6.
ZURICH.
On her way to the restaurant Kronenhalle, Elizabeth found herself crossing the Limmat River on the Quaibrucke, a gently arching stone bridge where she and Hans had once dared to rendezvous, before Yvette"s suspicions had driven them indoors. In the weeks prior to his death, she had lingered here on several occasions, reliving the delicious moment when he had kissed her in front of G.o.d and a busload of tourists, several of whom had snapped their picture. Today, as then, swans and ducks plied the clear water, boats bobbed in the marinas of the Zurichsee and, with high gray clouds capping a pale post-rain sky, the air was clear all the way to the snow-peaked mountains. But now her heart was in her throat-the icy wind blowing off the water pierced her to the core. Worse, she knew it wasn"t the cold that was plaguing her: it was a bone-deep fear that was making her shiver so hard her teeth chattered. Spooked, she jogged across the rest of the bridge, turned left and followed Ramistra.s.se to the address of number 4. Inside, the Kronenhalle was an Art Deco extravagance of carved wood, etched gla.s.s and earlytwentieth-century art. Rose-Anne Brinkman was waiting at a back banquette, wearing a floral print dress and a gold turban. The bartender, a pale Italian, was lighting her cigarette. Rose-Anne patted the seat beside her and Elizabeth slipped cautiously into the red booth. "How are you feeling?" the woman asked straight off, looking deeply" into Elizabeth"s eyes with her quick blue gaze. "I"ve been better," said Elizabeth warily. "Me, too. Marco," she called to the bartender, who was watching them in the bar mirror. "Bring the young lady something to warm the pipes-make that two Courvoisiers." She turned back and got down to business. "Where you from, Elizabeth?" If she hadn"t seen this woman sobbing at the cemetery, she might have thought her incapable of mourning. In the artificial light, she seemed hard as nails. It might be the alcohol or the form her grief was taking-but whatever the cause, Elizabeth reflected, it would make it easier to share her suspicions, which had grown alarmingly since the funeral. Last Sunday, unable to get Hans"s voice or the sound of the broken connection out of her head, she had driven into the Juras to the accident site, and had seen something she couldn"t shake. "Originally? Lansing, Michigan. You?" "Waxahachie, Texas. Married into the Navy, so Pensacola, Guam, Switzerland and Cherry Point, North Carolina came into the picture, too. Oh, and Vieques." "Vieques?" said Elizabeth. The name rang a faint, haunting bell. "Where"s that?" "Oh, just a little nothing island in the Caribbean. So," she said, reaching out and tapping Elizabeth on the wrist, "you knew my son. At the sudden gentleness in the woman"s voice, Elizabeth felt her heart lighten, and in the same moment warned herself to be careful. "Through a mutual friend," she fibbed.
"You were lovers," Rose-Anne corrected sharply. Elizabeth flushed. "Did Hans say that?" she asked in the calmest Voice she could summon, putting her hands in her lap so the woman couldn"t see them trembling. "Didn"t have to," she declared. "Plain as the nose on your face. Leave the bottle," she added to the bartender as he set down their drinks. "But yes, he did talk about you." It was music to Elizabeth"s ears. "Often?" she ventured. The woman smiled slightly. "Often enough. Never said boo about the others. And you know what I say? Good for you. She lifted her drink, inviting Elizabeth to touch gla.s.ses. "He had lots of other women?" Elizabeth asked, putting gla.s.s to gla.s.s. "Does the Pope wear funny white shoes? Come on, you must"ve known that just from how smooth he was. Drink up. Elizabeth did as she was told. The liquid burned as it traveled down her throat and expanded into a pleasant fireball. Rose-Anne nodded approval. "Myself, I"m drinking more these days," she said, and swallowed her own in several fast gulps. "Brandy and Patsy Cline, they get me through these nights." She refilled Elizabeth"s gla.s.s. "If it helps you," Rose-Anne said, "the others meant nothing to him." "How do you know that?" asked Elizabeth, at once frightened and heartened by the woman"s frankness. She was afraid by how much she wanted to believe her-and yet terrified not to. "Because I asked him." Rose-Anne laughed. "I"m not shy. Fact is," she said more carefully, "I was worried about him." Elizabeth went on alert. "Worried?
"He must have told you about Yvette."
"A little," Elizabeth allowed.
"Not that I"m any big fan of affairs," Rose-Anne said. "I"m from Texas-we shoot women who mess with our men. But they had already bled each other dry. Hans lacked a certain clarity, let"s say, about what was really important in life. Always did run just a little ahead of his headlights." Elizabeth found herself smiling. "If you mean what I think you mean, he did, didn"t he?" "And his dad and me, we couldn"t help him. He was his own kid always. Well, except for flying, but that came later, after Dave died. After Hans gave up physics." The woman"s voice was matter-of-fact; Elizabeth felt a chill. "His father isn"t alive?" "You see how close-mouthed he was? Don"t know where he got that trait-didn"t come by it honestly. No, hon, my husband"s dead almost thirty years. SAM missile got him over Hanoi in 1972. No man could"ve done it. Dave could fly circles around a sparrow hawk." Elizabeth nodded. "Hans loves to fly, too." "It was the one thing he probably remembered his father talking about. The rest, well, Dave just knew flying. Hans seemed interested in everything, and a lot of it more complicated than either of us could get our brains around." Elizabeth thought a moment. "Vieques."
Rose-Anne looked up.
"What about it?"
Elizabeth shrugged. "I don"t know. Ever since you mentioned it, the name has been echoing in my head, like Oz or Tara, you know?" "Nope."
Elizabeth laughed. "I don"t either, except it"s got a kind of children"s-tale feeling to me, like a place you know about but not in real life." Rose-Anne blinked. "It"s not make-believe. In fact, it"s where Hans was born. Little island off Puerto Rico. Big Navy base. Dave used to fly bombing practice there with his squadron." She hesitated a moment, then continued. "They had a fertility clinic, too." For no reason she could name, Elizabeth felt her heart speed up. "A fertility clinic?" "Dave and I had gone five years trying. G.o.d bless Dr. Wolfe, we used to say." "Dr. Wolfe?"
"Doctor who ran the clinic. Hans owed his life to him-we owed him our happiness. All that time we had waited-it seemed to make us love the boy all the more. Though sometimes," she added sadly, "it did seem like a one-way street. When Dave died? It didn"t seem to rattle Hans at all. Kept it all inside, I guess." She smiled a bittersweet smile and looked off. "How"d you deal with your dad"s death?" Elizabeth gave a wary frown. She had only mentioned this once to Hans, in the middle of the night after lovemaking had left them exhausted but too happy" to sleep. "Hans told you?" Rose-Anne nodded. "In a funny way you were like the glue between us-talking about you brought us together. You were a service brat, too, weren"t you?" "A service brat? No. I mean, my dad was in the Navy, yes, for a while. I kind of blotted out most of my childhood." "A parent"s death can do that. And then you had your own brush with mortality, isn"t that true? You were quite a skier, Hans told me. And then, what, you had an accident?" He had talked about her so much it astonished her. She felt exposed, briefly, but then warmed, as she realized exactly what that implied. She kept her face oblique. "Yeah, an accident," she said. "See, now you"re clamming up. Racing on skis, wasn"t it?" Did it make it worse, knowing how much he had cared about her? "Bit of bad luck. A rut in an icy track at the wrong split second-I went through the snow fence at about seventy, I guess. "Went into the trees, Hans said. Smashed your face. Horrible." "Well," said Elizabeth, "I was never quite Olympic caliber." "Didn"t spook you?"
"Actually, it had the opposite effect."
Rose-Anne laughed, and there was affection in it. "So Hans said. You like to ride things out-get to the bottom of things. And it sure didn"t ruin your looks." "In fact," Elizabeth admitted, "it improved them. They did a better job on my face than they did on my knee." "Well, they must have had something good to work with. I can"t get my hair done without seeing your face in some magazine or other. She took a drink, then smiled conspiratorially. "Want to see some pictures of Hans?" Without waiting for an answer, Rose-Anne opened her purse and pulled out a sheaf of snapshots. Old pictures, mostly, in funny formats, small, long, trimmed-even a few yearbook photos. "Hans in junior high, star pitcher of the baseball team." Elizabeth studied the picture avidly. Hans at fourteen was already Hans. "And here he is on the high school diving team. All-state two years running. A natural athlete-whatever he took up. Straight As, too- like you," she said fondly. Elizabeth leafed through the snapshots, absently running her finger over Hans"s face, feeling again that odd sense of kinship that had haunted her from their very first meeting. She found a snapshot of him in his early twenties, standing next to a Cessna twoseater, shoulder to shoulder with a grinning, spade-bearded man twice his age. "That"s the day he soloed," said Rose-Anne. "This his father?"
"His flight instructor. Said Hans was a natural. But then Hans seemed to do everything easily-except make real connections with people. You, I think, got closer than anybody." Elizabeth fought back the lump in her throat and went to the next snapshot, Hans as a tiny boy. All smiles, standing on a beach holding a big red ball about his head. Without asking, she knew this was Vieques. "He looks so happy." Rose-Anne squinted. "Hans loved Vieques. Always wanted to go back, never got around to it. He was so busy, he never had time to take a rest. Maybe he"ll rest now," she added quietly. Her voice sounded bitter for the first time, almost angry. "So," she changed subjects, "what"s this thing that doesn"t make sense?" Elizabeth took a deep breath, her heart taking off at a gallop. "I was talking to him," she said, l.u.s.t before the accident. Somebody did something stupid-another driver, it must"ve been-he was about to crash into him when he was cut off." Rose-Anne blinked. "You sure about that?" she asked soberly. "That"s what it sounded like to me."
"The police didn"t mention another car. There was only one set of tire marks." "It"s not just that," said Elizabeth. "I drove up there, where it happened? I found his tire tracks. He braked hard. You could see that very clearly. Then he must"ve swerved. There was a big dent in the guardrail with the same color paint on it as his car." "He went through the rail."
"Not there, he didn"t. He went back across the road, hit the rocks, and bounced back to the rail a second time. Rose-Anne took another sip of her drink. Elizabeth realized how hard it must be for her to hear this. "So," the woman said, "he went through there, right?" Elizabeth checked the bartender. He was watching them in the mirror again until he noticed her looking back. Then he busied himself polishing a gla.s.s. Elizabeth leaned in closer to Rose-Anne and lowered her voice. "The tracks stopped at the edge of the cliff. The car didn"t have enough momentum to go over. You could see where the frame rested on the edge, and where the tires had sunk in after it stopped. He stopped, and then he went over the edge." Rose-Anne looked away and finished her drink. "So, what"re you saying...?"
Elizabeth frowned. "I don"t know" She finished her drink as well but they didn"t reorder. Rose-Anne looked back at her, and Elizabeth asked, "Rose-Anne, tell me, did Hans ever mention being followed?" Rose-Anne straightened. "You really are turning into a sleuth, aren"t you?" "If that"s what it takes."
Rose-Anne smiled as if she understood, reached out and patted Elizabeth"s hand. "Matter of fact, he talked about it all the time. Last week I visited him, he was having his house swept for bugs." "What do you make of that?"
Rose-Anne looked at her and then laughed. "I think it shows how little Hans knew people, thinking Yvette was having him tailed. She didn"t give a d.a.m.n about his affairs. He was her meal ticket, hon. Period." Elizabeth looked at her. "Meal ticket? I thought her father-" "Was rich? Nope. Connected, sure. Used to be rich, maybe. But when it came to actual plunk-down-on-thebarrelhead cash, the family was d.a.m.n near hand-to-mouth. The reason they looked rich was because their capacity for denial was as overblown as their lifestyle." She shook her head. "Yvette was completely dependent on Hans." "Maybe she did it for the money?"
"Maybe Hans"s estate will keep her afloat for a while, but no, Yvette will go through that faster than a cow can c.r.a.p. She was dumb, but not dumb enough to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs for her every quarter." Elizabeth sighed. "But he was so sure something was going on." "One word for that. Paranoia."
Elizabeth stared at the photo, Hans with the beach ball held aloft, a palm tree rising behind him, the turquoise ocean. It was as though she were expecting the picture to move, the palm to start waving in the breeze, and Hans to call out to her in a little-boy voice. She felt Rose-Anne"s hand on her arm again. "Really, Elizabeth, don"t beat up on yourself. You"ve got to take the hit and go on. That"s what I"m doing." But she couldn"t. Somebody had made Hans crash, she felt it in her soul. But if not Yvette, who?
VIEQUES ISLAND.
That Peter had survived at all was a miracle, and it brought other miracles in its wake. With the exception of a few easily repaired bleeds, his body was alive and his condition stable. Even more encouraging, early CAT scans revealed no lesions or anomalies in his brain. His autonomic functions were normal, and the reflexes in his extremities were at full strength. This implied strongly that the brain stem had survived undamaged. So far as Wolfe and his a.s.sistants could tell, all the major splices had not only held but were now transmitting neural messages bilaterally as fluently as they would in a pristine body. The brain had survived the transfer, and the body had survived the implantation. The outcome, Wolfe declared, with a bow toward Mary Sh.e.l.ley, was "electrifying." Henderson continued to send flowers and champagne every day". Wolfe had ordered the chemicals keeping Peter in his protective coma be withdrawn at the end of the first week. Within two days Peter"s higher brain waves were sending the needles of the EEG trembling into tentative bursts of activity. Barrola had recommended a Valium drip, in case there was some kind of psychic trauma hidden in the marriage between body and brain that would overwhelm Peter"s psyche once he awoke. Wolfe, however, saw no evidence of anxiety in Peter"s brain scans, and had discontinued the IV. All Peter"s cortical readings, in fact, were approaching normal. With the exception of an auxiliary oxygen tube, Peter was taken off life support. The body kept breathing on its own.
The cardiac redcart team was taken off alert, as was the emergency surgery unit. Except for security patrols, by degree and echelon the remainder of the Fountain Compound stood down, catching their first rest in weeks. Meanwhile Wolfe and Beatrice and Emilio Barrola waited to see what would happen next, watching at Peter"s bedside in overlapping shifts, never daring to expect more miracles than they had already been granted, and always prepared for the worst. But the miracles kept coming. Every day. Indeed, Peter"s brain appeared to be thriving in its new environment. The waves grew in vigor until they approximated normal human deep-sleep consciousness. Electrodes taped to his eyelids gave evidence of REM, a strong indication that he was seeing images in something approximating a dream state. He was alive and sleeping well, in fact. But there was a difference, a crucial difference. When morning came, he didn"t open his eyes. Morning after morning.
After five days of this, Wolfe began to show impatience. "He should be waking by now," he grumbled. Seeing the blood drain from Beatrice"s face, he instantly regretted having said anything at all. Like Peter, whose deputy he had become, he abhorred causing her pain. They tried mild injections of stimulants, without results. They tried loud noises: nothing. They" touched him, they slapped him. Nothing. Beatrice read to him from Lewis Carroll, her favorite author and from Thomas Pynchon, who was Peter"s. Nothing. She described every hotel they"d stayed in on vacation, and, when Wolfe was out of the room, highlights of their erotic life together. Nothing. They tried playing Haydn, for whom Peter had cultivated a preference over Mozart and consequently adored. They tried Ornette Coleman, whom Peter particularly detested. Nothing.
"How long are you going to wait?" Beatrice asked, as one week turned into three, and worry moved into despair. "I don"t consider it my decision," Wolfe answered prudently. He knew she was testing his loyalty, as if sensing, beyond her single-minded focus on Peter"s welfare, that he as head of the entire project had other fish to fry. But the fact was he had at the moment no other experimental subjects on whom to practice, and no wish to think of anything else but the survival of this key organism lying before him. "You"re thinking of pulling the plug on this, aren"t you?" she asked, eyeing him as would a creature with its back to the wall. He looked at her with as much kindness as he could. "Beatrice. To begin with, there"s no plug to pull. To withhold nourishment, at this point, given the vitality of his brain waves, could be construed as actionable-" "Freddy," said Beatrice, wincing as she turned away from Peter"s body, from the humming, blinking monitors, "You"re the heartless one, not Henderson." "I"m agreeing with you," Wolfe protested. "He"s completely viable and we"re not going to abandon him in any way!" "Although," a voice piped up behind them. It was Alex Davies, who had taken Barrola"s shift while the surgeon was off doing big-ticket surgery on the mainland. "Who"d bring the malpractice suit, when you think about it?" "Alex," said Wolfe gently, "that will do." Alex looked at Peter and rubbed his chin. "Maybe he"s afraid to wake up," Alex said, ignoring the rush of blood to his grandfather"s face. "What do you mean, afraid?" said Beatrice tightly "Don"t encourage him," said Wolfe.
"Afraid of what?" Beatrice persisted.
Alex pa.s.sed a knuckle under his nose. "Afraid of facing the finer implications, you know what I"m saying? I would be. He was supposed to die, he was ready to die, and then you guys made him an offer he couldn"t refuse." He looked at them and grinned, guileless. "Maybe he"s afraid to rejoin you two. G.o.d knows what you"ll ask in return." They glared at him.
He threw up his hands. "Just being whimsical. Sorry." There was a vein bulging on Wolfe"s forehead by now as he fixed Alex with a laser eye. "Alex," said Wolfe, "you"re free to go. Now." "Just a thought," said Alex and shrugged. He gave a friendly wave and walked out the door. "Anyone want coffee?" He stopped and looked back, then shrugged again and disappeared. Beatrice turned back to Wolfe.
"Maybe Alex has a point," she said.
"I"m not sure I heard any point," Wolfe grumbled. "Then what"s the answer? Why isn"t Peter coming out of his coma?" "I don"t have an answer," he declared, acknowledging to himself that this woman was getting on his nerves. "That"s not the right answer!" Beatrice shouted back at him. "I want my husband back!" Wolfe blanched. Was it possible, what he suddenly" found himself suspecting-that in some perverse and jealous chamber of his soul, he didn"t want Peter to wake up? Absurd, he thought. If Peter dies, I"ve failed. The rest is childish nonsense. "There"s no right or wrong here," he pleaded with her, feeling off-balance and impotent. "Obviously we"ll do everything we can. Considering all we"ve got invested, to do less would be madness." "Oh, I see," said Beatrice coldly. "Now it"s a money issue-" "Of course that"s not what I meant," he protested. "What we"ve all got invested-emotionally, spiritually-Peter especially-Peter"s life is of paramount importance here-that goes without saying." "No, Freddy, That never goes without saying. Ever." It was said in cold fury and then she was out the door. Wolfe listened to her footsteps echo down the hall, and in a rare spasm of self-reproach cursed himself for his tactlessness. All that hard-earned grat.i.tude and affectionwere they going up in smoke? Don"t be an idiot, he told himself. He turned again to Peter, and vowed inwardly that he would win it all back as soon as Peter came around. Then we"ll see who owes what to whom. "Right, Peter?" he said aloud. On the monitor, the EEG seemed to surge for an instant, as if in reply. Good Lord, thought Wolfe to himself, you"re getting as flaky as your grandson. And, thinking of Alex, he hurried out of the room to tell the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d never to embarra.s.s him in front of Beatrice again. 7 VIEOUES ISLAND.
Beatrice had moved into Peter"s room; she no longer trusted anyone else to keep watch. Wolfe"s cavalier att.i.tude still rankled, and Alex Davies seemed to be avoiding her. She caught up with him finally at a table in the base cafeteria. He made some polite inquiries about Peter"s condition, although she suspected he already knew. She decided to be blunt. "What"s going on between you two?" she asked him. "What do you mean?" said Alex disingenuously. "You know what I mean. You and your grandfather." Alex shrugged. "The usual." "He dotes on you," Beatrice declared gently. Alex let out a laugh. "Yeah, maybe. Like the way Lear dotes on the Fool." "You"re anything but a fool, Alex."
"Protective coloration," agreed Alex with a smile, and poked at his food. "Do you think Frederick still believes in the project?" "You mean in Peter Jance?"
This kid was always a step or two ahead of where she expected him to be. "All right," she said. "Do you think he"s in it for the long haul with Peter? Has he confided in you?" "As far as he can, I suppose," Alex said. "He"ll stick in there with Dr. Jance. It"s a matter of pride, if nothing else. Besides, science must go on, right?" "Perhaps everyone deserves to live a little longer. Maybe it would help advance the acquisition of wisdom." She felt cold inside. Not even she believed that. Alex smiled thinly. "Scientists first-that was always how he sold it. And with the implication, of course, that military leaders came in a close second. That was because he needed them for funding, by the way, not because he respects them." She looked at the kid, and saw in his eyes all the hidden doubts she had about the project herself. Just for an instant. It was far too threatening to the necessary survival of her husband to question it that way. "I"m surprised," she chided. "You don"t think it"s the government wanting the president to live in perpetuity?" Alex shook his head, taking her jest as a straight comment. "No. the military"s more powerful than any president-they"re around far longer, and they"ve got better security." He grinned impishly. Was he serious, or putting her on? She didn"t know. "But eventually he"ll dump the military and look for private-sector funding-that"s where the real money is now. Corporations. They"ll pay through the nose for immortality, and they"ve got the deepest pockets." She watched him. She still didn"t know. "What about artists? Philosophers?"
He just laughed. Then he leaned forward and said in a surprisingly earnest voice, "Peter"s the ticket. If he survives, the sky"s the limit. Grandpa will never give up on him, he can"t afford to." Why wasn"t she comforted? Then she remembered the word. "If?" she asked. "Do you know something I don"t?" "When," said Alex. "When. Peter survives. Listen," he went on, as though reading her mind, "I don"t know anything you don"t. It"s just-" He let it drop. "What?"
He looked at her with a strange expression, then shrugged and said, "Problem is, there"s not much you know that I don"t." He looked at her as if to let that sink in. And it did. "Like.., like what?" she asked, and was almost sorry she did. Alex looked off for a moment with a smile, like a little kid that"s far too smart to be patronized might if he were being talked down to. Then he looked back and said matter-of-factly, "He took skin sc.r.a.pings from all you guys, right? Back in the days of the fertility clinic?" Beatrice put down her fork; suddenly she lost her appet.i.te. "Frederick told you that?" Alex laughed again. "Well, sorta. He keeps it in an encrypted computer file, but that just made it more intriguing." He looked at her like one friend to another. "You ever read Peanuts?" he asked. "You mean the comic strip?"
He nodded. "You know Snoopy, the beagle, how he says Anything on the floor is mine"? Well, my feeling is, anything on a computer is mine." He smiled. "There isn"t an encryption logarithm I can"t break. He took DNA from all of you guys. She was only able to nod her head slightly, astonished to have something so hidden in the past spoken of so offhandedly, especially by someone young enough to be her own grandson. But he wasn"t through surprising her. "Yours included. Right?"
She felt her blood run cold. She heard her voice as if from another room. "Yes, I suppose he did." "Well, there you go," said Alex.
"And you know who the clones are," Beatrice managed after several deep breaths. "What makes you think that?" he said, trying to smile but twitching just noticeably. "That day at the briefing," said Beatrice. "You knew the man whose spinal nerves had been joined. I heard you say his name. "Rashid ala.s.sad," said Alex after a moment. "He was a guinea pig, not a clone. No, my grandfather"s got all the clone data kept somewhere else-maybe in his head, maybe buried in the backyard-who knows?" He said this last a little too brightly, and immediately stood. "Look, I"m sorry to blurt and run, but I"ve got some differential equations to solve. Second-order suckers. Want to be up to speed when your husband comes around-which he will," Alex a.s.sured her softly, giving a thumbs-up as he went out the cafeteria door. Beatrice watched him go and wondered whether everything he"d said about his own knowledge was true. It occurred to her he might know everything, whether it had been planned that way or not. It also occurred to her that if that were true, it might be the reason he was included so intimately in Wolfe"s program. He might know-literally-where the bodies were buried. She made a mental note to keep a closer eye on Alex, and to try to talk to him again soon. But somehow it never happened. In the following days, both Wolfe and his quirky grandson vanished off her radar screen, along with her own research. Her only thoughts were of Peter. She brought a cot into his room, forsaking sleep in order to monitor his progress. His vital signs hadn"t changed, he refused to wake, but she knew in her heart he was in there; and she suspected- hoped to G.o.d-that he was in there intact. "Locked-in syndrome" was the term Wolfe had used to describe it, hinting (even as he attempted to console her) that if Peter didn"t come out of it soon, he might indeed die after all. Beatrice, refusing to be handled, retorted that Wolfe didn"t know Peter. Peter was a fighter. Peter never gave up. She prayed Peter still knew that as well.
Two more weeks went by. She spent countless hours simply sitting by his bed-studying him, this man who was at once her husband and a stranger. But such a familiar stranger.
He was Peter at age thirty-five, and it took her back to their earliest days, and her own youth. Peter had been forty when his DNA was harvested, but his clone was even younger, his skin ruddy and resilient, nails smooth, hair glossy, abundant and blond, lips soft and full. She marveled at it all, even as it made her shudder. After three weeks, there was hardly a trace of scar tissue left on his body. Beatrice"s genetic bonding material had fused the skin back together almost seamlessly. In a darker moment, it crossed her mind that she could make a fortune in cosmetics if she were working in the civilian sector. That would be someone else"s good fortune, she mused, years into the future, when all this knowledge was decla.s.sified and accepted as routine. For now, if they only knew, governments would kill for the secret she had discovered, and for what it had allowed Peter to become. "You look exactly the way you did in 1958," she told him, caressing his strong, graceful hands. "Remember 1958?" She stopped. Something was different in the room. What? "Explorer I, when it made it into orbit? How many times did we make love that night-three? Four? It was your math that made that flight possible. G.o.d, I was so proud of you." What was that new sound?
She glanced over at the screens. Was it wishful thinking, or was the heart monitor showing a slight increase in pulse? She gripped his hand more tightly. "Remember Von Braun? We hated his pomposity, we thought he"d grab all the credit, and then he thanked you publicly? And you were imitating him, and we started to laugh-remember that four-poster bed? And the champagne he sent us-the cheap stuff?" No question about it. Peter"s heart was beating faster. "Yes," she said, her own heart in her throat now, "you remember. What else about l958-come on, you used to love this game. Elvis went in the Army, what else? Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Compet.i.tion, Pasternak won the n.o.bel, what was that Miles Davis alb.u.m you used to make me listen to, until I finally broke down and learned to enjoy it?" Peter"s chest was heaving and her eyes were tearing. She leaned into his ear, trembling. "Kind of Blue, that"s right-and what about the new Pope? One of the ten best years of the century, 1958, what were some of our other favorites?" His breath was coming in rasps and she reached to adjust the intertrachial catheter. She had barely touched it when his hand came up and pushed hers away. "Hurts," he croaked.
The word was barely audible, but Beatrice gave a shout that brought the nurses running and, behind them, Frederick Wolfe. The light in Wolfe"s eyes, though it signaled less than total optimism, made her heart beat even faster. She hugged him, and he held her, as they waited for Peter to say more. He had sunk back into sleep, but-G.o.d willing-if the signs were as they seemed, the worst might be over. Peter not only was alive, but was fighting his way back.
Sometimes he could see the room he was in. For three more days, he fought to reach the light, each time losing it just as it seemed within his grasp. Then reality would waver like a station dialed in and out on a gigantic radio, eventually swinging him over into endless striations of static, alien DJs and cosmic noise. Heroically he struggled to remain awake, to retain his awareness of Beatrice at his side, holding his hand, stroking his forehead, desperately sensing, even as he was slipping in and out of it, how much he craved that homeland of rational consciousness. And then he would find himself drowning again. The liquid was pleasure, and he was looking up at Beatrice. Her lively gray eyes were full of grateful tears; her mouth was moving, but no words were coming out. Her face grew smaller and the touch of her hand was so light he couldn"t feel it, and then he was somewhere in perfect darkness again, without pain or stress or thought, swathed in a womb of primal being. Helpless and pure. But even there he was wrapped in the warmth of his terrible, wonderful secret: I"m alive, he kept telling himself. I"ve been reborn. The pain is gone, the cancer is gone, as if it had never been there at all. "Beatrice?"
Was that the first time he"d managed her name? He could see her eyes, two gray suns in an ocean of darkness. "I"m here. Peter? Can you hear me?"
He struggled to make his thoughts clear. "Not here," he said. "Yes, you are. You"re here."
"Not me. I"m not me."
Her silence told him everything. She forced herself to speak. "I said yes, didn"t I?"
"Yes. And thank G.o.d you did."
It was his turn to be silent. His mind seemed to be hovering high above the bed, as though fighting to escape the body where it didn"t belong. He was terrified. "Peter, are you cogent?"
His tongue was thick. "M I hungry? Yes, hungry." She was laughing. The sound of it dispelled the horror for a moment, filling his heart with something like delight. "I felt you did it for me," she said.
"Didn"t," he managed.
She didn"t say anything. She knew what he meant. She felt his anguish, even his guilt. And his nascent hope as well. Her maternal instinct to comfort him was enormous; she wanted to protect him in his newness. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. "Peter, remember what you said? About how things were meant to happen? Well, this was meant to be." "S"a miracle," he said with difficulty, and his eyes misted. "Yes, a miracle."
Suddenly he was crying like a baby. In the next moment he wanted all the tubes yanked out of his body. Nurses were called to restrain him. After a few minutes he calmed down. He asked for solid food. "Peter, not vet."
"I"ll walk out," he said, his voice ragged but stronger than before. He was unsure whether he meant it or was trying to make her laugh, but it had that effect. Beatrice laughed, and nurses ran to confer with Wolfe about food. Wolfe was cautious, but Peter was given the equivalent of baby food, a mash of nutrients that he apparently found delicious. He ate with the fierce pleasure of a child at his mother"s breast. Whenever he asked for something, people jumped as never before. His thoughts grew more complex once he was satisfied. He wondered if he now had some terrible leverage, now that he was the pioneer craft in their exploration of this brave new world. So fragile and singular upon such an uncharted sea. And there was no denying that was true-it was the first thing Beatrice had described to him, once the)" were able to carry on a sustained conversation. He couldn"t find it in his heart to tell her how frightened he was himself. He told her how normal he felt, although every time he glimpsed his new body, he was terrified by its otherness. He dissembled, and did it well. He didn"t have to lie about everything, to be sure. He told her of his overwhelming love and grat.i.tude to her for staying by him, for all she must have suffered during the h.e.l.lish procedure and its uncertain aftermath. Thanks to Beatrice, even thanks to Wolfe and his shadowy organization, he was alive. But when he was alone, he was accompanied by a leaden fear. He was himself and he wasn"t. He would never be purely himself again. He was a third thing. The eeriness of his situation haunted him, never so much as when he was about to fall asleep. Worse was when he was hurled groggy from his frequent nightmares, long arduous affairs in which he reexperienced the pain of his cancer, as if whatever remained of his soul was telling him to be thankful, to forget guilt and savor life. A week after he had regained consciousness, Peter suddenly began spewing out theorems, postulates, formulae-all manner of random shards of textbook physics-as if his brain was up and doing calisthenics after a long, long sleep. And soon he had to stop and think before he could ask where his doubts had gone. At week six, he stood on his own for the first time. In isolated bursts, he now found himself speaking cogently about the Hammer, pouring out ideas that were fresh and original and sent Wolfe scrambling for stenographers. The next day, he asked for a full-length mirror. Beatrice watched him as they wheeled it in. He stood in front of it a full five minutes before speaking. The sight of his body, its evoking familiarity, seemed to mock him. It"s me, he told himself. Then why did it look and feel so foreign? Until the age of sixty or so, he had felt a seamless continuity between his past and his present, as if he"d never really been different, in mind or body, from what he was at age twenty, almost as if he"d never been a child at all. And here he was again, age thirty-five, and the effect was every bit as startling as standing in front of a funhouse mirror, or seeing himself from an entirely new angle in a clothing store mirror. That can"t be me, he said silently to his reflection. And it isn"t, his reflection answered back. "S"been a while," he said thickly. His speech control, though improving, was still uncertain, especially when he was talking about things that frightened him; the science had come forward easily, almost unbidden. "Since you looked like that?" said Beatrice gently "About forty years. "N"even while shaving."
She understood without his having to elaborate-that over the years he"d fallen into the habit of not really looking at his reflection at all, for fear of noticing some new collapse or blemish; his dermatolo.. gist had, in effect, become his mirror. Beatrice knew the feeling all too well. "Body"s better"n mine was."
"Well, different," she said.
"He took good care," he said. That, of course, was at the root of it. Somebody else had owned this body. He, an aged man in a process nature had mandated for all time and all species, had gone against that law and stolen this body for himself. He wondered if in the process he had forfeited some precious part of his own ident.i.ty. A part of him was sure he had. But another part, a growing part, stirred in restless rebellion against such doubts. This part, and he suspected it was the body itself, wanted only to live. In that sense, the body was his now, no matter how dark that truth might be. You can"t very well give it back, anyway, can you? he told himself. "Thank G.o.d he took care of it," Beatrice was saying. He swung around slowly to stare at her. He saw her flinch, and then realized that she was suddenly selfconscious of her own body compared to his. He took her, somewhat clumsily, into his arms. It felt good to hold her. The familiar smells of her hair and skin thrilled his senses, and he loved her with all his heart. Perhaps that was all that mattered. Over the next few days, she showered him with attention of every sort, and he reveled in it. He complained about the bad food at the Fountain Compound and they sent out for seafood from local restaurants. He found his speech improving every day, and he began to eat ravenously, including items he had learned to avoid, like cream sauces and rich cheeses. He discovered he could read a newspaper at ten feet, and smell nightblooming jasmine when the nearest bush was apparently a quarter mile away. And he began to have erotic dreams. They were vague enough to report to Beatrice. Whoever his partner had been, she had vaporized instantly upon waking. "I don"t suppose it was me," said Beatrice. Peter laughed. "Of course it was you," he said. "Who else would it be?" She accepted his statement, and so did he. Although he actually had no idea if that were so or not.
In a much shorter time than anybody had ever dared hope to expect, the key members of Peter"s team were flown in from White Sands. Hank Flannagan, Cap Chu and Rosemarie Wiener got off at Vieques Airport knowing only that they were in for an exciting surprise, and that they should be prepared to stay. Beatrice hunted down Alex Davies, who had been avoiding her. She found him in his tiny cubicle, the cinder-block walls utterly bare except for an enormous velvet clown painting. He was so engrossed in his computer screen he didn"t look up as she entered. She caught a glimpse of a file name, H. BRINKMAN 1963-? Alex was scrolling through it furiously. As Beatrice took a step closer, he spun around with a yelp. "Sorry to startle you," said Beatrice. What was he up to? The screen was layered with windows, but when she tried to read further, Alex swiftly clicked back to his screensaver. "Just catching up on some e-mail," said Alex. "What"s up?" He was acting awfully furtive, but Beatrice had her priorities. "We"re having a briefing on Peter. His team is arriving and we need to discuss the cover story." "Yeah? How"s the old man feeling about this? Excuse me, the new man." "I think he feels two ways," said Beatrice. "Appropriate," said Alex. "So, you think he"s going to be able to handle it? Old cowboy, new horse?" rushed him back to bed and administered anticoagulants, along with cholesterol-reducing drugs designed to help reverse the sclerotic changes in his seventy-six-year-old cerebral blood vessels. He responded within a few hours and they gave him a CAT scan. There was a cloudy area in his left hemisphere, but it cleared even as they shot the scans. "Could have been anything," Wolfe said quietly, his expression grave. "One tiny fleck of clotted material from any of a dozen sutures We"re lucky it hasn"t happened before." By the next day, Peter was joking about it, but the general mood had grown somber. He was placed under twenty-fourhour watch, and a strict protocol was established to monitor and test his physiological parameters three times a day. Meanwhile he hara.s.sed the clinic"s nurses, in a wheelchair. "Where"s Hawking? I"ll race him to the chow line," he shouted, but n.o.body joined in the laughter. Beatrice retreated to their room, trying to keep herself from flying apart. Flannagan and Chu wondered what had become of their new boss and why their lab sessions had been put on hold, and Rosemarie Wiener was in a lovesick funk. Oscar Henderson phoned Wolfe every hour, demanding progress reports and asking when in h.e.l.l they could expect work to resume on the weapon. But it would be a while. Peter had only partial use of his left arm and leg, and his recollection of the previous day was poor, including the astonishing ideas that he had presented. With heavy hearts, they began the process of teaching him what he had taught them only twenty-four hours earlier.
ZURICH.
Elizabeth hadn"t slept for three days.
Last night she had managed no more than a two-hour doze, plagued by nightmares. She saw Hans"s hands snaking out from beneath wet, heavy soil, his hands caked with mud. She heard him in her kitchen, making them breakfast. She saw him lying in a web of pain, writhing in agony as the net bucked and some hideous arachnid with steel mandibles rushed to enfold him. She had never dreamt anything so frightening, and after a certain point, sleep was no longer an option. To ease the anguish, Annie suggested meditating. Meditation had worked for Elizabeth in the hospital, after her skiing accident, while she was recovering from the blown knee and the spiral fracture in her leg and, later, from the pain of ma.s.sive plastic surgery. She constructed a huge white room in her mind, then went around throwing open all the doors and windows. She put herself in the center and waited. Presently she saw the gossamer drapes heave inward as if an unfelt wind had entered the room. "That was Hans," Annie told her later. "You"re helping him find peace. But Elizabeth doubted if the exercise was helping. That night, as she tried to take a nap, she could feel his hands groping at the edges of her fatigue, fingernails sc.r.a.ping at the seam between waking and sleeping. She had to get out of the house.
She went to the police again to report the marks at the brink of the canyon, as if a car had rested there. They told her the case had been closed, refusing even to take a statement. She spent a couple of afternoons with Annie, but Annie"s New Age prescriptions were starting to grate on her nerves, and Elizabeth was reluctant to burden her with further doubts. Besides, in her own mind Annie had already accounted for Elizabeth"s problems. "You"re reliving your dad"s death," she declared. "His heart attack was senseless, and so was Hans"s accident. That"s why you"re inventing these theories. You"re trying to control things after the fact." "The car didn"t go over the edge fast enough to make a clear tire print," Elizabeth insisted. "He could have gotten out. The car must have been pushed or tipped." "By his wife"s detectives?"
"No. I don"t think that anymore."
"No, because his mom showed you how that couldn"t be true. Lizzy. you"re like those people who predict the end of the world. And when the world doesn"t end, they have to find some reason it didn"t. Like their prayers kept it from happening. It"s called cognitive dissonance. I"ll give you a book to reado" On one day, the worst so far, Elizabeth had driven to Fluntern Cemetery with a pocketbook full of cash and offered the operators of the cemetery"s gravedigging backhoe a healthy bribe to dig Hans up. They were North Africans, and thought she was joking at their expense. When she had convinced them that she was not, they took the money and instructed her to come back at midnight. She"d done as she was told, terrified, but determined to see Hans face-to-face. But the gravediggers didn"t show up. Worse, the police did. She was humiliated when Annie and Roland had to bail her out, and further mortified when she had to hire a lawyer to have the criminal charges dismissed. She escaped with a stern warning, but meanwhile her modeling agency had heard about the case. The head of the Helvetica office told her that if she ever tried a stunt like that again, her career as a model was finished. She had been so long without sleep by then, though, it hardly mattered. Photographers were starting to comment on her haggard look, and the calls for her services were thinning to a trickle. Annie started leaving the names of psychotherapists on her answering machine. Elizabeth ignored the messages. As for the dwindling job offers, she found she didn"t much care. She was glad for the free time. She needed to do more investigating. She found the drivers of the ambulance that had responded to the crash, and questioned them closely. One was particularly helpful in describing the clothing of the victim-the few sc.r.a.ps that hadn"t been charred to ashes, including the Schiaparelli tag inside the jacket. Hans had a Schiaparelli suit that he favored for meetings. Dove-gray flannel, as she recalled, as soft as a bird"s plumage. She asked about the general build of the body, and anything unusual the driver had observed. "There is one thing," the driw"er recalled. He was a Frenchman with prominent pink gums and a postage-stamp mustache. "What?"
"I don"t like to talk about it, mademoiselle. Maybe somebody at the morgue could help you out. They have pictures, you know. They keep them under lock and key, but I have a friend who could show them to you. What"s your friend"s name?"
"That depends on you.
Elizabeth started to take out her wallet, but the man shook his head. "Not that," he said simply, and gave an oily smile. Elizabeth felt her throat tighten. "You did see something unusual?" "On my mother"s life, I swear it."
I should have built a shrine to Hans, thought Elizabeth, and let it go at that. Paste his picture to the wall, the one from Vieques, surround it with candles. Hans, I"m doing this for you, she thought shakily, as she unb.u.t.toned her skirt. She left the driver"s apartment without showering. But before she did she turned and looked at the creep with such intensity he flinched. "If this is bogus," she said coldly, holding up the piece of paper with the morgue attendant"s name, "I promise I will come back and this time you will feel nothing but pain." At the morgue she found the attendant who had taken in the body. He was wary of her, as if she were a clochard who had wandered in from skid row. When she glanced in the dissection room mirror, she was shocked by the wildness of her hair and eyes. She gave him ten thousand francs and he pulled the records. The photographs appalled her.
There was little more to the body than a burned torso, arms ending in charred stumps, a head that was more bone than face. She had intended to photocopy or steal the dental records, but her first glance at the close-up of the skull told her that was hopeless. There was nothing approaching teeth left, only a dark hole where the mouth should be. She threw up in a wastebasket, and when she looked again the attendant was sealing the records away. "Just a second, I"m not finished," she said, and grabbed the close-up of the skull out of his hand. "Where are his teeth?" "Comment?"
"His teeth. He doesn"t have any teeth. I want to see his dental records. " "Pas de dents."
"Exactly. That"s what I"m saying. There should be teeth, there should be dental records-ou sont-ils? Comprenez?" "Non. Je ne comprends rien. Allez. Vite. " As the attendant turned away, she slipped the skull photo under her coat and sprinted for her car. In her rearview mirror she saw the attendant bolting out the door after her-she accelerated wildly, running two red lights on the way back to her apartment. She double-locked the door, jerked open a drawer and took out the photo Rose-Anne had given her, Hans Age 7 inked on the back. Vie ques 1970. Hans"s face smiled out at her, the small plump lips vaguely parted- She took the skull photo out of her coat, staring at the dark, toothless, empty hole. The phone rang. The police again, thought Elizabeth, and let the machine pick up. "Lizzy, it"s Annie," said the voice. "I"ve got a new name for you, this one you have to check out: Dr. Bender-he"s Swiss, he"s a Jungian, he"s got a waiting list a mile long, but he"s willing to see you right away- Elizabeth s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone. "He didn"t have any teeth." "Who didn"t? Lizzy, what are you talking about?" "Hans. His teeth were gone. Teeth don"t burn up in a car fire. Not if the bones don"t, and his skull was intact. " "Poor baby, what have you been up to now- "Annie, did I ever mention Vieques to you? Does that ring any sort of bell? Because that"s making me crazy, too-I keep thinking I"ve been there." "Vieques? No. What is it?"
"It"s an island. Never mind, I"m going to look it up on the Net, I should have done that long ago- "But what"s this about teeth? Lizzy?" "Unless it wasn"t. . ." She was thinking aloud now, hardly conscious of Annie on the other end. "Wasn"t what?"
"Unless the body wasn"t Hans. And that"s why there weren"t any teeth to compare against his dental records." The thought struck her with such force she had to sit down on the bed. "Oh, wow-" said Annie.
"Exactly," said Elizabeth.
"-you"re still in the denial stage, aren"t you? You should be way past denial and into anger. That does it, Lizzy, I"m calling Bender." Elizabeth snapped to. "No. Annie? It"s okay. Forget I said anything. Really, I"m all right. I am angry. "You sit tight, you don"t go anywhere. I"ll be right over. Annie clicked off and Elizabeth hung up the phone. She picked up the two photos, one in each hand. Hideous as the skull was, the contrast was even more hideous: innocent boy and-what? Innocent victim? Could it be? Was Hans alive? It was no more than a hope, a desperate supposition, but suddenly Elizabeth felt calmer than she had in weeks. She rolled over on her futon and pulled her coat over her body and immediately was drawn into a fathomless sleep. When she awoke, it was the evening of the next day, a worried note from Annie was under her door, and she had the too-much-sleep hangover from h.e.l.l. Her head ached, her clothes clung to her and smelled of stale sweat. She staggered up, then went into the bathroom and relieved herself. When she looked in the mirror she saw the deep creases from the futon on her face, the rat"s nest of her hair. It didn"t matter now. I"m not crazy after all, she thought. She stripped off her clothes and showered with water that was so hot it enveloped her in a steamy cloud. She let the water and heat and soap carry it all away, the fatigue and dirt and shame and memories of what she had done and how she had been during the past few weeks. She made a project of it: shampoo and conditioner; hair tied back; teeth brushed and flossed; sweats and tennis shoes. A big pot of coffee, a steaming cup in her hand as she turned on the computer, hot liquid coursing down her throat as Microsoft Windows came up with its oddly comforting orchestral flair. She hit "Start," then "CompuServe 4.0 for Windows 97," then punched in her pa.s.sword. She was about to click on "World Wide Web" when she heard the cheerful digitized voice saying, "You"ve got mail. " She clicked it on, and every hair on the back of her neck stood up.
Subj: Lucky You Date: 99-02-28 From: [email protected] corn To: [email protected] lAccessCornpuServe. corn CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE JUST WON A COMPLIMENTARY.
STAY AT THE INN ON THE AZURE HORIZON, VIEQUES ISLAND, PUERTO RICO, IN CELEBRATION OF OUR 20TH ANNIVERSARY. CONFIRMATION TO FOLLOW BY FAX. IN OTHER.
WORDS, ELIZABETH, WISH YOU WERE HERE!!.
ROOSEVELT ROADS NAVAL STATION, VIEGUES ISLAND.
The effects of Peter"s stroke-though no one was prepared to say, unequivocally, that it had been a stroke-proved transient. By the end of the week he had made what appeared to be a complete recovery. His work on the weapon was going well, his team was back in the loop, his outlook appeared to have brightened. Though he sometimes stopped in mid-sentence to stare into the middle distance, on the whole he was less removed from others and from himself. To Beatrice he confided that his brain still felt as though it were hovering outside his body, unworthy to take possession of its new home or, worse. searching for the phantom body from which it had been amputated. When these spells came upon him, a spark of terror would light in his eyes. Beatrice was learning how to spot the signs and was able to get him through the difficult times. "You"re a pioneer," she reminded him, hoping to flatter him past his fears. "No one"s ever been through this before." "No research to consult."
"Exactly. But do you know what it reminds me of?" she asked. "The car. He laughed out loud.
In 1961, when Peter had won the n.o.bel Prize in Physics for his work on the properties of plasma in vacuums, he had used some of the prize money to buy a BMW. He"d taken a lot of ribbing for shoving up with it at the lab, but owning that car had taught him something about himself. As first he"d been overwhelmed with buyer"s remorse, feeling embarra.s.sed by the BMW"s enormous cost. Next he felt undeserving of its luxurious appointments and, oddly, incompetent to drive something so d.a.m.n fast. Beatrice had talked him down from his guilt-after all, he was hardly the first n.o.belist to treat himself to an expensive car. As for being intimidated by its speed and size, within a week he found he could put the pedal to the floor on the highway, and park it just as easily as he could his old Volvo. Its power and agility began to awe him-as Peter phrased it, to represent him. He loved the way he could zoom away from everyone else at stoplights, accelerate to one hundred miles an hour within seconds, or tear around a curve without any sway. One day on one of those arrow-straight, two-lane blacktops cut to Los Alamos, when he could see ten miles of empty road stretched out before him, he had opened it up full throttle and watched in fascination as the speedometer pa.s.sed 100, then 120, then 140, until sage and scrub and yucca became a blur. There was only road and distant mountains, suspended in time and velocity. He was thinking hack to his boyhood and the day he had first grasped Einstein"s relativity equations, when the car lifted off an invisible rise in the road and landed not on macadam but on hard sand. The rest was a funnel of dust and spidering windshield, bits of broken cacti, wheels of blue sky arid a screech of barbed wire tw.a.n.ging like a gigantic guitar string as he ripped out two hundred feet of turf and flew on. When the car finally succ.u.mbed to friction and the resistance of many otherwise immovable objects, he sat silent and elated behind the wheel. A huge dust cloud surrounded the car. From inside, there was only a faint brown light, well suited to the contemplation of his mortality. "And how did you feel?" Beatrice said. "Do you remember?" "I felt happy."
The car, amazingly, had landed upright. He was alive, unhurt. He had gone faster than he had ever imagined he could. He would never have to own a car like this again because in that moment he had experienced it more intensely than most people would during a lifetime of careful ownership. Best of all, he no longer felt old.
"You remember when you came home that night?" asked Beatrice. "You were ready to kill me."
"I thought you had lost your mind."
"Those wrecked by success." You showed me the pa.s.sage from Freud." "And the next day we bought a VW bug with the insurance money. "But I did feel reborn. At age forty."
"Maybe," said Beatrice, "you can have that feeling again. Once you get past this buyer"s remorse. In the weeks following the incident with the BMW in the desert, Peter began some of his most audacious work. One breakthrough followed after another. And the feeling had lasted for years. But nothing lasts forever.
Slowly. so subtly that he was hardly aware of it, he had begun to slow down. He stopped taking physical risks, he gave up exercising regularly. "And you were drinking more," Beatrice recalled. "I don"t want that to happen again."
Unless he was just saying it to please her, it was good to hear-a sign that he was starting to regard his new body as a challenge rather than as a forbidding mystery. "Why should it happen again?" she challenged. He had the body of a thirty- five-year-old now. His muscle tone was amazing; his sense of awareness was astonishing. He had a blood supply that sent his brain into overdrive with the promise of dissolving whatever plaque had built up in his cerebral arteries. But despite not having any more relapses in the last two weeks, he couldn"t shake the thought that all this stunning progress could vanish in an instant. "That"s only the guilt talking," said Beatrice. "You let me worry about that, all right?" Alone and usually in the bathroom (the only place he was afforded privacy), he would study this body he had been given, running the back of his fingers lightly over the taut skin of his neck, dabbing under his eyes where he had been accustomed to seeing satchels of flesh. He practiced telling himself that this was not some alien staring back at him in disbelief, but his own birthright, a fact that still seemed a dangerous lie. No matter how you rationalized it, this was still someone else"s body. He was like a father looking at his son. "What does Freud have to say about infanticide?" he asked Beatrice one morning. "Peter, you can"t keep dwelling on this." "I"m not dwelling, I"m just asking. "
"It"s not your son.
"Yes, I know," he said, as though reciting his catechism: "It"s merely a part of my body arbitrarily split off and allowed to grow independently. Cell for cell, gene for gene. My own personal property. Me. Just forty years younger. I say it"s spinach, and I say the h.e.l.l with it . . ."
He was venting, she knew, demanding that she make her case over and over again, which she was willing to do. In the end, he always felt better for it, the way he had felt in that BMW Aware of its strength and perfection, he had at first been uneasy, then comfortable, and then ecstatic to be inside that shining, flawless machine. Finally, it wasn"t a matter of being in it at all but rather of simply being it. Fit. Filled with energy. Young! Then there was the question of s.e.x, she reminded herself. Starting in his fifties, s.e.x for Peter had become less and less a priority or pleasure. Eventually, as he moved into his sixties, after exhausting tension-filled hours in the lab and on the test range, he simply couldn"t be bothered. But even though the sight of Beatrice naked still had the ability to stir him, he couldn"t bear to look at himself unclothed. The only mercy was that his eyes were so bad by then that without gla.s.ses he could barely see his flaccidity and wrinkles. Now things were different. s.e.x, finally, was proving to be the most effective solvent for guilt. He was constantly aroused now, routinely rolling out of bed in the mornings tumescent and ready. One morning, he woke wet and sticky, and this time the images from his last dream were still vivid. He had been floating in a sea of stars with a woman he could only describe-and only to himself-as the Angel of Eros. She was blond, this woman, in her mid-twenties, lithe and athletic and infinitely caring about his pleasure, responsive to his every thought and movement. It was the most luxurious and satisfying s.e.x he could recall. Before he could strip off his shorts, Beatrice saw the stain. "Qops," he said sheepishly.
She tilted her head, trying to smile. "Congratulations. You must tell me about it." In the past, they had made a point of sharing their dreams, unless any of them might prove hurtful, which was almost never. Now he demurred; the Angel"s face was still etched in his consciousness. "Hey, you know what I"ve noticed? I"m sleeping on my left side again. Remember when my left shoulder stiffened up, and I had to sleep on my right? And I started to have insomnia, and when I did fall asleep I had these left-brain dreams. Now suddenly it"s no problem, which is deeply strange-" "Is that what you call it, a left-brain dream?" She looked at him. only slightly amused. "Another thing. When I put my clothes on in the morning-didn"t I used to put my socks on first?" "Why? Are you putting them over your shoes now? We"d better have you tested again." "No, I mean before I put on my undershirt. Now the socks come last. It"s a small thing, nothing to worry about, just interesting. In the shower, too, I seem to do things in a different order. Soap my chest before my arms. Didn"t you once do some work on cellular memory?" "In graduate school. It didn"t amount to anything. " "Circulating peptides, messenger RNA-wasn"t that the theory?" "What has this got to do with your nocturnal emissions?" "Did I say that"s what it was?"
"Either that or you"re masturbating again." Well, you remember what Oliver Wendell Holmes once said." "Please, let"s stick to the sub-"
"A law student approached him-he was in his eighties-and asked him, Justice Holmes, you"re the wisest man in America, can you tell me when a man stops masturbating?" And Holmes said-" "-You"ll have to ask someone older than I." Peter, stop babbling. You"re not eighty-five, you"re thirty-five, and I"m not in the least embarra.s.sed-" "Okay. of course it was a wet dream. Haven"t had one of those since I was peeing straight up in the air." "Was she attractive?"