The Crystal Child (18 page)

Dr. Santiago gave her an irritated frown.  “Sure.  Unless they don’t want.”

“Is it okay for me to check her over?”  Another shrug.  When Julia got back to her cell that evening, she did not ask the girl if she was willing to be examined.  She simply gave her a sharp order to “come along” and took her off to the infirmary.  All she needed was a blood test and a rapid physical.  She was right.  The girl was down with an advanced case of gonorrhea, one of the few serious illnesses the prison was equipped to handle.  Later, after a course of antibiotics, Achula — Julia had finally gotten a name out of her — began to brighten up.  She kept thanking her benefactor each time they saw one another until Julia had to ask her to stop.

***

In her fifth month inside, Julia received a surprise.  Kevin Forrester came to see her. Instead of meeting her in the visitors’ room on the other side of a glass panel, he requested to see her in a conference room adjacent to the warden’s office where they could talk across a table.  The arrangement required two guards stationed between them and another at the door, an automatic weapon across her chest.  Like everybody else, Forrester started with expressions of sympathy and small talk.  “Why are you here, Kevin?” Julia asked, cutting him off abruptly.

“Well … to see how you are.”

“Why really?”

“I told the warden I had to consult you about a medical matter.”  He nodded toward one of the guards who was holding an oversized envelope.  The envelope was passed to Julia.  She recognized the material as photos taken from a DNA sequencer.  “I need your opinion about these pictures,” Forrester explained.  “These are the results from the last test I was able to run on Aaron.  That was in March.”

Julia tilted one of the images up to the light.  She could discern shadowy rows of genetic markers, Aaron’s DNA prints, she assumed.

“The others are read-outs taken of his chromosomes. Can you interpret them?”

“I’m sorry … I’ve gotten rusty,” Julia confessed. She squinted at the film.  “Remind me of what I should be seeing.”

With clear impatience, Forrester asked, “Can you recognize these as gametes?  Do you see the long telomeres?”

“Oh yes,” Julia said, remembering now that gametes — the reproductive cells — maintain long telomeres and so age far less slowly than other cells of the body.  That explained why embryos, which are formed from the cells of older humans, fathers and mothers, develop into young babies rather than old babies.  As absurd as it might seem, old babies would be the result if they were formed from cells already twenty or thirty years old.  But the gametes stay young, repairing themselves assiduously throughout a person’s lifetime.

“Look at the pictures closely,” Forrester said.  “You see?  The chromosomes you’re looking at are absolutely pristine, right?  Not a sign of wear.  Look at the other pictures. The telomeres are as good as new.”

Julia felt a small thrill of gratification.  She was back at her professional calling, if only for a fleeting few minutes.  “Yes, I see. They look normal enough.”

“Normal gametes, is that how you would identify them?”   She perused the images again and nodded agreement.  “Well, suppose I told you those aren’t sex cells.  Those are somatic cells gathered from several other parts of Aaron’s body.  Hair, skin, blood, mouth.”

His words jarred her into paying closer attention.  “But that can’t be,” she answered, now scrutinizing the pictures carefully.

“Well, it is,”

“Do you have an explanation?”

“What else can we conclude but that something you did not only reversed the aging process but repaired all the cellular damage he may have suffered since birth?  He isn’t back to age ten.  He’s back to newborn.  In fact, as far as I can tell, his telomeres are repairing themselves with one-hundred percent efficiency.  I haven’t been able to find a senescent cell in him.  Every cell I’ve cultured is still undergoing error-free mitotic division.  His mitochondrial DNA shows no sign of deletion. There’s no sign of oxidative stress.  He’s not just young, he’s being constantly rejuvenated.  I need more tests, you can see that.  Maybe I’ve made some mistake.”  Forrester, his face tense, leaned as far forward as he could, trying to pass a private word to Julia.  “You have to help me.”  The guard at once advised him to sit back in his chair.   Julia knew what he intended to ask.

“Kevin, he’s run away.  I assumed you knew.”

Forrester fell back in his chair as if he had been punched.

“When …?”

“A few weeks ago.  His parents were here.”

“And you don’t know where he’s gone?”

“No.  I’m not allowed to be in touch with him.  You know that.”  Forrester’s growing disquiet was becoming oppressive.  Turning to one of the guards, Julia asked, “Hasn’t Dr. Forrester used up his time?”

The guard glanced at the clock on the wall.  “You got three more minutes.”

“I don’t think so,” Julia said, rising to leave.  She passed the pictures back across the table.  The guard moved quickly to intercept them and inspect the envelope, then offered it to Forrester.

“Please let Dr. Stein keep it,” he said with a heavy sigh, sliding the envelope back across the table.  “They might remind her that she was once a doctor.  Those are historic pictures, Julia.  Like seeing the Earth from the surface of the moon. Please give them some thought.”

Back in her cell, Julia spread the pictures Forrester had given her across her bed.  One by one she picked them up and held them closer to the light.  From across the room her silent Hispanic cell-mate stared at her with fear and suspicion, as if Julia might be performing a diabolical ritual.  Julia smiled at her to put her at ease, but it did no good.  If she were to tell the woman that the strange markings on these films were pictures of a little boy she had tried to heal, it might sound like voodoo.  And maybe it was.  The old witch doctors practiced methods that invoked arcane forces both good and evil; they walked among demons, kept company with angels.  How different were the images she held in her hands from the inscrutable symbols of ancient times?  Now as then, it took a priest to read the mysteries of the organism.

As she studied the pictures more closely, she could see why Forrester was so agitated. These were astonishing images.  Even at the age of ten, a person’s telomeres should show some sign of deterioration. The oxygen that we take into our bodies with every breath gnaws away at our DNA from the day we are born.  For that matter, babies lose a certain amount of telomere length fighting their way out of the womb.  But the telomeres she was looking at were longer than those of any normal baby.  There was not a trace of senescence.  They did indeed look like perfect gametes as they might be illustrated in a text book.  If the ancient Greeks had known modern genetics, they would have expected Apollo to have a DNA fingerprint like this. The genes of a god.

Then it struck her. 
Eros in every cell.
  Of what other matter could love’s body be crafted?  It was as if Aaron’s every molecule had been transformed into a pristine sex cell. What others had to find in reproduction, he found in his own physical nature.  Was that the secret of Eros, that his entire child’s body was sexualized?  A body that affirmed life in its deepest structure.  The god of love, depicted as a child because he has the genetic substance of a newborn baby.  Not that anyone before our time could have known about genes. But myths are the masters of time, fusing past and future.  And by some miracle of insight, artists had used the language of the phenotype to portray Eros. They saw the god of love as ageless, embedded in a child’s body. Aaron was that myth reborn, the
puer aeternus
.  Whatever else might be in doubt, of this much she was certain: nothing she had done with Aaron could have produced such an effect.

***

Prison was taking on a strange, new character.  It was like a harsh retreat that cut her off from all the rest of her life, everything she had ever valued, loved, prized.  Her books now became the passage into another world of meaning.  She read with a passionate intensity, as if she were determined to tear a sequestered knowledge from the printed page.  For the first time in her adult life, she realized that the minds behind the words she read were so many doors opening into other realities.  That was how she had read in her childhood, wanting every book to be an adventure.  Ovid’s
puer aeternus,
she discovered, is a minor mythological character, a youth granted eternal life by Hebe, the goddess of rejuvenation, who is herself one of the lesser deities.  The place of eternal youth in the myths is not great.  Few mortals pursued it because it was considered a futile quest.  Only the gods had the right to escape age.  It was too much to imagine humans laying claim to such a blessing.  Not even the makers of myth could contemplate such a possibility.

Is it possible, she wondered, that the image of the eternally youthful boy is prophetical?  Had she seen that prophecy come true?   Maybe that was what Forrester’s laboratory pictures represented, a vision whose time had come.  The Revelation According to St. Aaron.

Her thoughts turned back to Forrester.  She remembered the fierce displeasure she had seen in his face as he glared at her across the table the day he had visited.  At one point he seemed on the brink of spilling over, barely able to suppress the exasperation he felt when she would give him not one word of understanding. 
I can’t be of any help to you,
she had said.  She half expected him to shout at her not only out of displeasure, but more so out of desperation.  It was almost as if he were the one imprisoned, trapped in his own narrow view and begging to be set free.

She understood why he was angry with her. He remained stubbornly faithful to a calling she had left behind.  He was obsessed with expanding the boundaries of the known.  What he saw when he studied Aaron’s cells was a puzzle of nature.  He saw chromosomes that lost nothing as they divided, telomeres that never grew shorter, never cracked or frayed.  In his eyes, that had to be the work of the tricky little imp called telomerase, the exuberant renewer of life, the wild force whose other name is cancer.  But in Aaron’s case, the imp was obediently serving the needs of the cell, keeping it whole and healthy. There was no sign of rampant cancer cells; the balance was perfect.  Aaron’s cells would divide forever, never losing a fraction of their protective sheath.  Aaron had stopped aging.  He might be struck down by injury, but otherwise, how could he ever die?  His cells carried the chemical blueprints of immortality.

That, at least, was the message she read from the pictures Forrester had left with her.  But the subtle and blurred markings she saw there, like the bodies of squashed insects carefully lined up, were such a poor imitation of life.  Could they be taken seriously at face value?  Perhaps Forrester could do that, with his skewed view of life.  These arcane genetic runes meant so much to him; he was nearly ecstatic with what he saw there.  He was like some superstitious peasant standing in awe before a holy relic.  How incensed he would be to hear her say such a thing, Kevin the man of reason.  But it was true.  He was hopelessly sunk in his abstruse methods and measurements.  Dry abstractions, illusions actually that purported to be the secret of life.  But now she knew with an intensity beyond Forrester’s understanding that there was no secret to be found in these markings, these numbers. They belonged to Aaron, and Aaron was part of some other story.  Or perhaps the beginning of a new story. To be undying was to be inhuman.  Or transhuman. As angry as Forrester had been because she had sent him away unsatisfied, she was even more irate that he should be trying to drag her back into that lower realm where graphs and charts took the place of living flesh.

***

With the limited English she knew, Achula asked a favor.  “Will you read me?” she asked, holding out one of the books Julia kept beneath her bunk.  It was a children’s book, an illustrated collection of myths.  The week before Julia had caught the girl looking at it furtively when she came back to the cell.

“It’s all right,” she had said.  “You can read it.”  But Achula could not read it.  She was literate in Spanish, but her command of English was poor.  She was asking Julia to do more than amuse her; she wanted to learn English words on the page.  So Julia fell into the habit of reading her a story each night, and at last of challenging the girl to sound out words.  Achula was a conscientious pupil.  She kept track of the words and phrases she learned, scrawling them into a little notebook she kept under her pillow. The more company the two women kept — eating together, walking the yard — the more comment they aroused among the other prisoners.  Soon even the guards were referring to Achula as Julia’s “girl friend.”  Julia did not bother to correct them, especially when she realized that she was now seen as the girl’s protector.  More than once, a severe glance from Julia put an end to the cruel ribbing that was often aimed at Achula. Julia too experienced some benefit from being seen as the butch partner in the relationship.  It was a status some of the rougher prisoners respected. Would that go on her record, Julia wondered.  Would she leave Stockton as both a child molester and a practicing lesbian?  It was almost amusing.  You slipped just once in life, and suddenly found that your entire identity had shifted.  Julia Stein, the frigid professional, had become a criminal nymphomaniac.

At times Achula got caught up in the stories they read as if she really were a child. “How old are you?” Julia asked one day.

“Twenty,” Achula answered assertively.  She surely did not look it; she could have passed for fifteen.  Julia doubted that she belonged in an adult prison.  “I have a baby,” she added, as if to prove what she had said.  “A girl, three years.”

“Where is she?”

“With my mother,” she answered, a shadow of dejection falling across her face.  “I send her home.” Gradually Julia pieced her cell-mate’s story together.  She was more Indian than Latina, a girl out of the lower rural depths.  She came from a fishing village outside Guaymas where her mother ran a bakery, a
panadería
.  She had been brought north by her fiancé, the child’s father.  He had scarred her face during a drunken outburst.  He had promised to marry her and send for the baby when he found a job.  Instead, he put her to work on the streets and plied her with dope.  That was why she had been arrested.  She had less than a year to serve on her sentence.