The Crystal Child (6 page)

She said, “I know you’re hurt, Aaron.  I know you’re disappointed and angry.”  I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard her.  Then she said something that took me by surprise.  She said, “Maybe you’d like to show me how angry you are.  Come on, show me.”

I thought she was teasing me.  With my face turned, I said, “What do you expect me to do?  Hit you?”

She said, “All right.  Let’s try that.  Hit me.  Hit me if you think I’m such a fake, such a liar. Hit me.”

She didn’t have to encourage me. I turned over and gave her a good, solid slap on the cheek.  It felt good to slap her.  I wanted to do it again.

I could see how surprised she was by that.  There was a small, red patch on her face where I’d hit her. She reached up to rub it, but all she said was, “Is that the best you can do?  Here, try again.”  And she held out her hand. “Come on,” she said, “you must be a lot madder than that.  You have reason to be.  Think of how I failed you, led you on, raised your hopes.  Show me how disappointed you are.”

This time I hit her with all I had, hard enough to turn the back of her hand red.  She flinched but she kept her hand out, asking for more.  So I slapped her again and again and again.

Finally she said, “All right, that’s enough!” and she caught hold of my hand.  I was furious with her, I wrenched myself loose and raised my hand to hit her again, this time with my fist right in the face.  But before I could swing, she shouted, “Look!” and held up her hand.  “When you first came to see me, you were weak as a kitten.  You couldn’t hold a glass of milk.  Remember?  Now see?  You’ve bruised me.  That really hurts.  A sick, old man couldn’t leave me marked like that. Two weeks ago, you couldn’t get out of bed without help.  Now I’ll bet you could jump out of that bed and strangle me if I gave you the chance.”

And just then, in that instant, I realized she was right.  She was right!  I couldn’t remember when I last felt so much strength in my arms, my legs.  And then she was on the bed, holding me close to her.  And I was letting her hold me.  She was saying, “Aaron, you
are
getting better.  I don’t know what I’ve done to make you better.  But anger is a good sign — when there’s that much energy behind it.  Can’t you feel it inside?”

I couldn’t answer her.  I was blubbering like a baby.  All I could do was grip her tight and press her to me. After a moment I could feel her trying to free herself, but I didn’t want to let her go.  I hugged her closer and buried my face in her shoulder.  “Aaron,” she was saying, “that’s enough.  Aaron, you’re hurting me.”

Julia picked up the phone, drew a breath, and assumed her most confident manner.  “Hello, Kevin,” she said. “How good to hear from you.”

At the other end of the line, a gruff, male voice answered.  “Congratulations, my dear.  It looks as if ye old village sawbones has finally discovered something of interest to modern medical science.”

She was accustomed to the jocular, semi-affectionate tone; it was all that remained of a love story that had ended in emotional shipwreck more than twenty years ago.

Julia — then Julia Shapiro — and Kevin Forrester had been two of the brightest residents in their class at Johns Hopkins.  That had made them rivals, but not for long.  Initially, their relationship had been hotly competitive, every encounter filled with caustic jibes and wry put-downs.  If they did not notice how much time they spent in each other’s company trading barbed remarks, none of their classmates had any difficulty seeing where things were headed.  There was no surprise when their rivalry made an about-face and turned into something very different.  All it took was the right word at the right time.  As they were packing up their books one night after a round-the-clock cramming session, Forrester said, “Maybe we should be making love not war.”  And so they did on her narrow bed in the women’s dorm.  Before their first year of residency was out, they had become intimate friends.  Julia remembered that year, with some nostalgic exaggeration, as the grand passion of her life.  It was certainly her first significant affair of the heart, the first to involve serious talk of marriage.  Twenty years later, Jake still referred to Forrester with mock jealousy as “your old boy friend.”  The relationship ended at Forrester’s insistence and not very gracefully.  He had offered some rambling and clichéd excuse about “not being right for you.”  Julia might have said that was neither true nor sincere, but there was no point in arguing over it.  It was a deliberately heavy-handed way of breaking up.  Later, judging by the shape his life assumed, she concluded that he wanted the freedom to build a career.  She should have seen that coming.  Having a bright and ambitious wife with priorities of her own looked like more than he wanted to take on.

For the next few years, after they broke up, Julia followed his progress with a sort of peripheral vision as he moved from one prestigious appointment to another.  Had they met again, she would not have passed up the chance to resume where they left off.  But his work took him to more and more distant places.  On his own, Forrester prospered handsomely, picking up positions at leading universities and laboratories, bouncing higher with each new appointment.  For two years he was at Cambridge, for another three years he was at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.  Then, ironically enough, he returned to the US where he set up in a lab of his own near Stanford no further off than an hour’s drive from Julia’s clinic.  But now there was his wife and her husband between them, making the distance far greater.

Whenever they met, Julia did her best to mask the disappointment she still felt; even so, Forrester could not have been unaware of the scars she bore.  She never found herself in the same room with him without remembering they had once been lovers.  Was it the same with him?  If so, he never showed it.  Time had taken its toll of him, as it had of her; his trim build and the once firm line of his jaw were gone and he had begun balding.  Still, with only a minimal effort, Julia could recall the handsome, athletic young man with whom she had spent so many enraptured nights.  Reaching back in thought to their time together, she realized she could not pretend she had found as much pleasure with any man after Forrester — not that there had been many.  Was it peculiarly him, or was it their shared youth that touched those memories with such vividness?  If she were to judge by what Forrester had become, her recollections were little more than fantasies of first love.  He seemed to have done an efficient job of forgetting the love they had once known — as if it were something you could delete on a computer.

At first she thought his reticence might be intended as gentlemanly discretion.  Later she realized it had another source, a change that had come over Forrester at the time he left conventional medicine.  There was now a practiced detachment about him that made it clear he had blanked out their love affair to leave more room for other, more professionally pressing things.  He had become a different man, a biologist married to his microscope and to the acclaim his professional life might bring him. Julia suspected his ambition left him with no greater warmth for the woman he finally did marry.  Once, at a party, his wife, a morose French woman who was more than a little tipsy at the time, had confided to Julia that “Kevin knows everything there is to know about sex except how-to.  Maybe if I were shaped like a double helix, we’d get it on more often.”

After medical school, professional success, both Julia’s and Forrester’s, had taken them along steadily diverging paths.  Julia often wondered if Forrester still qualified as any sort of doctor at all.  If he did, he was a physician whose patients had dematerialized into abstract chemical formulas, numbers, diagrams, x-rays etched on film.  A veteran of the human genome project, he had helped found a small, but highly respected genetic therapy laboratory in Palo Alto, an area where the masters of biotechnology were gathering to explore the foundations of human heredity. He was the company’s junior partner, as much involved now in negotiating contracts as in pursuing research.  How did he feel about this change of roles?  He pretended it did nothing to inhibit his devotion to research, though in fact it did.  Projects that he still told himself might lead to major breakthroughs kept being put on hold.  He was working out more financial calculations though the day than chemical formulas, attending more funding banquets than professional conferences.

His new location offered the chance to renew his friendship with Julia and so they now met every few months for lunch or dinner.  He told her nothing about the conflicts in his life; instead, he made a great show of intellectual superiority as if to justify the way he had broken off with her so many years ago.  They were back to the professional rivalry that had brought them together at school.  Still, without formally agreeing to the role, he became Julia’s consultant whenever her work impinged on his science.

That was not often.  As Forrester reminded her at every opportunity, no matter how much vitality Julia might tease out of her aging patients, at the core of their physiology the same chemistry of life continued to do as it had done for millions of years, determining more about human survival than Julia’s medicine ever could.  In Forrester’s eyes, senescence was a disease; his goal was to trace that disease to its source and expunge it from the genetic vocabulary like a dirty word.  The things Julia took pride in achieving — keeping a few centenarians agile and good-humored, improving their skin tone or their memory — had nothing to do with their cellular machinery.  Forrester saw such changes as little more than a cosmetic cover-up, a futile holding action that was the best doctors could do until the mysteries of the organism stood fully revealed. Genetic therapy was, in his eyes, destined to replace Julia’s style of medicine as completely as antibiotics had replaced black-strap molasses. Still, out of remembered friendship and honest respect, he was willing to take an occasional phone call for old times sake, provided she was willing to put up with his jibes.

But this time there was something different.  As soon as she heard his voice on the phone, Julia could detect a note of eager curiosity in his words.  He was calling to make some serious talk.

“I’d like to see your complete file for this case,” he said.  “Including anything you have from other doctors who treated this boy before you.”

“Yes, I can send that,” Julia said.

“Do you know if he was ever checked out by a geneticist?”

“I don’t believe so.  Why would anyone do that?”

“Progeria is one of the diseases we’d like to knock out of the human genome.  Since it’s so rare, it pays to document every case we can.”

“Have you found something unusual?” she asked.

He quickly veered off into a gale of technical fine points, elaborate technical analyses that made him sound like a graduate student out to impress his professors.  Whenever that happened, Julia let her mind float patiently above his words.  There was no point in trying to follow what he had to say.  Invariably she soon found herself lost amid research she had never heard of.  She made an honest effort to keep up with progress in genetics, but she would have been frank to admit that the field had gotten beyond her, too beholden to techniques and methods that not even a conscientious physician could master.  Medicine, once the province of priests and magicians, had always had its esoteric depths; still, not too long ago, in her mother’s time, the members of the guild spoke a common language; their lore dealt with the anatomy of the body, with a short list of medications, with a brief repertory of diseases.  Now, within no more than a few decades, all this had changed. Genetic medicine was grounded in a chemical complexity that kept its discoveries more esoteric than the Latin vocabulary doctors were once expected to learn.  Julia’s habit with Forrester when he rose to this rarified level of discourse was to listen for key words, terms she wished to hear or feared to hear — and then pounce.  “Changes” was one of those words.  When Forrester began to talk about “changes,” she interrupted him.  He was telling her that something in Aaron’s genome had changed.

“In fact,” he said with excitement in his voice, “that’s putting it too mildly. More like an upheaval.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was looking at the genetic profile of a ten-year-old.”

“But you are.  Aaron turned ten last week.”

“I mean a
healthy
ten-year-old. A super-healthy ten-year-old.”

“He’s been showing a steady improvement.”

“You talking about weight, bones, skin texture — that sort of thing?’

She detected the dismissive tone in his voice.  She had heard it often before. “Yes, that sort of thing.”

He gave an snide sigh.  “I’m talking about
real
changes.”

Real changes.
How like a molecular biologist to put it that way. For those who study disease as it reveals itself under the lens of an electron microscope, the genetic blueprint of life is more real than the body whose arcane chemistry it is privileged to carry.  Aging is, therefore, essentially a flawed portion of that blueprint, an unfortunate chemical quirk.  Julia and Forrester had argued the question many times.  What does it mean to grow old?  Make a list.  Hair, skin, bones, ears, sinew, gonads.  We grow old in a dozen different ways and places.  To Julia’s naked eye, aging looked like a general deterioration; her job was to patch, patch, patch.

Forrester saw things differently; he had stopped being fatalistic about aging.  Shakespeare may have believed we have no choice but to finish our hour upon the stage of life “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”  Not so Forrester. He believed Shakespeare’s cascade of miseries flowed from a few failing genes. One of these — a discovery credited to Forrester — bore the nondescript name p21.  It did not glow like alchemical gold or burn like magic fire under the microscope, but it was a cellular mastermind.  P21 was a master gene that issued silent orders to scores of other genes, including many whose job it is to mix the proteins that still other genes needed if they were to grow.  But with the passage of years, p21 can become weary and begin to send out signals to stop growing.  At that point, the body lurches toward senility.  So then, the obvious question: could science drill down into the dark, organic depths of the body and switch these signals off and on as it might choose?  Would the result then be a body that did not age or aged so slowly that it mimicked immortality?  Was something like that happening inside Aaron’s genome?  In the thirteenth month of his treatment, his p21 master gene was toiling away with all its original infantile energy.  That was what Forrester had to report.  Aaron’s once crippled gene had become a powerhouse that showed no sign of flagging.  That changed everything.

Before Aaron had recovered from his coma, monitoring his treatment had been a reluctant favor on Forrester’s part.  Now he was calling to announce a significant discovery.  “Your boy isn’t suffering from progeria. At least not any known form.  He may be experiencing accelerated aging, but his genes diverge from every known progeric pattern.  That could be hopeful.  It may mean you can arrest the disease.  That looks like what’s happening with p21.  The kid is going into remission.”

“Can you recommend anything?”

“The first thing I’d recommend is that you stick a name on whatever ails him.  Name it after yourself.  Stein’s Syndrome.  Your name will live in medical history.  Either you’ve discovered a significant variation on progeria or an entirely new disease.  Beyond that, we need to bear down on his DNA.  This is a remarkable effect, Julia.  How did you produce it?”

“I’ve been doing so many things,” she said, fighting back the embarrassment she felt for a weak answer. “It’s hard to know which treatment might have … ”

“Have you been using any radiation?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?  Because nothing you feed him or dose him with could yield a change like this.  Broccoli and brown rice don’t soak through to the genes, you know.”

“I’ve been doing as much caloric restriction as he can tolerate.”

“Ah, that might explain the abnormal amounts of SIR2 I’m finding, which is also a good sign.”  SIR2 was one of Forrester’s current passions, a gene that fights off oxidants and strengthens the immune response.  It seemed to increase under conditions of stress, such as cutting back on calories, a practice that mimicked starvation.  In the right amounts, SIR2 can extend the life span of yeast, fruit flies, and even mice.  “You should keep that going, maybe push it further.”

Julia did not like that idea.  She felt guilty enough denying Aaron as much dessert as he wanted.   “The boy’s life is hard enough without starving him more.”