Catnip (3 page)

Talk about irony! Whatever made them think
that? It took them only ten years to figure it out. “So what do you
suggest?” his mother asked.

Mrs. McNamara cleared her throat. “Home
schooling would be best if you can’t afford a private school. His
scores are way beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

It was time to smile. Home schooling—yes, I
can have it all, he thought, and after his mother came outside, he
stared at her expectantly. “Well, is it okay?”

His mother nodded. “You’ve been
eavesdropping?”

“Yeah, I have. I don’t want to go to a
special school.”

Mrs. Goldman faced her son with a wry smile
playing around her lips. In spite of their jobs, the Goldman’s were
not rich, and Harry didn’t want to go to a private school. He’d
visited one once and found the kids too snobbish. While he might
have had nothing in common with regular school kids, he had even
less in common with the other so-called prodigies. “You’re…you’re
not gonna send me to a private school, are you, Mom?”

His mother shook her head in resignation. “Do
the homework. You’ll bring it in once a week and the rest of the
time is yours.”

Isolation might have sucked to anyone else,
but Harry relished it. The way he rationalized the whole thing,
sure, he lost out on some potential friendships, but he didn’t have
much in common with anyone at his ex-school, and outside of his
parents, nothing much in common with anyone else.

He had made one friend, Jason Parham, in his
first year at junior high. Tall and sort of geeky looking with a
mop of dark hair and plain features marred by adolescent acne,
Parham was an avid gamer, anime fan, and all-around nerd. For some
unknown reason—perhaps because they were outcasts in their own,
unique way—they clicked as friends, but had totally different views
on life. While Harry left junior high to pursue knowledge, Jason
continued on with the humdrum school routine.

After reaching high school, his best and only
friend moved with his family to New York and continued to get
average grades. They sent mail to each other on a regular basis.
Parham filled Harry in on who was doing what and with whom and
served as his lifeline to the world outside.

Jason existed only to play his games, connect
with the various anime and fan-boy clubs around the world, and live
for the here and now.
You gotta live in the moment, man,
he
wrote one day.
It’s the only way to have fun.

As if Harry knew what the term
fun
meant. When he got the message, he was in the middle of perusing a
biology text. To him, studying ribosomes was fun. However, Jason
was a pretty decent guy, although his tastes in pastimes shifted
from one week to the next.
I got my moment in front of me,
he texted back.
I’m studying.

Jason’s reply was typical. He sent an
eye-roll emoticon, his way of saying Harry was taking things
way
too seriously.
Lighten up, man,
he wrote.
Hey,
I’m into Princess Yasuda now. You know about her?

Harry quickly checked her name on his
computer, found out she looked like every other anime he’d ever
seen—long legs and arms, round eyes, narrow, pointy chin, and tiny
skirt—and figured his friend had lost it.
Living in the now
doesn’t have to involve make-believe characters.

At least I haven’t given up
on
reality,
Jason replied.
What do you do? You study all
day, don’t talk to anyone, and stay inside. I go to school, man, go
to the shows and comic conferences…I
meet
people.

The truth hurt, but after a little
introspection Harry admitted he
was
more than a bit of a
shut-in. Still, his experiments took priority. In the sanctity of
his room, he laid the groundwork on his computer. A place the size
of a large storage area with drab green wallpaper, it consisted of
his bed, study desk, computer, and held nothing more exciting than
three shelves full of textbooks. Plain and ordinary, yes, but it
served as his refuge from the world outside. He ruled here, the
king of his domain.

For the real work, however, his father’s
friend taught medical ethics at the University of Oregon. Professor
Morton allowed Harry to come in and use the lab. While he was still
in grade school, the grad students looked on with amusement at the
short, skinny kid who liked messing with the chemicals.

The years passed and as he got more
proficient with DNA manipulation, the looks of amusement turned to
envy. One man in particular, Professor Nixon, often asked how he’d
gotten to be so good at a subject ninety-nine percent of the world
didn’t understand.

“I just know,” Harry told him bluntly. He
knew the prof was jealous, and also knew the man didn’t know jack
about this aspect of research. He only pretended he did.

The professor asked him a question about the
idea of transposing genes and their effect upon the host body’s
cells. Harry replied that he’d gotten around the problem by
introducing a protein that formed a protective sheath around the
newly transposed DNA. “That’s impossible,” the professor
breathed.

Harry pointed at the computer screen. “Tell
me I’m lying, okay?”

Nixon bent forward to look at the matrix on
the screen and his face twisted with the rage of an adult
outsmarted by a kid. “You’re just a punk,” he spat out and stalked
off.

In order to circumvent any trouble, Harry got
his driver’s license on his eighteenth birthday and used his
father’s car to go to the university lab at night when no one else
was around. Professor Morton had given him a passkey for the outer
door as well as for the lab, and even the night watchman never
bothered him.

It was a period of excitement as well as a
thrill to do the heretofore forbidden. After working on his formula
for transposing a pig’s genes to a dog in order to cure a heart
ailment, he judged the computer simulation a success. The formula
would work, he felt, but again, he said nothing to anyone.

His father did caution him when the subject
of using animals arose. “There is such a thing as ethics, son,” he
said. “Crossbreeding plants and flowers is one thing, and
genetically modified food is something else.”

He stopped speaking for a moment and clutched
at his side. Harry noticed the expression of pain cross his
father’s face. “Dad, are you okay?” He touched his father on the
shoulder as if to give him some kind of reassurance.

“Just a cramp,” the elder Goldman said. He
winced again, and after taking in a deep breath, he let it out
slowly and nodded as if the truth was self-evident. “Anyway, what I
was saying before is a given. What is
not
a given is using
it on people, not yet.”

Harry knew the score and while not offended
at being read the riot act, he figured he had things under control.
He’d done his research, knew about the Frankenstein Syndrome, and
had no intention of proceeding with anything as drastic as human
experimentation. “Dad, I know it’s against the law, and…”

His father held up his hand for silence.
“Transgenic experiments are probably being done as we speak, but
aside from them being illegal, you can’t play God. This I know.
Even if it’s to help people, who’s to say it won’t hurt them?” He
shook his head. “There are some things better left alone.”

Harry almost laughed at the cliché. He knew
he was on the right track with his research, but heeded his
father’s words and confined his research to various plants and
flowers. He wanted to go further, but then things changed, as they
inevitably did, and they were things he couldn’t control.

Cancer was a mean mother. It came without
warning although he should have seen the signs in his father. But
how could he have? He couldn’t, and by the time they found out, it
was too late. Pancreatic cancer struck his father in September of
Harry’s senior high school year. Six weeks later, the inevitable
happened.

His quiet and devoted mother was inconsolable
and followed her husband into death due to a heart attack two weeks
after the funeral. Attending two funerals wasn’t on his to-do list,
but life sucked, you died, and he mourned.

Harry had never cried, even when he’d gotten
his butt kicked in a fight. Weak or not, he had his pride. Pride
wouldn’t let him show weakness in the form of bawling like a baby.
He didn’t cry when the pain from the bruises hurt so much even
breathing became an ordeal.

The tears did come, though, when his mother’s
coffin went into the ground. For the first time in his life, he was
totally alone. Having no friends had never bothered him. He’d had
his parents. They’d always had his back and had given him comfort
and support. Now he had no one.

The family lawyer informed him his parents
had left everything to their one and only child. “The house, the
investments they’d made over the years…the good thing is you won’t
have to go through probate court,” Mr. Munson, the lawyer said.

“Which means what, exactly?”

“You’re financially set for a few years.”

Good enough, and as he’d turned eighteen,
which made him an adult under Portland law, he continued to live at
his parents’ modest two-story house. He continued his experiments,
but a little cloud with the name of Professor Nixon found out about
his lab tests and called the police…

“Hey, Goldman, you’re wanted in the warden’s
office.”

Harry’s mind came back to the present and he
looked in the direction of the voice. One of the guards—his
nameplate read
Walker—
stood outside the bars, an impatient
expression on his face. Large, dark-skinned with a pockmarked face,
shifting from one foot to another, he tapped the bars again and
then slammed them with his fist. “Get up!”

Harry was still only half awake. His
cellmate, a black man named Tim Withers, looked at the bars and
kicked his legs upward. Small and skinny, barely five feet and a
buck-twenty, Withers had been incarcerated for auto theft, but they
got along and left each other alone. Harry felt the impact of the
shove and peeked over the side of his bed. “What is it?” he
mumbled.

His roomie glanced up at him. “Hey, man,
maybe this is your ticket outta here, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah…” Harry had been told to expect parole
in a year, and it hadn’t been nearly that long, not unless Uncle
Sam decided thinking wasn’t against the law…

Another slam on the bars jarred him into
wakefulness. He gazed at the guard through bleary eyes. “The warden
wants to see me?”

“What, are you deaf? Get your butt in
gear.”

With a start, Harry sat up, fully awake now,
and rubbed the crud out of his eyes. He jumped down off the bunk
and landed clumsily on his feet. At times he wished he was more
athletically capable, and then realized this was how things
were.

“You gonna be okay?” Withers asked. He moved
with a small man’s economy and quickness of movement. In contrast,
Harry, who’d already reached his full height of five-eight and
never went beyond a hundred fifty-five soaking wet, was a klutz of
the first order.

The cell, small and clean, consisted of a
bunk bed, a table, some books, and a pad of paper where he did his
research. In spite of being incarcerated, this place had an oddly
homey feel to it, although he hoped it wouldn’t be his home for the
rest of his life.

He glanced at the small alarm clock on the
table. It read seven AM. After brushing his teeth and washing up—he
didn’t bother shaving as the guard kept tapping his truncheon
against the bars and besides, at his age, he was too young to grow
anything more than peach fuzz—he signaled the guard, the door flew
open, and he went out to meet his destiny.

As they walked, Harry thought about his
sentence. This place, Columbia River Correctional Institute, had
been chosen by the court. He’d been arrested a day after his last
visit to the lab. Since his parent’s untimely death, he’d gotten
the idea of upgrading the human immune system with that of a
shark’s.

It was a myth that sharks never got cancer.
They did, but they also had the ability to produce an enzyme from
their cartilage which in turn basically surrounded the tumor and
choked it off, preventing it from spreading. He’d managed to
isolate a gene, beef it up in terms of its strength, and the
results looked more than promising.

After downloading the data onto a disc, he’d
driven home and found two cops waiting for him, along with another
man, gray-haired, tall and lean, and equally somber. He wore a
black suit. Harry had the feeling the plainclothes cop was on his
way to a funeral and suddenly he knew whose funeral it was. “Can I
help you?”

“Are you Harry Alan Goldman?” one of the cops
asked.

“Yes, sir,” he’d answered truthfully. No one
had ever used his middle name before. This had to be serious beyond
serious.

The first cop, white, blond haired and built
like a tank, held up a piece of paper. “We have a warrant for your
arrest.”

Harry’s heart suddenly stopped working. “Uh,
what’s the charge?”

The second cop’s partner, a moving black
mountain, recited, “You’re being charged with espionage, breach of
medical ethics, and intent to sell on the black market.”

Who could have told the authorities, he
thought, and then figured out one of the other researchers had
found something on the hard drive of the computer he’d used. He
cursed himself for not erasing it. “Shouldn’t I contact a lawyer or
something?” he asked.

“We have to read you your rights first,” the
black cop said.

He proceeded to do so, and after Harry had
heard everything and said he understood, the cops took him down to
Portland’s Police Station and ushered him into an interrogation
room not much larger than a janitor’s storage area, and not the
usual prison cell with the ordinary scum of the universe. Five
minutes later, the same tall and gaunt man entered the room and
introduced himself as Agent Farrell. Harry caught the older man’s
stare and shifted his gaze to the worn tabletop. “You’re with which
agency?” he wanted to know.