Naomi Kritzer

by Monster (html)

  What’s wrong with me, I thought, and then I thought, there’s nothing wrong with me. The problem here is him. He’s acting like an asshole.

  I made some excuses and left.

  We didn’t talk for twenty years.

  * * *

  Genetics became my life’s work. Sequencing, first, through my undergraduate years and the beginning of graduate school. Genetic engineering, starting midway through graduate school and continuing through my postdoctoral work and my years at the university. CRISPR, when CRISPR became available, was just one more tool, but a particularly fascinating one. My focus was genetic diseases in humans.

  There are basically two approaches to genetic diseases. The first is to test people—this has gotten cheaper and easier every year—and discourage carriers from having genetic children with other carriers. If one parent carries the gene for cystic fibrosis, but the other doesn’t, none of their children will have the disease. The problem with this approach is that because carriers will continue to have children with noncarriers, the genes themselves stay in the population and at least a few babies with genetic diseases are more or less inevitable. (Please note, I’m not talking about eliminating neurodiversity from the population, or anything that could possibly be a reasonable human variation. I’m talking about diseases that cause years of misery and an inevitable early death, like cystic fibrosis, or diseases that just kill any child unlucky enough to have them, like Tay-Sachs.) The second approach is to step into the genome with the tools we have and simply fix it. If we use something like CRISPR to edit an embryo’s genome, we can not only ensure that the child born from that embryo will not have Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis, we can ensure that they will also not grow up to pass along that particular gene.

  Using techniques like this on humans beyond the embryo stage is years away. Or at least, I assumed it was years away.

  Andrew got back in touch through Facebook. When I friended him back, he sent me a private message—CECILY, wow, when I found out your family had moved out of town I thought I’d never catch up with you again. What are you up to these days?

  I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins, and Andrew was a lot more enthusiastic about my work now than the last time we talked, which was reassuring; he’d matured, clearly. And we’d both grown up; I was no longer the angry, insecure girl I’d been at that point in my life. I’d found my place in the world a long time ago.

  We started chatting regularly again. Andrew told me about his job at a biotech start-up. It had taken him a lot longer to get through college and it didn’t sound like he’d gotten through a doctoral program, but skills count for more outside of academia and he’d always had an abundance of intelligence and creativity. He’d signed a nondisclosure agreement, he said. As head researcher at a university lab, I had not.

  “I would give anything to see that paper you’re working on,” he said one day, after I’d told him about the research I was doing into whether gene-editing technology—not CRISPR, but I’d started with CRISPR—could be used beyond the embryonic stage.

  I sent it to him.

  * * *

  When the FBI agent came to my lab, I assumed she was looking for my colleague Jeanine, who developed a process for recovering DNA from centuries-old bones. She was not. “Dr. Cecily Grantz?” she asked. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  I looked at the clock on my desk and said, “I have a class to teach later today, but not until 2 PM How can I help you?”

  She closed my door, and pulled up a chair, like a student looking for help with a confusing assignment. “I’m Agent Locke,” she said. “I’m here to ask you a few questions about someone I think you know.”

  What’s Andrew done, I thought.

  On some level, I must have known all along.

  Agent Locke showed me photos: Andrew’s one-person lab, with a tidy row of molecular printers directly adjacent to a hospital bed with restraint straps dangling down. The home freezer where he kept genetic samples for his record-keeping. And the bodies. The bodies that had torn themselves apart as his serum had wreaked its horrifying havoc. There were many bodies. He’d run test, after test, after test.

  He’d lured in homeless teenagers. Do you need a place to stay? read an e-mail message he’d sent to two dozen separate runaways. I’m here for you.

  There was a video interview with a girl who’d survived, barely. “I was an A-student,” she said in thick speech with a tongue that no longer wanted to cooperate. “My ex-boyfriend was stalking me. I had no way to protect myself. I wanted to be strong. He promised me this would make me strong.”

  He’d used my research for this. Then adjusted the serum. Improved it. Changed his approach. Found more test subjects.

  Left their bodies in shallow graves.

  Agent Locke wanted to see what I’d sent to Andrew. I gave her everything I had.

  I never knew him, I thought. Not really.

  He was confident in the serum, Agent Locke told me before she left. In the end, he’d used it on himself. It had given him inhuman speed, reflexes, and strength. He’d used them to escape the armed officers who’d come to arrest him. “He broke their necks,” she said, matter-of-factly, “with his bare hands.”

  * * *

  The morning is cold and windy, and I put on extra layers before finding a car to take me to the abandoned mining town.

  The town isn’t entirely abandoned, nor are the residents actually a secret: a clothesline runs across the former town square, with four T-shirts and two pairs of pants drying in the morning air. As I hike up a narrow trail past a four-story apartment building, a dog waits calmly in the doorway of the apartments, not approaching, his tail slowly waving back and forth.

  I think I can guess which buildings have inhabitants just based on where the satellite dishes are and where the glass windows are intact. I follow a trail up the hill. My socks and leggings get covered in tiny burrs; I also spot four patches that have been cleared of weeds and planted with something that might be that B. oleracea cultivar I’ve eaten every night at dinner.

  Back down the hill, near the river, I look over at the rusted wreckage of a very ruined car and step inside what appears to have once been an auditorium.

  If Andrew is here, he’s given no sign.

  The driver takes me through a mine shaft cut straight through the mountain and to the disused prison on the other side. This prison was abandoned in the 1970s, along with the mine; as with the town, there are nonetheless people living here. They grudgingly open up the gates when the driver bangs on the door and yells at them.

  They are using the prison as a chicken farm. The doors to the empty cells all stand empty; inside, they reek of chicken droppings. When I step inside one, a chicken gabbles at me nervously and flaps her way to the other side of the cell, leaving a feather drifting in the air.

  Most of the buildings in this part of China are unheated. Certainly a prison would have been no exception, and the visceral unpleasantness overwhelms me for a moment. I wonder if the prisoners here were criminals, or political prisoners, victims of the Cultural Revolution, who they were.

  I briefly imagine Andrew here.

  It’s what he deserves battles with no one deserves this. I don’t even know what justice would look like after what he’s done.

  Anyway, he’s not here. The longer I stand here the more certain I am that he would never hide in a prison. I can go.

  * * *

  When I arrive back at Danzhai Village, I can see a crowd gathering on the square outside the performance space: there’s music and dancing. They’re wearing traditional clothes but the music sounds more modern. I walk up for a closer look and get pulled into the dance by a smiling lady with a silver hat. There are choreographed steps that the locals are all following, although tourists who join in are all given enthusiastic encouragement. I feel foreign, heavy-footed, and stupid, but let them egg me on for a few minutes. “Good try!” one of them says in sympathetic English.

  The statue of the G
olden Pheasant Girl looms over all of us, lit by little spotlights as the sky grows dark.

  When your people are starving, and the gods or dragons or magical tree demands a sacrifice, you might volunteer yourself; you might race to be the first to volunteer yourself, to spare someone you love.

  I leave the square, walk down to the edge of the river, and think about monsters.

  Nadine tried to tell me. Andrew himself tried to tell me. Did I turn away from these warnings because on some level it felt like being the one person the monster would never harm made me special?

  How sure are you that this will work? Jeanine asked when I told her a little about the plan, when she agreed to keep an eye on my lab when I left for the two-week winter break. What if they’re wrong about whether he values you?

  That’s not why I’ve been dreading finding him. I’m confident he won’t hurt me. I’ve been dreading finding him because I’m here to turn on him. To betray him.

  Because that is what you do when your friend is a monster. Truly a monster—not a part-time monster like a werewolf who can be contained with proper precautions, not a misunderstood monster like the Beast from the fairy tale, but a monster. You don’t defend them. You don’t deny it. You do what you have to do.

  That doesn’t mean you want to do it.

  * * *

  Back in my room, I pull up my social media and post some pictures I’ve taken: the chickens at the prison, the big empty room in the ghost town that used to be an auditorium. There were some Chinese characters painted in red on the crumbling wall, and now that I’m at my computer I plug that photo into a translation program and find out that the words say “NO SMOKING.”

  Maybe, I think, I’ve looked hard enough. Maybe I can just go home. Tell them I couldn’t find him.

  Then I see the picture I took of the clothesline strung across the village square. There’s a pair of pants hung neatly by the ankles, but for the first time I take a closer look at the shirts. There are six: two work shirts, four T-shirts. The T-shirts have printing on them.

  There’s one with a TARDIS; one with a dragon; one with a math joke.

  He was there. He was there. I just didn’t recognize the signal.

  I lie awake that night for hours, still drawn by that thought I had earlier: I don’t have to go through with this. I could spend another day walking around Danzhai and go home pretending I tried my best. I fall into fitful sleep about halfway through the night, then wake at some very early hour because of a commotion in the hallway outside.

  I put on my glasses, open my door, and step out to see what’s going on.

  A few doors down from mine, a room is open, light spilling out, hotel staff crowding frantically around. One of the women sees me, and she gestures for me to come. She pulls out her phone and speaks into it: it translates her words into flat, British-accented English. “You speak English. Please tell this man that we have called for a doctor.”

  My door shuts behind me, and my heart pounds as I follow her down the hall.

  In his hotel room, Tom is lying on the floor, writhing in pain. Around him are things the hotel staff have brought to try to help—a kettle of hot water, a bowl of ice, towels, a bottle of pills, a bottle of alcohol. He’s barely conscious. I can see the veins in his forehead bulging out like swollen twigs, the blood inside black and thick. It’s the serum—the unfinished, fatal version. I wonder how Andrew got it into him. I can guess why: I was right. Tom isn’t a “travel writer,” he came here to find Andrew.

  The staff backs off and lets me speak to him. I’m not sure he’s conscious. “They’ve called an ambulance,” I say. “They told me to tell you that a doctor is coming.”

  Tom opens his eyes a sliver, looks at me. “It’s not going to help, is it? It’s not.” His tongue isn’t cooperating; his throat is thick and his voice is raspy.

  There have been some survivors. I don’t think he’s going to be one of them. I don’t want to tell him that, so I ask, “Do you want me to tell anyone where you are?”

  He tries to gesture toward his nightstand. His arm flops to the side. “My wallet.”

  I take it down and open it. It’s a thin, impersonal wallet—no pictures of children, no coffee shop or grocery store loyalty cards. Just a UK driver’s license, two credit cards, and a wad of cash. Plus a single handwritten index card saying “if found . . . ” on it, with an e-mail address and a phone number. “There,” he whispers.

  “Who’s this going to reach?” I ask.

  He tries to speak, and for a moment can’t. I think I see his lips forming “MI6,” but what comes out, in the end is just, “They’re no threat to you.” His eyes close and a moment later he starts gasping, the air catching on the edges like burrs on clothing as his throat swells. If he could control his hands he’d be grasping desperately at his throat. I stand up and back away, putting the wallet down on his bed.

  “Where is the doctor?” I ask the staff, not sure if anyone can understand me. “He needs a doctor right now or he’s going to die.”

  The ambulance has arrived outside and the Chinese EMTs—or whatever they’re called here—run to Tom’s hotel room. I clear out, give them space to work, and am standing back in my own hotel room as they bring him out a few minutes later. Silent, and covered by a sheet.

  The staff member who frantically brought me to Tom’s side knocks on my door a few minutes later. She has a tray with tea, and sliced melon, and the steamed buns they serve at breakfast. Also a newspaper, because she’s seen me buying newspapers, and I flinch a little at the sight of it. I certainly don’t need that today.

  Her face is tearstained and filled with guilt and shame. I want to reassure her that this catastrophe in her hotel was not her fault, but I don’t want to dig myself into a hole I won’t be able to get out of if anyone comes asking questions, so I say xie xie and let her go.

  * * *

  Today, the clothesline is empty. I go to the entrance of the building that has the satellite dishes, hand the dog a treat I’ve brought along to increase the chances of friendship, and make my way down the hallway.

  This building is inhabited, but it’s filthy. There are doors that are closed; other doors are open, with trash spilling out. I can smell peppers and rice cooking, overlaying the smells of mildew and dry rot. Somewhere in the building, there’s a TV on. I know it’s a TV just from the buoyant tone of the voices. TV Announcer Voice is one of those weird cultural constants.

  When I reach door 28, I knock on it. Twenty-eight was my favorite number when I was a kid. (It’s a perfect number. That means that if you break it down into its factors, and add those numbers together, you get the number again. 1+ 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28. Andrew didn’t much care about perfect numbers, but he listened to me talk about them.)

  He answers the door.

  I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I’m surprised to see that he’s shaved and clean, so “unshaven” was apparently what I was expecting. His hair is a lot grayer than in the pictures he had on his social media. “Cecily,” he says, and his voice sounds exactly like I remember, which is also, in its own way, a surprise. “Come in.” He steps back from the door and I follow him into the apartment.

  There’s a table, two rickety chairs, a large cask of water, a small gas burner. He puts water on to boil, and silently makes tea for both of us. I watch the leaves unfurl, not speaking.

  “You came all this way,” he says. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you nicer surroundings.”

  Unbidden, the image of the bed with the straps rises up in my mind and I bow my head over my tea and pretend to drink it. He watches me, and I look up in time to see his face shift. He thought I’d come to help him. Or to warn him. Or just to see him. But he knows, now.

  “How soon are they coming?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He looks up at the ceiling, blinks back tears.

  “Why not just kill me?” he asks. “Why betray me?”

  “I seriously considered that
option,” I say. “But I was going to have to pass through Chinese customs. Also, I’m really not a violent person. Imagine me coming at you with a gun, even if I could get it through Chinese security. Or a knife.”

  Tears spill down his cheeks. “I’ve seen you throw a tray full of food into someone’s face.”

  He doesn’t flinch away from my hand as I reach out, wipe his tears away with my thumb. “Yeah, and remember how ineffective that was? I got a trip to the principal’s office out of it, that was it.” I wipe his tears off on the side of my pants. “Why did you do it, Andrew?”

  “I told you years ago. I wanted to be strong.”

  “But to sacrifice all those people. You didn’t go seeking out the football players who were sexually harassing girls in the cafeteria line and assaulting boys in the locker room.”

  “No. I looked for people who needed to be strong. I looked for the people I wanted to help.”

  It’s strange how easy it is to talk to him. Still. Here. My tea is growing cold on the table by my hand. “Why did you come here?”

  “I had to get out of the US before the bulletin went out. I speak Mandarin Chinese and around here, I thought maybe I could pass myself off as being from some other part of China. This region is where my grandfather came from, the one who immigrated to the US. It’s quiet. I thought I could hide here, and maybe no one would come after me.”

  “They’d have followed you to the ends of the earth, Andrew.”

  He hears a hint in my voice, even though I didn’t mean to put one there.

  “Do they want my formula?”

  I don’t answer, which is answer enough. He laughs. A little bitterly, a little triumphantly.