The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  Levy blew a stream of smoke up and out the side of his mouth. His obsidian eyes never left mine. “Anything else you need to get off your chest, pal?”

  “Before my execution? Yeah. I want you to think about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About how it would look if I disappeared here, like over that rail out there. It’s pretty complicated for the Agency now. Must be, or you wouldn’t be waiting for your boss to arrive and make a decision on this. Tell me, are they coming by helicopter to take me out of here? Planning to maybe drop me off with a bronze copy of the U.S. Constitution tied around my neck before we reach shore?”

  I didn’t expect an answer, and got none.

  “There are people,” I said, “who know I’m here, Levy.”

  “What people?” Levy asked, a little too quickly.

  “The ones who helped me. Same ones who doctored the files the FBI must have found by now. Don’t you people talk?”

  “We don’t do lunch, if that’s what you mean,” Levy replied brightly.

  “Even during the war on terrorism? Maybe that’s why we’re here now, even with this dilemma. Supposed to have been a couple simple experiments, like maybe other experiments you tried in Zion before? But now the genie’s out of the bottle, and too many people are involved. Maybe you want to kill the guy who helped me next door, now, and the guy I talked to on the plane. And what about the guys who hacked your hackers? See, I don’t even know who they are. They’re real good at hiding. Just like I am. If you can’t stop a geek research engineer from breaking in here and discovering the truth, what can you expect from the press? You guys didn’t even expect me to get out of Zion alive.”

  “We had nothing to do with that.”

  “Of course not. Just like you had nothing to do with Jeffers’ Caddy hitting a telephone pole or something at eighty miles an hour.”

  “How did you—”

  “How? It’s an easy guess. What ineptitude. The Studio didn’t expect the virus to escape, the gene to fail, or Jeffers and the team you hired to fail, either.”

  “You mean the team he hired.”

  “Whatever. It’s all gonna look the same, if it comes out.”

  “If?” Levy took another long draw, and squinted at me through the drifting smoke that snaked from his nose. “What do you mean, if?”

  I got up painfully, and shuffled slowly toward the terrace. Levy got up too, and followed me. “Let’s say you don’t toss me in the ocean,” I postulated, lifting my bloody hand in hypothetical gesture. “Let’s say we make a deal.”

  “Deal?” He laughed. “What kind of a deal?”

  I looked out at sea, and kept my head up, but my gaze fell to confirm what was draped along the side of the chair. At the bottom I could see what had been missed amid the folds of the long, heavy beach towel. The indistinct shape of a pistol. Jeremy’s pistol. The barrel just showed, and almost as an extension of the chair’s tubular cross support.

  “How about Winsdon and I swap places? You throw him in the ocean instead of me.”

  Levy laughed. “How would that solve our problems?”

  “I don’t know, but it would solve mine.” I tried to laugh with him, until a stab of pain shot through my groin. “Or how about if I jump?” I posited, and took a step out onto the terrace. “Wouldn’t that solve it?”

  “Come back inside,” Levy demanded, his voice level. “Now.”

  I turned and backed to the rail, my arms out forty-five degrees to the side. “You really want me to jump, Levy? You can just say I tripped, went over. Case closed, right? I don’t think so.” I turned my dripping hand palm up. “It’s too late to cover this up. Too much blood. It won’t disappear, even if I do.”

  Levy put one hand on the gun at his shoulder holster. “Get back in here,” he insisted.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me? I don’t think so. What would your boss say, if you did it before he could interrogate me? Think about it. I don’t need a fancy condo, Levy. A trailer park in Wichita will do, long as you pick up my expenses. Do it for Homeland Security, consult with the NSA too, if you have to.”

  “You’d sing like a mockingbird at midnight.”

  “What about Winsdon?”

  “He’s dead too, now. Just don’t know it yet. Probably thinks he merits plastic surgery, so he’s not going to talk about this yet.”

  “And all this because we can’t tell the public we wanna play God?”

  “You might put it that way.”

  “I could also put it down to covering your ass, and passing the buck.”

  “Whatever.” He stepped toward me. “Your gene was a bust, Dyson. Might have helped, but it’s too late now. Time to clean up the mess.”

  “But I’m not the one who made the mess, remember, Levy? It was Jeffers, and now it’s Winsdon. Why don’t you finish the job? The old coot needs to be wiped. He’s been drooling again.”

  “Nice try, but it’s not my decision.”

  “Then I was right,” I said.

  “Right about what?”

  I leaned back to look up at the upper deck, where the eternally festive music had never once paused, except maybe around September 2001, March 2003, and more recent dates. And then I saw what I’d only hoped for—Jeremy looking over the rail from high above. “About everything,” I finally answered, just as Jeremy saw me.

  I feigned more pain than I already felt, and doubled over to stumble toward the chair and beach towel. But in four quick strides, Levy was there ahead of me. As I had expected, he blocked my way. Then he lifted the towel, revealing the gun. “Well, what have we—”

  At that moment I propelled myself backward, up and over the rail. It had been my alternate plan, if I found I was being watched. With Jeremy being the one watching, the decision was clinched. It was something I would never have been able to do unless I had to. I sailed out and down into the churning ocean twenty-five feet below, yelling as I fell. Then I struck the aquamarine water, and plunged into the cool embrace of a rolling wave, through a tunnel of bubbles.

  I stayed under for a moment. But no bullets stitched the silence around me, only the hollow thrumming sound of the ship’s propeller as it passed. Then, mingled with that sound, I imagined I could hear my mother’s voice calling from below . . . or was it from above?

  Mother?

  Yes, child.

  I had the brief, eerie sense that only by drifting down into the dark blue void beneath me would I meet her. Into the depths that held the eternal quality of outer space, and the unknown. But how could that be? She should be beckoning me to rise, not to sink. To life, not death. It was so like her, though, I realized. She had believed what Jasper’s mother believed. That life didn’t matter—it was only an experiment, an interlude. But had I ever really lived? Had I ever really tried it? Was I done with it so soon, and ready to return to my Maker?

  Mother? I asked again.

  Yes, son?

  I looked up at the bright swirling surface above me, which now beckoned with a precious new light like I’d never seen.

  Goodbye, I said.

  I rose, as from baptismal waters. I came up in the wake, and looked toward the stern. And there I saw him again—Jeremy. He was looking in my direction from on high. My guardian angel, I decided. I held my bloody hand above the water, and waved. Thinking of sharks, I did not stop waving, even after Jeremy and two others saw me, and ran for help.

  39

  They did their best stitching my hand in the ship’s infirmary. There were pills to take, and a morphine derivative given intravenously, for which I was grateful. There wasn’t much one undercover agent could do to stop me from making my call via radiophone to the FBI, especially considering everyone on the ship’s crew now knew who I was, and because I’d claimed to have been thrown overboard. While catching up on the news by watching a TV monitor from my bed, I placed a call to the Miami Herald too, and was told a helicopter was being sent for me. One that didn’t belong to any government agency.


  Then I called my sister.

  Rachel hadn’t slept all night. She’d imagined me dead. I told her what had happened, then asked if she had found Julie yet through the Thurmans.

  “No,” Rachel replied, her voice sounding tired but at least calmer now. “Julie’s vanished. Jean gave her statement to the press, and spoke for her. But even she doesn’t know where Julie went. Do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Let me call you back. And don’t worry, Sis, this is over now. Or almost over.”

  “What do you mean? Alan?”

  “I’ll explain later.” I started to hang up, but paused. I was always hanging up on her, without explanation, and she deserved more. I needed her now, too. She was family, after all, and didn’t we define ourselves by family and friends? “Can you come to Washington to meet me tomorrow?”

  “Washington?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Okay, I will! Tomorrow, then.”

  “Don’t worry,” I repeated, and then I hung up.

  I dialed Clifford Seagraves next. But a different computer voice answered this time, just as impersonal, and said the number had been disconnected. What now? I wondered. Was I alone again, as I’d always been alone?

  No. Julie was out there, somewhere. Maybe she would find me, if I didn’t find her first. But I would try, even though I didn’t know her real name.

  Before boarding the helicopter, I visited Jeremy one last time. He answered on the fifth knock, and let me in. I walked past him into the room, and rested my hand on a small bronze sculpture on the end table next to the sliding glass doors. I hadn’t noticed it before, but then I was preoccupied at the time. It was a ballerina on point arching a graceful arm toward the ocean. The sea beyond it looked deceptively calm. A gently rolling rhythm, hiding both life and death in its depths, as one and the same. Predator and prey. There was no moral compass out there that I knew. But it was the wrong place to look, and I was not searching for that, yet. Not for that, right yet.

  “Thank you, my friend,” I told Jeremy. “My life was in your hands, and you gave it back to me.”

  “No,” Jeremy said. “You took your life back, and I’m taking mine back, too. I’m not going to hide on this ship.”

  “Who do you have to hide from, Jeremy?”

  “Myself. But not anymore.”

  “Good for you.”

  We shook hands, and he saw me off. I gave him one of my throw-away cameras, and he snapped a photo of me with it for posterity. Then I gave him my other camera and made him promise to take photos of Winsdon and Levy when they finally emerged under custody, and to send me the dupes in care of a reporter I promised would be nameless.

  “Don’t you want to take the photos yourself?” he asked me.

  “Not anymore,” I confessed. “Now that the truth’s out, I just want to get this over with. Then I need to find someone I’ve been searching for all my life.”

  “Good luck,” Jeremy said.

  “And to you, my friend.”

  It was all over quickly, except for the legal traffic jam stepped into by the special prosecutor assigned to direct the flow of denials with finger pointing. Tactar’s lawyers disavowed knowledge of Jeffers’ and Connolly’s schemes for saving the company out from under the nose of the FDA. Even Winsdon’s involvement was described as an “unfortunate fluke,” just after his “unfortunate heart attack” and the mysterious burning of the Jensen Hog Farm. These were men who had acted alone for their own interests, without the knowledge or consent of Tactar’s board of directors, they claimed. And even the CIA and CDC fell short of admitting culpability in anything, while not disclosing what the FBI and NSA promised to root out. Although they did once again promise to talk more to each other about national security matters in the future. Like over lunch one day.

  My own testimony in the matter consisted of two lengthy sessions on the Hill, where I related what had happened from the night my nightmare began . . . the same night our files were wiped from the mainframe at Tactar. Afterward I then privately asked the FBI for help in finding Julie, and was denied. The only letter I got from a government agency came from the IRS in the form of an audit.

  I was grateful to Rachel for attending Darryl’s funeral with me, because I didn’t know what to say to Darryl’s wife except that I was sorry for not trusting him with my suspicions when I could. Also that he was a good man. Was, and is, in my memory. My words seemed empty, as all words do at such a time, except those breathed in a prayer. For those with nothing to believe in, of course, all that remained were colored pills in a bottle. That didn’t describe me anymore, either.

  Rachel and I talked afterward about those things you do following a trauma. Death has a way of confusing conversation, though, and interjecting little silences that are punctuated by random thoughts. Pensive and reflective, I said something about wishing I’d known Darryl better, and had made more friends like him. But also that my old life was over, and that I’d found some closure in starting a new one. Rachel didn’t hear that the way I meant it. Rachel, being Rachel, wondered when my savings would be exhausted. And for an instant the same kind of feeling swept me that a new retiree must own after thirty years living the same routine. The fear that clock faces would melt like Salvadore Dali’s if one stared at them too long, now that there was no time clock to punch anymore. But I knew that I couldn’t go back to Tactar, even if it did survive.

  “You shouldn’t wear makeup either, Sis,” I said.

  “What?” She studied my face, looking worried for me, now.

  “Time ticks in everything and every body,” I said. “Maybe we can slow the clock, maybe we can’t. But it can’t be stopped forever. We’re like a walking countdown timer, each of us with a different zero point. We think that makes us separate, but it doesn’t. Not really. It makes us the same. Makes us human.”

  Rachel looked at me oddly, her confused amusement backlit by fear. “What on earth do you mean now?”

  I hugged her as we prepared to part once again. “I don’t know. I was blind, but things change. I’m not who I thought I was. Time to stop planning or thinking so much. Time itself’s an illusion, anyway. Just like security.”

  “I see,” she said, although I wasn’t sure if she had. “So . . . what are your plans? Or haven’t you got time to tell me?”

  I could have said I was just doing what she once did, long ago. But what came out was: “Didn’t you hear me, Rachel? I think I just said life is what happens while we’re making other plans.”

  She cocked her head, and became philosophically predatory, with a wry smile. “Wasn’t it one of the Beatles who said that? The one who got shot?”

  After my final clearance in Washington, I returned to the Sunshine state for an interview with the same Miami Herald reporters I’d first given the story to. I finished up with them late the same day. By then, of course, the SS Seven Seas had long passed through Gibraltar, but in Miami the traffic was getting worse, just as Dr. Kyle Metcalf had warned me. Franchise fast food signs blazed in the night as I breezed my way up A1A past gaggles of fatherless kids in baggy clothes and starched white tee shirts—kids who were seven times more likely to go to prison than college, when America needed them most. To my right the moon hung low over the ocean like a pepperoni pizza with stringy layers of cheese. So much traffic for so late, and so much motion and light. It felt unreal. Maybe it was unreal.

  Tired and emotionally drained after hearing about the Feds finally angling for dismissal after throwing blame on a few ‘rogue agents’ and ‘overzealous scientists’ looking to start up their own biotech company as partners in a major discovery, I was now especially motivated to find Julie. But for the time being a beachfront motel north of Lauderdale would suffice. The owner of the Seabreeze Terrace promised it to be roach free, and it was. But after a sleepless night of tossing and turning to the sounds of the head bangers next door, I found a crushed bug of some unknown species in bed with me, and I discovered the beach to be a wide
and littered collection of tire tracks. As for the ocean, it was not as blue somehow, but copper in the early morning light. Pretty in its own way, but not the same as I imagined with those hulking trawlers out there on the horizon, and the lingering chill of late autumn in the air.

  On the road again, I tuned into a morning talk show host on the radio, a middle of the road guy trying out a conservative time slot. He had the expected radio voice, but was short on bombast. He’d been a print journalist, and sounded a little like Larry King one moment, and a little like Winsdon the next . . . a cigar smoker too, no doubt. Callers enjoyed open lines on this particular morning, and when one of them asked just how long the hearings on Zion would continue, the host rightly suggested it would end only when a bigger story broke, and probably soon. But when someone asked about Tactar Pharmaceutical’s stock as a potential investment, I had to turn the radio off. I’d had enough of pills and sound bites, both of which served the same purpose. I had something more important to do, after all, and it was long overdue. A promise to keep, which I remembered as I remembered our every word.

  Montana? That would be next. Until death did us part, whenever that was. Hopefully later rather than sooner, if luck was on my side for once . . . and if Julie really hadn’t put an apple from home into her backpack, but had breached Eden’s gate herself.

  First things first, though.

  It was nearly noon when I pulled into the big horseshoe-shaped parking lot of the Halifax plaza in Daytona, parked next to the bowling alley, and walked across the street toward the neglected and vandalized trailers there. The palm trees surrounding the park were disease-ridden, with missing fronds and high yellowed cusps of vegetation. The pool was empty, cracked, and even the weeds were dead and lay crisped on the patchy lime green bottom. Seeing that, I shook my head. And so I almost passed the dozing old geezer who was stretched out in the battered lawn chair just above edge of the deep end. He didn’t stir at my approach, either. Not until I kneeled beside his empties, and took off his hat. Only then did Dad open his eyes. A moment later, a faint recognition. I waited, though. I was in no hurry, anymore. I had all the time in the world.