Elixir

by Charles Atkins

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘You’re my perfect guy, Frank. That’s the problem. You listen to me, don’t pull any competitive bullshit or get upset that I’m smart and can make a lot of money. You’re my best friend, have never betrayed me … and you’re gay.’

  ‘There is that.’

  ‘It pisses me off.’

  ‘I’ve never hidden it from you. And we did try.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, and don’t remind me. I did not need to know you had a crush on Cory Johnson in the seventh grade.’

  ‘I wanted you to know.’

  ‘We all had crushes on Cory … he was dreamy, and that’s not the point … it’s just, why can’t I find a version of you who’s straight?’

  ‘You can do better than me, Grace. If you didn’t have chocolate on your shirt, you’re quite attractive. But maybe you shouldn’t play on a gay team.’

  ‘I have to,’ she said. ‘Someone has to look after my best friend. And I’m tired of guys hitting on me because I’m pretty. Pretty fades.’

  ‘That’s how it works. Law of attraction.’ He pictured Sean and chided himself for the memory of his ass walking away. It’s hormones. You’re gay, horny, and he’s hot. Get over it.

  ‘I know, and it sucks.’

  The crack of a ball meeting the bat. And they watched Jane Brettford get a solid base hit. Dirk advanced to second.

  ‘You’re up,’ Grace said.

  ‘Right,’ he strode to the plate, made a few practice swings. His legs felt good and loose from the earlier run from the Brookline PD. Though for the first few miles of that he’d not been able to clear Sean from his head. Did I make an idiot of myself by asking him to play, or by saying it was a gay team? But other stuff intruded. Jackson’s murder, a horrible sense of freefall, of not knowing what the hell he was doing, and where he was supposed to go with his work. Jackson couldn’t have been clearer. And he’s gone, and you’ve got no sponsor … at least no one you can trust. And why did you tell Sean about Caesar and Lavinia?

  Distracted, he made eye contact with the pitcher. He gripped the bat and focused. He found comfort in, keep your eye on the ball.

  The first pitch came in hard and fast, he swung and missed.

  ‘Strike one.’

  He adjusted, then thought. What the hell am I doing here? Pitch two was low.

  ‘One ball, one strike.’

  Pitch three was a gift. Eye on the ball, and that awesome feel of the bat’s sweet spot as it connected. It was good. His feet dug hard. He rounded first. What am I doing? Tenure track means something … Or does it?

  Oblivious to the other team’s frantic efforts to field the ball, he pumped hard and rounded second and then third. He heard cheers as Dirk, and then Jane, scored. He glanced back to see an outfielder fumble. He sprinted home.

  Surrounded by teammates his head buzzed. If he couldn’t make it stop, it would overwhelm him. What am I doing here? Panic, never far from the surface, clawed at him.

  ‘Fuck, that’s a hard act to follow,’ Grace griped as the players resumed the game.

  ‘Eye on the ball.’ He forced a smile and practiced a breathing technique his shrink had taught him. What am I doing? If I don’t have my work, if I don’t have Jackson. But what helped was thinking about Jen Owens and the kids on that ward. That’s the point. They’re the point. Problem was getting his research to where it could make a real difference. But the truth crushed him. It’s too late for her, for any of them. It would take full-scale studies, and that was money. Big money, which no matter its source, came with strings. Jackson knew that. And Frank too had seen colleagues get sucked into the pharma industry where they lost all control of their research.

  And then his psychotic mother’s voice rang in his head. ‘Son of Satan. Dance with the devil you know or the one with the pretty bow.’ He gripped the bench.

  Shut up. It was always like this, when he was at his most jangled, dear old mom, Candace, crawled into his head. Not really a voice, but snippets from his childhood, and the court case that ended in her being deemed not guilty by reason of mental defect for the murder of his father and attempted murder of him when he was eight. But that was just the tip of a childhood no one should have to endure.

  ‘You should never have been born,’ she hissed.

  Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  ‘Should have drowned you in the bath. Should have bashed in your skull with a ballpeen hammer.’

  His cell rang. Reflexively, he went to reject the call, but looked at the screen. It clicked to voice mail. He put it to his ear.

  ‘Hi Doctor Garfield, this is Cameron Causeway with Frick and Braxton. I’m calling on behalf of Jones-Ehrlichman Pharmaceuticals. We have a unique opportunity that seems like a perfect fit for you. They’re most eager to set up a meeting, and I was hoping—’

  With his finger poised over delete, Frank did something rare. ‘This is Frank Garfield.’ He took the call.

  ELEVEN

  With his Little Brother earpiece in place and the powerful receiver in his briefcase Dalton focused on Frank and his gal pal. Earlier in the day he’d told the UNICO recruiter assigned to Frank that he was canned. He’d made zero headway, and the last thing Dalton needed was Mother’s wrath. Yes, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

  He assessed the options. Through shades, he watched as Frank got up, batted and hit a home run. Then as the lanky scientist rounded the bases and was embraced by his band of teammates, he smiled. He pondered what that must be like, to be part of a team. To have people care for you and cheer you on. His years at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts had given him a taste of that. Being part of a theatre production, performing, albeit mostly with parents and classmates in the audience, the applause, the rush of adrenalin. Leona, of course, never came.

  ‘And what’s this?’ he muttered, as Frank took the call from one of UNICO’s competitors. Uh oh, Mother will not like that. He thought of Grandma Karen’s, ‘whatever Leona wants, Leona gets.’ And that’s the truth, shit. And you don’t have much time. Someone will land this tall fish and it best be you.

  From his shadowed vantage point in the bleachers, he mulled the data. Frank had the hots for the detective investigating Atlas’s murder. Pride surged at how well he’d played that and that Leona had no clue that he’d been the triggerman. She seemed upset. The fly in that ointment and his current unrest, Did I kill my biological father? And why did she never tell me about Atlas?

  His thoughts churned, bouncing from Leona back to the detective. It wasn’t concern that she might learn the facts of Atlas’s murder, but something else. Interesting. The past few weeks studying Frank Garfield had given him a sense of ownership. He pondered this. Do you find Garfield attractive? Are you jealous?

  Dalton’s fluid sexuality was not a thing he questioned. Women he found delicious, with their soft curves, and the ease with which they gave themselves to him … Men, the few he’d dallied with in college, were another matter. There, it was less about the physical and more a battle for domination. Who would submit? He now stared at Frank’s back, broad shoulders, narrow waist, and compared him to Grace. She was delectable, like a ripe blonde peach. And a key component to the Garfield challenge. He pictured the both of them naked, one on either side of him.

  Then as one dull inning droned into the next, Dalton listened and scribbled verses in his notebook. Over the years, he’d filled dozens. Nothing fancy. Some he’d go back and work into songs. His most-recent YouTube video had nearly gone viral, with twenty-thousand hits, over a hundred comments, sixty-two shares, though several had been his own to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Almost enough to get him noticed. Though if he’d had Mother’s connections and money, it could have happened a dozen times over. But that did not fall under what Leona wants. What I want doesn’t matter. It never has. It never will with her.

  ‘Am I Oedipus?’ he wrote at the top of a fresh page.

  As he scribbled out the day’s emotions, his thoughts flowed. ‘When did
I become Mother’s Renfield? Why does the blood of two fathers stain my waking dreams? Who stole my silver chalice? What ransom will they need?’

  Words spilled forth along with memories. As he listened to the easy back-and-forth between Frank and his Grace, he mused. Where are my friends?

  The answer was clear. You have none. You are the man who walks alone. And then he launched into free verse.

  Where are my friends, Leona? Where are my companions of youth? Little red-headed Peter when I was ten, what were his faults? You listed them all. Too poor, not our kind. And don’t get me started on the gingers. You called him a throwback and a mutant.

  You can do better, Dalton she’d say, try again.

  Amy in seventh grade. Dark hair and doe eyes. You summed her up fast and summed her up well. For a fat girl, not bad, but the apple and the tree do not fall far. Look at her dad, passed out on the couch, look at the mom, haggard by thirty-three.

  You can do better, Dalton she’d say. Try again.

  By ninth grade, he’d stopped bringing home potential friends. And when he’d get invited for sleepovers they were accompanied by Leona’s interrogations, and then character assassinations of his prospective hosts and their families. She didn’t and doesn’t want me to have friends.

  As his thoughts roamed he took inventory of the people in his life. It was mother and Grandma Karen. The Lang cousins, Rebecca, Kendra, and James, children of his Aunt Joan and Uncle Bennett, they’d been a part of his life before Dad’s death. But after … Well, he’d attended Becca’s wedding two years back. Leona had declined the invite. ‘They’re jealous of what we have, Dalton. I have no intention of going, but will of course send a gift. It’s the only reason they invite us.’

  Where are my friends, Leona? Who will love me?

  With pen poised, he stopped. The answer was too painful, but as a true artist, he had to go there. I have no one. I have only blood and water on a shower floor. I have another man, an older one, crumpled on the floor.

  But then a sixth-inning conversation between Frank and Grace pulled him from his reverie.

  ‘Her review is soon, isn’t it?’ Grace asked, all humor gone from her tone.

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘I’ll go with you.’

  ‘No need. I’ll be bad company,’ Frank said.

  ‘I don’t care. And I don’t understand why they put you through this every six months.’

  Dalton knew what they were talking about. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dr Frank Garfield, his curious origins and that his mother had bashed out his father’s brains with a hammer and had tried to do the same to Frank. We have things in common, you and me.

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘I know, it’s just …’ Grace said.

  ‘They’re well intended,’ he interrupted her, ‘but they miss the central problem with my mother.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘She’s smarter than all of them; the doctors, the social workers. She knows how to keep her crazy hidden. If I don’t go, there’s no telling what they’ll do.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let her out?’

  ‘Yes, they would. And that’s why I go … and we’re out.’

  Dalton also followed the game as The Nimble Nerds got their third out on a simple fly ball, and Grace and Frank headed towards their positions at first and second base. He studied them. Frank, tall, dark-haired, good-looking albeit with scruff and a fourteen-dollar haircut with long wavy bangs, which back in the eighties were a thing. And Grace, five-two, curvy and blonde, though Leona would savage her features one after the other. There was an ease to the two of them together, no pretense, no holding back. What is that like? To have friends? Real friends.

  Leona would call him naïve. I’m the only one who truly loves you, she’d say.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered. Head in the game. And as he had nights earlier, when he’d killed Atlas, he calculated the equation of Frank Garfield. Only now was not the time for murder, but for casting bait, hooking, and then reeling in this fish. He weighed the variables, the pretty best friend, the dying children, and his mother’s insistence that Garfield had something she needed. But into the mix, he allowed the possibility for something else. Maybe Mother always gets what she wants. He stared at Frank, gawky, poetic, and from angles, beautiful. But maybe, just maybe, I get something I want.

  TWELVE

  Frank stared at the Persian carpet in Dr Aaron Stein’s cozy office in the university mental health clinic. His thoughts swam with badness. It began with Jen Owen’s latest MRI, progressed to the neurologic decline in five-year-old Lakeesha Thomas, as her astrocytoma now spread to her visual cortex, and to a sick sense since Jackson’s murder. But this started before that. So why aren’t I doing something to save them? Because you can’t. Not true. You can, you have to figure how. You know how.

  ‘Put words to your feelings,’ Stein urged.

  He looked up at his bearded and bespectacled therapist. ‘Hollow, empty, sad. But that’s not it … not all.’ He checked out the color of Stein’s socks, having been disturbed in a session a decade ago that one had been black and the other blue. Today, they matched … thank God.

  ‘I’m sorry about Jackson. I know he was important to you.’

  ‘To lots of people. But yeah, he’s been my faculty advisor since I was twenty-two. He helped me write my first grant, got me through my thesis and lots of papers.’ So why couldn’t you have done what he asked. Change directions. Do something else. ‘I’ve been with him almost as long as I’ve been with you.’

  ‘Did you go to the funeral?’

  ‘It was a memorial service on Saturday. He wanted to be cremated and hated funerals. People said nice things.’

  ‘And you? Did you speak?’

  ‘I didn’t. And most who did were full of shit. The dean could not stand Jackson. He made it sound like they were chums. It stank.’

  ‘Jackson liked to stir the pot. The dean was being political.’

  Frank nodded. His gaze caught on an arabesque in the rug, symmetry and chaos. ‘It’s like DNA.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything. People think it’s order and structure. But when you really look, it’s a frenzy. Apparent anarchy, but it’s not.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘God … and the devil, too. One brings order and the other chaos. Nothing happens without cause.’ He sensed Stein’s interest intensify, a shift in posture, an eyebrow raise.

  ‘You’ve come a long way, Frank. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Thanks … but she’s still in here … I hear her sometimes.’

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Yeah. Me and Norman Bates. I push her back. I couldn’t when I was a kid. Your rug helps. DNA helps. Baseball helps. Jackson helped … and that’s another thing, his murder can’t have been a robbery.’

  ‘What if it was?’

  Frank met Stein’s gaze. ‘It is what it is, right? Accept and move on. His murder makes no sense. Sure, he had stuff that someone could sell, but it’s like going to the Museum of Fine Arts to commit a robbery and taking the donation box.’

  Stein nodded, ‘What else, Frank? You’ve got stuff going on in there. Big stuff and you don’t have to be a psychologist to see it.’

  ‘Everything. Like, what am I doing here?’ He caught a flash of concern cross Stein’s face. ‘No. I’m not suicidal, haven’t been for years. I stayed at MIT to work with Jackson, he was helping me figure it out. It was my name on that last grant … with his, so it’s not like anyone’s going to kick me out. At least not right away. But I can’t see how I’m going to get the funding I need without becoming some giant drug-company whore.’

  ‘So Jackson’s killer murdered your work as well?’

  ‘If I let it. Jackson wanted me to shift directions.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘He thought I was headed down a dangerous road. Something that could be twisted into … I don’t know what. Although he did. And maybe I do too.�
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  ‘You work on the stress response and its effects on the DNA?’ Stein asked.

  ‘Yes … I’m trying to alter the natural course. At this point everyone knows that the more bad things that happen to you when you’re young, the shorter your life expectancy. In the lab, under the electron microscope, this translates to shorter telomeres.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘That the biological clock is older than the person. The DNA has lost the configuration of youth, and diseases of both the body and mind, increase.’ Frank paused, caught on a thought. ‘Age is relative. We say you don’t look your age, or man she’s really aged bad. Numeric age is irrelevant. Cellular age is everything.’

  ‘Interesting. I’ve read several of your articles. The last one on the stress response was mind blowing.’

  Frank started. Stein checking on his work outside of their fifty-minute sessions, felt discordant. It made him think of Sean, and with that came a pang of regret that he’d never hear from him again. ‘Jackson didn’t want me to publish that.’

  ‘Really? You’d not mentioned that. What reason did he give?’

  ‘That some drug company would see potential in what I’m doing and sweep me off to their evil world.’

  ‘You’ve had a lot of offers,’ Stein said.

  ‘True. And since that paper came out, my phone hasn’t stopped.’

  ‘It’s important stuff, Frank. You don’t need a PhD to see that. You’re onto a central question of existence. What causes us to get ill, to age, and to die? What you’re investigating in the lab, I work with in my office. The fallout of trauma. Although for me it’s mostly about the mind and less the body.’

  ‘It’s a mistake to separate them.’

  ‘You’re not alone in that belief,’ Stein said. ‘But back to you and your life after Jackson Atlas.’

  ‘I took Killer and Harvey.’

  ‘Jackson’s pets.’

  ‘Yeah, my place is too small.’ And he’d never told Stein about Caesar and Lavinia, how he’d crossed a line … several actually, including one of the most basic rules of animal research – don’t name test subjects.