The Cure for Modern Life

by Lisa Tucker

  “I’m not scared,” he said, lifting his chin. “I just don’t want to bother you.”

  “It won’t bother me, it will make me happy.” She smiled her radiant, straight-teeth smile. “Knowing I taught a little kid about the best band in the world.” When he still hesitated, she said, “Consider it your way of repaying me, okay?”

  He couldn’t let her put the white plugs in for him; he didn’t want her to see how dirty his ears were. He figured out how to use the earphones easily enough, and when he was finished listening, he remembered to wipe the plugs on his jacket sleeve to remove any wax. He didn’t want to be disgusting to this girl. For some reason, his usual knight’s excuse of spending too much time traveling outdoors, without access to daily baths and other civilized things, didn’t comfort him the way it always had before. Standing with this perfect girl, none of that even seemed real.

  The total time he’d listened to the music was probably no more than a minute. One of the girl’s friends had come along and told her that it was time to go back in, lunch was over. They were students at a school near Suburban Station called Friends Select, where Danny loved to hang out. Most of the kids were really nice, even those who didn’t give him any money.

  One minute, but it was enough. He couldn’t get his mind off that white music-making box. Before the end of the day, he knew what it was called. He’d even seen it in a commercial with people dancing, but he hadn’t paid attention then. Now it was a word he noticed everywhere, a word he loved as much as he’d ever loved crown and sword and knights and honor. iPod.

  He wanted one more than he’d ever wanted a home. If only he had an iPod, he wouldn’t have to listen to the people in their house cry and moan when they ran out of drugs. He wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming all around the neighborhood. He wouldn’t even have to listen to people who didn’t believe him and yelled that he was supposed to be in school, not panhandling on the street. “I got my own kids to feed. Tell your mom and dad to get off their lazy asses and get a job, like everybody else.”

  The iPod would fill the whole world with music, and everything in his life would be different. Maybe he would make it play sad music to get him in the mood for tears, when necessary. Or he could have it play happy music when he was trudging home and Isabelle seemed so heavy. He could even play Big music when he was looking at the whole city from 30th Street Station, and the Big music would remind him he could do anything, just like it did for the boxer in the only movie he could remember seeing, a movie set in Philly called Rocky that they’d shown every night in the homeless shelter. His mom said Rocky was supposed to inspire them to get off the streets and find work.

  Naturally, the man had an iPod; he had everything. When Danny picked up the white beauty, connected by a cord to the computer, his only conscious thought was to listen to it until Isabelle woke up. He’d already heard her stirring, so he knew it wouldn’t be long. He had to take this chance now, while he still could.

  He hoped he wasn’t about to steal the man’s iPod, but he couldn’t be sure. If the iPod hadn’t lit up when he touched it and told himDO NOT DISCONNECT , he might have figured out how to get the wire off, he might have slipped it in his pocket. Instead, he let go immediately, afraid an alarm was about to go off. Then he jumped in his seat as the computer screen suddenly came to life. The shifting pictures were gone, and in their place was a box with hundreds and hundreds of numbers. Above the box it said Microsoft Excel. Next to it was another, smaller box that repeated the warning not to disconnect the iPod. But most noticeable of all was that the computer had started talking to him.

  He understood the first word, hello , but after that it was all gibberish except the word hola , which some of his mom’s friends used. After a minute or two, he heard another regular English sentence, “How are you? I’m fine, thank you,” followed by more gibberish. The pattern continued, English, gibberish, until he figured out that all the gibberish must be words in other languages. The clue was that each gibberish sentence had a different accent. He recognized the Italian accent from the Rocky movie. He recognized the Spanish accent from a woman his mom knew. Why he recognized the Japanese he wasn’t sure, but that made him guess the man had been listening to this to learn how to say things on his trips.

  He was just deciding that the guy might not be all that smart—his mom knew lots of Spanish, just from having friends; shouldn’t the man already know hello in Japanese if he was flying there?—when he heard a sound that made him spin around so fast he hit his shin on the leg of the desk. It was Isabelle’s voice, and it was so loud that he thought she’d fallen off the couch. But no, she was sitting up, looking at him, making the same loud sound over and over. “Chow! Chow! Chow!”

  He knew she didn’t mean food, but he had to wait for the whole thing to start from the beginning again before he could figure out what the word meant. It was her first word other than constant nos and the rare yes , and of course he was thrilled. Even if it was in Italian, it was still hello. And she was smiling at him like she meant it.

  During the next hour, while he was feeding her crackers and giving her sips of Gatorade, the tape kept playing. Danny wasn’t sure how to stop it, and he was glad he didn’t because Isabelle got two more words before she put her hand out, meaning she was full. One of the words was from the middle of a sentence and Danny couldn’t tell what it meant or even what language it was, but the other one was you . And she said it over and over, pointing at him all the while.

  He wasn’t surprised she knew what it meant; she’d understood language for a long time. But that she could talk, well, that was a miracle. It had to be, because a mean nurse at the clinic had told his mom, “It will take a miracle for your daughter to suddenly start speaking.”

  That this miracle came from the computer with the equation made the little hairs on Danny’s arms stand up as he wondered what else this computer could do. How could he leave before he found out how many more words Isabelle could learn? And what about the other things in this apartment? What if this magical place even held the key to fixing his sister?

  Of course the security guard was still a problem. For all he knew, the man was calling him right now. Somehow, Danny needed a way to stay here without anybody finding them. He thought for a moment, until he remembered the guy’s bedroom. As he was wandering around the apartment, he’d noticed something in that room. He picked up Isabelle and headed in that direction, squinting his eyes the way he always did when he was hoping hard that this time, something good would actually work out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Matthew’s No-Good, Very Bad Day

  While Danny was examining Matthew’s bedroom, Matthew himself was on a plane to Chicago—where he had a short layover before he boarded the flight to Tokyo—drinking his second cup of bad airplane coffee, trying to decipher a cryptic but clearly panicked email from his assistant, Cassie. He’d tried to call her from the pay-as-you-go-phone he’d picked up in the Philly airport, but he never got through. He suspected that she was frantically dialing his cell, wondering why he wasn’t answering since he always answered her calls unless he was in the air or with a client, and she knew his schedule perfectly so she knew that until 8:27 that morning, neither of those was true. Takeoff at 8:37 meant cell phones off at 8:27, which always annoyed Matthew since he thought the evidence that cell phones caused navigation problems at any point during a flight was unconvincing and probably paid for by the maker of those overpriced, ugly, seat-back-mounted phones. Which of course he still tried to use, repeatedly, to reach Cassie or Cassie’s assistant, Geoff, or any of the managers in his division, but no one was answering—if the piece of shit was even dialing his office, which he couldn’t be sure of since the calls just rang and rang rather than switching over to voice mail.

  Writing cryptic emails was part of Cassie’s job, to avoid creating an audit trail for anything beyond the mundane. But obviously the point was to make the meaning indecipherable to everyone except Matthew.

 
; “Hello, Dr. Connelly. I’ve heard Tokyo may be having bad weather. Perhaps you should reschedule your trip. I’ll be in at 6:30 to discuss alternate flight plans. If you like, I can schedule you for a lunch today at Bookbinders. The email server keeps going down, so it would be best to call me directly about this. Cassie.”

  She always called him Matthew, but he insisted on Dr. Connelly for emails to hide how closely they worked together, in case he was ever in trouble, so she wouldn’t go down with him. Bad weather in Tokyo was obviously a problem in Japan, but a problem wouldn’t mean rescheduling the trip, but rather going there immediately, as Matthew already was. The email server lie was fairly standard procedure, but it did mean that the problem was too delicate to discuss in even the most cryptic of emails. The six-thirty arrival was the real sign that she was panicking, as Cassie had kids (two or three, he wasn’t sure), and she wouldn’t come in at that hour unless something was seriously wrong. The other sign was the Bookbinders lunch date, which was code that his boss, Walter Healy, wanted to meet with him—but that had to be Cassie going over the edge and forgetting what lunch at Bookbinders meant. Everyone on his staff knew that Walter was in Paris, where he was the keynote speaker at a European Union conference.

  His second cup of crap coffee finished, he found himself worrying what could be so wrong in Tokyo that Cassie had decided he shouldn’t make the trip. That idiotic TV show had been shown on every channel in the country? Picked up by all the newspapers and radio stations? The Japanese government had decided to hold emergency hearings? Even so, Matthew would have gone there to protect his billion-dollar baby. He had nothing to worry about; all the Galvenar safety data in his PowerPoint presentation had been extensively verified by statisticians, not to mention by the “geniuses” at the FDA.

  His mind wandered to Ben and Amelia then, and before long he’d fallen asleep, waking up only when the plane landed. Waiting for him at his gate was the PR rep, Dorothy Hilton, an older gal (really older, not older like forty) known for her immensely reassuring presence, her knowledge of Japanese and several other languages, and her endless ability to sling intelligent-sounding bullshit. Her firm was the top of the line for pharmaceutical PR, and Matthew was glad to see her smiling. Dorothy Hilton would not be grinning if there were a problem in Tokyo. “Nothing new,” she said, and showed him a thick file of downloaded Japanese newspapers. No news is good news, as she said.

  Meaning Cassie knew something about Japan that this PR expert didn’t? Highly unlikely. So what was she talking about? Jesus, why couldn’t he get through to anyone? Was Astor-Denning on fire? He finally decided to call the company’s main number and asked the receptionist to connect him with anybody on the third floor, building B.

  “Could you be more specific, sir? We have more than a hundred people on that floor.”

  “I’m aware of that. And any one of them will know who I am, so just put me through to someone you know is in today. The higher up the better.”

  “Fine,” she said snippily. Maybe he had sounded a little pissed off. He was about to apologize, but then he found himself transferred, and the phone was ringing. When he heard the click to voice mail he was relieved, but then he heard his own voice. The receptionist had put him through to himself. Fuck.

  Dorothy had gotten him a latte and a bagel at Starbucks, accepting without question the strange fact that he didn’t have any cash or his ATM card. She sat down and repeated her reassurance that the receptionist’s busy signal when he tried to call again (and again and again) wasn’t worrying. “Our trip is going to be a dazzling success. It’s all good.”

  He tore off a chunk of the bagel and wondered why PR people always repeated themselves, like good kindergarten teachers making sure everyone understood. For instance, “It’s all good,” which had been repeated so often it was an annoying cliché. All good? Then how come I’m sitting on an ugly blue plastic bolted-to-the-ground chair in Chicago, about to board a fourteen-hour flight? How come I feel like I’ve just been run over by a bus? How come I can’t get through to my assistant, or her assistant, or anybody in my department? How come I couldn’t think fast enough last night to get out of doing an illegal drug that caused me to get robbed? How come I let homeless people take over the only place I can really relax, my citadel against all the slings and arrows, my personal little castle complete with security system moat, my home sweet home?

  Of course the scheming boy and the sick girl he’d left in his apartment had been bugging him all morning. His plan had been to explain what happened to Cassie—all of it, including the E—and then get her to deal with the security guard and social services or whoever would get them out of his house. In the cold fluorescent light of the airport, it was abundantly obvious that no sane person would believe he’d let two homeless kids in just to be nice . Hell, he wouldn’t believe it himself if he hadn’t done it. So calling the security guard, knowing the boy would bring up the sex allegation, was out of the question. He could imagine the headline:ASTOR-DENNING VICE PRESIDENT A PEDOPHILE ? Better to have his entire place ransacked by the addict mom and all her addict friends than risk that nuclear-sized disaster.

  He hoped that the kid wasn’t lying and they were already gone. It was possible, if unlikely. If only he had some way to find out. Too bad he hadn’t gone to any of the building parties and had ignored all his neighbors’ attempts to be friends. Too bad he didn’t have a wife or at least a live-in girlfriend. The girlfriend could handle all this for him, not to mention that the pedophile story wouldn’t be as compelling if he wasn’t a forty-year-old man, living alone, never married. It sounded bad even to him. In his thirties, he had been considered a player, but suddenly, at forty, he found himself nailing the profile of a sicko who hit on little kids. The march of time: inevitable, inexorable, inescapable—whatever word you used, it really sucked.

  He’d always thought he would be married someday, but later, when he had time to think about finding someone who wasn’t the beautiful-but-dumb type he always found himself in bed with. Marrying one of those women was out of the question; he couldn’t even stand them after a few weeks (or, more often, after one night), when he realized they had no idea what he was talking about. The only woman he’d ever lived with and thought he loved was Amelia. She wasn’t traditionally beautiful, but she was beautiful to him and incredibly smart—and look how well that worked out. She not only hated his guts, but she’d used every opportunity to make his life miserable for years . Everyone in his office was afraid of the woman, and no wonder: she was considered one of the most vocal critics of American pharmaceutical companies. Even Walter, a soft-spoken southern gentleman, had called Amelia Johannsen a “vicious bitch” and some other things that Matthew himself, no gentleman at all, really, was too much of a gentleman to repeat.

  But Walter had forgiven Miss Johannsen for all her numerous affronts against Astor-Denning when an entire year and then another passed without one peep out of her about Galvenar. Of course she kept up her diatribes against Big Pharma in general and AD specifically, but she never said one public word about their baby, which was an unprecedented stroke of something—could it be luck? Walter even asked Matthew if he was sleeping with her, which would have been funny if Matthew hadn’t already tried that a few years ago and found it most definitely did not work. If anything, trying to get back together with Amelia was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, but he’d learned his lesson from that fiasco. This time around, he’d come up with something much more effective.

  The plan had taken over a year to execute, but it had turned out exactly as he had envisioned. Even better, actually, as he never expected Amelia to say she was ready to put the past behind them. Yet she’d said those exact words, last weekend in the Caymans. Of course she was madly in love with one of the most famously ethical scientists in the world, which probably made her see things through a softer lens. Give her enough time and Matthew was sure she’d return to her old tired way of separating everything and everyone into Do Right or Do Wrong
. Matthew also knew on which side of the black and white line he would inevitably fall, because he knew Amelia. This was why he’d never once believed that Galvenar would go unnoticed by her forever. The very idea was laughable.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” Dorothy said. They were standing in line, getting ready to board the plane. She’d been talking nonstop and Matthew wished again that he’d remembered to bring his iPod. “Paris appears to be off to a fabulous start.”

  Matthew nodded. Though the EU conference hadn’t officially begun yet, AD was already enjoying a big public relations boost for aligning itself with the World Health Organization as sponsors of this “humanitarian” event. Matthew wasn’t surprised it was going well, despite the stupid fears of some of the company’s old guard, who’d worried that paying for a conference to examine the issue of drugs in the third world might confuse stockholders and make them think AD was becoming dangerously soft on profit. He expected the news would be even better after Walter’s excellent keynote speech.

  “We’ll have dozens of our own articles tomorrow on access to quality-of-life medicines,” Dorothy added. “Reprints of ‘Chronic Heartbreak,’ too. It’s all good.”

  “Chronic Heartbreak” was a first-person account of what it was like to live with severe, untreated pain from MS. For the last two years, it had been widely circulated by members of the grassroots organization Pain Matters, as part of their vigorous and relentless lobbying campaign to force doctors and medical schools around the world to take pain as seriously as any other disease because pain kills.

  It’s true; pain does kill. Chronic pain patients commit suicide when their pain goes untreated, not to mention the demonstrated effect of pain on the heart and immune system. But Pain Matters was not really a grassroots organization, but the creation of Dorothy Hilton’s PR firm, when Matthew first hired them to help him launch Galvenar. This particular PR stunt, cleverly named astroturfing , was so common in corporate and political marketing campaigns that Matthew had never given it a second thought. Since pain does matter, why shouldn’t they say so as often and loudly as they wanted?