A gelatinous semitranslucent mass glowed at the bottom of the container.
“This was originally a pig liver, but one now made with human cells infused onto the protein scaffold. We’re also experimenting with 3-D printing of the scaffolding. It’s a way to create organs for transplant.
“A hundred thousand people in the United States need organ transplants each year, yet only a third get them while the rest die. Mostly, this is because we can store a fresh organ for only four to six hours, so the donor must be relatively nearby. This is why we are leading a project to flash-freeze organs and then rewarm them, using nanotechnology to avoid water crystallization.”
Danesti stepped over to the next plastic tub, which contained a small kidney that looked made of glass. “It’s been cryogenically frozen for a month,” he said. “But it’s a real human kidney. Tomorrow, we’ll rewarm it and implant into a pig. It means we can open the international market for organ procurement and exchange—if we can perfect the process.”
“International? Where did you get that kidney?”
“America has only four percent of the world’s population, but more than thirty percent of the waiting list for transplants. In many jurisdictions—Iran, for example—it is legal for living donors to sell their noncritical organs.” The doctor fidgeted with a control on the side of the incubation machine. “This is all confidential, of course.”
“You have offices in these places?”
“We have affiliations.”
“Where?”
“Bangladesh. India. Even China. Of course, all with regulatory approval.”
“You said an organ could only stay ‘fresh’ for four to six hours. What about my donor’s body?”
“In your case, the entire body was used as a transplant.”
“So you don’t know when my donor died?”
“I understand your frustration. But even I don’t get that information.”
“But the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network has it?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m on the board of the OPTN, then yes, I am,” Danesti said. “But I don’t have access to the individual donor data.”
That wasn’t Roy’s question, but the admission stunned him. He was on the board of the OPTN. Wasn’t that a conflict of some kind?
“Even without a brain, your donor body could have been kept functioning for days, even weeks. Some patients in vegetative states can live for decades.”
“They’re not dead, then? How can you use them as organ donors?”
“They’re brain-dead. If the patient signed up for organ donation, and they’re judged to be medically dead—”
“How do you determine that?”
“Determining when death occurs is a difficult problem, I agree, even with modern medicine. Come, I’d like to show you something.”
The doctor led him to another set of plastic tubs. A tiny white mouse had fine tubes running into its mouth.
“This is a clone.”
Roy wasn’t as impressed as he felt the doctor wanted him to be. “There’s a company in Texas that will clone your dog for fifty grand. I’ve seen it on TV. Mail order.”
“But not one without a brain. We make a few tweaks to the genetic machinery to induce a kind of anencephaly. Create organisms that grow without brains but are genetically identical to the host. Once gestated, we nurture them in specialized incubators and grow them to maturity at accelerated rates. You and Mr. Sheffield were among the first to demonstrate that a body transplant is possible, but soon we won’t need donor bodies. We can grow them.”
He meant they wanted to clone humans, fast-grow them without brains.
No worries of rejection.
“We don’t show this to everyone, Roy, but I wanted you to understand the future. We can even improve—make modifications to the genetics of the clone. Make them disease-resistant, improve the new body. Imagine if we could have transplanted the mind of Stephen Hawking into a revitalized, healthy cloned body? What it could have meant for the world?”
It all looked so clean, so antiseptic. Something about it wasn’t quite so clean.
“But you need to birth them.”
“With surrogates. We implant fertilized eggs into surrogate mice.”
“I meant with humans.”
“The same process. We already have an active surrogacy program. Affiliates of Eden. It’s very common these days.”
Some of Roy’s mother’s friends had used them.
The doctor gave him a knowing grin.
Something about it said more than just the words he’d been saying. What was he hiding? Something buzzed in Roy’s backpack, vibrated again, louder, and then started ringing.
His cell phone.
“Excuse me a second,” he said to Danesti.
* * *
Angel had called, said he had dug up something important. That he’d been trying to get in touch the past two days.
Roy had said goodbye and thank you to Danesti, who at first told him he should stay in Eden, but then insisted that he at least go home and rest. Go back to the Hamptons. The doctor said that Penny had called him more than once and was worried. He said to call his wife.
Roy lied and said he would, then took the elevators down and walked across the street to the food court in the basement of the Bank of America building on Park Avenue. It was lunchtime, and the tables were packed with men and women in business suits, with fast-food wrappers scattered around them, all staring at their phone screens.
“Nice outfit,” Angel said. He had a half-eaten burrito in one hand. “I like the ascot. Did your riding instructor dress you this morning?” He took a bite of his burrito and proceeded to talk through it. “Where the hell have you been the past two days?”
“I had to get inside Eden,” Roy said.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk about this latest blackout. He dropped his backpack on the table between them. “Anyway, weren’t you supposed to have someone tailing me?”
“I did, right up till you went into that fancy party in Meatpacking. No way my guy could follow you in there. He waited outside all night, man. Said he couldn’t see anybody following you.”
“What did you find out? Did you get that list from Brixton yet?” Did they find out who his donor body belonged to? Could it have been that quick?
“No, man. Brixton won’t give that up without some dirt on Danesti first.”
Roy leaned closer to Angel. “He’s got frozen human organs up there.”
“Is that illegal?”
“Fresh ones that could be used for transplants? He said they had offices in India and Bangladesh.” They had looked into Eden online, but being a private company, it could keep its structure and operations opaque. “Tell Brixton that, and get that goddamn list. Tell him Danesti is on the board of the OPTN. That’s got to be a conflict of some kind.”
“How’d you find that out?”
“Because he told me.”
“He controls the supply and the sales?” Angel said. “That’s badass. So he’s an organ dealer. That’s what you’re saying? What else?”
“He wants to build his own floating country on a platform out in the Pacific. He says religion used to be the only authority, but now science is the new religion. It’s a cult in there.”
Angel nodded thoughtfully and took another bite of burrito. “So basically, he’s an aspiring Bond villain. Anything else?”
“He said my donor might have died months before my operation or have been brain-dead. I’m not sure.”
“That doesn’t help narrow things.”
“Find a way to get that list from Brixton and put someone onto tailing me again.”
The feeling was back. Roy felt eyes on him from somewhere in the food court. Was it Danesti? Someone from Eden? Nothing would surprise him.
; He gave it up for now. “So, what did you have for me?”
“Ah, man, you’re not going to like this.” Angel scarfed down the last bite and swung his briefcase onto the table, opened it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers.
Watching him, Roy decided to open his own backpack. He’d felt something rattling around in there. Something glittered in the bottom of his bag. Jewelry? On top were two containers. He pulled them out.
Angel looked at the stickers on the two empty jars in Roy’s hands. “Do those say ‘Clooney’ and ‘Bieber’?”
“What do you have?” Roy stuffed them back into his pack.
Angel’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t persist. “I found a lawsuit from a few years back. Your mother trying to get your money. Said I was your lawyer. Said I looked into it because you said Penny told you about it, or something like that. But this isn’t that.”
“It was from when I was in a coma?”
“No, man. Years ago, right after your dad died. It claimed that the terms of the trust were invalid, because you weren’t their son.”
“What? You can’t be serious.” Roy had seen pictures of his mother’s brother, dead now, and he was a spitting image.
“You know the weird part? The court threw it out after they did a maternity test.” He displayed a sheet of paper.
Roy stared without responding, trying to process what it all meant.
“I know, right? I heard of paternity tests, to see if someone is a kid’s dad, because, you know, sometimes you don’t know. But maternity test? How can you not know if a kid came out of you? I mean, did your mom not know? Why would she request a maternity test and then fail it?”
Dumbstruck silence. His mother had always been distant, but …
“You okay?” Angel asked.
“You go and get those files.”
“And you?”
“I need to go home.”
26
The overpass with its wire-and-steel cage swept by, quieting for a moment the drumming of rain on the windshield. Roy escaped Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel, slid under the East River to emerge in the low-rise suburbia of Queens—mile upon mile of single-family dwellings and tarmac and concrete. The trees lining the expressway were half crowned, with more of their red and yellow leaves on the divider between the highway and the service road than on their branches.
Roy kept the window down and sucked in the cool fall air.
He had called his wife and his mother yesterday, even called Dr. Danesti, telling them he was going home. He didn’t say he was going to stay, but they assumed it. Let them. He had other motives. They had volunteered to have one of the Chegwiddens’ helicopter shuttles pick him up at the Thirty-Third Street heliport, but instead he bought a broken-down Chevy from a used-car lot on Avenue D. Paid cash. The fenders didn’t match the body.
Emerging from the concrete canyons of Manhattan, the relief was palpable. It felt good to be out from under the oppressive weight of millions of people and all their problems and dramas. He imagined the crowds of people in all the houses and apartments as he swept past. Someone had just fallen in love. Someone was emotionally devastated having split with the person of their dreams. Another person somewhere out there had just died, and someone else was grieving. A roiling sea of human anguish and bliss that ebbed and flowed.
His own emotions were as flat as the gray sky.
Sleep had been short and fitful. He had dreamed again of the little girl with hair as red as her mother’s, of the driving rain and the red-brown woman sitting in the grass. Always the same sense of impending doom.
After Hauppauge, the storm clouds cleared as sprawling suburbia gave way to rural Long Island. On a whim, he got off the expressway and wound his way up onto Middle Country Road, paralleling the highway but halfway to the water on the north side, near Long Island Sound. He wasn’t in a hurry.
The countryside opened up—small farms and paddocks interspersed with broken-down homes and rusted cars on blocks. Dogs barked as he passed.
He mused over what had prompted him to get off the expressway. Maybe it was because he could have turned left into Hauppauge, dropped in at the medical examiner’s office himself to see that report. But Angel was already on his way there.
Or maybe he liked the idea of driving past the Suffolk County PD headquarters in Yaphank and maybe seeing that policewoman again, Detective Devlin. Tell her what he had found out. Maybe turn himself in. For what? Roy couldn’t shake the sense that he’d done something wrong, was being punished for some sin. The guilt followed him around.
Emotions in him sometimes felt like tsunamis, but not just because they were destructive. When someone close to him died, he withdrew, like the water emptying from the beach—a curious event that left fish stranded and gulping air while curious bystanders came down to see what was going on.
But anyone who knew Roy knew what was coming. A shift on the horizon, and then the onslaught that destroyed everything in its path. It had happened when he was a teenager, when a cousin he was close to died. At first, Roy didn’t react. Then, a year later, he started doing drugs and almost dropped out of school. That was what happened when his father died. For a year or two he was okay, and then he started hitting the sauce. Maybe his dad knew that about him. Maybe that was why he created the trust fund.
Only this time, Roy was the one who had died.
* * *
Roy passed through the town of Coram, a one-light village with a single-story United Income Tax Center building at its crossroad. The parking lot was empty on a Monday, and a large red sign in the window said, “Karate Lessons.”
In another ten minutes, he passed a sign for Brookhaven National Laboratories. This was the Department of Energy lab where, in the 1940s, they had conducted some of the world’s very first nuclear chain reactions, which led to the creation of atomic weapons and other horrors. All he saw were leafy green forests and rolling pastures.
He drove past a sign for Tom’s County Automotive, a ramshackle repair shop with dozens of rusting car hulks behind a razor-wire fence, next to a two-story Public Storage building in bright orange against the slate sky.
Something about the area calmed him, and he felt his stomach relaxing for the first time in weeks. He realized that this was the area where he had woken up after one of his blackouts. That night in the rain. He had driven up here without knowing it.
He kept driving.
The road hooked around south and connected with the end of the expressway in a Tanger Outlet Malls complex just outside Riverhead and Northampton. He drove south to the Montauk Highway, a two-lane road that was the only passage to the other end of Long Island. Crossing the canal at Shinnecock was like crossing the River Styx into the underworld.
His first stop was to see his old friend.
* * *
“Cheers.” They clinked their beer bottles and drank.
Low clouds scudded over the Atlantic, but the rain had stopped. It was cold enough that Sam brought out two blankets so they could sit out on the deck by the sea grass. He loved sitting here surveying his private nature reserve, fifty acres of oceanfront sand dunes that were all his.
“Worried about you, my friend,” Sam said. “Been, what, eleven days since we last spoke? I was getting separation anxiety. You changed your cell phone? That number you called from the new one?”
“Don’t worry, they always know where I am.” Roy pointed to his temple.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The ones tracking me.”
Sam closed one eye and scrunched up his face. “You okay, buddy? Maybe you should go home for a bit. Or maybe stay here with me?”
“Dr. Danesti told me the implants track my location. That’s how they found me the other night.”
“Penny said they picked you up in Central Park. Another blackout?”
“Two whole days
this time. I almost killed two kids the other night. In a bar fight.”
His friend almost choked on his beer. “What? Never seen you throw a punch.”
“Took down these two huge twentysomethings without breaking a sweat.”
“Your knuckles do look beat up.” Sam inspected Roy’s hand and forearms.
“There was cocaine and ketamine in my bloodstream the night of the accident.” Roy looked straight out over the ocean. “Any idea how that got there?”
A wave crashed in the silence, then another.
“Ah, damn it. You’re the one that asked for it, but maybe that was my fault. You were drunker than a sailor on shore leave. I was the one that gave it to you.”
“But ketamine?”
“It was New Year’s. You’re the one that likes that stuff. You hated going to the Chegwiddens’.”
Roy didn’t often take those rave drugs, but sometimes he did. At some parties. Usually with Sam.
“I’m really sorry, man,” his friend added. “I’ve been feeling guilty about it. I mean, what if … maybe the accident was my fault?”
For the first time in longer than Roy could remember, Sam looked sad.
“You should have told me before. And it was me driving, not Penny. Did you know that?”
“I did not know that.” Still the look of sadness, but now also puzzlement. “Did Penny tell you?” His blue eyes narrowed. “Or that cop? Devlin? I met her on Friday, at your mother’s art auction.”
Roy was surprised for an instant. “At my mother’s auction? Are they investigating me?”
“I got the feeling she’s more just curious. More coincidence than anything else. Pretty girl. She’s an artist. I gave her my number.”
“There’s no way that was coincidence. I hired a private eye. He’s digging up the medical examiner’s report from the Suffolk County Police Department records.”
“And what does he think about all this?” Sam took another swig.
“He says to always follow the money.”
A squall of wind whistled through the sea grass.
The Dreaming Tree Page 15
