Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  “Now, we spoke about this, Caley. I don’t know how many times.”

  “He’s got something for the baby. Can you get them to San Francisco? If I know they’re there, I can . . . I can focus.”

  Caleb felt a crackle of fission inside his cornea, and Mack took his hand away, studied his eye. Above, Caleb saw the floating presence of a ferruginous hawk.

  “Are you negotiating with me, Caley?”

  “No.”

  “Kind of sounds like, if I say yes, you’ll focus, and if I say no, you might not?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He felt confused. But as he blinked, his eye started to feel normal.

  “Your energy is building up again. Look how fast you’re healing. Most people would go to the hospital for something like that.” Mack took a step back, looking into him. “You were so depleted, dude. But since I pulled you away from June and Lily, your training is astronomical. Everything I’m coaching you to do is working. After Yosemite you’re going to be one of the elite athletes in our sport. And you’re back obsessed with them?”

  For the first time he could recall since he was a boy, Caleb felt tears running down his skin.

  “Okay, Caleb. I’ll bet you were a damn good consultant. Here’s a counteroffer. I think if Lily and June are off with your brother, you’ll be thinking about them even more than you are now. You’ll be wanting to know what’s going on, wanting to call them. And you will fail at Yosemite. So my offer is this: they stay here. You keep staying away from them. Think about nothing but the Slam. Win it. After that, if Lily’s not one hundred percent better, I’m not getting it done. You take them out to San Francisco and focus on them. Take as much time as you need. And then come back, open arms. Okay?”

  He took a shaky, deep breath. “Okay.”

  “In the meantime, nothing will happen to Lily under my care. She’s starting to crawl and move, which means she’s building up her stores of kinetic energy. Which I can build on.” Mack wiped Caleb’s tears with his thumb. “However. You just had your last day working in Boulder. You’re on lockdown until Yosemite. For the next six months, I don’t want you distracted by anything.”

  Caleb nodded.

  “So we don’t need to discuss this again?”

  “No, Mack. I get it.”

  “Well, then. It’s a deal.”

  Mack went past him, inside the house. When the door opened, Caleb heard the joyful sounds of his housemates, laughing, dancing, turning up the reggae on the ancient black boom box. He stayed out in the starlit snow, his whole body shaking, a shaking that would not go away, not even after he went back inside, no matter how close to the fire he could get.

  • • • • • • •

  On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Prajuk committed his first crime.

  Sitting in his small office, he casually slipped a thumb drive into his computer, exported the Airifan section of his gene library, and dropped the drive into his pants pocket.

  All afternoon he wondered how the rest of the world could not see it there, burning through the cotton. His hand slipped down into his pocket again and again, turning it over with his fingers like a nervous groom with a ring.

  At seven, his shirt damp with sweat, he drove down the highway to Greenway Plaza and pulled into a five-story-tall concrete building. He lit a Parliament and smoked it in his strange manner, holding it in his fist and sucking at the air. Then he stepped onto the elevator for the first time. On the third floor he emerged into a dim corridor and opened a door to Lab 301.

  He almost ran into a heavyset cable technician walking out. Broadband had been successfully installed. He glanced around the room. It was over-air-conditioned, and the sound of the giant ducts echoed through it. He could see that equipment was trickling in sporadically, and that Shane was not quite sure what to do with it all.

  The incubator had arrived first. It was refrigerator-white, square, small. Water baths, gel apparatuses, shakers came next. Ice buckets. Bunsen burners. Lab gloves.

  Shane had come straight from work to find them left in a pile by the locked door to Lab 301. He stacked them against the wall of the small room.

  The Promega gene kit arrived two days later. A heavy box called a centrifuge, which looked to Shane like a miniature washing machine. He opened the top and peered down at the round hole. Some miracle might take place there. He worried about contamination and quickly shut it.

  Metal stools came in next. Something called a flow hood, which Shane carried to a table and out of curiosity plugged in, revealing a purple light. He lost track of time in the windowless room, screwing the wheels onto three Aeron chairs long past Nicholas’s bedtime. Prajuk saw him removing a water bath from a rental box and looking around for the proper place to put it.

  “Here,” he offered, taking it to the long metal working counter, “like this.”

  Shane grinned at him. Already he had found himself growing emotionally attached to this room, its unused double sinks, its off-white walls.

  Prajuk slid the thumb drive into the rented Mac and exhaled shakily as his gene library appeared on its monitor. Then he surveyed the lab, his arms crossed.

  “This is how it will work.”

  A sense of approaching motion hung in the air.

  “This thing, alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency, is caused because the child was born with a gene switched off. We will isolate the protein that flips that switch on. Clone it. Grow it here. Make it therapeutic and inject it into the child. It will alter her DNA so that it instructs the gene to switch on. It’s not complicated.”

  “Of course not.”

  “This thing will be taught in sixth-grade biology class by the time your son is six.”

  “My sixth-grade biology teacher was a hippie slide guitarist,” Shane informed him.

  “They let anyone teach in American schools, don’t they?” Prajuk walked around the room, examining equipment. “Proteins march through our bodies like workers going into a city, flipping switches as they go. And the body responds. Many terrible diseases are simply workers flipping the wrong switch. Did the slide guitarist explain this to you?”

  “I might have been dissecting a fetal pig that day.”

  “Apologies. We did not have the luxury of using pigs for children’s experiments in my school.”

  “So, how do the genes know which switches to flip?”

  “The brain follows simple instructions in our DNA. You would guess this recipe for human existence is quite complicated, with millions of different steps?”

  “Sure.”

  “But there are only four.”

  Shane blinked.

  “T, C, A, and G are the only four nucleotides in DNA. Depending on the pattern of these four letters, you can grow a fin, glow, you can process logic, you’re a cat. And so on.”

  Shane leaned back, listening.

  “In an alpha-one antitrypsin deficient patient, there is a random disruption of the pattern in the DNA. Fixing it is fairly simple. We splice out the extra nucleotide, restoring the pattern that was intended.”

  Shane cocked his head playfully. “Intended by who? Are you getting all Intelligent Design on me?”

  “Ah,” Prajuk nodded seriously, stopping to look him in the eye. “That a pattern is intended is obvious from the fact that we share ninety to ninety-nine percent of our DNA with every living creature, and that our genes are interchangeable with all of them.”

  Shane felt a desire to prod him. “Then changing someone’s DNA means changing this pattern that was designed. Altering God’s plan sounds, you know, concerning.”

  Prajuk looked frustrated. “Do you have an ethical concern over a surgeon repairing a toddler’s cleft palate? Or removing a cancerous tumor? Or giving a feverish child some Tylenol?”

  “Of course I don’t,” Shane grinned.

  “You get pretty close to
this thing, Christian Scientists, if you follow that path of thinking. When we fix faulty genetic code, we are not altering a plan, we are returning it to its Creator’s intent.”

  Shane sat forward on the metal stool, his elbows pressing into his knees. His voice was hoarser, lower. “When I was a kid, I read about the Middle Ages, how people died from strep throat and ear infections. I thought, thank God I was born at the end of medicine, after all that’s been taken care of. Then I understood that we’re not at the end of medicine at all. We’re in the Middle Ages.”

  “The Dark Ages,” Prajuk told him. “We know almost nothing. Our treatments for just about every ailment are primitive. Two hundred years from now, people will be thinking how lucky they are not to have been born today. They’ll think of antibiotics the way we think of leeches. And radiation the way we think of bloodletting. Which might be healthier for us.” Prajuk looked around. “When is our mouse coming?”

  “Charles River says March.”

  “That’s good. This thing is looking possible, Shane.” He nodded, seeming pleased. His high voice seemed brighter. “What are you doing with your holiday?”

  Nicholas’s first Christmas would involve a long, dumpling-filled day at Liu and Hua’s, followed by an afternoon of watching football with Wenceslas and Cynthia. He could not wait to place a Santa hat on his head to the bewilderment of his five-month-old infant, to take those photos, to build those memories. To stand with Janelle and watch their sleeping infant and make love while Christmas music played. But Shane knew he would also feel an irresistible pull to drive back here and put more chairs together.

  Leaving the lab, Prajuk explained this feeling to him. “I watched Poulos go through this. I know what you feel. You feel like an entrepreneur.”

  But Shane knew a few entrepreneurs and felt this was not an accurate description. Those guys were driven by visions of houses in Beaver Creek and fame. Shane had no financial future at stake, and the mandatory anonymity made sure no one would ever know his name. His surges of euphoria and terror did not feel to him like an entrepreneur’s. They felt like he was losing his mind.

  The next afternoon, as he sat in his cubicle writing last month’s Sorion sales spreadsheets, Prajuk texted him to stop by the lab on his way home. It hadn’t mattered; he would have gone anyway.

  11

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Did you know,” Mack asked her, “that Caleb offered me a deal?”

  June rubbed her eyes. She had not slept well.

  She had lain still and watched her baby awaken. Lily was thin, and small, but whenever she woke, Lily’s face assumed a blend of wonder and confidence; try as she might, June could not recognize herself in it. She had recently grown a singular bottom tooth of astonishing bone white. But Caleb was right. Her breathing was no better.

  She was beginning to crawl, but when she got more than a foot away her eyes would narrow with strain, her wheeze would grow higher pitched, and inevitably one of their housemates would snatch her up and place her where she had intended to go. And she was deprived of the opportunity to reach it herself. It would be like having someone lift you up at eighty miles and carry you to the finish line, June thought. It wasn’t right.

  Downstairs at breakfast, Ryan rolled Lily a balled white sock. A mischievous smile overtook her face, as she dragged herself forward, made it, squeezed the sock between small fingers, and brought it to her lips.

  “Don’t stress, it’s clean. I only wore it three times.”

  June started laughing.

  The door to Mack’s room opened, and he walked out yawning. Mack was only five feet five, which always took her by surprise; whenever he came into a room, her first instinct was to look up, and she would have to adjust. This morning he wore a red Marlboro sweatshirt and black running shorts, his shaggy black beard bunched in varying directions. He walked over to Lily, a bemused smile on his face. He knelt by her, watching her play. Then he looked up, smiling.

  “How’s the day looking, Ms. June?”

  “Great. I’m cleaning three apartments by Dushanbe. Do you want me to pick up anything?”

  “Sencha would be great.” Mack sat down beside Lily. “How is she?”

  “It was a rough night actually.”

  Mack put his hand up the back of Lily’s oversized yellow Goodwill shirt, flattened his palm on her back, and shut his eyes. “Teddy Roosevelt was born with severe asthma. Couldn’t walk without wheezing. His father made him hike up hills for miles, and they didn’t have trail shoes then either. He went from a sickly child to a bulked up motherfucker. The kinetic energy turned his body on. He was wrestling broncos and charging up hills before long.” He paused, watching her. That was when he asked about the deal.

  June squinted. “I don’t know about any deal.”

  “I figured he had your approval?”

  “Caleb didn’t tell me anything like that.”

  “I’m going into town. Why don’t you ride with me? We’ll talk about it in the car.”

  • • • • • • •

  The Jeep moved evenly through the snowpack. To her north, June watched Lone Eagle rise behind the sun. Somewhere out there, she knew, there were people moving along its trails.

  “I’m going to Fadden’s,” Mack said. “You need anything for Lily? A rattle? One of those ladybugs?”

  “Sure,” June smiled. “She’d love that.”

  “She’s getting so big,” Mack said. “Our little girl.”

  “Our girl,” June repeated softly.

  “Hell of a family she has, right? Seventeen people?”

  Mack slowed at the Oradell light, idling. Then he turned and looked at her with the full force of his visage. “Why would you ever want to take her away from them?”

  June’s mouth opened. But Mack was looking back at the road, driving slower now that they were in town. Outside she noticed the flannel jackets, wool hats, and beige work boots of the people who lived here. Many of them worked in Boulder or Denver, if they were lucky enough to be working at all.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Caleb says you want to leave here, because Shane has some specialist in San Francisco? Specialists,” Mack muttered, “like they’re special.”

  A cold shiver ran through her body.

  “Let me tell you, doctors are employees of drug companies. They get them out of medical school when they’re loaded with debt, and they sign them up for fucking life. To make their side money these doctors prescribe infants powerful psychotropic drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin, sometimes three or four of them at a time. They tell their parents it’s so they sleep through the night, cry less. And these dumbass parents are thrilled to give these drugs developed to treat schizophrenics to their babies. And then they’re shocked to discover they have drug-addicted, psychotic teenagers on so many drugs it’s impossible to ever get them back to baseline.” Mack tapped his temple. “They don’t follow the money, Junebug. These doctors sell out children for thousand-dollar kickbacks, and it’s not rare either. And you trust these people with Lily?”

  June began swallowing hard.

  “You’ve been there before. When they gave her steroids that almost gave her a heart attack.”

  She shook her head. “But Caleb’s brother . . .”

  “Shane doesn’t care about Lily. He cares about getting Caleb to leave here. Lily is his bait. And it’s working. Caleb is all torn up, he doesn’t know what to do.” Mack took a breath, and squinted. “Do you ever worry about him?”

  June flashed back to their run through Flagstaff, when out of nowhere Caleb had brought up missing his family. It had struck her as unlike him.

  “Sometimes,” she whispered.

  “More and more, myself. Listen to what he offered me.”

  A fear fluttered through her now, a coldness upon her skin.

  “
He wants you and Lily go to Shane, while he stays here. He said he’ll be more likely to win under those conditions.” Mack slowed to let a yellow light turn red.

  June’s mind was racing, spinning. “He’s just thinking about Lily.”

  “He needs to be thinking about Yosemite. Not his brother. Not his parents. Not Lily. And not you. It’s a dangerous race. If he’s running it thinking about anything at all except his body, he’s going to have another accident. And this time he won’t land on a shelf.”

  June inhaled sharply, her eyes reddening.

  “I mean, June, you must feel terrible. You came here because you were so worried about your daughter, and now, you’re worried about Caleb. It’s like everyone you care for gets to a place where they need worrying over. He was perfect until you met him, you know?”

  She started crying as he held her eye.

  “I want you to help me save him. And Lily. Because June, if you go to San Francisco, hand to God, he’s not the only one who’s going to die.” Mack touched his chest. “Shane’s drugs will kill Lily. I feel it. I understand it.”

  She stared at him as he pulled into Fadden’s parking lot. The tears came fast now.

  “You need to cut him off. You need to cauterize his infection.” He grinned. “Be right back with one ladybug.”

  When he pushed the door open, the cold flooded over her, and she understood right there how it would never stop.

  12

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  They began on the evening of December 27.

  Prajuk was a blur, running what seemed to Shane to be a decathlon of chemistry, moving from the microscope to the centrifuge to the computer. Shane felt like a nurse, handing him parts and equipment when asked.

  And he was following them fairly well. The 3-D images of twisting genetic code were still abstract and obtuse but lightening around the edges, starting to make more sense to him now. He found it fascinating to watch the manipulation of the basic blocks of life. Spinning them down, splicing them in new sequences. It was not science so much, he realized, as art.