by Jamie Metzl
“Fine,” she says, taking a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, “notwithstanding.”
It doesn’t seem to matter that we, like everyone else, would use IVF even if we were having kids, which we’re not. It also doesn’t change things that most women across the country, regardless of their marital status, are having their eggs extracted, frozen, and stored at twenty years old based on the new National Cryopreparedness Protocol. Notwithstanding, of course, the induced funk we’ve somehow entered.
The momentary silence is beginning to grow heavy so I resort to shameless cheating. “How were the waifs?”
Toni lifts her eyebrows. “You can’t trick me that easily, Dikran.”
I stand my ground with a pitiful half smile. Toni volunteers once a week after work at Wayside Waifs, the Grandview animal shelter that rescues, heals, and puts up for adoption dogs, cats, and other furries rejected by their past lives.
“But,” she adds, throwing me a verbal bone, “I’m a pushover for those puppies.”
Toni not only loves dogs, she also loves underdogs, and the Wayside puppies are both. She knows I’m not a big fan of pets, which she, like most everyone else in America, recognizes as a vile personal failing. Seeing how her eyes soften at even the mention of the dogs, I feel once again a bit like a jerk that Toni and I don’t have a dog of our own. But a dog is connected to a commitment, which is connected to a life, which is connected to a fear still pinging out irregular signals of caution from somewhere deep inside of me.
Her eyes betray a hint of the debate I sense is going on in her head. Instead of making me feel worse that we don’t have a dog or a life fully conducive to such a dog, her expression softens. “Well if that’s the game we’re playing …”
I’m not sure where Toni is going until she lifts her right wrist and whispers into her u.D. Looking over my shoulder, her face blossoms. I stare at her for a brief moment, taking in all that could be if I’d just get over myself, before turning to see a video box opening on the freezerator door.
“Auntie Toni!” Nayiri’s happy voice coos. The eighteen-month-old daughter of Maya Armstrong, the young woman from Oklahoma Toni and I saved two years ago from the rogue US government agent systematically murdering women who, like her, were carrying genetically enhanced embryos as part of the Genesis Code conspiracy, Nayiri’s wild mane of puffy blond hair, radiant blue eyes, and buoyant smile dominate the screen. “Uncle Dikran,” the ecstatic baby adds as I join Toni in front of the camera.
“Aww,” I say, overwhelmed. I’d scrubbed references to Maya in my stories two years ago, and we’ve been hiding her ever since at my mother’s home in Glendale, California, where she’s assumed the name Magda Aramian to try to avoid notice in our Armenian American community. “How is my little hokees?”
“Shad lav,” Nayiri responds.
I turn toward Toni for a brief moment. Our eyes connect.
“What are you doing today, Nayiri, honey?” Toni asks in her most sugary voice.
Maya’s angular face pops into the screen. Still only twenty-seven, she has clearly blossomed and matured in the two years we’ve known her.
“Hey guys,” she says nonchalantly, “what’s up?”
“We just wanted to say hello,” Toni says.
I love Maya and the baby and my mother a lot, but I’d be in much less regular touch with all of them were it not for Toni.
“Want to see our new trick?” Maya asks.
Toni and I glance at each other and we are back on the same team. Every video call seems to elicit another manifestation of what little Nayiri is capable of.
Maya taps her u.D and a familiar colored fish begins dancing above the words on our screen. She rubs Nayiri’s head softly. “What does that say, yars?”
Nayiri points to letters as the words form in her mouth. “O-o-one f-ish, two-o-o f-ish,” she says, starting to gain confidence, “red fish, blue fish.”
“That’s so wonderful, honey,” Toni sings.
“Amazing,” I add.
Two barks reverberate through Toni’s room.
“Is that who I think it is?” Toni calls, a crooked smile budding. “Is that who I think it is?” she repeats in an even more playful voice.
“The one and only,” Maya responds, lifting my mother’s Shih Tzu, Shoonig, to the screen.
The dog wags his head and barks excitedly.
Toni’s face again lights up. “There’s a good dog,” she declares in her silliest dog voice. “There’s a good Shoonig.”
“What have you guys been up to?” I ask.
The connection endures for another ten minutes with more feats from the baby and updates from Maya and my mother about life together, cooking, and various bits of modern technology Maya is exposing my mother to.
I turn to Toni as we tap off the call. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
My words are vague but she doesn’t need to ask what I mean. “I appreciate your saying that,” she says after a pause. “This is tough. They keep saying they’ll eventually be able to make eggs from induced stem cells and skip the whole extraction process altogether, but my ovaries will probably be dried-up craisins before that happens.”
I hate it when she references her age. Thirty-three is still young, especially in these days of scientifically managed reproduction. But we both know that the clock still ticks, even if it’s a bit slower than it once was. “Two more days and you’ll be off the hormones,” I say, trying pathetically to add a positive spin.
She humors my humble offering for a few quiet moments. “Two more days and they’ll stick an electronic arm up my hoo-ha.”
I reach my hand slightly in her direction, then stop myself.
Toni sees that I’m not sure how to respond and throws me another bone. “Your mother and Maya were so proud of their little janig. She’s becoming a real little Armenian.”
Of course, Armenians also excel at nasty words just as much as endearing ones, and Toni has learned enough about my culture these past years to pull back from my pivot with one of them.
“Eshoo kak,” she says with a mischievous grin.
It’s not the most appropriate use of the words “donkey shit,” but she somehow both makes her point and diffuses the remaining tension at the same time. I sit in the chair next to hers and take a spoonful of her ice cream.
“It was an interesting day,” I say.
Her eyes focus warmly on mine for the first time since I walked in the door. “Tell me, honey.”
6
I’m waiting calmly with two bottles of Badoit water, two café Americanos, and two cinnamon rolls on the table in front of me when Maurice walks in at 8:02 a.m. As always, he looks sturdy and well-kempt, his afro cropped close to his head like the US Marine he once was. I get the feeling he’s forced himself to be two minutes late just to make a point.
“What do you have?” he asks sharply. He doesn’t mean the food.
“It’s nice to see you, Maurice.”
Maurice unscrews the top of his water bottle and pours a glass. “Good morning, Rich,” he says in a slightly sardonic tone as he sits.
“Is your family okay? MJ, the dog?” I ask.
“They are fine,” he says with a faint smile, not asking me about Toni even though the four of us—Maurice, his wife Janae, Toni, and I—have been out to dinner three times in the last two years. He takes a perfunctory sip of his water, no doubt waiting for me to tell him why he’s here. Maurice Henderson doesn’t do social coffees.
“The department?”
The words bring a hint of life to Maurice’s face. “Health-care costs are bankrupting us. We have to cut back on hiring new recruits to take care of the old codgers living out their golden years. With everything happening in the Middle East, we’re having to put round-the-clock protection at the synagogues around town, not to mention the people we already have keeping an eye on the fertility clinics and biotech labs. If anybody has a beef in Kansas City, eventually we need to send a team out to patrol something, but
the beefs keep adding up as the country metastasizes and our budget keeps getting cut.” Maurice shakes his head. “The department is great.”
I smile.
I may be one of the few people who see this side of Maurice, though his expression suggests he’s not quite sure that’s a good thing. “What am I doing here, Rich?”
“Does the name Benjamin Hart mean anything to you?”
“Not really. Why?”
“He is—was—a retired KU biology professor. He was dying of cancer before he disappeared from the hospice at a hundred and twentieth and Wornall a couple of weeks ago.”
“I didn’t recognize the name but I saw that in one of my briefing notes a while ago. What about him?”
“He just vanished. The guy was practically a vegetable. There’s no trace of him.”
“Strange things happen. There aren’t always answers. You know that.”
“A few people told me KCPD hasn’t been doing much to look into the disappearance.”
“I’m sure a few people are saying that about lots of things. I don’t know the details about Hart, but we have young kids disappearing all the time and don’t have the resources to follow up. Those kids have their lives ahead of them.”
“I started looking into this yesterday and there seem to be some strange coincidences.”
“Look, Rich, I don’t need to get pulled into another one of your wild goose chases right now. We’re a police department. We prioritize. That’s what we have to do.”
I don’t need to say that one of my “wild goose chases” turned out to be the biggest case of Maurice’s career. “Can I just tell you the circumstances?”
His face maintains its mild annoyance as I lay out what I’ve learned.
“That’s it?” he asks when I’m done.
The image of Katherine Hart’s desperate stare into her coffee table screen flashes through my mind. “I need to ask you a favor, Maurice, a personal favor.”
Maurice eyes me impassively.
“All I ask is that you look into this a bit more. I’m sure there are more important things on your plate right now, but just do me this little favor and have an extra little look. At worst it will waste a bit of your time, and at best there might be a stone somewhere that’s gone unturned.”
Maurice taps the table a couple of times. Then he shakes his head with a wry smirk, stands, and walks out the door.
7
“Now I’m sure that when you’re not living your lives and going to church and cheering for your kids in soccer and baseball games, when you just take a step back in a quiet moment and think about it, most of you good people are wondering once in a while, ‘what the heck are those crazy people in Washington doing?’”
Slipping into the back of the Chapel Hill Clubhouse in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, I watch Senator Carleton King—tall, lean, and chiseled, his brown hair parted over the side of his triangular face—pause for humorous effect. If rumors are to be believed, King’s series of health-care forums around the state are just a prelude to his expected run for the presidency three years from now, in 2028.
“But when you have to be in Washington week after week as I do, it forces you to ask that question every day.”
I look around the room. The almost two hundred people in the audience seem the epitome of country club privilege.
“Well, I’m just a country boy from the boot heel, but I’ve been looking around for eleven years, and to tell you the god’s honest truth, ladies and gentlemen”—he pauses and leans forward as if about to reveal a deep secret—“I’m not exactly sure what they’re up to. They’re certainly having a lot of meetings. They’re certainly spending a lot of your tax money.”
The crowd releases a collective guffaw, King’s humor seeming to confirm what they know deep in their hearts to be true: that they are victims of a secret government plot to give their hard-earned money to slackers living lazily off the fruits of other people’s labor.
But then a face catches my eye. I have no idea why she’s here.
Sierra sees me and gestures for me to come over to her side of the room, near the opposite door. I pause a moment, my mind flipping through the possibilities. Did Martina send us both? Is Sierra now taking on the politics beat as well?
“You know, ladies and gentleman, Robin Hood may have been good at racing around the forest in little green tights,” King continues as I walk toward Sierra, “but he wasn’t trying to keep a country competitive. He didn’t have to make sure small business owners like you had the incentives you need to grow your companies without worrying that the more you made, the more would be taken from you. That’s why Robin Hood isn’t the symbol of America. We don’t have his picture on our dollar bills. Our symbol is the American eagle, who doesn’t sit in his nest waiting for it to rain frogs but heads out every morning to find them himself.”
I reach Sierra, trying my best to appear unperturbed. “What brings you here?”
“Should I not be?” she whispers, probably reading my tone better than I had intended.
“I’m just a little surprised,” I say quietly. “Did Martina—”
“Yes. You, too?”
I nod.
“I guess health and politics are becoming inextricably linked,” she says.
“Senator, are you going to let them take away our health care?” a tight-faced elderly woman in a red, white, and blue sweater shouts to King.
“Now that,” King says emphatically, “is an important question.”
The United States has been debating health care for decades, but in spite of the major progress we made through the National Competitiveness Act, we still spend more per person than any country in the world, have far worse health outcomes on average, and remain shackled to politicians promising everything to everyone even as high prices and miraculous innovations make health care so expensive it threatens to sink the US economy once and for all.
“You all know that Jack Alvarez and the liberals don’t want you to be able to go to your doctor’s office or to the hospital and get the treatments you need and have worked your whole life to afford. You know what they call this kind of discrimination?” King pauses, a mischievous look on his face. “What do they call it?”
“Health democracy,” disparate voices from the crowd yell out.
“You said it, my friends,” King replies, boomeranging into a rhythm. “They call it health democracy, but it doesn’t make us healthier and it undermines our democracy. How can it make us healthier when it’s denying good people like you the opportunity to get the health care you need? How can it strengthen democracy by limiting your rights?”
“How about by making access to health care a little more equitable in our increasingly dividing society?” I whisper to Sierra. Advances in medical science—from applied genomics to neural conditioning to even the preliminary progress in the brain-machine interface—have been astounding these past years, but some of the most cutting-edge treatments are still out of reach for people less privileged than everyone in this room.
She looks at me and shrugs. “It’s complicated.”
“Alvarez and the liberals say they’re trying to control costs,” King says, “but how are they going to do that? The only way to control costs is through a free market. They say they want to regulate, but the government bureaucrats I see in Washington couldn’t regulate their way out of a paper bag.”
“How much money are King and the other Republicans getting from the big health companies and hospitals betting on them to hold back any type of regulation that might cut away at their bottom lines?” I whisper to Sierra.
“Yeah,” she replies, unimpressed, “but the health companies are also counting on the Democratic candidates they support to push for higher levels of government investment in new drugs and health-care technologies.”
Sierra clearly knows her stuff.
“Alvarez and the liberals shouldn’t be playing politics with your lives,” King continues. “If you want to spend your mo
ney making yourselves healthier or taking care of your parents, then it’s your fundamental, God-given right as Americans to do so.”
The heads continue to nod as I imagine the big health stocks ticking up. “With no regulation of costs, we’ll go from the 24 percent of GDP we currently spend on health care to whatever number will finally push us over the edge,” I whisper to Sierra, probably trying to impress her with my statistic.
Sierra nods, finally agreeing with something I say. “But the acquisition of smaller companies with promising technologies and drugs in their pipelines will have already been made based on the inflated share prices, and the big health stock options will have already been exercised by then.”
As King thunders on, I start to worry again about why both Sierra and I are here, but then pride gets the best of me. “I’m going to head out,” I whisper to Sierra. “Why don’t you take it from here?”
“Suit yourself,” she says, no doubt recognizing why I’m leaving.
I’m annoyed at Sierra, Martina, the Star, and most of all myself as I stand there, still not moving. But then I feel the slight vibration on my wrist and tap my u.D.
“It’s Maurice,” he says.
I can hear his seriousness in my earbud even through the din of the room. I rush out the door and into the clubhouse hallway with purpose.
“Sir,” I mumble softly.
“I came across something I thought might interest you. William Wolfson is a retired scientist living in St. Louis. Old guy. Used to work for Monsanto.”
“Okay,” I say, not sure where Maurice is going.
“I just came across a short reference in one of the statewide police reports. He’s been dying of cancer these past five months.” Maurice pauses. “And he disappeared nine days ago from the St. Louis hospice.”
8
The mezuzah strikes me as an odd coincidence.