Lethal Discoveries

by Erica Pensini



  Lethal discoveries

  A novel by Erica Pensini

  Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme (Science without conscience is nothing but ruin of the soul) – François Rabelais

  I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness – Allen Ginbsberg

  Born like this

  Into this…

  …The natural effect of general decay

  And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard

  Born out of that

  The sun still hidden there

  Awaiting the next chapter

  -Charles Bukowski -

  Contact: erica.pensini@gmail.com

  Disclaimer : This novel is a work of phantasy. All references to institutions, people and places are purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  It was 7 p.m. and the only people around were Brad and I.

  I was ready to leave too, half frozen as I was. It was steaming hot outside but I couldn’t tell. Winter or summer, the thermostat kept the temperature at a constant of 23 °C in the perfect cosmos of FoodTech labs, the ultimate generation facilities for engineered food.

  My goal there was to find a way to foam pudding. Use half the amount of ingredients, find a way to boost the volume and you’ve got it all: pudding cheap for the consumer and profitable for the industry. For the last three months I had been trying to synthesize a polymer that could do the trick when added to the pudding. Inexpensive pudding for happy people, this is what I was after.

  Ok, not exactly. I didn’t care about the pudding, the people or the food industry. I just wanted to find the polymer for the sake of it, because it was a challenge, a game if you will. There was no ethics and no real life involved as far as I was concerned: it was just about me, my polymer and my air-conditioned, mint white, neon lit world. You find this squalid? I was hired to make cheap pudding because money is what makes the world go round. I never set these rules, so I chose to forget them. Someone wanted cheap pudding, I wanted the fun of making it for them. You’d call this a win-win deal. Wouldn’t you?

  Today I had finished producing a new batch of polymer. The jars with the different puddings were nice and ready in the rack waiting for a small dose of my polymer.

  “Still not ready to go?”, I heard at my back.

  That was Brad. Our homes were 5 minutes away one from the other and we carpooled almost every day.

  “I want to try this new stuff on the pudding”, I said without turning, “Just stay here, will you?”

  He came around me, lifted the bottle containing my polymer and looked at it against the light. “Ehm, nervous?”, he asked with a smile, “I failed again today. No luck at all lately”.

  Brad and I were running for the same elusive goal. “Well, what about we give this a try”, I said, starting to inject the polymer in the pudding.

  “Why not”, Brad laughed, “What else should we do on a Friday night?”

  Nothing else but try our luck once more, I suppose. And fail, of course.

  “Ah, here we go again”, I sighted.

  Brad and I looked at each other.

  He shrugged, “Come on, it’s Friday night. Who cares about this crap anyways?”

  We both did, and a lot too. But Brad was right, it was time to let go. When the automated doors opened to the outside world a wall of thick moist air wrapped around us, starting to warp the disappointments of the day.

  “Brad?”, I said, stopping in front of his car

  “Yes?”, he replied, eyebrows slightly arched and hand on the door handle.

  “Can we have dinner somewhere? It would be too depressing to go straight home”.

  We ate and drank to our failure, and by the time I got home the polymer seemed a bit less important.

  Chapter 2

  Once I got home I made some lemonade for myself and sat on the on the chipped steps of my old house’s porch, barefoot, sipping my drink slowly. Traces of the sunset were still streaking the darkening sky, where deep purple clouds floated in the moist summer air. The heat enhanced the odours, filling my nostrils with the smell of pine and cooking lingering around my neighbour’s house. I could hear the kids’ hushed voices followed by laughs, fragmented at first, then loud and uncontrollable. It felt good to be sitting on my porch, taking it all in, slowly. I stood there a while after the house next to mine fell silent, and all I could hear were the cicadas, singing their lullaby somewhere in the night.

  After the owners of the house had passed away, their kids had decided to rent out the place for cheap, in exchange for a few renovations. I had done most of them myself during the week-ends, repainting the walls and fixing some windows. I had wanted the house not so much because I could stay there almost free, but because I needed to sleep under a roof drenched with life and history after spending my days in the aseptic atmosphere of FoodTech labs. I had found refuge in work during a difficult moment of my life, using it as a tool to turn away from real problems, to limit my horizons to a model world where things were simple and problems were like the buzz of a fly in the summer, of no consequence at all. I had always been a diligent kid, but after that critical moment in life I became addicted to work in a way that I realized was unhealthy, without really wanting to change it. I had the runner’s high, so to say, and it felt good in some perverse way to keep it up well beyond exhaustion.

  And yet in the last months something had shifted slightly within me, although the change was imperceptible from the outside. The hole that had been carved in my existence that winter of 1991 was still there, I could keep it silent for a while but it would wake me up in the middle of the night, now and then, leaving me lonely and disarmed. What I had shyly started to admit in the last months was that I needed more than work therapy in life. I had grown up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else. There were about one hundred households, one bakery that also served as coffee shop, one grocery shop, one tiny theatre and a school, and a large chemical factory that employed almost everybody in the town. I think that I became who I am at least in part to honour my father, who was an engineer in that factory. In 1991 I was 11, and I had moved to NY to live with my grandmother. The change had been huge, neighbours barely acknowledged each other and making friends in the block where I lived seemed impossible. I slowly socialized with some of the kids at school, and after some time I began seeing some of them during the afternoons, every now and then. But overall I became a solitary girl, spending most of my time in the library or doing homework at home. Things could never be again as they had been before NY, and I can say without too much bias that the beginning of my adulthood coincided with the day I moved to the Big Apple.

  When I walked back inside the house the darkness felt too thick and a familiar pang of pain grabbed my guts. I turned on the lamps and took a shower. The water started off cold, as usual, but the air was hot and I didn’t really mind. By the time I was done the anxiousness had subsided. I found the book I had left on the kitchen table and walked to my bedroom upstairs, the stairwell squeaking under my weight. The cicadas were still singing, and a full moon was glowing through the open window. The night felt maternal now, and I fell asleep with my lamp on, the book slipping away from my hands.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning I woke up with the sun, the dawn spreading its pink and velvety tints across the sky. The block was still asleep and I drank my coffee on the porch in the silence of the morning, broken only by the slow, reiterated whine of my old rocking chair.

  There was a lake close to my house where I would swim early in the morning, often before going to work. The water was chilly and it was painful to dip in, but after a few minutes making laps the cold would become almost unnoticeable and after half hour I w
ould emerge from the lake feeling optimistic and pacified with myself. I went back into the house to leave my cup in the kitchen, grab my bathing suit, a towel and the car keys.

  When I turned on the ignition Wooster rushed out of my neighbours’ backyard, running towards me. Wooster was a black Labrador who made its way to the Wheeler’s house as a puppy one year earlier, carried in the arms of their over-excited kids, shortly after I had begun working at FoodTech labs. The Wheeler’s had mounted a swinging door on the back, from which Wooster would come and go as it pleased. The town was small, Wooster would never go too far and everyone knew it was the Wheeler’s dog anyways. I had brought Wooster to the lake a couple of mornings, and after that it had gotten into the habit of joining me whenever it heard my ignition start at my typical swimming hours.

  I drove in the woods with Wooster on the front seat beside me, head tall, scrutinizing every detail on the way as my wonky third or fourth-hand Buick made its way on the unpaved trail. When we reached the lake the colours of the dawn hadn’t yet faded and they mirrored on the smooth surface of the water, flickering with reddish-pink reflections.

  I laid my clothing on a rock and tested the water with the tip of my food. Wooster looked at me, waiting for me to go in first. I carefully walked in the lake, holding up my arms to avoid contact with water for as long as I could and finally I plunged in, followed by the dog. Wooster would swim with me for a while only and then find his way back to the shore, shake the water off and sit waiting for me to return.

  When I got back home I found a brown paper bag in front of my door, accompanied by a good morning note written in stylized print. Unmistakably Jack’s. The muffins in the bag felt warm and their smell made me salivate. I walked inside with my muffins, smiling. Jack had moved to California after working in all sort of trades across the States and finally decided to settle there few years earlier, after opening a small bakery. He had started off by working alone 7/7 for ten hours a day, but when the business had begun to thrive he hired a local boy to help him out with the shop.

  Back then I couldn’t tell for sure what was the nature of Jack’s feelings for me, but I knew he liked me and he did for me things he didn’t do for the other people in the town. By the time I showered and had breakfast the sun was high in the sky and the air was turning hot. Suddenly I missed the ocean, driving along the coast with the car windows rolled down and eating in one of those restaurants by the beach. I thought I’d go find Jack and ask him to join. I drove to his flat at a leisurely speed, taking the time to observe what was along my way, the trees, the trimmed gardens, that old lady with her dog and that man talking to himself as he read the news.

  Jack’s flat was one storey above the bakery and could be accessed from the back of the building through fire stairs, which I used as if they were the regular ones when I wanted to see him. When Jack opened the door and saw me he smiled, looking as if he had been expecting the visit, and asked me if I had liked the muffins. I said I did, and then we both fell silent for a moment. Neither of us was a fast talker. When I asked him to come with me for a day on the ocean shore he looked at me strangely. Which beach did I want to go to, he asked me. Any beach, I said. He wanted to know if I would you mind spending a day fixing a boat. For a friend who needed a hand, he added. The idea of restoring old relics always pleased me, and when I said so Jack smiled, I think more at the way I phrased my thoughts than at the concept itself.

  “Just give me a moment to put on a shirt and I’ll be back”, he told me, before disappearing into the house.

  For some reason he didn’t let me in that day, so I waited beside his truck and a few minutes later we were heading to the highway, making our way to Mission beach.

  Chapter 4

  We drove for a long while enjoying each other’s presence and the endless blue of the sky, without saying a word, just smiling at each other every now and then. Then we reached a semi-arid stretch of land, burnt dry by the sun of California, and seeing the thirsty earth I began to long for a drink myself. When I saw a gas station that sold ice and pops I signalled Jack to stop.

  “So, who is this friend you told me about?”, I asked him as we got back on the road.

  He told me I needed to have some patience and looked at me like someone who has in store a surprise prepared for months and does not want to spoil it. Jack was not one to reveal himself easily, and I didn’t know much about his past life. He communicated with greater ease when his hands were busy, and most of what I had learned about him was from comments he had dropped casually as we were working together, fixing some broken part of my house or baking. I had been behind the scenes at his store several times, and I remember thinking that there was more science in what he did in his bakery than in what I did in the lab, and more simple and honest joy too. But even then whichever information he released was brief and enigmatic, not because he deliberately wanted to keep things from me but because of his reserved nature. He was not the type who liked to be at the center of the scene, and was better at listening than at talking. I wasn’t a great talker myself, but when I got started I could go on for quite a bit, drilling into the details of what I wanted to say till I felt I got my story straight. So Jack had learned more facts about my life than I had about his, although I think I knew him as well as I knew me. I tend to sense people, and I don’t really need facts to tell who they are.

  When we were close to Mission beach we turned into a residential road and stopped in front of a house with a low white fence and a wealth of florid plants covering the whole yard with the exception of a white pebbled walkway leading to the door. There were wind chimes hanging all over the porch, where three plump cats lay on large cushioned chairs and a chaise longue, lazily looking at us with eyes half closed as we rang the bell.

  A man opened the door, and when he saw Jack he laughed, and took his hand bringing him close to his chest at the same time, patting him hard on the shoulder as they hugged.

  “Come on in lad, come on in”, he said and then, looking at me, “I see you’ve brought a nice lady with you”.

  I smiled politely, introducing myself. The man’s name was Fred. Fred was no longer young when I met him but he had a solid frame and lively manners, and his dark blue eyes were inquisitive and warm at once.

  The wallpaper and the furniture in the house were pastel colours and I could tell that there was a woman living with this man. Books were all over, and there was a thick stack of them on the coffee table in the living room.

  I looked at the titles and while I was trying to create a mental profile of the Fred’s interests he told me, “I study marine biology. Theoretically I am a retired professor, but I still show up in my old labs a couple times a week”.

  He laughed and added, “I can’t let go”. I told him he had no reason to. I wondered how Jack had met this man but it seemed out of place to ask at that moment, so I kept my curiosity to myself.

  It was almost lunch time and Fred proposed to fix us something to eat, simple sandwiches, he said apologetically addressing me more than Jack, since his lady was away and he wasn’t much of a cook. Then Jack excused himself to the bathroom and I was left standing in the kitchen as Fred sliced the bread, strangely caught between the embarrassment of letting him do the work while I watched him and having to ask him what I could do to help. Fred must have sensed my state of mind, because he turned around and told me that all he needed from me was that I sit down and help myself with a drink from the fridge.

  “Have you know Jack from long?”, he asked after a moment, and I was surprised at the question.

  He listened to my answer and then said, almost talking to himself, that it was time Jack found a girl. At that moment I had the distinct feeling that something had happened to Jack in the past, and that Fred had been there to witness it. I returned the question I had been asked when Jack walked in. Fred looked at Jack with complicity and said, placing a hand on his shoulder, that they had known each other for quite a bit.

  Chapter 5 />
  After lunch we loaded the tools and the paint on Jack’s truck and we headed to the shack where Fred kept his sailboat. I felt there was a tension in the air, something unsaid, and Jack’s silence felt different from usual. The boat was covered with a dark plastic sheet, which was cracked here and there and was caked with sand and dust as if it hadn’t been touched for a long while. Jack stood there, holding the bucket of paint, looking at it. I caught Fred leaning on the door of the truck with the toolbox in his hands, observing Jack from a distance. I approached Jack and when I spoke to ask him if it was long since the boat had been used he started, as if he had forgotten that someone else was there. It would have been two years in a month and a half, he replied, and the way the answer had been phrased, the accuracy of it, surprised me and I was sure there was something with this boat only Fred and jack knew. I nodded, and waited for Jack to decide what to do next. He seemed confused though, and in the uncertainty he kept where he was, with the bucket in his hands, until Fred touched his shoulder from the back and said, “Come on lad, let’s get started”.

  When Fred removed the cover I noticed that the tree was cracked and that some of the wood on the keel was also damaged. We worked till dusk patching the wood, and by the time we finished putting fresh paint on the boat I was so hungry my stomach hurt and my back was sour from being bent for hours. I let myself lie on the sand, still warm from the day’s sun, and rapidly slipped in the limbo between sleep and wake, losing track of time, while Jack and Fred reloaded the truck. It must have been just a few minutes later when Jack kneeled beside me and gently touched my back, whispering that it was time to go.

  “I don’t want to”, I said, “just let me stay a bit longer”.

  Jack laughed, and began lifting my arm. I was still sleepy as the car made its way back to Fred’s house, and I could feel the dirt sticking on the sweat that had turned dry and cold. Fred looked at me from the rear mirror.