She looked over at Steve Marcus, and trilled her fingers at him. He swung around and stalked back into the newspaper building.
"A journalist," she said. "How come a newspaper person didn't pick up on this?"
"If one of them thought they could win a prize or get a raise from writing about some little tourist dolphin place, they'd do it. Or if one of the Kennedys was involved somehow. But hey, fucking journalists don't get a lot of points for writing about the Roy Everlys of the world."
"Okay, let's say it's so. Just for the sake of argument. Then who the hell would want dolphin endorphins? What for?"
"Drug company, maybe. Someplace with scientists who know their way around a chemistry lab, looking for a cure for something. They send some lowlife out to get their raw ingredients. They can't get legal permission to trap and kill dolphins for their experiments, so they go where the dolphins are easy to steal."
"I don't know, Roy. Even if all that were true, how the hell would you find out who's doing it?"
"I got my feelers out. I should hear something the next couple of days."
"What kind of feelers?"
"Don't worry about it, Monica. This is my problem. I'm sorry I even came over here, bothered you with it. I just thought Thorn might want to know. That when you see him you could pass it on to him."
He started to stand, but Monica put her hand on his and he settled back onto the bench.
"You're being cautious, aren't you, Roy?"
"Sure I am."
"All this stuff on the Internet, thrashing around in public like that."
"Hey, Monica. I'm no dummy. I've been playing with computers since before you were born. I can talk to people all over the world and stay anonymous. Don't worry about it."
She stared out at the traffic.
"I don't like it. Somebody who'd kill dolphins like that, they aren't going to take kindly to some guy sniffing their trail. They hear you gaining on them, they could turn around, shoot you through the heart."
"Hey, let 'em shoot. What the fuck do I care?"
"Roy."
"It's not like I'm putting it up on a billboard, Monica. But I need to talk to specialists. I'm using my connections to find out what research companies might be doing work in that area, have some interest in that kind of drug. That's all. Harmless as that. Last piece of the puzzle."
"Maybe you should be talking to the police."
"A couple more days, I'll hear back from my contacts. If they know of any research going on out there, dolphins and endorphins, then I'll talk to the cops. Give them something solid, not a lot of speculation. So don't worry. I'm being very circumspect. I've thought this through. Only people I called were the ones I've already worked with a lot. People I know, friends, like."
"Who?"
"That professor at FIU and Dr. Wilson down in Key West. They're closer to the hard science end of things than I am. They study the research, know who's doing what with dolphins; they deal with the drug companies all the time. One of them'll come up with something, I'm sure of it."
"Just be careful, Roy. Promise me you won't take any chances."
"You worry too much, Monica. You're the one needs to calm down."
She stared at her shadow.
"Yeah, you're right," she said. "You're absolutely right."
CHAPTER 16
After Thorn stowed his clothes in his stark and gloomy room on the first floor of the pain clinic, he took the one-man elevator up to the third floor. Bean was waiting for him when the doors slid back to reveal a spacious and sunny set of rooms. Bean had rinsed his face, slicked back his thick blond hair, and put a small bandage on the cut on his forehead. Once again he had the scrubbed and well-tended look of prep school aristocracy. He'd changed into a fresh white polo shirt and faded jeans, and wore the same tennis shoes he'd had on earlier.
"I'm afraid you'll be displeased with your accommodations after you've seen mine. But actually it was more a question of money than pampering myself. I began restoring the house from the top down. Funds simply haven't permitted finishing the work. I've had to devote a good deal of my own capital to getting the clinic up and running."
His oak floors were freshly refinished and glowed golden. There were window seats in several of the windows, the cushions upholstered in lush tropical prints, oriental rugs and simple furniture fashioned out of thick planks of pine. Over the windows were gauzy white drapes that swayed in the breeze and gave the light a soft and faintly luxurious feel. But it was the photographs on the walls that dominated the room.
There must have been over a hundred framed black-and-white snapshots. Some had been blown up to more prominent sizes, but most were the blurry five-by-nines of ancient Kodak box cameras. And as Thorn rolled forward into the room he saw his own face everywhere. He and young Bean together.
Thorn and Bean in a skiff that had long ago rotted; Thorn and Bean at thirteen or fourteen, their snorkels and masks cocked up on their foreheads, both holding up matching lobsters while they treaded water miles offshore; Thorn and Bean scooched down in a pair of rattan chairs, with their heads bent over Hardy Boys mysteries. Another shot of the two boys shirtless with cutoff jeans hanging low on their hips as they wrestled atop a sand dune, a prairie of sea oats waving behind them.
Thorn circled the room and felt the soft, dizzy swirl of his boyhood arrayed before him, a hundred vivid moments in the sun. A hundred plucks on the tight string in his chest. Moments he barely recalled, the film in his own memory bleached to white. But here it was, the complete and unabridged edition of Thorn and Bean. The boys on water skis pulled in tandem behind Bean senior's old teak runabout. Another shot of them proudly holding up fish, Thorn's yellowtail a few inches smaller than Bean's hog snapper. Another crisp and sunny shot of Bean standing next to a hefty sailfish hanging at the docks at Bud and Mary's. A smiling Thorn on the other side of the fish, gripping the gaff he'd used to help land Bean's fish.
A hundred blinks of time framed and glassed in and pickled in silver—preserved far better than Thorn's brain had saved them. But as he stared at each of the photographs, the scene beyond the frames glimmered to life. Other friends, Thorn's adoptive parents, Bean's mother and father, all of them cropped out of this specialized collection. It was as though Bean and Thorn had lived alone on some desert island of boyhood, undisturbed by adults or rival chums. Bean and Thorn, Bean and Thorn. Two blond boys who wore the uniform of the Keys' perpetual summertime, torn shorts, shoeless, their bare backs and shoulders burned coffee dark, hair scorched and tousled. At ten or eleven the two of them had nearly identical bodies, but as time passed in the photographs on the wall, Thorn's body bulked up while Bean stayed slim and sinewy. Bean had never been a team-sport man. He had no use for weights and running, skipping rope, isometrics, the hundred grueling high school exertions Thorn's coaches had demanded. Thorn's muscles ripened, gaining at least twenty pounds on Bean as the photographs aged.
At the end of the exhibition on the far wall near the kitchen, there were a few shots in color. The boys were not grinning so readily anymore, a somber distance taking shape between them. There was one of Thorn and Bean about to race the length of Doc Wilson's saltwater pool. Bean with his long lean frame cocked, toes curled over the lip of the pool, setting up for his racing dive, while behind him Thorn aped for the camera, pretending to be about to shove Bean into the water. Bean won that race. As Thorn recalled, Bean had won most of the things they'd competed in. Serious and focused. Determined to prove his athletic skills were the equals of Thorn's or any of his friends who had embraced the silly theatrics of high school sports. And Bean was right. Developed in isolation, cultivated on his own, Bean's strength and speed and agility in all things physical was daunting. But what was absent from those last snapshots, missing in Bean's face and in the rapport between the two of them—in fact, what had started to quietly disappear from Bean's demeanor long before those final color snapshots, was any clear sense of pleasure in the moment. Thorn could see it now, see it wi
th the stark clarity of thirty years' distance—Bean Wilson had always been deadly serious about his fun, and for him, Thorn was never as much a friend as a rival.
"You probably don't remember most of these."
"This is weird, Bean. This is very weird."
"It's what Dad did instead of parenting. He took photographs. I believe he thought the two of us were brothers."
Bean offered Thorn a drink, which he declined. He was looking at one of the final color shots, the summer before Bean went off to that New England private school. The two of them were target shooting at a range in a palmetto scrub field that was now the parking lot of a Publix grocery store. Bean had been a poor shot. It was the only sporting endeavor he didn't excel in. Something about the noise, the kick of the pistol, the anticipation of that violent blast made him wince at the trigger pull, send his shot high again and again. Or maybe it was what he pictured down range, the target's concentric circles coalescing into some familiar face he could not bear to fire upon.
"By all outward signs," Bean said, "we had a fairly happy childhood. I look at these photographs and in a second I can travel back there. I'm on that skiff, on that sand dune. It's all still very alive for me."
Thorn nodded.
"Having the photographs on the wall seems to preserve it. My youth isn't gone. I don't have to grieve, be nostalgic, any of that. It's all right there, black and white, flesh and blood. None of it lost. I know that sounds demented, but I've found it's important to keep that time alive somehow. It's the golden place I go back to when things seem overwhelmingly bleak in the here and now."
"We had some fun."
"But then we had some pain as well, I suppose."
"Yes. There's always that."
Thorn rolled himself into a patch of sun, looked out the west window into the luminescent green depths of a banyan tree.
"You know a little about pain, don't you, Thorn?"
"I've been to the dentist," he said. "If that's what you mean."
"Now you're doing it again. You're treating me like I don't know you. Like my father hasn't been sharing every medical emergency you've suffered for the last twenty years. No, no, Thorn. I know about every cut, every gunshot, each of your concussions. I know how many stitches you've had. You have some considerable experience with pain. Don't pretend otherwise."
"How many is it? Stitches."
"A hundred and five at last count."
Thorn shook his head, staring across at Bean. After a few moments he said, "Sure, I've been hurt a few times. I don't know that I've learned anything very important from it."
"Okay, that's good. That's better."
Bean eased himself down onto the couch and rubbed at his knees.
"I didn't realize it years ago when I started out in medicine, but that's always been my interest, my driving concern. The study of pain."
Thorn rolled away from the window and looked over at Bean. He was gazing across at the photograph of the two boys target shooting.
"What I came to learn, at least medically, is that pain treatment is an incredibly complex area to master," he said. "Partly because there's no meter you can use to register someone's pain, no X-rays. All we have is the patient's own descriptions. We give them questionnaires. It's called the McGill test. Circle one, two, three, or four. Does your pain flicker, shoot, stab, crush, scald, or sting? Is it a temporal sensation, a spatial one; is it a puncture, an incisive pressure; is it thermal or does it have brightness?"
"Gotta say the right word before you get the right shot."
"Exactly," Bean said. "That's the problem. You need people to tell you what they're feeling, describe it accurately. And you need for them to tell the truth. Naturally, you'd think they would do that willingly. They're in pain, they should want help. But you'd be surprised how many people, even those in acute distress, will underplay what they're feeling. As if they're ashamed of it. Or that by trivializing it, they've diminished its power over them."
"Stiff upper lip."
"Well, that's part of it. But the other part is that people simply have different thresholds, different attitudes toward their pain. Generational differences, regional ones too. Our parents are more likely to deny their pain than we are, and if they're from northern Europe, they deny it even more. Mediterranean cultures have lower thresholds, Scandinavians have higher. An Italian will cringe at a needle prick. A Brit or Swede is more likely to take a serious wound without much outward show of distress. Put two people side by side, what's tolerable to one can be unbearable to the other.
"Christ, there are even cultures where women practice couvade, in which the female in childbirth shows virtually no sign of distress. She will work in the fields until the onset of labor, then give birth and be back in the fields in the afternoon. While she's delivering her child, her husband crawls into a bed nearby and screams and moans as though he is in great pain while his wife bears the child. Then after the delivery the man will stay in bed with the newborn to recover while the wife goes back to her manual labor.
"For these women, pain simply doesn't play the same role in their experience as the childbirth pain of an American woman. All of which suggests that pain is at least as psychological as it is physical."
"What isn't?" Thorn said.
Through the bedroom door he could see an oak chest of drawers, and lying on the rug beside it were two prosthetic legs with white tennis shoes fixed on the feet. His extra pair.
"Every generation has different attitudes toward pain," Bean said. "Ours, for instance, has been incredibly spoiled. Pampered and protected, coddled. We've had it so goddamn easy, most of us. Nothing like the stresses and physical discomfort of our grandparents' era. Add to that the fact that our generation also learned a great deal about drugs, discovered there are some pretty good sensations available with the right ones. Some pleasures. We're not as frightened of drugs as our parents were, or their parents. We're a watershed generation in that sense. We've experimented and found there are a whole host of virtues to chemically induced experiences, and the risk of addiction is not nearly as great as we'd been warned. We've smoked our share of dope and not gotten hooked, so our suspicion of drugs in general has been mitigated by that knowledge.
"But the big difference between us and all the generations before us is that we don't accept pain as a given. We don't see it as character building. Enduring pain doesn't make you a richer human being, a wiser one. We don't even see it as particularly useful for alerting us to the seriousness of an illness. Most of us don't put any value in pain at all. It's purely an aberration, a wrong turn off the highway of happiness and pleasure."
Thorn watched a squirrel pick its way through the branches outside the window, halting and moving ahead with nervous bursts. He was carrying something in his mouth, some ruby-colored morsel of garbage he'd scrounged down on the earth. An anxious twitch of his tail as he hauled the bounty back to the nest. A strawberry.
"Think of it, Thorn. A cavity filled without Novocain. A headache that doesn't stop until it's run its course. And every generation before our parents—thousands of years of human life on this planet without any real relief from the agony of broken bones, war wounds, rotten teeth, the daily savagery and brutality of primitive life. Oh, yes, the ancient Greeks had their salicylic acid, a mild aspirin. They made it from the bark of willow trees, as did Native Americans, and they had alcohol and an array of root teas and grass beers. They had opium and cannabis. But it's only been within our lifetime that we've made any real progress in anesthesia. Nitrous oxide—laughing gas, for godsakes. Ether, chloroform. Like using sledgehammers to put a patient out.
"It's a breakthrough time. We're on the threshold of amazing discoveries. Drugs with morphine's clout but without its side effects, electrical stimulation of the spine to interrupt the pain messaging system, spinal implants, a whole new class of antidepressants that can diminish nerve-damage pain. An incredible array of new drugs. And all of this because you and I, Thorn, we don't like to feel bad. W
e stub a toe and reach for the Tylenol. We wake up with a twinge in our back and we're screaming for a pill, something that will make the world all peachy and perfect again."
Outside the window the squirrel with the berry had stopped, its body hunched awkwardly. As Thorn watched, a flurry of feathers and wings surrounded the squirrel and was gone. The red berry with it. The squirrel rubbed a paw across its face and hurried on.
"That's what's going on, Thorn. That's what I'm a part of. Creating a new world, a world with no pain."
"Sounds like a dreary place. Everybody stoned, smiling at the sun."
Bean smiled tolerantly.
"Oh, yes," he said. "There is that school of thought, that you only know pleasure by contrasting it with pain. Like pain is some kind of exotic spice that makes the stew taste better. But that's idiotic. That's the nonsense of someone who doesn't know chronic pain. Pain that's unremitting."
"Like yours."
"Yes, like mine. I have no legs, but my legs hurt like hell. They hurt every second of every day. The only variation is when they flare up like they did earlier. That's not some minced garlic that flavors the meal. That is the meal, Thorn. Second by second, hour by hour, day after day, the legs I no longer have are broiling incessantly."
"And with all these brave new drugs," Thorn said, "there's nothing that helps your pain?"
"That's exactly what I'm working on," he said. "A medication, a cure."
"Well, well, well."
"People with phantom limb pain are not exactly the largest constituency out there. The work being done on finding remedies is practically nonexistent. So I'm contributing what I can, in my own meager way. It may sound selfish to focus my energies on the very condition I suffer from, but Thorn, the truth is, if I were to make a serious dent in my own condition, then there's no pain out there that's not within my reach. None. Chronic, acute, cancer pain, you name it."
Thorn looked out at the oak branch. A monarch butterfly staggering through the breeze landed on the trunk, hesitated a moment, then dragged its feet through the damp remains of the strawberry.
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 15