by Jake Wolff
Sadiq nodded, as though he’d decided on something. “I want to make it clear that I’m not promising anything. But tell me what you need.”
“Why would you help me?” I didn’t want to dissuade him, but I was too curious not to ask.
Sadiq looked at me as though the answer were obvious. “Because he asked me to.”
A jolt ran through me—another secret of Sammy’s, passing through my body. “When?”
“He called me, well, a week before he died. He said that if a friend of his contacted me, I should help that person. That I had to help.”
I tried to hide how much this news hurt me. Everything that had happened—the package left late at night, the infuriatingly vague note—suggested suddenness. But if he’d called Sadiq, how long had he been planning this? My anger with Sammy made me resentful of Sadiq. “He asks you to help, so you fly from London? Just like that?”
Sadiq laughed. “Was anything with Sam ‘just like that’? Of course I resisted. We hadn’t spoken in years. He said it was important, that it was the last favor he’d ask of me. What could I do? I said okay, and he hung up.”
I didn’t know what to say. Sammy had enlisted help on my behalf, but I felt as if I’d been bartered for—a debt to be settled.
Sadiq leaned back in his seat. “Only now I see the trap he was setting. He’s dead, and you’re a child. So either I ignore his dying wish and read in the papers that you’ve killed someone, or I stay.”
My phone buzzed with another text from RJ, and Sadiq glared, suspicious. “Who keeps pinging you?”
“Just my friend. He’s waiting for me outside.”
Sadiq froze. “He knows?”
“He’s been helping me.” I was scared Sadiq might leave, fly home, and never talk to me again.
Instead, he rubbed his full stomach and pushed back his chair from the table. “He’s just waiting out there? Let’s go get him, for God’s sake. I might as well meet the whole crew.”
* * *
Sadiq rapped his knuckles against the faux-mahogany nightstand of his hotel room. He did this, I would learn, when he was thinking. RJ stood with his hands in his pockets. The recipe book was open on the table.
“Can you get us the ingredients?” RJ asked.
“There’s only one way to get the Dor, but I haven’t spoken to Bogdi in years. I’ll put out some feelers.”
“What about the Entrée?” I asked.
Sadiq sat at the edge of the bed. He had two teenage boys in his motel room, and I could see, in his careful movements, his awareness of how it would look to an observer. “We still have enough of the mercury and cupana?”
I nodded.
“The rossica we can just buy online, but the rapamycin will be tricky.”
“Which thing is the rapa—?” RJ asked.
“In the pill bottle,” I reminded him.
“Write it down,” RJ said. “I’ll get it.”
“How’s that?” Sadiq asked, skeptical but already scribbling the information onto a Post-it.
RJ pocketed Sadiq’s note. “My dad.”
“Can he be trusted?”
I don’t know what I would have said to that, but RJ didn’t let me respond. “If I tell him I need something, he’ll get it for me.”
It was hard for me to imagine, this kind of trust. When I’d left for RJ’s that morning, I’d given some excuse to Emmett I no longer remember, but I do remember he’d said, “If you don’t want to hang out with me, I don’t care,” and I’d said, like a baby, “Fine!” When I approached RJ’s house I could see, through the window, his family eating breakfast together. All of them were eating food that came out of one box or another: Pop-Tarts for RJ, cereal for Stephanie, instant oatmeal for his mother, a breakfast bar for his dad. They were all on their phones or their laptops, not really talking. Still, they were together.
As if he could sense me judging him from afar, my dad called, the number from St. Matthias appearing on my screen. I excused myself and stepped outside to the parking lot.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Kiddo. What’s the latest?” His voice sounded distant and hoarse. I imagined him in his room at St. Matthias, his fuscous skin turning the color of cigarette smoke in the dim light of the cabin.
“Just working on school stuff.”
He laughed and coughed. “Every time you lie, an angel loses its wings.”
“Okay. Thanks for calling.”
“Wait,” he said quickly, with enough distress in his voice that I removed my thumb from the END button. “When are you going to come visit again?”
“Did Dana tell you to ask that?”
He paused. Even if he wanted to, the Copper Code was making it hard for him to lie. “Well, actually she did.”
I almost hung up again, but something kept me from it. If I could finish the elixir, could I convince my father to take it? Did he trust me enough, and love me enough, to accept my help?
“Dad? If at some point in the future I asked you to do something, but I couldn’t explain why, but it was really important, would you do it?”
“Is this a riddle? Should I be asking for clues?”
“I just need to know.”
“Is it bigger than a bread box?”
“Dad.”
There was a moment of quiet as he considered what to say. “I think it’s usually the person dying who gets to Make a Wish,” he said finally. “But okay. Anything you ask me to do, I’ll do it. But it can’t involve murder. Or spiders.”
“Thank you,” I said, surprised by the relief I felt.
“Do I even want to know what’s going on with you?”
“I’m fine.”
My father gasped theatrically. “Did you hear that? An angel is screaming in pain!”
I hung up. As I did, I glimpsed, in a distant patch of trees, someone watching me. I squinted. Yes, someone was there. I told myself I was being paranoid—it is not inherently sinister to stand among trees—but as I started to move in that direction, the figure ducked, this motion was clear, and then bolted. I stood in the emptiness of the lot, much too far away to chase him. I looked back at the motel. My fear was a sickening weight in my stomach, but Sadiq’s help, his presence in Littlefield, still felt tenuous. If I told him what I’d seen, would he stay?
“The next problem,” Sadiq said as I returned to the room, “is this tribal medicine.”
“What do we do?” I asked, trying to hide my unease.
Sadiq bit his lip. A shadow had passed over his face. “There’s no way around it: we’ll have to call Catherine.”
I stared at him.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Let’s run some tests on the ingredients we have left—if we can understand the tribal medicine, perhaps we can re-create it ourselves. We have time to kill, anyway, while I track down Bogdi. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, and as if any of this made sense, we shook on it.
* * *
Over the next week, Sadiq and I studied the recipe book during every free moment I could muster. He kept the book when I would leave, and I didn’t like this—surrendering custody. When I left for Dana’s or, more rarely, for school, I was always gripped by the fear that when I returned, Sadiq and the recipe book would be gone. But no, he was always there, dependable and honest Sadiq, with the book spread to Sammy’s final elixir.
ELIXIR OF LIFE #101
Yield: 1
INGREDIENTS
THE APPETIZER
1. Dor (1 sp)
THE ENTRÉE
1. Quicksilver (200 ml)
2. Tribal medicine (100 ml)
3. B. rossica (3 oz)
4. Rapamycin (15 mg)
5. P. cupana (100 mg)
PREPARATION
Inject Appetizer. Combine Entrée and drink.
HOW DID IT TASTE?
still not strong enough. what’s missing?
“‘What’s missing?’” Sadiq read out loud. “He must have thought he was very close if he believ
ed you’d be capable of finding the answer. No offense.”
“It’s okay. I thought that, too.”
I’d been describing my experiments on, and necropsy of, Number 37. I finished the story with Number 37’s brain, strangled by quicksilver—just as anyone could have predicted. Reading Sammy’s account of his trip to Romania had given me a better understanding of Dor, but I still couldn’t grasp its interaction with Sammy’s Entrée. “I don’t get it. Even if I’d given Dor to Number Thirty-Seven, how would that have stopped the mercury poisoning?”
“That’s an important question,” Sadiq said. “How does mercury accumulate in the brain?”
This, like so many of the questions Sammy once asked me, wasn’t a question but a quiz. Luckily, I’d been studying. Remember: mercury crosses the blood-brain barrier by adopting a sort of disguise; it pretends to be an amino acid. But once inside the central nervous system, the chemical features of the brain fluids cause the mercury to demethylate—in other words, the brain dissolves the disguise. Mercury can sneak in, but it can’t sneak out.
“Good,” Sadiq said. “And you’re correct that a boosted immune system alone couldn’t solve this problem. How about cocaine? How does that interact with the blood-brain barrier?”
I was starting to get the picture. “It tears it apart.”
“Mercury does damage to the barrier, too, but cocaine, especially when injected, is like a hole punch.”
“So Sammy thought the Dor would allow the mercury to escape.”
“Look.” Sadiq turned the pages of the book. “After his early overdose, Sam used very low quantities of mercury. We can even call him cautious, if we overlook the absurdity of the whole endeavor. After he incorporated Dor into his regimen, you might expect him to use less of the mercury, since the cocaine was doing some of the same work. But no.”
I followed his finger. “He almost doubled it.”
“And in his final recipe, he doubled it again. Somehow, that brought him close enough that he thought a teenager and his old, fat ex could find the missing piece.”
Sadiq and I smiled at each other, but these were sad smiles, of the left-behind.
* * *
The focus of our research was the CATHERINE vial, the tribal medicine. Sammy’s journals said only that the medicine’s centerpiece was the Zamia nesophila, a cycad grown in the Bocas del Toro region of Panama. But a search for the plant in the scientific literature revealed almost nothing, and the few articles we did find reported not on its medicinal value but its conservation—apparently, Z. nesophila was extremely rare.
If we scraped the walls of the vial, we had just enough to run a few tests. For this, we needed some of the equipment from Sammy’s storage unit, which I retrieved with RJ’s help and set up right in Sadiq’s motel room. We hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorway, and considering all of the broken locks and the figure stalking me in the distance, this seemed a futile gesture, like strapping on a seat belt before driving off a cliff.
To start, we ran a sample of the tribal medicine through Sammy’s mass spectrometer, which we had set up on the desk beneath the wall-mounted TV. The device looked like a large printer, with an ugly industrial casing that disguised the beauty and intricacy of the inner components: the filaments, magnets, and vacuum pumps, the repeller plates, focusing plates, and electron traps. A spectrometer is a precision instrument that demands a clear, contaminant-free environment, so having it set up in a cheap roadside motel was painful, almost sacrilegious—any good scientist would have seen it and winced.
A mass spectrometer destroys whatever you feed it: inside, the sample of tribal medicine was vaporized and blasted with electron beams. This allowed the machine to dismantle and sort the sample, the results of which it then reported to a computer—in this case, Sadiq’s laptop. It didn’t take long; we sat at the edge of the bed, watching the monitor grow fat with data.
Interpreting that data took longer, so we ordered a pizza, which we ate noisily, using tissues from the bathroom as napkins. Sammy had done well to bring me Sadiq, whose research on HIV/AIDS had prepared him to see something I would have missed. Z. nesophila, we discovered, had an amazing quirk: it was filled with progesterone, a hormone typically found only in humans.
“Protective Role of Progesterone in HIV Vulnerability and Progression” was the title of that first paper Sadiq had published when he was only nineteen. “Look.” Sadiq pulled up the article on his browser. “Progesterone repairs the blood-brain barrier.”
“But why would he want that? The whole point of the elixir is to break down the membrane.” It would be like trying to light a fire and douse it at the same time.
We sat with this question. RJ texted to check on me, as he so frequently did, and Emmett wrote to see if I was up for a movie. I typed my responses wearily. I was sick of making excuses to Emmett and scared of disappointing RJ, but most of all, I was just tired.
One benefit of exhaustion is that when you’re too burned-out to think, you have to trust your instincts. I hopped off the bed and scraped another dab of the tribal medicine from the vial, likely the last it would produce. In the bathroom, we had a microcentrifuge set up next to the hand towels, and I placed the sample in it, flipped on the machine. Sadiq watched this silently, understanding that if I was using the equipment, I must have had an idea. The centrifuge began to whir, spinning the sample like a high-speed merry-go-round, separating fluids of different densities.
This is what I was remembering, as it spun:
On Monday, July 12, I met Sammy in the chem lab for another round of testing, and I had no way of knowing that it was also his birthday. He arrived slightly late, wearing his usual clothes: twill pants, dark shoes, a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, a cardigan or sweater that he would remove, put on, remove, put on, somewhere between four and five hundred times a day.
It was injection time, so I lifted Number 50 from his cage and held him belly up in my palm. He squirmed against my hand, his big teeth showing. I poked him with the needle and scratched his ears until his eyes closed and he didn’t want to bite me. He held his tail straight against my arm, and I could see the network of veins.
“All good?” Sammy called from the closet. The rules of the science fair said he had to be watching me anytime I interacted with the rats invasively, but Sammy wasn’t big on rules. It was clear to me that he didn’t care about the science fair at all. My love for him transformed this indifference into further evidence of his enlightenment. He didn’t waste time worrying about science fairs, prizes, or publications; he was seeking a higher form of truth. Even as I saw my chances of winning slip away, I was never, not once, mad at him about it. I only loved him more.
As I carried Number 50 to the water maze, I could see small indications of how the P. cupana had strengthened his memory. Before we even reached the pool, his paws started air-swimming, anticipating the feel of the water. I indicated this to Sammy with a flick of my chin. Until then, Number 50 had shown improvements in escape latency, but these differences were small and nonlinear. His last escape latency, two days before, was thirty seconds.
I placed him in the water, and for a moment he paused, doing nothing. My pulse quickened. Was the stress too much for him? No, he was doing everything I hoped he would do: thinking, orienting, remembering. When he was ready, he spun his tiny paws and propelled himself directly to the hidden platform, where he sat, his breathing only slightly elevated, looking up at me, like, What else you got?
I smiled at Sammy. “Ten seconds.”
I rescued Number 50, dried him with a hand towel, and placed him back in the cage, where he curled up immediately and slept with his face pressed into the warm haunches of Number 5.
Later, as we were testing Number 37, watching him swim his happy, high-speed, directionless laps, Sammy startled me by saying, “What sort of effect might Annona muricata have on our rats?”
Annona muricata was soursop, the key to my previous science-fair project. I was surprised he even
knew the subject of that study—he’d never shown any interest in its specifics or, honestly, in anything about my life before I met him.
Seeing the surprise on my face, he said, “Yes, Conrad, I read your study.”
My report on the study would have been online, deep in a PDF on the web page of that year’s science fair listing all the losers. The idea of Sammy googling my name was thrilling, strange, and sort of erotic.
“Well”—I thought hard, not wanting to sound stupid—“it’s a strong anti-inflammatory, so—”
“It’s interesting how your study noted the slow-acting nature of the treatment. Are there any potential benefits to this?”
I didn’t know if this was a question or a quiz. Either way, I didn’t have the answer. Although soursop was the strongest-acting treatment I tested, it was also the slowest acting. When it comes to scarring, you typically want something quick. This was partially, probably, why I had lost.
“Well, give it some thought,” Sammy said, when it was clear I was coming up empty. He gestured to our soggy Number 37. “Now rescue this poor bastard, and let’s go home.” It was the first time he’d done this—refer to his home as our home—and even if it was just a slip of the tongue, it left me lightheaded as we walked to the car.
* * *
It didn’t take me long, once the centrifuge finished its work, to plate the newly separated samples and examine them under the microscope. My instincts had been right. The primary component of Catherine’s tribal medicine was Z. nesophila, but in a close second place was soursop.
“Son of a bitch,” Sadiq said, when I finished explaining. “We sorted ourselves right into a queue for him, didn’t we?”
Sammy’s problem was that he needed some way to repair the blood-brain barrier following its encounter with Dor and mercury, but he couldn’t repair it too quickly, otherwise the Dor and the mercury wouldn’t work. The Z. nesophila could play that restorative role, with soursop like an anchor, slowing it down. Some compounds adhere more slowly to the cells; it’s the same reason methadone is used to treat heroin addiction, even though methadone is, itself, an addictive opioid: it’s just slower.