Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  Comprehending biology on this level, or at least comprehending the concepts behind it, made the whole world come alive for him. Eating a pear, he could feel its cells bursting against the roof of his mouth. Touching Janelle’s skin, holding Nicholas naked against his chest, he could feel the movement of molecules, the energy of their friction. Their, dare he think it, kinetic energy.

  On the second of January at eight o’clock in the evening, he walked into Greenway Plaza Lab 301 and stopped, startled. A twentysomething kid was standing at the metal bench, destroying a green apple.

  Shane extended his hand. “Shane Oberest. Can I help you?”

  “Hey,” the guy said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “Jeff Healy.”

  “Jeff, how did you get in here?”

  “I work here.”

  The kid reached into a pocket, produced a phone, and held it up. Shane squinted at an e-mail.

  “I’m supposed to meet Doctor Prajuk Acharn?” he mispronounced both names.

  Healy seemed in the lower five-feet range and looked to be a serious weightlifter. He was possessed of menacing eyes and acned cheeks and shoulders. Shane suspected him of steroid abuses.

  Some awkward minutes later, Prajuk arrived in a short-sleeved white shirt and clapped his hands, grinning. It struck Shane that this was a different Prajuk than he had seen before. Upbeat, confident; he could envision him leading a team of bioresearchers.

  “Shane, this is Jeff Healy. Our postdoc.”

  “We met.”

  “Do you know how to Atkins a gene?” he asked Healy, walking to the bench.

  “No worries.”

  Shane stepped forward, wanting to stay included. “What’s that mean?”

  Prajuk lifted up the vector from the table. “The gene on the fourteenth chromosome, with the protein which produces alpha-one antitrypsin, is in this solution. A gene is full of carbohydrates and cellular matter, and we must strip these things away, to isolate the protein inside.”

  “Eliminate the carbs,” Healy underscored.

  “Oh, Atkins,” Shane whistled. “I get it.”

  He watched closely as Prajuk held up the vector.

  Healy cocked his head. “You look like you’ve never seen a human gene before.”

  Prajuk and Healy bent over the vector, chatting offhandedly. Shane felt as he had as a boy when Caleb and Fred went running ahead up the long road. He was a spectator; this was as close as he might get.

  In the parking lot later, Prajuk held a Parliament an inch from his lips in his fist and inhaled loudly under the night sky.

  “How much does he know?” Shane asked.

  “He thinks this is a Helixia project, that we rent outside space for overflow.”

  “How much am I paying him?”

  “Three hundred a week. Plus gas. I am very careful with company money, especially since the company is you.”

  “Much appreciated.” Shane took a breath and pushed a hand through his hair. “So, when should I tell Caleb to bring the baby here?”

  “Three months? Maybe four. It depends on our mouse.”

  “Four months feels like a long time.”

  “A minute can feel like a long time.”

  Shane nodded and stretched his back. He supposed that was as true as anything.

  • • • • • • •

  Isolating the protein took a week.

  They had developed a rhythm. Shane arrived after work with food from Thai Orchard. Healy, his headphones on, accepted it with a nod and remained bent over his solutions. Once, Shane glanced at his iPod and was surprised to see club music. It seemed to him that the relentless beats would be aggravating to someone patiently stripping molecules from strands of DNA. It seemed to require more of an ambient kind of deal. But though he maintained his Facebook account on a laptop at all times and stopped to text every few minutes, Healy kept up. Neither he nor Prajuk wore lab coats, Shane noticed. Other than their latex gloves, there was no sense of reverence; this was just work for them. Though to Shane it was a miracle.

  One night over noodles, Healy showed him the process. He opened a flask. Inside was a liquid that looked to Shane like apple juice.

  “It’s media,” Healy explained.

  “What’s media?”

  “Just dead bacterial cells and sterile water. We place it in this shaker. Throw it in a plasmid. Spin it down in the centrifuge.” He switched on the shaker.

  “Like a margarita,” Shane smiled.

  “I wish. Over the next couple of days, when the culture grows turbid, we’ll break the cells open, and wash out the purified protein.” He gestured toward a collection of pink petri dishes. “Transect it onto an E. coli cell, where it will multiply.”

  “E. coli?” Shane asked, casting a worried glance at the petri dishes on the bench.

  “Here’s the secret of it all, bro. Everything bad has a good, and everything good has a bad. The gene that makes people dwarfs also makes them immune to mumps. You have to look at both sides. E. coli takes over your body and kills you horribly. But it also permits itself to be transferred peacefully into any organism as a carrier. Disabled E. coli is one of the bacteria we use most.”

  Shane shook his head in awe. For fifteen years he had been selling the products of pharmaceutical chemical labs, never appreciating the artistry of biotechnology.

  “Got to piss.” Healy stood up from the bench. “Don’t let it eat your face while I’m gone.”

  During these weeks, Shane lived in a euphoric state. In the mornings, he looked out of their window at the bay sky and let himself feel part of the energy Caleb summoned in Boulder. He had spent his whole life watching his brother’s back, a shadow of sweat spreading across his dark green T-shirt. In middle school he would step into new classrooms and wonder if Caleb had sat at this desk. He ran the high school track imagining Caleb’s feet falling in the same lanes. Now, after all of this time, he felt finally connected with Caleb, through the simple act of breathing air. He wondered if it had always been this easy.

  The sublimity of the lab was always with him. Like an adulterer, Shane invented after-hours meetings to explain his late arrivals home to Janelle. His heart battled itself: when he stayed there to work, he suffered an avalanche of guilt for not having seen Nicholas before he fell asleep. What kind of father was he? But on the nights he did go straight home, he felt a separation anxiety from the lab which he could not quite bear. During his drive back to the city he would experience wild swings of exuberance and depression, a simultaneous sense of oncoming glory and approaching catastrophe.

  In mid-January, Shane opened his front door to find Janelle sitting at their dining room table, waiting for him with a serious look. He sat down wondering if he carried a scent of the lab.

  “I’m quitting,” she told him.

  Shane exhaled slowly, nodding.

  As he listened to her, Shane attempted to fight off huge waves of terror. This was no time to give up her salary and benefits. He might be caught and fired by Helixia any day. He reminded himself that this was the woman he had pursued even while she was fully committed to an all-consuming job, had slowly won over during stolen camping weekends, and waited for on Sunday nights after her endless dinners with her parents just to catch a quick drink, for whom he had videotaped a tree she adored from her last apartment window, and projected it onto their wall. Now she wanted to stay in their home, to take care of their son. This, of course, should have been all that he wanted.

  “Okay,” he said, watching her face. “Whatever you need.”

  She was crying. “Okay.”

  “So, we’re down to one paycheck,” he reminded her. “And only my insurance.”

  “Don’t fuck up at work.” She kissed his cheek.

  He knew he had to tell her. The burden of his secret now fell upon her too. This was the moment, befo
re she executed her decision, while there was still time.

  During a brief interior struggle, he realized how telling her now could come off as some kind of emotional blackmail, to guilt her into not quitting. She might resent him, and the whole project, for interceding now. So he let it pass. This weekend, he promised himself. But the weekend passed as well.

  • • • • • • •

  The whir of the centrifuge was proof of their progression. He watched Healy graft their protein—for now it belonged to all of them, he felt—onto the E. coli viruses on the pink petri dishes, and Prajuk transfer this work into a small millimeter Eppendorf tube and place it into the freezer. Each run produced a thimble full of clear liquid, which might mean six months of life for Lily.

  If it worked. Which they would only know when their genetically modified mouse arrived.

  On a Tuesday toward the end of the month, Healy burst in fiddling frustratedly with his phone. “They can make these things do anything you want, but they can’t make headphones that don’t get tangled?”

  He tossed it into his backpack and washed up in the stainless steel sink. Then he took a Clif bar from his pocket and walked over to have a look at the centrifuge.

  “How long’s it been doing that?”

  Shane raised his eyebrows. He was alone in the room while Prajuk had gone out for food. “Doing what?”

  “Making that”—he waved the protein bar in the air— “sound.”

  “I don’t know.” He listened. The whir did seem a little labored. “Is it bad?”

  Healy grunted and moved over to the machine. He pressed its power button off and gingerly lifted its top.

  “Oh fuck.”

  Shane stood up and peered over his shoulder.

  Healy narrowed his eyes, lifting out something small and jagged. “Glass.”

  “Did a vial break?”

  Ignoring him, Healy carefully examined the inside bin with his fingertips. “This thing,” he whistled, “is fucked heinously.”

  Prajuk returned carrying three styrofoam containers of fried rice. His lips compressed and released like a young boy’s fist as he examined the centrifuge.

  “How long will it take to get a new one?”

  Shane realized the question was addressed to him, the money man, the producer, the fixer. He blinked.

  “Well, it took six weeks for this one to get here. Is there a repair shop?”

  “A repair shop?” Healy shook his head. “We can ship it back to where you got it and wait for a replacement.”

  “We can’t wait six weeks.” Shane heard Lily’s sharp breaths in the whir of the crippled motor. “Do they have some others at your school?”

  “Centrifuges?” Healy laughed. “Sure, they leave them lying next to the Porsches.”

  Prajuk let out a phlegmy cough as he walked suddenly out of the lab. By the time Shane looked up, he was already out by the elevators.

  Healy shrugged and nodded at the three containers of fried rice Prajuk had placed on the bench. “No thanks.”

  Healy stood and took them all.

  13

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Winter raged against the wooden planks of the house.

  At night the sound of it trying to get in through the walls, pushing, scratching, like wolves, kept Caleb awake on his mattress.

  But for all its discomforts, the Happy Trails Running Club seemed in good temper; most of them loved winter. Running in the daily new powder was akin to running on sand. The extra effort strengthened their calves and lungs and hearts.

  Caleb pulled on double layers of waterproof socks, fleece head gear, his Houdini shell, hat and goggles, and went downstairs to the back door to wait for everyone. Only June and Lily were missing. Caleb glanced around nervously. This was strange; morning was prime playing time for the baby. She adored crawling over seventeen prone bodies, everyone tickling her, holding socks, her favorite things, out to her. He turned to go look upstairs for them when Mack emerged from his room, his arms spread out triumphantly. He wore a small pine green hooded sweatshirt, his azure eyes beatific.

  “ABC is covering the Yosemite Slam,” he shouted, clapping his hands. “They pulled it from ESPN, gave it to their big guns.”

  Everyone stopped and gazed at him. Caleb watched him with awe. He had set himself a goal, to establish Happy Trails as the premier ultrarunning organization in America, with a televised event. And he had accomplished this in under seven months.

  “They’ll have ten cameras stationed along the course.” He spoke animatedly, rushing around the open main room like a dervish in a tie-dye. “Get this, they’re going to fly a helicopter over the densest parts, to get aerial footage of everyone climbing Half Dome. Then they’re going to edit it to four hours and air that on a Saturday in summer, and show the whole thing online.”

  Kyle, Juan, and John laughed and high-fived. Mack was smiling fully, his small arms literally shaking.

  “You know what we need?” Alice asked loudly. “Team shirts!”

  “Team goddamn shirts!”

  “What color, Vive?” shouted Leigh.

  Aviva smiled. Caleb had noticed a change in her mood since Rae had been expelled, a darkening sadness, but this seemed to draw her out.

  “Pink?”

  Makailah and Alice cheered, “Pink for everyone!”

  Young Ryan called, “Screw that. Yellow and green, like Brazil. That shit’s awesome.”

  “White,” John added, “will keep us coolest.”

  “And match your hair,” Makailah laughed.

  John ran his hand over his crew cut head, nodding happily.

  Mack raised his voice, “‘Colorado men are we! From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus! From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!’”

  They all shouted the last line excitedly. Caleb felt Aviva’s eyes on him.

  “What about you, Caley? What color should our shirts be?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Caleb told them, adjusting his goggles. “Let’s just run.”

  • • • • • • •

  Many times, when he was sure he could not be seen from another point in the cold, snowy woods, Caleb would break from the trail.

  Then he would double back through the white firs, dodging the quicksand of powder and roots, until he reached a spot in the wilderness that he had marked with an old yellow sweatshirt.

  There he would slide down the incline of the mountain, to a back road which wound in serpentine circles. He would run this west for ten miles. At the end he would reach a cluster of cheap houses, where the undocumented off-the-books workers lived. No stores, or town, just these twenty thinly constructed houses, and a low-budget playground.

  It possessed an old chipped red seesaw, two infant and full-size swings on rusted chains, and a straight metal slide that burned skin in the summer sun and was covered in ice now. Behind them the red and brown houses popped against the white world.

  This was his secret place, where he met June and Lily. When she had the good fortune to swing next to another baby, Lily would conjure a thin-lipped smile that lit her whole being. She would reach for them, emit sounds of such loveliness that he stopped feeling the icy winds and lost himself completely.

  The first time Caleb had met them here, bathed in sweat and breathing loudly, a Mexican teenager had gone to get her boyfriend, a lithe kid with green prison tattoos along his shaved scalp. Since then, Caleb had slowed down to a walk a good mile before the playground, to try to appear normal.

  He found June pushing Lily slowly on a creaky swing. The baby was dressed in a worn pink coat from Goodwill and a white fleece hat with ear flaps, both of which seemed too large for her. She was so thin, he saw, anything would look big. It was very cold, and they were alone. An em
pty playground, Caleb felt, is a sad thing.

  When Lily saw him, she sang the syllables of his name: “Cay-cay.”

  Since Mack had ordered their separation, Caleb had spent less time holding her, stroking her cheek, inhaling her milky breath, and he worried that their bond might be thinning. Her hair was changing, its red evolving into a strawberry blonde, and growing longer. A cleft seemed to be retreating from her chin.

  “Hey, Lulu,” Caleb hollered, letting the vowels linger into silliness. She looked away demurely, and he laughed.

  But June wasn’t smiling. In her fleece and sky blue mittens she looked uncomfortable, her face was creased and distant. Now that he was standing still, the full chill of February hit him.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said quietly.

  He smiled.

  “I’m not doing it.”

  “Not doing what?”

  “I’m not taking Lily to your brother.”

  Caleb’s eyes darted to Lily nervously. “Why?”

  “You know,” June began in a new breezy voice like an overrehearsed anchorwoman, “Shane’s going to tell us about some chemical that he wants to put into her, how much of a miracle it is. But Buddhist monks live to be a hundred without ever taking any medicine.”

  Caleb smiled calmly. He understood now. “You talked to Mack about it.”

  She pushed a strand of hair away from her mouth with her gloved hand and frowned. “Even if Mack said he would buy us plane tickets today, I don’t think it’s right.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He’s worried about you.”

  “What else?”

  Her voice got harsher. “He told me how these drug companies shoot people up with drugs they know nothing about, just to learn if there are horrible side effects. How they give babies drugs for adults just to make them be quiet.”

  He shook his head; she was even using Mack’s inflections now.

  “Mack’s the one who can help her.” She pointed to him. “He healed your knee. And Kevin’s diabetes.”