Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “Rooster surgeon,”

  “What?” Jasmine asked.

  “I’ve done thirty-two pigs and five dogs so far. Roy was the easiest,” he said. “He doesn’t bite, bark or squeal.”

  “I’ll go talk to Jonelle,” Jasmine said pausing to stroke Will’s hair.

  Jonelle was sitting in the boathouse, watching pornographic Japanese Anime with Rammy. Jasmine thought for a moment how lucky Earl was to find a mother like her. She was solid, self-assured, and she lived in the real world. She knew Roy would almost certainly die, but she tried anyway, and she accepted the idiosyncrasies of people around her.

  Jasmine looked at Rammy for a long minute before saying anything. She could tell he had been up for several days. His hair was dirty and matted, and his eyes looked glazed over as he watched the Anime intently.

  “The Japanese have a thing for white panties,” he said to no one.

  Jonelle looked at Jasmine, with a trusting, searching look.

  “He’s fine, Jonelle, a little groggy, and he should stay in bed for two days, but he’s fine,” Jasmine said softly.

  “Just like me,” Rammy said, twirling a 12” data CD on his finger.

  Jasmine sat down next to Jonelle and held her hand. Will walked in and stood silently. It was a strange moment. There was no sound Jasmine looked at Rammy, not wanting to ask the question.

  “It’s the female promiscuity gene in response to sperm antibody problem in primates,” he said, tapping the data CD.

  “You worked in behavioral genetics?” Jasmine asked.

  “Uh, only at the fringes,” he said, glancing at Will.

  Jasmine looked at Will wondering what Rammy’s reply meant.

  Will slowly turned his hand around and brushed the side of Jasmine’s face with the back of his fingers. He bent over to her ear and whispered,

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Okay,” Jasmine said, and laid her head on Will’s chest, exhausted from the frantic flight from Black Rock.

  Will bent down to Barney, the old Labrador, and began shaving a spot on his tummy as a road race began on the big screen TV. A long line of Porsches snaked down a hill on a racetrack somewhere. “There’re but for fortune,” he said longingly.

  Jasmine suddenly felt alone. She longed for Earl’s quiet presence, for his guidance and his unswerving dedication to treating sick people. There was none of that sentiment in Will. He was actually an artist, Jasmine decided, a wild and untamed artist.

  The morning passed quietly. Rammy and Will closed the door in the control room and worked on the 9900 all day and into the evening. Roy slept and Jonelle held his hand, reading and dozing off.

  Jasmine walked on the beach for a while, and helped two adorable little girls make a sand castle. “We have to have a big room in the tower for the Princess, and for all her clothes and stuff,” they kept saying, as Jasmine carefully cut the small rectangles in the cone of sand for the windows with a pencil.

  “I’ll make these windows big so when the knight comes to save her and take her away, he can get out,” Jasmine said.

  “Is he cute?” they asked in unison.

  “Of course he’s cute,” Jasmine replied. The deeply gratifying simple fun of playing with the children affected her in a completely unexpected way. “I love children,” she thought, turning to look back at the happy little family on the beach. “I would have another family,” she thought.

  The old schooner was quiet when she got back, and groaned softly at the dock, anxious to go to sea. She tried to sleep, but the tense decision to implant Roy’s ASCO left her in a strange state of nervous exhaustion. She read the parables from The Teaching of Buddha. They were beautiful and the message was very simple: ‘People are driven by desire; an endless thirst that is never fulfilled and only leads to more desire.’

  Jasmine thought for a moment about her desire: her desire to know, her desire to see, and to understand life. It was almost as if there was an intelligent force there, wanting the excruciating secrets revealed, wanting the truth known about life and the mystery of existence, tantalizing and tormenting scientists with a little glimpse here, and a little glimpse there.

  “Is curiosity desire?” she said aloud, wrestling with this little dilemma in the afternoon warmth.

  Then she thought about Victor, and his endless quest for wealth and status. Victor was like many successful people. They are scorecard driven, she thought. They’re constantly looking at their scorecard in life and comparing it to other scorecards. Suddenly some of the ideas in the little book began to make sense to her. She fell asleep and dreamed of children.

  “About three weeks,” Will was answering Jonelle’s question in the MRI trailer. “The organ will reach its normal output by then, and we’ll see a surge in his energy and appetite. Once he is treated, the organ will simply modulate itself. After about three years it will simply dissolve,” Will said. “He’ll have all the adult stem cells he’ll ever need, and they’ll be immortal.”

  Will had been up for almost three days now. Jasmine thought, looking at the exhaustion in his face, and smelling that peculiar sweat that people generate when they’re working at a high intellectual level.

  “We finished this morning,” he whispered in Jasmine’s ear. “I’ll leave in a few days, after we treat the dogs, and look at Koji’s data.” He slipped his arm around her, to pull her to him, but he was so weak Jasmine turned into him and held him up.

  Koji’s data. She tried to imagine what the treatment operation must look like in Cuba, but she couldn’t. Suddenly she realized that Koji had said there was more, and that some of it hadn’t been decrypted.

  Marjorie’s big green Audi station wagon pulled into the parking lot, distracting Jasmine. She stepped out of the trailer and blinked in the bright morning sunlight.

  “Jasmine, my God, you look terrible!” Marjorie said, staring at Jasmine.

  “I just, haven’t had time to wash my hair,” Jasmine said. The three old Labradors tried to bark as Marjorie pulled open the tailgate, but their barks were muted and hoarse.

  “Two females and a male,” Marjorie said. “I guessed at their weight.” Marjorie looked at Jasmine and hugged her quietly.

  Will performed the stem cell organ implants in the dogs in just over three hours. All five dogs were sleeping peacefully as their IVs ran. “Maybe we should take a picture,” Will said, clipping an ear tag on Barney. “This is history.”

  Will carefully swabbed Roy’s incision and taped a new bandage on it. “Hard to be humble when you’re perfect,” Will said, pleased with his suturing job.

  “Here are some antibiotics and a very mild sedative to keep him quiet for the next week,” Jasmine said, as she buckled Roy into Jonelle’s car.

  “What are you going to do?” Jonelle asked.

  Jasmine started to answer only to discover that she didn’t really know. “I’m not sure,” she said, wondering suddenly if she wanted to go home for a few days, or stay here.

  “You need a rest, Jasmine. You look very tired,” Jonelle said.

  “I think you’re right. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jasmine said. “I think I’ll come home, as I want to be close to Roy for the next several days,” she said weakly.

  Marjorie was unusually bubbly as she tapped commands into the 9900 in the shipping container. “I think we should write Fed EX a letter,” she said, humming loudly, and breaking into her Go Go dance.

  “Why, Marjorie?” Jasmine asked.

  “It’s because they are making this whole thing possible! Five different synthetic gene labs in three countries turned this construct around in less than two weeks! Think about it! We have the services of labs and techs that would cost millions of dollars and would have taken years to assemble, all for a lousy two-hundred thousand dollars!” she said, holding up her hands and dancing around the control console.

  “You ran the PHRED scores for sequence accuracy?” Jasmine asked.

  “Perfect,” Marjorie said. They’ve narr
owed their error window down to absolutely nothing, just in the past year, and they don’t ask a lot of silly questions, either,” she said.

  Jasmine opened the cooler and saw two sets of IV bags. “You have extra treatments?” Jasmine asked.

  “Yeah, and they are both human treatments. I’m worried about Darla. She didn’t get any stem cells. I treated her circulatory system, and she’s in rough shape. She might die on us before her stem cell organ gets here. We might have to just treat her with this batch and trust that the Rockcrusher is telling us the truth,” Marjorie explained.

  “Hello Marjorie! Hello Dr. Metcalf,” a soft frail voice called out from behind the door of the container. Jasmine stepped out into the bright sunlight and stopped. In shock, she grabbed Marjorie’s hand.

  James Easton, the icon of the DNA revolution, stood in the parking lot, wearing a worn out tweed jacket, trying to steady himself on a cane. He tried to reach up and take off his soft wraparound plastic sunglasses, but his hand was shaking too much.

  “You told me to look you up if I was in the Bay Area, and I am now in the Bay Area!” he said, tottering a little. “I’m visiting all my former students, before I die, which just might be today, if I don’t get a place to sit down.”

  “How did you find this place?” Marjorie asked in a shocked tone of voice.

  “I stopped at your house just as you were driving off, and just followed you. You drive like a bastard, you know, but so do I,” he said.

  “I was very surprised to learn you’d left UCSF. I hope you’re doing something terribly interesting.”

  “How old are you now?” Jasmine asked.

  “I’ll be ninety-seven in five days if I live. So far, I have visited over half my old grad students. I couldn’t think of anything else to do before I die. No one listens to me now, anyway,” he said, starting to sway.

  “Sit down, Dr. Easton!” Marjorie said, pulling him over to a chair. “I listened to you in Santa Fe.”

  “So what, and did what I said change anything?” he asked, wheezing slightly.

  “Yes it did. You were very eloquent that day, and focused for a change. I left UCSF because of what you said. I wish you had said it twenty years ago, though,” Marjorie looked closely at the old man.

  “What a bunch of whusses we scientists have been in the last twenty years! Hell, we should all be horse whipped with barbed wire for lying down when the religious right went fruit loops! Then, we let the business people just run off with the whole damn field of biology, and all we did was wring our hands a little and lay down again! No wonder we’re all tied up in knots in this damn country!” he was bellowing now, and his face turned red.

  “It’s gotten pretty bad for research,” Jasmine said, her voice getting hoarse.

  “I think most of it was my fault. They kept coming to me, asking me to speak out when the courts and the patent office was granting patents to whole sections of the genome, but I just pansy-assed around and tried to keep everyone happy in Washington. I wish I had the last twenty years to live over!” he said, out of breath. “Is that the speech?”

  “That was the one,” Marjorie said.

  Dr. Easton was the most famous scientist in the world, although long forgotten, he had taken up the challenge of determining the molecular structure of life. With the pioneering X-ray lithography work of Rosalind Franklin, he had worked out the chemical structure of DNA and revealed how life stores information.

  “Why did everyone take a posture of acquiescence?” Jasmine asked.

  “Damned if I know! But it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said, smiling broadly. “That’s what I’m out doing now. I’m trying to put fire in the bellies of my old grad students, but so far, lots of bellies, but no fire,” he said, breathing heavily. “If I had it to do over, I’d kick some ass; I’ll tell you that much.”

  Jasmine and Marjorie said nothing. The implications of Easton’s visit were whirling through their minds as fast as they could process them. Marjorie was the first to finish.

  “Do you mean that, Dr. Easton?” she said pointedly.

  “Mean it? Hell! I mean all of it! This death bullshit is terrible when you feel like you have been a whuss, and let down your field, when it is too damn late to do anything about it! Yeah I mean it all,” he blurted, looking at them and bobbing his head.

  “What would you do if you were twenty years younger?” Jasmine asked.

  “I’d take on these pompous religious demagogues and I’d put together a scientific Bill of Rights. Then I would take apart these damn blanket patents, and personally hang about six-thousand biotech lawyers. I’d get tough!” he roared.

  “My, my,” Marjorie said, smiling.

  “I’m sick as hell, though,” he said after a long pause. “What are you two up to in this chopped up container, in this crazy damn hippie town anyway?” he asked, looking at the data cascades.

  Marjorie looked at Jasmine for a long moment. “Come over here, and I’ll show you,” Marjorie said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Jasmine left the container and started to walk back to the boat to take a midday nap. She laughed suddenly; a forced, nervous laugh that shocked her, as she could hear the stress in her voice. She had to laugh. Dr. Easton’s arrival was just one more guest at the Mad Hatter’s tea party she thought. At least it could not get any crazier.

  The crash came from the direction of the parking lot. It sounded like a car had hit one of the big trees on the little hairpin turn at the bottom of the hill. It was a loud serious crash. Someone was probably hurt, Jasmine thought and hurried back.

  Darla’s VW camper was wedged in between the two big containers, and was smashed all the way back to the doors. It was venting steam and dripping green antifreeze. Marjorie and Will were trying to get Darla out of the van, but she was flailing around and vomiting all over the smashed windshield. Dr. Easton was stumbling around the container, blood running between his fingers as he held his head with both hands.

  “I got here. I can’t believe I got here,” Darla said repeatedly, as they carried her to a bed in the MRI trailer. Her eyes were so bloodshot she looked beaten up. She fell into a deep coma as the MRI machine started its maddening buzzing and clicking.

  “She’ll die today,” he said finally, looking at the first images. “Marjorie’s treatment restored her immune system, and her Lupus is almost completely regressed, but her circulatory system is trying to regenerate, and there are just too many dead and senescent cells in the way. They’re sending apoptosis signals out and killing the other cells around them.”

  “Did you say today, she’ll die?”

  “Either today or tomorrow,” he answered. “With Roy, the stem cells were able to regenerate the tissue fast enough for him to survive the telomerase induction, but we didn’t have any for Darla. It looks like we killed our first patient.”

  “When is her stem cell organ due?” Jasmine asked in a cracking voice.

  “They had a break-in at the organ printing shop in Dallas. Anti-technology nuts smashed up the place and shut off the refrigerators.

  I’ll call them, but I doubt if we’ll have it for another two weeks,” Will said.

  “Better say goodbye, if she comes out of this coma.”

  Dr. Easton was shaking like a leaf. Marjorie had the bleeding stopped, but he was hyperventilating and looking wildly around the room.

  “Was it a bomb?” he asked, repeatedly. “Those damned nuts have been threatening to kill me for along time, but I never thought they’d catch up to me!” he said, his hands shaking badly. “Aw hell, maybe I’ll just die and do them all a favor,” he said, trying to stand up.

  “I want you to lie down in the house,” Marjorie said, slipping her arm around him.

  “Damn it! It was just getting interesting too!” he complained, as Marjorie helped him into the boathouse.

  Jasmine and Will looked at Darla’s MRI scans for a long time. She was bleeding internally.

  “Even if
we treated her today she’d die without a flood of stem cells,” Will said. “No one is answering the phone in Dallas, so they’re probably mopping up the mess. I doubt if they shipped her stem cell generator before the break-in,” he said, slowly standing up.

  Jasmine and Will left Darla on the MRI table, tucking her in with blankets and pillows. Jasmine looked into her face for a very long time.

  “Audios, Muchacha,” she said softly.

  The big displays were still on in the control container, and still displaying the cascades of data. Jasmine started to clean up the blood from Dr. Easton’s head wound with a towel, which she threw in the cardboard box in the corner. Will crossed quickly over and picked it up. He cut the bloodstains into little squares and put them in a plastic bag.

  “I’ll get these moving to Dallas,” he said. “I can see this one coming.”

  They walked out into the parking lot and stood there for a long time. Looking at the bizarre sight of Rammy’s wrecked Porsches, Darla’s totaled VW camper, and Jasmine’s Volvo wagon, they walked over to the van and looked into Darla’s life. The van was filled with half-finished paintings, rolls of canvas, sketchpads, and flower pots hanging in beaded Macramé slings. There was a shoebox on the passenger’s seat with vitamins and prescription drugs. “She would have been perfect,” Jasmine said.

  “Let’s get some rest,” Will said, as they turned to the path.

  They had reached the beach when they heard a car, revving highly, and screeching tires all the way down the hill. They turned as Rammy burst into the parking lot in a blue Porsche Carrera, sliding to a stop in a shower of gravel. He rolled the window down and held up a small white card. “The State of California likes me! They really like me!”

  He looked at Darla’s smashed VW camper for a few minutes, trying to figure out what had happened. “My soul mate is here?” he said finally.

  Jasmine and Will walked back over to Rammy’s new car, looking at the long deep scratches on the passenger side, and pulled the blackberry vines off the shattered mirror.

  “It’s a four-wheel drive! I just had to try it off road,” he yelled.