Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  Victor stood up dropping the remote control. “Do you know how that sounds? That is exactly what the religious fanatics want to hear! An important molecular biologist is trivializing embryonic gene therapy! Marjorie, could I buy you a long trip to Europe?”

  “Sure. Can I take some of my boyfriends?” Marjorie laughed.

  “Let’s move this heartfelt, meaningful discussion on man, God, law, and love to something more important, like picking a restaurant tonight,” Earl said, tossing the sponge in the sink.

  “Hear! Here!” Malia shouted from the Lazy Boy. “I say Martha’s Kitchen.”

  “The Strudel House,” Jasmine yelled from the sliding glass door. Jasmine had slowly learned to stay out of most bioethics discussions.

  “Strudel House,” Koji yelled from the loft.

  “Strudel House is on,” Victor said quietly, assuming a leadership role.

  “Strudel House works,” Earl replied from the hallway.

  The dinner was tense. Earl kept trying to steer the conversation toward skiing and food, but the big issues swirling around them kept the conversation to buy-outs, patents, and Earl’s seething frustration with Genetechna’s board. Earl stirred the big Caesar salad with his fork, finally spearing a piece of chicken. “Five years, Victor, and eleven dead children; want to see the pictures? We could put them on your wall.”

  “I’m on vacation, Earl,” Victor said, sipping the green Hungarian wine.

  “You said you’d swing the bat for me. What happened?” Earl tipped his head slightly to see into Victor’s eyes.

  “They said no, is what happened.”

  “Why? Why does this board feel that an experimental program to develop a gene therapy for dying children is a bad thing?” Earl squeezed his hands together into balls when he was angry, which was rare.

  “It’s big stuff. Big stuff is why. They’re nervous. The FDA is about to approve a human trials application for PIES. You want to take a run at extending the telomeres in the Progeric kids who are dying. They don’t want to see you in front of those cameras, like that French guy, apologizing for killing a kid. Not now, anyway,” Victor said as calmly as possible.

  “Bullshit,” Earl said quietly.

  “Think about it Earl! The company has some long tails already. We’ve got two of the best short-term blood thinners on the market, and another killer protein that knows how to erase duodenal ulcers. Add that together with PIES, our gene replacement therapy, which could be approved in less than two years, and you’ve got some tails out there, like liability issues. Throw in a dicey gene therapy to treat thirty-five kids a year with a weird terminal disease and you might have one tail too many.”

  “Genetechna hired me to help them with their image. How many cancer researchers have we turned down, six, ten, or fifteen? One would be too many, Victor, but I’ve stomached all of it, living on the promises I give to the Progeric Children’s Association. Marjorie might not be the only loose cannon on this biotech ship.”

  Victor stopped toying with his wine glass and looked away for a moment, slowly turning back to the table and leaning into Earl. “Thirty-seven million, Earl; two years is only twenty-four months. Do you want to be a loose cannon, and sink your own ship? Calm down. Wait. You’ll get the access to the telomerase patents. Give the new owners some time to wear the shoes.”

  Earl pushed the last of the salad away and tapped the table softly. The jaws were always the same. They came from two directions and tightened at the same rate. They squeezed until he could taste the bland anesthetic of acquiescence. “Never mind,” he said, in the tired tone Victor had hoped for, “It’s never about what it’s about.”

  “Maybe Solista management will see the tremendous PR value of Earl’s work a little later in the acquisition,” Jasmine said to Victor.

  “Sure. They’re square guys, boring, but square.”

  “Dad, we’re like, on vacation,” Malia said, reaching over to hold Earl’s hand. “This will all work out. It will. It will.”

  The rest of the evening, the lavish desert trays, forced small talk, and the subdued drive home through the new snow did nothing to ease the burning resentment in Earl. Something snapped, snapped quietly, in a deep, deep place. It snapped the years of quiet acceptance completely and cleanly. Jasmine could see this in his face and could feel it when he squeezed her hand under that table.

  Jasmine and Earl always used the master bedroom at the ski cabin, and Jasmine slept on the window side. She was glad the wind was blowing tonight, dropping large tufts of snow on the roof from the trees. They talked briefly about early retirement again, if Genetechna was bought out when the PIES therapy was approved.

  The Pre-Implantation Embryo Screening System was a remarkable leap in genetic engineering with an estimated market of about four-billion a year, especially in Europe where congenital disease is prevalent. The political fight had been excruciating, but the rise of patient groups had done a lot to offset the religious right. There was tremendous interest in Asia as well.

  Jasmine drifted into a near sleep. She thought of her mother, and a ball of sorrow and terrible frustration welled up in her chest. Watching the life slowly evaporate from her, leaving her in wracking pain, and diminished to a wisp of her once beautiful self was so tortuous Jasmine couldn’t even talk about it.

  “Well, I want to get back to my little grass shack… in Kealakekua Hawaii. Where the Humuhumunukunuku apu a’a’ go swimming by. Well where the Humuhumunukunuku apu a’ a’ go swimming byiii… well where the Humuhumunukunuku apu a’ a’… go swimming byiii….”

  When Jasmine couldn’t sleep, as a child, her mother would hold her and sing a song from a long forgotten 1960’s Hawaiian vacation. Jasmine would hum the chorus when she couldn’t sleep, and the warm reassurance that only a mother can bring would help her drift off.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Homewood. Even the name of the little town was mellow. The ski area looked small and rundown from Highway 89, but it was a big area, and had a fantastic view of Lake Tahoe. It still had the old style lifts, with ragged plywood seats and grungy loaders who would let the chair smack you in the ass if you complained about the lift lines.

  “We’re the only ones in the line with skis,” Marjorie remarked.

  “We’re also the only ones over fifty,” Jasmine responded, looking back at the snowboarders. “And we’re the only ones without a black watch hat.”

  The views of Lake Tahoe started with the first chair lift. Jasmine and Marjorie half-turned around to watch the small riverboat make its way over from the Nevada side. The beauty of the scene seemed scarcely noticed by the snowboarders, but it left Jasmine with a deep appreciation for the beauty of this wonderful planet and something new.

  A vague humbleness crept into her thoughts now, and gently provoked her to look down at her hands. The age spots were still new to her, and she woke up every day thinking they would be gone. Life gets more precious, when there’s less of it to lose; the lyrics from the Bonnie Raitt song drifted through her mind.

  “I got laid in Santa Fe,” Marjorie said out-of-the-blue.

  “What?” Jasmine responded, grateful to be snapped back.

  “I forgot how much fun sex was.”

  “You got laid at a bioethics conference?”

  “Not once, but twice.”

  “Marjorie! What happened?” Jasmine screeched, wondering if she should be so surprised.

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the bar, where I was seduced by a ravishing Frenchman. A delightful man, who knows nothing about science, grants, patents, or data,” Marjorie said.

  Jasmine looked at Marjorie’s moon shaped face, and saw a new softness in her intense brown eyes.

  “Did you say twice?”

  “Two different Frenchmen,” Marjorie responded with her signature impishness.

  “What?” Jasmine looked at her incredulously.

  “I think it’ll be my new hobby,” Marjorie said, pulling on her gloves.

  “I d
on’t know why molecular biology professors aren’t supposed to have some fun, especially widows. I didn’t see it in my contract,” she said.

  Jasmine hesitated for a minute, realizing that she, too, had felt deep stirrings of change. “Twice?”

  “Actually once, but twice,” Marjorie loved riddles.

  Jasmine began chuckling. “Are you going to sequence your new friend?”

  “Maybe, but I’m ready for something new,” Marjorie responded in a bright chirp.

  “Marjorie…?” Jasmine asked.

  “I’m going to start living. I’m tired of begging corporate lawyers, who make more in a month than I do in a year, for the privilege to work in the field I discovered. I’m taking early retirement.” A gust of wind snatched away Jasmine’s gasp.

  “When are you going to tell me the Marjorie Cunningham I know and love has been abducted by aliens?” Jasmine replied, lamely.

  “James Easton was at the conference. I haven’t seen him in almost twenty years. He’s as crazy as ever, and still a walking stream of consciousness, but he did connect with a message this time, a message that really jolted me,” Marjorie said, pulling on her gloves.

  “And you… got religion?” Jasmine asked mockingly.

  “Yeah, I got religion,” Marjorie said, folding her hands.

  “Tips up,” the lift worker yelled, jolting Jasmine.

  “He’s cute!” Marjorie said out-loud.

  It was a short ski down to the bowl chair, which was a long, cold ride. As they settled in for the trip, Jasmine turned to Marjorie and looked at her carefully. “No dilated pupils, no rapid breathing…”

  “It was Easton. He launched into a period of lucidity in his speech I’ve never seen before. First, he started crying, actually crying! He said we were the first generation of scientists to lie down before the religious demagogues and the drug companies. After that, I really thought about what got me into science, and what kept me in science, and you know, there’s nothing to keep me in science anymore.” Marjorie always spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, but there was a new, detached flatness in her voice.

  Jasmine sat up so high in the chair she almost lost her ski poles. “But your lab, and your papers, and your students…?”

  “I just want to do science. I simply will not sign another material transfer agreement, and I will not spend half my time thinking up work-arounds to do what I want to do. The golden age of academic biological science is gone, and I’m moving on,” she said, looking away.

  Jasmine was stunned, but everything Marjorie said was occurring to her as well. “What are you going to do, Marjorie? You’re only sixty-two, Department Head, tenured, and with how many grants underway?”

  “I thought about fighting, but, I’m not a fighter. I just want to do science, and I want to have a life, a life with a little sunshine… and I can do that now.” Marjorie turned suddenly and looked directly at Jasmine. They both quickly explored their feelings of irony. Marjorie’s husband had left teaching to start one of the first small molecule drug discovery companies in the Bay Area. The company was acquired by a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, the day he was drowned in the Farallons single-handed sailboat race.

  Jasmine listened to the creaking of the lift for a long time, trying to think of something to say. When the lift suddenly stopped, it forced her to speak. “How are you going to do science without a lab, and grants, grad students, intellectual property lawyers?” she said, genuinely mystified.

  Marjorie replied while looking away, which was unusual for her. “I don’t know. Barbra McClintock did it. They all laughed at her when she speculated that genes could jump from chromosome to chromosome. She just did the science herself, and let the chips fall where they may.”

  “And she won a Nobel Prize,” Jasmine said, longingly.

  “A big Nobel prize,” Marjorie replied. “She just did science. That’s what I want to do: science, and have a good time.”

  Jasmine choked her reply before she spoke. She sat back, gently rocking the lift. Conducting basic research, pure research they used to call it, had become a nightmare of administrative challenges. Complicated negotiations were necessary to work in practically any area in the human genome.

  “In Silico research,” Jasmine speculated, knowing Marjorie was proficient in bioinformatics, the field of biotech computer modeling.

  “Mostly,” Marjorie responded, looking back at the lift.

  “Do you mean telomerase reduction?” Jasmine said.

  “No,” Marjorie replied.

  As the lift approached the ridgeline, the wind picked up suddenly. Lit up by the morning sun, the snow looked like a dust storm of gold, and almost snatched away Marjorie’s reply.

  “I mean telomerase induction.”

  The long trail to the start of the Glades run was so beautiful almost no one spoke on it. Even the shredders didn’t yell much. The heavy snow still clung to the pine trees like frosting on Christmas cookies, and the sky was so blue it had a tinge of dark purple.

  The term telomerase induction seemed to be written in the dark purple of the sky, as Jasmine looked up, feeling a massive hand at her back, pushing her through an instant of monumental change.

  “Telomerase induction,” Jasmine said, as a statement, just to hear the words.

  “Yeah,” Marjorie said, still huffing a little.

  Jasmine looked down at her hands and slowly pulled one glove off. The cold penetrated her hand and the age spots quickly darkened. She hinged her hand back slightly revealing the paper-like thinness of the skin and the insidious web of wrinkles that didn’t seem to belong to her.

  Inside those cells in her skin, the molecular machinery of life was slowing down, stopping, and refusing to divide and repair the damage of fifty-nine years. The cells were refusing to divide because the ends of the chromosomes in those cells, the telomeres, were shortened. Telomerase knew a trick. Telomerase knew how to re-extend the ends of those chromosomes, and make the cells young again. Jasmine slipped the glove back on and tried to recover from the impact of what Marjorie had said.

  “Don’t stand in the doorway and don’t block up the hall…,” the shredder croaked in a Bob Dylan voice as he squeezed by, deftly handing a joint to his scraggly blond girlfriend as they pushed off on the run.

  “They must have come from the cosmic metaphor service,” Marjorie said.

  Jasmine laughed, watching the couple snowboard in and out of the trees, hooting and loudly spanking their boards on the snow.

  “Youth is invincible,” Jasmine said absentmindedly.

  “Life is invincible,” Marjorie said, starting to push off. She stopped abruptly, holding herself on her poles.

  “Life could be invincible,” she said, looking down the run.

  The cold wind from the downhill speed woke Jasmine up, and the sheer pleasure of skiing over the velvety snow turned off the torrent of thoughts, but the giant hand was on her back, pushing her through the wind.

  At the end of the run, three trails converged at the bowl lift. They stopped for a minute, relaxing and breathing the cold air. The towering, almost vertical un-skied face of Sudden Death was off to their left. As they stood looking at the hill Victor flew off the top, hung in the air in a dramatic slow motion pose, then made an impossible high speed turn in the deep powder, sinking in to his mid-section with each punishing turn. At the bottom, he flashed through the intermediate skiers like they were stationary. Even the snowboarders were impressed. “Dude, rocks,” they said, in a jagged unison.

  Earl stood at the top of Sudden Death for a few moments before pushing off. Jasmine felt a tinge of fear for him, but he made the turns perfectly, turning at the hips like a Matador, almost coming to a stop each time, slowing at the bottom to let a telemarker pass.

  “Once a gentleman, always a gentleman,” Jasmine thought, admiring her husband.

  Victor was almost bald, with a sharp, hawk like nose and a forehead that bulged on each side. He liked to unzip his parka and push out his spandex
covered chest as he stretched after a run. His perfect physique and crystal clear eyes told everyone this was a man of intent, and a man in control.

  “That’s high pucker factor stuff, huh?” Victor said, too loudly, to a huffing Earl.

  “If it was any colder with any ice it would be dangerous,” Earl said, with his chin down, trying to catch his breath.

  “It’s a lot like dropping in at Maverick’s on a big day. It’s straight down and no goin’ back!” Victor liked to talk about surfing.

  “Do you downhill racers want to accompany two old ladies on Miner’s Delight?” Jasmine asked.

  “I’ve got a conference call in ten minutes,” Victor said, stamping the snow off his race boots, sounding happy that he had an excuse.

  Koji and Malia approached, making loud scraping turns with their Day Glow painted snowboards. “So, the Snooze Snails are finished with their sleeping!” Koji yelled, with his innocent smile.

  “Hi Mom, are we going to ski Bonanza?” Malia asked, brushing the snow off her watch cap.

  Jasmine looked at Malia’s face in the morning sun. She was such a wonderful child. She was so innocent and uninterested in anything more than living a simple life and enjoying herself.

  “We’re off to Miner’s Delight, but we can’t get any gentlemen to accompany us, so you’re all invited,” Jasmine said.

  “I’ll go,” Earl said.

  “Great, Dad!” Malia said, flipping off her snowboard.

  “Earl, Gerhard Schliefen, General Counsel for Solista will be on this call, and I need you to sit in with me. I’ve got an extra headset.” Victor liked to ambush people, and he never said please.

  “Don’t they have everything?” Earl said, surprised.

  “Schliefen came up with a few new questions last night, small stuff, but the Europeans are all about small stuff,” Victor said, watching a tall blond girl in a bright pink spandex racing suit carving the Sudden Death face.