Race Across the Sky (4 page)

Mack spoke roughly. “I can't tell you why those people died. I can tell you they did not train with me.”

He had everyone's attention.

“We are not just bringing back the most challenging physical event in the country, we are amplifying it. And the whole country is going to fucking watch it.” He beamed. “I already talked with a gal at ESPN. She says the country is ready. Because it ain't no bullshit Iron Man, watching dudes jog down a
highway
.

“This is going to be like watching a war. Seventy-two straight hours on old mining trails, up twelve thousand feet and back a dozen times. In complete darkness, in brutal sun, over waterfalls, through mines, Half Dome, up El Capitan. Rescue can't even get to eighty percent of the course. Stunning shit to look at on a plasma screen. But the most stunning things will be you. People want to watch people who believe in themselves.”

“ESPN?” Rae frowned.

“This event is going to be the spark for our whole movement. ESPN is the wind. People are going to watch this in bars, at home, at the gym.”

“That'll bring out all the hacks,” Rae suggested anxiously. “Clogging the trails, puking all over the place.”

Mack shot her a riley look. “A hack golfer can buy expensive clubs and clog up a pro course. But no fancy sneakers can force you up El Capitan in your sixty-sixth hour. It'll make pretty amusing television to watch poseurs try. People can place bets on when they'll drop and beg for ambulances.”

“I just don't get it. What's wrong with—”

“Go upstairs please.”

Caleb watched Rae stand solemnly, heard her callused feet shuffle up the wood steps behind him.

Mack turned to the group. “We have a great world here, but I feel stasis. We run, we work, we travel, we enter events, and we kick their asses. But what's
forward
? I want kinetic energy in this group, not just in our individual bodies. A new event, the hardest event in the country, that's motion.”

“Cool.” Ryan raised his hand for a high five and got one from Makailah.

“We're going to spend the year training. And someone here”—he looked at Caleb—“is going to win.”

Aviva put her hand on the small of Caleb's back and rubbed a gentle circle. The bottle of Beam made its way to him, and Caleb took a good pull, feeling its warmth slide into his belly. Across the circle, he tried to catch June's eye, but she was watching Mack.

“But before Yosemite, we have the Hardrock, and that's no Fat Race. Hands.”

Aviva took Caleb's left palm, and Gigi took his right. Mack put a small pipe to his lips, lit a soft ball of chocolate brown hashish, took a hit, and passed it on. Its sweet thick scent blended with the cherrywood, and the house entered a dreamlike phase. Caleb exhaled deeply.

This morning, he had spoken with his brother for the first time in ten years. Shane's voice had sounded different than he'd remembered, but their conversation had been easy. They had agreed on this weekend for his visit. At first he had felt a deep relief, but now the guilt of what he wanted Shane to do bubbled through him, and he worried that Mack would see it in his soul.

But Mack was occupied, rubbing his hands together, collecting his energy, his voice quiet and sincere.

“We had some injuries this week. Leigh's ankle, Hank's neck.” He closed his eyes. “‘Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth. Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees. Earth of the mountains misty-topt. Rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes.'”

The pipe reached Caleb, and he inhaled; the hashish encircled his head immediately. He felt the blaze of the fire, heard the crackling of the birch. He felt Gigi's small fingers hover near his back and a furnace emanate from her palms. Under his skin he felt a shudder, as her energy unblocked closed channels throughout his body. This heat spread to his foot and knee and sinuses, everywhere he had difficulty. He did the same for Aviva beside him, and she for Hank.

Happy Trails was made up of seventeen people, of different ages, backgrounds, parts of the country, but they were one single being now. When he healed Aviva he was healing June. It was, he thought, a type of prayer. Communion in its most literal sense. Mack believed that sexual energy creates a chemical enzyme called orgone, which he regarded as one of the body's most powerful forces. On Sunday evenings they created orgone in each other, and this in turn helped them heal.

Across the room he heard June's distinctive breaths. His stomach clenched. Do not look, Caleb told himself. Do not. But he did, and on her face he saw the look he loved. Her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open, her arms raising beside her, hovering as though in a penitent prayer.

Mack lifted his hand, and they each stopped moving, holding it. Caleb felt a hot energy fill his lungs and pulse out into every limb. He felt his blockages burst open, dead zones spring to life; he felt swallowed whole.

Then Mack nodded, and they all shifted, and then like fission, waves of kinetic energy bounced through the house, out to the mountains and into the sky and back again, and he could feel June connected to him all the way across the circle, a part of him now, where she was supposed to be.

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

A
s Shane hit the freeway, rays of light bounded off the bay beside him.

This morning he had an informational interview with Dennis Adderberry, the Director of Commercial at Helixia, which Janelle had arranged the morning following the arrival of Caleb's letter. He had never met Dennis, but he had heard of him for many years. He had a reputation as genuine and honest, and Shane was flattered that he had made time for him.

But Shane knew he was not prepared. That short letter on blue paper had stolen his attention from everything important. When he had phoned the copy store listed on the return address, their conversation had been disappointing. After a silence, Shane had explained that their due date was next week and offered to come this Saturday. The whole exchange had been stilted, and Shane had hung up feeling disoriented and doleful.

Today, he swore he would focus on his own future. He was listening to sports radio, wearing his brown suit with a French blue shirt and his blue tinted wraparound running shades. His short black hair was gelled back. His mouth tasted of mint. He kept a watch out for the South San Francisco exit, and took it to Pinon Drive.

As always, he felt astonishment at Helixia's headquarters. Visitors to Orco Pharmaceutical's campus in Saint Louis drove a winding, tree-lined mile down Orco Boulevard, and parked by a reflecting pool in front of an imposing black glass headquarters. Where no one could miss it, an enormous sign listed directions to the gym, the steakhouse, the helipad.

Helixia's architecture conveyed the opposite message entirely. The headquarters of the third-largest biotechnology company in the country was a simple seventy-year-old brick warehouse. Two decades ago the company had constructed a separate two-story concrete building beside it for research and production labs, an addition as drab and unadorned as a Midwestern middle school. All the money here, the buildings communicated, went to research.

Shane stepped inside. Here he saw that Helixia was not without some unnecessary adornment: by the reception area stood a small corn plant.

“Well, hi, Ruth,” he nodded to the elderly receptionist. He had known her for some years.

“Janelle just got in,” she informed him.

“Actually, I'm here to see Dennis Adderberry.” He signed in and smiled at her. “You have a great morning.”

He rode an old freight elevator to the third floor, and walked down a long hallway to Dennis's office.

Dennis Adderberry was exceedingly tall. He seemed around forty years old, with striking silver hair offset by thick black Scottish eyebrows, over a boyish face. In place of the Orco Director of Sales' blue suit and American flag pin, Dennis wore a loose yellow golf shirt and khakis. He smiled broadly.

“You're here,” he said in a surprisingly deep baritone.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“Well, I know a little bit about you. First, sir, you have excellent taste in wives.”

Shane grinned.

“Second, you have great relationships with doctors. I wish our team had more of that. You'd be surprised how many oncologists still aren't comfortable with what we do.”

“They're not paid to be comfortable with it,” Shane ventured. Why not throw his real feelings out there, he figured?

Dennis studied him, eyes sparkling. “We don't do that here, you know.”

Shane sat down. “That's what I wanted to talk with you about. I've been in pharma sales my whole career. And maybe it's me getting older, but I feel like it's moved somewhere I don't really want to be.”

“Where is it you're looking to be, Shane?”

“I want to rep drugs that help people survive disease, not de-stress before the golf course. I'd like to go to work for a boutique. Do you think my experience is transferable? Is there a path from Big Pharma sales to start-ups?”

Dennis thought for a moment. “Well, the cliché says a good salesman can sell cars one day and raincoats the next. But I don't believe that. I think you need to have passion for what you sell, feel and understand it as if you made it. We've hired quite a few pharma people. My feeling is they tend to think of our drugs as products. That's the way they were trained. But I don't think of them that way, I think of them as medicine. As lives.”

Shane was nodding.

“So my question back to you Shane would be, your skills are transferable, but is your passion?”

“I already have passion for what your guys do.”

“What do you know about biotech? I'd imagine being married to one of our best product managers, it's quite a lot.”

“Not as much as I should. If I get a chance to interview somewhere, I'll tighten up.”

“Give it a shot.” Dennis's eyes sparkled.

“Okay. Well, the big idea of biomedicine, as I understand it anyway, is that all living things, plants, animals, fish, viruses, bacteria, insects, are all made of the same genes. And that these genes are interchangeable. Like Lego pieces. They will work the same way in any organism they are transferred to. So we can move a gene with a specific property from one organism to another.”

Dennis was nodding encouragingly.

“For example, a major problem in cancer surgery is that surgeons leave microscopic particles of a tumor behind, which grow back. You guys took the enzyme from a firefly gene that causes its tail to glow and grafted it onto a chromosome in a human cancerous tumor. So that in surgery, every molecule of that tumor glows like a firefly.”

“Two-hundred-million-dollar a year product, by the way.”

“Congratulations. Orco made that much with a female Viagra that was ineffective.”

Dennis smiled. “What do you think our biggest challenge with internists is?”

“They still think that biotech is a cutting-edge new science. When actually, the Romans used biotechnology. Any time you add yeast to make bread, or wine, you're transplanting bacteria. Beer is biotech.”

“Beer is biotech. I'll have the T-shirts printed this weekend.”

Shane shifted in his seat. “So, you know who runs each sales department. Who do you think might be a good fit for me?”

“I have an opening for a sales director.”

Shane blinked.

“I realize we have more than ten employees just in our mail room,” Dennis shook his head, his voice dropping as he considered this.

“That's not why I came to see you.”

“I know. And I know we're the opposite of a boutique or a start-up. But”—Dennis raised a finger and narrowed his eyes—“we started that way, and many of the people here can remember those days. That ethos hasn't gone anywhere. And I do have a solid position open. I'm supposed to interview someone for it after work tonight.”

“Don't you guys have a nepotism policy?”

“You don't graft firefly cells onto human genes if you're following every policy.”

“What's the director lead?”

“Sorion.”

Shane swallowed a wash of disappointment. Sorion was Helixia's marquee drug; the nanosecond it had been approved, in 1994, their stock had doubled. Its use had spread so quickly that conferences detailing its growth had to be rewritten quarterly. The time to be working on it, Shane felt, was fifteen years ago.

Dennis read his eyes. “It's a good place to learn our business. It's stable. You can make connections, get your footing. And there's none of the frantic all-night panics of a Phase Three.”

“I like all-night panics,” Shane told him.

Dennis smiled, revealing surprisingly yellow teeth. “Oh, don't worry,” he assured him, “you'll get them.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

hat evening, he and Janelle walked into a small Nob Hill steakhouse.

They were greeted by dim lighting and a somber jazz. The whole vibe seemed too down for Shane's mood, but it was too late for a change of plan. Doctor Wenceslas Chin and his wife Cynthia were waiting for them at the bar, and Wenceslas loved his steak. Shane felt lighter the instant he saw them.

Wenceslas was an internist at Greenbrae Medical Associates, a general practice catering to Marin's elite. He had a wide South Chinese face and behind his round eyeglasses lay happy eyes. He and Shane had become close friends these last years, played countless rounds of golf, and shared many bottles of Shane's beloved Washington State reds at medical conferences, on Orco. This dinner would be their last with the Saint Louis pharma picking up the check, without the accompaniment of an infant, their last before so many things promised to change.

“Oh my God,” Cynthia laughed, hugging Janelle. “When are you due, today?”

“Next week.”

Her eyes fell to Janelle's protruding belly. “Can I touch it?”

“Go crazy.”

Watching Janelle lean forward stirred Shane. Nine months of pregnancy had only made her more alluring to him. She wore a black and gold top over ashen maternity cigarette pants that expanded over her belly. Her black hair was parted down the middle, the steakhouse's soft light showcasing its maroon highlights. When he touched her arm and back, her skin seemed moist. Small black moles had begun to appear on her body, and a slight vertical line had developed from her navel southward, as if her seams were showing.

Plus, Janelle had a new way of looking at him, with swollen eyes, and a slightly upturned mouth, that made him feel something very deep that he could not quite identify. Shane took her hand as they walked to an oddly high table, which added to his mounting sense of silliness.

“Hey”—Wenceslas leaned across the table—“I got one of those checks.”

Shane nodded. The Big Pharmas had begun sending unrequested checks for between ten and a hundred thousand dollars to doctors. Fine print explained that cashing them was the equivalent of signing a contract for exclusive prescriptions. The FDA, Shane felt, would come down very hard on these companies and doctors soon. Except that after a decade, they still hadn't.

“How much?”

“Thirty thousand. With a letter about being a valuable doctor at an important practice.”

“You cash it?”

“I shredded the thing.” Wenceslas looked horrified. “My patients expect me to write the best script available. If they knew I was pledged to one drug company?” He shook his head no.

But Shane shrugged. “One day doctors will put up signs like the ones about which insurance companies they accept. Except about which drug companies they work with. ‘Greenbrae Medical Associates only prescribes drugs from Merck,' or something.”

“Ah,” Wenceslas nodded. “If we did that, they wouldn't need you. How much money would pharmas save with no reps?”

Shane considered this. The amount seemed too staggering to verbalize.

“They're about to get that money back anyway,” Janelle grinned across the table.

Wenceslas stared at him. “Really? Where are you going?”

“Helixia.”

A prolonged whistle escaped from Wenceslas's lips.

Cynthia asked, “Is that a different drug company?”

“It's a different category. It's biotech. Where Janelle works.”

“What's the difference?”

Janelle explained, “Pharmaceutical companies create chemical compounds that are delivered into the body to cause a specific reaction. But the body reacts to these foreign chemicals in a myriad of ways, and you get side effects. If you have a stuffed nose, Sudafed unstuffs it. But it also makes your heart race and your mouth dry. Biotechnology treatments use natural proteins from the body, which it recognizes, and never fights. So only the intended reaction happens.”

“Sounds amazing,” Cynthia said happily. “Congratulations.”

“We can play a celebratory round at Peacock this Sunday,” suggested Wenceslas.

Shane raised his eyes. “Love to, but I'm going to Boulder this weekend.”

“Last romantic getaway before the baby and the job?”

“I don't know about romantic. I'm going to see my brother.”

“I didn't know you had a brother. You never mention him.”

Shane drank more wine. “Don't I?”

“Boulder sounds fun,” Cynthia told him.

“Oh, fun fun fun,” Shane said. Janelle pressed his leg under the table.

She started to tell an amusing story about a lactation video she'd seen online. He tried to pay attention, but Caleb had hijacked his thoughts again. What would he find at this house in Boulder? Who would he see there, calling himself his brother?

As they rode in their taxi back toward the Marina, Janelle leaned against his shoulder. Outside, a neon blur of North Beach topless bars created sparks against the city sky.

“Have you told your parents you're going?” she asked softly.

He shook his head no. “Think I should?”

“They'll want to come with you.”

“Let's not start a full-scale intervention. They can see Caleb when I get him home.”

“Is that your plan? What if he just wants you to watch a race?”

“He's wasting his life.”

“What if he's happy?”

Shane frowned out the window.

“Seek first to understand, baby.”

“Seek first to kick his ass.”

Janelle looked at him, concerned. “I know you take it personally that he disappeared on you, but give him two minutes before you put him in a half nelson and throw him in the car. If you turn him off, you'll never hear from him again.”

“Okay,” Shane nodded, exhaling. “I'll give him nothing but love. But the guy that runs that place? Him not so much.”

The taxi wound through the wharf toward the tiny house they had invested everything in. He realized that this might be the last time they would ever approach it as just the two of them, focused only on each other. He kissed Janelle's cheek and glanced out at the bright buoyant lights of Tiburon and Sausalito, and the curve into the cold Pacific beyond.