Eternal Sonata

by Jamie Metzl

  “Of course I’m here. I know I don’t say it enough, but you’re the most important person to me in the world.”

  “More important than your mother?” she asks mischievously, catching me off guard.

  “Yes,” I say, feeling guilty as the words escape my mouth. Baby Nayiri notwithstanding, I still don’t visit or speak with my mother as much as I probably should.

  “I’m just teasing you.”

  I relax.

  “More important than yourself?” she fires once my defenses are down.

  A part of me wants to protect myself. It’s overruled by the fact that I’m here escorting her to a surgical procedure that may be commonplace but is still traumatic for her—and by the possibility she has a point.

  Maybe I’m being defensive, I think, but I’ve made sacrifices, too. I had a pretty exciting offer from the investigative news organization ProCivica to move to New York last year. We thought about it seriously. But at the end of the day, Toni didn’t want to leave her parents and her friends and probably knew in her heart she was not a big-city woman. Her parents live in Independence, Missouri, and Kansas City was also half a country closer to California and Maya and Nayiri, she had argued. I guess I could have gone on my own or tried to convince her to change her mind, but I knew then as I know now that I value Toni more than my work. So I turned down the offer but bought myself the Tesla as a guilty consolation. If I was going to slow down my life, at least I could do it in an obscenely fast car.

  Toni notices my mind drifting. “You really are a pain in the ass sometimes.”

  We both stop walking and face each other, then she wraps her arms around my neck. Our bodies pull together.

  “I’m scared,” she says.

  “I know, baby,” I say softly, focusing only on her and holding her tightly.

  The walk through the hospital takes under ten minutes. The deliverybots and Robotic Nurse Assistants on their rounds courteously steer themselves out of our way as we pass. We arrive at the OB/GYN ward and get in line behind a small army of women all here for the same ORC—oocyte retraction and cryopreservation—procedure. The well-oiled machine of the clinic makes it seem like a McDonald’s drive through. The fact that the entire procedure is carried out by surgical robots only heightens the perception of mechanical efficiency.

  I’m not allowed in, so after she enters the ward I pace the surprisingly empty waiting room. Maybe this procedure has become so routine, like a teeth cleaning, that people come on their own. To my surprise, she emerges twenty-five minutes later with a small bandage on her arm and a relaxed smile on her face.

  “Well?” I say expectantly.

  “Piece of cake,” she says nonchalantly, as if our earlier conversations had never happened.

  “Are you sure? Are you okay?” I’m unsure how much I should ask. I’m not the one who’s had a robotic arm inside of me.

  “Yeah, of course,” she says, making clear she doesn’t want to go into the details.

  I’ve learned over the past few years to stop pressing immediately in the face of that look. “Okay,” I say hesitantly.

  “Walk me back to work?”

  “Um, sure,” I say, taking her hand.

  Her step somehow feels more carefree than it’s been for weeks, maybe months.

  “All right, honey,” she says outside the NICU doors. “I’ll see you later?”

  “What time are you done?”

  “My shift ends at seven thirty.”

  “Meet at your place at eight? I can bring dinner.”

  The mention of her place seems to cause a momentary flicker in her eye. “Sure.”

  12

  “What do you have for me?” I fire, approaching Joseph’s cubicle.

  He doesn’t look up. “Scientific papers, patent applications, pharmaceutical and gene therapy trial guidelines.”

  “Anything jump out?” I say, chewing my sesame flagel.

  “Relative to what?”

  “Any reference to Benjamin Hart or William Wolfson?”

  “Not connecting them to Santique.”

  I take a slug of matcha. “Anything about recent cancer protocols?”

  “Lots of references to sequencing the cancers, stem cell treatments, pharmagenics—”

  “Does it list the names of specific Santique employees connected with the most recent trials?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “Can you narrow it down?”

  “With the right search terms.” He turns his head toward me as if to say, well?

  I pause. “How about getting a list of their researchers associated with Santique’s cancer work over the past few years to see which names are cited most, at least to get us started?”

  “I can probably do that,” he says, mumbling into his u.D and waving his arms to move files across his wall. “I’m guessing there will be a lot of names.”

  In ten minutes, the list in order of citation frequency appears. There are around eighty in total, mostly French-sounding. None of them mean anything to me. Michel Noland, Mathieu Gignac, Celine Henri, Olivier Meilleroux …

  Joseph transfers the list to my u.D.

  “Let me see if I can track down any of these people individually,” I say. “Keep looking.”

  He stares at me blankly.

  “Please,” I add, turning back toward my cubicle.

  It takes me almost an hour to cover the first eleven names on the list, and I’m beginning to get frustrated by my complete lack of progress when Joseph steps gingerly to my desk.

  “I think I may have found something interesting,” he says, tapping his u.D to splash a document on my cubicle wall.

  It’s hard to know what he’s referring to from the tiny print. “What is it?”

  “A footnote in an article in the American Journal of Cancer Research on stem cell treatments for specific cancers from March 2022, three and a half years ago, that references both Michel Noland, chief scientific officer at Santique Health, and a Santique scientist named Dr. Noam Heller.”

  “And?” I ask, not clear why this is significant.

  “They’d publish something like this as the foundation of a patent application. It’s like a preemptive claim.”

  “Okay,” I say cautiously.

  He takes a breath then a small step back. “I downloaded all the cancer papers filed by Santique over the past decade and put them in a database. Then I ran an association algorithm targeting the names of the scientists and the compounds mentioned in each of their studies.”

  I’m not entirely sure where Joseph is going but have, like most everyone else, developed a profound appreciation these past years for how big-data analysis can uncover narratives far beyond our limited brains.

  “Heller and Noland only published one article together, which appears to be Heller’s only publication as a Santique scientist. All the other Santique research seems to stem from that single article,” Joseph says, tapping his u.D to splash a heat map on my wall. “This shows all the associations over time between Santique scientists and the compounds they reference in their papers. Heller and Noland’s paper is represented by the bright blue dot in the middle. See how it gets so much larger just after the American Journal article is published in March 2022? Their work is the foundation of the other studies. It’s like they’re showing the way and the other research is following the lead. Forty-two papers are filed in the next six months, all referencing the original article. Noland is a co-author on all of them, but Heller is only co-author on that single paper. Then, just as fast, the blue dot shrinks very quickly, as if Heller and Noland’s work is taken out of the equation. It’s not just that they stop releasing papers referencing the Heller and Nolan article; they completely stop publishing cancer papers.”

  “And this is a company betting its future on finding a stem cell–based cure for cancer?”

  “I had the same question,” Joseph says. “That’s why I ran a search of the full database for references to all of the compounds referenced i
n Heller and Noland’s 2022 article. Look what I found.”

  I’m not exactly sure what the red blotch on my wall is telling me, but Joseph opens his hand to bring the blotch into sharper relief. The text of an article emerges.

  “This is a paper Heller published in Cell on revolutionary stem cell approaches to cancer therapy, the year before, in 2021, when he was at Sowers,” Joseph says. “All of the compounds referenced in the paper he did the next year with Noland are there.”

  “Which makes you think Santique acquired Heller and his research after then?”

  “It could definitely suggest that. Heller and Noland’s March 2022 paper was just the codification of Heller’s previous work. It’s like Heller’s discovery is being handed off to Santique. Then Santique starts focusing like a laser beam on this work with Noland but not Heller, then the publications stop.”

  “So maybe they’ve got Heller working quietly in the basement.”

  “They hire him from Sowers, focus all their energies on patenting his work, then suddenly go dark?” Joseph asks, not waiting for an answer. “This got me at least interested in seeing if I could learn more about Noland and Heller. Noland seems to be a lifer at Santique, a rising star, but look at Heller.” He waves his right hand to manipulate the files. “The guy is unbelievably impressive, a genius. Born in Cape Town in 1956; University of Cape Town PhD in biology; Stanford post-doc; most of his career at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he was one of the early pioneers in stem cell research; came to Sowers in 2016, where he publishes a series of path-breaking papers, but then he seems to vanish from the public record in 2022.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s not just that. He seems to have mastered and pulled together a lot of different fields in his work.”

  “Like?” I ask.

  “Computer science, deep learning artificial intelligence, biology, psychology, advanced mathematics for a start.”

  “Not Mayan numerology? The guy is an idiot.”

  “He’s also apparently a concert-level violinist and composer. He and his wife used to perform together in Israel. She was also a scientist. Looks like she died ten years ago.”

  “So Heller was a major figure, then three years ago he just drops off the radar,” I say quietly. “What about other references to him? Is there a way to map more general references to Heller over time?”

  “That’s easy,” Joseph says, already waving his hands to manipulate the data.

  The heat map that splashes on my wall a few moments later tells the same story as the research papers. Heller, like most everybody else, lives a life exuding a traceable data stream. Then, in late 2022, the stream goes dark.

  “So Heller leaves Sowers four years ago to join Santique, just before Santique builds a major facility next door to the Sowers research park. He co-publishes a paper with a Santique scientist based solely on his own research, then Santique takes over the science and he’s not heard from. He’s an older guy. Could he have died?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Joseph says. “You’d think someone like that would have an obituary somewhere. I don’t see anything.”

  The logic is appealing, but I battle in my head with William of Occam, the fourteenth-century English theologian I sometimes channel to keep me from veering too far off track. It’s easy to come up with complex theories, but the simplest explanations are usually the most accurate. “Is all of this strange or just a product of our imaginations?”

  “At very least Noland and Heller could be a key if we’re interested in learning more about Santique’s experimental cancer research,” Joseph says, making the source of our realization clear.

  “And from my experience at Santique earlier today, there’s not a big chance they’re going to let us talk with Noland.”

  “Which leaves us with Heller,” Joseph says, completing my thought. “If we can find him.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Joseph continues to wave his hands, moving files across my wall. “I still can’t see where he lives or works. I can see what hospital he was born in in South Africa, where he lived in Palo Alto, his apartment in Israel, and where he lived in Kansas City until three years ago. But for the last three years, there’s essentially no record. It’s like he’s been erased.”

  I stare at Joseph but my mind is elsewhere. What is it about vanishing scientists these days?

  13

  Flat and rectangular, the dilapidated one-story building must be about a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet or so wide. The cracked asphalt surrounding the building shows faded yellow markings for parking but no other cars are in sight.

  I knock on the sturdy front door of the orange brick warehouse. No answer.

  I yank the steel door handle. It doesn’t budge.

  All casual observation suggests this building is unoccupied. The Missouri River flows quietly by.

  But thank dog I’m not relying solely on casual observation.

  Joseph’s call to Sowers human resources had hit a predictable brick wall, both on getting access to Noland and on information about where we might find Heller. Then I’d called in a bigger gun.

  Once his initial reservations were overcome, tracking down Heller was the kind of challenge Jerry Weisberg reveled in.

  “Death and taxes,” he had said, responding to my query about how someone could simply vanish without leaving a trace.

  He targeted death first. The morgues and funeral homes had not prioritized network security, and it was relatively easy to at least show that nobody named Noam Heller had been officially recorded dead in the United States over the past few years.

  Taxes were another story. Jerry drew a line there. “I wouldn’t be comfortable hacking the US government on this even if I could,” he had said. “Not based just on what you’ve told me.”

  “This is important, Jerry,” I’d pleaded, but Jerry was not going to be railroaded.

  “But,” he continued with a suppressed smirk, “we don’t need to hack public records. They’re public. We can’t get the details of personal tax filings, but we can confirm whether or not a filing has been made.” He wiggled his finger to track through the database links splashed on his wall. “Here we go. Noam Heller. Jackson County, Missouri. Personal taxes filed for 2024. At least you can bet he had some connection to Kansas City in April of this year.”

  I’d wanted to hug Jerry but knew full well that nothing would do more to knock him off his game. “How can we narrow this down?”

  “We can’t from the tax database, but what else do we know about him?”

  “We know he was born in South Africa, that he’s a cancer researcher, that he used to live in Israel, that he plays the violin—”

  “What type of cancer?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” I said. “The research he published a few years ago was on genetic sequencing and stem cell–based approaches to diagnose and treat cancers.”

  “Is he still working?”

  “I don’t know. I’d imagine that someone with that kind of passion wouldn’t just quit.”

  “But if he was working for a big company like Santique, he’d probably have shown up in an employment database, which he didn’t.” Jerry had paused to think. “Does he have his own lab?”

  “Could be. How would we know?”

  “The easy way would be to look up the address, but we did that already.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said ironically.

  “But maybe,” Jerry continued, “he’d need to order special equipment or materials for his research.”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  Jerry was already deep into his research. The files splashed across his walls. “According to this, an advanced stem cell lab would need specific antibodies for confirming the flexibility of the cells, stem cell media, and usually specific viruses to help reprogram the cells. All of this is pretty specific, but let’s see what we can do.”

  I’d watched in wonder as he made a list of the ke
y materials, in awe as he hacked the medical supply companies to see where they had been delivered in the Kansas City area over the past three years. Then he eliminated all the listed hospitals and known labs from the list. Two unknowns remained. So he’d hacked into the Kansas City Power and Light system and learned that the large energy bills for one of them were being paid by Santique Health, and so here I am at 1836 Levee Road in Kansas City’s West Bottoms—the historical base of the city, now mostly abandoned but for a few dilapidated warehouses and struggling bars where the down-and-out cohabitate with the artsy poor.

  But there doesn’t appear to be anyone here, and the main entrance is locked, and nothing happens when I keep knocking.

  I walk a loop of the facility, peering into the darkly glazed, grate-covered windows and banging on the back door, but see and hear nothing. If something is happening here, there’s not much evidence of it.

  A part of me thinks I should leave, but it doesn’t take my philosophy PhD to know that much of our transient lives happen outside our direct gaze. I’ve also invested too much energy in getting here to back down so easily. I have at least enough confidence in my own research to keep trying. I drive around the block, then park my car beside a neighboring abandoned building with a decent view of the facility and wait.

  I fill the first thirty minutes reviewing Joseph’s additional notes on Heller and then scanning the international headlines, again dominated by the forever unfolding crisis in the Middle East where the Sunni–Shia wars that already destroyed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and most of the old Arab states are metastasizing into roving bands of militias fighting with the weapons, including tactical nukes, of the disintegrating states in a scorpion’s duel with each other and Israel.

  Now that the Israel-Palestine peace deal has collapsed, the jihadi terrorists have fully infiltrated the West Bank. The international commitment to keep that territory disarmed has proven worthless. As part of the grand compromise between America’s support for Israel and China’s still-desperate need for Middle Eastern oil, the United Nations–led consortium of big powers had agreed to provide and man sophisticated anti-missile protective domes to shield both Israel and the scattered oil fields. The UN’s done a decent job working with the Israeli military to shoot down the daily barrage of missiles, but many of the UN member countries who support fortifying the oilfields are waging a rearguard action to halt the expensive, challenging, and sometimes deadly protection of Israel. The international movement to pull back has been growing for months.