“I’d forgotten what it was like to feel normal. I didn’t even realize how much the disease was dictating my life—what I did, what I ate. Everything.” He squeezed her hand. “I feel like I’m finally free of all that.”
“I’m really glad it worked out so well.” Amanda sighed. “Too bad it’s Sunday already. I need to head back in a few hours. At least it should be an easy drive with the nice weather.”
Jeremy hesitated for a moment, then decided the time was right. “Amanda, I want to talk to you about something.” He spotted a wooden bench under a maple tree a short distance ahead. It sat on a small rise and overlooked a peaceful meadow. No one else was around. “Let’s sit over there.”
Amanda shot him a questioning look. “Sure, what is it?”
They sat down on the bench. Jeremy desperately wanted to hold Amanda’s hands in his, but instead he clasped his hands together in his lap and cleared his throat. “I know you can’t keep driving up here every weekend forever, and I’m recovered now and don’t really need help…”
Amanda stared at the ground. “Oh, I suppose you’re ready to get back to a normal rhythm and all…”
“Well, no, that’s not it. Not exactly.” They’d gotten closer and more comfortable with each other over the last several months, but neither of them had spoken of what might—or might not—come next. Their focus had been primarily on his recovery. “I just…well… I’d just… Oh, screw it. Would you move in with me?”
She looked up at him. She seemed to weigh the question for a few moments, then she smiled. “Yes. I want to be back with you, Jeremy. I love you.” She threw her arms around him.
Jeremy stole a quick look around. Still no one nearby. “I love you, too. I never stopped loving you.” He kissed her long, hard, and recklessly. He’d never been so happy.
He scratched his side, noticing it was no longer smooth there. He encountered a series of hard, rounded ridges there when he scratched now. He looked at the back of his hand. Where it used to be smooth, there were parallel ridges there, too, thinner than the ones on his side.
Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t understand it.
He didn’t feel much like moving around. Sometimes he felt weak if he stood up too quickly.
There was something else, too. A dark line went across his stomach now. He couldn’t remember it being there before. It looked angry and twisted. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it itched. It used to hurt a lot more all the time, back when there were white things pressed over it. Not so much now.
The White Coats acted differently, too. They measured and examined and collected things from him much more than before.
Before what, though?
There was something else he didn’t understand. He had a recollection of something bad happening with the White Coats, but he couldn’t quite recall what it was.
The screeching next door started again. He didn’t care like he used to. The food the White Coats brought used to taste better. Now it tasted so bad he didn’t really want to eat it.
But the last time he didn’t eat it, one of the White Coats had done things to him. He’d tied him down to his bed, then hurt his arm with something sharp. Then he let him lay there for a while with a bottle hanging above him.
This didn’t use to happen.
Things were better before.
Before what?
The Subject scratched another itch and lay down, too tired to try to figure it out.
CHAPTER 34
Jeremy set the report down on his desk. He’d read the same paragraph about ten times, and still hadn’t comprehended a bit of it. Time to admit it was a losing battle.
He simply couldn’t focus. He was way too happy to concentrate.
Crohn’s had lost its grip on him, and he felt better than he’d felt in years. And now Amanda had agreed to move in with him. He’d loved her since the day they met back in their undergrad days. Now they would be back together—with him healthy.
Yet a darkness lay beneath that happiness. He knew it had a price, and he wasn’t the one who had paid it.
Right after the procedure, such thoughts didn’t enter his mind because it took everything he had to focus on his recovery. It had taken some weeks before he was really up and around, let alone ready to return to the SomaGene offices.
Since he’d been back to work, though, he’d indulged in purposeful avoidance. He’d buried himself in catching up on the state of the business and deliberately pushed aside thoughts of what really lay beneath his miraculous recovery. He’d even avoided any mention of the Subject with Tim and Glen. And they seemed happy enough to let it lie.
But it was catching up with him. His good fortune had a dark lining, and he knew he had to face that at some point. Right after the surgery, Glen and Tim had assured him they had only taken a section of intestine and that the Subject had survived his part of the procedure and would go on to live a relatively normal life. Well, as normal as one can live locked up like a lab animal.
Yet he hadn’t had the nerve to see for himself.
Jeremy rose from his desk and started down the hall toward the Subject’s quarters.
Fortunately, the Subject was housed in a segregated section of the facility, away from the general staff, but today he didn’t even want to run into Tim or Glen. He was uncomfortable enough without getting into a situation where he might have to explain his presence to either of them.
Now he stood outside the door, his heart pounding and his mouth dry as paper. It would be so easy to just accept Glen’s and Tim’s word that all was well, and spare himself the firsthand encounter. But they’d kept things from him before, and maybe they were doing it again. What if the Subject hadn’t survived? Did they replace his entire large and small intestine after all? He’d been forced to trust them with his life while under the knife, but his overall trust in them had shattered when he discovered they had initially kept the existence of the Subject from him.
He reached out and slowly opened the door. As he stepped inside, he felt immediate relief to see the Subject lying on his little padded shelf. He’d survived the surgery; they’d told him the truth to that extent anyway.
He stepped closer, and his initial relief dimmed. The Subject stared back at him listlessly, his eyes set in dark circles. His face was thin, far thinner than Jeremy recalled.
The Subject sat up slowly and soundlessly without breaking his stare. His hospital gown hung on him. His legs stuck out from beneath it like pale sticks. Even from this distance, Jeremy could tell he had lost noticeable muscle mass. He approached the bars of the enclosure for a closer look. The Subject leaned back against the wall and drew into himself as if trying to keep as much distance as possible between them.
Thinking back on their last encounter, Jeremy figured maybe he had frightened the Subject with his own reaction to his touch—and to that strange sensation he’d fleetingly experienced. Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised to elicit this sort of response now. He decided not to attempt any sort of firsthand physical examination. He’d seen enough to just take it up with either Glen or Tim.
He turned and left without speaking. He felt like he should say something, but didn’t know what he could say that the Subject would even understand. As he shut the door behind him, he tried to soothe his guilt by viewing the Subject’s condition in the best possible light. He had survived the months since the procedure, and he apparently was doing so without extensive medical intervention. There had been no sign of a feeding tube or other sorts of painful or inconvenient devices required for survival. That was something, anyway.
Jeremy headed down the hall toward Tim’s office to ask a few questions. He felt somewhat more comfortable speaking with Tim. Glen seemed focused solely on the purpose and goals of the experiment and didn’t seem to even recognize there were ethical questions.
“Tim, got a minute?” he asked as he poked his head into the office.
“Sure, come in. What’s up? I was just checking the upcoming surgical sch
edule. Pretty good pipeline.” Tim motioned toward the computer screen he had been peering at when Jeremy came in.
Jeremy took a seat in front of Tim’s desk. His hands intertwined and fidgeted as if of their own accord. “Hey, that’s great to hear. I, uh, have a question or two.”
“About what?”
“The Subject.”
Tim’s face became more serious and he sat up straight in his chair. “Sure, what do you want to know?”
“What’s his condition?” Jeremy decided not to let on he had already seen the Subject in the event it might color Tim’s response. He wanted to see if he was going to play straight with him.
Tim briefly scratched behind his ear before answering. “Well, he’s doing as well as can be expected.”
Jeremy waited for more, then prompted, “What do you mean?”
“Well, we only took a section of small intestine, but of course, that’s where the body absorbs most of its nutrition, so we’ve had to change his diet to provide more readily absorbable nutrients.”
“And how well has that worked?”
“As we calculate it, the altered diet should be enough to compensate for that loss of function. Problem is, he doesn’t seem to like it very much, and it’s hard to get him to eat enough of it. We don’t really know what he does and doesn’t understand, so we can’t simply explain to him that he needs to eat all that we give him. Thing is, we’ve also been trying to avoid having to implement any ancillary supplementation.”
“You mean like a feeding tube?”
“Yeah. We’re trying to keep the changes to his daily life as nonintrusive as possible, yet still make up for the loss of absorption. We’re particularly trying to avoid anything that would be inconvenient to live with—or uncomfortable.” He sighed. “We also don’t know how he would handle anything like that, whether it would disturb him enough that he’d try to remove it himself and create more problems.”
Jeremy nodded. “That makes sense. So how would you gauge his current condition?”
Tim looked directly at Jeremy. “Honestly, he could be better. He’s lost noticeable muscle mass. He’s a bit weakened. Nothing life-threatening—unless he were further compromised with something else, like a bad flu or some other additional health issue. I’d like to see his condition improved over what it is, but given that he’s isolated in a controlled environment, I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.”
Jeremy started to ask another question, then thought better of it. He nearly asked if the Subject was suffering or if his quality of life was diminished by living that way. Why even bother to go down that path—he’d been created in a lab and had never lived as a human being. Seemed like there was no good answer to that question even had the procedure never taken place.
He rose from the chair. “Thanks, Tim. Appreciate your time.”
Once back in his office, Jeremy shut the door and set his phone to go straight to voice mail. He sat down heavily in his chair, rubbed his eyes, and rested his face in his hands while he considered what he had seen and heard.
He had to put this to rest, one way or the other. The situation had been weighing on his mind and conscience for the better part of a year now. He began to consider his options, then realized he had none. Maybe in the beginning, when he first found out about the Subject, he had the chance to lay it all on Ivan, cut Glen and Tim loose as scapegoats, and free himself and the rest of SomaGene from the fallout as best he could. But time had passed and he had said nothing.
And worse, he had sealed his and the Subject’s fate when he submitted to the procedure. He’d partaken. He’d benefited. There was no way he could disavow the project now.
Jeremy decided he was just going to have to accept Ivan’s gift, package up and compartmentalize his guilt, and move on. He’d make sure the Subject got the best and most humane care possible. Any other approach would expose Amanda for her involvement, and would most certainly bring him and SomaGene down.
CHAPTER 35
Amanda paced in her living room. Rick was due to arrive at any moment, and she wasn’t ready. She tried to mentally rehearse what she was going to say, but nothing seemed right. She didn’t know what she was going to say to him.
Surely her post-surgical girlfriend story had worn thin by now. She’d stretched it far beyond its intended use when she continued visiting Jeremy on weekends even after he was able to fend for himself. Rick had become increasingly impatient with her excuses, but he hadn’t yet pressed her hard on the matter. Surely that wouldn’t last. And now that she’d accepted Jeremy’s invitation to move in, she had to break things off without revealing anything concerning Jeremy’s miraculous cure.
She now understood her feelings for Rick for what they were. She’d thought she’d fallen in love with him, but she really had fallen in love with who he was. He was smart, successful, and attractive. He exuded confidence in every situation. She liked that. But deep down, he pursued his achievements for purely selfish—not altruistic—reasons. When he developed a new surgical technique, it was all about what it meant for his reputation and persona, not for the human value of how it improved patients’ outcomes.
Jeremy wasn’t that way. If anything, he tormented himself with concerns for what SomaGene’s developments meant for its patients, not for his potential personal glory. And she knew he carried a tremendous burden of guilt for the real cost of his newfound health.
The doorbell startled her from her reverie and she stopped in her tracks. “Be right there.” Her heart racing, she tried to gather her nerve as she went to open the door.
“So what’s up?” asked Rick as he stepped in, bearing a bottle of Cabernet.
“I, uh, need to talk to you about something. Something serious.” Amanda dodged his attempt at a kiss, sat down on the couch and stared at the floor, not knowing how to begin the conversation.
Rick followed her over, put the wine on the coffee table, and sat beside her. “What is it? Are you mad at me for something?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s not your fault.”
“What, then? You know, you’ve been avoiding me a lot lately. Something’s going on, isn’t it?” He eyed her suspiciously.
Amanda wished she’d been able to plan ahead of time what she was going to say, because the tension in the room was becoming unbearable—and fast—and she was having trouble thinking at all coherently. “Rick, I’m planning to move up to the Twin Cities.”
Rick drew back, a surprised look on his face. “Why? Did you get a job offer?”
Amanda suddenly needed some space to say what came next. She stood, stepped around the coffee table, and kept her back to him while she stared straight ahead. “No, no job offer.” She knew she’d have to say enough to make the break clean. She couldn’t have him trying to come up and visit. “Well, when I was spending all that time up there to look after my girlfriend, I ran into someone I used to go with a long time ago. It was pretty serious at the time, and, um, we’ve decided to get back together.”
Rick was silent for a moment. “Anybody I know?”
Amanda decided to steer clear of mentioning Jeremy at all costs. “No, someone from way back. You wouldn’t know him.” She turned to face Rick again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
Rick stood. “I don’t think there’s anything else to say.” He cast her a sharp glance. “You don’t think I really believed that bullshit about some unnamed girlfriend, did you? I figured I’d let you play out whatever you were playing out, and that you’d be back when you were done. Obviously, our relationship wasn’t that important to you.”
“Rick—”
He waved her off. “I’ll let myself out. Have a good life.” He walked out the front door, shutting it firmly and finally behind him.
Amanda collapsed onto the couch. She was exhausted from the encounter, yet relieved. It didn’t go that badly, all things considered. So he did suspect she was visiting someone other than an old girlfriend all this time. Well, he was probabl
y seeing someone else while she was gone anyway. It’s not as if women didn’t flock around him all the time. She felt less guilty thinking that he hadn’t been sitting around all alone, and probably wouldn’t miss a beat in his love life.
She glanced at the wine he had left behind. Maybe she’d open it and have a little to celebrate her new life with Jeremy.
CHAPTER 36
“You know, I used to hate this place, but you’ve transformed it. Maybe I’ll forget about selling it and just redo Ivan’s room some time.” Jeremy stood next to Amanda in the archway to the living room. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the late spring sun shone through the windows and cast cheery light onto the gleaming wood floor. The room had been grand to the point of haughty before, but now that Amanda had interspersed it with her own decorations and what-not, it had become downright inviting to sit in there and talk over the day’s events before dinner each night.
Amanda had already snagged a plum research position with a local firm. Her reputation for excellent, meticulous work had made the job hunt short and sweet, and she was happily settling into her new environment. Jeremy had offered to hire her at SomaGene, but in the end they decided it was probably safest for her to secure outside employment. Just in case anything ever leaked out about the Subject, she would need all the insulation she could get.
SomaGene’s services remained in high demand. Things were going so well, in fact, that Jeremy had recently hired several new surgeons to keep up with the flow. Naturally, any and all knowledge of the Subject was carefully kept among himself, Glen, and Tim.
At Jeremy’s urging, Tim had revamped the Subject’s diet to be more palatable, yet still provide the added nutritional support he required. The Subject had started accepting his meals better, and had even replaced some of the lost muscle mass in recent weeks.
Amanda broke into Jeremy’s reverie. “You’d better not sell this place now, not after I’ve spent this much time humanizing it. Now I know what you meant. As big and well-equipped as this house is, it just wasn’t a very inviting place to be.” She glanced around and smiled with satisfaction. “Much better now.”
The Janus Legacy Page 11
