Death Spiral (9 page)

“Come on, Jesse, I'm serious. You get to ask me all these questions about my life. What about your mother? You never talk about her.”

“Fine. About six months ago she wouldn't get out of bed. The end.”

“The end? That's your story? She wouldn't get out of bed? Was she sick?”

Jesse looks out the window. In the long pause that follows, I realize how much easier it is for him to do the asking than the telling. It's harder when you're the one baring your soul.

“Sick, yeah, but not physically,” he finally says. “Depressed.”

“Depressed?”

“Look, this isn't something I want to talk about, so how about we—”

“Don't talk about things that are hard? Yeah, I haven't done any of
that
today.” I say it as a joke, but Jesse doesn't laugh. “Look, I'm not going to get all Dr. Phil on your ass. I'm all for repression and denial, but fair's fair. I told you something. Actually, I told you a lot of somethings. It's your turn.”

It's like sticking a tack into a balloon. Jesse goes flat. His shoulders slump. Even his face seems slack.

“My mom always tried to be the perfect wife and mother,” he begins slowly, as if the words have to fight their way to the surface. “She had to keep up appearances and all that crap. She had to do it for Doc.” He drops his eyes and settles his gaze on his lap. “I guess she couldn't take the pressure anymore. Let's just say our family's in free fall right now, and without Mom there isn't any parachute to slow us down. Doc's dealing with the whole thing by channeling Stalin. ‘Didn't do your homework? To the Gulag!'”

“How's she doing now?” I ask, wishing I knew how to bridge the canyon between my hurt and his. “Is she getting better?”

“Depends what you mean by better. Better than she was when we were in the city, yeah. Like she was before? No way.” He balls his hands into fists and presses them to his eyes. “Doc blames me for how she is. He never says it, but it's what he's thinking.”

“How on earth could it be your fault?” I feel like a hypocrite for asking. How many times have I blamed myself for what happened to
my
mother, told myself I could've done something to help—made her see a doctor, given her vitamins, herbs, crystals, prayed, hired an exorcist?

“According to Doc, I'm the original fuck-up. He says I make her life hell—skipping school, not giving a shit. Maybe he's right. But every time I try to be his college-bound-Ivy-League-wet-dream, I feel like I'm going to kill someone.” He pushes his plate away and it skids across the table. “Mom's the real reason we moved out here. It wasn't for me. I'm just the excuse, so Doc doesn't have to admit to anyone that his wife's plunged off the deep end. Gotta keep up appearances, you know?”

He stops talking. I search for something to say. I could tell him not to worry—that it'll all be okay and none of this is his fault. Isn't that what people do when you fess up to your problems? Try to make you feel better? It's bullshit though. Trite platitudes just make you retreat deeper and feel less understood.

“I'm sorry,” I murmur, offering up the only words I can think of.

Jesse looks at me for the first time since he started talking about his mom. In the look that passes between us, something inside me shifts. His world isn't so different from mine after all.

He reaches out and touches my hand. I let his fingers join with mine. The touch is our bridge. For the first time I feel my way across the divide.

Ten

A half hour later Jesse drops me at the train station so I can go meet Dr. Monroe, and we say good-bye with a hug. This time the hug isn't so much a current in my belly as a connection in my heart. I hold back on a kiss, though. I'm not ready for that. The bridge might be there, but there's still a speed limit.

I sit on a bench with a few student commuters once Jesse's gone and imagine what it would be like to be a college student, to study biology or some other science, physics maybe. Not that I'd ever fit in with the AP physics clique and their quarks and N-dimensional space and inside jokes.
Two atoms were walking across a street when one said, “I think I lost an electron.” “Really?” the other replied, “Are you sure?” “Yes, I'm absolutely positive.”
Give me life science any day. If you can see it, you know it's real. Maybe I'd study genetics, and like Mrs. Lopez said, be in the forefront of scientific discovery. The problem is when I follow the thought and go through the list of steps needed to actually becoming a scientist—steps which begin with college, which begins with applying, which begins with dealing with financial aid—my internal hard drive crashes and rebooting just gives me a headache. So I push it all away.

I take out my iPod, close my eyes, and tune out to Bob Marley until the train arrives. I listen to “One Love” all the way to Sixty-ninth, where I get the Market Line to Thirty-ninth. From there, I turn off the tunes and walk, letting the sounds of the city be my music.

Last year the school guidance counselor at West Philly High took every sophomore on a campus tour of Philly U, and I remember seeing the human genetics department, a complex of impressive-looking buildings with lots of glass and steel and elevated walkways, so I know where I'm going—at least generally speaking.

I pass a vegetarian taco place, an all night pizza parlor, and a vinyl shop with posters of The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, and Eric Clapton decorating the front window. Just as I pass Sydney's Second Hand Clothes, someone creeps up behind me and grabs my elbow. Judging from the strength of the grip and the size of the hand, I'm thinking some testosterone-fueled bastard is about to mug me. The IMPACT personal safety You Tube video with the man in the padded suit and the woman attacking him and screaming, “GROIN! EYES! ELBOW!” flashes through my mind.

I whip around to take a swing at the guy's nuts. He seizes my free arm before I can make contact, but not before I get a look at his face and discover it's not some mugger after the three quarters, lint, and lighter in my pocket. It's him. The Rat Catcher.

“Shouldn't you be in school?” he hisses into my ear as his grip on my elbow tightens, and he forces me down the sidewalk around a girl with a messenger bag slung over her chest.

I wriggle my arm and try to struggle free, but his hold is too tight. “What do you want from me?” I say in a taut voice I hardly recognize as my own.

Instead of an answer, he pulls me off the sidewalk into an alley and now I'm thinking, great, he's going to kill me, and the real panic sets in. My heart hammers furiously as I check out the scene for an escape. Dead end to my left, and Mr. Drug-Dealing-Thug is blocking access to the right. I wait to see what happens, which, unless you count the Rat Catcher lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke in my face as something happening, is nothing.

With the Rat Catcher this close, I notice he's younger than I first thought. I realize the erosion of his face isn't so much a byproduct of time as a byproduct of a life hard lived. The acne scars on his right cheek. The yellow teeth and empty space where an upper left canine should be. His unwashed hair, the ashtray of his breath. I almost feel sorry for him. He seems more like a street bum than a drug dealer.

But then our eyes meet, and my nanosecond of pity hemorrhages and suffers instant death. The look he gives me is nothing to feel sorry for. The look in his eyes is a mix of madness, determination, and something else I don't even have the word for, but makes me shrink back against the wall and look again for an escape.

“I heard through the grapevine that you've been poking your nose around in your mother's death,” he says in a low voice that reminds me of the kind of snarl a dog gives when warning an intruder off his territory. I start to respond, but he holds up a finger and continues. “Listen to me and listen carefully. Your mother was a drug addict. It's bad business, and if you keep asking questions, you're going to end up meeting some people who, I can assure you, you don't want to know.” He drops his cigarette, stubs it out with the toe of his boot, then smiles showing off those big, unbrushed yellows. “This is where I come in. I'm here to give you a little friendly advice, Sweetie. You don't want to get involved in this. Do you understand?”

“No. I don't understand,” I snap, conjuring up defiant, tough-girl Faith. It's all smoke and mirrors, though. The real me, the one behind the assertive voice and FU attitude, is terrified. “Who are you? Her dealer?”

The Rat Catcher studies me with dark, unblinking eyes. “Let's just say I work for some powerful people who do not favor a kid poking into their business. As long as you stop asking questions, you'll be fine. Remember, I know where you live and how to find you.”

Before I can say anything else, he steps out of the alley and into the street.

“Wait!” I chase after him, but I've taken just two steps when the light changes, and I'm nearly flattened by a taxi.

I jump back onto the sidewalk, and he disappears into the crowd.

Fear and adrenaline blast my legs into action. I take off running toward the university. I don't care how stupid I look sprinting down Spruce Street in combat boots and a leather coat. I don't stop running until I'm on a campus quad surrounded by turreted brick buildings like medieval castles. I lean against a wall to catch my breath. What people was the Rat Catcher talking about? Who doesn't want me poking around? Who was Mom messed up with? A drug mob?

Something pegs me in the chest. I scream, certain I've been shot, and then flush from head to toe when I realize the “bullet” was a Frisbee and it must belong to the smiling blond guy trotting toward me like a golden retriever.

“Sorry,” the bearded blond says when he's a few feet away. “Didn't mean to scare you.” He opens his hands and I'm thinking what, you want money? And then I realize he wants me to throw his toy to him.

I pick up the Frisbee and fling it lamely in his direction. He calls thanks over his shoulder and goes back to the grass to join the other Frisbee-playing college coeds.

As I watch the Frisbee game, my breathing slows, my heart beat returns to a nonlethal rate, and I consider my options: Stay safe, abort the mission, and forget asking questions, or take the risk, continue to Dr. Monroe's office, and find out what I can about the clinical trial.

The choice is obvious.

I pick up my pace to meet the professor.

***

A few streets later I'm in front of the genetics department. I follow a hedge-lined path past a stone statue of some serious-looking bald guy whose head is covered with pigeon shit. A bunch of the offending birds roost on his shoulders and arms.
Immortalized in pigeon shit
—
every scientist's dream
. Finally, I reach what appears to be the main building. I enter a vast circular lobby with three sets of elevators and overhead walkways jutting out in all directions like tentacles.

I'm standing there, literally scratching my head, when a short, curly-haired guy wheeling a metal cart packed with microscopes passes. I stop him, half expecting him to ask me for ID or something to prove I belong here. He doesn't, and I tell him who I'm looking for.

“Next building to the right. Third floor. Room 310.”

What's left of my adrenaline propels me up the stairs two at a time to the second floor. I take the elevator up another level to the third floor and start down the main hall, reading room numbers and course titles as I go:
Molecular Basis of Human Genetic Diseases. Genomic Technology. Developmental Biology and Genetics. Statistical Analysis of Biological Data
.
Model Organisms and Epigenetics.
I recognize individual words, but string them together and I've landed on another planet.

The hall ends in a T. I turn right and follow the numbers until halfway down this new hall I find room 310. The door is closed and covered with cartoons of talking bugs, mad scientists, and cows that stand on two feet. Next to the door is a plaque that says
Dr. Monroe: Molecular Genetics of Drug Addiction. Office Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 10:00–11:00 and by appointment.
I check my phone. 9:30. I plop to the floor and trace circles in the dust with the toe of my boot, checking the time approximately every five seconds as I wait for the professor to arrive.

At ten, a small, ponytailed woman wearing jeans and sneakers walks down the hall and unlocks the door. She turns when she sees me sitting there and asks if I need any help.

“I'm here to see Dr. Monroe,” I say, jumping to my feet.

“You're in luck. That's me. What can I do for you?”

I white-knuckle the lighter in my pocket and take a breath. “I'm here about my mother. She was in the clinical trial for RNA 120 at the Twenty-third Street Methadone Clinic.”

Dr. Monroe's eyebrows rise above her pale green eyes. She's pretty, I notice, but not the kind of pretty that's self-conscious or put on. She has an earthy confidence about her. “I see,” she says. “Come inside and we can talk.”

I follow Dr. Monroe through her lab. The walls are plastered with diplomas and white boards scribbled with equations and notes. Every inch of counter, table, and desk space is occupied with notebooks, papers, books, and weird looking machinery. The weirdest piece of machinery though, is this large appliance-like white box attached to a computer. The thing takes up half a counter. I stare at the blinking lights and listen to its hum.

Dr. Monroe follows my gaze. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“I guess. What is it?”

“A DNA sequencer. I can pop in a sample of DNA and a day later the sequence for whatever gene I'm looking at is emailed to me.”

“Emailed?” I blurt. “So, like if you have a mutation or something it comes to your inbox along with discount offers to Target and Facebook messages from your friends?”

Dr. Monroe smiles. “It's a little more complicated than that, but basically, yes.” She goes into the office connected to the lab. I follow and wait as she riffles through about a zillion pages scattered on her desk. She plucks the one she's looking for from the mess and hands me a paper filled with what must be thousands of A, T, C, and G's, the letters of the genetic code. “AGS3,” she says, as if this might mean something to me. “It's a gene that plays an important role in opiate craving.”

I stare at the rows of tiny letters until my eyes go blurry. “So just like that you could put some of my blood into that machine and sequence my DNA, and I'd find out if I had that gene?” I say, handing back the paper.

Dr. Monroe laughs. “It's not quite that easy, but yes. I could sequence one or all of your genes, depending on how much time and money you had.”

I can hardly speak. Standing here, staring at the real deal, a machine that can actually sequence my genetic code, I think about Mrs. Lopez's question again. Would I want to know?
Do
I want to know? I thought the answer was yes, but now I'm not so sure I want my A, T, C, and G's appearing in somebody's inbox.

“Now, how can I help you?” she asks, attempting to bring order to the anarchy of her desk. “You said it was about your mother.”

An image flashes through my mind—a blustery March day and Mom's taken me to the Morris Arboretum, blocks from here, to admire the blooms of the witch hazel, their ruby red flowers a promise of spring. No sooner does the image appear than it mutates. The red flowers turn to blood, her sleek hair to tangles. She's scabby and emaciated, hunched over the kitchen table wheezing for breath. I blink and look at Dr. Monroe.

“Right before my mom died she got really sick. Everyone tells me she had side effects from the heroin, but I was wondering if maybe there could've been side effects from the clinical trial.” I pick nervously at a piece of lint on my sweater and look at the floor. “I mean from, you know, your drug. RNA 120?”

Dr. Monroe stops moving. Even though I'm studying the pattern of grain in the wood floor, I can feel her eyes on me. “What kind of side effects?”

“Like her skin,” I say, glancing up. “It was all blistered and scabby. And she started getting short of breath, wheezing all the time.”

Dr. Monroe adjusts the fold of her turtleneck and doesn't answer right away. “I suppose it's possible she had an immune reaction to the vector,” she finally says, but before she can elaborate, there's a knock on the door. “If you'll excuse me.” She crosses the office and opens the door to a trim, gray-haired guy in a striped shirt and khakis.

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” the man says, looking past Dr. Monroe and smiling an apology at me, “but I've been reviewing your dossier and I have some questions about the NIH grant.” He hands her a thick document in a brown file folder. “You'll want to review that before the tenure meeting.”

She takes the document and flips through a few pages, nodding as she goes.

“Also, I have a question about some data in the AGS3 paper. I heard Bickwell's lab is submitting a similar manuscript to
Nature
. I don't want you to get scooped on this. How soon can we meet?”

“I have office hours and class until three,” she says, tucking the folder under an arm.

“Fine, let's say four o'clock in my office. I think that's about it, at least for now. You all set for the conference next week?”

“Once I get through this,” she says, holding out the folder. “And the tenure meeting. And that.” She points to a table in the corner of her office where a pile of papers is stacked underneath what must be a week's worth of empty Chinese food take out boxes. “Not to mention two sections of intro genetics, office hours, and senior seminar.” It's the to-do list of a small empire, but if the workload is a stress to her, she doesn't show it. “Then, I'll think about the conference. I'm just glad Glass is presenting RNA 120 and not me.”