THE ALCATRAZ OPTION

by Jay Begler

  Their varying sexual appetites, hers voracious, his slight, was a substantial, but not an overwhelming negative. Still, except for Daniel being underwhelming in bed, he was a fabulous husband and father. If ever asked if she was happy, Rebecca would answer, “reasonably so.” Daniel, unaware of Rebecca’s affairs and her disappointment in his limited sexual prowess, asked if he was happy would no doubt answer, “Blissfully.” So, their marriage moved ahead with one partner reasonably happy, and the other blissfully happy. In the thirteenth year of their marriage, however, everything changed much for the worse. So terrible and traumatic was what happened that afterwards they only referred to it as the “Event.” Their marriage and lives were never the same after the Event, and true happiness no longer attached itself to them.

  Earlier in the day, Rebecca participated as a panelist in a program for women entrepreneurs, primarily those heading up biological or pharmaceutical start-up companies. This was not her first speaking engagement. In recent years she had given many talks and appeared on many panels. On this day, Rebecca was at the top of her game, at ease before an audience of three hundred and responding to questions with both humor and concrete answers. Her day went as well as her morning, capped off by a luncheon meeting with Daniel, and prospective investors. These meetings became routine, with Rebecca enthusiastically describing the nature of the company’s molecules and Daniel walking the investors through the potential for income. After the meeting, both agreed that the meeting went extremely well, and each had a sense of optimism as to the financial prospects of the company. Daniel was off to meet with one of their lawyers.

  Rebecca, at home, was simultaneously on her cell phone, discussing one of their molecules with a scientist from the NIH and preparing supper, when the front doorbell rang. Peering through the eyepiece she saw two policemen and, in the background, what appeared to be flashing police lights.

  “The first policeman said, “Mrs. Levy, it’s about your husband.”

  Before he could say more, she opened the door in a panic and said “What happened? Is he ok?”

  There was no reply. Instead, the second man, well over 6’4 and 250 pounds, smiled and smashed her in the face with his fist, breaking her nose. Blood spurted out, and she gasped, “Take what you want. Just don’t hurt me.” Ignoring her plea, he dragged her by her hair up a flight of stairs, ripping some of it out of her scalp, which caused more bleeding.

  The second man, significantly smaller in stature but the one in charge, was already in her bedroom combing through draws for jewelry and cash. Rebecca just became a victim of the O’Brien brothers, Mickey and Johnny, whose specialty was home invasions. These cunning and highly sadistic criminals developed an expertise and a methodology in the art of home invasions. Like so many of their other invasions, they found a secluded house in an affluent neighborhood and observed the comings and goings of the family. The police uniforms were one of many costumes used to gain easy entry into a target’s house. They knew that people rarely kept their doors closed when someone in uniform, a policeman, or a fireman, rang their bell. The brothers would never do a home invasion within 400 miles of their prior home invasion. Thus, the residents of Sands Point would not be on the alert for this type of crime and would be unaware of how the brothers would use costumes to have a victim open his or her door.

  The larger man, Mickey, threw Rebecca on the bed and began fondling her breasts. She whimpered “no,” provoking another fist, smashing her jaw and knocking out some of her teeth. The second brother said, “Ask her where the safe is,” as he began exploring the interior of their large walk-in closet.

  “Where is the safe?”

  “We don’t have a safe.”

  Mickey blackened her eye. Then he straddled her body with his crotch close to her face, unzipped his fly and took out an already erect penis, which he began rubbing against her face while his brother was deep within Rebecca’s immense walk-in closet. “Open your mouth” he commanded and pushed forward to where his penis was touching Rebecca’s lips. She held her arms in front of her face to protect herself, though she knew another blow was coming, but the man grabbed her wrist instead and pulled off a large yellow diamond ring from her finger, breaking it in the process, and wrenched her expensive Cartier Tank watch from her wrist. He said, “Now, where was I?”

  Despite her pain, she clenched her jaw, causing the man to raise up his fist. “Maybe if I knock out some more of your teeth.” But before he could bring it down, he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder blade. He turned around to see Daniel, who was about to stab him again. Daniel couldn’t understand why the man didn’t fall. He turned and swung at Daniel, who evaded the punch with the grace of a ballet dancer. He shouted “Johnny, get in here,” as he ran towards Daniel. Instead of backing away, however, Daniel ran full tilt towards the man, leapt into the air, held the man around the neck and in a nano-second plunged his knife in the man’s eye and pulled down as hard as he could.

  Rebecca, bleeding profusely, summoned all of her will, crawled to the phone and called 911 and said, “You better get out of here. I’ve dialed 911.” Johnny did not attack Daniel, but took his brother by his hand, and said, “Mickey, let’s get out of here; I got their jewelry and cash.” Sirens blared in the distance. As they ran out, Mickey turned; his blinded eye shut, blood running down his face and said, “I’m coming back for you; for both of you. You won’t know when, but I’ll be back. That’s a solemn promise, and I always keep my promises.”

  While the crime provoked an initial round of local television coverage and a significant effort by the police, the O’Brien brothers were not found. After several months, the police treated the home invasion as an unsolved crime. Rebecca made a slow and agonizing physical recovery. Plastic surgery restored her looks within five months. The trauma of the Event, however, wrecked her psychologically. She fell into a deep depression and, for several weeks, became a patient in the psychiatric ward of Long Island Jewish Hospital.

  After her discharge, Rebecca attempted to put up a brave front when in the presence of her peers. Inwardly, however, she had an ongoing current of fear. The two men, particularly the man named Mickey, haunted her. Daily, they became her demons. It was difficult for Rebecca to enter an empty house and she developed the habit of looking over her shoulder and at people off in the distance, fearing that the two criminals might be lurking nearby. She often complained to her psychiatrist and to Daniel that she felt vulnerable all the time and always afraid.

  “Anything else you’re feeling, Rebecca?” her psychiatrist asked.

  “I have nightmares and, I don’t know, feelings of emptiness. I’ve become forgetful. The other day for example I washed my face, walked out of the bathroom with the water running. This morning I walked out of a store without paying. I know it’s not dementia, but it’s upsetting. You want more?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I sometimes feel guilty. Isn’t that stupid? And there are those horrible sleepless nights.”

  “Have you been taking your medications?”

  “Yes, but the side effects often seem worse than the symptoms. But the worst thing is the fear. It’s not just mental, it’s physical. My body feels tense all the time. I often have pains in my stomach. I seem to always be afraid. I jump at the slightest sound. And I am always looking over my shoulder, literally.”

  Rebecca’s dreams and nightmares, in one form or the other, always contained images of the men returning for her and repeating the same horrible acts but in each dream, there was no rescue by Daniel. She often screamed in her sleep, hyperventilated or have extreme night sweats. For days after these dreams, she would lock herself in the house and sit by her bedroom window to see if anyone was approaching her house. She admitted both to Daniel and her psychiatrist that she occasionally thought of suicide.

  The psychiatrist explained that over time her fears and anxiety would diminish. In a sympathetic voice he instructed, “Just be patient.” But the fear that gripped her did not diminish. It
seemed to stay at a steady level and then spike whenever the local evening news reported a story about a home invasion. At these times she would fall apart. Finally, the psychiatrist and Daniel insisted that she no longer watch the news. Just at the point that she seemed to make progress, she received an envelope mailed from Grandview, Iowa. It contained an 8 by 10 photo of the large man, with an eye patch and a deep scar running down the side of his face and the words, “I’m coming for you, little bitch.” This was so upsetting that she returned to the hospital for about a month. Daniel hired full-time security guards for the house, but that was not enough to allay her fears. Rebecca insisted that their den be converted into a safe-room with a safe-like metal door. Even in that room, she didn’t feel entirely safe.

  Her drug therapy eventually helped, but the side effects of the drugs, headaches, hives and blurred vision were intolerable. On or off of the drugs, she would periodically cry hysterically for no reason. A sense of malaise washed over her. Rebecca could no longer bring herself to take part in panels or speak in public. She went about her tasks with as much purpose as she could muster, but with a lack of energy or enthusiasm. When she made presentations to prospective investors, they were flat. It seemed to Daniel, though he dismissed it as an illusion, that she seemed to shrink physically. But it wasn’t shrinking that he saw; Rebecca stooped.

  Rebecca’s voracious appetite for sex evaporated. The idea of anyone touching her, including Daniel, filled her with revulsion. Daniel, respectful of her injuries and sensibilities, did not initiate sex for many months after her attack. He waited for her physical wounds to heal. He waited for her hospitalization to end. Then, he waited for her to indicate that she was ready to make love. The indication was never forthcoming. Every time he attempted to initiate sex, she found an excuse or wept. Whenever this happened, Daniel backed off and gently stroked Rebecca’s hair while assuring her that things would get better. After a year of rejecting his advances, she tried to make love with him, but the experience for both of them was terrible. As they stopped mid-stream, he said, “Any time you’re ready,” but she never was and they drifted into a marriage still full of love, but not one that included making love. In that respect, her life paralleled that of Morales; love without sex.

  The cliché that “time heals all wounds” didn’t work for Rebecca. More appropriate she thought was “Time tamps down all wounds.” Three years after the Event, Rebecca was functioning reasonably well and fully integrated in their social and business life, but she now carried a gun and practiced shooting three times a week. The shooting range was about the only place she felt safe. There, she was among many kindred spirits who were motivated like her to practice out of fear of the future. Before the Event, carrying a gun was unthinkable. She had in fact never held a gun. But now, the Glock 43 handgun was something she carried with her at all times. After six months on the range, she had become a crack shot and confident whenever she held her weapon. When she entered her house by herself, it was always with her gun drawn and like policemen entering a criminal’s home, her hands were ahead of her in shooting position.

  Now, as Rebecca sat in the hospital’s cafeteria and composed an email to Morales, she had additional concerns. Their good and happy life was unraveling. The business which provided them with a high upper middle-class lifestyle, which at its apogee pushed them temporarily into that mythical one percent, a place where the other ninety-nine percent naively thought life must be perfect, was in deep trouble. While success came quickly to them with their sepsis molecule and then with a molecule for ALS, for the past five years they had no new molecule to offer. Royalty income was evaporating and the major push by Rebecca and her research team for the next new molecule for Alzheimer’s had stalled.

  At first, the Alzheimer’s molecule she developed showed extraordinary promise as a breakthrough drug for the disease, which had become significantly more widespread as the population aged. She and her team developed a molecule that was a combination and modification of three other molecules, one having the structure of the illegal street drug Ecstasy, and now prescribed for certain cases of clinical depression, Razadyne, a drug classified as a “cholinesterase inhibitor,” and a memantine hydrochloride. The combination drug with some structural modifications produced remarkable results in some patients, so much so that press touted it as the new cure for Alzheimer’s. Investors lined up, but as testing became more widespread, the results showed that the drug was only effective in less than three percent of the population. Investments in their company stalled and then stopped altogether.

  They had not taken a draw for six months and were dipping deeply into their savings to keep their business afloat. The traditional trappings of what Rebecca called their “go-go years,” had disappeared. For the first time, they had to skip their annual trip to Paris and a cruise to some exotic place. When friends talked about their next trip, Rebecca and Daniel made up excuses for passing up any near-term travel. “To busy with business,” was the usual explanation. They had refinanced their mortgage twice and now were at the limits on all of their credit cards. They were at the point where they discussed, in more than a hypothetical manner, the sale of their house. The possibility that they could not pay for their daughters’ college was just too gruesome to even contemplate, though they both knew the reality of their situation.

  Their last chance for financial salvation was via a joint venture with Actalmar Pharmaceutical, a giant company resulting from the merger of other pharmaceutical giants. Actalmar agreed to invest two billion dollars to modify the drug so it would work on a large segment of the population. No money would go to Daniel and Rebecca until the tests succeeded. At first there was a glimmer of hope, but each report back from the company began with the word “unfortunately.” The failures, however, did not deter Actalmar. After Actalmar exhausted the two billion, it voluntarily invested another billion without requiring a renegotiation of their original deal. Despite the additional investment, success seemed to elude Actalmar. Thus, Daniel and Rebecca were not surprised when they received an email from the company’s general counsel, confirmed in a letter sent via FedEx, which stated, “Pursuant to Paragraph 10.001 of our Agreement with you, notice is hereby given that we have stopped all work on the Drug Project, as defined above and this will serve as our Notice of Termination. Per our agreement, we are attaching ten thumb drives comprising all of our research and our test results.”

  The stress of their financial straits affected each of them differently. Rebecca, the more emotionally frail and volatile of the pair, became unglued at the oddest times, sometimes crying, sometimes raging, with no precipitating event. Daniel, through no fault of his own, was often always the target of her spontaneous wrath. She couldn’t direct her anger at anyone else because was incapable of confrontation with anyone other than Daniel. He was safe. In his gentle way, he attempted to deflect her outbursts and to calm her. But there was no one to calm him or be a buffer against his mounting anxiety.

  As she composed the email to Morales, Rebecca tried to conjure an image of him two plus decades older from the last time she first saw him, but had difficulty doing so. She wondered how she would answer his question, “How’s your life been?” Proffering a lie, would she say, “never better,” or would she tell the truth and answer, “never worse?”

  The email Morales received from Rebecca surprised and saddened him. “Dear Hector, I hope this finds you well. Sadly, my father had a second and I’m told a rather severe heart attack. I don’t know his prognosis yet, but I fear it isn’t very good. He very much wants to talk with you in person. He says it’s urgent, it’s about your latest ‘veterinary problem,’ but I don’t know what he means. He wants to see you sooner than later. He’s at New York Presbyterian Hospital. I hope this is not an imposition and look forward to seeing you. To think, when we first met you were just working at the hacienda and now you own and run Mr. Chula’s cattle empire. Where did the time go? Regards, Rebecca.”

  Why, he wondered, her b
rief email excited him? Why did the words “looking forward to seeing you,” resonate in his psyche? He responded in a moderated appropriate tone, however: “Dear Rebecca, I am so sorry about your father. He is a wonderful man. I owe him a great deal. I will be there within a week and look forward to catching up; it’s been a long time. As to the problem, there is some new type of viral infection threatening our steers, and I had asked if he could help. He told me about all the wonderful work you were doing on Alzheimer’s related drugs, and I’m quite interested in hearing about that. I am on the board of The ABC Medical Center, that is, the American British Cowdray Hospital. We are planning on establishing a new research center devoted solely to Alzheimer’s, and I’d appreciate any views or suggestions you may have. Sincerely, Hector.”

  The formality of his response masked his excitement and his nervousness. He asked himself, “Aren’t you over her after all these years?” He pulled up a photo of her on Google, a pre-Event photo, and then answered his question with a smile and a whispered, “Maybe not.”

  Sixteen

  •

  Reunion

  As he heard the rumble of the wheels on his chartered Hawker 800XP jet being lowered, Morales sent a text to Isabella. “Sixty miles out from JFK. Can you send me a brief description about the Alzheimer’s drug Rebecca’s company, DRB, had developed? Thanks, Hector.”

  Isabella’s response came fifteen minutes later. “Hector, amazing what you find on Google; all of this is public information. In a press release a few years back, DRB announced that when it combined her drug with two other molecules, the combination reversed the symptoms of the disease, cleared the cobwebs, so to speak. Here’s the bad news: the drug only works in less than three percent of the population. It showed so much promise when it worked that Actalmar Pharmaceutical agreed to attempt to make the drug work in a significant part of the population. It invested billions but made no headway and gave up. So, right now the drug’s not economically viable and the company’s funding has taken a big hit. In a Wall Street Journal interview a month back, Daniel, her husband and DRB’s CEO, said that he firmly believes that with the right funding his company could still make the drug work with a large segment of the population. Given the failure of Actalmar to achieve this goal, no one believes that claim, and word on the street is that the company will tank fairly soon.”