by Steve Alten
15
You know the day destroys the night—night divides the day. Tried to run—tried to hide . . . Break on through to the other side.”
I reached over to the CD alarm clock and shut Jim Morrison off midverse. My bedroom was dark, save for the glow of my cell phone mounted on its charger. Reaching up, I removed my T-shirt from the bedframe’s support bar, exposing the IV bag.
Empty! The shark stem cells were in me . . . but did I feel any different?
I tried to move my legs . . . nothing.
Again and again I tried to find a hint of improvement . . . a hip roll . . . a toe wiggle. Sweat broke out over my body as I turned the event into a full-blown workout in bed—and still there wasn’t a pulse of movement.
It’s only been five hours, asshole. Did you expect to leap out of bed doing the Macarena? Hide the evidence and continue with the second dose tonight.
I undid the empty IV bag from the crossbar, then slid the needle out of my vein, drawing blood. Using my T-shirt, I applied pressure to the wounded vessel, which I knew would bruise over the next few days.
That was a potential problem.
Making a mental note to wear long-sleeved shirts, I hid the IV bag and needle inside the false bottom of my Doors backpack, reset my alarm for six o’clock, and went back to sleep.
I made it through to fifth period lunch. There were still no physical changes to my lower body. Wheeling over to an empty table, I started to eat when I saw Principal Lockhart enter the cafeteria. He looked around, saw me, and walked swiftly toward me with purpose in his step.
“Kwan. I just got off the phone with Dr. Becker—did something happen at the lab?”
My heart rate jumped. “At the lab? Why? What did she say?”
“She said something came up and she had to cancel your internship.”
I felt lightheaded . . . scared. Should I confess? Would they arrest me?
“Kwan, are you okay?”
“I really liked it there. I just wanted to help . . . you know—to find a cure. Did she say why she was kicking me out?”
“She couldn’t talk. She was in a rush to catch a flight out of DC.”
She must’ve met with the feds. The FBI will probably be waiting at your door. You gotta get those two stem cell pouches and inject them before they do a search and seizure.
“Sir, I’m not feeling well.”
“You look a little pale.”
“I think I need to go home and rest.”
“I’ll call your grandmother—”
“No, it’s okay. She’s on a twelve-hour shift. I’ll call my driver; it’ll be fine.”
Bill picked me up in front of the school half an hour later. On the way home, I asked him to stop at a pharmacy—that I needed a bottle of saline solution to cleanse a wound.
The “genius” exited Walgreens with my change and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Bill, I need saline, it comes in a pint bottle. This stuff is too harsh.”
He got the order right two trips later.
There were no squad cars at the house, no federal marshals or members of the SWAT team. I keyed in and waited another twenty minutes for the big drug bust but no one came.
Decision time. I had two pouches of stem cells, a vial of HGH, and enough saline to fill an IV bag. I could mix everything into one big, juicy, dangerous cocktail, or feed it into my system every few days.
Asshole, you don’t have a few days. By tonight, Becker and a dozen deputies will be slapping on the cuffs while they search the house. You either inject it now or dump it in the toilet and burn the pouches—otherwise, come morning, you’ll be pleading your case in front of a judge.
Paranoia is a tough foxhole from which to assess your options. Fortunately, I had already considered all of mine back in the hospital.
It was four thirty in the afternoon by the time I had prepared the IV bag, burned the empty stem cell pouches on my grandmother’s outdoor grill, and sterilized the needle for insertion into a fresh vein.
My hand shook as I pierced my skin. I watched my blood curl up the IV line—coaxing the clear elixir to open up and flood it back inside my vein. And then I grew scared.
Maybe I should wait a week? Given my cells a chance to acclimate. I still hadn’t started the flow—it wasn’t too late. Was there a place in the refrigerator I could stow the IV bag?
Despite all the indignities of paralysis . . . despite drowning in a sea of guilt over my mother’s death, I realized I didn’t want to die.
Lying in bed with the needle in my vein, I thought about my mother. Would she approve of the risks I was about to take? I remembered a lecture she had given me when I was eight or nine years old . . . a lecture about right and wrong after she caught me stealing a candy bar from a convenience store shelf.
“Kwan, all of us have voices in our head. One voice is your conscience . . . it’s a voice that tells us we are about to do something wrong. Then there’s another voice—a louder, more confident voice—a voice that tells you exactly what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. It’s a voice that knows you intimately—it knows which buttons to push and what words to say to get you to do something bad.”
“But how do I know the difference?”
She tapped me on the chest. “Your heart knows.”
What was my heart telling me now?
It was telling me that my coming to Seacrest High . . . meeting Anya . . . interning at the lab as well as every event that led me to be lying in bed with this elixir poised to enter my vein—none of it was a coincidence . . . it was fate.
Rachel Solomon had told me I could only cleanse my soul by helping others. Well, wasn’t this helping others? By proving Becker’s serum worked, I would be accelerating a medical breakthrough that could change the lives of millions of suffering human beings.
Kwan Wilson . . . hero.
Reaching up, I opened the IV bag and adjusted the drip drip drip. Then I turned on my CD player and closed my eyes.
“Break on through to the other side. Break on through to the other side . . .”
I was floating, drifting in an island of muted, painless calm—while below the paramedics worked on my body, which appeared broken and cumbersome . . . and lifeless. Sun Jung was shaking her head, clucking like an animated chicken, and Dr. Beverly Chertok—the one who had found me—was giving a statement to a police officer in another room.
I had forgotten the shrink was coming to see me.
None of this bothered me in the least as I floated past the circling red and blue lights, beyond the night into the day—only not day, just light . . . warm and loving like a mother’s embrace—which is exactly what it was.
My mother’s soul was cradling me, washing away all the hurt, all the pain, all the toxins and mud and chains that bound me to life like a lead casing. Time did not exist. Ego had been flushed with my passing as I bathed in a sea of love . . . break on through to the other side.
You cannot stay, Kwan. You have to go back.
Mother, why?
It’s not your time.
Am I still being punished?
The Creator does not punish. I left because it was my time.
I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you.
We were never separated. Every soul remains bound through eternity . . . every act intended to help us reach fulfillment.
And then she let me go . . . and I fell back into my prison cell.
16
Comatose, I somehow remember hearing Sun Jung confront the Colombian doctor as if he had been reading from the wrong medical chart. “My grandson’s been lying in a coma for four days, and now you’re telling me his legs are working? What the hell you talking about?”
Dr. Xavier Prettelt attempted to calm my grandmother, who kept smacking my still-detac
hed body—her words piercing my consciousness which remained semilost in the ether. “I didn’t say his legs were working, Sun Jung. What I said was that his leg muscles are receiving nerve impulses, and that’s what’s causing the severe spasms in his lower extremities. I’ve had two neurologists examine him and both specialists concurred with that diagnosis. There’s simply no precedent for this—then again, we still have no clue what was in that empty IV bag that caused his white cell count to rocket so high. We’ve managed to drop his fever, but until your grandson regains consciousness his condition remains a mystery.”
It was pain that forced me awake. Imagine a thousand needles stabbing bone-deep in your feet, legs, and butt while your skin itched and burned so badly that it felt like you had stepped in a nest of fire ants. I cried out in my delirium, only there was a tube down my throat which muffled the sound. When I reached up to rip the damn thing out, I discovered my wrists were bound to the rails of the bed.
I don’t remember any of this, or what happened next. I only know now because the doctor showed me the evidence of my violent awakening, hours later, after my soul had fully returned to my body.
“You bit clear through the intubation tube.” Dr. Prettelt handed me the ten-inch-long plastic tube that had been inserted into my trachea to help me breathe. Sure enough, the last two inches had been crushed and punctured, as if by a steak knife. “I don’t know how you did that—it looks like something my German shepherd does to his Frisbee. I also don’t know how you managed to snap the leather wrist straps from your bedrail.”
“Guess they were loose.” I shot him a cocky half grin as I flopped my legs beneath the bedsheets. Waking up to find my lower limbs dancing was like waking up on Christmas morning with the Admiral stationed overseas. Then the pain hit. It felt as if my lower body had been frozen for eight months and was experiencing a slow, painful thaw. Fortunately the queen arrived to ease my agony, allowing me to figure out if I could move my legs myself. Unfortunately the muscles were too weak, but after a few hours of practice I found I could roll my feet and slightly bend my knees—the movement like a supersized epic orgasm.
“I’m starving, Doc. When can I get some real food?”
“I ordered lunch. Are you still in pain?”
“It’s tolerable.” I glanced to the IV bag on my right where my old pal, Dilaudid, was dripping its warm blanket into my veins.
Sun Jung squeezed my wrist, her eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “What was in the IV bag, Kwan? The other IV bag.”
“Like I told the doc, saline and HGH. At least the guy who sold it to me said it was HGH. Is that what healed my spinal cord?”
“We don’t know what caused your spinal cord to heal,” Dr. Prettelt replied. “Before we christen this a miracle, we need to assess the extent of the repair, whether it’s permanent, or if your leg muscles will ever regain enough strength to allow you to walk again.”
“Why would you give yourself an IV?” my grandmother asked for the third time, growing more annoyed.
“I told you, the guy who sold me the HGH said it would work better as a drip.”
“Why you buying HGH? Since when are you allowed to self-medicate?”
“I wanted to get stronger. I’m sorry, Sun Jung, what I did was stupid. But if by some miracle it helped heal my spinal cord . . . ?”
Lunch arrived—three pieces of greasy baked chicken, french fries, and chocolate cake for dessert. I was so hungry I asked for a second helping of everything.
After lunch, Dr. Prettelt removed my catheter and gave me a urine bottle—a trial run to see if I had regained control of my bladder . . . and more important, my little fella. I could squeeze the muscles constricting my groin, but the area still felt numb.
Later that afternoon a physical therapist by the name of Gary Blackwell came by to see me. With me lying on my back, Gary manipulated my legs while I attempted to offer resistance. The pain was excruciating—it felt as if someone were lashing my lower back with a whip, and it took all of my willpower just to hold my trembling legs up to his chest.
I endured the torture for an hour. After twenty minutes of ice packs on my spine, I was taken downstairs for three hours of isolation in my old oxygen bunker. That was followed by dinner and another visit from the therapist, who massaged my cramping leg muscles, which were twitching and throbbing so badly that I wondered if I had made a huge mistake.
What if I never regain control? What if my legs become so annoying that I’m forced to have them amputated just for a moment’s peace?
A shot of Queen Dilaudid put me out until three fifteen in the morning.
When I awoke, everything felt different.
The first thing I noticed was that I could feel my penis and the fullness of my bladder, which I joyfully relieved into the urine bottle. After I peed, I realized the pain in my legs was gone. Pulling away the sheet, I stared at my bare feet and wiggled my toes. Encouraged, I brought my right leg up to my chest, held it, then lowered it to the bed—a movement I was unable to complete hours earlier without my therapist’s help. Adrenaline coursed through my body as I repeated the exercise with my left leg, alternating three sets of fifty reps.
My limbs were responding, but they needed more.
Quietly, I dropped the rail of my bed, then rolled my legs to the side and positioned my bare feet to the cold tile floor. Gripping the rail with one hand, my IV stand with the other, I shifted my weight onto my wobbling legs . . . and stood—then cried out as I tumbled sideways onto the mattress, tearing the IV from my hand.
The old man sleeping in the next bed over continued snoring through the disturbance.
It took me several minutes to stop my torn vein from bleeding. At some point, I looked toward my roommate and spotted the old man’s walker.
Using the furniture as crutches, I made my way over to the four-legged aluminum device and stood once more, this time allowing the walker to bear most of my weight and balance. One step followed the next, until I was standing/leaning outside my room in the empty corridor.
I turned left to bypass the nurses’ station and continued placing one foot after the other as I leaned on the walker, gradually allowing my legs to bear more and more weight. Each baby step was a tutorial for my brain as I relearned how to shift my weight and balance. I’d count twelve steps and pause, then attempt to stand as long as I could on both feet.
I was back in training, lost in the world of reps and sets . . . in essence, I was me again! The fact that I had brought myself to this place by facing my fears stoked my ego even more.
After about an hour, my quaking legs began to regain some coordination. With coordination came muscle memory, and with muscle memory came strength through repetition.
Repetition? Using that walker, I made my way from the west wing to the east and back again six times. I must have trekked two miles before I returned to my room just before the seven a.m. shift change. Climbing back into bed, I rang for the day nurse, who redid my IV and gave me a shot for the pain. By now, my muscles were quivering as if I had run a marathon.
I slept through breakfast. When I awoke, my therapist was standing over me, along with Dr. Prettelt, the nurse, Sun Jung, and three other physicians—everyone staring at my legs.
“What’s wrong?” I sat up, my heart racing.
Sun Jung shook her head. “What did you do to yourself? Your legs . . . they no longer scrawny—you understand my English?”
I looked down. Somehow in the span of four hours my quads, hamstrings, and calf muscles had literally doubled in size.
“Lower the rail on my bed, I want to stand!”
The nurse complied. Swinging my legs around to the side, I stood on leg muscles as secure and balanced as the Rock of Gibraltar.
Gripping my IV bag, I walked across the room to the corridor. And then I jogged past the nurses’ station and sprinted back, leaving my grandmother giggling a
nd the medical staff dumbfounded.
Dr. Prettelt ordered more blood work, along with a battery of neurological tests.
“No,” I said, handing the nurse my IV bag. “No more tests. No more drugs. No more hospital stays. Sun Jung, tell them to get my discharge papers ready, I’m going home.”
The pain seized me then, as if someone had plunged a hunting knife into my internal organs. I collapsed to my knees, crying out in agony.
I was placed on a gurney and given a shot of Dilaudid, then rushed inside a CAT scan chamber where an arc attached to an X-ray machine passed over my outstretched body.
Sun Jung squeezed my hand as Dr. Prettelt gave me the news.
“It’s bad. For some reason your stoma closed. Waste has been backing up into your intestine. We’re prepping you for emergency surgery. If we can we’ll try to reattach your colon.”
A dozen thoughts rambled through my mind as nurses rushed into the room to obtain signatures and attach blood pressure cuffs and EKG electrodes, while an anesthesiologist checked my jaw and teeth. Had the HGH injections failed? Were my internal organs changing?
Was I turning into a bull shark?
At some point he injected a liquid into my IV. The queen took over and blah, blah, blah, blah . . .
17
The infusion of shark stem cells into my bloodstream had set my immune system into overdrive. Anything considered a threat was annihilated; any abnormal function attracted my genetically enhanced stem cells like engineering bees to a leaking dam of honey.
That’s what happened with my colon. My jacked-up stem cells interpreted my stoma as a tear and sealed it up. Fortunately, my surgeon was able to reconnect my colon—an unexpected happy ending to an emergency that nearly killed me. Four hours after being wheeled into the operating room I woke up, groggy, medicated, and no longer needing a colostomy bag. In every physical sense, I had been granted a “do-over.”
What I didn’t know was that the aggressive concoction of stem cells and HGH that had healed my spinal cord was far from satisfied with the original genetic design of its host.
