She closed the lid of the toilet, sat down. It was a handwritten note. At first the line breaks made it appear as if it might be a poem. It didn’t appear to be a letter, which is what Christine had hoped it would be. But the more Christine looked at it, the more she was convinced it had to have come from Gabriel. He liked to talk about poetry and writing and the books he had read. She wondered if it was a trap. But the handwriting was unique, and difficult to make out. In fact, she wasn’t sure what it said. If it had been a setup by either the investigators or her boss, why would they have made it so hard to read?
Christine decided to look at it as if it were a math problem. “What’s the given?” And it came to her. She focused on the letters of her name written on the envelope and transposed the letters from the envelope to the writing on the document, and between the two vowels and the handful of consonants, Christine was able to establish a key.
We
We abide among the abandoned.
A collection of the isolated,
We enrich the space reserved for the marginalized.
We make utility from others’ excess, we
Equate the necessary with the beautiful, we
Excel at experience, made at a young age.
We pirate animation from rails long forgotten.
And traffic in ink and lead in
Lines connecting history to invention.
Left to learn from relics
And remains of stone,
Steel, cinder, ash,
We are a congress of kind,
Born from a common currency,
Grounded in laws: elementary, practical.
The writing ended there. No matter how many times Christine read the note it always stopped at this point.
Christine hadn’t eaten or slept since she’d found the envelope a few days ago. She hadn’t left her apartment. Was it from Gabriel, or was it that she wanted it to be from Gabriel? She didn’t care. She decided it was from him and hugged the paper to her pounding chest.
But how had Gabriel been able to deliver this to her apartment without being caught? And if he’d come here, why hadn’t he stayed? Was Gabriel including her in “we”? Her mind was racing. How did this fit with the chairman? Christine thought about her boss, and the board.
The poem had to be about the Dyscards, she thought. So, Gabriel was with them. She had heard about the Dyscards. Everyone had, but Christine knew a little bit more about them than most, not only because she worked at the med center, but also because the medical center was held partly responsible for the problem. Christine had no idea where they lived after they were discarded, or how they survived. After reading this note, Christine still had no idea about the Dyscards. But now she was determined to find out.
It’s the Recovery That’s the Problem
The people around Christine pretended that nothing was different, while the truth was, nothing was the same. Gabriel wasn’t there, victim of a violent crime many had watched happen. Christine felt she was a victim as well. Had Gabriel deceived her? She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to believe he had used her. She still missed him, and no matter how hard she tried not to, she thought of him often, daily in fact. Meanwhile, there was the bizarre note. And she had been implicated in the clandestine operation Gabriel had been conducting at the Pool, even though Christine didn’t want to believe that Gabriel had been involved in that either; yet he was.
What the investigators implied was that Gabriel had not followed the customers’ directives for the genetic makeup of their children, and instead had “radicalized” the gene and tampered with the product and the profit center, which, as Christine knew, was the most egregious form of treason.
But the implications ran deeper. They wanted to know who else was working with Cruz. They were afraid that the center, and the system, had been further infiltrated. And if the Conglomerates thought this was true, Christine was afraid it might be.
And, of course, a link had been made between Gabriel and the underground resistance movement, the Dyscards.
Gabriel had achieved such access at the med center that the authorities assumed Gabriel must be part of a sleeper cell of Dyscards who were infiltrating the Conglomerate machine.
As a result, Christine had been investigated over and over, and was the subject of constant surveillance. She had been forced to forge her character into something it was not; duplicity had never been her forte. She had to be an actor, and play a part with every answer. Every move had to show that she had been transformed, redeemed. She had to remember every lie she had ever told and store it with the person and situation so as not to slip up. She was exhausted.
And if that weren’t bad enough, Christine had to be in bed with the Conglomerates. It was the only way to survive and find out what happened, and where Gabriel was. She shivered for an instant. Of course it could be worse: she could really be in bed with the Conglomerates. The chairman, however, had asked her to join him in something that might be even more repulsive. She had hesitated an instant before she said, “No.”
SHE LEFT THE bedroom and looked out her front door to see if there was another envelope underneath. There was not. The red message light on her phone was blinking, but she doubted that would be Gabriel. She had turned her cell off at about three o’clock A.M., thinking that might help her sleep. She flipped open her phone and crinkled her brow when she saw the number.
“Good morning,” the chairman of the Conglomerate party’s message began. He even paused as if he were expecting Christine to answer. “I am outside and will wait for you here.”
Christine pictured the chairman sitting in the back of the town car; she thought of the silent driver. “First a shower and then a cup of coffee,” she said as she considered her next move.
She knew she might be playing with her life, to string the chairman along, but she felt that at the moment she might have a slight advantage she wouldn’t have for long. The chairman had gone too far with her, regarding his desire to continue his chairmanship through genetic manipulation toward youth; he could not retreat without serious consequences, but the guy had enough of the bait to salivate. Right now Christine was the best thing the chairman had going.
“There is no time like the present when your future is in doubt,” Christine said, and got herself ready to go to work.
THE BLACK TOWN car was double-parked outside Christine’s building. The engine was silent. When Christine approached, the door opened. A blade of white light fell onto the street, and then the door closed and the light went out.
“Ah,” the chairman said. “Here you are.”
“Good morning,” Christine said, “What can I do for you?”
“What is the date?” the chairman replied.
“The end of June,” Christine said, thinking this might allow her some time while providing him with a not-too-distant goal.
“I don’t want to wait that long,” the chairman said.
The truth was that she wanted time to find out where Gabriel was and then to try to get in contact with him. Christine said, “You think it’s easy getting this arranged for you, without raising suspicions, but it’s not. Especially after all the trouble I’m in. Certainly you know about that.” Christine took a quick breath. “And your time and attention has only increased the speculation and suspicion surrounding me.”
“You do this job well, and in a month,” the chairman said in a monotone that pronounced each syllable, “you’ll be the only one left standing. You and me, that is.” To which Christine could only shiver. She realized her T-shirt was wet and cold from perspiration.
The temperature inside the car adjusted almost immediately.
“Tell me how the procedure will go,” the chairman said.
“The procedure is fairly routine. It’s the recovery that’s the problem.” Christine stopped there for a moment, to let him think about that. She had put a lot of thought into this presentation, and now it was time to follow through. She was in no hurry, and t
he longer the chairman had to think about it, the better.
Even though Gabriel was no longer around, he had helped Christine formulate a plan that would now be a possibility for the chairman. When Christine had learned some of the accusations against Gabriel, she had been surprised at first, then more hurt than surprised. She felt that Gabriel had not held up his end of the bargain in exchange for what Christine had brought to the relationship. She hesitated each time she got to this part—the relationship. She hadn’t held anything back, but after she had dealt with the blow of his disappearance, what Gabriel was allegedly up to hadn’t really surprised Christine. That he had decided to undermine the Conglomerate plan of parenting, after what he had said about his own childhood experiences, seemed only natural.
Christine thought about Gabriel’s behavior in relation to her own situation with the chairman, and she thought, Why not? What the chairman was asking for was a new procedure that had not been perfected yet. She thought it best to act as if it were clearly in her command, and to try to figure something out, something stronger and more effective for her means.
Christine looked at the chairman; he looked impatient.
“The procedure begins with a simple swipe from the inside of your mouth,” Christine said. “Then I will do my work. Initially I will extract your genome and take an inventory, determine and quarantine the defective genes, delete them and replace them with repaired genes. Then we do a complete resequencing of your genome, all from that one swipe on a single slide, bathed in a rejuvenating solution,” Christine said. “Then I will confirm that the DNA accepts the replacement as its own. As it is formed from your own genetic base, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.” She took a breath; all of this had not been fully tested yet. “We supplement the gene with an enzyme that speeds up the replication of your new genetic structure. We use an IV drip and eventually it replicates through your whole system.”
She looked at him. “And then that’s where your work comes in.” She waited. “We will need to sedate you during the procedure, prior to inserting the repaired gene. The process should be rapid, and the emotional reaction you feel could be dangerous. We can’t risk that.” Christine wanted to make the chairman feel that they were partners in this operation.
“It’s dangerous,” the chairman said. “How?”
“To your nervous system, for one,” Christine said. “Not to mention your heart. The change to your brain and nervous system could produce shock, which could result in cardiac arrest. On the other hand,” Christine said, “if your brain and nervous system are not conscious of the changes your genetic makeup is going through, you will, in effect, sleep it off, in as little as eight to ten hours. You will wake up a changed and more youthful man.” The chairman of the Conglomerate party stared at his reflection in the tinted glass. They were heading through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel as though the car knew where it was going.
“Why eight to ten hours?” he asked, still looking at his reflection.
Christine didn’t say that she thought she might need that amount of time to get a head start in the run for her life. Instead, she said, “For your own good.”
“How so?”
“Sleep will aid the rejuvenation process,” Christine said. “And as stated before, to avoid shock. As you’re an intelligent man,” Christine said, “you would naturally intellectualize the changes your internal wiring would be going through, and that process might overload the circuits and burn your hard drive.”
“I can handle it,” he said. “I can’t be out of it for that length of time.”
“Do you want to risk having a breakdown? And in front of your subordinates?”
The chairman turned his head away from the window and looked at Christine.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it your way.” He paused before he said, “Do you know what that means?”
Christine knew this agreement meant that she had accepted responsibility for its outcome, and with that acceptance, the consequences. She nodded and shook the chairman’s hand.
He looked directly at Christine and said, “Aren’t you interested in the whereabouts of Gabriel Cruz?”
“I’m interested in the welfare of all of my employees,” Christine said.
“He’s alive, you know,” the chairman said.
“I imagine you must have him in custody,” Christine said. She hoped they had not caught him since he’d left the note.
To her surprise, he said, “Cruz got away. He was dumped. I think the idiot agents who broke into the center got spooked, and they dumped him.” The chairman turned back to look at Christine. “Have you heard from him?” he asked. It felt like a slap across the face to Christine. She was trying to apply these facts to what she knew about the break-in and Gabriel’s kidnapping and not let on about her confusion, or the fact that she thought she had heard from him.
She tried not to think about the note in her pocket as she said, “Cruz would be crazy to contact me, after what he did to my department. He’d be getting off easy if I just turned him in.” The chairman was staring into Christine’s eyes, and she decided she had better shut up and stare back.
“It would be in your best interest to turn him in, should you hear from him,” the chairman said, and looked away.
The Collaborator
So, it’s X, is it?” X’s companion asked. They were making their way south, stepping between steel columns and iron rails along the A train tracks just beneath Central Park West and the old Dakota at Seventy-second Street. In the perpetual fluorescent glare of the underground station, it could have been noon. Even hunched over, the guy towered over X as she tried to keep up with him. He had told her that he’d been on the run as long as he could remember and had found his way to the underground on his own. He was thrilled to meet other kids like himself and had no problem fitting in with the misfits. The forsaken found his resourcefulness useful.
X had been waiting since she had met this guy for him to ask this question—any question, really, but she hadn’t expected it just then. She was preoccupied by the menace of the third rail that gleamed lethal on either side of her, while her companion was acting as if he were strolling down Central Park West. He said they were headed for Columbus Circle, where he had some work to do.
X had been surprised that he had a job and had asked what kind of work he did. He’d answered that it would be easier to show her than to explain. At first X thought he was being evasive, and then decided that of course he was, but it didn’t bother her. What was normal down here?
In the blue-lit space between stations, the light reflected off the track rails like a laser line to guide them: X’s companion was counting off his paces. The light from the Columbus Circle hub didn’t seem so far away. X thought it was bad enough walking in between these tracks; she didn’t want to have to contend with navigating through the confusion of Columbus Circle, where trains were going every way at once.
They were at an alcove recessed a few feet into the wall. Her friend pulled a flashlight from his jacket and lit up the area. There was a steel door with large rivets and bolts and an old-fashioned keyhole. The door called for a special tool, and X’s companion handed her the flashlight before he reached inside his coat and pulled out what looked to be a knitting needle and picked the old-fashioned lock. “This way,” he said.
They walked a few steps to another door, with a bell etched into the frosted glass window. It looked like it had been there forever. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small key and opened the door. It was a room full of multicolored wires connected to tall panels and squat boxes. There was a hum like a motor. She felt the air circulate above her and saw an exhaust fan in a transom window on the other side of the room.
Her companion said, “Communications.” X looked for a microphone, a receiver, a soundboard. Nothing.
“Come in,” he said, and he disappeared into an aisle between the panels. X heard a scraping sound as he returned dragging a wooden bench out into the space at t
he end of the panels.
They sat down, and he said, “Keep the light here, please.” She directed the light toward the side of one of the panels while he took out a Phillips head screwdriver and opened up the end of the panel.
He reached into his coat pocket again and pulled out what looked like a red telephone receiver complete with a coil wire that looked frayed at the end. Then he took out a small keypad with four wires sticking from the top. He matched the ends to connectors inside the panel and they heard a dial tone. He took the four wires from the keypad and attached those to the same connectors and punched a series of numbers into the pad. X heard a phone ringing.
“Hi,” her companion said. “I’m at Columbus Circle.”
X couldn’t make out what was being said at the other end but her companion said a series of yes’s and uh-huh’s until he finally said, “Goodbye.”
“Telephone,” he said, interpreting her look.
“Well, I see that,” X said. “How’s it work?”
“You don’t need no satellite, don’t need no laser beam,” X’s companion explained. “You need one of these,” he said, holding up the red receiver, “and some of those,” he said, pointing at the open panel, “and all those ancient, unused, forgotten phone wires in the air and under the ground. Except, we use them.”
A FEW DAYS after X had been released from quarantine, she’d walked through a connecting tunnel between subway lines. There was steady foot traffic in both directions from the citizenry of the underworld, the huddled masses continually moving in search of warmth, shelter, food, and something to do.
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