George wanted to comment that she hadn’t responded to any of his messages for more than two months, but he bit his tongue. He tried to look her in the eye, but as usual she resisted. George wondered if Pia had tried to change, as she had promised back in Will McKinley’s hospital room. Would she ever be able to speak from the heart, or was she always going to keep a wall between them, fearful he might betray her? George knew what kept her from opening up. Her childhood in foster care from age six until age eighteen had been one of ongoing abuse and betrayal, sucking all the love out of her. She had learned to survive by going inward, not trusting anyone.
“I know what I said in Will’s hospital room,” Pia continued. “I’ve tried to change, to be open to love, but I just don’t seem to be able to do it.”
George wondered, as he had so often, if Pia could read his thoughts. But what was encouraging was that he also thought she looked convincingly pained. If it were true, he thought of it as progress of sorts. It certainly wasn’t bringing them together, but at least it might be a few steps in that direction.
“My father suddenly reappearing like he did, saving my life at the eleventh hour, I suppose I should have been more thankful, but it was difficult. After abandoning me to foster care and all the pain that caused, he thought he could just march back into my life. He said he wanted us to be a family, as if that were possible. I had to get away from New York and from him and you didn’t help.”
George looked at his shoes. He recalled the uncomfortable meeting he had had with Burim Graziani, born Grazdani, Pia’s father, without telling Pia beforehand, much less asking her permission. By that time Pia had refused to talk about her kidnapping to George or to anyone, and George had been questioned for days by the police. What did he know about the deaths of Pia’s boss, the renowned researcher Dr. Tobias Rothman, and his associate, Dr. Yamamoto? What had happened when Pia was abducted in the street and Will McKinley shot, events he had witnessed? Did he know where Pia had been held, and how she escaped? Had he ever heard of Edmund Mathews and Russell Lefevre, two bankers whose deaths were thought to be linked to Rothman’s? In truth, George knew very little, and when Burim called him, saying he was Pia’s father who had changed his family name after giving Pia up to foster care, and asked to meet, it was a bolt from the clear blue sky. Unfortunately George had thought he could help.
When they met, despite George’s unfamiliarity with life’s unpleasant underside, he recognized in Burim Grazdani, he couldn’t adjust to Graziani, a very dangerous man. George had left their meeting in a café shaken up, but he had agreed to try to intercede between Burim and Pia. Once again his urge to try to help had got the better of him. When Pia had learned of the meeting she’d become enraged, screaming at George to stay out of her life, saying that this man who said he was her father was dead to her. It was one of the last times George had seen Pia before he left for Los Angeles and she had left for a supposed long sojourn on a beach somewhere, a trip Pia had never talked about to him before coming to L.A. herself.
“I understand you wanted to get away from New York, and maybe it was best for you,” said George, even though he regretted her leaving terribly. “I understand your sudden career confusion and wanting to put off your internal medicine residency and getting a PhD because of Rothman’s death. I understand all that. But Boulder! Why Boulder…?”
“I love it here, George. I love the air. I love my work. I love the mountains. I’ve become a health nut. I started running, mountain biking, even skiing.”
As Pia carried on about Boulder and exactly what she was doing in her current work, George stopped listening. He didn’t care about Boulder; what he really wanted to know was why she had not ended up in L.A., where Pia had said she was going before they had fallen out over her father. The fact that Pia had told him she was going to L.A. to do research for several years was the one and only reason he had turned down the residency at Columbia Medical Center and gone to Los Angeles himself. As he might have predicted, without Pia there, he was not fond of L.A. Pia was still talking.
“… and another reason I came here to Boulder was because of Will McKinley’s osteomyelitis infection in his skull. If you haven’t guessed, I feel overwhelmingly guilty about his condition. Indirectly, I was responsible. My hope is that we can use nanotechnology in the form of a microbivore-based antibacterial treatment on him. We’ve got them here at Nano, and they work. What is needed at this point is FDA approval, which is what we’re going to be working for as soon as we finish preliminary safety studies. Ever since I’ve been here I’ve been working with these microbivores. They are amazing.”
“Microbivores? You’ll need to fill me in a little.”
“George, you weren’t listening. Didn’t you hear what I was just telling you about what I’ve been doing here for eighteen months?”
“My mind wandered a bit,” George admitted. His uncertain smile returned. The hoped-for rapprochement with Pia was testing his less-than-perfect diplomatic skills.
“I’m not supposed to be talking about what we are doing before all the patents are formalized, but what the hell. I haven’t breathed a word to anyone. I trust you will keep what I say under your hat.”
“No problem,” George assured her. He wanted to encourage her. Counting on his confidence was a suggestion of intimacy, for which George hungered.
“It’s going to be a new type of antisepsis,” Pia continued. “The antibiotic era of fighting bacteria is near its end. I mean, bacteria are developing resistance faster than new antibiotics can be found. The hope is that medical nanotechnology will come to the rescue and provide rapid cures, particularly for sepsis. Specifically, I’m convinced it could cure Will’s osteomyelitis.”
“How will nanotechnology help Will?”
“As I said: by using the microscopic nanorobots called, appropriately enough, microbivores, which I’ve been working with for almost two years. They are much smaller than red blood cells, and they eat bacteria and other microorganisms when introduced into the bloodstream of a living animal. They’ll even be able to be programmed to seek out, eat, and digest infectious proteins like prions or the tau proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which antibiotics are useless against.”
“I’m sorry to have to admit this, but my knowledge of nanomedicine isn’t the greatest. I mean, I know how it has contributed to sun screens, but that’s about it.”
“Well, you are going to have to catch up or you’re going to be left behind. Medical nanotechnology is the future. It’s going to totally change medicine, probably as much as regenerative stem cell technology. Between the two, five or ten years from now, the practice of medicine is going to be completely different.”
“Microbivores coursing around in the body eating up bacteria. Sounds like that old science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage.”
“I guess. I never saw it. But this is not science fiction.”
“And they are smaller than a red blood cell?”
“Absolutely. The ones I’m working on are ovoid, with their long axis about three micrometers long, which is six times smaller than the width of a human hair.”
“I’m telling you: this sounds like science fiction.”
“They’re real. I’m working with them every day.”
“So, what about L.A.?”
Pia cocked her head to the side and regarded George questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘what about L.A.?’” To her, George’s comment was a total non sequitur.
“I thought you were going to L.A. to do research. You never mentioned Boulder…”