“Honey, these things happen,” Mary said, pulling a pair of NutriFast protein sacks from the freezer. “People die, no matter how good you get at saving them. You aren’t gods, you know.”
“I know that,” I said, stirring the water. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we have no idea why this happened. And it happened on my watch.”
Braids swinging, she set the bags on the table and pulled out knives and forks from a drawer. She sliced open one bag, then the other. She brought them both over to the boiling pot and poured them in, the protein powder from the freezer bag, and gluten-free wheat, the sugar-free legumes and other sodium-free bits sliding from the other bag into the tumultuous water. She clicked the timer on her new Atman. I stirred.
“I wish you would stop dwelling on it,” she said. “You can’t be there every moment of the day, watching over every patient.”
“No,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow. “But this one—I don’t understand it. It makes no sense.”
“What did the O.N.K. show? Was it drugs or something?”
I placed the spoon on the stove.
“That’s exactly why I’m baffled,” I said. “The O.N.K. found nothing wrong with him. It’s like the kid died of old age. His heart was healthy, but it just stopped beating. There were no traces of drugs other than the stem-cell boosters—and that couldn’t have killed him. Everything just…shut down.”
She smiled. She pulled me close and kissed my forehead. Then she turned back to the fridge. I watched and admired her: the black hair in the tense braids, her lean limbs tanned and taut and rippling with strength even in the years after two tours in the Middle Eastern wars with the Marines, and her soft face with those big gray eyes. That was her feature that made my heart stop. Whenever I returned home from work, she always seemed to glow—like she was something incandescent to pursue at the finale of each day. She was my daily prize, and her love was a need for me as basic as food or drink.
“You’ll figure it out, honey,” she was saying. “It’s always the simplest explanation, isn’t it? That’s what you learn in the Marines. Breaking it down, Barney-style. I don’t know what that means. But that’s what we called it.”
“In medical school we called it Occam’s Razor,” I said. “Because if you cut to the most direct solution, it’s usually the right one.”
I left the kitchen, heading down the corridor nearest the stairs, over the Iranian rug in the dining room, to the front window looking out to the street. Down the yard and along the driveway, far off, solar streetlights cast dim halos in the dark heat of summer. Against the night I could see the shapes of the other new houses in the neighborhood—all doctors and lawyers, married, starting families in brand-new houses in a suburb just far enough outside the radius of a demilitarized Newark to feel safe. Thirty miles. It was close enough to be reachable, and far enough away from…someone, something, anything, everything. You could never be sure of anything anymore, the world had gone crazy, and the times had never been more dangerous—that was what everyone seemed to say, every damned day.
A steady line of cars rolled down the road, with flashing lights. The funeral procession, coming from the kid’s house. They rolled slowly past and I peered into each tinted window without seeing anyone inside.
Cruzen, according to the hospital intake forms, lived a few streets over. His jetsetting parents owned one of the biggest estates in the neighborhood. The father was a federal judge; that’s where I had recognized the name. The kid had a perfect upbringing in an affluent suburb, the best of everything, a bright future. Now he lay cold in a coffin, cause unknown. His parents were mourning a few blocks over—they’d returned from summering in the Alps to plan their teenager’s funeral. I sighed.
I had failed that boy. I had failed that boy the same way the doctors had failed me the night I was orphaned, the night they couldn’t save my loving parents from something so simple it was laughable. I had sworn never to fail that way—to leave a child jettisoned alone out in the world like I had been. But I had, and here I was watching a funeral procession pass my very door. The cars continued rolling down the road through the darkness.
I shut the curtain and walked back to the kitchen, to the boiling pot. Mary stared down at her Atman with a strange smile on her face, but as soon as she heard my footsteps, she stepped to the fridge and rooted through a collection of bottles. I stirred the protein and carbs in the pot, scowling at its thickening pastiness. I hate NutriFast, but Mary insisted we needed our supplements.
“Honey, snap out of it,” she said, shaking a container of tofu sprinkling and vitamin spice powder vigorously, with two hands. She came over and kissed me, looking purposefully into my eyes. “You are a good doctor. You did everything you could. And you’ll figure out what happened.”
The timer on her Atman beeped, and she pinched her wrist and silenced it. I turned off the burner and strained the boiled food in the sink. Setting the table, with the plates and the chopsticks, I headed over to the wine rack, pressed a button, and Merlot streamed into a pair of glasses. Mary punched away at her Atman with a weird intensity, a look of fire in her eyes. She came over, hesitating mid-stride at the sight of the wineglasses on the table. Another strange indication of whatever was going on with her, but again, I ignored it. I ladled out dinner and whistled up at the ceiling. The lights dimmed a bit, and the stereo came on. The soft strains of violins, something from before the Blackout, hummed overhead.
We ate in silence. I didn’t notice for a few minutes, but I realized suddenly that all I could hear was my own chewing. She wasn’t eating. Mary was always the one to start the conversation over dinner—about our days or her parents, or about our next vacation. We’d been married for seven years, and we’d never run out of things to talk about. I set my chopsticks down and scrutinized her over my Merlot. She was engrossed in her Atman, completely lost in its glow. Was this a new milestone, a terrible descent to the silence of a middle-aged marriage? My stomach upended. Had we reached a sort of dead end to our intimacy? Our passion?
Her Atman beeped again. A smile spread across her face. I set my wineglass down.
“Do you have to use that when you’re at the dinner table?” I said. “I knew you never should have gotten that damned thing implanted.”
“I don’t know why you never got yours installed,” she said, not glancing up. “I couldn’t get anything done without it. I’m going to get the Four once they work out all the bugs.”
I scoffed.
“I respect the natural beauty of the human form,” I said, the same way I chided all my colleagues and friends who’d gotten the implants. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouthing the exact same words as I said them, but I continued. “Those things work off the natural electrical currents in your body, Mary. Who knows what they could be doing to your brain? Your heart?”
She laughed.
“Joe, you’re paranoid,” she said. “The Bureau of Wellness approved them. They’re safe. Safer than that wine you’re drinking.”
I gulped down the dregs of my wineglass, stood and went to the wall. I placed the glass under the spout of the dispenser, and it shot out a stream of perfectly-aerated, room-temperature Merlot. I returned to the table with an intransigent look on my face.
A smirk crossed her face, her hands hung down at her sides. Something was amiss—she was acting strangely. Her plate and her glass were untouched. I pretended not to notice—I just dug into my dinner. But after a few more moments, I felt her stare. I glanced up.
“Why aren’t you eating?” I asked. “And you’ve barely touched your wine. It’s Thursday night. We drink wine. It’s wine night, Mary.”
Her smile widened to a grin.
“I don’t think I’ll be drinking wine for a while,” she said.
I stared at her blankly. I had no idea what she was talking about—she wasn’t a drunk. She’d been fine with her drinking since she had gotten the right medications from the Veterans Affairs psychiatrist.
/> But she beamed her electric smile at me, as her eyes searched my face. This was strange.
“I can’t drink wine,” she said. “No alcohol for me. For nine months.”
Her words hung there for a second.
And my heart leapt up.
“Oh—oh my God,” I said. I tried to rise, but she was already around the table, grabbing me, squeezing me tight. We laughed and kissed like we’d won the lottery. In a way, we had beaten the toughest odds of all, considering all the exposures she’d suffered during the tours in the Middle East. After years of trying to have a child, medicine had again come through for me—for both of us, for our family-to-be. It was a time to celebrate.
Hours later, after a joyful call to her sister in Nebraska, we went up to our big pastel bedroom. She kissed me and turned out the light. She attached the big mask of the Dormus over her face, set its oxygen tubes out straight, folded her hands under the pillow, and fell asleep. The machine gusted softly with her breathing. It was always so easy for her, that drift off to the blank abyss so graceful and effortless. But not so for me. For a while I just sat there and tried to picture the face of my unborn child: the girl a miniature version of Mary, and the boy a shrunken vision of me. The thoughts whirled in my head, nearly making me dizzy, and finally I sat up in bed. Propping a pillow behind me, I scoured files on my Atman over and over again. I could not help myself—when these particular mental itches started nagging me, I had to scratch them. Otherwise I would just lay there and brood all night long—without that crucial peace of mind.
The night of his death, James Cruzen’s vitals had all been normal—even better than normal, according to the data. The teenager’s recovery had been perfect. Death was clinically impossible. I cross-referenced case histories and stem-cell booster injections. After twenty minutes of research, I discovered it. A single study in the annals documenting sudden patient deaths as a side-effect of stem-cell boosters, published by researchers at some Ivy League school six months earlier. It concluded the pluripotent cells’ effects had not yet been fully cataloged, and that work under controlled environments had to be conducted in the future. I highlighted the name of the lead researcher, someone named Yoshiro Fujimi, and sent it to my work computer. My mind was at ease, finally. I yawned and stretched out in the soft sheets.
But as I did one final nightly check of the patient census, I noticed something more. One name popped out at me from the lengthy list. I did a double-take and sat up in bed. The name Esmeralda Foyle was there, entered in the night before last.
The girl was in Saint Almachius somewhere, after all.
Foyle, Esmeralda—age seventeen, admitted for traumatic injuries, no date or time of admission. There was a strange serial number attached, beginning with the old alphanumeric BOW-137. The picture showed a pretty girl with green eyes and baby-chubby cheeks. A tattoo of a neon yellow rose with bristling thorns grew up the side of her neck. A vacant stare, no smile.
Esmeralda. She couldn’t be the same one Cruzen had been talking about. How could a patient go missing, with all the mandatory checks at the hospital? I rubbed my eyes, set the device aside. I’d make it a priority tomorrow, after a good night of sleep, I told myself. I took off my FocalSpecs and set them on the nightstand. My mind continued to cycle the possibilities. But I needed sleep. All the checks had to wait for the morning rounds at the hospital. I affixed the Dormus over my nose and flicked the switch. But nothing happened. I flicked it on and off again—nothing. Cursing, I tossed the mask over the side of the bed and curled up with the pillow. Mary slept on, without stirring, her own Dormus gusting slowly with rich oxygen.
Sleep eluded me for hours, as thoughts of Cruzen and Esmeralda and the hospital database raced through my mind. How could patients just die of treatments proven to be safe? Could the girl possibly be at the hospital, in some unknown room, some unknown bed? Could the boy have been telling the truth about a vanished patient in our midst? I turned again and again on sweaty sheets, my mind reeling. Eventually I drifted off—and without the anesthetizing effect of the Dormus, I dreamt for the first time in years.
Something about a river, the water cool and dark. Sinking deeper and deeper into it, without ever reaching bottom.
* * *
Buzzing jolted me off the pillow. It was still before dawn, and I felt sick from sleeplessness, but it was time to rise. Mary stirred, the mask still affixed over her face, the Atman buzzing in her wrist. I silenced both alarms and pushed myself up from the damp sheets. A shave and a shower, then a shirt and pants and tie. When I reached the kitchen, the coffee maker turned on at the sound of my footsteps. I snorted an energy stick. I whistled, and the TV wall flicked on; the situation in Korea was still the lead story. That idiot on How Low Can You Go—Steeling or whatever that idiot’s name was—was biting poisonous snakes, and winning thousands of dollars every night at nine eastern, eight central time. I sipped my coffee, and silently cursed the tastes of the American public.
Mary padded down the stairs, her robe open to reveal only her camouflage nightie, her braids undone, like the ends of rope fraying off her head. She skipped the coffee and poured herself a glass of water, walked in front of the sink and stared out the window at the dawn. I admired her form, and at that moment she seemed to glow in the sunlight from the window. She had never been so beautiful to me.
“Good morning, hon,” she said. “Feeling better?”
“Damned Dormus broke last night,” I said, tearing my gaze from her bare legs. “I actually dreamt a bit. Something about a river, and an island. First dream since I was a kid.”
“That’s terrible. We’ll get it fixed,” she said, smiling broadly at me, gently shoving me out the door. “But get moving, so you’re not late, Dr. Barnes. Have a good day.”
Outside, the day was already hot and humid, and that rotten-egg scent hung over the neighborhood and its cloverleaf of cul-de-sacs. The hundred-home development had been built atop a wetland during the pre-Purge real estate boom. Something was always a bit off in the air on warm summer days, or when it rained, or the first spring days when everything was in bloom. The Bureau of Wellness water-treatment plant they built down the street a year earlier seemed to improve things a bit. But overall, it was a good neighborhood, with professionals like us and the Cruzens a couple streets over. Crime and property values were not a problem.
But when we paid off the mortgages, we would move west. As far west as we could go, to find a better place for the child. Moving west had always been a pipe dream, a remote option. Now it was a necessity. The baby would change everything. I needed to pull this child away from the ultrahighways, the Atman ads, and the headlong rush of the East. Out West things were slower, and safer. Especially since the Blackout, and the loss of the grid out there. There was more oxygen and elbow room out there to let a family grow and thrive. My child would not be pushed headlong into adulthood like I was, or sent half a world away to fight in wars like Mary had been. The child would have better than we did.
A mile later, I reached the ultrahighway. The traffic had already piled up. It crawled along all eight lanes. Some people in the jam around me laid on their horns; others laughed at game shows on their heads-up displays; some checked their Atmans for news. The holographic billboards flickered ads for personal lubricants and TV shows into the brilliant sky, between the strip malls and exits, disappearing into the morning light. I flipped on the radio and turned to the national news station. Only five miles until the hospital, but that could take an hour or more if any lanes were closed. The road construction was neverending, as the state continued to widen the ultrahighway to a ninth and tenth lane for the millions who streamed east to offices each morning, then reversed course and chased the sunset back home.
I turned the radio up to a minor roar to drown out the horn of a raving woman in the car next to me. The broadcaster’s dignified voice explained the state of the world. Her name was Saxas, an intelligent software program relaying the events of the day across the United S
tates. The stations had decided to computer-synthesize the voice, half British and half American, to appeal across all demographics after the Blackout. The result was a flat transatlantic tone that didn’t sound quite human and didn’t really belong anywhere. Saxas was international and tireless—the faceless voice of everyone and nobody, everywhere and nowhere. But she had announced all the great upheavals of the last few years, ever since the Blackout. Nothing phased her—that wasn’t in her programming.
“…from the annual Pyongyang Summit, the East Asian Federation has announced that all remaining tariffs and trade barriers will be lifted between Japan, China, and Unified Korea over the next five years,” Saxas intoned. “A unilateral alliance for regional security will be created, they announced.
“On the domestic front,” Saxas continued, “a group of medical experts have lashed out against the Surgeon General’s declaration of victory in the War on Cancer last month.”
I turned it louder.
“Some say the long-term side effects of stem cells and genetic therapies have not been fully cataloged. Others claim there could be dire consequences for survivors.
“In other national news, the missing persons’ database continues to grow, with at least 250,000 people of all ages reported missing in the last decade. Interest groups say it’s a growing epidemic that threatens stability in some U.S. cities, especially those with active Intifada insurgency. Authorities have yet to comment on the estimates.
“And locally, a tractor-trailer crash in the right lane on the New Jersey stretch of the ultrahighway is causing a twenty-minute delay,” Saxas said, dully. I turned the radio down and banged my head on the steering wheel.
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