by Dan A. Baker
“You look good, Father,” Jasmine said.
“I feel terrible. This damn hip won’t heal, and one of my medications is giving me the worst headaches,” he said.
“I’ll talk to your doctor,” Jasmine said.
“Did you get Earl buried?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jasmine said flatly.
“You look like hell,” he said, looking at her sternly. “Where have you been?”
“Working, I’ve been working very hard, Father,” Jasmine said.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say that.”
“I’m trying to finish some work that Earl wanted to complete for a dying child,” Jasmine said.
“What kinda work?”
“It’s a very complex gene therapy, Father,” Jasmine said, reaching out to take his hand.
“What’s it do?” he asked bluntly.
“It reverses the damage caused by a single gene disease, and allows these children to grow up and live, live a long life,” she said, hesitating.
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” he said, surprising Jasmine.
“Isn’t it?” she asked, puzzled.
“Not necessarily. I wouldn’t call this a good thing, lying around all doped up with nothing to do but think about dying. Hell, this is the worst part of life, I think,” he said, closing his eyes.
“This patient is only eight years old, but he’s actually older than you are.”
“Progeria, huh,” Herbert said. “That’s the damnedest disease I ever heard of. Little kids dying of old age before they’re ten! I saw one of those kids once, at the University of Oregon Medical School. It’s crazy, crazy stuff.”
“Earl worked hard on a treatment before he died,” Jasmine said softly.
“Where are you working, UCSF?” Herbert asked out of the blue.
“We’re doing the work, in, in… a private foundation,” she replied.
“They have all that equipment, those big computers and things?”
“Yeah, we’re really making a lot of progress.”
“When do you hear on your Nobel?” he asked.
“They announce the awards pretty soon,” she replied.
“Too bad Earl won’t be there to take you to Sweden,” the old man said rubbing his temples furiously.
“Are you okay, Father?” Jasmine asked.
“These headaches take my damn head off,” he said, his voice trailing off.
Jasmine looked at her emaciated father for a long time.
“Father, if the therapy I’m working on could make you feel better, and get you out of here, would you be interested in trying it?
“Get me out of here?” he asked, sitting up.
“Yes. It would regenerate your entire body, organ by organ. You would become healthy, and then you would become much younger, for…”
“Younger? You mean I’d feel younger?” Herbert looked right at her.
“No, you’d actually be younger, physically, like when you were in your thirties,” Jasmine said.
“For how long?” the old man asked.
“As long as you wanted,” Jasmine said.
“That could be a long time,” he said, surprising her.
“I just wondered,” she said.
“Nah,” Herbert said off-handedly.
“No?” Jasmine asked.
“I’m ready. I’ve had my run, and it was a damn good one. I miss your mother and I think we should move over and make room for the young people. Hell, we live way too long now,” he said running his fingers up and down his battered forearm.
“Are you sure, Father? I don’t want to see you die,” Jasmine said, an unexpected sadness welling up in her.
“Why is dying so bad anyway? Hell, it’s been part of the deal since day one, and now it’s supposed to be so bad and all. No, I don’t want to mess with this thing. It’s too big. It’s been this way for too long and it’s worked beautifully. Life has given me a lot,” he said, turning away. “Besides, I miss your mother, and I don’t think you’ve got a gene therapy that will bring her back, do you?”
“No, father, we don’t,” Jasmine said, looking at him with an exhausted puzzled look. “Not yet.”
“The hell with it then,” he said in a tone of finality.
Jasmine didn’t realize she was shocked by her father’s response until she got all the way down the hall.
As she walked past the rooms she looked at the hunched over people in the beds and in the wheel chairs, sitting alone or sleeping, waiting to die, waiting to move through the next phase of life. They were so patient, she thought as she pushed the door open to the parking lot; patient because there had never been an alternative before.
How could she ever be patient now?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“You’re going to Burning Man?” Malia asked.
“Will and I are going with some people from Santa Cruz,” Jasmine replied. “We’re in a waiting period in the work we’ve been doing on your father’s project, and we want to be shot out of a cannon.”
“Shot out of a cannon? Mom, haven’t you had enough shocks in the last six months?” Malia asked.
“It’s just a three-day break. Koji told me he goes every year.”
“Can I come? I haven’t been in two years!” Malia said.
“Sure,” Jasmine said, looking at Will longingly.
The trip up to Black Rock Desert was a full day’s drive from Santa Cruz. Jasmine didn’t want to arrive at night so they located a B&B in Cedarville, a lovely little town in Surprise Valley. Jasmine’s anxiety had subsided now, and a confident, exciting apprehension was beginning to take its place. Will didn’t talk much, Jasmine noticed, as the long boring hours of driving on Highway 5 ticked off. While passing the endless truck walls, and dodging the speeding, jacked up SUV’s with their huge chromed wheels, Jasmine felt a sharp jolt of anxiety. “Where is all this going?” she asked Will, reaching for his hand.
“Movement, the first rule of life,” he said as a bright green super bike screamed past, almost brushing the front bumper as it slalomed through the traffic. “It’s not where it’s going that counts, it’s where it’s coming from.”
“Where is it coming from?” Jasmine asked.
“Nothingness: a lot of boredom and monsters in nothingness.”
Jasmine liked Will’s irreverence and succinct way of half-cynical insights. Maybe that was it. Maybe life wasn’t going anywhere at all, just running from chaos and starvation. She began to think about the work again.
The dog data would help immensely, as the entire gene expression sequence would take place over a four-month period instead of about ten months in the human. In less than six months they would have complete expression data and would be very confident that the therapy would work the way they believed it would in humans.
“And I know that the crime in the city is getting worse, so I’m goin’ on down to the gun sale at the Church.” Will’s obnoxious cell phone ringer tune jolted Jasmine from her near sleep. Will seemed to be answering a long line of questions with the minimal answers. The subtle effervescence of intrigue drifted around them, as he put the phone away.
“How’s your protein run going?” she asked sleepily.
“Quicker and slicker,” Will replied.
“Is that good?” she asked.
“Quicker and slicker is always good.”
“Is good ethical?” she asked.
“Yeah, good is ethical. There’s big irony there,” Will said, peeling a banana with his teeth.
“Irony, in what way?”
“Yeah, the whole thing is so ethical it can barely function. The whole pharma industry is the most ethically driven industry in the world today, and everyone thinks they’re flakey robber barons. That’s irony, super sized irony,” he said, reaching over to stroke her hair.
“Earl didn’t think so,” Jasmine said.
“Earl didn’t get his toy and neither did I.”
“And you still thin
k that?”
“Yeah, look at us. The whole drug discovery industry spends years and decades jumping through regulatory hoops to feed an indolent, bloated, corrupt Federal government agency that couldn’t find it’s ass on a clear day. The big drug companies cross every T, dot every I, employ expensive over-educated people who are literally stewed in ethics, and endure years of bureaucratic stiff-arming to bring medicine to undeserving patients who then sue them with lawyers who make that Mohave Green rattlesnake look like Bambi. They’re actually saints, but no one knows it. And now, the drug companies are keeping half the human race alive.”
“I never looked at it that way,” Jasmine said, slowly realizing what Will was saying was true.
“Don’t feel bad. No one ever looks at things the way I do.”
The long bluish twilight had finally slipped into night time, as they walked around the tiny little town of Cedarville.
“There are no Cedar trees here,” he said, as they walked along the quiet street behind the big pink and grey two-story house.
“I wonder why?” Jasmine said.
The song always started with a jolt. “And I know that the crime in the city is getting worse, so I’m going on down to the gun sale at the Church.” Jasmine hated the Beat Farmers lyrics on Will’s cell phone ringer, but it reminded her again of his dedication to irreverence. He looked at her briefly, answered the call and walked away, which bothered her.
“What are you running on the 9900, Will?” she asked.
“Just some stuff for a guy who is trying to win a bet,” he said.
“Are you going to tell me?” Jasmine asked pointedly.
“No, maybe later.”
“Are you going to tell me what it involves?” she asked, feeling a new sense of intrigue, and rising anger with Will.
“Hotrodding,” Will said.
The vicious, dry wind blew long lines of dust devils down the approach road to Black Rock desert where the Burning Man art festival was held. People came from all over the world with wildly creative costumes and vehicles and booths, and a few went naked in the desert enjoying what the unbridled human mind could bring into the world.
Jasmine watched a nude young German couple pedal a giant fluorescent green inflatable fish around, which was covered in tiny plastic balance scales.
“Is that a fluorescent green inflatable fish?” she asked Will.
“With scales,” Will noted, as the deeply tanned couple pedaled past.
As Will worked on the rusty mountain bikes Jasmine wandered around the arrivals.
There were fire-eaters from Paris, steel artists from Prague, and musicians from all over the world, many playing instruments they had built. Instruments, like a huge automated steel drum set that covered anentire semi-trailer. It was played by servo motors from a computer keyboard by a tall man from Jamaica with warlocks that had blue flashing light diodes at the ends of his braids. He smiled at Jasmine as she watched him play the largest steel drum set in the world.
Jasmine felt overdressed in the tank top and shorts she was wearing and simply took the top off. She had never been naked in public before, and was surprised at how enjoyable it was. She stopped in front of a large mirrored box, The Box of Reflections. It was about ten feet tall, and mirrored on the outside and the inside. She stepped in and looked at her body for the first time in a very long time.
“Gravity poisoning,” said a young man in the corner.
“Gravity poisoning,” she said to herself, as she noticed how her shoulders were pulled forward and down and how the skin seemed to droop off her skeleton. Her head and face were still very much intact, and the sharp New England jut of her jaw and her excellent teeth seemed to defy the effects of aging, but the overall effects were undeniable.
The message is simple; nature doesn’t care what happens to an organism after it reproduces. Nature only wants one thing: a new model in the driveway every year. The entire life cycle is set up for this one thing: to defeat the unseen and all consuming monster- time. The power of life was clear to her now. The incredible triumph of life over endless nothingness was a strong force, and a capricious force that only wanted one thing: more life, more life, and more life.
This force was only glimpsed for a few moments in life, and in those moments its naked power was absolute. Jasmine had just felt this power, felt her carefully trained mind obliterated by it, swept away by it, and infatuated beyond control by it. Love is the power of life, and when it is revealed it is uncompromising and majestic.
“I could spot your vertical smile from across the desert. I see you’ve been to the Burning Man Boutique,” he said, laughing again.
“I haven’t looked at myself for a long time,” Jasmine said tenderly.
“Evolution has moved on. You were a good model, a great model, but Mother Nature wants the new stuff,” he mocked, absent-mindedly.
Jasmine was hurt by his remark. There was a vague sexual tone to it, and she didn’t like the word “stuff.” No one had ever referred to her as an object before.
“And what do you want?” she asked.
“Love,” he said standing next to her, stroking her back with his fingernails. As Will’s erection touched her thigh through his Samoan lava, she blushed and looked around.
“Is that, I mean how is that handled here?” she asked awkwardly.
“Am I over dressed?” he said looking down, laughing a long crazy laugh.
Jasmine tried, tried not to touch him, but she couldn’t stop. They slipped between a trailer and a tent and she took him in her mouth suddenly, wildly. He pushed her hair back on her face and looked deeply into her eyes as he came in a long trembling rush.
The balmy wind of the desert poured over them for a few minutes, as Jasmine closed her eyes and lolled in the delicious sensuality of the moment. Will had such beautiful hands, she thought, as he caressed her back in long circular motions.
“I wonder what love is,” she said quietly. “Gene based,” Will said flatly.
“It’s like a radio transmitter, it’s always on, always looking for that super specific matching frequency, and when it finds it, its reproduction city. I think it’s a lot like monoclonal antibodies, but in the behavioral subset. It’s super selective.”
Jasmine didn’t expect a real answer. She expected a moment of loving abandon, a moment of being lost in one of life’s great mysteries. Strange new impulses were coursing through her now, and she felt vulnerable and a little scared. Will somehow deeply satisfied her, and provoked in her an intense desire to be loved and loved again. “What’s happening to me?” she said aloud, not meaning to.
“You’re aging. Your role as a sexual creature is over, which means you have no value now, or so your medulla oblongata is telling your conscious mind, so you crave sexual attention to prove to the old brain that you’re still valuable, still wanted, still desired,” Will said, again annoying her with a real answer when she wanted soft reassurance.
Jasmine laughed quietly for a few seconds. “Gene based behavior?” she asked hopefully.
“Yeah, most of it is,” he said.
“Maybe we can build a gene therapy then?” she said, chuckling a little.
“Funny you should ask,” he said.
Night doesn’t fall in the desert, it occurs. Suddenly it was night, and after the usual fiasco of setting up the tents, Malia arrived.
“Mom, you’re like, topless!” Malia said innocently.
“That’s not the half of it,” she said, throwing her head back.
Malia looked at her mothers face, the glow in her eyes and the pinkish flush in her skin. “Way to go, Mom. You look really happy.”
“I am happy but sad at times, although tonight I know I’m loved and I’m happy,” she said, vaguely fearful that her remarks might sound like psychobabble.
“Where’s Rammy?” Malia asked.
“He’ll be here tomorrow. He’s running some subsets for Will today,” Jasmine said.
“Let’s go dance Mom, let m
e get ready,” she said, ducking into her tent.
The bonfires were just building up as they headed out into the dance area. A huge techno disk jockey station was pumping out techno music that Jasmine had never heard before. It was fascinating, deeply layered, wildly undulating music with bizarre overlays of poetry reading, sirens, screaming, and other sound effects all driven by a monstrous back beat.
There was a huge video display, that played random images, which sometimes seemed to come out of the music and sometimes seemed to cause the music. There were scenes of atomic explosions, time stop images of traffic, people having sex, African tribes dancing and scenes from 1950’s American television commercials, cutting in and out, fading to romantic scenes from long forgotten Hollywood movies.
Malia saw Koji on the video console and waved to him. “There’s Koji!” she shouted to Jasmine. Koji was painted with bright silver body paint, and was wearing a vest that flashed blue, red, and green with the music. He waved to Malia.
Jasmine danced with Malia for a long time, wondering where Will was. The crowd was an unending source of fascination for Jasmine. The costumes were incredibly creative and exciting. One girl was wearing a dragonfly costume of some new kind of fabric that was electrified and shimmered with green light. The eyes were made of tiny red Christmas tree balls that looked very real and otherworldly. When she flapped her wings everyone stepped aside.
The tight knot of excitement and abandon that she felt in Santa Cruz flooded over her again, and she felt like a young artist, living large in a world of endless possibility. “Could I really feel young again?
Could I really feel like this again, for a very long time?” she asked herself. Then she looked up at the video screen and stopped.
A grainy video, showing a face of an old women, was running with some kind of technical information displayed next to it. Then the face slowly morphed into the face of a much younger woman, jerked, then morphed into the face of a grotesque corpse, with a large tumor on the neck, and then it started over. Jasmine could see the hair turning from white to black, from the roots out, and the skin becoming shiny and supple, then the jerk, then the horrific face of the diseased corpse.