Rabid (52 page)

The little bitch smiled with her pastel lips pressed together, primly, knowingly.

Bev yanked her hand back from that woman’s clutches and pivoted to face the altar.
Peggy
. That was
Peggy
. Another one of Conroy’s sluts had shown up. Damn her. Damn
him
.

She wanted to rage and tear the fat little woman apart, but she stared straight ahead at the altar and the priest she had screwed a few, wonderful times. Their affair was the only spot of lightness in this whole deathly mess.

John the deacon chanted, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace,” and watched Father Dante.

Dante broke a communion wafer, mingled it with the wine in his chalice, and recited prayers over the pyx and the cup. “By your body and blood, free me from all my sins, and from every evil.” The flat cracker in his fingers was soggy with red wine and almost disintegrated. A drop of watery wine trailed down Dante’s thumb and beaded in the creases.

Bev’s knees trembled, and she sat while her friends shuffled past her to the center aisle. Mary’s eyebrow lifted when Bev stood back to let her by. Bev couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t look at that gorgeous, magnificent box bearing Conroy’s body.

One of Conroy’s whores sat behind her. She should be more careful. Bev might have a knife. According to the police, she was capable of killing anyone.

Damn that Conroy, lying in that box, shriven.

God shouldn’t forgive Conroy. She sure as hell didn’t.

Dante stood next to the deacon, held the wafer aloft and above an elderly woman, and said, “The body of Christ.”

The woman responded, “Amen.” She opened her mouth and extended her tongue.

Several of her teeth were gray with silver amalgam. Dante touched the wafer to her tongue, and she retracted it into her mouth, lizard-like.

Bev’s friend Lydia was next in line, and she held her hands cupped in front of her, so Dante laid the cracker in her hands and she walked away.

Dante looked over at the long pew, and Bev was sitting alone, hunched over, pressing her forehead to the railing. He should not stop the communion rite to go to her, and he hesitated, but he held the plate of wafers on one hand and walked toward where she crouched.

Leila watched from the back of the church. The people in the short communion lines received wafers from Dante and the deacon. Each person came forward, received the little bread crumbs, and walked away, hands clasped in front of their chest.

Saps.

Suckers.

It was like the communion wafer stopped them from thinking, made them stupid, killed brain cells.

Leila remembered that the dry communion wafer adhered to her tongue as soon as it touched. It had seemed mystical when she was a girl, the way the wafer burrowed into her mouth.

Now, it seemed viral, the way a virus clasps a molecule on the outside of a cell, climbs the receptor hand over hand like a gym rope, and slinks into the cell.

If the communion Host was a virus, the wafer would travel though her alimentary canal until it reached the vagus nerve and, prion-like, propagate like a string of firecrackers through her peripheral nervous system to her spinal cord and up to her brain, gumming everything in its path with insoluble gunk plaques and streaming through her cerebrum like ribboning bullet trails, sending all the neurons into irrevocable apoptosis, programmed cell death.

That made the communion wafer a neural apoptosis ligand.

Leila snorted
ha
at the biochemical heresy.

That knife had entered Conroy’s chest the same way: it touched his skin and, biochemically propelled, the serrations chewed their way inside to his left ventricle and killed him. That made the knife an apoptosis ligand, initiating a caspase cascade causing the programmed death of all Conroy’s cells. Maybe the knife was an apoptosis superligand.

The knife and the communion wafer were both ligands initiating biochemical events. The knife ripped apart Conroy’s heart. The cracker caused apoptosis in brain cells.

Heresy.

Leila shifted her legs on the hard pew and watched Just-ah Dante set a wafer in a woman’s hands. The Inquisitor handing out the communion wafers might burn her at the stake for such heresy.

If she took communion, and the wafer adhered to her tongue and internalized, she might spontaneously combust for her heresy, then the wafer would be an apoptosis superligand like the knife, but it wasn’t, of course. The wafer was much more like a viral factor, insidiously inducing apoptosis over time, with repeated exposure.

Maybe that had been her father’s problem: all that communion he took had a neuron-specific apoptosis factor, and that’s why the AIDS-related dementia ravaged his brain and he hallucinated God and angels until he forgot how to breathe and drowned in his own flooded lungs.

Conroy’s rabies virus, however, infected brain cells without killing them, until the very end. It didn’t produce neural apoptosis ligands, so the virus was killing Danna but not her consciousness.

Together, her own clandestine HIV experiments and Conroy’s secret rabies experiments coalesced into a terrible beauty.

Neurons must have their own apoptotic cascade that was different than other cells’ death throes. HIV had a neuron-specific apoptosis factor that it secreted from its roost in the microglia and killed brain cells, and her father had died demented and raving. That was why she couldn’t find classical apoptotic activations in the HIV-infected neurons even though the neurons were definitely apoptotic, because neurons had their own, unique pathway.

Rabies must encode a neuron-sparing factor, or it short-circuited the neuron-specific apoptotic cascade, so Danna was going to die perfectly lucid as the virus burned away her peripheral nervous system.

Leila and Conroy had run the same experiment from two different ends of the question.

HIV killed neurons without infecting them.

Rabies infected neurons without killing them.

If Leila looked at Danna’s fMRI, she could see Danna thinking but not dreaming about God.

And, if she called Florida and got her father’s fMRIs, she could see his demented dreams of God.

It was awful, and wonderful.

Oh, Conroy. They had it.

They had evidence for a grand, unifying theory about consciousness and the neural locus of God in the brain. They had proved that the brain dreams of God, and they had proved that God is all in your head.

They just didn’t know what they had done because they hadn’t talked to each other, because they were both running secret, dangerous, illegal experiments.

God, she missed him.

Leila should have stayed inside his apartment that night. She shouldn’t have left stupid Conroy alone with that crazed woman. He had probably said something stupid. He was such an ass. He couldn’t even stop skinny little Leila from wrenching his arm around behind him. He had stood no chance against a furious wife with a knife.

Oh, Conroy, you mad, tragic scientist. The church blurred and swam as if a flood had burst through it. Leila tried to stop the damned tears dripping out of her stupid eyes.

At the front of the church, Bev rested her cast on the communion rail and bent over. That bastard. That bastard who lay in that box.
That bastard had left her and her girls far more irrevocably than if he had merely moved into a love shack with his honey. He had left. He had left
them
all
. Her eyes flicked raging tears down her cheeks. Her arm throbbed.

Warm flesh pressed Bev’s good hand, and she looked up from the wide railing.

Dante asked, “Why do you not take communion?” His whisper echoed in the church.

“Oh, Dante,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

His black eyes looked narrowed because he stood and his head was above her, like when he had been on top of her. She couldn’t receive Holy Communion, and especially not from his hand. The sacrilege frightened her. She couldn’t add
that
to the sin that cut her off from God. She shook her head and dropped her forehead back to the rail to shut him out. His black shoes under the white robe hesitated for a moment, then walked away.

In the coffin, Conroy’s body, cold but still supple from the preserving chemicals, reclined. The embalmer had used a Formalin variation, a low-odor formulation, but the scent that lingered around his body was reminiscent of that which he brought home with him from the lab, aldehydes and ketones and metabolic breakdown products.

His body also smelled like his aftershave cologne, which Bev had tucked into the pocket of the suit and which the embalmer had discovered and splashed on his preserved skin. He had had the cologne blended in Paris when he had trysted there with Valerie Lindh, which was also the last time he had worn this suit. Dr. Lindh was one of his lovers not in attendance at his funeral, but Bev, Leila, Peggy, and Mary were present.

He would have liked that they were there, had any of his pickled neurons fired to produce an emotion, or registered the docking of aldehyde and ketone molecules at his olfactory bulb, or responded to the light reflecting from the white silk to his corneas from where the lid ill-fit the dark box.

~~~~~

Bev took two more green pills in the car going to the funeral home, and she didn’t remember a thing about any of the eulogies, thanks be to all the saints, and neither Leila nor that horrible Peggy woman had come to the funeral home, and she didn’t think they had come to the reception at her house, so she hadn’t had to toss either of them out of her house onto her skinny ass or bloated ass, respectively.

Mary and Lydia sneaked out early from the funeral home to set up the reception at the house.

Sister Mary Theresa would bring Christine and Dinah over afterward.

The eulogies droned on.

Dante, sitting beside Bev, held her hand like he had that first terrible day, tenderly, as a priest. His gentle hands covered her exhausted fingers.

People began to arrive at the house, Dr. Lugar and his wife, other professional friends.

The phone rang. Bev answered it in the kitchen. “Hello?”

A man’s unctuous voice said, “Hello? Is Conroy Sloan there?”

Bev’s cheeks burned. “May I ask who is calling?”

“This is the Katana Porsche dealership. I was just making sure you were home.”

“Why is that?” she asked, but the man already hung up. She added a bit more whisky to her coffee and went back to the living room.

“I think I’m going to sell the house,” Bev said to Mary, Lydia, Laura and Dante. Laura’s son Luke, after following Christine and Dinah’s examples and furtively hugging Dante’s leg, had retired to the back yard with the girls to swing. “It’s too big,” Bev said about the house, “and it echoes. Conroy’s life insurance isn’t going to last forever, and some needs to be saved for the girls’ college.”

Lydia said, “Honey, let me finish figuring out where you guys are financially. I’ve still got files and whole accounts to go through. There may be more there than you think. You might even have time to pick up a master’s.”

“I don’t know,” Bev sipped the coffee. Her throat closed on the acerbic whisky. “I didn’t have a Plan B. I should have. Conroy’s father had a heart attack before he was fifty.”

Lydia and Laura glanced at each other, doubtlessly musing about the viability of a Plan B if Bev was in jail for the rest of her life. Bev sipped her coffee and waited for it to interact with the little green pills so those thoughts would float away.