The Man Who Ivented Florida (32 page)

She was going by the name her parents had given her at birth now, refusing to answer when Tomlinson slipped up and called her one of the names she had chosen from the old commune days. "Moontree," that had been his favorite. But she couldn't abide it now. Gave him a boiling look when he used it. It was one more way, he thought, for her to cut away the strings of their relationship.

He had hoped it would be different this trip. Instead, it was worse. Started on Friday night when he had called from the airport.

"You expect me to drop everything, open my home to you, just because you arrive on a whim to see Nichola?"

Two days' advance notice was a whim? He had called from the marina on Wednesday and left a message on her answering machine that he was flying in.

"No, two days is not enough notice! Two weeks, perhaps. Two months would be better. Yet you take it for granted that your wishes have first priority. Not everyone lives on a boat, Tomlinson. More to the point, not everyone lives in the past! Some of us have jobs. I have classes to teach. Nichola has her own schedule at the nursery and the day-care center. And the election is only four days away!"

That was the main thing. For now, anyway—the election. Musashi was campaigning for a friend of hers, a man named Niigata, one of her professor buddies who was running for the state assembly. Because of the baby, Musashi didn't have time to be Niigata's campaign manager, but she was one of his first lieutenants. Perhaps the man's lover, too. At least that's what Tomlinson was beginning to suspect. The way Musashi tensed up whenever he mentioned the guy's name. Got so nervous when Tomlinson suggested that he and Niigata meet. Something was going on, and Tomlinson wondered why she didn't come right out and say it. He felt no jealousy—well, not much. But as he had told Musashi, "Because we created one flesh doesn't mean we can't live separate lives."

To which Musahi had said, "I know, I know: Saints don't marry. And please don't be confused. I'm not asking you."

"Bitch!" The word slipped out as he walked, and the nastiness of it stopped him. Tomlinson glanced around. Bare trees, wind, people jogging, people roller-blading, people hurrying through the late-afternoon gloom toward dinner or a late class, or the dorms. If anyone had heard, they made no sign. He might have been invisible, a rut in the bike path to be swerved around. Tomlinson pushed his hands into his pockets, hunched his neck into the sweater, and continued on. Never in his life had he used that word in reference to a woman. Well, not a woman whom he knew, anyway. That word wasn't an oath or an assessment; it was a short cut, a way of avoiding difficult realities. To say it was a piggish stupidity.

Tomlinson thought, Somehow, I've gotten railroaded into destructive currents. I feel as gray as the weather. Feel like my cell walls have sharp edges, cutting me a little every time I move.

A few blocks later, just across the street from the modern marble and steel two-story office complex that was Massachusetts Research Labs, Tomlinson thought, What I've got to do is get my work done, try to help Joseph and Doc's uncle. We've all been karmically linked, and it's bad luck to ignore such things. I'll get my work done, kiss my daughter as much as I can, then get back to Florida on the first flight out. There's something growing in me. Maybe sunlight can cure it.

Tomlinson's
friend at Mass Labs—that's what they called it—was Ken Kern, a buddy from the old days, one of the university's founders of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Back then, Kern had had hair to the middle of his back, wore a silver cross of infinity along with the Star of David, and smoked unfil-tereds. Now, Kern was nearly bald, wore a Freudian black beard and a white smock. He was the lab's senior geneticist, and Tomlinson's daily visits were beginning to make him uneasy. Tomlinson could tell. The way Kern tapped his fingers at the security desk, waiting for Tomlinson to get his own smock buttoned and clip the visitor's pass to the pocket. Kern's habit of saying, when they were alone together, "You know, I'm going out on a helluva limb for you." The way he checked his watch when Tomlinson was around, using body language to say he didn't have a lot of time to spend on private projects. A project they had been working on after hours, four or five hours a night for the last week. A project that could go on for another two weeks, or even a month. That's what Kern was worried about.

Tomlinson never reacted to Kern's uneasiness. Always just smiled kindly—Kern had been one of his closest confidants in college,- a great man with a great brain, but always worried about something. The nervous type, so he and Tomlinson had balanced nicely through five years of weirdness and revolution. What Kern probably remembered as clearly as anything was that Tomlinson had willingly taken the rap on twenty-two counts of possession of illegal substances: fifteen blotters of acid and seven dime bags of truly fine Jamaican ganja the campus cops had found in their dorm room. All Kern's. But as Tomlinson had said at the time, "No sense involving you, Kenny. This is the seventh time I've been arrested, and seven's my lucky number."

Now the two men were walking down the hall toward Lab Room C—the tile and stainless-steel room where they had been working. That's where the PCR machine was kept—PCR for Polymerase chain reaction, the key apparatus used for amplifying specific units of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. A second machine, an ABI 4800, automatically sequenced the base pairs.

From his reading, Tomlinson already knew the basic procedures and objectives. But, talking on the phone before Tomlinson left for Boston, Kern had put it even more simply: "All living organisms derive from a single unit that generates complexity. That unit is DNA. From a single strand of DNA—the way its base chemical pairs are sequenced—the researcher can, theoretically at least, determine not only an individual's sex and race, but what that person looked like, how he sounded, and, to a degree, how that person behaved. Take a strand of DNA two to three centimeters long, and it's all there, little dots and dashes. Like a fingerprint, only more telling. Life is nothing more than an expression of the DNA instructions encoded in the genes." Kern had chuckled after he said that, knowing that Tomlinson still saw all things as spiritually fired, constructive or destructive. Kern had said, "Remember that freeze-dried food we took the time we went looking for mushrooms? In those tinfoil packages? It's kind of like that. To create life, you just add water."

Which Tomlinson didn't believe, not for a moment. Though Ford would like it—and would probably accept it—when he told him.

To create life, just add water.

But what interested Tomlinson most was that Kern said it was possible to take the root of one of Joseph Egret's hairs and to isolate a cell that contained strands of DNA. He had also said that if Tomlinson could come up with at least thirty separate specimens of bones from Calusa burial mounds, he might be able to find a DNA sequencing pattern—flags, he called them—found only in that race of people.

"We don't need much," Kern had told him. "Maybe a gram or two from each bone, but they have to be good bone from the femur. If we don't get that, we might end up isolating the DNA of the archaeologist who dug them up and put them in the sack. The outside part could be contaminated by the archaeologist's hands."

So, prior to leaving for Boston, Tomlinson had spent five full days going to Florida's universities and museums, calling in favors from old friends, humoring scientists he'd never met, collecting little nubs of bone—something archaeologists didn't part with easily. Sometimes he nearly had to beg: "Only a gram. Only this much—" Holding his thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart. "And I'll send you all the data we produce."

Even so, it was tough going. Tomlinson had even considered driving back to the mounds at Mango to do a little digging himself. But just the thought of that outraged his personal standards of the human ethic. Defile the sacred artifacts of fellow human beings? It made no difference that they had lived and died hundreds of years before him. They were still people. People who had walked and wept and worried and laughed, people who had scratched their butts and hugged their babies and made love in the same subtropical milieu he called home—Florida. Only scum would impose upon the dead. Someone with a black hole for a conscience.

In the end, Tomlinson gathered nineteen specimens of Calusa bone. Not enough for an ideal survey population, Kern told him, but it would have to do.

"If you had a hundred specimens, we probably wouldn't find anything, anyway," he had said. "Like that saying: Everyone knows what race is, but no one can define what race is. They're always so mixed. The most Irish Irishman in Boston is probably at least twenty-five percent ethnic something. Spanish or Italian or Swede, or any mix in between. The blackest black in Harlem averages about twenty-five percent Anglo-Saxon. A thousand years ago, or today—people mix. That's one thing that makes race su-premicists so laughable. We're not the same people our great-great-great-grandfathers were, genetically or otherwise. Our species is in a constant state of flux. Historically, when strangers of the same sex meet, they make war. When strangers of the opposite sex meet, they make the creature with two backs."

But Kern's enthusiasm for the project had faded as the repetitious nightly work continued. He said his wife was badgering him to get home earlier. He said if they continued to work after hours on the project, it was just a matter of time before the lab's management found out. Kern said that, with just nineteen specimens, there wasn't much hope, anyway.

In reply, Tomlinson only smiled.

Now, on this Friday night, Tomlinson and Kern put on surgical booties, gloves, and masks before unlocking Room C. Kern switched on the lights and said, "Well, the crapshoot continues."

The light in the room was cold white, as sterile as the tile floors and walls.

In the far corner of the windowless room was the PCR machine—Genesis II, it was called. Genesis was a little high-tech box not much bigger than a stereo turntable, at the center of which were fifty uniform holes punched into aluminum stock to hold bullet-sized test tubes. There were wires and plastic programming keys. Cables connected the machine to computer monitors.

Kern found another key and knelt before the stainless specimen locker. "I'll get the samples out and you can set them in the machine. I think you know the procedure well enough."

Tomlinson said, "Sure, man. In fact, you want to go home to your wife, I think I can manage the wh&le thing. Except for maybe identifying the anomalous gene markers right off—"

"No kidding," Kern broke in dryly. "It only took me—what?— three or four years to get the hang of that."

"Hey, no doubt. It's a complicated gig. I'm not saying I don't need you, Kenny."

Kern took a rack containing twenty test tubes from the locker, stood, and said, "I know ... I know. Same old Tomlinson. It gets to me, that's all."

"Like preparing the samples," Tomlinson said. "I didn't have a damn clue about that. Drilling to the bone cortex before taking samples. Doing all those little steps so neatly. Purifying, separating, all that stuff. Taking the strands and making them soluble in a water-based buffer. Like you said: Just add water, huh? Even from reading the books, I didn't know about any of that."

"The way you catch on to things so easily," Kern said. "That's what I mean." He was carrying the rack of test tubes across the room so carefully that the tubes might have been filled with hot tea. "It used to bother me. It did."

"Naw ..."

"I don't mind being honest about it now. It's not a big deal anymore. Back in college, the way you always just cruised, but I had to work my ass off to keep up."

Tomlinson was surprised to hear that; a little saddened by it, too. "You were brilliant, man! Come on. Everybody said so."

"No, I'm gifted. And I'm a worker. At least, I was when I wasn't hanging out with you eating drugs." Kern was positioning test tubes in the Genesis machine as he talked, thinking in fragments as he did: Why am I telling this man these things? We were students together; now we're strangers. . . . And maybe that's why. . . .

Kern said, "But you, it was like you were born with a trillion bits of data and just needed your memory refreshed every now and then. Like writing all those papers for the journals when you were—what?—just a sophomore? Hell, I've got colleagues now who hold dinner parties when they're lucky enough to get published."

Tomlinson had the main computer on, checking the hardware before punching in the program they'd be using. "You think back, Kenny, you'll remember there was no cable television in those days. Sometimes a guy wakes up at three A.M. and just doesn't feel like watching static. And you always had that typewriter ready to go by the window. No shit, if we'd had 'Gilligan's Island' reruns back then, it woulda been a whole different story. The Skipper? Maryanne?" Hunched over the keyboard, Tomlinson snorted through his gauze mask. "My left hand pretended to be Maryanne so often that—when I hear the theme song?—the damn thing still jumps around like a cat. You shouldn't feel bad about that, Kenny."

"I don't. That's what I'm telling you. I look at what we ended up doing, the way we turned out. My life compared to your life." As the words left his mouth, Kern thought to himself, That's a damn cruel thing to say. Where is all this bitterness coming from? The pressure of running this damn department... the pressure of begging funds and grants every year . . . the strangeness of living with a woman I no longer even know.... And he instantly felt miserable, wishing he could take it back. Wishing he could take back so many, many things.

But Tomlinson was nodding his head, dark goat's beard bobbing up and down as he threw an arm over Kern's shoulder and said, "Don't you be jealous about that, Kenny. You want to live on a sailboat, you should do it. This little bay where I'm anchored, Dinkin's Bay, there's plenty of room. I could introduce you around. Every day, when the fishing guides get back, we sit around the docks and drink beer. Me and this friend of mine ... you'd like him. A dude named Ford. He's got a little lab, and he'd probably let you use it when you got the urge."