The Perfect Generation

by C. P. James

  There were only seconds to allow the fly to drift over the spot, because immediately after it was a downed aspen that would instantly snag him if he let it drift too far. And yet, he couldn’t yank it away either, lest it pull free of the surface too suddenly and make the ploop sound that would spook a wary trout. He pulled the fly in, dried it, dressed it in floatant, and flicked it upstream. It missed the grass, but settled on the surface almost exactly where he wanted it. Nothing else existed but its white wings. He wanted them to vanish suddenly. He reminded himself to pause when the strike came, lest he pull the fly right out of the fish’s mouth. Patience, he thought.

  With less than two feet to go, a shadow fell over his spot. Startled, he looked up to see the silhouette of a person standing at the edge, not 15 feet away. His eyes returned to the water just in time to see the current pull the fly down into the tangle of aspen branches, where it would forever remain. Enraged, he grabbed the line with his hand and gave it a quick yank to break the tippet and leave the fly where it was. His carefully nurtured cover was blown. He shielded his eyes against the setting sun as he reeled in his slack.

  “You’re trespassing.”

  A young woman’s voice responded, “Am I?”

  She’d come from the direction of the cabin, most likely having followed the trail from behind the garage. He made a mental note to either hide it or gate it off as he waded downstream to where the river was wider and shallower, climbing up the bank on the same side as the visitor. He felt his 65 years in his knees.

  “I’d be within my legal rights to shoot you right now.”

  “Wait a few years. It’ll save you a bullet.”

  He stopped about 10 feet short of her when she said that, finally having gotten a good look at her. She was strikingly beautiful, a blonde wearing stretchy pants and a fleece vest. He also knew what she meant—she was a PG.

  “Do I know you?” Geller said.

  “My name’s Heidi Robb.”

  Geller stared at her for several moments, trying to make the connection.

  “Jim’s granddaughter?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, well.”

  He discovered a second mug at the back of the cupboard and noticed it had a dead fly and dust inside. He poured her coffee from a pot he’d just made, using his own clean mug, and distastefully washed the other for himself. The gesture felt magnanimous. He didn’t entertain much.

  “I’m curious to learn how you found me,” he said.

  “Grandpa told me you used to come on vacation out this way. I started asking around and looked at land records at the courthouse. Honestly, I got sort of lucky.”

  “How is old Jim now?”

  “He’d’ve been 84 this year.”

  The news hit him hard—harder he could have anticipated. It gave her some pleasure to see his face change. To know he could feel. It passed quickly.

  “When?”

  “Two years ago. He was in for a hip replacement and threw a clot. They said it was fast. I was in Malaysia so I couldn’t even make it back for the funeral.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and poured his coffee. “They sort of stopped sending the alumni magazine.”

  “So was I, at first. But then I realized he wouldn’t live to see me go.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Breast cancer,” she said. “The kind of thing she hoped to protect me from.”

  “Well you’re certainly a wellspring of good news.”

  He took a seat across from her at the kitchen island, on one of the uncomfortable wooden barstools he also never used. She glared at him, shaking her head—a look he’d seen many times before.

  “If you came here to unburden yourself of something, then get on with it. Otherwise—“

  “Unburden myself?”

  “You didn’t come all this way to tell me Jim died.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to meet you. See if any of the stories were true.”

  She watched carefully for a reaction, but the comment just slid off like a lone raindrop. He smirked.

  “Most of them probably are.”

  “You cared about my grandfather.”

  “Very much.”

  “So what about the rest of the world?”

  “I knew Jim. The rest of the world isn’t half as interesting.”

  “Do you even know what’s happening out there? Twelve million people are already dead because of—“

  “I’m well aware, Miss Robb. I came to escape public life, not the truth.”

  “And what have you been doing with all that time?”

  “Writing a memoir. Fishing. Old man things.”

  “Why leave when you did?”

  Shortly after the deaths began, foreign governments with entrenched US interests held a summit of top physicians and scientists to discuss the Cure situation. GIG had provided all its past research to the global scientific community in hopes they could stop, or at least slow the casualties. GIG offered $10 billion to anyone who could devise a solution, just as Merriweather had done. GIG was working on it exclusively by then, having closed everything but its headquarters. Geller, Baz, and Erik had worked on it for three years to no avail, and the foreign teams didn’t fare any better. Geller pledged $1 billion of his own money toward the reward, then bowed out. Many thought he had either killed himself or gone mad. That was four years ago.

  “We were out of options. I had nothing left to offer but money so I gave it and left.”

  “You were the only one even smart enough to create a problem like this. Don’t you think you’re the only one smart enough to solve it?”

  “Starting a fire and putting it out are different skills.”

  “How well did you know my grandfather?”

  “As well as I’ve ever known anyone. Like I said.”

  “He fought for you. When they decided to change the name of that building, he threatened to resign.”

  Nine years prior, the Laird College trustees voted to change the name of Geller Hall, in response to public pressure. It was now called Melvin Hall, after a professor emeritus who left his entire estate to the college. He knew about that, but he didn’t know what had occurred behind the scenes. He felt a pang of regret for not having reached out to Jim for so long.

  “He told them science was all about making mistakes. He said no one could have predicted any of this, and that there was plenty of blame to go around. It made him a pariah. They offered him an early retirement, which wasn’t really an offer at all. It broke his heart. He wasn’t home three months before he slipped on the front steps and broke his hip.”

  “He didn’t have to fight for me.”

  “No, but that’s just the kind of man he was. He loved you. I never understood it. Frankly, I still don’t.”

  “If you have something else to say, I wish you’d just—“

  “Have you been close to an actual PG?”

  “Miss Robb, this isn’t—“

  “Answer the question. You say you know what’s going on out there, fine, but do you really know? Have you ever watched someone start seizing, and thrash around while their organs dissolve?”

  “I think we’re done here.”

  “Have you watched them cough and sputter as they choke on their own blood, while you stand there helpless and just pray for it to just stop? Have you seen the faces of people who love as they watch it all happen?”

  A memory seemed to pass behind his eyes, and his lips briefly parted as though to say he had, but then he said:

  “I’ve never been in the room at that moment, no.”

  Heidi looked at him pityingly and sighed. His air of indignation had evaporated.

  “My grandfather said you administered my mother’s shot personally.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you remember the year?”

  “Well, it was just after that silly building was dedicated, so …“

  He stopped short, a realization washing suddenly over him. Heidi
sipped her coffee and waited. She’d expected it much sooner, considering his reputation.

  “It was 2035,” he said after a moment, staring at her as though she’d just stepped out of a dream. His eyes studied her up and down and his brow knotted with confusion. “You would’ve been born the next spring.”

  “Twenty-seven years ago last April,” she said, sliding her coffee mug across the counter toward him. “Mind warming that up a little?”

  23

  Marius was seldom in town for long. Even before, it was a special thing for a group of like-minded musicians to cross paths, build a fan base and catalog en route to fame, but in these times it was nearly impossible. Most kids didn’t bother learning instruments well enough to call themselves professionals. Even if they did, they rarely had the commitment to make a go of it.

  It didn’t surprise Rubin Beecher that his only son had managed to pull it off. Marius was a remarkable kid from day one. He and Ellie had decided not to start a family, owing to their grim medical legacies. His family had a history of heart issues and Ellie carried the gene for Huntington’s Disease. But one day he was waiting to get his cholesterol checked and had a conversation with a very pregnant woman who had just had the Cure administered to her unborn baby. She hadn’t planned on having kids either, but it seemed like a very attractive sort of insurance policy. Rubin hadn’t put much stock in it before, but the more they looked into it, the more it sounded like it was just what they needed to set their minds at ease.

  Later that year, they welcomed Marius into their lives—as perfect a child as there ever was. Their miracle had come courtesy of science, and for 11 years everything was as it was supposed to be. Marius learned he had a gift for music and pursued it with vigor. Ellie became symptomatic when he was only 8, but Marius adjusted to her new reality just like Rubin had to.

  He was nearing the end of fifth grade when he learned the news about the so-called Perfect Generation. It took a long time for everyone to understand that it wasn’t some sort of temporary condition, but once they did, everything started to change. They didn’t know about whether the spontaneously activated genes would be passed on to the children of PGs (and still didn’t), but it was all but certain that PG kids would die in their early 20s. Rubin and Ellie’s beautiful son was doomed.

  Ellie went into deep denial at first. She convinced herself that only the kids in Phase 1 trials would be affected. Marius was going to be one of the lucky ones. Deep down, Rubin knew better.

  That Marius would die young wasn't even the worst part. It was that they’d treated his childhood as ordinary. The vast majority of PGs learned early on about their fate, and so had tried to squeeze a lifetime of experience into 25 or so years. They hadn’t learned what was going to happen until Marius was almost 12, by which time half his life had passed. Though it took a few months for the truth to finally erode their illusions, preparations for sending Marius out into the world could wait no longer. He’d have to get a crash course on life, and it started with explaining to him that he was going to die young.

  The laws regarding the legal status of PGs changed shortly after Marius’ 13th birthday. The fact of his mother’s sickness coupled with his own tragic circumstance turned him into a bitter and angry kid for a while. He resolved to stay even though he was legally an adult, and even worked with him in the factory for a time. But when he was 15, they pooled his meager college fund together with contributions from their extended family and sent him off to a music festival for PGs. He didn’t want to go.

  His life changed that week. He met the boys who became his bandmates in the Clockwatchers, and the lightning in a bottle they caught together quickly gained the attention of a PG community desperate for heroes. Rubin knew then that Marius’ time at the little country house had ended—whether he realized it yet or not.

  24

  The concert let out at about 11:30, but Lars Heiser didn’t leave. Not right away. Red Rocks was always sort of a clusterfuck. It only had two narrow walkways on either side of the stage for ingress and egress. Years of seeing shows had taught him to wait until the crowd thinned and leisurely make his way out after that. That suited him anyway, because he liked the post-concert feeling to linger like melting chocolate.

  He felt older than his 15 years—much older. He’d experienced as much of life as he could imagine for someone his age and he wanted more, but he felt a little weary, too. Like so many of his friends, he’d been on something of a world tour, taking advantage of the low airfares given to PGs and the almost universal kindness he experienced in his travels. People generally extended PGs every courtesy and he could tell that many felt badly for America. He took some strange comfort in that.

  After a while, the house lights came on and the cleaning crew came out. Stragglers finished their beers and made their way back to the lots, where the mood was still high. Lars’ friend, Tom, called him over to an old truck, in the back of which was a huge cooler full of beer. He took one, sat in a folding chair and mostly listened. They were all PGs, not a one of them over 17. In 8 years or less they’d all be dead, yet they were laughing and carrying on like they didn’t have a care in the world. He laughed, too—there wasn’t time to waste being morose.

  When he came in at almost 3, his father was waiting up. He could never sleep until Lars was in the house. He wondered what would happen when he was gone.

  “Good show?” his father said.

  “Amazing. I’m super tired, though.”

  “Who was it again?”

  “The Level Bosses.”

  “That’s right—I couldn’t remember. I just wanted to make sure you got home okay.”

  His father patted him on the shoulder, smiled, and retreated toward the bedroom. Lars knew enough about GIG’s history to understand why his father had stuck around even after everything that went down. After Baz finally retired, he would be in charge.

  GIG had once been at the bleeding edge of not only research, but hope itself. The Cure aside, it had changed the world in profound ways. His father had very few peers, and fewer still who didn’t work for him. The others were either Nobel laureates in complementary fields or former employees named Geller. The work, which had worn his marriage down to the nub, was all he had. He wanted nothing more than for his father to lay down the burden of guilt and pursue something more joyful, but it was an impossibility. As long as death waited at his door, his father would be bent over a microscope, looking for something that could keep it closed.

  Erik’s clock read 3:48 a.m.—far too early to think about getting up. He hadn’t slept well in years, so it was not unusual to be lying there in the dark, thinking.

  His late wife, Lucy, reacted to his news about the Cure with the same calm objectivity he’d noticed at their wedding in Canberra. The caterer, who was late, undercooked the chicken and by the time the dancing was supposed to start, three-quarters of the wedding was either praying to the porcelain god or at the hospital—including him. Ordinarily, a new bride would freak out about that sort of thing. Lucy had been upset, but ultimately shrugged and said something like, “Mistakes happen.”

  At the time he’d admired her rationality, but during the intervening years he’d come to see it as almost a mild form of sociopathy. When the truth about the Cure came to light, Lars wasn’t even three—a delightful, beautiful and obviously smart child any parent would envy. Lucy listened to Erik explain the problem and all its repercussions from across the table. You would expect a mother to immediately deny this kind of truth, or suggest new angles he hadn’t thought of. Not Lucy. She said:

  “Then our job now is to help him make the most of the time he has.”

  And that was that. It wasn’t necessarily cold, or heartless, or insensitive. It just didn’t suit the gravity of the situation. It never did. But Erik wasn’t just some guy, powerless to do anything. He was Dr. Erik Heiser, wunderkind of GIG and protégé of Geller the Great. He was chief geneticist for the most powerful and prestigious laboratory on the planet. If
he couldn’t find a way to save his son, then who could?

  He threw himself into the work. GIG had been his first and only real job, and he never wondered what might have been. Baz was a terrific mentor and friend, and understood all too well the heaviness of Erik’s soul. Together they had continued forward while most of GIG was sold off or repurposed, and over the years rebuilt some of its reputation. The Cure aside, medical and pharmaceutical innovations driven by their research had saved millions of lives. Internally, they thought they might actually have saved more than they doomed.

  Through the lens of time, however, the only thing about GIG that anyone would remember was it was responsible for ramming the Cure through FDA approval and delivering it at scale. That was what kept Erik up at night, what drove him through the day and what he thought about while brushing his teeth.

  His marriage to Lucy was troubled and largely inconsequential to either of them, save for Lars, but it still carried the weight of time and memory. He’d encouraged her to take trips without him, needless of work as she was, and so she’d ended up on a catamaran off St. Kitts with her sister four years ago. There were different accounts of how she ended up unconscious in the water, but most of them agreed that she’d taken some kind of blow to the head, maybe from rigging and maybe not, and fell into the water at high speed. They’d circled back immediately but found only a single sandal. A search was undertaken, but they never found her. In the end she’d left him—just not in the way he expected.

  Lars was still asleep. In a house so often filled with silence, he’d learned to distinguish one kind from another. The sharp silence that followed one of Lucy’s thoughtless slights. The sterile sort that greeted him after a 17-hour day in the lab. The gentle, almost feminine silence of a new morning. But not this morning. This morning was different.