The God Organ

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Matthew had never faced the Jacqueline who lay beside him now.

  He couldn’t comprehend how a conversation about the breeding habits of mourning doves had led to her current state. He felt as if he was at an L-train stop, seated on a bench with a crying stranger. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No.” She wrapped her arms around him.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  Her warm breath brushed across the hairs on his chest, her brunette locks tickling his stomach.

  She breathed out heavily. “I do.”

  Straightening up next to him, she reached out to grab the wrinkled cream-colored blouse she had discarded on the nightstand. Her fingers worked their way up the front of the shirt, buttoning it and obscuring the slow, steady motions of her breathing. Matthew felt even more uncomfortable and naked as she hid her stomach and breasts.

  Her eyes gazed blankly ahead, her breathing slow and controlled. “I know I’ve avoided this, but I never thought that anything would actually come from—” She paused and lifted her hand toward him. “Well, this. I was bored at work and you seemed fun enough and just unhappy enough with your home situation.”

  “I don’t know about—”

  “I’m not saying I was right, just that that’s what I thought.” Jacqueline gave her familiar impish smirk, though the expression was half-hearted at best. “Do you trust me?”

  “I do.”

  “And can I trust you?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m not talking about keeping a promise or a secret. This isn’t a kindergarten pinky swear. I mean, can I trust you to support me and be there for me?”

  “Yes.” He looked at himself again in the bathroom mirror. Her questions were familiar, reminiscent of the vows he had taken once before. He turned back to meet her gaze. “Yes, I’d be there for you.”

  Matthew, the college freshman who had emailed professors, yearning for a chance to delve into tissue-engineering research positions before he had even settled into his dormitory at the University of Iowa campus. Matthew, the student who had strategically outlined his four-year undergraduate career and secured internships at Medtronic in the Twin Cities and Andrews Labs during his summers away from Iowa. Matthew, who had methodically planned every step of his swooning proposal atop the Hancock Tower in the ninety-fifth-floor restaurant that his wife, Audrey, had come to love. Logical, steadfast Matthew had been suddenly caught up in a flurry of decisions he had weighed more by the gratification of his immediate emotional desires than rational foresight.

  The guilt that he had attempted to quarantine deep in his brain escaped the emotional barriers he had spent sleepless nights constructing to explain his marital infidelity. Despite the riptides of guilt and an overwhelming sense of fear and realization of what he had been doing to his career—and Audrey, he thought to himself, feeling guiltier still for selfishly considering himself first again—he couldn’t tell Jacqueline “no.”

  She kissed him, her lips massaging his. Logical Matthew succumbed to the demands of raw sexuality and the pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears. Rain began to patter against the window. He opened his eyes. The mourning dove scrunched protectively over her incomplete nest. He closed his eyes again as the sound of rain and Jacqueline’s breathing filled his ears and drowned out his thoughts. They joined together in a slow burn of passion and raw emotion that turned into physical ecstasy.

  When they finished again and Matthew curled around Jacqueline’s body, his mind had cleared. Once again, he had momentarily quelled both his rationality and his guilt.

  “I had a family once,” Jacqueline said abruptly.

  As she talked, her eyes left Matthew’s. She acted as if he wasn’t even in the room; as if she was telling a story to herself, for her own benefit.

  When she was twenty-four, she had married a freshly graduated lawyer, Patrick Booth. They had met on a breezy autumn day while running along the Lakefront Trail that bordered Lake Michigan.

  She had been a little perturbed that Patrick was following her back toward Northwestern’s medical campus, where she was due to analyze an experiment. As she eyed the man nervously, he developed the mistaken impression that she was checking him out. She began to jog faster through the trees lining Lake Shore Park and dodged quickly into the ivy-covered building that was Northwestern’s School of Law.

  Patrick had followed her into the building and she turned to confront him. A hasty explanation from him led to exchanged numbers and a promised date.

  He had practiced intellectual property law, mostly prosecuting patents. Jacqueline had helped establish the startup, ProlifiTEC, wearing several hats as the small company sought a buyer for their technology.

  They had a son, Austin. He had been a happy-go-lucky boy with a love of sports that wasn’t shared by either of his academically oriented parents. While Patrick and Jacqueline enjoyed staying personally fit, that was as far as their passion for athletics went. Austin loved baseball, and Patrick and Jacqueline had delighted him by taking him to frequent Cubs games at Wrigley Field.

  The boy had gone wild watching baseball and even more wild when playing the game. When he got sick, it was especially heartbreaking for him to be unable to participate in the sport he loved. Jacqueline’s company was bought out at the same time that Austin was diagnosed with a neurological cancer.

  “Of course, we tried everything,” Jacqueline said, a slow, resentful anger building in her voice. “All the primitive chemo and radiation therapy, the Eastern medicine that I knew would never work, but Patrick insisted we try. ‘Just in case,’ he said.”

  Matthew didn’t know how to respond and offered only a weak, simple statement. “I’m sorry.”

  “We even tried to enlist Austin in some experimental studies, desperate for a cure. But...”

  She stopped. Her eyes were filled with an intensity Matthew had never seen before. She seemed almost possessed.

  “...those didn’t work, either?” Matthew offered, desperate to finish her lingering sentence. The wrath emerging from Jacqueline unnerved him.

  She shook her head. Her eyes grew glassy and distant again.

  “Right,” she said. “They didn’t work.”

  Shortly after Austin died, Jacqueline and Patrick’s relationship had completely unraveled. They separated and Patrick left Chicago. Jacqueline couldn’t move on. She couldn’t leave the city that she had grown up in, the city that had never left her.

  She and Matthew sat for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, saying very little. They were both lost in thought.

  “Why did you finally want to tell me all this?”

  She turned to him for the first time since she began her story. “I want you to know the baggage I’m bringing into our relationship. We’ve all got baggage. And I already know yours.”

  Matthew’s brow knitted up. “You know mine? What is it?”

  “Well.” She smirked, as if she had forgotten the lengthy confession before. “You’re married to it.”

  ***

  He took a cab home, staring blankly out the window. As the car turned onto his street, Jacqueline’s words echoed in his head: “our relationship.” He was losing himself, losing his marriage, to this affair. “Our relationship.” Was he in a more significant, a more real relationship with Jacqueline than he was with his wife?

  My wife, he thought. Audrey.

  What had happened between the two of them that made him feel as if any kind of relationship with Jacqueline was at all excusable?

  “Please confirm comm card payment,” the touch screen in front of him repeated, jolting him out of his distracted thinking. He pressed the grimy, old-fashioned touch screen with his thumb.

  When he walked through the front door and dropped his shoes in the shoe rack by the door, Doug sauntered over, wagging his dopey tail and leaning forward to lick Matthew’s hand. Matthew brushed him away, but the dog waddled behind him toward the master bedroom.

  The muffled sound of water on tile wafted out fro
m under the bathroom door. Audrey’s blouse and dress pants were strewn over the end of their bed. Neither one of them had bothered to make their bed in the morning; the striped comforter and satiny sheets were crumpled and tossed halfway down the bed.

  A few months ago, Matthew would have thrown his clothes at the end of the bed next to hers. Their clothes would combine into a single messy pile much like their bodies and lips would in the mist of the streaming hot water.

  Despite the alluring thought of Audrey’s thick red hair soaked and spilling down her shoulders, he couldn’t muster that same fervor. His mind was heavy with thoughts of betrayal and passions and twisted career paths as he fell asleep, fully clothed, on the bed.

  A soft, wet kiss on his cheek woke him. He imagined Jacqueline’s dark hair swaying over his face and her thin, perfect lips. Her sapphire eyes. Instead, a pair of vibrant emerald eyes greeted him, accompanied by a soft smile and sopping wet red mane.

  “Good morning,” Audrey purred, flopping down next to him.

  He sat up straight, disoriented. “Is it already morning? I’ve got to get to work. I’m late!”

  Audrey put her palm on his chest. “You’re fine! I was just joking.” Her gaze burned into the side of his head. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You just seem—I don’t know—out of it?”

  Matthew nodded weakly.

  “Work getting to you?”

  He nodded again.

  “Me, too,” Audrey said. “I’ve got this big exposé on NanoTech’s downsizing. They’re claiming it’s due to increased automated efficiency. But we both know that’s bull, right? So I’ve been talking with a source and, get this, their therapeutic nanoparticle team is reporting record losses. Apparently, sales are down—and they’re afraid of an upswing in Sustain sales.”

  She certainly didn’t appear to be stressed or drained by her job, despite her claim to the contrary. Her voice never lost its energetic timbre and she carried on, even as Matthew’s interest waned. She sounded chirpy and electric, which only ground at him more fiercely.

  “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this—”

  Yeah, well, we both know you stole plenty of things from me that I shouldn’t have told you.

  “—so you have to promise not to tell anyone. I haven’t told you any of the juiciest parts, but you’ll see it all on the news streams soon anyway. Maybe I can sneak you a first-draft copy. You might be able to use the info to impress your higher-ups, you know? Show a little managerial initiative, sales knowledge, or something? You think that’d help? Of course, you’d have to be strategic and you couldn’t reveal too much. You can’t compromise my job, right?”

  Can’t compromise your job? As if you haven’t already done that to me?

  For an investigative journalist, she certainly was verbose. Shouldn’t she be the one asking questions and listening?

  Maybe it was better that she didn’t ask any questions. She no longer probed into his whereabouts or his long work hours. Instead, she had devoted herself to her own job.

  Besides the continued, but suspiciously less frequent stories written by Beth Childs, Audrey had increasingly published stories under her own byline.

  Matthew had learned that the sources at NanoTech, Andrews Laboratories, and DNA Innovations had provided Audrey with enough useful news. The increased distrust in the medical industry due to LyfeGen’s recent problems and the rising cost of therapeutic technologies had offered ample opportunity to capitalize on her stories.

  Of course, she had tactfully avoided LyfeGen discussions with him. Likewise, he had been more secretive about his involvement in LyfeGen even as his workload increased. Every time he saw a story by Beth Childs, though, he saw the bits of information that he and Jacqueline had planted in his inbox for Audrey to discover through her snooping. Each time, his resentment of Audrey grew and festered.

  “So, how is work going? I heard your new CEO has announced that the issue was in the doctors prescribing updates and adding their own cocktail of therapeutics.”

  Matthew had heard what Anil Nayak claimed had caused Joel Cobb’s stroke, along with the deaths of the other patients with Sustains. According to Nayak, Dr. Travis Wu, another prominent Sustain specialist, and Dr. Tamir Hassan, Preston Carter’s personal physician, had experimented with cocktails of mixed therapeutics from other companies, and had included them in their patients’ Sustain updates. Nayak claimed it was the doctors’ hubris that had led to their private, highly immoral research and their abuse of their patients’ trust.

  Dr. Wu adamantly opposed these claims, while Dr. Hassan remained silent on the issue. Dr. Hassan’s medical license had been revoked, though the Board insisted Nayak’s claims were not the central issue in that case. Dr. Wu’s license, however, had only been suspended; investigations were underway into Sustain updates that had been found to be contaminated with foreign material. Dr. Wu claimed there was a conspiracy afoot, which only heightened public scrutiny of the doctor. He appeared more and more like a kook rather than a level-headed clinician as the evidence mounted against him.

  Matthew tried to trust Nayak’s judgment, but was dismayed that the new CEO had dismissed his recent findings regarding the discrepancies in the apparently mislabeled samples from the dead Sustain patients. Nayak had told him it must have been a simple clerical error. Matthew had a difficult time believing that. It would’ve been exceedingly difficult to have mixed up each of the tissue samples. They had been delivered separately and were tracked and labeled before and immediately after arrival.

  “So you don’t want to talk?” Audrey’s bubbly voice brought Matthew back to reality.

  He shrugged. He didn’t need to talk. She could get whatever she wanted through her sources, or she would find a way to take it from his comm card. He wanted her to slip and ask him about some confidential work that he was involved in at LyfeGen. Then he could confront her; he could let her know that he knew all about what she’d been doing.

  She walked back into the bathroom, holding a towel around her body as she wrapped her hair with another.

  Moments later she returned and sat on the bed, now wearing a gray t-shirt and baggy sweatpants. “It’s almost Friday. Do you want to, you know, make it a date night? We haven’t done that in a while.”

  Matthew hesitated. “I don’t know how long they’ll need me at work. We’ll see.”

  “Figured.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘figured’?”

  “You seem so aloof, so distant. You’ve changed just in the past couple of weeks.”

  “Me? You’ve practically been stuck in every story you could get your hands on. It’s not like you’ve been especially devoted to our relationship, either.”

  “You’re right. I know I’ve spent a lot of time working.” Audrey’s face contorted, her cheeks matching the red of her hair. “But at least that’s all I’m doing.”

  Matthew scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think you know exactly what I mean.” Audrey walked from the doorway toward him, her arms crossed and her eyes aflame. “I can’t keep doing this. I’m tired of this bullshit.”

  “What bullshit?” Matthew stood, a snarl wrinkling his nose. “You mean the fact that you’ve been stealing information from my comm card, my personal and work messages? How stupid do you think I am? You’ve been fucking me over.”

  “At least I’m not fucking someone else.” Audrey jabbed a finger into his chest and scowled. “I can’t stand this. I can’t pretend to stay with you and be happy.”

  “You’ve been using me. That’s it, isn’t it? If you were so upset, you would have been long gone. But you care so much about your own goddamn career that you used me to get all the info on LyfeGen you could get your hands on. That’s all this is to you. You don’t give a shit about us.”

  “Are you kidding me? Are you joking, Matthew Pierce? You cannot possibly compare what I did to what you’ve done to me. To us. You’re a bastard, M
atthew. A selfish fucking asshole.”

  “Screw you.”

  She cocked a hand back, ready to hit him. Instead, she stomped away and let out a yell that made Doug jump and bark.

  Her stomping footsteps echoed down the hall. The front door slammed and the cheap paintings and holoscapes rattled on the walls.

  Matthew didn’t move. He fumed in frustration as Doug cowered in the corner, his tail between his legs. He looked at Matthew pitifully, his head hunched between his shoulders.

  Heart pounding, face still scrunched in a snarl, Matthew stared hard at the dog. “It’s a good thing you aren’t a bitch.”

  Chapter 33

  Matthew Pierce

  November 29, 2063

  Audrey didn’t return home. Matthew tried to fall asleep, but could do nothing but toss and turn. He blamed her for everything: for almost sabotaging his career, putting up a barrier of deceit between the two of them. Part of him hoped she wouldn’t come home, but he hated leaving issues unresolved.

  After promising himself that he’d graduate with his PhD in four years, he successfully defended his thesis three months before that deadline. His toned muscles were a testament to the vow he had made to devote himself to constant fitness. After he promised Audrey early in their marriage that they would never go to bed angry, he had ensured that they made the compromises necessary to resolve marital issues, no matter how long that took.

  But he couldn’t resolve the issue this time and it tore at him. He had always taken the relative calmness of his personal life for granted, even as he pursued his relationship with Jacqueline.

  Now, everything he’d worked for was at risk.