The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  Just a phone number. No name. No address. Just numerals on expensive card stock.

  Del took it. “Thank you. Maybe I will.”

  She studied his face. The guy was charming, she had to admit, even though he was more than twice her age. “One more thing I know.”

  Sam’s grin widened, and he leaned closer to her. “We sharing secrets now?”

  “You should be careful of the Matruzzi family.”

  The man’s grin faltered for barely half a second. She had gone back and checked through the files. That was what triggered her memory when Roy mentioned Sam. She’d seen Samuel Phipps’s name on the list of accounts from the Pegnini case, attached to a debt of a shell company of the Matruzzi clan.

  Sam’s smile widened and he asked, “Who are you, really?”

  “I already told you. Delta Devlin.”

  “But you’re not just an artist? A reporter?”

  “A cop, actually.”

  Now she really studied his face. A flicker of heat across his forehead and cheeks, but his grin just intensified. The knowledge seemed to excite him.

  “A woman in uniform. Well, then, you’ll definitely have to come over and inspect my place. Make sure it’s safe.” He rubbed one temple. “You know, that was a legitimate expense. Tony Scalisi’s construction company did work on my house. How was I supposed to know it was connected to some mob shell company? Their laundering companies do real work, too. I explained all this years ago.”

  “Two million dollars is a lot of money.”

  “Maybe to some people.” The way he said it, he wasn’t lying.

  “You sure it wasn’t a gambling debt?”

  “Like I said.” He leaned back. “Who was your mother, again?”

  “Amede Bechet.” No use in lying.

  “Ah.” Sam’s face lit up. “I remember her. Our family supported her work, back in the seventies. I’ve got some of your mother’s art on my walls. So you’re her daughter? Now you really should come over.”

  Del didn’t bite. “One more thing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know where your friend Roy is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She watched him. He looked as if he was telling the truth.

  “But I hope you’ll find him,” Sam added. “He’s been having blackouts. If you do find him, give me a call. Promise? I’m worried.”

  “Sure.”

  Sam said, “You know who you should be careful of?”

  Del waited.

  “Dr. Danesti. I get the feeling you’re barking up his tree. There’s something not right about that guy, if you ask me.”

  22

  Water radiators clanged in the church basement, urging some heat into the damp space. Roy had slept through the whole afternoon after collapsing on his bed the day before, when he got back from his dad’s office. Today, he felt much better and had bought some clean clothes, taken a shower, and shaved.

  A new man.

  Literally.

  It could also be the Oxy he bought from the Afro kid in the park. He felt in need of a little extra pick-me-up for his second visit to the transplant group. He’d sat through an hour of stories and confessionals, but that wasn’t what he was here for, not really. Finally, there was a break, so he headed for the doughnuts and coffee urn by the wall.

  “You feeling any better?” Roy asked his new friend Fedora. He filled Styrofoam cups for both of them.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” the Mexican replied.

  The man had a habit of tucking in his chin when he spoke, so that he looked at you from the tops of his perennially bloodshot eyes. It made the skin around his neck bunch up in flaccid rolls. A little crazy was the overall effect. Today he wore a dark-blue faux-silk shirt, open almost to his navel, with a thick gold chain hanging over his sparse salt-and-pepper chest hair. Still rocking the leather sport jacket, full sideburns, and mullet. He reeked of cheap cologne.

  “The cops, man—they won’t stop bothering me. Tell me I can’t have three passports with different names.” Fedora took the cup from Roy and blew on it. “I mean, I got medical papers saying my condition. I need it, man, when I’m not in the right body, you know? I need to have the right papers. Know what I mean?”

  He did know what Fedora meant, even if it sounded nutty. Right now, he liked nutty. It made him feel more normal.

  Roy said, “It’s not easy. Take it slow, one day at a time.”

  He couldn’t believe that he was the one dispensing advice. That was what support groups were for, he guessed. Shared experiences. Shared fear. He’d read that people did exercise classes together, like the spin classes that Penny loved, because humans could tolerate pain better in groups. People could withstand more suffering when they shared it.

  “Thanks, man.” The dysmorphically confused fashion victim took a sip of his coffee, then asked, “Hey, you ever heard of celebrity poop?”

  “Is that a website or something?”

  Fedora laughed. “No, man, It’s actual poop. Celebrity shit.”

  “You mean, as in excrement?”

  “Yeah, dude, that’s the stuff.” He leaned in to Roy as they sat down in the group circle. “These rich ladies, they pay crazy money to get the poop of famous people. Fecal transplant—supposed to help the microbiome in your gut. Makes you super healthy. They say the celebrities already have the best stuff, you know, from Indians or something. I just think they like the idea of sticking Brad Pitt’s turds up their asses.” He giggled hard enough to spill his coffee.

  “I have heard of the procedure,” Roy said.

  “I’m going to go looking for celebrities around town. You want to come? Maybe have a few drinks?”

  “I can’t drink, not tonight.”

  “Just come. It’ll be a hoot.”

  “Let me think about it.” The group looked as though it was settling in again for another session, and Roy wasn’t sure he was up for it.

  “Mister Roy!” It was Fatmata Johnny, the receptionist. She waved a pillowy arm, today’s yellow-gold-embroidered sari floating around it in circular waves. “Dr. Brixton is here!”

  * * *

  “Ah, Mr. Roy, Mr. Roy! So good to see you again, sir.” Dr. Brixton beamed a buck-toothed grin. He had shaved within the past day and a half, but his comb-over was matted and the green sweater was a painful match with the wide blue tie and frayed brown jacket.

  Roy shook his hand and sat down as Fatmata closed the door behind him. “How’s the group going?”

  “We lost another member last week, I’m afraid. Rejection. As always.”

  Join the club, said a voice in Roy’s head. “I was hoping you could help me.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” The smile made his ruddy cheeks puff out.

  “I need to find who my donor is.”

  Brixton indicated two wooden chairs beside a fold-out table. Roy took the seat opposite the doctor, who sat and craned his neck back to stare at the ceiling as if he expected something to crash through it. Still looking up, he said, “You can write a letter to the donor family. Have you—”

  “They won’t respond.”

  The doctor leveled his gaze at Roy. “Then I’m afraid—”

  “I know you were on the British equivalent of our organ transplant board. You know how it works. Couldn’t you call someone?”

  “I get a lot of these kinds of requests.”

  “I know you don’t like Dr. Danesti.”

  Roy waited. He had sensed it before: something more than mere professional envy.

  The doctor smiled, this time without showing any teeth. “Did you know that the Danesti family is from Romania? An old family, the Danesti—they were once cousins to the Dracul dynasty, did you know that? It’s a real family, if the history has been, um, gorified. But then, the younger Da
nesti seems to be making good as the prodigal son.”

  “Maybe more Frankenstein than Dracula, but I get your meaning.”

  Dr. Brixton’s eyes seemed fired with an inner glow. “Do you know the life expectancy of a woman born in Monaco today?”

  “No idea.”

  “Ninety-four years. That’s just the average. Do you know what it is for someone born in one of the southern United States? Seventy-two. Yet these are both rich countries, and these humans aren’t genetically different. Interchangeable people, vastly different lifespans—almost twenty-five years—and the difference isn’t fried chicken and okra. Do you know what is the difference?”

  An easy guess. “Money?”

  “Our northern friends in Alberta live ten years longer than someone in Alabama, yet they pay half as much on health care. How is that possible? Because the health system focuses more and more of its money on the wealthy. Dr. Danesti and his friends don’t just want to live longer; they want to live forever.”

  Brixton let the word hang in the air a beat before continuing. “You, Roy, are the living embodiment of the medical divide between the rich and the poor: a rich head living out its life on a body of the poor dead.”

  How do you know my donor is poor? Roy wanted desperately to ask. “And you want to stop it?”

  “I’m not sure we could stop it. Slow things down, perhaps. I want to help you, Roy, but Dr. Danesti—he wants to stop death itself. What he doesn’t understand is that death literally is life.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s an evolutionary mechanism that didn’t always exist—Danesti is right in that—but death is the tide of life that cleans the beach. Malthusian limits are reached in a population when bleak new conditions are imposed. Darwin’s finches starved when leafy plants died out on their island, but in a population of thousands, a freak eventually emerged with a hard beak that could crack nuts. A mutant. The leaf eaters died, and the mutant freaks survived and flourished.”

  “I’ve heard of that.” The doctor was rolling now, and Roy was giving him lots of runway. He couldn’t help being a little bit fascinated—but that word “freak.” He felt like the freak, the mutant with the hard beak.

  “Do you know what happens if we stop the death of just one human cell out of forty trillion in our bodies? We can do it. Just disable the human gene BCL2 to stop cell death, so that a cell can literally live forever. Do you know what the result is?”

  It was a rhetorical question.

  “Cancer. That is the result. The uncontrolled growth of a malignancy. Death of the larger organism. Can you imagine what this would mean for the global human organism? What uncontrolled malignancies will grow within the soon-to-be ten billion people on this planet if some of them stop dying? Can you imagine what would happen if a Vladimir Putin ruled for a thousand years over a new Russian Empire, amassing trillions of dollars and an iron grip over the world? Or if John D. Rockefeller had lived into the present day?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “And Dr. Danesti isn’t just stopping there. He and his friends call it ‘newgenics’—making genetic modifications in the germ line. Cloning bodies, transplanting brains—have you read what the madman wants to do?”

  Brixton was up out of his seat now, pacing the room, waving his arms in the air.

  “Are you aware of things British doctors have done in the past? My antecedents? It was Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who laid out the simple idea for improvement of the human race. His cousin Charles put forth natural selection, so Galton proposed to improve on this with unnatural selection.”

  “Eugenics,” Roy said. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “It was a word before genetics itself was even invented. Led to the horrors of Nazis in the mid-twentieth century, but the madness has returned.”

  “I don’t think we’re talking about Nazis. Right now it’s more about housewives in the Hamptons.”

  Brixton’s eyes were wide and wild. He had a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “You don’t need dictators for mass eugenics programs to exterminate millions of people. Did you know that the largest eugenics event in human history wasn’t the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis?”

  Seeing Roy’s stare, he said, “Arguably, at least. You could say the dubious distinction would go to India and China in the recent past, where more than ten million females are missing from the adult population, thanks to infanticide and neglect leading to death. These were free citizens—your housewives and their husbands—enacting one of the largest mass exterminations in human history.”

  “Are you okay?” Roy asked. The doctor was flushed.

  “I do tend to get a little worked up.” He wiped his forehead and stopped pacing. “I’m trying to make the point that all we have is our morality. When it becomes distorted, we are capable of horrific things.”

  “I wouldn’t argue with that.”

  “And I’ve heard rumors about Eden Corporation in the background. Illegal international trade in organs. India and Bangladesh and such.”

  “You think Danesti is involved?”

  “He’s pushing that line too far. His ethical protocols are compromised.”

  “So if I help you find some dirt on Danesti, you’ll figure out who my donor is?”

  “Down to the point right away, eh?”

  23

  “That Brixton is loco, yeah? I heard him yelling at you. We all heard him.”

  Fedora brought his face up so close, the fumes of his cologne almost made Roy’s eyes water. He was a close talker.

  After the support group meeting, they had taken a taxi down to Meatpacking. It was Thursday night, and the streets were jammed with revelers lining up outside the door-to-door clubs. Bouncers with big muscles and tight black shirts manned the red velvet ropes that held back the hopeful masses.

  Fedora added, “Kind of a nutball, but at least, he’s our nutball.” He threw his arm around Roy’s shoulder and cackled, chucking his head back as if he had just come up with the funniest joke in the world.

  “What happened between him and Dr. Danesti?” Roy pulled back an inch. Fedora definitely had something with garlic in it for dinner.

  “I don’t know.” The edges of Fedora’s mustache tilted down as his eyebrows rose. “But I can tell you, that day when you walked through the door, Brixton’s eyes just about popped right out of his head. You were like manna coming from heaven to him, I think. He’s got an ax to grind, that’s for sure.”

  “Est-ce-que on peut jouer de poker?” the young man next to Fedora asked.

  Tall and thin with a bit of a stoop, he wore a red-and-white Canadiens baseball cap. Guillaume was his name, Fedora had explained at the support group, Guy for short—“rhymes with ‘tree,’” Fedora said—but everyone called him Rat. Guy le Rat. He’d had a heart transplant last year at twenty, just after his family moved from Quebec to New York to have the operation performed privately. He didn’t speak much English.

  “Poker—he wants to play poker,” Fedora explained. “Not tonight,” he told Rat. “We’re looking for celebrities. Anyone famous.”

  Rat’s eyes lit up. “Ah, oui. Célèbre—famous.” His eyes narrowed and began scanning the crowd—a task his height made easier.

  “Come on, this way, I know a place.” Fedora still had his arm around Roy as he muscled through the crowd.

  Brixton had told Roy that he couldn’t access the specific registry to find out where a single donor came from, but that in Roy’s case, the problem was somewhat simplified. As a transplant surgeon himself, Brixton could access the list of recently deceased donors. It now stayed active for years since they could freeze skin samples for genetic matching.

  The list would still number in the tens of thousands, but they could cross-reference by age and narrow the date of death to not long before Roy had his operation. It had to b
e someone young who died in a way that left his entire body intact and unharmed. A time-consuming process to sift through all the files manually, but Roy had Angel and Charlie to divide the labor with.

  Even then, Brixton had said, there would still be some uncertainty.

  “Hey, c’est Georges Clooney, no?” Rat said, tapping Fedora’s arm and pointing.

  “Nice work.” Fedora got up on his tiptoes for a better look. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He pushed them through a knot of people, toward a black-painted brick wall with a pink neon sign: “Heaven.”

  “Are you serious?” Roy said. Before, it had been a bit of fun—let’s go to Meatpacking and look for celebrities—but now it was getting real. “You think we can just go up to George Clooney and ask him to take a crap in your hand?”

  Fedora still had his elbow hooked around his friend’s neck. “You kidding me, man? You know how messed up these people get at these places? He’ll take a dump on your face if we ask nice.”

  Roy grimaced. “Don’t ask nice.”

  “I’ve done this before. Leave it to me.”

  They shoved through the last of the crowd, stopping at the impassable wall that was Heaven’s head bouncer. The guy was seven feet if he was an inch, with biceps like bowling balls. He looked at them with disdain but still asked, “You on the list?”

  “Ah, maybe, but we were with George,” Fedora said. “Didn’t he tell you we were coming?”

  The bouncer’s sloping forehead didn’t register the least bit of surprise. His eyes returned to scanning the crowd. Roy and Fedora had ceased to exist in this Neanderthal’s mind.

  “George Clooney, man, we’re with Clooney,” Fedora protested.

  “Please step back,” the bouncer instructed, sweeping them aside with a scything motion of one bulldozing arm.

  Four young ladies traipsed past in impossibly high stilettos and skirts the length of Roy’s boxer briefs. One of them gave the bouncer a kiss on the cheek, and the sea of people closed in behind them, swamping Fedora, Rat, and Roy in their wake.

  * * *