The Last Goodbye

by Reed Arvin

  Robinson’s left eye was developing a tic. “Don’t know,” he said. “Longer is better, more pronounced response. Bigger dose, too. Bigger, longer. Eight hours. Twelve hours, maybe.”

  “Shit,” I whispered to the sky, and we disappeared back onto the freeway, a miscreant, an unhinged scientist, and a lawyer with no faith left. The three fucking musketeers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS ANOTHER THIRTY MINUTES to Grayton Labs. During the drive, Robinson calmed down; having made his choice, he shored himself up. It was nearly ten when we dragged back into the parking lot. Robinson walked us past security. The rest of the place was deserted.

  I fell into an office chair on wheels, rolling to a stop after a few feet. Nightmare stood, hands in pockets, looking like Dracula caught in sunshine. Robinson was talking to himself, muttering something inaudible. “Look, you don’t have to do this,” I said quietly. “Killing yourself won’t bring those people back to life.”

  Robinson jerked his head around. “What about the rest?” he asked. The tic had come back, but his voice was still level. He was making peace with his risk. “All the people who Lipitran was supposed to save? The liver transplants that won’t be necessary? The deaths from cancer? The chronic fatigue, the loss of quality of life? What about them?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “I’m a doctor,” Robinson said. “I heal. And if the only way to do it is to inject myself with Lipitran AX, then so be it.” He walked over to the far side of the lab, dropped to his haunches, and opened a small refrigerator. He pulled out a small glass vial, and closed the door. He brought the vial over to us, and pulled out the syringe he had taken to the funeral home. “Two years’ work, and thirty-five million dollars.” He held it up, and the overhead light glinted through the clear liquid. “All a huge waste, unless this works.” He prepared the syringe and pressed the needle through the rubber top of the vial. He withdrew 5 cc’s, then hesitated. He pulled back the stopper a little further, going to 7 cc’s, then 10. I started to protest, but he shook his head. “Don’t,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, now. Either I bring them down, or I couldn’t care less.”

  Robinson sat at a table. He was sweating, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. He wiped them off, then picked up a rubber ball. He pumped the ball with his hand, filling his forearm with blood. He pulled out a brown strip of elastic, tied off his bicep, and started flicking his wrist to get a vein to rise.

  Nightmare and I stared. Nobody spoke. I didn’t know if what he was doing was brave or crazy, but it wasn’t my decision to make. Robinson had cast his die. If he was wrong about Ralston, he would die in agony like his patients. There was nothing more. Robinson looked up at me, our eyes locking in a sudden, terrible moment. He pressed the needle into his arm, his eyes widening slightly at the puncture. Then, he slowly, methodically, pressed the stopper down, emptying 10 cc’s of Lipitran AX into his body.

  Time became an enemy. If it had been difficult waiting while the lab was full of people, doing it in a deserted building was like dragging ourselves through setting concrete. The minutes passed like hours.

  Robinson tried to send me home; he needed several hours before it was worth doing a test. The work would be tedious, and screwing it up would make the awful risk he had taken meaningless. I was an automaton, not having had any real sleep in more than twenty-four hours, but I couldn’t leave him. Maybe the drug would kill him, maybe not. But at least I could stand watch.

  Robinson, now in a cold sweat, staggered into his office. He fell down into his chair and closed the door. Nightmare started after him, but I caught him by the arm. “Leave him,” I said. “He needs some time alone. He might fall asleep, which would be a blessing. You should do the same.”

  “Me? I’m all right. You look like shit, though.”

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  “You can trust me, you know. I mean, if you’re worried about leaving me alone with the doc.”

  “I’m not worried, Michael,” I said, and I wasn’t. But he was right; without sleep, I was in no position to help Robinson with any tests. I turned off the lab lights, went back to my chair at the far end of the lab, and fell into it. For the next couple of hours, I drifted in and out. Nobody came into the lab, not even security. Robinson’s banishment was total. We were untouchable, lepers in a world designed to cure the sick.

  Around two in the morning, I went to check on Robinson. I opened the door cautiously, unsure of what I would find. But when I looked in, he was sitting up, staring straight ahead. I was certain he hadn’t slept. He had been feeling every sensation in his body, terrified he was moments away from an internal breakdown of horrifying consequences. “You okay?” I asked.

  He looked at me, his eyes hollow. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. Some nausea. Nothing too bad. As predicted.”

  “So we’re okay.”

  Robinson gave a weak smile, then looked back at the wall. I closed the door behind myself, then woke up Nightmare, who had been dozing in a chair. “You hungry?”

  Nightmare looked up and asked, “How’s the doc?”

  “He’s okay. Scared, I guess.”

  Nightmare nodded, closing his eyes again. I pulled up a chair, rolled it next to Robinson’s office door, and fell into it.

  The night passed in fits and starts; at one point, Robinson walked out of his office, eyes still staring, and grabbed my arm. “Seven hours,” he said. “I’m not dead.”

  “No.”

  “Couple more. We’ll wait a little longer.”

  A few hours later, the sun began coming up. A little before nine, I knocked softly on his office door. There was no response, and I opened the door; Robinson was slumped over his desk. I quickly moved toward him; as I approached he sighed, and I realized he was sleeping. It had been more than nine hours, in the range he had said necessary for the enzymatic response to be easily measurable. I gently nudged his shoulder, and he started awake.

  “It’s okay,” I said, quietly. “You’re fine. You were sleeping.”

  Robinson sat up in his chair, preternaturally alert. He sat breathing, taking stock of himself. He reached over, pulled out a waste-basket, and vomited into it violently. It was a terrible moment, until he straightened back up, coughed, and said, “Thank God. I’ve needed to do that for hours.”

  “You mean you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, the nausea was a part of things. I feel better.” He stood. “I’m . . . I’m all right. What did you do, just sit up all night?”

  “I was in and out. In, mostly.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “So you’re alive. Tell me how this thing works.”

  Robinson nodded and said, “Meet me in the lab. I’ve got to clean up.”

  I went out into the main lab area, woke up Nightmare, and together we waited for Robinson to return. He opened the big doors a few minutes later, carrying a paper cup of water. He set his cup down and pointed to a large, rectangular machine shaped like a casket, six feet long and two across. It was humming quietly. “QTOF tandem mass spectrometer,” he said. “With the electro-spray ionization source, they’re four hundred thousand each. We have two of them.”

  I pointed to the machine. “So what’s this thing do?”

  Robinson brightened incrementally—it was a small change, but noticeable. I could see it then, the spark I had first witnessed at the park when we met. He was a junkie, and research was his drug.

  “What this thing does,” he said, “is truly beautiful. Measures the mass of blood components. That lets you isolate the likely possibilities for enzymes. Everything has a specific mass, and you don’t want to waste time on nonproductive elements.” Robinson led us to a long table filled with instruments. “The point is to find the enzymes that are in a survivor’s blood that are lacking in the dead patients. I’m the survivor . . .” He looked at us meaningfully. “So far, anyway. I’m using Najeh Richardso
n, one of the dead patients, for the other blood specimen. I want to isolate the metabolizing enzyme I have he lacks.”

  “How?”

  Robinson smiled. “You won’t believe me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you won’t believe how elegant and simple and beautiful it all is. You’ll think it’s magic, only it isn’t; it’s just beautiful, lovely science.” Robinson looked at us. “What’s red and blue make? Think back, school days. Red and blue. Mix them together. What do they make?”

  “I don’t know. Purple, I guess.”

  “Purple!” Robinson’s energy spiked upward, his fatigue receding. “Damn right, purple.” Now come here,” he said. “Look at these.”

  Nightmare and I followed Robinson to the end of the table. “You extract the blood of both subjects, me and Richardson. Remember, you want to find out what’s in mine that isn’t in his.”

  “Right.”

  “You spin out the red blood cells, some other things that don’t matter to you. The point is, you’re left with the protein extracts. A few thousand proteins from each sample.” He picked up two small, rectangular slides of glass. “You use a voltage to spread my proteins out on one slide, the ones from Richardson on the other. You with me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, doubtfully.

  “Next, you dye my samples red, and Richardson’s blue. Then you combine them on a 2-D gel.”

  “Which means?”

  “You overlay them on top of each other, until they’re completely mixed together.” He looked at us. “So what does red and blue make?”

  “Purple,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Robinson opened his arms, as though he had just said something profound. He saw my blank look and said, “Think, damn it. So what happens?”

  “I got no idea.”

  Nightmare came to life. “Red and blue, on top of each other. Any components that are in both samples turn purple. A red part and a blue part. Any components that are only in one sample stay their original color. Red or blue. The unique ones would stand out like crazy.”

  Robinson’s smile was so genuine, I wanted to cry. If he went down over this, it was going to be a loss for humanity. But he was still vibrating on pure science. “Exactly.”

  “How long does all that take?” I asked.

  “There’s a lot of prep time. When I finish the gels, there are likely to be quite a few unique proteins, and most of them have nothing to do with Lipitran. They’re just unique qualities to each person. I can narrow them down, leaving a handful of likely candidates. I’ll trypsonize the protein extract of those to get their amino acid sequences. Then I can go onto the NIH site, compare them with the human genome, and identify the precise enzyme.” He paused. “For one person working alone, at least two full days. But with help ...” He pointed to Nightmare. “You want a job?”

  Nightmare looked around, as though Robinson must have been talking to someone else.

  “Hell, yeah,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Every second of your life until this is over.” Nightmare smiled, possibly the first smile of his life not tinged with sarcasm and irony. Robinson turned to me. “You should go home,” he said. “Change clothes. Take a shower, for God’s sake.”

  “Are you going to live?”

  “Apparently. The point is, you can’t help here. What are you going to do, baby-sit for a day and half? And as far as Ralston’s concerned, Doug’s body is cremated and we’re no threat to him. We’re working free.”

  I sighed, deep with fatigue. “Yeah, I’ll go change, take a shower. I’ll call you.”

  Robinson shook his head. “Get some sleep, Jack. I’ll call you when we get closer to any results.”

  I motioned for Nightmare, and he followed me out into the hallway. “You did good, Michael,” I said. “How’s it feel?”

  Nightmare smiled. “Weird.”

  “I have a reward.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “Guess you forgot how we met.”

  “Yeah. But seriously, can you get any? From your parents, or anybody?”

  He paused for a while, considering. “My parents,” he said. “They’re stinking rich.”

  I paused a second, then burst out laughing. “You little counterculture shit,” I said. “The only reason you turned into an anarchist is your parents could afford to pay your rent.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “I’ll laugh for both of us. Of all the hypocritical—”

  “Hey, it’s not easy growing up like that.”

  “Yeah. But there is a trust fund, isn’t there?”

  Nightmare’s pasty face turned red. “Yeah, whatever,” he said.

  “Millions?”

  “A few,” he said. “But not till I’m thirty-five. They don’t trust me, the little—”

  “Save it,” I said, interrupting him. “Beg them for a few thousand. Whatever you can get. Steal it from Radio Shack, I don’t care. Imagine somebody is going to kill you if you don’t get it. That’s how serious I am. And tell Robinson to do the same thing.”

  “What are you driving at, dude?”

  “There’s more than one kind of revenge, Michael. Wait and see.”

  I dragged myself home, nearly asleep by the time I got there. Robinson was safe behind the guarded gates of Grayton, and I was hoping for a few hours sleep. I walked in the apartment, looking around suspiciously for signs of disturbance. But everything was in its place. I locked the door behind me, pulled off my pants, and fell onto the bed. I slept about four hours, which I badly needed. When I woke, it was nearly three in the afternoon. I took a shower and changed clothes, both of which gave me a burst of energy. My first impulse was to call Robinson. I knew he would only have just started his test, but I just wanted to hear his voice and make sure he wasn’t turning to chaos inside himself. I walked back to the living room and stared at the answering machine, which was still blinking. Reluctantly, I pushed play. The messages spilled out into the dead air of my apartment. There were a couple from Blu, wondering where I was. The original message from Billy, asking me to call back. And then my world turned upside down again, because the last message on the machine was playing, and the voice was Michele’s. She had called only a few hours ago.

  Jack, it’s me. Can we meet? We need to talk. Things have gotten...I’m sorry about the way things got. I told you not to show yourself at the speech, darling Can we meet tonight? I wish you were here. I need to see you. So much has happened, so much madness. About nine, tonight, at your office? Can you? I love you.

  I sat back against my couch, listening to her voice. In the last seventy-two hours, I had been lectured by Derek Stephens, had my secretary resign, had my car run off the road, been kidnapped, wrapped with duct tape and thrown in a closet, escaped, gone through a pointless exercise at a funeral home, and watched Thomas Robinson risk his life trying to find some reason for his life’s work. I had done these things because I wanted justice, and because I was in love with a woman who I believed was married to a murderer.

  I was not immune to the fact that she had lied to me about her husband knowing the truth about her. Hearing her—disembodied for once, absent her intoxicating presence—I admitted that I didn’t actually know how deep the lies went. What had she said? Maybe you can tell me how that works, Jack. How a woman whose entire life is a lie finds the right moment to stop.

  It wasn’t that discovering she’d lied to me meant I couldn’t love her. Trust is rigid—it snaps like a dry twig—but love is elastic. When a woman you care about is drowning, you don’t give her a personality test, you throw her a rope. But there was still an open question about what happened afterward. Loving a woman like Michele was a high-stakes enterprise, and I had already paid one hell of a price. I was wondering how high it would go, and who would end up paying. But sitting there listening to her voice, I suddenly realized that there was a way—final, and indisputable—to bring trust and love toget
her again or to separate them forever. The real story of Michele Sonnier was buried in the court records at the Fulton County Courthouse, and my best friend had the keys. If I hurried, I could catch Sammy before he left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AT LEAST I COULD BEGIN with good news. “You don’t die, Sammy,” I said. “You live.”

  I had managed to catch Sammy before he left, at about four-thirty. I pulled him into his small office, sat him down, and closed and locked the door. After I laid out for him what Stephens had told me about the car, Sammy looked up warily; it was obvious that the initial endorphin rush that had come with his declaration of independence had run out about forty-eight hours ago, and he was stoically expecting his beating. “But he’s going to have my taxes audited or something, right?”

  I shook my head. “Derek Stephens can’t have you audited, Sammy.”

  “Yeah, but you know. I mean, something bad.” “You walk, Sammy. It’s the timing. You’re lucky.” That last comment was an utterly new concept for Sammy, so it took some time to enter his list of realistic possibilities. “Lucky,” he repeated, as though speaking a foreign language. “Me.” “Yeah. He isn’t doing anything about the car.”

  Sammy looked up from his desk. “Because of the quiet period.”

  “That’s right. He can’t afford any bad publicity right now. What you did to his car would be on Letterman by tomorrow.”