The Fountain of Age (21 page)

His father knew how to push Ben’s buttons. Solitary by nature, Ben was nonetheless a sucker for stray kittens, homeless beggars, lost causes. He could picture his father, tanned and relaxed in the retirement condo in West Palm Beach, counting on this trait in Ben.

He said resignedly, “When does she arrive?”

“Tuesday. You’ll meet her plane, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Ben had said, not realizing that the single syllable would commit him to four years of mentorship, of playing big brother, of pleasure and exasperation, all culminating in the disastrous conversation that had been the beginning of the end.

He and Haihong had sat across from each other in a dark booth at a favorite campus bar, Fillion’s.

“I’m pregnant,” Haihong said abruptly. “No beer for me tonight.”

He had stiffened. Oh God, that arrogant bastard Scott, he’d warned her the guy was no good,
why
did women always go for the bad-boy jerks . . .

Haihong laughed. “No, it’s not Scott’s. You’re always so suspicious, Ben.”

“Then who—”

“It’s nobody’s. I’m a surrogate.”

He peered at her, struggling to take it in, and saw the bravado behind her smile. She was defiant, and scared, and determined, all at once. Haihong’s determination could crack granite. It had to be, for her to have come this far from where she’d been born. He said stupidly, “A surrogate?”

Again that brittle laugh. “You sound as if you never heard the word before. What kind of geneticist are you?”

“Haihong, if you needed money . . .”

“It’s not that. I just want to help some infertile couple.”

She was lying, and not well. Haihong, he’d learned, lied often, usually to cover up what she perceived as her own inadequacies. And she was fiercely proud. Look at the way she always leapt to the defense of her two friends and roommates, slutty Tess and brainless Emily. If Ben castigated Haihong now, if he was anything other than supportive, she would never trust him again.

But something here didn’t smell right.

He said carefully, “I know another woman who acted as a surrogate, and it took a year for her to complete the medical surveillance and background checks. Have you been planning this for a whole year?”

“No, this is different. The clinic is in Mexico. American restrictions don’t apply.”

Alarms sounded in Ben’s head. Haihong, despite her intelligence, could be very naïve. She’d grown up in some backwater village that was decades behind the gloss and snap of Shanghai or Beijing. Ben was not naïve. His post-doc had been at a cutting-edge big-pharm; he was now a promising researcher at the San Diego Neuroscience Institute. A lot of companies found it convenient to have easy access to Mexico for drug testing. FDA approval required endless and elaborate clinical trials, but the starving Mexican provinces allowed a lot more latitude as long as there was “full disclosure to all participants.” As if an ignorant and desperate day laborer could, or would, understand the medical jargon thrown at him in return for use of his body. Congress had been conducting hearings on the issue for years, with no effect whatsoever. Any procedure or drug experimented within Mexico would, of course, then have to be re-tested in the U.S. But ninety percent of all new drugs failed. Mexico made a cheap winnowing ground.

And, of course, there were always rumors of totally banned procedures available there for a price. But no big pharm or rogue genetics outfit would actually use a legitimate fertility clinic for experimentation . . . would they?

“Haihong, what’s the name of the clinic?”

“Why?”

Their drinks came, Dos Equis for him and Diet Coke for her. After the waitress left, Ben said casually, “I may be able to find out stuff for you. Their usual pay rate for surrogates, for instance. Make sure you’re not getting ripped off.” Unlike Haihong, Ben was a good liar.

Haihong nodded. So it was the money. “Okay. The clinic is called Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.”

He’d never heard of it. “How did you learn about this place?”

“Emily.” She was watching him warily now, ready to resent any criticism of her friend. He said only, “Okay, I’ll get on it. How did your meeting with your thesis advisor go yesterday?”

He saw her relax. She launched into a technical discussion of semiotics that he didn’t even try to follow. Instead he tried to find traces of his family’s faces in hers. Around the eyes, maybe, and the nose . . . but he and his brothers stood six feet, his hair was red, and he had the spare tire of most sedentary Americans. She was tiny, fragilely made. And fragile in other ways, too, capable of an hysterical emotionalism kept in check only by her relentless drive to accomplishment. Ben had seen her drunk once, it was not pretty, and she’d never let him see her that way again. Haihong was a mass of contradictions, this cousin of his, and he groped through his emotions to find one that fit how he felt about her. He didn’t find it.

Abruptly he said, interrupting something about F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Is the egg yours or a donor’s?”

Anger darkened her delicate features. “None of your business!”

So the egg was hers, and she was more uneasy about the whole business than she pretended. All at once he remembered a stray statistic: Twenty-one percent of surrogate mothers changed their mind about giving up their babies.

“Sorry,” he said. “Now what was that again about Fitzgerald?”

She was eight months along before he cracked Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.

His work at the Neuroscience Institute was with genetically modified proteins that packaged different monoamines into secretory vesicles, the biological storage and delivery system for signal molecules. Ben specialized in brain neurotransmitters. This allowed him access to work-in-progress by the Institute’s commercial and academic partners. Colinas Verdes was not among them.

However, months of digging—most of it not within the scope of his grant and some of it blatant favor-trading—finally turned up that one of the Institute’s partners had a partner. That small company, which had already been fined twice by the FDA, had buried in its restricted online sites a single reference to the Mexican clinic. It was enough. Ben was good at follow-through.

Haihong was huge. She waddled around campus, looking as if she’d swallowed a basketball, her stick legs in their little sandals looking unable to support her belly. The final chapter of her dissertation had been approved in draft form by her advisor. The date for her oral defense had been set. She beamed at strangers; she fell into periods of vegetable lassitude; she snapped at friends; she applied feverishly for teaching posts. Sometimes she cried and then, ten minutes later, laughed hysterically. Ben watched her take her vitamins, do her exercises, resolutely avoid alcohol. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her anything.

The day in her fourth month that she said to him, awe in her voice, “Right now he’s growing eyelashes,” Ben was sure. She was going to keep the baby.

Twenty-one percent.

He went himself to Mexico, presenting his passport at the border, driving his Saab through the dusty countryside. Two hours from Tijuana he reached the windowless brick building that was not the bright and convenient clinic Haihong had gone to. This was the clinic’s research headquarters, its controlling brain. Ben went in armed with the names and forged references of the partner company, with his formidable knowledge of curing-edge genetics, with pretty good Spanish, with American status and bluster. He spent an hour with the Mexican researchers on site, and left before he was exposed. He obtained names and then checked them out in the closed deebees at the Institute. Previous publications, conference appearances, chatter on the e-lists that post-docs, in self-defense, create to swap information that might impact their collective futures. It took all his knowledge to fill in the gaps, complete the big picture.

Then he sat with his head in his hands, anxiety battering him in waves, and wondered how he was ever going to tell Haihong.

He waited another week, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping in his lab on a cot, neglecting the job he was paid to do and cutting off both his technicians and his superiors. The latter decided to indulge him; they all thought he was brilliant. Every few hours Ben picked up the phone to call the FBI, the FDA, the USBP, anyone in the alphabet soup of law enforcement who could have shut it all down. But each time he put down the phone. Not until he had the inhibitor, which no one would have permitted him to cobble together had they known. Let alone permit giving it to Haihong.

A lot had been known about neurotransmitters for over seventy years, ever since the first classes of antidepressants. Only the link with genetics was new, and in the last five years, that field—Ben’s field—had exploded. He had the fetus’s genome. The genetics were new, but the countermeasures for the manifested behaviors were not. Ben knew enough about brain chemistry and cerebral structures.

What he hadn’t known enough about was Haihong.

“An inhibitor,” she said at the end of his long, lurching explanation, and her calm should have alerted him. An eerie, dangerous calm, like the absence of ocean sucked away from the beach just before the tsunami rolls in. He should have recognized it. But he’d been awake for twenty-two hours straight. He was so tired.

“Yes, an inhibitor,” he echoed. “And it will work.”

“You’re sure.”

Nothing like this was ever sure, but he said, “Yes. As sure as I can be.” He tried to put an arm around her but she pushed him away.

“An inhibitor calibrated to body weight.”

“Yes. Increasing in direct proportion.”

“For his entire life.”

“Yes. I think so. Haihong—”

“Side effects?” Still that eerie calm.

Ben ran his hand through his red hair, making it all stand up. “I don’t know. How can I know?” He wanted to be reassuring, but the brain contained a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand or so branches. That was ten-to-the-hundred-trillionth power of possible neural connections. He was pretty sure what neurotransmitters the genemods on the baby would increase production of, and pretty sure he could inhibit it. But the side effects? Anybody’s guess. Even aspirin affected different people differently.

Haihong said, “A six-month shelf life and a one-week half-life in the body.”

She echoed his terminology perfectly, still in that quiet, mechanical voice. Ben put out his hand to touch her again, drew it back. “Yes. Haihong, we need to call the FDA, now that I have something to use as an emergency drug, and let them take over the—”

“Give me the first batch.”

He did. This was why he’d made it, because he’d known months ago what she had never told him in words. Twenty-one percent.

He agreed to put off calling the authorities for one more day. “Just give me time to assimilate it all, Ben. A little time. Okay?”

He’d agreed. It was her life, her child. Not his.

The next day she’d been gone.

In the foul public cyberbooth, nine years later, Ben deleted Haihong’s email.
Rumors
, she’d written,
Sichuan quarantine may lift soon
. Interred in her remote village, which the most modern of technologies had forced back into the near primitive, she hadn’t even heard the news. The quarantine had always been as much political as anything else, or it wouldn’t have been in force so long. It was to be lifted today and even now, right there in Chengdu from which she must have sent her email, she still seemed oblivious.
I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot
.

What exactly did that mean?

He left his coffee untouched in the filthy booth. Outside, in the fresh air under California’s blue sky, he pulled out his handheld and booked a flight to China.

Four: Haihong