Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  Jasmine closed the door to the small closet, slowly turning to Will. They melted together in one long gesture. They held each other in the doorway, their eyes closed, caressing each other, letting the future take its time.

  “Ob la di, Ob la da,” he whispered softly.

  “Lala, how the life goes on,” Jasmine sang the old Beatles song softly, turning her face to kiss him.

  The gentleness and carefully measured passion they both expected lasted for only a second, then the love long overdue suddenly released an explosion of desire, deep kissing and fitful caressing.

  Will held her face to him like a precious sculpture, suddenly pushing her back to look into her eyes.

  The brilliant light in their eyes was so powerful the sensation was too much after just a few seconds, as they looked away, the sensation quickly melted into a warm river of desire and complete abandon.

  Will put his hands together behind her back, then ran his hands down her back pressing his fingers into her spine, pushing her sweat pants down and digging his fingers into the hard muscle of her loins, while lifting and spreading her legs at the same time. The heat and the wetness forced him to turn his hands upwards and touch her deeply. Jasmine moaned loudly and flung her head back, reaching up to Will’s face and holding his head against her face.

  They collapsed on the gimbaled bunk in a mad stretching motion. Will pushed his pants down and thrust into her in one long lunge.

  The desperate rush of passion and deep touching completely encapsulated them in a blurred world of sensation. The terrifying force of human desire whipped them back and forth violently, completely, without modulation. Suddenly, Jasmine felt a hot knot of excitement deep in her stomach that expanded like a huge balloon inside her, pushing aside the last tiny moments of consciousness until she felt a sudden tension in Will’s back, and a new vastly powerful rhythmic force seized them both.

  The orgasm began as a shortening of thrusts to a point where the sensations became one and suddenly exploded into a shower of bright orange light and an overwhelming sensation of warmness and complete acceptance. For that one tiny moment, their bodies and minds shared the same place, the same time, and the dividing of life’s components ended for that one second.

  Will moved slowly, as Jasmine lolled in the lost moments of orgasm. She was no longer a thinking rational human being, but an animal without a mind or a will, given over completely to the unimaginable pleasure of love. As consciousness returned she looked at Will, who had his head back and his eyes closed.

  She wondered briefly what the aftermath would be like, what they would say, and how the snuggling would feel. Then she noticed a deepening of the thrusts and tried to stem the overwhelming wave of sensation, but it was impossible. The rhythm of love began again, from somewhere deep inside them and threw them both into a roller coaster of sensation and touching, sensation and touching.

  The orgasm started suddenly and welled up more quickly than before, catching them both by surprise. The pulsing lasted for what seemed like hours. They held each other tightly, slipping in and out of consciousness.

  She drifted back into consciousness as Will traced lovely little patterns on her tummy and thighs with his fingers, sighing softly. Somewhere, in a far away place, she knew she had experienced this sensation before, this exhilarating, lusty feeling of complete abandon and freedom.

  “When I was young,” she said to herself, finally placing the lost emotion. “When I was young, and in love with boys and had sex in strange places and didn’t know what the future would be, and didn’t care,” she was suddenly aware that she had never considered that aging reversal might mean a return of the magnificent abandon of youth, and the delicious thrill of carefree invincibility.

  An intense knot of desire for youth suddenly seized her. It was a strange mixture of nostalgia and desire. She looked down at her hands and at the long lines of wrinkles in the skin under her arms and felt Will’s hard penis touching her. She looked at his beautiful skin and noticed for the first time that his hair was shining as well. As he entered her again, she arched up to his ear and said, “I love you, and I want to be young again.”

  “So do I,” he whispered, as he pulled her earlobe into his mouth.

  In a moment of panic Jasmine thought of Earl, and her life with him. The overwhelming rush of love had completely obliterated her mourning, and now she desperately searched for the feelings of guilt that she expected. There was nothing there. Earl was gone, and the absoluteness of death impressed her deeply at that moment. She searched and searched and searched for her feelings, shocked that she could be in love so soon after Earl’s death, but there was only a calm acceptance.

  The sleep was so perfect and so complete that when her mind first began working again she tried to remember where she had been. The sensation of lightness, and tranquility began to lift. When she breathed in deeply, she became aware that she was in a very strange place. A place that smelled terrible. The smells were foreign, but somewhere she had smelled them before.

  “Diesel fuel,” she whispered, without thinking, remembering the smell from the Islander 36.

  “Dirty sheets,” Will said softly.

  “Paint,” Jasmine said.

  “Patchouli oil,” he said.

  “The ocean,” she said.

  “Stale beer,” he said, bending his head slightly to suck her nipples.

  “Pizza,” Jasmine said stretching her feet and toes.

  “Wood sealer,” he said, closing his teeth gently around her nipple.

  “WD-40,” Jasmine said, sighing softly.

  “Mildew,” he said.

  “Marijuana,” Jasmine said.

  “Dirty socks,” Will countered.

  “Sweaty man,” Jasmine said softly.

  “Excited woman,” he teased.

  “Excited man,” Jasmine said, turning to him in a rush, guiding him into her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Jasmine, this modeling software is just magnificent!” Marjorie said as Jasmine and Will slowly sat down at the console in the badly rusted shipping container. “What a shame we couldn’t use it at UCSF!”

  “How are we doing?” Jasmine said, dreamily.

  Marjorie looked at them both, and laughed. “Fine, until they let the unwashed in! You both need a lap through the car wash, or a quick shower, you smell like, well, like a rodeo hooker on Monday morning!” They all shared a wild laugh, as Marjorie clicked through the modeling routines, and the DVD drives whirred and blinked.

  “Did you work all night?” Jasmine asked, looking at the gene list.

  “I worked all night and then some!” she almost shouted. “Look at this! I’m already through one-fifty-seven, and so far the fidelity has been perfect. I think we’ll be through this in less than two weeks now.”

  Will stepped over and looked down the list of gene assemblies, and slowly shook his head. “I see Earl combined a lot of these cascades and modulation loops. Good idea.”

  Marjorie shot a quick glance at Jasmine to see if the mention of Earl’s name would affect her.

  “He evolved the treatment to an absolutely elegant stage, somehow,” Jasmine said respectfully.

  “I can see that,” Will said, as Marjorie clicked through the protein models. “How many more are left to model?”

  “Seventy three,” Marjorie said.

  The silence lasted a long time as they realized that they would have a completed gene therapy within a few days. Will bent down, took the artificial stem cell organ out of the little cooler and held it up. “I couldn’t think of a way to print hot rod flames on it, but we tried,” he said.

  The next three days went in stints of three or four hours. Will helped immensely, seeing several conflicts, overlapping cascades and opportunities to eliminate or combine gene functions.

  Jasmine was somewhat embarrassed by the return of her sex drive. They made love several times on a faded pink futon in the shipping container, and then worked naked for long hours durin
g the night. They worked beautifully together, racing through the routine work and seeing several new opportunities.

  “The enhancer sets for this network are unbelievably sweet. I still haven’t figured out how it deals with cross-regulation from the transcription factors, but it does,” Will said softly, rolling through the promoter sequences on the big display.

  “The enhancers are very complex. I know Earl struggled for weeks, trying to figure out how to fine tune the induction. Then he hit on the idea of mixing in suppressor elements, and adding in matrix attachment regions, which tuned things to the micron,” Jasmine said, with a note of sadness. She looked down so the tear wouldn’t fall on the keyboard.

  “That’s something I and about sixty-thousand other molecular biologists would never have thought of. The modeling must have been a beast. Did he do much in vitro correlation?”

  “Minimal. There’s three decades of published work on this stuff. Most of it is still accurate. Earl wasn’t much for lab work, but he read through journal articles like a madman.”

  “But the timing, how can these inducers possibly work?”

  “He piggybacked the cassettes by homologous recombination in front of the genes involved in development. The real kicker was using some of the embryonic lines to test the gene cassettes.”

  “Earl, you super smart bastard. I thought Earl was just a GP with a mail order PhD. I would never have picked him to be this creative, and dead on accurate. Earl is the man,” Will said softly.

  “Earl was the man,” Jasmine said, laying her head on Will’s sunburned shoulder.

  Jasmine was gratified that Will acknowledged Earl’s brilliant work. Earl had carefully worked out the timing of the gene cascades so that they expressed at the right time and gave the body time to process the cellular debris and regenerate the organs and tissues in the proper progression. It was like performing a lost symphony.

  Maybe this is how it had always been, she thought. How the energy required, to overcome the gravity of fear and conservative thinking came together in a spontaneous roaring river of creative will.

  The thrill of doing unlimited science was intoxicating for all of them. There were no limits. There were no barriers. There were no delays. The work flew together. The days melted into a long continuous torrent of work. The weeks passed so fast Jasmine forgot what month it was. Sometime in the third week, the moment arrived. It’s the magical point in creative work, where the project can be seen into for the first time.

  As they assembled the genes on the artificial chromosome, Jasmine looked carefully at Will and Marjorie before she clicked the command to display the chromosome for the first time.

  “Who’s ready to see the assembled genes?” Jasmine asked.

  “Light it up,” Will said.

  “Let’s dance,” Marjorie said.

  “Hope I’m funny,” Jasmine said as she clicked the command.

  The complete artificial chromosome with all one hundred and eighty-seven genes slowly assembled on the three big screens.

  “There it is,” Will said.

  “There it is,” Marjorie said.

  “Shall we zoom in?” Jasmine asked, before clicking the command to display the coding and regulatory sequence.

  “Give the creature twenty-thousand volts!” Will shouted.

  “Yes, Herr Doctor!” Jasmine replied, clicking the command.

  They looked at the display for a long time, suddenly realizing just how far they had come in such a short time.

  “There’s the answer to the most sought after dream in human imagination,” Marjorie said softly.

  “Let’s take a break,” Will said, as they opened the door of the shipping container, not really knowing if it was day or night. It was dark.

  “I wonder what time it is,” Marjorie said.

  “I wonder what day it is,” Jasmine said, suddenly feeling the cold on her skin through the old bathrobe.

  They walked out into the dimly lit parking lot, where Rammy joined them in his red kimono, his eyes glazed and smiling a crazy little smile.

  “How’s the soup coming?” he asked.

  “It’s just about done,” Marjorie said, yawning.

  “Already, you modeled the entire list that fast?” Rammy asked.

  “With a little help,” Jasmine said, while holding Will’s hand.

  “How did six weeks of burn time become two weeks?” Rammy asked.

  “Did it on our lunch hour,” Will said.

  Jasmine and Will walked slowly to the old schooner. They stopped to watch a group of six nude cyclists peddling around the harbor, who waved as they whizzed past.

  “Santa Cruz,” he said.

  “Santa Cruz,” Jasmine replied, as they walked up the gangway.

  They slept so soundly even the morning sounds of the harbor didn’t wake them. It was the heat that woke Jasmine. The Bay Area summer had finally arrived in early September and it was uncomfortably warm in the aft cabin by noon. She stroked Will’s hair, wondering if he was awake or merely pretending to be asleep.

  “Dog trials,” she whispered.

  “Labradors,” Will replied, turning over on his back. “We’ll need old dogs, at least five,” he said, stroking Jasmine’s pubic hair gently, pinching her lips together with his fingers.

  “How are we going to get baseline MRI’s?” Jasmine asked.

  “It’ll be here today,” Will answered groggily.

  “What’ll be here today?” Jasmine asked, paralyzed with fatigue.

  “The MRI from Havasu will be here. I never leave home without it,” Will whispered, falling asleep again.

  Rammy complained all afternoon about moving his favorite wrecks to make room for the trailer, but there was just enough room when the big rig arrived with the trailer from Lake Havasu. It took a couple of hours to run power to the MRI, but it was operating by dark.

  “Barney. Get up Barney, time for something new.” Will said trying to get the old Lab to stand up. He wagged his tail a little and rolled back over. Will finally cut up a hot dog and got him on his feet, and into the MRI in the big trailer. Barney loved all the attention and went right to sleep in the big plastic tube as the buzzing and whirring started.

  “One down,” he said as the last image came into view.

  The massive computing power of the Fujitsu generated the analogous sequences for the Labrador species in just over ten minutes. “Our DNA is so close to these dogs it’s a wonder we don’t have tails,” Jasmine said to no one in particular.

  “Or that dogs aren’t driving BMW’s,” Rammy said.

  “Some are,” he added, with a trace of bitterness.

  Finding four old Labradors proved to be a challenge. Ritzy was a real find, as she was near death. The old man who ran the Kayak rental shack in the Marina couldn’t figure out why anyone would want an old water dog, but he liked Jasmine and Will, plus he was going into the hospital that week anyway.

  “She’ll still chase every bird that lights within half a mile of her,” he said as he hugged her for the last time. “Be a good girl now, Ritzy.”

  Will drew blood from each dog and FedExed the samples off to an enucleating lab in New Mexico. Once the Nucleus was removed, it would be frozen and sent on to a new company in San Diego that would clone the starter embryonic stem cells, and send them to Will’s friend at the artificial organ printing lab in Dallas.

  “We can treat them any time. The stem cell generators will be here in about three weeks,” Will said, as Marjorie packed up to begin the treatment batching in her white greenhouse.

  “I’ll have the treatments ready to encapsulate in the nanoballs by the end of the week,” she said.

  “I want to run all the signaling proteins at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley,” Jasmine said.

  “Not necessary, Jasmine,” Will said. We know what the proteins are going to look like.”

  “We know what the computer predicts the proteins will look like. I need to see the crystal structure of the proteins.
If they’re off, we could see irreversible problems as the genes express.”

  “It’s going to take a lot of time up there to run them,” Rammy said.

  “I have the time,” Jasmine said, suddenly wondering why Will and Rammy would be opposed to analyzing the proteins the genes produce.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jasmine tried to put her finger on the atmosphere at the nursing home. It was a strange mix of quiet resignation, muted fear of death, and that kind of make busy but don’t mention what’s really going on static that permeates most institutions.

  Waiting to die is something that’s hard to do with much élan, she thought, suddenly fearing this outcome for herself. Fear was new to Jasmine. She had had a lot of fear lately: fear of change, fear of love, fear of failure, fear of discovery, and fear of death.

  This was new. Fear of aging. Fear of finally reduced to a pain-wracked bag, kept alive by pharmaceutical companies, and kept alive for what? For endless boring days with other dying people in boring human warehouses that were too warm and shared the same cheap impressionist prints, pastel wall paper, and elevator music?

  Herbert was sleeping when she pushed the door open to his room. His roommate had died that morning and the bed had been removed. The old guy had been by the window, and there was a strange quietness in the room now. She looked at her father for a long time, trying to remember what he looked like when she was a little girl, when he would hold her above his head, spinning her around, saying, “My girl is the best!”

  What would he say? How would he react? She tried to think this through, but the work of modeling the gene therapy and the magnificent love affair with Will had taken every atom of her energy.

  “Good morning, Father,” she said softly. Herbert opened his eyes.

  “Did you bring the hacksaw I asked for?” he said.

  “It’s in the cake,” she said.

  “Shh, I’ll make my breakout tonight then,” he said, chuckling a little, rolling over and raising the bed with the button pinned to the sheet.