by Dan A. Baker
“We know the modulation genes work. If there is a problem we can at least turn those cascades off,” Marjorie said, “and build a patch later.”
“If we just had three months,” Jasmine pleaded.
“You don’t have three days,” Will said.
“We can’t do this! We know there will be adjustments and changes after we look at the proteins and process the dog data, and …” Jasmine stammered. “We just can’t! We might, I mean, something could go terribly wrong!”
Jonelle sat on the cheap vinyl couch by the door and wiped the tears from her face. They turned to look at her. “Thank you. Thank you for the year I had with him,” her voice steady and strong.
The small clicking noises in the MRI marked the time as the minutes passed. Jasmine looked at the big screen monitors, at the images of Roy’s lungs and gut, flooded with cell debris, shutting down by the minute. She reached back, back to the complete vision of his treatment from her time in the near death place. It was still there. Jasmine turned to Jonelle slowly.
“Jonelle, we have to administer the master gene treatment now. It’s the only thing that will save him, but there will almost certainly be problems with some of the signaling proteins we’ve designed. It might give him another few months. Or we can…,” Jasmine said holding Jonelle’s hand.
“He’s very tired, Jasmine. I don’t want him to go through another disappointment. He just doesn’t want to be sick anymore. He’s worn out,” she said, surprising everyone. “I would like it if he died at home.”
Marjorie gasped, and stood up quickly, paralyzed by the finality of Jonelle’s decision.
Will reacted first. “I need to do a procedure before you take him home,” he said sullenly.
“Okay,” Jonelle said, closing her eyes.
The minutes clicked by in silence. Even the incessant clicking from the MRI stopped. The emotions swirled in Jasmine’s mind as she looked up at Roy’s vital signs. She watched the green and red traces for a moment. She silently admired the power of life; the power to keep going, long after it was possible.
The tears started when she thought about Earl. Earl wanted Roy to live. Earl wanted to conquer the insidious mistake evolution had made. Marjorie looked worried, suddenly realizing that her treatment and Will’s stem cell organ could not run without the master control of Earl’s gene therapy. Will started to speak twice, but merely shook his head. You do not second-guess the mother of a dying child.
The sound started so distantly Jasmine thought it was outside, but it increased slowly. At first, it was a tiny scratching, then a dry rhythmic scratching, then a rapidly shuffling scratching, and then an alarming buzz. Jasmine jerked her head up and looked at Will.
“Sid?” she said.
Marjorie’s face went white. Will quickly looked around the room, holding his hands out, motioning them to freeze. Jonelle started to jump up, but Will frantically waved her down.
The rattle was slow, but steady, somewhere near the MRI. Will grabbed a long piece of silver conduit and tiptoed to the MRI. “Oh no,” she said, suddenly realizing the snake might be in the MRI with Roy.
“Fooled ya,” Roy’s hoarse, far away voice echoed out of the MRI. He held up the big rattle and shook it weakly. Will laughed his crazy laugh.
“It’s Roy,” he said, turning to Jonelle. “I guess he found his rattle.” Jonelle looked up and tried to speak through the tears, but couldn’t.
“I can shake it harder when I’m not sick,” Roy said. “I’m trying really hard not to be sick.”
“Yes. Yes you are,” she said, walking over to Jasmine, falling into a sobbing hug.
“I wish you could come with me to heaven, Mommy,” Roy said and passed out.
Jasmine held Jonelle for a long, long moment, breathing deeply and shaking her head. “I’m worn out too,” she said softly. Will stood by the door with his arm around Marjorie. Jonelle slowly lifted her head and looked at Jasmine.
“Treat him,” she said and walked out the door, crying silently.
Jasmine and Marjorie helped Roy sit up. He vomited blood twice, splattering them both with bright red blood. “I’ll get his treatment ready,” Marjorie said.
“I want to be with her,” Jasmine said, opening the door, and turning to go down the stairs. She gasped so loud Marjorie heard it and stepped over to the door.
“Hi!” Veta said. “My god, what happened? Dr. Metcalf? Are you all right? Is that blood?”
Jasmine froze. The young reporter was holding a tape recorder. “I was just biking in Santa Cruz and I thought maybe you’d have a few minutes for background,” she said, trying to see around them into the trailer. “Is that an MRI in there?” she asked. Jasmine whisked her out to the beach.
Jasmine quietly walked into the MRI trailer. “We have to go.”
Will looked at everyone intently. “The trailer will leave here tonight, and the MRI will be there when we arrive. Now let’s go. I do not need another trip to the front page of the newspapers.”
The two nights in a small exclusive residency hotel in San Jose gave them all a chance to rest. Roy slept continuously with Jonelle at his side in the dark room. Will used both his cell phones on the small balcony, stepping in quietly to plug them into the chargers.
“The plane is ready. We’ll leave in the morning,” he said to Jasmine. “You’ll like it out there. We’ll have the time and the seclusion to figure out a solution to this circus,” he said.
“I hope so. I need things to settle down, Will. This has been very…,”
“Squirrelly?” Will asked.
“Squirrelly.” Jasmine replied.
The trip to Lake Havasu went by in a blur of efficiency. Jasmine saw the big lake and the red and black mountains surrounding it for the first time from the air. The miles and miles of empty desert surrounding the town and the lake seemed to go on forever. “I hope we get some quiet time here,” she said to Will.
“So do I,” he replied, taking a call on his second cell phone.
“Lightning,” Darla said weakly, slowly opening the sliding glass doors. The big thunderstorm cell was moving through Lake Havasu from the south, just as darkness fell. The purplish blue lightning streaks stabbed through the white rain in the squalls every few seconds, lighting up the valley, and reflecting in the lake.
“Come on, everyone look at this! It’s beautiful!” Darla yelled back into the big house. Dr. Easton, Jasmine and Will came out to watch. The smell of rain in the desert was new to Jasmine.
“It doesn’t smell like rain anywhere else,” Jasmine said.
“It smells like wet dust,” Will said. “These big thunderstorms come up from the Sea Of Cortez, they go on for about another month, and then we’ll have some great weather until it gets cold.”
“That’s magnificent!” Darla said, watching intently as the spectacle flashed again. “I have to paint that!” she said, and scrambled back inside for a sketchpad.
“She paints everything,” Easton said.
The first three days in Lake Havasu were quieter than Jasmine expected. They put Roy in a small bedroom with a sliding glass door, and kept two IVs flowing, with a mixture of electrolytes and vitamin B supplements. Roy stopped throwing up and seemed to be resting. Jonelle had slept in so many hospital rooms she automatically pulled a small futon into Roy’s room and slept holding Roy’s hand. Darla slept in the little bedroom on the poolside.
“We’ll get scans tomorrow, when my MRI gets here,” Will told Jasmine, while she stroked Roy’s hair.
“I think we’re going to be okay. Your work and Earl’s work is magnificent. I think it’s going to do exactly what you want it to do,” Will reassured her, “and nothing more.”
“I hope so,” Jasmine said, and walked into the big master bedroom for a long overdue nap.
“I never thought I’d live long enough to see this day,” Easton said, as Will tapped on the oversize lap computer screen. “We’re really there! We can really do it now! Do any damn thing we like with
the human genome!”
“Yeah,” Will said, “anything.”
“We talked about this day, you know. We talked about this in the fifties, and in the sixties. Hell, that’s over fifty years ago!”
“What did you guys talk about?” Will said. “When you first got an idea what the DNA molecule looked like.”
“We did talk about screwing around a little, but it was mostly wacky or chimeric stuff,” Easton said, wolfing down his breakfast burrito.
“Chimeric stuff?” Will asked.
“Yeah, like giving a human the smelling of a dog and the eyesight of an eagle. Stuff like that. The football guys used to joke around about gene splicing some ten-foot tall linebackers. I thought it might be possible to design a brain that would have a radio in it,” Easton said.
“A radio brain,” Will repeated.
“Yeah, it probably wouldn’t really take much.” Easton said.
Jasmine had changed a great deal over the last months. Her near drowning, Earl’s death, and reading the Buddhist parables had instilled a desire to live in harmony with the events around her. She wanted to think carefully before speaking, and to select deference whenever possible. So far it was working. The sat port on the 9900 matter needled her, but it was old news now, and Will was probably porting it to Nielsen anyway, as he was probably anxious to back up their work.
The big house was so comfortable everyone began to relax. The large open spaces and the big flagstone fireplace imparted a sense of unlimited room.
Jasmine and Will began walking in the early morning in the desert behind the house. The bright green Palo Verde trees looked like they had come from another planet. “I’ve never seen any of these plants,” Jasmine said.
“There’s one out here that should interest you,” Will said, stepping over to a large dark green windswept bush with small yellow flowers. “It’s Larrea tridentata. Walter and I looked at this plant several times.”
“Why?” Jasmine asked, running her fingers over the sections of the branches that looked like knuckles.
“Because it’s one of the few life forms that we know is immortal. A couple of plant DNA scientists dated one of these plants last year at twenty-seven thousand years old. I think that qualifies as immortal,” Will said.
“I heard about that,” Jasmine said standing back to admire the big bush.
“Best guess is there’s about thirty species of plants, big fish, sea anemones, and a couple of other things that just don’t age. That amazed me, when I first started. I thought every living thing aged and died. When I found out Mother Nature doesn’t think aging is really necessary, it changed everything for me.”
“What do you mean?” Jasmine asked. “It changed everything?”
“You know, it changed that whole argument. Should we do this? Is this a good thing? Will said, gathering a handful of the white wooly seeds.
“If it occurs in nature…,” Jasmine said, standing back to look at the plant again.
“Yeah, if nature did it, then it’s okay.”
“Nature did do it,” Jasmine said.
“Several times, I saw the sea anemone that Henderson studied in the British aquarium. They know it is at least eighty years old. I looked at its cells.”
“And…,”
“Nada, there’s nothing, indistinguishable from cells from a young anemone. They don’t age at all.”
Jasmine gently stroked Will’s face with her long fingers. “Was that important to you?”
“Yeah, it helped me through the spooky part. The part when we knew we could do it, and started thinking about just what that would mean.
We thought about the over-population and the complete disruption of the process that defines human life - that part,” he said.
Jasmine held him for a long moment, grateful to know that Will had some sense of ethics.
The big house was quiet when they returned. “Ooh, I like these! I can use them in my sculpture,” Darla said when Jasmine handed her the wooly creosote bush seeds. Her eyes were the first thing Jasmine noted. They were clear, and bright. “I’ve had enough of this sick bed bullshit! Show me where you got these,” she said, flinging back the covers.
They were eating breakfast by the pool when Roy walked out, “No tubes!” He shouted so loudly the women in the white house behind them looked over the fence. “Can I swim now? I can swim really well.”
Will and Jasmine stepped over to look at him. His eyes were actually glittering. “Sure, Jasmine will go in with you. Just let me look at your incision first.”
Roy paddled around the pool for several minutes, splashing loudly and yelling, “I’m not sick anymore! I’m not sick anymore!” Jonelle looked away, and held her forehead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Keeping Darla fed was almost a full time job. “I crave everything!” she would say, piling cottage cheese, refried beans, and huge chunks of barbecued chicken breast on her plate. Her skin shone now, and she walked almost upright. She drank milk constantly, and ate three orders of chile rellenos at the small Mexican restaurant in the shopping center.
“You will become a very big woman that way,” Cheramie, the young waitress from El Paso told her everyday.
“That’s fine with me! I’ve been a small one for long enough!” Darla said, and plowed into the third order of chile rellenos.
Jasmine held Darla’s forearm in her hand for a long time as they sat in the busy restaurant. The age spots were nearly gone, and the suppleness was returning almost hourly. The shine caused by the return of collagen was striking.
“My eyes are much better already!” Darla said. “That damn macular degeneration thing has gone away completely!”
The problem was muscles. The muscles had superb blood flow and were regressing in age rapidly. The connective tissue, the ligaments, and the cartilage would be the last to regenerate and would be the most prone to injury. Jasmine made a deal with Darla, that when she had the urge to walk, she would not walk alone.
“But the stiffness is almost gone!” Darla complained, “And I love to walk!”
They took short walks out into the desert, early in the morning before the heat rose above a hundred. “I feel great!” Darla would say, repeatedly.
“What are you thinking about?” Jasmine asked.
“Oh, my God, what am I not thinking about, you mean! Well, I’m thinking about traveling. I have not been able to travel for a long time and I want to go to Europe and look at some pictures, and I want to start swimming again, and I want to buy some clothes! I’m sick of this old hippie crap I’m wearing! Let’s go shopping when we get back!” she said spontaneously.
“After your MRI,” Jasmine said, noticing Darla’s shoulders looked rounded again, and her figure was returning.
“Girls Gone Shopping?” The sales girl giggled, as Jasmine and Darla finally paid for her big pile of new clothes. “I like your dye job. How did you do it?” the girl asked Darla.
Jasmine suddenly noticed that Darla’s hair was darkening just an inch above the roots. Darla bounded off to a rack of tank tops and didn’t hear the question.
“She’s an artist, and she does stuff like that all the time,” Jasmine said, suddenly a little nervous.
Two older women were looking at Darla quizzically. Darla was filling out, Jasmine noticed. Her hips were round now, and her shoulders were full, and almost straight back.
Both of the women approached Darla as she twirled the rack around.
“Your skin is beautiful!” they said in unison. “What are you using?”
Darla smiled a huge smile and looked at Jasmine. “I’m using mud baths and young men!” The two old women reached out and touched Darla’s arms. There were still places where you could see aging spots, but these were almost gone.
“Which spa do you go to?” they asked.
“I go to the spa with the men with the big chiles!” Darla said, smiling broadly.
The old women backed off, suddenly embarrassed.
“That
’s not a very Christian thing to say,” the older woman huffed.
“Christian men don’t have chilies?” she shot back, laughing hysterically.
The sales girl laughed, enjoying Darla’s irreverence immensely, as the two women stalked off. Jasmine asked her why she was laughing.
“Lake Havasu is the northern end of the Bible belt, and it’s very un-cool to say anything like that in public. You must not be from around here.”
“No, we’re from the Bay Area,” Jasmine said.
“Ooh, San Francisco. I want to live there. I want to be wild in the streets.” She leaned over to Jasmine and said, “I have nipple rings.”
“Darla, we need to get going,” Jasmine said, noticing the two women standing at the window outside watching Darla.
The next three weeks passed in a wonderfully restful way. Jasmine walked with Darla every morning, and read by the pool until it got hot. She watched some of the movies she had missed in the last ten years, when Will showed her how Netflix worked. She and Darla spent hours picking out romantic films on the Internet, and raced each other to the mailbox when they arrived.
Roy’s MRI’s were encouraging. The therapy was a little slower than they anticipated, but the modulation loops slowed the rate of de-senescence down and normalized his vital signs. He loved the big pool and paddled on the blow up Jet Ski for hours.
Easton swam in the pool several times a week, and went with Darla to the Mexican restaurant every day for lunch. Jasmine had to stop him when he tried to order his fourth Carne Asada. “You need to slow down a little.”
“Aw, hell, I’m just getting started,” he said. “I’m starving!”
“Where did you get these two nutty kids?” The young waitress asked every day.
Will was gone most of the time now. He went to Phoenix for several days at a time. One incredibly hot afternoon a bright blue helicopter dropped him off in the desert, just a hundred yards from the house. The dust and noise brought out several of the neighbors, who stared intently at the house.
For some reason, they all started listening to country and western music. Will and Jasmine would lie together on the big hammock by the pool late in the day and listen to a station in Kingman.
