Still Life with Shape-shifter (28 page)

Yeah, she’s human.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

JANET

T
he only thing that changed Cooper’s life more profoundly than meeting me was meeting Evan Baylor, who was not only a shape-shifter himself but connected to a couple of dozen others in the region. Finally, Cooper had access to a community of people who were just like him—who understood his idiosyncrasies, his challenges, his unconventional joys, and his reasons for despair—without needing to have a single thing explained to them. I couldn’t imagine what that was like. I supposed it was, only in a much more intense fashion, akin to what I’d experienced when I finally encountered kindred spirits in college. I supposed it might be what a gay young man born in rural Mississippi would feel the first time he set foot in San Francisco. Like he had found the place where he belonged.

Even so, it wasn’t like all the shape-shifters of central Illinois got together in a clubhouse every few weeks and sat around sipping beer and trading stories. They were an odd, diverse, diffuse, and not particularly chummy group. Through Evan, Cooper met twenty or so men and women who could take animal form, but I only laid eyes on about half of them. Some of them were—like Evan, like Cooper himself—perfectly comfortable in their human incarnations, talkative and friendly and engaged, though they all exhibited a certain
oddness
that you couldn’t overlook even if you never would have guessed what caused it. They were the ones who could hold down jobs, maintain relationships, speak with a sense of humor about the strange existence they had been fated to endure. Others were edgy and ill at ease when they took human shape, virtually unable to sit still long enough to eat a meal or carry on a conversation. These were the ones who lived on the very fringes of civilization and were in constant danger of slipping permanently into the wild.

For each of them, we learned, the process of transformation was unique. Some were human 350 days out of the year; they could control when and how often they turned into animals. Others, like Cooper, were at the mercy of some internal compulsion, though few of them switched so regularly between forms as he did. Some could choose what animals to become; others frequently found themselves to be creatures they had never imagined before. Some rarely traveled beyond the borders of Illinois. A handful had roamed the continent from end to end, meeting others like themselves in every state and climate. These wanderers were the ones who came back with information about places they’d discovered in their travels—safe houses and other havens where shape-shifters were welcome or at least out of danger. The homes of other shape-shifters, most often, the ones who had enough control over their lives to earn money and own property—or the homes of the people who loved them.

It was soon clear to me that I had a duty to this newfound circle of most unusual friends. I needed to launch my career, buy a house, and add yet one more refuge to the list of places where shape-shifters could pause in peace.

And I was willing—more than willing, even eager. And I realized these new friends could fill a need
I
had as well, supply a lack. The ones who learned to trust me might allow me to draw their blood and analyze their makeup. They might let me experiment with their chemistry and devise serums that reformatted their genetics. They might help me figure out the one thing I most wanted to know: how to keep Cooper human. How to keep him alive.

Five years after we met Evan, we were able to make substantial progress toward this goal. My years of obsessing about Cooper’s biological changes had convinced me that I wanted to specialize in veterinary medicine, but eventually I concluded that I really wanted to conduct biomedical research. Who knows, maybe I was influenced by the fact that U of I had both a vet school and a specialty scholars program in veterinary medicine. My career interests dovetailed perfectly with my keen desire to stay in a geographic location that had become familiar to me and comfortable for Cooper. I had been accepted in both programs, but it might take me close to ten years to finish both of them. A long time to wait to start fulfilling the dream.

I was still in school when Evan came to us with a proposal. He and a few well-funded colleagues would buy a house for us as far out in the country as made sense for me to still make the daily commute to campus. In exchange, I would begin supplying free medical treatment to any shape-shifter who could make it to our land. It went without saying that we would also provide shelter to any of these half-human creatures who needed a place to stay even when they didn’t need medical attention. So our property would include a house, an artist’s studio, a research lab, and a few cabins, kennels, and lairs where our strange assortment of friends could bed down, no matter what shape they had currently taken.

I had initially protested what seemed like overwhelming generosity, but Evan, always blunt, had won me over. “We have no one like you among all our friends,” he said. “Someone who can help us when we’re hurt or sick. We have lost so many because we couldn’t risk taking them to a hospital or a vet, even though they might have needed nothing more than a shot or a few stitches.”

“I’m not a licensed practitioner yet,” I warned him. “I need another year or two of school—”

“You’re already better than any other option we’ve got,” he said. “We want to get you set up as soon as we can. We’re already looking at property.”

It was impossible not to love the place Evan and his friends eventually bought for us, a rambling farmhouse on about fifty acres of land. It was close enough to civilization that it was wired for electricity, but its water amenities included a well and a septic tank. The house was old, crumbling in places, and in desperate need of updating, but otherwise it was perfect: It had two stories, ten rooms, a cellar, a garage, and a barn. A small stream wandered along its back border, and although its main agricultural products appeared to be prairie grass and the occasional stand of wild corn, it was obviously fertile enough to sustain a diverse garden of vegetables and fruits. Trees were not plentiful, but the tall grasses and occasional oak supplied enough cover for animals moving in after nightfall. We could not have asked for something better.

Evan oversaw the heavy work of renovation, dealing with contractors and deciding we needed new features such as a backup generator. Cooper and I picked the colors and materials for the new bathrooms and the remodeled kitchen, painted some of the rooms and hallways, and did all the work required for turning the barn into a studio.

“I think this is the happiest I’ve ever been,” Cooper told me one day as we took a break from sweeping out the debris of reconstruction. It was a Sunday afternoon in autumn, sunny and warm. We sat outside with our backs against the barn, drinking soda and marveling at the colors all around us. The few trees were flaming with an insistent scarlet, but the long, thin prairie grasses had turned a subtle shade of vibrant brown I could only describe as “fawn.” Cooper had spent one whole day trying to mix paints that would capture the exact shade, but he had eventually given up.

I pushed my sweaty hair out of my face. “You mean, thinking about moving out here when it’s all finished?”

“Not even that. Not even looking ahead. Now. This minute. Working here with you. Working toward something. Making—” He gestured with the hand that held his root beer. “Making a home for ourselves. Who would have thought we’d ever reach this point? That we could have so much? I didn’t have anything when I met you. You gave up everything to be with me. And now look at us.”

I leaned in to kiss him. “Now look at us,” I agreed. “Already so rich, and poised to have so much more.”

“So I just wanted to take a moment to impress it on my brain, in case someday I need to remember,” he said. “This is what happiness feels like.”

*   *   *

I
was happy, too—God, how could I not be, blessed with such gifts?—but I was also anxious. Every year brought me nearer to my degree, every week brought us closer to our move-in date, every day brought me some sweet exchange with Cooper, whether he came to me as a wolf or a man. We had friends, Cooper’s art career had begun to take off, and I had already started to provide medical treatment to the local shape-shifting community. I’d saved more than one life, too, which filled me with a deep and triumphant sense of satisfaction.

But I was no nearer to solving the puzzle of Cooper’s blood. I now had samples from ten or twelve other shape-shifters—vials drawn when they were human and when they were animals—and I studied these under all kinds of conditions, adding heat, adding chemicals, changing temperatures, switching compounds. I had discovered, somewhat to my chagrin, that I could inject Cooper’s wolf blood into a sample of his human blood and cause the whole test tube to change over to the lupine composition. If I kept the samples live for long enough—generally two weeks—the transformation would reverse itself. The two samples would separate, the wolf’s blood collecting in the bottom of the test tube, the human blood at the top.

But the reverse did not hold true, no matter how big the relative sizes of the samples. The human blood could not convert the animal’s. The wolf’s genetic makeup was dominant.

We had tested the theory in a couple of experiments, one of them a little unnerving. I had learned from Evan that shape-shifters could rarely tolerate blood transfusions from other donors, but it had seemed safe to inject human Cooper with a serum made from his own wolf blood. He had almost immediately taken animal shape—a week before his normal schedule. To say I was horrified would be inadequate. I could not sleep, I could not work, I could scarcely breathe for the next three weeks, wondering if I had inadvertently and permanently turned Cooper into a wolf. When he came to me in the middle of the night, human again, I began sobbing violently in his arms.

“No more experiments!” I wept into his shoulder. “You’re fine the way you are.
Perfect
the way you are.”

But he wasn’t, of course. That was the problem. I could see it already in the skin on his face, in the slow, gradual decline of his energy. He was aging. At twenty-six, Cooper should still be in the prime of life, almost as fit and healthy as a teenager. But he wasn’t. Fine lines rayed out around his eyes; the flesh along his jaw had grown heavier. Every time he reappeared in human shape after two weeks in the wild, I traced a few more lines of silver in his dark hair. He slept more, had a softer stomach, complained now and then of a stiff knee. He was still healthy, still in good shape, but he no longer possessed a young man’s body. He was middle-aged. He was at least halfway through his life.

But I was not halfway through mine.

I wasn’t sure if he realized how frantically I worked to find a cure for his condition; I’m not sure if he knew
why
. In fact, once we moved to the house, once our lives took on the contours and rhythms we had worked so hard to attain, Cooper seemed to lapse into a state of absolute contentment. He even told me once, “I don’t mind it anymore. Taking wolf shape. I even like it sometimes. Now that I know other shape-shifters, now that I see how other people live—it seems natural somehow.”

“That’s because it
is
natural, for you,” I replied.

“I just wanted you to know. In case you can’t ever find the cure. It doesn’t matter. You can stop looking if you want.”

For just a moment, I felt my heart stop, my breath suspend. For just a moment, I couldn’t think how to answer.
I have to find the cure, don’t you understand? If I don’t, you’ll die, and I will never be ready for you to die.
Instead I said, as breezily as I could, “Oh well. I’ve put this much effort into it. Now I’m curious. Now I want to
beat
it, if you can actually
beat
a biological imperative.”

“And maybe someone else will want the vaccine,” he said. “If you can ever figure it out.”

“That’s right,” I said. “So there’s no stopping me now.”

*   *   *

I
was thirty-three and Cooper was thirty-two—though he looked more like fifty—when I first started experimenting with my own blood. I spent hours, days, weeks, trying to analyze how the composition of mine differed from the composition of Cooper’s—and Evan’s and that of the other shape-shifters I knew. I can’t remember what story I told Crystal and her husband and one of their artist friends to convince them to donate vials of their blood so I could conduct additional tests in my never-ending quest to determine where the difference lay between the human and the beast.

But I do remember the series of experiments I carried out that summer when I decided to mix serums made of Cooper’s blood with samples that were entirely human. I was not surprised, when I added the wolf’s blood to mine, to see it undergo the transformation I had watched in the past. As always, the wolf’s blood was dominant; soon the entire sample took on its composition. I stored the mixture carefully in a refrigerated container to see how long it would take for the two samples to separate out again once the transformation had run its course. I figured that my human molecules would put up a mightier fight than Cooper’s since they weren’t diluted and frequently seduced by the lupine influence, so I expected the reversal to come within a few days.

But it didn’t. Two weeks passed, and still the transformation was not undone; a month went by. Six months. I knew the sample had degraded so much it might no longer be viable, but I was still astonished and rocked by the implications of that single vial of mutated matter.

I repeated the experiment, of course—with Cooper’s blood, and samples from some of Evan’s friends. I mixed them with mine and with the donations supplied by Crystal and the others. In every case, the results were the same. The animal components overwhelmed the human markers, and not just temporarily. The changes were permanent.

A person injected with a shape-shifter’s genetic material would conceivably take on that shape-shifter’s same animal form. And never again be human.