Race Across the Sky (10 page)

Caleb peered down into Lily's eyes, which sparkled in the fading light.

“He's your brother,” June told him. “What's he doing?”

Caleb looked out the window to the white aspens and their hieroglyphic black eyes, which he knew were watching his every word.

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

E
very day his face appeared different.

Sometimes he looked like an aged Shanghai bureaucrat, or a Florentine cherub, just like Janelle, nothing like Janelle. His face seemed to be a template formed by whichever spirits happened to be floating by.

He's completely pure, Shane thought, lying next to him in their bed. The air that passes through his body comes back into the world purified.

Then the thought of the air trapped and spoiling in Lily's lungs swept over him; he pushed it away as fast as he could.

Janelle's mother Hua arrived daily bearing fragrant Hunan lactation herbs, and Fred and Julie flew down the following weekend. Recently Fred had become adept at making sushi and spent Nicholas's nap time rolling maki, squinting through bifocals under arched white eyebrows, adding his personal touches. His lifelong focus had never left him, Shane saw; it was simply being deployed in new pursuits.

“Dad looks,” Shane commented to Julie, “like Gepetto.”

His mother laughed. Her chestnut hair was cut short, and she wore a shapeless sweatshirt and high-waisted jeans. What force was it, Shane wondered, that commands women over sixty to take on the fashion of lesbians?

Watching them, he realized with some melancholy that he had never really known his parents, not the way they saw and defined themselves, at their peaks, vital, alive. He had no memories of Fred winning a case, of Julie on the eve of starting one of her ill-fated catering companies, laughing in the messy kitchen as she made Fred try obscure appetizers. He had no image of them arriving at a cocktail party together, young and magical, or of them standing over his crib, full of dreams, the way he and Janelle now did at Nicholas's. He knew them only as older people. He felt as if he had missed something significant.

And, he understood with a sharp stab in his belly, Nicholas would never know him or Janelle the way they were right now, which seemed to be the real them worth remembering.

After dinner, and several pointed glances from Janelle, Shane looked at his parents. “I saw Caleb.”

Julie whispered, “Oh.”

Fred shifted in his chair, lawyer's eyes narrowing. “How did that happen?”

“He wrote me a letter.”

Janelle stood, opened a desk drawer, and retrieved it. He handed the blue paper to Julie, who stared at every word.

“I didn't tell you, because I wasn't sure what I'd see. So, it's a lot like we thought. He's living with sixteen or seventeen other people in a house, a big cabin really, in the middle of the woods. It's about half an hour from Boulder.”

“The Manson Family Runners,” Fred stated.

“But they're not like that. They're nice, kind of normal people. And, he's involved with someone.”

“A woman?”

“Versus a man?”

“Versus himself.”

“Ah.”

“You met her?” Julie leaned forward, her elbows digging into her knees.

Shane nodded. “Her name is June.”

“We got a letter from him a few months ago, but it didn't say anything about a girl? It just said he was fine,” she said quickly, looking from Fred to Janelle to Shane as if they had an answer.

“How does he look?” Fred asked quietly.

“Good. He's really, really fit. He's working at a copy store.”

“A copy store.”

Julie asked, “Did he say anything about coming home?”

Shane did not reply.

Janelle added, “But he reached out. It's . . . fragile.”

“Can we go see him?” Julie asked desperately.

Shane touched her arm. “I know it's hard, but I think you guys ought to wait. We need to let him lead.”

Fred pursed his lips as if he had eaten something unpleasant. “You think I don't know you all blame me?”

Shane rushed a smile onto his face. “Nobody blames you for anything.”

“Sure you do. I took him running all those years. I took you too, and you didn't end up in a cult.”

“Caleb would tell you I did.”

Fred stared at him, and he changed his tone of voice. “Look Dad, it's not our lifestyle, but it seems to work for him. He's getting pretty known for these races.”

“Events,” Fred corrected in a bitter voice. “That's what he calls them.”

“Do you follow him online? See how well he's doing?”

From the way Julie looked at Fred, he knew they did.

In bed that night Shane stared at a spiderweb that had appeared in the corner of the wall. Did he blame his father for Caleb's choices? No, he knew, of course not. He felt that he had learned only positive things from their ritual family runs. Goal setting. Discipline. How to see things in miles rather than in yards. Running had taught them all focus. And this focus had propelled Fred to senior partner at his firm, and fueled Caleb across finish lines so distant that Shane could not imagine them. Lying there, he wondered if this focus was coded deep in his genome, waiting to rise out of him, too.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Shane went back to work that Monday. Almost immediately, he felt different.

Walking through the halls, he noticed specific products that had not before caught his attention. Helixia's product line was like taking a course in incomprehensible human suffering. Dozens of types of cancers, Parkinson's, and to his dismay, rapid onset childhood disorders that had been rare during his youth but were now exploding.

Neurofibromatosis, up 45 percent in the last five years. Childhood leukemia, up 110 percent. Asthma. Cushing's disease. Marfan syndrome. All up by astounding percentages in the past decade.

Helixia's researchers possessed many theories as to why: the average American mother's breast milk contains fifty toxic chemical compounds not known a generation earlier, baby formulas which fail to fully develop the infant immune system, constant exposure to low-level radiation from cell phones and airplanes. Whatever their root causes, these diseases were each the subject of long decks, all of which contained a section entitled “Early Symptoms.”

When Shane returned home each night, his eyes would wander to the slight widening of the base of Nicholas's head, a tiny red dot on his leg, all bullet points on those pages. At night he would listen to the bassinet next to their bed. Was Nicholas snoring? Did he have infant sleep apnea? Would his resulting moodiness be misdiagnosed as ADHD, and Nicholas end up lost in a swirl of psychotropic overmedication?

The universe was revealed to him as a forest at night, with spirits hiding behind the trunks of wicked trees. But Shane shook these off with relative ease. Environmental concerns could be mitigated: he and Janelle used no products with artificial scents of mountain breeze, cleaned using only the vinegar their grandmothers had used. It did not go unnoticed that neither of their grandmothers had died of cancer.

But there was nothing he could do to protect his boy from genetics. What happened there had been embedded deep in code, far beyond him.

That week, the annual sales conference for Sorion was to be held at the Union Square Sheraton. Shane was responsible for a presentation on the drug's past, current, and future, and the status of prescriptions in his region. Besides getting up to speed, simply learning Helixia's style of presentation took attention. He could feel his promise to Caleb drifting out to sea.

On Wednesday, sitting at his desk, he scanned the guest list. Investor Relations, Corporate, Physicians, Patients. He noticed someone missing.

“Hey, it's Shane Oberest,” he said when Prajuk answered his phone. “What are you doing today?”

“I am working. Did you have some more questions about this thing?”

“Actually, I'd like to invite you to join us at the Sorion sales conference.”

“You're kidding. Science is never invited to these things.”

“Science is the Star. Says so right on my mouse pad.”

He heard the doctor laugh.

“Come on, I'll drive you. You should see this.”

After a pause, Prajuk's nearly falsetto voice returned. “This thing, when would we be back?”

And so on Thursday morning, Shane stood in the courtyard between the two Helixia buildings, watching an astonishing mix of people emerge from Research. South Asians, Africans, Nordic blonds. There seemed to be no cultural lock on the study of enzyme proteins. And here came Doctor Acharn, lighting a Parliament. He had a manner of smoking Shane had never before encountered: he gripped a lit cigarette in his fist an inch away from his lips and sucked loudly at his hand. It seemed an utterly foreign act.

“What do you want to listen to?” Shane asked, as they drove the blue Civic out of the lot.

“The Giants are playing.”

Shane's radio was already preset to it. They hit the 101 to the sounds of the second inning. Half an hour later, the unsightly Union Square Sheraton appeared, hovering over the low-end pornography shops. Shane and Prajuk made their way past tourists in college football sweatshirts toward a ballroom. The hotel's beaten carpeting and stained floral furniture had clearly been abused by conventioneers for generations.

In the hall, a group of older people congregated by the main ballroom. They seemed displaced, called to come, but unsure where they were supposed to be. They wore yellow cotton sweaters, tennis shoes, a specific look on their faces; even if Shane had not known what this conference was about, he might have guessed. There is a look in the faces of cancer survivors that causes them to stand apart from the earth.

Shane walked over with a friendly nod. “Are you Sorion patients?”

Each of them nodded.

“This man”—Shane gestured to Prajuk—“invented it.”

A stocky woman in her sixties exclaimed, “Oh, my Lord.”

She took a step forward and hugged Prajuk. Shane watched him accept uncomfortably.

An older man, with a head full of thick white hair and eyes that registered honor, stepped forward. This man, thought Shane, had served. His watery hazel eyes never left Prajuk's, and he clasped his shoulder as if there were some secret history between them.

A well-appointed woman, possibly his daughter, spoke softly. “He was wasting down to nothing. He had pneumonia, he couldn't walk. Then he started on your drug. Now you just look at him.”

Shane asked, amazed, “Did it work right away?”

“Oh no,” she shook her head. “When he first took it he got a bad fever. A hundred and four, the doctors wanted him off of it.”

“That is a good sign,” Prajuk nodded. “That is the cancer cells dying in the millions. The body just cannot process all of these dead cells at once.”

She went on, “He still has his tumors, but they stopped growing. He plays golf. He does the yard.”

The man finally spoke. “I know you saved my life.”

And then overhead lights blinked, signaling the start of the conference. Shane presented an overview of Sorion's sales, projected growth. He ably charted Asia-Pacific projections and gracefully handed the stage to the finance team. Patients spoke, some of them moved to tears, then oncologists, and one medical school dean from San Diego. Afterward, the trade reporters began to drink at the hotel bar. At Orco, he thought, he would have laid down a corporate card and suggested some stories on his other drugs. Now, he just went to find Prajuk.

On the drive back, Shane watched the slight scientist look out at the orange electric buses.

“Thank you for inviting me. This thing, I am very . . .” he seemed to be searching for a word. “This mattered to me.”

Shane smiled. “That's really, really good.”

“We never see the patients.”

“We'll do it again.” As he hit the on-ramp, a thought occurred to him. “So, do you know anything about lung disease?”

“Lung cancer?”

“No, more inherited genetic diseases?”

Prajuk raised his eyes. “A bit.”

“My brother knows a baby who has one called alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency.” His mouth stumbled over the syllables. “It's pretty rare.”

“I know it. How old is the baby?”

“About four months.”

“In infants the prognosis is fairly poor. Is that what they told your brother?”

“That's right.”

“Of course we've been quite involved with immune-system-sponsored lung disease for a long time.”

“Helixia, you mean?”

“My team.”

“You work on lung diseases?”

“We developed this thing Airifan.”

Shane slowed behind a truck and looked at him. “You worked on Airifan?”

“This thing is going to save quite a lot of lives.”

“It's out of trials, right?”

“It resides in a lovely limbo between FDA approval and Marketing. One is understaffed, and the other is busy designing golf shirts with the logo.”

Shane took the hit with a grin and changed lanes.

“It must feel incredible,” he said quietly, “to create something that saves people.”

“Oh, definitely. Airifan will save many lives. It will also prevent other suffering. Current childhood asthma medication is steroids, and there are many concerns with steroids in children. Airifan has no steroids at all.”

“What are projected sales?”

“Oh, you would need to ask the finance people but it's blockbuster for sure. A billion a year, probably. But asthma is just a part of it. The real target is emphysema, which is fatal one hundred percent of the time. The technology we developed for Airifan is the key to a treatment. We believe it will be prescribed off-label for emphysema fairly quickly.”

“My wife's grandfather died of emphysema.”

“Big smoker?”

“He's Chinese.”

“Ah,” Prajuk said flatly.

Shane's eyebrows raised. “Children with alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency get emphysema.”

“Definitely.”