Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

“But he’s not helping her, Bluebird. She’s the same as when you came here. It’s been ten months.”

  “She’s not getting worse. He’s saving her every day.” Her voice wavered and tears began slipping silently from her eyes.

  “Is that what he’s saying?”

  “I’m so lucky Mack took us in. How many people show up here, and he turns them all down? But he accepted us. Without him, we’d be living in some studio apartment in Taos, I’d be working in the bar all day, with some day care watching Lily. I love you, Caley, but I didn’t come here for you.”

  A sudden shortness of breath caused his chest to contract. Behind June, Lily’s swing had slowed, and she sat still, waiting for them to notice. A sharp wind blew through the playground, rustling the ends of her reddish hair. All she had in this life was her mother, he understood that. All decisions were June’s to make.

  “If staying here is what you think’s right for Lily, then that’s what you do. It’s simple. You’re her mother.”

  June was watching him closely.

  He met her soft eyes. “I love her.”

  June took a long breath. The sun shifted behind the smoke-white sky, and June lifted Lily out of the plastic swing. They carried her across the playground to a snow-covered slide. Caleb brushed it clean of ice and crouched at its bottom, waiting for Lily’s laughing face. He felt, in this cold morning, like he imagined a family would. This could be enough, perhaps, to sustain him for some time.

  When Lily grew tired, June loaded her back into Mack’s Jeep, and Caleb kissed them each on their foreheads. Something hard and ruinous was forming in his stomach.

  He turned and began his four-hour run, ten miles along the wintry road, a backcountry climb up the side of the snow-packed mountain, and another twenty miles through the ice-covered trails, back home.

  PART THREE

  Knockouts

  1

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Good night, Doctor Acharn,” Yasmine El-Fayed waved to Prajuk.

  Yasmine was his youngest microbiologist, an expert splicer who had come to him from Amgen. Usually, Prajuk made time to talk with her, wanting to keep tabs on the mood in the lab. Tonight he barely heard her.

  When the door closed behind Yasmine, Prajuk glanced around the empty room. In stark contrast to the small room Shane had rented, Helixia’s labs were immense and immaculate. Stainless steel benches, sparkling glass beakers and vials, temperature controlled, and videotaped with three cameras at all times. The leftover molecules of chemicals, media, and the people who had been standing together all day in the room, along with the occasional mouse, were dissipated by an eight-million-dollar air-filtration system. The work done here continued even after the human beings departed, as the bacterium, the spores, the virus cells, reproduced, multiplied, spread in their petri dishes.

  It was ten at night. Down the long corridor doors opened and closed. Prajuk composed himself and produced a beige key card from his shirt pocket. At the far end of the corridor, he pressed it and his forefinger against a plastic rectangle, which read his fingerprint and card code, emitted a clicking sound, and popped the storage-room door open.

  Swallowing nervously, Prajuk went inside. A small desk, normally occupied by a short Honduran kid with a perpetually runny nose, sat empty, and Prajuk walked into the stockroom unhindered. Petri dishes stood in circular towers like stacked coffee-cup lids. Cardboard boxes full of test tubes, microscope filters and lenses, latex gloves, 3M masks, lots of stuff from 3M actually, were shelved to overflow. Prajuk moved past them to the heavy equipment. On one side of the wall were two top-loading centrifuges.

  They were squat boxes, like small washing machines, the size of a desktop computer. Prajuk considered them for a few seconds, judging their weight. On Sunday he had done something to his lower back while jogging past the Marina Safeway. He exercised a deep squat, as they had taught him in the Khon Kaen gymnasium of his youth, placed his hands on the side of a centrifuge, slid them under, and lifted.

  Carefully Prajuk carried the centrifuge to the door and glanced again at the desk. Should he leave a note? Sign for it somehow? He determined that his need for a centrifuge was impossible to justify; better to hope it would not be missed. He pushed the door open with his foot and started down the long, quiet hall, perspiring noticeably.

  Prajuk decided to take the stairs; there was little chance that he would run into anybody there. He stumbled with the heavy instrument for a flight and set it down, promising himself a cigarette upon completion. Then he lifted it again and finally pushed through the heavy door into the lobby of the Research building. Here was where he might be required to provide some explanation. But he met only the evening security guard, who said nothing as Prajuk set the centrifuge down and scanned his card. The benefits, Prajuk swallowed, of long-term employment.

  Outside, he had difficulty spotting his car. A deep chill blew off the ocean. Why had he not worn his coat? His fingers began to burn. Soon they would numb, he thought, and he would drop the damn thing and break his foot. He was running out of bicep strength, and his lower back was protesting in a way it was now impossible to ignore. Sweat poured between his shoulder blades. In his pocket was his car key, with its red panic button, and Prajuk would have stopped to depress it but for the attention it would turn on him. Finally he spotted the white Volvo he had driven for almost a year a few rows away. He had just about reached it when he heard a voice.

  “Doctor Acharn?”

  Prajuk turned around and did not see, as he had briefly visualized, three armed Thais in black turtlenecks aiming assault weapons.

  It was Jon Benatti, the Assistant Director of Science, and Anthony Leone’s deputy.

  Benatti approved budgets for equipment, raises, and new hires, though not the hires themselves, which was Anthony’s province. Benatti’s thin blond hair was combed over a balding patch, accentuating an elongated face and jaw. Prajuk set the big beige box down on the pavement, and to his horror its top popped open.

  “Good to see you,” Benatti smiled affably. He glanced down at the centrifuge.

  Prajuk nodded, sweating. “Yes.”

  “How’s Emerion going?”

  “Oh quite well,” Prajuk explained brightly. “This thing, it always goes slowly but we hope to be in Phase One this quarter.”

  “Taking your work home with you?”

  It might be best, he felt, to act as if he did this every night. “What do you hear about Roche?” he asked Benatti casually. Rumors were flying that a joint research project with the European giant might be extended. Some rumors went as far as an approaching takeover bid.

  Benatti gave him a poker face. “Over my head. Have you asked Anthony?”

  “This thing is exactly what I tell people.” Prajuk tried to smile.

  Benatti touched his shoulder quickly and lightly in that odd American way; there was always a need in Americans, Prajuk noted, to show both sides. Many new arrivals from foreign lands sought his advice as to working in the States. When Americans smile and touch you, he answered, beware.

  “Need some help getting that in your car?”

  “It’s the only exercise I’ll get today,” Prajuk said, popping the trunk.

  He grunted as he placed the centrifuge gingerly beside his dry cleaning and a quilt-wrapped painting of a beach. Benatti kept staring at it. He clearly wanted to ask more, but Prajuk kept moving.

  “See you,” he said, shutting the trunk. He rubbed his shoulders to communicate his discomfort in the cold as he walked to the driver’s door, hoping even Jon Benatti would realize it rude to keep him longer. He got in, fired the engine, and eased out of the lot. He spent a long time watching his rearview mirror, where Benatti stared after him. Then he drove to Greenway Plaza.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Healy asked him when he walked in.

  Prajuk placed h
is car keys on the bench. His shirt was wet, his mouth dry.

  “There is a centrifuge in the trunk. White Volvo.”

  Healy nodded and grabbed the keys. When he was gone, Prajuk sat down on a stool and placed his head between his hands.

  • • • • • • •

  Janelle left Helixia for good on the final Friday of January.

  Her team threw her a nice party in the lunchroom, with boutique cupcakes and sparkling wine. Shane had attended and brought flowers. Her manager pulled her aside and reminded her that she could come back anytime. They all understood that this was not out of the realm of possibility. Janelle had been working since the sixth grade; they all sensed the potential for a serious reversal.

  Driving her home, the car packed with office photographs and CDs, she seemed relieved, but Shane felt a nearly overwhelming anxiety. Everything had changed now; it was all his responsibility. And Prajuk was stealing centrifuges.

  Shane promised to be home by eight every night to help out with Nicholas; twice he made it. But Janelle was not used to being housebound, and taking the baby to classes and museums did not satisfy her need to be out among people. He sensed the tension building weeks before she did.

  Just before Valentine’s Day, Shane sped back from the airport after a sales trip to Portland. It was nine o’clock at night. He had drunk an airport coffee too late, and now he was jittery. He parked poorly on Bay Street, opened the front door, and almost collided with Janelle, who was dressed in a sleek gray sweater and dark jeans. Her lips had been painted a matte red, her eyes brushed with blue, and she looked flawless to him. He started to put his arms around her waist.

  Janelle pulled back, frowning. “Don’t. I’m late,” she said, car keys in her hand. “I’ve been waiting for you. Nicholas has some stuff in his nose. Use the aspirator.”

  “Aspirator? Where are you going?”

  “I’m meeting Shia for a drink. I need to get out of this house.”

  “Okay, well, give me a minute? I just need to change clothes and . . .”

  “I’ve been on all day.”

  “What have I been, off?” Shane stood in the doorway flustered.

  “I know what you did today. You had a decent lunch with some doctors while you talked about Sorion. You had a beer on the airplane. You can handle a baby.”

  “You have no idea what I’m doing,” he told her heatedly, the caffeine pushing his heart rate. He walked into their house, where Nicholas was indeed crying from his crib.

  Janelle followed him, her heels clicking on the wood floors. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, just go. Have fun.”

  “What do I have no idea about?”

  He knew from her tone of voice that he had triggered a process which would not end quickly. Or particularly well.

  “We can talk later,” he tried anyway, starting for the stairs. Nicholas seemed to have stopped shrieking, but his own head was throbbing.

  “We talk now.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’ve been working late constantly for months. What are you doing that I don’t know about, Shane?”

  He sat down on the bottom stair, gazing up at her. And then he told her everything.

  He started with Prajuk explaining his team’s discovery. He told her about Prajuk’s interest in his idea to produce just enough of a drug for one person. About renting the lab, and how it worked there. But he was defensive and wired, and he ruined it. He had so wanted to tell her about this softly, proudly, when the drug was finished, when it was all beautiful. Instead, Janelle stood in their living room, her mouth falling open, while he rambled.

  “You idiot,” she whispered.

  In all of his life with her, Shane had never seen this expression on her face.

  “What?”

  “You can’t do this to us.”

  “Do this?” He cocked his head. “What’s ‘this’?”

  “They’ll throw you in jail.”

  “Who will throw me in jail, honey?”

  She was shaking in the movements of an adagio. “Anthony Leone. Steven Poulos. Walter Pietrowski will have you renditioned to a fucking Syrian prison.”

  “They’ll never know about this.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Jesus.”

  He stood up, spoke with a passion he felt emanating from somewhere deep. “Imagine if Nicholas couldn’t breathe. And someone saw a way to save him? Okay? Can you imagine that? What would you expect that person to do?”

  “Please,” Janelle said in a deeply mocking tone; immediately it became the worst thing she had ever said to him.

  “If I didn’t pursue this, what would that make me?”

  “A father and a husband. Which you won’t be in prison.”

  “Prison for what?”

  “For theft,” she whispered harshly enough that he felt her breath upon his cheek. “Of physical and intellectual property. For making a drug without any license. I can just see you, holed up in some lab like a high school kid making meth, thinking you’re not going to get caught.” Her mouth wrinkled in disgust.

  “It’s not as wrong as selling an antidepressant that I know doesn’t work to every pediatrician in Mill Valley. And I did that for years.”

  “That was legal.”

  “Look,” Shane nodded. “We’re the only ones who know about it. Me and Prajuk. None of us are tweeting about it. There is no threat to us.”

  “Until Caleb’s girlfriend, who you don’t even know, posts it on her Facebook page.”

  “She doesn’t seem like she updates hers very often,” he replied with sarcasm.

  Janelle stared at him. “It only takes one.”

  He punched his thigh in frustration, “I asked Dineesh. I asked Anthony. I wrote a request for a grant application. I did everything the right way. They said no. I’m going to help this little girl, Janelle. I am going,” he repeated slowly, “to help her.”

  “Shane,” she whispered to herself.

  “So I did it myself. And I’m proud of it, actually. Anyway,” he exhaled, “we’re almost done.”

  “How can you be almost done? The approvals will take six or seven years.” She stared at him. “Oh God, Shane.”

  There was nothing to say at this point, he recognized.

  “You’re not filing this with FDA?”

  “This protein has already gone through testing as part of the Airifan trials. It was approved.”

  “In babies?”

  He swallowed.

  “Airifan was tested on children with asthma. Not newborns. You could kill her. This baby. You could kill her.”

  Shane spoke in a lower voice. “If this was Nicky, and we could cure him, you’d be driving me to that lab every night at a hundred miles an hour.”

  She hesitated then. From upstairs, Nicholas wailed again. Shane seized the opportunity to get off of the staircase. Upstairs, Nicholas was asleep; he’d been having a nightmare. Shane bent over him, stroked his black hair. At what age, he wondered, does the world become so imposing that fear manifests in dreams? He had hoped it would be later than six months.

  He returned downstairs to Janelle, who was curled on the couch, crying.

  “Bad dream,” he explained.

  She looked up at him. “Make it better.”

  2

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  All February, Caleb trained in the snow.

  The mountains had received enough snow to turn the trails sallow. The expanse of pure white powder came up to his knees, his hips, sometimes his chest. It acted as resistance, like training in water. He welcomed it, choosing paths where he saw no footprints except a mule deer’s, or the slithering impression of a milk snake.

  Running across the snowpack was risky; danger lay in its blinding white. In the thick roots that hid under
neath it like pythons. In the sharp rocks camouflaged in gentle sparkles. In the fearsome cold that could disorient as the beauty of the sunlit snow beckoned him farther and farther away from the roads.

  Up in Boulder, people ran their daily five miles equipped with thermal gloves, expensive microfiber jackets, iPhones tucked into specially designed zippered pouches. Caleb disappeared into the backcountry wearing only his light Houdini pants and jacket, plastic goggles, an old fleece hat. In the shade, bitter wind blew shards of ice across his lips. Even under the sun the cold bore its way into his bones. But avoidance of pain was never Caleb’s intent. Only avoidance of suffering.

  Over the past decade he had successfully extracted any emotional confusion from his life. Jobs, career, family, the expectations of the world, were all like forgotten high school friends. But now, like a patient in remission who with horror senses his symptoms returning, Caleb felt a range of sharp emotions rising up; emotions he thought he had put aside forever.

  He ached for June. He ached for her like he had for the heartbreaks of his youth. He ached for her with a desperation that pulled him back from every forward step. He ached for her in a way that affected his posture, his breathing, his heart rate, his clarity of mind upon these icy paths. Even while he slept, he ached. He dreamt of his first months with her, his hours in the fields and the back room at O’Neil’s, and awoke in an agony that no strained quadriceps could touch.

  Instead of floating in the void, he was constantly thinking of her, where she might be, whom she could be with, and therefore also unbearably conscious of the ripping in his sinews, the lactic acid burning his muscles, the white flame in his lungs, the cold torturing the exposed skin of his face.

  And yet he could not stop.

  His need was like a living being running beside him, jeering his attempts to return to his previous state. He could smell its funk. He heard its breathing in his room at night, and behind the trees on the trails. No matter how he begged, it would not leave him alone. And so he suffered, day and night, in a way far worse than any cold or ruined ligament.