"But I want to," he said. "Show me how it's done."
He always did like to know how things worked.
* * * * *
The injection produced no immediate effects, but by noon the next day Jason was running a degree of fever.
Subjectively, he said, it was no worse than a mild cold, and by midafternoon he was begging me to take my thermometer and my pressure cuff and—well, take them elsewhere, was the gist of it.
So I turned up my collar against the rain (a blank, dumbly persistent rain that had started during the night and persisted through the afternoon) and crossed the lawn once more to my mother's house, where I rescued mementos (school) from the basement and carried it up to the front room.
Rain-dim light came through the curtains. I switched on a lamp.
My mother had died at the age of fifty-six. For eighteen years I had shared this house with her. That was a little over one third of her life. Of the remaining two thirds I had seen only what she had chosen to show me. She had talked about Bingham, her home town, from time to time. I knew, for instance, that she had lived with her father (a Realtor) and stepmother (a daycare worker) in a house at the top of a steep, tree-lined street; that she had had a childhood friend named Monica Lee; that there had been a covered bridge, a river called the Little Wyecliffe, and a Presbyterian church she had stopped attending when she turned sixteen and to which she had not returned until her parents' funerals. But she had never mentioned Berkeley or what she had hoped to achieve with her M.B.A. or why she had married my father.
She had, once or twice, taken down these boxes to show me their contents, to impress on me that she had lived through the impossible years before I existed. This was her evidence, Exhibits A, B, and C, three boxes of mementos and odds & ends. Somewhere folded into these boxes were fragments of real, verifiable history: the toffee-brown front pages of newspapers announcing terrorist attacks, wars waged, presidents elected or impeached. Here too were the trinkets I had liked to hold in my hand as a child. A tarnished fifty-cent piece issued in the year of her father's birth (1951); four tan and pink seashells from the beach at Cobscook Bay.
Mementos (school) had been my least favorite box. It contained a campaign button for some evidently unsuccessful Democratic candidate for high office, which I had liked for its bright colors, but the rest of the space was taken up with her diploma, a few pages torn from her graduate yearbook, and a bundle of small envelopes none of which I had ever wanted (or been allowed) to touch.
I opened one of the envelopes now and sampled enough of the contents to register that it was: a) a love letter and b) in a handwriting not at all like my father's neat script from the missives in mementos: marcus.
So my mother had had a college sweetheart. This was news that might have discomfited Marcus Dupree (she had married him a week after graduation) but would hardly have shocked anyone else. Certainly it was no reason to conceal the box in the basement, not when it had been sitting in plain sight for years on end.
Had it even been my mother who had hidden it? I didn't know who might have been in the house between the time of her stroke and the time I arrived a day later. It was Carol who had found her collapsed on the sofa, and probably some of the Big House staff had helped clean up afterward, and there must have been EMS people in here prepping her for transport. But none of them would have had any remotely plausible reason to carry mementos (school) downstairs and slide it into the dark gap between the furnace and the basement wall.
And maybe it didn't matter. No crime had been committed, after all, only a peculiar displacement. Could have been the local poltergeist. In all likelihood I would never know, and there was no point dwelling on the question. Everything in this room, every object in the house including these boxes, would sooner or later have to be salvaged, sold, or discarded. I had been putting it off, Carol had been putting it off, but the work was overdue.
But until then—
Until then, I put mementos (school) back on the top shelf of the étagère between mementos (marcus) and odds & ends. And made the empty room complete.
* * * * *
The most troubling medical question I had raised with Wun Ngo Wen about Jason's treatment was the issue of drug-drug interactions. I couldn't discontinue Jason's conventional medications without throwing him into a disastrous relapse. But I was equally uneasy about combining his daily drug regimen with Wun's biochemical overhaul.
Wun promised me there wouldn't be a problem. The longevity treatment wasn't a "drug" in the conventional sense. What I was injecting into Jason's bloodstream was more like a biologically enabled computer program. Conventional drugs generally interact with proteins and cell surfaces. Wun's potion interacted with DNA itself.
But it still had to enter a cell to do its work, and it still had to negotiate Jason's blood chemistry and immune system on its way there—didn't it? Wun had said emphatically that none of this mattered. The longevity cocktail was flexible enough to operate through any kind of physiological condition short of death itself.
But the gene for AMS had never migrated to the red planet and the drugs Jase was taking were unknown there. And although Wun had insisted my concerns were unwarranted, I noticed he seldom smiled when he did so. So we hedged our bets. I had been backing off Jason's AMS meds for a week before the first injection. Not stopping them, just cutting back.
The strategy had seemed to work. By the time we arrived at the Big House Jason was exhibiting only minor symptomology while carrying a lighter drug load, and we began his treatment optimistically.
Three days later he was spiking fevers I couldn't knock down. A day after that he was semiconscious much of the time. Another day and his skin turned red and began to blister. That evening he began screaming.
He continued to scream despite the morphine I administered.
It was not a full-throated scream but a moan that periodically rose to high volume, a sound you might expect from a sick dog, not a human being. It was purely involuntary. When he was lucid he neither made the sound nor remembered having made it, even though it left his larynx inflamed and painful.
Carol made a brave show of putting up with it. There were parts of the house where Jason's keening was almost inaudible—the back bedrooms, the kitchen—and she spent most of her time there, reading or listening to local radio. But the strain was obvious and before long she started drinking again.
Maybe I shouldn't say "started." She had never stopped. What she had done was cut back to the minimum that allowed her to function, balancing between the very real terrors of sudden withdrawal and the lure of full-blown intoxication. And I hope that doesn't sound glib. Carol was walking a difficult path. She had stayed on it this long because of her love for her son, dormant as that love might have been these many years. The sound of his pain was what derailed her.
By the second week of the process Jase was hooked up to intravenous fluids and I was keeping an eye on his rising BR. He'd had a relatively good day despite his horrifying appearance, scabbed where he wasn't raw, eyes almost buried in the swollen flesh that surrounded them. He had been alert enough to ask whether Wun Ngo Wen had made his first television appearance. (Not yet. It was scheduled for the following week.) But by nightfall he had lapsed back into unconsciousness and the moaning, absent for a couple of days, started again, full-throated and painful to hear.
Painful for Carol, who showed up at the door of the bedroom with tear tracks down her cheeks and an expression of fierce, glassy anger. "Tyler," she said, "you have to stop this!"
"I'm doing what I can. He's not responding to the opiates. It might be better to talk about this in the morning."
"Can't you hear him?"
"Of course I can hear him."
"Does that mean nothing? Does that sound mean nothing to you? My god!" she said. "He would have been better off in Mexico with some quack. He would have been better off with a faith healer. Do you actually have any idea what you've been injecting into him? Fucking quack! My god."