I thought I had the thing aced.
Wrong.
So, okay, I phoned it in a little. But still. A B+ after those abs?
Things I Think About, Exhibit B:
How I was supposed to bail out Aislin’s dirtbag boyfriend after school, which is why I was checking her latest frantic text when that out-of-place apple caught my eye, which is why I wasn’t looking where I was going, which is why I am now in an ambulance with an MD from Aveda and some guy with a perpetually smug look on his face.
Things I Think About, Exhibit C:
How I missed prom yet again. (I had a previous engagement, organizing my sock drawer while watching old Jon Stewarts on my laptop.) Aislin claims I didn’t miss anything: It was a total waste of a good buzz. Even with the purse searches and rent-a-cops, she managed to sneak in three separate flasks of lemon vodka.
I am a little worried about Aislin.
Things I Think About, Exhibit D:
How I can’t figure out the deal with this Solo guy. Is my mother using him as her stand-in? Is that his job?
Things I Think About, Exhibit E:
How Solo’s eyes have this distant, don’t mess with me edge to them. They’d be hard to sketch, but then, I can never get faces right.
Last week during Life Drawing, Ms. Franklin asked me if I’d ever considered majoring in art instead of biology.
I asked her for a new eraser.
Things I Think About, Exhibit F:
How Solo smells like the ocean when he leans close and smooths my hair.
Things I Think About, Exhibit G:
How Solo, once he’s done gently smoothing my hair, starts pounding out an incredibly inept drum solo on my oxygen tank.
Things I Think About, Exhibit H:
How I might never run again.
– 5 –
SOLO
We pull into Spiker Biopharm. It’s located on the back side of the Tiburon peninsula across the Golden Gate and down some windy roads. As you drive up it’s not mind-boggling or anything, because the road at that point is maybe two hundred feet up above the ocean, and the Spiker complex is more vertical than horizontal. It spreads down that steep slope from the road above to the water below. And it is big. From the water, it looks like the City of Oz had a giant baby with one of those big-city Apple stores.
The place is built around three massive spikes—as in Spiker, heh—with each of the spikes being an elevator array. Connecting them is a sort of ziggurat construction with terraces, open spaces, entire floors given over to gardens, sandy volleyball courts, a pool.
It is, without question, a great place to work. If you can get past some of the people.
And number one among the people you have to get past is the boss woman herself, Terra Spiker. Known throughout the campus as Terror Spiker.
That, to me, is a major clue someone should have gotten: If you’re going to name your daughter Terra, and if she’s going to grow up to be a psycho-bitch, people are going to start calling her “Terror.”
The way the complex is laid out, the floors are bigger below and smaller above. The bottom floor, Level One, is the largest space, the Orphan Disease Research Division. They focus on the many less-than-popular diseases that no one is ever going to get rich curing.
Whatever else you can say about Terra, she’s done some very major work down there on Level One. As in cures. As in people who were being eaten alive by some parasite or some germ are walking around alive today because of Level One. Because Terra Spiker said, “Screw profits, we’re throwing a billion dollars into beating this disease.”
The reason no one gets serious about investigating Spiker Biopharm? Because of what happens down there on Level One, that’s why. Because the psycho-bitch saves a bunch of lives.
On the other hand, the reason so many people think about investigating Spiker? Because of what happens on Levels Seven and Eight.
Me, I live on Level Four. My parents, Isabel and Jeffrey Plissken, were Terra’s business partners way back in the day, when all they had was a broken-down IBM, some petri dishes, and a dream.
I don’t remember them. It’s like that.
I could say Terra raised me, but that would be wrong. She’s no mother to me. She gives me a place to live, an education, a job at the lab.
She tolerates me.
She wouldn’t even do that if she knew.
– 6 –
A steel door opens and we enter an overlit garage. Two men and a woman, clad in black lab coats like Dr. Anderson’s, are waiting for me. I have an entourage.
“She’s stable,” Dr. Anderson remarks, “doing well,” and the other three lab coats seem surprised. They mutter medically in ways I can’t decipher.
I am whisked into a long white-tiled tunnel. Solo keeps pace beside me.
We arrive at a large glass elevator. Each member of the group stands before a wall-mounted lens.
“Optical scanner,” Solo explains as a green light clears him.
I’ve only been to my mother’s office a couple times. (She says mixing home and work is like mixing a single malt with Sprite.) The complex is visually stunning, or at least that’s what Architectural Digest said: “Frank Gehry on steroids.” When you look at satellite photos, you see more security than the Pentagon. Even the security gates have security gates.
It’s the kind of sprawling building you’d expect to find in Silicon Valley, not Marin. But Spiker Biopharm is a different kind of company, my mother likes to say, and I suppose that’s why she decided to locate it in a different kind of place.
“Different” would be her word, but others have had worse things to say. As drug companies go, Spiker’s the bad boy on the Harley your dad doesn’t want you to date. I first realized this in fifth grade, when Ms. Zagarenski passed out a form letter soliciting parents to give classroom talks for Career Week. She sent a note home with everybody but me (“Your mother’s so busy, dear”) and I got the clue. Even Danny Rappaport got one, and we all knew his dad ran the largest pot farm in Mendocino.
The elevator shoots to the sixth floor. The doors open to reveal a breathtaking lobby. Marble, glass, steel, tiered fountain. It looks like the Ritz-Carlton my dad used to retreat to when the fights dragged on too long.
I’m wondering when the concierge will show up, and suddenly here she is.
“Baby,” says my mother, “welcome to my world.” Burying me in her perfumed embrace, she lowers her voice to a whisper and adds: “Mommy’s going to fix everything.”
She leads the way through swinging doors, and suddenly we are in a hospital.
A really swank hospital.
Dr. Anderson has a platoon of assistants: specialists, nurses, techs, but, as far as I can tell, only one patient. They are shocked at how well I am doing. Everyone wants to have a look at my mangled arm, swollen like an overcooked hot dog. I learn that my spleen, whatever that is, has been ruptured. Also, I’ve lost a rib.
“You’ll never miss it,” Dr. Anderson assures me.
The star attraction, however, is my reattached leg with its Frankenstein stitches. My mother is especially interested—my mother, who always made my dad apply Band-Aids because the sight of blood made her woozy.
My gown is an oversized napkin, barely covering the essentials. I’d be massively embarrassed if I weren’t so drugged up. Fortunately, Solo seems to have stayed behind in the hall.
“Miraculous,” breathes a nurse.
It looks horrifying to me, all the blood and goo and gauze, but I have to admit I’m not feeling as awful as I was a few hours ago. The pain has gone from blinding to merely throbbing. And when they finally remove the tube from my throat, the first thing I say is “I’m hungry” in a hoarse whisper, which gives rise to appreciative laughter and applause.
One of the nurses, an older guy with a trim gray beard, introduces me to my room appointments like a bellboy sniffing for a tip. Wi-Fi! Flat-screen! Italian marble! Heated towel rack!
“Is there anything you need?” my
mother asks. “I’m having your pajamas and robe picked up from the house.”
I try to focus. “My laptop. My Titus Andronicus T-shirt, you know, the blue one? Maybe some Clearasil.”
“You won’t be needing your laptop any time soon.”
“Do you know where my phone is?” I croak. “I should call Aislin. I think that guy—Solo?—I think he said somebody turned it in.”
A tight smile. My mother does not like Aislin. She tolerates her the way she tolerated the pet ferret I could never quite housebreak. I believe this is because Aislin shorted out our seven-thousand-dollar full-body Swedish massage chair with a puked-up Mojito, but Aislin is convinced the tide turned when she suggested a cure for my mother’s chronic headaches. I gather that the phrase “get some” may have been employed.
“Derek, see if Solo has my daughter’s phone.” A tech scurries away, and moments later Solo appears, carrying a plastic bag.
“Someone turned in your cell,” he says. “Also your sketchbook. It’s a little muddy. Nothing too major, though.”
“Thanks,” I say. I sound like my great-grandmother after her nightly Marlboro menthol.
“I’ll take that,” my mother says, but for some reason, Solo refuses to let go of my sketchbook. She yanks and it falls to the floor.
When Solo retrieves the pad, it’s open to a sketch I’ve been working on for several weeks for Life Drawing. We’re supposed to draw a person, either from memory or from our imagination, without referring to a model or a photo.
Easy, I thought.
Turns out: not so easy.
Solo stares at the drawing. It started out as a guy’s face in profile. Not a memory, just something that came to me. Mostly it’s just lines, angles, planes. A preschool Picasso.
It’s deeply lame.
Solo takes it in, meets my eyes.
“Interesting,” my mother says without looking. She snaps the sketchbook shut and hands it to an assistant.
My mother doesn’t like art, mine or anybody else’s, probably because my dad was an artist. “Austin was a failed sculptor,” she’s fond of saying—she always pauses a beat here, raising a professionally waxed brow—“but he was an accomplished failure.”
“So you’re an artist,” Solo says.
“She’s a patient,” my mother answers, “and she needs to rest.”
“Right.” Solo starts to hand her my phone.
“No,” I say quickly. “Would you check for messages first? The password’s 0123.”
“Impenetrable.” Solo scans my mail. “Aislin wants to know ‘WTF are you dead or what OMG please please please call.’”
“Didn’t you call her?” I ask my mother. “She must be so—”
“I’ve been a little busy, dear,” my mother says crisply. “I’ll have someone give her a call, let her know you’re all right.”
I can tell she’s planning to forget to remember. “Would you do it?” I ask Solo. I don’t know why him exactly, except that he’s still holding my phone.
“Sure. No problem.” He taps the screen. “Got it. Don’t worry. I have a photographic memory.”
“Really?” I ask vaguely. Suddenly I am incredibly weary.
“Just for things that matter,” Solo replies.
His gaze lingers on my leg, then moves on to my middle. I am not sure if he’s staring at my flattened arm or my boobs (also pretty flat), but either way, I’m not dressed for company.
He meets my eyes for just a moment. Then he hands my mother my cell and makes his way past my bedside fan club.
– 7 –
I wake up hours later, clawing my way out of the Vicodin haze. It’s dark, but my room is lit with soft yellow light. If I squint just right, I could be in a romantic restaurant. On a really bad date.
The first thing I see is Solo, looking with intense focus at the iPad they use in lieu of an old-fashioned clipboard medical chart. It’s not the concentration of someone trying to make sense of something he doesn’t understand. It’s the concentration of a guy confirming something he’s already suspected.
He hears me moving. The iPad is back in the slot at the foot of my bed and he’s smiling at me. Covering up. Looking innocent.
I think: Strange boy I really don’t know, don’t you realize nothing is more suspicious than an innocent look?
Before I can say anything, Solo slips out the door. Seconds later, a nurse arrives. I haven’t seen her before, so I figure she must be part of the evening shift.
I close my eyes, pretending to sleep. I’m not in the mood to chat.
She checks the bandage on my leg. It’s one hell of a bandage. Gently she begins to cut away the tape and gauze and pressure mesh. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t make me happy, either.
“Oh my God!” she says.
She has laid the flesh bare and her first thought is to call up a deity.
I risk a slit eye to see what horror she’s witnessed.
She’s not looking at my face. She’s staring down at my leg. And she’s not horrified, exactly.
She’s amazed. She’s moved. She’s seeing something she never expected to see and can’t quite believe is real.
I’m afraid to look, because I know that something must be very wrong.
Or, just possibly, very right.
– 8 –
SOLO
The Spiker complex has an amazing gym. Everyone is constantly nagged to stay in shape. I don’t need to be nagged and I don’t need to be coached. I need to be left alone.
I run on the inside track. I run barefoot; I prefer it. The soles of my feet make a different sound, nothing like those three-hundred-dollar running shoes, groaning as all that shock-absorbing rubber takes the impact. My feet are almost silent.
I run and then I hit the weights, the crunches, all that. I like weights—they’re specific. There’s no bull in weight lifting; you either get that seventy-pound dumbbell up to your chest or you don’t. Yes or no, no kind-of.
After weights I go into the dark, smelly side room where the speed bags and heavy bags are. The rest of the massive gym complex is spotless and bright and gazed-down-upon by screens.
The boxing room—well, there’s just something seedy about the sport that comes through, even if the designer you hired insisted on a lovely shade of teal for the ring ropes.
Pete’s there, all ready to go.
Sometimes I go rounds with Pete. Pete’s older than me, maybe twenty-five. I’ve never asked. But he’s one of the geeks so we tend to get along well. We speak geek, or we would if we didn’t have slobbery mouthpieces in and weren’t beating on each other.
Pete’s not as quick as I am, and he looks softer and spongier than I do. But damn, when he connects you know you’ve been hit. You know it and you have to acknowledge it as your brain spins inside its bone cradle trying to reconnect all the switches.
I kind of love it.
It’s obviously crazy that I enjoy getting punched. But I do. You take a hard one to the side of your head, a shot that makes you feel as if you aren’t wearing sparring headgear at all, one that rings the bells in your ear, and then you come back from it, still swinging? To me that’s one of life’s finest moments.
Hit me. No, I mean hit me hard. Turn my knees to overcooked linguine.
And I take it and come back with a combination? Prodigious.
I’m done and covered in sweat. From the hair on my head down to my feet, wet, shiny, panting, grinning, wondering if I’m going to get feeling back in the left side of my face.
“Wimp,” Pete says.
“Weakling,” I respond.
“I don’t feel right beating up on a little girl.”
“Don’t feel bad, Pete. Keep at it and you may learn to throw a punch that actually connects some day.”
With our ritual abuse concluded, we make an appointment for the day after tomorrow. Pete heads for the gym’s showers; I head for my quarters.
My quarters, my place, my space. It’s on Level Four, where Spiker mainta
ins rooms for visiting scientists and dignitaries. Some of those rooms are amazing. My quarters do not justify the word “amazing,” but they aren’t bad.
In any case, this place is a major improvement over the boarding school in Montana that Terra shipped me off to after my parents died. Some kind of tough-love dude-ranch high school for troubled kids called Distant Drummer Academy. I wasn’t troubled—unless you count being orphaned overnight—and I wasn’t in high school, but Terra provided them with a nice diagnosis of severe ODD. And a hefty donation.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Yeah, I can do that.
I lasted eight days.
After they kicked me out, Terra gave me two options: I could live at her place, or I could live at Spiker.
We both knew which one I’d choose.
I have a single room, but it’s big enough for a queen-sized bed and a sofa, TV, desk, beanbag chair, and mini kitchen. Except for the two framed photos on my desk, it’s as sterile as a hotel room. I like it that way.
I barely notice the photos anymore. There’s one of my parents at a podium, my mom in a shimmering green evening gown, my dad in a tux. They’re accepting an award, flashing smiles. And there’s one of me and my mom reading a book together. We’re in some kind of waiting room, sitting on orange vinyl chairs. I don’t remember where it was, or why we were there.
But then, I don’t remember much of anything.
Next to the mini kitchen is a small bathroom. That’s where I strip down, soap up, and shower off.
That’s where I start thinking about the girl.
Like I don’t know her name: the girl. Please, Solo. I know her name. Evening. E.V. to her friends.
Eve.
There’s a problem with that name, Eve. You say “Eve” and you think Garden of Eden, and then you think of Eve and Adam, naked but tastefully concealed by strategic shrubbery.
Eve and Adam Page 2