by Jamie Metzl
“Maya, honey,” Toni says in the same soft voice, “are there people in your family you may need to tell not to worry about you?”
“Not so much,” Maya says wistfully. “I talk to my mom every couple of weeks, my dad every few months, so I guess I’d better say something to my mom. Not that she’d much care.”
I glance at Toni’s pained face absorbing the words and see her as a mother of kids, for a flash, almost, as the mother of our kids.
“Okay,” Toni says, “you’ll probably need to call her one of these days.”
“Yup,” Maya says in an adolescent tone. The mention of her mother seems to have a devolutionary impact.
“How about your apartment?” I say.
“Rent’s due on the first of the month.”
“Can we send them a money order?” I say.
“They don’t give a shit,” Maya responds. The words seem to embody Maya’s feelings about most of the people in her life.
We’re fifteen minutes from Collins’s body, from the dying Gillespie, and already we’ve sunk into details. Maybe, I think to myself, life is details.
“Why do you think he did it?” Maya asks after a long silence.
“Who?”
“Gillespie,” she says. “Why’d he send me away when he’d put so much effort into, into this?”
I see Maya in the rearview mirror putting her hands on her stomach.
“Maybe he was a father,” Toni says.
“The father?” I ask, surprised.
“He was helping create something.”
The three of us silently absorb the possibility.
“And so the babies that got killed in their mothers’ wombs, the embryos, were his kids?” I ask.
“Maybe not genetically,” Toni says, “but in other ways, maybe.”
“‘He wanted to dream a man, he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality,’” I recite.
“What’s that?” Toni asks after a reflective pause.
“A line from Borges,” I say. “I’m not sure I fully understood it before now.”
Toni reaches across and takes my hand.
I think of Gillespie, picture the ambulance rushing him to the hospital. In a screwy way, I pray for him. I put myself in his shoes. What can any of us leave behind in our transient lives? Changing the human code, improving it, becoming immortal, being God for a few moments. Terrifying, intoxicating. Genesis. “And you think he wanted Maya to have a normal life?”
“I think he understands what’s coming. Do you?” Toni asks.
I look straight out the window as I drive. The road ahead is empty. The arc of our headlights fills a passing ark of nothingness.
“So, what now?” Toni says.
The fragments of my mind shift wildly in my head, but I feel them coming together. I feel the pot being remade from the jumbled pile of shards. I look over at her, holding her gaze before looking to the road. “Do you guys mind sleeping in the car tonight?” I ask after a few moments. Neither of them answers.
When we reach Derby, Kansas, I pull into a Wal-Mart and park. Maya stretches across the back seat, and we slide the front seats back to rest just above her body.
“Everybody okay?” I ask as we settle in.
Toni takes my left hand in her right. “Maya, give me your hand, honey,” she says. I realize what Toni is doing and pass my free hand through the space between the driver’s seat and the door. Maya’s meets it immediately.
Maybe it’s only now I realize that I’ve been alone, that my drive for self-reliance has been partly a fear of truly connecting in a way that might reprogram the code of my life. Maybe it’s at this moment that I realize I don’t have to be alone. Toni squeezes my left hand, Maya, my right. I don’t let go. We all drift off to sleep.
The first light and the movement of cars wake us. My mouth still tastes of washcloth and carpet. I feel filthy but alive. I pull over to the ChargePoint station and plug in the car as I fill the reserve tank with gasoline. We take turns in the restroom washing up.
I’m the first Wal-Mart customer at seven thirty. I stop by the electronic device section and do my research, then come back to the car with orange juice, a box of oatmeal cookies, and a bag of apples.
“Ready?” I ask resolutely as I start the car.
Toni swings her head toward me. Maya articulates what Toni’s expression asks. “Where are we going?”
“Topeka,” I say, matter-of-fact.
“Hmm.”
The drive takes two hours.
I place the address in Toni’s palm, engulfing her hand with mine.
“You’ll figure it out,” I say.
She looks at me awkwardly, as if she wants to punch me and kiss me at the same time. I can’t blame her for either.
This is the time when a normal guy is supposed to say I love you. We’re at the train station and the Southwest Chief is about to board. But the decrepit station is hardly the scene of an old Bogart movie. Somehow it doesn’t feel right. We hug desperately, then Toni’s arm reaches out from our merged being and grabs Maya’s jacket. I feel another arm resting on my back.
In the movies a horn would blow and someone would shout, “All aboard!” In Topeka, the anodyne, prerecorded voice announces in disjointed and disassociated words that “The-ten-thirty-Southwest-Chief-train-is-now-boarding-on-track-two.” In Topeka, I don’t say the three words pushing up from my subconscious.
As the train pulls away, I head back to my car and drive toward Kansas City. Alone again, I think.
But then again, I wonder, maybe not.
69
“Are you . . . ?” Martina stammers.
“I’m okay. She’s okay. We need to meet,” I fire staccato from the payphone in Lawrence, Kansas.
“Where?”
“There’s a small reading room in the southwest corner of the Plaza library, on Main Street.”
“I know it,” Martina says.
“Meet me there at two. Park across the street in the BoT Lofts building and come in through the underground walkway.”
“Got it,” Martina says, taking my lead.
My tone has changed. I have changed. “We’re going to need help. Bring Abraham. The two of you should leave separately. Tell him to bring Jerry Weisberg if he’s been released.”
The line is silent.
“Two o’clock,” I say, then hang up.
I begin forming and reforming the story in my head. I mentally draft opening sentences, edit them, scrap them, and start over. I poke holes in the narrative then fix them. My mind is on fire.
I get to the library a little before two. Martina and Joseph enter the reading room a few minutes later. Martina walks up to me, squeezes my elbow, and sits down. Even Joseph’s nonchalance conveys an emotional warmth he’d never communicate in words.
I look at each of them with a feeling of appreciation that rises from somewhere deep inside. “Now we need to tell the story.” I focus on Martina. “Are you in?”
“Let’s hear what you have,” she says.
I look at her sharply and let the uncomfortable silence hang.
“Dammit, Azadian,” she says, her words clearly a confirmation.
I start with the National Competitiveness Act and the Chinese genetic enhancement program, then I roll through the secret US plan and how Bright Horizons fits into the picture. I veer off to track the Becker story until his quest for the messiah links him to Bright Horizons, then shift to MaryLee, to Maurice and me taking up the case, to the fake autopsy and the stolen tissue. I describe what I know about Gillespie, which, I realize, is not nearly as much as I should about someone who has just saved my life. I go through the Christian right’s campaign to save the country’s soul, the underground militants it inspired, the Eden’s Army terrorist attacks, Senator King’s brilliant maneuver to capture all of this energy in the great sail of his campaign to oust President Lewis in the Republican primary. I finish with my arrival here. It’s a vast, complicated, interweavin
g story with such obvious consequences for the future of our country, our world, and our species, but also, obviously, for the specific victims it has swept in its wake.
A profound, momentary silence fills the room after I stop speaking.
Martina is the first to break it. “And the girl, Maya?”
“Safe,” I say, then amend my words. “Safe and hidden away for now.”
“And you want to—”
“Yes. To deal her out of the story. I insist on it.”
“How strong is the connection between Senator King and Eden’s Army?” Martina asks.
“Nothing direct. No smoking gun,” I say, “but it’s hard to deny that the climate of fear and militant righteousness he’s nurtured is one of the main catalysts for all this.”
“And President Lewis?”
“I hate to sound like Cobalt Becker,” I say, “but there is going to be hellfire coming down on his head for the covert genetic enhancement program. Everyone wants this country to be more competitive but not at any cost, not at this cost.”
Martina nods. “This could kill genetic research in America and kill the Star, you know.”
“You know these technologies have enormous potential for good and bad, and if the Star can’t tell the story it deserves to be killed.”
“Let’s do this,” she says, her battle voice kicking in.
Martina and I dole out the research tasks. Joseph will compile everything we know about the National Competitiveness Act, genetic engineering, and Becker, and reach out to Franklin Chou for help with the science. Martina will run interference with the Star, and I will buckle down and begin writing.
Jerry runs in breathlessly, looking a bit worse for wear after police custody. I give him the short version and ask him to nail down the ownership structure of Bright Horizons and to work with Joseph on the multimedia content to embed in the article.
As the team fans out I begin dictating into my u.D. The words flow through me as if the story is being downloaded from my own genetic code. I write until the library closes at ten then sleep for a few hours in my car. I don’t trust going home until the story is told.
I’m the first visitor in the library door at eight the next morning. Joseph Abraham is the second. Joseph and Jerry feed me information and check my facts. The story grows longer and deeper, yet I hold to the connective thread, the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
Martina arrives at 2 p.m. to do a final edit.
“Wes Morton is on board,” she says. “I’ve told him we don’t want any edits, that we’re going to give them the copy at the last possible minute and it will go straight to press.”
“What did he say?” I ask.
“That he needed time to think about it.”
“And?”
“I told him if he didn’t agree I was resigning and taking this to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I told him I thought we had enough to bust through the News Protection Act restrictions or go down trying, that if they wanted to take us down for this, then let them fucking try.”
I’d never thought I’d view Martina’s combative obstinacy so lovingly. How can it be, I wonder, that our best and worst qualities are so closely interlinked? “What did he say?”
“We’re going to release the printed version and post the digital story at exactly the same moment early tomorrow morning.”
At four thirty the story is ready. It runs almost ten thousand words. We synch it to encrypted files Jerry has installed on each of our u.Ds, and part, separately and in silence.
Martina rushes back to the Star to meet the 5 p.m. deadline.
I jump in my car.
There are two places I need to visit before tomorrow morning.
70
Forty-eight hours ago I was an injection away from dead. But the fear gripping me now is of an entirely different sort.
My hand twitches as I reach it toward the doorbell.
My forty-five minutes with Christine Fogerty had been impossibly difficult. I’d left for Springfield feeling that the price of truth might be unbearable pain, that sometimes a comfortable lie might be the more bearable option.
I now wonder for a moment if I should turn back.
I’ve always seen myself as truth’s champion, my mission to track its elusive shadow down its rabbit hole. But who am I to dispel someone else’s fantasies? Perhaps I should leave Carol Stock with the story she has in her head. Her beautiful daughter died of terrible but natural causes, God’s will. The Lord works in strange ways. The church is his institution here on earth. Cobalt Becker is his helper. The messiah will come and save all believers.
But then what?
Then the story will come out tomorrow. Then someone else will be on this porch in the morning. Then Carol Stock will be even less prepared for what’s coming. Then . . .
I ring the bell.
“Mrs. Stock,” I say, “it’s Rich Azadian.”
She pushes the screen door open slightly, as if opening the door to me is opening the door to a dangerous world.
“May I come in?”
Carol nods.
I follow her into her living room. The place is immaculate. School photos of MaryLee from various ages and framed knittings line the walls. GOD’S LOVE IS THE WAY, JESUS IS COMING—OPEN YOUR HEART, the knittings say.
Who am I, I ask myself, to take Carol Stock’s world away from her?
But maybe it’s too late. Maybe that world died with MaryLee.
“I promised you I would find out what happened to your daughter.”
She looks at me blankly.
“I am so sorry.” I begin to tell the story, hoping that someone will be around to pick up the pieces or that Carol Stock will have the power do so herself. As my words unfold, she seems caught between the world she has believed in and the world I am ushering her into. “And then they all started dying,” I say toward the end of my story. I stop and rephrase. “They all started getting killed.”
Carol slumps back into her chair. Her world of knitted certainties of God’s love has not prepared her for this tale. Maybe she had agreed for her daughter to be Mary, but never had she signed on for her only child to have become the red heifer sacrificed on the altar of her beloved Second Coming.
I tell her about Gillespie and Collins. Part of me wants to tell her about Maya just to let her know that death does not always emerge victorious. I refrain.
“And so Collins is dead,” I say softly, “all of the women are dead. And the full story is coming out in the Kansas City Star in four hours.”
Carol looks at me, stunned.
“That’s why I’m here. I wanted to be the one to tell you. I wanted you to know what might be coming your way. Reverend Becker and the church are going to be in the middle of this. I just wanted you to be . . .” I’m not sure how to finish the sentence. Safe? Protected? I’ve hardly delivered either.
“I’m so sorry,” I say pathetically. “I’m—.”
Carol cuts me off.
“I understand,” she says through her soft breath. She lifts her torso slightly then takes my hand in hers. “I understand,” she repeats in a slightly stronger voice, “and thank you.”
71
Bzzz.
I don’t feel the slightest hesitation as I stand outside the door of Cobalt Becker’s palatial home.
Bzzz. I press again. Bzzz. Bzzz.
A dog barks. Light from a higher floor pierces the 4 a.m. darkness. Footsteps.
The door opens and Becker, in pajamas and a fleece robe, faces me squarely. His golden mane still flows like a lion’s.
“I thought it must be you,” he says as if he’s been expecting me.
“It was a rogue agent in the National Competitiveness Agency.”
Becker takes in the information.
“He belonged to Eden’s Army. There were eight other women who were part of the same program,” I lie.
“And they—”
“Dead. Same as MaryLee.”
The mention of h
er name sucker-punches Becker. He holds his chin between his thumb and index finger.
“I never wanted—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t know about the bigger program,” he stammers. “I didn’t—”
“I know. What you did was despicable, but I know.”
“So now what?”
I get the sense his mind is starting to lay out options. His shift to self-preservation mode disturbs me. “You can guess,” I say. “The story is coming out this morning. Actually, the papers are being released and the story is going up on the website, well,” I look down at my watch, “actually both happened four minutes ago. About the time I rang your bell.”
The look on Becker’s face makes absolutely clear he understands the personal, professional, and national political implications. “I’m not sure I’d have tried to stop you anyway.”
His voice sounds surprisingly human to me.
“Doesn’t really matter now,” I say with a shrug.
“And the story says?”
I spit out the essentials. Rapture Grove. Genesis labs. The National Competitiveness Agency. Eden’s Army. I state the names of the nine dead women, each word feels like another stab in the great Caesar’s wounded body. The Second Coming that never came.
I sense Becker sees his world crumbling, his church collapsing, that he understands the onslaught that will arrive in a few hours, can almost see the television trucks lining up down his street, almost read the headlines in the tabloids, hear the protesters chanting their condemnation. I sense he’s already imagining the furious debates in Senator King’s office as it becomes painfully clear that Becker has become the poison arrow piercing the heart of the Christian right’s political surge, that the King 2024 presidential campaign has crashed to the ground just months before it was set to officially launch.
Becker breathes in as if rising to face the onslaught then pauses. His shoulders drop and he stares at me with his powerful eyes. But in them I see a hint of the unknown, of fear perhaps.
“I’ll go write up my resignation,” he says as if speaking to himself.
His cool still unnerves me. “And Senator King?”