Maybe seven minutes later a gopher showed up with the coffee and the biscuits. It was a new gopher-it was pretty much always a new gopher, gopher being the lowest rung in the Unger organization-but the British cookies were really good, and the coffee, as always, was Costa Rican and fine. He kept the cookies down and had several cautious sips of the coffee, and he physically recovered to the extent that he really began to hurt. He ordered the gopher off for some aspirin, or better yet, codeine. The gopher never returned.
Then one of the private secretaries arrived. He was one of the older secretaries, Señor Pabst, a family loyalist, a nicely groomed old guy with a Mexican law degree and a well-concealed drinking problem.
Pabst looked him over with genuine pity. Pabst was from Matamoros. There were a lot of Unger family connections in Matamoros. Alex couldn't say that he and Pabst had had actual dealings, but he and Pabst had something akin to an-understanding.
"I think you'd better get right to bed, Alejandro."
"I have to see El Viejo."
"You're not in any condition to see El Viejo. You're going to do something foolish, something you'll regret. See him tomorrow. It's better."
"Look, will he see me, or won't he?"
"He wants to see you," Pabst admitted. "He always wants to see you, Alejandro. But he won't like to see you like this."
"I think he's past shock by this time, don't you? Let's get this over with."
Pabst led Alex to his father.
Guillermo Unger was a tall, slight man in his late fifties, with carefully waved artificial blond hair the very color of the finest-quality creamery butter. He had blue and very watery eyes behind very thick glasses, the unfortunate legacy of a prolonged experiment with computer-assisted perception. Beneath his medicated pancake makeup, the acne from the hormone treatments was flaring up again. He was wearing a tropical linen suit. His mood seemed-not good, you could never call it good-but positive.
"So you're back," he said.
"I've been staying with Juanita."
"So I understand."
"I think she's dead, papa."
"She's not dead," his father said. "Dead women don't read their E-mail." He sighed. "She's still shacked up with that big dumb bastard of a mathematician! He's taken her off somewhere in New Mexico now. A failed academic, for Christ's sake. A crazy man. She's thrown it all over, she's let him smash her whole career. God only can help her, Alejandro. Because God knows I can't."
Alex sat down. He put his hands to his head. His eyes filled with tears. "I'm really glad she's still alive."
"Alejandro, look at me. Why the paper suit, like a bum off the street? Why the dirt, Alejandro? Why do you come into my office looking this way, couldn't you at least get dean? We're not poor people, we have baths."
"Pa pd, I'm clean as I'm going to get. I've been inside a big tornado. The dirt lodges deep in your skin. You can't wash it out, you just have to wait till it grows out. Sorry."
"Were you in Oklahoma City?" his father asked, with real interest.
"No, Dad. We were out where the storm set down at first. We were tracking it and we saw where it started."
"Oklahoma City was very heavily mediated," his father said, reflectively. "That was a rather important event."
"We weren't inside Oklahoma City. Anyway, they all died there."
"Not all of them," his father said. "Hardly more than half of them."
"We didn't see that part. We only saw the beginning of the F-6. We-the Troupe-they wanted to track the storm from the beginning, for scientific reasons, to understand it.
"Understand it, eh? Not very likely! Do they know why the storm stopped so suddenly, right after Oklahoma City?"
"No. I don't know if they understand that. I doubt they understand it." Alex stared at his father. This was going nowhere. He didn't know what to tell the man. He had nothing left to tell him. Except the ugly news that he was very near death, and someone in the family had to watch him die now. Just for formal reasons, basically. And he didn't want Jane to have to do that. And his father was the only one left.
"Well," his father said, "I've been wondering when you'd come back here, back to sense and reason."
"I'm back, papa."
"I tried to find you. Not much luck there, not with your sister hiding you from me."
"She, uh...ell,, I can't defend her, papd. Juanita's very stubborn.
"I had good news for you, that's why I wanted to talk to you. Very good news. Very good medical news, Alex."
Alex grunted. He slumped back in his chair.
"I don't know how to tell you the details myself, but we've had Dr. Kindscher on retainer for some time, so when I heard you had arrived, I called him." He gestured above a lens inset in his desk.
Dr. Kindscher arrived in the office. Alex got the strong impression that Dr. Kindscher had been kept waiting for some time. Just a matter of medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important.
"Hello, Alex."
"Hello, Doctor."
"We've had new results from Switzerland on your genetic scan."
"1 thought you'd given up that project years ago."
Dr. Kindscher frowned. "Alex, it's not an easy matter to scan an entire human genome right down to the last few centimorgans. Doing that for a single individual is a very complex business."
"We had to subcontract that business," his father said. "Bits and pieces.
"And we found a new bit, as Mr. Unger has said," Dr. Kindscher said, radiating satisfaction. "Very unusual. Very!"
"What is it?"
"It's a novel type of mucopolysaccharidosis on chromosome 7-Q-22."
"Could I have that in English?"
"Sorry, Alex, the original lab report is in French."
"I meant give me the upshot, Doctor," Alex croaked. "Give me the executive report."
"Well, since your birth, this genetic defect that you suffer from has been periodically blocking proper cellular function in your lungs, proper expression of fluids. A very rare syndrome. Only four other known cases in the world. One in Switzerland-we were quite lucky in that eventuality, I think-and two in California. Yours is the first known in Texas."
Alex looked at the doctor. Then at his father. Then at the doctor again. It was no joke this time. There wasn't any of the usual hedging and mumbo jumbo~ and alternate prognoses. They really thought they had it this time. They did. They had it. This time they actually had the truth.
"Why?" he croaked.
"Mutagenic damage to the egg cell," Dr. Kindscher said. "It's a very rare syndrome, but all five of them diagnosed so far have -involved maternal exposure to an industrial solvent, a very particular industrial solvent no longer in use.
"Chip assembly,"-his father said. "Your mother used to do chip assembly in a border factory, long before you were born."
"What? That's it, that's all there was to it?"
"She was young," his father said sadly. "We lived on the border, and I had just begun the start-up, and your mother and I, we didn't have much money."
"So that's it, eh? My mother was exposed to a mutagen in a maquiladora plant. And all this time I've really been sick."
"Yes, Alex." Dr. Kindscher nodded. He seemed deeply moved.
"I ~
"And the best news of all is, there's a treatment."
"I might have known."
"Illegal in the U.S.," his father said. "And far too advanced for any border clinica. But this time it sticks, son. This time they really have the root of it."
"We have a clinic contacted already, and they're ready to take you, Alex. Genetic repair. Legal in Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus."
"Oh..." Alex groaned. "Not Egypt, I hope."
"No, Cyprus," his father said.
"Good, I heard there's a bad staph strain in Egypt." Alex stood up and walked, painfully, to the doctor's side. "You're really sure about it, this time?"