by Jamie Metzl
“There was no entry point, so you would have been killed instantly,” Maurice adds, “but I appreciate the gesture. I want you to know that.” Maurice is straining at the far end of his intimacy spectrum and it means a lot to me.
“Have you spoken with the families of the officers who were killed?”
“Are you asking me as a reporter?”
“I won’t release anything you tell me not to.”
“The chief and I just came from their homes. The chaplain is with them now. It’s the worst part of this job.”
“I’m sorry.” I work to keep my voice steady. “If you think it would help the families, we’d like to do meaningful obituaries at some point.”
“Yeah, Rich,” Maurice says, “just not right now. We’ll be releasing the names later tonight, then you can connect with the press officer.”
“And you?”
“Two of my officers are down, and I’m going to find out why.”
I tell him of my conversation with the incident commander and ask Maurice if he can get the records from Kansas City Power and Light. He doesn’t commit, but I sense he’ll do it. I resolve to surreptitiously ask Jerry to see what he can dig up as a backup.
“How could it be,” I ask, trying to lure Maurice into the broader story, “that all of this happens at the same time? Two scientists disappear, then Heller is killed, then the explosion.”
He doesn’t take the bait. “I don’t know, but my first focus right now is on my men and the second focus is on Heller. Anything beyond that is off my radar.”
“But Benjamin Hart—”
“Off my radar right now.”
“Have you heard anything back from the Tobago police at least?”
Maurice shakes his head, looking slightly annoyed.
“Could I possibly ask you to follow up?”
26
Compared to the vast expanse of the 4.5 billion years of this planet, or the nearly four billion years it took life to morph from a single-cell organism into the hundred trillion or so cells I lug around today, each of our presences is but a blip.
Blip, actually, is too strong a word.
We are a pimple on the nose of a speck joy-riding on the blip’s ass.
In other words, we are small.
But each of us is the hero of our own little play, endowed with enough narcissism to believe our lives, our presence here on Earth during the estimated five billion more years our blue marble has left to twirl, somehow counts.
Faced with death two years ago in a musty hotel room in Norman, Oklahoma, I realized that as small as our lives may be in the grand scheme of things, loving another person is our tiny ripple in the universe, our song into the vastness of space announcing the inexplicable artistry of our one true creation greater than ourselves.
But over the past two years I’ve gradually lost hold of this insight. Perpetually overthinking life, I seem to have reverted to my ongoing dialectical battle between—and I’ll be the first to roll my eyes whenever Jean-Paul Sartre is referenced—being and nothingness.
In the last three days I’ve learned of two men’s disappearances into thin air, come across the body of a genius I’d just met being grotesquely devoured by jellyfish, and essentially witnessed the deaths of two police officers caught in a massive explosion. No wonder my grip on reality—whatever that strange concept actually means—is feeling tenuous as I pull into Toni’s driveway.
She’s running back and forth in the kitchen waving her arms as I enter through the door from the garage. An easy smile blankets her face. “Come on, Sebastian, come on,” she says in her silly baby voice.
The dog leaps in circles with delight.
“Look who it is!” she says to the dog in the same voice. “It’s Daddy.”
I turn as if to see if someone is standing behind me. Toni seems to forgive my poor attempt at humor and crawls toward me.
She swats my left shoe back and forth, which the dog recognizes as placing my foot on the edible list. Sebastian darts in with what looks like an irrepressible smile and I’m reminded, as if I need reminding, which I probably sometimes do, just how special Toni is.
Maybe the dog knows on some level he’s now an orphan, maybe he doesn’t. But right now Toni has delivered him into a momentary trance of joy.
I drop to my hands and knees and lower my head to face Sebastian. He leaps and I roll him over, rubbing his stomach.
“Look at you,” Toni says.
I spring at Toni and bite her playfully on the shoulder, now rolling her over and catching her in my arms.
“I was worried about you,” she says with sudden seriousness, staring me in the eye.
“I know, baby,” I say, feeling reconnected. “I’m okay. How are you feeling?”
“Just happy to be off the hormones. My eggs are resting comfortably in liquid nitrogen.”
I smile at Toni, not quite knowing what to say.
The dog must read the change of energy because he suddenly launches himself between us.
“There’s a good Sebastian,” Toni coos. “There’s a good Sebasti-basti.”
Sebastian yelps, but his excitement stops in its tracks the moment the Kitchenette bell rings. He lifts his head in panic, his body starts to shake, he leaps off us and runs up the stairs with Toni and me in hot pursuit.
We follow him into Toni’s bedroom and find him burying his head under the clothes in her laundry basket.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, Sebastian,” Toni says as we kneel down. Her voice could melt butter.
Sebastian is shaking.
“If only he could talk,” I say.
“We could bring him with us to couples therapy.”
Ouch.
Toni’s eyes train on Sebastian. “He’s such a puppy but he has an old soul.”
“An old soul?” I ask, not a lot of room for reincarnation in my hard-won atheism.
“I just get the feeling he plugs into energies.”
Something about her words, about the way she says them, triggers a thought. I close my eyes to process it. “What did Heller say about the dog when we were with him yesterday?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something about the dog containing our history. Do you remember?”
“Yeah. He said that dogs carry their entire history in their cells,” she says, still unsure why I’m asking.
“Right,” I add, my mind struggling to piece together the ill-fitting shards. “Like a log book of a journey they can never know.”
Toni scrutinizes me, not sure where I am going.
I feel a few shards starting to shift together. “And what about his name? Sebastian, as in Johann Sebastian. The eternal sonata, where each melody contains the mathematical formula guiding the whole.” I lean my back against the closet wall and cover my eyes for a moment with my hand. “Doesn’t that sound a bit like a genome?”
Toni raises an eyebrow.
“It’s almost like Heller is saying something with the name,” I continue. The idea seems crazy even to me, but I can’t escape the strange logic. “Do you mind if I take Sebastian for some tests?”
Her body stiffens. “What kind of tests?”
“Lab tests?” I say contritely, realizing as the words leave my mouth how poorly they will be received.
“Does ‘over my dead body’ mean anything to you?”
“There’s a lot at stake here,” I plead softly.
Her stare tells me she’s not willing to sacrifice the dog on the altar of my hunch.
“How about if you come, too?” I add, trying to strike a more palatable deal. “I won’t do anything with Sebastian unless you give the green light.”
Toni is unmoved.
“I promise?” I add.
Calling her expression suspicious would be a vast understatement.
27
I call Franklin Chou from Toni’s bedroom and describe my theory, wanting to make sure that Toni, and in some way maybe even Sebastian, hears what I am saying. To
ni listens apprehensively, cradling the dog in her lap.
I sense what she was thinking. It’s taken this long to make Sebastian feel at home and now you want to take him to a strange place where he’ll be poked with needles? Is that what you call taking care of something?
It’s probably typical of us, I think as I help the two of them into the passenger seat of my Tesla; Toni processing the interaction based on emotion while I float somewhere in the philosophical stratosphere of my head. But Heller didn’t seem like a person to use language lightly. If he said the dog told a story and that each individual melody contained a key to the complexity of the entire sonata, how could I not follow that trail, test the hypothesis?
Maurice’s message arrives on our way. Tobago police sent photo of men getting into the car. License number didn’t match anything in their records, probably a fake. Searched the island. No trace of car or three men.
He obviously doesn’t want a dialogue or he’d have connected by video.
Three? I respond.
The two who matched the scan and their driver.
Anything on the driver?
Irises didn’t correspond to anything in their global database.
I’m still processing this new information when we find Chou, still shaken from the explosion earlier in the day and suspicious of my request, but now engaged enough to have put on a pair of jeans and headed back to his lab so late at night.
Sebastian, on the other hand, senses something is amiss. He’d resisted getting out of the car and dug his head into Toni’s arms as she’d carried him into the elevator. He now growls furiously as Toni and I hold him down and Chou uses a small metal instrument to extract a series of skin grafts and takes blood with a hypodermic needle. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, Sebastian,” Toni coos to no avail.
Chou carefully examines the blood samples on glass plates under his scope while Toni sits in a swivel chair with Sebastian sleeping in her lap.
After about ten minutes, Chou looks up at me with a strange, nonplussed expression. “Has Sebastian been around any other dogs recently?”
“I really don’t know,” I say. “We brought Toni’s mom’s dog over yesterday. The two of them played together.”
“How old is that dog?”
“Dreyfus is about three,” Toni whispers, not wanting to rouse Sebastian.
“It couldn’t be him, then. Has Sebastian been out of your house in the last twenty-four hours or so?” Chou asks.
“Just when I’ve taken him out.”
“Did he interact with other dogs then?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? He’s not been out of the house alone?”
“I’m certain.”
Chou turns his head and looks back into the scope. “I’m looking at the cells from the skin graft,” he says slowly, moving a small lever to shift the glass plate. “About seventy percent of the skin cells are exactly what I’d expect to see from a puppy. Good, normal, healthy skin cells.”
“And the other thirty percent?” I ask, suspecting I may already know the answer.
“That’s what strange. The other thirty percent are the kind of dead cells being shed, cells you would expect on a very old dog.”
My mind flows with images of blue-hued jellyfish. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve taken grafts from five places on Sebastian’s body. It’s hard to imagine cells rubbing off from something else could be so evenly distributed. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“So the dog is young and old at the same time. Exactly what Heller was experimenting with.”
“I’m a scientist, Rich. I can’t go off into flights of fancy, but this is certainly very strange.”
“How can we test the hypothesis?” I ask excitedly.
“That’s what the blood’s for,” Chou says, “and we’re going to need more of it.”
I cringe at the look of pain on Toni’s face as we approach. “I’m so sorry, baby,” I say softly.
Toni recognizes the need, but that doesn’t make her empathy for Sebastian any less acute as the needle punctures the dog’s restful sleep.
“Sorry, Sebastian,” I say, trying to be comforting.
Wrapped in Toni’s arms, he still shakes.
“We’ve got to take him home,” Toni orders.
“How long will this take?” I ask Chou as we stand to leave.
“Tomorrow late morning at the soonest, and that’s if I’m here all night. It’ll take at least twelve hours to run the sequence through a genome-wide association algorithm.”
“Anything we can do to speed things up?”
“Sorry, Rich.”
“You’ll call me when you know something?”
Chou lifts his eyebrows. “Goodbye, Rich.”
“Thank you,” I say sincerely.
He makes a sweeping hand gesture for us to leave.
It’s after midnight and we’re both exhausted, all three exhausted, as I drive home.
“It’s just so incredible,” I muse. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it’s hard not to imagine …”
Toni is not focused on my hypothesizing. “You poor dear,” she says to the still shaking dog. “I’m sorry we put you through this. We’re almost home. It’s okay, Sebastian.”
As the car slows into Toni’s driveway, Sebastian somehow senses he’s almost home. His head lifts. He looks around expectantly.
“That’s right,” Toni coos. “We’re almost there.”
Sebastian leaps from Toni’s lap and through her outstretched arms as I open the passenger-side door. Toni jumps from the car to follow.
“You did it, Sebastian,” she says, turning her key in the front door. “You’re home.”
The pressure of Sebastian’s head pushes the door open enough for him to slide in the crack. Toni swings the rest of it open, and Sebastian sprints up the stairs toward his laundry basket haven.
“That’s right …” Toni says, stepping in after him.
The faint smell hits me first. Did we leave the freezerator door open? Did we leave the groceries out? Did we drop eggs?
From somewhere deep within me a massive alarm bell sounds.
A violent energy surges through my body.
“Toni,” I screech at the top of my voice.
Her startled body jerks to face me from halfway up the stairs.
I bound up the stairs toward her in two leaps, grab her waist, and pull her back with all my might.
“What are you doing?” she shrieks as I yank her out the door.
She begins to realize. “The dog—”
It happens in a fraction of a second.
I race around my car and throw her to the ground. I dive to cover her body as the deafening blast obliterates the last remnants of a fragile peace.
28
My body shakes uncontrollably as I wrap myself around Toni.
I feel the heat flowing across the back of my head. My heart is pounding. Innate impulses from somewhere deep in my evolutionary past take over.
“Baby,” I shriek, looking down at Toni as my conscious brain struggles to reboot.
She looks up at me, unable to speak.
“Are you okay?” I shout through the din.
She swallows, as if the physical gesture can help her mind consume the reality of what is happening. Her eyes vacillate between blank and bewildered.
I feel the heat flashing across my face, hear the debris smashing into the car, its windows shattering. The burst of light turns night into a terrifying facsimile of day. “We need to get farther away from the flames,” I yell, my body still trembling but my mind beginning to command my emotions.
Toni nods vacantly.
I grab her gently by the shoulders. “We need to move,” I say with as much focus as I can muster.
Her eyes lock with mine.
“We’re going to keep low and run across the street behind that truck. Do you hear me?”
She nods.
&nbs
p; I put my hand on her forehead, trying to project a calm I don’t remotely possess. “It’s going to be okay. Are you ready?”
Toni affirms.
I take her hand. “One, two, three!” I pull her up and push the first few steps from behind before she finds her feet. I follow her as she runs, trying to remain between her and the billowing flame. Small debris filters down from the choking air.
We dive behind the truck, gasping for air.
“We can’t stay here,” I yell over the deafening noise of the fire. “We’re going to run behind that house on three.” I hold Toni’s shoulders and look into her dazed eyes, then point her in the direction of her neighbor’s house. “Are you ready?”
She nods.
“One, two, three.”
I push her in front of me and we run.
It’s only when we’re leaning against the back of the house across the street that I see full recognition arriving in Toni’s eyes. It’s only then I feel the terrifying realization arriving in my own head.
“Sebastian,” she whispers.
I take her in my arms. Her body is beginning to regain its agency. “I’m so sorry.”
My heart is pumping wildly, but the dog’s name kicks my mind into overdrive. Two explosions in one day. What connects Heller’s lab and Toni’s house? The dog? Us? My story? I suddenly feel existentially vulnerable. If someone is after us, are they here now? I pull Toni more tightly into me as I nervously scan the area around the burning house.
The distant swirl of the sirens amplifies to a scream as the police and firefighters descend.
Grabbing Toni’s hand, I run with her toward the first of the police cars to arrive. “I need someone to stand with her.”
The policeman hardly notices me as he reports into his radio.
“She may be in serious danger,” I plead more forcefully.
“We’re all in danger until this fire is out,” he barks.
“You don’t understand—”
“What’s going on here?”
That voice. I turn to see Maurice running toward Toni and me.
“What the hell happened?” he shouts, placing a hand on each of our shoulders.
“We were just coming back,” I pant. “We opened the door and I smelled gas. I pulled her out just before the explosion.”