I have to get you down to Dr. Rodriguez’s office. She’ll be waiting.”
19
DR. RODRIGUEZ, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH for Multavirin, made me sit for thirteen minutes in a shotgun waiting area outside a locked door. Again, my glutes were being assaulted, this time by a hard plastic chair next to a tiny table covered in scientific journals. I rolled my rump left to right and failed to get comfortable, finally standing up to avoid any misinterpretation about my movements. One Tetra employee suspicious of an itchy ass in Dr. McCormick was enough.
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