by Mark Davis
She put the whole pill on her tongue and swallowed it with a gulp of water.
George fished a flask out of his back pants pocket and took a pull.
“Scotch?” she asked.
“If I am going to have to be in this park for a few hours to watch you rave and talk to goddesses, I will need a little toddy to keep me comfortable on this park bench. Give me your room key.”
Elizabeth handed George her key card. He pocketed it and patted her on the arm.
“I’ll be here with you at every moment,” he said, voice lower, more intimate, fatherly. “Just relax and go gently with this ride.”
Elizabeth declined George’s flask and took another swig of water. It was closer to night than dusk now, the shadows between the trees joining into gloom.
“Tell me about Lars,” she asked.
“You know I cannot do that. Especially if you two might get involved.”
“No secrets … just tell me about him.”
“I will tell you what anyone who knows him well would say,” George said, taking another swig. “Lars is very stern on himself. His father was stern on him … very stern … and he internalized that. He has a deep-seated need for control. Of himself. Of other people.”
“And he came to you?”
“He came to me after the disintegration of his marriage. His wife left because of that controlling nature. And he was disappointed that he had been passed over for a promotion from the Department of the Environment to the Justice Ministry or the PST.”
“I guess that all fits.”
“Now tell me about Nasrin,” he said.
“She has a crush on me.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
Elizabeth told George about what had happened on the plane. She recalled the incident slowly, trying not to let emotion get into her voice.
“And you were asleep?”
Even in the twilight, she could see that George’s face had colored with anger.
“Goddamn her, I’ll report her, that’s—”
“If anybody does any reporting, it will be me,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, I was in a very light sleep, dreaming … so I think I was, well, you know … responsive.”
“With your eyes closed?”
“Yes, in a very light sleep.”
George took a brisk pull on his flask.
“Still, I don’t think I will ever look at Nasrin the same way.”
“Neither will I.” Elizabeth realized how silly that sounded. They both laughed.
The sun was just above the low buildings now, shafts of gold penetrating the trees and casting a supernatural light on the immense mountain face of a thunderhead over the city. Once again, Elizabeth could see why ancient peoples were certain gods lived in the sky. The clouds, carved in golden light and purpled shadows, were vessels ferrying the gods as they chased the sinking sun.
Chariots in the sky.
The sun winked out, falling beneath the distant profile of the Royal Palace adjacent to the park. Darkness spread between the trees. It was like a rain, a curtain of wetness that blackened the grass and moved toward her as fast as a car. Elizabeth jumped up onto the bench to keep her feet from getting wet.
“Get up George!”
“Elizabeth … Elizabeth … look at me dear.”
She looked at George, at his sweet walrus face.
“Elizabeth, you are starting to hallucinate. Please understand that. Give in and don’t fight it. But always understand that you are simply watching your own mind at work, just like in hypnosis.”
Elizabeth nodded and put her feet back on the sidewalk. It was dry.
She connected her earphones and put them in her ears.
The piercing binaural beats permeated her mind and body, shearing and reshaping her thoughts. She watched a screen of abstract patterns merge and divide, paramecium shapes with fractal fringes that throbbed and pulsed with the obscenity of flesh.
The sound was too much. Elizabeth took out her earphones and opened her eyes. The quiet was better. There was enough going on with what she could see.
The darkness was now made flesh. It pulsed and rippled between the trees. Elizabeth did not want to think about that so she got up from the park bench and walked over to the statues where the lamp light was strongest.
The statues were moving, of course. Elizabeth knew that they would be, and this did not surprise or alarm her. The babies rolled around the muscular arms of their parents. The wasted-thin elderly reclined while letting out deep sighs of resignation. The girl with the braids chittered nonsense. Elizabeth looked closely at her and saw that she was Sophia Goddard.
She looked away.
The bronze trees swayed over their granite trunks while the statues writhed beneath them. The diving woman dove and met an updraft, an air column on which she floated and manipulated the currents with subtle movements of her hands, with twists of her hips and arches of her back.
The diving woman had been afraid. Now she swam through the air with the confidence and poise of a dolphin.
The dying man was Daryl Parnell, moaning, bereft and abandoned by the God he had tried to please. Now he wanted nothing more than annihilation. He begged for it.
George’s face emerged out of the gloom, his eyes bright and concerned.
“George, why are you here?”
“I will not leave you, my dear.”
“Oh George, I see them.”
“Who are they?”
“The victims.”
She turned from him and he stayed behind her as she toured the statuary, made more dramatic in the chiaroscuro of bright lamp light in the night.
Elizabeth came to a new section of the park she had never visited before. Human forms struggled with lizards the size of wolves. Some held them off, prying open their jaws like Hercules. Some curled and meekly submitted to their fate, while others screamed as fangs were sunk into their necks.
“George … is this … am I?”
George wrapped his strong arms around her and placed his chin on the top of her head.
“You are not making this up. These grotesques were left here by Vigeland.”
“Why did he do it?”
“It is only an expression of the human unconscious. His monsters are not real.”
But Vigeland’s monsters had been real. They had been as real as these creatures the artist had liberated from the stone with a chisel, as real as the metal he had molded in his studio. In the afternoon, Vigeland’s monsters would take hostages—men, women and children pulled from the routines of their days—and line them up in back alleys and mow them down with Mausers. In the early evening, these very same monsters came calling on the great artist, ingratiating and polite, happy to sip aquavit and talk of the Aryan aesthetic.
“Monsters,” Elizabeth said.
“Are not real.”
“Are.”
George released her and she walked in the lamplight around a corner to come face to face with the truculent toddler.
Sinnataggen, she had learned the name, Angry Boy, his fists curled, feet stamping and mouth an ugly downward curl.
This was one of the smaller and more modest of Vigeland’s creations. And yet it was by far the most famous one of all, the statute every visitor had to see and touch. Out of a small block of granite, the artist had somehow crafted the purest expression of the most primal of emotions.
Elizabeth lingered. The boy’s foot was raised for a stomp, shoulders pinched, fists turned into small hammers, mouth a downward gash, eyes narrow slits.
Anger radiated from the boy, waves of wrath that washed over her.
“I see her.”
“See who?”
“Freyja. This is her heart.”
TWENTY-THREE
Sandra Armstrong stood before the dozen men and women who made up Therapso’s board of directors. The directors looked up to her, literally, from their seats, at thei
r tall and commanding CEO in her dark-blue business suit.
It was all a bit of virtual reality magic. Sandra was still in Japan in a crummy little office in downtown Tokyo while the board met at its annual offsite in Scottsdale. She had gone to considerable trouble to make sure her projection would be slightly elevated above them.
Sandra was officially on her Japanese vacation. She had met with some old friends from Nebraska and Stanford to hike Mount Fuji, tour the castles of Kyoto and take pictures of the snow monkeys of Jigokudani. It had been a swell time, the first real vacation she had taken in years. And it was all theater, ostentatiously enjoying Watabe-san’s country while the old bureaucrat sat in his hard-back executive chair in Tokyo and squirmed.
Sandra had even emailed Takahito a few selfies of herself on top of Fuji and in front of a country ryokan. Each email came with a jocular note about how much fun she was having, just to rub it in.
Now Sandra stood in that small, cramped company office in downtown Tokyo in late afternoon. She stared into a screen the size and shape of a full-length mirror ringed by tiny cameras that streamed her HD, 3-D image to the other side of the world, where the board was taking up the first issue on its morning agenda.
“Sandra, why aren’t you here?”
The question came from the non-voting executive chairman of the board, an eminent attorney and former secretary of state.
It did not sound like a friendly question, but it was.
Sandra explained her strategy. If you net out Japan, she said, it is still a smaller loss than having to renegotiate all the other contracts around the world downward. Worse, capitulating to Watabe’s demands would inflict reputational damage on Therapso, a tacit agreement with their worst critics that the company does, in fact, hold countries hostage and extract exorbitant payouts.
You had to keep politicians and regulators in their place, or they would own you for good.
Sandra stopped speaking and stood in silence. There was a slight delay for her words to resonate around the world.
“It still makes no sense,” said another board member, a man in his late thirties who was never expected to wear a tie because he was the founder of a tech company. “By value, Japan is the largest market outside of the U.S. and EU. Are we supposed to wave goodbye as this huge chunk of our future calves away?”
“Instead of waving, you should expect handshakes and signing ceremonies,” Sandra said. “There has been a lot of press of late about the impact the Ministry’s decision will have on Japan.”
She did not have to explain how that press had come about. A premier Japanese public relations firm had spread some cash, called in some chits and placed human interest stories throughout key social media sites, TV news and newspapers. Millions of impressions had been made about anxious families praying that the cruel Ministry would decide to spare their beloved little Harotu or Yui. Bee hives of bloggers had been unleashed on Watabe, resulting in letters of protest from opposition politicians and an official query from the Prime Minister’s office.
There was even a rumor afoot that the Empress herself was concerned. It was not true, of course. But it was a useful rumor.
“Within one more day, two tops, my phone will ring and I will be asked to make another visit to see Watabe-san,” Sandra said. “After the usual nested courtesies, the distinguished minister will pound his table and demand that Therapso supply training for his physicians and fresh IV equipment at cost. This demand, of course, will be a face-saving capitulation to our price.”
The following day, Sandra’s phone did ring. Watabe went further, demanding that Therapso provide the training and equipment for free. Two days later, the two of them held a press conference and shook hands after making their announcement before the Foreign Correspondence Club of Japan in the Ginza.
That evening, Sandra Armstrong relaxed into her seat and glanced out the window as her chartered Bombardier Global jet rumbled east. Beads of light festooned the Sea of Japan, night-fishing boats lined up in phosphorescent strings as elaborate as lace.
Japan had been interesting, she had decided. But overall, it was nothing special.
___________
Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda was a handsome man, lithe and fit at 60, with olive skin, swept back white hair and a white nib of goatee. A biochemist who also held a degree in computer engineering from Cal-Tech, Alonso had been Therapso’s Chief Science Officer for eight years. He sported casual dress—dark jeans and a thin sweater worn like a shirt—but he stood before Sandra’s desk with the posture of a military officer reporting to his commander, waiting for his CEO to speak first.
Sandra bade him to speak with a wave of her hand.
“We have completed all the round one assay comparisons against all the best machines and clinical laboratory professionals,” Alonso said.
“Standard deviation?”
“Z-score of zero,” Alonso broke out into a smile. “Sandra, we have built a near-perfect machine.”
Sandra rose from her desk, too agitated to sit. Out her third-floor windows one could admire the sweep of Brandywine forest beyond the company parking lot. The leaves were already beginning to turn. Soon the C-Suite’s view of the Delaware countryside would be a pointillistic masterpiece of red and orange dots.
“Show me.”
The work was being done two floors down, away from the main bio labs where there would be too many curious eyes. It was kept in a simple rectangle of an office with no windows and a guard posted in front of the door.
Despite the human guard, Alonso’s handprint and retinal scan were still required to gain entry.
The machine was not impressive to look at, just a black box resting on a metal desk. It had the size and heft of a heavy-duty office laser printer, an oblong piece of molded plastic whose black surface glistened under the lights. It had a touchscreen that for now said only “Therapso,” but with just one minute of analysis would spit out readings: liver function, A1C blood sugar, complete blood count, blood protein tests, tumor markers, the usual markers for anemia and infection ranging from bacterial STDs to the viral, including HIV. It would also produce more detailed results for the presence of tumor cells and signs of cancer, as well as forms of inflammation and genetic markers for Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.
It was two hundred laboratories in one machine, the universal assay test, the Golden Fleece of high-tech medicine.
“Have you come up with a name yet?” Alonso asked. He knew his boss would want the naming rights.
Sandra ran her hands along the smooth sides of the machine and pressed the button that opened the tray that would hold the samples under lasers, glucometers and tiny test strips.
“It needs something warm, catchy. I’ve got just the name.”
___________
“Before we get started, I thought you would like to see how it works.”
Sandra had not worn her customary business jacket, just a shirt of white cotton and a pair of brand new, nicely pressed blue jeans. Her communications director thought the casual look would make for a better photo op.
A good twenty of the nation’s top health and business reporters filled the room before her, with the blinding lights stabbing at Sandra’s eyes. There were cameras from major-market East Coast television at the back of the room.
Sandra rolled up one sleeve while Alonso stood to her left and the company nurse stood to her right. In front of them was a standing phlebotomy chair so Sandra could remain on her feet throughout the procedure.
The nurse slipped on sterile gloves, applied a rubber tube tourniquet, swabbed her boss’s inner arm with alcohol and inserted a needle.
Sandra watched with calm fascination as dark fluid spurt out and filled one specimen tube. It looked like a tiny sea, a turbulence of waves and eddies while the tube filled. As the nurse filled two more tubes of her boss’s blood, Sandra smiled at a memory from the last office blood draw. There were men who worked for her,
senior executives who bedeviled the office with their endless macho jokes about the office basketball pool, who could not bear to watch blood coming out of their arms.
The news people watched Sandra’s blood drawing procedure in reverent silence, as if they were witnesses to open heart surgery. Sandra looked around the room to make eye contact with beat reporters she knew. The digital cameras flashed and emitted programmed whirling sounds as if they had film inside them.
After the third collection, the nurse stamped a round bandage over the puncture wound in Sandra’s inner arm and taped a cotton pad over it. She removed the tourniquet tubing. Sandra flexed her arm while the nurse handed a small tray with the samples to Alonso. Of course, Sandra Armstrong had taken the test before, just to make sure she would not be hit with a surprise diagnosis before the eyes and ears of the world. She also had to sign a number of HIPPA and other releases regarding her medical privacy.
Alonso pressed a tab on the machine and the room filled with a whirring sound as the machine’s built-in centrifuges spun and separated plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. The sound ebbed and the machine emitted clicks and guttural glunks as it began to analyze Sandra’s blood.
The panel illuminated.
“What do you see Alonso?”
“Sandra, I can see many things about you. You are O-negative, so you would make a good universal red cell donor. Your white blood cell count is in the average zone, so you have no worries about anemia or infection. The markers for inflammation are low, non-existent for cancer. Your risk for Alzheimer’s disease would be graded downward based on this test.”
Sandra had breathed a sigh of relief the first time she had taken the test. Her father was living—if it could be called that—in a “memory care facility” in Nebraska. She knew that the blood test was not final, and that she would live with genetic Russian roulette throughout her life.
“But Sandra …” Alonso shook his head and tut-tutted in the way he had done several times before in the practice session … “Your A1C is slightly elevated.”
Sandra scanned the expectant faces in the room.