by Greg Dragon
“Use a towel to put pressure on the bleeding,” Rett called to Eddie Jean. “Hear me!”
Her answering sobs nearly tore his heart in half.
“Help Eddie Jean!” the twins howled in unison from the hallway.
“Boys, don’t come in here. Stay back!”
Jenna tried to bite his leg. He moved. She wiggled, snorted, and snapped her teeth as if being driven mad by blood scent. Sweat drenched her body and his hands slipped. He recalled a recent case where police had shot a naked woman biting people at a jazz festival. She had taken LSD. Ended up she had a medical condition called “excited delirium.” Reported symptoms included aggression, high temperature, sweating, and taking off clothing.
Jenna tried to bite him.
He slugged her. Rett wrapped her slippery body in the bed quilt and carried her to their bedroom. He tied her in his mother’s rocking chair with a sheet.
“Did you look in Kimmy’s coffin?” Jenna’s voice sounded slurred.
Panting, Rett ignored his sudden chest pain. Jenna knew how to wound with words. Tears rolled from his eyes. He wiped them away and went back to tend Eddie Jean.
“Kimmy’s grown. Want to see her?”
Her words struck like a wave pulling him under and stealing his air. Rett went to his office and grabbed duct tape. He taped Jenna’s mouth shut. He couldn’t bear more snide comments about Kimmy. Maybe Jenna had taken drugs—she could be experiencing excited delirium—but he couldn’t take her hatred anymore.
One piece of tape wasn’t enough. He put three across her lying mouth. Hands shaking, he made sure she could breathe. He spent more time securing Jenna to the chair with his belts.
Satisfied, he went to his daughter. Eddie Jean had wrapped a towel around each hand. A washcloth was folded across her leg and secured by a gold scarf. The twins sat beside her, hugging her from both sides.
At first he couldn’t speak. “The bleeding stopped?” He squatted to take a look. She jerked her hands away.
He kissed the boys. “Get dressed. We’re taking your sister to the hospital.”
“Let’s go, Tim,” Tommy ordered, standing.
Eddie Jean waited until the boys left before she said, “Daddy, we don’t need a hospital. I self-heal, remember?”
Rett couldn’t look at her—an exact replica of Jenna, except taller. “Two weeks ago a spelunker caught rabies from a bat bite. I’m not taking any chances with you.”
“Oh, Daddy.” His girl held her arms out to him, and he lifted her. “Granddad explained it to you. I can’t get sick. Momma needs the hospital, not me.”
Quitman Delaney had explained how a few people grew up in Cloudland with extraordinary skills and intellect. Quitman claimed the swarms changed DNA in certain people. He had added, “Eddie Jean’s got more kick than the rest of us, she heals with her hands.”
Rett had laughed.
The old man had grinned and slashed Rett’s forearm with a knife. He told Eddie Jean to heal the laceration. Eddie Jean got upset with her grandfather’s demonstration, but she healed him. Rainbow-like colors formed under her skin. No, Rett couldn’t dispute a miracle occurred, but he didn’t understand it.
He put her on the bed. “This is different. You’re hurt.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Rett looked up at the ceiling. “Your mother is insane?”
Eddie Jean’s chin quivered. “I don’t know.”
“She bit herself and then you. It’s rabies, or she took something that made her act wild.”
Eddie Jean’s eyes widened. She went into the bathroom to wash her hands.
Rett decided he’d let Eddie Jean down. His marital problems, his grief after losing Kimmy, and his failure to confront Michael Thomas for wife poaching, combined to render him spineless. He needed to man up. Rett walked into her bathroom. “I need to see what she did.”
Eddie Jean shook her head. Her necklaces circled her neck like a jewelry bib. She only took them off during soccer season. Eddie Jean made and sold her designer necklaces in downtown Cloudland and on the internet. Her sales boosted her college fund. He was proud of her creative talent. “Let me see.”
Eddie Jean was five-nine to his five-eleven. He didn’t have to stoop. Rett held out a clean towel and she put her hands on it. His breath caught at the damage after healing began. Eddie Jean’s hands had been shredded, and her fingers were discolored from deep bites. He stared at proof his wife had abandoned the natural instinct of protecting her young. Tears dribbled from his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I can take pain, betrayal, and disappointment. I can’t take your mother acting like a rabid dog.”
“Daddy, you’re my rock.”
Her hushed words meant everything. “Did she ask you for healing?”
Eddie Jean shook her head. “When I came home from school, I found her drinking salt water in the kitchen. She said an infestation was inside her. It told her to bring Kimmy home.”
Rett grew up on military bases and learned to take his knocks. He wanted his kids to be rooted to their family, their home, and their community. Jenna’s behavior was destroying their family. He had to act. “Did you try to cure her?”
“She’s rotten inside, and I can’t heal her. She woke me up when she tied my leg. After she bit me, she licked my blood. I’ve never been so scared.”
Family was his breath and he lived to make them happy. This conflict might break him. Rett brushed hair from his daughter’s pale face. “How can you take the pain, honey?”
“I’m your daughter.”
Rett hugged her. “I’ll take her to the emergency room.” The power went out.
“I guess we’ll all go,” Eddie Jean said.
Rett looked at her hands again. Almost healed.
Louis
Chills swept up Doctor Louis Janzen’s body.
The sensation had nothing to do with the thunderstorm passing overhead. He stared with awe and trepidation at the white ice chest delivered to his lab on UVA’s campus. Louis worried his research might fail. He couldn’t convince himself his actions bordered on dementia, but it was a close call. His hopes for an Alzheimer’s cure depended on what he discovered, if anything, on the brain in the ice chest. Emotions clouded his decisions, leaving him exhausted and weak.
When his head began to swim, he sat on a stool and leaned over the counter top. He smelled the diluted bleach used to clean the work surfaces. Sweat beaded his forehead. He shut his eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass. Louis wiped the sweat away with a tissue. He’d almost fainted. He hadn’t visualized the brain yet, much less cut slivers to mount on slides. This had never happened to him. Had he lost his edge? Worry consumed him like a fever.
A clinical investigator had to remain aloof to collect research data trusted by peers. Gathering data without emotion was a researcher’s goal. After a colleague’s suicide, Louis decided to give up the researcher’s “cold shroud.” He missed his friend’s symptoms, and they shared an office suite. How did he not notice?
Louis visualized the cold shroud as a mental lab coat that shielded him from his emotions so he could concentrate on science. Over time he realized it was one thing to wear the shroud when performing a painful procedure, but another to stay detached every day. He became addicted to being disconnected and withdrew from social activities. His secretary, Cindy Van Zant, accused him of becoming a lab hermit.
Surprised, Louis kicked the cold shroud habit. But without wearing the mental shield he experienced disgust. More than one clinical research study he participated in had high, adverse side effects. His patients suffered; he suffered.
As he retreated from patient care, Louis began to question his life’s work. Sometimes he missed the cold shroud. With it on he didn’t have to admit to ethical conflicts. Now, he doubted his decision not to advise UVA colleagues of his plans. He worried they might object to his testing on a long-dead relative’s brain for a microbial infection. He couldn’t bear their censure, so he kept mum.
Janzen
, drop the pity party. Get on with it.
Louis learned over drinks at a neurology conference in Hawaii that his great-grandfather’s brain had been preserved by a leading neurologist in 1908. Yale University claimed the brain as property, along with clinical records and glass plate negatives. A Yale colleague had discovered the name Louis Edmund Janzen from Boston on the museum’s specimen log. The news came on the same day Louis considered withdrawing from the quixotic race to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
AL, as his family called the hated disease, had struck Louis’s father, a well-known researcher and two older brothers, and recently symptoms had targeted him. He forgot long-time colleague names and directions to common campus buildings. As with his brothers, age thirty-nine became his jump into the first AL symptoms. Louis wanted to withdraw to the country and immerse himself in nature. Instead, he cut his teaching schedule. After learning about his great-grandfather’s preserved brain, and the discovery they shared the same name, Louis enjoyed renewed hope. He returned to the lab.
The medical museum’s curator told him his ancestor’s specimen jar had never leaked. Few of the four hundred brains remained in mint condition like the Janzen brain. Yale turned over his relative’s clinical photos printed from glass plate negatives, a yellowed medical chart, and a brain incarcerated for over a century in a bell-shaped jar.
The cure might be inside a brain lobe.
Maybe the disembodied voice in his mind was an early dementia sign or stress. He didn’t know which. The accepted rule in medical circles: Doctors shouldn’t treat family members. Louis meant to dissect his relative’s brain because time was slipping away from the cursed Janzen family. He and his brothers might not escape, but his nephews and nieces had a chance for a normal lifespan as long as scientists chased the cure. Recent failures, his included, had created a hole in new funding.
He needed to find a spark. Someone had to break the vicious AL cycle—the cared for or the caregiver. He needed to follow his instincts even if cutting his grandpop’s brain felt indecent and made him ill. Louis lifted his head and his vision remained clear. He took deep breaths and visualized what he wanted to accomplish.
A neurologist and researcher like me stole his brain to study.
His inner conflict stemmed from the omitted family consent for brain removal. Doctors stole the brain, stored it inside a jar in a dingy hospital basement, and forgot about it. His researcher side applauded them, and his human side despised their arrogance.
The Janzen family never knew he had been buried missing an organ. It didn’t make Louis feel any less outraged because the same thing happened to Albert Einstein’s brain at Princeton. He understood why the neurologist took it. Like Louis, he searched for answers, and answers led to cures, and cures led to less suffering. As a family member, doctors swiping body parts for science left a putrid taste in his mouth.
Louis stood. He moved to the sink and splashed cool water on his face. He wiped it dry on a rough paper towel and ran wet fingers through his short dark hair. Louis turned off the faucet and went back to the ice chest.
Now, I’m going to experiment on my grandpop’s brain.
He’d already prepared the lab. He buttoned his lab coat and put on gloves and a respirator to avoid noxious fumes. He opened the ice chest and gently removed the wax-sealed jar. The shriveled brain’s color reminded him of pale mushrooms as it floated in a formaldehyde bath. He turned on a lamp to examine it closer. He noted where previous slivers had been taken from various brain segments. Overcome by another rush of emotions, he removed the respirator and waited for his eyes to dry.
Hands shaking, he opened the manila envelope from the box. Black and white photos slid out. Louis pushed his pity aside and studied them. His relative had bowed to allow the photographer to take pictures of bizarre vein-like structures growing out of his scalp. The root-like growths were engorged and tangled, others were thin and short. Between the roots grew a clear membrane, like fly wings, and studded within he saw thin filaments. His stomach cramped at the grotesque sight.
Louis stared at the hideous growths—sprung from a brain tumor, according to the chart. His grandpop didn’t survive the surgery. The surgeon had released the brain from the root tangles and gelatinous growths by removing a chunk. Evidently, the malignancy grew as a bean vine from the brain’s posterior lobe.
The curator claimed the autopsy record and lab reports on the brain biopsy were missing. He confirmed his relative reported early onset dementia symptoms. The confusion had interrupted his law practice years before the growth protruded from his head. AL history confirmed.
A lump grew in Louis’s throat at the uncanny resemblance they shared. Dark blue eye shape and thick, dark brows matched. Long patrician nose and flat ears with lobes, but his ancestor had smooth, pale skin while his own resembled a pock-marked landscape. Grandpop was tall and skinny as well. Louis didn’t resemble his parents or siblings. Just this one man.
The old man had respected and trusted his doctor enough to let him photograph his rare condition. Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded the doctor stealing his brain. Louis knew any requests to keep the whole brain or a part would have been denied. Back then such requests were considered ghoulish. Still, it rankled that his brain might have fallen like others did. Brains freed from shattered jars ended up tossed into the trash or flushed in toilets.
Get on with it.
His grandpop’s expression held a mixture of defiance and vulnerability. “Forgive me,” he said before sliding the pictures back in the envelope.
He polished the lens on his glasses, re-gloved, and put on the respirator and safety glasses. Louis turned on the video camera to record his experiment. He’d been fired from the CDC two years ago. For two years there, he led the task force to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease after the gene had been identified. The cure proved to be elusive.
His family history forced Louis to consider the obvious. He’d been overheard at an international symposium telling a colleague he’d found disturbing similarities between Alzheimer’s and autism. He suspected an exotic microbe turned on the AL gene. The same microbe wreaked havoc in autistics by releasing a protein or enzyme creating their symptoms as well. The reporter knew sounding pet theories off colleagues was common practice and not meant to be released as news. He reported it anyway. Back in Atlanta, the parents of autistic kids called for his head. Their kids didn’t have bugs in their brains. The CDC dumped him.
Louis scraped the wax from the lid and removed his great-grandfather’s brain. He eased the fragile brain to a sterile cutting tray. He weighed it and described his impressions for the camera. As he worked, he remembered a funny thing happened after being fired. Friends rallied around him. First, an old mentor brought him back to UVA and told him to stay on track. Louis began his best work once freed from the cutthroat rivalry between peers.
Four other university researchers across the country contacted him. They agreed with the microbe theory for AL, but were afraid to support him publicly. The five formed a secret group. They called themselves the Cognoscenti—those in the know—or COGS for short. The COGS followed a fringe theory on the side. They shared secret microbial research and gave each other tips to shave budget dollars to fund their work.
Louis mounted and labeled several brain slices. He put the samples in an automatic stainer and waited for the results. He drummed his fingers on the desk, paced back and forth, and wore himself out as the machine flicked through its stages. His head ached before the drying stage ended. When the machine gave an automatic beep, he lifted them out.
He loaded the first slide. Nothing. On the second slide he studied a bizarre reaction to the staining agent. The specimen had turned lime green. When he studied it under the microscope, his heart performed a slow somersault.
Louis jerked his head back and blinked his eyes. Impossible.
He took a deep breath and flexed his cramped shoulders. He squinted back into the lens. The microbe remained because the st
ain had de-cloaked it.
He concentrated on his work. He sliced, mounted, and stained brain pieces. In the end, he found two. He couldn’t deny the rush pulsing through his veins along with frequent adrenalin boluses. Louis faced the camera and shouted, “Eureka!”
***
The COGS discussed his findings over Skype. Despite the late hour his colleagues beamed excitement. Like him, one had worked late in the lab. The others wore pajamas because Louis never waited to share his good research news. Much of their side research took place after hours. The group had agreed to locate older preserved brains for the new tests, but Louis had the first discovery.
John Wahl, from Columbia University, asked, “Is the effect related to the tumor?”
“Unknown,” Louis said, rubbing his temples. “My mother sent me a box containing my dad’s earlier work. He did advanced research on the immune system on so-called super healers. I haven’t had time to review his findings. Maybe I can glean tips from him.”
“Wish I was a super healer,” Stan Jenkins grumbled. “Can’t shake this snotty cold.”
“Well,” Eric Richards from Seattle said, “let’s assume it’s microbial. And over the years it remained preserved without contamination. Is it possible the microbe excreted a byproduct into the formaldehyde and it caused the stain reaction?”
“Or,” Wahl said and snapped his fingers, “did formaldehyde have different additives back then? We know the specimen jar is a rare combination of glass and lead to keep the inside from turning cloudy.”
“Good ideas. I’ll take formaldehyde samples from the jar and shoot them out to you in the morning. Try it on your specimens,” Louis said. “It’s risky, but why not be aggressive? Meanwhile, I’ll ask a few microbiologists to check out our new friend. I know a chemist who will assay the formaldehyde. The problem is the fluid is a biohazard.”
Wahl quipped, “Anything that exits the human body is a biohazard.”
“Babies aren’t biohazards,” Wilma Collins, the lone female, pointed out.
