Mind in Chains

by Bruce M Perrin

  “So, a month of treatment with no brain development …,” started Nicole.

  “Yields about six months of growth in the rest of the body,” finished Greenwood.

  The cellular biologist got that faraway look again. Nicole started to ask if there was something wrong when the woman spoke. “Of course, this is all based on an extremely small sample. We’ll be in a much better position to answer these questions when we have all the data from your new instrument package.”

  Greenwood raised her eyebrows as if inviting concurrence. And Nicole wanted to give it, although she knew there were challenges. Perhaps her hesitancy spoke to Greenwood, as she asked, “You’re not nervous, are you?”

  Nicole hesitated and then admitted, “Maybe a little. The challenge is in the scale. Human preterm babies are small, but the primates you’re working with? Their preemies are hardly bigger than my thumb. The equipment exists, but getting it packaged and integrated with an interface that supports your methods, the sequence you use when you work? That’ll be the challenge.”

  “And the way you just described the project is exactly why I need someone like you,” responded Greenwood. “My current setup is an octopus of wires and readouts. It’s more of a hindrance than a help in getting the job done. I’m constantly recalibrating and sifting through applications to find the functions I need. You can turn this mess of hardware and software into a well-oiled machine.”

  “We can,” said Nicole. “I’ll handle the hardware, and together, we’ll document the steps in your protocol. Then, I’ll have a software engineer package all of the applications and create a menu that follows the workflow. When we’re done, it’ll feel like a single app.”

  “Perfect,” said Greenwood. “You ready?”

  “I am. And let me suggest we start with the perfect case, the one where everything goes right. After that, we’ll branch out to the complications.”

  Greenwood rose from the chair and stepped over to the whiteboard. “The perfect case,” she said and started drawing.

  After a moment, Nicole realized the scribbles were supposed to be a preemie. She ducked her head, pretending to type on her laptop a moment to cover her amusement. Perhaps it was too much to think that such a brilliant scientist could draw anything better than a stick baby.

  6:23 PM – The Central West End Neighborhood

  I pulled the order of Moo Shu Shrimp closer to my face, sheltering it from the light rain that pattered against the hood of my jacket. I’d had the foresight to grab it for the walk from my apartment to the restaurant and then on to Nicole’s place, but the realization of how much easier it would be to carry this load with an umbrella had escaped me. Now, I had to protect our dinner from the elements with my bowed head and hunched shoulders.

  Ah, that smells good.

  The spicy aroma of the food just inches from my nose brought several thoughts to mind. The obvious one was the empty feeling in my stomach. Nicole and I generally dined closer to 5:30, but work had kept me late. And yet, as strong as that biological drive was, another thought swamped it. It was the thought of Nicole. This particular meal was the first we had ever shared and had been repeated often over the intervening 18 months. The scent brought back those memories in a kaleidoscope of images and a feeling of warmth. I was certain time would never erode the sensation.

  I climbed the stairs two at a time and let myself into Nicole’s apartment. She was sitting at the kitchen island, bent over a Sudoku puzzle. “Thank goodness. I’m starving.” She tilted her head to the side, and I placed a kiss on her cheek before dropping the package on the counter. She jumped up and pulled two plates from a cabinet. I retrieved silverware from a drawer.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Good. Shorter than yours … obviously.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I replied. “We had some new, three-dimensional displays come in. I had to make sure they got set up. And first look, they’re better than the last but still not there. The scenes look good, but there’s a bit of delay in updating if they’re complex or you move your head too fast. Probably end up with some sim sickness if you use them too long.”

  “And you got all that from a first look?” she said, as she spread some plum sauce on one of the Moo Shu pancakes and started rolling. “You didn’t leave me here starving so you could play with your latest electronic toy, did you?”

  The slight smirk on her lips said “teasing,” so I replied in kind. “I was thinking about playing longer,” I replied, emphasizing the verb she had used. “But the manufacturer suggests no more than six hours at a time.”

  She gave a single, quiet laugh, shaking her head. “My day was excellent.”

  I waited for more, but food appeared to be consuming her attention.

  “Mmm,” she said after a bite. “I suppose it's not polite to make noises while you eat, but mmm.”

  We both ate, Nicole ending the lull in the conversation after a few minutes by asking, “Are you going to be able to make it to dinner tomorrow night?”

  What?

  I stopped with my second Mu Shoo roll inches from my mouth, turned, and looked around the room as if seeking the person to whom she was speaking. Other than an occasional business trip, I’d hardly eaten anywhere else for the last year. One of us asking the other to dinner had long since been replaced by planning menus together, so my confusion was only partially feigned.

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “No, it’s just that I started work with Dr. Laura Greenwood today. She sounded interested in having dinner with us, so I invited her. You available?”

  “Sure,” I replied. I scoured my memories. “Is she the one you’re designing those instruments for? The stuff for primate preemies?”

  Nicole nodded, her mouth full of food.

  “She connected with the zoo?” I asked.

  Nicole swallowed and stared at me a second. “No. Dr. Laura Greenwood? She’s a cellular biologist.”

  My blank stare was apparently enough to let her know that I still didn’t see the connection, so she explained. After a few moments recounting how Greenwood wanted to adjust brain development to bring it and the body in sync, Nicole finished by saying, “I know it’ll be years before her research is put into practice, if ever. But she may hold the key to several developmental disabilities for preterm babies. You gotta admit, that’s exciting.”

  After a moment, I said the only thing that came to mind. “Wow.”

  “I thought you’d be impressed,” Nicole replied, a knowing smile coming to her lips.

  “Yeah, really. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of her. Laura Greenwood?” Nicole nodded. “I’ll have to read up on her a bit before tomorrow.”

  I meant it. I mean, how often do you have a soon-to-be-famous cellular biologist come to dinner?

  Wednesday, May 8

  9:18 AM – The Biomedical Engineering Associates Building

  Nicole stepped out of the front door of her building, looking up into the dark gray overcast of the morning sky. She turned to the east, finding no one on the sidewalk. To the west, it was the same story. She looked across the street. There wasn’t much there: a small grocery store to the left, a parking lot ahead, and a four-story office building to the right. She was getting worried. Greenwood’s rental car was in the part of the lot reserved for visitors, but the woman was nowhere to be found.

  They had started at 8 o’clock, right on schedule. After about 40 minutes, Greenwood had asked to take a break, saying she needed a few minutes alone to collect her thoughts about the next step in her procedure before they discussed it. Nicole had stayed in their temporary workroom, cleaning up the notes she had taken. But when Greenwood hadn’t returned in a half-hour, Nicole had become concerned and started looking. After several circuits inside her small building, she had moved the hunt outdoors. Where else could she be?

  Nicole walked east, turning at the corner of her building and looking down the sidewalk. No missing cellular biologist. Since the west
side of her building abutted another structure, the back was the only place she hadn’t looked. When she got there, her search was rewarded. There stood the woman, her smartphone held out in front of her.

  “Surely you can find better scenery to photograph than the back of my building.”

  Greenwood jumped at the sound, bringing her smartphone down as she turned. “Nicole.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nicole said. “I sometimes get lost in thought, too.”

  Greenwood brought the phone back up. “Ah, no wonder you came looking. I didn’t realize how long I’ve been gone. There was this large bird, maybe a hawk? I couldn’t get a good picture and got carried away trying.”

  “I’m not enough of a bird watcher to know what they are either, but I’ve seen a couple of them,” Nicole said. “I’m surprised they’ve adapted so well, except the parks and residential areas around here are teaming with rabbits and birds. I guess that’s what they eat?”

  Greenwood shrugged. “I’m not sure either, but I’ve slowed us down enough. Shall we get back to it?” She started for the building’s back entrance.

  “We should walk around to the front,” Nicole said. Greenwood stopped and turned to her, raising an eyebrow.

  Nicole cleared her throat, feeling a bit like she was about to divulge a company secret. “The building’s owners have been fixing the outdoor lunch area.” She raised a hand to the temporary, wooden fencing just to the right of the entrance. “The surface was starting to crumble. But the job has left the back sidewalk and the area just inside something of a construction zone. We’re in A27, up front, so you won’t have to deal with that mess.”

  “Is the door locked?” asked Greenwood.

  “No. But if my boss caught me leading you through that obstacle course, he’d be none too happy.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” replied Greenwood. The women headed back to the front of the building.

  “I don’t think we discussed a time for dinner,” said Nicole. “Is 6:00 too early for you?”

  Greenwood hesitated. “That’s normally when I eat, but would it be possible to move it back an hour to 7:00? I have a call that may run late.”

  “No, that’s fine,” replied Nicole.

  “I worked on a project in Italy, a long time ago,” said Greenwood. “I never could adapt to their dinnertime—8:00 or later. And then, the meal lasts for two or three hours. You take a table in an Italian restaurant and it’s yours for the evening.”

  “Now, that’s how I picture you—at some exotic location, having late dinners after a day of treating newborns.”

  Greenwood chuckled. “Yeah, that job was great, but as I said, it was a long time ago. My last business trip was about two years ago, to Omaha. Like the old joke goes, I spent a month there one week. But I’m not complaining. I’ve visited some great spots during my career.”

  When the women reached the front of the building, Greenwood paused. “In addition to being an excellent, wildlife photographer …”—she cleared her throat dramatically to emphasize the irony—“I also do a mean selfie. Mind if I take one of us?”

  “Us?” Nicole asked, letting her voice slip into wide-eyed, schoolgirl mode again. She pushed some of the enthusiasm from her tone. “Sure. I’d be honored.”

  The women turned, putting the Biomedical Engineering Associates building in the background. After Nicole heard the old-fashioned click from the totally modern device, she said, “Can you text me a copy of that shot?”

  Greenwood glanced at the phone, then said, “Hmm, first no decent picture of that hawk and now this.” Nicole leaned forward, looking at the phone’s screen from the side. Even with the angle and the sun glinting off the surface, she could see the picture was off-center. Only about half of Greenwood’s face was showing.

  “Let me try again.”

  The women resumed the pose, with the result turning out much better the second time. Greenwood finished texting the picture by the time they reached the front door.

  “So, tell me a little about the people you work with,” said Greenwood. “Anyone particularly inspiring? Any good friends?”

  “Both,” said Nicole. “Those aren’t questions I can finish before we get back to A27, but I can start.” The women headed down the hall, Nicole lost in stories of her coworkers.

  11:21 AM – The Evangelical Church of the Rock

  The morning had been lost from the day, obliterated by a layer of dark clouds that promised rain but only delivered dreariness. Reverend Micah Eastin rose from his desk and parted the slats that covered his study’s window. The spring flora beyond did nothing to lighten his mood. Their reds, yellows, and blues were but muted shades of themselves, the gray sky stealing their brilliance. Even the smell of the flowers some of the church women had placed in the nave earlier this morning failed to penetrate his sanctuary. All he could detect was the bitter odor of stale coffee and the lingering traces of the disinfectant used to clean their living quarters.

  He moved to a corner of his study and turned on a floor lamp, determined that the darkness of the day not invade his soul. Last Sunday’s sermon had disappointed. It had not been the call to action he had thought, a fact he gauged from the heft of the offering plate. True, his congregation’s giving had increased but not enough to cover the need. His flock hadn’t fully understood the threat from the slow infiltration of medical immorality, and that was a problem, lest his plans collapse of their own weight.

  There was a knock, followed by the face of his wife as the door cracked open.

  “Where’d you leave them?” he asked, surprised to see her in his doorway.

  “They’re in back. You can’t see them from the parking lot or the road. I’ll go back and keep an eye on them, but I was wondering if you wanted a cup of coffee.”

  Reverend Eastin released a long sigh. “Thanks, but no. I’m fine.”

  “Trouble finding divine inspiration?”

  “You could say that,” he replied.

  “You’ll find it. You always do.”

  “Thanks, Mary Jo,” he said as she closed the door.

  It was one of the ironies of his life that his wife bore the same name as his first love. But what made that coincidence even more significant to him was the fact that they wouldn’t be where they were had it not been for the first Mary Jo. Of that, he felt certain. She had seen something in him that no one else had, least of all, himself. And when she revealed that insight—a mere sentence, a phrase really—his life’s work had materialized from the fog of his doubts and uncertainties. And though some 21 years in his past, it still felt like yesterday.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  A drop of sweat rolled down his forehead, stinging as it reached his eye. A sixteen-year-old Micah Eastin wiped it away with a hand, pushing the mop of brown hair from his face as he did. Although the sun had set nearly an hour earlier, he knew relief wasn’t coming. The air refused to move, leaving the 40 or so worshippers in the one-room church to stew in the heat and humidity of a July night in northern Mississippi.

  It was time for prayers and each member of the congregation raised their impassioned pleas. Micah couldn’t make out the words, although “glory to God” and “hallelujah” reached his ears with regularity. He added a “praise the Lord” to his own mumblings.

  Later, there would be time for the members of the church to share some of their victories—a birth, a marriage—as well as the setbacks that were always more numerous by comparison—an illness, time in prison, a death. Singing, piano and guitar playing, hand clapping, and more prayer would follow. Then, there would be a collection, hardly enough to keep the lights on, but more than these folks could afford. And eventually, some in the congregation would be overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit. At that point, dozens of twitching, twirling, and writhing bodies would nudge the mercury even higher.

  It was a pattern seared into Micah’s brain from the five years his mother had been bringing him here. For the last four, she hadn’t
stayed—at least, not for the Saturday night services when she needed to attend to “personal matters.” He knew what she was doing. Hell, everyone in town knew. But he wasn’t bitter; he wasn’t ashamed. He felt sorry for her, but his pain was also mixed with a touch of pride, tempered to the consistency of steel by the whispers of the townsfolk. She was doing what was necessary for the two of them to survive, and that was more than could be said about several of the men sitting in the pews with him.

  Micah took solace in the fact that this year would be the last his mother would be toiling alone. Next May, when he left school, he wouldn’t look back because on the following twenty-fifth of August, he would turn seventeen. Had he been born a week later on the first of September, he would have to attend school a year longer. But he wasn’t born later. As for the job he’d find? That worried him. There was always farm work, but he hoped for something better, something that would let him take more of the burden from his mom.

  “Praise the Lord,” said old Mr. Coonts, pounding Micah’s shoulder as he sat beside him. “We be praying for your ma.”

  Micah glanced at the man, wispy gray hair around his ears turning to white stubble on his weathered cheeks. He had a first name, obviously, but “old mister” was all Micah had ever heard. “Thank you, sir. I’ll tell her.”

  “I feel His spirit in the piano,” said Coonts, pronouncing the word like the dessert and the girl’s name—pie Annie. “Been feeling puny myself. Needs the power of the Lord.” Coonts’s head jerked a couple of times as if slapped by an unseen hand. He stood and walked to the front of the room. Soon, one of the brothers was leading a prayer for him, one hand held in the air as the other squeezed Coonts’s shoulder as he kneeled.