by E. E. Giorgi
Red eyes, waning through thick curls of smoke, the reek of burnt plastic and wet dog, lacing my hands through the sheepskin seat cover as I hear him speak, his words gray and thick like molasses, like the air in the old Camaro. Him, slouched in the driver’s seat, a cigarette butt clinging to his greasy hands and a slur pasting his tongue.
You ever had a girl?
No.
I’ve had many. He laughs. I make them beg, I do.
How?
Yellow smiles echoing through the fog of dope.
I’ll tell you a secret. Can you keep a secret?
I clutch the penknife in my pocket and nod. And that’s when he tells me. How he made a noose out of her stockings, wrapped it around her neck and made her beg. He watched her eyes beg, Her eyes, man, the way she looked at me, pleading, don’t you get it, the more she begged the more exciting it got, I had her, I had to keep her begging me, I made her tell me she wanted more, I made her…
It was too much to recall. Silence fell. A wall clock ticked somewhere in Watanabe’s office. Outside a dog barked at the moon. I squeezed my knees, wading through the murkiness of memories.
Watanabe’s flat cheekbones emerged from the cone of light. “Ulysses?”
“Huh?”
“What happened next, Ulysses?”
I shook my head. “I can’t—I don’t remember.” I licked my lips, snatched a bit of time. “They found me a few feet away from the car, my clothes drenched in blood—Mendoza’s blood. They uh—they said his throat and eyes had been carved out. They said the stab wounds were compatible with a penknife blade. The one I was holding, precisely.”
A veil of clouds covered the moon. The dog stopped barking. Through the window, black silhouettes of palm trees staggered against yellow streetlights.
Watanabe moved away from the table lamp. Darkness swallowed his face. “So the judge denied bail, based on the cruelty of the crime, but revoked the decision one month later,” he recalled.
The case had made headlines at the time.
“I told them he’d killed Lily, but they didn’t believe me until they found her clothes inside an old cooler Mendoza kept in his garage. They didn’t drop the charges, when they corroborated my story. A jury did, one year later. Acquitted on all counts.”
Watanabe’s face remained in the dark. His fingers played softly with a pen. “And you can’t remember anything of the attack? You must have suffered some wounds too, or else your lawyer couldn’t have claimed self-defense…”
I fished a key out of my pocket and dropped it on the desk. We both looked at it. “It was in my personal belongings, when they released me.”
“A key?”
“I checked. It was Lily’s house key.”
Watanabe said nothing.
“From Danny. Don’t you get it, Doc?”
I saw his face nod through the shadows. “Your first trophy,” he said.
I looked out the window. The clouds had shifted, the moon was out again.
Watanabe tapped his pen. “I found your old medical records, Ulysses.”
I raised a brow, unsure how to take the statement.
“Ulysses Moris Presius.”
I grimaced. “That’s me. Greek grandfather and a longstanding family tradition of obnoxious names.”
He bobbed his head, clicked the pen. “Listen. Did your parents ever talk about taking you in for an MRI when you were ten, or maybe twelve? Did they ever mention—” He swallowed, corrugated his forehead. “Do you have any recollection of being at the hospital when you were six?”
“Six?” I shrugged. “Yeah. I think it was one of those childhood diseases. I got it pretty bad and they had to take me in.”
“The measles?”
“Must’ve been, yeah.”
“That’s all your parents told you? That it was the measles?”
“Look. My parents hated doctors.” I scratched my brow, trying to remember. “Mom said when I was little a doctor wanted to drill a hole in my head—her words, not mine. Apparently, the doctor was convinced I wasn’t going to live another six months.” I laughed. My laughter vaporized under Watanabe’s hard stare.
“Nothing personal, Doc. I like you,” I joked.
Still, the man wouldn’t budge. He rolled the pen between his fingers, his silence as heavy as a next-day hangover.
“You had a brain tumor, Ulysses. When you were five.”
He let the words chill out on me, then reached for the brown envelope in his drawer. It looked fatter than last time. He pushed it towards me and let it hang at the edge of the desk. “It’s all in there. Two signed referrals from pediatricians, one recommendation for surgery from an oncologist. I made a copy of your CT scan. ‘Grade two juvenile astrocytoma’—that was your diagnosis. It’s still visible, despite the image being over twenty years old—a mass about half-centimeter in diameter in the left cerebellar hemisphere.”
I looked at the image in disbelief. “Oh, come on.” I made a face. “Look at me, Doc. I’m thirty-eight and pretty healthy, save a moderate addiction to ethanol and caffeine. Those docs,” I waved a hand at the brown envelope. “They had to be wrong.”
He shook his head.
I forced laughter out of my throat. “Really, Doc. I’d be dead by now.”
“Something saved your life. A virus, precisely.” Watanabe pulled a bunch of papers out of the brown envelope. They were photocopies of old documents, some handwritten, some typed on yellowed hospital letterhead. None I recognized. “You changed after that. Your vision, your acute olfactory senses, your—aggressiveness. You weren’t born a chimera, you became one.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You said—I couldn’t be a chimera.”
“Not a genetic one, no. You’re an epigenetic chimera, the most extraordinary kind. The measles killed the brain tumor but turned on ancestral genes that are normally off in most individuals.”
Watanabe forked his reading glasses and flipped through the papers. “Visit dates, temperature, BP—ah, here it is. You were hospitalized in April 1976—you’d just turned six. You were running a fever of one-oh-four and having seizures. A doctor named Frank Haynes saw you, one of the two pediatricians who had made the tumor diagnosis six months earlier. He concluded you had contracted encephalitis as a complication from the measles. You were in a coma for about a week. They treated you with anti-inflammatory drugs and analgesic. You had to undergo physical therapy for about three months afterwards.” He raised his eyes above the rim of his glasses. “You have no recollection of that?”
It all sounded distant, as if he were telling me somebody else’s story, not mine. “Of the hospital? Yes. I hated it. Brain tumors? No. Look. I wasn’t the brightest kid in school, okay? And I was ridiculously clumsy in PE—that I remember. But I outgrew it.”
“Exactly.” Watanabe flipped through the papers. “Dr. Haynes actually saw you again—for the last time—one year later. Your symptoms were gone: no more headaches, dizziness, or fainting. He checked your balance, movements, etc. Everything looked normal except—”
“Except?”
“Haynes found your vision and sense of olfaction to be dramatically enhanced: ‘Exceptionally fast reflexes, enhanced vision and sense of olfaction. Mild irritability.’ He suggested a new CT scan but your parents declined.”
I let out a snort. “Of course. By then they realized the brain tumor had never existed, and my mother was right to be pissed.”
“And how do you explain the changes after the encephalitis?”
I laced my hands together and leaned forward. “I told you the story a million times, Doc. You still refuse to believe me. We were camping, Dad and I. I got too far from the campground and was attacked by a cougar. I was still in kindergarten.” I sank back in my chair. “I never was the same after that.”
“How did you survive a cougar attack?”
“I don’t know. It roared at me. I screamed and froze. Then it—” I swallowed. I could still see its amber eyes flash before my face. “It barely s
cratched me with its fangs and left.” I shook my head, smiling without meaning to. “My parents didn’t believe me either. Said I’d gotten the scratches from tree branches.”
Watanabe didn’t blink, his face as flat as a board. He stuck a hand inside the brown envelope and fished out one last paper. “Your recent MRI. Take a look.” He handed it to me across the desk and pointed to the middle of the skull. “That’s your cerebellum. And see the tiny white blob on the right side of the image? You have to know it’s there to see it.” He stood up, leaned across the desk, and tapped the MRI scan in my hands. “Right there. See?”
I nodded.
“That’s the scar your childhood tumor left. A scar, nothing else. The measles virus destroyed the rest.”
I shot up my brows. “You’re not saying—the virus—how’s that even possible?”
“Viruses kill cells, Ulysses. Tumors are made of cells. There have been quite a few case reports of cancer remission after an unrelated viral infection. In fact, viruses are used in experimental anti-cancer treatments. The measles infection you got in 1976 got to your brain, causing the encephalitis, and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It killed the tumor, leaving a tiny scar.”
He stared at me.
I set the MRI back on the desk. “Let me get this straight, Doc. A stupid virus I got when I was five saved me from dying of brain cancer but turned me into a monster?”
Watanabe smiled. “Not a monster, Ulysses. A mezurashii. A one in a million. The virus turned you into a chimera.”
“Don’t chimeras have two DNA’s?” I asked.
“Genetic chimeras have different DNA’s in different tissues. But you’re not a genetic chimera, Ulysses. You’re an epigenetic one.”
He started blabbering about pseudogenes and that word he liked so much, epigenetics; how genes turn on and off and the environment we are exposed to—diet, diseases, even traumas—can screw that whole “on/off” process. My brain was reeling. I got to my feet and walked to the window. The pale face of the moon filled the sky.
A virus.
A virus turned me into a chimera.
An epigenetic chimera—whatever that meant.
“Ulysses? Are you listening to me? Do you understand, now, how the viral infection turned on the ancestral genes that control vision and olfaction?”
I swallowed. “It wasn’t the measles.”
“What?”
“That doctor—Haynes. He said it was the measles because the stuff was going around at the time. But it wasn’t. I—I’d been vaccinated against the measles.” I turned away from the window and stared at him, his face carved out of darkness by the yellow table lamp. “The virus was rabies.”
CHAPTER 27
____________
Tuesday, October 21
I propped my feet on the desk and stuck a paperclip in my teeth. Roy, a young detective with a square neck and a flat head, tossed a paper airplane in the air and snickered. I caught it midair, crumpled it, and thrust it in the trash bin. They should forbid anybody with a flat head to wear a buzz cut. It’s disturbing.
Roy flashed a sheepish grin, which I ignored.
I spit out the paperclip and yawned. The weather was dull, the afternoon was dull, the mood was dull. Until a new spice gently rippled the air. I dropped my feet from the desk.
“Sat.”
“Hmm.”
“Was there a meeting I forgot about today?”
“No, why?”
“Diane’s here.”
* * *
“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Diane told us, slightly out of breath. I unlocked the door to the captain’s office, which we use as a conference room whenever the boss is not around.
Satish pulled a chair and noisily flopped in it. “Track announced you, all right. About three minutes before you stepped into the squad room.”
Diane whirled her head and stared at me. “Really?” she asked, a flattered look dancing on her face.
She walked to the captain’s chair and slid off her short-sleeve jacket. She was wearing a sleeveless top that held her breasts in the most marvelous way, the balance between what it revealed and what it left to the imagination as poetic as a Shakespearean sonnet.
Something excited her. “I just got back from UCLA and couldn’t wait to show you guys.”
“UCLA?”
She opened a folder and spread its contents on the table. “I spent the whole day at the Electron Imaging Core, staring into a transmission electron microscope. It’s an amazing instrument: it can enlarge objects one thousand times smaller than the section of a human hair.”
I sent a sideways glance at Satish. “Imagine Gomez’s moles—how beautiful they’d look.”
He grinned. “Like the surface of Mars.”
Diane glared. “Anyway. I prepared a sample with the blood taken from one of the Chromo monkeys, and this is what I saw.” She flipped a picture in front of us. On cue, Satish and I leaned forward and peered at the photo, both feeling as clueless as chipmunks crossing the street.
“What are we staring at?”
“A virus. Nathan Kim’s killer.”
“I thought the Chromo lab tech died of anaphylactic shock,” Satish said.
“He did.” Diane tapped on the cluster of circular blobs depicted in the picture. “The virus got into his system through the monkey bite and triggered the massive release of histamine.”
I struggled to understand. “Diane, a virus can give you the flu, a cold, or hepatitis. I’ve never heard of a virus triggering anaphylaxis.”
“This was no ordinary virus, Track,” she said, flopping back in her chair and retrieving a second sheet of paper. It was a diagram this time. “I analyzed the genome of this particular virus and compared it to a flu strain.”
“Hold on,” Satish interrupted. “Does this mean the monkeys were sick?”
“Not quite. Look at this: the top diagram represents the genes of the flu virus, the bottom one represents the genes of the virus from the Chromo monkey. I put them together so you can see the similarities.”
“Similarities, huh?” I commented, staring at the diagrams. “This is what a color-blinded person feels when staring at a Chagall.”
Satish snorted, but Diane wasn’t amused. “Guys, you don’t understand.” She dropped back in her chair, a shade of frustration jagging her brow. “A virus is basically genetic material wrapped in a shell. When the virus attacks a cell, the shell opens up and the genetic material is delivered inside.” Diane paused. We remained silent this time. “Now look at these diagrams. This is the gene coding the outer shell of the virus. It’s pretty similar across the two species. Now, here”—she tapped to the right of the two diagrams—“is what each virus will inject inside the infected cell. And this is where the Chromo virus gets strikingly different from the flu strain.”
“How?” Satish asked.
“Because these right here are no ordinary genes. They’re human genes.”
The air in the captain’s office felt suddenly stale and hot. I rose, walked to the thermostat, and cranked up the AC. The Venetian blinds started tapping against the windowpane.
“How can a virus contain human genes?” Satish asked.
I knew the answer. I knew it too damn well.
We can do it in a lab, Watanabe had told me last night. We can now make chimeric viruses by mixing pieces of DNA from different organisms.
“This is not just any virus,” Diane explained. “It’s been artificially engineered.”
“They’re called chimeras,” I said, in a low voice, the name—chimeras—such a new, intimate detail of my life it almost startled me to hear it coming out of my mouth.
Diane looked surprised. “They are, Track. How did you—”
“No,” I interrupted. “The question is why was Chromo making these viruses and injecting them into monkeys.”
Diane pulled a lock of her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. I need to study these genes better, see what proteins they code.
It might be part of some gene therapy experiment. Maybe they wanted to modify genes that cause genetic disorders.”
“Are you saying—?” Satish said.
“Exactly what you’re thinking: if a virus can be modified in a way that it still retains its ability to enter the cell but deliver the ‘right’ genes instead of its own, then you’ve got a way of replacing a defective gene with a healthy one.”
“Has it ever been done?”
Diane nodded. “A French group conducted a trial study to cure a defect on the X chromosome. The disease is called SCI, or Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. The study was halted in 2002, though.”
I walked back to the table. “Why?”
Diane tilted her head and winced before replying. The implication struck her as the answer came out of her mouth: “Two boys enrolled in the study developed leukemia.”
I banged my hand on the table. Hard. “This is what Huxley was onto.”
“We have no proof she knew any of this.”
“Because we still don’t have access to her computer!”
“You said we had her e-mails.”
I bit on my knuckles and nodded. I’d flipped through the printouts Amit had delivered to my desk. It was all scientific jargon.
I turned to Diane and flashed her a grin. “Yes. We have her e-mails and we have a scientist.”
* * *
“Tonight?”
“Yeah. Bedtime reads. Can’t be any worse than War and Peace, can it?”
Diane gave me a sullen look. “I love War and Peace.”
“Well, then chances are, you’ll love this stuff too.”
She stared at the ream of papers piled on my desk and bit the inside of her cheek. I wanted to bite the other side. “You haul it down to my car.” She spun around and headed out the door.
Satish sneered and walked to his desk while whistling Frishberg’s jazz tune Peel Me a Grape. I preferred it when Diana Krall sang it.
On the elevator, Diane gave me a supercilious look. “Just so you know, those e-mails are not the only thing on my agenda.” Neither on mine, I thought, basking in her scent. And then shamelessly said nothing. “We need to find out what Chromo was doing with those monkeys. I’ll search the literature, see if they published any scientific results in the past few years.”