by Dan A. Baker
“I wasn’t exactly up, up. But I didn’t get much sleep,” Marjorie said.
“What a beautiful boat, Will!”
“Thank you, Marjorie. We’ll go down to the Parker Dam and then we’ll have lunch at Three Dunes,” he said, throttling up the big boat.
“Was this lake natural or is it artificial? Marjorie asked.
“It’s a reservoir for L.A.,” he said. “Pretty spectacular, huh?”
“The colors are like Disneyland,” Earl said, marveling at the deep red rocks and the striking green of the lake and marshes. Jasmine sat in the aft seat, soaking up the sun and enjoying the ride.
Will had found a retired nurse to take care of Roy for the day, who promised him she would try to find a rattlesnake. The brisk north wind had fallen off completely, and the lake was like a huge piece of green glass. Will lapped the big marshes by the low white Parker dam in a long graceful turn, and then pulled into a picnic area to unload at the base of a big white sand dune. Jasmine noticed Will and Earl didn’t talk much.
“I like this spot,” Will said. “I sometimes come down here during the day to walk the sand dunes. The view from the top of the sand dune is great.”
Jasmine and Marjorie walked up the steep dune while Will and Earl started the grill. The view from the top of the dunes was spectacular. The soft warm wind blew over the lake in ripples that looked like frosted glass. When the winds reached them, they breathed deeply and relaxed.
“I thought you were kidding about your new hobby,” Jasmine opened.
“So was I, but my luck just kept…” Marjorie said, giggling.
“Arriving?” Jasmine said.
“Or synonym thereof. Sometimes I wish I could do it all over again. I think I would have made one of history’s great Madams,” Marjorie replied. “Did you ever wish you could do it all over again?”
“I wouldn’t change much. Life has been good to me,” Jasmine said.
“Will and Earl can’t quite seem to connect,” Marjorie said, watching them below in the campground.
“Earl isn’t very happy with Will’s lack of concern for the privacy of our work.”
“This is all so new to us, and Will tells me the whole movement of garage science is only a year or so old. We are revolutionaries, Jasmine! Or, Comrade Jasmine, I should say!”
“I was surprised he invited Nielsen to dinner last night, and that he seems to know all about this effort,” Jasmine said.
“What’s he like? I’ve never met him, just his money,”
“For a ninety-four year old he looks very, very good. Will’s been treating him for about a year, with stem cells, and growth factors, insulin and probably testosterone,” Jasmine said. “But he’s sharp as a razor and he does have one take home message.”
“Which is?”
“Drive around the dummies, instead of fighting them,” Jasmine said.
“If you can,” Marjorie added.
“And we can,” Jasmine seconded.
“Will wants to take a long look at your treatment strategy and batching. Earl objected, but I think Will made the point quite well that we’re partners in this effort now, and in a world where everyone seems to trade favors,” Jasmine said.
“I know,” Marjorie said.
“He told us you wanted to be treated with some cloned stem cells.”
“Of course,” Marjorie replied, “Don’t you?”
“I haven’t spent much time thinking about how I’m going to handle old age,” Jasmine said, although it was not actually true.
“Wait until you start pissing blood,” Marjorie said, lying back in the sand. ‘I’ve buried both parents, my brother, my husband, and as for a slow lingering death in a vegetative state in some stuffy nursing home with sadistic orderlies, I’m not goin’,” she said.
“What do you think the stem cells will do?” Jasmine asked.
“Well, six-hundred-million isn’t very many, unless they happen to be…,”
“Immortalized?” Jasmine almost gasped.
“Yes, immortalized, with a double P-53 cancer checkpoint. Then my guess is they will mostly become bone marrow adult stem cells, endothelial cells, and skin stem cells, as that’s where the damage in my bone bag is anyway. They go right to where the damage is, all by themselves, like little ambulances,” she said.
“But aren’t you concerned about…”
“Jasmine, did you ever see West Side Story? I remember one thing from that movie. When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet, and all the way you’re a Jet! It taught me the importance of commitment. I’m in this thing all the way, and if the whole biological patent system falls, if the entire system of biological research changes, if this fine nation changes, if I change, that’s okay, I’m ready. I’m fed up with the way American science has evolved, and I don’t feel like getting any older, either,” she said, wiggling her toes into the sand.
Jasmine looked out at the beautiful green lake and felt the soft warm breeze in her hair. She looked down at her hands and thought about the young girl on the Gondola. Who could resist wanting to be young again? Who? And, who could deny them that power, if it existed?
Jasmine and Marjorie ran down the long sand dune, laughing and yelling in the bright sunlight. “I haven’t done that since I was a little girl!” Marjorie said, huffing at the bottom of the dune.
“I’m starting to like it out here,” Jasmine said, “really like it.”
“One thing you don’t want to do is let a doctor do the grilling,” Will said. “They want to make sure there are no living bacteria whatsoever in the meat, no matter what, and what you end up with is charcoal!”
“But the charcoal is sterile!” Earl laughed, opening another beer. Jasmine noted that just being out on a boat helped Earl relax, and to remind him of what life was supposed to be about. After a lot of jokes, badly seared hamburgers, and cold beer, the conversation died down.
“Where do you think this will all go, Will?” Jasmine said finally.
“It’s going to be wild. That much is easy. The second we know this works, the world’s super rich will know, and they will reach for it with big powerful hands. They might not know for a while, but they will know and soon. It’ll be like having a steak sandwich in a shark tank.”
The pause was so long Marjorie finally stood up. “We’ll have to deal with that when it does work, I guess.”
“If it works,” Earl added.
“If, and when it works,” Will finished, looking at everyone. “Look at it this way. In the no, no world, it would take the bioethics people ten years just to consider all the little vicissitudes. By then, we’ll be playing tennis in the south of France.”
“The ethics people have a function, Will. What’s before us now is unprecedented, and it just takes time for people to adjust to new paradigms,” Earl remarked, annoyed at the arrogance in Will’s thinking.
“I’m sure they said that about agriculture too. They said we can’t stop chasing these big animals around and half starving all the time, because that’s the way it’s been for a long time, so it must be good and we shouldn’t change it. And people like that, have been hanging people like you and me, for a long time,” Will repeated, “a very long time.”
Marjorie stood up. “What we’re doing here is having a big discussion about whether or not we should be going down river while being swept along by a raging torrent. We’ve been swept away, and now all we can do is to make the most of it,” Marjorie responded, which ended the discussion.
The boat trip back was a welcome break in the day. It was hard to hear over the inboard engine and the wind, and there really wasn’t much to say anyway. Jasmine was beginning to lapse into these states more often now, where she just felt the wind on her face and appreciated being alive.
The following day was an exhausting technical review of the treatment in Will’s trailer. Marjorie was right. Will did see some things they hadn’t thought about, and suggested several new ideas. Will was impressed with Marjorie’s treatment stra
tegy and batching. She gave him two data DVD’s without hesitation, Jasmine noted.
Will’s mini-mainframe being incredibly advanced, ran Jasmine’s protein modeling subsets with no problem. She looked again at the gene constructs and felt confident the effort to bring Roy’s circulatory system out of senescence would work.
It happened about midnight, after six furious hours of discussion and the intense probing and jabbing that is scientific discovery. There were no more questions. They sat in the big trailer looking at the main display from the mainframe as the treatment batching codes rolled endlessly.
Will suggested it first, “Let’s stick it in humans.”
Marjorie hesitated, and then looked at Jasmine.
“What do you think, Doctor?” Jasmine said, turning to Earl.
“Let’s go,” Earl said softly. “We go now, or Roy dies.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Earl and Jasmine left Lake Havasu early, driving south on Highway 95 through spectacular red rock formations, and through the sleepy little retirement town of Parker. The miles went by in a blur in the early morning light.
“I think Will was right, adjusting the level of telomerase in the treatment, and delivering the stem cells over two days is a good idea,” Earl said as they approached a big sign that read THE BARRY GOLDWATER BOMBING RANGE, just south of Ajo, Arizona. Earl laughed when he saw the sign.
“If Goldwater had been elected in 1964 we probably wouldn’t be here now. He would have invaded Cuba and a nuclear war would have started,” Earl said, still amazed that the world had gone over sixty years without a nuclear exchange.
Suddenly, two dark gray F-16s screamed over the car. Earl opened the window to look at them, waking up Roy.
“Those are fighters! Can we stop so I can see?” Roy pleaded.
“Sure, we can,” Earl said, a little stiff from the driving. When he got out of the car, he began to regret the decision to stop. It was much hotter than he thought.
“I can see them!” Roy yelled, as two gray F-16s turned sideways in the sky a few miles away and dipped down to the desert. They were flying so low that Earl thought they were going to crash, but they came right over the road with a skull-shattering roar. Earl watched them come around again, and grabbed his binoculars from the glove box. He watched the planes for a few minutes, and then turned to take Roy’s hand. Roy was lying on his back in the sand with his eyes open.
Earl yelled, “Roy!” as the jets approached again, but Roy’s blotched skin and shallow breathing indicated heat shock. Earl gently picked Roy up, craning his neck to see the pulse in his carotid artery. He stumbled badly in the sand, and fell on his bad knee, just as the two jets screamed overhead. For an instant, he thought of the pictures from Vietnam, of terrified villagers fleeing jet fighters. The noise actually shook the car in tense little jolts as he struggled toward it.
Jasmine saw him coming and leaped out. “Earl, what happened?” she screamed.
“It’s heat stroke!” Earl quickly put him in the back seat, and grabbed a small hand towel, then dipped it in the cooler. He slowly dabbed Roy’s face and temples, squeezing the blood in his arm and legs.
“That fast?” Jasmine said, holding Roy’s hand.
“Yeah, I can’t believe it, but he’s just so fragile,” Earl said softly.
“I’ll get the defibro…,” Jasmine tried to yell as the jets passed over again, obliterating every sound. Roy suddenly blinked his eyes and threw up.
“Turn the AC up all the way! Earl yelled, gently sitting Roy upright, and wiping off his face. “I’ll sit in the back and cool him off. You drive!”
Jasmine quickly jumped in and closed the door, turning the AC on full.
“I feel really sick,” Roy said weakly.
“What’s the next town?” Earl asked, frantically.
Jasmine fumbled with the map. “Why?”
“What?” Earl asked.
“Why. I don’t know what’s there,” she said.
The fear they both felt was so intense Jasmine almost threw up. “What if Roy died? How would they feel if the treatment killed him? They both explored these feelings simultaneously, feeling their courage waver, their resolve leave them in waves of nausea. Roy’s skin was so grey he looked like a corpse, Jasmine thought. She angled the mirror over to see Earl’s face, suddenly noticing for the first time that Earl was close to age seventy. His ears seemed bigger and his hair was completely gray now.
She took Earl’s hand and turned to look at him. “I, I…,” The words didn’t come, because there were none. They both knew what it would mean if Roy died from the treatment.
Jasmine drove on as fast as she could, and suddenly realized she was cold. The AC was blowing at full power and had cooled the car down.
She looked again at Earl’s kind, patient face. He was gently squeezing Roy’s arms with the white towel soaked in the cooler water. Jasmine could see the magic of the healer in his face. When she turned the mirror back to Roy she saw the pink color returning to his tiny face. When his eyes opened, Earl was able to get him to drink some juice. His pulse returned to normal over the next few minutes.
“Can I go for a ride in a fighter plane?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“Sure,” Earl said softly. “We have lots of them in America.”
When they passed the sign that read WHY- Population 127, Jasmine looked back at Earl as they approached the sun bleached, peeling white buildings. The torrent of thoughts came more like a sensation than separate realizations now. Why? Why is life so precious? Why do we treat life as a precious fire, celebrating its beginnings and mourning its’ passing with our deepest pathos? Why? Why do we live at all? Why?
Jasmine pulled up to a white clapboard building with a faded red Café sign. She quickly ran in to make sure it was air-conditioned, then helped Earl with Roy.
“What you see is what you get in WHY,” the slim old woman said, waiting to take their order in the battered, dusty café. Jasmine looked down at the old Formica table with chromed legs. The table was so heavily used the Formica had worn through. The long black cigarette burns looked shiny from cleaning. The cigarette stench was so strong you could almost see it in the air, and the ceiling was a dark, dirty yellow. Jasmine choked back a gag. “Is there a clinic in WHY?” she asked softly.
“Nearest medical anything is a drugstore in Lukeville, but it’s not a very good one,” she said, bending down to look at Roy. “He looks just like my last husband, and I’ll bet he likes berry pie too,” she said, smiling softly.
The blackberry pie seemed to help Roy. When they left the dusty, forlorn little town of WHY, the signpost stayed in their minds for a long time.
“Why?” Jasmine said finally.
“It’s a mystery,” Earl said, shaking his head and revealing his fear.
The small border crossing at Sonoyta was quiet when they arrived. When Jasmine saw the Mexican flag on the small yellow building, and the khaki uniforms of the border agents, the realization of what they were doing jolted her. “Alto, alto!” the Mexican border guard said holding up his hand. He was young, and Earl noticed his heavily starched shirt.
“Where are you going in Mexico?” he asked in good English.
“Puerto Penasco,” Earl replied.
“Open the trunk please,” he asked.
He looked at their bags carefully, turning them around and unzipping Jasmine’s overnighter. He unzipped the defibrillator, holding the paddles for a few minutes. “And what equipment is this?” he asked.
“It’s medical equipment for emergency. This child is a special child, and he may need this equipment at any time,” Earl said. “I am a medical doctor,” he added.
“Why are you traveling with a sick child?” the guard asked.
“This child has a disease that he cannot survive, and he always wanted to visit your country, so we are taking him to beautiful Mexico,” Earl stammered.
“I must see if this equipment is allowed into Mexico,” he said, quickly pulling t
he bag out of the trunk, when he noticed the open cooler in the back seat. He opened the rear door and looked at the four IV bags in the cooler. “And what is this? Medical treatments also?” he asked.
“Those are medicines for the boy here,” Earl said, suddenly panicked.
“These I will have to investigate as well to see if such treatments are allowed to be imported into Mexico. Do you have a prescription for these medicines?” he asked, sliding the cooler out of the car.
“But, Senor, I am the doctor! I write the prescriptions. This is only medicine! It is for this boy in case he becomes ill!” Earl almost shouted, silently cursing himself for not considering covering up the treatments.
Jasmine stayed with Roy in the car while Earl argued in the sweltering customs office.
“Salino solucio…” The guard tried to read the label over the phone, finally putting it down. “You will have to remain here for two days until an inspector arrives to examine these medical items,” he said with a solemn finality.
“We can’t do that! We’ll just go back to Arizona,” Earl said.
“But these items have been brought into Mexico and they must stay,” he said, looking quizzically at Earl, who finally got the message.
“Perhaps we could estimate the duty on such items,” Earl said.
“Perhaps, I think I could estimate those duties to be, about, one-hundred dollars,” the guard said, “for each item.”
“I can pay that. That would be okay,” Earl said, wondering for a minute what the treatments were actually worth.
Driving carefully down Highway 8 to the Sea of Cortez, Earl finally relaxed. Two freak-outs in two hours, he thought, hoping today was not a harbinger of the near future. Roy and Jasmine slept the rest of the trip. Earl suddenly laughed when he thought about the town of WHY. “Why ask why?” he said to himself, trying to laugh.
The Plaza Las Glorius hotel looked like a Riviera hotel in Europe, painted a soft yellow and surrounded with beautiful bright fuchsia colored bougainvillea. It had a big sweeping lobby with a view of the sea, and a very good mural on the gracefully curved walls. They checked into a lovely two-bedroom suite with a great ocean view on the third floor. Earl ordered two Cosmopolitans from room service to wash out some of the stress, as Roy punched the buttons on the TV remote.