Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  I caught the metro to Anvers and walked a quarter mile to the base of Sacré-Cœur. A long grassy slope preceded the church, mounted by several long stairways. I chose a spot about midway up the hill where the slope plateaued. From there I had a clear view of anyone approaching from below.

  I sat down on a bench. The church was closed, but there were still tourists all over the place, like ants on an anthill.

  I waited.

  After about an hour, a man appeared on the hill, carrying a red cooler. He climbed the steps to the plateau and took a seat two benches down from where I was sitting. I knew this had to be my guy, but I hoped I was wrong.

  Where was Greta?

  When the bell tower rang nine times, I gave up hope. I knew nothing about the mysterious woman with the red coolers. But I knew she wasn’t the kind of gal who shows up late for a delivery. Moreover, the guy with the red cooler was starting to look antsy.

  I went over.

  “You my guy?” I said.

  The man jumped. I had startled him.

  “What’s your name?” the man responded. He had a thick accent, French. He was clutching the cooler to his chest.

  “Jim Frost,” I said. “Who’re you? Where’s Greta?”

  His mouth twitched nervously. I could tell he hadn’t done this before.

  “Greta had to work late in the labs,” he said. “She sent me to give you this.” He handed over the cooler.

  “What labs?” I asked.

  He answered as if he were on trial for murder.

  “Le Jardin des Plantes,” he said. “She works at le Jardin des Plantes.”

  “Okay,” I said, swinging the cooler around. “You did good. Thanks.”

  The man looked relieved. He jumped off the bench and scrambled down the hill. I watched him until he was gone.

  Le Jardin des Plantes, I thought. That’s a start.

  When I showed up at the Jardin des Plantes, a big botanical garden in the middle of Paris, the gates were locked. I walked the whole perimeter of the garden, from place Valhubert to rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, searching for a breach in the fortress walls, or some sign of life.

  Finding none, I wandered defeated through the crooked streets of Paris until I found myself in a small cocktail bar called Le Crocodile. It was brimming with students from the nearby universities, some of whom looked to be easily below the legal drinking age in the States.

  I ordered a Desperado, which was a potent mix of mescal, grapefruit juice, and some other things I couldn’t understand in French. It didn’t take long before my head was spinning. I ordered another and sat watching the door. Every woman that walked in looked, for just a moment, exactly like Greta.

  After about an hour, a pretty girl, maybe twenty or so, sidled up to me and asked if I was waiting for someone. She had an Australian accent.

  I said no.

  “Well my friends over there thought you looked lonely,” she said, pointing to a table of blond Aussies who would ordinarily be just my type. But I shook my head.

  “Thanks,” I said, “I’m fine. You guys have fun.”

  I paid the bill and tipped probably twice what I should have since I hadn’t quite figured out gratuity in France. Then I stumbled onto the metro and collapsed in my bed at the Hotel Champs-Élysées, not quite sure why I felt so miserable but knowing it had something to do with that goddamned woman with the red coolers.

  The next morning I called the airport and booked a flight for later that afternoon. Since the cooler wasn’t due back until the following morning, Pacific Standard Time, I had hoped to spend a little time sight-seeing.

  And now I had a very clear idea what I wanted to see.

  The Jardin des Plantes opened at 7:45 a.m. I was there by eight. I had brought a book to read, a John Grisham novel I had picked up at the airport bookstore as bait.

  Agatha Christie. Mary Higgins Clark. The woman was clearly a sucker for mystery thrillers.

  I walked the gardens for a while, my body tensing every time a tall brunette came into view, but it was always just another visitor like me, strolling or jogging or reading on a bench. Every so often I’d see an employee moving through the grounds, watering or weeding or checking something off a clipboard, but none of these turned out to be Greta.

  Finally I tracked down one of the park rangers, a slight blonde in a khaki vest, and asked her if she knew where I could find Greta.

  “She works here?” the girl asked. She had an accent that I couldn’t quite place. Not American, not French.

  “Yes, in the labs,” I said.

  “Oh,” said the girl, “I don’t know the botanists. Do you know if she works for the university?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the girl. “Maybe you can ask one of the gardeners.”

  I got the same result when I approached a gardener. The place was huge, with several private administration buildings, a paleontology museum, a mineralogy museum, two large greenhouses, an alpine grove, a hedge maze, and a small zoo.

  Finally I just picked a bench to sit on and read for a while, hoping fate would throw me a bone.

  But fate is frugal. At some point I knew I had to be going if I wanted to catch my flight. And I wanted to catch my flight. There were ten big ones waiting for me on the other side of the ocean. I had already checked out of the hotel and was carrying everything on me: one small backpack and the red cooler.

  I flew back to San Francisco feeling as if I’d been robbed of something. I kept thinking, What did I forget? What am I missing? Then I’d remember the woman with the red coolers, and I’d think, Oh. That.

  Not every love story has a happy ending. Sure enough, I did eventually marry Greta Van Bruggen. But we had our share of troubles. She cheated on me, for instance. And she died young, like everyone else in my life.

  Eliza says I’m cursed. That’s why it’s a good idea for everyone around me to get their brains downloaded, she says.

  I’d hardly say I’m cursed. But maybe you can say I’ve been the victim of bad genetics. And if that’s the case, then I feel bad for Eliza and Spencer and Kendra Ann, and Marilee Junior and Luanne and Joyce, and Gokul and Rajiv. They’ve all got Greta’s genetics, and mine. Heart disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cancer. In that way, I guess it’s sort of like a curse. A family curse.

  Lucky for Tinsley and Margaret, they’re adopted.

  I ought to mention that Spencer, Eugene, and I arrived in Paris Saturday. The girls are bouncing off the walls. We’ve been put up in this handsome little three-bedroom flat in the Marais, overlooking the Place des Vosges, the city’s oldest public square.

  The onetime home of Victor Hugo, now a museum, shares a wall with our flat, and throughout the day, we can hear the muffled echoes of tourists clambering about on the other side of the wall like specters in a tomb.

  Today I have the flat all to myself. Spencer is at the university sorting out some paperwork, and Eugene took the girls out for ice cream. They asked if I wanted to come, but the flight over here wiped me out, and I said I’d prefer to sit by my window and watch the people come and go in the square below, and listen to the ghosts bang around next door, and perhaps get some writing done.

  I got an e-mail yesterday from Sam Getz, who has read some of my book and says it needs work. It needs to be more accessible, he says. Not so cerebral.

  “Get out of your head, Jim,” he says in his e-mail. “Tell the story from start to finish. Stop beating around the bush. We’re not interested in your children and your grandchildren. We want to know about YOU.”

  Typical.

  If I told the story from start to finish, then I guess you’d know by now that I was a pretty good beatboxer back in my day. I was goofing around with my friends in the dorms my first year at Berkeley, and one of them had a camera phone, and they took a video of me throwing down a beat while my friend Charlie rapped the Gettysburg Address. It got something like four million views on YouTube before the end of spring term
.

  I just checked, and it has three hundred million views now. There are too many people in the world with too much time on their hands.

  I guess if I had told the story from start to finish, you’d also know by now that I lost my virginity in the ninth grade to a girl named Sally Cunningham, who was in the eleventh grade. She took advantage of me the night of the winter formal. She was tall and had big breasts. I was growing.

  I have also never used a condom.

  How’s that for knowing about me?

  When I returned from Paris in May 2011, I considered asking Dustin, the kid on the motorbike, to tell me more about Greta. But when I showed up in front of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, the next designated meeting place, it wasn’t Dustin who greeted me but a disheveled fellow in his late forties wearing Birkenstocks and a lab coat. He seemed hurried, so I didn’t have time to question him. He just handed me the money and grabbed the cooler and left. But I did have a chance to get a look at the ID badge he wore clipped to his breast pocket.

  Rowan Krasimir, the nametag read, CEO InfraGen Tech.

  When I got home, I tried calling Marilee. I hadn’t spoken to her since March, and I wanted to make sure she was holding up okay. I figured if she was getting worse, she wasn’t about to tell me. And I was starting to get anxious about not telling our parents. I felt like the family deserved to know. After all, none of us had seen Marilee since she left for Haiti in 2010.

  It was probably about 8:00 a.m. Japan time when I called. The phone rang and rang. After about ten rings, I hung up and tried again.

  This time a woman answered. She greeted me in Japanese.

  “Hello,” I said. “May I speak to Marilee?”

  More Japanese.

  “Marilee,” I said. “Marilee Lorenzo.”

  “Ah! Mawagi Wawanso!” the woman said. “No, no.”

  “She’s not there?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she repeated.

  “Can you tell her Jim called?”

  “No, no.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Okay!” she said. “Bai-bai!”

  Click.

  CHAPTER 20

  I ASKED MARILEE one time what she thought heaven was.

  “It’s anything you want it to be,” she said.

  In that case I wouldn’t mind so much if heaven was a deep void of nothingness where no part of anything is distinguishable from anything else. Or a coma. A coma would be perfect.

  “People wake up from comas,” Spencer said to me when I shared this sentiment with him the other day. “I wouldn’t ever want to wake up.”

  Now you’re talking!

  “How about a black hole?” Eugene said from the other room where he was typity-typing away at his computer.

  Eugene is writing a story about a band of renegade misfits who sail the galaxy in their spaceship, the Jolly Roger, and steal planets from alien solar systems. They use a special device called “the Cannon” to shrink the planets down to pocket-size, and they hold them for ransom, or trade them for gold and liquor and women, or sell them to wealthy warlords on other planets.

  The captain of the Jolly Roger is a fellow who was badly burned in an atomic blast on his home planet, Earth. Extensive surgeries have rendered him half man and half robot.

  Whenever any of the bandits violates the Pirates’ Code, which is the governing law on the Jolly Roger, the captain makes the perpetrator walk the plank, which means he has to venture out into deep space for three minutes without a space suit. If the bandit survives, he is welcomed back onto the ship but forced to do hard labor in the galleys. If he dies, they say his soul is swallowed by a black hole.

  Eugene asked me the other day if I had ever met anyone who had survived an atomic blast, like the captain of the Jolly Roger.

  There have been only three deadly atomic blasts in the history of Earth. I cannot speak to the total number of deadly atomic blasts in the history of the universe. The three earthbound atomic blasts were Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Atlanta, Georgia.

  I met a man when I was visiting the children’s hospital in Japan where my sister worked whose face had been melted off in Nagasaki. The man was working at the children’s hospital as a nurse’s aide. I asked my sister if the man frightened the children at all. She said sometimes, because he looked like Lord Voldemort. But mostly they just wanted to know if he knew Harry Potter.

  I asked Eugene if Paris has been good for his writing. He said, as good as anywhere. He asked me the same question. I said I just hoped the ghost of Victor Hugo wasn’t looking over my shoulder.

  Eugene writes everything down by hand, and then when he’s got about ten or fifteen pages fleshed out, he types it all up on his computer. This way, he says, he can’t second-guess himself too much.

  “The delete button is an easy out,” he says. “I like to write forward, and if I get into a sticky spot, it’s up to my characters to dig their way out.”

  Maybe I’d feel the same way, except I already know exactly what all my characters are going to do next.

  For example, I know that Greta says yes when her old boss and lover Gerard Boule calls her up out of the blue and asks her if she’s interested in going to Korea for an exciting research opportunity.

  “South Korea?” Greta asks.

  “Not quite,” Boule says.

  Greta finished her studies at Pierre and Marie Curie University in 2006, the same year I graduated with my BS in business administration. Greta was only twenty years old, and she had already completed the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in cellular and plant biology and a master’s degree in biodiversity and genetics.

  She had a low-wage position as a research assistant in a genetics lab associated with the Jardin des Plantes, where she had spent the last five years under Dr. Julie DuPont, a woman famous for crossbreeding a grape with a watermelon and making the world’s first grapemelon, a common household snack today for those who can afford it.

  Greta Van Bruggen, as DuPont’s assistant, was responsible for mapping the genetic codes of all the outlandish plant species Dr. Julie DuPont cooked up in the lab. They would cross an avocado with a guava, or a kiwi with a lemon, or a beet with a radish with a cactus, and see what turned up. Ninety-nine percent of their experiments were complete failures. Of the 1 percent that succeeded, about 99 percent of those were total abominations of nature. Imagine Aphrodite’s bust topped with the head of a scorpion. That sort of thing, but with fruit.

  The remaining fraction of the successes, however, made the big time: the grapemelon, which tasted like a bite-sized splash of Kool-Aid; a strain of banana that could grow in the desert; and a variety of wheat that was gluten-free, whatever that means.

  There wasn’t always a demand for these freaks of nature, so if they didn’t die on the vine, they very often died in the marketplace. People are very picky about their fruit. If it doesn’t look like something Eve might have plucked from a tree in Eden, then usually nobody wants it, even if it costs half as much to produce, uses a fraction of the natural resources to grow, and retains ten times the nutrient content.

  God didn’t create the grapemelon, some religious activists will say. He didn’t create the poodle either. Or the common house cat. Where did they come from? From thousands of years of meddling, that’s where.

  Some of the other researchers at the laboratory had a nickname for Dr. Julie DuPont. They called her Dr. Frankenstein. They had a nickname for Greta, too. They called her Igor.

  Frankenstein and Igor made a fabulous team. Dr. Julie DuPont was a wide-eyed dynamo in her forties. She had been married three times and divorced just as many. She had two young children, a boy and girl, from her second marriage, and she toted them around in a canopied rickshaw on the back of her bike, since she didn’t believe in the use of fossil fuels.

  DuPont always had a dozen projects going at once, and she divided her time between the genetics laboratory, the classroom where she taught an advanced course on genetic s
equencing, the laboratory at the Jardin des Plantes, and her children. DuPont never slept except for two or three hours in the wee small hours of the morning when the rest of the world had gone so still she couldn’t get much else done, and as far as Greta knew, she survived off a strict diet of trail mix and quinoa.

  Greta Van Bruggen came into DuPont’s life right about the time the grapemelon made its first big splash in the scientific community and funding started pouring in from all over the country. In a matter of months, the harebrained postdoctoral scholar everyone called Frankenstein became the most respected plant geneticist in Western Europe.

  Greta acted as chief of staff to DuPont, keeping her schedule, reminding her of publication deadlines, making sure she ate, not to mention single-handedly running the labs at the university and the Jardin des Plantes.

  So when Greta graduated, DuPont was desperate to keep her on staff. DuPont wrangled together some funding for Greta to do independent research at the Jardin des Plantes. That would keep Greta in close enough proximity to keep things running smoothly. It guaranteed Greta a paycheck for at least another couple years, and Greta got to run her own lab, working on the projects that mattered most to her.

  What mattered most to Greta Van Bruggen?

  Conservation of the species, for one. It was all well and good to play God and design totally new plants, like the grapemelon. But what of the plants God had designed with his own two hands? Greta was concerned. Rising sea levels and changing weather patterns were decimating the natural environments of many rare plant species that had nowhere else to call home—she had borne witness to as much in her work with Dr. Gerard Boule in Indonesia. Moreover, large corporations were encouraging farmers to plant monocrops and GMOs—most farmers today wouldn’t be able to identify the type of corn served at the first Thanksgiving dinner on Plymouth Rock. Not to mention the clearing of the rain forests, oil spills, melting ice caps, and every other manner of horror the hippie liberals were shoving down our throats in those days.